194: Dr. Mark Hyman: Why You're Still Sick—Finding the Root Cause With Functional Medicine

What if the reason you're still sick isn't because there's no answer—but because no one has looked deeply enough for the root cause? My guest, Dr. Mark Hyman, is one of the world's leading voices in functional medicine, a bestselling author, physician, and founder of The UltraWellness Center. After navigating serious health challenges himself, he built his career around a different approach to chronic illness: stop simply naming the disease and start asking why it happened in the first place. We break down what functional medicine actually is—and why people struggling with mold illness, Lyme disease, MCAS, autoimmune disease, chronic fatigue, brain fog, and unexplained inflammation can spend years moving from specialist to specialist without getting to the underlying problem. We also discuss the new partnership between The UltraWellness Center and Next Health. The UltraWellness Center specializes in deep functional-medicine evaluation for complex chronic conditions, while Next Health provides physician-led longevity care, advanced diagnostics and access to therapies that may be recommended as part of a personalized treatment plan. Together, we are joining forces with a goal to bridge the gap between identifying the root cause and accessing the therapies needed to address it. In this episode, you'll learn: • Why getting a diagnosis is often only the beginning of understanding chronic illness • How functional medicine searches for root causes instead of treating symptoms in isolation • What mold, Lyme disease, MCAS, toxins, gut dysfunction, and inflammation can have in common • How advanced testing can uncover toxins, infections, nutritional deficiencies, microbiome dysfunction, and other factors standard labs may miss • How therapies including hyperbaric oxygen, ozone, phosphatidylcholine protocols, IV therapies, and plasma exchange are being used in complex cases • Why understanding what's happening "under the hood" can help us take a more proactive approach to our health One of my biggest takeaways from this conversation is that a diagnosis shouldn't be the end of the investigation—it should be the beginning. The future of medicine isn't just about treating disease once it appears. It's about better diagnostics, deeper personalization, understanding the interconnected systems of the body, and giving people the tools to address dysfunction at its source. Learn more about Dr. Shah: Website: drshah.com https://www.drshah.com Clinic: next-health.com https://www.next-health.com/ Instagram: @darshanshahmd and @extend_podcast Learn more about Dr. Mark Hyman: Website: drhyman.com https://drhyman.com/ Clinic: ultrawellnesscenter.com https://www.ultrawellnesscenter.com/ Instagram: @drmarkhyman and @ultrawellnesscenter Thank You to Our Sponsors: Function Health: Learn more and join at functionhealth.com/drshah https://www.functionhealth.com/drshah! Use my code DRSHAH25 at checkout for $25 credit towards your membership!

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Before we get started with this episode, I'd like to invite all of you to the first ever Next Health Longevity Summit, happening in Nashville, Tennessee, at the Conrad Hotel on Saturday, September 12, 2026. This is an all-day summit where you're going to be hearing from some of the best speakers in longevity's medicine, including Dr. Vonda Wright, Dr. Luisa Nicola, many of the podcast guests that you've heard here on the Extend Podcast, and of course, I'm going to be there, curating the entire day. We also have incredible vendors coming, so you can try the latest technologies in health, wellness, and longevity. Go to next-health.com/summit and buy your ticket today. We only have 400 spots and

• 0:39Dr. Darshan Shah?

  they're going quickly. That's next-health.com/summit. I look forward to seeing you all there. Welcome to Extend with me, Dr. Darshan Shah, a podcast dedicated to cutting-edge science, research, tools, and protocols designed to help you extend your health span. Having become one of the youngest doctors in the country at the age of 21, and trained and board-certified at the Mayo Clinic, I've accumulated three decades of practice as a board-certified surgeon and longevity expert. Over that time, I've discovered that a mere 20% of health knowledge yields 80% of the results when it comes to your health span. We are living in a new era where we are creating a new healthcare system, no longer focused on disease management, but achieving optimal health and vitality.

• 1:21Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Join me as I interview world-renowned experts, offering you a step-by-step guide to proactively avoid disease, and most importantly, extend your health span.

• 1:33Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Today, I'm going to be diving deep into the future of healthcare with a true pioneer in functional medicine, Dr. Mark Hyman. As a practicing doctor and the founder of the Ultra Wellness Center and a leading voice in functional medicine, Dr. Hyman has spent decades serving as a medical detective for patients dealing with the most complex, chronic, and incurable illnesses. He shares his own personal journey of overcoming severe health battles, from chronic fatigue, Lyme disease, and heavy metal toxicity, to autoimmune issues and gut disorders, and how it shaped his mission to end needless suffering. In this episode, we explore why traditional medicine often misses the root cause by playing whack-a-mole medicine with your symptoms. We're going to talk about how advanced biomarker testing can transform diagnostics and your healthcare, and about the powerful

• 2:18Dr. Darshan Shah?

  synergy between functional medicine insights and cutting-edge treatments like hyperbaric oxygen therapy, ozone therapy, and the P-Cure Protocol. Dr. Hyman and I taped this episode together because of a partnership between Next Health and Ultra Wellness Center, where we are offering advanced-level functional medicine care between our two organizations to truly help patients all across the nation. Get ready for a mind-opening episode that will change how you think about your body and your longevity.

• 2:50Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Hey, everyone. Before we dive into today's episode, I want to talk about something that you hear me talk a lot about, your biomarkers. And I want to tell you how I'm approaching this situation right now with all of the patients that are calling me from listening to this podcast. So what happens is, every day, patients are writing to me saying they feel exhausted, they can't lose weight, they're having brain fog, and they see their doctor, and the doctor tells them all their blood work is normal. But the problem is, this doctor usually is only checking about 10 to 15 biomarkers that only tell you if you have a disease developing. Meanwhile, your body has 160 different systems that are running, and all of these have blood tests that we can test on how effective they're working for you every single day. So if someone is not close to one of my clinics,

• 3:32Dr. Darshan Shah?

  one of my Next Health clinics, then I tell them, go to their local laboratory and get on Function Health. Function Health gives you access to 160 different biomarkers, the same kind of comprehensive testing that we do at all of our Next Health clinics. And if you try to get this on your own through your regular doctor, it can cost you thousands of dollars. Hormones, inflammation, toxins, nutrient levels, they're all tracked over time in this one platform called Function Health. They can even help you get an MRI scan or a CT scan if you want one. So what I love most about this company is that they don't have a crazy incentive to do this. Function doesn't push supplements, they don't have pharmaceuticals they're trying to get you to take. You're just getting the

• 4:12Dr. Darshan Shah?

  data, and you're getting insights from the data. And you can bring this data to a clinic like ours, and we then have the information that we need to tell you how to improve your health. Membership is now only $365 a year. Literally, it's just a dollar a day. And right now, if you're one of my listeners, you can get a $25 credit towards the membership. You just go to the link in the bio, or go to functionhealth.com/drsah, and use the code DRSAH25 for a $25 credit towards your membership.

• 4:45Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Dr. Hyman, I'm so glad to be here with you today, again, on the Extend Podcast. Thanks so much for joining me today.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  Of course, Darshan. It's amazing to always talk to you. I love you, man. You're the best.

• 4:56Dr. Darshan Shah?

  I feel the same way about you. You know that. And it's so great that we've got to be friends, and we get to, you know, see each other at conferences everywhere, and then talking about, you know, making our businesses friends as well, and having Next Health and Ultra Wellness Center come into a partnership. It's been pretty incredible to see this come to fruition.

