Fix the Brain, Change the Mind: Root-Cause Psychiatry with Dr. Robert Hedaya

On this episode of The Dr. Hyman Show, I sit down with Dr. Robert Hedaya, a psychiatrist who has spent decades working at the intersection of biology, brain function, and mental health. His approach starts with a different question than most psychiatry asks: what’s interfering with the brain’s ability to regulate, adapt, and repair itself? We talk about why many mental health diagnoses describe symptoms without explaining causes—and how measuring brain function, energy, and network activity is opening the door to more precise, individualized care. Watch the full conversation on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts. [YOUTUBE THUMBNAIL] We discuss: • How biological imbalances can drive anxiety, depression, and cognitive symptoms • Why many “treatment-resistant” mental health issues have overlooked root causes • How brain energy and mitochondrial function influence mood and cognition • What advanced brain mapping reveals about how your brain is actually working For far too long, mental health care has focused on managing symptoms in isolation. This discussion looks at what becomes possible when we treat the brain as part of the whole system and support its ability to heal. View Show Notes From This Episode Get Free Weekly Health Tips from Dr. Hyman https://drhyman.com/pages/picks?utm_campaign=shownotes&utm_medium=banner&utm_source=podcast Sign Up for Dr. Hyman’s Weekly Longevity Journal https://drhyman.com/pages/longevity?utm_campaign=shownotes&utm_medium=banner&utm_source=podcast Join the 10-Day Detox to Reset Your Health https://drhyman.com/pages/10-day-detox Join the Hyman Hive for Expert Support and Real Results https://drhyman.com/pages/hyman-hive This episode is brought to you by Seed, Sunlighten, Timeline, Paleovalley, Fatty15 and Pique. Go to seed.com/hyman and use code 20HYMAN to get 20% off your first month. Visit sunlighten.com and use code HYMAN to save up to $1400. Receive 35% off a subscription at timeline.com/drhyman. Head to paleovalley.com and use code HYMAN20 for 20% off your first order. Visit fatty15.com/hyman and use code HYMAN to save an extra 15% on a 90-day subscription. Secure 20% off your order plus a free starter kit at piquelife.com/hyman.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  A woman comes to me and she's having panic attacks. She has B12 deficiency. I give her injection. With the first injection, her panic is gone. And I'm like, oh my God, what else am I missing?

• 0:11Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Today's guest is Dr. Robert Hadea, a true pioneer in functional psychiatry, and has been doing this work for more than 46 years, helping people with some of the most complex and treatment-resistant cases. Now psychiatrists are looking at the brain, doing imaging, doing something called QEEG, which is like a brainwave test that maps out things that we never saw before and that we're not making sense of. Talk about some of your more recent work around the whole adoption of this technology of improving neuropsychiatric treatment with QEEGs. What is it? Why do we use it?

• 0:40Speaker 00

  We can follow and detect the information flow patterns in the brain. So we can see this and study a person's brain and then correlate with the symptoms.

• 0:48Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So when you see these patterns, it tells you like which area of the brain is working, which is not working, what you target, how it correlates with symptoms. And so you can see almost like diagnostically in a way that you can never see before.

• 0:58Speaker 00

  Yeah. Oh, it's mind-boggling.

• 1:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Are you the only one doing this?

• 1:01Speaker 00

  To my knowledge, yeah.

• 1:02Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So what do you think are the most common things that are causing these problems of sort of anxiety, depression, cognitive decline?

• 1:08Speaker 00

  I hate that question. If you said to me, what are four things that you could tell a person to do to help themselves? I would say diet, be careful what comes into your mind. You need to really communicate with God or the universe, or whatever you think this greater thing is. Some kind of exercise, whatever is appropriate for you is really critical. And I would say relationships are essential.

• 1:36Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Bob, Dr. Hadea, welcome to the podcast.

• 1:39Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me, Mark. It's great, great, great to be here.

• 1:42Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Holy cow. I don't know where to start. We, we were the OG functional medicine neophytes, learning functional medicine together at the first training session that... Applying functional medicine clinical practice in Gig Harbor, Washington in what was it 1998?

• 2:00Speaker 00

  98.

• 2:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And we were one of the first cohorts to go through the program. There were more teachers than there were students in the class. And we became best friends there and it's been almost 30 years that we've been doing this functional medicine stuff.

• 2:15Speaker 00

  And I want to say thank you to you for what you've done for functional medicine. You know, I'm, I'm the scientist, the clinician, working, you know, in the trenches, you know, learning and expanding and doing all this and you're out there.

• 2:27Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I'm just a big mouth.

• 2:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, you're doing a great job, man. You're doing a great job. You're spreading it to the world and it's fabulous because it's really needed.

• 2:35Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I want to be the mind virus that can fix every doctor. Yeah, it's amazing. We know, think back, back then, we were just sort of joking before the podcast that, you know, people were laughing at us for what we're doing and were making fun of us for talking about things like leaky gut and mitochondria and the microbiome. And we didn't even call it that then and we'd call it the gut. And now it's sort of mainstream. And just last week, I got a call from the chief medical officer of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation or CMMI, which is the innovation hub within Medicare that looks at new solutions to chronic disease and problems. And she called me to tell me they were launching a hundred million dollar effort with 30 different

• 3:20Dr. Mark Hyman?

  sites, $3 million or so each to study functional medicine and lifestyle medicine in the treatment and prevention of chronic disease. In my lifetime, I never thought that would happen. And in the website of Medicare, it says the word functional medicine. I'm like, wow. And we've come a long way. And you know, you are a psychiatrist also and everything is at this point.

• 3:43Speaker 00

  As you say, accidental psychiatrists, I'm an accidental internist.

• 3:47Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Internist. Yeah. So like you can't look at the body without looking at the brain. You can't look at the brain without looking at the body and you can't look at the mind without looking at the brain, which is sadly what most psychiatry does. And we're in this extraordinary moment, revolution. I mean, you're 73, I'm 66. We're kind of, kind of old now, but.

• 4:04Speaker 00

  But getting younger.

• 4:05Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Getting younger and we, we've seen, we've seen the trajectory of the science emerging over the last decades. And now there's, there's people we've had on the podcast like Sabani Seti and Chris Palmer. Talking about metabolic psychiatry and realms of psychedelic psychiatry we've talked about with Rick Dabla and others and you actually, you know, do ketamine assisted there, which is in that realm. You know, you, you really got in the front row seat to what's happening in the field of, of mental health, but from the lens of functional medicine. And your book way back when, which I think was even before you.

• 4:40Speaker 00

  It was before functional medicine.

• 4:42Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Understanding biological psychiatry.

• 4:45Speaker 00

  I didn't know it, but I had discovered functional medicine.

• 4:48Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 4:49Speaker 00

  In 1987.

• 4:50Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's right.

• 4:51Speaker 00

  And maybe even, even before, because of my internship, there was a woman who had low potassium and I decided to give her bananas instead of, instead of K light.

• 5:03Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 5:03Speaker 00

  They did, they were not happy with me.

• 5:05Dr. Mark Hyman?

  No, that's right. Food is medicine. And you basically have seen, you've seen the development of this field and how so much of our ideas and concepts around mental health are just wrong. And that in order to treat people, you need to think about treating the whole system and that there are ways to fix the brain that change your mind. And that's not something that is really done in psychiatry. And you have therapy or psychiatric drugs, they suppress symptoms, but they don't really deal with the root cause. And, you know, as functional medicine doctors, we are root cause specialists. That's what we do. We like to dig and dig and dig until we find the thing that's, or the things that are off, and then we try to correct them. And we also then try to do things with modalities that we're going to talk about, which help map out where the dysfunction or imbalances

• 5:49Dr. Mark Hyman?

  are, and then how to correct them by supporting the body's own endogenous healing system, you know, the built in repair system that we have, which is available. Like, we just don't know how to activate it.

