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Radical healing with Functional Medicine – environmental toxins

Radical healing with Functional Medicine - environmental toxins
Radical healing with Functional Medicine – environmental toxins

This is the continuation of the transcript of Patrick Wanis, Human Behavior and Relationship Expert, PhD and Dr. Michael Bauerschmidt, Medical Director of Full Potential Health Care exploring radical healing via Functional Medicine – treating the root cause instead of symptoms for serious chronic disease. For Part 1, click here: https://patrickwanis.com/blog/radical-healing-functional-medicine/

Patrick Wanis: But the physical toxin is different to the environmental toxin?

Dr. Mike: Yeah. And when I say physical toxins, I’m also talking about things that are already broken on you. So your hormones are out of balance. You got — men has low testosterone; women has the pre-menopause thing. Most everybody in this country has adrenal stress, functional hyperthyroidism, hypertension, hypercholesterolemia which by itself is not an issue, by the way, but that’s a whole another topic of discussion. Cholesterol is not the enemy; cholesterol is your friend. Overweight, metabolic syndrome, all these things that are demanding the body engage in maintaining other than — rather than growths and repair. So those are kind of your physical toxins.

As opposed to environmental toxins which are all the heavy metals, the 800,000 different chemicals that have been invented since the 1900s, that are just rampant through our atmosphere and our water and our food supply — pesticides, herbicides, plasticizers, phthalates, volatile organic compounds, diesel exhaust particles, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, new car smells, carpeting, paints on the walls. I mean, it’s not a question of are we toxic? The question is really how toxic are we and how is it affecting our life?

Patrick Wanis: Are you saying then the physicality is what’s already going on with our body.

Dr. Mike: Yes.

Patrick Wanis: Correct?

Dr. Mike: Correct.

Patrick Wanis: The environment, everything that’s happening to us from outside of our body — that could be the air, that could be the water, that could be whatever — heavy metals —

Dr. Mike: Food supplies, yeah.

Patrick Wanis: — in the food supply. The next is the emotions which is what are we thinking, what are we feeling which is obviously one of my areas of expertise. And I’m always asking people, always trying to get to the root cause of my client. What are your thoughts? What are your beliefs? How do you perceive the world around you? How do you interact with the people and the world around you?

Then the final one, which is the letter D, is diet, and now what you’re referring to here is, what is the fuel that you’re giving your body?

Dr. Mike: Exactly.

Patrick Wanis: So what are we bringing into the body? What emotions and thoughts are going on in the body? What else is happening in the environment that’s affecting our body as well as potentially our emotions? And then finally, what state is our body presently in? Whether that’s a genetic state or whether it’s just right at this moment your body has low thyroid, has adrenal exhaustion, your hormones are out of balance, et cetera. Is that summation correct?

Dr. Mike: That correct. Yup, that’s a very nice summation.

Patrick Wanis: All right.

Dr. Mike: So all together is what is manifesting your current state of health.

Patrick Wanis: Let me ask you this, I’m curious, are you a pariah in your field because you’re coming from — become renowned for being very critical of anti-depressants, and yes, I understand that there are some — in some case, it has saved people’s lives in a crisis. But just today it was announced that there was a Dallas Sunday schoolteacher who committed suicide just after he tried to kill his wife or stab his wife and it’s now being found that he was on zolazepam, I think it is, which is another name or generic name for Ambien.

Dr. Mike: Ambien.

Patrick Wanis: It’s a — right. And I have numerous clients who had extraordinary horrible experiencs with Ambien. Jack Nicholson, the famous actor, warned Heath Ledger about taking Ambien. He said, “Don’t take it.” And Jack Nicholson told Heath Ledger of an experience he had when he was on Ambien and he was driving and he did — and he almost ran off a cliff and he didn’t even know he was in the car driving.

Dr. Mike: Yeah.

Patrick Wanis: So I’ve had clients tell me that — yeah, that they’re on Ambien, and it’s not until the next morning that someone else tells them, “You we’re doing this last night.” And that person says, “No, I was asleep.”

Dr. Mike: Yeah. I have had patients tell me things just like that. I went to bed and the house is a mess and the next morning I woke up and everything was clean and neat and dinner was — and the plate was set for a six-course dinner.

Patrick Wanis: Wow!

Dr. Mike: And somebody must have broken into my house because I don’t remember doing it.

Patrick Wanis: I have a client that unfortunately would tell stories that the next morning her husband or children were telling her that she was walking around the house naked at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning, and she has no recollection.

So my point is, unfortunately, the way that medicine has evolved today in the West is that it’s purely focused on treating the symptoms and it’s not about treating the cause. And that’s very different to the way that medicine originally began which was really about looking at the whole person and particularly looking at something that we’re going to get to talk about in a moment which is about food, that the food is the fuel. Hippocrates said, “Let food be your medicine,” not medicine be your food. I didn’t have that, but that’s what I would be reaching for.

Dr. Mike: Yeah, it was only in the 1900s when Abraham Flexner and John D. Rockefeller got together with the AMA to standardize medical school education that was not taught. And there’s a whole story behind that if you’re interested.

Patrick Wanis: I’m realizing as we speak that we could talk about this for hours. And I really want to get some of the powerful information out to help people because you’ve just identified a beautiful blend of I guess Western medicine and maybe even Eastern in the sense of looking at the whole person, looking at the diet.

I’ve had a lot of experience with traditional Chinese medicine because it’s been very helpful to me. And there they talk about the food that you eat. There they talk about the herbs. They look at you as a whole person. And interestingly, for example, one Chinese doctor that I went to said to me, “Don’t worry about what you eat. Just make sure you eat all five colors,” for example, meaning eat a little bit of everything. And one of the Chinese doctors that I attend to is a Western trained doctor and a Chinese trained doctor. So he has — he’s able to combine both.

But what you’re doing is unique, and you’re bringing it back to what it originally was when you said let food heal you. Let food be your medicine. So maybe we can record a separate interview just on adrenal exhaustion and talk a little bit more about the kind of recommendations that you give to people when you’re talking about the diet, emotions, environment, and the physicality.

Dr. Mike: Diet is, to me, until you fix that, you’re just banging your head up against the wall because your diet is what your body is going to be the fuel for your body; it’s going to have all the vitamins and minerals and nutrients which are all the cofactors that your body needs in order for it to produce energy and to maintain its basic functions.

The big enemy here is processed foods. And you can know a processed food very easily because what you’re about to put in your mouth, if it doesn’t look like it did when it was growing on a plant or on the tree, it’s been processed. And when you process a food, you take the nutrients out of it.

For the continuation of this transcript – Part 3 (discussing processed foods), click here: https://patrickwanis.com/blog/radical-healing-functional-medicine-processed-foods/

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