Learn True Health with Ashley James

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Experience a free sample of their program: learntruehealth.com/coach www.drbrownstein.com www.centerforholisticmedicine.com The Many Benefits of Iodine with Dr. David Brownstein https://www.learntruehealth.com/the-many-benefits-of-iodine-with-dr-david-brownstein   Highlights: Importance of iodine in the body Halide elements Why fluoride causes more harm than good Why do we need salt in the body Refined salt vs. unrefined salt In this episode, Dr. Brownstein is back on the show to talk about the importance of iodine in the body. He shares some stories of how two of his patients with breast problems got better after taking iodine. Salt goes hand in hand with iodine, so he recommends taking in unrefined salt with iodine. Intro: Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. I’m excited for you to learn from today’s guest. He was recently on the show sharing some mind-blowing information, and now he’s back because I wanted to dive deeper and explore thyroid and iodine and how we can use iodine to detox certain chemicals in the body that are wreaking havoc. I’m really looking forward to you listening to this and deepening your knowledge of how you can support your body’s ability to heal itself. Another way that I support my body’s ability to heal myself, and I would love for you to also do the same, is by using Sunlighten Sauna Technology. I had a heavy metal issue for many years and I didn’t know it. I finally figured out that the cause of a lot of my health issues came from my body not being able to get rid of all the heavy metals that I had accumulated. I was having liver problems. I was having an array of hormonal issues. And as I did the heavy metal detox and this is actually doing the show. Since I started the show five years ago, I got a Sunlighten Sauna and I used it regularly almost every day, I would say about five times a week. I would sit in that sauna for about half an hour, sometimes 45 minutes. I feel amazing after I get out of a sauna. The Sunlighten Sauna especially because it uses a different kind of technology than the other saunas out there. It uses full-spectrum, and I had a whole episode with a cardiologist on this. Light is a nutrient that our cells have receptors for, which just blows my mind. And when you are in artificial light, you’re not receiving it so we become deplete. We end up missing out on, the cells are lacking this key component. When we are in a Sunlighten Sauna, we’re getting full-spectrum, it’s actually nutrition, the sunlight nutrition. We’re getting the mid, near, and far-infrared spectrum. So, there are receptors on our cells that receive this information. What’s great about the Sunlighten is it decreases inflammation, decreases pain, helps the body to lose weight. You burn about 500 calories every time you do sauna therapy. The sweat that comes out of you contains toxins that now your liver doesn’t have to process, your kidneys don’t have to process. There are heavy metals in that sweat, so now you’re removing, you’re eliminating things, not only chemicals but also heavy metals. And it opens up the blood flow in the body, it helps to balance and stabilize blood pressure. People have deeper sleep because they’ve decreased the stress levels in the body, the stress hormones go down. There’s this cascade of events that happen when we use sauna therapy. I also did an interview with the man who regularly, once a year—and he has a degree in traditional Chinese medicine. Every year he does a 30-day fast and he spent thousands of his own dollars doing lab tests to show that long-term fasting helps the body to eliminate forever chemicals and the chemicals that’s in our food supply now that disrupt hormones. What he noticed is when he did a fast and incorporated sauna therapy as well, he had way greater results than if he just did a fast alone. That’s because sauna therapy allows the body to bypass the liver, bypass the kidneys when it comes to detoxing certain heavy metals and certain toxins, and just everything I explained earlier about all the other things that it can do. I’ve had several interviews about saunas. If you want to dive into it and learn more about sauna therapy, just go to learntruehealth.com and search sauna. Or you can go to learntruehealth.com and search Sunlighten. I remember five guests off the top of my head that all told me they own a Sunlighten as well and absolutely love it. Now Sunlighten has these big wooden saunas that you can fit into a corner of your room, or if you’re like me and now live in a smaller space, you can get what’s called the Solo System. The Solo System is something that you lie on, you put on top of you, and then you have a nice good sweat like a cocoon. Then you are able to pack it up and put it away when you are done. The Solo System is so compact because it telescopes into itself that it fits in a closet or under the bed, which is so fantastic. What I also love about it is it’s ultra-low EMF, meaning you won’t have negative reactions like a lot of cheap saunas out there. Unfortunately, if you go to just buy a cheap one, you’re ultimately going to be exposed to high levels of electromagnetic radiation, which is damaging to the body—not good at all. And then another thing that I love about the Solo System, and all of the Sunlighten products but especially the Solo System, is it is non-toxic. The padding they use for you to lie down on is made of non-toxic bamboo memory foam, which I did not know you could make memory from bamboo, but isn’t that neat? So it’s non-toxic, it’s low EMF. This is what I love about Sunlighten is they truly are thinking about how you can support your body’s ability to heal itself and detoxify. I know several cancer patients as well who use Sunlighten’s Sauna Technology to support their body’s ability to fight their own cancer and live to tell the tale. So many reasons why I recommend Sunlighten, and I know right now they’re doing a special. They often do specials at least once a quarter for our listeners. So you can give them a call just to ask questions like what size fits in my house, what’s the pricing like, and what’s the payment plan like if you want to do a payment plan? Then be sure to mention my name, Ashley James, and the Learn True Health podcast when you do call Sunlighten so that you get the special listener discount. They’re always putting specials on especially for our listeners.  I sat down and had a talk with the founder of Sunlighten and interviewed her, and she gave us a great deal like free shipping, which saves you about $500, as well as $100 off of accessories. My favorite accessory is the bamboo cushion and it has a bamboo cover. The reason you want to use things like bamboo or organic cotton when you’re in a sauna—if you’re not going to be naked, you want to use all-natural fibers because synthetic fibers will block the rays of the frequency of the light. So the mid, near, and far-infrared will be interrupted and you don’t want that.  Excellent. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing my podcasts with those that you love and care about. If you’re interested in learning more about detoxifying and using sauna therapy for healthy hormones, for healthy hormone function, for weight loss, for lowering blood pressure, for supporting the body’s ability to fight cancer, and also supporting the body’s immune system, decreasing inflammation, decreasing pain—all these topics are explored in the podcast at learntruehealth.com. Search sauna or search Sunlighten.  I have at least six episodes where we talk about how great it is, and multiple doctors that help their patients detoxify and absolutely love Sunlighten, and I have loved it. It has really, really helped me tremendously and measurably to remove heavy metals from my body. Thank you so much for you, listeners. Continue to share this podcast with those you care about. If you want to come and discuss what you learn today or if you have more questions, join the Facebook group. Go to learntruehealth.com/group, or you can search Learn True Health on Facebook.   [00:08:33] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 464. I am so excited to have back on the show Dr. David Brownstein. Man, when we had you on the show that was just a recent episode, 462. You shared with us how you’ve been successfully treating all of your patients who are infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. You treat it much like all the other upper respiratory infections you’ve treated for decades with amazing success, just outstanding success. Is it the FTC that came after you because you were sharing for free all this information on your website, and they don’t want anything that could possibly be considered a treatment, a cure, or therapy that is effective to be publicly posted, which just blew my mind? So listeners got to go back to episode 462 for that information. What’s cool though is that you’re able to publish a book and it’s still protected under your freedom of speech rights. We have had several listeners who’ve read your book since having you on the show in episode 462, and they’ve reported in the Learn True Health Facebook group that your book on basically supporting the structure and function of the body’s ability to fight off viruses and respiratory infections with holistic medicine. How your book’s amazing and they loved it. So I definitely recommend listeners check out all of Dr. Brownstein’s books. You can go to drbrownstein.com. He has so many books that’s why I’m really excited to have him back on the show today. Today we’re going to talk about something I think is really interesting because there’s a lot of doctors that say we have too much iodine. There are doctors who say we have too little iodine. Some doctors say, don’t worry about it, you’re just got to get enough in your food or just eat fortified salt or whatever. Is it the right kind of iodine? Are we getting too much or too little? What parts of the body use it other than for just creating thyroid hormone? So this is very interesting, we’re going to dive into this because you have some information about preventing cancer as well, which I’m really excited about. Welcome back to the show.   [00:11:06] Dr. David Brownstein: Thank you for having me on, Ashley.   [00:11:08] Ashley James: Yeah, absolutely. I hope to have you on again and again because you have so many amazing topics and you’re such a fantastic doctor. You know what really blew my mind—not only blew my mind but many of my listeners also shared with me how you helped your dad reverse his heart issues by looking at his nutritional levels and balancing his hormones, and that was so cool. That was kind of like your wake-up moment, introduction to seeing how much we’re missing in the allopathic world. The world would be a different place if every doctor had the education that you’ve earned through your clinical experience through the years. I really wish that more doctors would read your books, learn from you, and continue the curiosity of what we can do with nutrition to support the body’s ability to fight off disease and maintain optimal health. Having said that, let’s dive right in. Tell me, what happened along your journey as a doctor that made you interested in wanting to explore the topic of iodine? Do we need more of it, do we need less of it? What’s going on with iodine?   [00:12:27] Dr. David Brownstein: Well, my journey with iodine began when I started holistic medicine. I talked about that story of my father in that previous episode, right?   [00:12:40] Ashley James: Yes, that was mind-blowing.   [00:12:43] Dr. David Brownstein: Let me give the Cliff Notes version of that because that’ll sort of segue into iodine. My dad had his first heart attack at age 40 and his second heart attack at 42, and he suffered from severe coronary artery disease after that. He had continuous angina for 20 years. I was a conventional doctor at that time, I thought he was dying, and I think he was dying. He was on 12 medications to treat hypertension, diabetes, and heart disease. He looked awful and was doing awful.  I was given a book by a chiropractor who told me I should look at this, and it was really my first anything holistic given to me or anything shown to me. It’s called Healing with Nutrition by Jonathan Wright who’s an allopathic physician. I read that chapter on heart disease first and drew a few blood tests on my father and treated him with two natural therapies: natural testosterone and natural thyroid hormone. Within seven days of that, he made a dramatic improvement. His pale and pasty color went pink and healthy-looking. His 20-year history of using nitroglycerin daily for angina for anything he did go away, never to return. His cholesterol in the 300s fell below 200 without changing any of his bad dietary habits, and he looked and acted much better. When I saw the changes in my father, I knew that’s what I want to do, doing holistic medicine. Because I used two natural hormones in my father—natural thyroid hormone and natural testosterone—every single new patient I’ve seen since then gets a whole hormonal workup. Because part of that hormonal workup is checking thyroid hormones, ovarian hormones, testicular hormones, adrenal hormones, pituitary hormones, and trying to balance the hormonal system and see why the hormonal system is imbalanced if it is. After I started doing this and using bioidentical natural hormones, I was seeing great results, practice was growing, I was happy. I thought I was doing good in medicine and helping people, which is what I was tasked to do in life. But it was bothering me, why was I having to use so much thyroid hormone? I had the first ten years or so of my holistic practice, I would say I had about 75% of my patients on thyroid hormone, little amounts. They were feeling better, their physiology was better, and their biochemistry looked better on blood testing, and most importantly they felt better, they reported. But it was bothering me, why are there so many people who need to take thyroid hormone? Why is the thyroid gland so screwed up? I would look at the ins and outs of the thyroid, what makes the thyroid work, what doesn’t make it work well? When you read about the thyroid, you read about iodine. Iodine is an essential element that the thyroid utilizes to make thyroid hormones. Without iodine, the thyroid can’t make thyroid hormone. But it’s not just the thyroid, all the glands in the body need iodine. In fact, every cell in the body needs iodine. But if we’re going to focus on the glands right now, that includes the thyroid, ovaries, uterus, breast, prostate, and pancreas. These glands all make hormones, prostaglandins, and other things. There’s not a hormone in the body that can be produced without iodine. The highest concentration of iodine in the bodies of the thyroid gland, and the active and inactive thyroid hormones T3 and T4, the four and three refer to how many iodine atoms are attached to the thyroglobulin molecule. The thyroid gland, it’s made of iodine so important that it can concentrate iodine against the gradient, meaning the highest concentration of iodine in the human body is in the thyroid gland. There are very low concentrations in the bloodstream, and the body has developed an intricate mechanism to take iodine from a low concentrated area like the blood and put it into a higher concentrated area of the thyroid.  It’s an ATP-dependent process, so it’s an energy-dependent process. We use up energy to do that. The body doesn’t like the use of energy, it likes to conserve energy, and the reason it utilizes energy is because it’s so important. We can’t live without thyroid hormone. I would look at what makes the thyroid hormone go and think about why this patient needs thyroid hormone, why all these patients need thyroid hormone.   [00:17:30] Ashley James: So many people are on thyroid medication and it’s just amazing. It blows my mind that they’ll be on it for years and years and there’s no question. Okay, well, what’s the root cause, what’s behind it, or why is the body not especially women, and a lot of men don’t go for the tests, or the doctors don’t test men, but men too. Why are they deplete? Why are they having thyroid disruption? And why are there so much Hashimoto’s right now? It’s way more than we had 30, 40 years ago.   [00:18:09] Dr. David Brownstein: Oh, it’s at epidemic rates right now. Hashimoto’s is in epidemic rates. All those conditions I write in my book, and in my newsletters and stuff. I say it’s all related to iodine deficiency. The iodine deficiency causes problems with the thyroid, causes problems with the breast, prostate, pancreas, ovaries, uterus. What do we see in problems of all those tissues? As you mentioned, there’s epidemic rates of thyroid problems from thyroid cancer to autoimmune thyroid disease like Hashimoto’s and Graves’ disease, as well as hypothyroidism. The fastest-growing cancer in America right now is thyroid cancer, meaning the most diagnosed cancer. And then we have one in seven women with breast cancer. We have one in three men with prostate. cancer. We have epidemic increases of pancreatic, ovarian, uterine, and it’s cancers and it’s all related to I think the same thing. Iodine deficiency is a big part of that. You mentioned that so many people are on thyroid hormone. People are on hormones and the other problem with people being on thyroid hormone and so many people on thyroid hormone and they still feel lousy, they still feel tired, they still feel achy. What many of these people need is iodine. If you put someone on thyroid hormone who’s lacking iodine, you make the iodine deficiency worse. When you put someone on thyroid hormone which increases the metabolic needs of the thyroid gland, it increases the body’s needs for iodine. You make iodine deficiency worse if you put them on thyroid hormone and they’re deficient in iodine. There are studies, there have been three of them over the last 20 years, that show the longer women take thyroid hormone, the increase in risk of breast cancer goes up over time. After ten years, women who take thyroid hormone for ten years have a 50% increased risk of breast cancer compared to women who don’t take thyroid hormone. How can that be? I struggled with that when these articles came out. I didn’t have a great answer, and I think the answer is they’re iodine deficient.  As I wrote in my book, if you put a woman on thyroid hormone who is iodine deficient, you’re going to make the iodine deficiency worse. And you’re going to make it worse in other tissues besides the thyroid like the breast, the ovaries, uterus, and that’s why you’re seeing these cancers go up with that.   [00:20:49] Ashley James: So, are there receptors for iodine in other places in the body other than the thyroid hormone?   [00:20:57] Dr. David Brownstein: Every single cell in the body needs and requires iodine. The white blood cells need iodine to fight infections. Iodine is needed in fat cells, muscle cells, and immune system cells. Everything needs iodine. The problem is iodine levels have fallen over 50% across the United States over the last 40 years. Iodine is part of the halide family in the periodic table of elements. The halides consist of fluoride, bromide, iodine, and chloride.   [00:21:32] Ashley James: This was my next question. I’m so glad you’re segueing into this, please continue.   [00:21:37] Dr. David Brownstein: So, of those halides, two are toxic and two are essential. Iodine and chloride are essential, we can’t live without them. We need lots of it in our bodies. Bromide and fluoride are both toxic items that are non-essential. We can live and we can thrive without them, we don’t need them because they’re both poison enzymes and they’re not good for our body. The problem is, over the last 40 to 50 years we’ve gotten way more fluoride and bromide from fluoridated water to brominated drink in bromine and flour. It’s a fire retardant used in so many consumer items such as phones, computers, mattresses, carpets, curtains, and things that we become over-fluoridated, over-brominated, and at the same time more iodine deficient. The halides are very interesting to study because they can competitively inhibit one another, which means that if you get too much of the toxic halides—fluoride and bromide—it’ll kick the body out of the essential halides—chloride and particularly iodine. Conversely, if you get enough iodine in and you’re toxic on the other ones, you’ll be able to release those. We’ve had a double whammy going on for the last 40 or 50 years. Iodine levels have fallen over 40% to 50%. At the same time, our exposure to toxic halides has increased. That is the main reason I think we’re seeing this rapid rise in thyroid disorders such as autoimmune thyroid disease, Hashimoto’s and Graves’ disease, hypothyroidism, and thyroid cancer, as well as all the other iodine deficiency disorders—breast cancer, prostate cancer, pancreatic cancer, ovarian cancer, uterine cancer, and so on and so on.   [00:23:30] Ashley James: So, to put it in a way that we can visualize, the thyroid, like you had mentioned, takes and concentrates iodine tremendously. When we consume fluoride in tap water or bromide in baked goods, for example, that competes with iodine. Is the thyroid, then concentrating the fluoride, does it also then uptake and concentrate that as well?   [00:24:03] Dr. David Brownstein: Well, we know the thyroid can concentrate bromide, and we know if there’s not enough iodine and excess of bromide that the thyroid hormones can be brominated instead of iodinated. We were designed by our maker to have iodinated thyroid hormones, not brominated thyroid hormones. We don’t quite know what the significance of that is because it hasn’t been studied, but I can tell you, I think the significance of that is increased risk of thyroid cancer, Hashimoto’s, Graves’ disease, and hypothyroidism, and that’s exactly what we’re seeing. As far as fluoride goes, the conventional mantra is that fluoride helps prevent cavities. If it does, it’s a minimal improvement, but almost every Western country except two, us being one of them, have removed fluoride from the water supply because we realized that if it does decrease cavities, it’s minuscule. The only way that fluoride has been shown to decrease cavities is topically applying it like in toothpaste, not by drinking water.   [00:25:11] Ashley James: I do have a question about that. Sodium fluoride, which isn’t that a byproduct of aluminum production and that’s what we’ve been drinking basically in tap water? I’ve read this so I don’t know if this is true or if this is just something that was published online. But didn’t they put sodium fluoride in certain prisons and certain concentration camps in the water in order to sedate the prison population? Fluoride, in certain amounts, kind of makes a more lazy or less aggressive society. Is that true?   [00:25:53] Dr. David Brownstein: The Germans used it in their concentration camps to do exactly that. Fluoride also has been shown to lower the IQ of newborns, mothers who have high fluoride levels. There have been studies that show the IQ declines in newborns in women who drink fluoridated water at levels like what’s fluoridated in the US.   [00:26:17] Ashley James: So we’re creating a population that is less likely to rise up, rebel, and is also stupid. That’s quite fascinating, and this is why I really believe that we should question everything. Don’t ever trust what’s in your food, what’s in your water, what’s in your medicine. Always, always, always do your own research and never trust anyone with your own health. Always filter your water. Don’t just trust that your water is safe, the air is safe to breathe, or the water is safe to eat, to drink, or the food is safe. We have to be more diligent because there are over 80,000 new man made chemicals in the last 40 years that are in the food supply that we’re now seeing are forever chemicals. And that they enter our body and block our receptors from absorbing certain nutrients and from interacting with hormones. It’s quite scary. Fluoride is an essential nutrient in small amounts in the soil. It’s in the soil along with all other trace elements and minerals. We’re probably getting enough if we eat enough fruits and vegetables and like you said, you could brush your teeth. But then, there are populations that don’t have any fluoride whatsoever added to their water, and that their teeth are wonderful. So when the body concentrates fluoride, do you think that also is a contributor to other hormone dysregulation and cancer creation?   [00:28:12] Dr. David Brownstein: Well, studies have shown increased fluoride content results in certain bone cancers in young boys. We know fluoride poisons hundreds of different enzymes in the body. It’s a known carcinogenic agent. I think it’s ludicrous to put fluoride in the water. If you can’t afford an expensive filtration system, then you don’t have a choice. You’re just getting fluoridated water. Personal choice comes into play here. Remember, the World Health Organization has done studies with cavity rates and fluoridated non-fluoridated countries, there’s no difference at all. It has been shown for over 40 to 50 years. The decline in cavity rates that have occurred over the last 50, 60 years has occurred in countries that don’t fluoridate their water as well. There’s really no business in fluoridating water. There’s really no business in our health of doing that.   [00:29:16] Ashley James: I can’t remember the exact information, but I read an article years ago. They did this in rural parts of Canada. I’m originally from Canada but I live in the states now. They gave tablets of fluoride to children because everyone was on well water. One of my friends was part of this experiment—governments like to do that thinking that it’s healthy. It actually had the reverse effect and all the children end up with rotten teeth. There was something about too much fluoride or high concentrations of fluoride actually led to the opposite effect, that led to teeth that decayed rapidly. Maybe because it just threw the body so out of balance, I don’t know. When I was pregnant, I really looked into everything I could do to ensure my baby was healthy and that his or her IQ would be optimal. I did see that iodine was one of the needed essential nutrients along with essential fatty acids. There were studies that showed that mothers that consumed iodine had smarter children. So, that makes sense that fluoride, since it competes with iodine, would dumb down the IQ, so it’s like that’s the opposite. What you’re saying is we need more iodine. Now, you did mention that iodine helps to almost detox fluoride. So can you discuss that, how to use iodine as a detox agent?   [00:30:58] Dr. David Brownstein: Like I said with competitive inhibition, if you get one of the toxic halides that’s a little too much, you’re going to kick out iodine from the body. Conversely, if you get enough iodine, you can kick out those toxic halides and detoxify the body. Now, one of the problems is if you’re full of bromide and fluoride when you take iodine, you can create what’s called a Herxheimer reaction where you get an overload of detoxification and people don’t feel good. Now, if you’re working with a holistic doctor who is knowledgeable about this can help you avoid that. I don’t find that happens very much in my office, but it can happen. It just needs to be done appropriately. One of the ways to avoid that happen is when you take iodine, take salt with it. Salt is the second major constituent in the body next to water, and we need adequate amounts of salt. We need over 100 grams of sodium and chlorine at any one time in our body, we’re supposed to have that. Most people are deficient in salt. I’ve been checking people for 28 years on salt levels and recommending salt intake go up for many of my patients because you need a lot of cells in the body. And salt can help usher out the bromide that’s in there.  In years past where medicines with bromide such as Bromo-Seltzer were used and people would get bromide toxic. So one of the ways conventional medicine dealt with it when they got bromide toxic, when they get delirious, very tired, and the brain wouldn’t work very well is they would salt the bromide out with a salt solution IV. But you can do that naturally, which is taking more salt in your diet. I wrote a book about this called Salt Your Way to Health, which is one companion book to the iodine book.   [00:32:48] Ashley James: I love that you’re bringing up salt. So many doctors say that salt is the contributor to high blood pressure and that we should reduce salt or eliminate it completely. We do actually consume more calories when something has salt in it, that’s true. So we still have to manage our food intake, but know that when we add salt—think about a bowl of rice. If it’s just a plain bowl of rice and no salt on it you’re going to eat to satiety. But with a bowl that is salted, we can overeat it because it tastes good. So we still need to be more conscious when we salt things that it does taste good and we might eat past satiety. But what’s interesting about salt is the body uses chloride and sodium chloride to make hydrochloric acid. There’s an epidemic of heartburn out there and indigestion. Of course, if you’re not digesting your food you’re not absorbing your nutrition, and then everything cascades from there. I’m sure you have a book on that.    [00:33:50] Dr. David Brownstein: I talk about that in my salt book.   [00:33:52] Ashley James: There you go. I knew it. I knew you’d have a book on that, but it’s fascinating. You recommend that people use salt along with iodine. Where should they get their salt? I know you’re not going to say basic table salt or are you?   [00:34:09] Dr. David Brownstein: Well, there are two types of salt that are available—refined salt and unrefined salt. Refined salt is made by food companies because they refine food products to take out things that degrade. The reason they do that is the refined food products can stay on the shelf forever. It has a longer shelf life and then they make more money because they don’t have to throw products out. So, just as they refined flour to take out some natural things because the natural things will go bad, they refined salt. Refined salt is that thin white stuff that’s pretty much in every restaurant across the United States. It’s the girl with the umbrella on the side of the salt container, I can’t think of the name of it as an example of refined salt.   [00:35:02] Ashley James: Morton’s?   [00:35:03] Dr. David Brownstein: Yeah. It’s just got sodium and chloride plus some other toxic ingredients that shouldn’t be in salts such as ferrocyanide and aluminum silicate in it. That’s compared to unrefined salt, which has a full complement of minerals in it that come with wherever the salt is mined from. Celtic brand sea salt, Redmond Real Salt, and Himalayan salt all have over 80 minerals in them. Now, the minerals are in small amounts, but the minerals are essential and utilized. I did a little study with my daughter Jessie when she was in middle school. She did it, and we did a study for her science class where we looked at what’s the difference in pH of refined salt and unrefined salts. Refined salt creates an acidic pH environment, unrefined salt helps alkalize tissues, and the minerals help alkalize it. If you eat a bunch of refined foods, you’re going to be too acidic, and that can lead to degenerative problems in the body. You want to have a neutral pH, which is generally 7.2 or so. Unrefined salt can be part of maintaining that neutral pH because we all tend to be acidic if we eat lousy food, we’re stressed, and we become nutrient deficient. So, salt’s really an important substance that’s why I wrote a whole book on that.   [00:36:35] Ashley James: That is fascinating that refined salt versus unrefined salt acts completely different in the body. One is acidic, one is more supportive and alkalizing. One has toxic ingredients, as far as I’m concerned. I’ve even seen certain refined salts where one of the ingredients was sugar. I kid you not, I just laughed. Because so many people don’t read labels.  When I go to a grocery store, my husband gets so frustrated. He calls me the label reader. I will read all the labels, but when we go to a restaurant, you just trust that they’re going to use good ingredients and they don’t. They use the cheapest ingredients. So we really have to be diligent to eat as much as we can at home and to use the healthy salt at home that has those trace minerals that don’t have all those weird agents in it that are very toxic for the body if eaten over time. I always think about what our health was like 100 years ago versus now. Heart disease, cancer—these things are so much higher than 100 years ago, and we have to look at what we put in our mouth. What we put in our mouth every day is either hurting us or healing us.  So we’ve got our salt, that’s something that we can easily switch to because you’ve given us some good advice on how to find it. What about iodine, how should we take iodine? And we want to avoid that thyroid storm that might occur by consuming too high of a level of iodine because from my understanding if you consume too much, the thyroid shuts down in a protective manner if you consume too much at once. So, how to know how much iodine our body needs every day? I’ve heard some Naturopaths like to use the skin test where you put some iodine on the skin and watch if acid absorbs, whereas others say that’s really not an accurate way to measure if you need iodine or not. How do we figure out how much we need to take and in what form?   [00:38:54] Dr. David Brownstein: So, the skin test is not an accurate way. There was a study that showed that 80% or so of the iodine placed on the skin sublimates into a gaseous phase and leaves the skin. So there’s no reason to do that. That’s not an accurate measure. A large percentage of the body’s iodine is in the skin so I don’t know if it’s just you’re measuring that.  The best measure of iodine status is a urinary excretion test. A holistic doctor can help you with that one, but the iodine loading test is by far the best test. I was involved in developing that test and working with my mentor, an iodine doctor, Guy Abraham, who developed a test. But we worked together on it, refining it. I got to help refine it. Urinary testing of iodine is the best way to go by far. The skin test doesn’t show you much. What was the other part of your question, Ashley?   [00:39:56] Ashley James: So, what form of iodine should we take and how do we know how much we should be taking?   [00:40:03] Dr. David Brownstein: We should get your levels checked to work with a doctor who’s literate in iodine, so that’s number one. I wouldn’t suggest doing it alone, but I have 30 years of working with iodine. In my first ten years, I couldn’t get it to work clinically in my practice because I was using the wrong form of iodine. I know now what I did wrong and I don’t make that mistake anymore. But with iodine, I think the best form is using a combination of iodide and iodine. What that means is that it’s a reduced and oxidized form of iodine.  For the chemistry people out there, if all the electrons in the outer shower are paired, that’s a reduced element. And if there’s one electron missing, that’s an oxidized element. It’s looking for an electron. The reduced and oxidized forms of iodine are used in different tissues of the body. The thyroid uses iodide, a reduced form. The breast uses iodine, the oxidized form. So, for a whole-body effect for iodine, it’s best to use a combination of the two. So, I use Lugol’s solution, which was first made in the 1800s. It’s a solution of potassium iodide and iodine in water. There are pills of this Lugol’s solution available too. I find it very effective, and by far it’s the best form of iodine out there.   [00:41:44] Ashley James: Oh, fascinating. Now, of course, listeners can buy your book on iodine to get way more information. This was just the tip of the iceberg. How can we find a holistic doctor that is proficient in iodine? Can listeners work with you? Do you do telemedicine, or is there an organization they can look up where they can find a roster of doctors that are proficient with this?   [00:42:20] Dr. David Brownstein: Well, I don’t have a roster of doctors. My book describes where you can do the testing and all that stuff. The labs know who’s sending in tests, so the best advice I can give people is to call a lab that’s doing an iodine loading test, and there’s a few of them out there, and they’ll tell you who’s sending in tests in your area. That’s one way to look for who’s doing the iodine testing out there.  Unfortunately, there’s still a lot of misinformation about iodine even in the holistic world. I call it medical iota phobia. They’re afraid to use iodine—it’s been successfully used for over four generations of clinicians—for their own unnatural fears and not looking at the science, and not looking at what’s really true with iodine out there.   [00:43:12] Ashley James: Could you share a few stories of success you’ve had with your patients? How has iodine changed their lives?   [00:43:25] Dr. David Brownstein: I’ve had so many patients whose first ten years I have 3/4 of them on iodine, and then now, I have less than 1/4 of my patients on thyroid hormone because they’re all on iodine. When people are diagnosed with a thyroid problem, I also do hormonal nutritional workups at the same time. So if they’re iodine deficient, what I always teach doctors when I want to teach them about iodine is to correct iodine deficiency first or concurrently with thyroid hormone. Don’t put them on thyroid hormone first because you’ll make the iodine deficiency problem worse as I said earlier. I have a patient who had a bad fibrocystic breast disease who came to me with a bilateral mastectomy scheduled for three weeks after that visit. I was the last resort for her. She’s a nurse at the University of Michigan and she was miserable. She couldn’t wear a bra. She couldn’t not even wear tight clothes but just form-fitting clothes or something like that. She couldn’t stand anything tight. She was wearing this baggy stuff, which was still hurting her. And if anyone rubbed up against her breast, she’d bumped into anything, she’d start crying. She’d been to the University of Michigan Cystic Breast Clinic and they told her to come off caffeine and chocolate and clean up her diet. She was eating a bad diet and she tried all that. It helped a little bit, but then symptoms got worse over time. Really, they told her, the only thing you can do is have a mastectomy. She sees a lady in her late 30s scheduling a bilateral mastectomy. She had had enough.  So she came to me as a last resort, read my book on iodine, and read about fibrocystic breast disease. I do an iodine loading test on her. The iodine loading test is where you take 50 milligrams of iodine at time zero, collect 24 hours of urine after that, and measure how much iodine comes out in the urine over the 24 hours. When you take iodine orally, 98% or so is excreted in the urine. You can measure the amount in and the amount out, subtract the numbers, and know how much the body has hung on to. Generally, when the body hangs on to more iodine, it’s more deficient. So once people get iodine sufficient, they have enough iodine in their body and they take 50 milligrams, they’ll pee out about 45 milligrams or 90%. They’ll hang on to 5% of it or so. That’s iodine sufficiency. So, in her case, this patient peed out 50% of the iodine and held on to 50% because she was very deficient. So I told her to move her surgery back three months. I said, let’s give this a try. I said it won’t be gone in three months, but it should be markedly better. If it’s not better, it’s too late. I didn’t know if it was too late. Tissue sometimes gets so disorganized and such a mess that you can’t get them to come back sometimes in the body. So, she called me up after two weeks into it and said she’s starting to feel better. And I saw her a month later, she had moved the surgery back two more months. And she said she’s 50% better. When I did an exam on the first visit, her breast felt like the best description I can give you is when I used to take Taekwondo in my younger days, like that punching bag feel. Like a hard-punching bag with bumps on it. It felt like alien tissue on her chest. I could barely even touch it because she was wincing and in pain. I didn’t do an exam during the one-month visit, but I asked her to come back in another month. She came back another month and said she’s 80% better. I examined her breasts at that point. It felt like she had a breast transplant. The punching bag feeling was gone. She still had lumps but they were much smaller. Now I could do almost a full exam with very minimal discomfort. She canceled her mastectomy surgery. I saw her back three-month visit, almost normal breast tissue, no bumps. She went back to her fibrocystic breast clinic and had an exam. The doctor said, wow, what are you doing? It’s way better. So she started to tell him and she said he’s just glazed over his eyes. When she stopped talking, he said, all right, I’ll see you in six months. That’s a good story.  Another good story with iodine is a lady, I diagnosed her with inflammatory breast cancer—the worst kind of breast cancer. Usually, you’re dead in three to six months from diagnosis. I was doing a study on iodine at that time with Dr. Abraham, and I put her in the study group of breast cancer diagnoses. She had very low iodine testing. I put her on iodine at 50 milligrams.  She called me up about two weeks into it and said, I’m having a problem with the iodine. I said, what’s the problem? She goes, my nightshirt is yellow over where my breasts are when I wake up in the morning. I’m on the phone with her and I said oh, well, how do you feel? She goes, I never felt better. I’m able to babysit my grandkids now, my energy is coming back. She goes, I don’t know what to do. I said, well, why don’t you come in, bring your nightshirt with you. So she brings in the nightshirt and you can clearly see this yellow stain on the inside of her nightshirt. I asked her if I could keep the nightshirt and analyze what the yellow stain was. She had yellow nails. There are not many things that cause yellow nails except for maybe if you got jaundice, but it wasn’t a jaundiced yellow, it was a little different yellow.     [00:49:46] Ashley James: And her eyes weren’t yellow?   [00:49:48] Dr. David Brownstein: Her eyes were not yellow. She’s not jaundiced there, but her nails were this particular yellow color to it. It was not a jaundice yellow but a different shade. It’s hard to describe it. So, I said to her, bromide has a yellow color to it, you’re probably detoxing from bromide. She said, what do I do? And I said, well, I’m going to put my head together with a friend of mine and we’re going to analyze this t-shirt. And I said, since you’re feeling good, up your salt intake to another teaspoon a day. I put her in a teaspoon of salt with it, increase your water intake, and start bathing in Epsom salts and we’ll get this bromide out of you. She kept on the 50 milligrams of iodine. She was part of a study, so when I tested her, we did a bromide check on day one. When she took out 50 milligrams of iodine, her bromide levels were the highest I’ve ever seen. Thirty days later, I checked her iodine and bromide levels again. Her iodine now was coming up and her bromide was starting to come down. Sixty days later, she didn’t have a lot of bromide and her iodine levels were stabilizing at high levels, and she felt much better. She lived six more years. She died of inflammatory breast cancer and had a good six years. The only thing I would do differently with her now is I would have put her on more iodine from what I know now. I did have the shirt analyzed, it’s a funny story with that. I lost her shirt. We were moving house.  I was consulting with Charles Hakala from Hakala Labs. We were developing a chemistry experiment to take a gram of the shirt from where over her breast where it’s yellow, and a gram of the shirt from the back (not yellow), and analyze the halides—fluoride, chloride, iodine, and bromide. We know how to do that. We were planning it out and then I lose the shirt. I look all over the place, can’t find it. I look at work, I look at home, and I had moved my home. We were packing stuff up and moving. So we moved to our next home and I can’t find the iodine, it’s done. So I had some shelves in my office that maybe ten years later from this incident. It was just a couple of years ago. I was cleaning out and lo and behold in the back of the shelf is that shirt in a bag. I had sealed the bag. It was sealed. I couldn’t believe it when I found it because I looked for it for years. I opened the bag and it’s still got the yellow color to it. I called Charles, we pulled up our data, we did the experiments on it, her bromide levels were, I don’t remember the numbers, but they were really high. On the back of the shirt, there was no bromide, and so she was excreting bromide. This was the first case that was ever reported of someone detoxifying from bromide in that way.   [00:53:04] Ashley James: From her breasts.   [00:53:06] Dr. David Brownstein: From her breasts.   [00:53:07] Ashley James: Where the cancer was.   [00:53:09] Dr. David Brownstein: And her nails.   [00:53:10] Ashley James: Yeah. Wow. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Brownstein. I know you have to go. Thank you so much for coming here today and sharing this information. I think it’s so vital that we continue to seek out information to add to our nutritional protocol and also the idea that using certain things like iodine for detoxification as well is really critical. It’s always a pleasure speaking with you. Listeners can go to drbrownstein.com. They can also go to centerforholisticmedicine.com. And please, get Dr. Brownstein’s books, go to his website, lots of great information. Of course, listen to episode 462 where he shares his very fascinating story with very successful treatment of his patients over the last year plus that have had coronavirus infections. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. Is there anything you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview?   [00:54:16] Dr. David Brownstein: No, thanks for having me, Ashley. I would say that if you’re not feeling good out there and you’re sick and you’re not getting answers, really try and find a good holistic doctor who can help work with you and work together with you to find out what’s wrong and what’s imbalanced. The human body is pretty well-designed when we give it what it needs, and we keep away from what it shouldn’t be exposed to. It takes a little bit of work, but the work can be worth it because you should go through life feeling good with enough energy and be happy.   [00:54:50] Ashley James: Absolutely. That is my philosophy as well. Thank you so much and I look forward to having you back on the show.   [00:54:57] Dr. David Brownstein: Thanks, Ashley.   [00:54:57] Ashley James: Have a great day, thank you. I hope you enjoyed today’s interview with Dr. Brownstein. I just wanted to remind you, if you’re interested in using the Sunlighten Technology to help your body detoxify and achieve your health goals, I highly recommend going to sunlighten.com, checking it out, listening to my interviews about sauna therapy, and specifically using the Sunlighten Technology, which you can find those by going to learntruehealth.com and using the search function there, or just give them a call. Just Google Sunlighten, Sunlighten Sauna, and give them a call.  Make sure you mention my name, Ashley James, and the Learn True Health podcast so that you get this special that they are giving our listeners this month. I want to make sure that you get the best discount and also get the best experience with them. If you have any questions about my experience with Sunlighten, feel free to reach out to me. You can email me, support@learntruehealth.com, and you can also reach out to me in the Facebook group by going to learntruehealth.com/group to be redirected to the group, or just search Learn True Health on Facebook. So again, that’s Sunlighten Sauna. Google them, give them a call. They’re all wonderful to talk to, and then make sure you mention Learn True Health the podcast and Ashley James to get your special. I am just so thrilled with the outpouring of information, the sharing from all the listeners these last five years. So many listeners have gotten a Sunlighten Sauna or done other practices that other guests have recommended and then they come back and they share with me, they email me, or they share in the Facebook group. And so many people have been thrilled with their experience using the Sunlighten Sauna, as have I. This is one thing for me to say that I’ve had a great experience, I’ve had an amazing experience, and my guests to share that they and their patients have amazing experiences. But then when we see it in the Facebook group and listeners are sharing that they love their Solo System, they love their Sunlighten, and that it’s made such a difference in their life, it’s really cool.  As a community, we can come together in the Learn True Health Facebook group and we can share what’s worked for us so that we can learn from each other. I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day, and I look forward to you coming and joining the group and sharing with us what you’ve learned and loved learning from the Learn True Health podcast. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day.   Get Connected with Dr. David Brownstein! Dr. Brown’s Holistic Medicine Center For Holistic Medicine Books by Dr. David Brownstein A Holistic Approach To Viruses Drugs That Don’t Work and Natural Therapies That Do! 2nd Edition Iodine: Why You Need It. Why You Can’t Live Without It. 5th Edition Ozone: The Miracle Therapy The Guide to a Dairy-Free Diet The Guide to a Gluten-Free Diet   Check out more wonderful books by Dr. Brownstein!

Watch the 4 Hour Event: https://www.flemingmethod.com/recorded-event-2021-presentation-series Find LTH on LBRY: https://lbry.tv/@Learn-True-Health Find LTH on Bitchute: https://www.bitchute.com/channel/kGf34VnWr7H9 Join the LTH community: learntruehealth.com/group Ashley James and Dr. Richard Fleming Highlights: Where did SARS-CoV-2 come from What is InflammoThrombotic Response What is FMTVDM or Fleming Method Effective treatment or COVID-19 What kind of diet help to prevent disease Dr. Richard Fleming on the Most Effective Drug-based Treatment for Covid-19 https://www.learntruehealth.com/dr-richard-fleming-on-the-most-effective-drug-based-treatment-for-covid-19   Dr. Richard M. Fleming, PhD, MD, JD is a scientist/physicist and also a cardiologist who discovered that inflammation and heart disease go hand in hand and have patented the Fleming Method (FMTVDM). He led a clinical trial on COVID-19 treatment protocols. In this episode, Dr. Fleming shares where SARS-CoV-2 came from, which medicines are effective for the treatment of COVID-19, and what type of diet helps prevent diseases. Intro: Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. This is a long-awaited episode that I did with Dr. Richard Fleming. I have been so excited to publish this and I apologize for the break that I took. Man, this year has been crazy.  Basically, we moved, we had to move very quickly. We had to use the Marie Kondo method and get rid of most of our belongings that we filled a 2700 square foot house. And now we are living in a beautiful and very small space. We have decluttered our life, and that’s what we have been doing the last two months. We got rid of all of our belongings, only kept the absolute essentials, and we moved. So now we are living in a beautiful area, in a very, very small space, in a more efficient life. It’s a huge emotional process going through decluttering and just emotionally and energetically removing from my life what no longer served me. I watched the Marie Kondo show on Netflix, many of my friends have read her book, and I read some of her books. What I wasn’t aware of is how much of an energetic release would happen. When we decluttered, we donated, we sold, we gave away, and in some cases had to throw away so much of our belongings. And now, everything we own can fit in basically one room, which feels liberating. Also now, I realize that there’s a whole ‘nother level of organization that we’re going to achieve. But we’ve taken the last two months, we were very, very busy doing all of that, and finally we’re now set up and I have my computer set up, and I’m able to interview and publish episodes again. This particular interview is, in my mind, one of the best or one of the most informative pieces that I have ever done. What I really enjoy about Dr. Fleming’s research is—you know, there are some doctors that sell a book, this is how they make a living, and so there’s always a question in the back of your mind like, what’s your motivation? Is it money motivated? I believe everyone has the right to earn a living, you just have to wonder, how much are they selling, right? Whereas Dr. Fleming, he has everything to lose and nothing to gain from putting this information out there. He loves doing research. He’s a research scientist and cardiologist. He is a patent holder of a method called the Fleming Method that is used today for early detection of heart disease and in some cases cancer. And he really doesn’t like self-promotion, that’s not his thing. Him and I talked about that off the air. Now, when I interviewed him, he had an event coming up in which he was even upset they were charging $10 to come attend the event. And it was a four-hour lecture that he was giving with over 100 slides that you could download for free. This information is so incredibly valuable and I’m so excited to bring it to you today. Because of my move and everything that’s going on, unfortunately, I’m publishing this after his event. However, the good news is you can go to his website, flemingmethod.com, and of course, the links to everything that Dr. Richard Fleming does is going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. You can go to his website and from there you will be able to see, I believe he’s cut it into something like the four-hour lecture into something like 15 parts. You can stream, watch, and I think you might even be able to download his lecture. And definitely download the PDF with all of the slides. What he gives you with all of the evidence is he gives you the paper trail of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Who created it, how it was created, the effects it has on the body from a medical standpoint. The paper trail is very evident. He shows who funded it, the labs have funded it. He shows basically what it does to the body, and if we understand what it does to the body, then we can also understand how to best combat it as well. He shows his study—which he talks about in our interview today and you’re going to be blown away— where they’ve used medications to see which ones are best at surviving, decreasing the mortality rate of coronavirus infection. He also shows the latest vaccine trials, their efficacy and their safety. He basically pulls all this data and digests it and explains it. So it’s fascinating. I watched the four-hour lecture. I listened to most of it because I was listening to it while I was packing up our house. I’d look over occasionally at the slides that he was presenting, and just my mind was blown. So I’m excited for you to hear this episode. Thank you for your patience. I know you guys have been eagerly waiting to hear it. Definitely go to his website to listen to his four-hour lecture where he goes into great detail. What’s great about our interview is he goes into stories and explains the backstory as well, so this interview will complement his four-hour lecture very well for you. If you have any questions, if you want to chat about this interview or anything that Dr. Fleming does, please join the Learn True Health Facebook group. It’s a great community of holistic-minded people who are all looking to achieve true health and looking to continue learning from each other. Just search Learn True Health on Facebook, or you can go to learntruehealth.com/group. That’ll redirect you straight to the Facebook group.  Thank you so much for being a listener and thank you so much for sharing these episodes with those you love. This is one of those shareable episodes for sure. I know that there’ll be new listeners and I’m very excited. Welcome guys. I’ve been doing this podcast for five years now, and I continue to just love everything I learned from all the holistic doctors. Now I’ve got some more episodes in the hopper for you after this one, and I just know that you guys will love the next few episodes that are coming up so stay tuned. Make sure you’re subscribed on your favorite podcast directory. And please, if you love the show, give it a five-star rating and written review. It really does help. The more positive five-star written reviews we get, the more platforms like iTunes, Spotify, and Stitcher, the more they, in turn, will promote the show’s search ability to other people. So we can spread this information through giving it great reviews.  So if you like it, give it a great review, and if you don’t like it just write me an email and start a conversation with me, support@learntruehealth.com. I’d love to hear from you. Either way, thank you so much for being a listener and sharing the show. Enjoy today’s episode, I know you will—some amazing information. I’m so excited to get it out for you today.   [00:07:57] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 463. I am so excited for today’s guest. You just have no idea. We have probably the smartest guy in the world on the show today. I watched a two-hour YouTube video with Dr. Richard Fleming, explaining the link between inflammation, SARS, and COVID. He’s the one that discovered the inflammation and heart disease go hand in hand. Dr. Fleming, your research, what you’re sharing with us on your website, which I recommend all listeners go to flemingmethod.com. He puts out lots of great information. He doesn’t like charging for things. He just wants to keep helping us and get this information out there. He’s got over 30 videos explaining the science behind COVID and inflammation, and it’s really going to wake people up for real, blow their minds, and get us back in charge of our health. That’s the whole point of this podcast is getting us back in charge of our health. When you understand how these things work in the body and you understand an inflamed body, how it responds to disease and infection versus a body that’s not inflamed, the care that you can do to take care of yourself to prevent things from happening in the future, you’re going to be so much better off. Dr. Fleming, it’s such a pleasure to have you here today. Now, you have an event coming up in Texas, in Dallas. So if any listeners are in Dallas, they got to go to flemingmethod.com and right there at the top, it says Event 2021. It’s only $10, it’s a whole day event where you can learn from Dr. Fleming and you’re going to learn about COVID. I’m sure you’re going to tell us a little bit today about what this event is, and it’s going to be filmed. So for those who aren’t in Dallas, Texas, we’ll be able to go to your website, flemingmethod.com, and watch the event as well. You’re going to be giving us the download of all your slides. There are over 100 slides referencing all the studies. We were just talking before we hit record that you’re surprised you haven’t been assassinated. I mean honestly, you’re putting out so much information that would make some government officials very angry, some CDC officials very angry. People that want to keep telling us we all need to follow their guidelines, which I’m not sure how studied their guidelines are. I don’t see the science. I just see them constantly changing directions. In my state, in Washington, what I’ve seen is almost half of all restaurants have gone out of business. We’re heading for a major disaster if the economy goes this way. Small businesses are being crushed, and so many people are losing their jobs. I am in fear of what is going to happen in the next few years as a result of the government not taking true science into account and making mandates that aren’t necessarily helping any of us. And then, of course, we’re not being told what we can do to actually prevent or support our body in mounting a healthy response. So there’s all this in the air and Dr. Fleming, I’m so excited to have you here today to share with us what we can do to support our body to prevent heart disease, which you are the expert in, and also, talk a little bit about COVID since you have so much information around that.   [00:12:11] Dr. Richard Fleming: Well, first off, thank you for inviting me, Ashley. It’s my pleasure to be here and given an opportunity to try to provide some information for your listeners and let them know about the upcoming event.  It’s interesting that you mentioned the CDC just a few moments ago because back in 2005, the CDC invited me to attend a conference and present on not only the patent FMTVDM, which some people have shortened to the Fleming Method because the name of the patent is rather long. But also, the role that diet and other risk factors for heart disease played for it. So we were talking about heart disease and cancer at that point in time in conjunction with the patent.  Just for the heck of it, the title of the patent is the Fleming Method for Tissue and Vascular Differentiation using same state single or sequential quantification comparisons. I thought I was doing people a favor by the acronym FMTVDM, and now it’s been shortened to Fleming Method, which is fine. This is year number 53 for me doing research—and one of the things that I learned way back and particularly back in medical school when I entered medical school in 1980—was we were told by the dean that 90% of what we’re going to be taught was incorrect. He encouraged those of us who are research-oriented, and I was clearly research-oriented, to investigate different fields of medicine and try to advance it as best we could.  So I’ve spent several of those decades looking at the tests that we do, understanding what causes different disease states, and trying to get a better handle on finding problems earlier, but not from the point of view that there are so many people that get tests done that they don’t quite know what the results of those tests are. It’s not a matter of having an insensitive test finding things, or an overly sensitive test finding things. It’s a matter of actually measuring things. Much of the work that I’ve done diagnostically has been to look at how we measure things and to define not only disease but our health on a spectrum from one end to the other so that we can find things sooner. Not just so we can attack it using the same old methods, but hopefully so we can do things to improve our health earlier on using, hopefully, less aggressive and less toxic means, and perhaps more fundamental approaches than we’re so used to doing. One of the things that people need to appreciate or I would hope that they would appreciate about medicine is that much of what medicine has had to focus on is just simply keeping people alive in emergency situations, and that’s where a lot of our focus has been. Only after you tackle that type of problem do you get the luxury of going back and looking at how we can then prevent things. There is not a lot or actually any emphasis by the Federal government on preventing disease. In the 1960s, that was discussed briefly, and some of the people that raised those questions were advised to stop asking those questions, and they did. The government does not like it when you raise questions and does not like it when you think outside of the box.   [00:15:53] Ashley James: It was pressure by the pharmaceutical industry, you think because there’s no profit in not being sick?   [00:16:04] Dr. Richard Fleming: Well, I’ve got two responses to many questions people answer. First off, there’s a heck of a lot of profit for people in not being sick because vitamins, minerals, and lots of different things like that are made by the same pharmaceutical companies that sell you the prescription drugs. But you are correct in that there is an awful lot of money to be made by disease. It’s like casinos. If you look at a casino and you and you look at what they consider the risk of winning there, you just have to step back for a moment and think, how do they keep the doors open to all these bright shiny places? And it’s not because they’re losing money, they’re making money. Big Pharma is making money. There’s no doubt about it. The SARS-CoV-2 has demonstrated a tremendous capacity to make money.  In fact, billions and trillions have gone into SARS-CoV-2. And the irony is when you look at the evidence about this virus, where it came from, who paid for it, and who’s funding the research not only for this virus but for vaccines, for CRISPR technology, for SAM technology, for transmissible vaccine technology, for all the other components, you’ll find that it’s basically the same groups of people. It’s our Federal government, it’s the Gates Foundation, it’s the Helmsley Foundation. It’s people that were connected with Jeffrey Epstein when he was alive.  You’re right. I mean, those types of things are controversial and I don’t think the powers that be really want that information out there, but unfortunately, they really haven’t, in my opinion, been manipulating something as long as they have been with this pandemic. The amount of time that they’ve been manipulating it had its effect of getting people to not talk to each other and to go along with the flow, but it’s also had a secondary effect, which is a significant amount of the population that I’ve guesstimating is about 30%, have really kind of had it with this process. And that’s caused them to start doing what they’re not supposed to, which is to get together and to talk about things. The more people talk and share information, the less likely they are to be manipulated and controlled by the powers that be.   [00:18:46] Ashley James: Yes, that’s why we’re here today. You guys that are listening to this, that is exactly what you need to know is the more you know, the more you’re not going to be manipulated. We talked about this in past interviews about how we’ve been raised to believe milk is good, milk does a body good. That was marketing.   [00:19:10] Dr. Richard Fleming: Oh yeah.   [00:19:10] Ashley James: We’ve been manipulated through marketing, that’s federally subsidized, right? It doesn’t do a body good. There’s so much science now, so many studies show that it’s actually not great for you, and it’s not a great source of calcium. Calcium is much better getting it from vegetables, for example, versus getting it from a cow because that’s so pro-inflammatory for the body and there are higher risks of cancer. We can get into that, but I just want to bring it up, just touching on this a little bit because you did go there. The word conspiracy is a plot or a scheme to do harm, to do things that are illegal. So when we talk about conspiracy because, in the mainstream media, it’s been twisted. The word conspiracy is, oh, those are the nutjobs who believe the Earth is flat or whatever. They try to paint the word conspiracy, and it’s actually not the definition. The definition is when we are identifying a group of people who are doing harm, who are doing something possibly nefarious. And you mentioned those organizations like the Gates Foundation, those same organizations and people that you mentioned are also connected to or were connected to the Wuhan lab that was studying the SARS-CoV-2 virus. So just putting it out there, when we go down that rabbit hole, we see that there’s so much to look at. These organizations that are now telling us what we need to do or to our body have been involved for a long time in studying this virus, and creating vaccines. Scary though that every vaccine they’ve ever tried to test on animals for COVID because COVID has been around for a long time just like influenza, different variants have been around for a long time. Every time they go to create a vaccine, all the animals die during the trials. And now, the animals that it’s being given to are humans because it’s a trial now. This is the scary part. What is the connection? Now considering that you are the discoverer, you are the person who discovered that heart disease and inflammation go together, that inflammation causes heart disease and you can see the two together. I love that then you created this method of measuring it so that we could catch it way early on. Most people know they have heart disease when they have their first heart attack or when they have angina, when they have major they’ve had it for years. They’ve been developing it for years or they develop a stroke. They’ve had it for years, but what if they could have gone through a test and then caught the inflammation early on and then changed their lifestyle so that they didn’t have that inflammation, they didn’t go that route? Now, this is near and dear to my heart because my dad died of heart disease and my mom died of cancer. These two things, if they had known years before that their body is going to create this disease that will end their life early, they would have made different choices, hopefully. But what is the link between inflammation and maybe how people, when they have COVID, how their outcomes are? Can you see that there are significantly worse outcomes for those who already have inflammation? If their body’s not inflamed, do they have better outcomes? Is there a way of treating the inflammation while they’re in COVID, while they’re infected so that they have a better outcome?   [00:23:31] Dr. Richard Fleming: Right. Let me walk everybody back to a little bit of history on me so that you can get a perspective of me laying these answers out. So in 1976, I joined American Heart as a faculty member, which made me the youngest faculty member at that point in time in history. I hope nobody has taken me out of those positions at a younger age than I did. But, more power to them if they have. As a result of doing it, I get put on three basic committees. One was basic, one was advanced cardiac life support. And then the other one was a new committee, physician cluster education faculty. I began on all three of those for the latter one talking to physicians primarily and then expanding beyond that about what caused heart disease and what can be done about it. The primary theory at that point in time was it was cholesterol. I spent a couple of decades teaching that and training that to people. And then in the late ‘80s, I started questioning some of that. From ’89 to ’92, I was actually the cardiology fellow who did the Dean Ornish program studies for them at UT where I did my fellowship in cardiology. I then questioned further on that because some of that data even is questionable about what the real outcomes were, and proceeded to look at a variety of other factors that people were reporting as significant but not uniformly. And so over the course of time and eventually I took six months sabbatical to just sort this out. I developed what was called the Fleming inflammation and vascular disease theory, the Fleming inflammation and heart disease theory. The inflammation and heart disease theory has been called a variety of things. Presented it at American Heart in 1994 then again in 1995, reduced it to a textbook. So, written up as a chapter in a cardiology textbook in ’99. And then, from 2000 to 2003, published a couple of studies on bacteria and their specific roles. And then we were on 20/20 in 2004 talking about it. And essentially began with the process that heart disease is an inflammatory process, it’s not a narrowing of an artery, although that occurs later on. About half of the people find out they have heart disease by dropping dead of it, which is not your best approach to find out that you have a problem. It’s the inability of an artery to relax and increase its blood flow upon demand that’s called Flow Reserve and I wrote the quadratic equation for that back in ‘90 or ‘91. So that is the blood flow equation for humans. Then came up with these 12 factors of which one of those are infectious diseases like bacteria and viruses that produce an inflammatory process. Now, I then also went on to explain that this is what causes diabetes, high blood pressure, cerebrovascular diseases, strokes, cancers, and a variety of health problems. And that obesity is one of the primary reasons why these chemicals exist in the body called cytokines are interleukins, which means they are chemicals that are released from one type of blood cell to another type of blood cell to signal that there’s a problem. So the entire theory boils down to two things going on: an inflammatory process or a swelling, and a thrombosis or blood clotting process, which at first blush might seem not good for the human body until you realize that really what that does is it tries to kill off something that’s not supposed to have been in the area by releasing chemicals that just perforate or destroy cells that are damaged. And then, depriving them of blood by forming a blood clot so it decreases their nutrients getting in there or their oxygen getting in there so things die. The focus is to attack things that shouldn’t be there. These chronic inflammatory diseases, however, are the result of us, humans, doing things for our bodies that we shouldn’t. I chuckled at the milk comment because that’s one of the conversations that I’ve had with people in the past. I’ve had lots of criticism from people that they don’t like what I have to say. I like to be liked, but it’s not my goal as a scientist/physician to make you like me, my goal is to tell you the truth. I always tell people that if they’re given the choice between the doctor they don’t like that saves their lives and the one that will hold their hand while they’re dying, go for the first one. The latter one doesn’t have a very good outcome, even if you feel good while you’re doing it. So, the inflammatory process is designed to protect you. But if you’re doing things to insult your body consistently, it will produce disease and you will stay in a hyperinflammatory, hyper thrombotic or what I call InflammoThrombotic Response, ITR for short because scientists and doctors like to abbreviate things. And then my students get to listen to me say don’t abbreviate, tell me the whole thing. They get to abbreviate when they’re later, older, doing things like I do, and getting tired of using the full phrases. What we saw with SARS-CoV-2, and it’s important to distinguish between the viral infection and the disease. So SARS-CoV-2 is the virus and COVID-19 is the disease. It’s like cholesterol is a problem, and coronary artery disease is the disease. They are two different things. COVID means that you have developed an InflammoThrombotic Response. Well, why would you develop a potentially lethal, life-threatening InflammoThrombotic Response? Well, it’s because you have comorbidity. You have one of these other health problems that your body is already in hyper or increased inflammation or inflammatory and thrombotic process. So now, you just simply toss a little bit more gasoline on the fuel by having the virus, and what we see were people’s systems that simply couldn’t hang on anymore, that was “the straw that broke the camel’s back”. So that’s what we really saw and see with this disease. During 2020, I began the process very early in the year of sorting out what was going on with this virus as best I could and looked at treatments. Where everybody else was focused on what type of treatment, was it an anti-malarial or an antibiotic, I was asking a different type of question. Which was, what’s the mechanisms of action or how do these drugs work? Because that’s really the key. It’s not the label that you put on it, it’s how do the drugs work? They do the things that are necessary to treat a) a virus, and b) this InflammoThrombotic Response that can occur to it. Because I patented FMTVDM or Fleming Method and had already done about two decades’ worth of research, we already have the data that shows where this inflammatory and thrombotic process of infection lies in the measurements of FMTVDM.  The other thing is that I’m not a big fan of doing sloppy research, even though I get a lot of criticism from people who like to do sloppy research because they like to do one drug or two drugs and then compare that, and that’s not very useful. I mean, it’s nice if you have lots of time and people aren’t dying, but when people are dying, you have to take a different approach, in my opinion. And that’s to look at a lot of drugs altogether. You can only do them one at a time, but if you do it intelligently, you can layer them one after another. We took 1,800 people. I’m going to answer this now because I see criticisms on social media. The study was not changed from 500 people to 1,800 people. The study was designed to end up with 500 people who were hospitalized with the InflammoThrombotic Response of COVID-19. To do that meant that we had 1800 people that we originally saw to get to the 500. In fact, we got to 501 because I didn’t stop at 500. I stopped at 501, big deal.   [00:33:03] Ashley James: When you saw these 1,800 people, were they all positively infected?   [00:33:09] Dr. Richard Fleming: Right, so that’s the thing. They were done in 7 countries, 23 facilities outside of the United States. Because the United States had already established that it wasn’t going to do this type of research, it was going to muddle along at the pace that it was doing and it was going to focus on vaccines. So I have—I never thought I’d see it in my lifetime, but I certainly have now—seen an environment where the Federal government said there are no treatments for these things and you’d better not be treating people for it. So clearly this was not something we could do in the United States, and I make no apologies about that.   [00:33:49] Ashley James: That seems completely unethical.   [00:33:52] Dr. Richard Fleming: I think it’s unethical and considering where this virus came from, everything shows that this is a bioweapon that we’ll get into if we have enough time. And that the same people that said there are no treatments, we’re going to go vaccines, are the same people that paid for this gain of function by a weapon. And I don’t think it’s just unethical, I think it’s criminal. I think they have violated international law. And if I have anything to say about it, they will be held before a second Nuremberg trial and be held accountable. So we did it outside the country and what we did is we brought them, so they came to see their doctors. I simply coordinated the study and made the patent available without cost and designed a study. So they came to see their doctors. They had to have a positive PCR test, for lack of a better thing. That’s all we had at the time. And then their doctors decided whether they would say, okay, I don’t think you’re symptomatic enough to be treated. Go home, come back in three days. I want to re-evaluate you, or their doctors who would say, well, we have four options to treat from here in an outpatient setting. I think you’re symptomatic, I’m going to start you on that, and then come back in three days. They were almost evenly distributed, there were slightly more who ended up getting treatment by their physicians. And then in three days, a decision was made. You came back, you looked better, and you get kept on that medication; or if you weren’t getting medication and you got better, everybody said hooray.  In either group, if you didn’t get better, you got hospitalized because you were symptomatic and you were then diagnosed with COVID-19 coronavirus disease 2019. Because it was not the 19th coronavirus, it was discovered in 2019, or at least that’s when all of us were told about it. Although, we have documents that show that SARS-CoV-2 was actually part of a research project out of China in 2007 where they combined hepatitis C virus, HIV virus, SARS-CoV-1, and SARS-CoV-2 in a gain-of-function research project.   [00:36:17] Ashley James: That’s where the bioweapon thing comes in?   [00:36:19] Dr. Richard Fleming: Well, we’ll get into that in more detail, but it’s out of the United States and out of China, primarily.   [00:36:28] Ashley James: Is this a patent that people can see?   [00:36:30] Dr. Richard Fleming: I don’t know if they patented that, but the papers are certainly out there. In fact, I’m writing a book on gain-of-function because I was asked to write a book. Not only was I asked to write a book, but I’ve been asked to provide documents for court. [00:36:47] Ashley James: I’d love to have you back on the show when you have released your book so that we can promote it because I know my listeners would be very interested in reading it.    [00:36:57] Dr. Richard Fleming: I would be delighted and you know how I feel about promoting things.   [00:37:01] Ashley James: Don’t worry, I’ll do the promotion for you.   [00:37:04] Dr. Richard Fleming: Thank you. So they did that and when they came into the hospital, they had an FMTVDM done. They also had a number of other tests, a couple that looked for information, and other things that we were concerned about. They had electrocardiograms, looked at their heart rhythm and the QT interval that everybody stresses out about, and then they were randomly assigned a treatment—1 of 10 treatments. Sorry, that’s just how you do research.   [00:37:36] Ashley James: But this was suspected to help them?   [00:37:42] Dr. Richard Fleming: Right. Every one of these treatments I had selected based upon the mechanism of action and data that was available that I’m surprised more people aren’t aware of, but that’s the function of a good researcher is to be able to do that type of thing. And then in three days, they had the studies repeated, and one of three things was going to happen. Either they got better, they got worse, or no change. I won’t go through the details of how we did the measurements and what accounted for better or worse, but just using that if they got better, then they were maintained on that drug. If they got worse, the drug was stopped and they were randomly given another one. If there was no significant change, they were randomly assigned to a new drug on top of what they had already received. So with 10 treatment combinations, we ended up with, in the end, 52 different combinations of drugs that were studied. And because FMTVDM quantifies and measures, we had the ability to statistically analyze that and sort out what worked and what didn’t work, and in what combinations things worked and didn’t work. That boiled it down to three combinations that were 99.83% successful for COVID patients. Outpatients with SARS-CoV-2 had a variety, about an 83% success rate. Although one drug combination worked 100% of the time, and as I tell people, it worked 100% of the time, my response is yeah. But if we get enough people, somebody is not going to work on it. You just have to be intelligent enough to realize what the information is telling us is what works, and it shows us why the drugs work because these drug combinations, when you tend to look at them, by doing them in combination, decreased hospital stays from 40 to 60 days down to 1 to 2 weeks. And then the other thing was that we’re very careful about the ventilator settings because using ventilators, the way that they are standardly typically set and used on patients has already been shown in three major publications published in the New England Journal of Medicine—when it was still a journal versus a political tool—had shown previously that if you set ventilators the way we set them routinely for patients, you’ll kill patients with this type of lung disease. And I think we’ve done a great job now of validating those papers as well with all the people that have died, and SARS-CoV-2, for the only positive note I can say on that, is it validated my original theory from 1994. Not where I was going or wanting to go with that, but there you go.   [00:40:36] Ashley James: It originally validated that inflammation is the root cause of disease?   [00:40:42] Dr. Richard Fleming: It validated the fact that bacteria and viruses are one of those pro-inflammatory things that will kill you with heart disease and the other diseases because that’s why people died.   [00:40:53] Ashley James: It exacerbates what’s already there, right?   [00:40:57] Dr. Richard Fleming: Yeah, they weren’t being treated, that’s the problem. 99.83% of our people survived. So what that tells you is that had everybody else been treated for this InflammoThrombotic Response that I described in the theory, we wouldn’t have had hundreds and thousands and millions of people die. But it’s the attitude of, well, everybody talks about inflammation and heart disease, but it’s lip service to me because nobody then turned around and treated the people. If the attitude is we don’t have treatments for this, or if we treat you that way that they’re going to come after our medical licenses or throw us in jail, well, understanding that that is the scenario that happened in the United States and around the world, it’s not too challenging to understand why the German Medical Association behaved the way it did under Adolf Hitler. And Göring at the 1947 Nuremberg trials when he knew he was going to be hanged for crimes against humanity, the Germans and Nazis were no different than the Americans, the British, or anybody else. He said, any government can do this to its people, and the American attorney that was arguing with him said, no, no, no, we’re a free society in the United States. This does not happen. And Göringlooked and he said, you know, it doesn’t matter whether you get a republic, a parliament, communist, socialistic, or fascist society. All you have to do to manipulate the people is tell them there’s a problem. Tell them if they don’t step in line that bad things will happen. Tell them that people that don’t step in line are unpatriotic and you will manipulate the people. And I think we’ve seen a good demonstration of that over the last year and a half. I mean, at least that’s my perspective on it. Psychologists have known this for a long time since the 1940s if not before, how to modify this. The US Army and government are very good at learning how and controlling people’s behaviors, and yet they continue to repeatedly conduct experiments on US citizens. I mean, you don’t even have to be good at this. You can go to Wikipedia and type in something about US government experiments on its people, something like that, and you’ll pull up a Wikipedia page that will just blow you out of the water.   [00:43:39] Ashley James: Yeah, there’s video footage.   [00:43:41] Dr. Richard Fleming: From [inaudible 00:43:40] experiment to syphilis to radiation exposure on US military personnel—you name it. We’re not living with a bunch of nice folks. If you look at the last 20 to 30 years, you’ll see that the US government has conducted gain-of-function research, and it has paid Peter Daszak of EcoHealth over $61 million, $39 million of which came from the Department of Defense and they provided an advisor, David Franz, who was a former Deputy Commander of Fort Detrick, our bioweapons Center for the US military in the United States. Provided that to Peter Daszak who then provided funds to Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina, and Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And you don’t have to be really good at this, I don’t think. I mean, I’ve got a ton of grant data, I’ve got a ton of published papers that showed who paid for the results. There are patents out there that show that Daszak patented for gene manipulation, including humans and viruses and bacteria. The US government gets patent kickbacks on not only that one, but specifically the patent for investigating chimeric, which is the scientific term for gain-of-function, spike proteins on coronaviruses. So what Anthony Fauci did earlier in the week or during this last week when Senator Dr. Rand Paul asked him about gain-of-function research coming out of NIH and NIAID to Daszak and the others on coronavirus. When Fauci danced around that as he did and said the US government has not funded gain-of-function research, they’ve got a bloody patent that they’re getting the rights and monies for that very type of research. The paper trail of publications and money trail shows that Fauci committed perjury.   [00:45:52] Ashley James: Oh my gosh.   [00:45:55] Dr. Richard Fleming: I mean, Fauci, remember, was pushing the vaccines and he is connected with Pfizer and Moderna.   [00:46:02] Ashley James: Yes. And connected with the Wuhan lab that created the virus, the study.   [00:46:10] Dr. Richard Fleming: Yeah. Not only that, but if you go and you look, you will see that Fauci, Gates, Helmsley, and Epstein are all tied together behind the scenes. Epstein not so much anymore because he’s dead, which is what happens to you—speculative on my part, it is my opinion, not a known fact—if you displease powers that be, bad things happen to people, even if they’re powerful people.   [00:46:40] Ashley James: And it definitely sends a message to everyone else step in line.   [00:46:43] Dr. Richard Fleming: It definitely does. I mean, one of the things that I’ve commented to people is—and some people don’t like me to get this off track—I’m Viking ancestry. I frequently tell people that my ancestors had a good way of cutting down recidivism. They just simply cut the heads off their enemies and it sends a very powerful message. I’m pretty sure that my ancestors aren’t the only ones that learned that message. People end up dead, people end up missing. I know more than enough examples of it.   [00:47:20] Ashley James: There’s a lot of holistic doctors, a lot of doctors that have been speaking out, such as yourself, who suddenly passed away even though they were super healthy. It does leave us suspicious. I pray that you are safe. You’ve moved to Texas. We joked about how you moved to Texas, everyone has a gun—you don’t—but everyone has a gun, they’re going to protect you. You mentioned that 99.8% of people survived. Is that out of the 1,800 people in your initial study, or was that the hospitalized 501?   [00:47:54] Dr. Richard Fleming: It was the whole 1,800. All three people were on a ventilator, one died at three days, one died at four days, and one died at five days.   [00:48:04] Ashley James: Still, to work with people around the world, 1,800 of them who all tested positive, 501 ended up in the hospital, which you have to be pretty sick to end up in the hospital. I know because a few days after I gave birth, many listeners (some don’t), some might be first time listeners.  On April 13th of this year, I gave birth to our daughter who passed away. So I was struck with intense grief, which put my blood pressure through the roof. Normally my blood pressure is actually slightly low, in the healthy low range. And then I think I might have gotten it from one of the paramedics because there were 13 paramedics in our bedroom because we did a home birth.  Just so you know, it’s something that wouldn’t have been prevented if I had gone into the hospital. She died right as she was born. It’s not anything we could have prevented if I was in a hospital either way and there was no detection that we would have known in advance. That’s the thing I struggle with. I couldn’t have prevented it, and it’s really God’s will. That’s what I have to be with. There are these times when we can take charge of our health, which is what we’re learning today and all our interviews, and then there are times when we have no control. And that’s when we have to just step back and realize that, yes, our life is in God’s hands. We do everything we can to be healthy, and the outcome sometimes is just not in our control at all. But a few days later I developed COVID, and everyone who was part of the birth, actually most of them who were part of the birth also developed COVID. My son, zero symptoms. I mean, he’s six, he’s healthy. My husband had a stuffy nose. He mowed the lawn for four hours while in the height of having COVID. He’s like, yeah, I kind of have a runny nose. That was his sickest, but I was bedridden.  I was on all the homeopathy and I was on all the supplements, everything I could possibly get my hands on. And it all kind of helped, and then on day eight, which I heard is the day that a lot of people kind of tank, my blood pressure went down. It was like 96/46 or something. I was practically fainting. My blood pressure just all of a sudden tanked. My O2 was down to 93 and I was having problems breathing all of a sudden. The concern was that I developed a clot from pregnancy, which is possible. It’s like okay, we should definitely get checked out. I went to the hospital to get checked out to make sure that I didn’t have a blood clot from pregnancy because I had just given birth. I got a CT scan for the first time in my life and that was an adventure. You know what was funny, the entire time I was telling the tech about you and your research. I was like, oh, the isotopes. A layperson trying to explain your Ph.D. research to him and he’s like, okay. I’m like, no, it’s so cool, you got to check it out. So I told him to look at your videos. But anyway, luckily I didn’t have a blood clot. The doctor comes in and he has a very concerned look on his face. Now my oxygen came back up to 95, so I was doing okay. My lungs were kind of sore, it was a little bit hard to breathe, but I had stabilized basically. He said, well, I really want to put you on this experimental drug. It’s not approved by the FDA and he doesn’t know if it’s going to be paid for by my insurance. I’m not going to get a $20,000 bill. I can’t even pronounce it casirivimab and imdevimab.   [00:51:57] Dr. Richard Fleming: Right, so two antibodies.   [00:51:58] Ashley James: Okay. They wanted to give me that. And so I said, can I please have the paperwork? He prints me out this nice little sales form and I’m looking at it like, well, there’s no statistics on here. So I went to the website, I looked, and I read the studies. They studied two groups of people that were hospitalized, one was 200 and something then the other was 200 something. The ones that were hospitalized and didn’t receive the treatment, 10% of them died. The ones that did receive the treatment, 11% of them died. I’m like, 1% more. I could die. I could have a 1% more chance of dying if I do this. I look through it and I’m like, you know what, just send me home with an inhaler. I’m going to take my chances. I’m not a guinea pig. I don’t believe in enrolling myself at any—   [00:52:50] Dr. Richard Fleming: Experimental research.   [00:52:51] Ashley James: Experiments, thank you. I’m not a guinea pig. He was really concerned. He’s like, you really need this. We’ve seen this work really well. I felt like he was selling me on it, and I’m like, okay, you know what, I’m going to come back if I get worse, but I really feel like I’m stabilized now. And I didn’t have a fever the whole time, I didn’t have a headache. It was all just breathing stuff. And now that I know I didn’t have a blood clot, I could go home and continue taking all my supplements, just resting, and the inhaler, the albuterol helped tremendously. I also got on glutathione and almost immediately got better, which is really interesting considering, you see that inflammation absolutely plays a role in the outcomes that people have. So I get home and then the next day, I get a phone call from the hospital. The pharmacist is trying to sell me on coming back to get the medicine. I’m sitting up on the couch sorting clothes and doing laundry. I’m like, I’m fine. I feel great. I just needed that little help with the inhaler to get me through the tough breathing. I was already on my way back mending, and they’re trying to get me back to get in the study to be part of the experiment. I mean, that they’re trying to sell me on it is pretty interesting. We, of course, quarantined the whole time, we were at home. But just to see how the medical system and how they were really excited to get me in this experimental thing, right? It’s like, no, thank you. And I got better. It’s interesting. Our son got completely exposed, no symptoms. There are a few people that were in our inner circle during that time that also had no symptoms, so their body must have mounted a response without having to have COVID-19. They were exposed to it but didn’t have to have it.  My husband had minor, minor symptoms. I had more major ones, and the doctor said to me in the ER, you’re not sick enough for me to admit you, but you’re not healthy enough for me to not be worried about you. You should really get on this drug I’m trying to sell you. It’s interesting. Now, I’m very curious, and I’m sure all the listeners are curious. What was the most effective treatment that you guys figured out?   [00:55:18] Dr. Richard Fleming: For outpatient or inpatient?   [00:55:21] Ashley James: Oh, let’s talk about both.   [00:55:24] Dr. Richard Fleming: The combination that we saw for outpatients that were most successful was a combination of primaquine, clindamycin, and hydroxychloroquine. And the reason for that is that you have to look at what the drugs actually do. So, SARS-CoV-2 everybody I think has heard the term ACE2 receptor. If you’ve heard of a site on the cell that the spike protein attaches to, it’s typically the ACE2, the angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 receptor that we talk about. Although, there are actually four receptors on the cell. So the first one is ACE2. The second one involved is something called TMPRSS2 or transmembrane serine protease 2. The third one is called a furin cleavage site. And the fourth one is called neuropilin-1. So, the second one TMPRSS2 explains why black people tend to get more infected with SARS than white people because their nose and upper respiratory system have more TMPRSS2 receptors, than do Asians, Latinos, or Caucasians. So they’re more prone to the virus.  And it turns out that when I did my research to look at that upfront, that clindamycin which is an antibiotic works because it interferes with the TMPRSS2 receptor, and it interferes with the ability of the virus to replicate itself called the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase, which is the enzymes involved in ribosomes that take the RNA and translate it to protein. For example, the spike protein. And that turned out to be correct. Obviously, I didn’t know it before we started it, but it turned out to be correct. Then primaquine is an aminoquinoline like hydroxychloroquine but it’s a one-time dose. And, it has a longer-term effect and so it interferes with the binding of the virus to the ACE2 receptor and also interferes with the virus being able to replicate itself. And then hydroxychloroquine does a number of things that interfere with the attachment of the spike protein to the ACE receptor. It decreases an inflammatory process through inhibition of what’s called a toll 7 receptor. It interferes with clotting by interfering with what’s called glycoprotein IIb/IIIa, all of this was back in the original theory in 1994. It slightly increases the pH of something called cytosol, which is where the virus finds itself once it gets inside your cells.  The first thing the virus has to do is get the envelope off to release its genetic material onto our cells. And it turns out that hydroxychloroquine, by slightly increasing that pH—and we’re not talking about anything that you would significantly know, I mean, this is minuscule—it interferes with the ability of the envelope to come off. It opens up a passageway, which is called an ionophore because it’s an ion that passes through. So the ion is zinc, so it opens up the passageway for zinc to come from outside the cell to inside this cell, which interferes with the ability of the virus to replicate itself again to RdRp, RNA-dependent RNA polymerase. It also decreases some of the other cytokines or chemicals released by cells to cause tissue damage. So, that’s how it works. It’s not because it’s an anti-malarial because it’s a drug that works by these mechanisms independent of what we call it. So those three together had that effect. It turned out that for individuals that actually develop full-blown COVID, the best combinations turned out to be three. Two of them included patients who had received an aminoquinoline like primaquine or hydroxychloroquine as outpatients and then got admitted. And if they have that, then two drugs, one called interferon alfa-2b, which interferes with the ability of the virus to replicate itself again. And another one is called tocilizumab. It’s an interleukin-6 inhibitor, which is a prothrombotic scenario. So again decreasing the ability of the virus to attach to replicate itself and to cut down on the inflammation and subsequently blood clotting. So there was that. Another combination if they’d gotten an outpatient aminoquinoline like primaquine, hydroxychloroquine, or the combination was to put them on methylprednisolone, which has that same effect on decreasing inflammation and blood clotting. And then the third group were those people who hadn’t received an aminoquinoline as outpatients, and what proved to be successful was the combination of primaquine and clindamycin. And then the same two drugs tocilizumab and interferon alfa-2b. Those were extremely successful. It doesn’t mean that other treatments don’t work, but I did not include them in the protocol to be randomized too. There was one drug that we were going to use that we elected, the IRB that initially set this up, we decided to avoid it because there were questions about it way back when. I don’t know if that was the right thing to do or not, but we elected not to keep it in the study, so it was deleted between the time that we set it up and the time we actually implemented it. And then we’re going to look at taking the same approach with mechanisms of action and looking at how vaccines actually work. I’ve assembled based upon the best science that we have more than likely drugs that we think will be beneficial, and we’ll release that. Obviously not prescribing to anybody or telling you to do it. That’s up to you. It’s a semi-free society, emphasis on the semi. So that people can download the material, take it to the doctor, and talk to their doctor. They and their doctor can decide, presuming they’re allowed to anymore. But somewhere somehow, people will be able to take a look at this, investigate it, and see if it doesn’t help.   [01:02:35] Ashley James: If your doctor is not willing to look at the studies that you bring to them, you have to fire them and get a better doctor. You want one that is willing to keep their mind open enough to look at new research.   [01:02:51] Dr. Richard Fleming: Right. Well, the problem is that there’s so much interference to the practice of medicine that shouldn’t be there. That some of these poor doctors are just simply scared. The question is, what are you scared of? Are you scared of losing your job? Because I know a lot of them are. Are you scared of losing your medical license? I know a lot of them are. Are you scared of losing the life of your patient? You have to balance that in there, and I’m not telling anybody I have the answer for you because I’ve certainly run my role with the Federal government and got taken to task for it, but I would do it again because it was the right thing.  You just have to decide whether you want to practice medicine under heir Hitler and the regime of Nazi Germany and fascism, or whether you want to allow physicians to practice medicine the way that they think. Because if you look at the Constitution of the United States, I have a law degree also and I thoroughly read the Constitution of the United States. I will assure you that I’ve seen nothing in the US Constitution that authorizes the Federal government to determine what healthcare is. It doesn’t mean that they don’t think that they have the right to do it, I’m just telling you that I don’t see anything in the US Constitution either in Article One, Article Two, and clearly not in Article Three because the courts don’t run medicine, although they might think they do. Nothing that gives the Federal government authority to run medicine. So I’m not sure why we go to medical school and actually get an MD, DO, or whatever people get to practice medicine if they’re not going to be allowed to practice medicine.   [01:04:41] Ashley James: Yeah, this is scary.   [01:04:45] Dr. Richard Fleming: You don’t call up a three-letter Federal agency when you’re sick, do you? I mean, when was the last time you felt sick and you called up NIH, CDC, or any of the others?   [01:05:00] Ashley James: I love that you talk about hydroxychloroquine, and this is something that a lot of people don’t know. What they know is what they’ve been told. What they’ve been told by the media is hydroxychloroquine, and this was right around when Trump was saying—if you remember the last year, I know some people have PTSD and don’t like to remember 2020. But when you think back, I mean really, it’s a big fuzzy blur to me, right?  But when you think back to early 2020, it was right after my birthday, March, 8, the restaurants here closed and the bars closed. They said we need two weeks. We’re going to shut down for two weeks. Governor Inslee, we’ll reopen at the end of March, beginning of April. And then April 1 came.   [01:05:51] Dr. Richard Fleming: They didn’t say what year though, did they?   [01:05:53] Ashley James: Oh, shoot. You got me there. Oh my gosh. And then it was, okay, it’s going to be May, and then, okay, it’s going to be August. I just got angrier and angrier as I saw what was going on. The manipulation and taking away our freedoms. Was it North Dakota or South Dakota, I’m sort of having a brain fart right now, but it was one of those states sort of in the middle there, to the north, where the governor said, I’m not shutting down anything. I’m not going to affect any business. If you want to wear a mask, you wear a mask. If you don’t, you don’t. If you want to stay open, stay open. Let the people decide, but the government is not going to interfere with your businesses. Fauci said, your hospitals will be overflowing and you’re going to kill people because of this. And she had one of the lowest rates and did not have her hospitals overflowing. People decided to wash their hands and take their own precautions, but they still went out, did stuff, went to restaurants, and lived their lives. Maybe they took a little bit more precautions, but that’s just showing that the shutdowns have not been working because there are states where they didn’t shut down and the numbers are either similar or lower.  I mean, it just boggles my mind. And the numbers, don’t get me started because it’s so easy to manipulate these things. Positive cases don’t mean hospitalization, although there’s a percentage that we can look at. But to say the cases are up doesn’t mean that the hospital stay is up. So you talk about hydroxychloroquine, and it was Trump early on.   [01:07:57] Dr. Richard Fleming: Let me stop you for just a moment. I know you’re in a good role, but I want to point out something. Kary Mullis invented the PCR test, Polymerase Chain Reaction test, for the express purpose of finding genetic material. Now, Dr. Mullis, I think he got a Nobel Prize for this. The PCR test is an outstanding test, and for those of you who don’t think so, go read the patent. What you’ll see is that its expressed purpose was to simply find genetic codes.  Kary Mullis also said that if you look at his data on the patent—having a patent I’m particularly sensitive to this that you put down what needs to be known. You may not put down everything but you put down what needs to be known. Didn’t use more than 15 to 20 cycles to do it. And it was not a test for diagnosing disease. Now, around 2006 I think it was, his patent expired. Right around that same time, the Federal government of the United States got a patent for PCR specifically related to viruses. So it’s interesting to note that with the Emergency Use Authorization, PCR tests were given an umbrella under the EUA by the Federal government who just happens to have a patent on PCR tests. I just think that’s fascinating. Mullis, fortunately for him, died in 2019 before this fiasco really took off. Unfortunately, I see a lot of similarities in Mullis and myself in our perspectives on many of the people on the powers that be, which is I don’t think they’re smart enough to really understand it but they certainly know how to make money and manipulate the scenario. So, with that said, I just want to put that out there because I think it’s interesting for people to realize that the US Federal Government has a patent on PCR testing. Wow, you can use this for this virus. Okay, go ahead.   [01:10:19] Ashley James: When you hold the patent, you can profit from it.   [01:10:22] Dr. Richard Fleming: There you go, no conflict of interest there at all.   [01:10:28] Ashley James: I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, the cycles that were being used were really kind of oversensitive.   [01:10:38] Dr. Richard Fleming: Well, they didn’t stop at 15 to 20 like Mullis said, did they?   [01:10:42] Ashley James: Yeah, and so we were getting false positives?   [01:10:48] Dr. Richard Fleming: Well, here’s the thing. I wouldn’t call them false positives because they detected the genetic sequence, okay. But when the test is designed and the man says, look, at 20 cycles, you get everything you’re going to get that’s of value, then why do you go beyond that?   [01:11:10] Ashley James: Could they be picking up on a different coronavirus or something that’s not necessarily infecting them but just hanging out in their body because they already have an immune response to it?   [01:11:21] Dr. Richard Fleming: Well, I mean, anything’s possible if it has the same genetic sequence that you’re looking for, okay. An additional point is that it doesn’t define whether you’re going to get sick and need treatment, okay. It doesn’t define whether it’s a virus that’s from living tissue that was in the process of replicating or it’s been laying outside of a cell where it’s dead. It doesn’t give you any of that, which is what Mullis told people. It was to look for specific genetic sequences. It’s an outstanding test. It was used for something it was not designed for, and when his patent expired, the Federal government got up with a very specific twist on it to make money on it.   [01:12:13] Ashley James: It’s interesting. I also find the timing interesting that when the next administration after Trump came in, very soon after, they announced that they were lowering the testing into those ranges that were more accurate.   [01:12:35] Dr. Richard Fleming: Well, a very interesting thing that you should notice when the current administration came into power, and I haven’t looked at this for a while, but the vaccine studies stopped recruiting on the National Clinical Trial website. They were actively recruiting patients before that, but on or around the 20th of January, Pfizer, Moderna, and Janssen all stopped recruiting, Well, they didn’t need to because you’re either in the experimental group or the control group right now.   [01:13:04] Ashley James: Yeah, we’re all in the experiment. It’s kind of sick. A year ago when this was very new, we’re all just going what is going on? I did an interview with a Naturopath who’d come up with his supplement recommendations to support the body during this time, help the immune system—zinc, vitamin D, the things that we know work. And then also the things that he’d seen were helpful if someone had it.  Interesting that the FDA is really going after NAC right now when NAC is such a powerful, it helps our body with the antioxidant effect, especially in the lungs. It’s a decongestant. There are so many ways the body uses NAC in a very supportive manner and people have been using it preventatively and also when they have COVID. And then now, it’s being threatened to be taken off the market. Not because it hurts people, but because they’re saying, well, we studied this originally as a drug. It’s an amino acid, leave it alone. You can’t patent this, stop it. Back when we’re all looking around I had that interview and I said to the doctor, I said, years from now, if we ever get to look at the true numbers, if they ever actually have real numbers, years from now, we’re going to study 2020 (now 2021) as the world’s biggest experiment on its people. This is how I felt then and I definitely feel that way now a year later. We have to know more and more information. We have to be tapped in. We can’t just blindly listen to the mainstream media. Example being, early on when Trump said—coming back to the story—he said, oh, promising information is coming out about using hydroxychloroquine, and all of a sudden the media starts attacking him and attacking what he said. Oh, he’s telling us that we’re going to inject bleach into our bodies or whatever. Oh my gosh, it’s just ridiculous. He was sort of using the layman’s terms of trying to describe some things that he was told work.  He’s just trying to encourage people. Hey, there’s some interesting stuff out there that has some good information. Stay positive, stay safe. And the media went nuts and said he’s trying to kill us all. He’s telling us hydroxychloroquine is going to help us, and then also the study comes out.  Maybe you can fill in the gaps because you know more about this than I do, but when a study came out there’s like 90,000 participants and they said that hydroxychloroquine doesn’t work. The media latched on to that and said, Trump’s a loser. He’s telling us a bunch of stuff that’s going to kill us. Don’t listen to him, or whatever they were saying. I just thought this was really interesting. Why is the mainstream media so angry about this drug and this treatment? They’re not doctors. Who are they, right? And then it turns out that a prominent study was completely made up. Maybe you could fill in the gaps of that.   [01:16:47] Dr. Richard Fleming: Yeah. Unfortunately, that’s gone on both sides of that so you can’t take much. You have to take it all with a grain of salt because there’s been so much manipulation of the scientific literature, particularly in the last decade or so. I actually resigned from The Lancet and from the British Medical Journal Open Quality journal due to my concerns about the ethics of what’s being published. So, with all the politics going on and some of it is related to the fact that the Chinese have gotten so many grants from the United States, and some of that money has been invested into actually buying control of the journals, it’s very hard to know what’s—   [01:17:33] Ashley James: What?   [01:17:34] Dr. Richard Fleming: Yeah, you got it. You heard it right. What’s really valid and what’s not. As a researcher, I get a chuckle out of people who criticize individuals publishing in journals that aren’t at the top journals. I mean, I just resigned from two of them because of my concerns about it. When Watson and Crick first published their paper on DNA, they published it in a then relatively unknown journal called the Journal of the American Medical Association. But when Watson and Crick published their little one-column piece, JAMA was not well known. So this is not how you figure out what’s valid and what’s not. The scientific method is what determines that by reproducibility. So, taking that in mind, let’s address a very specific issue about hydroxychloroquine. Hydroxychloroquine is supposedly a big no, no. Let me back it up. For SARS-CoV-1, Anthony Fauci thought that hydroxychloroquine was a great drug, so I’m not certain what happened between his go-go for that versus it doesn’t work. Oh, wait a minute, there’s that conflict of interest about him being connected with Pfizer and Moderna. Never mind that comment then. The scenario of hydroxychloroquine is that it will stretch out part of your heart rhythm, the cell’s activity that is called the corrected QT complex. Q and T are areas that we measure on the electrocardiograms. When it gets too long, you get a bad rhythm. If it gets too short, you get a bad rhythm. We have this kind of nice, in-between zone. So, the argument is that hydroxychloroquine will prolong your QT and develop a heart rhythm that could kill. That’s possible, but so do a lot of other drugs that people take every day that nobody seems to stress out about. Here’s the killer in the argument. The rhythms that they’re worried about from prolonged QT are polymorphic ventricular tachy dysrhythmia and torsades de pointes. That’s me as the cardiologist now speaking. There’s not a single published case since SARS-CoV-2 hit in 2019 that anybody has published in any medical journal anywhere that I’m aware of, since I keep saying it this way in interviews and nobody is correcting me, I’m presuming nobody else has found one either. Not a single published case report of a single person having either one of these two rhythm problems as a result of taking hydroxychloroquine. So, for millions of people around the world, and I don’t know how many people actually have taken hydroxychloroquine, not a single case example of what causes seizure activity in Anthony Fauci’s brain or somebody else’s brain.   [01:20:37] Ashley James: Some people take it prophylactically because they’re in areas with malaria. This is a very well-studied drug, very well-studied.   [01:20:48] Dr. Richard Fleming: Look, every drug has side effects. The question is, if you have a drug that has a side effect and it’s the drug that’s going to treat something that could kill you, you might want to look at that in that light.   [01:21:08] Ashley James: Right, absolutely.   [01:21:10] Dr. Richard Fleming: Disease that might kill the patient, no, we won’t treat them because this drug might produce your heart rhythm that we’d have to actually do something about. FYI, we included that in the trial protocol too where calcium is one of the things that you use. We made available a drug called esmolol whose side effect is it shortens the QT interval. It’s not like they were going to get hydroxychloroquine for the rest of their life. They were in a hospital with COVID-19 and their QT interval was being monitored because the cardiologist was a member of the team in each one of these places.  That if a decision needed to be made that whoops, look at that QT interval—and by the way, we did collect all that data and it didn’t result in anybody having to stop the drug—you could start IV esmolol, intravenous esmolol, IV in the vein and give them a drug for the period of time they’re getting hydroxychloroquine. They weren’t going to be discharged on it, they weren’t going to be discharged with an IV. If the worst amount of time you have to do is treat for 7 to 10 days, that’s not the end of the world, particularly if it’s saved somebody’s life. The irony here is that I’ve seen patients that come in with 20 or 30 drugs and half the drugs are to treat side effects from the first set of drugs. It’s like, okay, this is too much chaos going in for my little brain to handle. Maybe we should simplify the regimen. Anyway, I think that the hydroxychloroquine and the nonsense related it to death, even if it could cause the death of anybody.   [01:22:54] Ashley James: Well, thank you for the clarification. So what we have to understand is if you think hydroxychloroquine isn’t effective to help people with COVID-19, it’s because of what you’ve been told. If it’s because of what you’ve been told in the media in the last year, understand that they’re going off of a fake study, of a study that was completely—   [01:23:21] Dr. Richard Fleming: Yeah, it was made up. You’d have to check the motives of those people. But here’s the other thing. Hydroxychloroquine is an FDA-approved drug. Physicians use drugs for what’s called off-label purpose. In other words, a drug approved for one thing and then used for something else. All right. There’s a drug called Procardia or nifedipine. Nifedipine is the drug name, Procardia is the trade name. It came in an orange capsule and it was useful for blood pressure, for chest pain, for angina from the heart, but it frequently dropped the blood pressure too fast, and so it wasn’t the favorite drug for a lot of people.  But here’s the thing, if somebody came in with really high blood pressure, you could either run down the hall and start an IV and run nitroprusside, nitroglycerin, or a variety of medications into them, which you usually required putting them in the intensive care unit. Or you could go and get a Procardia capsule that was an orange capsule and stick a needle into it, squeeze it, and the fluid that Procardia would come out of the hole. Have the patient tilt their head back, lift their tongue up, and squeeze that under their tongue, and you could watch their blood pressure just nicely come down so they didn’t have a stroke, a hemorrhagic bleeding stroke. Now, since I’m sure the FDA is listening to this, let me assure them and the rest of your listeners that we use that, I use that frequently. It was an off-label use. Completely legal because the drug was FDA-approved and physicians get to practice medicine how they want. So, when a drug is approved for one thing, if a physician believes and their patient is willing—I think that’s called informed consent, not that we’re doing that for vaccines—then you can actually use that medication for the patient for some other purpose. Classic example minoxidil. Minoxidil is a fairly aggressive drug for lowering blood pressure, which you really should have a cardiologist watching you and monitoring your heart to make sure you don’t have what’s called pericarditis as a result—irritation of the lining around the heart because it’s been known to happen. But a side effect was women grew mustaches. Now, what do they use minoxidil for? Put it on the scalp of men’s heads so they grow hair. Not what it was really FDA-designed for or approved for. Just because big pharma doesn’t want to go back for every indication doesn’t mean that a drug can’t be used for something else. Patients used to come into me with their medicines and I would say, well, what are you taking this for? They would say, well, you’re the doctor, don’t you know? I would look at them go, well, I do, but there’s more than one thing you can use this medicine for. I thought maybe you, since you’re taking the medicine, might have a clue why the doctor told you. No, no clue. That’s right because too many people get prescribed medicines without a thorough understanding of why they’re taking them, and too many people take medicines without a thorough understanding of why they’re taking them.   [01:26:42] Ashley James: Right. The state of our healthcare is very sad. Off-label use is common, it’s done all the time.   [01:26:54] Dr. Richard Fleming: Yeah, so what the heck is the FDA and all the other agencies getting involved with this for? And threatening doctors to take away their licenses if they use it and threatening pharmacies and then pharmacists won’t fill prescriptions. I’m sorry, pharmacists, you’re not practicing medicine, you’re practicing pharmacy. Your job is to dispense these medications. It’s not for you to be second-guessing physicians for how they’re treating them. And when pharmacists got to the place where they would say, well, I can fill this prescription for hydroxychloroquine but I need to know why you’re prescribing it. No you don’t, it’s a violation of HIPAA. You’re not the patient’s doctor.   [01:27:37] Ashley James: So when we look at it from this perspective, the conclusion we kind of tend to jump to is the government and the media and other bodies are trying to prevent people from acquiring a treatment that is effective, and then telling them what they should do is, stay in your home, wear a mask, don’t go to restaurants. We’re taking your freedoms away. You have to get a vaccine that, by the way, I don’t even want to call it that because it is not yet. It’s an experiment, it is a trial that you are entering into. This blows my mind. This has not been studied enough to know that it’s safe. The FDA hasn’t approved it, right?  State governments are all saying their own different things, but they’re kind of threatening that your freedoms will not be given back to you unless you enter into this experiment. And then you had mentioned, we’re not really practicing true informed consent when it comes to vaccines.   [01:29:04] Dr. Richard Fleming: Yeah, so people don’t really know what the side effects are and the consequences are. Let’s run through Pfizer, Moderna, and Janssen vaccines as approved under EUA authorization, not FDA approval. Let’s look at what these Emergency Use Authorization documents actually tell us because I think we’ve got enough data. If we read through the emergency use authorization documents, what you hear from everybody is vaccine efficacy, vaccine efficacy. Most people don’t know how vaccine efficacy is determined, so here’s how it’s determined. It’s 1 minus what’s called the risk ratio. Well, what’s the risk ratio? Well, the risk ratio is, how many people got diagnosed with COVID who got vaccinated, divided by the number of people who got COVID who didn’t get vaccinated. One minus that times 100 for percent tells you the vaccine efficacy. You don’t take a drug based upon how often it fails. You take a drug based upon how often it works. If I were to come up to you and say, Ashley, I want you to take this pill to prevent diabetes. Now, it doesn’t work any better than not taking anything, but I want you to take it, would you take it?   [01:30:41] Ashley James: No.   [01:30:44] Dr. Richard Fleming: Okay, good. I actually had one guy once say yes because it’s you, Dr. Fleming. Okay, I missed my point on that one. The point was that he trusted me so he presumed that it wouldn’t do what’s been done.   [01:31:02] Ashley James: That’s a good point though. Just like we trust our mechanic. The mechanic says I have to replace the thingamabob. We’re like, do it.   [01:31:09] Dr. Richard Fleming: Which you should be able to trust your doctor. And I’m going to stand my ground on that one. I’m an MD, I believe you should be able to trust your doctor. I’m not accountable for everybody. But I do believe you should be able to trust your doctor.   [01:31:26] Ashley James: But it’s up to us to pick the right doctor that we trust.   [01:31:29] Dr. Richard Fleming: So let’s look at the emergency use authorization documents and ask the intelligent question. How often will we not get diagnosed with COVID, right? That’s the point. Because the reason why people think they’re getting vaccinated is so they don’t come down with COVID or don’t die. And it’s not that they think they won’t come down with COVID, it’s that they think they won’t get infected. Well, here’s a point, vaccines do not prevent you from getting infected or transmitting the infection. Vaccines expose you to something that you’re likely to see with the infection so that it takes you less time to mount a response. Nothing in that says prevents infection or prevents transmission. All right. Now, if we ask the question of Pfizer and we look at the numbers, and I don’t have them in front of me. You can go read the EUAs, go look at one of the lectures I’ve done or any of the number of things where I pull these out, or come to the June 5th presentation where we’re going to get them in even greater detail.  You look at the numbers, what you will discover is that seven days after Pfizer’s second injection—which is the day that they chose not me, their documents—and you ask that question, how many people did not get diagnosed with COVID who got vaccinated versus how many people who did? You do the statistical analysis—that’s the scientific method of looking at the numbers, not just going, wow, one more than the other. You actually have to look at how much more compared to how many people in the group, and is that statistically significant. When you do that, you will find out that there’s no difference, statistically, in the number of people who were diagnosed with COVID, who got vaccinated or didn’t. If you do the same thing for Moderna, same results. If you do the same thing for Janssen at 14 days, a slight difference that is statistically significant at 14 days, but at 28 days, 2 weeks later, that difference is gone. No difference in the number of deaths. So the EUA documents show that there is no statistical difference in you getting COVID or dying whether you get vaccinated or not. I think that’s the end of the conversation.   [01:34:00] Ashley James: It doesn’t stop you from getting it, it doesn’t stop you from transmitting it. It is maybe making it so that your body can mount a response against it faster.   [01:34:13] Dr. Richard Fleming: Although I would love to see the actual data for that because scientists like myself measure T cells, antibody responses, and titers and none of that data is in the EUA documents, and I have seen minimal, I mean miniscule information in the published scientific literature medical papers. In fact, nothing that actually gives the raw data numbers to look at to go, is this real, is this valid? Just percentages.   [01:34:41] Ashley James: Yeah. And then if we look at VAERS, we can see the injuries from it.   [01:34:48] Dr. Richard Fleming: VAERS is an interesting thing. Interesting information about VAERS is that if you look at this Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, a lot of people are not turning in material because they have been told that, oh, that’s not the vaccine. A lot of doctors I’ve heard trying to enter data into it and it’s bouncing back, so they’re not actually getting it in there. Back in the mid-1970s, there was something called swine flu. I was an orderly working in the hospital, taking care of several of these patients who had been vaccinated for swine flu and had something called Guillain-Barre syndrome, which is a neurologic abnormality that affected their ability to walk, talk, eat, drink, and even breathe.  We lost in the United States right around 25 people from the swine flu vaccine, and they pulled it off the market. We’ve lost how many thousands of people now following these SARS vaccines? It’s over 3,000, I’m not sure if it’s over 4,000. I’d have to look at any given day. I’ve kind of given up watching because the death rates, just if you track bars over the decades, you’ll see it’s relatively flat and then just taste this spike in 2021. Are you with me? Why in the 1970s did 25 deaths get the attention of people? And today in 2021 with more deaths than were killed in the Twin Tower attacks, we’re still oblivious to saying, wait a minute, we’re using something that is associated with deaths, it’s associated with inflammation and blood clots. And FYI, that stuff’s in the EUA documents. Janssen, Pfizer, Moderna put this stuff in the EUA documents, these side effects, which raises a point I want to make on safety and efficacy. I want to encourage people to quit saying safety and efficacy. I would like to encourage people to start saying efficacy and safety. Because if it’s not effective, it doesn’t matter whether it’s safe or not, you wouldn’t take it. And the first thing you do in clinical trials, which by the way weren’t done, is to determine if it’s effective. What dose is effective, and then you spread it out beyond phase one. We took the development of a vaccine from a 3- to a 10-year process—it’s typically 10, but we’ve done it in 3—to a less than 10 months process for all 3 of these. In fact, Janssen started the later phase, phase three, before it started 2A, And it goes phase 1, phase 2, phase 3. And so they started the last phase before they started the second phase. My little scientific brain has challenges with that because that’s not how it’s done. But that’s how it was done. It doesn’t matter how the scientific method is supposed to work. What we did is we took an infection that was man-made, we quarantine the healthy, we pan cultured everybody using a test that its inventor said not to use for that purpose, and then we shoveled money into vaccines that we now know don’t statistically change whether you’re going to get COVID or die.   [01:38:53] Ashley James: But they’re still pushing them and they’re opening up younger and younger ages for part of the trial. This is a trial, this is an experiment. The entire population is being pushed to enter a drug experiment.   [01:39:10] Dr. Richard Fleming: Mom and dad, if you’re doing this with your kids, I would never experiment on my kids.   [01:39:20] Ashley James: Thank you. It’s scary.   [01:39:24] Dr. Richard Fleming: Somebody asked me sometime within the last week or so what I thought about it, and anybody who’s listened to me knows that my answers are never really short. I might give you an answer but then I will explain it because I think you’re due that. It’s not because I want to hear myself talk. If you ask me a question, I believe it’s my responsibility not only to give you that answer so that you’re getting an answer as opposed to listening to the explanation, and you’re going, is there an answer in here? So I give you the answer and then I explain it to you so that you know it. Somebody asked me the other day about what I thought about vaccinating children 12 to 18, and I said I’m going to deviate just a little bit. It’s stupid, and then I explained it. If you don’t care about other people, at least care about your children. I understand everybody’s scared. One of the things I emphasize is that people recognize, everybody recognizes that most people are scared. And if you see people that are sheltering in place and are masked up—I mean, I approached a woman at the store yesterday and I thought she was going to jump through the flowers. I mean, she worked behind the flower ornaments at the store, and I simply wanted to ask if they had something in the store. She almost jumped over the counter to get away from me. It’s like, ma’am, okay, got it. You’re scared, I got it.   [01:41:09] Ashley James: This is right back to what you said—I can’t remember the Nazi General, I can’t remember his name.   [01:41:16] Dr. Richard Fleming: Göring.   [01:41:17] Ashley James: During the trials he said, if you put a population in fear, they will lap up whatever it is that is the solution. Whatever that solution you bring they’re just going to eat it right up because you put them in a place of fear. They’re fearing for their life. Same with 9/11. 9/11 was a great example of taking away freedoms because we’re like here, take them, take them. Take all our freedoms. Wiretap us, we don’t care. Surveil us. Take all of our freedoms away, we don’t care. We want to be safe. We want to feel safe.   [01:41:54] Dr. Richard Fleming: The Founding Fathers frequently said, people who will sacrifice freedoms for security will have neither. US Military Army Reed Hospital was very much involved in some of the early research and control of human beings in the 1940s. And for your listeners, I have most of my master’s studies in psychology, experimental not clinical. Which means I’m a researcher and don’t want to sit down and listen to you tell me your problems. The data was very clear, if you take somebody, people, and you tell them there’s a problem that is threatening them. And then you say, but if you do this, you will be safe, and we can measure this so we can tell you if you’re doing it right, and gives you positive reinforcement. That is an extremely effective way of getting people to do whatever you want them to do. If you think that the military does this stuff and then doesn’t apply it, again, the DOD does not work with the Girl Scouts. They’re not selling your cookies.   [01:43:10] Ashley James: Is it true that when you get the vaccine you sign something that says that the DOD is tracking you for the next two years?   [01:43:19] Dr. Richard Fleming: I don’t know because I’m not getting the vaccine so I haven’t seen what they’ve had people sign.   [01:43:25] Ashley James: I listened to a lecture a doctor gave who explained that you are entering into an experiment, but you’re also entering into an experiment that the DOD is watching you.   [01:43:34] Dr. Richard Fleming: Hey, I would love to have that paper. I’d love to see that document. Whoever you did that wants to get that to you and then to me, I would love to have it.   [01:43:42] Ashley James: I will see what I can do, absolutely. I mean, I understand people are entering into experiments, but the DOD is involved in monitoring the results of it?   [01:43:52] Dr. Richard Fleming: The DOD paid $39 million of the $61 million that went to Peter Daszak. And they provided him with a policy advisor.   [01:44:02] Ashley James: You know, always follow the money. Follow the money. That if you ever want to be a researcher and you want to think for yourself and not just believe what you’ve been told, follow the money. Money doesn’t lie. The money trails don’t lie. So there’s a lot of confusion out there. I’m in a bunch of Facebook groups because I’m interested, and you know what, there’s so much misinformation. When we start talking about conspiracies, again, I’m not talking about conspiracy theory, I’m talking about conspiracy factor. It’s a felony or it’s a group of people who are conspiring to do harm, to do something nefarious and not good. We look to see them. We see there’s a conspiracy over here. An example is governments experimenting on their people, this is documented, many governments including our own.  I love the United States. I love this country. I’m incredibly patriotic. I’m originally Canadian. I love living here. I want to live here forever. I look at that American flag and I actually get emotional because of what it represents, because I love the Constitution. I love the Founding Fathers and how they broke away. If you really study the history, I’m from a country that still worships the queen. So to come here, it’s like this is the country that broke away from or tried to break away from that and create something that gave more freedoms to its people. And I believe that we all deserve, that is our right to have freedom as long as we’re not hurting someone else, right? Just like New Hampshire, New Hampshire Live Free or Die, that is what I believe in.   [01:45:48] Dr. Richard Fleming: Iowa is where I’m from originally, and the banner there is Our Liberties We Prize and Our Rights We Will Maintain.   [01:45:55] Ashley James: Right. And each state you find this theme especially in pockets of areas. Certain states are more forward like having an actual motto, but this is what I love about this country. But we have to always protect our rights. We cannot just assume that they’re just given to us. We have to constantly protect them. So anyway, lots of misinformation out there. I’m the most open-minded skeptic. I’m going to listen to information, but then I’m going to use my critical thinking, which we were not taught to critical think. That’s actually something as adults we really should learn how to critically think. It was systematically taken out of the education system when they introduced the Prussian education system. You can study or read John Taylor Gatto’s books, he talks about that and he has lectures on YouTube. He has since passed away, but he has some amazing eight-hour lectures on YouTube and interviews about how they have designed the education system to make good little factory workers or make good little students that think the way they want them to think and not teaching us critical thinking. We have to learn it ourselves. And I know I’m going off on a bit of a tangent here. But what I see in Facebook and these communities is they’re talking about that there’s a fear that if you don’t have the vaccine and you’re in close contact with people that do, that you could also be affected. For example, some polio vaccines shed, and I understand that this isn’t a live virus vaccine, but that there’s concern that people can get even sick or harmed that are not vaccinated from being in close contact with those who have. Is there anything in your research, is that completely phooey or is there some basis to that?   [01:48:04] Dr. Richard Fleming: Well, to begin with, my first statement is we don’t have any scientific evidence one way or the other, which is something that raises enough questions that we should be trying to figure out if there’s something going on. I will tell you that back in March of this year when I was giving some lectures here, I was trying to emphasize that I didn’t think that these vaccines—Pfizer, Moderna, or Janssen—merely contain the genetic information for the spike protein. It was my opinion then and it’s my opinion now that there’s insufficient information in just that segment for that structural protein, the spike protein, to get that much of a response. So my proposal was that there is probably something more in these vaccines that enhances that. Now, there is something called transmissible vaccines and something called SAM or self-amplifying mRNA vaccines, hence, SAM. What SAM is, is it has not only the mRNA for what you want built like the spike protein called the structural antigen. But it also contains the earlier part of the genetic sequence that makes an enzyme called replicase to replicate.  Combined together, they produce a substantially larger amount of the spike protein to get an immunologic response. One of the interesting things about getting SARS-CoV-2 person-to-person is that you’ll get,I don’t know how many viruses for a viral load, but it’s not billions. So every one of those viruses gets into your sinuses and potentially the rest of your body and attaches to an ACE2 receptor and starts that sequence I talked about, and it has to have that sequence and it downloads its genetic mRNA. The lipid nanoparticle vaccines Pfizer and Moderna carry 13.1 billion mRNAs, and the Janssen double-stranded DNA carries 50 billion for every one of those inside an adenovirus that attaches. So we’re talking about billions versus thousands. And so what we’re seeing where people were dying with COVID-19 with comorbidities is we’re seeing a different group of people pop up with responses to the vaccines in a younger age group that are healthy, and that should be what we see with that type of phenomenon because if they’re healthy and they haven’t had a hyperinflammatory disease process going on, then you would expect them to mount a response to those billions of genetic sequences that they just injected into themselves.  Bearing in mind that this is a gain-of-function of spike protein so it’s manmade, so it’s a bioweapon. What they’re doing is injecting themselves with billions of genetic code sequences for a man-made bioweapon. Now, whether that is so amplifying the numbers that there’s spike protein that is shedding or something else is shedding, whether it’s that or if they’re doing transmissible vaccines where it’s already been done and studied were certain viruses you can vaccinate the animal and another animal will come up and touch it and be vaccinated by virtue of touching where the vaccine was injected. Their favorite animal they’ve done this and so far the most are bats. They’ve also done some studies in rabies viruses and SARS-CoV-2, and a lot of other viruses where they’re looking at transmissible vaccines. And when you read the papers, they’ll tell you the virus and they’ll tell you the vector. Is it a virus, a lipid nanoparticle, or is it something else getting into this cell? And then they’ll tell you the animal—dog, mouse, human, cat. Did you notice what I mentioned there?   [01:52:35] Ashley James: Human.   [01:52:36] Dr. Richard Fleming: Because for rabies and SARS-CoV-2, the animal that’s listed is human. All the other viruses, they’ve got one of the other animals, but for rabies and SARS-CoV-2, the animal listed is human. Not rhesus monkeys, not humanized mice, not anything else—human. You’re the animal. And this research has been going on for two to three decades funded by our government and the groups of people—Helmsley, Gates, and the Epstein’s of the world for two to three decades. This did not just happen. This has been going on. So, do we need data to really find out what’s going on, absolutely, we do? Can I tell you exactly what’s going on? No, I can’t. Can I tell you this two to three decades worth of work that’s been going on with this type of stuff? Yes, I can.   [01:53:46] Ashley James: Do you know what’s interesting is that the people who are not going to get the vaccine on Facebook and all these groups are afraid of the people who are getting the vaccine and are avoiding them. And the people who are getting the vaccine, there’s a lot of them who are like, I’m going to still wear my mask even though they told me I don’t have to, and I’m going to stay away from those non-vaxxers because they’re going to be contagious. It’s interesting what has been created is this environment of fear—fear your neighbor. We’re the 99%.   [01:54:18] Dr. Richard Fleming: Fear your neighbor, turn on your neighbor, tell on your neighbor.   [01:54:23] Ashley James: It’s very Orwellian. I love Orwell and his work. If you look at it, it’s very sci-fi. I’m a big sci-fi fan and this feels like we’re living in a sci-fi future, it’s very weird. That they’re creating this to fear each other instead of coming together. I mean, when we are divided fighting about political things of the past like abortion rights or race. It’s always been this black and white, let’s fight about two different opposing thoughts. The dichotomy, right? It’s a dilemma. When you have two choices it’s a dilemma, and as long as they keep us fighting—and that’s why I never understood the two-party system.  Being from Canada, there’s like 20 parties or something to choose from. There are three of them that are always sort of somewhat in power, but you have a choice. But here, you’re fighting over one thing or the other—less taxes, more taxes; bigger government, smaller government. And as long as they keep us fighting among ourselves, we won’t rise up together to make a change. We won’t look at what we all stand for. Let’s say you’re one way, pro-vaccine, and I’m the other way, anti-vaccine, or whatever. Let’s say you’re pro-abortion, I’m anti-abortion, whatever it is. We’re on two opposing sides. But if we actually come up to the bigger picture, we both have the same goal. We both want health, right? We both want to protect people. We want freedom. When we look at the bigger picture, we all actually want the same thing. We have to come up and see, don’t let fear control us.  But it’s very interesting and I feel this has been created, this fear has been orchestrated to keep us from questioning, from thinking for ourselves because that’s what it looks like when you look at the environment the last year and all this craziness that goes on. And now that people are saying that they’re going to stay away from each other and they’re afraid of each other, even though those that are not getting the vaccine are afraid of all the other people. There’s so much fear keeping us silent and keeping us from learning or questioning. So we got to come out of fear. So it’s interesting that there is a potential for someone who’s unvaccinated to be exposed to in close quarters to someone who’s been vaccinated. That there can be something that transmits. I saw some things printed out from one of the vaccines as part of their trials that talked about it, but I don’t know enough of the science to completely understand it.   [01:57:23] Dr. Richard Fleming: I’ve seen some of that too and I have responded to people by saying, well, it doesn’t really say this is happening, but it does raise a question in my mind scientifically as to why those statements were made.   [01:57:43] Ashley James: You and I could talk for hours, I realized we’ve been talking for quite a while. Seriously, this could be a 16-hour interview. I want to respect your time. I love learning from you, I hope the listeners do too. Actually, I know they will because our listeners are just like me wanting to know as much as possible to support their health, and they’re used to long interviews. I lost my sense of smell—it was kind of freaky—having COVID, and I tripled my zinc. I was taking 30mg a day, and I tripled it. I took one in the morning, one in the afternoon, one in the evening— spread it out. And two days later I got my sense of smell back. I thought that was interesting. My husband lost his sense of smell too. I told him to triple his zinc, he did, and it came back right away. I thought that was really interesting. What are your thoughts on homemade quinine? The simmering of the grapefruit peel and then drinking that a few ounces a day. Is there any basis that if someone couldn’t get their hands on hydroxychloroquine, is that chemically similar enough to hydroxychloroquine—homemade quinine?   [01:58:55] Dr. Richard Fleming: The bottom line answer is I don’t know. One of the things hopefully your listeners are picking up and you as well is that I’m science-oriented. And in the absence of scientific information that gives me an answer on something I won’t pretend to know it because I don’t know it.   [01:59:15] Ashley James: Absolutely.   [01:59:17] Dr. Richard Fleming: Even many of the medications, I don’t know whether they work or not. I know people who claim that certain drugs work, but they didn’t measure actual tissue effects, so I don’t know whether it worked. Half the people who received nothing as outpatients got better, so did they get better because they got nothing? I mean, an outcome doesn’t mean that it’s the result of what you did, unless you can measure something there because there are all sorts of other variables that go on that you don’t know. I mean, was it something else that happened or a combination of things that happened? And that’s why science is supposed to be more rigorous and not guessing. One of the comments I make about Remdesivir is, well, I know it got cleared EUA for SARS-CoV-2. But in our study, if somebody did not have an aminoquinoline or anything else before they get randomly assigned to receive Remdesivir, 28% of them got better on it. You can take that for whatever it’s meaningful to you, but to myself as a research scientist physician, if you can get better, get worse, or stay the same, you have a 33% and 3% chance of each, and 28% is performing at less than chance. But, again, thanks to the powers that be, it got cleared for SARS-CoV-2. And I would argue that there’s no scientific data that shows that it’s beneficial. I don’t know if the home approach for trying to get an equivalent aminoquinoline compound out of that would work, number one; two would be adequate dosage-wise to have an effect, I don’t know. I just don’t know.   [02:01:24] Ashley James: Well, I appreciate that. I’ve been getting the feeling since I’ve been following your YouTube videos that you have strong ethics, you’re honest, and you’re here to show us the truth whether we like you or not. I like you, you keep showing me the truth. I like you. Listeners should go to flemingmethod.com, absolutely continue to follow Dr. Richard Fleming. To conclude our interview. You’ve done so much research around cancer, cardiovascular health, the cause of pretty much all the major illnesses, which is inflammation—it all starts with inflammation. This is what you’ve been saying for years because this is what you see in your research. What can we do to decrease inflammation in the body? What’s really effective, or maybe point us to some resources?   [02:02:19] Dr. Richard Fleming: Well, other than being self-serving and saying go look on Amazon. As far as diet and lifestyles are concerned, again, my parents would probably have a pretty good handle on this, and they didn’t have to go to school like I did. To do the basic things that make sense, which is to not overeat. You actually need about 10 calories per pound per day for your caloric intake. It does not change much from that. Maybe 10%, 20%, 30% if you are a heavy construction worker, which I doubt many people are these days. For total caloric intake, I’ve always advised people to cut down on saturated fat. Saturated fat really doesn’t do much for the human body except provide calories. I have told people not to eat a lot of refined processed foods, primarily because it’s very easy to consume a large number of calories. If I asked a second grader or a fifth grader what happens if you eat too many calories, they’re usually pretty smart. They’ll say, yeah, you get fat. I asked most adults that and I get the most interesting answers, many of which are not related to getting fat. Clearly, smoking does not help your body. I’ve not seen a single study that says that smoking is good for people. I mean, I know that it’s a habit that people learn. It’s a drug, it’s addicting, but you can quit. You just have to decide what it is that motivates you for doing that. I think people should exercise. I like to run, I like to fence, I like to downhill ski, I like to scuba dive. I don’t suggest everybody do that. A lot of people would kill themselves with some of those sports, but you need to be doing something. I’ve always encouraged people to find something at least three times a week for half an hour like running, bicycling, or just walking, and then do something else to be active on the other days. I mean, they used to be that people were so much more active. Clearly, this sheltering in place—a term that I just love because it has very little to do with what you’re doing—did nothing but inactivate people, cause them to eat more, get stressed, and not take care of themselves.   [02:04:50] Ashley James: Increasing comorbidities, which if then they got COVID-19 would increase their chances of dying or having a much harder time with it.   [02:05:00] Dr. Richard Fleming: Yeah, a very well thought out plan. So those types of things. Again, you don’t need nearly as much protein as people think you need. Most people need about 40 grams of protein a day, and plant protein. Your body doesn’t know where those amino acids come from, whether they’re animal products or plant products. I kid you not. When you eat arginine, it doesn’t come with a label that says plant-based versus animal-based. I chuckled at the milk comment earlier because I’ve gotten way too much abuse from people for saying, not sure why you’re drinking this. We consume more calcium in the United States than the vast majority of people, but what we’ve discovered is that the more protein you have, the more it leeches the calcium out of your bone. The studies that have actually looked at that show that about 800mg a day of calcium with exercise including aerobic and anaerobic—so in other words, exercising your heart and heart rate and then exercising your muscles—are the types of things that keep bone formed and bone forms along what’s called lines of stress. If you use a muscle and a bone, it causes stress along that to be activated and that will lay down the calcium. If you don’t do that, you end up with weak bones, brittle bones, and they break over the course of time. If you get a hip fracture when you’re older, about half the people will die from the hip fracture because not only is there a broken bone with immobility and blood clots from that, but you can also get fat released from the bones and it can go through your blood vessels. It’s called a fat embolism, and it can kill you. That type of thing. And I encourage people to be interactive with other individuals because socially, there’s quite a positive feedback for people who get out, and they’re mentally, physically, and (dare I say) spiritually, but that gets into another realm of activity that is positive for people. All of that has been shown to reduce stress levels and improve immune functions. This is the type of stuff that you don’t need somebody like me telling you about. I never thought in my early life I would have done as much research into these areas as I’d done. It demonstrated some interesting research over the years and I think it was helpful. I mean, it’s certainly provided some of the insight needed to better understand inflammation and disease. A variety of diseases proved to be fortuitous between that and the patent to investigate SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19.   [02:07:55] Ashley James: What kind of diet do you eat to prevent disease? Can I just eat like you? I want to like you. First of all, you look so young. You look great in your videos, so I know you’re doing something right.   [02:08:13] Dr. Richard Fleming: I got my hair cut the other day so I think I look better.   [02:08:18] Ashley James: Well, how do you eat? I want to know how you eat for preventing disease and staying healthy.   [02:08:23] Dr. Richard Fleming: Very boring for what most people do. A disappointment, I’m not a red meat eater. I don’t even have a taste for red meat, and that’s not to harm people who say that just cut the fat off so you’re not ingesting the fat. You don’t need the fat, I know you like the flavor of it, but your body doesn’t need it. As far as meats or proteins are concerned, I do like more lentils and lean meats. I would argue that I’m actually more interested in fish than anything else. I like sushi. A lot of fruits and vegetables, and I always remind people that apples, oranges, and bananas are not the only vegetables out there. There’s this whole list of things that if you walk up and down the stores—although not as much today as there had been, but those days will return—you’ll find a whole bunch of things that actually grew in the ground that you can eat. It’s just amazing. They’re called fruits and vegetables. I avoid canned foods like the bubonic plague, which I thought was a particularly appropriate pun there for SARS-CoV-2 and the plague because I don’t need the added salt. I don’t add salt to my food. People are used to that because it’s flavored. The reason why people are used to the flavor is that when people settled this country in the United States, they started down the east coast and as they moved westward, well, if you pull up vegetables and fruit they only last so long. So people took animals with them. And then to keep those meats from spoiling, they originally used a lot of pepper in Europe to pepper the foods so the meats would not spoil and become infected with bacteria and kill people. And then, they discovered this really cheap thing in China called salt, sodium chloride, and they found that it did the same thing. So what our ancestors did is they settled this country in North America was they would then salt the food to preserve it so bacteria didn’t grow, and over the course of time, people got used to that flavor. Many people are of the confused notion that that’s what they need to actually make the meats or whatever foods they’re eating taste normal. You don’t need to add salt to it. If you’re adding salt to it for flavor, you’ve lost your taste and not due to SARS-CoV-2. Find something else to season it with, there are tons of seasonings, and you’ll appreciate what foods really taste like. Fruits and vegetables are definitely high. Do I eat bread? Yes, I do eat bread. I’m not gluten-free. I’m not certain that many people are really gluten intolerant. My ancestry is Scandinavian, so I would argue I’m probably very lactose intolerant. I’m not a big milk drinker. I like yogurt, but I can’t stand the taste of milk. That’s just a personal preference.  My children grew up with skim milk when they had it. I would prefer that they drink orange juice, but that’s up to them. I had an ex father-in-law who was a dentist who insisted that everybody needed milk for calcium for their teeth. I just had to look at him and say, where did they teach you this in dental school? Well, I was in dental school. You need calcium, but nowhere other than perhaps if the tooth falls out is there a benefit of milk for a tooth. Because if you immerse it in milk it does protect it pretty well. Why get it to a dentist if there’s a chance of it being implanted? But that’s the misperception that they were taught, and so go for it. Sokolof I did know, he was the guy who bought a million-dollar—the first of the year football game. I forget what it’s called. The once-a-year football game.   [02:13:12] Ashley James: The big one, the Super Bowl.   [02:13:14] Dr. Richard Fleming: Yeah, Super Bowl. Thank you.   [02:13:16] Ashley James: It’s okay.   [02:13:19] Dr. Richard Fleming: I remember that Phil Sokolof, who passed away many years ago now, bought a $1 million 30-second ad so he could take a container of milk, look at the camera, and throw it over his shoulder. Well, you have a million dollars to throw away on that cute commercial. I don’t know if that answered the question for you.   [02:13:43] Ashley James: I liked that you brought up that there’s only a certain amount of calories we really need. That we can get a lot of our protein, we can get all of our protein, all of our amino acids from plants if we wanted to. We can choose to completely eat plants. If you’re going to choose to eat animals, then focus on the leaner ones and avoid things like milk because there’s actually no nutritional benefit to milk. There’s plenty of studies showing that it’s actually a harmful effect to the immune system. It creates phlegm.  I mean, you can get all that calcium and all those minerals that you’re supposedly getting from the cow, which actually, how the cows are getting it is they’re being supplemented. Because these cows are all grazing in minerally rich soil. They’re not eating grass that’s grown in minerally rich soil. You’re buying factory farm milk where the cows never see the light of day for five years while they’re being impregnated constantly, and they’re being forced to give up the milk. And then they’re being supplemented, they’re being given calcium supplements. So why don’t you just avoid the milk, take a calcium supplement, skip the middleman?   [02:14:53] Dr. Richard Fleming: Bypass the middleman?   [02:14:56] Ashley James: Right. Bypass the torturing of an animal. Seriously, it is. It’s animal torture, you don’t need it. Go drink some almond milk, you’re going to get lots of great nutrients, or water. Water is wonderful for you. Yeah, you had mentioned Amazon. You have books on Amazon. Stop Inflammation Now! is on paperback on Amazon, and the links to all your books and stuff are definitely going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. We need to know this information. I love talking to researchers because that’s where we get the real stuff from. Don’t listen to mainstream media. There’s an agenda behind it, they’re being paid.  You don’t like money being involved because money corrupts truth oftentimes because there’s an agenda. You just want to show us the truth without an agenda being behind it. So I really appreciate how candid you are, and I’m looking forward to your talk that’s coming up on June 5th. Listeners got to go to flemingmethod.com. Click on the event 2021 and get that information, especially if you’re going to be in Dallas, Texas or gain access to the video footage. Are you going to live stream it or are you going to record it and provide it later?   [02:16:11] Dr. Richard Fleming: We’re going to record it and we’re hoping to live stream it. We’re talking with a number of people right now who’ve expressed an interest in live streaming it, and we have people all around the world that have asked for that. Our hopes are that we’ll not only be able to live stream it, but receive questions from people around the world at the time that’s happening and then filter that through other people, not myself. Other people that are sitting to the side looking at the questions and going, okay, let’s make this one of the questions that we answer. There’s no way in the world for me to respond to all the questions that come in.   [02:16:55] Ashley James: Right. I see you have a 12:30 PM to 1:30 PM time slot for Q&A, I have a feeling you’re going to be there longer than 1:30 PM.   [02:17:03] Dr. Richard Fleming: Well, I think that’s a hard cutoff.   [02:17:09] Ashley James: Well, then it’ll be a challenge. Everyone around the world, I challenge you to come up with the coolest question to get submitted. It’s like winning a prize. So that’s going to be a lot of fun. You’re going to talk about the real science behind viruses, vaccines, and treatments. We didn’t really even get into your research around how bacteria and viruses affect inflammation and thus affect cardiovascular disease. You did touch on it. There’s a lot more information on videos that you’ve released. There’s this two-hour one you did, that’s how I found you and I just absolutely fell in love with your work. I’ll try to find it and link that in this episode as well. But that’s going to be a great talk, so I’m really looking forward to you doing that on June 5th. Is there anything that you’d like to wrap up today’s interview? Anything you’d like to leave the listener with?   [02:18:06] Dr. Richard Fleming: I think it’s important that people realize that they’re able to make sense out of this, even though viruses are not something that most people are familiar with. But I think there’s a common sense approach to understanding something. Despite all the advantages I’ve had academically, research experience, medical experience, and even a little legal experience that I’ve had in my life, I just always return (believe it or not) to my parents and my grandparents. I ask just very fundamental questions, which is what would my parents or grandparents think about this? They had a really good sense of looking at something and saying that something just was not quite right. And that has actually been very useful in my life, both from a research and medical perspective. But as far as sorting a lot of this out with SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19, which is the agendas of people, what they’re saying, and why are things inconsistent this go around compared to other things that we’ve all experienced. Which is, why were treatments shut down? I mean, treatments were just simply shut down. Why were vaccines pushed from day one? Why did we quarantine the healthy versus the sick? Why did we pan culture everybody when we’ve never done that before? I mean, I guess what we’ve demonstrated is that, yup, it’s a respiratory virus and it passes from person to person. Okay, that was just outstanding. We could have used those resources much more efficiently to treat people, get them in and out of the hospital, and save lives. But instead, this was the approach. I think taking my parent’s approach, the common sense approach is the way to do it. The goal of the website and these presentations isn’t for you to just listen to me and go, well, he says to do that, that’s what we should do. If there’s any credibility into what somebody is telling you, you should be able to listen to what they’re doing and look at the information yourself and say, yup, that makes sense.   [02:20:29] Ashley James: Okay, I have one more question. I’m sorry. If we could fire Fauci and put you in his place, if you had Fauci’s job tomorrow, what would be your advice to the American people, to the government? Right now, his advice is to get a vaccine, wear a mask, and stay inside your house. What is your advice if you had his job?   [02:20:59] Dr. Richard Fleming: I’ve answered that question as to what I would have done when SARS first hit. Much to the chagrin, many people don’t like the answer that I gave to that one. What I would do immediately at this point in time is I would, the first thing I would do is I would immediately stop the vaccines, and I would demand that they be run through animal model trials because the animal model trials are more alarming than we’ve talked about in this program, number one. Number two, I would reinvest in emergency funding of research treatments to get a better handle on this, and I would allow physicians to treat them based upon the best knowledge base that they had available with agreement and informed consent from their patients. Quite possibly, I guess the first thing I would do is I would immediately shut down gain-of-function research where there’s an argument for benefit of gain-of-function research, it has gone way astray. The implementation of that has not been what it was meant for. I would immediately pull off funding and shut down all projects, demand that the vaccines be placed under animal studies to demonstrate efficacy and then safety long before we gave it to people. Make certain that physicians and patients were allowed to use the treatments that we know are available, and then invest massively in clinical trials to validate the treatments that there’s already scientific evidence for, and to expand that, to include medical treatments that have not been considered. So those would be my first three things.   [02:22:58] Ashley James: I love it. Oh gosh, can I vote you in, please?   [02:23:02] Dr. Richard Fleming: I would probably be assassinated.   [02:23:09] Ashley James: So, we need to wake up. We really need to think for ourselves. Please, please, please, please think for yourself and just become an open-minded skeptic. Gather information, question everything. Question what Dr. Fleming says, question everything.   [02:23:24] Dr. Richard Fleming: Yeah, it doesn’t hurt my feelings.   [02:23:26] Ashley James: Yeah, seriously, question everything, but keep taking in the information. And also, always follow the money, follow the money trail. The doctors have never before been treated this way, and all of a sudden, their hands are tied when it comes to treating their patients. It’s very weird. Well, it’s also that way with cancer treatments in the United States, that’s a whole other topic. But doctors, their hands are tied when it comes to treating cancer patients, and follow the money trail there as well. But for the majority of illnesses, we’ve never seen this happen before. This is unprecedented. And then now, it’s like a global experiment. We’re going to stay safe, we’re going to stay healthy, we’re going to keep preventing disease as much as possible by eating healthy and lowering inflammation in the body. Getting your book and going to your website, flemingmethod.com, and continuing to gain learning from you. Especially also YouTube, I love your YouTube lectures where you have slides.   [02:24:38] Dr. Richard Fleming: They have pulled those down.   [02:24:40] Ashley James: That’s why I couldn’t find it. I was looking for that two-hour one, I couldn’t find it.   [02:24:47] Dr. Richard Fleming: We have several on Rumble, and then there are several people like Steve Bannon and David Clements and Del Bigtree that have been interviewing lately, and [inaudible 02:24:56]—just a wide variety. We’ve done some interviews out of Italy and Australia. I have a French interview later on this week. There’s a variety of ways that people are getting different messages out there, they’re just having to use alternative channels.   [02:25:13] Ashley James: Yeah. Well, hopefully you’ll be able to host those videos that you’ve created on your website, or like you said, you got it on Rumble. Get it on LBRY. It’s done through the blockchain, they can’t shut it down. But there are ways to host videos that are unmessable, they can’t mess with it.   [02:25:39] Dr. Richard Fleming: I’m hoping we get a very good turnout on June 5th to help get some information out to people.   [02:25:45] Ashley James: Yes, let’s do it. Let’s all make sure we’re there, either in person or virtually on June 5th. And again, all the information is on flemingmethod.com/event-2021. Dr. Richard Fleming Ph.D., MD, JD, I love your work. I pray that you are safe and that no one comes after you, me, or anyone that you talk to for bringing this information out to the public. They certainly don’t want it to be out to the public, and that is deeply, deeply concerning. Stay safe. Thank you so much for this interview, and I really appreciate the work you’re doing.   [02:26:28] Dr. Richard Fleming: My pleasure, Ashley. Thank you for the invitation.   [02:26:30] Ashley James: I hope you enjoyed today’s interview with Dr. Richard Fleming. Please visit his website flemingmethod.com to watch the event. When I interviewed him, it was before the event. I thought I would have enough time to publish this before his event, but unfortunately, with our very quick move, we had to move very quickly out of the house we were in. I didn’t have enough time, and so now I’m publishing it after his event. But like I said in the introduction to today’s interview, in case you missed me saying that, the good news is you can go and watch the entire four-hour lecture, which I highly recommend checking out and just absorb the information. Listen, my stance is don’t blindly trust anyone. Question everything, even question the guests I have. What I like about Dr. Fleming is he has all of the research behind what he says, and he invites you to check it out. You can download a 100+ page PDF with all of the research that he shows, all the studies he shows, all the information out there so that you can come to your own conclusions. I really like it when guests point us in the direction of resources so that we can do our own digging and affirm what direction we want to go with our health. I believe that we need to be proactive when it comes to everything we put in our body—be it food or medicine—and that we need to look into research instead of blindly following or trusting anyone. Please don’t blindly trust or follow anyone, me, your doctor—anyone. We should look into information, and that’s why I say I’m an open minded skeptic. I’m going to be skeptical, but I’m going to be open-minded enough to look into the information and be open-minded enough to really check in.  I have to do an ego check. Do I put my ego aside enough to humble myself to be wrong? Is it okay that my belief system can be challenged? Is that okay? Some people it’s not okay. Some people want to blindly, no matter what, trust their belief system even when new evidence comes out that challenges it, and that’s where we can get ourselves in trouble when it comes to health because that then becomes dogma and not actual science. So are you following science, which science is always changing as new information comes out, or are you following dogma, which is a belief system that would negate new information? We all have to do kind of an ego check and just ask ourselves, am I okay with my belief system being challenged in the light of new information? I know that you are to a certain extent because you’re here listening to this podcast, so you’re seeking information, you’re excited to seek information. So just remember, being humble, being open minded, and being skeptical are really good strengths to have or to work on for your health. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing this information with those you care about. Please join us in the Learn True Health Facebook group, what a great community we’ve been building over the last five years. I feel so privileged and so humbled to be in your presence, to work with all of you there at the Learn True Health Facebook group. Right now we have our community and in a Facebook group, and maybe in the future, we’ll have it somewhere else. Maybe I’ll host it somewhere else, but for now, several thousand listeners are there. Please come join us, it’s a wonderful place to be. Ask questions and also use the search function there to see past conversations as well. Be sure to look up Dr. Richard Fleming and his website flemingmethod.com and check out his amazing four-hour lecture. I’d love for you to come join the Facebook group or if you already joined, come into the Facebook group afterward and let’s have a discussion about this episode today and also his four-hour lecture. What do you guys think? Let’s talk about it. All right, thanks so much for being a listener and sharing these episodes. Let’s keep an open mind. One of my past mentors would say, keep your mind so open your brain could fall out. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day. Get Connected with Dr. Richard Fleming! Website Linkedin YouTube Twitter Books by Dr. Richard Fleming Is COVID-19 a Bioweapon?: A Scientific and Forensic Investigation CoVid-19 Made Extremely Simple (Unmasking CoViD Book 6) The Truth About the Diet Grifters in the Era of CoVid-19 CoVid-19 Is Not a Hoax. Exposing The Real Grifters Unmasking CoViD – Part 1  ;

Dr. Brownstein's study that he published about his findings with treating patients with Covid-19 can be found here: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/A-Novel-Approach-to-Treating-COVID-19-Using-and-Brownstein-Ng/c1805feeee6e9e68a68a0a0071e98e67e7062399 And the PDF can be downloaded here: https://cf5e727d-d02d-4d71-89ff-9fe2d3ad957f.filesusr.com/ugd/adf864_cc5004cfa84a46d3b1a0338d4308c42c.pdf Find LTH on LBRY: https://lbry.tv/@Learn-True-Health Find LTH on Bitchute: https://www.bitchute.com/channel/kGf34VnWr7H9 Join the LTH community: learntruehealth.com/group   Dr. David Brownstein on Proven Effective and Natural Protocols for Respiratory and Covid Viruses https://www.learntruehealth.com/dr-david-brownstein-proven-effective-natural-protocols-respiratory-covid-viruses   Highlights: Importance of hormones to overall health Importance of maintaining adequate iodine levels Natural therapy for COVID How to maintain a properly functioning immune system   In this episode, we have Dr. David Brownstein. Dr. David Brownstein is a family physician that specializes in using vitamins, minerals, herbs, and natural hormones, and utilizes nutritional therapies. He shares how he went from being a doctor practicing conventional medicine to becoming a holistic doctor. He talks about how he has helped his patients recover from COVID and gives some tips on strengthening our immune system so we can have a good immune response to stressors or illnesses. Intro: Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. You’re going to love Dr. David Brownstein who has a very interesting story that he shares right off the bat at the beginning of the show. I don’t want to spoil it, so you’re going to have to listen to it because it really blew my mind. But his story is what got him into holistic medicine, and holistic medicine is where he ended up with a bunch of patients in his clinic who had COVID. He used the same tools he’s been using for several decades, and here we are with this amazing study that he published and the FTC coming after him. Just so much crazy information, I’m so excited for you to hear today’s interview. I hope you listen to the last interview I did with Dr. Paul Thomas, and I hope you also listen to the next interview I’m going to be publishing. It’s a three-part series. It just so happens I did these interviews and I thought they really go well together. Even though it’s similar information, it’s also very different.  This doctor used a more holistic natural approach to helping his patients boost their immune systems and fight viral infections with great success. And then the next interview I’m going to be publishing one of the things we do talk about is his 1800 person study using pharmaceutical drugs very successfully at supporting the body’s ability to fight this specific viral infection that we are facing at the moment.  Please find the Learn True Health Podcast on BitChute as well as LBRY. And you can just search for BitChute, search for LBRY and find the Learn True Health podcast. You can follow me there, you can follow me on iTunes, or most other podcast directories. But if I become censored because of the information that my guests are sharing, I just want you to know that you can find me in these other places. You can find the podcast in these other places where they still believe in freedom of speech. You can also find us, our whole community, in fact. Join the Learn True Health Facebook group. It is a fantastic community of very supportive, holistic-minded people, and I just love the community we’ve built there. So you can come and join us there. I don’t have any plans to switch the group to another platform, but with censorship and with holistic practitioners being de-platformed these days and holistic reporters and podcasters being de-platformed, we might have to at some point. So hopefully, all this content is protected by freedom of speech. I’m just here to help holistic doctors and really successful doctors, successful in that their procedures are successfully helping people to gain health. I’m creating a platform for them to give you the information you need so you can make great health choices for yourself. I’m so excited to continue to do that, and I hope and pray that everything we do here, we get to continue doing. It does concern me that the people I’ve been following have been taken off of platforms like Facebook and YouTube. It does concern me, and these are people who are also sharing similar information. So, I hope that we can all stay sound, healthy, and safe, and also be able to continue to learn and grow from all these wonderful experts and guests. But do follow us at places like BitChute, LBRY, and our Facebook group. And you could also join the email list by going to learntruehealth.com and the pop-up pops up, just put your email in there. I do not spam. I send very few emails, but you will get notifications from us should there be any news that’s worthy for you to know about. Thank you so much for being a listener and sharing this podcast with those you care about. Today’s episode not only touches on COVID and supporting the immune system, it also talks about heart health, hormone health, and how hormones directly affect heart health. So share this episode with those who care about that may have those concerns as well and want to learn more about that. Come to Learn True Health Facebook group after listening to this and share what you think. This episode really blew my mind, so I’m really excited to start a conversation with you guys about today’s interview. Have a fantastic rest of your day.   [00:04:59] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 462. I am so excited for today’s guest. We are in for such a treat. We have Dr. David Brownstein with us who’s an MD, board-certified family physician, and you got into natural and alternative therapies. I’m always fascinated because medical school does not necessarily like the holistic approach and doesn’t necessarily teach it or focus on it. I’ve met a lot of MDs that their training kind of led them to [inaudible 00:05:43] it or almost look down upon holistic or alternative methods. I would love to know just jumping into this conversation, and I’m very excited because you have some books that I know my listeners would absolutely love. Your latest one, A Holistic Approach to Viruses, which of course, isn’t that just the big buzz for the last year? But you also have Iodine: Why You Need It, Why You Can’t Live Without It. I mean, we can have you on again for an entire episode about that. You have a book specializing in vitamin B12 for your health, which, again, I would love to have you on multiple times because every book you have, I’m like, oh my gosh, that’s an entire interview. The list goes on and on. The Guide to a Gluten-free Diet, The Guide to a Dairy-free Diet, The Soy Deception, I mean, I have a feeling we’re going to be learning a lot from you. And then Ozone: The Miracle Therapy. I have listed all of your books, they’re all very interesting. But what I really want to know just jumping into our interview today is what happened as a medical doctor that had you go into that holistic realm, that had you go, I really want to help people, maybe natural therapies instead of just jumping to a drug right away? What happened as a doctor that had you go this route?   [00:07:09] Dr. David Brownstein: Oh, Ashley, thanks for having me on. And I didn’t start off as a holistic physician, I’ve turned into one. You know why? My career in medicine started as a little boy when I used to go to the doctor for severe asthma and just decided I want to be a doctor and help people. So I geared my undergraduate training at the University of Michigan for going to med school. I went to Wayne State University School of Medicine, and I wanted to model myself after my family doctor. I didn’t come from a holistic household. We didn’t take vitamins in our household. We didn’t do anything holistic. We went to the doctor when we were sick, we took whatever they gave us. We didn’t question anything in my household. That’s what I thought I wanted to do in medicine. So I finished a family practice residency and started practicing conventional medicine as I was taught in my training. My turning point came around six months into that when, for a couple of nights, I just lost sleep for an unknown reason and became anxious after losing sleep for an unknown reason this anxiety percolated up in me. I remember getting ready to go for work the next day after the sleepless nights and my wife, Allison, was getting ready to go to work. I blurted out to her, “I don’t want to be a doctor anymore.” It’s the first thing I ever said to her about it.  Now, she has known me since I was 18. I had $100,000 in student loans. I always talked about being a physician, this was all I wanted to be. I want to be a family doctor. So she says to me, what’s wrong? And I said I’m not really helping people. I’m just prescribing all these drugs that don’t really work. I’m prescribing more drugs to treat the side effects from the first drugs, and they’re not getting better. I just said to her, I can’t do this for the next 30 or 40 years. She said, Well, why don’t you do another residency? And I said, I’m not doing that again, one was enough. What was happening in my life at that time was my father was really sick. He had his first heart attack at age 40, he had a second heart attack at 42. Over the next 20 years. He had two bypass surgeries, he had numerous angioplasties, he was on 12 medications for heart disease, cholesterol, hypertension, and diabetes. My dad had suffered from continuous angina over a 20+ year time period. Every day he was having chest pain, it was getting worse. If he did any mild activity, he would start popping nitroglycerin pills like they were candy.  We were all just waiting for the phone call that he had died because he looked so bad. He was pale and pasty. My dad wasn’t the best patient either. He could eat like the best of them, he was overweight, he smoked, and never exercised much. Those sleepless nights came, I didn’t really know what was going on. I go to work that day and I happen to see a patient. The patient is friends with Allison and I. We’ve gone out and his wife works with Allison. He was bothering me to meet his chiropractor. At that time of my medical career, I never met a chiropractor, I never went to one, never knew what they did. In my medical training, I was taught to not send patients to chiropractors, they were dangerous, and that was it. So I never sent a patient to a chiropractor, and I used to actively tell them don’t go because they were dangerous, even though I never knew what the philosophy was, never knew what they did. But the patient, Michael, was bothering me to meet his chiropractor, and the chiropractor really helped him out in much more so than back pain through taking some supplements and things like that. So in my anxiety and my lack of sleep state, I took the phone number from him. I remember I called the chiropractor at lunchtime, we set up a dinner meeting for a couple of days the following week. Tuesday comes around for dinner with the chiropractor, and I tell Allison when I get home from work, I’m going to cancel. I don’t want to waste my time with a chiropractor. She said that would be rude, you need to go because you made this date. She said, be nice. I met the chiropractor, his name was Dr. Robert Radtke. He was using nutritional therapies and he was talking functional biochemistry to me much more so than I knew, way more than I knew at that time. He brought a book Healing with Nutrition by Jonathan Wright who was an allopathic physician. I read that book. I took the book home. First off, Dr. Radtke and I hit it off. He was much more functional biochemistry than I did. He was very smart. He was telling me stories of using nutrition to heal his patients and to help them along. Either Dr. Radtke was lying to me, or there were other therapies out there that I wasn’t exposed to. So I took that book home. I read that book until late at night. The next morning, I called my dad up before I went to work and said, I want you to come in the office, I want to do a few blood tests on you. I checked two blood tests on him based on talking to Dr. Radtke and what I read in that book—his thyroid hormone levels and his testosterone levels. A few days later, I got his blood work back. His testosterone levels were below detectable limits, they weren’t even reading on the lab test. No one had bothered to check that. His thyroid levels were in the reference range but in the very low part of the reference range. No one had bothered to check anything but a TSH before. So I checked his other thyroid levels of T3, T4, and thyroid antibodies. So based on that lab work, I started reading and I put my dad on two things. I put him on natural testosterone, and natural thyroid hormone, desiccated thyroid hormone. Within seven days, his 20+ year history of angina melted away and never returned. Stopped using nitros. He actually called me that day. He said, I want you to know, I haven’t used the nitro today. I’m like, why? And he said, because I don’t have chest pain, it seems like maybe it’s going away. I followed up with him the next couple of days, that was gone, never to return. Instead of looking pale and pasty, he started to look pink on his face and looked healthier. Thirty days later, I checked his cholesterol levels, which were stuck in the 300s on cholesterol-lowering medication. Without changing any of his bad habits, his cholesterol fell below 200. All these inflammatory markers improved his blood work.  Once I saw the changes in my dad, I decided that’s what I wanted to do in medicine. I decided I was going to be a holistic doctor. I didn’t really know what it was, but I knew I couldn’t do this in a conventional office. I went to the partner of the practice and said, I need to leave. He said, why, you’re going to be a partner in a few months? I said, I want to do holistic medicine. He goes, what’s that? I’m like, I’m not really sure yet, but I’m going to figure it out. He said, well, why don’t you do it here? I said, No, I can’t do it here. I need my own office. So I left and that’s how it started. Since I treated my dad with natural testosterone, natural thyroid hormone and he made such a dramatic improvement, every patient that I’ve seen for the last 27, 28 years has been given a full thyroid, full hormonal workup, and full nutritional evaluation. That’s how it all began. The first book I wrote was The Miracle of Natural Hormones in 1998. I’ve featured my father in that book because of the response he had. Overcoming thyroid disorders came shortly after that because of the response I had with him and seeing all the thyroid effects. One thing led to another and it was the best thing I did in medicine. Now I know biochemistry much better. You learn it in medical school, you learn it in undergraduate school, but you don’t learn to utilize it in your practice. You learn it to pass the test and then you forget it. Now, I’m studying biochemistry every night. I’ve got biochemistry charts up in my office at home. My goal is to support a patient’s biochemistry, which leads to support for the immune system and leads to better health. It was the best thing I did in medicine. Medicine went from being I can’t do this for the next 30 to 40 years to I’m almost 30 years into it and hope I got another 30 ahead of me to do it. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.   [00:16:20] Ashley James: Now, the Center for Holistic Medicine in West Bloomfield, Michigan, that’s your clinic?   [00:16:28] Dr. David Brownstein: That’s mine. I left his office and that’s what I formed when I left that partner’s office. And then lo and behold, about eight years later, I liked him. He and I kept playing tennis and I kept bugging him about, hey, Rick, this is a better way to practice medicine, this is way better. I finally convinced him eight years later, he just walked away from this practice and joined me. There are three doctors in the practice now. We have a nurse practitioner and a physician assistant. We have a busy holistic practice.   [00:17:00] Ashley James: I love it. I’ve been in this space studying intensely holistic medicine for 10 years. Applying it to my own life first and then I became a health coach and I’ve been working with being mentored by Naturopathic physicians for the last 10 years, I have never heard of heart disease being caused by and also then cured by balancing testosterone and thyroid. I mean, it makes sense, but I have no idea what the process is. Why is it that his thyroid was out of balance, his testosterone was out of balance, and he had heart disease because of it? Why is that?   [00:17:48] Dr. David Brownstein: Well, it’s a good question. It took me some research after I saw the improvement he did, so I started researching all these hormones. What I found was that having a balanced hormonal system is just essential to health. If you look at the hormonal pathways of the body, the adrenal and sex hormones like testosterone, estrogen, DHA, and progesterone, they’re all produced in the ovaries in women, testes in men, and adrenal glands in men and women. We all have the same pathways. The precursor substance to all this is cholesterol. You can’t make hormones in those glands without adequate amounts of cholesterol. So here, my dad, he’s got this high cholesterol in the 300s, and he’s got testosterone levels of zero, basically. Now, I checked his other hormone levels like DHA and pregnenolone, they’re all in the same pathways. It’s kind of like driving from town A to town B to town C in order. Your hormones are made in a certain order, one follows the other, and that’s the way it is. If you go from the beginning, cholesterol is really the substrate that fuels this pathway. So here’s my dad with a cholesterol of 350 or so and he can’t make hormones. They’re all near zero when I checked them all as I started learning about one after another and I put him on small amounts of all of them. Why wasn’t he making hormones? Well, you need adequate thyroid hormone to stimulate that pathway. You need vitamin A as a cofactor to make that pathway go. You need magnesium and some B vitamins to make that pathway go. So my dad was lacking a lot of basic nutrition like most of the patients that I see are, he was lacking thyroid hormone, and he couldn’t make his hormones. If you look at the literature for heart disease and what causes atherosclerosis, hypothyroidism is known to cause it. That’s been known since the late 1800s. Low testosterone has been known to cause heart disease. Much of the research with that has been out of Europe, but that’s been known for over 50 years. Maybe I got a little lucky with my dad, but when I put them on those first two things and I went and researched some more, how does that make his angina better? And there was tons of research showing this is why his arteries were blocking up. Either the underlying cause or a major part of the underlying cause of what was causing his problems. After I treated him with those two things and then I started adding DHA, pregnenolone, and other things in there as I found what he was lacking, but he never had another day of angina in his life. He was able to lose weight without changing his bad habits. Once I saw the changes in him, I knew that’s what I wanted to do in medicine. That’s been my passion, that’s been my drive. It served my purpose and it served my patients’ purpose.   [00:21:06] Ashley James: This is what I want for every listener, to have a doctor on their team that acts like Sherlock Holmes. I want a doctor that questions and goes, what’s going on? Let’s look deeper and understand this. The fact that they never ran these panels on your dad, that they were only looking. It’s like the iceberg story. They’re only looking at the tip of the iceberg. They’re like, oh, heart disease. This is my frustration with allopathic medicine is it’s reductionistic. He has angina, let’s look at the heart, and they’re not looking at the body as a whole. Hello, we’re not looking at his thyroid, testosterone, or any of his nutrient levels, right?   [00:21:49] Dr. David Brownstein: Well, you’re right. He has angina so he’s got chest pain when he does any activity, right? He walks up a flight of stairs, whatever. Walking up a flight of stairs or walking sometimes a few steps, so you give him nitroglycerin which dilates the arteries and the chest pain goes away.  Well, does he have a deficiency of nitroglycerin? I mean, it’s kind of the reductionist model of conventional medicine. But really, what my father had was no testosterone, his hormonal biosynthetic pathways were not working because he was lacking thyroid hormone, he was lacking vitamin A, he was lacking some B vitamins. Once we corrected those things and supported him with small amounts of hormones, he made a dramatic change in his health. It was really something.  I still think about that today, that got me going in the right pathway for medicine. He was my first patient. All patients are important. He was certainly probably the most important patient in my career.   [00:22:55] Ashley James: Of course, one of our parents would be, wouldn’t they? Now, you mentioned that you use desiccated thyroid hormone, and that surprised me because you were just newly introduced into holistic medicine. The training of an MD is to do more synthetic. Can you explain for the listener what desiccated thyroid hormone is versus the synthetic that we’re so used to?   [00:23:21] Dr. David Brownstein: So I ended up writing a book on this, Overcoming Thyroid Disorders. In med school, I was trained to assess a patient’s thyroid status by drawing a TSH level, a thyroid-stimulating hormone level. That’s a hormone secreted from the pituitary gland in the brain, and that is released from the pituitary gland, hits your bloodstream, goes to the thyroid, and causes the thyroid gland to release thyroid hormone. Now thyroid hormone released into the bloodstream from the thyroid gland feeds back into the pituitary gland. It was supposed to be this check and balance thing to see if you got enough thyroid hormone. If you don’t have enough thyroid hormone, you should produce more TSH. If you got too much thyroid hormone, you should produce less TSH. There are multiple places where this pathway gets disrupted. Going back to basic biochemistry and physiology, and just basic biochemical pathways can help. Sherlock Holmes is a good example. As a physician, I’m always thinking, what’s the underlying cause of this? I don’t think this is sent from another planet if the patient’s sick for something. I mean, sometimes you can never figure out why they’re sick or why something happened and many times you can. Again, I said that from the beginning that supporting the patient’s physiology and biochemistry is really what we should be doing in medicine. And the problem with relying on drug therapies, I mean, look, most of the first two years of medical school are spent on memorizing drugs, their mechanism of action, their half-life, and things like that. When you look at those mechanisms of action, nearly every drug prescribed out there is either poisoning an enzyme or blocking a receptor in the body. For the long term in our lives, I don’t think it’s a good idea to poison enzymes or black receptors. The enzymes and receptors are there for a reason. Now, there are times to do that. If you’re having an acute heart attack, there are enzymes that might need to be poisoned and receptors might need to be blocked temporarily. But for long-term care, using those drugs doesn’t support physiology, doesn’t support biochemistry, it does the opposite—it disrupts it.  I think that you also have to look at our health statistics in the US. We take more drugs than any Western people on the face of the planet. We spend more money on health care than any people on the face of the planet, and we have worse outcomes than every western country. We are bottom last in almost every outcome, and the only one we’re not bottom last, we’re second to last. That includes infant mortality, neonatal mortality, maternal mortality at birth, longevity in adult males and females, chronic health conditions—the list goes on and on. We have lousy health outcomes. What’s happened with coronavirus epitomizes how we are as a country. It’s a sad state we’re in right now. I think the sad state is being driven from this lack of education of doctors that have no idea how to holistically approach anybody, no idea just basic holistic things like vitamin C, iodine, or I call these as basic things that people need and they can’t live without. I mean, 99.9% of physicians out there have no clue what these things do with the body, why they’re essential, how to assess them, and how to rectify deficiencies with us. Unfortunately, we have 600,000 deaths from COVID because, in part, we’re an unhealthy country, and we’re unhealthy because we take too many of these drugs, and we’re unfollowing holistic lifestyle.   [00:27:24] Ashley James: It’s those with comorbidities that have the highest chances of passing away from a viral infection, let alone COVID. But also, in the United States, doctors are being told not to prescribe drugs to try to treat it or try to try to support it. There’s no treatment, you just have to manage the symptoms. It’s just very frustrating.   [00:27:52] Dr. David Brownstein: No, no, no, you can’t manage the symptoms either because there’s no prevention, treatment, or cure for COVID. Therefore, any mention or any action thereof falls in violation of the federal code. That was part of a letter that I received from the FTC for treating COVID patients, and we can get into that.   [00:28:12] Ashley James: We’re definitely going to get into that. I want to go there. The little voice in my head is going, we’re going to be delisted from Google from going there, but we have to, everyone has to understand you. We live in a country where the government—this is unheard of. I feel like I’m in an Orwell novel.  The government is telling doctors how to practice medicine. It’s unconstitutional what’s going on right now, and it’s unethical. It’s unethical that your hands as a physician are being tied and unable to practice medicine. You’re allowed to practice medicine with other illnesses, why are you not allowed to treat the patient the best way you know-how with this one? It is so political and we are killing people, are harming people for politics. So anyway, I’m just upset, scared, and angry for all the people who are suffering from this when good doctors like yourself could absolutely be saving lives but they’re being told not to. Isn’t that crazy? That sounds crazy. That sounds absolutely crazy, doesn’t it?   [00:29:25] Dr. David Brownstein: I’m 58 years old and I’ve never seen anything like this, never thought anything like this would occur. Orwellian is the right—what is that, an adjective? I’m not quite sure when I use it that way. But it is an Orwellian-like thing where big brother is just controlling everything. The message from the beginning of COVID was to hide in your basement and don’t leave your house except to get food until we have this vaccine.  The message to physicians was you can’t treat it so don’t even try. What physicians were telling their patients from the beginning of COVID, well, nothing I can do. Stay home until you can’t breathe then go to the hospital. We all know what happened at the beginning of COVID. We were, as physicians, we didn’t know how to treat that disease, and we were treating it incorrectly. That’s not blaming anybody, it was a new illness. We really didn’t know what we were doing and we tried our best. If you went to the hospital and you got ventilated a year ago—March, April, and May—you had an 88% chance of dying. It’s the first illness that I’ve seen that physicians were instructed not to do anything and wait for this vaccine. Waiting for the vaccine caused about 400,000 people to die for doing no therapy. Doctors who were doing therapy like me were silenced. You were warned, either you stop talking about it or you’re not going to be able to practice medicine. You have to make your Sophie’s Choice. I was seeing COVID patients from the beginning. Do you want to get into COVID right now?   [00:31:17] Ashley James: Yeah, let’s do it. Let’s go there. We’re already there, let’s go there.   [00:31:20] Dr. David Brownstein: So when COVID came, when those first reports out of China in December 2019, an atypical pneumonia. I think it was three or four patients who had this novel coronavirus with atypical pneumonia. I read those reports and I followed it from the beginning. I watched what happened in January and February, Spain and Italy, and Europe experienced it before we did. I knew it was coming. I mean, we all knew it was coming. And then the first cases in the US were in Seattle and California. That was the middle to the end of February of 2020. COVID was clearly coming, and it was going to come across the country. We didn’t have any immunity to this. I remember I had a meeting with my staff at the end of February 2020 that the media headlines were awful. Everyone’s dying or gets COVID. Italy’s got bodies piled up on the streets. Spain was a mess. It’s only a matter of time until it comes here. I have this meeting in my office at the end of the workday, the end of Thursday. The tension in the air was palpable. You could cut it with a knife, everybody’s scared. Everybody’s scared. In this meeting with the staff, I said, we got to clear the air here. We’re going to stay open through COVID, and my staff started to question me, why don’t we close? I said, why would we close? This is our time.  I said, I’ve been practicing medicine for I think it was 27 years. I said, 26 years and a few months were for this. This is what I’ve been practicing for. I used to talk we, my partners and I. This is what we were practicing for, to get ready for something like this. This is a novel illness that conventional medicine has no clue what to do yet we do. I said, we’ve been treating flu-like illnesses with 30% of them being coronavirus infections, because it’s known that 30% of all influenza-like illnesses are coronavirus every year, with an approach to support the immune system.  We’ve done the same therapy for over 25 years. The only thing we changed was if we learned something new, we added something new with little tweaks like that. But otherwise, it’s been the exact same therapy for over two decades. The therapy consisted of using high dose vitamins A, C, and D, iodine for four days, and nebulizing a dilute solution of hydrogen peroxide and iodine.  What we found over the 25+ years was that our patients didn’t get hospitalized, didn’t get pneumonia, and didn’t die at anywhere near the rates of what’s reported every year from influenza-like illnesses during the flu season. Remember, in a light flu season, 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 Americans die. In a medium season, it’s up to 80,000 or so. And in a bad season, 100,000 to maybe 120,000 dies. A lot of people die from flu and flu-like illnesses every year in the wintertime in America. Our patients didn’t seem to do that, so this therapy was working. The other part of the therapy was that if people got worse or they needed a little support, we would do intravenous vitamin C and hydrogen peroxide and then shots of ozone. That was the whole therapy in a nutshell. In the meeting with the staff, I reminded them, we’ve got therapy for this. The question came back to me, how do you know it’s going to work for this new strain of coronavirus? I said, I don’t know if it’s going to work, but why wouldn’t it work? It’s worked for every other strain over the last 25 years.  I said, we have an immune system for a reason. I said, we’re going to support the immune system. The immune system is going to do fine with coronavirus if it’s got the right raw materials. That was my prediction. I said to them, look, I can’t guarantee anything because I haven’t seen this one before, but I don’t see any reason why we’re going to have trouble with this. So I told the staff, hey, anyone who doesn’t want to work, you don’t have to work. I’m not going to force anybody to work through this. I said, I will work alone if I have to work alone. I said, I’m working until either I get sick or they won’t let me work, but our patients are going to need us more than ever. I said to them, this is our time. This is 27+ years of practicing medicine for this moment. This is our time to shine. That was the meeting. We had about 40%, 50% of our staff. As soon as it hit Michigan, it hit the Detroit area where I was. We were one of the four hotspots, in the beginning, was Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts. It already started in Seattle where you are. We were one of the four hotspots when it moved to the western part of the US. We were getting phone calls, people couldn’t breathe, the hospitals were filling up, the media headlines were fear, fear, fear, fear, fear. I’m not lying to you, I was scared at the beginning too. Here we were treating patients, we didn’t let them come into the office. We were treating them outside in March in Michigan. Let me tell you, March in Michigan isn’t pretty. It’s snow, sleet, ice, wind—it’s terrible. We were in snowstorms in full hazmat gear trudging out there with ice and stuff and having people put their arms out the windows of the car in freezing weather and giving them IVs. Then when you have them put their buttocks out the door as we were putting shots in the rear end.   [00:37:20] Ashley James: Of what, B vitamins?   [00:37:22] Dr. David Brownstein: Shots of ozone in the rear end. So look, truth be told I was scared for myself. I have a 65-degree scoliotic curve with lung involvement. I have severe asthma, which I used to be in multiple inhalers and wheezing all the time, and adopting a holistic lifestyle, that doesn’t bother me much at all. I play tennis without inhalers. The only time it bothers me is when I get a cold now. But I have severe asthma, I have lung involvement from scoliosis with half a lung missing on one side, and my normal pulse ox is low just because I don’t have a full two lungs like everybody else. And I have an immune system disorder that 1% of the population has. My immune system disorder is lack of immunoglobulin A, which makes me more susceptible to viral illnesses.   [00:38:17] Ashley James: Oh my gosh, that’s three. That’s like the trifecta.   [00:38:20] Dr. David Brownstein: I went in the wrong profession for my body. Let me tell you, I was scared for myself as well. You know what, I eat well, I take my supplements, and I know what to do for viral flu-like illnesses. So we were treating people. I was reporting it online on my website. I was putting videos of patients as they recovered. Patients who couldn’t breathe, who called their doctor, the doctor told them there’s nothing to do. Take Tylenol or something or stay home until you can’t breathe in and go to the ER. Patients would come in with pulse ox in the 80s and low 80s, even upper 70s sometimes. They were trying to stay out of the ER. Everyone was scared because you were going to die it felt like if you went to the emergency room back then. About a weekend into this, the fear starts to go away for me and for my partners because people are calling us back, I feel better. They particularly reported they felt better after nebulizing peroxide, and they felt better after getting an IV if they really were sick. Two weeks into it we feel no different than any other flu season except we’re swamped with too many patients. We’re going outside and we’re working after hours, we got cars lined up in the parking lot. We’re all taking turns going outside. We have an assembly line going to meet them outside. We’re lining up 10 cars on the weekends. Three docs, nurse practitioner, my PA, we’d all show up and do our job. So a couple of weeks into it, we’ve got a pretty good plan, these patients are doing okay. I was doing interviews online, I was talking about it. I was saying what I thought was wrong with conventional medicine. But I titled each of these blog posts, there’s still hope out there because there was no hope from conventional media, there was just no hope. You got COVID, you were going to die. That was the feeling out there. We all remember this. I mean, it’s going to be seared into our psyche. About two months, March-April, I’m posting my blog post number 30 or something. Out of the blue, I got a letter from Federal Trade Communication. I remember I walked in the door, it was Tuesday night, which is my late night, not only was it my late night at work, but we’re treating patients in the parking lot and it’s tiring.  I’m walking in at 8:00 or 9:00 at night after getting there at 7:00 in the morning. I’m working as hard as I worked as a resident it felt like. I’m way older than I was back then, and so I’m exhausted. I walked in and my wife and daughter were at home. They’re looking at the computer, which I see as soon as I walk in. I’m like, what’s wrong? I thought someone died, from their face. She said, well, come in. I’m like, no, tell me what’s wrong and I’m standing there holding my bag and I got my coat on. She said, you got a letter from the Federal Trade Communication. I said, The FTC? She goes, yeah. I said, what they want? She goes, well, they’re ordering you 48 hours to remove all your blog posts about COVID or else. I said, what? I probably said a few words after that.   [00:41:53] Ashley James: I know, me too.   [00:41:55] Dr. David Brownstein: She said, you have 48 hours to remove it or you’re going to hear from the US Justice Department.   [00:42:03] Ashley James: What happened to freedom of speech?   [00:42:04] Dr. David Brownstein: I was speechless. I come in, my wife’s a lawyer.   [00:42:14] Ashley James: Oh, that’s handy.   [00:42:16] Dr. David Brownstein: So I said to her, maybe it’s time to retire. She said, you’re not retiring over this letter. This is stupid. It’s ridiculous. You’re doing a good thing. You should get an award. You don’t deserve this and you didn’t do anything wrong. If you want to retire because you want to retire, let’s talk about that. But you’re not retiring over this letter. This is stupid. She talked me off the cliff because I told my mother, I did tell my elderly mother this story. If the FTC released a press release about me and I thought the local papers were going to pick it up, and I didn’t want my mom to read in the papers. I told my mother, I was proud to be the first in the family to have a federal agency after them. I didn’t cheat anybody, I didn’t steal any money. I didn’t hurt anybody. I was doing my job. When we got the letter, we read it a bunch of times. We pulled everything down off the internet the next day. So in there, I got 20 years of stuff and we just took it all down. It was the last blog post I did, which was in April of last year. I’ve been blogging for 25+ years. So I was keeping track of the patients I was treating with COVID and we’re doing the same therapy. Out of the first 107 patients, we had a couple of hospitalizations and no deaths, when we should have had—I can’t remember the numbers, they’re in my peer-reviewed paper I published on this. We should have had 8 or 10 hospitalizations and 5, 6 deaths, something like that, from the numbers that were occurring at that time. My wife, being a lawyer, started communicating with the FTC, the gentleman who wrote the letter. He said, in this original letter, they went through all my blogs and they spent a lot of time bullet pointing what they said was inaccurate information about COVID because they kept repeating the line, “There’s no prevention, treatment, or cure for COVID, therefore, any mention thereof falls in violation of federal code…” and it’s a long number. I’ve been cataloging these patients that we were treating, I knew we had 107 patients at that time when that letter came in. In that letter, they said, “because there are no clinical studies indicating what you say is true, there’s no prevention, treatment, or cure for COVID, therefore, any mention thereof falls in violation.” I called a few friends and one of them said to me, if they want a study, why don’t you give them a study. You’ve been treating patients for two months. I retrospectively reviewed the data of my patients that were treated. Since I wasn’t blogging, I had some time on my hands that I’m not used to. I put together a study of 107 patients, case series study, and I got it accepted for peer review. It was peer-reviewed three times. I got it published in a peer-reviewed journal.  When it was published, my wife sent a letter to the FTC saying, well, you said there are no clinical studies, here’s one. She attached it and said, we want to publish this on our website without commentary, just publish the study. And they said, no, this is not a randomized control trial.   [00:46:00] Ashley James: Now they change the story.   [00:46:03] Dr. David Brownstein: Now they changed it. So here we are at the beginning of an illness that’s killing hundreds of thousands of people. There’s no randomized control trial at that point of anything related to COVID because who could do it? You can’t randomize a trial. And I wasn’t going to randomize anybody to receiving therapy and not receiving therapy. Now when I thought it was going to help them. That’s unethical. I should go to jail for that if I did that, and there’s no way I could sleep another night, another minute in my life if I did something like that. But anyway, there were no randomized control trials at that point, there were only clinical observations. I wasn’t hiding in my basement. I wasn’t closing my office. I was on the frontlines treating people. We get the letter back from the FTC saying, no, not a randomized control trial. That was the last contact we had with them. We kept doing our thing. Now, we’re over 400 patients. Again, we have a couple of hospitalizations, no deaths from any of our patients related to it. The therapy still works. The consequence of the powers that be telling physicians there’s no therapy and you can’t do anything for your patients and just wait for the vaccine was we had over 400,000 people dead before the vaccine was even started. I believe those were the numbers. When this post mortem is written on coronavirus, it’s going to be ugly. One other side to that story was, so here I published the study, FTC won’t let me put it on my website. So we hired a first amendment lawyer in DC who really is a specialist with the FTC recommended to me by two prominent people out there. This gentleman’s in his 70s. He’s been doing this for 40+ years.  In the final analysis he said to me, you do not have first amendment protection right now to talk about COVID online. You should, but you don’t. He goes, that’s the political world we live in right now. He said, you have to make a decision whether you want to continue treating patients or you want to fight the FTC. He said, if you want to fight the FTC, I’ll do it for you, but his retainer was multi-millions of dollars that I don’t have. He said, it will go to the US Supreme Court and then we’ll see. But if you don’t have that money and you want to treat patients, then I advise you to stop writing about it. He said, I’ve never done this before in my career, and it’s not right, but this is the world we live in right now. But I said to him, hey, I’ve been writing this book on my experience with treating viruses. Can I publish it? He said, oh, your book has first amendment protection. He goes, yeah, you can publish anything you want.   [00:49:12] Ashley James: Okay, so explain that to me. You’re not protected by the First Amendment if you’re posting a blog on your website, but you are if you publish a book, why is that?   [00:49:23] Dr. David Brownstein: He said it’s not right, it should go to the Supreme Court, and it should be rectified, but that’s the way it is. He said, me personally, you do not have First Amendment protection. He goes, the book does. Books are treated differently than the web and anything you write. So I published my book, A Holistic Approach to Viruses, the therapy we’ve been doing. It’s been amazing. We just got through another round of COVID in Michigan, in the Detroit area where I live. We were, again, working long hours in the parking lot. I think we’re at the end of that. That seems pretty settled down now, but the therapy still works. There’s nothing better we have than our immune system. It’s what we should be focusing on more than anything as physicians. If the immune system has the basic raw materials it needs, it can do pretty, pretty wonderful things when it’s confronted with stress from a virus or something else.   [00:50:34] Ashley James: Absolutely. So you mentioned that part of your therapy was high doses of A, C, D, and iodine. Did you mention zinc?   [00:50:44] Dr. David Brownstein: No, I did not mention zinc because we did not use zinc as part of our therapy. It’s never been part of our therapy.   [00:50:50] Ashley James: Why is that?   [00:50:51] Dr. David Brownstein: Well, that’s a good question. Why is that is because I’ve been doing holistic medicine for 20 years checking people for nutritional and hormonal imbalances, and zinc is one of the things that I’ve been checking. It never was part of our therapy. So our therapy is what I told you, what you just repeated. I can’t explain why it was never part of our therapy, and part of it was because we’ve been checking zinc levels for years and rectifying zinc levels. Most of our patients weren’t low with zinc going into this thing, but we never found a need for zinc for treating viral illness. It just wasn’t.   [00:51:29] Ashley James: Your patients aren’t deficient, everything was good, and if you saw zinc deficiency, you would handle it.   [00:51:33] Dr. David Brownstein: Of course I would. Do I think zinc should be used for this thing? I can’t speak to you, I didn’t use it.   [00:51:41] Ashley James: Yes. Sure, sure, sure. That makes sense.   [00:51:44] Dr. David Brownstein: I didn’t need to use it. My patients did fine with what we gave them.   [00:51:47] Ashley James: I had COVID. Right after I gave birth and we lost our child, very traumatic. My body’s in shock. My immune system is tanking because I’m in grief and I just gave her, so postpartum. And then I had postpartum high blood pressure, which we weren’t sure if it was—I had no signs of preeclampsia during pregnancy, but it was very high the moment I gave birth, which also having paramedics work on your newborn for an hour while you’re begging for your daughter to be alive, I’m sure that raised my blood pressure. But my blood pressure was through the roof for the first time in my life. That’s a comorbidity in and of itself for COVID. We think maybe one of the paramedics gave me COVID because a few days later, I developed symptoms, and my husband had it but he had a sniffly nose and he mowed the lawn for four hours in the height of his COVID. He’s like, yeah, I’m kind of tired and I was sniffling. That was it. We did quarantine just to protect everyone else. I’m not going to be a schmuck and just make anyone sick. So we stayed at home, obviously, and I was postpartum.  But I was hit really bad. Normally I’m a very healthy person, but knowing what my body had just been through with giving birth, grief, and high blood pressure from whatever it was from—whether it was grief or whether I did have all of a sudden, out of nowhere, have some preeclampsia. But I had no other symptoms of preeclampsia. It was just like, okay, well, the body acts weird after giving birth, who knows. So I was hit really hard, I was in bed, and I was exhausted. And then I’d get really lightheaded and dizzy, and my blood pressure all of a sudden tanked into the double digits. I was like 94 over 46 or something crazy, like I was fainting, which I also read is something that can happen. When you have COVID, you can experience all of a sudden these dips or drop in blood pressure. And those on blood pressure meds, there’s this whole article that talked about blood pressure medication and how doctors need to know that patients should be taken off of them because it can cause massive kidney damage to be on blood pressure meds while someone has the active infection that they’re fighting. I didn’t have a lot of the symptoms like I didn’t have the headaches. There’s a bunch of things I didn’t have, but it was really hard to breathe. My lungs felt like I had asthma. I’ve never had asthma in my life but describing it, it’s like I took a breath and everything hurt, everything was tight, and it was very hard to even get air into my lungs. It felt like it was all tight like asthma. And I lost my sense of smell, it was crazy because I have essential oils. I was just like, all of a sudden I can’t smell peppermint. This is crazy. What I did was double my zinc. I went from 30 milligrams to 90, and two days later, my sense of smell came back. I was like, okay, maybe my body was using up more zinc to fight the virus and I dipped into a deficiency and so my smells went away, and then it came back when I took more. But basically, my smell came back the moment I took more zinc, which I thought was really cool.  Then my husband noticed his sense of smell went away. So I said, okay, take more of your zinc. He did and his sense of smell came right back. I was like, this is cool because some people lose their sense of smell for a while. I’ve heard weeks and some people, even months later, say they don’t really feel like their taste or smell is back to normal whereas mine is totally back to normal. I definitely incorporated zinc into it. I was taking everything I could, everything I could get my hands on. And now NAC, which Amazon has taken out of their store even though NAC is not illegal. But this is really frustrating. Also, Amazon also took down I think Colloidal Silver a while ago because they’re like, how dare you use natural medicine to support your body in fighting an infection. We’re going to make sure that doesn’t happen. This is pretty crazy that major stores like Amazon are limiting our access to natural therapeutics that support the body’s ability to fight infection. Why is that? It boggles my mind. I’m very excited about your book and I think listeners are. Considering the fact that your book, A Holistic Approach to Viruses is protected, giving you free speech, you’re allowed to share everything that you’re not allowed to share online. Are there things in your book that you aren’t even comfortable with saying in an interview? Are there things that are so shocking that you couldn’t say it here? Are you allowed to talk freely about what’s in your book?   [00:56:54] Dr. David Brownstein: First off, I’m sorry, for your loss. I didn’t know any of that.   [00:56:59] Ashley James: Yes, the last month or so has been a little crazy for me.   [00:57:07] Dr. David Brownstein: But no, there’s nothing shocking in the book. It’s a 25-year history of what we’ve been doing. There’s still good news out there, there’s good news in that book. Your immune system was designed by somebody for a purpose, and the purpose was so you can survive, have kids, and perpetuate the species, otherwise, we wouldn’t be here. This is what should be done, in my opinion. I think that when you look back at this, and basically CDC, NAAT, Dr. Fauci, and everybody is basically saying there’s nothing to do. Just stay home, social distance, and wear your mask. That’s it. That was incorrect. We should be supporting the immune system. It’s not rocket science. It’s pretty basic stuff in my mind. I wrote a peer-reviewed paper, I published a book on it, and we’re still doing it. I don’t know. I feel like I’m in Alice in Wonderland where down is up and up is down right now. It’s sad, it’s really sad. When the truth finally comes out about this, people could see through the fog of fear that’s been thrown at them, I imagine there’s going to be a lot of angry Americans out there. I mean, right now, they’re just placid Americans, I don’t quite understand that.   [00:58:40] Ashley James: I don’t understand it either.   [00:58:42] Dr. David Brownstein: We should be in the streets. Europe they’re in the streets. They’re not happy with the situation they’re in. We just do nothing here. We’re just complacent sheep. I’m not quite certain why that’s the case.   [00:58:56] Ashley James: Maybe they’re drinking the fluoride in the water.   [00:58:59] Dr. David Brownstein: Maybe.   [00:59:02] Ashley James: Well, it’s probably because so many people are listening to their friends and family and listening to the mainstream media, and the narrative is very convincing. But we have to start thinking for ourselves. We really do. We have to put on the critical thinking cap and go, okay, I’m going to question everything. I want people to question what I say. I want people to question what you say. I want people to question everything, become the Doubting Thomas. Don’t just blindly listen to anyone. I don’t care how much of an expert they are. I don’t care what level in the government they are, what level in science they are, how big up in leadership they are, question everything. We really, really, really need to put on our thinking caps, what’s going on here?   [00:59:53] Dr. David Brownstein: Let me tell you, I bring back the analogy of Vioxx. Vioxx was a COX-2 inhibitor. It was in the 2000s I think when it came out. The headlines were, we have a new anti-inflammatory medication and it’s not going to cause GI bleeding because tens of thousands of Americans die a year from GI bleeding due to NSAIDs, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug use like Motrin, Advil, and prescription NSAIDs.  Here’s Vioxx, it’s not going to cause GI bleeding and it’s going to treat them because it works in the COX-2 pathway instead of a COX-1 pathway, which most anti-inflammatories work on both COX-1 and COX-2. So, here I go look up the mechanism of the drug when it was announced it’s coming out. I look at the pathways, I look at my biochem charts, I’m like, hey, this is going to prostacyclin, which is an important prostaglandin that needs to be produced to keep blood vessels dilated. So if you don’t have prostaglandin, the blood vessels are going to constrict. If you don’t have prostacyclin, the blood vessels can constrict and you can get strokes, heart attacks, and blood clots. I saw that and I remember writing about it and said, this may be causing strokes and heart attacks. I’m not going to use this drug, and I never prescribed Vioxx once. Well, the consequence of Vioxx coming to the market, FDA-approved, touted in all the headlines as the greatest advancement in NSAID therapy. Fifty thousand Americans died that didn’t have to, over 150,000 had strokes and heart attacks that didn’t have to, and the drug was pulled from the market. Merck paid billions of dollars in fines. There was no reason it should have been approved in the first place. There are many incidents of conventional medicine, missing the boat, and being late to the boat. People do need to think for themselves. They need to not rely on TV personalities and fear to make their decisions. Because really, through this whole COVID crisis, this was being driven by fear decisions from Dr. Fauci on down. It was a fear-based approach of locking yourself in your basement, social distance, and wearing 10 masks when you go outside. Look what we got for it, almost 600,000 dead while we waited for the vaccine. That was just a mess.   [01:02:36] Ashley James: I want to talk about the vaccine, we’re going to get into that in a bit. In your book, do you talk about what we can do to support the body in preventing getting infected? This is my thing, my son was exposed and had zero symptoms. He was exposed to both of us.  We all sleep in the same room. He has his own bed, but we’re all in the same big room. I do that because actually, he has asthma. We have it under control now, but I want to listen to him. I’m like a paranoid mom and I want to listen to his breathing because oftentimes, he would go into respiratory distress at night. He’s been hospitalized twice. It’s allergy-induced, and one of the things he’s allergic to is dust mites. That’s hard with a house that’s carpeted. We just stay on top of vacuuming, but we can’t get rid of all the dust mites in the world, so I like to listen to his breathing. But he was in the same room as us, he’s in the same house as us, we hugged him. I’m sure he grabbed our glass and started drinking from it. He’s obviously breathing our air. Apparently, this is highly contagious, what I’ve been told, and he never had any symptoms. What I’ve heard is that people can get exposed to the virus, the body will mount a response, the immune system will figure out how to handle it, and they won’t have any symptoms. But some people develop symptoms and develop this COVID-19 sickness. Maybe you could explain why some people either have incredibly minor symptoms or no symptoms at all. Is there anything we can do proactively to support our body so we’re one of those people?   [01:04:33] Dr. David Brownstein: Well, I mean, look, we’re all unique biochemical individuals. I can’t explain why some people’s households got nailed with it and some people got very minimal or didn’t get it at all. I mean, that’s life and that’s how things go. But there are things people can do to minimize the risk of becoming a statistic with COVID, becoming a severe statistic or a death statistic. But it’s not just COVID, it’s with any viral illness, it’s with any infectious illness. If you have a properly functioning immune system, we were designed to withstand things like this. How do you do it?  You do the basics. Number one, eat a clean diet free of refined sugar and other refined food products like refined salt, flour, oil, and sugar. Number two, maintain adequate hydration. Drink half your body weight in water. Take your body weight in pounds, divide it by two, and that many ounces of water a day should be your minimum.  Number three, maintain adequate salt levels. My book, Salt Your Way to Health talks about that where salt is the second major constituent next to water. We need adequate salt levels. Many people find themselves every flu season in the hospital because they become hyponatremic. Their sodium levels fall when they become ill. We want to start off with good sodium levels when you get sick, good salt levels. Part of the basics for my practice is maintaining adequate iodine levels. Iodine levels have been falling over 50% over the last 40 years across the United States. The vast majority of people are iodine deficient. My testing has shown over 97% of people are iodine deficient, most of them severely iodine deficient. Iodine deficiency explains the epidemic of cancer of the breast, ovaries, uterus, prostate, pancreas, and thyroid that we’re seeing in this country. One in seven women has breast cancer, and one in three men has prostate cancer. Thyroid cancer is the fastest-growing cancer in the US. I say, iodine deficiency, if not the underlying cause, is a huge part of that underlying cause of why we’re suffering so many endocrine cancers across the US. That’s just basic stuff that I think people should be doing. And then you should work with your holistic doctor to correct your nutritional and hormonal imbalances. When you get exposed to a viral illness, bacterial illness, a parasitic illness, or a stressor in your life, your immune system and your body can fight back and do what it’s designed to do, do what we were programmed to do by our maker. The proof is what I’ve seen in my practice for 28 years. It does work. On the other hand, you can eat the typical American diet and call it the standard American diet or the sad diet full of refined foods, way too much sugar, way too much refined flour, salt, and oil and be overweight like 2/3 of Americans are. We don’t exercise, we don’t drink enough water, and we probably drink too much alcohol, especially during COVID. And then what’s going to happen to you when you get hit with some stressors, some viral illness? It’s not going to be kind to those people.  I think that this COVID-19 brought forth everything that I’ve been talking about for 28 years, everything I’m seeing in my practice, everything that’s wrong with our country health-wise, and everything that’s wrong with conventional medicine all in one package. It’s an ugly look for us. Here we spend 20% of our GNP on health care. What the hell do we get for it? It’s 600,000 people dying when Dr. McCullough and others feel that’s probably at least 75% of people with coronavirus, if we treated them early, tried to support their immune system, and treated them with therapies that were known to help support the immune system or to help other viral illnesses, we probably would have had over 75% of people still alive from this. Maybe we’ll get 150,000 people dead from Coronavirus, which is basically a bad flu season. We wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in now. We wouldn’t be still talking about masks, social distancing, gloves, and all that stuff. But we’re not, we are here. People need to wake up. They need to get past that fog of fear; start reading for themselves; and start adapting eating better, exercising, and taking better care of their bodies. The proof is in the pudding. It’ll pay off when you’re exposed to something like SARS-CoV-2.   [01:09:29] Ashley James: Your protocol, which you’ve used for many years for other viral infections and lung infections is working tremendously well. I love the statistics that you have that you’re showing. The proof’s in the pudding. The proof in the pudding is in the eating. You are showing that you are having a better outcome than we’re telling you all to sit on your hands and stop treating them and just let him go to the hospital and wait until they get a trial vaccine. That which just again blows my mind that that’s what doctors are being told. So you have this great protocol. I do have a question. Have you looked into glutathione and supporting glutathione? I’ve heard people have really good success with it. I personally also took oral glutathione and noticed a very positive shift in my health while my body was fighting the infection.   [01:10:40] Dr. David Brownstein: We use glutathione in our practice both orally and intravenously. I’ve used glutathione for the majority of my holistic practice. However, it wasn’t part of our holistic protocol. You should certainly want to have optimal glutathione levels when you get sick. The best I can tell you is it wasn’t part of our protocol. We just didn’t use it and we got the results we got. But I use glutathione in my practice and it is very important. When you take Tylenol, Tylenol blocks the production of glutathione. So if you take a lot of Tylenol, you’re going to be glutathione deficient. I was talking to my patients on the phone when they were calling and they couldn’t breathe, don’t take Tylenol, unless you absolutely have to. Just get in the bathtub or sponge off with cool water to keep your temperature down. I didn’t want people taking Tylenol unless their fever was over 103.5. It’s because it would deplete glutathione levels, but we didn’t use it as part of our protocol.  It was high dose vitamin A—100,000 units A day for four days. Vitamin C, 1000 milligrams every hour until they got loose stools and they felt better. Vitamin D, 50,000 units a day for four days. Iodine 25 milligrams a day if they weren’t using it, and double whatever they were using if they were going into it with iodine for four days. And then nebulizing 0.03% solution of hydrogen peroxide and iodine every hour while they were sick, and then lessen it as they got better.  Then they’d come in the parking lot, they’re still coming in. Not doing as many now, thank goodness. It’s not as bad here. But coming in the parking lot for IV of vitamin C and peroxide and ozone shots. Keep in mind, ozone stimulates glutathione production. Vitamin C helps regenerate glutathione in the body. So, there are mechanisms to get glutathione levels up through doing what I was doing.   [01:12:52] Ashley James: And these patients of yours, you’ve seen them for a while, you’ve helped them adjust their diet, you’ve already been working on helping them with any comorbidities they may have had such as high blood pressure, obesity, or type two diabetes. These are patients who have been seeing a holistic doctor and have been working on building their health.   [01:13:14] Dr. David Brownstein: They were part of our practice.   [01:13:16] Ashley James: Hopefully they were already healthy, to begin with, or at least they didn’t step into this illness with nutrient deficiencies. These were healthier than normal people, would you say?   [01:13:30] Dr. David Brownstein: Probably. That’s one of the criticisms of my study is that they were healthier than regular people. Well, I don’t think that’s a criticism. I think that’s praise. I’m glad they were healthier. But look, we had our share of people with low pulse ox, who couldn’t breathe, who we were scared. We called them every night, the sick ones, to check on them until we felt they were out of the woods. There were some people that kept me up at night that I wasn’t sure are they going to make this or not?  COVID was very random and it seemed to hit harder than others. I was shocked that sometimes some of the healthiest people got really nailed with it. But again, the end of it is our results speak for themselves.   [01:14:12] Ashley James: They do.   [01:14:13] Dr. David Brownstein: It’s a powerful message.   [01:14:17] Ashley James: It is. Who should read your book, A Holistic Approach to Viruses?   [01:14:23] Dr. David Brownstein: Well, I think anyone interested in how to properly support the immune system, so it can overcome viral, other illnesses, and other stressors. So who should read it? I think we should all read it. I’ve written 16 books, people ask me, how do you write? I have a full-time practice, I write a newsletter. I was blogging every night during COVID and still writing all this stuff. The books come easy for me because either I write them in one of two moods, either I’m really excited about something, or I’m really irritated about something. But there’s a passion either way with it. What I write in my books is what I see works in my practice, or what I see doesn’t work in my practice like my Drugs that Don’t Work book. What I see work is easy for me. I’ve done this enough to know this therapy works. I’ve done testosterone enough to know that it helps people with heart disease. I’ve diagnosed thyroid enough to know that I feel like I know what I’m doing. It’s not like I’m not learning, I’m learning every day in my practice and I’m changing things up. I write about what I see works in the practice. I wrote this book, A Holistic Approach to Viruses because we were seeing it work. We’ve seen it work for 28 years, and we saw it work through COVID. I told you the story. I wasn’t sure, this was a different corona strain, but it helps a third of the flu-like illnesses every year or coronavirus, why wouldn’t it work? That was my view, and it did.  Who should read this book? We’re dealing with SARS COVID 2 right now. Next year, it’s going to be SARS COVID 3 or some other thing. The year after that it would be SARS COVID 4, 5, and 6, or whatever else is out there, This isn’t going to be the last of this stuff. We’re going to have to learn to have a good immune system going into this, otherwise, we’re going to be going through what we just went through over the past year and I don’t want to do that again. I don’t think our country can handle it again.   [01:16:40] Ashley James: No. I mean, we’re the 99%. We need to help our fellow friends, family, and neighbors learn this kind of information. We all need to protect ourselves with knowledge and with the truth. So absolutely buy A Holistic Approach to Viruses. Read it, then pass it along, get all your friends and family to read it, and share this podcast with them. They need to understand that there are doctors like Dr. David Brownstein who are successfully helping those who are infected with the coronavirus. They’re having way better outcomes than just sitting, waiting, and being sick, way better outcomes. And that we can support the body’s ability to fight it off, support the body’s structure and function of the body to heal. We can do that with natural medicine. And I just love the work you do. I love your books. Definitely, please come back on the show.   [01:17:50] Dr. David Brownstein: I’d love to.   [01:17:50] Ashley James: Thank you. Yes, absolutely. We got to go through more of your information because every book you’ve written, I feel like Alice in Wonderland, I don’t know which rabbit hole to go down. There are all these rabbit holes, I can’t wait. I’m very excited. I do have a few questions about your protocol, and I’m sure that you specify in your book as well. The A, the C, the D, the iodine. It doesn’t matter what form someone gets it in. Like vitamin C, there’s Ester C, there’s these Buffered C’s or whatever. Does it matter what? Obviously D is D3? But is there a specific kind that we make sure that’s the most bioavailable, it’s the cleanest, or are there certain brands that you say this is the best because they’re better quality?   [01:18:39] Dr. David Brownstein: It’s a good question. Before we get into A, C, D, and iodine, the more important thing is to eat a clean diet free of refined sugar and other refined foods. Drink enough water. Maintain adequate salt levels, and maintain optimal iodine levels going into any illness. But having said that, I recommend in the book, ascorbic acid is the form of vitamin C. I don’t think it’s that crucial what form of vitamin C. I certainly don’t think you have to spend expensive amounts of vitamin C. Some companies complain there’s is more absorbable than others. I haven’t seen that occur in my practice. As far as vitamin A goes, that’s really the only thing I guess to make a point of. I’m talking vitamin A here, not beta carotene. Beta carotene does not have the immune support properties that vitamin A does. I use an emulsified form of vitamin A. Vitamin A can be toxic like all the fat-soluble vitamins we take large amounts of. The four days of this is, in my experience, hasn’t been toxic to anybody. But the emulsified form has less chance of toxicity too. Vitamin D, like you said, is vitamin D3. And then iodine is a combination of iodine and iodide. I write about that in my iodine book. It’s Iodine: Why You Need It, Why You Can’t Live Without It. It is important to use the right kind of iodine for whole body support of iodine.   [01:20:10] Ashley James: Oh, man, I got to have you back on the show because I want to start going down this iodine rabbit hole but it’s not really relevant to this conversation. It’s more of just I want to talk more about iodine. I definitely have to have you back. We’ll just leave that on a cliffhanger and say listeners got to keep listening because we’re going to have you back for a whole iodine talk for sure. I’d love to finish off the interview by discussing these experimental tests, this experimental thing they’re doing where they’re calling it a vaccine, but I don’t even think you can actually call it a vaccine yet because it’s still an experiment. We’re the guinea pigs. We’re not even doing an animal trial. You know, all the animals died or a majority of them died when they did animal trials in the past.  Just like they make flu vaccines, they’ve been trying to make corona vaccines for a long time and all the animals died. But let’s just skip the animals and go to human trials, incredibly scary. This is a trial. This is not an approved drug. This is what really scares me. We have to understand, this isn’t about anti-vax or pro-vax, and that’s what the mainstream media wants to just taint this picture. This is not about that. I know doctors who are incredibly pro-vaccine who like, yes, I got all the shots. They are very pro-vaccine and they’re incredibly scared of what’s going on right now. So I’d love to know, if you could just paint the picture, what are your thoughts on these trials that are going on right now?   [01:21:55] Dr. David Brownstein: Okay, so the vaccine for COVID. I wrote a long chapter about that in my book, my virus book. I hope the vaccine is safe and effective, but the last two words in that chapter are we’ll see. This is a phase three experiment undergoing right now. As far as the animals go, the animals are waiting for us because they’re not going to take until they see if the human trials are favorable or not. They’re waiting. This is the first time in history that a vaccine has been used like this. The best two words I give you are we’ll see. Do I think the vaccine should be used for kids? The death rate for kids is near zero, as near zero as you can get it. No, I don’t think the vaccine should be used for kids. Should the vaccine be used for people under 70 where you have a 99.7% chance of surviving? I guess the people can decide that one. Should it be used for over 70 when there’s up to a 5% death rate for those who get COVID? Maybe we could consider it for them. But look, I think if people had a healthier immune system this thing overall doesn’t kill the same percentage that kills the flu. The problem is, it’s killed more people because it’s a novel virus and we’re so unhealthy in our country. I think the big mistake we made was telling everybody to just wait for the vaccine, wait for the vaccine. This is a new technology that hasn’t been used before, and I am not very quick to use new drugs as I told you with Vioxx.  Let me give you this analogy. I remember when I was a resident, I was rounding with Dr. Solomon. He was so knowledgeable, I thought he knew everything. He was a good family doctor. I said to him, Dr. Solomon, how do you keep up with all these new drugs that are coming out all the time? He says, David, that’s easy. The drug hasn’t been out for two years, use something else. Why would you consider using it? They don’t study well enough. I was a resident back then, I wasn’t even a holistic doctor. I was just a regular doctor and I took his advice to heart, and I certainly took it to heart with Vioxx, which killed all those people. What do I think about this vaccine? I tell you, I think we’re moving way too fast. And if this vaccine turns out to be problematic, we have vaccinated half of our country right now, 160 million people have it. What the hell are we going to do If this turns out to be a problem going down the road? We’re really not going to know if it’s a problem for a couple of years fully, but we’re going to find out a lot this fall when coronavirus comes back. We’ll see how people’s immune systems respond who have had this vaccine.  I hope it’s safe. I hope it’s effective. I hope it’s a wonderful thing and it’s protected a bunch of people, but I can only leave you with we’ll see. People need to study it, people need to make their own decision. I’m not so thrilled about rolling out something that hasn’t gone through proper safety studies. If this turns into a problem, what the heck are we going to do in this country?   [01:25:36] Ashley James: Especially because all our first responders got it.   [01:25:38] Dr. David Brownstein: Not all the first responders. Not all of us. That’s not true. Now remember, if you look at some of those numbers, I still see the numbers. There’s 40% to 50% of nurses out there who aren’t getting it. The reason they’re not getting it is because they’re on the front line and they’re seeing some of the side effects with these vaccines. We’ve seen in our practice some serious side effects with it.   [01:25:57] Ashley James: What are the side effects that you’ve seen?   [01:25:59] Dr. David Brownstein: In our small practice, we’ve seen three strokes, we’ve seen a couple of pulmonary embolisms, we’re up to six blood clots, and then the host of other problems, some serious other problems. If that’s happening in my small practice, we’re not solely just seeing this, this is happening elsewhere too. I think that time will tell. I’m hoping it’s safe and effective. I think people need to, again, not react as part of fear with this issue but study it and make their decision about what they want to do.   [01:26:44] Ashley James: I’m not a guinea pig. I don’t put myself in drug trials.   [01:26:53] Dr. David Brownstein: This is a drug trial.   [01:26:54] Ashley James: This is a drug trial. And the fact that there are companies, not that I would go to Dick’s Burgers anyway. But here in Seattle, we have Dick’s Burgers. It’s like a really popular local burger joint and they have a sign outside that says, if you’re not going to wear a mask, you have to show your vaccine card to us. Doesn’t that violate HIPAA? That blows my mind.   [01:27:23] Dr. David Brownstein: Show us your papers.   [01:27:24] Ashley James: Right, show us your papers. And then I went to Chipotle a few days ago and they have a sign up that says if you’re, you don’t have to wear a mask. I’m like, oh, all I read was you don’t have to wear a mask so I walked in and the manager’s like, wear your mask. Where’s your mask? I just pointed at the sign, I’m like, your sign says I don’t have to wear a mask. I mean, they can’t. It’s against HIPAA violations to ask me medical questions like that, at least that’s my understanding.  But the fact that we’re being pushed in this direction by businesses, by the media, and we’re being peer pressured. The way they’re doing it, they’re getting your friends and family to pressure you. I’ve heard from several people that they’re feeling pressured by their friends and family. I can’t go to my bridge club or I can’t go to my book club until I get it. Why in the world were you even discussing your private business? That’s private. Your medical decisions are private, and yet the way that they’re marketing it is that we got to do it right now. You mean, you want the entire population to be in a drug trial? We don’t know the long-term efficacy and safety of this. What is going on? Again, very Orwellian. I’m very concerned for people.   [01:29:04] Dr. David Brownstein: Concerned for our country.   [01:29:05] Ashley James: I’m very concerned for all countries. Look at Israel where people’s freedoms are completely taken away because if you don’t have your vaccine passport, you can’t even practically be a citizen. This is what we’re hearing is that all rights are being taken away, it’s very scary. I keep hearing about they still have outbreaks there because again, trial, right? Maybe you could speak to explaining vaccines because I think this would be good for those of us to understand the difference between marketing and reality. Marketing is vaccines are this bulletproof, all of a sudden, you won’t get the infection. You won’t get the infection. You won’t be infected, but that’s not what vaccines are. Vaccines don’t stop you from getting an infection.   [01:30:03] Dr. David Brownstein: Well, a true vaccine should. The measles vaccine should stop you from getting measles. The chickenpox vaccine should stop you from getting chickenpox. This vaccine has never been shown to stop you from getting coronaviruses. In the original studies, they were shown to stop severe illness and hospitalization. It has never been shown to stop transmission, and it’s never been shown to stop you from getting sick. So this is different from other vaccines that we’ve had, and that’s why you’re seeing some places on the internet where they’re saying, well, it’s really not a vaccine. It’s a genetic device or the kind of medical device to modify your genetic material. But this is a whole different mechanism that they’re titling a vaccine, which is different from how we’re used to vaccines as we know them.  If we take the chickenpox vaccine, I was a resident when the chickenpox vaccine came out and that really stopped chickenpox. Kids don’t get chickenpox anywhere near what they used to get it. This is different. This one’s different. It is a grand experiment and we’ll see. There are many people out there who feel like you do, they don’t want to be part of any big pharma experiments. But this is where we are. I think if people were more aware of that, we see some more hesitation and some more thinking about this. Right now, people aren’t thinking, they’re just reacting in fear that that’s the only way to protect themselves.   [01:31:58] Ashley James: Yeah, that’s the sad part is buying into the fear. So we don’t need to buy into the fear, we need to educate ourselves. Knowledge is power. The more knowledge we have, the more we can utilize the more tools we have in our tool belt.  Slow down, take a deep breath, take in the information. Anytime you make a medical decision, one of my friends was deciding whether she was going to get radiation or not after chemotherapy, or when she was deciding to do chemotherapy or not. They want to just rush her in and they tell her all statistics that make her afraid so that she’ll take immediate action. I thought that was very manipulative.  Let her take a deep breath, let her do the research, and let her decide for herself. They wanted to schedule, okay, we’re going to start your chemo tomorrow. If you don’t do this, you’re going to die. Do you really need to give someone that just found out they have cancer scare tactics? You don’t do that, that’s not helping. Let the person Take a deep breath and give them true informed consent, give them all the information—the good, the bad, the ugly, and also tell them about alternative therapies.  But we’re not experiencing true informed consent with this drug trial because we definitely don’t know all the side effects yet. People are still reporting to VAERS, and that’s even being manipulated. And then they’re not allowing physicians to practice any kind of alternative therapies, so we can’t really get true informed consent. It just boggles my mind.  But what we can do is we can get your book, A Holistic Approach to Viruses, and we can learn what’s really working to support the structure and function of the body to fight viruses. Thank you for writing this and thank you for coming here and sticking your neck out. They’re trying to silence you and you’re sticking your neck out. I love that you found a workaround by publishing your book. I’m excited that this information is getting out there.   [01:34:05] Dr. David Brownstein: Well, thank you for having me, Ashley. It was a nice talk. Hopefully, we can take the fear knob and start turning it down and then we can become rational people again and make better healthcare decisions.    [01:34:20] Ashley James: Absolutely. And listeners should go to your website, drbrownstein.com. And also, I love this because you’ve been doing this for so long. You bought these really good URLs, centerforholisticmedicine.com. I love it. Those are your websites, and of course, the links to everything that Dr. David Brownstein does including his books will be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. We’re definitely going to have you back on the show because there are so many rabbit holes we could go down with all the information and all your wonderful books. I’m very excited to have you back.   [01:34:54] Dr. David Brownstein: Thank you.     Get Connected with Dr. David Brownstein! Dr. Brown’s Holistic Medicine Center For Holistic Medicine Books by Dr. David Brownstein A Holistic Approach To Viruses Drugs That Don’t Work and Natural Therapies That Do! 2nd Edition Iodine: Why You Need It. Why You Can’t Live Without It. 5th Edition Ozone: The Miracle Therapy The Guide to a Dairy-Free Diet The Guide to a Gluten-Free Diet   Check out more wonderful books by Dr. Brownstein!  

Follow the Learn True Health Podcast on LBRY: https://lbry.tv/@Learn-True-Health:f Join the Learn True Health Community on Facebook: LearnTrueHealth.com/group   Study Outlines Key Factor In Chronically Sick vs Healthy Children https://www.learntruehealth.com/study-outlines-key-factor-in-chronically-sick-vs-healthy-children   Highlights: True informed consent Are face masks safe and effective in preventing COVID-19 transmission What you can do to prevent yourself from getting COVID-19 Absolute risk reduction vs, relative risk reduction of COVID-19 vaccines   Dr. Paul Thomas is back on the show, and he catches us up on what has happened to him since the last time he was on the show. He shares his research about vaccinated and unvaccinated kids and also some studies about COVID-19. He also touches briefly about masking and its safety and efficacy for children and adults. Dr. Thomas also gives some tips on how to stay healthy.   Intro: Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. This episode and the next two episodes after this one are going to be a series. I am excited and nervous to publish them. There is a threat that might eliminate my podcast and that is free speech, so I bring you three doctors, these are medical doctors. One of them is also a PhD, cardiologist, and research scientist. Today’s doctor, Dr. Paul Thomas, is a pediatric general physician of over 30 years, and each of my guests—this and the next two, the three episodes—are all doctors who’ve been practicing for a very long time, 30+ years each I believe, and they are being silenced for speaking the truth, for sharing science, and it’s a science that has been so controversial because it goes against what is being taught in the mainstream. So, I invite you to open your minds, take in all the information, become critical thinkers if you’re not already, and use this information to empower you. We will not fear monger, we will not coerce, it is all about sharing free information and allowing us to think for ourselves. Please share my podcast with those you care about, share this episode with those who want to keep learning, growing, and continue to educate themselves on the best choices possible that they can make for themselves and their family as it pertains to their health. I interviewed Dr. Paul Thomas back in episode 224 and he shared the stories in his life as a child growing up in Africa to white missionary parents and the perspective it gave him in order to become a doctor. And then his experiences in his early career watching children go through regular wellness checks as we know them today, and experience side effects from vaccines, and see how the CDC schedule was not optimal for every patient. That led him to create his solution, which was to use one vaccine at a time and watch and see how the child reacts to it. He then wrote a book called The Vaccine-Friendly Plan, and his whole approach is that he’s not anti-vaccine, he’s also not pro-vaccine. This sort of upsets people on both sides of the spectrum. I hope that you, like me try to stay in the middle, take in all the information, and not vilify either side. But just take in all the information in order to make informed decisions. Instead of being pressured by fear or coercion, make informed decisions. He shares some amazing information, and he did back in 224. So you can go back and listen to that episode as well. But today, he shares some information that is so empowering, that is so mind-blowing. I hope you go to the links of the studies he has published in journals that show the findings of his studies. And if you’re like me, you will get excited because this information is empowering when we take it all in without emotion and we really look at it, and then we can decide how to navigate our health choices based on all of the research in this information. So, I’m excited for you to listen to this episode, and I really, really want you to share it with those that you think will help them to also make informed choices in their life to help them. So, thank you for being a listener of the Learn True Health podcast. Thank you for sharing. If you ever go to your favorite podcast directory like iTunes, Spotify, iHeartRadio, wherever you listen to my show. If you ever go there and you find my show has been all of a sudden not there anymore, then I have been censored. I post my show also on LBRY. I believe it’s called LBRY. I post it everywhere I possibly can. But just so you know, if you don’t find me there, you can also email me, support@learntruehealth.com. If you ever all of a sudden can’t find my podcast, if I’ve been censored, deleted, and blocked, just know that I’ll still be publishing in places where censorship doesn’t exist or where there’s still parts of the internet where freedom of speech is still protected. So I will continue to publish in those areas. You can follow me on LBRY and come to the Learn True Health Facebook group as well. As long as Facebook allows us to be there, we will be there. We’ve got a robust and beautiful Facebook community. Just search Learn True Health on Facebook and we have a wonderful community of people who are answering questions, seeking advice and seeking solutions to grow, to learn, to achieve true health. Enjoy today’s interview and please also listen to the next two interviews that I’ll be publishing because I think that this is a very interesting series to publish and get out there, especially for those who didn’t know this information before. Take care.   [00:06:14] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 461. I am so excited for today’s guest. I’ve had Dr. Paul Thomas on the show. It was episode 224 back in February of 2018. Can you believe how much time has passed? Can we just get on a time machine and go back to 2018? That’d be so great.   [00:06:48] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yup. Well, thank you, Ashley, for having me on your show again. So much has happened in my life since early 2018, oh my goodness.    Ashley James: Well, when we had you on the show, you shared some amazing stories. I’ve always referred back to our episode together because I like to try to stay neutral on many topics that are controversial and allow the guests through science and through real research help people to better understand their medical choices. I think that when we polarize a topic, we really become ignorant because making a choice that’s emotional, making a medical choice based on a belief that’s uninformed can end up harming us. Or making a medical choice based on, well, my doctor just told me to and he created a lot of fear. My mother-in-law is really pushing for it. When there’s fear, emotion, and people are pushing us or we feel peer pressure to make a medical decision for ourselves or our children, we’re not fully informed. We end up paying the price, and so many have.   [00:07:57] Dr. Paul Thomas: Absolutely.   [00:07:58] Ashley James: What I love about what you do is you believe in true informed consent. and I really learned that from you on such a deep level. I’ve actually had to say that since you and I talked on the show in 2018, I’ve had to say that to several doctors—I want informed consent. They just stopped in their tracks and they switched gears. They’re like, oh, okay. It was great because I could see that they were like, okay, I can’t just tell this person what to do. I have to show them all of their options and really go through them. I actually had one doctor get very excited. My son ended up in a children’s hospital with respiratory distress, it was very scary. Before they stuck a needle in him for an IV, what they were actually giving him magnesium, I had no idea what they were doing. I’m like, I need informed consent. She stopped and she got really excited. She’s like, okay, great. Let me tell you, this is what we’re doing, these are the possible side effects, these are the benefits, these are the alternatives, and she really walked me through it. I’m like, wow, the doctor that wants to give you true informed consent wants to empower you to make good choices, to make the best choices that you can. The doctors that get upset, that’s a doctor I’d be afraid of. So, I learned so much from you and our listeners learned so much from you. I heard the other day from one of my friends who’s in the medical field that you have been up against it, and she heard you in another interview talk about some very interesting things that have been going on. I’ve been watching you, I follow you on Facebook, and I would love for you to share with the listeners what has happened since 2018 since we had you on the show.   [00:09:41] Dr. Paul Thomas: Oh my goodness. A lot, and I’ll walk you through the key points. Thank you for highlighting informed consent. It is the ethical principle upon which all medical procedures should be judged. If you’re going to die right in front of me, if I don’t do something, you would just jump in and do something, right?   [00:10:02] Ashley James: Yes.   [00:10:02] Dr. Paul Thomas: But anything else, if you’re not at risk of dying right now, then if I’m proposing a procedure or a treatment—whether it be medication, surgery, vaccines—you deserve as a patient to be informed of the risks, the benefits, and the alternatives, and one of the alternatives for any medical procedure should always be putting it off, not doing it. Because if I’m just here to coerce you, to convince you, to get you to do my procedure, that’s not true informed consent. I mean, you could pretend like it is, but you as the consumer, you have to know that it is your option, and you’re not going to be judged, you’re not going to be looked down upon, you’re not going to be made to feel bad if you choose not to follow the advice. Doctors typically have what they think is best, so generally, we go with whatever our doctors say. But, in the area of vaccines, which has been the world I’m most known for, I mean, I’m a general pediatrician. I also do addiction medicine. I really focus on preventative health and wellness, but the area that I’ve become well known for is this vaccine issue, which like you said, it’s so polarizing. Part of the reason it’s so polarizing is that the mainstream mantra that is funded by huge pharma dollars is the simple marketing slogan—vaccines are safe and effective. That, folks, is not a medical fact. It is a marketing slogan. But unfortunately, physicians, the public, everybody has just adopted that as if it were a truth, as if that were science. So just to dispel that, vaccines are safe and effective because I’m not anti- or pro-vaccine, just like I’m not anti- or pro-antibiotics, or any other procedure. We have to look at the specifics and individualize for this patient in front of us and go through the pros and the cons—risks, benefits, alternatives. So, vaccines are safe. Well, that’s obviously false. There is no safe medication. How risky a given vaccine depends on the vaccine, and we’ll probably get to this, but COVID is by far, the COVID vaccine is the most dangerous vaccine that has ever been brought to market. We have over 5000 deaths already from the vaccines reported in VAERS, which we know catches about 1%-2%, no more than 10% for sure of the adverse events. It’s more deaths than all other deaths for the past 30 years from all vaccines combined, think about that.   [00:12:47] Ashley James: Can you say that again?   [00:12:49] Dr. Paul Thomas: There are more deaths from the COVID vaccine than there have been deaths from all other vaccines combined over the entire duration of the VAERS system, which is 30 years. This vaccine is so dangerous it should be pulled from the market, in my opinion, and in the opinion of many physicians and scientists. But those opinions are silenced, you don’t hear it on the news, and there is massive suppression of that sort of information because it just seems like this program has a life of its own. They don’t seem to know how to pull back because they’ve invested I don’t know, hundreds of billions of dollars or something, some massive amount. I mean, they’re trying to vaccinate the planet with an experimental vaccine. Anyway, I went off on the COVID vaccine a little too soon because this guy’s crazy. You know folks, you got to look at the data, and the data is very convincing. But let me walk you back through my journey since we were last together. So, in 2016 I wrote a book, The Vaccine-Friendly Plan, and that book is not anti-vaccine or pro-vaccine. In fact, I pissed everybody off with that book because the people who truly hate vaccines call me baby killer because I am recommending vaccines, and the people who are pro-vaccine hate me because I’m not recommending all the vaccines or I’m making it too complicated to follow the CDC schedule. People are not going to get all their vaccines, therefore, I’m harming public health. Well, that is the narrative that has been used by the Oregon Medical Board to come after me. And actually, since around the time you and I talked, actually it was that month I believe. Maybe it was after we talked, around that time I got a notice from the Oregon Medical Board that said prove. They’d already been hitting me with a few complaints. I know there’s an effort to attempt to get rid of me, let’s just say it that way.  I am seen by some as dangerous for the public. If I’m causing patients not to follow the CDC schedule and all I do is give informed consent. I tell people the risks, the benefits, the alternatives, and when you really get the truth about risks and benefits, some vaccines just plain don’t make sense. The easy one is Hepatitis B for newborns. So in America, every newborn in the hospital is given an injection of 250 micrograms of aluminum for a disease Hepatitis B that you catch from sex and IV drug use. The babies in my practice frankly are not having sex and not sharing dirty needles, so unless their birth mother has Hepatitis B, their risk for that disease is absolutely zero. The risk of injecting that much aluminum is known, it is fairly significant, although it’s not recognized so that’s the issue. Those of us who are aware of aluminum toxicity, it creates problems with your immune system, allergies, and autoimmunity. We know that it affects neurodevelopment. Since 1990 and before, there were studies about aluminum toxicity and how it harms neurodevelopment, so why would you cause something that’s going to affect your baby’s development and brain for a disease they have zero risks for? So that’s the kind of informed consent. When you as a parent are actually told those facts. I think I’ve had 1 patient out of the last 3000 in my practice still want to get the Hepatitis B vaccine. That one’s so clear. Now, a lot of them are not so clear because they have risks, but they also have benefits, and that’s where it gets muddied. That’s where in my book, The Vaccine-Friendly Plan, I tried to navigate that whole issue. Let me go back to the fact that the board asked me to prove that the vaccine-friendly plan that I talked about in my book was as safe as the CDC schedule. So, I got this letter from the medical board, and you have to produce, by the way, when the medical board comes after you. If you refuse to cooperate, they just yank your license. So, I hired a doctor to come into my office. He was a former pediatrician neonatologist who had then morphed his career into medical record informatics systems. He had designed, I think, almost 50 informatics systems around the world. I mean, this guy’s a nerd genius data guy.   [00:17:33] Ashley James: Just to explain what that means, he’s able to take all the records and he’s able to quantify certain information? Can you just explain what it is he ends up producing?   [00:17:45] Dr. Paul Thomas: What he does. So I asked him to answer the following question. He came and spent a week in my office. Extracting data about vaccines is pretty complicated when you have different health care systems. I had transferred patients from an old practice, and our systems had changed from one to another. It took him a lot more work because of that, but I basically asked him, identify every patient born into my practice. So this practice, Integrative Pediatrics, was opened in June of 2008. At that time we had 10 ½ years of data. I said, find every patient born into the practice. We want patients who were seen from birth because I get a lot of patients come into my practice because they’ve had other vaccine injuries and they know that I will listen to them, whereas other practices will just kick them out if they don’t follow the CDC schedule. So I attract a lot of higher-risk families, and I wanted a pure sample of just kids born into the practice. So that ended up being over 3,000 kids. And then I said let’s look at every vaccine they got, every single diagnosis they were given, and let’s just plot out the data. Actually, he wasn’t even going to plot out the data. His job was merely to find the data. He then had it de-identified by an honest broker so that when I sent that data set to my co-author, James Lyons Weiler, he had no clue who was who. He was purely working from raw data. Now, the guy that came in, when he came in he was not really a believer that vaccines can cause harm. He was more of the old-school vaccines are safe and effective. I said, well, we’ll see. I mean, I honestly didn’t know what we would find. After the first day, he came out excited like a kid in a candy store. He’s going, oh my God. The data just jumps out at you. I said, what do you mean? He says, well, I’m not looking for the results, but you cannot not see it. The unvaccinated kids just don’t get sick. They don’t get anything. I knew there was some signal he was seeing, but then when we analyzed this data and we published it, we took it through peer review. The article for your listeners is called Relative Incidence of Office Visits and Cumulative Rates of Billed Diagnoses Along the Axis of Vaccination. It’s published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, published November 18, 2020. Now, that’s a mouthful for a title but I just wanted you to have it if you’re looking it up. But basically, if you just look for International Journal Environmental Research Public Health 2020 I think you’ll find it, Relative Incidence of Office Visits and Cumulative Rates of Billed Diagnoses. Sorry about that. Maybe on your show, you can give a link or something. I think I sent it.   [00:20:39] Ashley James: Yes. We actually transcribe all of the interviews and put it on our website, learntruehealth.com. So we’ll make sure the link is there.   [00:20:48] Dr. Paul Thomas: Perfect. For those of you who go and get this article, which I highly recommend, see if you can print it out in color because we have a page of graphs all on one page. It’s Figure 5 Analysis 5, and what it shows is for all the major conditions that were looked at, in orange, you have over that whole 10 years the increase in the diagnosis of the various conditions. So we’ve got asthma, allergic rhinitis, breathing issues, behavior problems, ADD, ADHD, ear infections, other infections, eye infections, eczema, dermatitis, and urticaria. So skin problems and anemia. For every single one of the conditions, the orange line, which is your vaccinated kid—and by the way, these are children in my practice following the vaccine-friendly plan, so they’re getting about half the vaccines that a CDC schedule kid would get. But even then, when you compare them to over 500 kids who were unvaccinated and it was age-matched, so we’re comparing kids of the same age, the unvaxxed kids just don’t get these conditions. It’s almost a flat line in blue and this rising level of problems for the vaccinated kids.   [00:22:03] Ashley James: I’m looking at the graph right now, I just googled it. I’m looking at Figure 5 and it’s unbelievable. There’s no question when you see this data.   [00:22:12] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yeah, it just jumps out at you, and that’s what he was I think seeing when he was just looking at raw data. I didn’t expect it to be this dramatic. Here’s the problem, for listeners to understand, doctors don’t realize that these things have anything to do with vaccines. I mean, who would think that asthma, ear infections, ear pain, dry skin, itchy skin, or even anemia—who would ever have thought that they had anything to do with vaccines? It seems that they do, and we now have other studies. There’s something called the control group that’s just incredibly powerful. You can go to thecontrolgroup.org and they did a survey. What they found was one-quarter of 1% of Americans are totally unvaccinated. One-quarter of 1%. 99.9.74% have had at least one vaccine, and that was mind-boggling. They surveyed 48 of the 50 states, they had a sample size of I think over 3,000 surveys done. And when they looked at things like heart disease, cancer, or diabetes, the unvaxxed adults had zero—no heart disease, no cancer, no diabetes, zero. And of course, the incidence we know of heart disease in adults is somewhere around 50%, I believe, diabetes 10%. People don’t know that the chronic things for which you need medication could be related to vaccines because this has never been done. That’s the tragedy of our health system. It has never, because of the sales marketing pitch of vaccines are safe and effective, they’ve never bothered to look. Some of us are waking up to the fact that whoa, we got a problem and we should be looking. That vaxxed-unvaxxed study was published on November 18, 2020. It was first available online at the end of November, and five days after it was available online, the Oregon Medical Board had an emergency meeting and they immediately suspended my license to practice medicine.   [00:24:43] Ashley James: So they asked you for the proof, you gave them the proof, and they suspended your license because you gave them the proof that they asked for.   [00:24:54] Dr. Paul Thomas: There you go. I mean, obviously, I can’t prove that they emergently suspended my license because I published this data. But it’s pretty close to guaranteed proof because of the following. A week before that or maybe it was two weeks before that, they had just sent a new complaint that was absolutely ridiculous. They’ve been sending me new complaints that are anonymous by the way so we don’t know where they’re coming from, who’s initiating these complaints.   [00:25:23] Ashley James: The pharmaceutical company could be.   [00:25:24] Dr. Paul Thomas: I don’t know who, I’ll tell you, but they’ve been endless. I would say the last two, three years, I get complaints every other month and I have to address them. I dig for the data that they’re asking for and give it to them, never hear back. So they’ve never filed any charges, just they’re fishing. So they complain after complaint. So we were already in the process of trying to respond to another complaint, yet another complaint when this emergency happened. Well, what was the emergency? Nothing had changed. My patients are the healthiest patients in town, and I’ve got data to prove it now that’s been published in a peer-reviewed journal, so where’s the emergency? There can only be one explanation, in my opinion. So we have other good news to report. Just a couple of weeks ago, I got my attorney to take their situation of yanking my license without making any charges, which is basically illegal, and he took it to a judge. The judge ruled in our favor, and the board actually just two weeks ago gave me back my license.   [00:26:36] Ashley James: Congratulations.   [00:26:38] Dr. Paul Thomas: Thank you. The loss of my license caused me to lose all health insurance contracts. I don’t have health insurance, I don’t have insurance contracts. I lost my board certification from both the Board of Addiction Medicine, the Academy of Pediatrics, and I haven’t worked for the last six months. It’s taken a huge toll on our practice. We’re still open. Thankfully I have four actually, but three mostly working in the trenches nurse practitioners who are doing an incredible job of taking care of the patients. But it’s not been easy.   [00:27:16] Ashley James: Wow. When we spoke, I thought you also had a few doctors and a Naturopath that worked with you.   [00:27:23] Dr. Paul Thomas: I did. You and I talked, at that point, there were 10 of us in the office. So we had a Naturopath who was just amazing. I think we were three doctors, five nurse practitioners, and a Naturopath, 10 in total. If you count me, we’re down to four with one nurse practitioner doing a tiny bit of fill-in here and there.   [00:27:47] Ashley James: I know with Washington state there’s some weird law where you have to be a doctor to employ doctors or something. I don’t quite understand it. Were they not allowed to be employed by the clinic because you lost your license? Why did they leave?   [00:28:04] Dr. Paul Thomas: Most of them left in fear.   [00:28:08] Ashley James: Oh my gosh.   [00:28:10] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yeah, they were targeting me and it looked like they were starting to target the practice. So, one of my nurse practitioners, just a lovely, lovely lady, oh my gosh, but she was young. She had gotten her PhD or whatever the doctorate level for nurse practitioners was. She had ambitions to teach. She just had to move on because it was just too risky for her career. I had another doctor who just left, it was just too risky for her career. She still had young children. Yeah, it’s a lot of pressure that doctors who speak up for informed consent are—I mean, what’s happening in California, it’s just any doctor who’s written exemptions for vaccines is having to fight for their license. I mean, it’s like a witch hunt.    [00:28:59] Ashley James: Wow. So I have a friend, actually, he’s a listener and we became friends. They contacted your office, but it wouldn’t make sense to have a medical exemption written in Oregon if he’s in California. But his son has had major problems, surgeries, and based on his history, of his past, and the kid is I think six now because he’s about the same age as my son. Just based on all of the health conditions he’s gone through and is currently going through, he’s a candidate for exemptions right now because his immune system is compromised, there are all these other things. Because they’re in California, he can’t find anyone. If he were to go to any other state, a pediatrician would say, absolutely, this is not a candidate right now for a vaccine because he’s compromised. You’re saying there are effects. I don’t even like the term side effects. There are effects of certain medications, and when a person is compromised, those effects are more dramatic.   [00:30:13] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yeah. The problem is, somehow, pharma has captured the CDC. So the CDC makes recommendations, they also make money on vaccines, and they also are kind of a marketing arm in a real sense for vaccines based on what data they choose to collect and then what data they choose to publish. But the CDC has never done any of the research that’s necessary to answer the question as I did, for example, comparing vaccinated to unvaccinated. Your friend that was hoping for an exemption, I would actually guess that 90% something, close to 100% of pediatricians would not write an exemption even though it sounds like there’s pretty strong evidence that that would be a mistake to vaccinate that child with all that’s going on, either because they truly believe vaccines are safe and effective. They, in a way, drank the Kool-Aid. I mean, they’re just not doing their own research, or in this day and age, it’s career suicide. I mean, if you write medical exemptions, you’re waving a big old flag to the medical board, come get me. Unless you’re close to retirement, that’s just not an option for a young doctor who’s trying to build a career and maybe feed their family.   [00:31:39] Ashley James: Wow. That’s actually something I wanted to bring up was talking about safety testing. But first, I wanted to point out, I loved that near the end of our interview back in 2018 episode 224, you shared a story. At that time in February, it’s the tail end of “flu season.” And at the time, I’m up in Washington state. So in the pacific northwest, we had a really bad flu outbreak. My family didn’t get it, but in all of the clinics, all of the hospitals, it was like a four or five-hour wait. They were just full. And down in Oregon as well, you guys had four to five-hour waits in the emergency rooms and clinics were just full. We got hit really badly with some form of influenza and you said to me, last Friday, our clinic closed early because we didn’t get one phone call. I think you said 10,000 patients, not one phone call from 10,000 patients saying my son Johnny has a fever and sniffles, I need to come in or what should I do? You didn’t get one phone call from all your patients. About 50% of your practice I think you said was unvaccinated and the other percentage would follow not the CDC schedule but would follow what’s laid out in your book, which is one at a time, wait and see, how does the kid react. And then I said, well, what do you guys do for the unvaccinated children for those that choose to not do it? What do parents do to help keep a child healthy? And you say, well, all my patients take vitamin D. They all get outside into the sunlight, get fresh air, and exercise. They all eat very clean, very healthy fruits and vegetables. I think you went down a list of everything that regardless of vaccine status, you make sure they all follow these guidelines.    [00:33:48] Dr. Paul Thomas: Well, they’re recommended. I’m not sure how well—    [00:33:52] Ashley James: They’re followed?   [00:33:54] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yeah. Lifestyle is tough, right?   [00:33:55] Ashley James: It is.   [00:33:57] Dr. Paul Thomas: For adults, you’re supposed to exercise, not drink, eat healthy, and you get your sleep, and how many of us are perfect on that? But no, you’re absolutely right. To this day, I have two waiting rooms—a well and a sick side—because at my old practice, before I started this one, there was this one giant waiting room and it was always like three quarters filled with sick kids, and you have these little well babies and well kids sitting amongst coughing, sneezing, a snotty nose, feverish kids, something. This is not good. You’re exposing healthy kids to so much stuff. I mean, it’s like, stay away from the pediatric office. So I set this up with two separate completely separate waiting rooms. Our sick waiting room almost never has anybody in it. It was true back then, and of course, it’s really been true with quarantine. Quarantine, for sure for most practices, reduced the volume of visits just in general. How much of that was just people wouldn’t come in for fear of being exposed to somebody with COVID, or that they truly weren’t sick? I think it’s a little bit of both. I mean, the fact that people were not in school, we know as a pediatrician, once school opens, just give it a few weeks and we get busy. The states that had no direct student contact schooling, so if it was completely at homeschooling, it definitely reduced illness.  But the other thing that happened with COVID is we had what I’m going to call diagnostic substitution. So, traditionally, in the United States, the CDC has reported there’s, oh, I would say from 30,000 to 60,000 cases of influenza in the US per year. As a practicing busy pediatrician, I can tell you that probably at most 10% of those cases were actually influenza. It’s usually less than 5%, but definitely no more than 10%. How can I say that?  Well, it’s reported by the CDC that’s the case. But when we get a really sick kid in the winter and they’ve got a cough, fever, maybe a little sore throat, body aches, a flu-like illness, today you would call it COVID, probably not even see them. You don’t want to bring that patient into the office, you just assume it’s COVID. But back then, before COVID, you would bring these sickest kids in to figure out what’s going on because they could have bacterial pneumonia and there are antibiotics for that. So you want to know who needs to be treated or are they so sick they need to be in the hospital. Maybe they have a requirement for oxygen. So, those sickest kids, the last few years we were doing something called a recipe path where you would actually swab the nose and send that off to test for maybe 20 different most common things that would cause an infection in the kid. And it would include influenza a, influenza b, rhinovirus, and the various cold viruses, even coronaviruses on that panel before COVID came around, the bacterial causes, et cetera. And that’s why I know at the height of flu season back then, 5% to 10% max. So now, I’ll bet you it’s similar to COVID even though it can be a very devastating illness for those who are high risk, it’s no big deal for kids. So if a kid comes in with flu-like symptoms, if we could test them for COVID and use a proper test, not the PCR test that’s high cycles of amplification, we can talk about that. That’s giving so many false positives. But if we had a real test, those with a flu-like, COVID-like illness, I’ll bet you it’s less than 5% who are actually COVID. We just changed.  So, now all the people that used to be labeled as flu because that supported the flu shot campaign, now we’re labeling them as COVID because that supports the COVID shot campaign. The truth of the matter is do that panel of 20 tests and you’ve got some mycoplasma in there, you got some pneumococcus, you got some rhinovirus, some adenovirus, some different coronavirus. You’ve got RSV, parainfluenza, pertussis, influenza a, influenza b. There’s a long list of things that are causing that person’s symptoms, but we don’t bother to figure it out anymore. Right now you just said, stay home until you get better. If you get really bad, go to the hospital. That’s not good medicine, folks.    [00:38:31] Ashley James: That kind of blows my mind because we’re told “flu season,” it’s just a bunch of influenza and that’s it. But really, it’s only ever been 5% to 10% percent and the other infections are different bacteria or viruses. That marketing, that’s right, we’re marketed to. I remember when the flu shot came out, I was a teenager. I grew up in Canada and the marketing was big. It was all happy people dancing in a field and downhill skiing. Get the flu shot, prevent the flu. And I even got the shot, I think I was 19. I got it at my chiropractor’s office of all things. She was so excited. Free flu shots or maybe it was $25, I don’t remember. She was so excited, it was so innovative. It was so new. And my mom and I never got sick. I don’t know why we were excited about the flu shot. I guess we totally bought the marketing, but my mom and I never ever got the flu ever. I don’t even remember having the flu my entire life. And then after that shot, my mom and I were so sick. We turned to each other about a week later and said never again are we going to get this shot. This is ridiculous. What were we thinking? I started to go, that’s interesting. It made me question a little bit. And then when my mom was dying in the hospital of a medication the week before she died—she was in the hospital for the last two weeks of her life and I was there with her. I had the radio on and they announced on the news that the medication she had been on that her doctor feared her into taking. It was a synthetic estrogen. Her doctor said, if you don’t take this, your bones are going to be brittle and you’re just going to break a hip and die, basically. I remember my mom who was the strongest woman I knew came home in tears crying, leaning to get on this medication because her doctor told her she was going to have brittle bones and die if she didn’t take it. And then a few years later, she’s dying in the hospital of cancer, and it was this drug that was taken off the market for causing an insane amount of cancer in women. The doctor that prescribed it got cancer too because she was on it because. She believed the marketing.   [00:40:56] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yeah, doctors believe it themselves.   [00:40:59] Ashley James: Right, they do. I mean, they have conviction around it as well. Something in my brain switched and I’m like, I was raised to blindly trust the marketing, blindly trust it to get excited about drugs. Like, oh, this is going to make me better, this is going to help me. If I have an infection, I can’t fight it naturally, and it’s getting bad, then yes, I want allopathic medicine at my side. But when we go to a doctor with symptoms that are symptoms of nutrient deficiency, symptoms of lifestyle issues, and we’re put on medication after medication after medication, this is a system that’s failing us, especially when we look at statistically the number one and two and three causes of death in the United States. These things aren’t getting better, and we’re medicating them more and more and more and they’re not getting better. I have interviewed so many holistic-minded doctors who have amazing results, like you do with your patients, who have outstanding results, and have published these results with reversing chronic illness and preventing disease with natural medicine. So, in my mind, it’s like, if I could help the listeners to think critically and not buy the marketing. I don’t want to say never get X drug. The whole black and white thing, that doesn’t work either, it’s dogmatic. But they’re being dogmatic and saying always blindly trust this and take it, and I’m saying use critical thinking. Definitely read Dr. Paul Thomas’s book, use critical thinking, and look at his studies and see that we need to question everything we put into our body. People will question a supplement. You recommend a supplement, they’ll be like, well, who manufactured it? What are the safety studies? But then they’ll just go and blindly trust a doctor with a medication. We have to use critical thinking with everything. Where our food comes from too nowadays.   [00:43:12] Dr. Paul Thomas: Oh my goodness, absolutely.   [00:43:13] Ashley James: There’s GMO potato. I had a whole episode with Jeffrey Smith who’s an advocate for non-GMO, and he talked about apples and potatoes are now GMO. It’s not just corn and soy. These things are having major health problems. It’s destroying the bacteria of the gut, the microbiome of the gut. The microbiome of the gut produces our serotonin. It actually helps convert some of our thyroid, I think it’s T4 into T3. If we don’t have a healthy microbiome, we begin to just lose health on all fronts, and GMOs are causing that. Not to go off on a tangent, but just to say that we really need to question everything and educate ourselves on everything we put in our body—clean water, clean food. Even when it comes to medication and supplements, we have to do our own footwork basically. What always, I guess, confused me, we were told that vaccines are safe because they’re tested. There must be safety studies, right? I mean, drugs are tested for years. My mom died of this, so every drug that was approved to be given to patients in Canada, in the states, any country—I’m going to use the FDA as an example for America—but every drug that’s been taken off the market for doing harm was also first approved. So, these drugs that have then been rescinded, the drug that was rescinded off the market for killing my mother and killing other women was approved at one point. We have to remember that. Just that alone, we should start to just question things more instead of blindly follow them. But in my mind, I always thought that vaccines were tested. Aren’t they safety tested for years like drugs are safety tested, and don’t they do double-blind studies because that’s their thing, right? Double-blind studies. And then I heard somewhere that vaccines are not safety tested with double-blind placebo studies. They don’t do a placebo that’s inert. Can you explain that? What I mean is, you think they’re injecting water or saline solution into someone’s arm and they’re the placebo trial, and then they’re injecting the actual vaccine to the other person. But that’s not the case. If they were to take people and just inject saline versus a vaccine, then they actually might show the negative effects like you said with VAERS, the negative effects far outweigh the inert placebo. How do they “do safety tests”? How do they study safety before they release it to the public?   [00:46:21] Dr. Paul Thomas: Awesome question. The problem with vaccine science and research when it comes to safety testing is they have very cleverly gotten completely away from using a true placebo, which would be an injection of just saltwater, saline which is at the same concentration as your blood or plasma. On one group you would have the vaccine, and on the other group you would have saline. The trick they use is in the case of aluminum, which we know is extremely problematic, they’ll just give aluminum instead of saline, and then the vaccine will be the vaccine antigen plus the aluminum. Their side effects are, look, oh they’re the same, therefore the vaccine’s safe. I call that tobacco science. So for example. Ashley. why don’t you smoke one pack a day, I’m going to smoke two packs a day, and we’ll have a third group smoke none. We’ll see who died in a week. Nobody died, so it’s safe. That highlights the second problem with vaccine research, which is the duration of the study. How long do they follow these people is very short, much too short to pick anything up other than a little redness at the injection site. That’s why they say, oh, it’s one in a million to have bad side effects except of course you’re going to get a little redness where you got your shot and it’ll be a little sore. They completely intentionally don’t look for long-term side effects. Autoimmunity and allergies take years sometimes to develop. They’re never going to pick that up. They don’t use a proper placebo, they’re not double-blind controlled studies, and they’re not long enough. That whole phenomenon creates a situation where really, oh, a couple of other huge things because the belief almost like religion is that vaccines are safe and effective, they don’t look at all health outcomes. They only look for a few things that they know are known side effects from vaccines. So, in my research, for example, they would never be looking for asthma, behavioral issues, ADD, ADHD, allergies, breathing problems, ear infections, ear pain, or eczema. They don’t recognize these things as related to vaccines. If you don’t look, you don’t find it. The trials are set up specifically to look at a certain set of things, and then they shut off the trials before there’s a chance for there to be any difference in the two groups. They can say look, the two groups are similar so the vaccines are safe. There’s another problem. If you are funding a study. So I’m a pharmaceutical company let’s say and I’m going to study product X. Let’s say I set it all up, I want to show that product X is going to help you live healthier. We get going with this study and it’s not going well. It’s not looking like this study is going to help. Generally, we’re just going to abandon that research. This research isn’t working, we must have designed it wrong. We’re not going to do this research. Sometimes they’ll even get to the point of publication and why would they publish it? It’s going to harm their product. The people funding the research obviously have a desire for a certain outcome. When they get the outcome they like, they publish it, if they don’t, they often don’t publish it. Worse than that, pharma money has infiltrated the academic institutions, universities, all the PhDs who are doing research in their labs have to apply for grants so they can fund their research. Most of these grants are coming from somehow pharmaceutical money. You don’t get a grant unless you’re researching something that they’re interested in. They have never ever, ever yet funded a true vaxxed-unvaxxed study. This is why my published study is so important because there was no funding. We just did this. The next set of problems comes. If you ever get something published, which we did with a very rigorous peer review process, they try to get it retracted. And in fact, we are right now under review. Somebody complained and said, well, our methodology is new, it’s not valid. Well, the reason they were complaining is we did it the old way, which is do you have the disease or not right? So if we looked at asthma, ADHD, autism, or whatever, it was just a yes, no. That’s how most research is done. Well, what we did in this research is we looked at every single diagnosis even how many times it happened. So, if you’re in the study and you’re seen once in your lifetime for an asthma attack, compare that to a child who’s had 20 visits for an asthma attack. That shows an increased severity. The way we designed this study, we did it the old way, we analyzed it that way, and it was significant in a few things. But when you look at severity, it’s highly significant. So we also published this as sort of a shot across the bow for future researchers saying look at all health outcomes and look at all visits so you can pick up severity. It’s a really clever design, but it’s new. People who want to try to discredit research, they don’t want anything new if it’s going to show what they’re trying to protect in a bad light.   [00:51:53] Ashley James: That’s amazing. I like your way much better because it shows the severity. That makes so much sense. Instead of this black or white, they have it or they don’t have it, well, how many times did they have that incident occur over a period of time shows the severity. That makes so much more sense.   [00:52:14] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yeah, exactly.   [00:52:16] Ashley James: You really spent the extra time to go into it. I love that that guy came in believing one thing and then the numbers don’t lie. The numbers don’t lie.   [00:52:29] Dr. Paul Thomas: It’s data, and when people take offense to data that’s been peer-reviewed and well researched—what’s so ironic is that as we pointed out at the beginning of this interview, this was the data they asked for. They sure didn’t like what they found. We also published another study that I’ll just mention, it’s a short little paper. Well, it’s actually not that short, but it’s called Vaccine Practice Payment Schedules Create Perverse Incentives for Unnecessary Medical Procedures – at What Cost to Patients? So this was published in the International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research. Basically, what we did was I took a month’s worth of data from my practice back in August, September a year ago, and we looked at every single superbill. In other words, everybody that walked through the door for that month, and on the back of my super bills, I have a vaccine refusal form. Because we’re so meticulous about documenting informed consent that anytime vaccines are discussed, we flip the superbill over, it’s just a piece of paper that we click off what we’re doing that day so the billing people can double-check they bill appropriately for what was done. That’s all our superbill is. So on the one side, say they got a CBC to check for anemia, or they got a breathing treatment for asthma, we just check off what we’ve done. And then on the flip side though is this checklist of all the vaccines that we could possibly give. We go through and say, well, looking at your vaccine status, you’re behind on this vaccine. Here’s what other pediatricians would tell you to do so that you’re following the CDC schedule, and the patients either agree to do them or they refuse them. So we had the ability to actually tabulate which vaccines were given for an entire month by which company because some insurance companies pay better than others. I mean, this was real-world data. The vaccines that were accepted and done, and the vaccines that should have been done if you were following the CDC schedule but were refused. And then we extrapolated that for 12 months and learned that our practice of about 10,000 patients where we bill out about $3 million—well, before all this happened to me it was about $3 million. It’s dropped to about $2 million now. But our gross billings was about $3 million. We have 30 some employees. At that point, we had close to 10 providers. For a practice billing out $3 million, we were losing over $1 million dollars in just administration fees. You can’t survive as a practice if you’re losing a quarter to a third of your overhead because pediatric practices run about 70%, 80% overhead. So, no wonder I haven’t been able to give my employees a raise. I think they got one raise in the last 10 years. It is a service of love by everybody that’s working in my practice because we believe in what we’re doing, we’re helping kids. Money’s tight when you’re not getting vaccine money. If I’m leaving $1 million on the table for the last 13 years, that’s $13 million. My employees could have had nice raises and bonuses, and I’d probably be doing just fine, right? I’m the sole owner of this practice. I haven’t taken a paycheck in six months. The vaccine compensation is set up in such a way that it is so enticing, and pediatricians deny this. I used to deny it. I used to say, oh, no, no. We don’t make any money on vaccines. That’s because the markup that most practices do on vaccines is very, very low. If I buy a vaccine for $100, I might charge you $103 or $105 for it. I’m not making a massive amount of profit on selling vaccines. But the insurance companies give you this payment, it’s called administration fee, and it’s over $1,000 in the first year of a baby’s life. One baby, I’m getting over $1,000 in just the administration fees by the time they’re age one.   [00:56:32] Ashley James: For keeping them on the CDC schedule?   [00:56:36] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yup, if you follow the CDC schedule.   [00:56:38] Ashley James: How many babies does a pediatrician typically have in their practice?   [00:56:42] Dr. Paul Thomas: Well, a busy pediatrician like I am, I would get about 30 babies a month. I’d say $5,000 to $10,000 maybe?   [00:56:51] Ashley James: So, it’s $5,000 to $10,000 a month, upwards of $30,000 a month if a pediatrician were to vaccinate 100% of their infants each month?   [00:57:03] Dr. Paul Thomas: That’s just the admin fee. You still get paid to see the patients.   [00:57:07] Ashley James: Oh yeah. But let’s say a pediatrician gives zero vaccines versus 100% of the CDC schedule. So pediatricians are incentivized, if they see only five to ten babies a month, it’s $5,000 to $10,000 a month in their pocket.   [00:57:25] Dr. Paul Thomas: Per year. No, that is per year.   [00:57:27] Ashley James: Per month, they see five to 10 new babies per month?   [00:57:33] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yes.   [00:57:33] Ashley James: So, if they see five to ten new babies per month, then it’s $5,000 to $10,000 a month.   [00:57:37] Dr. Paul Thomas: Oh, I see what you’re saying. Yeah. I see how you’re doing the math.   [00:57:42] Ashley James: If it’s 30,000 babies a month for you because you’re busy, then that’s $30,000 a month for keeping them on the CDC schedule versus a pediatrician who does informed consent and only attracts parents who wish not to vaccinate 100%. That is significant.   [00:57:42] Dr. Paul Thomas: It’s huge, and pediatricians deny that they’re incentivized by money. I think honestly, they don’t know. I just got this published this past year in October of 2020. Or wait a minute, when was this published? This was March of ‘21. That’s right, I knew it was more recent. We just got this published two, three months ago. I don’t think pediatricians are aware that—here’s the reality in my town. Almost any other pediatrician will not see you unless you follow the CDC schedule. So, that is now a process that the Academy of Pediatrics is okay with ethically. In other words, you can kick people out of your practice if they won’t follow the CDC schedule. However, there is a little caveat. They have to have alternative care available. So here’s the funny thing. They’re trying to take my license away because I’m honoring informed consent, but I’m the only place these people can go. So if they shut me down, they’re not going to be able to kick these people out. It’s kind of weird. Financially, they’re getting to benefit from getting rid of the patients that kind of costs you money. If you see patients and they’re not vaccinating, it’s actually costing you money because the overhead is so high. So, let’s get these patients who aren’t getting us in the profits, let’s send them over to Dr. Paul at Integrative Pediatrics. We’ll keep the ones that are lucrative. They’re not thinking that way, but that is the reality.   [00:59:47] Ashley James: You got to imagine, some of them have figured it out.   [00:59:50] Dr. Paul Thomas: Maybe. I’ll tell you what, the office managers know. I remember back in my old office, back in the early 2000s when we figured out we were injecting too much mercury because a lot of the vaccines had mercury in there to prevent fungal infections in those vials. There was data accumulating that that was causing health problems and probably linked to certain cases of autism.   [01:00:15] Ashley James: Wait a second. Mercury is not healthy for you?   [01:00:19] Dr. Paul Thomas: It’s not. I think that was called mad hatter disease or something. Chimney sweeps would get too much mercury. No, mercury is not healthy for you. You’re absolutely right, Ashley. Good memory there. I mean, think about it, the old thermometers, you’re not old enough to remember.   [01:00:35] Ashley James: No, no, no. I went to Mexico with my family when I was a kid back in the ‘80s, ‘90s. They used to sell—I don’t know if they still do—this glass jewelry that had mercury in it and I had broken one and played with it. Because it was like the Terminator. Remember the guy would turn into mercury, and I was touching it and rolling it around playing with it. Oh yeah. mercury is not healthy.    [01:01:02] Dr. Paul Thomas: Mercury is a liquid metal but it is not good for you. Anyway, where was I going with that?   [01:01:12] Ashley James: You figured out on the mercury.   [01:01:14] Dr. Paul Thomas: I know what it was. I went to my office manager and I said, I heard they were going to get the mercury out of the vaccines. So I went to my office manager at the time and I said, as soon as we get options to get the vaccines that don’t have mercury, please, please let’s get those instead of the mercury ones. And she said to me, Well, they just became available, but are you willing to pay the $6,000 extra it’s going to cost to buy the newer, more expensive ones because your partners aren’t willing? At that time, I was a younger pediatrician with a huge family to feed, and no, I couldn’t do that. They wanted me to pay for the difference for everybody. So we kept on using the inferior vaccine until they were no longer available. And that was an economic decision. And unfortunately, pediatrics and medicine, in general, is a business, just as pharmaceutical companies are a business. Sometimes, you’re making decisions that are more important for your business bottom line than are really in the absolute best interest of your patients. And so, folks, if you’re listening, parents, if we’re talking about making vaccine decisions for your children, you’re the last hope that your child has that you will save them, that you will protect them. They don’t have a choice. You take them to a pediatrician, the pediatrician says this is what you should do. And if you’re not protecting them, if you’re not doing your research, then unfortunately, they are at the mercy of the system. You are so right, Ashley, earlier to point out this is a sick care system. It’s not a wellness system. Our bodies are naturally capable of being very healthy if we stay away from toxins. You mentioned it near the beginning: drink filtered water, don’t eat pesticides and herbicides, make sure you’ve got non-GMO, if possible organic food, and avoid injected toxins, which are your vaccines. I’m not telling anybody what to do with vaccines. This is just an educational and informational conversation we’re having here. But folks, look into it. When you really look at the research, vaccines are not safe. They’re borderline effective, depending on which vaccine. And exercise, take vitamin D. You cannot get enough unless you’re living at the equator with your clothes off.   [01:03:40] Ashley James: I’d love to do that. Let’s go to the equator and eat mangoes naked.   [01:03:44] Dr. Paul Thomas: Wouldn’t that be nice? Yeah, that sounds good to me. Count me in. I never could bring myself to go to those nude beaches. But yeah, it sounds like a good thing anyway. So, there are things we can do to be healthy. And mostly it’s just letting nature the way it was beautifully designed to keep you healthy. If you want to pivot a little bit more to COVID, I do want to talk about it a little bit.   [01:04:09] Ashley James: Yeah. All right. So, we were doing a catch-up on everything that happened since our last interview. I love everything you’ve discussed so far. I did see a few times on Facebook you talking about masking children. And, that’s been something that is so cringy to me. I’d love for you to touch on that at some point.   [01:04:35] Dr. Paul Thomas: Sure. So the mask issue I can touch on quite simply. Masks, the medical ones that we use in hospitals, were not designed to prevent viral particles from going back and forth. They were designed to make sure the surgeon doesn’t sneeze on the operating field, drool, or whatever. To try to keep the operating field where you clean the belly. Let’s say you’re doing an abdominal surgery, you clean it really well, scrub, scrub, Betadine, drape it with sterile drapes, and then you’re cutting the abdomen open. You don’t want a surgeon leaning over and sneezing or dripping into the surgical site. I mean, that’s the purpose of those masks. They are very ineffective at preventing viruses of the size of COVID, the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19. That virus can get through those masks so easily it’s kind of a joke to think that’s going to protect you.   [01:05:37] Ashley James: It’s like a bumblebee flying through a chain-link fence.   [01:05:40] Dr. Paul Thomas: Exactly. And certainly, if you’re talking about the cloth masks, it definitely is like a fly or a bumblebee going through a chain-link fence. It’s just completely almost worthless. In fact, it’s probably worse than worthless because what you’re doing is you’re creating moisture that’s trapping things. And so you may actually be creating more risk for yourself than benefit. So, that being said, if I was a very high risk person and I was truly scared of coronavirus, COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2 virus, I would probably wear N95 and the face shield when I was going to be in close proximity to other people. So, if you are yourself afraid, there’s something you can do and do it. I mean, if that’s going to help you be able to go shopping, put on an N95, make sure it fits nice and tight, and put a face shield over that and I think you’ll be fine. Except be careful to wash your hands before you touch anything that’s going back home with you because I think the virus does have capability of going from your hands, then you touch your face or whatever, and you get it onto yourself. So, that’s masks. Children don’t need them for a couple of reasons. One, they don’t work. Well, lots of reasons. Two, they’re more risky than they’re beneficial. Most studies are showing that. So, there’s plenty of garbage studies that show benefits, folks. Remember, that’s pharma trick. Whoever’s got an agenda, we want people to mask up, can fund a study that will show benefit. It’s so easy to do studies like that. But good studies show that they’re not only mostly worthless, but they’re actually probably causing more harm than good. One of the harms that has not been well studied, I think I’ve read one or two articles about this is when you mask up children and now they’re not being exposed to facial expressions, to smiles—I mean, we’re social creatures. We’re supposed to be interacting in a loving, supportive way with one another. You become a little robot almost. And then you add the fact that we’ve kept kids at home in front of screens. Before COVID hit, my number one problem in teenagers was anxiety and depression, it was triggered by screens. I mean, that was crystal clear to me. Now we add COVID, isolation, and so much more screen time, and we wonder why we’re having increases in ADD, anxiety, suicides. It’s a disaster. Now, when we know that children—unless they happen to have severe underlying medical conditions—most children, their risk of dying from COVID is less than 1 in 100,000. I mean, they just don’t get seriously ill. Of course, the news is going to report those rare cases and get everybody afraid. So fear is what they’re selling. The strategy was, we’re going to mask everybody up, we’re going to isolate everybody, and get them so tired of it that when we come through with a vaccine as the savior, they’re going to line up, and it’s worked. I mean, we’re getting so many people vaccinated. And it’s truly tragic, especially now that they’re starting to target children. Parents, the science is in, it’s crystal clear. You’re not hearing it on the news, however, because the news has already been bought and paid for. You can go to The Highwire, Del Bigtree, his show. You can go to my show, Against the Wind: Doctors & Science Under Fire. You can go to the Children’s Health Defense and look at their daily news called The Defender and get all the science and all the information you need to understand that oh my Lord, the science has been done. This is a very dangerous vaccine. It probably is time. Dr. McCullough was on my show twice already. He’s a mainstream doctor, that’s probably the most published physician in the United States who’s also treating COVID. He’s now calling for the program to be abandoned. That this is no longer safe for humans. So, we’re at a turning point, and it’s not too late to save the children. If you’ve already gotten this vaccine, I don’t want you to be afraid because fear does not help your immune system. So, if you’ve already gotten the vaccine and you start to have any new symptom, don’t discount it as being unrelated to the vaccine. Just see a physician or healthcare provider who understands natural healing processes. You’ll see we give at the end of my show, every two weeks, I’ve got the show. Just go to doctorsandscience.com. At the very end of each show, we give you resources. And you can use those same resources that are to treat a COVID-19 infection to treat the side effects. The spike protein in this vaccine is what’s causing the mischief. You can get exposed to the spike protein from the infection, but you also get exposed from the vaccine. My best guess is we’re going to have an interesting fall and winter. I have a feeling based on what I’m reading in the research is it appears that those who have gotten the vaccine are actually going to be at greater risk of problems than those who did not. Just like my data showed, natural immunity appears to be superior. So, whether it’s a new strain that comes through, they’re having trouble in India, England, and across different parts of the world with new variants they’re calling them. I think the unvaccinated will do much better against new variants than the vaccinated, although time will tell, right? But the good news is there are treatments that work whether you’re vaccinated or unvaccinated, so don’t despair. But please, if you’re a parent, they are pushing hard on the teenagers. I’m hearing stories already of peer pressure, big peer pressure, to get the vaccine.   [01:11:44] Ashley James: The universities are saying that they have to vaccinate if they want to attend class.   [01:11:51] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yeah. The pressure is immense. They’re now talking about rolling out passports. Vaccine passports, to me, are like apartheid South Africa. I grew up in Southern Africa as a kid, and if you are white, you could move about freely, you had total access to the country. If you were not white, you had to carry papers just like a passport. If you didn’t have your papers, you couldn’t enter certain parts of cities. That’s where we’re headed with the vaccine. Don’t call it a vaccine passport, call it a slavery passport. I mean, it is ridiculous. The least risky people are those who aren’t vaccinated, okay. This is clear from my research on all illnesses, but it’s becoming clear with COVID as well. So, it’s the unvaccinated who should be given free rein, you’re at no risk from them, or let’s not say no risk. That was an exaggeration. There’s risk everywhere, but less risk because the unvaccinated are not as likely to get sick. Their immune systems are going to keep them healthier. And you know what? COVID-19 illness is real and it can be fatal, it can be serious, so I’m not trying to tell people to be reckless. But it’s not a big deal for kids. They can go to school with no masks, no shields, just go to school. I mean, if it appears that natural infection will give you long-lasting immunity, that will be much more robust than the immunity you get from vaccines.   [01:13:25] Ashley James: Well, that’s right. There are three studies that I know of, and I’m sure more will come up. But there are three studies recently that show that if you’ve had the coronavirus, the COVID-19, that you have lifelong immunity. They even did a study where they took samples of bone marrow and found that months and months and months later, the antibodies were there. The media has told us that you only have three months of protection. If you’ve naturally had wild COVID-19, that in three months, you could get it again, and then another three months you could get it again.   [01:14:10] Dr. Paul Thomas: No.   [01:14:11] Ashley James: But this is what people have been told.   [01:14:13] Dr. Paul Thomas: That’s not true, and the other truth is that those who have had natural infection are actually at greater risk of vaccine side effects.   [01:14:23] Ashley James: Really? Why is that? Do you know why?   [01:14:24] Dr. Paul Thomas: I had a guest on my show who went through that fairly well a while back. He’s a strong proponent for test before you vaccinate. I mean, we have enough testing capability now. So, anybody who’s going to get a vaccine should be tested to make sure they don’t already have antibodies because we’re just simply seeing more reactions. And I think what it is, they call it pathogenic priming. And somehow, having been exposed to that virus before, you already have some immune capability to respond, actually, a very robust capability to respond. And then if you get the vaccine, which is such a massive dose of spike protein and you’re already primed to respond to it, you can have this massive inflammatory response. It’s an unnatural trigger, right? If you get a natural infection, you just get a few little antigens coming in through your nose, your immune system, boom, knocks it out before it becomes a big deal. If you get a vaccine with a massive exposure to spike protein and you’ve got the capability to respond to that, you need a massive response, so I think it’s related to that. I did want to cover two things. I want to talk about PCR testing, and I also want to talk about absolute risk reduction and relative risk reduction. So, let’s cover those two things because they are critical to understanding what’s going on.   [01:15:47] Ashley James: I want to cover those. Before we cover those, just wrap up the last topic. You talked about spike protein and people can have reactions to it, regardless of if it’s of through a vaccine, or through natural immunity, or naturally having COVID-19. If someone’s had COVID and they’ve had the spike protein in them, how long until it’s out of them? You mentioned that you have some resources for supporting the body around that. Is this something that we should be watching for problems with spike protein like six months after an infection, or is this only days or weeks after the infection?   [01:16:30] Dr. Paul Thomas: I’m not going to claim to be an expert to answer that question with every authoritative piece of science. I’ve done my best to keep up, but boy, it’s coming fast. I have read that two weeks after a vaccine, you can find spike protein in the blood. I’ve read that for longer than that, after a natural infection, you can find SARS-CoV-2 in the stool. So, some people, I think it’s around 10% of people who get diarrhea, and that virus is present in the stool longer. So, that’s speaking to natural infection. The other study was speaking to the presence of this in the blood in a vaccinated person. There are these reports—I think we’ll hear more in the very near future—of vaccinated people somehow being able to transmit the spike protein to unvaccinated people. And, so I get a lot of questions about that. I don’t know quite what to tell people because it’s just starting to come out. It’s something that’s just starting to be discovered and researched, but it appears that that can happen. I’m not exactly sure of the mechanism. But it’s one of those things where if you’ve been vaccinated, maybe for a couple of weeks you don’t go around your unvaccinated loved ones. Just a thought. I mean, I don’t have enough hard science to say that’s a firm recommendation. It’s just a thought.   [01:18:08] Ashley James: I’ve heard that. There’s a lot of anecdotal stories out there. So it’ll be interesting to see the studies as the science comes out. I hate that term, the science is settled.   [01:18:23] Dr. Paul Thomas: Oh, it’s never settled.   [01:18:24] Ashley James: You know what, dogma, religion is settled.   [01:18:28] Dr. Paul Thomas: Even that.   [01:18:30] Ashley James: But the idea that science is something that’s constantly moving, the target’s constantly changing. We’re constantly learning new things. We’re constantly disproving hypotheses and disproving old studies. The science is settled is a marketing term, is a brainwashing term.   [01:18:50] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yeah, it’s a brainwashing term. I was just reading a report. Dr. Kelly Sutton is an MD who wrote some exemptions in California and she’s on trial right now. It started yesterday. And the report was the other side, the people that are trying to take away her license, their attorney was able to silence several complaints by saying, well, that science has been settled. And so, it’s that same thing, we’re not going to go there, it’s been settled. What’s so ridiculous about that is just think about it folks. Kids born today are so different from their grandparents in terms of the world they’re growing up in. Their grandparents got zero or one or two vaccines. They’ve had 72 vaccines by the time they graduate from high school. They’ve had 40 by the time they’re in school. They live in a world that’s got all this glyphosate, pesticides, and herbicides, and it’s just a different toxic world. You cannot compare the science that was done generations ago to what’s going to happen to a kid today. Just like with vaccines, most research is done on people who’ve already had so many of them. And so when they’re adding one more and going, see, it hasn’t made anything worse. But you don’t know because you’re not comparing them to an unvaccinated person.   [01:20:15] Ashley James: Okay. The spike protein causes inflammation in the body. Is that also what’s causing the increase of blood clots, especially in healthy people that never had an issue of blood clotting before?   [01:20:29] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yeah, it seems to be definitely the trigger of that. Again, I’m not the scientist that should describe the exact biochemistry or biology of how that happens, but yes, they are definitely related.   [01:20:43] Ashley James: And I definitely urge listeners to go back and watch the previous episodes of your show where this has been discussed. What was the name of the doctor again that talked about it on your show?   [01:20:54] Dr. Paul Thomas: Dr. McCullough.   [01:20:56] Ashley James: Dr. McCullough. Okay, so we can go check out that episode for more information as well, and follow Dr. McCullough’s work as well to get more information if listeners are interested. Okay, you want to talk about PCR tests, right?   [01:21:09] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yes, please. So, when this epidemic started rolling out, none of us knew what was going on. And the main form of testing—especially in the United States, but in a lot of places around the world—was using PCR, polymerase chain reaction testing. This testing has this methodology where they call it amplification. So you throw your sample through a number of cycles of testing, each time you’re analyzing a more dilute sample to try to detect the most minute amount of material. I’ve read two published studies out of Europe that are both showing the same finding that’s just absolutely conclusive and important to understand. So at somewhere around 13 to 17, or 18 cycles of amplification, if you get a positive test, they can actually grow the SARS-CoV-2 virus. So, in other words, that PCR represents a real virus being there. Think about it on a graph and up to 13,14, 15, 16 cycles, you’re getting a positive culture 100% of the time. Now, as you get into 30 cycles, you’re down to like, I don’t know, 20% of the time you could actually grow a virus.  By the time you get to 34, 35 cycles of PCR amplification, you never grow a virus, it is just noise. And this is why you’ve been able to get positive tests on healthy people who there’s absolutely nothing going on. They don’t have the virus, it’s just genetic noise. They never are able to grow the virus. So, guess what the cycles that are being used in the United States until very recently, how many cycles of amplification are they using?   [01:23:04] Ashley James: How many?   [01:23:05] Dr. Paul Thomas: Thirty-five to 40, sometimes more than 40. And at 35 to 40, you have a 97% chance that it’s a false positive. In other words, that positive test, it’s not COVID.   [01:23:17] Ashley James: Wait, 97% of the time it was a false positive?   [01:23:22] Dr. Paul Thomas: A false positive.   [01:23:23] Ashley James: Are these the cases that they reported to us every day in the news for the last year and a half to fear us?   [01:23:29] Dr. Paul Thomas: You got it. So, it’s a case epidemic, not a COVID epidemic. And then the death numbers are equally amplified because anybody that dies, if they’re in any way connected to a health system which is where most people die, you get sick—   [01:23:47] Ashley James: Heart attack, stroke.   [01:23:48] Dr. Paul Thomas: Well, it doesn’t matter what. Motor vehicle accident—oh, nursing homes. If you die of old age and you test and it’s positive—and remember, 97% of the positives in many instances is false, it isn’t COVID—it gets labeled as death with COVID. It wasn’t from COVID, but it’s with COVID and it gets counted. There are ample reports of this going on. The other phenomenon that’s jacked up the numbers is that you can get tested multiple times, the same person. So if I’m positive and I go back for another test, I go back for another test because I’m trying to get back to work or whatever reason, I need a negative. Each time I’m positive, that’s a case. In most states, the system doesn’t differentiate, oh, that’s the same person. They’re just reporting positive tests. We have this scare tactic, fear tactics on all the channels of the news, the mainstream media of look at all these deaths, look at all these cases, and then we’ve got a vaccine for you that will solve the problem. So let me move over to absolute risk reduction and relative risk reduction. Folks, if you get this, you will no longer live in fear. You can set yourself free, walk outside without a mask, which by the way, there are states—I have one of my nurse practitioners who just came to help out from Ohio and nobody’s wearing a mask indoors or outdoors. Florida is the same way. There are several states where masks are a thing of the past. I’m in Oregon, and I was just at the Oregon Zoo with my grandson, and it felt like 95% of people outside were walking around with masks. So, why is it so different? Is the virus just so much more dangerous in Oregon? No. Oregon has one of the lowest rates in the country. We have fear. Our government, our governor, and our health department have done a masterful job of making sure that everybody is scared out of their wits. It’s a fear campaign. But here’s the trickery. It’s unconscionable that that reporter can report what they do and not be aware of this fact. So the studies that Pfizer and Madonna did that showed their vaccine was 96% effective, 90% effective, you hear that on the news, right? Get this vaccine, it’s 90% effective or it’s 96% effective. What they’re talking about is a relative risk reduction. So I’m just going to average out numbers. I’m not giving you the exact numbers because I don’t have them in front of me right now. But take for example with Pfizer, and that initial study had 40,000 participants. So 20,000 people were given the vaccine, 20,000 were given saline, a placebo.   [01:26:31] Ashley James: Were they given an inert placebo, or were they given something with other antigens in it?   [01:26:38] Dr. Paul Thomas: I think in that one it was an inert placebo. But I know in some of the trials, they were actually given a different vaccine, which is just weird to me. They picked a really yucky vaccine for side effects and we’re going to give that instead. That will be the placebo, you get this vaccine. It’s like, oh my God, my point is this. When they were about three months into it, I believe, when they stopped the study, as far as their numbers, there were about 200 cases of positive COVIDs. So out of 40,000 people, there were only 200 positives, and that’s when they stopped the analysis. They found that, wow, 96% of the positives were in the unvaccinated group. So of those 20,000 people who were unvaccinated, what was your risk of having a positive? It was about 1%. Now the real risk reduction, so the absolute risk reduction, not the relative one. So the 96% was relative to the vaccinated, but the absolute risk was 1%. And what was that risk for? It was at risk for mild COVID symptoms—runny nose, cough, maybe fever. They didn’t look at hospitalizations, they didn’t look at deaths. So folks, would you like to take a vaccine that has about a 50-50 chance you’re going to have side effects, and maybe a 1 in 10 chance you’re going to have serious side effects, and maybe a 1 in 10,000—I don’t remember what the exact number is of death—when your chance of it helping you avoid mild symptoms is 1%. It makes absolutely no sense at all, but it’s never presented that way. There was an actual mainstream journal, I’m trying to remember it. It was one of the biggies. Was it The Lancet, or The New England Journal, or JAMA—one of those big threes. They had an article titled The Elephant in the Room, and they talked about this very fact. They went through I think three or four of the major coronavirus companies—Moderna, Pfizer, and a couple of the other ones—and they pointed out the percentage of real risk reduction, actual risk reduction (ARD) was around 1% or less. And they’re going, what’s going on. It’s the elephant in the room, nobody’s speaking the actual truth of what’s actually going on. So, that’s why I get a little frustrated when the narrative is so off. It is just fear-mongering. Especially when it comes to kids, folks. They are just not at risk from this disease, and the risk of the vaccine is just pretty horrendous. I mean, now we’re getting all these heart inflammation reports that are real. A good friend of mine is writing an article about that, actually, it’s my co-author for my book, The Vaccine-Friendly Plan, Jennifer Margulis. She’s a really good investigative reporter. She says, can you tell me, Dr. Paul, you’ve been doing pediatrics for a long time. How common are pericarditis and myocarditis? So this is the inflammation around the heart or of the heart. I have seen zero cases in my career.   [01:29:57] Ashley James: And how many patients have you seen in your career would you guess?   [01:30:01] Dr. Paul Thomas: Oh my God, 100,000, I don’t know? I mean, we have 10,000 patients, I don’t see them all because I have a team. I mean, if you take everybody over 30 years, 10,000 patients times 30 years, that’s a lot of patients who some of them are the same patients year to year, but it’s a lot. I mean, it’s a massive number of patients, and zero.   [01:30:26] Ashley James: Had you known anyone or have heard a colleague talk about, I treated this condition today.   [01:30:35] Dr. Paul Thomas: No, my co-author’s husband got pericarditis before COVID came around. And it’s so rare that he had to be seen up at OHSU, the Oregon Health Science University for Oregon. Rare complicated things, you end up there. I mean, they had the top of the top people in the country consulting to figure out what the heck is going on here. Some rare, I’m guessing autoimmune, they just give it a label that’s just a descriptor. You have inflammation around the heart, but nobody knows why. We are aware that autoimmunity is a growing cause of a lot of chronic problems, and vaccines are definitely on the list of possible triggers for autoimmunity.   [01:31:20] Ashley James: One thing that you brought up in episode 224 when I first had you on the show—okay. When I was a kid, we didn’t get vaccines as an infant, as a newborn. They didn’t roll that out until—in Canada, they were giving the Hep B. I remember I was in high school, so it’s the late ‘90s. I would be first in line. I was like, oh, their marketing was so good. I rolled up my sleeve, I ran up because I’m not afraid of needles.  I’m so happy that I’m not into drugs and alcohol because I mean, I’m not afraid of needles. I might have been a heroin addict. If I was into drugs, I might have gone there because I’m like, I’m not afraid of needles and I wanted to prove how macho I am. I’m kind of a tomboy. I’m like, yeah, look at me, because all these kids are afraid and I’m like, I’m going to run up and I’m going to get this new Hepatitis.   [01:32:10] Dr. Paul Thomas: How old were you?   [01:32:10] Ashley James: I was in high school, it was in the late ‘90s. I just remember, they were like, oh, this is really great. And I’m like, okay. I mean, in Canada, it’s socialized medicine so their marketing is more about let’s keep costs down by keeping everyone healthy and preventing illness. But in the States, was it 2005 that they started to say, we’re going to give a vaccine that we’ve only previously ever given sex workers, drug addicts, nurses, and those that basically get exposed to this. We’ve never given it out to the public as a common vaccine, and all of a sudden now 100% of the population, the moment they come out of their mother, we’re going to give it to them. Was it around 2005? Was that it?   [01:33:02] Dr. Paul Thomas: A little bit earlier. Your recollection is correct, though. My kids are around your age as well, my oldest ones. I was following the CDC schedule for my kids. They got the vaccine as teenagers, and that was in the ‘90s.   [01:33:23] Ashley James: When did they start giving it to newborns, though?    [01:33:25]Dr. Paul Thomas: So the newborn shift in Oregon, and it felt like it was a national push here in the US, was around 2000, 2003, right around then. Because the interesting thing was I specifically remember it because it was right when they got the mercury out of the vaccines. And I thought to myself, is this a coincidence or is this a planned event? Because I was so excited about getting the mercury out of the vaccine. I remember going to my youngest son’s kindergarten teacher or first grade teacher, and I said, you see a lot of autism now and a lot of ADD and ADHD. She said, oh, yes. I said, well, don’t worry, in five years, it’s going to be gone. I mean, I was so convinced that that was the leading cause of that brain issue. And it never went away. In fact, it got slightly worse, but we replaced one bad thing—the mercury—with something that’s probably equally bad, maybe worse—huge doses of aluminum. By shifting that Hep B vaccine to newborn, two months, six months, that’s three big doses of a really bad aluminum product. The data is out there that that birth dose of aluminum is just horrendous or just the Hepatitis B series itself, it’s not a good thing.   [01:34:46] Ashley James: My point that I was getting at is as a child, me growing up in the ‘80s—I was born in 1980 and I never attended school with a child that was autistic, I never saw it. I think I knew one person with asthma. Never did I know a child in any of the schools I attended that had childhood cancer or any autoimmune conditions. Actually, I remember one kid that was allergic to grass, and so she’d get a weird rash if she sat on the grass. But everyone is growing up, super healthy, no problems. So sometime in the late ‘90s, early 2000s, 100% of all newborns are on a different schedule than when I was growing up. I had very few vaccines growing up comparative to today. I went to a pediatrician who was actually quite famous in Toronto for being a fantastic doctor and he was well known to this day. I followed the schedule that Canada had laid out in the ‘80s and the ‘90s. Nowadays, the children who are 10 years old, 15 years old, that kind of thing, the levels of childhood cancer, the levels of autoimmune condition comparative to 30 years ago, let’s say like, look at the before and after. What you brought up in our last interview you said, when we take a child and we overexcite the immune system with multiple doses of vaccine—because a vaccine, its intention is fantastic. Its intention is to train the immune system to mount a healthy response, so if you ever come in contact with it, you can have a healthy response and have better outcomes. That’s the intention. That’s a great intention, I want that for everyone. What happens in actuality is it overexcites and makes the immune system become hyperactive.   [01:37:06] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yeah, immune activation it’s called. Think of it almost like carpet bombing. The attempt was, we’re just going to get antibodies against X, Y, or Z. But when it goes wrong, the immune system is now attacking yourself, that’s autoimmunity. So, if you’re attacking the islet cells of the pancreas, you’ve got type one diabetes. If you’re attacking the myelin sheath of your brain, you’ve got MS. If you’re attacking your cartilage in your joints, you’ve got arthritis, and so on and so on.   [01:37:41] Ashley James: So, these children end up with a hyperactive immune system that then becomes autoimmune which is what you just described. And then these children with autoimmune conditions, who are still children, are then put on immune suppressants and years later developed cancer because the immune system is not functioning correctly and can’t clear out the unhealthy cancerous cells. We’re creating wonderful customers for the pharmaceutical and medical industry. We’re creating wonderful customers. Customers for life until they die.   [01:38:13] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yeah, you just outlined what I like to point out is vaccines are probably the number three moneymaker for pharma. They trigger autoimmunity. When you’re autoimmune, you have to give immunosuppressants as you stated. That’s the number one moneymaker for pharma. And when you suppress the immune system, you get cancers, the number two moneymaker for pharma. So numbers one, two, and three are all intertwined, turning you into an ATM cash machine for pharmaceutical companies. Trust me, folks, their interests are not in keeping you healthy, their interests are financial.   [01:38:48] Ashley James: It is such a dilemma to go upstream. Even me publishing this episode, I’m putting my career at risk. I’m putting my podcast at risk. And you have put your career at risk. I’m so grateful to your bravery and courage for continuing to speak out for the health, wellbeing, and safety of all children and adults.   [01:39:14] Dr. Paul Thomas: Well, thank you as well. You’re absolutely right. You are taking a risk, and you obviously are doing that because you care. That’s the only reason I do this. I mean, that financial incentive paper that I wrote just shows, for example, that there’s no financial reason for me to do what I’m doing. I mean, I walk in and I talk to the patient. I can’t right now, because one of the conditions of getting my license back was I can’t talk about vaccines to patients. I figure I’m covered by free speech on a show.   [01:39:47] Ashley James: Hopefully.   [01:39:49] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yeah, hopefully. And folks, everything we’re discussing here is just informational. Run this by your trusted health care providers, hopefully somebody who’s really aware of what’s going on because too many doctors are not. It’s a real risk because of censorship that’s going on at a very pervasive high level. If you speak out with facts, real data, and science, or even if it was your opinion. I mean, we could say you and I have opinions. We should be allowed in this free country. If it truly is a free country, we should be allowed to share opinions, disagree, and still be civil to one another. And I am trying to do that better these days. I think because you and I might be a lot on the same page, it sounds like we don’t like vaccines, but I’m with you. At the beginning of the show when you stated, everybody’s got to make their own decisions and we need to love one another and support one another’s opinions because this way of keeping people divided is really not a good strategy for us to have long term good health. It just gives more power to the big businesses that are trying to take more control. They can keep us fighting over you name the issue, whether it’s political, whether you’re this party or that party, or whether it’s over a hot topic of the day. If we can keep people divided whether it’s on race or some other issue, parties, it doesn’t matter, religion, anything that keeps people divided keeps them distracted from what’s really going on, which is that you are slowly giving up your freedoms, you’re slowly giving up your rights. And right now, they are attacking your body. We’re turning humans into GMO humans. It’s never been done before, it never should have been done, and it’s being done on a massive worldwide stage with an experimental vaccine. This vaccine is not FDA-approved, by the way, folks, it is still experimental. And that’s the one thing I think maybe could put this to an end is these companies that are requiring vaccines. So if I have to go get a vaccine because this company made me do it and I’m injured, I can sue that company. They aren’t protected, the vaccine manufacturers are protected because of the way the laws have been written, so they’re just going like crazy. Everybody should get it, cha-ching, cha-ching. But companies that insist that you get it in these schools, these universities that are insisting, they are liable. There’s going to be some lawsuits, and when that finally starts hitting in a big way, I think businesses will have to think twice about whether or not they want to become liable for the damage these vaccines are causing because these damages are just going to start accumulating to the point where it’s not going to be possible to keep them hidden.   [01:42:37] Ashley James: You just mentioned, I hope we’re protected on our amendment rights to be able to have freedom of speech. The next episode I’m publishing actually after this one is an interview I did recently with a doctor who has practiced for many years, and he’s an MD who studied holistic medicine. He chose to treat all of his COVID patients with the same formula, the same protocol that he has treated all upper respiratory illnesses for the last 20,30 years using natural medicine. He had such a huge success rate. He published it on his blog. He’s been running a blog since the ‘90s. And it was something like certain vitamins, certain things, you inhale—all-natural substances. And he also would do an injection in the buttocks of ozone. Most of the stuff you could do at home and take it home, that kind of thing. At that time, he had treated just about 100 patients and all of them survived. This was early on last year. The FCC wrote him a letter—FCC, not FDA—saying, you’re in violation, you have to take this down. You have to take your blog down. He said, what are you talking about? They said, you cannot make claims that you’re treating COVID-19, you can’t do that. Because there are no published studies. He said, well, I’m practicing medicine. I’m a doctor. Aren’t I allowed to practice medicine the way I see fit? They said, no, you are not allowed to do that. If he said, I treat arthritis with these vitamins and minerals. I cure arthritis with this, this, this. If he said that, they didn’t have a problem, which he did on his blog for many years. They had a problem with the fact that he was treating and publishing that he was treating COVID-19. So he said, okay, I’ll do what you say. I’m going to go publish a study. Then he got all of his information together. He’s now out of 400 patients at this point with COVID, and all of them lived and very few hospitalized. I don’t remember the exact numbers. It was like five or something, It was a very small amount. But he had great, great, great success. They recovered really well. And so then he found a journal, and he published it. He came back to the FCC and said, here, a published study proving that I can claim that this is a treatment. They said no, it needs to be a placebo double-blind study. So they keep changing the target. But he said that’s unethical. When I know what works for my patients to then do a placebo and let them die or let them be harmed, that is unethical. I hope we still have our first amendment rights, he’s married to a lawyer. He tried to fight it. He then took his blog down and then he wrote a book. He found out that a blog on the internet is not protected, for some reason. When he’s laying out the treatment plan for COVID-19. And then he said, but apparently, a book is still considered a protected free speech and so he wrote a book and published it with all of his findings basically. That definitely scares me.   [01:46:30] Dr. Paul Thomas: So I wrote a book early on in this COVID outbreak because I had a dear friend almost die. He was hospitalized before I even knew he was sick. They wanted to intubate him so badly and he just said no way. He’d already been hearing the reports that once you’re intubated, it was an 80% chance of dying. He went with almost very low oxygen for three nights, and couldn’t sleep. You know if he fell asleep he’d be dead. I was able to help him a little bit by just texting him once he could get access to his phone. But yeah, my book was accepted on Amazon and then last minute was taken down because I did not adhere to the World Health Organization criteria. I didn’t meet World Health Organization standards on the management of COVID.   [01:47:15] Ashley James: What are the World Health Organization standards on the management of COVID? Is it to wear a mask and wait until the vaccine comes out?   [01:47:22] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yeah, you’ve got it. At that point, it was do nothing and wait until you’re bad enough to be intubated. I mean, it was insanity. It was pretty clear that having really robust vitamin D levels is probably the most important thing you can do. Everybody should be doing that now and forevermore, just because that’s the one vitamin we’re almost universally deficient in because you have to be in sunlight to make enough active vitamin D, and we wear clothes when we’re outside. If we’re in the Northern Hemisphere, far away from the equator, the sun doesn’t do its job very well, anyway.   [01:47:56] Ashley James: And you also have to have a healthy liver, healthy kidneys, and enough healthy fats.   [01:47:59] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yup. Anyway, censorship is alive and well, and it’s getting worse and worse. It’s a real problem for our democracy.   [01:48:07] Ashley James: There’s a concerted effort to make the population do what they say, and that is not in our best interests when we look at the data, and that scares me. There are so many listeners who are like, I trust these people, I trust these organizations. These organizations have good people in them. Yes, every organization has good people in them. We don’t know what’s going on at the top, right? Why is it that these different organizations, why is Amazon is so eager to comply with the World Health Organization instead of the Constitution? Why are these independent companies so eager to follow this one direction when this one direction is showing it’s doing harm? And why is showing alternatives that are proven safe and effective becoming illegal?   [01:49:09] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yup. There’s a huge financial incentive. It’s all about control and money. Power, control, and money have always been underlying in any major shift. This is modern-day book burning. I mean, we really have a problem on our hands. Listeners, if you’re still with us—this show has been going on a while—take your power back. You the individual have the power to live free, but only if you insist on it because they’re coming for you.   [01:49:44] Ashley James: Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Paul Thomas. I value your work. My listeners are used to long interviews because they love really, really learning the nitty-gritty from our guests, and you’ve definitely laid out some very interesting points. We’re going to make sure that all the links to everything that Dr. Paul Thomas said are in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. Is there anything that you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview or anything that you really want to make sure came across in today’s interview?   [01:50:12] Dr. Paul Thomas: Listeners, please, just be kind to yourself. Do whatever you can to get away from fear because fear is bad for your immune system. So number one thing for that is just turn off the TV. Get outdoors as much as you can. If you get out into nature, you’re walking in a forest, you’re swimming in the ocean, or in the garden, in any way you can get out in nature, you will notice that the rest of the animal kingdom is absolutely fine. Isn’t that interesting? None of them are lining up for a vaccine. They are absolutely fine even in the toxic world that we have. So, remember that. You are uniquely gifted by your birth with a very good immune system and a way to heal yourself, but you do need to get the right nutrients, you need to avoid toxins. Just be careful about what you might put into your body, consider it your temple, and take vitamin D if nothing else. And then prepare yourself in the event that you do get sick with this COVID. It’s pretty rare, but if it happens, don’t just sit around waiting to get sicker. Go to the frontline doctors. Check out my show, doctorsandscience.com. The show is called Against the Wind: Doctors & Science Under Fire. I’m trying to bring to you what you need to know to remain healthy despite this crazy world we’re living in. I’m sending you love and wishing you the very best. Thank you Ashley so much for having me on your show.   [01:51:50] Ashley James: Thank you so much.     Get Connected With Dr. Paul Thomas!  Official Website Pediatric Health Outcomes Initiative Vaccine Friendly Doctors Facebook – Dr. Paul Thomas Facebook – The Vaccine-Friendly Plan Facebook – Integrative Pediatrics Facebook – Dr. Paul Thomas MD Twitter Book by Dr. Paul Thomas   The Vaccine-Friendly Plan Book Recommended Book by Dr. Paul Thomas An Epidemic of Absence by Moises Velasquez-Manoff

To buy the Nadovim NAD supplement that Ashley recommends, use coupon code LTH at nadovim.com or use this link to apply the coupon code directly: https://bit.ly/3uL3FEl   Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucliotide Supplement, NADOVIM (NAD+) The Missing Link to Energy, Brain Function and Longevity https://www.learntruehealth.com/nicotinamide-adenine-dinucliotide-supplement-nadovim-nad-the-missing-link-to-energy-brain-function-and-longevity   Highlights: What is NAD+ Benefits of using NAD+ Importance of having passion and purpose for the overall well-being  Anything that’s a toxin required NAD+   NAD+ is important for the body’s overall function, but not a lot of people have heard of it. In this episode, Caspar Szulc explains what NAD+ is and what are the benefits of taking NAD+. He also shares how Nadovim is different from other NAD+ supplements on the market.   Intro: Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. This episode is about a supplement that I had never heard of. It’s a molecule that our body absolutely needs in order for the mitochondria to convert food into energy. I’m surprised I had never heard of it until a few weeks ago. My friend and I were sitting around talking while our kids were in gymnastics. She said, you know my favorite supplement, have you ever heard of it? And I had not.  She said this is the difference between me just dragging through the day and me skipping through the day, and she’s a very busy mom with a demanding career. I’ve always known her to be full of energy and always be standing and moving around completing stuff. When she has days off she wants to go for hikes. I mean, she’s that kind of person. I’m like, you’re on a day off, why don’t we just chill here? She’s like, no, let’s go. Let’s go do stuff.  She’s one of those people that has such energy, and I never thought she had energy problems. But she told me that she really relies on this and a few other supplements just to make her body function more optimally, which then, in turn, gives her sustainable energy. That’s when I got really excited about learning more about this, and it just so happens that I was interviewing this guest the next week. Now, when I did the interview, I had never tried the supplement before. Since the interview, I have tried it. I’ve been taking it for the last few days and I really did notice a difference, which is cool because there are so many supplements out there that I haven’t noticed a huge difference. This one I was having a particularly hard day, it was a few days ago and I was having kind of a rough day. If you’ve been a listener and you’ve listened to past episodes, you may know that I was pregnant, I lost my daughter at birth, and then a few days later I got COVID and my body was just really run down because of grief, being in shock, and healing from postpartum. The last month, my body’s been through a lot, and on top of that, we’re moving. We’re actually downsizing 2700 square feet into a Fifth Wheel RV. Our life has been kind of crazy the last month and a half. So a few days ago I just had really low energy. Emotionally just very drained, kind of feeling depressed but pushing through it. Definitely feeling grief, and I was just continuing to mentally stick to focusing on this positive outcome we’re going to have, focusing on what I’m grateful for, but still, my body was not where my mind wanted to be. It was definitely very low energy.  Caffeine can wake you up, but it doesn’t really give you energy. You can still be awake and exhausted, so that’s not really the answer. I take all my vitamins and I eat as healthy as I can. Then I took this supplement and about an hour later I just noticed I’m not exhausted anymore. It’s not jitters, you’re not feeling hyper. I wasn’t feeling hyper. I haven’t felt hyper on it. I just noticed that all that fatigue was gone. We’ve gotten so much more done since then. We’ve been able to complete so much more of our moving, decluttering, selling, giving away, donating, or getting rid of all of our stuff. That’s really neat. I’ve also noticed that sort of deep depression has really eased up, the sensations of deep sadness have really eased up. And then in this interview, he talks about that. He talks about how this supplement really supports the brain as well as the body in producing energy, but people have noticed better sleep. I’ve noticed I’ve had, since taking it, much deeper dreams, much more vivid, colorful, detailed dreams, which is really interesting, so I must be getting deeper sleep.  Not that I ever really have had brain fog lately, it’s just coming down from all the events that I’ve had recently, I’ve noticed that this supplement has made things a bit easier. That’s a lot. That’s a lot of really positive payoffs for me. Even late into the evening, I just have the ability to keep going whereas I might have just called it a day at 4:00 or 5:00 PM and said, okay, I’m done with these tasks until tomorrow. Like last night, it was much later in the evening and we’re like, oh, I could keep going. This is really interesting. It’s what the body uses to convert our food into energy and we’re often depleted in it. We talk about in this interview why we’re depleted in it, where it comes from, and how we can take this supplement. The guy I interviewed, he formulated one that’s very high quality, so I recommend you check out his. The links are going to be the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. He gives us a coupon code. All the listeners, we get a discount which is great. The coupon code being LTH.  Enjoy today’s interview. Share it with your friends who might be going through some mentally or emotionally stressful times. I think it’s good for anyone who wants good sustainable energy, but it’s also good for people who have brain fog or are just really stressed out because I have noticed it has made it easier for me the last few days that I’ve been on it. That’s really exciting. Enjoy today’s show, share it with your friends. Let me know if you do try it and what your results are. I’m always curious to hear how different natural supplements or natural programs help people. You can join the Facebook group. Just search Learn True Health on Facebook or go to learntruehealth.com/group, that’ll redirect you to the group. Share what your experiences are with Nadovim and let me know. I’m really curious, let everyone know. I will keep sharing my experiences. I also shared it with my husband and he noticed that there was just—it’s not like this boom like if you take a shot of espresso, you feel something jittery almost right away. It’s not that, it’s just like an hour later you go, wow, I can feel it. I’ve got more energy. You got more drive, you got more motivation. Your body’s just functioning better, so that’s really cool. Awesome. Well, enjoy today’s show and let me know what you think. I’m really curious to hear the results that the other listeners get, so stay in touch.   [00:07:11] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 460. I am so excited for today’s guest. Caspar Szulc is on the show, President and co-founder of Innovative Medicine. Now, what’s really serendipitous is about two weeks ago I was hanging out with one of my friends while our kids did their gymnastics class together. We were talking about different supplements. She goes, have you ever heard of NAD+? I look at her, I’m like, that sounds familiar but tell me more. She goes, well, it is my favorite supplement. And I said, okay, why? Now, this is one of my friends who’s super healthy, crazy. Probably the healthiest friend I know. She’s so fit, she always has energy. She has two young kids. She has a career so she’s just like always, always on. She’s always standing or hiking, and I’ve never seen her sit. She just has energy, and I never ever think of her as someone who needs a supplement. But what she tells me about NAD+ is she said she experimented with a lot of supplements and NAD+ had the most noticeable energy boost for her. I’m quoting her, “It’s the difference between dragging through the day and skipping through it,” and I always see her skip through her days. Now I know her magic formula is not cocaine or coffee, it’s NAD+. Then I saw that I was interviewing you and I thought, whoa, this is so cool because you, your father, and your company created this supplement. I’m really excited to learn about what it does and how it supports our body’s ability to properly produce enough energy so we can skip through our days. Welcome to the show.   [00:09:07] Caspar Szulc: Thanks for having me, and that was a great intro. I’m hoping to skip through this and give people a lot of good information.   [00:09:14] Ashley James: Now, do you take your own supplement?   [00:09:16] Caspar Szulc: Of course. I mean, honestly, I think a lot of what started like why go into the supplement world because we were really in the medical world—we have a medical clinic—was what would be something I would like to take. That’s why I started a company. It’s like what would I want to see? That was the basis of it. So I take Nadovim daily.   [00:09:35] Ashley James: So Nadovim, which the links to everything that we talked about today are going to be the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com, and you’re giving us a discount code. You’re giving us a coupon code. The coupon code is LTH as in Learn True Health. Of course, that’s the one we like to use, so all the listeners know that one. Nadovim is a supplement, it’s an NAD+ supplement. I have so many questions. We’re going to talk about why is it better than the other brands out there, what it does, how it affects the body, and how it supports the body’s ability to make energy in a really healthy way? But before we get into all that, I’d love a little bit of background information. What happened in your life that led you to where you are now? What happened to lead you into helping create being part of the team that has created and distributed this supplement?   [00:10:34] Caspar Szulc: It’s a good question, one that I get asked a lot. It’s like what happened? I was recently asked this for a survey for top entrepreneurs to fill out that my PR team had me do. It was like, what was your aha moment of all this? I don’t have one. I don’t know, I was frustrated. I was born into this, first off, in a sense, meaning my father is a doctor, my mother’s a psychologist. They come from Europe, they have a little bit of a different background, but I’ve always been around medicine, health, and this idea of being healthy is just something that was really ingrained in me from day one on this earth. It’s not that this is something new or I had anything happen to get me into the field somewhat. I used to travel around the world with my father. When you go to conferences and just be around doctors as a five-year-old in China or something, that was just normal to me. I had that sort of upbringing, that happened in a sense. Then I went to school. I went to Boston University and got into finance and marketing, which was a little bit different. My father definitely wanted me to be a doctor. I was just like, you work really hard dad. I see patients and blood isn’t my thing. Here I am 20 years later after that conversation in medicine talking to a lot of patients and working really long hours also.  After I graduated with a finance and marketing degree I went into finance, became a financial analyst, thought this was the corporate road, the ladder to success, and living the American dream. Within a year I was burned out, frustrated, and miserable. It wasn’t what I thought. It wasn’t creative. I was just hitting buttons really and just typing in trades and seeing that they are correct and answering to 10 people above me that didn’t want any input on anything. A year of that is someone that is creative that really did value health and feeling burned out when you’re 21, 22. That’s not good. That’s a sign that something is going on. There was an opportunity actually that my co-founder who was a family friend growing up who was in medical school at the time and was also frustrated with things and saw what my father was doing in this integrative field because my father left the conventional field and being an anesthesiologist at a hospital to start to help patients regain their health rather than just mass symptoms and manage the disease.  He said, there’s a great opportunity here to get involved with a company side so that would get more people to know about this because not enough people do know about this idea of advanced integrative medicine, of personalizing, of really approaching things at their root causes, and mind, body, spirit, and all these things that are now pretty popular but this was the early 2000s when no one was really talking about it so much. That’s what led me into this, into starting a company in innovative medicine, into really pushing the boundaries of what we do in our medical center, and still traveling the world as I did like a little child to find out what is new out there. Experts in different countries and continents, what are they doing that we can apply in medicine to help people because we do have a problem right now? Over 60% are chronically ill and people are depressed. They have less energy than ever. They’re just depleted. It’s become a mission. The whole thing is I’ve done this my whole life, been around it, and I just want to expose more people to it to empower them. That’s really the backstory to everything I do and what I’ve been doing in this company for about 20 years now.   [00:14:29] Ashley James: Now, what you told me before we hit record is that your team for 10 years was researching and developing Nadovim, this NAD+ supplement, but in the last two years it was very intense R&D research. Can you tell us a bit about that?   [00:14:51] Caspar Szulc: Yeah. So I mean 10 years ago would be from the point of, hey, let’s do a supplement. We know there are great things that we’re utilizing within the clinic that are getting great results with patients, and they’re all different types of things. It wasn’t just NAD+. NAD+ we probably introduced around five or so years ago in an IV format into the center after learning more about it. We were looking at everything early on—glutathione—and we were kind of like, what will it be? What will our supplement be? And that was like 10 years. And then around two, three years ago, maybe a little bit more, we started to really focus on NAD+ because what we saw when applying it intravenously was that patients who had brain fog, neurological disorders, early-onset dementia—anything related really to the brain—saw a vast improvement when using this compound. We’re seeing it firsthand in really tough cases—parkinsonism, Lyme disease, neurological Lyme disease, again, dementia, anyone with a brain injury, and they were improving drastically in some cases.   [00:16:05] Ashley James: Multiple sclerosis?   [00:16:07] Caspar Szulc: MS. I mean, you could go across the board naming neurological pieces or something with a neurological function. When you talk about brain fog or depression, that’s linked to so many chronic conditions also. That’s a symptom, and that was greatly improving as we added this into the treatment—NAD+ infusions.   [00:16:27] Ashley James: What about autism?   [00:16:29] Caspar Szulc: Again, I look at everything from the source. Autism, while it’s a neurological disorder, you could also say it’s a toxicity disorder, it’s a disorder of emotions, and all sorts of things there too. I don’t like to ever say diagnoses that are multi-pronged outside just neurological, especially in children that this is the key or the answer. Again, NAD+ isn’t the answer to anything, I would say really. It’s a wonderful addition to help with the functioning of something, and we could get into that later.   [00:17:05] Ashley James: Perfect. Yes, absolutely. Now, my limited understanding—I’m really excited for you to help us dive in deep and understand it much more—is that this supplement supports the mitochondria, which is the powerhouse of the cell. I definitely want to get into that. First, can you tell us what is NAD+? What does that stand for and what is it?   [00:17:26] Caspar Szulc: So nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide. NAD+, and there’s a plus added, is basically a coenzyme factor that is in the electron chain transport—the whole transition of it basically. Actually, when I talked to experts about this originally, it was explained to me that it’s as important as oxygen in the body. Every single cell in your body needs NAD+, and it’s basically the way we transfer over from food and everything we take in water into energy within the cells within the mitochondria. It’s incredibly essential. The one thing I also learned is NAD+ gets depleted rather quickly as we age, and especially with modern-day living, meaning whenever you drink alcohol, one molecule of alcohol, it requires two molecules of NAD+ to get that out of the body. Same with prescription drugs, same with oxidative stress or just general stressors in general.   [00:18:33] Ashley James: This is fascinating, sorry to interrupt. Does the body make NAD+?   [00:18:39] Caspar Szulc: The body basically has stores of NAD+ that it will require to create this energy, but no, it requires an outside source, and you get it from food as well. It’s just things that are usually higher in protein or anything. You could actually do that, it’s just not a large amount you could say. Again, at the rate we deplete today, it is problematic. This is probably the reason so many people don’t know what NAD+ is because if it’s as important as oxygen to life and every single cell needs it, how come we don’t know about this? I was thinking the same thing, and everyone I spoke to answered because we never really had a problem with it before. We always had these stores, as we age it goes down, but it’s not enough to really cause an issue. If we eat normally, then fine. We have no need to know about this NAD++ because things are working fine. If it’s not broke don’t fix it or you don’t even need to know so much about it.  But because we live in a day and age where we are go, go, go, where we consume lots of things that actually take up our NAD+ supplies, we’re being depleted at an exponential rate. We basically have NAD+ depletion or something called NED that is happening to us, and it’s happening faster and faster and faster. It’s almost like as we’re aging a little bit quicker as well, it’s really the NAD+ that’s shifting out of us. And with that, we have the myriad of things that can go wrong when your mitochondria don’t have the energy to replicate, to do all the functions a cell has to. It’s really at the cellular level that we’re looking at where dysfunction starts to happen and that could turn into so many different things.   [00:20:32] Ashley James: To simplify it, the mitochondria, which is this part of the cell that makes energy, and actually, fascinatingly enough, mitochondria is like a bacteria. So it’s this really interesting beautiful symbiotic relationship we have with it. It needs NAD+ in order to take our food and turn it into energy, and when we don’t have enough of it, we can eat lots of food but it’s not getting converted into energy because NAD+ is being used up because of the stressors in our life—the alcohol, the toxic stress, drugs over the counter or prescription.  70% of adult Americans are on at least one prescription medication, so 70% of Americans are being depleted, their NAD+ is being depleted, and almost everyone drinks alcohol. I feel like an oddity because I very, very, very, very rarely drink. We don’t have alcohol in our house. I could enjoy a glass of wine maybe twice a year, but that’s just it. It’s a very rare treat, and it’s not even a treat. It’s just a very rare thing in my life, and everyone’s ordering drinks. It’s very interesting.  So I imagine the greater population is consuming alcohol on a daily or weekly basis, so they’re depleting their NAD+ significantly. In addition to the NAD+ being depleted from the drugs they’re taking, in addition to the NAD+ being depleted from the toxic environment that their liver is trying to get rid of all the toxins. There are 50,000 man-made chemicals that are new to our body that has been invented in less than the last hundred years. It’s over 50,000. I’ve heard other doctors quote 80,000 chemicals that are in our air, water, and soil, so they’re in our food, they’re in our environment, and our liver does not know what to do with it, but it takes up a lot of resources for the body to have to get rid of this. No wonder we’re feeling so sluggish. So thinking back to my friend who says NAD+ is the difference between just being draggy all day or just skipping through her day, that makes so much sense. So Nadovim is your NAD+ supplement. Is there anything else in Nadovim? Is Nadovim in any way different from all the other NAD+ supplements out there?   [00:23:05] Caspar Szulc: Yeah, it’s actually drastically different in a number of ways. So Nadovim is one of the first to market that actually uses fully formed NAD+, so it’s not a precursor. Most of the others go with the precursor, which is nicotinamide and nicotinamide riboside (NR). So anytime you take an NR supplement, you require other elements to it as well to then recombine and turn into NAD+. Absolutely, I’m not saying that won’t help, but there are processes that have to happen in the body. Some energy is actually expensed to require you to take that precursor, turn it into NAD+, bring it to the cells, and then fuel those cells. What we realized was that listen, you don’t use NR in infusions and no doctor does that. They use real full-formed NAD+. It is a larger and delicate molecule, but we also realized when we looked at the research is taken alone, it is true that it gets somewhat hydrolyzed within the small intestine and you lose some of that bioavailability. But when you combine it with other elements, especially ones like coenzyme q10, which have been studied when they take it orally with NAD+, it’s great for chronic fatigue syndrome patients. They showed a study out of Spain that showed great improvement in HRV and general energy levels when done together in specific ratios. We did that and really we approached this as what is the best synergistic model of different elements we could use in ingredients to get the best results? I always say it’s like creating a wonderful meal. If you’re going to a Michelin star restaurant, they’re never going to just put a really nice piece of steak on your plate and say eat it. They’re always going to garnish it with something. They’re always going to put some nice vegetables that complement it, whatever it is—mashed potato, anything with it that comes together and you get a really good meal. That’s what you should be looking for also in a supplement—something that enhances each ingredient and works together synergistically. So we also included glycine, great for the brain, great for memory. We included thiamine. We included bacopa, which is of course a known herbal and enhancer of cognitive function. Cat’s claw, inflammation was an issue we looked at as well. So there are eight ingredients in it together and we looked at the precise dosage of everything in there. So when you have 33 milligrams of coenzyme q10, it doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s really there to boost the actual NAD+, which you get 200 milligrams of. That increases the bioavailability, which helps with the actual delivery of it. Why we say where most people look at NAD+ or NR supplements is just cellular health and overall well-being, we looked at the brain because we added those elements such as bacopa and everything and realized 20% of all your energy and NAD+ is consumed by the brain. That is where you should be looking if you have things like brain fog, if you have things like memory loss, and even very small.  While we used it in the first year or two strictly within the clinical aspect, gave this to doctors with our network and used it on the tough cases of neurological diseases. Once we opened it to the public and started getting the feedback, you get things like I used to forget certain words, where I put my keys, that doesn’t happen anymore. I used to need that second cup of coffee in the afternoon, that doesn’t happen anymore. I used to forget different things throughout the day, that doesn’t happen anymore. It was wonderful to see that what we looked into the research, what we planned out, what we did lots of R&D about was actually happening, both in the population that was sick and really required to boost, but also the population that thought they were healthy and thought this was just declined in aging but it really wasn’t. It was NAD+ depletion. Lots of people are going through just fatigue and brain fog, that’s a huge population.  That’s why we created this product because we said, what’s the lowest hanging fruit that could impact the most people? What we saw on our patient basis was brain fog, neurological decline, and then that also related to the general population because I think everyone can say we have a little bit of this depletion and this need for focus more than ever. Where most people thought they were aging and going through this decline in their just general being, we realized that they were probably being depleted of NAD+, so this addition of this formula that gave them not just NAD+ but gave them the coenzyme q10, gave them bacopa, gave them thiamine, gave them the glycine. These were all together really helpful in restoring the proper brain function, getting rid of that brain fog, and also increasing energy throughout.   [00:28:15] Ashley James: That’s fascinating. You guys, for two years, did almost like a clinical trial? Drug companies do clinical trials. In that, you worked with doctors and their patients, had the doctors observe what was happening with their patients and then reported back to you. Then, of course, you and your own clinic, you’d been using NAD+ intravenously like you had shared, and then you’re using Nadovim in your clinic and seeing the results you were getting before you opened it up for the public to buy.   [00:28:49] Caspar Szulc: Right. And we were fortunate enough that we started as a company that really worked with practitioners first. Where we started this company was really education with other practitioners to show them what we were doing within our clinic. So we built up a network around the world of doctors that we went and spoke to. We were in India, we were in Brazil, we were in all these places showing them different techniques in integrative medicine. So when it came time to introduce a product, we said, well, why don’t we prove it on the medical side of things? It’s one thing to prove it in a lab, it’s another thing to prove it with the toughest cases and actually get the medical and clinical experience of what is going on and to have that come from the doctors themselves. When the doctor said, I did nothing, I changed nothing in the protocol. I gave this supplement to someone with parkinsonism and their tremors greatly reduced. That was a testament to us. And while that’s not a double-blind placebo, we understand that. We really do value that clinical experience because as we know, tons of things have gone through double-blind placebos and shown great, great success in them only to then be used by the general population they don’t see that same level of success. We value doctors’ opinions. We really value those connections we had with the medical community itself that was already in this integrated world and trying to look at what else can I give to my patients that can improve their outcomes. When we were able to provide them with Nadovim and some of these people already doing NAD+ infusions, but perhaps it was supplemental to take that home because NAD+ infusions are costly, number one. They’re lengthy, they’re several hours. They do sometimes have some—they’re not side effects, but they’re unwanted. If you push NAD+ too quickly intravenously, you’ll get this tightness in the chest and a feeling of anxiety, and a lot of people don’t like that. When you could provide them with a daily dose of NAD+ orally and they’re seeing similar results to what they were doing in the IV on let’s say a bi-weekly basis, that’s a wonderful extra option for any doctor to utilize. And then to be able to provide that safely to the public as well, we were really happy with the outcome from what we saw, probably more so than what we thought would happen.   [00:31:06] Ashley James: Oh absolutely. Now, the IV is getting right in the body. How did you figure out how to make NAD+ orally be readily absorbed by the body? Is it the cofactors that are also in the Nadovim supplement? How did you guys figure it out? In many supplements, so much is lost through poor absorption. If someone has a messed up gut, they’re not absorbing all their nutrients. How do you bypass that?   [00:31:40] Caspar Szulc: First off, knowledge of bioavailability is really important and understanding. We’ve worked with so many different compounds orally over the years at the clinic understanding that number one, quality is always the most important I think. There are so many different sources of NAD+, and that’s what sometimes upsets me is just this idea that NAD+ is NAD+. That’s the same idea as like, all right, a car is a car. Show me a Ferrari and then show me like a beat up old car, they’re not the same thing. You will gladly pay a premium for one and some you don’t even want to get into because you might not make it to point B in that. The same thing goes for supplements that goes for medicine, and I always say, in no other realm is it more important to put quality first than in medicine and health where it literally dictates your results. We had to go around from different suppliers and different nutritional manufacturers and see and test their NAD+, look for those purity sources, look for ones that are unadulterated, and really look for ones that had the highest quality to them. Then when you add in the cofactors on top of that, I think that alone is already a successful way to increase bioavailability. Now the one thing I’ll say about NAD+, I think it’s still often misunderstood as to how it really works, and I think we’re still learning about it because a lot of the competitors or people in our world state that yes, once you ingest it, it’s hydrolyzed and it won’t make its way into the bloodstream. That’s based on a 1980 study of rats that you could look at, and we did. There were definitely some flaws to that and some conceptions there that didn’t really make all that much sense. Once we did look at other studies that were more recent coming out of Japan and other places, you could see that there is new knowledge to understanding how it can be broken up and basically recombined. My co-founder who’s a doctor looked into this and started looking at those studies and published an article on the bioavailability of not just precursors but NAD+ itself. There’s a couple of conclusions that it came to.  Number one is that it gets broken apart but then it gets recombined. If you had to take a car through a smaller space than it could fit, what would you do? You take off the wheels maybe, you’ll separate a little bit, but once it’s back in there, you can recombine it pretty easily. As opposed to even the precursors do need to be broken as well to go through and be available, and then they need to recombine with something else that’s in the bloodstream before they become NAD+. So you’re going to require those extra elements whereas you already had the whole car going in. Then there are new understandings of how certain transporters in the gut can actually take the whole molecule and bring it through. That’s something scientists are just tapping into I think just last year they found that larger molecules host that NAD+ and those that are actually associated with some of the precursors that even larger the NR are crossing fully formed through the gut barrier in and become bioavailable and useful that way. I mean, science is ever-changing. That whole idea of the science is settled always makes me chuckle a little bit when people say that because science by nature changes almost every single day when we make new discoveries, and we’ll never stop making new discoveries about these things. It’s kind of interesting to see it anecdotally because that’s where we started. We started, okay, you give someone NAD+, they get better. All right, what about oral? They got better too, that’s anecdotal. And then you start to see the data that’s coming out that you research and it’s matching up. We didn’t even know when we first started putting coenzyme q10 with NAD+ that there were any research papers or anything. We just went off the knowledge of each individually. And then it got brought to our attention, hey there is this study out of Spain where they did it and they put the two together and supplemented over eight weeks and saw a vast improvement in HRV. It was like, oh, wow. That’s basically validating what we were seeing. That is the breakdown of where we went in this idea of bioavailability—always looking at quality first, looking at the purity of it, looking at what the cofactors can be that can increase not just absorption rate but effectiveness once it gets in, and then, of course, looking at what the data is showing. Are we seeing a placebo in all these patients, or is there something to it? And I think the science is catching up that there is something to it, and I know there are a lot of great, great researchers out there that are just looking at NAD+ and finding new things all the time. I think we’re still in a relatively early stage of understanding the usefulness and also how it works, the mechanisms of NAD+ within the body that go beyond this understanding of it just supplies the mitochondria with energy, it gets in through this, and you need precursors or you need this. It’s ever-evolving, which is kind of cool. At the same time, I understand it could be a little bit confusing for some. But at the end of the day, we care about results. We care about actually helping people. If that comes first before the data and research can really validate over and over, we’re okay with that. We hope it’ll catch up soon enough.   [00:37:14] Ashley James: So, Nadovim is giving the body the nutrients that are natural to the body, the body needs, but the body is depleted in. That’s vastly different from taking a drug or even self-medicating with coffee, with sugar. I remember a time in my life where I would go to coffee and sugar just to wake up in the morning. I had a really, really bad chronic adrenal fatigue in my 20s, it was ridiculous. I went to see a functional medicine doctor who actually performed in the Olympics twice. She and I are still friends today, she’s amazing. She’s in her late 70s and she still runs marathons. She’s just super awesome. I want to be her when I grow up. This was 12 years ago and she looked at my cortisol levels and said, I have never seen cortisol levels this low. You absolutely have chronic adrenal fatigue based on all my symptoms and my blood work. And then back then, I went to several MDs and they just brushed me off. They hadn’t learned about chronic adrenal fatigue. They’re like, well, you don’t have Addison’s disease. Just go home, drink coffee, or whatever. But I went to her and she’s like, okay, we’re going to get you better with supplements, a better diet, and lifestyle changes. It validated me because doctors said there’s nothing wrong with me or whatever until I saw her and she knew to run the labs to see that I had chronic adrenal fatigue. She said, I’d never seen someone so low. The closest I’ve ever seen was after I finished the Olympics, after her training. After very intense, she goes, my cortisol levels were about the same, but I bounced back and you’ve been this way for years. I know she would absolutely have put me on Nadovim if she had had access to it back then, but how she helped me to start to get on the path to healing was finding out all the different vitamins, minerals, and things that my body was missing and changing my diet. It took me years of just constantly researching and looking through natural medicine and working with several Naturopathic doctors until it all clicked and I found the keys to solving my health problems. I’m really excited about Nadovim because it’s what the body is missing, and when I started taking what my body was missing, even a really high-quality methylated multi B vitamin supplement was life turned on. All of a sudden, the lights turned on in my body because my body was depleted. And then I started taking different minerals, 60 minerals highly absorbed by the body, all of a sudden it was like the lights turned on even more and I started to feel my body come online. These are things that should be in our food but aren’t in our food because they’re food supply. They’re not our food in the amounts that our body needs, and our body is under way more stress so it burns through our nutrients much quicker. Doctors wanted to put me on drugs. They had different drugs for me, and of course, my body doesn’t have a deficiency for whatever drug they wanted to give me. My body was missing these key nutrients that are in Nadovim. So it’s very intriguing. I’ve had clients who say, because I’ll help them get on like a really great multi B vitamin that’s highly absorbed by the body and actually all 16 vitamins and some minerals. They’ll say, well, how long do I have to take this? I take it every day but when can I get off of it? It’s just such an interesting question. It’s like, well how long do you want to feel healthy because this is what your body uses every day. When you’re supplementing, when you’re filling in the gaps of your nutrient needs, you want to take that every day for the rest of your life. Your body needs vitamin C every day right, so if you’re not getting enough from your diet you need to supplement in order to give your body all the raw building blocks it needs to have a proper cellular function. So your body’s using everything in Nadovim to properly function. We have to think this isn’t a drug. You get on a drug and you want to know when you’re going to get off the drug, right? But with this, this isn’t a drug. This is supplementing what you are lacking, what your body needs in order to optimally function. Now, that leads me to my question because biohackers and athletes have really latched on to Nadovim and NAD+ to boost their results. I’d love for you to talk about it because we talked about people who are feeling sick or even just people who think they’re healthy but notice they have a decline in their energy or their mental clarity. But what about those people who are just super healthy like athletes, why are they so excited about Nadovim?   [00:42:27] Caspar Szulc: Well, one thing I want to get to that you say was really interesting that I’ve heard echoed by so many doctors is this idea that you will never be depleted of a chemical. You will never be depleted of a drug or anything. You will be depleted of so many other things, and that’s a cause of the way we live. Even our food supply is depleted, even our soil somewhat being depleted. I had Dr. James DiNicolantonio recently wrote the mineral fix. He said basically the soil we have right now is 30%–50% less magnesium than it was 30 years ago. So we have 30%–50% of Americans are basically depleted of magnesium. The numbers add up right there, and so much of what is going on is not a depletion of a chemical. It is a depletion of the nutrients, which we require, which are building blocks to our body’s functioning. That’s really important for people to realize that when you go on a drug, that’s just keeping you in a state where you’re managing something, you’re managing the depletion in a sense that is more natural, and then you start to become dependent on a drug. We never like that approach. I do think it’s really important to state that something like Nadovim and everything we do at our company and how we try and teach other doctors to work is not to look at someone as, oh, you’re depleted of a drug, let me give it to you. But let’s find out what’s really going on. What’s at the source of this? What is that underlying dysfunction or root cause and go after that? That’s a really important distinction of how you approach your health as well because anyone could say, oh, you want more energy, just take in more caffeine. Drink 5-hour Energy all day, some people do it. But trust me, that’s not healthy. That is the opposite of healthy. Our biorhythms and the chronobiological system are totally screwed up when you do that. That’s what causes adrenal fatigue, causes hormones to go out of balance and everything else, and a cascade of other things you don’t want happening. Now, to get into that idea, I’ve always said that if you look at biohackers and performance optimizers, they are doing the same thing that medicine should be doing, which is absolutely just how do we get you to your best self? How do we optimize your body, mind, and spirit? When we approach medicine, it’s not that we’re just trying to get you to this absence of symptoms, which most of medicine would say, yes, we did it. We cured you because you don’t have symptoms right now. Meanwhile, underlying dysfunction is still there. You probably require ongoing maintenance and you may not feel that good here and there. Really, if you push the goal and the end zone, let’s say, to having complete optimization of your health, of self-healing, of self-management, of getting you to a state where you don’t require caffeine or other things to wake up or pills to go to sleep, that’s what the aim of any medical treatment should be. And that’s also the aim of where biohackers go. They know this because they’re very, very passionate about it. So when they’re looking at compounds to help their mitochondrial function, to help how they’re feeling throughout the day, to give them that 1%-2% edge. I was on Dave Asprey’s podcast and he told me about his experience. He said, it’s really nuanced and that’s when I know something works because I’m already healthy. I’m already taking so many things to optimize me and I’m not in a sick state anymore. But you’re looking for these nuanced improvements and being able to say, okay, I could focus for 20, 30 minutes longer without having to take a break. I can go a little bit more in my workout. We had a professional soccer player who said I’m 21, 22. He said, I’m already full of energy on the field. What was great for me was when I was doing the back area looking at tape and doing all the training that way and the homework you got to do, I was zoned in so much longer after a long day of doing practice. After the physical exertion, I would usually be a little bit mentally exhausted. But with Nadovim, I had that extra edge to now have that mental strength to keep going, to stay really focused when others were zoning out on these things, and I could pick up on the reeds and different offensives I had to defend against. That’s where when you’re talking about these top performers, they’re looking for just any little edge to get ahead, and Nadovim was able to provide that. So I think that’s why they latched on. You had these big guys taking them, talking about it, and saying yeah, I noticed it. I do everything I can. I take 100+ pills sometimes to see what works and what doesn’t, and Nadovim was one of those that actually did bring them to those nuanced senses of improvement and they actually saw it. For them, that means the world. We’re really pleased with that. We started with patients, we started with people that are pretty sick and said, hey, can we help you guys? We didn’t even focus, but what became of it was, yes, the biohackers and athletes know what NAD+ is. They’re also depleting it with lots of energy and just what they’re bringing into their body and also expelling. They understood that if you could optimize and even something that we call pre-plenish your NAD+ levels.  It’s not about replenishing. Many of them would probably show that they’re really taking care of themselves and have pretty good levels of NAD+, but what about really stressful times? Can they pre-plenish so that when the stress hits, when they do have to work 12, 14 hour days, or really go deep into the competition, will they have the levels to keep going? That was something really interesting and something we didn’t see and just kind of happened. It happened very naturally that these top biohackers just got into it as something that started in the medical community. That’s something I’m really looking at right now, how do we bridge that gap between medicine and biohacking? Because I think it’s one in the same really. It’s about how do we get you to your most optimized self and basically the spot where you’re healthiest and happiest.    [00:48:53] Ashley James: I love that you brought it pre-plenish because it reminds me of when athletes carb load. They don’t need all the extra glucose stores for day-to-day function, but they are about to do something really big. They know their body is going to go through the stressful event of a marathon, their competition, or their game, and so they’ll make sure that they’re getting enough carbs and then extra so that they’ve got all the full stores of the blood sugar, the glucose stored in their muscles and their liver. So that when their body is under that stress, it can reach into those reserves. There are certain athletes that are choosing to use ketones for energy, and they don’t have a lick of fat on them so they can’t really wait for the body to burn off some fat for ketones. They’ll supplement with ketones before they go into an event so the body can use up those ketones as energy. My friend had a question and I thought that was interesting. You just mentioned this so this is perfect. You mentioned that we can preload if we know we’re about to go into a stressful event. Let’s say you’re going out for a night drinking with your girlfriends, you can pre-load some Nadovim. And please, take your B vitamin, hydrate, and all that. I don’t advocate for alcohol, but I understand, once in a while, if you’re going to blow off some steam with your girlfriends or something, there are things you can do so you feel really good the next day instead of really crappy the next day. You definitely want to add Nadovim to that to preload if you’re going into that kind of stress. You’re having fun but you know you’re putting stress on the body. But is there a point where it becomes toxic? Is there a point where there’s a dose we should avoid, or is it something the body uses? It doesn’t hurt the body to use it. Getting into understanding that, how long does it take for the body to clear it out of the system? Is it cleared out through the kidneys or through the liver? Can you just explain a little bit about just understanding how much we should take? Is there an upper limit to the dose, and what happens if someone takes too much? How is it cleared out of the body?   [00:51:16] Caspar Szulc: With everything, you could have too much water, you could have too much oxygen, you could have too much of anything in this world. I don’t like when people like there’s no way this could ever harm you or anything. I mean, listen, you could take a bunch and this isn’t anything that is toxic. It will be flushed through the liver. It will be broken down. Will it cause some stress? I’m sure if you took an enormous amount. But you have to understand that a lot of times when you do these infusions, you take in thousands and thousands of milligrams sometimes at a time. We’re talking about 200 that’s going through the oral system, as opposed to 1000 that’s going through an intravenous directly into the bloodstream. There are no toxic elements to that, and that’s a completely safe method of getting NAD+ into the system and utilizing that. It will be somewhat utilized within the cells, and those that aren’t are easily passed out without any of that toxic element that you would have in many synthetic drugs and chemicals. We found it as an incredibly safe method of delivering something that will provide you with energy and that every single cell utilizes, so you go through a lot of NAD+. Again, if you’re talking about someone that is depleted, then it’s important to look at that as a cause of symptoms as a cause of dysfunction in a healthy state. When we look at this idea of are there toxicity, I think at any high, high rate, anything can be a toxin to the body. We all say the devil is in the dosage, but there’s a lot of forgiveness with something like NAD+. There’s a lot of forgiveness with applying it through an oral method where you could take double the dosage, four-pill, that really wouldn’t do too much as opposed to something where if you took a synthetic material, if you doubled that, it may have a huge impact on you. The body is utilizing it. It’s just like with oxygen or anything else, it knows what to do with it. Even if it’s too much, it will change and adapt to that in a way that doesn’t make it toxic that the kidneys can expel, that goes out within the urine and through just through your GI system.  We felt it was a wonderful option for those who are suffering from any type of brain fog, anything like that. And again, I do believe that too many people don’t even recognize that they are suffering from some small kind of version of brain fog, short-term memory loss, all these things. I think it’s almost an epidemic right now where we’re required to focus so much. We’re required to use our brains. You talk about the industrial revolution, we’re required to use our muscles a lot. Now we’re in the information age. We’re in an age where we sit in front of a computer for long bouts of time and need to process things very quickly. All these tabs open you think about and then you have your phone. You walk around anywhere in this day and age, everyone’s going to be looking down their phone and processing so many pieces of information. That’s just the brain at work. We’re asking so much of our brains these days. That’s why it was really important to find something, well, how do we protect that one thing that top scientists said is the most complex object in the universe is your brain? It was really important to find out how to do that without being like this limitless pill, let’s say, from the movie that had so many side effects, that was a chemical. There are definitely ways you could stimulate the brain that is chemically induced. Lots of drugs do that. Adderall is a type of methamphetamine that does that, but that has serious consequences. While I would never compare having Nadovim to something like that, to a drug, I would say that I think it’s a happy medium between nothing or just going about your day and being in that state of brain fog and trying something like Adderall or anything else. We’ve actually had people that were Adderall utilize this and say that it was actually really good to utilize that instead of that and get away from the jitters, get away from the side effects of that, get away from the sleepless nights. I mean, NAD+ is really useful for chronobiological restoration. So people have deeper sleep and we noticed that with people wearing Oura rings. Their sleep score went up dramatically and their deep sleep went up. That was again an unintended benefit for many people who are just trying to enhance their cognitive functioning, then saw better sleep, and saw better skin because again, this is getting into every single cell and helping it regenerate, and helping it do what it needs to do. That’s absolutely going to impact your skin, which needs to regenerate so much. It needs to get toxins out of it, how do you do that? Every cell needs to do that also and expel. When you really break it down, we are truly happy with creating this because while we were honed in on the brain, it had so many other uses, and we hear that from users all the time that so many other improvements happen on top of improving brain function.   [00:56:47] Ashley James: ADHD, people who have problems with concentration, they were enjoying the benefits of Nadovim and seeing that it helped them much better than Adderall, which like you said has those side effects. I have a really close friend who 15 years ago was on Adderall and to this day still suffers from the side effects because it compromised his ability to make healthy stress hormones. This is 15 years later after he’s off those drugs, his body is still not regulating his stress hormones appropriately, that is a side effect. You can get off a drug and you may have side effects years later, which just blows my mind. We’re not given true informed consent when we get on drugs. Informed consent is when the doctor tells you here are all the possible things that could go wrong, here are all the things that could go right, and here are all the alternatives that you could choose to do instead of this. I mean, have you ever had that talk with your doctor? No. They’re like, hey, get on this. You might notice diarrhea, call me if you do. They might list three side effects, but they’re not really telling you you might have long-term damage from this. They’re not going to sit down with you and give you all the studies and explain to you, give you true informed consent. We have to essentially advocate for that and also go do our own research, read through some papers, and inform ourselves about the effects of a drug or a treatment, not just leave it up to the doctor. That’s what true informed consent is. I think if everyone got true informed consent, a lot of people would ask for a second opinion, go see some other kinds of doctors, hopefully, holistic doctors, functional medicine doctors like at your clinic so they’re getting better integrative medicine, and look at other options, look at other choices that would have less side effects or hopefully no side effects and just side benefits seeing other parts of their body healing. Like we’re doing with Nadovim, seeing all these other side benefits like skin. You already knew it was going to help with the brain but seeing that it’s helping improve other systems of the body because every cell that has mitochondria will use NAD+. That makes so much sense. But the fact that you had the testimonials from people who have been on Adderall or know they have ADHD and are seeing that they’re able to perform better on something natural that isn’t going to harm them. It’s natural in that the body is deplete of this substance. It’s what the body needs, not an artificial substance that has all these side effects that actually ends up depleting the body more of NAD+ because the body has to use up more NAD+ in order to clear out those toxins of the drug. It just blows my mind. We take someone with an illness or with symptoms like ADHD, give them something that then depletes them further of NAD+ when their brain actually needed more NAD+ to function better.   [01:00:23] Caspar Szulc: It’s a vicious cycle and you can’t blame the doctors if that’s the option they’re giving. You can’t blame a handyman if he comes and he only has a hammer and he’s trying to fix the pipe and just using that instead of a wrench. Can you really blame them so much? Another point to that whole informed consent is that I think it’s really difficult nowadays to truly have informed consent because it’s so hard to weed through so many different pieces of information. You have one piece of data that shows it’s good, you have another research study that may show you something else. The thing that I would love to see with people that are going through anything is the ability to go in a pattern that makes sense to try things that are the least toxic and easiest to get and then work your way up. Why would you come in with a little bit of pain and go straight to surgery? That happens a lot. A lot of doctors are like, oh, this could be this. Let’s go in with back surgery, which my father performed back surgery. There is a lot of complications that may arise when you start opening and start working on the spine, tons. When I looked at medicine, I thought we had it positioned incorrectly. Aside from the whole informed consent piece of it, it’s that we went from 0 to 100 way too quick. We went from I have pain to being on painkillers like that. Why didn’t you go to a chiropractor first? Why didn’t you go to acupuncture? Why didn’t you try this anti-inflammatory? Why don’t you try turmeric? There’s a list of things we should try. For me, the same is with, okay, you have some brain fog, why go directly to Adderall? Or you have someone with ADHD, why would you put them on something that is a Class III or so drug that can be abused so easily, that has real side effects? That even if you were informed that much, you could easily find stuff that is just like, whoa, that kind of scares me a little bit what I’m hearing about some people that use this. And of course, you could look at something like Nadovim and be like well, it’s not a double-blind placebo and it doesn’t have a vast, vast improvement in this. Yeah, but sometimes that’s what your body is just craving a little bit. You don’t have to go all-in on something that has all of these side effects. I sometimes have to sit there and laugh when I watch a pharmaceutical drug commercial. It’s like 10 seconds of people being happy followed by 30 seconds of really quick talk about everything that could go wrong with you.   [01:03:07] Ashley James: It could cause inner leakage and death.   [01:03:09] Caspar Szulc: And then they’re happy in the background, dancing to the nice music and everything. It’s like, why would you turn to that as your first recourse? Unfortunately, what happens and what we see in medicine is that they turn to that, they turn to surgery, they turn to really big things, they still don’t get better, and then they turn back to the easy stuff like Nadovim, going to a holistic center, or something like that when already, it’s like, whoa, there’s a lot going on wrong now. If you came to us first, maybe it would have been much easier. So I think it’s a little bit backward in that sense alone. Even with informed consent, it’s just about the number of options. If you started training like if you were just out of shape, maybe a little overweight, you wouldn’t go to an Olympic trainer and be like, all right, I’m going all-in with this Olympic trainer—six times a week, three hours, moving into this big gym out there. It would be like, why are you doing that? Just do some push-ups in the morning, start there. Start with something simple and easy that won’t require so much of you and go from there. On top of doing their own research, which I think is incredibly important, I think what I’ve heard from a lot of people is it’s confusing. There is a research study by the manufacturer of this drug that shows it’s amazing. Then there are people on forums that say they grew a third arm from this. Then there’s this, then there’s that. The paradox of choice isn’t good, that’s not informed consent either in a sense. I think you just want to go with, well, why don’t I try this?  And again, I think there is this element of what do you feel? Don’t listen to the doctors, to the commercials, to the people trying to get your money. Don’t even listen to me in a sense, I would say. What are you feeling? What does your intuition say? And I feel that’s something we’ve totally gotten away from. Because I see patients all the time being like, should I do this? It’s like, I’m not answering that question for you. This medicine isn’t for everyone. There’s a lot of responsibility involved. You’ll have to change your lifestyle, you’ll have to do a lot of things that you may not want to do, but I think this is a great option. But at the end of the day, you have to make the choice. What feels good to you? Maybe going on the drug is right for you right now because you know you won’t go through those lifestyle changes right now. Maybe in a little bit you will. Where we are with Nadovim is like well why won’t you start there instead of let’s say Adderall or going to something even bigger or really undergoing some big medical procedures for the brain or anything like that. Give it a try. It’s not a huge investment. It is relatively safe, you could say. I won’t sit here and be like it’s absolutely 100% safe. I mean, you could have some reaction to something in there, thymine or something maybe, but incredibly small because again these are all-natural elements. You should be getting them from your food anyway. That’s my input on that because I do see that happening a lot within the medical field and within just this idea of all right, what are my options? It’s like, whoa, you went really quick from being like I have a little pain to again going under the knife, or I have a little brain fog to being on a high dosage of something that’s addictive and has a lot of side effects.   [01:06:28] Ashley James: Right. I have a friend who’s a Naturopathic physician and she became—I don’t know, jaded maybe because when she first started out, she’d get patients that came in with high blood pressure. She’d be like, okay, you’re going to walk 20 minutes every day, you’re going to eat this way, and take these supplements. Then they’d come back and they still have high blood pressure and they hadn’t done anything or maybe they did one out of three things that she told them to do. It’s like, no, you’ve got to make these lifestyle changes because that’s what’s causing the high blood pressure. We’re going to listen to the symptoms of the body and give the body what it needs. Not everyone is willing to, motivated to, or are ready to make lifestyle changes that would give them better health, which just blows my mind because I’m like, tell me what to do, I’m ready to do it. I want to be better. I want to be even better. I’m always striving for better health because I suffered for so many years. So many of my listeners are sick of being sick and they’re motivated. They’re here listening, they’re listening for over an hour because they are motivated to make healthy changes in their life. But maybe they have a husband, a friend, an aunt, or whatever that has these problems but they’re not willing to stop drinking a bottle of wine a night. They’re not willing to go for a walk for 20 minutes every day. You can’t do it for them. The Naturopathic doctor or the functional medicine practitioner isn’t going to come home with you and get you to make these lifestyle changes. It is up to us as individuals. I like that Nadovim is a small thing you can start. If it seems too daunting, too overwhelming to exercise every day. If you haven’t been exercising for years, it’s like oh gosh, that just seems overwhelming. But could you start your day off with a big glass of water and a capsule of Nadovim? Yes. That’s what my friend does who says she just floats through her day, bounces through her day. She gets up at I think 5:30 in the morning to be able to beat the traffic to drive because she lives pretty far away from Seattle. She has a beautiful cabin in the woods, so she has to get up before everyone else and go downtown Seattle. Then she manages this huge, huge ordeal. She does manage this big company, all the people below her that report to her, and all the decisions she has to make throughout the day. Every time we make a decision, it uses up our brainpower. There are some fun studies about that at the end of the day, that’s why at 11:00 at night you can’t stick to your diet and you’re standing there in front of the fridge, I’ll just eat everything. Because every time we make a decision, we only have a certain amount of decisions. The power of our brain can only handle so many decisions in a day because the brain now ran out of its NAD+ and it’s just shovel food in my face, I can’t take it anymore. Throughout the day, every decision we make depletes more of that energy of the brain.  I just wonder how NAD+, how Nadovim would help since it’s supporting the brain’s ability to have energy. How that would then translate into increasing our ability to have willpower at the end of the day? So there are fun studies about willpower and how it gets depleted if we work at a job that requires us to make a lot of decisions, a lot of choices throughout the day. I don’t know if you’ve ever done that where you had to make a ton of choices and at the end of the day, your brain is spent and you can actually feel it. It’s like it’s depleted of its energy and nutrients. But yeah, she just always has energy and always bounces around. I’ve always been impressed by her, now I know her secret, and I’m so excited to know that it’s because she’s been taking the supplement. She said it’s her absolute favorite supplement. What about depression? You kind of mention that. How does Nadovim help people who have depression?   [01:10:42] Caspar Szulc: Again, depression is one of those things you got to look at from a holistic standpoint. I even read and interviewed Dr. Jodie Skillicorn who wrote a book about healing depression without medication. She basically said the idea being chemical imbalances has been debunked and we’re going about all wrong, depression. There are so many different contributing factors—diet, of course, your microbiome now is really linked to depression and certain strains even being there. I mean, there are so many different causes of depression. But at the end of the day, if you have the vitality or the energy to make decisions that are going to be better for you, I think that’s everything. I think that’s a huge part of getting out of a depressive state somewhat. Depression is a terrible state to be in, but it’s also one that drains you considerably. It’s one of those states that if you look at the scale of consciousness and what David Hawkins put out there, it’s a negative conscious state, very low and draining of energy, and keeps you down. You need to work yourself up from there—from feelings of guilt, hate, depression, shame—up into neutrality. The idea that you would have more energy to make certain things, to go to certain things, to get outside, and have these small wins can be the difference in starting to get out of depression. Of course, each case is different. I’m not going to say that if you’re chronically depressed and take Nadovim you’ll be better. There’s a ton of things you probably have to do to get your state into a good emotional state out of depressive moods. The one thing that I keep turning back to when people ask about these things in general wellness, depression, depressive moods is this idea of you never have time or you’re just stuck and you have this outlook on life that is depressive. I think when you have energy and vitality that shifts. The greatest resource, everyone has 24 hours in the day, do you have the energy to actually do things? Do you, like you said, come home and just lay around, turn on Netflix, sit there, and then start to question your life, what am I doing? I’m just sitting around not meeting people. That could keep you in a depressive mood. I think what we’ve realized even through this whole lockdown is we need connection, but at the same time, if we don’t have the willingness, the vitality, the energy to even get up out of bed when we get in really early at night, just sit there and like you said, just veg out because we have no will power left, and just sit there and kind of become zombies to a TV screen or even a computer screen. That can lead to a loss of purpose, a loss of connection. I think those are some of the biggest causes of depression. I would much rather look at those sorts of things than look at chemical imbalances and just drug you up and say take this pill, this antidepressant. We know that can have serious consequences as well as dependency. When I look at something like depression, this feeling which I also correlate with a feeling of lack of purpose, which I see in tons of patients. At one point, we were creating a program for patients of things they could do outside of the office because we knew we only had them an hour or two a week in the office for treatments. So many would ask, what should I do outside? And of course, we gave them all these tips but we wanted to put in a program. We interviewed hundreds of patients, hundreds of doctors, and really wanted to get it down to an X factor. What’s that one thing that was the difference between two people with the same diagnosis, same treatment plans, same everything, demographic. So what we saw when we took two patients with a similar demographic, similar diagnosis, similar background, and went through similar treatment plans was that if one got better and one didn’t, we wanted to know what the difference was. Why was one receiving the same type of treatment plan getting better and the other one would maybe see improvement but then slide back after the treatment plan was done? The thing we really broke it down to, this X factor, was purpose. It was this idea that one had a purpose to go live, see her grandchildren, and travel the world. Whereas the other one didn’t. They were still very much stuck on I am disease X, that is who I am. They didn’t really have a purpose. Maybe they’ve been out of work for a while and were chronically ill in bed, and suddenly even the idea of what do I do, what is the next step in my life kind of scared them. And they didn’t have that purpose. We really ingrained in this program, what we did was first, create a purpose for you. It could be anything. It could be I would love to go skiing in the Swiss Alps, or I’d love to run a 5K and just keep that in mind.  I think something like a supplement like NAD+, it gives you the vitality and the cognitive functioning to be able to really focus on that, to be able to do certain things and take those steps. Have that little bit of energy to start with one small win, one small step. Like you said, if it’s getting better, start with just waking up and having that glass of water and that’ll be one step. The next day, get up and take a few deep breaths. The next day, have a little bit more energy and stretch a little bit. See yourself running that 5K more and more and be positive. The next day takes a few more steps down the stairs, maybe walk outside, maybe do 0.1 k your first time right and then keep going from there. I think where Nadovim falls, it gives you that little bit of energy, edge, and clarity to do that and to always be focused on this purpose.  