• 5:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, I've had my practice for 22 years, and we basically see people from all over the world with the most complex illnesses that are often, quote, incurable. But we help people address the root causes, and it's quite amazing when you, when you actually have the right map for people with chronic illness, how much they can get better.

• 5:33Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, it's really incredible. And I think what's really incredible about that, too, for me, Mark, is that a lot of these patients go through the traditional medical system, and they get no help, and they get referred to so many different specialists, each one even more frustrating than the others, because they don't really understand how the systems interrelate. And, you know, I think having a center like Ultra Wellness Center that you created, where someone can look at them from a full systems approach, and make a real diagnosis and really help people, it's something that we just need so much more of.

• 6:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's true. I mean, Darshan, I always say to people, what is your mission? My mission in life is to end needless suffering through the power of understanding the body and through the lens of functional medicine, and then through the power of like, support and help and community to help people change behavior. It's really, you know, we really do have such an incredible scientific set of tools now that we didn't have, you know, even a few decades ago, to understand the human body in a new way. And that new way is not being taught in medical schools, it's not being practiced in most clinics. Unfortunately, it's really hard to get access to it. And the truth is that people suffer needlessly from things that have solutions. I personally have had chronic fatigue. I personally have had really bad Lyme and Babesia. I personally have almost died from mold toxicity. I have

• 6:50Speaker 01

  had horrible gut issues. I've had ulcerative colitis. I've had autoimmune diseases. So I personally have all these things, and I don't have any of them now. And I feel good, and I can function at a high level. And it was through my own journey of suffering, and desperate to find answers, that I had to become a medical detective, one for myself and then for my patients. And to be able to kind of do this over decades with people and help kind of be a medical detective, to pull back the layers and unravel the puzzle of what's happening with chronic complex illnesses, is something that traditional medicine knows almost nothing about. And it medicates with symptoms, covering over

• 7:32Speaker 01

  with drugs, it, you know, palliates things a little bit, it doesn't really address the issues. And people go from doctor to doctor, and I see 10, 20, 30 doctors before they get to me, you know, like, or get to our practice at Ultra Wellness Center. And my joke was, I used to work at Canyon Ranch, which was a health resort, and then I was a resort doctor, the doctor of last resort, you know. And I think, you know, it makes me angry, honestly, Darshan, because we have the understanding of human biology in a way that we never did. We understand the microbiome, mitochondria, the immune system, hormonal and cell communication, and we understand how our bodies detoxify. And we know these basic systems, we understand nutrition, food is medicine. And these puzzle pieces

• 8:16Speaker 01

  have been talked about in different aspects of medicine, but no one's sort of synthesized them until, you know, we kind of, functional medicine started to kind of create a framework or a roadmap or a way of thinking. I mean, functional medicine, for those who don't know what it is, it's not a test, it's not a lab, it's not a supplement, it's not a new specialty. It's a way of thinking. It's almost a meta framework for all of medicine, or everything that you can possibly think of, any condition, any disease, fits in this new framework. And we basically kind of took a left turn with Vesalius, who was a, you know, an anatomist who dissected the human body, saw all these different organs and parts. And then medicine got organized by these organs and parts that actually are

• 9:01Speaker 01

  not separately working. They're all dynamic, connected, and it's not actually the right way to look at it. Like, like inflammation is a great example. You've got, inflammation is driving diabetes, it's driving cancer, it's driving dementia, it's driving heart disease, it's driving depression, it's obviously driving all the autoimmune diseases, but driving aging itself. And instead of like, whack-a-mole, you're just treating all these diseases separately, if you treat the root causes, the diseases go away, the side effect of getting healthy. And that's really what functional medicine is. But it's sometimes, it takes a lot of detective work and a lot of effort to really deal with some of these harder, harder problems.

• 9:37Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, absolutely. And I think part of that detective work that you also leaned into very heavily is biomarker testing and with Function Health. And so we see a lot of people at Next Health that have had their Function Health labs done, and finally, they had that aha moment, like, oh, these are pieces of my biology that no one's even looked at, inflammation, my hormones, et cetera. And then they come to us, like, yeah, toxins, like, how does that fit into the puzzle of how I feel right now? We're like, thank God, you had this realization to actually look under the hood and get your own testing done, so you can now seek help in a more productive way.

• 10:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you know, I actually, that was one of the ways that I kind of figured all this out was was at the Ultra Wellness Center with our team. We have five physicians, we have physicians assistants, we have five nutritionists, nurses, we have an incredible team that's been working together, I mean, almost thirty years together, which is embarrassing to say, that means I'm really old, but it's like, we've been doing this a long time. And, you know, for a while, we were the only kind of ones out there doing this at the level we were doing it. But now more people do it, which is great. But the the thing that that I got to do, which was a privilege, was to do a lot of diagnostics on people. So I got to look at their genetics, I got to look at their microbiome, I got to look at their immune system, I got to look at their food sensitivities, I got

• 10:59Speaker 01

  to look at toxin levels, I got to look at mold exposures, I got to look at tick infections, I got to look at nutritional status, I could look at organic acids and all kinds of things that traditional doctors don't look at. And, you know, it's like, there's a joke I used to tell during a lecture, which was a cartoon I saw once, I saw a guy looking on his light post for something, and this friend comes over and says, what are you doing? He says, well, I'm looking for my keys. He says, where did you lose them? He said, I lost them down the street. He says, why are you looking over here? He says, well, the light's better here. And essentially, when you go to the doctor, they do the normal set of standard tests, because that's what they know what to do, that's where the light is, but it's not actually where the problem is. So they might like, do a

• 11:40Speaker 01

  blood count and a chemistry panel and like, check, you know, an X-ray or something, but they don't know, jeez, I should look at your microbiome for the answer to why you have an autoimmune disease, or I should look at your level of toxins to see why you have, you know, you're not recovering from chronic fatigue syndrome, and look at heavy metals, or you should look at, you know, your food sensitivities and leaky gut as a way of sort of understanding why things are wrong, or maybe I should look at, you know, deep dive on ticks and viruses and latent infections that are affecting a lot of people. Or maybe you, God, you should, I should have taken a history that found out you had like a moldy house and you didn't even know it, or maybe you didn't know it and you were living in there and that caused this whole immune reaction that's causing this chronic symptoms. So, you know, you have to kind of start to do the diagnostics, and that really

• 12:23Speaker 01

  helps you to figure out what's going on. I'm gonna take a little side turn here if I can, if I take a little side turn. I just, this is, this is an incredible story, which is, I was, a friend of mine's kid had a pretty bad, pretty bad ADD and kind of on the spectrum, and, you know, very, you know, behavioral difficulties, they want to give them tons of drugs, and, you know, the parents are like, what do I do? And I look at the kid and I could see, looking at him, he's got allergies, because he's got like the dark circles under his eyes, he's got for sure gut issues, usually often it's dairy. And, you know, he's like five years old, but like, he's got a lot of behavioral issues

• 13:04Speaker 01

  and a lot of, you know, hyper and hyperactivity and, and on the spectrum. And we did a deep dive on the diagnostics, and I'm like, we've got to look at the levels of toxins, we've got to look at his gut, we've got to look at his nutritional status, we've got to look at, you know, things that that are kind of specific to some of these kids. And what we found was he had folate receptor antibody. So basically, the, in the brain, folate is really important for methylation, for brain chemistry function, affects mood, many things. In some kids, dairy is something that triggers this antibody response. So you're creating antibodies to the dairy, but the the side bystander is this folate receptor antibody.