• 5:59Speaker 00

  Right.

• 6:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  What's really tragic is that there's so many people suffering with mental health issues and they're not able to access the care. They don't know that this is even an option for them. They don't understand that, that there's a way out of their suffering that has nothing to do with. Talking to a therapist, or not that that's bad, but I've certainly used them, or taking psychiatric drugs, which generally don't work or cause a lot of side effects, or have a lot of symptoms expression that don't really do the trick. Maybe you kind of walk us through sort of the original insights you had around how to think differently? Because as you mentioned before, I wrote a book called The Ultra Mind Solution in 2009, which is a good decade more than when we first met, and where I basically was seeing all these people and treating their bodies and their mental symptoms.

• 6:45Dr. Mark Hyman?

  We could have either ADD, or the dementia, or their depression, or anxiety, or whatever was going on, or bipolar, or schizophrenia, like, well, what's going on here? And I realized, oh, the body is connected to the brain.

• 6:57Speaker 00

  The neck, it's called the neck. We missed that lecture, right? They didn't give that lecture, actually.

• 7:04Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's true, and we don't really think about, you know, in psychiatry, what happens below the neck. But that's where all the action is typically, and it's systemic. So can you kind of walk us through the kind of origin story of how you began to understand this? What, let me see, some of the original cases you had were, and what you've learned over the last 30 years? Give us sort of a bird's eye view of the life and mind of Abhijaya.

• 7:27Speaker 00

  So, a quick thing that happened in medical school is I took six months off of medical school to study medicine on my own. And, you know, I had the two years under my belt, and I took six months off, and I said, you know, I'm memorizing stuff. Let me get this, let me get this, right? So I took six months off, and I was studying about 10 hours a day. I had a whole thing that I laid out, and I stuck to it, and I was, you know, very diligent and very...

• 7:54Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Amazing.

• 7:55Speaker 00

  And I actually came to actually understand the body and basic physiological principles. I wasn't just memorizing. Fast forward, I go in, I'm gonna be a surgeon. I have a great mentor who teaches me how to do hypnosis in 10 minutes. I'm like blown away by the results. I switched to child psychiatry, go to Georgetown. Then I go to NIH, where they were doing cutting edge research. And then I go into practice, and I'm in practice doing basically psychopharmacology. And I'm doing cognitive behavioral therapy, which was, at the time, cutting edge therapy, which I learned from really one of the top doctors in the country. So a woman comes to me, her name is, we'll call her Joanne, and she's 50 years old. And she's having panic attacks. I'm like, well, this is a piece of cake. I mean, I'm just,

• 8:40Speaker 00

  you know, I'll, I'll do some cognitive behavioral therapy. Uh, well, that didn't work. Uh, so I'll do some, you know, amiprimine or Xanax came out at the time. They were telling us to use eight milligrams of Xanax. Eight milligrams. Geez, it's like a horse's dust. So my working hypothesis was she's 50 years old. She has an unhappy marriage. Her only child is going off to college. She's having separation anxiety because she wants to leave her husband. And, and panic is basically separation anxiety where you think you're gonna die. And then this deep parts of the brain, you trigger the adrenaline in the brain, the locus coeruleus, it gets activated and you're like, I'm gonna die. And you have panic.

• 9:23Speaker 00

  Your brain says mortal threat. So a year into treatment, I'm dancing Saturday night out of bar mitzvah, and my pager goes off. And look, go find a phone booth back in the day, right? Okay, call, hey, Joanne, what's, what's going on? I'm having a panic attack. Okay, talk to her. And then I'm like, what is going on here? This is a year. She should be better. So Monday morning, I go into the office early to look at her chart. I had one lab at a CBC, a complete blood count. Psychiatristing blood test? God, that was heresy back then. I had one. Turned out to be crucial. The size of her red blood cells, the MCV, the mean Was really high.

• 10:05Speaker 00

  It was one, not really high. It was 101, the range of 80 to 100. I ignored it because two, two reasons. One, I was taught to treat train wrecks, right? A little out of the range. Don't bother. Yeah. Because I was trained in the hospital. Yeah. They treat train wrecks, right? Yeah. And the second thing is, I didn't know what it meant. Right. So that was it. So I went to the National Library of Medicine. I looked it up and it says, oh, could be a B12 deficiency. Do a Schilling's test. No longer available, but at the time I, I never had done it, but I did it. Yeah. And she has B12 deficiency. I give her injection. With the first injection, her panic is gone. Gone.

• 10:46Speaker 00

  And I'm like, oh my God, what else am I missing? Because people are in the system. They're just in the system. They go around this, you know, you know, revolving door in this, this doctor, that doctor, you know, this medicine, that medicine. That's when I was like, I must be missing a lot of stuff.

• 11:03Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 11:04Speaker 00

  You know, and then there were a series of things where my mother-in-law was.

• 11:07Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And when the doctor says it's all in your head, it means either you're crazy or the doctor's missing something. And I would say nine times out of 10 or more, it's the doctor's missing something.

• 11:16Speaker 00

  This is very true. You know, in one sense, this is very simplistic, but you have the software, which is, you know, how you think about things, critical, obviously, but then you have the hardware is how's, how's the brain functioning? Does it have the nutrients? Does, is even inflammation low or the circuitry, is it working properly, et cetera? Well, you gotta have good hardware to deal with the software, right? If the hardware is broken, you know, then, you know, then you're not really going to get too far. You're gonna be in therapy for a hundred years. You're not going to get anywhere.

• 11:44Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So I would say it's a lot easier getting enlightened if you're not mercury poisoned or B12 deficient, your thyroid's working and your gut microbiome is healthy. It's a lot easier to.

• 11:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, if it's working, like, how are you gonna run the race if, you know, you got rocks on your back? You know, you can't, you can't do it.

• 11:58Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's an amazing story. I mean, I, I, you know, that's just one example. It's not that everybody with panic attacks has a B12 deficiency. That's the problem in medicine. We're like, oh, your panic attacks, oh, the causes of B12. No, that's, that, the symptoms in psychiatry are all based on like categorizing people according to a specific category and a disease, but it doesn't tell you anything about the cause.

• 12:20Speaker 00

  Right. The DSM is good for insurance companies.

• 12:24Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's, they call that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Psychiatry, which kind of is organized based on.

• 12:31Speaker 00

  Categories. Yeah, descriptions, but it doesn't tell you about etiology or cause at all.

• 12:36Dr. Mark Hyman?

  No, I would say, I said, you know, remember Thomas, and so was I, the National Institute of Mental Health. And I had dinner with him once. I said, so Thomas, what do you think of the DSM five? And he goes, well, I think it has a hundred percent accuracy, but zero percent validity. I mean, it's really good at categorizing people according to symptoms, but not telling you anything about what to do. And I think this example of the panic attack is so key because there are many reasons for panic attacks, such as one. And it's, and when you start looking at the biology, you, you kind of have to do a deep dive to see what's going on. I mean, I had a, I was, remember writing my book Ultra Mind Solution. I was talking on the phone and some guy was fixing my stereo or something in the office. And he heard me chatting. He's like, oh yeah, yeah. I, I was so depressed. And then I took the B complex and I was cured. And I'm like, well, yeah, if you have, if

• 13:20Dr. Mark Hyman?

  you have folate deficiency or B6 or B12, those affect your neurotransmitters and it works. But it's not, I mean, everybody with depression has that, right? So you kind of had that insight. You saw this.