So I think when you look at anything, whether it’s depression, whether it’s getting out of a state of feeling stuck in your life, or being disconnected, it’s about finding what really brings you passion and that purpose. It could be something small, it could be something big. That’s up to you. Don’t look anywhere else for that. Really sit down with a journal. Write that down. But then use little things, little pieces, little tips. Whether that’s breathing techniques or anything else, or Nadovim to then give you the best chances to see that through, to take those little small steps. I think when you’re really stuck on that, when every day before you go to sleep, when you wake up you’re thinking about that thing, what you want to do, what you want to accomplish, that becomes a priority. Like you said, I think right now what people are suffering from—health isn’t a priority to them. That’s the truth. The unfortunate truth is that for too many people, they have the ability to make the right choices, they have the ability to do these things, and they don’t. They will drink every night. They will stay up late, take pills, or whatever. That’s not to fall. I never like to put blame and guilt, but it’s just to say take responsibility. If you truly prioritize something, if that means the world to you, you’ll put it at the top. You’ll stop, you’ll close your computer screen at 9:00 PM because you know that’s going to screw up your circadian rhythms and probably keep you up at night stressing. Then you’ll have a bad day, you’ll need coffee again, your adrenals will go down, it’ll become habitual, you’ll need sleeping pills to go to sleep, lots of caffeine in the morning, and suddenly you’re wondering why your hormones all screwed up and you’re chronically ill. That’s the thing. I think when you take something like Nadovim, it gives you an edge to actually see through those choices. It gives you that little bit of a boost to then say, okay, I want to do this. That’s what I realized. I mean, I’m not immune to any of this. Even though I work in a center, I have access to wonderful things. I live in New York City, it’s stressful. I run multiple companies, that’s stressful. Sometimes I work way too long, but when I do realize, hey, I prioritize health. I have the energy to see through certain things and do them correctly, then I do take 20 minutes to meditate on a stressful day. I do drink more fluids and stand up a lot more even though I could be glued to my computer doing work all day. I think that’s what leads me to believe where Nadovim’s place in something like depression isn’t the treatment of depression so much. Although it could be the source, you never know. I’m not saying it is or isn’t. NAD+ depletion may be a cause of depression for sure, but at the same time, even if it weren’t, I would say take it also because I think it’ll lead you to have that clarity and that extra mental boost to then see through actions that bring you out of a depressive state, that get you connected again to the world that brings you into your purpose and passion.   [01:19:35] Ashley James: Oh, I love that answer. That’s so fantastic. So many studies have shown that those who have depression or even suicidal, if they volunteer, they find that they get more joy and more out of volunteering than what they’re actually giving. We think volunteering is almost like being a martyr. Oh, I have to give away my time and my energy. But really, you actually get back more. It’s just amazing. You can make an impact on the world and then that is helping you even more. There are so many studies that show that it not only helps with depression, it actually increases longevity. Those who volunteer, who have a life purpose, or feel that they’re making a difference in their community live longer. That makes a lot of sense. That NAD+ depletion, in and of itself, could be the factor that’s having them feel depressed. Like you said, we’re just starting to understand how this very complex system works—the brain. We’re even discovering that the gut is like a second brain, and then they’re discovering now that the heart is almost like a third brain. We always thought it was just the brain telling the organs information. But what we’re seeing is that all this new information that we’re discovering is that the heart and the gut is actually giving information back to the brain. It’s like these three brains in the body are communicating. The book, The Holographic Universe—a fantastic book to read—talks about how we think all of our cognitive abilities and all of our neurological functions happen in the brain. It actually happens holographically throughout the entire nervous system. That we can store memories not just in the brain, but in other neurological tissue throughout the body. I recommend reading that book for anyone that wants to just have their mind blown literally. Understanding that what we think we know, what we’ve been taught about neurology is so far off from what we actually are and it’s very complex. Of course, a nutrient deficiency could be the root cause of these issues. That makes total sense. Also, everyone benefits from focusing on a life purpose, focusing on feeling like they’re making a difference in this world, a difference in their family, or a difference with their friends, whatever is within your value system. Anti-aging was a big buzzword for a long time. They call it other things now, even reversing aging. Dr. Daniel Amen, I’ve been fascinated with his research and have been following him for the last few years. He was able to scan the brain and see that there are certain pockets in the brain that as people aged, and it depended on their diet, their lifestyle, and their nutrient deficiencies because a 20-year-old can start to have these sort of age spots within the brain. When he did these scans, he could see that there were pockets of the brain that weren’t functioning optimally that it was almost like Swiss cheese. That there are pockets of the brain that weren’t getting enough oxygen, weren’t getting enough nutrition. The blood flow was being restricted. When we think about heart health, there are certain diets that actually will blood flow and make the arteries healthier and you can reverse heart disease. I had Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn on the show who has performed the world’s longest study on using diet to be able to reverse heart disease and prevent it. He wrote the book How to Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease. He shows pictures of hearts that were totally clogged and the arteries that were not getting blood flow through. Then two years later, the same patient completely clear heart. So we can reverse arterial sclerosis and calcification of the arteries. It’s amazing. You go to a regular MD or maybe most cardiologists and they want to put you on drugs or put stents in, and they haven’t seen this research. They haven’t seen that we can completely reshape, restore, and reverse the aging or the damage. Maybe we shouldn’t be calling it anti-aging anymore. It’s reversing the damage of living and your lifestyle. If you eat fries every day, that kind of thing, it puts a huge strain on the cardiovascular system. But Dr. Daniel Amen sees that the same things that cause heart disease, we’re basically having heart disease in the brain. That we’re having cardiovascular disease of the brain. It’s like Swiss cheese brain where there are just whole parts of the brain that aren’t getting enough blood flow and they’re kind of dying off or just not functioning optimally. He’s been doing this for over 30 years. He’s been able to follow patients, change their diet, get them on supplements. I wonder if he’s using NAD+ or Nadovim as one of his supplements, and you should definitely reach out to him if he’s not. He has then maps and does these scans and he can see the blood flow coming back, the brain’s restoring, and the Swiss cheese going away. People were having dementia reversing that. Anti-aging is one of those keywords, one of those catchphrases, but really, it’s reversing the damage that has happened from living—I don’t want to say from aging but from living—because I think there can be a 20-year-old that’s unhealthy as a 60-year-old given lifestyle choices. With Nadovim, I know that there’s a lot of anti-aging experts that are really excited about Nadovim and have been using it. What are they seeing in terms of reversing the damage or slowing down the aging process?   [01:26:00] Caspar Szulc: Well, there are two parts of this that are pretty exciting when you look at aging and the reversal of aging. Number one would be the mitochondrial theory of aging. That really all aging starts with the mitochondria, which as you said, was originally a bacteria, one cell kind of an organism that predates as far beyond where humans were around and exist in. Really understanding that that’s where it starts on a cellular level. You want to understand everything. I think there are two ways to understand it. Number one is through energy because we all are energy really—frequencies and vibrations, and that’s Einstein’s wonderful contribution and many other quantum physicists’ contribution to science and changing it forever was that understanding that we aren’t matter at all. The other way is also to look at things really at the building blocks that are kind of visible are physical. Energy packets are in your cell. Understanding that the function of the cell to regenerate and to get the ones that are no longer functioning out requires energy. Once that stops happening, you’ll have aging occur. You’ll have dysfunction occur. That’s really what is triggering an aging response so that this max life potential is really just dictated by mitochondrial function. So if you can improve your mitochondria, that is one great way to increase the age you can live for. The other way to look at of course is somewhat through DNA and understanding telomeres and understanding how DNA starts to basically work against this in a sense and how we protect DNA and how we again regenerate ourselves. NAD+ does have a positive impact on both of those. NAD+ is directly correlated to something called [inaudible 01:28:00] which helps out with telomerase and also helps with longevity that way. Looking at it from those perspectives is that NAD+ is a vital compound into great arenas that you could say are dictating how we age. Now, the other element outside of NAD+ and I think something you mentioned there as well is this idea of us aging. I think aging, what we’re doing is living unnaturally. If you’re closer to nature, if you live a natural existence, I think you age at a natural pace. But when we live with light bulbs on all the time, that disrupts our endocrine system. When we eat things that are unnatural and also disrupts so many systems within the body. We have to kind of reap what we sow, in a sense. Part of that is aging, it can be seen as disease. If you age the body, the functioning of everything doesn’t work as it should and leads to dysfunction, which leads to disease or symptoms and then a disease really. Those are things you got to incorporate as well because I hate to sit here and be like, take NAD+ and you won’t age, keep eating poorly, smoking, and doing all these things negatively. Live a natural life and you might not need NAD+. Now, at the same time, I have to say, we live in a day and age where you can’t really go out and just hunker down in a cave and be away from everyone and just live naturally there. We do live within the constrictions of being in this modern world, meaning most of us have cell phones, most of us are around light bulbs all the time. You could protect yourself as much as possible, but you’re still going to have an impact on your body. All the actions you do, you’re going to be impacted in this world right now. That’s the reason also when people like, well, I probably don’t need NAD+, right? I’m really healthy. I get it, you really are. I take care, I’m really healthy, but you still live in a world that unfortunately has introduced so many unnatural things in it that you’re going to be impacted. Even if you’re living far off now, you’re still impacted. That’s just where we are right now, and that’s why I say something like NAD+ is useful for everyone because even if you’re quite healthy, why not pre-plenish? Why wait? Why not take proactive steps? That’s what I think health really is. I talk about choices and everything like that, but it’s also being proactive to prevent it. To prevent aging and prevent disease, which I say synonymous, are taking the action before they happen. Every one of us usually waits to go see a doctor until something’s wrong. With a dentist, you get your tooth cleaning. Unless it’s in pain, why would you go see a dentist, right? Really go into it. The same is for a doctor and all these things related to our health.  I wish medicine became more about prevention. I wish it was more proactive. I wish we could catch things earlier on. Even if you didn’t go to a doctor, why not take things like supplementation that you know can absolutely benefit your cellular function, mitochondrial function, all these things that can relate so closely to aging? You could say beauty, to preventing disease, preventing really tough chronic things that again, right now, if you’re healthy, you’re in a minority in the United States. That’s crazy to me. That is a crazy stat that most people don’t realize. That right now, if you’re healthy, you’re a minority. Trust me, in 20 years, you’re going to be a really small minority the way it’s going. It’s going to be 80%, 90% are going to be comorbidities through the roof. Obesity, all of this chronic fatigue, diabetes, it’ll be so normal, then you’re going to be a freak if you’re healthy. That’s scary to me because health is the greatest wealth. If we don’t start turning things around, we’re in for a really sick society, in many different ways to say that. I will say, be proactive. It doesn’t have to be Nadovim only. I think that’s one little thing. That’s not everything I do. Drink more water, breathe more. All sorts of things. I just wish. I think by taking a pill though you kind of put a burden. You put some money into that pill so there is like a value intrinsic that I’ve seen. It’s almost like when people take medicine they start acting differently almost like a placebo. I’m paying for it, I might as well do other things, and I think that’s a good thing too. I do.   [01:32:45] Ashley James: Yeah, it motivates you.   [01:32:46] Caspar Szulc: It’s why I think you should pay your trainer. Pay them more than you pay up because you won’t skip workouts if it costs a lot and then really take care of yourself. This idea of also free and not having to be responsible for your health, it’s crazy to me. I think it’s part of the reason that the majority of us are sick and waiting for someone to help us out when in reality, we could absolutely take a lot of preventive and proactive steps to being healthy.    [01:33:15] Ashley James: Yeah. The listeners listening right now, we are the people who in a sense we’re like salmon. We’re swimming upstream. We don’t want to be a statistic. One in three people will have a cancer diagnosis in their lifetime. That is ridiculous. If you’re in a room with three people, one of them is going to have cancer. That is insane. That is absolutely insane. The idea that our soil is so deplete of minerals and plants can’t make minerals, animals can’t make minerals. They have to come from the soil. If our body is minerally depleted, especially magnesium, which out of all the 60 essential minerals, magnesium is the most important. 1800 enzymatic processes in the body use magnesium. Zinc is the second most important at 800 processes. Calcium’s not even in the top two, and we’re marketed that we need to drink cow’s milk for calcium. Cow’s milk has a whole host of health issues that it comes with. It causes obesity and heart disease. It depends on who pays for the research, you always have to watch. If there’s a research paper that says cow’s milk is healthy, go follow the money and you’re going to find that it was paid for by someone who benefits from selling cow’s milk. It’s just crazy. People are unhealthy because of what they were taught, what they were told. We’ve been raised watching McDonald’s commercials and Kellogg’s Fruit Loop cereal, Lucky Charms commercials. We’ve been raised to see that these are actually foods. They’re not foods. They’re something that represents food that’s pretending to be food, but it’s not nutritious for the body. A lot of them are fortified with artificial vitamins that actually do more damage, especially for people who have methylation issues like the MTHFR SNP. So many people have MTHFR because of the toxicity in our environment. That’s what we’re seeing more and more. My listeners are like salmon, like me. I’m one of those people who’s going to go upstream. I’m okay with not following the herd because if I eat like, act like, and have a lifestyle like the majority of the people out there, then I will be a statistic. I don’t want to be one of those people that one in three has cancer, one in three has diabetes or pre-diabetic. I was diabetic. I reversed it with natural health changes and following holistic medicine. I’m not going back. My A1C is 4.7. I’m never going back to diabetes. I am just going towards better and better health. I know my listeners are doing the same. They’re highly motivated to make these changes. Even if it’s just adding a supplement and then drinking more water. It’s okay, baby steps. And then going for a walk three times a week. Just add what you can and keep on that path. My last question is about depletion. When people are on cholesterol meds, and I’ve had several doctors and cardiologists on the show say do not under any circumstances take cholesterol meds. I interviewed a Ph.D. and MD who is also a cardiologist, and he’s a cardiologist researcher. He looks at thousands of patients instead of just one at a time. He was the discoverer of the true cause of heart disease. That the true cause of heart disease is inflammation, and actually the cause of most diseases. You have to look to inflammation, then look to what causes inflammation, and then make diet and lifestyle changes to decrease that inflammation.  This was 30 years ago 40 years ago, while all the doctors were being told to put everyone on cholesterol-lowering meds, he said cholesterol is not the cause of heart disease. It’s a symptom that comes later after inflammation has done its damage. What’s causing inflammation? We have to go deeper, go deeper. The symptoms are being treated, but the root cause still continues to progressively do damage to the body. When people are put on cholesterol-lowering meds, there are so many side effects that happen. The patients end up not being able to feel their hands or their feet, then they can’t walk properly, then they stop exercising, and they live a more sedentary lifestyle. That leads to early death. So that’s just one problem that we see is happening with cholesterol-lowering meds because the neuropathy is caused by reducing the body’s ability to make healthy cholesterol that is used for the myelin sheath of the nervous system. So it’s doing damage to the nervous system. Well, another thing it does, by taking cholesterol-lowering meds, is that it decreases the coenzyme q10, which if you don’t have any coenzyme q10 in your body, your heart is not going to beat. Your heart will stop beating. That’s fuel for that wonderful muscle that we all love so much. It’s great that there’s some coenzyme q10 in because it’s one of those cofactors that you saw really benefited the nervous system. It’s absolutely needed. What doctors will say now when they keep their patients on cholesterol-lowering meds, they tell them to take a low dose actually of coq10. Now you mentioned that the body, when it needs to clear out drugs like the liver, has to process the toxins from these artificial chemical drugs and that depletes NAD+ in the body. Are there any drugs that significantly decrease NAD+, like absolutely what doctors should be doing if they ever put them on XYZ drug, that they should be taking an NAD+ supplement because it has such a drastic effect on our NAD+, or is it just like all drugs in general?   [01:39:38] Caspar Szulc: I mean, honestly, it’s all drugs in general. Every single drug has a toxic element to it and it’s going to require NAD+ to then flush that. Anything that’s a toxin and the body basically requires NAD+. That’s why you look at things like oxidative stress within the body and then just free radical formation—all these things are all part of the equation. Of course, the more toxic, the stronger drugs are, the more NAD+ is required. What do we do with everyone that’s on a lifelong intervention? At a certain point, you have to boost because you’re getting used to the drug, right? Your body is adjusting to it in a sense, which the body always does. It always adjusts. You’re giving it something synthetic, it’s not supposed to be there in a way, the body will adjust. It will try and maintain and go into homeostasis. What do we do? We give stronger drugs. We go higher milligrams and dosage. Guess what, that just depletes more and more NAD+. So we go in this vicious cycle of well, you’re going to need more because you’re not getting the effects of the lower dosage anymore so we’ll put you on this. And then what happens, you get a symptom from that down the line. Okay, that’s a known symptom. No worries. We’ll put you on another drug. Guess what, more NAD+ depletion. This approach we have with medicine right now, if you really took a step back, it makes no sense. It’s something that we’re just trying to manage everything in the body with something synthetic, which has lots of side effects that we’re not even incorporating. No doctor is thinking about NAD+ depletion when they give you a cholesterol medication. They can care less. They’re solving a problem, in a sense. Your cholesterol is here, we want it here, take this drug. That’s all I care about. That’s all I’ve been taught. And again, I’m not faulting doctors. I love them. My father’s a doctor. He was in conventional medicine for tens of years and I still have tons of friends and very close colleagues that are still abiding by the conventional and orthodox way of going about it. They are taught that way and they are doing good in the sense that someone comes in with pain and they leave without pain. But the long-term ramifications of chronic disease, you can’t really say that we’re winning that battle. That we’re doing something that’s really getting to the core of it and reversing disease. When you have this many people on this many medications, you’re bound to be depleting not just of NAD+, many other really, really important elements within the body that are critical to just regeneration to health in general.  To anyone listening, I’m not bashing it because it’s required at times. But I would want to take a different approach that yes, it’s required at times, but what’s the quickest way to get off of them? What’s the quickest way to get your body back to where it’s in a self-regulating space? It doesn’t require outside intervention of drugs within the body to do what it should be doing, and that’s really my mission is to show people. Because again, I’m not a doctor, I’m not going to go out there and push all the clinical data on everyone and go in that really technical analysis of each disease.  I’m here to tell you what I’ve seen within the 40 years or so I’ve been in medicine or around it to say that prioritizes health, and understand that your natural state is health. Don’t buy into that disease, I’m going to live with that forever because that’s not a narrative you want to be in because it is one that will lead to depression and this giving up on your own body to do what it should be doing. These miraculous things of healing itself every single day and so many processes that allow us to live are just really phenomenal when you take a step back and say, damn, my body does all of that in one second. Trillions of chemical actions that allow us to live and in perfect unity and harmony doing all this. Put more faith in your body in a sense and start to understand that there are options out there. One of them is taking, of course, something like NAD+ or Nadovim, but there are so many other options out there to bring you back into a healthy state because as long as you are taking any drugs or anything, that’s kind of the admission that you’re in a disease state. Without the drugs, you are in a disease state and you still are. Your cholesterol is high. Yes, we’re managing it. Then you’re telling me if you got off that pill you’d be healthy, no. It’s not making you healthy. It’s just managing your disease.  I want people to think about it differently. Stop managing disease. Yes, there’s a time and place you need to manage things, but it’s not a lifelong process. It doesn’t have to be. If you prioritize health and you start listening to great podcasts such as this one and start to appreciate a different approach to what health can be, what it should be, which is this natural state where you don’t need this intervention, other people giving you things to make you healthy, that’s when you know there is going to be a breakthrough, I think, not only in yourself but in society as a whole. That’s really what I’m aiming for. If Nadovim is just one of those hundreds of thousands of probably solutions out there, that’s great. Try it out. I will say, experience is what’s going to lead you there. You could look at all the evidence in the world, but until you start experiences, start taking an action, it doesn’t really matter what the evidence says because you’re not applying it to yourself anyway. It’s one of those things that so many of us rely on medication that in reality, if you broke it down even to this one thing of looking how can I be NAD+ depleted? Because you’re taking lots of medications, that’s one of the reasons. Even to take them, there really should be no contraindications of the medication. I won’t say that for everyone. I do think you need to talk to your doctor before anything. I can’t speak for every medication out there. I know there are somewhere if you provided energy to the mitochondria, you might have a reaction of pushing certain toxins from certain drugs that you may not want to and it may exacerbate some conditions. That’s true I think for anything you do if you’re on certain medications. Do speak with your doctor about it. I will say this, a lot of doctors don’t even know what NAD+ is, and that’s kind of sad to me because it is such an important compound. But we’ve had customers be like my doctor didn’t know what it was so he didn’t want me on it. I would say you have the power, doctors don’t. They think they do. I know doctors and they’re like, I’m telling you, I went to medical school. If they don’t have patients they don’t have a practice, they don’t have a career. They listen to patients, they really do. I’m not saying be nosy. Well, you should do research, but just ask your doctor. I’ve heard this, other doctors said this about, maybe you’d want to do a little research. Push back a little bit. I think this idea that doctors are infallible and know everything, that’s just crazy to me. They’re regular people. They don’t know everything, and why would you expect them to?   [01:47:03] Ashley James: Yeah, they’re not machines, they’re not computers.   [01:47:05] Caspar Szulc: No, no, no. They’re not computers. They’re specialists normally. I’ve met doctors that know nothing about other systems of the body and only about the GI. If you ask them anything about the brain, they would know very little. I mean that training, they forget it. You don’t remember everything you trained and learned about in college. I don’t remember my first year of college, what I learned in marketing there. Probably terms they’re completely outdated anyway now. I think there is something to be said. When a doctor says something, you’re allowed to ask why. Not in an adversarial way because I love doctors and I know a lot of people come in and just print out WebMD things and be like, oh, I think I have this. Doctors don’t like that, but I think there’s this ability to see yourself in a relationship with a doctor.  Our doctors here and everything, they’re coaches. You’re the athlete, you do need to listen, but it’s a back and forth. It’s a relationship of trust. It’s a relationship of being able to look at all the options and both sides doing the research. And be able to find a doctor that you really feel comfortable with I think. It’s not that all doctors are created equal, they are not. There are many different. All I think have good intentions, but that doesn’t mean every doctor is the right one, or just because they’re in your health insurance plan that you should just listen to them. Seek out other options and see, and then maybe one is going to be like, oh yeah, NAD+, I know that stuff. That would be great for you, you should do that.   [01:48:38] Ashley James: Your New York Center for Innovative Medicine, can people from around the world work with your functional medicine doctors through Skype? Can they do telemedicine basically with them, or do they have to go there in order to work with your doctors?   [01:48:57] Caspar Szulc: We’re old school in that way, we want to work with people here. This is where the treatments are. There’s only so much we could do. You could do a consultation. We have a patient ambassador that we speak with that is a practitioner here that you could do consultations with and talk to. But when it comes to actually getting treatment, it’s here because of the fact that we have over 100 therapies here. I mean, we really take pride in the amount of therapies and the way we personalize them to each. But if you’re not here, we can’t do that. The idea of being training with a coach and him not being there when you’re doing labs or doing all these other things, that’s difficult, that’s tough. A lot of times, if you require an intravenous infusion because you are depleted of something, it’s very difficult to do that when you’re not here. We want to be responsible for that. While we understand that traveling isn’t always easy, we also think health is a priority. If you want to get it done right with us, then come. We’ll make it as easy as possible, trying to do it as quickly as possible if you’re traveling. We have people come here from all over the world and it is unique in that way that you have so many options and it’s not just NAD+. That’s again just one of the tons of different ingredients we’d use in IVs, but we also have spiritual things, psychological. We have a psychologist on hand, psycho-emotional therapies, all types of energy medicines, anti-aging. I mean you got to run the gambit. Again, if you show up to a house with just a hammer, you may not fix the problem. You want a good tool kit, you do. You want all those things in there. That’s important. But at the same time, I will and everyone here will speak to anybody, even if they can’t come into the center, we have great resources, great information, and a great network of people that can help in some way, shape, or form. So if you’re not ready to make it over to New York or you’re not sure, I mean, there are still so many steps you can take. Whether that’s just taking Nadovim, that’s a great step. It’s learning, listening to our podcast, or doing anything like that. We wanted to make it easy for anyone to empower themselves and make the right choices for their health even if they can’t get into the clinic.   [01:51:15] Ashley James: Awesome. Thank you, Caspar Szulc, for coming on the show and sharing about NAD+ and Nadovim. Back when I was just starting to get on the health train, I decided to buy my B vitamin supplements and I had no idea that I had MTHFR. I bought my B vitamin supplements from Trader Joe’s and I didn’t really notice the difference. I didn’t really feel that much more energy. I kind of felt nauseous actually when I took them, and then my pee turned a bright yellow. It wasn’t until years later that I met with a naturopathic doctor who formulated his protocol and it was life-changing. Within five days, I was waking up just so much energy in the morning with mental clarity. I felt like I was a kid again, and that’s the difference between really high quality and it was the same. If you look at the back of the package and they look kind of similar if you don’t know what you’re looking for and you don’t know about the companies, okay, this has B vitamins, that has B vitamins. Why was it that taking one kind of made me nauseous and didn’t really give me energy, and the other one no nausea and it was a total game-changer, totally life-changing, and yet they looked on paper sort of similar supplements? When you go to a company that puts so much into making sure there’s quality and bioavailability and that really they developed it so that doctors could see a difference, so that they could do blood tests and see a difference, that they could study it and study the effects of it, that company has put in all the work to make something that is quality that you’re going to notice a difference you’ll really notice a difference.  There are other NADs out there I’ve seen, and it’s buyer beware because, in the supplement industry, someone could sell a bottle that says they NAD+ on it, or says ginkgo biloba on it, or vitamin C and there actually has no ginkgo biloba, no vitamin C, or no NAD+ in it. It could be all filler, and that is the buyer beware of the supplement industry. It’s not regulated, which we don’t want it to be because the second it becomes regulated, then they will take it all away and make it drugs. We don’t want it to be regulated, but that means we have to do our research and make sure the company is legitimate and really the company has the ethics and the high-quality standards to make sure that what’s in the bottle is what’s on the label. That’s why I’m happy to know that Nadovim exists, the quality is there. It’s nadovim.com and the coupon code is LTH for our listeners. I’m really excited for listeners to try it. Get a bottle, just try it for themselves, and then come into the Learn True Health Facebook group and share their experience. I want to hear from everyone, I’m going to do it as well, and we’ll just see what differences we notice. Big differences, small differences, no differences. I’m excited about the energy and the sleep, I think that’s great. I’m looking forward to, over the next few months, hearing back from listeners as we try it out for ourselves. Just give it a try and see what differences we notice. The proof in the pudding is in the eating so let’s try it and see what happens. It was wonderful having you on the show. I’m excited to try all this and see for ourselves. Thank you for coming here and explaining it today.   [01:54:41] Caspar Szulc: Thank you. Real pleasure, Ashley.   Get Connected with Caspar Szulc! Nadovim – Website New York Center for Innovative Medicine Innovative Medicine Caspar Szulc – Instagram Caspar Szulc – Facebook Caspar Szulc – Twitter Recommended Reading by Caspar Szulc Power vs. Force by David Hawkins

Magnesium soak: Use coupon code LTH at livingthegoodlifenaturally.com   Radical Longevity: The Powerful Plan to Sharpen Your Brain, Strengthen Your Body, and Reverse the Symptoms of Aging https://www.learntruehealth.com/radical-longevity-the-powerful-plan-to-sharpen-your-brain-strengthen-your-body-and-reverse-the-symptoms-of-aging   Highlights: How to be mentally sharp How to keep skin healthy Importance of vitamin C, magnesium, and zinc Iron and inorganic copper’s connection to Alzheimer’s Disease Tribulus as a precursor to testosterone   Ann Louise Gittleman is back on the show to talk about her new book Radical Longevity. Ann Louise has written so many books about health and nutrition, and the focus of Radical Longevity is how to become a super ager. She shares how to have a healthy brain, skin, and sex drive.  Intro: Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. You’re going to love learning from today’s guest. Ann Louise Gittleman has been one of my heroes in the holistic health space since I was a teenager. I had her on the show back in episode 284, so I recommend going back and listening to that. She’s written 32 books in her career and quite an amazing woman. She is absolutely the expert when it comes to learning about detoxification, supporting your organs like the liver and the brain, healing the brain, and also parasites. I read her parasite cleanse book back when I was a teenager. My mom and I did her parasite cleanse and it was very effective. We got tested before and after, and I’ve been fascinated by her work ever since. I also recommend you guys listen to episode 348 and episode 349. I had her husband on the show, James Templeton. His story that he tells is just mind-blowing. He had cancer and he was in really bad shape, and he tells the story of how he actually escaped the hospital when he realized that they were going to kill him. The therapy was absolutely… well, you just got to listen to the story. But in the middle of the night, he escapes the hospital and says I am never going back to doing that kind of chemo and all that stuff. And then he discovered more and more holistic ways of doing things and he healed his body. He wrote a book on how he did it and how he’s been cancer-free for many, many years. Doctors did not think he would live for five years, and I believe it was something like 25 or 30 years ago. He ended up finding his now wife who has been a holistic hero for going on 40 years, and together they’re such a powerful team. One thing that we talk about in one of our interviews with him is that he has a YouTube channel where he interviews other people who are survivors of cancer and how they did it, interesting. Not every therapy works for every person, but you learn a lot of new holistic methods, or maybe they’re new to you, but they’re not new by any means, so just really beautiful, inspiring. Both of them love to focus on education and spreading this information which is my calling too. I definitely know that you’ll enjoy listening to those episodes and then following them as well. And Louise mentions magnesium, and she does have a really great oral magnesium supplement she likes. Now, if you’ve been a long-time listener, you’ve heard me share about how much I love the magnesium soak from Living the Good Life Naturally, and that’s just another way to get magnesium into you.  What I love about that is it bypasses digestion and so you actually absorb. She did tests of the water of the magnesium soak and we absorb 20 grams of magnesium while we’re soaking for one hour. You soak your feet in a bowl of water, any temperature you want, just as long as the bowl is not plastic. It could be metal, ceramic, just any glass, wood I suppose, or you could put it in your bath as well. It’s safe for children, it’s safe for everyone, and it’s natural. That the body absorbs as much as it needs, which is great. You can’t really overdose when you’re absorbing because it’s through diffusion.  We’ve had over 2,000 listeners purchase it and try it, and many of them have purchased it again. You have to comb through our Learn True Health Facebook group, which you can use the search function to do that. We’ve had over 200 listeners over the last few years share testimonials and stories about how the magnesium soak has helped them.  People have reported migraines going away pain. Aches and pains going away. Better sleep, more energy, restless legs going away. I love it because my son who is so energetic and never wants to fall asleep, it calms him down and helps him sleep. I notice that I just overall feel better. It’s also really helped me through supporting my liver and doing the heavy metal detoxing that I’ve been doing for the last few years. I’ve noticed that it really did support my liver and calm it down, and I got better results when I incorporated it in terms of my detoxification.  Plus I notice I just feel better—more vital, more energy. Not that I was getting a lot of restless legs, to begin with, but I did notice a few times that I’d have that sort of itchy feeling in the evening, my legs just kind of itched. The muscles just were like, it’s an indescribable sensation but restless is a really good way to describe it. I was already taking a very good oral magnesium, and then when I got into the magnesium soak, it completely went away. I thought that was really interesting. But listen to my episodes. I’ve had Kristen Bowen on the show several times. She’s the founder of the magnesium soak that I absolutely love. What I love about her, she has a health journey. Just to give you a little teaser, she was 97 pounds having 30 seizures a day in a wheelchair almost unable to talk, that was her 15 years ago, and today she’s very active, very healthy.  I’m not going to say this is a magic bullet, the magnesium soak, but it was one of the biggest contributing factors to her recovery after she had had surgery to remove some things inside her. Just go listen to the first episode, the magnesium foot soak episode with Kristen Bowen and you will be amazed at her story. So listen to the episodes with Kristen Bowen and learn more about the magnesium soak. You can listen to episodes 294, 341, and 381, those are my three episodes with Kristen Bowen. Definitely go back and listen to episode 294, it’s her story, it’s quite amazing. Now, to get the listener discount, she does give us a discount. Use coupon code LTH at checkout when you go to livingthegoodlifenaturally.com and then click on the magnesium products and grab the magnesium soak. I also love the magnesium cream and the muscle cream as well, but really, the magic is in soaking in the magnesium. So that’s coupon code LTH at livingthegoodlifenaturally.com. I also interviewed sort of the magnesium doctor, Dr. Carolyn Dean. It was a very, very long, detailed, lots of information in that interview. It was over two hours, and she shared something very interesting. Now, she’s a naturopath and an MD. She’s been practicing medicine for over 40 years and is very well known in the holistic space as the magnesium doctor. She says that magnesium is the most important mineral of the body. It is used in 1800 enzymatic processes in the body.  Zinc is second most important at 800 enzymatic processes. So if you think about it, if you’re deficient in magnesium, 1800 things in your body aren’t able to fully function and are unable to fully do their job, and then the body starts to display symptoms. Symptoms are the smoke, not the fire. Symptoms are the body saying to us, hey, I don’t have the raw building blocks I need to maintain. Just like if your car was overheating or there was some weird smoke coming out of your car, you need to pull over. The check engine light comes on, you need to pull over. You need to get that belt changed and get the oil changed. There’s maintenance, there are things the car needs, and the body is the same way. The body needs a certain amount of all these nutrients to function.  If you’re zinc deficient, there are 800 things that can go wrong in the body, one of them is losing your sense of smell, losing your sense of taste. I know a naturopathic physician here locally who told me that one of her patients came into her after going to all kinds of doctors, doing all kinds of tests, and they told her it was in her head. She couldn’t feel her entire body. She touched things and her fingers were numb, her hands were numb. She didn’t feel pressure, her entire body didn’t have a sensation of pressure. My friend who’s a naturopath said, you know what, I’m going to get you on some zinc. And sure enough, it was such a severe zinc deficiency that her nervous system could not function properly. That’s how important these minerals are, and there are actually 60 minerals the body needs. So if you’re deficient in one, you’re usually deficient in several because it’s really hard to just isolate, eat food that only is missing one nutrient. If you have any symptoms of health issues, typically it’s a mineral deficiency because there are 60 minerals the body needs, and we’re usually deficient in a bunch of them. We have to supplement because we’re not getting enough in our diet.  We talked about this with Dr. Joel Wallach, I had him on the show a few times. He’s one of my mentors. He’s mentored me for the last 10 years. He has a degree in soil agriculture, a naturopath, and he’s a research scientist. He’s published so many things and what he saw was that there’s a deficiency in our soil because of the farming practices, and there is a direct link between that and 900 diseases. Over a 12-year study he conducted that was actually federally funded, he discovered that 900 diseases across species lines are linked to 90 essential nutrients the body could be missing. If you’re missing a handful of them, then you could have several diseases. Now the good news is we can reverse them through diet and supplementing the diet with specific nutrients. So the good news is we can heal the body. The body isn’t a pharmaceutical drug deficient, it’s nutrient deficient. Ann Louise Gittleman talks about this today. She talks about some nutrients that we can make sure that we’re getting. I also recommend checking out takeyoursupplements.com. These health coaches are absolutely amazing. They give their time for free, they help you to determine the right supplements for you, and I have been working with them. They’re really, really great health coaches that help you to pick out the right supplements for you that are based on the symptoms you’re having. The symptoms tell us what nutrient deficiencies you are experiencing. So check out takeyoursupplements.com and talk to them about how you can reverse the symptoms you’re having by addressing those nutrient deficiencies.  Excellent. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing the Learn True Health podcast with those you care about. Enjoy today’s episode. It is chock full of amazing, really, really great information. Have yourself a fantastic day.   [00:12:21] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 459. I am so excited for today’s guest. I’ve actually been a fan of our guest since I was a teenager. Not to age you, but you know what, given the topic today—Radical Longevity—you do live what you teach. Back when I was a teenager, I think I was about 15, my mom brought home a book called Guess What Came to Dinner. We did our first parasite cleanse. My mom was big into health and holistic medicine, and I was right there with her. As a young child, I remember going to the health food store with her. Well, we got on a parasite cleanse and we actually tested positive for three parasites. That’s what they could test for gosh knows what we actually had, but it was amazing. That blew my mind that why isn’t everyone talking about parasites? We all have them. If you’ve been to a different country, if you’ve had cats or dogs. There are so many ways that you can get them, and so I’ve been a big fan of yours forever. Then you came on the show in episode 284, so listeners can go back in and listen to that one as well. Today, you’re here to share about your new book that just got released, so it’s fresh off the press, and of course, the links to your book are going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. Radical Longevity: The Powerful Plan to Sharpen Your Brain, Strengthen Your Body, and Reverse the Symptoms of Aging. I look forward to learning how you’ve been doing that because you’re in amazing health. We’re all going to live to be 120 reading your books. Welcome to the show. We have the genetic potential to do it, why not? Let’s do it. Welcome to the show.   [00:14:28] Ann Louise Gittleman: Absolutely.   [00:14:29] Ashley James: Welcome back to show, I should say. I’d love to hear what motivated you to write this book?   [00:14:37] Ann Louise Gittleman: That’s such a good question, Ashley. This is my 37th book.   [00:14:42] Ashley James: I love it. I love your fire and I love that you have helped so many people for so many years. It’s just wonderful.   [00:14:53] Ann Louise Gittleman: Well, in that regard my dear, and I’m so appreciative of your kind words. I’ve written about parasites, Guess What Came to Dinner. I’ve written about weight loss, detoxification, men’s health, women’s health, hormones, premenopause, post-menopause, menopause and beyond, so there was nothing else to cover except for the concept and the arena of longevity and anti-aging. Although I don’t like the term anti-aging, that’s really what we understand today to be the next frontier, so to speak. I’m 70 years young, so this was the time. This is like enlightened self-interest. I figured I had a conglomerate, everything I’ve ever learned, researched, and studied and put it into a book for my fellow compatriots and people coming before us and after us.   [00:15:40] Ashley James: Why don’t you like the term anti-aging?   [00:15:43] Ann Louise Gittleman: Well, because I’m pro-aging. I really think that aging is a privilege, and I want people to really stop and appreciate that. It’s a privilege. Not all of us are going to have the opportunity to live long enough to say that they’re a super ager, so it’s a privilege. It’s denied to too many people. When I was looking at all the people—my friends, my associates, my compadres that had passed on before me and before their time and they’re all in the acknowledgments—I thought to myself, what were they missing? I wish they had this book in hand because maybe they’d still be with us.   [00:16:17] Ashley James: Super ager, I love that. I want to live to 120. I want to be a super ager, but also be very healthy through my golden years, which is the point, right? We want to be able to get out there, live, and be alive.   [00:16:34] Ann Louise Gittleman: That’s the point. We want to extend the youth span. I talk about preserving the youth span, extending the period of life when you have vitality, grace, gratitude, and resilience. We want to do this with resilience so that we learn to bend and not break.   [00:16:49] Ashley James: And the older we get, the wiser we get. We wish we had all these lessons when we were young, but what we really want to do is maintain a vital, youthful body throughout our life so that we can at least take advantage of all this wisdom we’ve been collecting so we can go live. So let’s talk about the first part, which is to sharpen your brain. What are some things that you teach that keep us mentally youthful, mentally sharp?   [00:17:25] Ann Louise Gittleman: To keep mentally sharp you have to keep physically active. Whether that means walking daily, it could mean walking up and down your stairs if you’re in an apartment or in a condo and can’t get outside because of the weather. It means moving your body. It means dancing on a daily basis. It means being physically active because that helps the body, mind, and spirit, so that would be number one. Number two, what helps the brain is physical contact, connectivity, which we don’t have because of the pandemic in this day and time, but hopefully, that will change. You want to have relationships with your family, with your friends, with your loved ones. It could even be virtual relationships, but connectivity is one of the traits of those super agers that we aspire to be. And then you want to have a purpose-driven life. You want to wake up every morning with a purpose. Whether that’s being a volunteer, whether that’s still working as I do at the age of 72 and going on, well I’ll be 72 in June so I guess I’m 70+. But it means really having a passion for what you do. Never give up on the joie de vivre of life, and that’s exceedingly important. Of course, eating properly, taking certain supplements, which I cover at length in the book. And then I think the other aspect that’s important is really having a spiritual, mental, or religious practice.   [00:18:44] Ashley James: You just listed the fountain of youth, the keys to life. That is exactly what people need to do. So many of us get caught up in the minutiae of life and we forget to move our body in a way that brings us joy every day. We forget to really make those meaningful connections. I love that you brought up volunteering because there are so many studies that show that people who volunteer do live longer and have less depression, less suicide. People who are depressed who go into volunteering end up having an increase in their mental health. That there’s something about serving and being part of a community, of being of service to others that actually rewards us more than the effort that we put out.  Volunteering isn’t about you sacrificing or being a martyr. It’s actually you get more out of volunteering than what you give, and that’s so cool to be part of a community where you’re getting so much mental health, emotional health, and as a result physical health from volunteering. What kind of volunteering work do you do?   [00:20:01] Ann Louise Gittleman: I volunteer on Facebook all the time. I’m answering questions 24/7. I consider that a divine volunteering job quite frankly because I’m helping so many people. At least point them in the direction of their health. If I can’t answer them directly online because that becomes a little dicey giving that kind of advice on the people that have such severe issues, at least I can point them in the right direction. Give them the tools, give them the website, give them the book, give them the supplement, and then they’re on their own. So that’s what I consider my divine passion.   [00:20:33] Ashley James: Oh, I love that. That’s so great. You said that you cover in-depth the supplements and the diet, can you give us a few pointers, really, really important pointers around diet and supplements?   [00:20:50] Ann Louise Gittleman: Well, the thing that I discovered that was the aha moment in writing the book was really the chapter on the brain and the chapter on minding your minerals. I think we call it misbehaving minerals. There are two minerals that can stockpile in the brain if they’re not the proper form of the mineral or the proper cofactor, and that is the iron and the copper. You have to make sure that your levels of iron and copper are kept in the minimum amounts. Taking a ferritin test on a yearly basis would be very important for those people that have a history of Alzheimer’s because stockpiling iron in the brain has been dramatically connected to all kinds of cognitive disorders, so that would be number one.  Get a ferritin test immediately. It’s got to be under a certain degree. I give you the levels of what’s optimally healthy and what the typical lab is going to show, but you want what’s optimally healthy. the healthiest people in the world have low serum ferritin levels, so you want to approximate what the long-living populations have of the blue zones.   [00:21:53] Ashley James: Yes. In the last year, they just published a study, I thought it was fascinating, that said this could be the reason why those who eat a more plant-based diet live longer because they have more managed, not deficient, but managed lower iron levels because they’re not you know over-consuming animal flesh, which contains high in iron. It’s sort of a very oxidative form of iron. They saw that people who had lower iron levels lived longer.   [00:22:27] Ann Louise Gittleman: They do, but if you’re a meat-eater or a carnivore, if you’re a paleo kind of person, there’s help involved with that because there are ways that you can circumvent the iron by eating iron blockers, and we talk about that, whether that’s red wine. See, red wine is healthy because of the fact that it’s a blocking agent to iron. That’s the secret of the Mediterranean diet and the French paradox. It’s the blocking effect of wine, which I go into the blocking effect of certain types of dairy foods, the blocking effect of tea, the blocking effect of coffee.   [00:23:02] Ashley James: Oh, that’s fascinating. I think there are a few listeners who are liking you even more right now.   [00:23:09] Ann Louise Gittleman: So here’s to some wine. Here’s to some vino. Healthy vino, not more than one small glass a day if you’re a female, maybe up to two if you’re a male because too much of a good thing is too much of a good thing.   [00:23:19] Ashley James: Right, exactly. And then also, just watching and seeing if you become stressed out. Some people have bad sleep and then that stresses them out the next day, and then that spirals downwards. We have to watch out. Some people can’t function properly when they drink any alcohol and they just have to check in with their body and see what’s going on. And listen to your advice because maybe they need to do some more cleaning up of their diet and killing parasites.   [00:23:49] Ann Louise Gittleman: But they’re easy fixes, this is not an involved program. I mean, it’s comprehensive because we talk about the brain, the heart, the bones, the sex drive, the hair, the nails, the skin. I’m not sure if I’ve covered just about everything there. We talk about all the major body organs and glands that people are concerned about, but the fixes are as easy as can be. If you want to spend more money, then go for that. You can as well. But taking that yearly blood test is a real key, and then of course the copper connection, which I go into in great detail is also important in checking the copper levels of your current water supply, which you can do easily online, and I give you the levels which are optimally healthy. Those that may be a precursor to Alzheimer’s.   [00:24:29] Ashley James: Is water the most common way we’re getting copper or are there certain foods that we should be avoiding?   [00:24:37] Ann Louise Gittleman: Well, it’s the copper that’s the copper that you don’t want. It’s the divalent or inorganic. You see, what I learned from the book and it was because a researcher contacted me out of the blue, Ashley. I always think that the universe sends me messages and messengers when I’m writing a book. He is a researcher, his name is George Brewer. He’s out of the University of Michigan. He’s in the genetics department, and he called and said I think I have the key to Alzheimer’s. I said, oh my gosh, what is it? And we have a discussion. He’s written profusely and he believes it was the implementation of copper water pipes in Europe that started the Alzheimer’s epidemic. He’s correlated that in many of his different publications. It’s the inorganic copper, the copper that’s in the food is food-based, that’s fine, and we’ve got plenty of it in the diet and the avocados. That’s the seeds, the beans, the shellfish, but it’s the inorganic synthetic copper that the body has no method of metabolizing healthfully. It doesn’t go to the liver the way the food-based copper does, it goes to the brain.   [00:25:41] Ashley James: Oh my gosh, that’s fascinating. I’m so glad you’re pointing this out.   [00:25:46] Ann Louise Gittleman: And nobody has written about it before, which just blows my mind. So the idea here is that if you’ve got issues with Alzheimer’s or want to prevent any type of dysfunction cognitively, you should get the book and read the chapter on the brain and on the misbehaving minerals because it will widen your eyes. It will open your eyes, it’ll open your mouth, it’ll be jaw-dropping as it was for me.   [00:26:09] Ashley James: I bet. Our brain’s the most important part. I liked learning from Dr. Amen. He helps people reverse aging in the brain, but it’s all about cardiovascular function, which your program is comprehensive. It’s treating the body as a whole. But that’s why I thought it was fascinating because if you can make your brain stay healthy, you’re actually making your heart stay healthy, you’re making your whole body stay healthy. So if you’re focusing on brain health, everything else falls into line. That’s why I love that you’ve given us this checklist—moving your body, that connectivity, eating healthy, the supplements, and watching those levels of minerals. Of course, I know that your book is going to be chock full of amazing information. Now, you did mention skin health. I know that sagging skin and loose skin. We’re vain, we don’t like it. We don’t like it when our skin gets a little saggy, a little wrinkly, so I’m interested to hear about some skin tips for firming up the skin. And then you mentioned sex drive and I think all of us want to know how we can feel youthful and still have fun with our partner no matter what age we are. So give us some of those pointers from your book for healthy skin and for healthy sex drive.   [00:27:42] Ann Louise Gittleman: Well, I’m not a big believer in collagen per se, I’d rather go to the vitamin c, which is the precursor to collagen. I’m a big vitamin c believer. The Vitality C that I talk about from UNI KEY Health is the C that I use on a daily basis. And the more that you can accommodate without getting loose bowels, the more that you need vitamin C. I go to 20 grams a day without an issue whatsoever.  I’m a big believer in vitamin C, a precursor to hydrogen peroxide. It’ll stop cancer from progressing, as you know from my husband’s book. I used to have cancer, and that is in addition to lysine. Nobody talks about the amino acid lysine or proline, those are the two biggest assists for great skin, and I can say to you that at the age of 72, I have better skin now than I did at 25.   [00:28:30] Ashley James: Oh, I love it. You mentioned your husband, James Templeton. I’ve had him on the show. I absolutely adore his work. I definitely recommend listeners go back and check out those interviews with James Templeton.  Vitamin C is really interesting because a goat will have about 16 grams of vitamin C coursing through its veins at all times, and a wolf has about 32 grams, and we don’t make vitamin c, but animals do. So how many grams do you think we should have? We’re about maybe the same size or bigger than a wolf, so taking 20 grams a day isn’t that unheard of, isn’t that surprising. It’s actually what our body needs.   [00:29:14] Ann Louise Gittleman: Well, it’s what my body needs is probably because of all the mercury fillings that I had years ago. But people are very individual. I believe in biochemical individuality. So I can say that what I can tolerate you might not be able to. But one scoop of the Vitality C gives you four grams of C plus D-Ribose for your heart, plus MSM for your skin. So my point being is it’s the best bang for your buck with this buffered vitamin C. And the more that you can tolerate, the more you need it. Some people can only tolerate one scoop. So for some reason, they just run through their system and they can’t accommodate it, but for those of us that can accommodate it, we’ll see a big difference in the collagen and the dewiness of the skin, the lack of wrinkles, and the lack of sagginess.   [00:30:00] Ashley James: Oh, I love it. Well, it’s so hard to get enough vitamin C from our diet because our food isn’t fresh.   [00:30:07] Ann Louise Gittleman: Impossible.   [00:30:08] Ashley James: You’re not going out into your garden and picking something right away and eating it yourself, and eating fruits and vegetables fresh all day long like we’re supposed to. That the food that you’re getting is weeks old, and the vitamin C is just not there anymore. We’re definitely, as a nation, not eating enough plants. So we’re not getting enough vitamin C from our diet, and that’s why supplements are so important because we are not eating in a natural way because we’re not walking outdoors and immediately eating fresh food. So we have to supplement in order to catch up with the modern diet.   [00:30:43] Ann Louise Gittleman: That’s a part of it, but modern-day stress will skyrocket your need for vitamin C. We’re all under stress. I mean, look at the news, that’s stressful. Seeing what’s going on in our daily political spheres is very stressful no matter what side of the aisle you’re on. So all that is going to be stressing us, plus getting older is stressing us, the pandemic is stressing us. There are so many things in the body that will respond to, and vitamin C, as well as magnesium and zinc, are lost because of a stress response. So you have to keep supplementing.   [00:31:15] Ashley James: That’s such a good point.   [00:31:17] Ann Louise Gittleman: But the other thing is for those of us that have had any kind of PTSD because we’ve had concussions and I’m one of them, the body needs more vitamin C because it’s an anti-stressor.   [00:31:27] Ashley James: What else does a body need to help heal concussions?   [00:31:31] Ann Louise Gittleman: Well, that’s a good question because there’s one that had a near-fatal concussion back in 2007. One needs brain training. It’s not so much nutrients, it’s re-patterning the brain. So I’m a big believer in the brain training methodology that was pioneered by a group called Cereset. So I’ve gone and done the brain training myself. I’m out of PTSD to some degree, but once you’ve had the PTSD, you get re-triggered by any kind of life event, and then your needs for all these stress-related vitamins and minerals really go way over to the stratosphere. So that goes back to the brain, and whatever you can do to heal that brain with all the things we talked about—the connectivity, the volunteerism, having a spiritual practice. But not getting triggered is very difficult. So you have to work on it on a daily basis. I personally take GABA 750mg morning, noon, and night. I live on Rescue Remedy and take a great deal of magnesium.   [00:32:26] Ashley James: Excellent. What form of magnesium do you take?   [00:32:30] Ann Louise Gittleman: It’s the one I formulated called Mag-Key, which has the orotate, the glycinate, the taurinate, and the threonate.   [00:32:38] Ashley James: That sounds great. I love me some magnesium. I’ll take all of it.   [00:32:45] Ann Louise Gittleman: As well as some Epsom salt baths. So whatever you can do. Stress is a big killer, but it’s very difficult to escape stress in this day and time.   [00:32:54] Ashley James: Right. So we got to keep working on ourselves and stay conscious. We got to take the supplements, like you said, have a spiritual practice, get outside and ground yourself or do some earthing. Walk barefoot on the earth and breathe in nature. Take time to consciously bring down the stress is so important. Now, you talked about sex drive and we all want to know, how do we maintain those healthy hormones especially post-menopausally? How do we stay very youthful and healthy in the bedroom with our partner?   [00:33:30] Ann Louise Gittleman: Well, I have one little tip in the book, which involves a particular vitamin which I will not give away to anybody until they get the book, and then we can talk about it then. But there’s one little tip that will heighten the intimate encounter. And then there’s an herb which I will tell you about called Tribulus which is a precursor to testosterone. Men and women can both take that at 250 milligrams three times a day. Very important for testosterone, which is the hormone of desire that goes south with both men and women once they reach a certain age and stage of life. So using the Tribulus, using this little particular vitamin to heighten the encounter, maybe a little lubrication for women, as well as some natural estrogenic products I think is really the tip of the iceberg, and that’s the key.   [00:34:16] Ashley James: Thank you. Now I know you’re pinched for time. I was so happy to have you on the show. You’re definitely welcome back anytime. I’d love to have you. You’re a wealth of knowledge. We’ve learned so much in such a short period of time. How can we find you on Facebook to be part of your community to continue learning from you?   [00:34:37] Ann Louise Gittleman: Let’s see, where do we go? To Ann Louise Gittleman, Ph.D., CNS, that’s the Facebook page. And then you can get the book at radicallongevitybook.com.   [00:34:48] Ashley James: Excellent. We’re going to make sure the links to everything you do are in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. We definitely want to all get the book, Radical Longevity. It would also be a great gift to give to our loved ones as well. Is there anything that you’d like to say or give us some homework to wrap up today’s interview?   [00:35:07] Ann Louise Gittleman: Well, I would say that the brain is very important, but so is the liver, and those are two organs that can regenerate themselves. So I put a lot of emphasis on the brain, of course, because we’re all afraid of Alzheimer’s, but the liver is the regenerative organ for metabolism, for metabolizing toxins, hormones, and all the poisons in the environment.  So taking care of your liver daily. Liver detox is not a seasonal event, it’s a daily event. So you’ve got to take something to get the poisons out daily. It’s not the fact that we’re accumulating poisons. It’s the fact we’re not excreting them that’s the key, and that’s where I like more fiber in the diet. I’m a big believer in psyllium husks, and that’s where I like some sort of liver-loving food, whether that’s artichoke hearts or artichoke chlorophyll. Maybe a little milk thistle and even Oregon grape root, but the liver is the key. It means long life. So keeping your liver will make sure that you enhance and ensure a long life.   [00:36:05] Ashley James: I am such a fan of taking care of the liver. My mom died of liver cancer, and I’ve had liver issues with detoxification. I’ve been working for the last six years now on supporting my liver, and I saw a huge shift in my health when I started doing that. So I absolutely, 100% agree with you. Which one of your books or maybe there’s several of them would you recommend we read for supporting our liver? Of course, Radical Longevity, but do you have any other ones that are more specific to liver health?   [00:36:34] Ann Louise Gittleman: Radical Metabolism.   [00:36:37] Ashley James: Oh, yeah. And that was the last book we talked about in episode 284. Excellent. Thank you so much again, Ann Louise Gittleman, for coming on the show. You’re welcome back anytime. We’d love to have you. I’m a big fan of your work. I definitely recommend listeners read all your books and continue following you. I can’t wait to interview you when you’re 120.   [00:37:00] Ann Louise Gittleman: We’ll see on the other side of 100, my love. You’re a sweetheart. God bless.   Get Connected With Ann Louise Gittleman! Official Website Bile Builder Facebook Instagram Twitter Youtube Books by Ann Louise Gittleman Radical Longevity Radical Metabolism The New Fat Flush Plan The New Fat Flush Cookbook The Complete New Fat Flush Program

Come join the supportive Facebook community: https://www.learntruehealth.com/group   Ashley’s Update For the Learn True Health Listeners https://www.learntruehealth.com/ashleys-update-for-the-learn-true-health-listeners   In this episode, I give an update about what happened during the last two months since the previous episode. I share how I’m coping with the loss of a loved one. I also share my COVID experience and how I recovered from it.   Hello, true health seekers, it’s so good to be back. I know many of you probably are wondering what’s going on. I took some time off. The last time I was posting episodes you may have heard me talk about how I was pregnant and I had a beautiful pregnancy. I was very healthy the whole time, as was the baby. And if you’re not in our Facebook group, then you probably haven’t heard but I lost our child during delivery. She was born still earlier this month. We’re still waiting for some answers, but it looks like perhaps the cord was interrupted right at the very last few minutes of delivery. She had a very strong and healthy heartbeat the whole time, and everything was smooth right up until the very end. And then just at the very end, sometime in the last three minutes, we lost her heartbeat right as she was coming out. Dealing with that, facing the grief, obviously recovering from labor, postpartum recovery, and then I got COVID. That was an adventure.   So this last month has for me been about emotional, spiritual, and physical recovery and healing. I kept thinking about you guys, and I kept thinking about what I would say, how I would share, and how much I wanted to share my journey with you. I’m really wanting to get on the microphone. If you’ve been a long-time listener, you know that all of my experiences I want to share because I want everyone to learn as I am learning. I’ve healed so many illnesses and diseases, I’ve come so far in my healing journey, and I continue to grow healthier and stronger. It’s not all just physical, right? It’s emotional, it’s mental healing and growth as well, it’s personal growth. When the paramedics were working on her, the paramedics came very fast. It was a home birth, and the thing is, this would have happened in the hospital as well because there’s nothing we could have done. Everything was going perfectly and then all of a sudden she was gone. There wouldn’t have been time for any kind of medical intervention. As I was lying on the bathroom floor and the paramedics were working on her and the first words out of my mouth were God, if it is in your plan, if it is your will please save her. That surprised me. I didn’t go to anger, I don’t feel any anger about it. I mean, obviously, I grieved and I grieved and I grieved because I lost. I lost the life I was going to have as a mother to this gorgeous baby girl. My husband and I grieved, and all our family and friends around us who are looking forward to being with her, they’ve all shared the impact with me that this has had. But I didn’t go to anger. Something in me trusted that my life, my fate is in God’s hands. And I’ve never had that level of faith before, I’ve never felt it. It was unknowing, it was a deep, deep knowing, and it’s something that I don’t think I could teach anyone to do. It’s something you have to go within and you feel it and it’s unknowing. I just knew. I have no control over this situation. I have no control and this is 100% in God’s hands. And so that experience surprised me. I didn’t know that I would grow spiritually so much from this. So I’ve really looked to God, and that spiritual component is I think really crucial in terms of mental and emotional healing. Being able to just pray and say, okay, I don’t have control over this aspect of my life, I don’t. There are things I can control. I can control what I eat. I can control how much water I drink. I can control the vitamins I take. I can control what kind of media I take in, which affects our mental and emotional health. I can control, for the most part, the people that are around me or the people I choose to be around. So there are so many things I can control about my life, but these moments like a car accident, a death, an illness, a sudden infection. You can control how you react, but you can’t control the outcome. Now, how you react can sometimes affect the outcome when someone’s already gone, when someone’s already dead. Now it’s time to focus on healing and growth and focus on what we can do. And then it’s okay. I really got that it’s okay that I can’t control everything. That there’s some peace, some grace in handing that part of my life over to God and just being this is out of my control, it’s in your hands. I’ve had some very spiritual experiences this last month since she’s passed where I know she was here with me. Very interesting and I’ve heard from other friends who have lost loved ones. A song will come on at a specific time, a rainbow will all of a sudden appear, or a lamp or a device will all of a sudden just turn on when no one turned it on, that kind of thing. So I’ve had a few of those and I thought that was very interesting. There’s a song that I chose to play at her funeral and that song came on the radio. It was Yo-Yo Ma’s Somewhere Over the Rainbow, and that song came on the rainbow the next day as I was talking with my husband about her daughter. What are the chances, right? It was really beautiful. So I wanted to come on the microphone and give you guys an update. I am every day getting better and better. It’s just one step at a time. I know everyone listening has lost someone or lost something in their life, has had to go through a process of grief. I’ve lost both my parents and so I’ve experienced it, but each one’s different. Each loss is different, but the feeling of going through grief, there are certain stages that are similar. What I can say is I’m really happy that I haven’t gotten stuck. When I lost my mom, I got stuck in depression for months and months and months and I didn’t move out of that. I didn’t move out of the anger and the depression really that first shock. I was in denial most of the time, just bouncing back between denial, anger, and depression.   This time because we surrounded ourselves with loved ones and we’re talking it through and we’re working on it, and I also believe in my faith that God has a plan. And I have those spiritual beliefs about where we go when we die. That there’s a purpose, there’s a reason. I think that really helped me as well. But of course, that still doesn’t help because I want her to be here, I want her to be with me. She was so beautiful, she is so beautiful. Join the Facebook group, I posted a picture of her. She is so beautiful, and she was very gentle in the womb. She had a calm, gentle, loving energy the whole time. Really a sweetheart. So I’m learning a lot about healing from loss. With every loss, we become stronger. We can, we have the potential to become stronger. So I’ve learned so much about myself those last few weeks, and I’ve thought about how I could then take that and incorporate that into the podcast so that I can help you. We all learn from each other. That’s something really beautiful also about our Facebook group, the Learn True Health Facebook group is that we are learning from each other and that we’re growing together. I will continue to share the lessons that I’ve learned from this experience through the podcast as I find amazing guests to interview and have these great discussions with guests. If you’re new to the podcast, we focus on mental health, emotional health, spiritual health, and physical health. So there’s not a separation. When someone has a physical disease, they’re affected emotionally, they’re affected mentally. Sometimes, when people are in spiritual crisis, they experience mental and emotional health, as well as physical health issues. I mean, you can’t separate that. You may have a diagnosis like diabetes, for example, and changing your diet and changing your lifestyle can reverse type 2 diabetes 100%. I did it myself. I reversed type 2 diabetes. My A1C is 4.7. I have amazing blood sugar, and I was diabetic for years. The point is though that those health changes weren’t just physical changes. I had to change my mindset, I had to do emotional work, I had to work on myself on a personal growth level. So we enrich our lives by focusing on all areas, all aspects of health. That’s why the podcast is where I have doctors on the show, counselors, therapists, healers, and spiritual leaders on the show so that we can gain lessons from all these people. We can collect them all and apply what works for us. So having COVID, that was really interesting. I used homeopathy, I worked with a homeopath, I worked with my naturopath. I got on all the natural stuff, and my body was just really, really worn down because of the grief and because I was postpartum. I was a few days postpartum. It hit me hard and I recovered fast. That’s what I’m so grateful for is that I was sick for less than 10 days. It was really bad. On day eight, I was very worried. It was hard to breathe, very worried for myself. But by day 10 I was totally on the road to recovery. Now I’m exercising. I’m a month postpartum and I’m back to exercising. I thank God. I thank God I don’t feel any of the effects. Some people experience long-term effects. I don’t have any of that. I really contribute that to the fact that I eat clean and healthy. I take supplements. I’m not deficient in zinc. I take zinc every day. I did lose my sense of smell, and that was the weirdest because we have flowers throughout the house. So many people have given us beautiful flowers that are just smelling amazing as condolences for losing our daughter. All of a sudden I realized I couldn’t smell them. I grabbed my essential oils and I realized I couldn’t smell them either. I was like, oh no. So I tripled up on my zinc. I started taking 90 milligrams of zinc a day and the zinc I take I really like this. Pure Encapsulations is the company, and it’s a zinc picolinate. It’s just 30 milligrams, and 40 milligrams is a very common safe dose for adults, so 30 is even less. But I decided to triple up on it. I took three, but not the same time—one in the morning, one in the afternoon, one in the evening. And two days later, I got my sense of smell back 100%. My husband had a similar experience, and then I talked to a friend who was also going through COVID and they were having a similar experience, but they lost their sense of taste and smell. I told them that I had increased my zinc, they increased their zinc and it came back right away. I thought that was very interesting. I’ve had a suspicion, and we’ve had a few interviews about that last year. My suspicion is that we use up the zinc when we have viral infections, especially like COVID. So then we become extremely deficient. By increasing it, then we’re just addressing the deficiency. That’s my suspicion. I took all the supplements that I knew that have been shared through the podcast and that also we talk about in the Facebook group. Those all helped a lot. You know what really helped was glutathione. I ordered some liquid glutathione through a friend of mine who’s a holistic practitioner and that really helped as well. So there’s light at the end of the tunnel. I’m back on my feet, and every day I am healing and growing stronger. So jumping back into doing the podcast, I’m also in the process possibly of moving. We might have another disruption in podcast episodes, but I’m back. I want to start publishing weekly. I have some episodes I recorded before I gave birth. I’m going to be publishing those soon. If episodes, I might mention something about being pregnant so just a heads up. Those episodes were recorded about two months ago. They’re still very relevant, the information. So if that happens, just know that I am no longer pregnant currently. However, those were past recorded episodes, which I’ve been meaning to get up. I just got to the point in the pregnancy where I’m like, okay, my brain’s not working. I think it was at 38 weeks. I’m like, I need to take some time off. Thank you guys for being on this journey with me. There are over 4000 people in the Learn True Health Facebook group, and you guys have been so supportive as I shared my experiences of having lost our daughter. Your support and your comments were so helpful. I read every single one of them. Often I read them to my husband, and often I cried. There are so many listeners like me who have lost a child, either to miscarriage, to stillbirth, early infant death, or even later. You’re not alone. That’s something that’s really important to know. Surround yourself with loving people who make you feel like you’re not alone and make you feel heard and listened to, and continue to share. No matter how sad you are, how lonely you feel, or how upset you are around losing someone you love, especially a child, your impact on the world matters and you being here matters. Vale, our daughter, was only here for a short time living inside me, and she had such an impact on my life. And then I heard that she had an impact on others. A few friends came to me and said that this whole experience has given them so much gratitude for their children and for their health. They were worried that that would sound selfish, and it’s not. It’s raw, it’s real, and it’s their experience. Of course, if you’re hearing that I lost a child, you’re going to want to go and hug your child, or hug your spouse, hug the person you love most. We don’t know how long we’re going to be here, right? Sometimes we get so caught up in the minutiae of life, in the stressors of life, and that rat race of paying bills, coming home, and just popping yourself in front of the boob tube. We go unconscious, so many times in our life going conscious about what we’re eating or how we’re not taking care of our bodies, and then all of a sudden we’re 30 pounds heavier. We’re like, what just happened? Especially this last year with COVID, people changed their routines, they went unconscious, they started self-soothing with food, alcohol, drugs, and TV. It’s easy to lose sight of the people you love the most and the amount of gratitude you have for them. So sometimes we need that wake-up call, that reminder, what is most important to us? Put down the remote control. I’m guilty too. I’m talking from personal experience. But put down the sugary, alcoholic beverages, or whatever we are using to sell soothe, and go be present with the person or the people that you love most. Have that experience where you’re in touch with the gratitude for those people. I am hugging my son harder than ever before now. I’m so grateful for my husband and my son. That’s another thing I noticed that when I realized I’d lost her is I started to think about all the things I was grateful for. Obviously, I’m in deep sorrow. I was in absolute shock, and this was one of the most painful experiences of my life. But it absolutely immediately shined a light on what I do have. What am I grateful for, and that also really helped me is constantly thinking I’m alive. I could have died, right? There are women who in these situations, they die during birth along with the baby. I mean, I’m alive. I’m so thankful for that. I have an amazing son. I have an amazing husband. There are so many people I’m grateful for in my life, so many friends I’m grateful for. There are so many things I have to be grateful for, and I am. I’m grateful for the time I got to have with our daughter. So I keep focusing on that as well.   Gratitude is a healing tool. I’m not ignoring the sadness. I’m not ignoring the grief or any of those other emotions that come with it. I’m holding that, I’m honoring her in my heart, and I’m also getting in touch with the gratitude because that allows me to not be unconscious in my life. Stay on the path of taking care of myself, which is really important. I noticed both losing my mom especially and losing my dad, I stopped taking care of myself. I just went to self-soothe with food. Luckily, I was never one of those people that liked self-soothing with alcohol or drugs. It was more just sugar, which I’m not into anymore, thank God. I would self-soothe with TV and food, go unconscious, and not take care of myself, not even brush my hair. That’s why I really knew I was in a hole, I was in depression when I lost my mom when I just didn’t take care of myself. With this, I watched and I made sure I’m still taking care of myself. I’m focusing on gratitude. Keep listening to the podcast, join the Facebook group, the Learn True Health Facebook group if you haven’t already. Some amazing episodes, these interviews I did, like I said, before I gave birth. There are a few episodes I’ve got to post that are really good, and I’ve been looking forward to sitting down and editing them, getting them posted. And then I’ve got some great interviews lined up this whole month. I’ve got some really cool guests, so I’m looking forward to having you listen to all that. Come join the Facebook group so that you can be part of the community and part of the conversations that we have about guests and about things that we learn together and just come be part of that. It’d be great to have you. It’s a very supportive community, and I just love being a part of that growing community of holistic like-minded people. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for being on this journey with me. Life is a blessing, and it’s hard. Without the loss, how can we truly feel the gain, right? I am hopeful for the future. Of course, there are moments where I just completely break down, but I’m just present in the moment with all the emotions. I also have been doing some Emotion Code work. Oh my gosh, that stuff works. Go back and listen to that episode, it was a few episodes ago. A friend of mine who’s a mental health counselor, she’s been studying it, so she’s done some with me and it really works. I’m feeling it, which is really cool. I mean, I knew it would, but to experience it firsthand it’s very neat. It’s a very gentle process, and then all of a sudden you’re like wow, I feel different. I feel good, I feel better, I feel whole. I’m just noticing I don’t feel fractionated. It’s very interesting. So, yeah, check that episode out if you haven’t already, especially if you know you’ve got some emotional work that you want to release from your body. All right. Well, I’m about to go in a few minutes and do an interview. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day. Thank you so much for being a listener of the Learn True Health podcast. Get Connected with Ashley James! Facebook Facebook Group Instagram Twitter Learn True Health Podcast on iTunes Free Your Anxiety! Take You Supplements

Visit TakeYourSupplements.com to get on the supplements that Ashley and her family have been taking for the last ten years. Become a Certified Health Coach Through IIN just like Ashley James! Experience a free sample of their program: learntruehealth.com/coach   Optimize Your Healing Through Holistic Coaching and Nutrition https://www.learntruehealth.com/optimize-healing-holistic-coaching-nutrition   Highlights: What to expect from takeyoursupplements.com How takeyousupplements.com helps clients with their concerns What does takeyoursupplements.com offer aside from supplements   In this episode, Jennifer Saltzman is back on the show and talks about what takeyoursupplements.com offers to their clients. She shares some testimonials of clients that have improved their health after going through a takeyoursupplements.com protocol. Jen also shares that their level of care for their clients is what sets them apart from others. Intro: Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. Today is March 1st. It is our fifth anniversary of the Learn True Health podcast. Can you believe it? Five years. I can hardly believe it. I remember the day that my husband and I decided to pursue this and do the podcast. You don’t hear his voice, but he’s behind the scenes. He’s been such a huge supporter and helper. When there are tech things I can’t figure out, he’s right there to help me, so really, it’s a journey that we’ve both taken this last five years.  We actually started something like six months before just planning it out, studying. We had to teach ourselves all kinds of things, what kind of equipment to use, what kind of programs to use, editing software, how to get guests, what kind of format to use, all of that. All that stuff we had to figure out, and we poured through all the research. Of course, I’ve been listening to podcasts for years so I had a deep affinity for them. I would always want to do one, and it just made so much sense that I wanted to share my healing journey. If you’re a new listener, you may not have heard, but I suffered for many years with a chronic illness. I had type 2 diabetes, chronic adrenal fatigue, chronic infections, for which I was on monthly antibiotics for. I was told by an endocrinologist after a battery of tests that I would never have kids, that I was completely infertile. I had polycystic ovarian syndrome, and I was basically told that I was barren. I was just getting worse and worse and worse. I felt like I was a prisoner trapped in my own body. I would just burst into tears all the time because I was constantly hungry, my blood sugar was out of control, and I just had this gnawing pain in my body. It was hunger, it was restless legs. It’s an indescribable sensation when the body is so deficient in minerals that your skin crawls, your muscles crawl. I had problems sleeping, and then all day I was exhausted. In the morning times, I couldn’t process human language. I had such bad brain fog. My husband would talk to me and I couldn’t even understand him. This was me in my late 20s and my early 30s. This was the quality of my life, and I was young. This is when we’re supposed to go out, just climb mountains, and have fun. There I was just feeling like I was on death’s door. It was holistic medicine and our journey that my husband and I started back in 2008 when we decided to shop the perimeter of the grocery store to buy organic, to seek out functional medicine, to seek out Naturopathic medicine. We kept searching and searching because we really saw that the mainstream medical system was good at prescribing drugs and maintaining chronic disease but had no tools to help me get better. I saw so many doctors, and I’m sure if you have any kind of chronic illness you have had the same frustrations. If you’re sick of being on drugs and you’re sick of just being told that you’re just going to have it because of your genetics, because of your age, because of your sex, or because of your heritage. MDs are not trained in how to reverse disease, and I value MDs as part of the full spectrum that is offered to us in medicine in general, but they only are one piece of the puzzle. They’re only one piece of the pie if you think about it, but we’re taught growing up that they’re the only doctor to see. I can’t tell you how many people, how many listeners in the last five years have reached out to me and said thank you. Because of your show, I learned that there are doctors other than MDs out there. There are doctors of Naturopathic medicine that have the ability to prescribe drugs if they want to. They have the ability to run labs. They’re fantastic diagnosticians, but their focus is on healing the body with nutrition.  Now we have health coaching and health coaching has taken off. It’s the number one growing career several years in a row in the field of health, and that is because you get this level of care, accountability, and partnership that was not designed to get that from our doctor. Our doctors look through our labs, analyze us, and listen to our symptoms. If it’s a good doctor, helps us with maybe diet changes, supplement changes, herb changes if they’re a Naturopath. Then you go home and then you try to do what they told you to do. A health coach, this is where they shine is that they help you to implement these changes on an emotional level, on a day-to-day level help you to make these habit changes. In the last 10 years, I’ve mentored under several very amazing Naturopathic physicians, very amazing doctors. They’ve taught me, they mentored me. I went back to school, I became a health coach. Not only did I reverse all of my health conditions using supplements. One of the things we’re going to talk about today are the supplements that I got on that helped me to reverse all of these conditions, but I was able to conceive our son completely naturally and on the first try. Same with the baby I’m carrying right now. When my husband and I decided, okay, let’s go for it, it was again on the first try. Now, coming from a woman who was told her entire adult life up until a few years ago that I could never have kids ever, that I didn’t have a cycle. I had very severe polycystic ovarian syndrome for which I do not have anymore. This is something that MDs will tell you can’t reverse. Those MDs out there will tell you you can’t reverse diabetes either. Type 2 diabetes is 100% reversible. It was probably one of the easiest things that I was able to reverse, but it was the thing that I was probably suffering from the most because blood sugar imbalance is incredibly uncomfortable. I’m sharing a little bit about my journey for those who are newer and haven’t heard this, and of course, you can go back and listen to past episodes—episode 0, the beginning one. You can go to the website learntruehealth.com. For about 15 minutes I share my story in more detail. But it was because of this, I was able to reverse the things that I was constantly suffering from using natural medicine. I decided to launch the show five years ago because this needs to get out. People are suffering needlessly and we need to help. We need to continue to share this information, and I love that the listeners of the Learn True Health podcast share these episodes with their friends and family. This is how we’ve grown. We’ve had millions and millions of downloads, and I’m so excited that we’re helping so many people to discover that true health is possible even if they’ve been told their whole life by doctors that it’s not. You’re seeing the wrong doctor if your doctor doesn’t believe in you. If your doctor doesn’t believe that your body can heal itself, go get a second opinion from a doctor that believes in you, that wants you to have optimal health, and that’s very important—the distinction between maintaining disease and achieving optimal health. Even if you have a condition let’s say type 1 diabetes for which you’re on insulin for. There is a broad spectrum of health within that space.  I know a gentleman actually who had raging out of control blood sugar, and he was at the highest end of insulin that he was injecting. Then he saw a Naturopath, got on the same supplements that actually I got on to reverse my type 2 diabetes, and it helped him—between the diet that the Naturopath recommended and the supplements that the Naturopath had him on. All of the minerals that are so good at helping the body become even more efficient, he was able to cut his insulin by 75% because his insulin sensitivity went up. His blood sugar became more stabilized as a type 1 diabetic. So imagine, no matter what condition you have, there’s a spectrum in which you can achieve optimal health within that. Now I know people who’ve reversed diseases that you and I believe are fatal, you and I have been told are irreversible. The body is amazing, and if you believe that you can heal, you want to make sure your practitioners believe that you can heal as well. Health coaches believe in you and believe in your ability to shift your life, not only to have great health but have an amazing, fulfilling life with joy in every area of your life, with fulfillment in every area of your life. That’s why I’m such a big advocate for sharing this information, for continuing the podcast. I can’t believe we’ve been doing this for five years. I’m very happy we have. That was my goal to continue to share this information. So here’s to the last five years and all the wonderful lives that we have helped. And here’s to the next five years and how many people can we help as a community. Continue sharing this podcast, and let’s turn this ripple into a tidal wave and help as many people as possible to achieve true health.   [00:10:15] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 458. I am so excited for today’s guest. We have back on the show probably one of my favorite guests, and you have not heard from her in a while, Jennifer Saltzman. Jennifer, you were in episodes 9, 10, 31, 179, and 180. So listeners can go back to those episodes to hear more about Jen’s story of healing. In one of those episodes, she interviews me and that’s a fun one turning the tables on me. I share my full story of healing and the things that we’ve both struggled with and ended up finding our salvation through holistic medicine. I should say our physical salvation to be able to come from such suffering for so many years and multiple illnesses, to be thrown away by the mainstream medical system and just told that you’re going to be on a drug for the rest of your life or this is just how it is. And then to find natural medicine—a really, really good natural medicine—that allows your body to heal, that gives your body all the nutrients it needs, the raw building blocks it needs to heal to the point where you no longer have any of those problems.  That’s something that Jen and I both have experienced. That’s one of the reasons why I started the podcast is I suffered for so many years, and as did Jen. So you can go back and listen to those episodes to hear more about her story. But she has basically been in the health industry for over 20 years and has been helping her clients to gain a foothold into their health that they never thought possible and to overcome things that they never even imagined could or dreamed could be possible using natural medicine. Jen, I’m so excited for you to be here today because one thing you do now, of course, you work with clients. You help them through the website takeyoursupplements.com, and I definitely recommend listeners go there and sign up for a free conversation with you or one of the other amazing health coaches at takeyoursupplements.com. By doing that, the coaches don’t charge you, which is a very unique system that we have at takeyoursupplements.com. The coaches help you to determine what supplements you need to take, some very specific diet recommendations to support your needs, then you buy the supplements, you follow their protocol, and you see fantastic results. It’s actually a very affordable way to do it. Now, Jen, you work with people at takeyoursupplements.com, but you also have been helping people who want to become health coaches. People who either are health coaches who want to incorporate holistic supplements and herbs into their existing practice, or people who are lay people who are just really interested in health and they would love to now help others as well. We’re here to talk about that today, this idea that we can heal the body with natural medicine and that we can then help others do the same. Welcome back to the show.   [00:13:43] Jennifer Saltzman: Thank you so much, Ashley. What an honor to be with you again today. I am quite moved, I have to say in this particular season. Since the last time we have talked, I feel like my prayers have been answered. In an earlier interview, I think I talked about being very, very sick as an age 25-year-old person on welfare, bedridden for most of the day. I prayed a prayer that was the following, that none of my sufferings would be in vain. That God would use all of my sufferings and turn it for good.  I have to tell you, I am feeling like that season is upon me and that there is an immense amount of grace and an immense amount of success that I’ve been having particularly in this last, I would say, the two-year season of working with clients. Not only have I recovered my health significantly. I mean, there’s one little thing I’m still waiting on but it’s happening. I’ve learned to live with it, and I’m 99% there. My energy has returned. I can work a lot of hours now. I’m so blessed to be able to put it into practice helping others now.  But what’s so incredibly encouraging to me in this particular season is that there are systems in place now with Take Your Supplements and some of the tools that we’re using and my ability to help and coach other health coaches—and we’ll talk more about that as we go—that is just systematically producing phenomenal results. I’m kind of pinching myself to be honest with you.  I’m just really excited to share with your listening audience breaking down what exactly they can expect if they do decide to go and join us in our journey with Take Your Supplements. What kind of support they can expect to receive, what kind of results we have had, and also what it might look like if somebody’s really excited about becoming an influencer for their people in their sphere of influence to really up elevate those people’s health with tools, self-advocacy. It’s amazing. That’s what I’m really excited to share with you today.   [00:16:15] Ashley James: That’s so awesome. There are a few things I want to touch on. The first thing is I’ve never told any listener, I haven’t said this on any podcast yet but I just remembered. Do you know who named takeyoursupplements.com? I had a client, this was over six years ago before we gave birth to our son. I always say we, by the way, I try to say we because I know I was the one that gave birth but my husband’s involved. It’s the two of us. It takes an effort on both parts. My client came to me, I remember her so well. She had hot flashes so bad that she was just drenched in a puddle and she lived in the desert and she was still drenched in a puddle all day long. She was really broke. She said I just have almost no money to put towards this but I just have to get my health back. I did the assessment, which is part of the scoring assessment that is taught to the health coaches. So if someone wants to become a health coach, they can talk to Jennifer Saltzman and get with the program. It’s a very affordable program that teaches this style. It’s actually taught from the Naturopathic philosophy of listening to the body, listening to the symptoms, and addressing the nutrient deficiencies based on the symptoms. I talked to her and I said okay, there’s this really good supplement we have, it’s very comprehensive, it’s also affordable, and it was less than $50 a month for this one bottle. It included a lot of minerals, it included a good amount of vitamins. If she had a bigger budget I would have done more with her, but I explained some things to change in diet and take this one supplement because at least she would be sort of filling up the mineral deficiencies she had. Well, she called me back less than a month later and she said, “You’re not going to believe this but my hot flashes are 100% gone.” She goes, “I’m on board. I want to learn everything about this. I have to tell all my friends about this. My husband says I’m a different person. I’m no longer frustrating to be around,” to put it nicely.   [00:18:40] Jennifer Saltzman: We know another word.   [00:18:42] Ashley James: There’s another word for it. She was so amazed, and I said, “Yeah, this is it.” The thing is, we weren’t even addressing the major nutrient deficiencies that often accompany hot flashes. But what I was addressing were the most common mineral deficiencies just with this one particular liquid multivitamin, mineral supplement that is really, really high quality that is provided through takeyoursupplements.com. Anyway, she got on board and talked to her husband. They decided to put more money towards her protocol so she could have everything her body needs. She said she had never felt so good. She kept calling me and just to update me. She said, “I’m in my 50s, I feel like I’m in my 20s again. I can’t believe it. I feel so good.” And this is something I hear so often from my clients, but the fact that in the first month that she went from hot flashes, sitting in a pool of her own sweat daily to none at all within one month, I just love that. I love hearing people’s results. Even though I’ve seen it time and time again, I love hearing it. So she started just telling all her friends and family, and of course, it’s hard to get people to listen when they’re not ready to change. So she started yelling take your supplements, take your supplements. That’s where I got the name takeyoursupplements.com because she was just like why don’t people just take your supplements.   [00:20:16] Jennifer Saltzman: That is so funny.   [00:20:18] Ashley James: That was just one of my clients in the last 10 years that have had such great success. The thing is supplements are like the mortar, they’re not the bricks. I’m not saying you can just keep doing everything else you’re doing in life. I like to use the example you can’t just go to McDonald’s, take a vitamin C, and expect it all to go away. That’s not the point.  But if you have a major mineral deficiency, you can’t get on top of it with diet changes because of the farming practices of the last 100 years, which is what we’ve discussed in past interviews. I’ve even had a man who has a degree in soil agriculture and he talks about we cannot get enough minerals from plants even if we’re eating plants all day long because of the way minerals are distributed across the soil. Because he’s tested soil, he’s actually worked with the Amish and worked with certain populations in China. If their populations live off of the land they often have major health issues because they have major mineral deficiencies because their soil is depleted. These are the things that we can get really good health from eating a very clean and healthy diet, and we can still have mineral or nutrient deficiencies that we want to fill in the gaps with supplements and herbs. I love herbs. Herbal medicine is so amazing when you have the right quality, when you have the right dose, and when you have the right one your body needs. There are so many things that we can do there. One thing you mentioned though is that you are struggling with one little tiny thing, and what I have to point out about Jen if anyone else had the thing that Jen has, they would be on massive pain meds and probably would have had surgery. Jen is on no pain meds and is fully functioning. When she said, I’ve learned to live with it, her version of learn to live with it is that she does physical therapy, exercises, and takes supplements. She takes care of her body so that her body doesn’t produce the amount of pain that other people would have been on massive pain meds for. I have to really give Jennifer credit. If anyone who’s listening has chronic pain, you got to talk to Jen. She’s really experienced in the realm of how to work with and manage pain on a natural level if that’s someone’s goal. This is something where you and I have really been parallel. You and I have been friends for many years, and our lives have been really parallel together in that we both suffered and we both didn’t want our suffering to be in vain. I also looked at losing both my parents—I lost my mom to cancer, my dad to heart disease, and I said I don’t want their deaths to be in vain either. I want to learn how I can help others. I can’t save my parents, but if I can help a listener save theirs or save themselves from that fate so that their children can have their parents longer, that’s exactly what I’m here to do. You’ve been helping people for many years with holistic health, but you said in the last two years, you’ve really seen just a very significant improvement. Once we do something for over 10 years or over 20 years, it’s like we mature into that field. You really see that you’ve gone into this with a new level of understanding and efficiency when it comes to helping your clients gain their health back. What do you think happened in the last two years that really helped you with that?   [00:23:57] Jennifer Saltzman: Well, a couple of things. I’d say the main thing is a more streamlined version of what you referred to as the—I can’t remember if you call it the health intake, we call it the health evaluation. Basically, we’ve had renditions of that over the years that we’ve worked with. But essentially looking at what people would call what’s bothering them, their symptomology. From a Naturopathic perspective, we understand that it all works together. But we do look at the body in these categories based on a lot of research from Naturopathic doctors over the years. But the advent of it becoming digitized, believe it or not, has been a huge piece. Not only has it become digitized, but it’s easier to share. Just the technology around it has become very, very, very, very good, and the systematic use and revisiting of that. As an example, when a client works with me or any of our coaches, we start out by giving them this health evaluation and they get what’s called a health score. What we do is we track that over the course of 90 days. Usually, I really like to retake the health evaluation in 90 days, but the most significant changes that I have found within the last couple of years are because I’ve been so consistent with using that, not only as a place to know exactly how to start somebody so that they’re getting the most bang for their buck. We’re looking at their overall nutritional needs and then any fine-tuning things so that things that they have been struggling with for years—particularly ones that from our perspective are not that difficult to help rectify or help elevate in terms of their health score—are getting very quick results. Examples of those things would be for instance acid reflux, digestive distress, bloating, constipation. Those things are things that we see rectify very, very quickly. But the other thing that I have done systematically over the last couple of years is set into place a very astute follow-up schedule with people. The level of care, the level of support that people get working with us without having to pay us for our time is really something that sets what we do apart. My follow-up with people—I set up monthly check-ins with them. There’s just a lot of support. If they need anything, they reach out. If they have questions, they’re not out there on their own trying to figure out what the next step is. There’s a lot of fine-tuning that goes in. Because of that, we do not work with clients unless they’re willing to. I mean, we will every once in a while, sometimes it happens. But we really can’t work with everyone because we only have so much time and availability. But for those that choose to understand the value of what we provide because it’s an extreme amount of value, the financial responsibility at this point—I’m not sure it will always be that way—is just for the supplements.   [00:27:23] Ashley James: What you’re saying is when someone goes to takeyoursupplements.com, they’re working with a health coach and the health coach is not charging them for their time. They do make a very small, and I have to really stress, it is a small commission off of the supplements, which is nice. It’s nice because we’re being compensated for our time, and the client really feels like they’re getting a deal because they’re getting their life back and their health back.  Should the client wish to hire a health coach and work with them long-term and pay them, that’s fine. But this isn’t some kind of upsell or you get roped into something. There’s no sales pitch. What is it called when you go like look at a vacation home and you’re getting like roped into a presentation?   [00:28:13] Jennifer Saltzman: Right, timeshare.   [00:28:16] Ashley James: Yeah, this is not like buying a timeshare. You go and you actually talk to a real health coach that probably has no sales training whatsoever. We have no system for trying to charge you for our time. If someone was like, oh man, I just want to keep talking to you every week, can I pay you for your time? I’m sure you and your health coach could work that out. But this is purely we’re trying to help people get on the right supplements they need that are very high quality, that is reasonably priced, and that really help people get results. This is a thing where we help as many people as we can, and these people don’t want to get off the supplements because they have amazing results and then they tell their friends and family. One of my clients ended up sending me his entire family and it’s so cool. Now, not everyone could get their entire family on board. I can’t even get my entire family to listen to me. We often can’t, but this was one thing where he was like, “I really want to help my whole family.’ I said to him, I just had this epiphany. Sometimes God just sends you a message like you just have this divine inspiration.  I said to him, “Who is the matriarch of your family that if you helped that one person the entire family would fall into line?” Because they have a very tight family unit. He goes, “My grandmother is the one person that if we could help her health conditions, we would have all my cousins. We would have everyone listening.” She had edema that was so bad her legs were purple. She was in so much agony and you should see this woman now. It has been almost 10 years, and you should see. She’s in her 80s, she’s super healthy. She got healthy so fast the entire family was like what are you doing? This is then when my client said you have to talk to my health coach. Just do what she says. Just listen to her and do what she says. This is one of those things where we’re trying to help people. Our main goal is you don’t have to suffer anymore, and your loved ones don’t have to suffer anymore, we’ve got this information. Sometimes, I guess, people have been jaded in the past. I’ve gone through that where I thought I was getting a really good experience and then a company tried to upsell me or tried to sell me something I didn’t need, so we became jaded. The frustration is that when real good information comes along, sometimes we listen through jaded ears because we’ve had bad experiences. What I can say is our number one goal is to help people get healthy. What’s also really cool—and I think you were about to say this—is that the supplements actually have a money-back guarantee. It’s all about helping the person get healthy.   [00:31:13] Jennifer Saltzman: One of the things that you had asked me was the difference between what changed two years ago and what I’ve been doing for the last two years. Here’s the thing, I personally ask my clients to commit to a 90-day period of time. The doctors that we work with, that comes straight out of them. That’s for anything that a person can do. If somebody isn’t really interested in doing that, then I have to say, you know what, that’s okay but I want you to really consider that you can’t just start an exercise program for a week or a month and then think, oh I’m done. The reason that I find that people have so much success working with us is because of the way I schedule my follow-ups, part of the way. Sometimes, with the different options that we have in terms of using supplements with people, there can be four or five different versions of a certain type of product like a multiple vitamin, mineral complex, as an example, or digestive support as an example. It’s my job to make sure that the person is having an excellent experience with the supplements.  As an example, if something doesn’t agree with the person within the first month of them taking it, I know that I know that I know that if they’ll give me a chance to make some adjustments perhaps in the way they’re dosing something, perhaps in the time of day they’re taking it, or perhaps in the version of the product we’re using, I can almost always get them right back on track within sometimes two tries, but usually just one. The thing that people don’t realize is obviously, we try to get people as much information before they get started so they understand all of what we do and they have a real sense of who we are. We are all very leery of jumping into anything in this day and age with the internet and everything, so I get it. But it is really a very unique service that we provide. As a matter of fact, I’ll share a story with you that just happened to me yesterday. I have a gal that I’ve been working with for probably two months now, and she’s been doing great. She’s had nothing but great results over the last couple of months. It’s been getting better and better and better. But she brought something to my attention because we do a follow-up. We do a follow-up every single month. Until somebody says, you know what Jen, I’m on a really good program. I’ll check in with you in two months or let’s put us on four times a year. I don’t ever want to lose track of people because as people’s things change, the weather changes, the environment changes, the immune reality changes in our world as we all know. Whatever changes, I want to be there to say you know what, have you considered that if things are not going as well, maybe we need to just tweak something. It’s so easy for me to make a little tweak for somebody that might take them so much frustration of years of pain. Here’s the example I’m going to give you. This gal yesterday tells me, “I’ve had chronic yeast infections since I was a kid, and I have had chronic bad breath since I was a kid.” I said to myself, “Have you ever gone on a candida program?” And I started talking to her about an overgrowth of yeast and all this other stuff. She says. “Well, actually, I have.” So listen, long story short, her doctor had told her, okay, if you have a vaginal yeast infection I want you to take antibiotics. She tells me this and I’m thinking to myself, oh my God. “So have you ever used a topical antifungal cream?” “No.” I’m thinking to myself, fire all your doctors. What is going on with this? They’re giving you antibiotics for fungal infection and they’re not giving you fungicides for a topical vaginal infection? What’s wrong here? Anyway, she was practically in tears because I said all I want you to do is go take a candida test online and tell me what comes back. If it comes back like I think it’s going to, we’re essentially going to go after—we had already given her the digestive support and the basic essential nutrients and she was already starting to feel better, but she said this is still going on. This is what I ate and this is how it happened. It all came to me. This is a total picture, yeah, I get it because I’ve walked through so much of this stuff myself. I’ve been to see 17 different Naturopaths myself. Just the learning that I’ve done with these doctors over the last eight years, I mean, I just have enough information to be able to guide people in the right direction. I’m not a doctor, I’m not going to diagnose them, but I have enough information to empower them to do a really simple thing that probably will be life-changing. She was literally in tears that I cared enough to be able to give her this information. And I said. “I feel like we might be onto something here. I don’t know for sure, it’s going to be trial and error, but that would be no different than if you went to a Naturopath, the same thing. You’ve probably been to Naturopaths, I certainly have. Yes, they have great intentions, but sometimes it’s trial and error.” So that’s why I ask people to commit to at least 90 days of working with me because if they can’t give me that amount of trust, I possibly cannot help them because we sometimes have to fine-tune.   [00:36:37] Ashley James: I like the boundary. You have a healthy boundary there, and that’s because it’s a unique system in which we’re not charging for our time. Now as a health coach, I charge for my time so people pay me for my time, and I’m working with them not only with supplements but I work with them because I help them adjust their lifestyle. We look at every aspect of their life. But when someone goes to takeyoursupplements.com, they’re not paying for their coach’s time. They’re just buying the supplements that are really meant for them specifically to help them adjust their issues. They’re being given something at such an extreme discount that you have to have a boundary as a health coach. You have to say you need to commit. So for me, my clients commit in that they pay me money. If they don’t want to show up for their appointment, I mean, that would be sad because I really want them to get their results. Or if they don’t do the homework I give them, if they’re only putting 50% of their effort into it, I still got paid. I’m a health coach, I still got paid. I came to the table, I helped them as much as I could, but they’re not willing to do the work, that’s on them not on me. I do my best.  But for you, you could be helping someone like the next person because you only have so much time in your day, and you want to help people who are going to be 100% committed to working with you, to fine-tune, to help dial in, to help be the detective, and figure out what’s going on so that they can get the maximum results out of the supplements they’re taking. Your boundary is, please, if you’re going to go to takeyoursupplements.com, be willing to commit to doing the work because you’re showing up to the table to help them basically for free, you really want them to get healthy, and you want them to also do the work as well so that they get the best results possible.   [00:38:32] Jennifer Saltzman: And here’s the clincher though, here’s the deal, in 90 days, here are some examples of people’s health score. This one gal started out at a -1. So our scoring system, the ultimate goal for someone’s health evaluation is to come out between 90% and 100%. That’s on the positive. This gal started at a -1 with all different kinds of issues. By the time we retook the health evaluation, this particular one was a little longer. It was at the four-month mark, her score went up to an 87. That’s 88 points. Almost at 90% within four months. As a matter of fact, her testimony is on the Learn True Health. Her name is Jennifer Arnold, she gave me permission to give her testimony. We posted it on there. She’s got pictures of what she can do now, how she feels better, and all that.   [00:39:27] Ashley James: Do you mean the Facebook group?   [00:39:28] Jennifer Saltzman: I mean the Facebook group. Sorry, what did I say?   [00:39:30] Ashley James: No, you said Learn True Health and I’m thinking, is that on the website? No, it’s in the Facebook group.   [00:39:36] Jennifer Saltzman: It’s on the Learn True Health Facebook group. Another example, a gal who started with me was a -20 when she first started.   [00:39:48] Ashley James: Can you give us an example? What kind of symptoms did she have as a -20. People might not know. What does it feel like on the day of a life of a -20?   [00:39:58] Jennifer Saltzman: When somebody takes their health evaluation, we look at things in four different categories of health. I’m not going to get into necessarily what those all are, but they’re digestion, hard tissue, soft tissue, and blood sugar. Those are the main ones. Those mean different things. That’s a heading, but there’s symptomology that falls under each one of those.   [00:40:24] Ashley James: And the symptomology allows us to understand the different nutrient deficiencies on a much deeper level.   [00:40:31] Jennifer Saltzman: Exactly. This particular gal has a very, very severe amount of pain around her cycle, for instance. She has I think PCOS, it’s not really clear but she has a lot of pain. So significant amounts of pain, digestive issues. I mean, many different kinds of things. What’s unique about what we do versus how a lot of people approach health is—and this is what really sets this program apart in my opinion—somebody might come and say, listen, I have terrible migraines, and that’s all they tell you. Can you help me fix, heal, or elevate my health in the face of terrible migraines? Well, if you will show me everything going on in your digestive category, your soft tissue category, your heart tissue category, and your blood sugar category, I’m going to have a heck of a lot better chance of helping you elevate your health in the face of migraines than I am if you just tell me you have migraines. That’s what the health evaluation does.  Somebody might have this important goal that they want to get rid of, this thing that’s bothering them, their motivation for contacting us, but I’m going to address their issues based on what I’m seeing based on their health evaluation. That’s where people get results because 5 times out of 10, at least, it’s something going on with their digestion. That’s at the root of their issue. They don’t really say they have a lot of digestive issues but they come up with a really high health score and some going on in their digestion, I’m going to give them digestive support. Then cleaning up their diet, eliminating the inflammation issues. We’re going to have success with those migraines much faster than if we just try to throw a bunch of stuff that’s specific to migraines that’s something. Does that make sense?   [00:42:26] Ashley James: Absolutely.   [00:42:28] Jennifer Saltzman: Here’s another example. A guy comes to me, he’s got high blood sugar, high blood pressure, swelling and edema, all this other kind of stuff. His score went up 68 points in exactly three months. He’s 100% on board. He’s starting to tell his sphere of influence. He just can’t even keep his mouth closed about it because he’s so excited about the results. Another gal I spoke with and followed up with lately, her score improved 110 points in three months. Terrible fibromyalgia pain, terrible pain in her hands, sleep issues, blood sugar issues. Most people don’t just have something going on in one of these categories. They have something going on in most of these categories, and this is why our program gets such good results because the basic program that we give everybody on some level addresses things at a cellular level that contribute to ill health or dysregulation in all four of those categories. The reason I never got the kinds of results when I worked with—I’ve worked with 17 different Naturopathic doctors, healers, and different people. Got a little bit of benefit probably from most of those that I worked with, otherwise, I wouldn’t have continued. But they never really addressed this foundational issue of wow, you’re malnourished. You don’t have enough minerals. I mean I had so many different things that got better.   [00:44:03] Ashley James: I remember m, you actually had a positive diagnosis of Lyme disease and the co-infections. You were seeing Naturopaths and you were working hard at it, I remember that. And then you got on board with the supplements that we’re using now with our clients and the comprehensive minerals, and that was the major change you made. Within less than three months, you went back for another test and you were negative. The Naturopath said your body needed these raw building blocks in order to even fight the infection. This was something that you would not have gotten. You could have spent years going to really good Naturopathic doctors, but they weren’t addressing the foundation of your health problems. Your body needs the raw building blocks to fight infection.   [00:44:58] Jennifer Saltzman: Well, one of the things that I tell a lot of my clients—I have a lot of clients that I work with that are either considering seeing a Naturopathic doctor or currently are seeing a Naturopathic doctor. We are all for Naturopaths. Obviously, they’re fantastic. A couple of things. Sometimes, people come and they’re seeing a Naturopath but they feel like they’re just not quite getting what they need. This is where I will often suggest that they add in our program and then go back to the Naturopaths. The Naturopaths are really, really good at getting people out of any kind of a very acute situation. If they’re in trouble, they need to probably work with a Naturopath. I love it when they do both, but I’ve had many clients who have worked with me as a coach, do our program, and then use their Naturopath. Maybe they have one that they’ve been seeing for years. They go back to that person for any kind of really challenging fine-tuning thing that either we can’t figure out or they just love their Naturopath, and they want to do both.  But invariably, their health score elevates tremendously and significantly more quickly than it had been during the time that they were just working with their Naturopath. Like I said, you can’t test. There isn’t a test to show the deficiencies that we address. It doesn’t even exist. The hair mineral analysis test is probably the closest, but it’s still not perfect. So for me, for example, I was spending $250 a month on supplements plus whatever the fees were to see my Naturopath. She thought I had been cleared of Lyme disease based on her protocols that she had given me. It was a lot of killing of things—antivirals and all this other stuff, which was great, but I had absolutely no energy. I mean none whatsoever. She was starting to do things that it felt to me, she had the best intentions. I mean, I loved her, don’t get me wrong, but it just wasn’t hitting the mark anymore. It was just not any longer applicable really. She was trying this, trying that, and doing this, and it just didn’t feel right. So when I heard about this program and started it, I actually was doing both programs for the first two months. I was doing these supplements that we now use and her program, and finally one day I’m driving to her and I’m thinking this is obsolete. I’m not going to do this anymore. Here’s the clincher, when I met one of the doctors who we work within the program that we used to take your supplements, he asked me the following question. “Did your Naturopath tell you exactly when you’re supposed to be feeling better? Did she give you a timeline of when you’re going to feel better?” And I said, “No, she didn’t.” He said, “I want you to go back and ask her for one, and I’m going to tell you mine is three months. I want 90 days. If you’ll give me 90 days and do exactly this, I want you to come back and tell me how you feel.” Well in five days I knew something was different.   [00:47:50] Ashley James: You mean five days on the new protocol?   [00:47:53] Jennifer Saltzman: On the new protocol. Five days on the new protocol.   [00:47:55] Ashley James: The one that we use now?   [00:47:56] Jennifer Saltzman: Yes. I woke up in the morning on the fifth day. My husband and I started at this exact same time. For the first four days, we’re looking at each other, “Did you feel anything? Did you feel any?” Neither of us felt anything for the first four days. On the fifth day, I woke up in the morning at 5:00 AM with lucidity and clarity that I had not had for years.   [00:48:17] Ashley James: That happened to me too. That was the exact thing.   [00:48:19] Jennifer Saltzman: I wasn’t all better, but I was alive, awake, and I felt this hope. I was just like something’s going on here. My husband who has had a benign tremor since the time he was a kid—shakes. He’s benign but he shakes. Within five days, it went down by like 80%. He had a pain in his shoulder that he didn’t even tell me about because he thought I’d worry. He then told me on the fifth day my shoulder is completely better. The crazy part about this is it’s not rocket science. It’s raw materials that the human body requires at a cellular level for optimal function. That’s the simplest way I can say it. When you don’t have that and you’re trying to spot treat Lyme disease, spot treat blood sugar issues, spot treat this, and spot treat that without the foundation, you’re going to be spot treating forever. What I love doing is if you need spot treatment and I can’t figure out how to do that, I’m not going to spot treat with you first. I won’t do it. It’s not going to work. You’ve already been doing that so let me do the foundational work and we got to fix the gut. There’s no question. We look at people’s gut. You don’t have to change their diet based on what we recommend, but if they will do the things that we recommend, it’s more of elimination of inflammation and oxidative producing foods. They will get faster results. I have people who clean up their diet in the first week before they get their supplements. They work with me, we decide what they’re going to do after the health evaluation, et cetera. I say, “Okay, can you eliminate these foods?” I send them the email with the foods right away. They get off the food. By the time I call them to tell them how to go take the supplements, their stomach is already feeling better most of the time because there are certain foods that just frankly create so much havoc in the body, and they are in most people’s diet. A lot of your listeners are not. A lot of my clients will come to me and they’re currently not on a lot of these foods because they’re already a bit more educated, which is also possibly why in the last couple of years, I’ve had better results because people know more. They know more since the advent of your podcast, and they know how to clean some things up. At any rate, it’s not rocket science, it’s like God science, it’s like earth science. It’s just food science. It’s just science, it just works. We’ve had so many years of research that have gone into figuring these specific nutrients out like over 50 years gone specifically into the formulation of these supplements in terms of research, testing, and all the stuff. Here’s another example. One of the coaches that work with us in Take Your Supplements also went through IIN. So she’s a really well-trained coach. She loved IIN. She’s just a junkie for information. She’s amazing.   [00:51:16] Ashley James: Just to clarify for those who don’t know what you’re talking about. Takeyoursupplements.com is where you go to get these health coaches because you can’t say Take Your Supplements, but takeyoursupplements.com. And IIN is a health coach training institute that takes a year to do. It’s an online program. They don’t teach you supplements. They teach you how to be a really good health coach from a psychological standpoint, and they also teach you 100 dietary theories. I did IIN and I loved it, but they teach you zero—they don’t teach you what a vitamin C is, they don’t teach you what a calorie is. It’s not about nutrients. So IIN is about how to be a good health coach in the emotional aspect and in the diet aspect. I absolutely love IIN, and I recommend listeners check it out. If a listener is interested in getting more information about IIN, they can go to learntruehealth.com/coach. That redirects them to a page that gives them a free module of IIN. So you can check it out. Just to clarify, it’s a year-long program that you do part-time at home while you’re still doing the rest of your life. It’s about 20 minutes a day that you do it for a year. It teaches you the psychology of being a good health coach, and it teaches you about diet. There’s no information about helping people heal through nutrition. That’s not what IIN really focuses on, but they get good results in helping people change more on an emotional level and on more of a habit level. What Jen offers, what takeyoursupplements.com offers is listeners can do a health coach training program. It’s actually a holistic health coach training program. It’s much shorter. You do it at your own pace but it is much shorter. You can complete it in weeks not months, and that teaches you exactly how to use these supplements and also the certain things to eliminate from the diet to help people get incredible results by getting to the root cause, and the foundation of what the people need specifically. So those two programs, although completely separate and they’re both considered health coach programs, are very different and they complement each other really well. You’re saying that in takeyoursupplements.com, there is a health coach that works there. They’ve done both programs. Sorry, I just wanted to clarify.   [00:53:45] Jennifer Saltzman: Absolutely, I’m so glad you did. Let me just change the subjects for a quick second. I’m going to just expand on that. We have a lot of coaches that have taken our coaching program to learn about how to help people the way that we do who are IIN graduates. IIN, Institute of Integrative Nutrition, a lot of my clients have been through that program and they absolutely love it. Nobody has said a single negative thing. As a matter of fact, they’re just crazy about it. However, like you’re saying, it’s such a great adjunct to then come and do our program with that background. On the other flip side of the coin, people don’t have to go through a year-long program in order to engage and learn to take our health certification program, which is much shorter. At six weeks it could be both, either, or whatever. But they do really complement one another. A lot of your listeners are very hungry for information. They are information people. They just love learning. I have a lot of people who have already contacted me and us about going through the health coach certification course that we offer through Take Your Supplements. It’s not our program, but we help people get started with it. I’ve had probably 25 people that I’ve worked with go through the program already.   [00:55:13] Ashley James: Your clients have gone through it?   [00:55:16] Jennifer Saltzman: My current clients, yep. And at least five of them, maybe more. I can’t quite recall. At least five of them have also been through IIN. But my point is that this one gal where I was starting to say before, one of the coaches that work with us, she has been on so many different supplements and some brands that I have a tremendous amount of—there’s a couple of other brand supplement programs that I particularly like, one in particular. This gal worked with that brand forever and she has never felt anything at all from supplements until she started taking ours, which to me is a big deal.  The point is we get results. We get results but we get results because the supplements work. A lot of times, people just take the supplements, they get great results, and it’s set it and forget it kind of thing. But in the last couple of years, to take it to another level, I have taken it upon myself to really dive in the ditch with people and figure out how to really get them great results. That’s what I love about what I do, and I figured out how to do it so we don’t have to charge for our time. We’ve already gone over that, but the point is that even though I am not IIN-trained or whatever, I still do work with folks like okay why are you not taking? I work with them on compliance. I work with them not in-depth because they have half an hour with me once a month or whatever rather than a weekly coach or whatever. But I really try, I refer them, I try to get them the resources if I can’t do it with them so that they start working with a counselor or they’ve checked out this.  The point is that we at Take Your Supplements and the health code certification course are very holistic. We work with mindsets, we work with exercise, we work with hydration. It’s not just the supplements. We work with diet. We really help people understand that if they really want to elevate their health and we can’t give them the resource, we’re going to guide them to the right resource. It’s just awesome. A lot of people that work with us have gone through the health coach certification course, and I just want to talk about that a little bit, it’s ridiculously inexpensive. I mean ridiculously. Everybody can afford it I promise. It’s just completely affordable. But I’ve had people go through it without working with me as a client, and I’ve had people go through it working with me as a client. The people who have had phenomenal success and basically have gone on to share and be a coach to their friends and family have been ones that have been a client first.   [00:58:09] Ashley James: Or people that go on to become successful health coaches.   [00:58:13] Jennifer Saltzman: Yes.   [00:58:15] Ashley James: Just to clarify what you said, people who work with you, so clients who go to takeyoursupplements.com, they go to takeyoursupplements.com, they get you, you start working with them.   [00:58:29] Jennifer Saltzman: Or one of our other coaches.   [00:58:33] Ashley James: But your experience is people working with you. So people who are working with you get on the protocol. You walk them through the entire process as being a client. So they’re a client, they’re doing their health score, they’re getting on the protocol, they’re eliminating those foods. Eliminating those foods alone will not solve all the problems although it does really help. But you’re right, I have had clients who refuse to get off those foods and they still saw results with the supplements. But I’ve also had clients who were like, well, I’m going to try just getting off these foods and not getting on the supplements. Inflammation will go down but you’re not going to fill your nutrient tanks that are depleted. Getting off of some foods isn’t going to change your vitamin D levels, zinc levels, magnesium levels, or any of the 60 minerals, but it will help to stop putting fuel on the fire. Those two go hand in hand. The clients who work with you and really, really focus for 90 days on a protocol   [00:59:32] Jennifer Saltzman: Or even two months, even a month they just have to really have a follow-up with me and feel like, okay, I get this. I’m getting results. As long as they’re getting their feet wet with the process. They’ve taken the health evaluation, they understand how it works. They’re engaged, let’s call it. They’re already engaged. They understand the premise of why we need to do this, that kind of thing. I’ve had people do it after a month with tremendous success. The ones that just say, oh, this is a good idea I want to do it. Even the ones that have been through IIN, even those, this is cool. I want to do it but they haven’t taken the supplements themselves or been on the protocol, they don’t have the same level of engagement. I don’t know how to explain it, and they really never ended up doing anything with the program. Do you follow me?   [01:00:23] Ashley James: Yeah, and I totally get it. When you have a visceral experience of success, even for those who are like, well I’m fairly healthy and I really just want to learn this for my clients. Everyone has a visceral experience. you’re just having the experience of being the standpoint of the client.   [01:00:44] Jennifer Saltzman: It’s so important.   [01:00:45] Ashley James: Yeah, it’s really good information to collect for someone who wants to become a holistic health coach, to be on the side of the client, to experience that. And then when you go do the online course to become a holistic health coach, you really understand why you want to learn these things about the research behind it and what symptoms the body exhibits when we have certain nutrient deficiencies. It just gets really fascinating. You’re invested also. You’re invested. Once you become a client and you experience the supplements, you have a physical experience, but then you’re also invested in it. And then when you go take the course you’re like, oh, that’s why I felt this. That’s why this works. That’s why there’s this ingredient or that’s why there’s this amount of this nutrient in it. I just geek out on all these kinds of details. But if someone just went in, just took the course, and has never had any experience of the supplements or any experience from the client-side, they’re missing out on the full understanding of it. I get why you’d want someone to go to takeyoursupplements.com and then work with a coach, experience it, and then go do the course.   [01:02:03] Jennifer Saltzman: I mean they don’t have to. Certainly, folks have taken it that haven’t, but my experience has been that it’s not nearly as beneficial. Not everybody that takes the health coach course is going to want to be a health coach. I’ve had at least maybe a third of the folks take the course, maybe not quite that many, a quarter maybe who have really done it because they just want to increase their own advocacy for them and their family. They really want to understand how to basically take care of themselves. I mean, I help them to the best of my ability. But the more that they can know stuff for themselves just like why they listen to your podcast. They’re empowered and they’re empowered by knowledge. A lot of times, people benefit from taking the course even if they don’t necessarily want to go on to actively have a client-based health coaching practice, but just really want to learn and be equipped with. Because at the end of the day, it’s not that complicated. Once you understand the basic four categories of health, how we have to balance things, nutrify the body at a foundational level, and then fine-tune as needed, it’s not like somebody has to have a super—I mean I don’t have any kind of a degree. I don’t have that super medical background right, and people ask me that. Well, what’s your background? Well, you know what, I’ve been doing this for a really long time. I am a health coach and I’m certified in what I’m good at. I’m going to stay within my lane. If you need to go talk to a doctor about some diagnosis, that’s what you’re going to do. We’re not diagnosing anything, we’re not doing that. We’re supporting the body from a very foundational level, and the body is doing the work that it’s designed to do because it now has the building blocks to do it completely rather than missing a little of this, missing a little of that. One of the interesting things about the problematic things about, for instance, people say, I heard selenium’s really good for you. I’m going to go out and eat five brazil nuts every day. People tell me that a lot and I say, you know what, that’s wonderful. Sorry to burst your bubble, but unless the soil that that brazil nut—which you don’t know where it was—has selenium in it, you’re not going to get any selenium in that brazil nut. Being that soils have veins of minerals in them, not every spot has selenium in it.   [01:04:32] Ashley James: Fly across the country or remember the last time you flew and you looked down. I always get the window seat. I think then when I married my husband that he insisted on getting the window seat, and I think we kind of fight over the window seat. Now that we have a kid, we have another on the way, I think I’ll never get the window seat again. But when I was a kid, I always got the window seat. I would watch for hours as the terrain changed.  We would fly from Toronto to Puerto Vallarta so we saw a big chunk of the continent. I would watch as the farmlands, the soil would change color. There are areas where it’s red, there are areas where it’s almost pink, there are areas where it’s black. Obviously, moisture does play a role, but color largely—when it comes to soil—you can see the different mineral compositions are obvious in some ways. In other ways, you’d have to actually go and test the soil itself. But there’s not an even amount of iron distributed throughout the whole crust of the earth.  There are more than 60 minerals and elements that exist. But there are specific 60 minerals that the body requires. Everyone knows calcium, magnesium, and zinc. Everyone knows those ones, but farmers will only put NPK back in the soil. Most farmers don’t remineralize the soil with all the trace minerals and elements. If someone’s been farming that land for 100 years, that soil is absolutely depleted. Organic doesn’t necessarily mean more nutrients, but it definitely doesn’t mean less. Organic simply means that they’re not using—and there’s something like 2000 chemicals that are even approved for organic farming, so it doesn’t necessarily mean chemical-free, but it does mean free of the really, really bad chemicals like glyphosate which is an active ingredient in Roundup. Roundup is a chelator. It binds to certain minerals, metals, and elements and it removes them, it washes them away from the soil.  So if we’ve been farming land and putting these specific kinds of chemicals on the land that are chelating the land, even with tilling. The way they destroy the composition of the nutrients by tilling. There are all these farming practices that are designed to maybe help make a big yield now but completely destroy the nutrition for later. If we’re relying on a brazil nut for our selenium, we’re living in a fool’s paradise. Just like if we’re thinking we’re going to get our iron from spinach, or our calcium and magnesium from broccoli, you can even see it. You could google it and start looking into this yourself that they did tests in the 50s and 60s for carrots and the nutrients in carrots and then the carrots today have significantly fewer sugars, nutrients, even the beta carotene is lower. It’s just that our food is becoming less and less nutritious.  Now, of course, there’s always an exception to that. There are a handful of farms out there that remineralize their soil, that does practices that protect the soil to make the most nutritious food, and of course, you can grow your own. One of the Naturopaths that we work with at takeyoursupplements.com and as part of the supplement program, you can buy in large quantities this special kind of humic shale. It’s black, it’s beautiful, and it is absolutely amazing to put into the garden. If you put it into your lawn, your lawn is the envy of your entire neighborhood, but I don’t like growing lawns. I like growing gardens. You use it for any amount of vegetable or fruit, you see such a yield you wouldn’t believe it.  It’s even in Japan, they use it there in certain fields. There’s a machine that’ll measure the sweetness, they’ll measure the sugar content and it puts it through the roof. When I say sugar content, I don’t mean all of a sudden that the food is now unhealthy because there’s more sugar in it. I mean it’s more flavorful, it has more phytonutrients, phytochemicals, it has more minerals in it. As a result, you really, really taste it. Nowadays, I taste a carrot, the carrots taste like cardboard. Back when I was a kid, you bit into a carrot, it was like eating dessert. That just goes to show you how much our food has been stripped of the nutrients we’re supposed to be getting.  I believe that a thousand years ago or two thousand years ago when we traveled more, when we ate more food from different regions and all these foods were grown naturally, the soil wasn’t depleted. Think about the Nile. The Nile would flood every year and bring new minerals to the soil, and then the Nile would go back and they’d grow. They grow all the crops there in that freshly remineralized soil. We almost had no chronic disease. People died of other things like because of sanitary reasons, but we didn’t have the diseases we have now. We didn’t have the nutrient deficiencies that we have now.  It’s just really interesting to look at, what are we dealing with now? What’s changed? Especially in the last few hundred years, what’s really changed? But now we require supplements. I don’t think we always required supplements. I think that as humans we were getting enough nutrients at some point but now we’re not. So we really need to fill those nutrient gaps. If the body’s missing a little bit of something, it doesn’t really have any major symptoms. It’s when we’re significantly missing a nutrient that we start to have major symptoms. MD-based medicine is not designed to look at the body from the standpoint of nutrient deficiency unless it is so overt like a goiter. Unless it is so overt you basically have to look like you have come from a starving village in a different country for an MD to go, well, maybe you should take a multivitamin or something.  But what we’re looking at because Naturopathic medicine doesn’t wait till you get sick to then treat you with a drug. Naturopathic medicine goes, let’s look at where you are now, and let’s help you get to optimal health. They’re trained differently. Naturopathic medicine is a different standpoint. We’re trying to get you to optimal health and to completely fill up all your nutrient tanks and making sure every cell is running optimally. MD medicine is an intervention that has to wait until you get sick enough to give you a drug to intervene.  We should have both in our lives, but we should not rely only on one. We should definitely know when to go to emergency medicine and when to go to holistic medicine. Holistic medicine to get us healthy, MD-based medicine to catch us when we need emergency surgery, when we’re suffering from an infection that our body can’t handle, when we’ve been in a car crash. That’s when we want MD-based medicine. But chronic issues because of chronic lack of nutrients, that’s when we have a problem, and we need to address it by filling the body up with the nutrients it needs.   [01:12:22] Jennifer Saltzman: Right. Well, one of the things that come to mind too as you’re talking is a couple of things. One of them is I’m always really surprised when I have a client that’s really young and has a terrible health score. But I shouldn’t be surprised because unfortunately, they’re younger than me, I mean by half usually. It gets worse through the generations of lack of nutrition. If your mother was depleted and your father was depleted, it’s going to be worse in the next generation. But it’s really shocking and alarming the level of autoimmune issues, digestive issues, all kinds of things that people in their 20s are appearing with. One of the things I also wanted to share about what we do and why our community because it really actually is a community. Whether a person decides to work with us at Take Your Supplements as a client only or as a person that wants to get more involved and learn about how they might influence a few of their friends and family or a lot of their sphere of influence. We have all different kinds of ways that people can engage, and that’s what I love about it because there’s never any pressure to do anything. It’s always where do you fit and how can we serve you. But those that do decide to partake and learn, we also have an amazing ongoing level of support all for free, besides just working with the coaches. I mean, for those who want to learn more and take the health coach course. There are weekly free calls five days a week on different topics where our gut specialist comes on. Different specialists that we have that work with different parts of the supplement protocols who are skilled in different areas, there’s ongoing training on a weekly basis all for free. It all comes within the ridiculously low cost of the health coach course. For those that are clients that work with us but they really want to become better advocates, they don’t want to take the course, or they don’t want to do the training, we also have an amazing level of educational materials and ways for them to plug into the community similar to how you have on your Learn True Health Facebook page. People can get into the community that way. We have our private Facebook groups but we also have educational webinars and lectures on different health topics from the perspective of this foundational nutrition plus the necessary add-ons that people can continue to learn. Really our main goal is to not only help people have success with their own health, educate themselves about not having to be reliant. So for example, if your doctor tells you, oh you have a yeast infection. Please take some antibiotics. You’re going to understand that you would never do that. That’s the exact opposite thing that you need to do to get rid of a chronic yeast infection is to take an antibiotic. I mean, I get a little bit irate when it comes to stuff like that. This person was thinking yesterday and I talked to her, she’s like, “I feel so dumb.” I said, “You’re not dumb. Your doctors are completely uneducated. It’s a crime.” It’s a crime against humanity, the level of information that was suppressed early on in the early part of the century about all of this. Anyway, I don’t want to get into the whole political part of it. Don’t get me started. The point is that we have a lot of value as your podcast has a lot of value, but it’s specific to what we do. So I just encourage people to come check us out, have a free consultation if they want to chat about what the options are. And then I just want to say one other thing and that is we have specific protocols too. For example, I mentioned a gut specialist. I want to share with you just something that happened with one of my clients. She did years and years of cleansing thinking she had parasites, and she did a lot of aggressive parasite cleansing. She was seeing a lot of stuff and different things were happening, but when she came to me, she didn’t have very good energy. She had scattered mental issues, not really focused. A lot of things going on and a pretty negative health score. I got her on the basics and I worked with her for a while. We started with some extra digestive support, and we got her up and running so she was doing better and better. But after about four months, it became obvious to me that she really needed to do our full 20-day gut restoration protocol because she had had years of antibiotics, and she had had years of now cleansing from parasites, which is great but you can’t just cleanse, cleanse, cleanse, cleanse. You’ve got to put the good stuff back in. After we did the 20-day full gut restoration protocol, which has been incredibly successful with people who have either chronic digestive issues, chronic health issues that won’t resolve, or chronic allergies—histamine response, skin rashes. Those are the things we’ve seen the best results with this particular protocol. But after she did that, her health score significantly went up. Now she’s sort of smooth sailing into the realm where I like to get my clients where she’s like, okay Jen, we can talk every three months now because we got her over this hump. She knew it and I knew it. I could tell just by the way she was responding back to me that it was like, oh yeah, I’m good. I’m starting to actually feel like I made progress. Even though she was getting better and better through that whole time. So I’ve gotten a little bit more savvy to recognize when somebody might need to actually start with that protocol. Sometimes, in this last season, I will start my clients right away on that 20-day gut protocol before I will even start them on the basic foundational supplements, only because they’ve had chronic diarrhea or chronic antibiotic use or something like that. I mean, so many of the people that you have interviewed are talking to us about the absolute vital essentialness of getting our gut on track, and so our gut specialist put together this particular protocol. A particular ND gut specialist studied the microbiome for years. She put together this very, very comprehensive protocol, and I have had phenomenal results with that.   [01:19:07] Ashley James: I love it. Well, Jen, I’m just so excited that you and I work together in this way to support the listeners. So many of them have come back to me and said, “I’ve worked with Jen.” I mean they’re just glowing. They’re so excited. I get feedback all the time that people have had such great results, listeners. And of course, listeners can go to the Facebook group. Now we’re coming up on, can you believe it, our fifth year anniversary of the Learn True Health podcast. The Learn True Health is going to be five years old. March 1st I believe is when we launched it, and it’s been a dream of mine to have a podcast ever since the podcast came out.  I didn’t ever know it would go in this direction, but when I got my health back, when I was suffering for so many years and I got my health back, I knew I wanted to turn around and tell everyone, and I did. I told my friends, a bunch of my friends got on the same protocols and had amazing results. I’ve shared that in past interviews. I mean, Jen has said this over and over again in this interview, and I’ve said it—if you want to help your friends and family. That’s because when you get results, when you no longer are suffering from what you’re suffering from, you want to tell those you love. It’s really hard not to, and it’s sort of a natural human instinct.  That’s why I love that we set this up because I helped so many of my friends and family and then they went on to help their friends and family. Let’s spread the word. We’re mission-based. We have a mission to help as many people as possible to learn true health. We have a mission to help you to no longer suffer. Suffering should be optional. When you stick with a health care system that is designed to manage the disease, you are going to be in a state of disease. That’s just it. But that’s the only thing we’re sold. I know that listeners come here because they’re sick of that system. What they want is they want more information and they realize they have to advocate for their own health. Everyone at takeyoursupplements.com has all been through the same thing. Have all had health problems, have overcome them with this protocol, with these supplements, and with removing these foods. All of them have then gone on to train and become health coaches and help others—help clients, help friends, and help the family. We’re all in this together spreading this information, and that is the same mission that I’ve been so empowered for the last 10 years. But the Naturopaths that have trained us, that built this system, this was their experience too. Their patients, I should say, the best way that they grew their business as a Naturopath is that it was all word of mouth because their patients would get better like real results, and then they’d go tell everyone. It just grew that way. This is a word-of-mouth effort, and we’re helping as many people as we can. So keep sharing it, keep spreading it. Keep sharing the podcast, share this episode. If you have some health complaint of any kind, even if you’ve been told you will have it for the rest of your life—we have one man, he was on the maximum dose of insulin and type 1 diabetic. Maximum dose. There wasn’t anymore it would take, and his body was not responding well to the insulin, and it was really not looking good for him. Then he got on this protocol and he was able to cut his insulin down by 75%, and he got his body back in order. So even things that you’ve been told you have for your whole life like type 1 diabetes, you can even see improvement within that realm. Or if you’re told you have an autoimmune condition, you’ll always have it, or maybe you’ve had certain organs removed like your gallbladder. This is the thing you’re stuck with and an MD will say, well, you just have to live with it. You don’t know how amazing the body can actually improve when given all the nutrients it needs to improve given the constraints it has. Just like Jen, you have a physical constraint in your spine because of a car accident. Anyone else I know would be on massive medication and bedridden. You walk around freely because of how you’ve learned to take care of yourself with holistic medicine. This is the point is if you’re suffering from anything, even if you’ve been told you can’t get over it by a doctor. Don’t listen to those doctors. I was told I’d never have kids. I had polycystic ovarian syndrome. I had type 2 diabetes. I had chronic adrenal fatigue. I had chronic infections. I had a very angry and inflamed liver, and I was going down a path of deep suffering for many years until I finally found this way of healing the body. I no longer have infertility. I was told by an endocrinologist that I would never have kids. We conceived our son naturally. We conceived the baby that I’m carrying right now naturally. And 31 weeks into the healthiest pregnancy, my midwife who has been a midwife for over 20 years says it’s the healthiest pregnancy she’s ever seen.  Just to give you that idea, you don’t even know. If you just listen to an MD tell you that your limitations and you believe those limitations, those are your limitations. But if you say I do not buy into this, I will not allow these to be my limitations. I’m going to go see how much I can heal my body with natural medicine. You go to takeyoursupplements.com and you just try it. Like Jen said, just try it for 90 days and see how far you can get and then keep going from there. If you get results, keep going and just see how far you can get because look what I did and look what Jen did. That’s why I’m on my soapbox. I’m so passionate that you can have amazing health. You just got to go in this direction and give it a try.   [01:25:02] Jennifer Saltzman: And on that note, I want to bring up a couple of things. Sometimes people feel a little uncomfortable with the concept. They want to share this amazing information with their friends and family, or they want to help their friends and family but (a) they don’t have the time, or (b) they’re shy or whatever. So one of the other things that we do is we have a program where that person would become like a connector. Sometimes those people may really want us to help their friends and family but they don’t want to take the course. We have that option also. I just want people to know that we work with all sorts and all types of conditions of man, so to speak. We really can try to work out whatever a person needs scenario-wise. I don’t want people to think, well, they have to necessarily take the course to get their friends and family help or anything like that. They can refer people. We are so grateful for that and we can help their friends and family with them. They can learn how to do it, any different way. And then the other thing I want to bring up is that sometimes people are on a really limited budget and they’re like, well, can I still get help? Can I still get benefits? Absolutely. Obviously, the more people can invest the faster they get results. That’s why we’re so encouraging of folks to work with us because we talk about all those things, we look at it. We honestly try to go, okay, how much can you genuinely do on a monthly basis? Let’s do the very best that we can for you with that so that you aren’t getting stressed about money too, you know what I mean? We take it all into consideration. I just got done with this one gal the other day and she was going to go see a Naturopath. Not that this is a bad thing to do, but not everybody needs to do this. She really doesn’t have that many health problems, but she was going to go spend $500 just to get her blood drawn. Let’s just get the process started to then figure out what she needs to do from there. I said, “Please, feel free to do that if that’s what you want, but let me suggest, work with me for 90 days, and if you still are not feeling like you’re doing as well as you need to, please go do that.” I mean, why should somebody that’s wearing a white coat—even a Naturopathic doctor. This is so crazy, but I don’t know. It must have been a prophetic thing. I worked with a Naturopath when I was maybe 27 years old, one particular guy. He says to me, “One of these days you’re going to know more than most doctors.” How is that even possible? The truth of the matter is it’s true. It really is true. It’s not that I know anything about surgery or anything like that. I don’t understand everything, by any means. I’m still completely learning myself, but I can help people enough to get them feeling better very quickly.   [01:27:56] Ashley James: I like how humble you are. You know a lot. You use a very specific type of medicine where we don’t need to look at labs because we’re coming at it from a different angle. Now, that’s not to say that people shouldn’t get a yearly physical. Go get a physical from a Naturopath because Naturopaths at least spend an hour to 90 minutes with you. They really comb through your whole life, and they’re great to go. For your annual physical, see a licensed Naturopath if you can.  Annual physicals are good. You should always just be conscious of the labs. But remember, if you go to an MD, they’re looking at your labs to see what drugs they can put you on. That’s it. They’re not looking at your labs to tell you to eat better, take a supplement, or go for a walk. Unless you’re seeing an MD that’s been trained outside of the norm and gone for holistic training or gone for functional medicine training, the average MD is looking at your labs to see when they can put you on Lipitor, when they can put you on whatever medication. It’s two totally different philosophies. Are you looking to get optimal health? Are you looking to get so sick that you need to manage disease? I’ve helped people get so healthy that their doctors took them off of meds, and I know you have too. My goal is to help everyone get so healthy that you don’t have a life sentence from a doctor from some diagnosis. You no longer have a diagnosis because you no longer have all the symptoms and you’re just feeling great. That’s exactly what we’re here to do. Jen, thank you so much for coming to the show. Thank you so much for sharing this information. I’m really excited to hear the results of this episode. I’m really excited to hear the listeners come. Come to the Facebook group, the Learn True Health Facebook group, and share their experiences working with Jen and working with the other coaches at takeyoursupplements.com as you go through it. I would just love to hear more feedback from the listeners. This is something that I’m so passionate about because I’ve been through it and I went out the other side. It’s like Plato’s allegory of the cave. I don’t know if you guys know. It’s 2500 years old, it’s beautiful. You should go google allegory of the cave and watch what little YouTube videos that they make of it. But basically, Plato talks about these men that were chained in a cave their entire lives, and all they saw were shadows dancing upon the back of the cave. So they thought the entire world was two-dimensional in black and white. One day, one man escapes his chains, runs outside, and all of a sudden he sees three dimensions and color and he can’t believe it. He comes back into the cave to try to wake up his fellow man and they attack him for it because they’re not ready to hear that reality isn’t black and white and one-dimensional or two-dimensional. So the point is, those who are listening to this podcast are escaping the cave. They’re ready to have their reality change. They’re ready to heal their body in a holistic manner, and it’s taking on a new paradigm. So take on a new paradigm and try it. You like me will become just absolutely smitten with holistic medicine when you can say that you overcame all these things that you were told you’d never overcome. It’s just amazing. The body has an amazing innate ability to heal itself. I’m so thrilled that you’re doing the work you do. I feel blessed to work with you, Jen, and that you have helped so many of the listeners. Thank you for the work that you do. You are tirelessly daily investing all of your time into helping all these people. I have to acknowledge that the hard work you do is paying off and that all those people that you’ve helped, their lives are affecting so many people so it’s a ripple. You’re talking to one person at a time but really you have helped hundreds of people at a time because their life goes on to help others, so thank you for the work that you do.   [01:32:04] Jennifer Saltzman: Thank you so much for saying that, Ashley. I really appreciate you saying that. Most of the time it’s very rewarding and people are very grateful. Once in a while, when something happens, you think oh my gosh, am I making any difference? It really is nice to hear you say that. I know it’s true, and I do receive that. I want to share one last story with you about just the way that things happen prophetically in life. When I was really at my sickest, I met a man and he was very spiritual. He said something to me. He said, “Jen, your complete healing is not going to come, it’s going to be like a patchwork quilt. It’s going to happen when it affects the most number of people. It’s going to be like a domino effect. That’s how your life is going to be, your complete healing,” and for me, it’s been years of layers of healing—spiritually and in many different ways. You can go back and listen to my story. I think it was episodes 9 and 10 you said. I was talking to my husband about this. Everything that I have been through but that has not been in vain, it just has not been. I think that’s what he meant when he said that thing about the patchwork quilt because if we genuinely have a desire to serve and help other people and not be in it just for ourselves, I feel like the blessing of when you look back over your life and see what you’ve had to walk through and the level in which now it’s helping other people. It’s the silver lining basically of your suffering. I just really feel so grateful, particularly in this season. It just feels like a really blessed season where a lot of people are getting help, particularly when the world is waking up to the fact that there’s so much misinformation on so many different levels.  I just feel so blessed to be able to give this much value. I am so grateful for you and the way in which we’ve been able to share this information through your amazing listening audience because we wouldn’t be reaching near the numbers of people had it not been for this podcast. Thank you for the amazing work that you do. I am always getting so much feedback from your listeners, which is a good chunk of my clients. They just are so incredibly grateful for the way that the podcast has changed their outlook on health and continues to evolve them as people. Thank you.   [01:34:40] Ashley James: Absolutely. Well, let’s just keep evolving together. All of us are evolving and growing together in this health journey. I do feel truly blessed. Our suffering has not been in vain. Let no one’s suffering be in vain here as long as we are committed to helping ourselves and then helping others. We will keep growing together spiritually and physically. I can’t wait to have you back on the show to hear more stories of success. I just love it.   [01:35:10] Jennifer Saltzman: Awesome. Well, I look forward to it. Thank you so much.   [01:35:14] Ashley James: I hope you enjoyed today’s episode with Jennifer Saltzman. If you’re interested in getting some more information about becoming a health coach through the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, go ahead and go to learntruehealth.com/coach to get a free module. You can always give them a call and mention my name, Ashley James, to get the listener discount if you do choose to sign up and do the IIN program. And then if you’d like to talk to Jennifer Saltzman or one of our health coaches that help you figure out the right supplements for you and the right diet based on the Naturopaths that we work with and the protocols that have been designed by them that work really well—these are the protocols that I was able to use to reverse all of my chronic health conditions, and Jen has used as well. We have been using it for the last 10 years with our clients having great success, then you can go to takeyoursupplements.com. All you do is fill out the information and then we reach out to you by text and email and schedule a phone call. There’s no obligation to buy anything, and there’s frankly no signup, no paying of the health coach. You talk to us and then we help you to get on the right supplements, and then you buy the supplements. There’s a 30-day money-back guarantee, so really there’s no risk and it’s all reward.  We set it up that way so that we help people as much as possible to get their health back and get their life back because we know what it’s like to suffer. We’ve been there. We’ve been in your shoes. We really, really want to help as many people as possible to get on the other side and to get healthy. Honestly, most of our customers come from referrals because one person gets healthy and then their entire family and their friends go wait a second, what just happened? You look amazing, we’ve never seen you this way. That’s how most of our referrals come. It’s really word of mouth and that is to the credit of how great this program works. Go to takeyoursupplements.com and check us out. Also, if you’re a health coach yourself and you want to learn more about how to become a health coach that uses these protocols, there is—as Jen talked about—a very quick program online, done at your own time, done on your own pace. You can complete it in a matter of weeks and it teaches you all of the protocols. Then there’s ongoing weekly training and support, which is really cool, and it’s a very, very, very affordable program which I love because we want to make this accessible to the masses. You can go to takeyoursupplements.com and fill it out. If you wanted to talk to them about getting involved as a health coach or taking the health coach program through takeyoursupplements.com. We’d love to have you. Both these programs—both IIN and also the Take Your Supplements program—really complement each other as we talked about in the interview because one really specifically deals with protocols for specific illnesses, nutrition, and diet. Whereas IIN helps teach you how to be a great coach, to help people change their habits, and understand the broader nutrition. They both go really well together. If you just want to be part of a great community, come join our Facebook group. Just find Learn True Health on Facebook or learntruehealth.com/group. That’ll direct you to the Facebook group. Come join the group. We’d love to have you there. It’s a fantastically supportive community of holistic-minded people like yourself like me all seeking true health. Thank you so much for being a listener. Happy fifth anniversary to the Learn True Health podcast. Here’s to the next five years and continuing this journey with you. Thank you for sharing these episodes with those you care about. That is how we grow. That is how we help as many people as possible to learn true health.   Get Connected With Jennifer Saltzman! Take Your Supplements   To contact Jen to purchase the supplements she recommends: jennifer@takeyoursupplements.com Get on our email list to stay tuned for a video of Jennifer Saltzman demonstrating Pilates training. Visit FreeDoctorCourse.com   Catch Jennifer Saltzman in these episodes! Episode 9: Pilates: What It Is, Benefits, and More! Episode 10: Heal Emotional Pain Through Spiritual Health Episode 31: Supplement Confusion Episode179: Finding The Cure Episode 180: Taking Supplements and Eating Right      

Energybits - LearnTrueHealth.com/energybits - Use coupon code LTH Medicinal Aloe for gut healing - LearnTrueHealth.com/aloe - Use coupon code LTH At Home Gut and Mitochondrial Test - Viome.com - Use coupon code LTH Become a Certified Health Coach Through IIN just like Ashley James! Get their Valentines Day Special! Experience a free sample of their program: learntruehealth.com/coach   Breast Implant Illness: Signs, Symptoms, Treatment & More! https://www.learntruehealth.com/breast-implant-illness-signs-symptoms-treatment   Highlights: Silicone is a neurotoxin Breast implants can cause issues with the mitochondria Importance of removing breast implants properly Different sources of toxins Alternatives to breast implants   Do you have breast implants or other foreign objects placed in your body? In this episode, Sarah Phillipe shares the dangers of having breast implants. Sarah enumerates different signs and symptoms of breast implant illness, the best way to remove the breast implants, and what could happen if the breast implants weren’t removed properly. She also enumerates different things that need to be addressed to recover from breast implant illness fully. Intro: Hello, true health seeker, and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. This episode really blew my mind even more so than I thought it would. If you’ve ever had plastic surgery or implants, you definitely want to listen. For those who haven’t, I still think you’re going to get a lot out of listening to this episode. In this episode and in others, I’ve shared a bit about my journey, and one problem I really struggled with was detoxification. In the last five years, I’ve been focusing heavily on supporting my liver and on doing heavy metal detox because I discovered that was the underlying cause of a lot of my health issues. I want to point out a few things that really have helped me because if you have an illness that you think has stemmed from having implants, and of course, listening to today’s episode you will definitely gather more information to help you come to some really good conclusions and give you some directions that you’ll greatly benefit from. For me, what’s really helped—actually doing this podcast has really helped because I followed a lot of the advice of my guests. When I interviewed Dr. Klinghardt—that’s a really good episode to go back to. He specializes in helping people who have difficulty detoxing for those, for example, who are on the spectrum, for those who suffer from mitochondrial disease, from Lyme disease, from heavy metal toxicity. He discusses a few things that we can do on a daily basis to support the body’s ability to remove heavy metals and toxins and support the liver and the emunctory systems of the body. I began to implement what he recommended and found I had fantastic results. So one is doing almost daily sauna therapy, and I chose to invest in a Sunlighten Sauna. They do have a payment plan program, and I opted in for that. It’s like a credit card payment, and they ship you a sauna. You can get a wooden one, it’s about the size of a closet. It fits into a corner of a room, or you can get the portable one that folds up. You can tuck it away under the bed or in a closet. I did actually interview the founder of Sunlighten Sauna, so you can go back and listen to that episode. The reason why I chose Sunlighten is they have a fantastic track record for being 100% non-toxic, and also they have a full spectrum system. So it is not just far-infrared, it’s near-infrared and mid-infrared, which shows that there are so many other benefits. For example, a decrease in pain and an increase in collagen production and elastin. There’s a youthful look that we can achieve by using the Sunlighten Sauna. But for me, it was about the heavy metal detox, which I’ve had fantastic results working with, and also decrease inflammation in my body. The next was the Platinum Energy System, and I have interviewed Kellyann Andrews several times. Of course, you can listen to those episodes. The Platinum Energy System allows us to pull out heavy metals from our feet, which I know sounds so crazy, but she sends the water off to the labs and has graphs and charts and shows that it does pull things out. What’s really neat is I’ve given treatments to my friends, and the sludge that comes out of people when they’re in this system smells like the chemicals they’ve been using to clean with. Someone who’s a swimmer in a Platinum Energy System and the water will smell like chlorine, will smell like pool water. It’s really crazy. But what’s awesome is anytime I feel sluggish, down, sort of toxic, I jump in the Platinum Energy System and within 30 minutes, I feel amazing. So I’ve had a great experience with it, so have my friends and my family. So you could check out those episodes with Kellyann Andrews and learn more about the Platinum Energy System. And then the third thing I learned from Dr. Klinghardt is eating chlorella and spirulina, specifically chlorella because chlorella will naturally and very safely—in a gentle way—chelate, bind to heavy metals in the body. Now he does discuss how to eat them. Chlorella is a crop, not a supplement, so people think oh, I don’t want to overdose. Are you going to overdose on broccoli? Yes, to a certain point. You wouldn’t want to eat 20 pounds of broccoli. That’s too much. But you’re not going to overdose by having two cups of broccoli, right? You’ll feel full, but you’re not going to overdose. So for chlorella, they dehydrate it, press it into little tablets, and you chew it. In our family, we call it the green crackers. But you want to take 30 of them at a time. So you can put them in your smoothie, or you can chew them and drink water. You do that ideally before a sauna, but you can do it every day, and that helps the body chelate these heavy metals. If you don’t eat enough of them, there becomes a problem because it kind of stirs up the toxins, and there’s not enough to bind to it. So you actually want to eat more, not less. So between 30 and 60 of these little tablets, and they also are a great source of amino acids and other nutrients. I interviewed the founder of ENERGYbits, Catharine Arnston, who has a wonderful story about how her sister used chlorella and spirulina as part of her holistic protocol to recover from breast cancer. That’s what had Catharine Arnston start ENERGYbits because she saw that out there, most of the chlorella and spirulina in the market is tainted with heavy metals and lead. That’s why I really don’t want you to go to some website like Amazon or some store and just buy it because most of the brands out there are toxic. If you look at the bag and somewhere on the bag it says California regulation says this can cause cancer, well that’s because there’s lead in it because of how they very cheaply process the chlorella. There are only two companies I know of on the planet that processes their chlorella and spirulina so purely that there are no heavy metals in it, and the one that I like better because I think it tastes better is ENERGYbits. Now all these companies I mentioned I’ve asked them to give a discount to our listeners. So Sunlighten Sauna, which I absolutely love Sunlighten. Definitely give them a call and get more information from them if you want to support your daily detoxification. By the way, their benefits to sauna are amazing. Type sauna into learntruehealth.com to see the episodes or hear the episodes on that. I did have a cardiologist on, Dr. Kahn, who talks about how much he loves Sunlighten Sauna because it helps to tonify the cardiovascular system and will lower high blood pressure. That’s just one of the amazing factors. I happened to do it because I wanted to support my body in detoxification, losing inflammation, and weight loss. But other people do it for other reasons like a reduction of pain and inflammation or to support the cardiovascular system. When you do call Sunlighten, you can mention that you heard about them through learntruehealth.com, through the Ashley James podcast. When you talk to Kellyann Andrews about the Platinum Energy System, make sure that you mention my name because she does give a fantastic discount to those who are getting the Platinum Energy System. And then as far as the ENERGYbits, use the coupon code LTH and you will get the discount that they give for the listeners as well. If you have any questions about this, and of course, those are my three biggest things but I do other stuff on a daily basis to support my emunctory systems, but those are my big three.  The fourth one I could throw in is on a daily basis I do take the supplements from takeyoursupplements.com. Those supplements turned my life around. I’ve been taking them for 10 years. I was very sick. I had many, many health issues, and that was the biggest turning point for me. I had been on all kinds of supplements before, never saw a difference until I got on the supplements from takeyoursupplements.com. It’s all about quality. It’s all about giving your body the raw building blocks it needs in the bioavailability it needs. So you can go to takeyoursupplements.com and check them out. They will talk to you for free and help you. Their health coaches will talk to you absolutely for free and help you get on the right protocol. So those are my four big tips for detoxification, but if you do have any more questions about that you can always reach out to me. You can go to our Facebook group. Join the Facebook group. Just search Learn True Health on Facebook and ask away. I’m there every day answering questions. Other guests that have been on the show are actually in the group as well answering questions, other holistic health practitioners, health coaches are there, and just passionate people like you and me who are out seeking true health through holistic means. We’re all there to support each other. I just hope that you get so much out of this episode because truly, this information is not in the mainstream and it should, but luckily it’s here. Enjoy today’s episode. Please share it with those you care about so that we can continue to spread this information and help as many people as possible to learn true health.   [00:09:54] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 457. I am so excited for today’s guest. We have Sarah Phillipe on the show. Her website is reversingbreastimplantillness.com. Now, if you don’t have any breast implants I still think you should listen, even if you’re a man—we got a lot of great male listeners—you should still listen because this is such an important topic when it comes to understanding the immune system’s response to materials placed in the body. I interviewed Kristen Bowen and I’ve had her on the show a few times. She’s the one that created my favorite magnesium soak, livingthegoodlifenaturally.com. I talk about it all the time. The coupon code is LTH for those who want to get that magnesium soak. She went down to 97 pounds, having 30 seizures a day, in a wheelchair because they put things in her body when she had surgery, and they said these things were harmless. Now we know years later that we could have an autoimmune response to even what is thought to be inert items. I’m sure Sarah is going to educate us on that. Obviously, the person who would benefit the most from listening to this is someone who’s had plastic surgery performed on them. However, I think everyone should listen because understanding what the body goes through when we’ve had surgery and if something’s been left inside us is so important, and then how to recover from that. Sarah, welcome to the show.   [00:11:36] Sarah Phillipe: Thank you so much, Ashley. I’m really happy to be here and to be sharing this really important information with your audience.   [00:11:44] Ashley James: Absolutely. I had a listener reach out and say that you’re amazing and that we absolutely had to interview you. Now, before we get into learning about this, I had never heard of breast implant illness, although I’ve heard of autoimmune responses to objects being placed in the body. I have a dear friend—my best friend’s wife—has had issues with not breast implants but with other plastic surgery items being placed in the body. The doctors guaranteed it was safe and absolutely nothing wrong would happen and she almost died. So it’s one of those stories that you just don’t know until it happens. The thing is that what you’re going to teach us is that it can be something where it creates a chronic illness not something sudden but someone can have it for years and not realize that it has to do with the breast implants. Before we get into that though, can you tell us about your past, about your history? What happened both personally and professionally in your life that led you to want to be an expert in this topic, illuminating this topic, and helping us better understand it?   [00:12:58] Sarah Phillipe: Sure. It was a place going from a place of pain to purpose really for me like a lot of us who are in the holistic health space, right? We have experienced something, a decline in our health for a particular reason or a multitude of reasons, and modern medicine hasn’t been able to help. So that leads us down this functional medicine or holistic health path of just wanting to discover the root cause. For me, I had always wanted larger breasts. I mean, this really came from childhood, which is interesting. You don’t always think about a desire like that coming from childhood, but it really started in this pivotal moment in my life when I was a young girl. Someone really important to me—and I don’t think she had ill intentions, of course, but—unknowingly said to me you’re going to be 4’11” just like me, but don’t worry, you’re going to have the Johnson boobs. So it was that really pivotal moment for me where I just realized how important breasts are, and I had no understanding of that before that moment.  That really stuck with me and it really shaped my perception about my body as I matured and didn’t get the Johnson boobs. I put a lot of worth into the physical appearance. I didn’t really realize who I was on the inside, not just who I was on the outside and. I think there were some driving factors there that led me to make that decision to get my breast implants placed.  I had them placed in 2011. Prior to that, I was working in a very busy teaching hospital, night shift—very hard on my body. I was pushing my body to the brink at the gym. Tons and tons of heavy weight lifting, cardio, cyclical dieting, and just really a lot of stress. When I got the breast implants placed, that for me I believe was really the straw that broke the camel’s back. Everything else had kind of set the stage for the fall. That was just my tipping point. That just overflowed my bucket.  Within six months I started developing symptoms, symptoms that I had never had before. I didn’t have a symptom to speak of before that. So while my body may not have been healthy, it wasn’t expressing itself in symptoms yet. But within six months, I had all kinds of symptoms. I was developing chronic fatigue, cognitive dysfunction, I had brain fog, difficulty concentrating, poor word retrieval, memory loss. I would have to read something probably 10 or 15 times to really absorb the information and be able to tell you what I read. Muscle aches and pains, joint pain, hair loss, weight gain, temperature intolerance, low libido, heart palpitations, shortness of breath. I had night sweats. I had insomnia. My mind would just race and race and race all night long. I had hormone imbalances.  I ended up getting diagnosed with Hashimoto’s. My thyroid was low, my thyroid hormone was low. I was very sensitive to light, sound, and chemical smells. I had lots of GI symptoms, so gas and bloating, loose stool, really painful abdomen. The more I ate the more my belly hurt. I knew there was something wrong. Lots of food intolerances, these things were never a problem before. So I went down this path of trying to figure out what was going on. I went to medical doctors who always told me, your labs look fine. Maybe you need counseling or maybe you should spice up your sex life.   [00:16:52] Ashley James: Wait a second, wait a second. You had a doctor say that to you?   [00:16:55] Sarah Phillipe: Yes.   [00:16:56] Ashley James: You had this whole host of symptoms. You were suffering daily and you had a doctor—was it a male doctor?   [00:17:04] Sarah Phillipe: Yes.   [00:17:05] Ashley James: And he said to you, you just need more sex.   [00:17:07] Sarah Phillipe: Well, yeah. I mean, with the low sex drive complaints and low hormone, he was just thinking maybe I needed to spice it up a bit.   [00:17:16] Ashley James: Oh, so it’s your fault that you have low hormones and low libido, and if you just spiced it up and were more active in the bedroom, that would raise your hormones. I wonder what medical journal he got that from.   [00:17:29] Sarah Phillipe: Yeah, very interesting.   [00:17:33] Ashley James: I had a doctor say that to me once actually. This is why I want to just emphasize, it’s so frustrating as a woman to have all these symptoms, all these medical problems, and not be taken seriously. the hubris of the MDs training. Anytime I get on my soapbox where I talk about MDs, there’s a lot of them that are really well-intentioned, right? But we’re talking about the ones that you saw. You went to so many specialists and they were like well it’s in your head, you just need to have more sex, or whatever. I mean, all this is just ridiculous.  They’re just making stuff up, and the hubris of their training is that they can’t be wrong and they can’t say I don’t know what it is. Let me go find the answers for you. Let me go peer through medical journals. Let me go think about things that it could be that I don’t have training around. Most of them don’t do that. Most of them just are listening to symptoms to give you a drug, to send you on your way, and not looking to heal the root cause. This is my biggest frustration. You want a doctor that’s a detective. You want a doctor that’s holistic, that’s going to look at you your whole life and go okay, why is this happening? And not blame you. It’s your fault. You’re not having enough sex, or it’s all in your head. You just need to go for a walk and see a counselor or whatever. I mean, that’s ridiculous.  You had all these symptoms that gradually started over time after your breast implants, and a really good diagnostician would have traced it back and seen okay yes, you were working really hard long hours and that deteriorated your health. But then, what was that one point where it all exacerbated, right? So what happened in your story that you clued in that it was your breast implants, or was it a specialist that finally figured it out?   [00:19:37] Sarah Phillipe: No, you know it’s interesting because I even eventually went down the path of looking for more functional medicine types of physicians. So I worked with a functional medicine doctor that I found locally and was diagnosed with SIBO and treated for that. That didn’t get better, of course. Multiple rounds of rifaximin and still no results.  Then I found a holistic health practitioner who was a chiropractor working with a lot of people with Lyme, mold illness, and just different really chronic conditions, and so I thought this would be the perfect person for me. I point-blank asked him do you think that my breast implants are a problem? Do you think they could be creating all of these symptoms and the reason why I’m not getting better having done all these things because I had done a lot. I’ve made a lot of dietary changes, a lot of lifestyle changes. I’d really been trying to figure out how I could recover my health, and he said no. I think that if we can get Lyme under control because he had anecdotally kind of diagnosed me with Lyme. If we get the lime under control, then you’re going to be fine. The breast implants won’t be a problem.   [00:20:49] Ashley James: I have a question. Why did you think it could possibly be your breast implants?   [00:20:55] Sarah Phillipe: I think I just had this gut instinct, I had this intuition. At the time, I mean this was a long time ago. Nobody was talking about this back then. There were no Facebook groups, no websites, no podcast interviews where anyone was talking about breast implant illness. So it was just kind of this little voice in the back of my head or just in my gut telling me that it could be the breast implants and just having that medical background, I understood that something inside of me that doesn’t belong there maybe could possibly make me sick and cause all this downstream dysfunction. At the time though, I didn’t have enough concrete evidence. That wasn’t enough for me to just go on a hunch to have them removed. It took me a long time to get to the point of deciding to have them removed. I mean, many years of going down this rabbit hole. So, yes, I had the intuition, but I didn’t trust my intuition initially.   [00:21:52] Ashley James: This is so interesting because this is a very similar story. We’ve had many people come on the show and share, many practitioners come on the show—these are professionals, these are scientists, these are doctors—and they too have a similar story where they were sick and when no one else knew what it was, their intuition was sort of whispering I feel like it’s this. Then they would second-guess it, and how often do we do that? How often do we second-guess? If your intuition says bring an umbrella and it’s a sunny day, or bring a sweater and it’s a warm day, how often do we second-guess that first voice? That first voice is the quietest, but that’s the truth. That is our truth.  We have to quiet our mind, stop second-guessing ourselves, listen to that gut instinct, and then find practitioners that’ll listen to us and listen to what our gut is saying. So then what happened? It took many years. What happened that had you go, wow, I think I’m right?   [00:22:58] Sarah Phillipe: I’m pretty grateful for the whole experience that I went through because it really ended up leading me down this journey of becoming a health detective, so to speak, becoming a holistic health practitioner so that I could try to figure out what was wrong with me and how to fix myself. I was no longer really in alignment with modern medicine or conventional medicine because I saw that they couldn’t help me, they weren’t helping me, and they didn’t understand why I was not doing well, why I had all these symptoms. So I knew I had to take a different approach.  That led me down this road of becoming a holistic health practitioner, completely changing everything about my life and the way that I was living. I did a lot of work on myself. I did a lot of detox work, addressing the gut, and working on all these different things that we do in holistic health in general because a lot of these things, regardless of what the source, is there’s only really a handful of things that create chronic illness in today’s world. So they tend to be fairly similar across the board, it’s just what is the source, right? So for me, it got to the point where my husband and I were trying to get pregnant, and we had been trying for a couple of years without success. I had ended up going to a gynecologist who specializes in endometriosis because I also had a hunch that I had endometriosis. Four or five years before that I had an ultrasound and they couldn’t find anything and sent me on my way. This particular specialist did an MRI and we discovered it was stage four. So I had bowel involvement, I had vaginal wall involvement, I had my left fallopian tube completely blocked. So there was a lot of inflammation in my pelvic floor and just my uterus, ovaries, and all of that.  So I just knew like I had been really thinking about it a lot and kind of in my mind mentally preparing myself for it and also talking about it out loud with my husband just to prepare him for it because I knew I was going to make that decision. So it came down to the fact that I wasn’t able to get pregnant, and I had been thinking in my mind if these implants are this toxic to me and causing all this dysfunction in my own body, what are they going to do? Even if I do get pregnant, what are they going to do to a growing child in me, in my uterus? What kind of problems could that pose to a growing baby, and what about breastfeeding? Am I going to pass all these toxins along to a baby who’s breastfeeding? I just didn’t want that for my future children, and it was really that whole experience with infertility that led me to finally making the decision to explant. So I did. Once I made that decision, I had my implants out about two months later.it was really quick once I finally committed to it.   [00:26:05] Ashley James: Well I take it they put you under to take them out, you weren’t awake during the procedure, right?   [00:26:15] Sarah Phillipe: Right.   [00:26:16] Ashley James: So when you woke up, did you notice the difference right away?   [00:26:21] Sarah Phillipe: I wouldn’t say that I had much of a difference right away. I mean, I had definitely made a fair amount of improvement, which is the work that I had been doing before my explant. So for me, I feel like I probably felt a little bit more alive, happier, just my outlook in life was improved. I felt lighter and brighter, and everyone else could see that in me. They just felt like when they were having a conversation with me, that I just came off a bit different. I just came off less intense, just calmer, more peaceful. Probably that’s because I didn’t have this chronic source of toxic exposure just overwhelming my detox pathways that can definitely create a lot of irritability, anxiety, and rage even—I’ve seen that as well. So a lot of different symptoms can come from toxic overload. So those things I noticed right away, but I did a lot of work post explant as well. It wasn’t just this miraculous healing story for me. I had to actually go and do a lot of detox work, a lot of gut work, dealing with infections things like that because there’s the downstream effect of having breast implants, and it’s not just about removing the source. There’s more work to be done after that. So over time, I would say it took me about a year of work before I felt pretty darn good, but I also needed to have a second surgery in between that time. So I did decide to go ahead and have a laparoscopy for that endometriosis. That surgery was a far more difficult recovery than the explant. It was a six-month recovery because I had to have a bowel resection, part of my vaginal wall was cut out. I had a fallopian tube removed and a lot of clean-up there. It was an eight-hour surgery. So that recovery was quite challenging, but I’ve never felt better and I’m really glad I did it. I wouldn’t say that excision for endometriosis is appropriate for every situation, but for mine, it was just so invasive and it had taken over so many different organs that it really needed to be done. So after those two surgeries and doing a lot of work, I would say about a year after that is when I felt quite good. And then about two years afterward is when I really hit the point where I felt better than I had in over a decade.   [00:28:55] Ashley James: Amazing. May I ask you a personal question?   [00:29:00] Sarah Phillipe: Mhmm.   [00:29:01] Ashley James: Have you guys had kids?   [00:29:03] Sarah Phillipe: We haven’t had kids yet, we have been trying, and it’s been a long time. We’ve been trying for probably four or five years now. I’ve lost count. But for me, the interesting part that was a huge blocking factor for me was my mindset, just my beliefs about what my body was capable of. Going into a fertility specialist or an endometriosis specialist like I did, it can be really disheartening to hear really discouraging words like your chances of getting pregnant are this, then your age, and then you’re only having one fallopian tube now because we had to take it out, here are your chances. So I think that was such a mental block for me. So over the past year, I’ve actually done a lot of mental-emotional work—working on healing past traumas, working on my belief about what my body’s capable of, and shifting that belief. And I know I’m going to get pregnant. I know my baby’s coming, but I didn’t know that before. I had doubts, disbelief. Even when I would say out loud, I know it’ll happen at the right time, I don’t think I really truly believed that. Our thoughts are so powerful. Even if we don’t speak it out loud, our cells are listening to whatever our thoughts are and responding as if it’s true.   [00:30:37] Ashley James: You’re a nurse and you’re a functional diagnostic nutrition practitioner. You have many credentials. You work with clients, but you’re also working on yourself. When I hear that of a practitioner, that’s the practitioner I want to see. I want to go to the practitioner who is working on themselves mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually, energetically. Who acknowledges that emotional, mental health is as important as physical health. Spiritual health and energetic health play a role in overall health and vitality. Now, I got to tell you, I was told by an endocrinologist that I would never have kids, never—0% chance that I would have kids, and my husband I tried for six years. So I just want to let you know absolutely, 100% possible. And it was holistic medicine alone that helped me to become fertile. My issue is not yours. I had polycystic ovarian syndrome, not what you had. However, I’ve seen so many women with so many different complications using a really holistic approach to be able to conceive healthfully. Once we got everything in order with our diet, nutrition, lifestyle, mental, emotional health—when we got all of it together, and for us the last step was adding just some Chinese herbs that our Naturopath was like, okay, these are the last thing. We’re just going to put this in place. Then we had to decide to watch for ovulation because, in the past, I didn’t ever track it because I was told I never had it to begin with.  When we saw ovulation, we’re like, oh my gosh. We did it. We’re ovulating. Our very first detection of ovulation we conceived our son, and now we’re pregnant again. We’re having a daughter. And it was both on the first tries. For that to go from six years of really trying but also not having a regular cycle, not having everything lined up, but using supplements, diet, herbs, and all that. I love that you’re looking at every aspect, and the belief system is so important because if I didn’t believe, then I would have never even gone as far as to ask my Naturopath for help in that area, for herbs, and I would have never even been conscious ever looking for when I ovulated. It’s like our belief system has us look for the evidence, has us look for the evidence that something is possible that we then can act upon. That’s why it’s so important to work on our belief system and to clean up past traumas so that we can believe in ourselves and we can believe in our own body’s ability to heal itself. My understanding of your situation with breast implants is that it was a toxic accumulation over time that affected all the systems. Is that because what is leaching into our bodies when we have a breast implant are endocrine disruptors? Can you maybe explain what kind of chemicals are slowly leeching into our body?   [00:34:11] Sarah Phillipe: Yeah. Breast implants are a stressor on a couple of different levels, and one of them is that they’re a chemical stressor. It’s not just silicone breast implants, it’s saline also. Saline breast implants most people think are safer because well it’s just water, it’s just saline water. But it’s not true. The shell of the saline breast implants are made of silicone, and so silicone in and of itself is a neurotoxin. There is evidence that it chelates neurotransmitters in the brain. We’re exposed to a lot of different sources of silicone these days. If you think about different kitchen utensils, all of the silicone that is in our personal care products, our makeup, our skincare, and things like that. There’s a lot of silicone out there, and there is one researcher who believes that it’s actually silicone toxicity that we’re dealing with when we have breast implants. That it’s a cumulative effect of not just the breast implants but all the different sources of silicone that we’re exposed to. And of course, breast implants are a pretty significant source of exposure, and they’re living in the body. But beyond that, there’s a lot of different cytotoxic, neurotoxic, carcinogenic chemicals, and heavy metals that are really inflammatory to our cells, tissues, and organs that are in silicone breast implants specifically. So there are 37+ different toxic chemicals and heavy metals in silicone breast implants. This means things like methyl ethyl ketone, cyclohexane, acetone, xylene, phenol—these are all neurotoxins. And then they contain things like dichloromethane, toluene, benzene—those things are carcinogens. And then you have things like talcum powder, formaldehyde, lacquer thinner, printing ink, and metal cleaning acid.  What are these things doing in breast implants? And then you have heavy metals like aluminum, tin, lead, and platinum. I actually developed some kind of reaction to my platinum wedding rings and I could no longer wear them. My finger just was like on fire every time I put it on. When I got my breast implants removed, that never happened again.   [00:36:35] Ashley James: Wow.   [00:36:36] Sarah Phillipe: So, that was a really interesting correlation there.   [00:36:40] Ashley James: Oh my gosh. So wait, have you ever taken these breast implants and had them analyzed by a lab to read out all of the heavy metals that are leaching into our body from them and all the chemicals? Is that information available for people to see? I bake with silicone, like it’s safe. Wait a second.   [00:37:02] Sarah Phillipe: Exactly. It’s not non-stick Teflon, right?   [00:37:06] Ashley James: Yeah, well exactly. I’ve always had that little intuitive voice we talked about, that little voice which I told it to shut up because I wanted the silicone baking pans because I thought they were so cool. I didn’t have to use oil. I’m like, look, they’re so much easier to clean. Oh my gosh, that little voice my heart was like this does not sound healthy. This sounds like it leeches stuff. Come on, don’t go for the silicone. Don’t buy into it. So, man, my little intuitive voice was right, my gut was right. The stuff we use in our baking in our kitchen that’s made of silicone, are you saying that this is also off-gassing or releasing chemicals into our food?   [00:37:55] Sarah Phillipe: I haven’t looked at studies on that, but I would say it’s a safe bet to assume so.   [00:38:01] Ashley James: Well I mean, if medical-grade silicone that they put in women is leeching stuff, can you imagine what the non-medical grade stuff in our kitchen’s doing?   [00:38:09] Sarah Phillipe: Exactly. There have never been like studies in humans examining what happens at body temperature with these implants, right? But there have been some animal studies that have shown that when the implants are heated to body temperature, that they do bleed out into the body. It’s called gel bleed. So, yes, they are a solid material but when they’re heated up, they do bleed into the body and the breast area is so full of dense lymphatic tissue that it’s like a highway for these chemicals to start traveling throughout different parts of the body. Not only is silicone toxic to the body, but there are some researchers out there that believe that it is considered an adjuvant connected to certain autoimmune conditions. So basically, it’s a trigger that can trigger certain autoimmune conditions. Autoimmunity is also partly genetic. It can trigger whatever your genetic susceptibility is. It can look different from person to person. It’s not always going to be the same autoimmune condition.   [00:39:12] Ashley James: You’re touching on exactly my next question to you, which is some women swear they have no problems with their breast implants. I have a friend, I was surprised to hear that she had breast implants because I honestly thought they were natural. She’s so gorgeous, but she was like are you kidding me? I was flat as pancakes. She said she breastfed successfully with them. She’s very happy with them. I knew my interview with you was coming up so I started asking her questions. I’m like, how’s your health? Do you think you’ve had any negative impacts? Well, I know she’s been focusing with her doctor—she sees a Naturopath—on brain fog, and she is a night owl. She has insomnia, and she cannot handle any stimulants. So even a little bit of coffee would drive her nuts, but I don’t know if that was how it was before the breast implants. But she says other than that, she’s in really good health, nothing to complain about. I thought, man, what if the accumulation of toxins being solely released is just exacerbating those issues?   [00:40:24] Sarah Phillipe: I get this question a lot of the time about will everyone get sick who has breast implants, and I tend to think of them as a ticking time bomb. From my perspective, why wait until your health spirals downhill because, usually, what I see is one of a couple of scenarios. Either someone has had a lot of different sources of toxic exposure as a child, kind of like a long history of toxic exposure. Maybe mercury amalgam fillings in the mouth, maybe they were born via a C-section and not breastfed, or maybe had a lot of antibiotics as a child and then they have amalgam fillings placed. Maybe they get breast implants and the breast implants are just that thing that overflows the bucket. And then I see another scenario where someone maybe had a pretty healthy, pretty uneventful childhood. Not a lot of toxic exposure, a healthy diet, not sick a lot. Maybe they got breast implants and have had no problems, and it’s been decades and they’re thriving. And then maybe later on in life, they experience divorce, loss of a loved one, or a car accident. And then maybe they have root canals and end up developing cavitations, which are infections in the jaw, and something ends up becoming the tipping point.  So there’s a lot of these different types of stressors that accumulate, build up in the body, and tax the body’s ability to cope with more. At some point, there can be something that becomes the straw that breaks the camel’s back, and then someone develops a lot of symptoms. Symptoms don’t happen early on when there’s dysfunction occurring. They’re one of the last things to occur. And when symptoms start happening, it’s usually that the body has been breaking down for quite some time and the symptoms are just the body’s way of communicating to you that it is time to start waking up and paying attention to what’s going on.   [00:42:25] Ashley James: What about MTHFR? How much does that play a role in this? I have a friend who has just the most severe form of MTHFR. I tried to say to her, there are phases of it, or I was trying to explain that you could have different snips like the 25%, 25% on each side, or 50% on each side, or 75% percent, and she has 100% which means she says her body only can methylate 23% and everything affects her. That she walked into a store and inhaled some perfume, she’d have a migraine. Anything that her body has to detox something, she’s down and out for the count. So she has to lead the cleanest lifestyle.  Do you have something like that where their liver cannot process phase one and phase two of detoxification properly? Everything gets backed up because of that. So someone who knows that they have any variant of MTHFR would definitely not be a candidate for having anything implanted in their body, which could then slowly over time increase toxicity, that it would just put this added stressor on the liver. Have you seen a link between those with MTHFR and breast implant illness?   [00:44:03] Sarah Phillipe: I have, and I think I’m a little biased though because the women that come to me that I work with are women who are quite ill even after their explant surgery. So I tend to see women who do have a lot of struggle regaining their health after having their explant. Usually, there is an MTHFR gene mutation or two. Well, I’m heterozygous for C677T, but I don’t have a really, really down-regulated methylation activity in the body. My body is methylating fine. So in my mind, it goes back to the difference between what your body is able to handle versus what you’re exposed to. I kind of liken it to either a two- or a four-lane highway at rush hour, which one is going to be moving more traffic? Obviously, if you have more lanes, the traffic’s going to flow better. And if you have fewer lanes, the traffic’s going to get jammed up a lot more easily.  So I think it’s not all about the MTHFR. It’s really about the fact that we’re living in a very, very toxic world dealing with far more than our bodies were ever designed to cope with, and then we add something like breast implants on top of that and it can be devastating. I don’t think it’s just our genes, it’s how the environment is interacting with our genes.   [00:45:34] Ashley James: I hesitate to use the word mental illness because there’s such a stigma around it, but what kind of emotional problems arise in women who have had breast implants who are experiencing this toxic load? We talked about insomnia and brain fog. Does it increase depression, anxiety? You talked about anger. Can we talk about the emotional aspects because women who are more likely to get breast implants are more likely to see a doctor for emotional issues and then be put on drugs for that as well further increasing the toxic load? I love that highway analogy.  Based on how much you’re methylating, based on how much you’re able to detox, let’s say you only have two lanes, the breast implants are adding more cars. Any pharmaceutical drug is adding more cars. Even some herbs the body has to then process adding more cars, right? What’s in our air, what’s in our water, what’s off-gassing from our carpets, right? If you go get your nails done, your hair did, and whatever kind of cosmetic products you use—all these chemicals. There are over 80,000 man-made chemicals made in the last 50 years that our bodies were not designed to have to handle, and here we are having to handle it. It’s all adding more cars to the highway, thus slowing it down, causing a backup, causing a toxic load in the body. We need to start, obviously, removing those loads. But for someone who begins to have that load build, they may not recognize physical symptoms as a problem. For you, someone said you have Hashimoto’s, you have small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, you have this problem, you have this physical problem, you have this physical problem. So they were addressing them. You have Lyme disease, and all these different doctors, because they’re looking for what they specialize in and they’re seeing symptoms. Oh, these symptoms match so we’re going to treat you for this. It doesn’t seem as obviously connected to the breast implants. But what about emotional issues? If you’re someone who’s never really been prone to anxiety or maybe just minor anxiety and all of a sudden you have panic attacks to the point where you’re being put on anxiety meds, or you have depression, or you have insomnia, or these emotional issues come up. Can you talk about the emotional side effects of breast implant illness?   [00:48:09] Sarah Phillipe: Absolutely. It’s very, very common. I see a lot of depression, a lot of anxiety, a lot of panic attacks, and a lot of feelings of overwhelm like you just can’t handle any kind of stress whatsoever. To me, that really signals the fact that your body is completely overloaded, and any kind of stimulation just is overwhelming for your body to try to cope with. Any kind of stress whatsoever triggers that stress response.  For me, I experienced this pretty significantly. It started off with just a very irritated nervous system to where when I would go down into the garage to do my workouts, I had to have complete silence like no music. I cannot work out with my husband in the garage because his heavy breathing irritated me. In between my sets, I would have to sit down and gather myself because it was so incredibly stressful on my body. Any kind of additional stress was just throwing me over the edge. It made me very irritable, really hard to recover from stress, and even a difficult conversation, I couldn’t handle that. I would blow up and start screaming and yelling because I couldn’t handle one more thing. So for me, the anxiety, the anger outbursts, heart palpitations, symptoms of anxiety, of chest tightness, feeling like I couldn’t take a deep breath. When I would go out into public, that was really hard for me because any stimulation from a crowd would just send me into this downward spiral. And even just being around family, if they were being loud and rambunctious. I have a husband with triplet brothers, so you can imagine there’s a lot of wrestling going on and stuff like that, a lot of competition. When we would all get together, I sometimes would just have to leave the house because I couldn’t handle even the audible stimulation. That to me was overwhelming. So those types of things that I experienced are really, really common. No one understood what the heck was going on with me. People thought I was crazy.   [00:50:34] Ashley James: Well, this makes so much sense because it’s almost like inflammation on the brain. It’s inflammation of the nervous system having to handle this toxic load. But at the same time, a lot of what you just shared sounds like the autonomic nervous system being stuck in the sympathetic mode of fight or flight. There are ways of measuring that. We can look at heart rate variability now.  I’m just curious. Let’s say breast implants, if having them puts the body in a state of stress like just triggers the autonomic nervous system so that we’re in fight or flight, which would then easily explain why would people have insomnia, why would they have that irritability, why would they have outbursts, why would they be on edge? And then you’re being told by a doctor it’s all in your head, you’ve got to go see a counselor.  Well, no. The root is in the body. Our physical body and our emotional body are connected. So when we have emotions, yes, of course, sometimes we get to come at it from healing traumas. We also have to come at it from looking at what’s going on in the body that’s putting us in this state, and it sounds like you were in fight or flight. Have you been able to measure that at all or look into that at all with your clients to see if they are kind of stuck in fight or flight?   [00:52:02] Sarah Phillipe: Well, when I did my own testing back when I was really, really sick, my neurotransmitters were completely tanked. I didn’t really produce a whole lot of neurotransmitters, which when you’re dealing with a lot of different sources of stress, you need norepinephrine and epinephrine in order to cope with that. That gives your body energy and the ability to either fight or flee, and I didn’t have that ability. I didn’t have those neurotransmitters at the adequate level that I needed them, which of course resulted in a lot of symptoms. My heart rate variability—and this is true for a lot of my clients—was very low. It was like a deep parasympathetic more than a fight or flight. I think a lot of us that are stuck with these chronic symptoms and not getting better, it’s more of this deep parasympathetic that we’re just not coming out of. And it’s more of a result of the mitochondrial function and how the mitochondria are really just going to bat for you rather than producing energy for you. So they go into this battleship mode rather than energy production mode, and that takes away from your cells and their ability to function, which your organs are made up of cells so you have different organs not functioning as well as they should. Hormone production takes a back burner, neurotransmitters take a back burner, things like that that are just required for someone to feel good, right? So that’s really a lot more common than fight or flight. I think the longer you’re dealing with chronic illness the more your body just goes into this deep parasympathetic mode and your mitochondria are just shut down. It’s like hibernation.   [00:53:48] Ashley James: Right, total exhaustion. That makes sense. I had chronic adrenal fatigue and I can relate to that. It’s like you’re walking dead. The overwhelm was real. Any stimulus was overwhelming. That makes sense. So what part of the breast implant harms the mitochondria? Is it a direct causality, or is it somewhere cascading down the way?   [00:54:17] Sarah Phillipe: I think that it’s on a few different levels. I think the toxic exposure, so toxins are one stressor that can definitely shut down the mitochondria, and they’re very delicate, right? They’re the canary in the coal mine, so to speak, so they’re very easily damaged.   [00:54:37] Ashley James: Well, they’re bacteria. I mean that’s the fascinating part is that just like our gut bacteria can be easily harmed, so can our mitochondria because they’re bacteria. We really have to take care of them because they’re what keeps us alive, they’re what creates our cellular energy.  I was fascinated by interviewing the woman who cured her MS using this theory that the MS was a mitochondrial disease, and then she ate a diet full of all the nutrients the mitochondria needed and removed all the foods that could harm the mitochondria. Lo and behold, she went from practically being months away from being dead to being able to walk again, then ride a bike, and ride a horse. I am having such a brain fart right now, I’m going to blame pregnancy brain, which I can. I’m allowed to. But she’s quite amazing, Terry Wahls?   [00:55:41] Sarah Phillipe: Yeah, I know Terry.   [00:55:42] Ashley James: The Wahls protocol and her TED Talk. She gave a TED Talk I believe is 2012. I love that she shows pictures of her in her special wheelchair that would have her feet higher than her head because that’s what she had to do. The doctors were basically saying that she was months away from death, and she stopped it and reversed it. She went to all the best doctors in the world for MS. They wanted to give her chemotherapy, they wanted to do all these things to her, and she just sat down one day and her goal was to live long enough to see her kids graduate high school. She sat down and thought, okay, well this is a mitochondrial problem. How do I heal my mitochondria?  Isn’t that interesting that it just takes one doctor with that detective mind we talked about to stop thinking inside the box that they’ve been trained to think in and start looking at the body and going what’s going on and how do we support the body with nutrition? So here we have this toxic overload. You said the mitochondria is incredibly sensitive, and just the toxins from breast implants can cause some issues for the mitochondria. What else in this big picture is affecting the mitochondria?   [00:56:57] Sarah Phillipe: Well, you also have the fact that breast implants are foreign objects. They don’t belong in the body, and so that is a chronic source of immune stimulation. It’s chronic inflammation recruiting inflammatory cytokines. They’ve been able to show even through just doing cultures on the implants the fluid inside the implants if they’re saline, and then also the capsule and the fluid around the capsule in between the capsule and the implant.  They’ll do cultures for those things, and they’ve been able to show 10+ different bacteria that are growing between the breast implants and the capsule themselves. It’s like a petri dish, basically, for all these different microbes to start growing, and it can be even a low-grade growth of these microorganisms that is just this chronic source of immune stimulation. Your body really can’t get those things under control because it’s got this foreign body that is like this big distraction. Your body’s trying to go to work to address that foreign object.  That’s the reason that it creates a capsule around the implant. It’s scar tissue. It’s trying to wall that implant off so that it can protect your body from that exposure. But unfortunately, our breasts are not sterile. There’s a lot of bacteria even within the breast tissue, and it’s a perfect environment for all kinds of different microbes to grow, wreak havoc, and thrive in the body that kind of goes undetected by the immune system. Part of that going undetected is the fact that they create biofilm around themselves to protect themselves from the immune system in general. The biofilm is the biggest problem with regards to breast implants and different infections, the causation, and the connection there. So we’ve got lots of different types of toxins coming from breast implants, which sets you up for this perfect storm situation because different unwanted microbes thrive in toxic terrain. They use toxins and heavy metals to create their biofilm, and some things like parasites will feed off of those things, will feed off of heavy metals, and candida as well will feed off of heavy metals. So you can have a lot of downstream dysfunction going on as a result of breast implants being in place. Chronic immune stressor because they’re a foreign object, and then a chronic chemical stressor because of all the different toxins that can bleed into your body from that exposure.   [00:59:46] Ashley James: That is fascinating. The body creates scar tissue around the breast implant. I mean, any woman who’s been pregnant or breastfed knows about mastitis. The breasts are designed to make breast milk that has all these good bacteria in it. We’re giving healthy bacteria and an immune system to an infant, so of course, it’s not a sterile environment inside the breast. To think that anything skin deep, anything below the skin is sterile is silly.  Putting a foreign object there, then it creates scar tissue around it, and then there are bacteria that are growing like a bad culture that can develop in your gut. Imagine the bad cultures developing around your breast tissue, and they themselves—even if it’s a low-grade constant low-grade infection—any kind of microbial presence as they die off creates toxins. Essentially, whatever they poop out is a toxin. That’s why we feel so crummy when we’re coming off of a cold, flu, or food poisoning. It’s actually the toxins left behind the poop and also the bacteria that are dying. All the toxins left behind make us feel so horrible because it is such a stressor on the body to have to handle those toxins. So not only is the body having to deal with that slow constant release of whatever’s in the breast implant, which you’ve mentioned some items that don’t sound too savory. And then it’s also dealing with any kind of bacteria or any kind of microbial buildup around the breast implants because it’s so hard for the body to get to that area to clear it out. And the immune system’s all kind of revving up and having to work on that. I’m sure you’ve looked at the meta-analysis. Statistically, women with breast implants, do they have a higher likelihood of developing cancer?   [01:02:15] Sarah Phillipe: That’s an interesting topic that I haven’t delved a lot into, but I do know that there is a connection between breast and someone women who have breast implants and a higher incidence of colon cancer, which is interesting, right? Not breast cancer. The theory is because the implants are putting a lot of pressure on that area.   [01:02:38] Ashley James: The immune system looking at it.   [01:02:41] Sarah Phillipe: I tend to think about it in a different way with regards to colon cancer where a lot of the toxins we’re exposed to end up going right to the gut. That’s one of the ways we eliminate through the liver and then dump it into the gut for elimination. So I have to wonder too, how much of the toxicity component is playing a part in the development of abnormal cells in the colon?   [01:03:04] Ashley James: I had this explained very scientifically once, and I’m going to try to do it in my layman’s terms. These 80,000 chemicals that are in our environment, our food water, and our breast implants, all that, the body doesn’t recognize these. So the liver gets rid of them but then the colon will reabsorb them if we don’t poop three times a day. If we don’t have enough fiber to bind to those the toxins in the bile and let’s say you have a little bit of constipation, the body does not see the difference between bile just to reabsorb because bile is costly, so the body wants to reabsorb it and reuse it. But there are these toxins that are in it. The colon doesn’t go oh wait, I shouldn’t reabsorb these because I’m actually just reabsorbing all the toxins again. This is why it’s so important whenever you’re doing certain detoxes and certain parasite cleanses to consume binders. People eat clay and they eat activated charcoal, or they take a lot of fiber in their diet. If you’re going to do one of those cleanses, I highly recommend doing it with a practitioner that knows what they’re doing. Don’t just randomly buy stuff. I really like Dr. Jay Davidson. I had him on the show twice. I really recommend listening to those two episodes. Listeners can go to learntruehealth.com and search Jay Davidson for those two episodes. He explains a bit more about the binders and stuff, but here we have the body reabsorbing all the toxins the liver worked hard at to get rid of. So no wonder if the colon wall is being bathed and reabsorbing and bathed and reabsorbing and bathed and reabsorbing these toxins. That makes sense.   [01:04:58] Sarah Phillipe: I absolutely agree that people out there in the world should not be attempting to do detox work on their own without a trained professional. I think that’s so important. I’ve seen so many women just make themselves so much worse.   [01:05:13] Ashley James: Can you explain a bit why? Because a lot of listeners, myself included, have attempted our own detoxes because we read an article, we hear from a friend, or maybe we listen to a show, and then we just go to town and make our own version of it. Going out and getting a colonic is fine, or going out and doing sauna therapy and eating chlorella, that’s fine. But if you have, for example, Lyme disease and then you decide to take all these herbs to kill it or something and you don’t have the right dose or you’re not preparing the body, all the emunctory systems correctly beforehand. You don’t have something to break down the biofilms. I mean, there are just all these things to focus on before we go to just kill the parasite or kill the infection, which can make it much worse like you said.  Could you give an example? Maybe teach us a little bit. We have women who are listening, let’s say they have breast implants. We have some women that have breast implants, and we have women that don’t have breast implants, and maybe they’ve already had them removed. How do we recover from breast implant illness?   [01:06:29] Sarah Phillipe: Well, that’s a loaded question.   [01:06:33] Ashley James: Give us the starting point. Where should we set ourselves up mentally? What should we start really looking into focusing on doing because you’re a detox expert? You’re an expert on breast implant illness, so let’s talk about the women who do have breast implants first. So they have breast implants, you’ve now opened their eyes to the possibility that this may be putting a major stressor. They can’t pinpoint exactly, oh it’s definitely causing this, or it’s definitely causing that. They’re starting to hear all these things that it could be causing, now you’ve got their interest. What can we do to support their health?   [01:07:16] Sarah Phillipe: With regards to healing in any situation, with regards to any root cause, I think the very first step is removing the source. We can do a lot to support our body with good clean water, clean food, good nutrition, exercise movements, good sleep, and things like that, but without removing the source, we can never really truly heal.  Removing the source means getting the breast implants removed, and there’s a very specific way that needs to be done to protect you. So I would look for a surgeon who has lots and lots of experience with explants, ideally even a surgeon who no longer places breast implants because they’re more likely to believe what you’re going through is real, believe that the breast implants are a problem, and do everything in their power to remove them properly so that you have the best chance at recovering your health.   [01:08:23] Ashley James: When you say remove them properly should they also remove that scar tissue capsule the body has built around them?   [01:08:29] Sarah Phillipe: Yep, absolutely because within that matrix of the capsule is going to be a lot of the different toxins that are found in breast implants because they bleed into that capsule, and also biofilm, bacteria, maybe even mold, mycotoxins, and things like that. So really important to get that source out. That’s what I mean when I say properly is that ideally, it would be done on block which means that the implants on the capsule are removed together as one unit rather than cutting the capsule open and taking the implant out first. A lot of really reputable explant surgeons who’ve been doing this for years and years will be able to remove your implants on block. The ones who say it’s not necessary or I’m not comfortable with that, I’ll probably look elsewhere because you don’t know if you have a rupture until you’re in there. It doesn’t even matter if it’s saline or silicone, especially with silicone, you don’t know if you have a rupture until you’re in there. With saline, you tend to have an idea because it’ll start shrinking, or it’ll just go flat. But you can have a slow leak and it can change in size a little bit but not significantly enough to notice. You don’t want to have that capsule cut open and risk whatever contents are in there spilling out into your chest cavity and then getting into the lymphatic system and traveling throughout the body. So that’s why it’s important to have them removed on block so that we’re protecting you from that exposure. And then if they can’t be removed on block or if any speck of capsule is left behind, the surgeon should go in and remove every tiny piece of capsule that’s in there. Sometimes that means scraping the ribs, sometimes that means removing a little bit of your own tissue to get it out, but that’s an important piece. Having any capsule left behind is just going to be a chronic source of immune stimulation. It’s a little bit harder to recover from. I wouldn’t say it’s impossible because I don’t like absolutes, but it’s definitely more challenging. And then once the implants are out, once you give your body enough time to heal from that surgery, I think that’s important to allow your body to rest, recover, and heal from that generally for about a month. As long as there are no complications, no hematomas, no seromas, no infections, no wound dehiscence, and things like that. As long as everything heals properly, then about a month after that, you can start doing some work on detoxing your body, addressing infections, and things like that. How I like to look at each unique person, and you could do this on your own, is I have people write me a self-narrative of their life from birth until now. It doesn’t have to be a long novel. It can be really a timeline of you plotting every different type of stressor you’ve encountered in life starting from birth. It can be physical, it can be chemical, it can be mental, emotional, it can be structural, it can be any type of stressor. I like to have people do that because it’s really helpful for me to be able to see how you got here, and then we can work backward with trying to figure out how we’re going to start incorporating some of these things into the plan for how we’re going to address them. And then I always think that functional lab work is helpful to look for other hidden stressors because not only are there going to be downstream effects of having breast implants like different types of microbial imbalances and toxicity. There are also going to be potentially other different types of hidden stressors in the body that may be unrelated. Maybe you had some health issues prior to the breast implants going in. Maybe you had ulcerative colitis, SIBO, candida overgrowth, or things like that. Those things also have to be taken into consideration. A lot of hidden things that people most people don’t think about or don’t even know exist to know to think about or look for are hidden infections in the jaw. If you’ve ever had any tooth pulled or a root canal, there is a significant chance that you have cavitation in the jaw, which is an infection in the jaw. That’s another source of low-grade chronic inflammation stimulating the immune system. We discuss to release their own toxins into your body that travel throughout the bloodstream. That can be one thing that keeps people sick. Amalgam fillings, silver fillings in the mouth—that’s another chronic source of toxic exposure. We have to look for other sources beyond breast implants because it’s a cumulative effect. As far as healing goes, I think it’s important to always start with supporting the downstream detoxification pathways, which means you have to be pooping two to three times a day—that’s a priority. If you’re not pooping, you’re not detoxing. Dr. Jay Davidson talks about this a lot, you have to think about the detox pathways as a funnel. The bottom of the funnel is the gut. You need to be removing your bowels regularly, that’s waste, that’s toxic waste. The more it sits there, the more it’s going to be reabsorbed back into circulation. The next above that is going to be your kidneys and liver and then your lymph above that. So if you’re someone who’s going out and getting lymphatic massages but you’re not pooping every day, how are those toxins going to get out? You’re probably going to feel a lot worse after a lymphatic massage. That’s the order of things and making sure those are well-supported and functioning the way that they should, proper hydration and minerals. When the body is ready, I think you can start addressing more of the gut—working on balancing the gut. Whether that looks like just introducing probiotics that can help balance the gut or whether that looks like going after specific pathogens like parasites, fungal overgrowth, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth—whatever that looks like for you, it’s going to be different from person to person. But addressing the gut I think is a helpful place to start after that because when you get into deeper detox work, you’re going to be dumping toxins into the gut and that can be very irritating to the gut. We want the gut to be in a good place before we start doing that. And then I think the next step—from my approach anyway—is oral chelation. Using true binders, strong binders that are able to get past the gut lining, get into your cells, and bind onto toxins strongly and long enough to be able to get them out of the body. So a lot of the binders that people are using out there, a lot of the time I see people using one product like a zeolite and nothing else. That’s their detox. If all you’re doing is using something like zeolite, yeah, that will bind toxins but you also have to think about the source.  Some zeolites are not tested for heavy metals, and that’s another source of toxic exposure to you because that’s a natural curator in the environment and so it can be contaminated and adding to the level of toxicity. And then if all you’re doing is binding and you’re not supporting other pathways, you’re going to burn out, you’re going to crash. You’re going to burn through your methyl groups, you’re going to burn through glutathione. That’s assuming that your detox pathways are open and working well.   [01:16:09] Ashley James: How do you test—as a practitioner—your clients’ detox pathways?   [01:16:16] Sarah Phillipe: It can be a little tricky to test for those things because we don’t have a really solid test that says, yes, you’re methylating really well or you’re glutathione stores are adequate. But I generally look at a comprehensive blood panel. There are some clues we can pick up on there about methylation and glutathione. I like the organic acids test as well. There are some clues there we can look at for methylation activity, glutathione, and things like that. As far as kidneys and liver, you’re not going to see anything show up abnormal on blood work until there’s pathology, until there’s a disease, so you won’t usually see that. I generally go by just how someone is feeling overall. If they’re feeling unwell, generally speaking, the detox pathways are not well supported. They’re probably congested. Usually, once we start supporting those pathways, people feel quite a bit better pretty quickly just being able to eliminate things.   [01:17:28] Ashley James: So you’re listening to people instead of telling them it’s in their head, they need more sex. You’re listening to how they’re feeling, and that’s very important. That’s why I like going to naturopaths over medical doctors because naturopaths will look at the same labs but they have a totally different way of analyzing the labs.  If you go to an MD, you’re lucky to spend 15 minutes with them. If you go to a Naturopath—a good one, I mean there’s bound to be good and bad doctors out there regardless of whether holistic or not. Find a good Naturopath that’s been practicing for a long time, and they sit down with you to six for 60 to 90 minutes to go over your comprehensive labs. They’re looking for, are you out of optimal ranges, and how can we get you back in optimal ranges? So their sensitivity to the lab. So if they look at kidney function, they’re looking, are you even remotely nearing towards not optimal? The red warning bells are going to go off in their head if they see signs that you are even in low normal.  Whereas an MD is waiting for you to be so sick they can put you on a drug because they don’t have any other tools until you’re sick enough for them to give you a drug to “manage,” not cure your symptoms. Whereas going to a holistic practitioner like yourself, a functional diagnostic nutrition practitioner, going to a good Naturopathic physician have so many tools. They’ve got diet, herbs, lifestyle, all these things that scientifically are backed and proven to support the body to get back into optimal ranges. But we have to look at the labs differently. We have to look at them from the standpoint of are you in optimal health, are you creeping out of optimal health?  And then of course listen to the client and believe them when they say, I feel this way, I feel this way, I feel this way. Believe them and go, okay, and take that into account along with the labs for understanding the whole picture about the person. That’s why I like going to like yourself, a functional medicine practitioner or a Naturopath, that spends enough time with you that they can really get the full picture of what’s going on in your life and they can do that detective work. I know almost every episode of my show, over 450 episodes, has been kind of a commercial for seeing holistic practitioners because I spent years beating my head against a wall seeing medical doctors just being given drug after drug and I was so sick. If I stayed in that world, if I stayed in mainstream medicine, I don’t even know if I’d be alive. But if I stayed in mainstream medicine, I’d still be on monthly antibiotics, I would still be infertile, my weight was out of control so I imagine I’d probably be one of those people on gurneys. My type 2 diabetes was completely out of control. I had really bad polycystic ovarian syndrome, infertility, and adrenal exhaustion so bad I could barely function. It was getting worse and worse and worse, and that was in my 20s.  If I had stayed that way and kept seeing MDs, I would just keep getting worse and keep being put on more and more drugs. I don’t even know if I’d be here. I’m so grateful for holistic medicine and for just snapping out of it and going I reject this entire system. I will gladly go to an ER if I need emergency medicine like I have a broken arm or something, or I have an infection that I can’t handle. I would gladly go to an ER—allopathic, reductionistic medicine when they take you apart, look at your little organs, and don’t look at you as a whole. That is fantastic for saving your life if you’re in a state of life or death. That’s where they shine. I don’t want to go to a Naturopath if I have a broken bone that needs to be reset and put in a cast or whatever.  But when it comes to chronic illness, that system of medicine is causing more chronic illness than healing. It perpetuates chronic illness, and it also perpetuates the idea that if you have, for example, an autoimmune problem, you will always have it. I was told I’d always have diabetes. I was told I’d always have polycystic ovarian syndrome. I’m sure you were always told that you would have the conditions that they diagnosed you with. And all of our listeners who have been to enough MDs who have had enough health problems have been told, oh, it’s because of your genetics. You will always have this. Or it’s because of your age or because of whatever. They tell you with such hubris that you will always have this condition. Here we have Sarah teaching us that you can go see her and she’s going to look at your labs in a different way. She’s going to listen to you, listen to your symptoms, and she’s going to help you completely change your lifestyle, your diet in a good way. Sometimes that’s a little overwhelming and scary for people, but holding your hand doing it. I’m a health coach so I know. I’m not going to throw the kitchen sink at you but get your body to the point where your body is so healthy you feel the healthiest you’ve ever felt in your life.  You can’t get that from MD medicine. You can’t get that from pharmaceutical-based medicine to feel the healthiest you’ve ever felt in your entire life from causing more toxins to the body. It all starts with the mindset, and I believe you talked about this before. It really does start with the mindset. We have to change our mindset, completely rewire our mindset to go into this new way of thinking. Believe the body can heal itself and then act accordingly.   [01:23:50] Sarah Phillipe: Yeah, absolutely. And I believe that the body was designed with this God-given innate intelligence to self-heal if we take responsibility for our health and take the actionable steps needed to get it back. That mindset component is so huge, and I think it even bleeds into how we think about our condition and how it happened.  With women with breast implants, I think this is so important because a lot of women with breast implants who are sick and they discover breast implant illness, the feelings—initially can become chronic—are of shame, guilt, regret, and then also anger towards the medical system. Why didn’t I know about this? Why wasn’t I told? There’s a lot of anger towards doctors and the medical model, and I think that’s not a healing mindset. We have to get out of the victim mentality in order to heal.   [01:24:59] Ashley James: I think it’s good to bring that up. I think it’s good to address. Anger, if held on to, is toxic. But anger that is processed is healthy because if we bury it, we don’t process it, or if we just try to stick it somewhere without really processing, working through it, healing it, that’s also holding on to a toxin. I know because that was me. But actually facing the anger, being with it because there are two forms of anger. You can take a negative emotion, it’s a negative emotion about the past.  For every time you’ve been hurt by someone you felt angry about it, that’s a gestalt in your neurology that you’re holding on to. That’s a chain of all of the events from your past, and that’s incredibly toxic because that gets reanimated inside our neurology every time we relive something that brings up anger. But anger in the moment about something that’s happening, let’s say, to us which I understand I don’t want to go into victim mode either, but something that’s happening that is violating our boundaries.  Anger is our body and our mind’s way of saying my boundaries are being violated. You got to do something about it. And if we take action to stop our boundaries from being violated and then process the anger, work through it, heal it, release it, and don’t hold on to it, don’t stay in it, but acknowledge it. Acknowledge, yes, my boundaries are being violated. Once we take action towards not allowing our boundaries to be violated like firing the MDs that no longer help you and hiring new doctors and new practitioners that are going to serve you. That is an actionable step because if you’re staying in victim mode, you’re going to stay with your captors, you’re going to stay with the people who victimized you. But taking all the actions to ensure that your boundaries are healthfully enforced. When anger comes up go ask yourself, is this anger because my boundaries have been violated, or is it anger from the past? And work through it.  Getting to that point, I think anger is healthy when it allows us to see that we have been down a path that’s hurt us, and now we’re seeing all the things that did hurt us. As long as we can go, okay, I’m going to enforce my communication, my boundaries, my research, everything. My mindset is now shifting. I am asserting myself, I am advocating for myself, and I will only put medical professionals on my team that is in alignment with my values and my boundaries, and just acknowledging that that anger was a motivation to get you there.  But don’t stay in it. Don’t say in victim mode because like you said, that shame, guilt, and that anger—we turn it inwards and start beating ourselves up, why did I do this to myself? Why did I let this happen to me? That is really unhealthy, so we have to let it go. I love that you’re acknowledging that because I think there’s so much emotional process work we have to do if we’re coming to terms with a choice we made in our past that has led us down this really negative route and now we’re looking to reverse it. So we also have to reverse and heal all the emotions associated with it. And then what about everything that led up to a woman choosing breast implants? I know it’s unique for each woman, and I don’t have breast implants so I can only imagine that for me to choose to get breast implants, I would have had such an insecurity—and this was just me, I’m not saying all women—that I needed to get them so that I would stop feeling that way about myself. Do you also look at that and look at what happened emotionally that had you want to get them, and is there anything to heal there?   [01:29:11] Sarah Phillipe: Certainly. I think there’s a lot of reasons why people get breast implants, and it’s not always vanity. For some people, it is a decision after having a mastectomy from breast cancer. For other people, they went in to have a lift after they were done having children and the doctor convinced them that they needed to have breast implants.   [01:29:37] Ashley James: Good salesmen. He had a boat payment.   [01:29:42] Sarah Phillipe: And then for other people, they were like me and just really had a lot of insecurity. The breast implants made them feel a lot more beautiful, sexy, or worthy. I think there’s a lot to think about, and I think it really just takes doing a bit of digging, reflecting, and processing everything that has happened. I really don’t think that this kind of thing happens to us. I really think that it happens for us. Personally, I can’t speak for everyone but for me, I really feel like I went through this partially to really discover who I really am inside as a person, as a human being beyond just the physical appearance. There’s so much growth that happened as a result of that, and I will say I’m probably not the same person that I was 10 years ago. Secondly, I think it really has taught me how I should be living just to maintain my health, to keep my health for life and rather than just struggle through life with a lot of symptoms and bounce around from doctor to doctor, this surgery and that surgery, and all these different prescriptions like most Americans. But it taught me how I should be living in order to really live a healthful vibrant life full of joy that we deserve. I think that we can take this experience and really learn a lot about ourselves, about who we are, and about how we should be living. It can be a positive experience once we can get to that place of going through those emotions of whether it be anger, sadness, regret, shame, or whatever, and acknowledging those things, and then letting them go, moving on, moving forward, and not looking back. Continuing to take the next right step each day towards your future.   [01:31:51] Ashley James: I’m sure you’ve been asked this, is there a safe alternative to breast implants? Wave your magic wand.   [01:32:02] Sarah Phillipe: I’m sure they’re working on those things as we speak just based on the uproar that’s going on with women right now with regards to breast implants and how they’ve contributed to poor health. So I know there are probably things in the work that we don’t know about, but one other thing that I do know is there is always the option of having a fat graft. There are a couple of different techniques that I know of. One is a fat flap technique basically where they take fat from underneath the armpit or potentially underneath the breast and rotate it around to make a breast out of it. I think that’s a great option, however, with regards to breast cancer patients, I don’t know if that’s a safe option. We don’t have any long-term studies showing that that’s safe. And then there’s liposuction with fat transfer to the breasts. That also has its own wrists. It’s an aggressive surgery. The cannula that they use—if you’ve ever seen a video of liposuction, it’s pretty darn aggressive and it’s superficial layers that they’re working with. How much does that disrupt the lymphatic system, how much is that impacting your ability to detoxify and remove waste products, and how and how much is that impacting your ability to get nutrients to the cells? I think that there are an upside and a downside to any option. Personally, I will say, I did have liposuction with fat transfer at the time of explant. Had I known now what I didn’t know then about lymphatic and how it really can impact the lymphatic system, I probably would have made a different decision. It didn’t really even stick for me, so my breasts are pretty much the same size they were as before I had my implants placed. That’s the other downside of it is that you don’t know if it’s going to stick because once you remove the blood supply of the fat, the fat dies. So whether or not it reestablishes the blood supply quickly enough in its new place is a whole nother story. So I’ve just gotten to a place where I’ve learned to love and accept myself for how I was created, and see the beauty in that. So that’s my hope for most people so that we stop trying to alter our appearance and realizing that you are beautiful just the way you are, and you don’t need to alter your body to be beautiful.   [01:34:37] Ashley James: Yeah. Do the emotional work to get to the point where you love your body. You love every square inch of it. There’s no such thing as perfection. There’s so much healing to take place. Look at what a damaging society it is that as girls growing up, we are developing these belief systems about what we should look like. This is not a new discussion. If we look at fashion through history, we can see that we have been subjected to basically being cattle for men but also for society and for other women for the acceptance of society. How we appear externally is going to determine whether we’re accepted or not. This is of course the mind of a child, the mind of a little girl analyzing the world. I believe that at our core, we have this need to be accepted because that’s part of how we survived, however long we’ve been here. Thousands upon thousands of years, we are a tribal people, and if you got exiled from the tribe, that was death. Being part of the tribe and being accepted and loved, and the first acceptance is being accepted into your family when you’re born. Feeling as part of a family, then part of a community, part of a school system, part of a church system, or whatever you are in growing up. If you are bullied, if you are judged, if you are pushed aside, if you’re feeling unworthy, unloved—all these things are processed in the mind of a girl growing up thinking that her physical appearance played a role in the rejection, and the hurt and the trauma from that. If only I put on makeup, do my hair, and look as sexy as I can, and spend all of my waking moments up making myself look good and appear nice, then I will be accepted. This is what the media tells us. Really, the most beautiful thing about a woman is true confidence. You kind of get to that point, I’m 40 now. Somewhere around 35, 36, right after I gave birth I kind of went screw this. I am not playing this game. I’m living for me. I’m living for my loved ones. I’m not living to look good for anyone. I’ve lost shallow friends over it, great. I’ve made some deeper friends because of it. I know that there are women who are in industries where they have to look good in order to get a raise, in order to get a promotion. This is the sad part about society, but we need to analyze how we grew up, analyze the world and realize that we internalized this idea that our looks need to be perfect in order to be loved and accepted, and then we do something like give ourselves implants or do plastic surgery causing further harm. I love that right at the beginning of the show, you brought up that this is as much of a physical healing journey as it is in a mental and emotional one, and to work on all aspects of it.   [01:38:29] Sarah Phillipe: Right. Women today, young girls today, gosh, I would hate to have grown up in today’s world as a younger girl. When we were young we had magazines, billboards, commercials, movies, and things like that. But now, everywhere you look it’s in your face all over social media. Having a constant connection to social media the way people do today is a recipe for disaster for young girls. We’re in the midst of this body positivity movement and loving and accepting all different shapes and sizes. But at the same time, we have that message, we have the other side of a different message, which leads us to do all of the things that we do that leads us to have our eyebrows tattooed on our face and have eyelash extensions, get breast implants, get Botox, get lip injections, get cheek implants, chin implants, and butt implants. We’re trying to create this body or this look that doesn’t really exist in real life naturally.   [01:39:47] Ashley James: Right, and Hollywood and the media have done us no justice. I read an article recently, really interesting about young children. It was doing a cross-section of the young children who are questioning whether they were born in the right body. What I found interesting—and I really didn’t know this because I thought maybe just from what we see in the media—that it’s more skewed towards boys wanting to be girls. But in fact, the statistic was something crazy like closer to 90% of these children were girls who felt more like they were boys. They’re all in the questioning phase, but no wonder. No wonder In this world where we have to achieve this level of perfection. If I was a girl now, I’d rather be a boy than have to live up to this idea of what it looks like to be a woman. It’s a total false, it’s made up, it’s not real. That’s not what it is to be a woman. But it just seems a lot safer, it just looks a lot easier to live life as a boy, right? No wonder there’s so much confusion. The way society is, the way the media is, the way social media is, we’re making it impossible for women to feel comfortable in their own skin, unless they do their own work. Unless they go within, they reject the external input, and they go with it and they love who they are on the inside, how they were born, and just be with themselves. Instead of trying to change who they are, just go within and do the emotional work. I just thought that it was really interesting that this level of confusion like very young children. I see that it makes sense that we’re trying to falsify what it is to really be a woman. Not us but the media making it very confusing. I love the work that you do. You’re exposing something that allows us to analyze our entire life and our body image, and then support ourselves on a level of detox, emotionally and physically. So tell us about how people can work with you. What does it look like to work with you as a practitioner? Obviously, you do it through Zoom or Skype. What does it look like to work with you?   [01:42:33] Sarah Phillipe: I’ve worked with women all over the world, and that’s really thanks to technology today. The women that I’ve worked with, it’s always been one-on-one. We work together for a minimum of six months. It really involves teaching women the tools that they need to heal themselves, and I think that’s really empowering because you can take that information and use it to help your family and keep your family healthy. So it’s not just about how it’s helping or impacting you, it’s about even the next generation. Teaching people how they should be living for a healthy body and a healthy life. Once dysfunction has occurred, how to restore function. What things we need to look into, what things we should address and what order, how to go about it, and all of that. I’m teaching women these things. I’m not doing the work for them. I can give someone the best plan in the world, but if they can’t implement it or if they’re not able to implement it, then they’re not going to get well. I think education is the most valuable thing because they can use that information for the rest of their lives. Soon, mid-year or so, probably around June, I’ll be shifting how I work with women and it’s going to be done in a group setting. We’ll be doing an online group program.   [01:44:02] Ashley James: That’s great.   [01:44:04] Sarah Phillipe: It’ll still be the same exact thing that I do now, it’ll just be in a group and a lot more connection and shared experience. I think that’ll be really valuable for people to go through things like this together. Because a lot of women who are going through this don’t feel like anyone really understands them. No one understands, no one gets it, people think I’m crazy, people don’t believe me. This is really great to connect with other women who are going through it at the same time that you are and be able to connect on that level and have that shared experience. Know that there are other people that you can talk to that get it and that understand what you’re going through. That’s what I’m working on putting together now. It’s basically my brain in an online program.   [01:44:48] Ashley James: I love it. Would people still be able to like do labs with you and get a consult?   [01:44:53] Sarah Phillipe: Yeah. The way I’m setting it up is we’ll have weekly or bi-weekly group calls and then there will be an option to have a one-on-one call scheduled with me.   [01:45:06] Ashley James: Great. Awesome. Is there anything else that people or women should know? I mean, men can get implants too. I was surprised that there are calf implants for men because they’ll work out in the gym forever but they don’t get that definition of their calf that they really wanted, and so they’ll get basically the silicone implants or something put in their calves to make them look more muscular. There would be a percentage of men that would be experiencing all these same issues but to male physiology. Is there anything else though that future students and clients should know when it comes to working with you about this program?   [01:45:51] Sarah Phillipe: One thing that I’m always telling potential clients is that you have to be mentally and emotionally mindset-wise prepared for the work. You have to be willing to do whatever it takes because usually, the people that come to me are the people who’ve gone from doctor to doctor to doctor, no one has been able to help them, and I’m kind of like their last resort. I ask a lot of my clients. It’s not always easy. There’s going to be bumps in the road. Healing is never a straight path, so you have to expect that it’s going to be challenging and it’s going to sometimes require that you step outside of your comfort zone because the way that we heal the body is not the way that you’ve been taught by modern medicine.   [01:46:47] Ashley James: And when you have those bumps in the road that’s feedback, that’s actually good. When you feel bad that’s good because you bring that to Sarah and then she goes, oh okay, then we need to make these tweaks. She understands, but you have to be vocal about how you’re feeling. That’s something that happened to me. I was doing methylcobalamin injections back in December. My B12 plummeted and then my iron plummeted as a result during the pregnancy, and so I took some methylcobalamin injections. I was feeling great for the first three injections, I was amazing. It was like two a week. I was like, oh wow, I feel normal again. I feel good. This is great.  And then about two or three weeks into the injections, they would make it so I was totally out for the whole day. I was in bed. I’m like, what is going on? I talked to my midwife who’s amazing. Absolutely amazing, she’s been my midwife for over 20 years. She looks at me and she goes well, Dr. Ben Lynch, and I’ve had him on the show by the way so I was just really impressed that she starts off by quoting him. “Well, Dr. Ben Lynch says that methylcobalamin shares the same pathways as insulin, and if you don’t need any more methylcobalamin, then it’s actually reducing your capacity for your body to use the insulin.” She’s going on and on about all the pathways and I’m looking at her like I should have you on the show.  So she told me, okay, I want you to do this instead. I went from I felt good but then I started feeling really bad, then she adjusted it, and I felt even better. That’s the thing is you have to be in communication with your practitioner. The practitioner—a good one like Sarah—who knows what to do with that information. So yes, it’s challenging, but it’s also then on the other side of the challenges is incredible rewards. But they have to be willing to put the work in. If you say stop eating gluten, they have to stop eating gluten. Or if you say you have to stop eating sugar, you have to stop drinking coffee, or whatever like some vices. You probably are going to have to give up some vices, but on the other side of it is how much do you want that amazing health, that vitality?   [01:48:55] Sarah Phillipe: Exactly, and I think that leads to another really important point is that people need to have a strong enough why. They really need to get in tune, in touch with their why. What is the reason that you want to get your health back? What’s the reason you want to work together? When someone says because I want to be healthy, that’s not a why. Why do you want to be healthy? What is the driving force that keeps you motivated to take the next right step each day in your healing journey? What do you want to be doing with your life that you are not able to currently do because of your symptoms, because of how much you’re struggling? For most people, it’s a struggle just to get out of bed every day. All the other things that they want to be doing with their life they’re not doing.   [01:49:43] Ashley James: Yeah, and the guilt and the shame that builds up from that. I want to live a life free of guilt and shame and be able to get out of bed. You’re like, yeah. Okay, great. Now do everything I tell you to do.   [01:50:00] Sarah Phillipe: Yeah. So I think that’s important because it keeps you motivated even when things get hard.   [01:50:05] Ashley James: Absolutely. Sarah, it’s been such a pleasure having you on the show. Your website is reversingbreastimplantillness.com. Are there any resources you want to send us to or homework you’d like to leave us with to wrap up today’s interview?   [01:50:27] Sarah Phillipe: Well, I have one resource that I find really valuable. It’s something that I use with all of my clients to just assess where they’re at and assess progress. It’s my neurotoxic questionnaire. It’s divided up into four different categories, each of them looking at a different type of toxicity. The first section looks at heavy metals, the second section looks at symptoms connected to general chemical toxins, the third category looks at some connected biotoxins and mycotoxins. Those are toxins that come from living organisms like mold, bad bacteria, parasites, and things like that. And then the fourth category is looking at symptoms that are connected to a combination of heavy metals and general chemical toxins. That’s really helpful. And then your total score you can look at where you fall into the range of mild, moderate, or severe neurotoxicity, which is important in determining whether it may be the thing that helps you make the decision to explant, or it may help you assess that even after explant you have some work to do. And then it helps you reassess progress as you go through your journey.   [01:51:44] Ashley James: How can they find that?   [01:51:46] Sarah Phillipe: I can share that link with you to share with your audience, or you can also find it on my website.   [01:51:55] Ashley James: Awesome. I’ll make sure the link is in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. Thank you Sarah for being on the show today. It’s been such a pleasure, and I’d love for you to come back when new exciting information comes out about breast implant illness. You’re welcome. I know you’ve got your ear to the ground. When really interesting stuff comes out that we all need to learn more about, please come back on the show.   [01:52:27] Sarah Phillipe: Of course, I’d be happy to, and thank you so much for having me, Ashley. It was such a pleasure and I really enjoyed our conversation.     Get Connected with Sarah Phillipe! Website Facebook Instagram YouTube Recommended Reading by Sarah Phillipe You Are the Placebo by Joe Dispenza   https://reversingbreastimplantillness.com          

Become a Certified Health Coach Through IIN just like Ashley James! Get their Valentines Day Special! Experience a free sample of their program: learntruehealth.com/coach Contact Dr. Vienna Lafrenz www.natural-therapeutics.com   The Windows to True Health: Iridology and Tongue Reading https://www.learntruehealth.com/the-windows-to-true-health-iridology-and-tongue-reading   Highlights: What is Iridology What to look for in the eyes Benefits of fasting What to check in the tongue Heal the child from childhood trauma to heal the adult   Dr. Vienna Lafrenz is a wealth of information. She’s back on the show to share even more information to improve our health. Dr. Vienna talks about looking and checking our eyes and tongue as an indicator of how healthy we are. She also shares how she was able to change the taste of food by collecting saliva on the seeds before sowing. Intro: Hello, true health seeker, and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. You’re going to love today’s interview. Dr. Vienna and I had such a great time going back and forth discussing some very interesting topics that you may not have learned about or dove into, or maybe you’ve heard of it but you really haven’t heard about it from this angle. So you’re going to learn more about how you can analyze your own body in order to help direct what you’re doing with your health. It’s all very, very, very interesting stuff. As you’re listening to this interview and as you listen to all my interviews, if you think to yourself you would love to do what I do—you’d love to become a health coach—please check out IIN, the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. Just google IIN and give them a call. You can also go to learntruehealth.com/coach. That’s learntruehealth.com/coach, and there you get a free module from IIN that will allow you to see if it’s something that’s right for you. Now, I’ve interviewed the founder of the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, and I’ve also interviewed their most recent CEO. Both interviews are fascinating and I’ve had actually several graduates on and several of their professors or teachers on as well. So you can go back and listen to all my interviews with those folks. You can always search my website, learntruehealth.com, to find episodes.  What I have found fascinating about IIN is that about 50%—it was something like 54%, it was very close to 50%—of students that choose to do the year-long health coach training program have no intention of becoming a health coach but want to do it for their own personal growth. Going into it, I wanted to add this tool to my tool belt. I was already in the health coaching space, to begin with. I’ve been doing coaching for years, and I wanted to just continue to learn and grow as you as a listener continue to want to learn and grow that’s why you’re here. You’re here to listen, learn, and grow.  What I found through the program is I did receive a lot of personal growth. All the work that you learn to do with your clients you do with yourself as well as you go through the program, so that was very gratifying. That was very rewarding.  So if you’re someone who just really loves personal growth or you’ve just decided it’s the beginning of a new year and you go, I’m ready. I’m ready to take my life to the next level. I’m not satisfied with certain areas of my life. I want more joy and vitality in certain areas of my life, then you might want to just do the program for your own personal growth. You’ll be getting great tools in your tool belt for yourself, your communication skills. It’ll improve your relationships. It’ll improve your relationship with your own body, your health, your spirituality, and your level of joy and vitality. So go ahead, check it out. Go to learntruehealth.com/coach and just get the free module. See if it’s right for you. Now, I did negotiate with IIN that all my listeners get a fantastic deal, and I know that in the month of February they were running a special. They might still be running it so you can give them a call and check that out. But they give us always—they always give the Learn True Health listeners—an extra special deal, so make sure you mention my name Ashley James and Learn True Health podcast to get that special deal. They do have a payment plan. So if you’re someone like me, I did the payment plan. It’s like a credit card payment basically every month. What was really interesting is when I enrolled, the woman who helped me enroll who, by the way, when you call them, everyone that answers the phone has been through the program as a health coach themselves and can really help you better understand the program and there’s no pressure. It’s not like a sales pitch. It’s just people genuinely wanting to help. What I thought was really interesting is they encourage you. They said the best graduates pay it off completely before they have finished the program because, for those who choose to be a health coach and want to do this as a career or add to their career in the health space, it’s a year-long program. After the first six months, you begin to take on clients. You can actually have it all paid off by the time you have graduated and have a successful health coach business up and running. Now, if you do want to do IIN, you heard about it through me but you have questions or you’d love a bit of mentorship, I’m absolutely here for you. Please feel free to give me an email, ashley@learntruehealth.com, or you can reach out to me on Facebook. We have our great Facebook group, the Learn True Health Facebook group. Reach out to me. I’d love to support you in your success. The world needs more health coaches right now. The world needs more holistic-minded practitioners right now.  What’s great is IIN is a stepping stone. You can go with that. You can go into focusing on functional medicine in terms of hormones, fertility, more mental and emotional health. There are so many different avenues that you can go, sports medicine. There are health coaches now that are being hired by insurance companies, hospitals, clinics, and doctors’ offices, or you can work independently like me. So the sky’s the limit. That’s really exciting. So go check it out. IIN, google it, give them a call, see if it’s right for you. But definitely get the free module by going to learntruehealth.com/coach. Excellent. Thank you so much for sharing these episodes with those you care about. I constantly hear from new listeners who say that their friends or family have turned them on to this. For new listeners, welcome. It’s very exciting. Now we’re about to reach our—is it our four-year anniversary? Has that time just flown? I can’t believe it. We launched in March of 2016, and so we’re approaching our anniversary which is really exciting. We’ve helped millions of people through all the downloads. Help them to get better health, and that’s my goal is to help you to achieve the true health that you’re seeking.  If practitioners or doctors have told you what you have is genetic, what you have is because of your age, because of your sex, or because of whatever, and you’ll always have it, you have to be on some drug for the rest of your life. If you’ve just been put in a box and told that you’ll always be sick, you’ll always feel this way, please find a new practitioner. Keep listening to this podcast. I was told that I’d never have kids. I was told that I would be diabetic for the rest of my life. I was told that I’d be sick for the rest of my life, and I finally broke away from all those MDs who kept me in a box, who wanted to just keep me medicated, who didn’t have answers for my true health. I went and I sought natural medicine. Through my journey of health, I was able to recover all those diseases, and now this is why I do what I do is to help you do the same.  So if you have any friends or family in your life who suffer needlessly and don’t want to suffer anymore, they want to put the work into their body to heal—even if they’ve been told they’ll always have that condition and they want to get to be as healthy as they can possibly be—keep listening, keep sharing. We’re going to get you there. Come join the Learn True Health Facebook group. It’s a very supportive community to help everyone achieve true health.   [00:07:30] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 456. I am so excited for today’s returning guest. We have Dr. Vienna Lafrenz on. Vienna, you were on episode 450, so not too long ago. Many listeners have contacted you to work with you, and you have had some really great experiences with our listeners.  This is the common thing. So I’m letting all you guys know—all the listeners know—that I’ve had other guests reach out to me. I hear from many people, including Vienna, that the listeners of the Learn True Health podcast are just simply amazing, wonderful people. This is something I commonly hear. I’ve never heard a guest complain about when a listener contacting them, let’s just put it that way. We’re all in good company here. Vienna, today we’re going to continue our discussion, which I’m really looking forward to because where we left it off last time was you were going to teach us how to assess our tongue. So we could look in the mirror and we can learn more about our health, and that’s really exciting. Also, get into a bit of your iridology.  Since we had you on the show, your clinic—you work with people remotely around the world but you also have a physical clinic. You moved to Republic, Washington and you’re in a beautiful space there. So if anyone lives near the Okanagan Valley or in the Okanagan Valley, they can come to see you in person, which is really exciting. Congratulations on the move of your clinic. Natural-therapeutics.com is Vienna’s website. Now, just to preface, for the listeners who didn’t hear episode 450, Vienna lives on a mountain with six feet of snow in Washington and she’s on satellite internet. So sometimes it may sound like we’re talking over each other, that’s because there is a delay on the line. So we’re not trying to talk over each other, but we’re going to do our best. We had a wonderful discussion last time, and we’re going to continue that great discussion this time. Welcome back to the show.   [00:09:46] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Thank you, and I do have to say, the listeners that you have on your show are so amazing. They all have the same interest at heart, and that is to get their best health possible in the best means there is. It’s wonderful. They implement things, they follow through them. It’s wonderful.   [00:10:06] Ashley James: Right. Now, for listeners who didn’t hear episode 450, I urge you to go back. I mean, you can listen to them out of order. You could listen to this one and then go back to 450. But I have to tell you, there is a story about a woman who had parasites crawling out of her body, literally running away from this woman’s body because the type of work that Vienna does makes parasites not even want to be in your body. So if you geek out on that kind of stuff like I do, you’re going to want to definitely work with Vienna and absolutely listen to episode 450 as well. Today we might get into some really cool stuff, probably not as gross as that, although I’m not grossed out by it. I think it’s awesome because if there’s something you can do naturally that has no negative side effects, it makes parasites not want to live in your body anymore, sign me up. Before we talk about tongue assessment, which I think is so interesting, since we had you on the show, you worked with several of our listeners. And without obviously disclosing their identities or their names, are there any stories of success that you want to share with us?   [00:11:19] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Oh, absolutely. So I have several actually. One in particular that really stands out is a person who had 20 years’ worth of chronic pain—daily, daily, daily pain. And with that, of course, the cognitive issues with it because as we know, the brain shrinks with as many years of pain that there is, which is reversible of course. But this person was having a ton of brain fog, memory losses, and forgetting people’s names, even for getting phone numbers of relatives and such. But the chronic pain was the biggest thing where there was no joy anymore. Basically waking up every morning thinking okay, what am I going to deal with today? As we started working on the biofeedback, identifying some of the areas where the pain was coming from, and truly finding the source of where the pain was coming from—not just the symptoms, just the side effects, or the emotional component, but truly finding the root cause of where the pain came from—was actually a nerve. As we did the biofeedback on nerves and worked on different pathways, neuropathies, and things like that, the pain went away to the point where this person was originally going to go in for surgery. But because of COVID and the fear of going into hospitals right now or whatever, or even just the availability of getting surgery right now, they were so far down the list that basically said okay let’s just do it one more time. Let’s try one more thing and really good results. That’s one big thing. Also got them back into dancing, which was really fun and phenomenal. The second thing would be digestion. Digestion is a big thing with many of my clients. Not understanding why their body is not responding very well to different types of diets, cleanses, detoxification, or things like that. And then seeing it manifest in the skin. So I’ve had about three to four of your listeners call me about digestive issues, and again finding the root cause behind what is causing this digestive issue including allergies—unbeknownst allergies or symptomologies of allergies that are showing up, and being able to implement some of the food back into their diets that they had been craving and missing for so long.  So really just finding out the digestive process and what’s going on, and of course, the constipation that goes with that. I had two that were maybe having a bowel movement once a week, which of course was a big concern for me. Once we got started, it’s now regular.   [00:14:16] Ashley James: Can you specify what regular is? Because people sometimes think once every three days is regular.   [00:14:21] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yeah, exactly. And they say, oh, I’ve had this constitution my whole life. That is not regular. If you work in any kind of hospital or nursing home, if somebody doesn’t go for three days, that’s a sentinel event where there’s something wrong and they could land in the hospital. Regular means if you have three meals a day, you should be having about three bowel movements a day, and that has to do with the amount of transit time that it goes to the digestive process.  From the mouth to the anus is the transit time. And so if it’s taking two days to digest food, there’s something going on within the digestive system. It could be anything related to a virus, bacteria, slow peristalsis of the intestines that could be leading to that, even just toxicity. It could be parasites. It could be a lot of different things. Yeah, enzymes.   [00:15:15] Ashley James: Not enough fiber, lack of minerals.   [00:15:19] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yes, the types of foods, the chemicals that are in our foods. If there’s a lot of prefabricated foods that you’re eating where it’s not raw, live foods.   [00:15:32] Ashley James: I love that, pre-fabricated foods. I’ve never heard it put that way. That makes you think that there are microplastics in the food. It’s been pre-fabricated.   [00:15:46] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Well, isn’t there?   [00:15:47] Ashley James: Oh, absolutely. Just this week an article came out that said that for the first time ever, they’ve discovered microplastics in the placenta of babies. I mean, this is really sad. This is really sad. So the more factory food we eat, the more microplastics we’re consuming. There are microplastics in the ocean right now, so when we consume fish we’re consuming microplastics. Like you said, if you focus on foods that are whole, living, alive, like something I can identify—there’s an apple, there’s broccoli—you’re less likely to eat prefabricated foods with microplastics and chemicals. I love that saying. That’s great.   [00:16:33] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: They’re even finding plastic in white rice. It’s pretty crazy. So you just have to be really careful about the types of food you eat. If you think about it, we’re 99.99999% energy. So the foods that we consume should have a high level of energy in them.   [00:16:52] Ashley James: You just said something that I really, really want to touch on. You just said that we’re almost 100% energy. People go, well, over 70% water, what do you mean? Can you just elaborate? From the standpoint of physics, chemistry, and quantum physics, why are we almost 100% energy?   [00:17:14] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Well, think about it. So, we’re 99.99% energy and 0.001% matter. So what that means is what do you think transports the lymphatics, the blood, the water? That we’re 75% to 85% water—what do you think transports that? Energy. So the heart can conducts energy to the blood, to the water, to the lymphatic system. It gets it to move. The environment that we’re in, our whole auric being surrounding us is all energy. The physical part is really just the sack that we reside in, which is a meat suit comprised of skin, comprised of bone. But even that has energy in it as well. When you think about it, the whole body is comprised of energy—from the organs, how they emit energy, how they respond to energy, as well as the blood, the lymphatics, the brain. The brain, yes, has this spongy type of gelatinous fibers within the skull, but it is also energy as well. It needs energy to conduct all the neurons, the fibers, and the hormones that are going from one organ to another. It’s all being done by energy. If you think about the meridians, the chakras, those are all energy vessels that that move the energy from one location to another and can be so influenced from the outside world to the inside world to the emotions to everything—that it’s all energy.   [00:18:58] Ashley James: I was really surprised when you did the quantum biofeedback machine on me remotely back in February, so 2020. I was sick as a dog, in bed, gasping for air, with a fever, sore throat. I mean, you could say all the symptoms of COVID, although, at the time, I know a lot of people in the Seattle area that all had these same symptoms but no one knew what COVID was. My Naturopath diagnosed me with strep throat, although I think I’m just one of those people that will always test positive for strep throat no matter what. I’m a strep carrier. It’s like, okay, but strep throat doesn’t normally do all these other things. So I’m lying in bed and I’m really suffering. You did quantum biofeedback with me, and I felt it so much so that within the three-hour session—I fell asleep during the session, I woke up and my suffering had ended. The fever broke. I could breathe again. It took me a few days to recover. It was a really bad sickness I was going through, but I was on all kinds of supplements and stuff like that for my Naturopath. What I just noticed is how quickly things turned around. Similar to my son going through the same energy work, I could feel it. I was in the same room as him because we did it in person with you and I could feel it. What’s described to me is that the mom always has an energetic cord-like umbilical cord attached to our children. As he was getting the treatment, I could feel it. The second you turned on the machine, I didn’t know when you had turned it on. I don’t know how this machine works. I’m just sitting in the room and all of a sudden I felt like I was being electrocuted but in a good way. I don’t know how to describe it any other way other than like my body was buzzing in a very odd way. I’m like, “Okay, is it on now?” And you’re, “Yup, the program’s running. We’re doing it.” And I can feel it. That we can do something with energy remotely, with an intelligence and an intention for healing on such a deep and specific level is phenomenal. It’s just amazing. And since learning more about it from you, I’ve heard from a few other practitioners who are deep into this kind of work and they all have a very similar experience.  We’re raised in society to believe that most people—it’s almost like atheism when it comes to the medical realm in terms of not believing that anything—if you can’t see it, if you can’t measure it in a lab with blood work, if you can’t see it on an ultrasound, an MRI, or blood work it doesn’t exist. MDs, if you go and tell them symptoms but they can’t find proof of those symptoms, a lot of times MDs will say you should go to a psychologist. It’s all in your head. I don’t know what’s wrong with you, but we can’t measure it, so it doesn’t exist. There’s this entire realm that’s missing. Whether you get into spirituality, religion, or energy work, we can’t ignore the fact that we are almost 100% made up of energy and thus we would be affected by energy. To bring it back to your point—which is what you were saying is we’re made up of almost 100% energy—of course, the foods we eat would not just only affect our physical health, of course, they’d affect our energetic health as well. The energy transfers—the heart does, the brain does—because when we eat foods that are alive, that have energy in it as opposed to prefabricated factory foods, which are very low-frequency foods, it just makes so much sense, right? So when we’re eating, we’re consuming energy. But more than just calories, we’re consuming the living energy of that plant, which is actually measurable. I’ve had episodes about that where there are scientists that can measure the frequency of plants versus dead meat, for example, and that we receive a lot more frequency and energy from plants.  So this idea that we can raise our vibration, that we can heal digestion, that we can heal emotional health and physical health by focusing on energy and frequency very specifically is in our diet but also with the therapies that you provide, it’s phenomenal, and this is something that’s so missing from the medical world because the medical world is blind to it. That’s really sad, but this is why we’re listening to you and this is why we’re here learning about this work, so I’m really excited. If I sound out of breath, it’s because the baby is pushing on my diaphragm right now. I feel like I’m just running a marathon just talking. I’m 31 weeks pregnant and the baby has taken up the entire breadth of my diaphragm. I apologize if I sound out of breath, but I’m quite happy with the baby kicking my diaphragm at the moment. How did you help? So was there was a listener who was having digestive problems and only having a bowel movement once a week, which is really scary. What happened after they worked with you?   [00:24:54] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Okay, one of the first things we always ask during our sessions is okay, tell me about your bowel movements, how are they looking? And of course, many are a little skeptical at first and not really open to talking about that as openly as I am. And then after a while, they get to be very open about it because now they can have something to look forward to. When I see that they started having bowel movements on a regular basis meaning at least first thing in the morning they may be having one or two bowel movements. So this person went from one bowel movement a week to now three bowel movements in a day and takes the time to really look at it and say oh, wow, look at the color. Look at the texture, that it doesn’t sink. It’s right in the center. It’s one whole form. I mean, they really break it down for me, which is nice. That tells me that they’re integrating the information that they’re learning, and they actually see the value of their digestive process and how important it is to tell you exactly what’s going on based on how it looks. So that’s been fascinating. Just the fact that they’re realizing that they don’t have to wait a week to have a bowel movement, that they’re having one every day, and then how good they feel. They feel lighter, they feel more energetic, they’re not as depleted. That’s the amazing part. But to go back to when you were talking about how you felt as a parent as the receiver while I was working on your son is one thing that also helps with the quantum biofeedback is the energy of the person receiving it—how open they are. I have huge results with people who are empathic, that are very open to energy, that are very receptive to it, that also understand it. If you have somebody that’s very closed to situations, to information, very guarded, they may not do as well until they actually start to feel it. But there’s also an in vitro aspect of it to where as a mother, you could be a surrogate for your son while I’m working on him because of that perinatal connection that you make during the time that he was in your womb. That connection will never go away as I’m sure you’ve already seen that already. That’s why you responded so well is that you are an energetic person, an energetic being, and so your body just craves energy healing, which is exactly what this biofeedback does.   [00:27:31] Ashley James: I was really skeptical. I like to say on my show I’m the most open-minded skeptic. I guess I just don’t want to be sold snake oil. Does that make sense? But I also don’t want to close myself off from the amazing possibilities out there because, in my heart, I’ve always believed that our Creator—in whatever way you see God—is this amazing scientist.  I think science is our way of understanding God better because when you look at, when you really, really, really study, for example, single-cell organisms. Just really go and look at YouTube videos of single-cell protozoa swimming, and there are some videos where the microscopes go to the point where you can see the mechanics because these things are almost see-through. You could see the mechanics of their tails, and it’s like a machine. It’s an intricate complex machine, and yet it’s a single-cell organism that can propel itself through fluid and respond to stimulus. How in the world does this incredibly complex, intricate, and beautiful single-cell life form just happen? Because chemicals and explosions occurred billions of years ago. It’s just this idea. So for me, it’s never sat well this idea that everything happened randomly. I really feel that there’s so much to this world we don’t even understand. The fact that we can use energy work to heal, and you can use it on children who don’t understand. My son didn’t know what was going on, so you can’t call it a placebo effect when he had results. You can’t call it a placebo effect when homeopathy helps newborn babies and pets. How is that a placebo effect? The reason why I bring up homeopathy is it sort of goes in the same category as energy medicine because it’s not molecular medicine, it’s energy medicine. So we have these great results, and I had a two-part interview on frequency-specific microcurrent. That one is a good interview to go listen to. I asked the woman my first question and an hour later I get to ask her my second. It was the most amazing first hour because it was just her telling the story, which will blow your mind, and it’s all about how her very, very specific form of energy healing using frequency specific microcurrent, which is a machine you can find in a lot of physical therapy clinics. I’m sure you’ve worked with this as an occupational therapist, but done in a specific way.  When you’ve changed the frequencies. For example, when someone has nerve damage, you change the frequencies and it will stimulate the body to heal that nerve really fast, like super, super, super fast to the point where while people are on the table, they’ll stop having pain or Parkinson’s people will stop shaking. I mean, just really, really cool results. It’s energy and it’s frequency. Yes, our bodies can heal when we figure out exactly what they need on an energy and frequency level. This is what’s so exciting is that so many people are walking around looking for the drug they need, looking for maybe the diet they need or the drug they need, and yet there’s this entire world that’s really, 90% of the healing is all these different forms of energy and frequency healing and medicine. We’re stuck only being sold on the 10% drug-based, physical-based medicine.   [00:31:40] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: See, if we took the time that we take in taking the drugs or the prescriptions, going to the doctors, getting them refilled, all that kind of stuff into the food preparation. What I mean by that is for the people like out here in Eastern Washington, everybody plants their own garden, we harvest our own food, and all that kind of stuff. If we have excess, we give it to people, we exchange. It’s about surviving out here, livelihood. So everybody plants their own gardens. One thing we did this year that was quite different than the past was as we were cultivating our seeds and we were planting them into the garden, we would put the seed in our mouth and collect the saliva on the seed, and then we would plant that seed. So then what happens is our DNA is now going into that seed, and then the food is then now grown more nutritiously, more specific to what our innate needs are based on the saliva that was put on that seed. What we found was when we grew our garden, we had the most plentiful garden you wouldn’t believe. The cucumbers, the zucchini, the tomatoes, the peppers, and our lettuces were just amazing and quite nutritious. It had different flavors to them. My husband’s would taste a little different than mine. It was really, really interesting the difference in that. You can actually have some fun with how you can influence the quality of your food, even the preparation that takes place. If you go to a restaurant, for example, and you see the cook in the back that’s cooking. He’s angry, he’s yelling at everybody, and all of that, I don’t think I’d want to eat that food because there’s a lot of anger, which is an emotion, which is energy put in that food. I’d much rather take it from somebody who’s singing in the background, who’s singing in the kitchen and having a wonderful day at work, and putting all that love into that food as it’s being prepared.  My husband does the same thing. When he cooks a meal, he puts this beautiful music on in the background. He puts some loving energy into each stroke of the knife or whatever he’s doing to make the food much more energetically loving to ourselves as we eat it. The environment is everything. But the food just tastes better when you put love in it. I’m sure you know that because you put a lot of love into your food.   [00:34:16] Ashley James: One of my favorite books as a young adult, as a teenager was Como para agua chocolate, which is Like Water for Chocolate. The movie didn’t do it justice, it’s a beautiful book. The author went on to write a sci-fi novel, which is even better, but it’s a sci-fi novel about healing, about emotional healing. About a society that when you’re sent to prison, they believe that you commit a crime because you really weren’t surrounded with enough love and understanding. The prison they send you to is a place where people surround you and give you love and understanding until you process why you did that crime and you really heal on an emotional level, and then you grieve for the victims. It’s very interesting. I don’t remember the name of that book, but a really interesting thing to get into. But one thing about Como para agua chocolate is that this woman, when she would cry, her tears would go into the food and then everyone at the table would cry. When she was in love and her sweat fell into the food because it was hot and she was in love, all of a sudden, everyone was lusty and in love. It painted this picture in my mind as a young teenager about how the mood that we’re in can be contagious. And also, when you’re feeding people, there’s that energy exchange there that occurs. Now, when you said that you held the seeds in your mouth, you’re not saying your literal DNA went into the literal DNA of the lettuce, but you’re saying your energy, the energetic DNA affected the lettuce on an energetic level, right? Because it’s not like that lettuce is now part human.   [00:35:58] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: No, no, no, no, no. Thank you for clarifying that. It’s similar to like—I think you had Viome on where they take a sample of your feces and then they make vitamins based on what your excrement is. So the same thing goes. The theory that I’ve formulated in my brain is that when you take the seed, then you stick it in your mouth, and your digestive enzymes from your saliva get onto that seed, then when you plant it in the earth the nutritious needs that your body is needing—whatever you’re lacking—will then grow into that vegetable.  We found that between the ones that were done by my husband and myself, it was the same seed but he had a different color than mine, it grew differently, or things like that. This is a little experiment that we did. We saw that—it was the same from the same batch of seeds in the package—produced a different vegetable—vibrancy, color, consistency.   [00:37:12] Ashley James: It’s so cool. I want to know what influenced your desire to do this experiment.   [00:37:18] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Well, when you think about how do you best describe how does biofeedback works with taking a saliva sample, hair sample, or something like that? Well, how else can you show the influence that could have? The digestive enzymes, the saliva, your own characteristics, your own constitution, how can that affect things? So I thought, well, what better way than to see how will my DNA, my saliva influence a growing thing? Now, I’m not going to swap saliva with my dog just to see if it would influence my dog. So I thought what better way than take an inanimate object that we think of as inanimate—this seed—then place it in the mouth, then plant it, and see what would make a difference. When you’re sitting around a table talking with friends and then this idea comes up, it’s like, hey, I bet that would have an influence so we just tried. Lo and behold we saw a difference.   [00:38:20] Ashley James: They say kissing your baby and also giving a bit of your saliva to the baby, or kissing their cheek—I don’t know if it’s pheromones. I have actually no idea why it does this, but that changes breast milk. Also, their saliva on the nipple of the mother changes the breast milk will change the immune cells that the breast milk is making for the baby. It’s a biofeedback loop between the baby and the mother so that the mother’s body knows how to formulate breast milk to support the immunity of the baby at the time. I thought that was really interesting. Now, the experiment I’d like you guys to do this year is I want you to do a batch where you don’t hold the seeds in your mouth. There needs to be a control. The lettuce over here just put in the ground, don’t do anything with it right, and then the lettuce over here is the one the seed you held in your mouth, maybe did a prayer, do some love to it, and your husband does the same, and then you guys compare. Because it’s all going to be in the same sunlight, same soil, all come from the same seed packet. It’d be interesting to see if you notice a really significant difference from the plant that received your energy signature before planting it versus the one that received nothing.   [00:40:01] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Well, we actually did do that because we truly did want to make it an experiment. That’s what was so amazing for us why we were able to see such a huge difference in the crop was the one that we didn’t put any of our salivae on, it was lifeless almost. The color was different. It wasn’t as vibrant. We didn’t have as much of a harvest from it either. Once we would clip, it didn’t always come back as far as like in some of the lettuces and stuff, and also the reseeding of it. We didn’t see huge pollination. We didn’t see a lot of the seeds going to pollination. The yield was much smaller with those that we did not put our saliva on.   [00:40:56] Ashley James: That’s interesting.   [00:40:58] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Now, I’d be interested though to see how our food would influence other people that ate our food. Think about that. I mean, I’m not saying that our DNA is going to change theirs. This is another example and this kind of leads into the iridology piece is that when animals like cats, for example, I have two mama cats right now who are both producing little kittens. When one mama cat is feeding the other mama cat’s kittens, we noticed that the color of their iris would change.   [00:41:34] Ashley James: What?   [00:41:36] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yes, and what I mean by that is not that the background color, which is the main color, but speckles in the eyes would show up, or we’d see little lacunae that would show up in the iris that wasn’t there before. That’s when they start picking up the other mother’s genetic characteristics. It’s pretty cool the way you can see that happen.  You can also see if there’s something wrong with the animal-based on where color changes occur in the eye. If you start to see more dots or you see lines starting to appear—white lines or things like that—that’ll tell you that there’s inflammation in a particular area so let’s check that area out. It will tell you whether they’ve got some problems with their liver. Same thing with humans. Animals have the same characteristics that humans do. Their eyes change when they have an injury. That’s actually how it came about was a little boy that was 11 years old found an owl that had broken its leg. He saw the there were some color changes in the eye of the owl as it was healing. It was kind of fascinating to see that happen. I see the same thing in my dog. I look at my dog’s eyes and I can say, oh yeah, she’s got some issues going on. We need to work on that. It’s pretty cool.   [00:42:57] Ashley James: When you look at your clients when they’re with you in person do you see a big difference from the beginning of a session to the end of the session, or is that something that changes more gradually over time?   [00:43:11] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: It doesn’t always happen that quickly. It’s usually gradual over time, and it depends on what it is that we’re working on. I’ve kind of switched my focus because usually when I’m talking to people and I’m talking to them live, face to face, I look at their tongue a lot because the tongue will tell me things. But now I’m also starting to look at the eye even more, and it really depends on the type of light I have to see the eye to see if I can actually see the little spots or the little lines in the eye that tell me something, or the rings, or even just discolorations that are occurring. Or if they’ve got some bloodshot eyes, that’ll tell me a little bit of what’s going on in the sclera. People have caught on to the fact that I look at their tongue, and so now they kind of block their mouth when I’m talking to them. Well, now they have to block their eyes if they want me to not look at their eyes to tell them what’s going on. But I can look at their eye and say, are you having some digestive issues? They’ll say, well, yeah. How’d you know? Oh, you got this little speck here that’s telling me that you’ve got some digestive issues. Looks like you might have a little bit of heavy metal going because of these little rings that are showing up or things like that. It’s pretty cool.   [00:44:19] Ashley James: Now, iridology—I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, isn’t it a fairly old, widely studied, and it’s practical but it’s repeatable. It’s a science.   [00:44:41] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: It is.   [00:44:41] Ashley James: How old is it? For those who’ve never heard of iridology, which is being able to basically to look in the different aspects of someone’s eye and see what organs and what systems need help. Can you tell us the history of it?   [00:45:00] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Well, yeah. It goes way back to the 1800s even. Even way before then, they even have pictures of drawings within cave dwellings and stuff like that of the eye. But back in the 1800s, the one that I was referring to earlier Dr. Von Peczely I believe was his name, was the 11-year-old boy that found the owl that had a marking on the owl’s eye that was depicted kind of by where the leg is, which is in the lower part of the eye. As the bird was starting to heal, he started noticing the change in the eye and the color of the eye change. I don’t know if that was the main reason why he went back to medical school, but he went to medical school and became a doctor. As he started seeing more and more of his clients and more and more of his patients, he started seeing that the eyes were reflecting what was going on in the body. As the body was healing, the eye was healing. So he could actually see that significant change. Now, whether it can change from the beginning of a session to an end of a session, typically not because basically, it depends on if it’s a congenital thing because you can actually see things that you’ve inherited from your parents, or if it’s something that is an acute, subacute, or chronic, or even a degenerative issue. But the beautiful thing it’s similar to biofeedback in that it can predict. It may not be something that you have right now, but it’s a precursor, so it’s leading up to it.  Just like biofeedback identifies things that are symptomatologies and energies that are leading to dis-ease, the same thing goes with the eyes is that it leads to dis-ease as well. It’s kind of like here’s something that’s coming on, and if you don’t do something about it now, this could end up being something that you’re going to have to deal with later that will take the quality of your life away. That was the first thing, but then there was Dr. Jensen who is an American iridologist who really brought the science and the use of it in the homes. He made it so that people would understand it.  And then there’s also another physician out there, Verghis, who actually put the behavior. So he made behavior iridology. What are some of the emotions that show up, the personalities that are showing up within the eyes? You can see if somebody’s an extrovert versus an introvert based on the amount of fibers that are showing up. You can tell if they’re a right-brain or left-brain person by the amount of activity in one eye versus the other. It’s really cool, so it helps you understand. If you’re interviewing somebody for a job, you can actually look at their eyes and say, is this somebody who is more of a creator person or more of a left-brained person that’s more focused on let’s just get the task done. You can actually hire somebody based on where their brain is activating and working the most.   [00:48:17] Ashley James: That’s really fascinating.   [00:48:18] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: It’s quite fascinating.   [00:48:20] Ashley James: So I’m a master practitioner and trainer of neuro-linguistic programming, and as part of that, we really study how to understand people’s personalities in a passive way. Because if one were to choose to—let’s say they are a headhunter for Microsoft, for example. They’re the recruiter for Microsoft. It’s illegal to give personality tests in America and in several other countries. There are certain countries where it’s not illegal. I’m sure it’s a lot easier to do hiring in those countries, but in the United States, you’re not allowed to do a personality test because it could be considered discriminatory.  I mean, I’m not going to discriminate against an introvert or an extrovert. It’s like if you’re hiring an accountant that’s going to be in the basement never surrounded by anyone else, you really want to hire an introvert. They’re going to be a lot more focused and happy there. You don’t want to hire an extrovert accountant. They’re going to be miserable. So there are just certain personality traits that are best if you understand the job you’re hiring for it’s best. Or if you’re dating. If you’re examining potential mates, even meeting new friends, or hiring a babysitter or a nanny—certain things you want to know about that person.  In neuro-linguistic programming, we learn how to read people, gain rapport with them and read people, not in a malicious way at all. Although, Hollywood loves to paint the picture of NLP in a very malicious way because that sells movies, TV shows, or whatever. But neuro-linguistic programming is simply becoming so observant that you can understand more about human behavior and all the signs are right there for everyone to read. If you can look into someone’s eyes and you study your iridology, you have the ability to understand their health, also their emotional health, and also their behavioral tendencies. I think that is really powerful.  This is something that would interest me. For example, being a mom, and again I saw studies recently, some articles published about how they see the differences in brain patterns that women actually see a larger spectrum of color than men do. That is they believe because we can detect micro changes in the vasculature of our children such that we will see if they’re developing a fever if they’re developing a flush. The capillaries around their cheeks, are they more white, are they more dark? What’s going on? That is all playing a role in telling us are they in a state of stress, are they going into a sickness? We have to look at our children all the time and judge, especially young ones who can’t talk to us.  I don’t know why the scientists found out that moms can do it more than dads because I mean, all power to the stay-at-home dads, right? But for whatever reason, we have been designed to be able to see, adapted, or grew in a way to be able to see and detect even further more minute changes in the nuances of how the body is expressing itself. So reading eyes is something that I think moms who are like crunchy moms who are into holistic health would be really excited to study more about. And then also the tongue, and I really want to get into talking about the tongue too. It’s kind of hard to teach people iridology through an audio podcast, but maybe you could direct us to resources that the layperson could study.   [00:52:31] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Absolutely. For example, when you were talking about this whole connection with the child and things like that, why do you think that they say that moms have eyes in the back of their heads? Well, they do.   [00:52:45] Ashley James: I have freaked my son out so many times. My son’s almost six. Now, he was an early talker. When he was 18 months old he knew the alphabet backward and forwards. We would just do fun games with the alphabet, he picked it up, and he could say really complex words. He could say avocado before he was two. By the time he was two, he was talking full sentences. He’s always been really communicative, which makes sense given who his mom is. And also, we talk to him all the time. We talk to our son all the time like an adult. We don’t do baby talk. We talk to him all the time, engage with him all the time, and he’s very communicative. So at a really young age, I’ll be in the kitchen, our son will be in the living room, my back is turned to him, and I’ll say, “Stop doing that. You know you’re not allowed to do that.” He’s like, “How did you know?”   [00:53:47] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Right. If you think about that, so you do actually have an eye on the back of your head because when you think about where the pineal gland is actually located in the brain. It is actually towards the back of the brain, and that is where your sense of intuition is. That’s also where all the hormones, the hypothalamus, the thalamus, and all that are coming through. So basically, I mean, not only are we emotional and hormonal beings but we’re also seers and feelers and key into that energy. That’s why that sense of intuition is so strong. When you feel somebody approach your child you say stranger danger, that this is not a good person. That was because we were designed that way. That’s one of the beautiful things about the differences between men and women is we were given that that intuition. So, of course, we have the eyes in the back of our heads for that reason. That pineal gland is actively firing [inaudible 00:54:43] stranger danger, do not approach, stay away from my child kind of thing, and me as well. But there are certain things that you can actually look for in the eye that can give you an idea of some things that would just be something to follow up with. For example, if you see rings in the eyes meaning circular rings on the outer of the iris towards where the sclera is, if you see a white ring around that, that typically, first of all, is one of the signs of old age. You’ll see that in some of the elderly, but it’s also circulation. So kind of looking at that. That’s also a condition of the skin. The aging of the skin is part of the aging process. Maybe too much sun, not enough hydration, that kind of thing. It’s all about melanin as well. But what most people don’t realize is there are truly only two-colored eyes—there’s brown and there’s blue. I have green eyes so I’m like wait a minute, where do I fall in that. Well, there is a mixed color, and that’s called a biliary. That’s where the greens and the hazel’s come in. Typically, the hazel would be like a brown, but it has some discoloration around the pupil, which could be toxins, it could be genetic things that have come in, it could be that you have a very strong constitution. If you see some strings in the eyes that are emanating from the pupil, that’s usually your constitution. They liken it to different types of fabric.  For example, the strongest constitution person will look like satin, meaning that the color of the pupil is very tightly woven. The striations coming from the pupil are very tight, so they have a very strong constitution meaning their digestion is going to be very strong, that their body’s going to be strong, everything’s going to be strong. Then if they have a very loose-looking pupil, meaning that they’ve got openings and stuff like that, not only does that mean—and the previous person would be more of an introvert. If you think about that type woven, very tight with their time, tight with personality, things like that. They’d be more of an introvert.  Whereas the one with the eyes that have a lot of light coming in them, they have open areas that we call lacuna that make them look very like a flower. Those are very extroverted people that also are very much emotional type. They tend to be more of a right-side brain dominant. They tend to be more spontaneous and creative, but you also want to see if there are color changes within the color. So if you have a blue eye but then you have some brown specks in it, typically that means that there’s a psora, which means there are some toxins and stuff going on within that area. So there are certain things that you can look for in the eye that might change as a result of things. If you hurt your ankle, you’re going to see a change in the bottom of your eye where the ankle is located, and you might actually see a speck. That spec might show that the body is trying to heal. You can actually see long-term phase versus acute. You can tell based on the color if it is an acute episode and if it’s going to convert it to long-term. You can actually stop it at the acute level before it even goes chronic. That’s the thing that I love the most about this is to be able to detect. It’s like a timescape. You can see, okay, you’re in the acute phase of this. If you change this now, it does not have to be a chronic disease later. That’s what I love the most. If you see some white colors, let’s say you have a blue eye and you have some white striations in there, oftentimes that may mean there’s a kidney imbalance or there’s too much acid. It’s in the acute stage of the disease. It could also mean that you have a very hard life that we need to look at the psychological aspects of it. They may over rationalize things. They may have a hard time forgiving. Yellow tends to mean that there is an adrenal imbalance. Oftentimes, the emotion associated with that would be fear, anger, or worry. So of course, if you think about that, it does influence the adrenals. If there’s a bright orange color to it—so you can see some of that sometimes in the hazel eyes the bright orange—oftentimes that’s a pancreas imbalance. You’ll see that a lot with people who have diabetes, and oftentimes it’s a lack of grieving. They haven’t had a chance to grieve for something, whether it’s grieving for their loss of independence in their life, their ability to enjoy the food that they’ve wanted to, or even grieving of lifestyle, people who have left, or even childhood issues. If you see dark orange, oftentimes, that would be a pancreas or gallbladder issue, or sometimes there’s something going on with the gallbladder. If you can actually catch this in advance, then you might be able to save your gallbladder at some point because it’s an early indication of something going. Usually, that’s a long-standing lack of joy that somebody’s had. So you might see some of this in some of your friends when you see some of these emotions showing up, and then you see some of the conditions like with traditional Chinese medicine, typically if I see something going with the pancreas and the gallbladder, I’ll also see hip issues or knee issues going on as well because it goes right along that gallbladder, or they might have headaches as well. Then if there are reddish-brown specks in there, that could be a spleen or blood weakness. Typically you’ll see that in the tongue as well, and I can explain that when we go into that. But that’s typically irritability or depression that the person is having some issues with. And then if you see some light or dark brown specks in there, that’s usually a liver imbalance and a sign of chronic disease. You can see the color spectrum. White, they’re in the acute phase. It’s more of a lymphatic thing. As the color gets deeper and deeper into the texture, then that’s the progression of the disease process. You can also just look at your own eyes and see some of those things as an indicator.   [01:01:14] Ashley James: The location matters though, right? Like you said, the lower part of the eye was the leg of the owl, for example. So you’re seeing these different colors in the eye, and the location also plays a role. I think studying it would be fascinating as a layperson, but I also think going to an iridologist and one that has been trained both in the physical but also the personality and the emotional to get a full sort of reading of what’s going on. I think that’d be a lot of fun.  And then doing the work like you said if, for example, heavy metals come up. I spent the last five years doing heavy metal detox and really noticing a huge difference in my labs. All of my labs improved, my liver improved, my blood sugar improved—all the functions of my body—my hormones improved. Everything improved because I was doing that, and of course eating an even healthier diet because I can’t say I was eating unhealthy before that. I’ve been pretty consistently eating as healthy as possible for the last 10 years. But in the last five, I’ve been really focusing on everything I can do to support the body and removing heavy metals.  Man, it would have been really interesting to get sort of a camera like a really close-up camera shot of my eyes five years ago versus now to see. I know I made these changes, but then to also have that confirmation to see that the changes took place over time in my eyes. That would be neat to go maybe once a year or something and get a picture of your eye and then see those changes as you do the work.   [01:03:05] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Oh yeah. You can see a change within a month. You can actually see it within a couple of days. So for example, I did a fun thing. The other piece of it is I’ve been having some of my clients who I’ve been seeing for biofeedback sending me pictures of their eyes, and they’ve been really, really good about that in that they can then send me an email of their eye, and they have to specify right and left—open that eyeball is as high as they can. So typically, I’ll have them keep their eyeball open with their fingers while their spouse or whoever takes a picture of it, and then that way I can get a really good picture, of course with the flash off. so there’s no glare coming from it and making sure you’re not getting a glare from windows. But then I can actually blow that up and really look at it and then get a really good idea. There are over 90 areas of the eye that we look at. That’s why it’s very important you do go to an iridologist for that. The beautiful thing is that you can actually see the changes from one aspect to another. So for example, before each full moon, I do a fast—three to four days before a fast and even before the new moon. So I’m usually doing a fast two times a month. So I’ll do my fast so. Before I do my fast I’ll do a picture of my eye and I’ll analyze it and take a look at it. And then I’ll do my fast and then after my fast I’ll look at that and go wow, look at that. You can actually see a difference within that time frame—that four days. You can see a difference in the eyes—the clarity, the color.  You might have had some people say like for me, I can be green eyes one day and blue eyes another day. Sometimes it depends on the color I wear, it sometimes depends on the mood I’m in. It’s kind of like I got motoring eyes or something like that. They could turn the little color so the yellow will come out more. But my eyes, when you look in the camera, are actually blue—a very pretty blue. But when you truly look at it with the naked eye they’re green, and that is because of the coloration that I have around the pupil.   [01:05:09] Ashley James: My dad was the same way. My dad had these hazel eyes that could be green, they could be blue, they could be brown. It was almost like golden brown, and they would change. I mean, the most change I’ve ever seen in anyone’s eyes my dad had that, and I thought that was fascinating, considering my mom was just pretty much always blue. I was like, what’s up with my dad? I thought that was really interesting. Now, I love fasting. I’ve had several episodes on fasting, and some people who’ve never heard of therapeutic fasting think you’re crazy. Why wouldn’t you want to eat when you have access to perfectly good food? Episode 230 of my podcast, so I recommend listeners go back and check that out. Episode 230 talks about water-only fasting on a therapeutic level, and the results that you can get.  Back in 2012, a Japanese doctor discovered that the body goes through on day three of a water-only fast. It’s somewhere around hour 30 it kind of ramps up. The body digests pathological tissue, cancer—and I’m not saying this is a cure for cancer, although it has been documented and this is something that we talked about in episode 230. But the body will digest scar tissue to the point where people have seen scars go away during long fasts. Fibrous tissue, so women with fibroids, women with very thick breast tissue, women with fibroids around their uterus or their ovaries, they’ve seen a significant improvement.  It’s just fascinating because if you weren’t into health, you would probably never go—unless you had to for a colonoscopy or something—skip a meal, right? And yet, we are designed, we have a self-cleaning mechanism. It’s like you put your oven on the self-clean setting. Even my washing machine has a self-clean setting, and I just thought that was so funny our body has a self-cleaning setting. That if we don’t eat for three to five days, our body goes through this huge cycle of self-cleaning and breaking down pathological tissue. That is absolutely amazing. There are so many health benefits. So you fast twice a month. Why do you choose to fast around the new moon and the full moon? What is your reasoning behind choosing the amount of days, like you said, about four days? Why do you choose the amount of time and the timing?   [01:07:50] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: The number of days was really random—three to four days. First of all, I always like the number three, so that’s one of the main reasons. But I always choose the lunar cycle because that’s when many things are more active in the body. That’s when a lot of things will actually start to show up. For example, that’s when parasites are much more active in the bodies during a lunar cycle. So if I’m wanting to clean my body out of any kind of parasites that may be remaining because we do all have parasites, it’s just how active are they. Then what better time than the lunar cycle? So why not use mother earth to help us heal?  So the more in tune that we get to all of these different frequencies and vibrations of the world, of the earth, then our body responds so much better to it. Why not do these drastic changes during lunar cycles and during these full moon episodes because that’s when your body’s going to be much more receptive to it. And I’ve noticed the difference between a fast in between, during a full or a new moon, and it just heightens everything. It heightens the meditations, it heightens the interaction that you have with the world, your senses become much more interactive. When you’re cleaning your body out, then it opens up every sensory system within your body to become much more viable, much more vital. That fast during that time just speeds everything up. My meditations get deeper, everything gets deeper.   [01:09:26] Ashley James: Very cool.   [01:09:27] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: So why not do a fast during that time?   [01:09:30] Ashley James: What’s really neat about even just a three to four-day fast, and the fact that you do it twice a month is fantastic. What’s really interesting is that people are often afraid that it lowers the metabolism, which slows down the metabolism. What studies have shown—they’ve repeated these studies—is that when we lower the caloric intake, let’s say you decided to go on a 1,200 calorie a day diet, and then you did that for three months, and then you went back to eating 2,000 calories, you would start to gain weight from the 2,000 calorie diet.  Let’s say you always ate 2,000 calories and you were always consistently the same weight. If you lowered your caloric intake significantly like to 1,500 or 1,200 calories, and then went back to eating 2,000 calories, which was seemingly healthy for you for years, all of a sudden now you’re gaining weight. What they find is that by eating a lower calorie diet, our metabolism slows. The body goes into a starvation mode and goes, okay, we’re in famine now. We need to conserve energy, and so we’re going to convert everything to fat to survive. We’re going to really sluggish slow it all down, make less heat.  This kind of flies in the face of all the diets out there. All the mainstream diets tell us to eat less. That creates more customers for more diet books because now we are in this perpetual cycle of, and I’ve been on over 30 diets in my life and I know. The more dieting you do, even healthy ones like the Mediterranean diet, so healthy. The Zone diet, and the doctors, all this stuff. All those diets out there cause the metabolism to slow. Now, everyone gets results in their first month. You shift your way of eating and oh, I lost 15 pounds. Well good. Some of that was water weight from removing inflammation because maybe you stopped eating sugar, you stopped eating junk food, fast food, or whatever. You’ve changed your lifestyle. But in the long term, it slows the metabolism, which is really bad so that you can’t actually eat a healthful diet without the body going into fat-storing mode. Now fasting—and I’m not talking about intermittent fasting. Intermittent fasting is something different. The jury’s still out about it. Some people have really negative effects from intermittent fasting, some people have really positive effects. When I work with clients that are pre-diabetic or diabetic, I do not get them to do intermittent fasting right away. It’s not the best for everyone because in some cases, it causes the body to go into a state of stress and actually maintain a higher state of glucose. Although, like I said, with some people, intermittent fasting is amazing for them. I don’t think it’s a good thing for everyone. I think it’s kind of a try it and see and notice how you feel and notice how your body responds kind of thing. But with the fasting that you’re talking about, which is a three- to four-day water-only fast, that—in a most fascinating way—speeds up the metabolism. My husband did a 17-day fast last year. He does a few fasts every year. The metabolism will stay fairly high, and here you and I think well you’re not eating so wouldn’t the body conserve energy? Well, no. It actually does the opposite. The body goes, I really need to go find food. We got to go forage. We got to go walk miles and miles to find food. Let’s ramp up the metabolism, and so things actually ramp up. Now that you’re not having to spend all your energy digesting, now the body is spending all that energy healing.  It’s very exciting this idea of incorporating fasting, and I like that you mentioned doing it around a new moon and a full moon because you’re ramping up your own metabolism, but also you’re supporting a very healthy stimulus to your immune system, and at the same time, you’re starving the parasites. I think that’s really neat that you’ve adapted that. How long have you done this habit?   [01:13:52] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Well, we’ve been doing this for, I would say, about nine months now, and we’ve been seeing a huge difference with it. First of all, it’s that interaction with mother nature. It’s really listening to her rhythm, responding to it, and allowing our body to succumb to that rhythm because when we do, that’s when true healing occurs and that’s when we really get a good response back from the fast itself. But it also gave you freedom. What I mean by freedom, how many of us are so stuck to the time that we eat? It’s 9:00 AM, it’s time that we’re supposed to be eating. At 6:00 PM we’re supposed to be having dinner. Based on how about how do you feel, do you even feel like you want to eat? Are you even hungry even, or is it more of a craving, is it more of something else?   [01:14:40] Ashley James: Or is it thirst.   [01:14:42] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yes, thirst is one of the biggest reasons. A lot of people think you have to drink water throughout the day to stay hydrated. I personally like to drink a 25-ounce glass of water first thing in the morning on my way to work and drink the whole thing, then I drink another one on my way home, and then I have some during the day. But then I really get a good flush and then it stays there because the biggest mistake most people make is they try to drink their water throughout the day and then they don’t get enough water in. Whereas if you start with a really nice big glass in the morning with some lemon in it, some apple cider vinegar, or something like that to really get that cellular structure to become more alkaline, then you’re doing much better that way. But then, the other piece of it is the freedom that it gives you. So let’s say that you’re going on a trip somewhere and you’re on a plane. You’re thinking, there’s no way I’m going to eat this food. But you’re like, but I’m going to be hungry. When you go through a fast you realize I don’t have to eat because I actually have gone three or four days I’ve gone without eating anything.  The first time you do one you’re going to have a major headache. It’s going to feel like your head is about to explode. I keep thinking that’s all these toxins that I’m releasing. It’s parasites, it’s all these things are saying, let me out, let it out, and they’re wanting to come out. They do, they eliminate quite drastically. After that first or second day of the headache, which happens the first time you do the fast. When you do your second fast, the third fast, and the fourth fast, you don’t have those headaches anymore because your body’s saying, oh yeah. Okay, that’s what she’s doing. We’re in this. We know what to do now. She’s not going to starve us completely. But think of the yogis that have gone 40, 45 days, 60 days, 7days without food. The body is very, very smart. I’ve heard of a lot of doctors actually saying that it’s actually healthy to have a little bit of fat on you. The reason for that is, for this reason, there’s a fat store in there that if there’s a disease, a virus, or something that comes into the body, it’s going to go after the fat first and not the organs. So when you see somebody who’s extremely thin, we’re talking like anorexic thin, they tend to—when they get sick—it starts to attack the organs more because there’s no fat to go for. I always like it when I see my clients with a little bit of meat on them versus real thin because of that reason. The same thing goes with COVID. I’ve noticed with some of the COVID clients that I’ve been seeing through biofeedback, those that have a little bit of meat on them respond better to the biofeedback energetically, and they respond faster to the healing process. Whereas those that may be thinner, and I think part of that is because of the parasites. I think the parasites are greatly impacting or interacting within the person that is being exposed to COVID. That’s what’s making it change so much is the parasites within the body are making the characteristics of COVID change. That’s why they’re having a hard time keeping ahead of it, I believe. Parasite cleanse, parasite cleanse, parasite cleanse. Do your foot spas that I know that Kellyann and the Platinum Energy System. I have one of those and I love it. That I do also at the end of my fast is I do a nice little foot spa too. That takes the dredges, the rest of the stuff out that that I didn’t quite complete with my fast. That was probably a long answer, wasn’t it?   [01:18:35] Ashley James: No, no, it was great. It’s all very interesting. Once you start getting into looking into parasites, you’re going down the rabbit hole chasing the white rabbit.   [01:18:51] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yes.   [01:18:56] Ashley James: I’m going to mix up my metaphors, it’s like Dorothy going down the rabbit hole.   [01:19:00] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: She could be going there too.   [01:19:03] Ashley James: It just keeps going and going. I had a man on the show who’s married to a woman who is very famous, and I’ve also had her on the show. Of course, pregnancy brain, I’m not going to remember anyone’s names right now, I apologize. But she’s famous for the book she wrote in the ‘90s called Guess What Came to Dinner. She’s written a bunch, but she’s famous for parasite cleanses. I’m like 15 years old or 12 years old, my mom brings this book home. I’ve been into health stuff my whole life I just. I just decided to rebel. In my teen years, I decided to rebel and I paid for it in my 20s, basically, and I spent my entire adult life having to recuperate from all the damage I did to myself in my teen years rebelling against all the cool stuff that I was into and I still am. We did a parasite cleanse with my family and we all got tested, and we had three parasites. We had two parasites from owning cats, and one parasite that we picked up from Mexico. This is in the ‘90s. Then we did a parasite cleanse and then we didn’t have them anymore. Reading the book, Guess What Came to Dinner, was like oh my gosh. And then to have her on the show I was just starstruck. I’m like you’ve been part of my whole life.   [01:20:25] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Are you talking about Hulda Clark?   [01:20:26] Ashley James: No, not Hulda Clark. She’s another amazing one. Anyways, her husband who I’ve also had on the show and he came on the show twice. His first time on the show—it was a two-parter—he shared that he about his cancer journey and how he was like in the middle of this weird chemotherapy that was killing him. He escaped the hospital in the middle of the night because he really realized that they will kill me in here. He escaped the hospital, and he’s like I’m just going to do something natural because I don’t want to go through this treatment anymore because the treatment’s killing me. And then he ended up completely healing his body using natural medicine, and it’s been his journey. That’s how he met his now wife who’s famous for parasite cleanses. So he came on the show the second time to talk about—he has this YouTube channel where he interviews people who have overcome cancer naturally and what they did, and so that’s a big eye-opener. But one guy he interviewed got on an anti-parasitic over-the-counter medicine that you buy for animals. It’s been on the market forever.   [01:21:43] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Ivermectin.   [01:21:44] Ashley James: And his cancer went away. They’ve had over 60,000 people part of this—there’s a blog or a forum where they all gather online and they all share their experiences. He goes through and talks about five different reasons why it strips the coating on the tumors so that the immune system identifies it. I mean, it does like five different things. Again, you can’t say this is a cure-all because there are people out there who it didn’t work for. I’ve never ever, ever seen anything that was a 100% success rate when it comes to cancer, and I believe that’s because cancer is not just one thing. When I interviewed the Italian doctor, Dr. Simoncini—for whatever reason I never forget his name. He’s fascinating. He was a surgeon, and he’s not a holistic doctor at all. So I always find it interesting when I interview doctors who’ve been kicked out of the mainstream realm for finding a cure and they’re not holistic doctors. Now they have to go around and hang out with all the holistic doctors because they’re the only ones that believe them. So Dr. Simoncini, as a surgeon, cut open a tumor and said, “Why do tumors look like cottage cheese? Why do tumors look like candida overgrowth?” So he took a dying patient who was on their death bed anyway and they had a catheter set up to deliver chemotherapy right into the vasculature of the tumor.  So he made up a mixture of sodium bicarbonate and water, which is baking soda and water, and that is a very alkaline mixture right. He says, well, this is what you would do if you had a yeast infection. The person was going to die anyway. They’re on their deathbed. He pours it into the tumor and the person lives. The tumor melts away, and he freaks out. I said, “Well, okay. What’s your success rate?” Because he does it all the time. This is his full-time job is he goes around basically installing catheters into the vasculature of tumors then pouring these sodium bicarbonate solutions into the tumors. He says about 70% of the time. I mean, 70% is better than any. Think about it, there’s no chemotherapy, no radiation that gets 70% of all kinds of cancer.   [01:24:17] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Let’s talk about side effects.   [01:24:19] Ashley James: Yeah, don’t even get me started. I’ve talked to oncologists and there’s commonly, if you’ve had chemotherapy, you have a 2% chance of developing secondary cancer from the chemotherapy. Similar to radiation, and the statistics vary from treatment to treatment. That’s just one side effect. But my point is that if all tumors were candida, then why wouldn’t this work 100% of the time? That’s because I believe that—I mean, based on talking to all these doctors that that help patients no longer have cancer, no longer have tumors—it’s not always one thing. There are multiple reasons, and we have to look at all these different aspects. We have to look at parasites. When interviewing Viome, I’ve had two people on the show talking about the Viome company, which I love. If anyone wants to get this stool test, it’s phenomenal. I did it and it’s so informative. It’s a few hundred dollars, and it’s a home test. You can do it at home and you mail it in, and you get a coupon code LTH as in Learn True Health—gives you a discount.  What I love about Viome is it’s going to give you the information you can’t get anywhere else because blood tests don’t show this. It’s showing the genetic expressions of the microbiome in your body and the chemicals they’re making from the food you eat because there’s a pharmacy in your gut. So it gives you this whole missing link of information. But what they said is there are new studies that just came out recently that show that tumors have their own unique microbiome. We can begin to detect tumors before they even become tumors because we can detect the microbiome of cancers. That leads me to think, just wrap your brain around that, what if the microbiomes are creating the tumors or stimulating the tumors? What if there are parasitic personality traits that a certain kind of microbiome is like a parasite and then the body is reacting to it. I mean, there’s this whole world that opens up, and unfortunately, science progresses one death at a time. We have to really push for research in this regard, but the research dollars only go towards something that’s going to make people profit because the medical system’s a for-profit industry, which is super frustrating. So if any listener out there wins the lottery, please figure out how to invest money into helping to get these answers solved when it comes to what truly is, what truly are these diseases? How come 70% of cancer just resolves itself after being treated with sodium bicarbonate solution, according to Dr. Simoncini.   [01:27:24] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Well, think about it, don’t most diseases grow in an acid environment? And then if you add on top of that, I bet he would probably improve his rate of improvement or cure if he also addresses the emotional components of cancer and look at the traditional Chinese medicine aspects of what organs hold, what memories, or what emotions. Typically that’s the one that’s going to get the disease. That’s when you look at the whole person. That’s what I absolutely love about what I do in integrative medicine is I integrate the two sides of the world.  I integrate the medical side and the natural side and make them all make sense to the point where we can all work happily in the same play yard. But it’s addressing the whole person, not just the physical symptoms, the dis-ease, but also what got them there. They have shown that cancer actually starts growing seven years in advance before it’s even detected. If you can actually see the formation of it before it even starts, whether it’s through your emotions, the ones that you’re holding, the personality, the worry, all of that, that would actually help to reverse it in addition to any of the natural remedies. I love the idea of baking soda. I mean, that’s amazing. I take baking soda every night before I go to bed.   [01:28:55] Ashley James: I asked him about that. Why can’t we just drink it? The thing is that the body has a buffer system. Drinking baking soda is not really going to get the alkalinity and the concentration it’s needed for a tumor. If you’re on an empty stomach, it doesn’t hurt to drink some baking soda just like if you’re on an empty stomach or you’re about to eat food, it doesn’t hurt to drink some apple cider vinegar. When you first wake up in the morning, it’s very helpful to drink lemon juice because even though lemon is acidic, when the body interacts with it on a cellular level, it has an extra hydrogen molecule that binds to—there’s a chemical process. I heard it and it made sense to me, but then repeating it I feel like I’m not doing it justice. In one of Ty Bollinger’s first docu-series where he goes down to—   [01:29:47] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: The Truth About Cancer.   [01:29:48] Ashley James: Yeah, The Truth About Cancer. It’s like season five, basically. It was back in season two of The Truth About Cancer where he went to Mexico. I don’t think it’s in Tijuana. It’s Mexico, and he worked with the Gerson Clinic. They explained the process that happens in the body that when we drink certain juices like lemon juice—even though it’s acidic—putting it in the body actually has a process it goes through on a cellular level which then alkalizes. I found that fascinating.  We want to do it safely. You don’t want to alkalize your stomach acid when you’re trying to digest it. The first half of digestion in the stomach is acidic, and then right near the end, the body turns it more to neutral so that it can empty it into the small intestine. So when you take a digestive enzyme or apple cider vinegar, do it at the beginning, don’t do it at the end of a meal. Don’t eat and then an hour later, I forgot to take my digestive enzyme. I might as well take it now. Because if there’s hydrochloric acid in it, you’re doing yourself a disservice.  You got to drink the apple cider vinegar in the beginning, or you take the hydrochloric acid digestive supplement in the beginning, not at the end. And then definitely don’t drink carbonated beverages during a meal. Any kind of fizzy beer, club soda, anything that’s carbonated that’s fizzy during a meal will lower stomach acid, will help to neutralize stomach acid, which is not a good thing during digestion. You certainly don’t want to drink baking soda during a meal either. But in between meals, go nuts. There’s my little safety rant for alkalizing, and I like to just get it from food as much as possible. Get your greens in, get your berries in. The body knows what to do with it when it comes to balancing out alkalinity.   [01:31:46] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: I don’t know if you ever listened to Dr. Zach Bush, but I absolutely love the man. He talks a lot about getting the nutrition from your food versus supplements and versus the other things. He basically says the supplement industry has taken over the pharmacy in that there are so many supplements out there that people are so confused as far as what it is. What they should be taking and how much, and is there an overload.  I prefer to get your supplementation from your food because that is truly your life force. There’s a life force in that food. There’s a life force in the eating of it, the preparation of it, and the growing of it. But yes, there are times that you have to take supplements. It’s like you said, it’s not one of those end-all-be-all. You can’t just have this cookie cutter for everybody. It’s got to be very individualized. But the more we can get it from our food, the better. That’s why I really don’t like diets per se. Maybe it’s the word itself because the first three letters is die. For me, that’s kind of like do I really want to do that? Plus, does it really stick? I’d much rather find a lifestyle plan, something that you can maintain your whole life versus just times that you want to fit into a dress, fit it into a pair of pants, or do something. You’re facing this life issue and now you got to drop the weight. How about you find something that is doable in your system that is like your ability to grow your own food or things like that that you can live with, that’s a long-term thing, that becomes a habit. That your body is growing with and fortifying with and so on, versus all these trendy little diets that keep showing up.  Let’s find it from the food and then take the pressure off. Because usually when you’re on a diet, there’s something that you’re having to eliminate. Usually, that thing that you’re having to eliminate is something that you really, really like. Now you’re going through this stress of not being able to ever have that ever, ever again, which you know you’re going to have again. But it’s that whole thing of the all or none. Like in ayurvedic, we talk about using different colors to enhance your food, to get the most nutrition from your food, and things like that. As well as the emotion that you put into it and the enzymes.  Why people have cravings is usually because we’re missing a taste in that food, whether it’s a sweet, a sour, or a salt. It’s missing. And so if you get all the flavors in your meal, you tend to not have the craving anymore because the taste buds have picked up that craving, that texture, that flavor, or that taste. All the taste buds on the tongue have been appeased. They’ve been relieved. They’re not saying, hey, I was left out so therefore I’m going to crave more of that, so the salt side. So then you start craving salty foods. So bring all those foods in. That was probably a tie into the tongue because I know we were really wanting to talk about the tongue. [01:35:00] Ashley James: We’re going to get there. About diet, 10 years ago I went gluten-free—barley, wheat, rye, and oats. Now, once in a blue moon and I mean once in a blue moon, I will have something that has gluten in it. Not a huge detrimental thing happens if I have it once in a blue moon. I had such a profound change in my health in the first month of cutting it out. I’ve shared this on the show before, so I apologize to listeners for hearing me say this again. I completely removed barley, wheat, rye, and oats, and my husband did at the same time. So there are 12 foods that we choose to cut out, and it was other things that are a little bit easier like no nitrates or nitrites. So if you’re going to have deli meat, you don’t have any nitrates or nitrites. No fried food, no oil in a bottle. So when you’re cooking you don’t cook with oil, and there’s a reason. I mean, I can go through and explain each one, and I have in the past in other episodes. But there are 12 foods that do harm to the body, and there are scientific reasons why.  You can be a vegetarian, you can be a paleo. I mean, you can be any lifestyle. You can be eating a diet from Latin America, Asia, Africa, and it’s just removing 12 things. And then there are of course things you can replace it with. No barley, wheat, rye, and oats were the biggest shift for me. I lost 25 pounds of water weight. This wasn’t fat. This was all water weight. My rings, which were custom fit for me sort of flying off my fingers, same with my husband. He dropped water weight, which was inflammation, and his wedding ring started flying off his hand which was custom-made for him. We had been married at the time for several years so we never had that problem. We decided to wait a few months. So we waited about six months to get our rings resized because what if it just bounces back? I didn’t want to [inaudible 01:37:10] it off it anymore. So six months of our rings flying off our fingers we were like okay. We got to a point where we had to tie elastic hair bands around our fingers to keep our rings on. When we realized, well, we’re not going back to eating barley, wheat, rye, and oats so we’re not going to gain all this water weight back from the inflammation of these foods. Our body isn’t going to all of a sudden bounce back so our rings are going to be fine. So we went and got them resized, and that’s when we found out that my husband went down two whole ring sizes and I went down one and a half ring sizes. That was such a profound difference for me that I don’t feel like I’m missing out by not eating barley, wheat, rye, and oats. For me, there are so many others. If I want grains, there are so many replacements for grains.  Just last night my midwife—she’s amazing—made flourless brownies, and they are to die for. There are less than five ingredients, and they’re so good. The main ingredient is cooked chickpeas, and you would not know, but these are the most moist, dense, delicious brownies you’ve ever had, and there’s no flour in it. It’s high in fiber and protein. The first ingredient is chickpeas, the second ingredient is peanut butter, and you can have other nut butter if you want or seed butter. You can add either dates or maple syrup. You can do dark chocolate. Anyway, hers were delicious. What’s so neat is that when you get creative in the kitchen, you don’t miss these things. But I like that you brought up that when people “diet,” they remove something suddenly from their life, and all of a sudden they’re missing that flavor profile. The fun that I’ve had the last 10 years as I’ve adjusted my diet because now I eat more whole food plant-based, as close to nature as possible. The fun for me has been how do I maintain that balance of flavors but find the healthiest version possible? About five years ago, I went completely sugar-free like I did a sugar detox, and I had to read all the labels. I love hot sauce, I can’t tell you how many hot sauces out there have sugar in them. I absolutely love hot sauce, but it took me a long time to find a variety because I kind of get bored with hot sauce. I want a different hot sauce. I want to be able to choose different hot sauces, and so many of them have sugar in it. I found two, three, or four over time. I had to go to different stores to find one that had zero sugar and also zero of the other really gross ingredients that can be in processed foods. How did you put it, in prefabricated foods? So I try to find the most natural artesian hot sauces with no sugar. But I really went to the extreme of absolutely no added sugar and my palate changed. I stopped craving sugar. I was always eating something with sugar in it, and I got to the point where I don’t want things that are that sweet. Even dates for me are too sweet, but I’ll go for some fruit. I’ll go for sweet potato, and that has an amazing sweet flavor. You can even make a chocolate mousse out of blending…   [01:40:36] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Avocado.   [01:40:38] Ashley James: Yes, you can do it out of avocado and raw cacao powder. But you can do it also out of—because I like to feed my son this because he’s allergic to avocado—I can feed him baked caramelized yams, take the skin off, blend it with raw cocoa powder. The sweetness of the yam—you don’t add any sweetness in. If you want to change the consistency you can add nut milk to it like coconut milk or something. But it tastes rich, chocolatey, velvety, and delicious. Then you feed it to your kid and you’re just sitting there laughing because you’re like, hahaha, I’m getting to eat something super healthy. They’re like, haha, my mom just fed me chocolate mousse. This is awesome. You can have a lot of fun replacing those things as long as you acknowledge, like you said in Ayurveda, it’s about getting that balance of bitter, astringent, sweet, pungent, salty. There’s one more word that they incorporate in the flavors.   [01:41:45] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yeah, I wasn’t sure which ones you already covered. One of the biggest ones that people always come to me about is I’m craving sweets. I usually recommend that they just get a bitter spray. You can buy that bitter you make your cocktails with, or you can get them at a health food store that may have a little flavor to them and you spray them on your tongue.   [01:42:06] Ashley James: Swedish Bitters.   [01:42:07] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yeah, you spray it on your tongue and there goes your craving.   [01:42:13] Ashley James: And it’s really good for the liver.   [01:42:14] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yes, well that’s the part is why? What is it? What emotion is driving that craving? You got to get back into the motions as well, but also then what is lacking in the diet? What’s lacking in emotion? What’s lacking in that aspect? I’ve thought about creating on the bestseller list of creating this diet that’s called the love diet. That should solve this question.   [01:42:41] Ashley James: You should do it.   [01:42:44] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: I should. The question is, is this loving to me? That’s always going to be the question. So there’s really no food that you’re going to have to look at, but it’s really just saying when you look at this food, is this loving to me? Meaning is it going to feed me, is it going to nourish me, is it going to make me more vital, is it going to regenerate my cells, is it going to be something that helps my mind become clearer, my thought become clearer, my breath, whatever? Is this loving to me? And if it’s not, then put it away and then identify why am I not wanting to be loving to myself by the food that food selection that I’m choosing, the amount of water, the type of beverage I’m choosing to drink? Am I choosing a Pepsi over water, why? Is this Pepsi loving to me or is the water more loving to me? And some people may say well I get more enjoyment from the Pepsi. Well then let’s find out why are you getting enjoyment from that sugar. What’s missing?   [01:43:39] Ashley James: Well, enjoyment isn’t love, right? It’s kind of like going on Tinder, getting a date and having really, really empty sex. Sure, we can have a romp around for an evening. I remember before I met my husband feeling so empty. I mean, sure, sex is great with someone. But there’s not that connection that love, that intimacy that you have with your spouse. I end up feeling shame and guilt, and that’s the same thing. Yeah, I could go to McDonald’s and sure I’m in the moment—by the way, McDonald’s is disgusting. Once you start eating super healthy, you can’t go back to those foods. I could find some kind of like pizza or whatever, some kind of gluten-free pizza. I could find something that is delicious at the moment or some kind of fried egg roll. At the moment it’s delicious—yum, but then I might feel gross, my digestion slows, maybe I don’t get to poop three times a day. I feel sluggish, I get brain fog. It’s kind of abusive. It’s not loving. It’s kind of abusive to go and have a bunch of empty dates, have a bunch of them sexcapades, and then just feel empty and shame. It’s kind of similar. Or go drinking every night. You’re getting that fulfillment at the moment, but is it really loving yourself? Is it an act of love for you? And no, it’s not. It’s a form of abuse. I think you’ve got to write that book.   [01:45:22] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Well, when you’re asking people to love you, if you don’t love you either like if you don’t love yourself, then how can they love you? How do they even know how to love you if you don’t even know how to love yourself? If we really start with loving ourselves first, then we teach other people how to love us too. That’s really what it’s about is teaching people how to love us. Sometimes that’s setting the boundaries, that’s setting limits. That’s saying no, that’s not acceptable in my love field, let’s say. When you eat the foods that are loving to you, you become much more loving. If you make decisions that are much more loving to you, then you are much more loving to yourself and then you exude that out in the energy kind of like we started this conversation about in the very beginning was about energy. When we exude love for ourselves that love exudes out. What else do we attract? We attract love back, so we get more loving people in our relationships. We can get more loving people in our atmosphere, in our gang, in our crew, in our team, in our tribe—whatever you want to call it. More loving things come to us. More loving opportunities come to us when we’re more loving for ourselves.  When we’re more self-destructive, we get more self-destructive things, more self-destructive friends, more self-destructive ideas or things. So you go down that forbidden path. Well, I’m just going to have 1 bite that then leads to 20 more bites that lead to the whole cake being eaten, and then you go down that deep dark despair. They even show it in movies where somebody has a heart broken, so what do they do? They go to the store and buy all this chocolate, they sit in their own little pajamas, they eat, cry, and do all that stuff, and then they feel horrible the next day when they’ve recovered their heart. So let’s just tune into the love of our heart and what’s loving for ourselves, eat things that are loving for us, and get rid of those that aren’t. One of the things that I like to show people, especially in biofeedback, is how to do muscle testing on themselves and see, is this food, is this medication, or is this supplement healthy for you? When you get to teach them how to do that, I see people in the grocery store now that are out there muscle testing themselves on food before they buy it, and I love it. It’s like, yes. I love it when I see that happening. I see their bodies swaying. I’m like, oh, yeah that’s a good one, and then it makes them have better choices. When some people are saying I don’t think my medication’s working for me anymore. I think I may be taking too much or something like that. Then I’ll say, well, let’s take out your prescription and how much you’re supposed to take. Now, what does your body say? I’m not saying this is for everybody, and it should always be under your care of a physician as far as whether you’re coming off your medications. But it’s just letting you know intuition-wise how in tune are you with your body. If your body’s saying I think I’m getting weaker on this stuff. I don’t think I need as much possibly. Maybe I can start titrating myself down, then I say then go to your doctor and start talking to them about can I start taking myself off of this? If so, what would be the best route to do it because I really feel like I’m not needing as much anymore or something like that.   [01:48:39] Ashley James: Oh, man, I can’t tell you that’s phenomenal how many times clients have come to me with really weird symptoms, and I say okay give me the list of meds you’re on. Not all my clients are on meds, but sometimes they come to me on meds and then I just have them sit on Google with me and we go through. Again, I’m not the prescribing doctor, I’m definitely not a doctor, and I don’t tell people they have to get off their meds but I ask them most of the time. I’ve only ever had one client say, no, I believe in medication and I want to be on it. I’m like, okay, this is your choice. But I want you to know the fullest of the side effects. So my question to them as I ask, do you want to be so healthy your body no longer needs this medicine? Now, that doesn’t always apply. There are some cases where people like for example, type 1 diabetics will require some amount of insulin. It doesn’t mean they have to be on the amount of insulin they’re on now because I know a type 1 diabetic who cut it down by 75% by changing a few things in his diet, not major. Just a few things, minor things.  He did cut out barley, wheat, rye, and oats as well, and he started taking a type of mineral supplement that did include chromium, vanadium, and other minerals because that helps to resensitize the insulin. Basically, insulin receptors don’t respond if there’s a chromium deficiency, and this was discovered in the ‘50s. That a doctor in California—I forget which university but in the ‘50s, and you could look at this on Wiki. A doctor could turn type 1 diabetes on and off in lab rats by starving them of chromium or by giving them chromium. So chromium is good, but it’s not the only thing. There are other things like B6 is incredibly important. There’s a whole process that B6 goes through when it comes to blood sugar regulation. So there are multiple nutrients, and there’s this whole world of how people have been able to completely rid themselves of type 2 diabetes with diet alone, which is 100% doable, documented, written about, and I’ve had interviews about. But as far as type 1 is concerned, people can get so healthy that they can lower their amounts, and of course they know they’ve been taught how to measure themselves. But if you’re on an anti-anxiety, antidepressant, something to that regard, a high blood pressure med, a water pill, or a cholesterol med, and then you change your diet to be healthier, you do all these other healthier things, and not have your medications checked. It’s kind of like, but your body is getting healthier. What if you could have a reduced amount or completely have yourself taken off of it? So that’s the goal. That the goal is to get so healthy that your body no longer requires that intervention or would require a minimal amount of intervention. What I do is if I have a client with a bunch of symptoms who are on medication, I will have them go on Google with me and we look at not the shortlist but the full list of side effects and we go down the list. They will start freaking out because they will go, oh my gosh. That’s the reason why they put me on this one. That’s the reason why they put me on this one. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had clients have epiphanies because they thought their bodies were breaking down further into the disease they were diagnosed into when it was the many of the side effects of the meds they were put on. If your doctor isn’t willing to help to work with you either to find a different drug, to find a lower dose, or to get you so healthy you no longer need it. If your doctor’s not willing to work with you to get you healthier, to get you to not have symptoms and side effects, you can fire your doctor and hire a new one. They work for you. Don’t ever let the hubris of a doctor and their ego scare you into following their advice. Find one that is supportive of your health goals to be the healthiest person possible.  It drives me nuts when people give over their personal power to a doctor. I know there are really good MDs out there who really, really, really want you to be healthy. They’ll take advanced courses, they’ll become functional medicine practitioners, they’ll go take extracurricular courses, and they want to help you either get on a different drug, get on a lower dose, or get you so healthy you no longer need it.  That’s why I said there are so many good doctors like that out there that if you are stuck with a doctor who’s like nope we’re going to keep you on these meds no matter what. We’re not changing them no matter what because there many doctors out there that say diet doesn’t matter. You still have to be on this cholesterol med. It doesn’t matter that you’re eating a whole food plant-based diet and your cholesterol is lower. We’re going to just keep driving it down lower even still. Because cholesterol medication bruises the liver and stops the production of about 30% of our cholesterol, which is required. The liver makes it because the body needs it. Lots of books out there about that.   [01:53:59] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: The liver is so key to emotion. In traditional Chinese medicine, the liver is where happiness is, so happy liver happy life. If you think about it, the liver is what filters everything. When you see someone who is not the happiest type of person, that’s pretty negative, angry, and very reactive, typically I’d want to say we got to work on some liver stuff here. Do a liver cleanse or something like that because the liver is processing everything from environmental toxins, to internal toxins, to our own emotional toxins. I mean, I feel like liver is one of the most important organs we have in the body.   [01:54:42] Ashley James: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you and I could talk for hours and you get me all riled up. You get me on my soapbox so I get so excited. I want to talk about the tongue, man. Something happened to me it must have been about a year ago or so. It feels really recent but then when I think about it I’m like that was like over a year ago. Where all of a sudden, my tongue—and my tongue when my Naturopath says stick out your tongue or I go to acupuncture and they’re like stick out your tongue, I kind of stick it out with pride. I’m kind of like, oh I know I’m so healthy and you’re going to look at my tongue and you’re going to be like impressed.  Well, all of a sudden, just over a year ago, my tongue did the weirdest thing out of nowhere and it had cracks in it like lines running down it like it split open. I had a geographic tongue and it really hurt for three days. I was kind of freaking out. But I have a friend who’s very much into energy medicine. He did energy work with me and he said this is an energetic problem. I’m not going to get too much into the details, I might freak people out, but basically, he helped me to resolve that, and then gradually my tongue healed. But super weird that it just came on suddenly and all of a sudden I had really, really deep fissures in my tongue out of nowhere. It felt more of an energetic problem and then we resolved energetically. But everywhere I looked online was like well people think it might be a virus, people think it might be a nutrient deficiency, but we don’t really know. So you can read the tongue and weird obvious things like once people stick out their tongue and if there are cracks down the middle, geographic tongue, or if there’s tongue separates and it looks like the Grand Canyon on their tongue, that means something. Let’s talk about the more obvious because the people who look at their tongue and they’re like well, my tongue just looks like a tongue. There are no lines, there are no bumps, it just looks like a tongue. I’m sure you could probably point out things for them, but the more overt like if you look at your tongue and it’s doing this weird thing over here, tell us about that first.   [01:57:00] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Okay. So first of all, I want to touch on that geographic tongue because in the geographic tongue, there are actually two different types. There’s one that’s a surface geographic and then there’s the one with the deep fissures like you’re talking about. The deep fissures is definitely an energetic issue that needs to be resolved, but there’s also a geographic tongue where on the surface of the tongue you’ll actually see where the papilla are. On the actual surface, you’ll actually see the geography of the mapping of the tongue. So the tongue is mapped geographically based on where the organs are. So for example, the tip of the tongue is where the heart is, then right behind that tip is where the lung is, then on the sides of the tongue is where the liver and gallbladder resolves, then right down the center is the stomach and the spleen, and then right towards the back of the tongue is where the kidney, bladder, and the intestines are located. So when you’re looking at the tongue, similar to the eye, you’re looking at geography. If you see any changes within that aspect or that area of the tongue, then you go, ah, we’ve got to look further into that. So when we’re looking at the tongue, we’re looking at the color first and foremost. The color tells us so many different things whether there’s inflammation, if there’s blood deficiency, if there’s too much cold, too much heat in the body, you’re looking at the color. So one of the first things I look at is if it’s a deep red tongue like it looks like a raw steak, then that’s a lot of inflammation in the body. That person is dealing with some pain issues, they’re dealing with a lot of maybe inflammation of the organs. That there’s some great illness going on there.  If it’s a pale tongue, then that means they’re very deficient in blood or in the yang aspect of things. They tend to be a little cooler, circulation tends to be their hands are cold, their feet are cold. If there’s a purplish color to the tongue—and a lot of people will say, well I don’t see the purple, because it’s very subtle—purple is a stagnation of blood meaning there’s an injury somewhere. Typically, when I see purple, it’s affecting the muscles and the joints, pain in the muscles and the joints. If it’s blue, then the person’s really, really cold. They’ve got a lot of coolness in the body itself, and so that means the organs are also running cold. I look at the color first. I always look for a coating as well. it’s normal to have a little bit of coating, but the coating is also based on what is the color of the coating and the consistency. So how thick is it? So if it’s really thick, then that means there are pathogenic issues going on? They probably have some candida, some yeast, parasites, those kinds of things. If there’s an absence of coating, that means that they’re they’ve got a yin deficiency so they don’t have enough heat in the body. If there is a white then there’s cold present, so that means there might be coming down with something. One of the things I used to do with my kids was if they didn’t feel like they wanted to go to school and they wouldn’t want to act like they were sick, I’d always say let me see your tongue. If that tongue didn’t have any coating they’re going to school. They can’t pull, they just can’t.   [02:00:26] Ashley James: Did you look at their eyes too?   [02:00:27] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Of course.   [02:00:30] Ashley James: You’re like let me look at your eyes, let me look at your tongue. No. Do you have a test today? You’re going to school.   [02:00:35] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: I was looking to see which direction they went because if they were having to create something, they were going up into the right brain. If they were telling me the truth they’re going to the left. That would tell me if they’re lying, so I look at that.  But also the moisture of the tongue. So if it’s really wet, then that means that there’s a lot of internal damp going. If they’re dehydrated it’s going to be really dry, too much heat going on in the body. So for example, if I see the tip of the tongue and it’s really red, then there’s heat in the heart. So that’s a really good way to look at that. I’m trying to think of what that state would be, but too much heat in the heart would be like a heart condition of some sort, not where you have congestive heart failure that would be the tongue on the tip would be wet and it would be of a different color not heat. I look at that. The crease down the center of the tongue typically means there’s something going on with the spine, so they’ve had a long-term spinal issue. So if I see that deep crease down the center I ask them, so tell me about your back. What’s going on with that? And they’re like, how do you know about my back? Then I’ll say, well, you got that deep crease going on, so they’ll tell me. But if there are more lines in the middle of the tongue, that means it’s a new thing. It’s more of an acute episode. If it’s a decrease and it’s been a long-term thing, I tend to see a deep crease on someone who has scoliosis, for example.  If I see bite marks on the outside of the tongue where the liver and the gallbladder are located, and typically I mean by that is where the ridge of the outside the tongue is, if I see bite marks there, either that’s a spleen deficiency where the blood is not coursing through the body as well, so there’s usually a pain issue or something going on with the blood. They need a blood cleanse of some sort, or they’ve got some pathogens going on.  But typically, if it looks like they’re biting their tongue, that means they’re not absorbing their food. So either they’re not eating their food enough—chewing it enough, or they’re needing a digestive enzyme. Their body’s not developing that enzyme. It could also mean they’re having difficulty processing protein like meat proteins, for example. So then their body is not being able to bring up enough of the digestive enzyme to break down that particular type of protein, so we may need to look at that instead. The best way that I do this is when I’m doing my biofeedback with somebody and I’m doing my first session with them I’ll say, okay, let me look at your tongue, and then they stick their tongue out. So I cue people that the best way to see what the health and status is of yourself is first thing in the morning before you drink any water whatsoever or drink anything, go look at your tongue—   [02:03:45] Ashley James: Or brush your teeth.   [02:03:46] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: And then scrape your tongue. Yeah, or even brush your teeth. Always look at your tongue first before you do anything, and that’ll tell you exactly what’s going on—how much bacteria you’re developing throughout the night as you’re sleeping. What the color is, just how much of a coating you have. And then before they drink any water I ask them to scrape their tongue.  What I mean by that is not with a toothbrush where they scrape it back and forth while they’re brushing their teeth because then they’re just pushing the bacteria or whatever is on the tongue deeper into the papilla kind of like when you had those creases and those crevices. Imagine if you were to take a toothbrush and scrape your tongue that way, it would push it deeper down into those crevices and then you’re going to get a great outgrowth of bacteria.  So I basically recommend that they scrape it. You can get those tongue scrapers. There’s a metal one, bamboo, or you can even get the plastic ones. I say just grab a spoon, a big old tablespoon from your drawer and just use that and then you just scrape it and then rinse—scrape, rinse, scrape, rinse, and keep scraping until no more of this stuff comes off. Whether you floss your teeth or you brush your teeth first and then floss, but then you floss and then do an oil pulling. The oil pulling will do the last little bit of pulling out all the rest of that bacteria that you might have missed and that’ll help a lot. So I usually recommend doing that.   [02:05:13] Ashley James: Explain oil pulling for those who don’t know how to.   [02:05:16] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Okay. So oil pulling, you just take a coconut oil—whether it’s the fractionated coconut oil or the solid oil. You just take a teaspoon or a tablespoon of it, then you stick it in your mouth, and you swish it around. It’s going to melt because your mouth is very warm. It’s going to melt it and then you swish it for five minutes. Most people, if they can’t tolerate five minutes, just two minutes then and then you spit it out. I want to caution people, do not spit it down your drain because it will congeal and then you’ll get a clogged drain. I don’t want husbands or spouses mad at me because they got a clogged drain now because of the oils going into the drain. So typically, spit it in a garbage can or something that you’re going to dispose of, and that’s the best way to do an oil pulling.   [02:06:07] Ashley James: What about sesame oil? I’ve heard use sesame oil, so why coconut oil?   [02:06:12] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: I like coconut oil because people like the flavor of coconut oil, and if you like it you’re going to do it. Whereas sesame can be very seasoned or a taste that most people have a tendency to try to acquire, but either oil would be good. I also use MCT oil, that medium-chain triglyceride. That’s also a very good oil to use as well.   [02:06:38] Ashley James: It’s not like that coconut oil has more anti-microbial properties than another kind of oil, it’s just a matter of taste?   [02:06:46] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Well, yeah. First of all, it’s availability. I try to make suggestions based on availability for most people. Taste and acquireness of taste because if they’re not going to like it they’re not going to do it, and how readily do they have it. So yes, I do like coconut oil for that reason—the anti-micro microbial, which is why the MCT works so well, why it’s so good for pulling the bacteria and the virus stuff out. But the sesame, yeah. I have sesame oil and I use it myself. I use it actually on my skin quite a bit, it’s wonderful. I love the taste. I also put it on my popcorn too.   [02:07:30] Ashley James: If they had any oil, I mean any plant-based oil, not canola oil. You throw that canola oil out. If you have oil in your house, you just throw that out. But if you have olive oil, any kind of oil as long as you like the flavor you’re swishing it around your mouth. And of course, saliva comes in also so your mouth is now full of saliva and a little bit of oil. Your mouth feels so clean after you do oil pulling, it’s really interesting. It really does.   [02:08:03] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: And I also encourage the use of bentonite clay, and I like bentonite clay especially with the brushing aspect of it. So most people don’t really like the flavor of bentonite clay because it’s clay. So I usually suggest that if they have a fluoride-free, aspartame, or sugar-free type of toothpaste that they really like, then go ahead and put the toothpaste on the toothbrush and then dab it into your bentonite clay. And the bentonite clay goes further into pulling out that bacteria.  If somebody has gingivitis or really bad cavitation or things like that in their teeth, which if most people understood the dental aspect of your teeth, they’re all associated with an organ. Each tooth is associated with an organ. So if you have an infection going in one of your teeth, it’s probably affecting that organ or it may be coming from that organ. The eyes, the tongue, everything about us is so fascinating. There’s always a map to something, and so the teeth are the same thing. So if you have an infection in the teeth, bacteria, or gingivitis then you’re going to have a lot of health issues. That’s where you find a lot of hidden things that aren’t being tested in the medical field. That’s why 85% of the people that come to me say I’ve gone to every specialist there is and nobody’s been able to find anything wrong with me except saying I need a psych eval, kind of like what you mentioned. I always go to the teeth, I always want to look at the teeth. That’s the second or third thing I look at is the teeth too.   [02:09:44] Ashley James: Eyes, tongue, teeth.   [02:09:46] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: But the bentonite pulls it up. Well, ears, everything else.   [02:09:48] Ashley James: Poop.   [02:09:49] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yeah, poop, you name it. Nothing is left untouched or looked at.   [02:09:57] Ashley James: I mean, once someone when someone’s gone to you they’re like what do MD? You go to an MD, they might see you for 15 minutes if you’re lucky. They barely look in your eyes ever, and it’s like how much information are they actually gathering? Well, they’re not trained to. And again, there are good MDs out there—the ones that really go for extracurricular courses and stuff—but traditional MD training, you don’t really look in someone’s eyes, tongue, mouth, ears, discuss their poop.  But as a doctor, you’re supposed to be a detective. Only looking at the objective versus also considering the subjective, and only looking at labs. That’s just one piece of that picture. You’re missing out on so much. So I really do love that you’re incorporating many different medicine modalities from around the world that show us windows into our health, not just physical but energetic, emotional, and showing us that they’re more than just a meat sack. It’s quite interesting.   [02:11:18] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: I love learning. I’m kind of a nerd.   [02:11:22] Ashley James: You’re in good company.   [02:11:24] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: I got a look at that. Yes, in fact, that’s what I find with most of your listeners is that they’re very learned. Many of them are like oh hey like I’ve learned a lot from some of my… and that’s the thing about healthcare. That’s the thing about being an integrative doctor is that when you stop learning, you should stop practicing because we should always be open to learning something.   [02:11:46] Ashley James: Right, same with teachers. I think if teachers stop learning they should stop teaching. We should always be expanding and always be excited. If you’re burnt out in your field you’re not serving. If you’re in a field where you service people, which there are very few fields where you don’t in some capacity service someone or service someone’s needs. But if you really are burnt out and you’re not growing as a person in that field, if you’re not growing and interested, you’re doing your customers a huge disservice and also yourself because being stagnant is akin to being in purgatory. Being stagnant, everything gets clogged up.  Find what you’re passionate about and then dive into it and it’ll radiate. When you’re passionate and you’re absorbing information, you want to help others. But like you said, you surround yourself with those like-minded people. When I cut out sugar and fast food, I noticed that I wasn’t surrounding myself with people that love to go to bars, drink alcohol, eat fast food, and eat sugar.  There were even some moms that our son was hanging out with, there’s a bunch of kids, and there were some moms who were really excited. We’re going to go to McDonald’s next. I’m like, okay, have fun. Bye. She was all excited, and she was a nice person don’t get me wrong, but she wanted to go to McDonald’s like every day and she did every day with her kids. She wanted all the other moms to meet there so that all the kids can play in the play area.  My husband, he’s so great. He goes, our son will never enter McDonald’s because I don’t want him breathing in the heterocyclic amines from the fried food. I look at my husband and I’m like I love you. I love you so much. I was even willing to go. Okay, well maybe we’ll just let him play in the play area, which is disgusting by the way. The McDonald’s player is disgusting. I mean, you want a kid to be a kid and just have fun. My husband’s like, no. He’s not even going to breathe in that poisonous air. What are you talking about? So you just end up surrounding yourself with people. Over time, I just found these crunchy moms that some of them are more crunchy than me if you can believe it. I had one mom reading labels more than I read labels. I didn’t think that was possible. It’s just raise your standards, find people that are in line with your health goals, and surround yourself with those people. So I just noticed that over the last few years, my friend base has really changed in a good way. I don’t throw people away, it’s just people that naturally will gravitate away from and gravitate towards depending on your focus. Going back to the things you were talking about when you talk about loving your body like truly, you look at that food, is this loving me? Not is this giving me instant gratification and pleasure, but is this loving me? Because if there’s a component of like well I’m going to have great pleasure eating it and then there’s going to be a period of shame and guilt afterward, that’s not love. That’s not loving you. That’s not nourishing you. That is creating healthy boundaries. That is learning how to create healthy boundaries within oneself. And when you learn to love yourself as authentically as you have illustrated, we find it easier to then inform others of our boundaries as to how we want to be treated. This is getting into the idea of that there are no villains or victims. Coming from the standpoint of if you believe there are no villains or victims because we choose based on all of our conscious and unconscious choices, we choose how to tell people how to treat us. We are the ones that choose to be in social situations. Now, this is not like a black or white situation. This is just an exercise in thinking to give us new access to information. So if we come at life from a standpoint of I am empowered in my life, I am responsible for my life and my choices, then what we do is we say to ourselves in this life that I have—sorry, my kids playing in the background it’s distracting me. I’m trying to focus here. The pregnancy brain has taken over. I’m surprised I made it this long.   [02:16:37] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: A sparkly thing.   [02:16:40] Ashley James: He’s playing with the jack in the box and I’m just like, ahh.   [02:16:48] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: It’s kind of funny that you were talking about McDonald’s, you know jack-in-the-box.   [02:16:52] Ashley James: Oh, right, right, right. Well no, the old toy. He’s playing within the background. It’s so funny my brain just goes oh. In terms of enforcing boundaries, this is what’s so exciting about enforcing boundaries, and if people want to get into this deeper, go look into non-violent communication and you can find hours of videos on Youtube. The man who invented this passed away, but his family created a foundation. You could pay something like $12 or $20 a month or whatever to gain access to thousands of hours of his training. There’s a lot of great lessons you can learn, but the focus is this. If you identify as a victim, you give up your personal power because you’ve given up your ability to say I am at cause in my world, I enforce my boundaries, and I teach people how to treat me. So when we decide to not identify as a victim but instead go okay, things have happened to me and I get to now choose how to train people how to treat me. I am in control in that I will teach them how to treat me. That is a measure of self-respect and love that will come more naturally when we start to do things like you said—choosing foods and even routines in our life like going to bed at 9:00 PM versus midnight is an act of self-love. It creates a discipline that is enforcing a boundary that says I love myself so much this is my personal boundary. And so then if you decide that your bedtime is always 9:00 PM. You get into bed, you read for an hour, and you go to sleep. And then someone wants to go drinking with you or do a behavior that would keep you up late at night, then you get to decide, am I going to teach these people in my life that this is my boundary and for them to respect it. And then you teach them and you show them this is my self-love. Over time, it gets easier and easier. But at first, people will abreact, will push against you, and try to bulldoze your boundaries.   [02:19:16] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Or shame you.   [02:19:17] Ashley James: Every form of manipulation, right? So when we go into health stuff and then we have friends and family that don’t understand it, then they really try to get us to go eat and behave the old way. That’s why I love it if we keep coming at it from how Dr. Vienna said everything you put in your mouth and every health choice you make, ask yourself, is this authentically loving me? And that will help open you up to understand boundary setting on a whole new level when it comes to your health. Then you have to teach people gradually over time how to treat you in this new way where they will respect the boundaries of your self-love instead of trying to manipulate, hurt you, or have you stumble or fall.  They’re all doing that unconsciously too. They’re not like hahaha, how am I going to make her get off her diet? It’s largely unconscious, but our friends and family will try to bulldoze our boundaries at first. This is why I like nonviolent communication because they teach you step by step how to, in a loving way, hold a boundary in place and not let toxic behaviors continue. I just wanted to incorporate that into what you said.   [02:20:34] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yeah, and I agree with all of that. You summarize it very nicely. When did we start making time so important? Okay, you didn’t develop to develop this illness overnight, so then why are you expecting recovery overnight. So allow yourself the time to heal, the time to develop that habit, the time to develop that good behavior because oftentimes, what happens is January 1st, everybody’s starting on this new year’s resolution, which I don’t believe in. Every day should be a resolution. But you start this new year’s resolution. Oh, I’m going to not eat sugar for however long, and then two days in you eat sugar. Then you go through the shaming of yourself, your psyche, everything. See, I can’t hold myself to anything. I’m just weak. No, you start out with I’m strong, doing the I ams. It’s a very powerful two-letter word—I am—and really working on that. But then it’s also really thoroughly enjoying the process, thoroughly enjoying it and finding out what’s the root cause behind that emotion. So many times, in the two-hour sessions that I have with people because really, that is about what it takes for people to just even open up is you find out the past hurts, the childhood hurts, the childhood traumas that made you the adult you are today. And so when you could go into those childhood traumas and you can heal that child, then guess what, the adult heals too. When the adult is healed, then that adult makes better choices, then they start to love themselves more, and then they become better parents because then they see, oh my gosh, I told myself I was never going to be like my parents and here I am, I’m becoming like my parents. Not like their parents were bad either, it’s just the way in which we were perceived or the way in which we were taken. But I see a lot of those childhood traumas that affect the choices they make today. So when we could go back and heal that, and that’s where I feel true healing comes in, where the true aha moment comes in. Because when you ask the question were you a child that got to be heard, or were you the child that could be seen and not heard? When they tell me I was the one that could be seen but not heard, oftentimes there’s that thyroid, there’s the immune system going on where they have a thyroid issue because of that or they don’t have a voice.  So they tend to be a victim because then they choose partners that are similar to that to where there’s comfort because back when that emotional intelligence was being developed in that childhood, that’s what they lean into as an adult. Therefore, that influences every decision they make, the friends they hang out with, the choices they make as far as the companion they want to be with for the rest of their lives. It’s not until you actually start to heal yourself to where you actually start to find that root issue that is making you destroy who you are internally, externally, emotionally, psychologically—all of that. Once you find that thing—that one thing—then you can actually build on it, and that’s where the true healing starts to begin and you start to see it physically. When people start to rebuke and when they start to sabotage possibly, it’s because they see this person who has made all of this wonderful effort. I have this one friend of mine. She has lost over 100 pounds and she’s done it the right way—with healthy food, with exercise, with walking, and you could just see the total vitality that is emanating from her. You can see this vitality of wanting to exercise. Everybody says, well if you just get off the couch you could lose some weight. Do you know how much it takes to have an extra 40 pounds on you, and then to have the motivation to lift those 40 pounds to go exercise? Yet you got to have that internal motivation, and that internal motivation is the love of life.  I saw this friend of mine who doesn’t allow himself to eat sugar very often, but when he does, he thoroughly enjoys the moment. Anybody who is around him gets to see him thoroughly enjoying it just from his facial expressions. When he takes that bite of that—he might only just take one bite of a cheesecake, for example, but the facial expression. Your mouth is almost drooling just watching him because he’s thoroughly enjoying that moment.  So if you’re giving yourself a moment to have that one bite of that one thing that you said I could never have again, but you take such sheer pleasure in enjoying it—let all your taste buds break down every ingredient of that food, of that I item, then you don’t need more because now you’re fully engulfed, almost an orgasmic experience that you’re having right now with that food because you’re allowing yourself to truly enjoy it. That’s how every meal should be taken. We tend to dilute it with beverages, with entertainment, with conversation, with our phone in front of us, our TV on, or something like that takes away that pleasure. But if you just take that one little plate of food, you take a bite of it, you close your eyes, and you let your taste buds taste every little taste or every little essence that’s in that food, you won’t need as much food to finish. You’ll be very nourished, you’ll feel gratified after your meal, and it would be one of the best meals you’ve ever had because you went in full-blown with every sensory perception there is in there.   [02:26:38] Ashley James: I love it.   [02:26:39] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: So thoroughly enjoy it.   [02:26:40] Ashley James: And make it be an act of self-love the fact that you’re not binging. Even like you said, people will eat and they’re not even conscious of the food that they’re eating. They’re just looking at their phone, watching TV, or whatever, and they’re not even experiencing it. They’re not enjoying it. When you do really, really, really enjoy it, you don’t have to just blindly overeat. You can really get the satisfaction out of each bite, and slowing down to chew your food—like really chew 20 times kind of thing with each bite—really helps digestion. We talked about this last time that you and your husband do. But there’s this amount of being conscious. Sometimes people go unconscious around their finances, or they go unconscious around their budget. They go unconscious around food. Wherever we go unconscious in life, we don’t really have healthy strategies, I’ve got to tell you. Look at an area of your life that’s been in your blind spot that you’ve really been unconscious of, that you’ve been neglecting, and look if you have healthy strategies holding that part of your life up, or are you kind of like being a teenager where it’s just instant gratification, looking for pleasure, and not really worrying about the consequences. So it does take that emotional quotient, that delayed gratification and being conscious of that one area of your life. Shine light on it not to grow shame and guilt, but shine light on it and build healthy habits around that area. I’ve got lots of episodes on building healthy habits, and of course, listeners can go to learntruehealth.com, use the search function there, and type in healthy habits. I’ve got several episodes all about doing that. Like you said, don’t rush it. What’s this idea that we have to do it right away? It has to all be done right away. Start. Start and get conscious.  If it’s something like getting conscious about how much water you drink. Getting conscious about the foods you’re putting in your mouth and staying conscious during a meal. Getting conscious while you’re moving your body in a way that brings you joy. Getting conscious about things around your body, your health, and your emotional state, and getting conscious about your eyes, your tongue, and those kinds of habits that you pointed out. How we can manage our oral health in a way that’s going to bring even more vitality.  But getting conscious allows us to make really positive changes in a much more rapid fashion, and then also bringing that learning about how to enforce healthy boundaries with others. Because once you start making changes, sometimes other people in our life don’t like it. It’s like crab in the bucket. I don’t know what it is. I want to protect you as the listeners in a healthy way to be able to not allow the people that love you to squish your efforts. Tall poppy syndrome I think it’s called in Australia.  When you’re just sprouting, when you’re just like a little baby sprout in the garden, it’s so easy to squash the plant as opposed to at the end of the season, when the plant’s huge now and it’s hard to squash it. So that habit is very delicate at first right, so protect that habit as you grow it and don’t let others around you squash it. Continue to protect it and also teach others that these new healthy habits are your self-love. Watch it flourish and watch it grow. Dr. Vienna, Lafrenz, it’s been such a pleasure having you on the show today. You and I could go on for hours and hours, as we often do. Your website is natural-therapeutics.com, and of course, links to everything that Vienna does are going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. Is there anything that you want to say to wrap up today’s interview?   [02:30:52] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Well, first of all, I want to say thank you to the listeners who have reached out to me in the past from the last podcast because we’ve developed some wonderful friendships from that, and I’ve learned a lot from them as well. The way that this iridology piece would work is they would send me a picture of their eyes and then I would spend some time analyzing it, and then we’d sit down and actually go through it together. Don’t be afraid of your tongue, not only with the appearance but also what comes off of it. Speaking our truth and like you were saying, standing up for ourselves and making sure that people are aware. I think truly, the consciousness, when we become more aware of our environment, aware of our feelings—developing our awareness actually adds to the consciousness piece. And so that heightened awareness of what is driving this craving? What is driving this mood? What is driving this reaction? And what is driving the reaction from another? So if you have someone who’s close to you that might be trying to sabotage you, what is driving that? Maybe they’re envious of the fact that you can stick to something so strong as cutting out sugar and they want to do it themselves. Oftentimes it’s a mirror that they’re looking into, and so you can help others. That’s what I like.   [02:32:19] Ashley James: I’ve seen this so many times. I had a boyfriend who we were together for like five years. I started to do a lot of personal growth work and that really threatened him. He tried to sabotage me every step of the way, it was really interesting. It finally came out, I finally sat down with him. I’m like listen, we need to talk. What is up with your inappropriate behavior around my choices? These are healthy choices I’m making. What are you doing? I pulled it out of him and he said to me I’m afraid you’re going to leave me because you’re going to grow so much that we’re not going to see eye to eye. It was all of his insecurities that came forward, and I think that’s really common. I like watching the show My 600-lb Life, not because of the health advice. Please, please, do not watch that show for health advice. It’s awful health advice. My 600-lb Life, you’re following people who are morbidly obese, and then they do things like gastric bypass surgery and eating a very bad diet like low-fat yogurts that have sugar in them. I mean, it’s just really weird. But they’re eating less than 1200 calories a day.  Oftentimes, they go through periods where they fail and then they go to counseling. I watch that show, they follow them for a year, and then they have another show where you follow them for a second or third year. The ones who make it, every single time—you watch a few seasons of this you start seeing a pattern—there’s going to be one or more enablers because these people were over 600 pounds someone had to bring them food. Someone had to keep bringing them the food. The enablers, if it’s a husband or a boyfriend, most of the time end up leaving the person one once they’ve achieved their goal weight or when they’re on their weight achieving their goal weight because they couldn’t handle the person getting healthy, getting their life back, and not being dependent on them.  I know it’s a really overt example because it’s oftentimes it’s covert in our life, but it’s very overt when you watch that show. And then for those who watch that show, if you do watch the show, please read the book or listen to the audio version of the book by Dr. Garth Davis called Probenazole. He is a weight loss surgeon who saw that he was gaining weight and losing his health on the same diet he had all of his 600-pound patients on.  He had to go back to the drawing board because he realized that everything he was doing was wrong and really not helping people in the long run. So his book is all about the actual science of eating healthy for health, for reversing disease. Now he doesn’t have to cut people’s stomachs out because he has a program that is about nourishing the body based on science. So I love his book Probenazole, and I highly recommend listening to it. I like watching My 600-lb Life because you see the psychological changes that occur when someone is making major, very overt changes, and how they learn how to enforce boundaries and love themselves, and how other people sometimes end up moving away from them or moving towards them based on whether they were there to actually support or whether they couldn’t handle it. It’s a very interesting thing when we start to make these changes in our life, know that some people are threatened by it, and that’s because they’re afraid you’re going to leave them or they’re afraid that they’re not going to be needed anymore. It’s all insecurities. The thing is if we live through fear, fear becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s best to get it out in the open and come from love, which is what you teach.   [02:36:24] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: When I was working as an occupational therapist, I specialized in people with size. What I found in many cases is the enablers didn’t know any other way to express love, and that was to feed them, to provide them the pizza, to do all those other things. They didn’t know any other way. So then that’s when it comes down to let’s have a conversation about what other ways you can show love because you don’t always want to discourage the relationship to end. In many cases, when you see such a loving relationship, you don’t want to encourage them to leave their partners or things like that, but how about let’s work with a partner too. I’m not saying that that’s what you’re saying. What I’m saying is let’s get everybody involved and let’s show a different way of love. So if this person is on this path of wanting to eat healthily, then let me show you another way you can demonstrate love. How about giving them a foot massage, a little reflexology, back massage, or just a little effleurage where you’re doing a little bit of soft mobilization which also circulates the fat and gets us the cellulite to disperse as well. Let’s show other ways. Whether through essential oils or other means. When you can give them that other avenue, then they can be part of the solution versus part of the problem. Then they also then can say, oh, so there are strategies to get around this. Once they learn how to love that person, they’ll start to learn how to love themselves, and so then it’s a wonderful thing.   [02:38:01] Ashley James: Beautiful. I love it. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show again. And of course, listeners can work with you. You help people gain profound results, and I feel that you’re affordable considering everything you offer, so I highly recommend listeners all around the world can work with you remotely. And of course, if they’re in the Okanagan Valley in Washington, they can go to Republic and see you in person as well, which would be fun. Natural-therapeutics.com is Dr. Vienna Lafrenz’s website. Well, we’re going to have to have you on the show again at some point and hear about how your garden goes this year with your experiments that you’ll do this time. Maybe sharing your food with others and seeing how it affects others, that would be very interesting. Man, I’d love to study the microbiome of different plants and the contrast that the microbiome has based on whether you held the seeds in your mouth or not. I think that would be really interesting, or the frequency. There are machines you can hook up the plants to and see is there a different frequency of energy or is there a different sugar content? Is there a different nutrient value? It’s all grown in the same soil, same sunlight, same amount of water, but what other changes can we see, and what are the changes can we see in other people?   [02:39:26] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Also, the ones that were my seed for example, if I went through a depression or something like that, would it affect my plant? I bet it would. I think that’d be fascinating.   [02:39:38] Ashley James: Right. Fun.   [02:39:44] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: So if I stop growing will my plants stop growing?   [02:39:47] Ashley James: I like to see the chain of custody. I like to think about the chain of custody of my food. The farmers, were they treated well? Was it a local farm, family farmers? Were they people who were happy with their job, or were they working in really poor conditions? Then there’s the distribution center, how those people had to handle your food. And then it goes to the grocer, unless you can source it straight from the farmer, which would be awesome. All the grocers that work there for minimum wage, are they treated well? How’s their level of happiness, and how long does it sit on the shelf? What country did it come from? How long did it have to fly?  So it’s the environment, how many weeks has it been since that apple was picked or months because apples can be stored in a way that it’s been months? How long has it been out of the soil basically dying slowly, and how many hands came across it? This is just talking about whole foods. Imagine if it’s these factory manipulated pseudo food, how many hands and how many chemicals had to go into that food? So if we can get the closest to the source as possible and be the one that influences the plant on that level, I mean that is such a cool experience to have even if you’re just growing microgreens inside your apartment, you know what I mean?  It’s such a cool experience to have to be able to influence directly, grow directly, nourish your body, and have zero chains of custody. You, you’re the chain of custody, that’s it. That is such a cool experience for your body to go through.   [02:41:51] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: I noticed a big change when I moved off-grid for several reasons because when you’re talking about the chain of custody, when you’re looking at electricity when you’re looking at the water when it’s coming into your house, where did it go through? What chain of custody did it go through? How many households did that electricity go through? How many households did the water go through? How many different way lines did it go through to get to your house? So based on that, how much anger, how much frustration, how much toxins, pollutants, and all that is going into the water, into the electricity? Here, in my house, I have a well that’s 800 feet down. I know exactly the source of where that water is. So there’s my custody right there, it’s right from the well itself. There are no other pipes it’s gone through, through the city, or anything like that. It’s come straight from the earth. So that water is so healing.   [02:42:45] Ashley James: There are no pharmaceuticals in your water. And because your water actually is so deep and under pressure, it’s likely that it’s structured water. I’ve had an interview about structured water.   [02:42:54] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: It’s got minerals, absolutely fabulous minerals.   [02:42:57] Ashley James: So good. I love well water, I just love it.   [02:42:59] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: So when people come to my clinic, they don’t get water from the city, they get water from my house. I take in a gallon jug of water every day with my freshwater that people get to drink when they come to my clinic because I want them to have my live water. It’s fabulous water. The same with electricity. I know where it’s coming from. It’s coming from my solar panel. It’s fabulous. It feels good. That’s another topic.   [02:43:22] Ashley James: Well it is, it totally is. I have a whole interview, I have several actually but one specifically of I think it’s like a Ph.D. in electrical engineering. He talks about how most houses have dirty energy because of the grid. It’s not aligned correctly, and the transformer in your neighborhood is not aligned correctly. If a home is not wired correctly, it actually goes back as a feedback loop and affects the rest of the grid. So it’s very rare to have a house that doesn’t have dirty electricity. It’s very rare to have a clean where the electricity is at a frequency that is normal and healthy and within healthy ranges. His clientele, he goes and he helps. There are certain things he can do with someone’s house, and sometimes it takes replacing a transformer. But most of the time, there are things he can do within that home in the wiring to make the electricity clean. There’s so much when it comes to health, and we always like to go down these rabbit holes. But basically, get back to nature as much as possible. One thing at a time. I don’t want to overwhelm people. One thing at a time. Choose something to do today to love yourself and keep doing it.   [02:44:37] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yup, and what’s the trigger.   [02:44:38] Ashley James: Absolutely. Thank you so much for coming to the show. As always, it’s been such a pleasure.   [02:44:44] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Thank you, Ashley. I always love our conversations. Like you said, they always go down a rabbit hole but that rabbit hole’s wide and big.   [02:44:54] Ashley James: And we all fit in it together.   [02:44:57] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Lots of topics, lots of topics. So thank you.     Get Connected with Dr. Vienna Lafrenz Website Facebook – Dr. Vienna Lafrenz   Book by Dr. Vienna Lafrenz WakeUp: Miracles of Healing around the World   Recommended Reading by Dr. Vienna Lafrenz Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself by Dr. Joe Dispenza