• 13:46Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 13:47Speaker 01

  And, and that causes them to have this huge problem where they they have these behavioral issues. And in fact, the FDA approved for this particular problem, by the way, no pediatricians are looking for this, by the way, like, unless you're in functional medicine, you're not paying attention to this. But they, the FDA approved lukaviran, which is folic acid, a form of folate, to actually treat these kids. So the treatment for this kid isn't just giving folate, it's giving a specific kind of folate called lukaviran. And I, and getting him, and he also had very high antibodies to dairy. So he had a very high antibodies to dairy on his allergy testing, and IgE testing, and he had a high frat binding antibody. That's, and that was just one piece of

• 14:32Speaker 01

  the puzzle. But he also had, he also had extremely high oxidative stress. These kids all have oxidative stress, so their brains are inflamed. He had metabolic triggers of inflammation that were coming from his gut, so he had leaky gut, he had overgrowth of yeast in his gut, he had antibodies against his, we looked at something called the antipyridol and anti-CDP antibodies, because these are antibodies that form after you have an infectious diarrhea, like an infectious gastroenteritis, and it causes like a motility issue in the guts, so he has irritable bowel, and his guts not moving well, and he gets overgrowth of bacteria, and he gets yeast overgrowth, which he had, which can cause a lot of the same symptoms these kids, creates inflammation, he's great, and these kids

• 15:16Speaker 01

  all have brain inflammation, so his kid's got brain inflammation. And he also had on the organic acids a test called quinolinic acid, which essentially is a, when you're metabolizing tryptophan into serotonin, it can kind of go off this side pathway, instead of making a good brain chemistry, it makes this very toxic metabolite for your brain called quinolinic acid. And so this is a kind of like, and he also had high antimony, which comes from like flame retardants, from like pajamas and shit, and bedding and furniture. So he had all these toxins and mercury. So he's got like all these different pieces. And I know we're going to help this kid resolve his, his autism spectrum disorder. I don't know how we're going to completely get rid of all of it, but we're going to help him become a way more functioning, way more normal kid without

• 15:58Speaker 01

  a lot of the symptoms by dealing with this. But none of this, none of these things that I just talked about, whatever hadn't looked at, they're not part of a regular blood count, they're not things people look for, they're, they're weird things, but the, the science is there about this.

• 16:12Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 16:14Speaker 01

  And what's beautiful now is like with AI, you know, the average doctor doesn't know about this, but if you go to Open Evidence, which is the doctor's, you know, kind of AI platform, or you can go to Claude, or, and you put this stuff in there, it's like, yeah, it goes, yeah, this is the thing, and this is how it works, and this is the, the science is there, it's just not getting to the people. So that's, at the Ultra Wellness Center, what we do, we try to kind of close that gap between the science and the practice, and help utilize some of these insights about how the body works as a system, getting the root causes, and then figuring out the right therapies. And sometimes the therapies, like, you know, for me, I'll just kind of share, like, for me, you know, I needed advanced therapies, like when I had Lyme disease and BESIA, and when

• 16:53Speaker 01

  I had mold toxicity, I wasn't getting better. Like, I was, I was wasting away, I had, I had like colitis from the mold and a C. diff infection. And it wasn't until I got ozone, and I got, which you offer at Next Health, and I also had hyperbaric oxygen, which you also offer at Next Health, you know, I was able to start to recover. And then I was able to use something called the PK Protocol, which is a very powerful therapy for rebuilding mitochondria, rebuilding cell membranes, it detoxifies a lot of cellular toxins, it helps remove a lot of the mold toxins, it's an incredibly powerful therapy. But like, you know, at the Ultra Wellness Center, we're in Lenox, Massachusetts, so we know how to think about problems, we know how to solve the problem,

• 17:38Speaker 01

  but a lot of the therapies, we actually don't do. Like, you know, so like, if you need to go and get, you know, hyperbaric, you need to go like, you know, twenty times or thirty times, or you need to go get ozone, you know, every week, or you need to go get PK Protocol, which is IV for cleaning your blood and rebuilding your cell membranes with phospholipids, you need to do that twice a week for ten weeks. So the beautiful thing about Next Health and the partnership with Ultra Wellness Centers, you guys actually do that stuff. So we actually can, you know, identify the problem, figure out the right therapy for that problem, and then you guys can deliver on those therapies, which is incredible. And, and I think, you know, you're now, you know, I don't know, twenty-five cities, and, and expanding, and so it's a real access issue that we didn't have before. So, you know, a lot of times it was frustrating for me, because I knew what a patient

• 18:23Speaker 01

  needed, but it was hard for them to get it, right? We'd like struggle to find the, you know, ways to do it. And, and now it's like, oh, wow, you guys really offer it. And so it's such a great partnership between the Ultra Wellness Center and Next Health, because we both offer something that the other doesn't. We go really, really deep, and, but you, but you can deliver on the modalities that are kind of unique, that are a little bit, you know, I would say a little bit on the fringes of medicine, like plasma freezers, ozone, phosphocoline, you know, NAD, those, there are, there are things that are kind of considered fringe, but if you look at the data, there's, there's data on them, some we'd like more data on, but, but, but, you know, the anecdotal data

• 19:05Speaker 01

  from like thousands of practitioners using this is so profound. And for me, like, I, all I can tell you is my own health benefited from all these therapies, and my patient's health has benefited from these therapies in ways that have really been like game changers. Like, you can't just give a vitamin sometimes, or change your diet sometimes, if you're stuck with these really difficult problems.

• 19:26Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right, exactly. Such beautiful stories, both yours and your friend's child. I mean, it's just such a testament to how well functional medicine actually can work and help people. And, you know, I think about my own story, the reason we even formed Next Health was because I got severely ill twelve years ago with an autoimmune disease. It was called Creutzfeldt-Schutz, an autoimmune disease that was eating away at my skull and my scalp, and causing my skin and my bone to just eat away and give me severe headaches, I couldn't even work anymore. And I was struggling, and I learned from you, functional medicine. I went to a conference in Arizona, I'll never forget it, you were talking about functional medicine.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  Was I there?

• 20:05Dr. Darshan Shah?

  You were there. Yeah, you were there. It was the first time I met you, it was like twelve, thirteen years ago, or fifteen actually now. And I was like, I gotta do a deep dive into this, and I did. And I Was running all over the city of Los Angeles, do hyperbaric at one place, IVs at another place, then I was getting, yeah, and you know, and I was doing all these therapies at like five or six different offices. And I thought to myself like, I'm gonna put this all under one roof. So really, you know, all the therapies that you talk about and you recommended, we put under our roof in one location in West Hollywood, and now that's grown to all over the country. And we look at ourselves as basically the service provider for functional medicine. If you have a functional issue, we can give you the therapies that are recommended

• 20:48Dr. Darshan Shah?

  that could help you. And, um, you know, I think it's been a great partnership with you guys, because you do, people fly in from all over the world to the Ultra Wellness Center to seek relief from conditions that they can't find answers to. And when they go back to their cities, like Chicago, or Miami, or LA, or all the cities that we're in, Seattle, we can then enact your therapeutic program. And that's what's been really working well, because I think a lot of people out there, you know, I always quote you on this one, Mark, I say, people are sick and tired of being sick and tired, right? And so, the first step is to get some testing done, and you know, you provide that, and we provide that at Next Health. And then people are like, now what? And if people come into our clinics, and they have a complex issue, like you were talking about with yourself or your friend,

• 21:33Dr. Darshan Shah?

  and by the way, autoimmune diseases, I think almost all of them fall in that bucket of complexity, because, right? And so then we refer them to you, and your practitioners do telemedicine with them, and figure out a treatment program. And then we put that into place. And it's just worked so well for people looking for this high level of care.