• 13:29Speaker 00

  Yeah. And then, and then I had a, my, I, I really, now, don't get me wrong, allopathic medicine is great for certain things, as we know. I don't want to throw that out.

• 13:39Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Of course.

• 13:40Speaker 00

  At all. But, you know, I saw really horrible care of my mother-in-law, my father, at the major hospitals in, in New York City. And they misdiagnosed my mother-in-law. She had, she had, um, myxodema. And they wouldn't treat it because the reference range, they didn't look at her clinically.

• 13:57Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Thyroid, low thyroid.

• 13:58Speaker 00

  Low thyroid. And, and the reference range said, no, she's not, she's not abnormal. That was the same test we use now, but the reference range was up to 10.

• 14:07Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, 10, right.

• 14:07Speaker 00

  And she was 11. They didn't want to bother treating it.

• 14:09Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Right. And that should be a three and a half.

• 14:12Speaker 00

  Or two and a half, even. And if you have a psychiatric problem, maybe even lower. And you have certain genetics, even lower.

• 14:17Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 14:18Speaker 00

  So it depends on that. So anyway, whatever, you, you're just forced to learn because there's nobody out there to help you patients. I, I would send people to end the chronologists, but I'd get back nothing. So I had to actually learn myself what to do.

• 14:31Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So you're the accidental internist. I'm the accidental psychiatrist. It all comes around the same stuff.

• 14:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:36Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Cause the body is one big interconnected web.

• 14:39Speaker 00

  All these things travel together.

• 14:40Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Now, there's this whole field of metabolic psychiatry we've talked about on the podcast, which uses like ketogenic diets and nutrition more aggressively. What do you think about those?

• 14:48Speaker 00

  I think it's great. It depends on the patient. You got to see what each person needs. It's really, does have to be personalized. And one thing, let's say this, understand this. The people should understand this. There's a book called Mad in America, and it traces the history of psychiatry in America over 250 years. And what you see is that there are fads in psychiatry and probably in medicine as well. And so you see. That, you know, maybe a hundred, 200 years ago, you know, we thought that the problems were demons in our heads.

• 15:15Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 15:16Speaker 00

  And so we, okay, exorcism for everybody. And then actually, they started putting people in giant centrifuges and spinning them around. And, and they said, oh, hey, it works. The studies show it works. So the hospitals got together and they made these centrifuges that had like, they could spin 12 people at a time. That's great.

• 15:35Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Like at the carnival.

• 15:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. And so bigger and bigger, bigger. And then after about 30 years, the science, they start to say, uh, you know, the study's not holding up. This is questionable whether it works. And then out comes a new model, insulin coma, you know, right? And, and then we had the psychopharmacology revolution in the 50s, right? And I don't want to say meds are bad because I wouldn't want to practice without them, but it's so overused.

• 16:04Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 16:13Speaker 00

  There's always feds. There were feds. So the metabolic medicine, to get to your question, if you don't mind. So I think for sure we're on to something here in functional medicine. There's no question about that. No question at all. But you have to also recognize, um, we have a chronic disease epidemic in the Western world for sure, spreading. Uh, and we're going to actually succeed because we're identifying now through functional medicine, the root causes. And it's going to permeate the system. It will take 10 more years, 20 more years, 30. It's going to permeate. Diseases change over time. If you remember in training thyroid problem, oh, thyroid problem on the fifth floor.

• 16:56Speaker 00

  Everybody runs up to see what it is. Let's feel the goiter. It's so rare now. What is it? One in five women have Hashimoto's thyroiditis, you know, and the disease changes. So as we, as we treat the chronic illness epidemic, we may have other things to deal with. So things do morph over time.

• 17:16Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And we have long COVID.

• 17:17Speaker 00

  Right. Now we have, now we have long COVID. Who would have thought that was coming?

• 17:21Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So, so you basically kind of mapped out this field of biological psychiatry even before, you know, you kind of found functional medicine. But you've evolved the model over the years. I need to treat people with dealing with their diet, with their gut, with nutritional status, with detoxification, with

• 17:35Speaker 00

  Hormones, infections.

• 17:37Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, all the, all like tick infections, whatever, whatever it is you have to deal with. But what, what I think is really interesting about your work is that you've evolved into using certain modalities, which typically haven't not been used in psychiatry. You know, I always say this on the podcast, but like the joke is the neurologists pay no attention to the mind and psychiatrists pay no attention to the brain. But now psychiatrists are looking at the brain, doing imaging, doing something called Q E E G, like an electroencephalogram, which is like a brain's wave test that maps out things that we never saw before and that we're not making sense of and using modalities that people aren't typically using. So I love to talk about some of your more recent work around the whole adoption of this, this

• 18:19Dr. Mark Hyman?

  technology of, of improving neuropsychiatric treatment with Q E E Gs. What is it? A quantitative EEG? How's it work? What does it do? Why do we use it? How does it connect to imaging? Like, what kind of imaging do we do? And what kind of things are you seeing?

• 18:33Speaker 00

  Essentially, the quantitative EEG is, uh, we, we put a cap on a patient, patient's head, we measure the electrical output at 19 points and it goes into the computer. It's really AI driven. This is standardized against a age and sex match control through the NIH database. And what we do is we get all this information over the course of 15 or 20 minutes with eyes open, eyes closed. And then the computer takes that.

• 19:04Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So you're just, you're just in there like quietly laying down and they?

• 19:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, your eyes are closed, painless, non-invasive. You do it, we do it at home all over the country. Actually, we send the equipment to people's homes. It takes about an hour. And what we get back from that is a, basically a wiring map of the brain. We can actually see all the networks in the brain. We can see the surface areas of the brain and how they're functioning.

• 19:26Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Wow.

• 19:26Speaker 00

  We can follow and detect the information flow patterns in the brain. So for example, dissociation, you'll see the information flow from the frontal lobe on the right side to the parietal lobe on the right side of the brain. These are two different parts of the brain that is not flowing. There's a dissociation, right? And so we can see this and study a person's brain and then correlate with the symptoms. And then we also do imaging like the Neuroquant MRI, which tells us the size of different areas, small areas in the brain, and we correlate all that data with the patient, with their symptoms, and we say, okay, here's what's going on. This network is out of whack, or this, this is, it's working

• 20:10Speaker 00

  too hard, or like your worry network is just like, it's not resting, you know, or you have trouble with the salience network, so you can't decide what's important, you get overwhelmed, you can't process things properly.

• 20:24Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So when you see these patterns, it tells you like which area of the brain is working, which is not working, what you target, how it correlates with symptoms, and so you can see almost like diagnostically, in a way you can never see before.

• 20:35Speaker 00

  Yeah. Oh, it's mind boggling. I could see if someone has a metabolic problem.

• 20:39Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And you can tell which areas of the brain are not working, what working. So what do you kind of see? And what are, what are the kinds of patterns? So someone's like having depression, or they're having bipolar, or they're having whatever.

• 20:50Speaker 00

  So in depression, for example, you'll see that the frontal lobes are not talking to each other. The information not flowing from left to right and right to left, right? So that's something we can treat actually, you know, with a light to the brain, specifically targeted to those areas. Or for example, a guy I had who had schizophrenia, and I didn't know till he was paranoid. Okay, I didn't know till I did his Q E G, I could see this tract that went from the front of the brain to the back of the brain, the visual part of the brain. And this helps you, this tract helps you assess the valence of a person's

• 21:31Speaker 00

  face. And I said, oh, this is strange, right? So I, I treated it with a laser, we could target it exactly. And after two or three treatments, he says, you know, I'm, I'm reading much faster, and I didn't realize that whenever I look at someone, their face was getting distorted. And, and they looked like they were looking at me with disgust. And, and it actually, he says, he said this, I remember him telling me this, that it actually doesn't make physical sense that their face would look that way, given how their body is. In other words, he could now see that is the distortion, and it was gone.