• 21:50Speaker 01

  It's true. And, you know, and there's whole realms of conditions where these kinds of intensive lifestyle and other modalities really move the needle. Like, you know, I was thinking like Lyme disease, and chronic Lyme, and long COVID, and mold illness, you know, we call this MCAS, which is basically mast cell activation syndrome, where people are just reactive to everything, and they have lots of histamine, and they're always having weird symptoms. But there's, and there's all, all autoimmune diseases, you know, from rheumatoid arthritis, to colitis, to MS, and then, and then there's, there's all the neurodegenerative problems, which are, I think, Parkinson's, and Alzheimer's, and ALS, like ALS patients who've done amazingly well, like the PK protocols, a lot of these, the data show ALS comes from, you know, actually these environmental toxins that I, one of

• 22:33Speaker 01

  my patients was a farmer, who was exposed to so many pesticides, and he got ALS, but he's been doing great by getting some of these modalities. So I think,

• 22:41Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Amazing.

• 22:43Speaker 01

  You know, we really, we really need to help people understand that there's, that, you know, that there's a lot that can be offered if you go to the right place, and you have the right intelligence applied, and you have the right modalities that you can lean on after. And there, there are things that, that, you know, people just aren't getting. And it's unfortunate, because so many people walk around suffering, and, you know, like mold is a really common problem. I can't tell you how many people have mold. Somebody or another, like, it almost killed me. I had, like, you know, I had an old barn, I was coughing for a year, then I kind of figured it out, and then I kind of moved out, but then I got a, you know, C. diff infection from an antibiotic, for tooth, for a bad tooth, and my whole system just collapsed. And so, the only way I could rescue myself

• 23:24Speaker 01

  was through ozone, and through hyperbarics, and through IVs, and a lot of the tools that Next Health offers. So I think, you know, sometimes you need the extreme stuff, sometimes you don't, but there's always, there's always a way to sort of design a plan that will help you build towards improving your, and optimizing your health over time.

• 23:42Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right, absolutely. So I'm thinking about, um, you know, people that come in, and they are frustrated because they can't figure out what's going on, and the traditional doctors can't give them help. And I would love for the audience to get like, some kind of, maybe like a word cloud almost, he could put out there, of symptoms that they're suffering with, that if they're suffering with these symptoms, and they can't find help with their traditional primary care doctor, maybe they should consider getting tested at a higher level for a functional, for like a functional issue, or a, or a complex illness. And when do you start getting worked up for a complex illness? Because I think it takes people like

• 24:24Dr. Darshan Shah?

  a year to get to that point sometimes, or five years, or decades sometimes, right? And it's like, you don't have to suffer that long, right? Your mission in life. So what are some of the symptoms that they could be seeking?

• 24:34Speaker 01

  Well, it can be really from the mild to the severe, I call it. You can have anything from FLC syndrome to FLS syndrome. FLC syndrome is when you feel like crap. FLS syndrome, you feel like shit. And so, I think, uh, you know, a lot of times people are walking around with stuff that they just think is normal for them. It's not normal. Like, it's not normal to walk around, everything from ear to bowel, to migraines, to joint pain, to congestion, or rashes, or eczema, these things are not serious or life threatening, but they're very annoying, and they affect people, and they affect the quality of life. So whether it's something like that, or something more severe, like chronic fatigue, or Lyme, or cognitive impairment, or severe psychiatric illnesses, or neurodegenerative diseases, or severe autoimmune diseases, these are, these are things you have to take

• 25:18Speaker 01

  seriously, and understand that, you know, traditional medicine is great for acute care, it's really bad at chronic illness, and they have the wrong map. They're really diagnosing you by symptoms and geography. Okay, where's, okay, you're, you're, you have this wrist pain, and it looks like this, and you have pain in the morning, and it looks like this at x-ray, you have rheumatoid arthritis, and you have this abnormal test. That's just the name of the symptoms. It's not the name of the cause. And, and the way we think about things is really, when you, I think it's worth talking about, is how do we approach these different chronic problems? When you have any of these things that you're suffering from, whether it's, whether you just got chronic eczema and you can't get rid of it, or whether you have like migraines that are debilitating, or whether you have, you

• 25:58Speaker 01

  know, MS, and you really can't walk, like, what, you know, what do you do? Like, and, and I think people think, oh, well, I, I just have to do the traditional treatment. But, you know, our friend Terry Walls, who's a, was a doctor who had severe MS, was in a wheelchair, couldn't move, and is now fine, and riding her bike 20 miles a day, because she uses the principles of functional medicine to repair her brain. And she's studying this at the VA, she's working, showing how improved, much improvement you can have if you follow this plan. But rather than like, all these specialties, and organs, and diseases, we just think of the body very simply. There's like, basically, too much of the bad stuff that's causing a problem that you need to get rid of, and not enough of the good stuff that your body needs to thrive. And functional medicine is really all about, like, diving

• 26:41Speaker 01

  as deep as you can in each of those areas. Like, right? So for that little boy, one of the things I figured out was, he's got too much dairy, which is causing this antibodies, that's blocking his folate receptor, that's causing his brain to not work. That's the problem. It's not that he needs ADD medication, or he's a tranquilizer because he's hyper, or like, you know, that's the problem. And, and so, but it requires you to think about, oh, maybe something he's eating is bothering him. So it's, so I go through the list, and then it's like, how do you figure out, they have too much of the bad stuff, or not the good stuff, what system it's affecting, and which systems are involved? Because there's not that many systems in the body. It's not like you've got the cardiovascular system, and your, you know, your, your kidney system, and your, you know, hepatic system, and your

• 27:25Speaker 01

  neurological system. That's not how the body's organized. It's, it, yes, if you cut yourself open, that's the organs you'll see. Like, you're a surgeon, you know that, but it's not actually how things are working. It's a network. And so there's basically seven systems we think about in functional medicine, and each one of these gets embalmed by either too much of the bad stuff or not the good stuff. It's your gut microbiome, it's your immune system, call it defense and repair, it's your energy system, your mitochondria, how you make energy, that's a very delicate system that gets affected, causes fatigue, and many of these symptoms have all that as part of it. There's your detoxification system, how you handle toxins, and both your own toxins that you make, it's a process of your metabolism, but also all the environmental toxins we're exposed to. Then there's your

• 28:08Speaker 01

  transport system, which is your lymphatic circulation, your vascular system, your communication system is another really important system. That's all the hormones, neurotransmitters, peptides, cytokines, like all the messenger molecules, those all are very sensitive, but those usually downstream to these other things. And then there's your structural system, which is your biomechanical structure, all the way down to your cell membranes. So basically, that's it. And, and, and when you have, it's really a different map. Rather than the 155,000 diseases, we just think about these simple things, too much, too little, and then these seven systems. So what are the too much stuff we look for? And this is really what a good functional medicine doctor will do, is they will be

• 28:50Speaker 01

  Like relentless about answering the question of like, what is it? Right? What's the cost? So is it food? And it could be just eating a shitty diet and eating too much sugar and any diabetes? Or it could be like this boy having dairy that he's got a unique reaction to that's causing a brain dysfunction. It can be gluten, you know, it could be so it could be food sensitivities. It could be microbes. So that could be like infections, like Lyme or things like. You know, mold would be more in the toxin area, I think, but it would be like, it would be like microbes could be like Lyme disease. It could be viruses. It could be changing your microbiome. Yeah, Epstein-Barr virus, you know, it can be changing your microbiome. That's a really big one. And then there's toxins, you know, and this is the environmental toxins, pesticides, heavy metals, mold toxins.

• 29:33Speaker 01

  And so these are, these are the things we have to investigate. So we know how to investigate mold. You know how to investigate Lyme, investigate your microbiome, you know how to investigate infections, you know how to investigate allergens, you know how to investigate food and dietary effects. We know how to investigate also stress, like we can mon- monitor the effects of stress on the body. And that's another big driver of problems. So it's stress, toxins, allergens, microbes for diet. These are the big things that drive the problems and you get rid of those things. And then you have to be a detective to figure out that. On the other side, you have to check what's missing, right? And this little boy, he, he knew he had a unique need for lukavoran. So this little boy had a unique need for this particular form of folate. That is pretty unique, that you would, it's very special to him. So I would, I can't just give him a multivit, I mean, with folate, it's not gonna work.

• 30:16Speaker 01

  So the, the, the idea is like, oh, is it, is it, you need enough of the real food? You need the right nutrients and we can measure those, right? You can measure vitamin levels, you can measure nutrition levels. And you need the right balance of hormones, you need light in the right way, it's circadian rhythm and you need movement and you need sleep. And you need community, connection, meaning, purpose, and you need to be able to investigate whether you have enough of those things. And some of these you can measure easily, right? You can measure, you know, you can measure, for example, like your nutrient levels, let's see if you're deficient in something. Or you can measure your re-ability to realize maybe you don't have enough parasympathetic activation in your life, you know? Can you eat a vagal nerve stimulator or something, you know? So, so basically, it's just, it's, this is the whole process and it's, it's a very systematic process.

• 31:01Speaker 01

  But it requires someone who really understands the body in a different way and understands the patterns and how things connect. And then can kind of create a narrative of what's actually happening. Like with this boy, it's clear his gut's a problem. He's got leaky gut, he's got dysbiosis, he's got yeast overgrowth. He's got dairy sensitivity, it's causing this receptor problem in his brain. He's got toxins as well. All of this is causing inflammation, all of this is causing oxidative stress, all of this is causing neuroinflammation. And so that, that's all has to get dealt with. So we're gonna change his diet and get him off gluten and dairy. We're gonna give him, you know, a treatment for his microbiome, I'm gonna give him an antifungal, I'm gonna give him this lukavoran treatment. I'll probably give him a methyl B12 shot because he's got some methylmalonic acid elevations on his urine test, which is another marker that doctors don't look at for B12.

• 31:45Speaker 01

  You know, we're gonna give him, you know, things to help support the oxidative stress that's going on with him. And so we're basically gonna, and I don't even have all his tests back yet, so I'm still like working, I just, so I'm, I'm just kind of giving an example of a flavor. How specifically we work? And if I saw another kid with the same symptoms, he might have a very different set of problems. And he'd have a very different set of treatments. Because I always say, if you know the name of your disease, it doesn't mean you know what's wrong with you. Say Alzheimer's or autism or migraines or rheumatoid arthritis, it doesn't mean you know the cause for your particular version of that condition. And that's what social medicine is really personalized. And then the treatments become personalized. So now as we start with lifestyle,

• 32:29Speaker 01

  but we often have to graduate to the things that offered at Next Health, which you guys are so good at delivering. The IVs, the phosphocolin IVs, the hyperbaric oxygen, the ozone therapies, polyphoresis, you guys do exosomes. I don't know if you're doing stem cells now, you do stem cells. These things should all be tools that are really helpful. So that's what's so beautiful. You first you need the map and then you know what tools you're gonna.

• 32:50Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right, exactly. And that's, that's such a great way of explaining functional medicine in a nutshell. And it's been incredibly powerful for so many patients. And so, you know, at our locations, we have medical providers there, we have doctors, we have nurse practitioners. But they, they don't have the deep level of expertise that Ultra Wellness Center has sometimes. So 30 years with five practitioners and your whole team there. And so some of these people come in and we really want to get that super personalized program for them. So we refer them over to you and I would love to like talk about two or three of the referrals we've made recently. And maybe you can kind of explain those to the audience so they know what type of people can get help through this partnership at any one of our locations at Nex Health.

• 33:31Speaker 01

  We did the math. I think we probably had like 150 years of collective functional medicine experience with the doctors. It's crazy.

• 33:37Dr. Darshan Shah?

  That's incredible. That's awesome. So one of the persons that came in, she had mast cell activation syndrome, okay? So this is something that a lot of people have not heard of, but she was really, really suffering. She was suffering with just, you know, in the middle of a day at work, she would just get hives all over her body. She'd have to go home, she would sometimes visit the emergency room for these types of symptoms, just, and they'd come out of nowhere. And so she was so frustrated to the point where she was just staying at home every single day, all day long, just in fear of this disease and caused a tremendous amount of stress. And so could you talk a little bit about mast cell activation syndrome? What it is, what are some of the causes and potential treatment options?

• 34:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, so mast activation syndrome is a really horrible condition. That, thinking about like allergies on steroids. It's, you know, the, it, it, it's an overproduction and overreaction to almost an allergic syndrome to almost everything that people eat, that they're exposed to chemicals. And, and mast cells are the cells in your body that produce histamine. So you know, if you get hives, that's like a histamine reaction or bee sting, that's a histamine reaction. But imagine that going on all the time. And that often is a result of, of many underlying factors that, that can be the things that we talked about. So it can be triggered by long COVID, it can be triggered by tick infections, it can be triggered by mold, it can be triggered by heavy metals.

• 35:03Speaker 01

  It can be triggered by gut issues that happen, like that cause a dysbiosis that then creates a leaky gut. And, and it just tips people into this cycle where they're reacting to everything. They're, they're, they're having all these autonomic symptoms or having all these weird allergic symptoms. And it's hard for them to eat things. And so there's a, there's a real way to sort of unpack the cause of it. So it's not just about treating the, the, with an antihistamine, because you can do that. And that may be part of the treatment, that part of the treatment might be, you know, giving people different antihistamines. It might be giving them things like chromolin, which is a thing that can help block the histamine in the gut. It might be giving them the herbs and things that are very good in modulating the immune reaction. But it's really more about getting to the root causes of it.

• 35:46Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 35:46Speaker 01

  And I think that's, that's what people with this problem often are not diagnosed. Uh, you know, there are, there are real ways to, to diagnose it, that people can, can, can learn. But I think that, you know, for the most part, uh, mast cell activation syndrome is something that people just don't, don't know that much about in the traditional medical field.