• 22:10Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Wow.

• 22:11Speaker 00

  That was the basis of his paranoia.

• 22:13Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's amazing.

• 22:14Speaker 00

  Amazing. It's, it's astounding.

• 22:17Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You you see the patterns in the brainwaves that correlate with different areas of the brain that are dysfunctional, that are not in line for various reasons. So what are the reasons that people's brain is not firing? It's a thing of like, almost like an arrhythmia for the heart, right? It's like your heart rate is not normal, your brainwaves are not normal. What's causing that?

• 22:35Speaker 00

  Well, there are many causes, obviously. So it could be head injury. You know, you could have had a head trauma you don't even remember, or maybe you had one when you were a kid. And that part of the brain, we had the trauma, got segregated. In other words, it couldn't wire when you were adolescent than a young adult. Brain rewires, and it couldn't really rewire with the whole brain. So you had to reroute all the information highways in a different way. And now you don't have certain skills, and you don't even know because you're just so used to it. You know what I mean? Could be that. It could be toxins. It could be certain infections have a tendency to go to different parts of the brain. Mycoplasma goes to certain, it goes to the basal ganglia, for example. I've seen it. And then you treat the mycoplasma, and you actually see the Q E G change over

• 23:20Speaker 00

  time. It's slow. If you have an infection that affects your brain function, it won't really normalize for three months. It's gradual, but it, you know, it will normalize, but won't, it takes a while. Different infections go to different places. It's strange, but that's what they do. We know pandas, you know, strep infection with some kids, you know, goes into the, yeah, OCD in the basal ganglia and the chordate nucleus, et cetera. So, you know, we're, we're seeing deep into the brain in a way that we could never see. And, and, you know, there's so much information in these scans. So I can say, oh, this net, you have, you know, you have six networks that are out of balance, let's say, but which one of these is bothering you the most? That's where we're going to start.

• 24:03Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 24:04Speaker 00

  Right? And that, that will help reduce your stress, enable you to function better, you know, and oh, now I can start to cope with my life. I can organize things now. You know, that kind of thing.

• 24:15Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So you're basically seeing the, the abnormalities, but then you have to trace back what the causes are?

• 24:20Speaker 00

  Yes, we're always doing the root cause medicine.

• 24:22Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Thing, is it a gut thing?

• 24:23Speaker 00

  Always, always doing the root cause, yeah.

• 24:25Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Right. So you kind of can see that the pattern in the brain, which gives you a more targeted therapy. So you do the root cause analysis and the treatments.

• 24:33Speaker 00

  Right.

• 24:34Dr. Mark Hyman?

  But you also then do other modalities that are kind of ancillary, like neurofeedback, epipharic oxygen, laser therapy, which is something you've kind of innovated. I'd love you to kind of talk about this hammock moment. What is this chat about? And like, how did you kind of get all these pieces to come together?

• 24:51Speaker 00

  It was from God or the universe, whatever you want to call it. So I was actually forced to take a vacation because we had paid for this place in somewhere in the Midwest and they wouldn't give us our money back. So I was like, all right, we gotta go. So we took a week off and very sparse, very sparse. It's like nothing to do. Right? So just hanging out there and my daughter was with us and we went into a sweat lodge and it was unbelievable. It was great. And then the next day I'm in a hammock for six hours. Like, and I'm actually at the time retired because I had retired in 2014.

• 25:29Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You had?

• 25:30Speaker 00

  Yeah. I missed medicine a lot, but I was retired and I'm in the hammock for six hours and I'm reading a book, Doidge, I think, How to Heal the Brain, or I think that's the name of the book. Anyway, so I'm reading about Russia. In Russia, they're using lasers for the brain. They snake it into the body, up into the brain.

• 25:50Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You mean through the entomogram?

• 25:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, like through the arteries, through the veins, not the arteries, but the veins, right? Into the brain. And then they're talking about how it works. And I'm like, oh my God, this could really help the brain. This is amazing because it's giving ATP, it's doing a lot of different things we could talk about. But I was blown away. Then I'm like, well, I don't know, how would I even know where to point this thing anyway? And the next chapter is Q E Gs. And I'm like, oh my God, this is how I would know.

• 26:26Speaker 00

  And so I studied Q E Gs and lasers. Laser I should define is just focused light. It can be very low potency or high potency, but it's very target, very focused.

• 26:36Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 26:36Speaker 00

  So we could control the wavelength, how the frequency of the pulses and, you know, a lot of parameters about it. So I, I, I'm, oh, I could learn Q E G. And then I could probably know, looking at symptoms, where I need to apply the light to heal the brain.

• 26:53Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 26:53Speaker 00

  And so I studied for three years and I started to do it in 2017.

• 26:57Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So you didn't, you weren't doing Q E Gs, you just read about them and then started learning about it.

• 27:01Speaker 00

  I hired a mentor. I studied for three years.

• 27:03Dr. Mark Hyman?

  What do they use for now and then?

• 27:05Speaker 00

  There's a difference between E E G, electroencephalogram that neurologists do all the time.

• 27:10Dr. Mark Hyman?

  For seizures and things like that?

• 27:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, to see if you have a seizure or something like that. Uh, and, and then there's a quantitative E G was, which is A I. It takes all this data that you could never analyze yourself, like all those squiggly lines that you see.

• 27:26Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Correct.

• 27:26Speaker 00

  Nineteen li- lines of this, you can't, you can't put that all together. So the A I actually puts it together and gives you visual patterns and network analyses and analysis of the, the, the electrical patterns and different surface areas, the whole brain really. And, uh, and that's the quantitative, it's quantity. E E G and it's all A I driven.

• 27:50Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Wow. And you were telling me that you could basically just send out a helmet that.

• 27:55Speaker 00

  It's not a helmet.

• 27:56Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Or a helmet.

• 27:57Speaker 00

  It's a box. It's a computer and various things.

• 28:01Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You have to hook it up to your own brain?

• 28:03Speaker 00

  You would, you don't hook it up to your brain. You put the cap on.

• 28:05Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Put the cap on.

• 28:06Speaker 00

  A lot of people think they're hooking up their brain.

• 28:08Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You just, you just.

• 28:09Speaker 00

  You put this cap on with gel and, and we have the tech who shows up on the screen.

• 28:15Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 28:15Speaker 00

  And, uh, tells you what to do and make sure the connections are good. And then you just, you just basically, uh, look at the screen for about 15, 20 minutes, depending how much time we want. And within you close your eyes 15, 20 minutes, take it off, wash your hair, pack it up, send it back to us.

• 28:31Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's amazing.

• 28:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:32Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So really anybody can get this.

• 28:34Speaker 00

  Anybody can get this.

• 28:35Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And then you get the report and then you identify the patterns and then you design a program, but you also have to do the sort of.

• 28:40Speaker 00

  What we do, that's part of what we do, but then I want to, I gotta get clinical data. Right? Know what's bothering you? And, and then I want a neuroquant MRI. So I can correlate it. There's a strong.

• 28:53Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Explain that because you're talking about waves length of the brain. And then you're talking about structural changes to a quantitative analysis of a brain MRI.