• 36:06Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Exactly. Yeah. And, and what I was gonna just say, just to add to that, Mark, is that, you know, if you're, if you are experiencing these hyperallergic reactions, the treatment is temporarily histamine, antihistamines, and some, some people even walk in on high doses of steroids. But the idea here is we gotta get to the cause or else you're gonna be suffering with this forever. And it could get worse and worse. And so until someone does a root cause analysis of why you're having this problem, you're just gonna suffer forever. And I think it's, it's, I think a lot of people get the diagnosis and they just assume that steroids is a treatment forever. And that's not the case.

• 36:42Speaker 01

  No, no. And it's really, you know, the, the mast cell activation syndrome, you can get all kinds of symptoms like skin stuff, flushing, hives, itching.

• 36:50Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 36:51Speaker 01

  You can get bloating, gut issues, diarrhea, you can get palpitation, blood pressure issues, brain fog, you know, all weird anxiety, headaches, sleep issues. It's kind of multi-system congestion, you know, all the respiratory stuff. But it's like, it comes, it goes, it flares. And, you know, there's ways to diagnose that, you know, there's, there's blood work, there's serum trip days, there's, there's 25 hour urine mediators, like methyl histamine. And, and so there's, there's a lot of ways to figure it out. And then there's, there's actually, you know, ways to actually treat it, like with lowering the load of, you know, foods that have histamine in them, eating more fresh food. Certain mast cell stabilizers, antihistamines, like they're natural, like quercetin, the Eol, and vitamin C. D A O is an enzyme that can help process histamine nettles.

• 37:36Speaker 01

  And there's, and then of course you might need medication, you might need antihistamines, you might need mast cell stabilizers. You might need things like low dose naltrexone, which is something, that's something most doctors will use. And then you'd sort of, you need to sort of fix the gut, you need to treat the mold, you need to treat it infections, you need to optimize nutrient status. You know, there's, there's things you can do. There's even helmet therapy and things like that. So I think, I think, you know, there's a lot of stuff that can be quite powerful. But again, unless you know how to think about the problem and know how to diagnose it, you're not gonna get to the right answer. And that's really what, what, what, what functional medicine is. It's a thinking solution. It's a, it's a new way of thinking. You know, my, my mentor Sid Baker talked about how traditional medicine is always in the naming and blaming game.

• 38:20Speaker 01

  We name the disease and then we blame the name for the problem. Oh, I know why you have hives, it's because you have mast cell activation syndrome. No, that's just a name we get to people who have hives. I know why you're sad and hopeless and helpless because you have depression. No, that's just a name we get to people who have those symptoms. It doesn't say anything about the cause. And so he says, instead of naming and blaming, we need to think and link. So it's a thinking and linking game, really. And that's what functional medicine is, you're really not, you don't stop thinking when you make the diagnosis. When you and I went to medical school, basically, once we got the diagnosis, we stopped thinking. It's like, okay, here's the treatment. Okay, you got this disease, this is the drug, right? This surgical problem is the surgery. It's like, as long as you make the diagnosis, that was the holy grail. But in functional medicine, diagnosis is just the first step on the way to figuring things out.

• 39:06Speaker 01

  Then, then you have to figure out what the cause is, and then that takes a little bit of investigation.

• 39:10Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, yeah, that's, that's such a great point. The diagnosis is not the end of the journey, right? It's not diagnosis and prescriptions and you're done. Now it's time to figure out why, so you can get off potentially the prescriptions and reverse the problem. Um, the other one I wanted to talk to you about that you actually had told me your story around was Lyme disease. And, you know, it's pretty incredible, even I practice out here in California. And we're seeing a lot of people with Lyme disease even out here in California now. So can you talk a little bit about Lyme and kind of why it's, how prevalent it is and what people should think about?

• 39:42Speaker 01

  It's very prevalent. It's, you know, it's not, when people say Lyme, I think it's a, it's a rubric for all tick-borne illnesses. So it could be Lyme, Babesia, Bartonella, Ehrlichia, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. There's a lot of these things. And there's very many variations. There's different forms of Borrelia, which is a Lyme. There's different forms of Babesia, there's different forms of, of Ehrlichia and Bartonella. And they all, they all are something that's hard to diagnose. And so my friend, colleague, Richard Horowitz, who's a, kind of a Lyme expert, who wrote, just come up with a new book called, I think, Antichronic Illness or something, which is similar, which are all these things we're talking about.

• 40:17Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 40:18Speaker 01

  And, and it's, and he, and he, you know, he talked about how he diagnosed it, but it's, it can come in so many different forms. It can cause autoimmune disease. It can cause chronic fatigue syndrome. It can make you more susceptible to mold stuff. It can get reactivated with COVID. It can, it can actually cause a lot of neurodegenerative symptoms. He, he, he just showed through a trial using a Dapsone and some other drugs in patients with Alzheimer's and high levels of a thing called PTW217, which is a biomarker we test to look at your risk for Alzheimer's again, something your doctor wouldn't check for. We offered it function. We offered it, I'm sure you're offered there at the next health and Ultra Wellness Center, but it's, it was like a, like a blood sugar. Instead of like checking for diabetes with your blood sugar, you're checking for dementia with this test.

• 41:03Speaker 01

  Cause it's not like cholesterol where it's like a risk factor. This is actually showing there's damage in your brain. So he was able to show by treating Lyme that we were able to reduce PTW217 and reverse the cognitive symptoms of Alzheimer's. So these, these conditions parade. It's all kinds of things, you know, and I remember you probably remember from medical school and you learned about syphilis. It was like the great masquerader, right?

• 41:26Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 41:27Speaker 01

  Right? And then all these, those neurosyphilis, all the weird heart, it would affect everything. And I think Lyme disease and the tick-borne infections are like this new syphilis, is or like AIDS. It suppresses your immune system. It affects everything. And so you really, you know, really need to kind of get to the root of it. And I mean, it's the right diagnostics. And the treatments are tough because, you know, antibiotics are, can be helpful, but they often don't solve the whole problem. And the things that can be really helpful are things like hyperbarics and ozone, which can really, really do help a lot. And that helped, for example, helped me a lot to get rid of my, had Babesia, I had Lyme disease. It was bad.

• 42:01Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah. Yeah. And we offer ozone at every one of our locations. So it's very prevalent and we can, we can definitely help treat people. We've seen a lot of people have tremendous improvement in their symptoms with it. So it's been, it's been great to, you know, be able to offer the testing as well for Lyme disease, which I think is very hard to find. Otherwise, you know, just traditional infection disease doctors, or if you ever even get to one. So.

• 42:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, they don't do the right tests. Yeah.

• 42:26Dr. Darshan Shah?

  They don't do the right tests. Right. Exactly. And by the way, just to highlight on that, what tests do you guys use at Ultra Wellness Center for Lyme disease?

• 42:32Speaker 01

  Well, there's different tests. I mean, you know, there's some of, some of the things you can use from regular lab that are indicators like CD57 levels, LabCorp, but we use infecto labs, we'll use iGenX labs. There's, there's specialty labs that are focused more on, on tick infections, but, but you know, sometimes you'll pick it up on a regular lab test, but often not. So.

• 42:54Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 42:54Speaker 01

  And, and even sometimes if your immune system's not great, you might not even melt a response that's very good. So it's sometimes a clinical diagnosis. It's tricky.

• 43:03Dr. Darshan Shah?

  It is tricky. Yeah. Yep. Let's talk a little bit about something both you and I have had in the past too, mold. This is rampant here where I live. It's, almost every house has a mold in it. And, uh, cause we live close to the water here, but, um, it's, it's a bad problem and people are really suffering from mold and they don't realize it. Talk a little more about mold.

• 43:22Speaker 01

  Well, I lived in a, I mean, I've mold a couple of times in my life. I lived in a house that was from 1825. It was the former post office in this little town in Massachusetts.

• 43:31Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 43:32Speaker 01

  And the basement was so moldy. And this is before I really knew about mold, before I kind of got into punctual medicine. And I got pretty sick with chronic fatigue and I couldn't get rid of it. And I moved out of that house and I moved into a barn. And I moved into a 1898 barn that.

• 43:50Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Oh, my gosh. Upgrade.

• 43:51Speaker 01

  Had the stalls in the basement with the mold. It was, you could smell it when you walked in, the musty moldy smell. And eventually I renovated it and I, and, but I, I, it was not even that long ago. It was about 10 years ago that I had, I was working really hard at Cleveland Clinic. I was traveling a lot. I was, you know, in my house, but I, I had this horrible cough that I couldn't get rid of. And I was like, oh, I just, you know, typical doctor, you know, I just ignored my health. I'm about a mission. I'm working hard, whatever. I think I booked whatever I was doing. And, and I mentioned, I was like, this is not right. I think it's, must be my mold in the house. And so I did, I did the testing. I tested myself. I tested the house. I was like, oh shit, it's really bad.

• 44:36Speaker 01

  And then I had to move out. I had to remediate my house, but, but, but then what happened was I got this massive inflammatory kind of crisis that happened. And there was a cascade of things, but I ended up having, uh, developing severe fatigue, cognitive function, uh, severe gut issues, like as a result of C. diff, but it was because the mold had set my system up to be in this chronic activated inflammatory state and I couldn't get out of it. And I was stuck in it. And I had, you know, chronic, you know, gastro, gastroenteritis in my stomach. I had colitis. I was going, had 20 bloody baubuns a day. I was in bed. I lost 30 pounds. I was a scarecrow. And it was bad. I don't have 30 pounds to lose. I'm pretty skinny to talk about. It was actually funny because it was a patient of mine who I'd been treating,

• 45:19Speaker 01

  who had mold and had been in a house in, in the area with mold. And I had been, you know, staying in touch with him. And he's like, hey, just FYI, I tried ozone and it really helped my mold. And I'm like, oh. And I was like, always like, oh, ozone. It's like, sounds weird. And I, I'm kind of on the edge, but it was, it fell too far out for me, even that, even this 10 years ago. And I was like, I, I, I've heard enough stories. Like I've heard.

• 45:47Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 45:47Speaker 01

  When my patients come and say, well, I was sick with this, this and that. And I did ozone. I got better. And I probably heard that a dozen times over the years. And, and this, this time I listened and I said, okay, well, I'm dying. I'm literally, literally dying. Couldn't eat. I was 30 pounds lighter. I was in bed. I couldn't function at all. I couldn't work. I couldn't answer. I couldn't do anything. I could barely just get downstairs for one meal a day. And I said, I'm going to try it. So I went to New York and like you said, I had to piece together a hyperbaric chamber here and ozone here and IV there. And I was like, oh my God. It was before Next Health. And, um, and I ended up getting better as a result of, you know, doing ozone therapy. And it was, it just, it just reset my immune system. It reset my mitochondria. It cleared a lot of the toxins. It was quite

• 46:32Speaker 01

  powerful. And I was really, I was really shocked, honestly, how effective it was. It's not a panacea for everything, but it is, it's a very powerful hermetic therapy that can really help a lot of people with many chronic issues, including chronic infections, cleaning mold, including, you know, like Lyme disease, tick infections, autoimmune diseases can be very helpful. So I, I definitely, I definitely think it's got a powerful role in medicine.

• 46:58Dr. Darshan Shah?

  The last kind of thing I wanted to bring to the audience's attention is this newer treatment that you introduced to me that we then lodged at Next Health specifically for your patients. And now we have a lot of patients talking about it, which is the PK or phosphatidylcholine protocol, the IV protocol. And I think this is something that people are hearing about. It's difficult to understand what it is. And I want them to hear it from you because you're such a great teacher of explaining this to me.

• 47:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, thank you. I mean, look, the, the reality is that, you know, we are poisoned. And whether it's the, you know, load of petrochemical products, flame retardants, pesticides, phthalates, plastics, I mean, you name it. We're exposed to pretty much everything. If anybody, and they've done these studies where they've done fat biopsies or they, when they get a fat, like they'll do a surgery and they'll, if you have to remove some piece of fat or even a breast reduction or even a panicolectomy or whatever, they'll just like do those five biopsy. And like, everybody is just loaded with toxins. And even the newborn study from the environmental working group, you know, showed 10 newborn babies

• 48:05Speaker 01

  before they took their birth breath had 287 toxins in their umbilical cord blood. And, and so what happens, these studies, your toxins get lodged in your tissues. They get lodged in your cell membranes. And your cell membranes are made of fat. And majority of that fat is something called phosphatidylcholine. And it's, it's really important for many things, including neurotransmitter function, but more importantly, just for the health of your cell membranes and the health of your cell communication and the relationship between your cells are determined by that. Mold also really disturbs the, this, this thing called paroxysomes, especially these little factors in your cells that mill, build the fats for your cell membrane. So mold actually poisons these things and you get

• 48:48Speaker 01

  really funny membranes. Your cells don't communicate well. You get lots of inflammation and you're dealing with all this cellular toxic load of mold and also in my mental toxins. And then that causes mitochondrial injury and mitochondria also have membranes. And so basically this is a protocol that was evolved and developed by someone named Patricia Kane and looking at. What we call phospholipid exchange. So basically they're taking, it's like a thing of it is like an oil change. You're literally putting in this oil, phosphatalkine into your body through an IV. And you can do it orally, but it's not as effective. And it basically rinses out all your cell membranes and it gets rid of the cellular toxins. It rebuilds your mitochondria, it rebuilds your cell membranes. Incredibly good for chronic fatigue syndrome, for mold toxicity,

• 49:32Speaker 01

  particularly mold exposure. It's very hard to deal with mold. That is one of the most powerful therapies. It really helps with people who have Parkinson's or Alzheimer's. It helps people with chronic fatigue. It helps people with any kind of neurologic issues, cognitive issues, brain fog. I did it. And I kind of was cleaning myself up after. It's one of the most consequential things I've personally done to improve my cognitive function and my, my brain fog was so powerful. And I've used it a lot with people with Parkinson's, with Alzheimer's, with mold issues. And it's really quite effective. And it combines phosphatalkine

• 50:11Speaker 01

  with a bunch of other things like glutathione and methylated B vitamins and biotin and carnitine and minerals. It's like a cocktail. But it's basically, you know, twice a week for 10 weeks. So the deal with my next health is it's like, you know, you have to go in regularly at the Ultra Wellness Center. We can't really deliver that because people come from all over the world. They're not just going to live there for 10 weeks. So they, instead of home, they can find an excellent center and they can do twice a week therapy for 10 weeks. Some of the people need to do it a second time. But, you know, you can actually measure your toxin load before and after. And I've done that. It's striking to see how dramatically it changes. So I think, you know, it's one of the most, I think, important and advanced therapies for all kinds of chronic illnesses that people are just starting to learn about. But I've been, I've been doing

• 50:56Speaker 01

  some version of it for 30 years. It's not, it's not new. Oh, yeah. Patricia Kane, Patricia Kane taught this to me probably in the late 90s. It was probably in the late 90s. And I, and I've been using it ever since, but in different versions. This is the more involved version of it. But it's quite, it's quite effective.