• 29:01Speaker 00

  So the neuroquant is telling us about the structure of the brain. Right? Is it big? Is it small? Is it inflamed? Right? Is it atrophied? Has a trunk? And then the, the Q E G, the quantitative E G that we do, that we put that cap on you. That tells us about function. We have structure and we have function.

• 29:20Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 29:20Speaker 00

  And then we correlate them and look at your symptoms. And then we could say, okay, this is where we need to focus.

• 29:27Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Are you the only one doing this?

• 29:28Speaker 00

  To my knowledge, yeah.

• 29:29Dr. Mark Hyman?

  No one else using laser in?

• 29:31Speaker 00

  There, there are people, there's a lot of, uh, they call it photobiomodulation.

• 29:35Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 29:35Speaker 00

  Right? So there are people making these helmets now, right?

• 29:38Dr. Mark Hyman?

  The red light therapy and different.

• 29:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know that. There's 1064, 810 or whatever, and the helmets that they put on uh, for neurodegenerative disease and that kind of thing. But the thing is, I think that that is a non-specific. Like, we're very targeted. We're very specific and we're very personalized. That's kind of a non-specific. So, uh, and, and I don't know. I think it's, it's definitely debatable whether that penetrates the brain. It's highly unlikely that it penetrates because.

• 30:06Dr. Mark Hyman?

  The laser?

• 30:06Speaker 00

  No, the laser penetrates. About 2.6% of the light gets through that. We know. Some people say 4.2%, about 2.6, let's say. But the LEDs, which are basically these lights that are very weak, you're not going to get much going into the brain. But you may still get some general benefits because, you know, you have all the blood flow and the mitochondria and the cells and everything, so, you know.

• 30:29Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So this is really key. You just said a big word, mitochondria. And I think, you know, there's a lot of work in this field around mitochondrial health and the brain. Whether it's Alzheimer's or Parkinson's or autism. Suzanne Go has been on the podcast, has done tremendous work in understanding mitochondrial dysfunction, autism as a way of both understanding the disease and also treating it. Chris Palmer at Harvard has wrote a book called Brain Energy about the brain energy system and how that's so dysfunctional as a driver. And it's basically an energy deficit in the brain that leads to mental illness. And by restoring healthy brain energy through ketogenic diets and metabolic health, you can correct a lot of psychiatric problems. So you kind of come at this the same way.

• 31:09Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And one of the treatments that you use, the laser, actually works by increasing mitochondrial function and ATP.

• 31:16Speaker 00

  Right. That's one of the main things that it does. So when you basically put the laser pointed to a certain area, the photons, the light particles or waves or whatever they are, go into the brain and they actually go to the mitochondria are like little batteries, right? And we have hundreds or thousands in every cell. And they have, you know, four points where they function and the electrons like floating down there like a wire, right? And the mitochondria do so many things, but one of the things they do is produce energy. Without that ATP molecule, we're dead. Right? So the photon from the light actually knocks off a nitric oxide molecule. And then ATP flows through.

• 31:59Speaker 00

  It's more complicated than that, but the ATP now instantly flows through. Now you have more energy. Now the brain says, oh, now I have energy. I can do some repair work, fix the potholes, you know, do the work that needs to be done. Then you have the nitric oxide bringing more blood flow. And then you have changes, Mark, that are amazing, like misfolded proteins or proteins in the brain that don't fold right and they cause problems and they're like, they're like viruses, they spread, right? And it actually reduces that and reverses alpha synuclein misfolding.

• 32:33Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Wow, that's a dimension protein.

• 32:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And tau protein, you know, all these things, beta amyloid, you know? And so there's the acute effects of the light, the laser, which we're directing to specific places. And then there's effects that occur over time.

• 32:49Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Basically, you do like the Q E G, the brain imaging. The functional medicine assessment and work up for causes.

• 32:55Speaker 00

  Right.

• 32:56Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And you design a comprehensive plan and then you use various modalities.

• 32:59Speaker 00

  Right.

• 32:59Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Laser therapy is one of the key ones that's kind of new and novel.

• 33:02Speaker 00

  Right. There's a lot of research on this.

• 33:04Dr. Mark Hyman?

  A lot of research.

• 33:05Speaker 00

  A lot of.

• 33:06Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Laser in the brain?

• 33:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:07Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Or just in general.

• 33:08Speaker 00

  Laser in tissues, laser in body, laser in the brain.

• 33:10Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I haven't seen anything about it used. Like I've seen the transcranial magnetic stimulation.

• 33:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's different. Yeah.

• 33:16Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Which is also used for depression and.

• 33:18Speaker 00

  Right.

• 33:18Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Mental issues, but.

• 33:19Speaker 00

  Right.

• 33:19Dr. Mark Hyman?

  This is really different than that, right?

• 33:21Speaker 00

  I personally think it's better because the TMS, the transcranial magnetic stimulation is basically like a shock. You know, it's a magnet that's shifting everything in one direction, then it shifts back to the other direction. So it's a little bit of a shock the cells and the outcomes, although now they're modifying a little bit, but the outcomes, they don't, they're not durable, really. After six months is a high relapse rate. You know, and it's a lot of money and expense and time and it's.

• 33:50Dr. Mark Hyman?

  A laser, you don't see the relapse rate?

• 33:52Speaker 00

  It depends on the person. So now if you're treating a young person, well, as an example, um, this woman, the first patient I ever treated with the laser, she had facial blindness. And I didn't, I didn't even know she had, I didn't even know what, I didn't even know it existed. Okay. And I'm treating her because she has a little early dementia and, you know, some memory problems. And she has a little bit of a temporal lobe seizure and, um, anyway, I treat her with the laser based on the Q E G and where, where I'm going to treat her because she's having trouble finding words. And she tells me after the first visit, like five minutes after the first visit, she says, oh my God, I can remember the, I still hear her voice.

• 34:37Speaker 00

  I can remember the face of the person I worked with this morning. Now she had built up a whole structure, but she was going to people's homes to do environmental consults. So she'd take pictures of their faces in the house, everything, everything was documented because she couldn't count on her memory for face. She'd come to the door and see someone, she would, like, I never saw you before in my life. And then with the laser, five minutes later, she's, oh my God, I remember the face of the woman I treated.

• 35:08Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's pretty amazing.

• 35:09Speaker 00

  The woman and her husband, and he had this mole on his face and like, wait, wait, wait, this. What are you talking about? This doesn't make any sense.

• 35:18Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 35:19Speaker 00

  I couldn't figure it out, but what I figured out eventually is that the brain has a lot of cells that are kind of alive. They have a heartbeat, but they're not doing their job. I say that they're in a liminal state, that kind of on the border between alive and dead. And if you give them the energy, they wake up. And so her cells woke up, she was cured. That was it.

• 35:39Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's amazing.

• 35:39Speaker 00

  I published it. It was the first ever cured acquired prosopagnosia facial blindness.

• 35:45Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And how long do you have to apply the laser to this head?

• 35:48Speaker 00

  It's a matter of how much energy you want to deliver to the. So we kind of measure the area we're treating, the square, how many centimeters squared? We calculate how much energy we want to deliver. And then I decide on the other parameters, you know, pulse frequency, et cetera. There's a lot of different parameters and, and then we start slow. We always get certain imaging before to make sure there's no reason not to do it. You have to make sure they don't have an aneurysm or that there's no tumor or there's, you know what I mean? And then we apply it and, and in some people, it actually really boom, they're on the road. They're done.

• 36:26Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Is it five minutes? Is it an hour?

• 36:28Speaker 00

  No, no, no, it's maybe, it depends. It could be 10 minutes to 20 to 25 minutes.

• 36:33Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's a short treatment.

• 36:33Speaker 00

  Oh, it's short.

• 36:34Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And you're just seeing one treatment or you need multiple?

• 36:36Speaker 00

  For most things, you're going to need multiple treatments.

• 36:38Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Like how many?

• 36:39Speaker 00

  So for example, for the visual thing, the guy needed three. I just did it on a guy who's 80 with Parkinson's. I did the visual thing and he needed three and that was cured. It was cured, not the Parkinson's, we're treating the Parkinson's, but this was a different visual treatment.

• 36:54Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 36:54Speaker 00

  It was causing trouble. Uh, but if you have someone with a chronic condition, then for example, one guy with Parkinson's, we were doing twice a week and now we're down to twice a month.

• 37:05Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And you combine that with other stuff like hyperbaric oxygen therapy and.

• 37:10Speaker 00

  Neurofeedback, speech therapy. In other words, you want to, it's like going to the gym.

• 37:15Dr. Mark Hyman?

  The brain gym.

• 37:16Speaker 00

  You go into the brain gym. Before you go to the gym, if you want to work out your biceps, you have to eat the food and then you got to work them out, right?

• 37:23Dr. Mark Hyman?

  This is a real revolution. Are there any other colleagues doing this?

• 37:26Speaker 00

  Uh, no, no. Um, that's why I want to, that's why I want to do these educational kinds. I want to train. People who need this, I have people coming from all over. So people listening and are curious about this, they can ask their doctor to work with you? Yeah, you can go to my website, it's wholepsychiatry.com. And we have an educational consult model that we've been doing for about a year. And basically, you go to your doctor and you say, because people feel weird asking their doctor, you know? So they go to the doctor and say, you know, you've helped me a lot, but we're kind of stuck here. I'm on too many meds or have these side effects, or I want to see if I can get to the root causes of my problem. And there's this guy, Dr. Hedaya, who's doing this method.

• 38:10Speaker 00

  Here's his website, and he does these educational consults. So your doctor stays in charge, and I, you come and visit me and physically in person. And we'll spend probably four or five hours together. And I'll do physical and go over all the records, and we'll have the Q E G. And we'll have the imaging for the structure. We have all that when you come. And then I process all that. I say, okay, here's what I think is going on, the root causes. Here's what's going on in your brain. I'll show you, and I'll show the doctor, we'll share the screen. And then I'll say, okay, this is the workup. I want to confirm my hypotheses about your immune system, or you know, this or the other thing, right? So you'll do these tests.

• 38:53Speaker 00

  And when we get all these tests back, I'll sit down for about typically four to six hours, go through all the data, which probably I won't have to do in the future when your company is in my office. I'll go through all the data and I'll come out with a plan, which I will make a sequential plan for the patient, turn paper, present it to the patient. They come back to my office for the presentation, the doctors on Zoom. And then the doctor will consult with me as needed going forward. And the point of this is to help a lot of people around the country and to train the doctors in this kind of methodology. That's my goal. That's my goal. I want to train people. This can't stay with me.

• 39:39Speaker 00

  And just to be clear, it's all based on clinical, the basic science, it's all there. The lot, you just go do a AI search on, on photobiomodulation of the brain. You'll see there's hundreds, if not thousands.

• 39:51Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, it sort of speaks to an interesting thing, which is that there's a lot of advances in medicine and science, but they kind of languish outside of medicine because doctors don't adopt them.

• 40:00Speaker 00

  Right.

• 40:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It can take decades.

• 40:01Speaker 00

  The decades, yeah. Semwise.

• 40:04Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Right, I was gonna mention that.

• 40:05Speaker 00

  Right, right. For people don't know, this guy, he, he actually learned in late eight hu- eighteen hundreds, I think, that hand washing prevented purple fever. Well, a lot of women were dying after.

• 40:17Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Well, all the midwives were washing their hands and the doctors weren't.

• 40:20Speaker 00

  And the doctors weren't, right? But the doctors didn't want to learn.

• 40:22Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And they were like, when he said, you know, maybe we should wash our hands, guys. They were like, oh, you're a heretic. How could you imply that doctors would cause their patients to become sick? And you're banished from medicine. And he died in disgrace.

• 40:33Speaker 00

  You know what he did? He sent out a letter to a hundred hospitals about hand washing. And they were incensed with him.

• 40:40Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 40:41Speaker 00

  And they didn't start washing their hands.

• 40:43Dr. Mark Hyman?

  For fifty years, fifty years.

• 40:45Speaker 00

  It's tragic.

• 40:46Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And one of our presidents died because the doctor didn't wash his hands.

• 40:50Speaker 00

  Really?

• 40:50Dr. Mark Hyman?

  McKinley was shot in the stomach. And you remember McBurney, the McBurney's point from medical school with the appendix? You know, the appendix point where you push on the stomach? It was named after the surgeon, McBurney, who got called to see McKinley after he got shot. And he stuck his finger in the wound.

• 41:07Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 41:07Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And he got infection and he died from the infection. It wasn't from the gunshot.

• 41:13Speaker 00

  You know, that's how Theodore Roosevelt became president.

• 41:16Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And yeah, it does take a long time. I mean, you know, we've been doing this for thirty plus years. Well, this medicine around for forty years.

• 41:23Speaker 00

  Right.

• 41:23Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Now only, now we're seeing it in Medicare language on the website after decades, right? It's sad because so many people are suffering. And I think that, you know, the work you're doing to understand the biological mechanisms are really important. And the, the kind of, there's a lot of ways into repairing the brain. And what, but the modalities you use are actually. Different than using a drug because drugs typically interrupt or suppress or block some something in the body. These actually enhance the body's own repair systems like hyperbaric oxygen and neurofeedback and laser. Can you talk about these as as sort of therapeutic levers they use in psychiatry and a little bit more about each one and how they how they work?

• 42:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:03Dr. Mark Hyman?

  About the laser, but I think, you know, it's about energy, right? At least an improvement.

• 42:07Speaker 00

  Yep. So hyperbaric oxygen, in a general sense, you could think of it as a general tonic for the body, right? As you know, you're treating actually the whole body. It's not, it's not targeted necessarily to a part of the body, right? And in in hyperbaric oxygen, you're, you're doing so many things. You're increasing delivery of nutrients, right? You're increasing delivery of oxygen. You're actually increasing nerve growth factors, your stem cell growth, right? Capillary perfusion, right? So it's really helpful unless you happen to have obesity as infection, then it's maybe not the best idea because they love oxygen. But obesity loves oxygen, right? Lives in red blood cells and they love oxygen. So we don't do it if you have obesity.

• 42:51Speaker 00

  But we'll do it for lots of causes and we don't use it in everybody, but we'll use it for people.

• 42:55Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And you have it in your office or you just send it?

• 42:57Speaker 00

  We have it in our, we have a couple of chambers in our office and and we

• 43:02Dr. Mark Hyman?

  People have to live there near you to do it.

• 43:04Speaker 00

  Some people move for a few months or a few weeks, six weeks to three months or even six months to get the treatments. And and some people will buy a H bot and put it in hyperbaric oxygen chamber, put it in their house, for example. And then, you know, with the laser treatment, it has to be done in my office, but as I train people in this, which takes time to train them, then I'm hopeful that people will actually be able to do it with their patients in that city where they are, you know. But right now I'm the guy who's doing that.

• 43:35Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I mean, you're seeing results using this sort of extra combination of things in addition to functional medicine that you weren't seeing before.

• 43:40Speaker 00

  Am I seeing results in situ?