• 51:16Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, I agree. We, we have quite a few patients going through hyperbarics, you know, ozone and PK protocol right now for mold toxicity. And they seem to be doing a lot better. And also, you know, people that have even some neurological symptoms and of even Parkinson-like symptoms as well that are using it, that are seeing some improvement.

• 51:36Speaker 01

  Well, that's what I really got kind of doubled down on it because I really saw a Parkinson's patient with like dramatic change. And I was like, whoa, you know, that's, and Parkinson's is one of those conditions we know is related to a high load of environmental toxins.

• 51:51Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yes, absolutely. And speaking of environmental toxins, you guys sent a patient to us in Colorado that's doing plasma exchange with us, specifically for toxin removal as well. Can you maybe just highlight on plasma exchange a little bit for us?

• 52:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, so plasma freeze system. Yeah, I mean, plasma freeze system is a sort of a treatment that's been around in medicine for a long time. And it's been used for autoimmune diseases, for people who have, you know, different levels of sort of inflammatory problems because it removes a lot of the autoimmune antibodies, removes a lot of inflammatory products in your blood, but also removes toxins. And there's some really promising research around Alzheimer's and cognitive function. So again, it's also, it's like, you know, you think about like your, your oil filter just gets clogged and you want to like clean it. And it's like, it's sort of like blood cleaning in, in a way, it basically filters your blood, removes a lot of the, you know, old waste and toxins and inflammatory products and antibodies. And, and then, you

• 52:47Speaker 01

  know, you get this new flush of albumin and it can bind to more stuff and clean. So it basically creates a, it's almost like an oil filter change.

• 52:55Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yes, exactly.

• 52:57Speaker 01

  And, and it really works for people with, with, with chronic issues, particularly people with, you know, long COVID. There's been quite a bit of research on that in Europe on long COVID and plasma freeze system. And I, I think there's more and more research coming out of longevity, as in longevity therapy, there's more research coming out of Alzheimer's. So I think, I think we're going to see more and more benefits of this. You know, it is, it is a quite an involved procedure. But, you know, I've done a fair bit. I've done a lot of these treatments myself at Next Health. So honestly, when I go there, I, I, I don't like to go any place where I don't trust. And, you know, I, I think there's a lot of shady operations out there. And I go in the next health, very professional, very buttoned up, you know, very clean, clearly follows, you

• 53:42Speaker 01

  know, protocols and standards. And so I feel like I'm personally, when I go somewhere and I want to do that stuff, I'm going to see you, Darshan.

• 53:51Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Thank you.

• 53:52Speaker 01

  I draw you up and like, hey, I'm in L.A. Can I come in?

• 53:55Dr. Darshan Shah?

  I love it. I get to kiss and hang out with you because we have you tied into the chair for two hours.

• 53:59Speaker 01

  That's right. You're like, tie me down for two hours.

• 54:03Dr. Darshan Shah?

  That's how we, that's how we hang out now doing plasma exchange. No, that's, that's fantastic. Well, I think this was a fantastic overview for my listeners about our partnership. And I'm really excited about this because we're just going to be able to help so many more people, people that did not have access to incredible thinkers, like the people at the Ultra Wellness Center that you've assembled there that have tremendous experience and we're giving them access to. And also, you know, they, they see you guys and then they come back and do the treatments that we really believe in that can really help them. So for complex cases, and even for non-complex cases, I think this partnership has been fantastic. And we really appreciate you.

• 54:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, you just need a tune up. It's like, you know, honestly, I think, you know, if people can afford it and need these kinds of treatments, you know, to me, you know, we all have something. And, you know, even if you feel okay, you know, it's always about trying to understand what's under the hood. Like, you could drive around your car and it's fine. But like, what if you had no warning lights and no, no dashboard, you know, if your tire pressure was low, your gas was low, your oil is low, or you need to check your engine, or like, we don't have that dashboard. So basically, basically your car would just go and then it would just kind of go off. But we were like, okay, warning, check your, you know, your tire pressure, check up for your car. We don't have that for our body. But we really need a dashboard. And that's why Function Health, you know, kind of give people a really clear dashboard. That's why

• 55:26Speaker 01

  people need to do the diagnostics at places like Ultra Wellness Center and Next Health to see what is actually happening. Because, you know, you might have a toxic load in your system, and you might not know it. Like, I had high, high levels of heavy metals and mercury, which is one of the things that I found out, you know, early on when I got chronic fatigue, that was the cause. And I didn't know it. And I was fine. I was like, fine. I was riding my bike 100 miles a day. I was, you know, cognitively great. I felt good. And then boom, something happened. And I went from perfect to like barely functioning within a couple of days. And so it's like, if I had found out I had mercury before, and I had addressed it, I probably wouldn't have gotten sick. Right?

• 56:07Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 56:07Speaker 01

  So, so it's really a cleaning up, making sure nutrients are optimized, making sure your toxin load is low, making sure your gut's healthy, making sure, you know, how many latent infections or ticks that are kind of swimming around in there that are potentially going to cause a problem. Because, you know, we, we manage, our bodies manage until the equilibrium shifts and the balance kind of goes, tilts towards the, you know, over stressed about whatever it is. And, and then, you know, you kind of fall apart. It's like, yeah, people with chronic illness were fine until they got COVID and then they died because they had this underlying chronic thing. So I think that's really important for people to understand that it's important to really be proactive about your health. So even, even if you don't have a chronic illness, even if you're not like struggling really terribly, but you just want to look at what's

• 56:51Speaker 01

  going on, there's so much you can do. We can do it at Ultra Wellness Center. There's so much you can do to tune yourself up. Like, I go in for plasma freeze system. I go in for ozone. I go in for IVs. I go in for like a PK protocol probably every couple of years because I just want to keep my system healthy. It's more like maintenance rather than like waiting till something happens. So.

• 57:10Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right, absolutely. It's a whole new world, I think, that we're living in now where there's solutions to complex problems. And also there's a way to maintain optimal health for a long time. And that's kind of like, I think, your mission and my mission is to help people live their longest and healthiest life and not get sick. Yeah. And to your point, and needless suffering, right? So really appreciate you doing this with me, Mark. This is awesome. Thank you.

• 57:34Speaker 01

  Fine. It was fun, as always. Take care.

• 57:37Dr. Darshan Shah?

  As always. Can't wait to see you again. Thank you.

• 57:42Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Thank you so much for listening to the podcast today. Please remember to subscribe if you liked this episode and give us a good review and share a link with your friends. It really helps to support all of our efforts. I also want to remind you that the information shared on this podcast is for educational purposes only and is not intended to replace professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Please consult with your healthcare provider or physician before making any decisions or taking any action based on what you hear today, especially if you have any underlying health conditions or on any medications. Your doctor knows your personal health situation the best, and it's always important to seek their guidance.