• 43:42Dr. Mark Hyman?

  In other words, you've been doing functional medicine psychiatry for decades, right? So with the advent of these new technologies that you're applying or these old technologies applied in new ways.

• 43:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:52Dr. Mark Hyman?

  What are you seeing as is the improvement over what you were doing before?

• 43:58Speaker 00

  First of all, I can, I can reach conditions that I could never reach. So for example,

• 44:06Speaker 00

  schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder.

• 44:09Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 44:10Speaker 00

  What, you know? Depends on the resources the patient has, their willingness for treatment. For example, a lot of times, these are infection based. You know, you can actually normalize things. You can treat this particular area, the super marginal gyrus with the light, you know, which is helpful. I'm seeing people with Parkinson's disease now, which I never bothered treating before. Now I can treat it with the neurofeedback, the hyperbaric, and with the targeted laser. And you find, this is fascinating, that Parkinson's, like everything else, is a kind of a wastepaper basket diagnosis. There's multiple types of Parkinson's. I have a guy who came to me with Parkinson's, and by looking at his Q E G, and then taking his history, his Q E G was the tip off.

• 44:54Speaker 00

  It turned out, he fell off his bicycle twice in the same place, and you could see it on the Q E G. So all I had to do was laser that, and he's been stable now for six, seven years, without any laser, without anything.

• 45:17Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Now, are you seeing the same thing work in psychiatric conditions, like bipolar, things like that?

• 45:22Speaker 00

  So with bipolar disorder, you have to be careful using the laser. They have to be stabilized before you do it, because they can respond with too much activity, and you could actually precipitate a mania.

• 45:33Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 45:33Speaker 00

  So you have to actually make sure they're on a stabilizer. If it's bipolar one, the severe type, you have to have the medicine to stabilize them, for sure. Bipolar two, you can stabilize most of the time with lifestyle, and you know, treat the infections and the hormones and all that. Sleep, and you know, all of those things. And then, there are things like severe depression, treatment-resistant depression, I mean, which nothing touches. And then, I have a guy who's now 45, who depresses since he's 12, and started treating with laser, and he's been doing great for a couple of years. Hadn't done that well for a long time now. The laser has to be recalibrated now, so he's not doing as well. But...

• 46:20Speaker 00

  You know, that's, you know, there's amazing things that we can do and neurological things, that's the other thing, you know, for Alzheimer's. So one of the nice things about this is like, people will come to me and they're like, not ready for the whole million tests and, you know, the four and a half hours and the whole thing. So I could just say, you know what, I'm just gonna jump in with these non-invasive things. I'm gonna do my quantitative EEG, I'm gonna look at the volumes in the brain, I'm gonna take your history and you, you know, see what's going on, do some objective testing with a computer, see where your cognitive abilities are, et cetera. And then I could just jump in and treat. You don't have to do anything. The neurofeedback, you watch a movie. Just watch a movie. That's all.

• 47:01Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Don't you have to actively engage with it?

• 47:04Speaker 00

  No, no, you can't control it. Your brain.

• 47:06Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I've done neurofeedback before and I had to play a video game where I basically had to use my brainwaves.

• 47:12Speaker 00

  Right.

• 47:13Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And I had to calm myself when I can get a certain relaxed brainwave, then the video game would work.

• 47:16Speaker 00

  Right.

• 47:17Dr. Mark Hyman?

  If I was stressed, it wouldn't work.

• 47:18Speaker 00

  No, this is different. This is different. Your brain, you say, I wanna watch this video. Your brain tags it as a reward. And now you're watching the video and we control the settings, right? So let's say the default mode network, we want it to function in this frequency, we wanna down-regulate it or up-regulate it, right? So, so we set the bar and we say, okay, when your brain default mode network goes here, you get to watch the movie. And when it doesn't, the movie gets gray or goes black where the sound goes down, right? So we start easy. You're getting reward, reward, reward, and then gradually make it a little harder and a little harder. And it takes about six or seven sessions and then brain

• 48:02Speaker 00

  says, okay, I know how to do this. You cannot control it. This is all.

• 48:08Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Automatic.

• 48:09Speaker 00

  Automatic. Your brain is like, I want the reward.

• 48:13Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It'll be a good movie.

• 48:17Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Wow. And you also mentioned in some of your work about a case of a dental infection and schizophrenia.

• 48:23Speaker 00

  So this is very interesting. There's a woman I've been treating her since late 90s, actually.

• 48:32Speaker 00

  And she has severe dental problems and she's just not going to go for anything. So I put her on.

• 48:40Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Didn't go to dental.

• 48:41Speaker 00

  She will not go.

• 48:42Dr. Mark Hyman?

  To the dentist.

• 48:43Speaker 00

  She has so much infection in her mouth. And as you know, the infection causes changes in the brain chemistry.

• 48:49Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Of course.

• 48:50Speaker 00

  Right? Increases glutamate, excitotoxins. So she was going in and out of the hospital periodically for decades. And I put her on two antibiotics to at least control the infection, you know? And she hasn't been in the hospital. She's doing great, better than she's done. And I've known her now for 26 years, something like that. Doing great. I understand the box. If you look at the genetic studies on psychiatric illness, they're called genome-wide association studies, right? Where they look at millions of people and look what genes show up in psychiatric. So what is, you know, this, it's like the immune system and it's the hormones. Those are the big drivers of psychiatric.

• 49:34Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, inflammation.

• 49:35Speaker 00

  Yep. So we're treating the neurotransmitters, right? But, you know, we're kind of missing, but again, not that these meds are not useful.

• 49:46Dr. Mark Hyman?

  But you've got this woman to eventually treat her dental infections?

• 49:49Speaker 00

  No, she won't go. But she's stable and making, doing artwork and, and she's amazing.

• 49:58Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So really severe psychiatric problems, whether it's schizophrenia, bipolar, you know, severe treatment-resistant depression.

• 50:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, you can treat these things.

• 50:07Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So many different things.

• 50:07Speaker 00

  Yes, we treat like 40 different conditions. I mean, you know, as you do, you know, these things all travel together, right?

• 50:16Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So what do you think the most common things that are now today causing these problems of sort of anxiety, depression, cognitive decline? Like what?

• 50:24Speaker 00

  I hate that question.

• 50:26Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Well, I mean, there's common things are common, right? So like, you know, there's so many, there's always the outlier case. But like, what are the things that really are driving this? And I think.

• 50:36Speaker 00

  There's food, right? There's mental set, your mindset, right? There's hormones, there's infection, there's sleep. There's a social breakdown is a big factor, right? Anti-social media, you know? Uh, you know, it's really a big problem. So there are problems at many levels now and now we have long COVID. So I would say if you said to me like, look, what are four things that you could tell a person to do? Right? To help themselves, right? I would say diet, right? So assimilation really be careful of what you eat, right? As you say, your fork is your best medicine, right?

• 51:17Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Right.

• 51:17Speaker 00

  Right? And also be careful what comes into your mind. What are you exposing yourself to? What are you listening to? What's on the social media? Who are your friends? What movies are you watching?

• 51:29Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Brain pollution.

• 51:30Speaker 00

  Brain pollution, right? It's all information and it damages you. What, you know, we're, we're floating in a cesspool of bad information.

• 51:38Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I don't really try not to pay too much attention to the news. And I just opened a, you know, a newspaper app and I was, Rob Reiner like stabbed by his son and the Jews killed in Sydney and the people at Brown. I'm like, what is going on? I just, it's so depressing. I try not to pay attention.

• 51:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, you can't pay attention to it. It's not, it's not good. I mean, so I think you have to work on this. I strongly believe this, and I think your previous podcast guests talked about this. You need to really communicate with God or the universe, or whatever you think this greater thing is. And be develop a relationship because the universe works with you. You work with it, it works with you. You ask for help, you get help, not always the way you want or when you think you should get it. But the universe has got you back.

• 52:34Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, I think I have to be more specific because I was like, I really want to slow down some more time at home. But then I didn't say how.

• 52:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:42Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And I got in a bike accident and busted up my feet.

• 52:45Speaker 00

  Very careful.

• 52:46Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I'm like, wait, I can't go anywhere, but it wasn't what I had in mind. Like be specific, I want to be healthy at home.

• 52:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, so that's very important. Assimilation, the food you take in, the information, the people, that's one thing. Then, because then you have exercise activity, and it doesn't have to be crazy exercise. I mean, you're a biker, I'm a biker, right? But I've moderated, and I wish I had moderated earlier, even though I love it. But exercise, some kind of exercise, whatever's appropriate for you, is really critical. And I would say, we'll say, relationships are essential. I think community, you know, they say, you know, social media and the community and social media, it's

• 53:35Speaker 00

  not a community. People don't even know what a community means anymore. I myself recently moved from Maryland. I was at Georgetown, Maryland, and I recently moved about, almost four years ago, to New Jersey. And I'm on the beach, right? And I have a whole community, because I grew up with this community. I know people. People, I'm walking down the street.

• 53:59Dr. Mark Hyman?

  The Jersey Shore.

• 54:00Speaker 00

  Jersey Shore, yeah. Yeah, Bruce Springsteen, right? That's where he grew up. And people say, hey, doc, I don't even know who he is. Hey, doc, can I give you a lift? And I stop, and I'm doing something with my car, and other guys, there's the guy who looks homeless, he's near my car. Somebody else starts and says, hey, doc, this guy bothering you? I said, no, no, no, he's fine, he's fine. He hangs around for a while. Or I go to synagogue, you know, and I have friends, I have people. I didn't realize how lonely I was, actually, in Maryland. I was pretty, you know, I had friends, and I had my practice, my wife, my kids, and everything. But I didn't realize that I didn't have a community, you know? And so, I think people need to develop.

• 54:45Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's important. It's definitely one of the best investments you can make.

• 54:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:49Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I would say, community is medicine, yeah.

• 54:51Speaker 00

  It really is. It really is.

• 54:53Dr. Mark Hyman?

  From a functional medicine perspective, there's a lot of things that are really going on now that are driving mental health issues, like the microbiome changes, mitochondrial injury, toxins, nutritional factors, deficiencies.

• 55:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, the whole list.

• 55:07Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, that's really why, you know, I've been thinking a lot about the biomarkers of mental health, you know?

• 55:13Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And in Function Health, you know, the company I co-founded, we do a lot of labs and we can see a lot of things that relate to mental health that people typically don't pick up on, whether it's marginal thyroid function, like you were talking about, or whether it's a, you know, B12 deficiency, or whether it's-

• 55:28Speaker 00

  You know, it's a big one. A big one is genetic glucocorticoid resistance. So steroid, corticosteroids, which we make, those are stress hormones, right? So there are a set of genes, five genes, NR3C1, FKB5, CRH receptor 1 and 2, CRH binding-

• 55:49Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, it's gonna be a test on that, guys.

• 55:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, you know, whatever. It's these genes that basically, when you're stressed, when you make your stress hormones, when you're under stress, whatever's causing it, the stress hormone goes to the cell and then it goes into the cell and knocks on the door of the nucleus, the center of the cell where your genes are hiding, knocks on the door, "Hey, let me in. I got a message for the genes." Nobody answers the door. Or it takes a lot of knocks. So you have the stress hormone, but it's like insulin resistance. You're not really reading the signal. So now you're more vulnerable to PTSD, to depression, you know, even suicide.

• 56:28Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Because, because you can't, the cortisol doesn't hit the receptor properly?

• 56:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, it doesn't translate to the genes, to tell the genes that you're under stress. So you don't make enough proteins to help you cope with the stress.

• 56:40Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That sort of breaks down some of the pathways that-

• 56:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:42Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Hard to keep your body healthy.

• 56:43Speaker 00

  Body can't respond to the stress. How do you, you know, now you have PTSD much more easily, right?

• 56:48Dr. Mark Hyman?

  One of the things you talked about was you had like a 23 treatment-resistant depression patients and you had 100% recovery rate. Like, when you look at psychiatric meds, like if it's 30% remission, that's like, "Oh, fucking, excuse my French," like a miracle.

• 57:00Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 57:01Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And you're talking about 100%, that almost seems like, you know, too good to be true. So tell us about that.

• 57:07Speaker 00

  With my second book, which was the Anti-Depressant Survival Guide, or Program, which was really functional medicine. I had a four-page spread in the Washington Post Health Magazine, and we had thousands of phone calls. I mean, thousands. You couldn't put the phone down without someone calling. So I couldn't really, obviously, treat everyone. So we screened people with, looking for people with treatment-resistant depression.

• 57:36Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 57:37Speaker 00

  And basically, people who had the resources, meaning the support, to do what I was going to ask them to do, functional medicine. And I'm treating people, and I was doing a lot of psychopharm. You know, I was, hadn't dropped that too much. And I was still doing a lot of psychopharm. So three years into this, after the book, I'm like, wait a second. Everyone's getting better. The diabetes is going away. Dysoplasia is going away. The MS lesion is going away.

• 58:09Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Right.

• 58:09Speaker 00

  Like, maybe I'm lying to myself. Maybe it's selective attention to the positive. Maybe, maybe I'm forgetting the failures. So I hired a statistician. And, you know, we're collecting data on everybody. And I said, you gotta go over the data and, and tell me, you know, here are all the patients, I've got the log. And he came back to me, says, no, you're not lying to yourself.

• 58:32Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Wow.

• 58:32Speaker 00

  Everyone, the mean depression score at start, it was in the severe range, the low severe range. They all were better by 10 months. And you could see when-

• 58:44Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And doing just those combination things and functional medicine.

• 58:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, just doing the functional medicine. By four months, when they're implementing the program, three months, four months, they saw it to get better and they steadily improved. And their overall health, all the other things are getting better, too.

• 58:56Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Right, well, that's the thing. You treat one thing, you treat everything, right?

• 59:00Speaker 00

  Right.

• 59:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's the thing. It's like we have such a siloed form of medicine, where each specialty focuses on their particular organ or their particular body part. And their disease categories, but there's so much cross all these diseases like they're all inflammatory, most of these chronic illnesses.

• 59:14Speaker 00

  Right, and mitochondrial.

• 59:16Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's, we're really in a revolution in medicine, a revolution in psychiatry, you know, I can't believe you're still going at it this hard.

• 59:23Speaker 00

  I, you know, I can't stop. I love it.

• 59:25Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, it's amazing.

• 59:26Speaker 00

  And there's no end to what we can learn, right?

• 59:28Dr. Mark Hyman?

  No, and we were just like at the beginning, we were the OG kind of, we thought we like, I remember when I took that, I was like, oh, this is a vision established field. I'm like, we were kind of the few guys who kind of started to poke our nose around.

• 59:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:41Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And we've been doing this for so long. And the reason we keep doing it is because it works.

• 59:45Speaker 00

  Right.

• 59:45Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Like you just see miracles. I always say every day I get to be witness to miracles. Things that I never thought were possible to cure or treat in medical school and things that people suffer from that they don't need to and that we have answers for. They're just not getting them.

• 59:58Speaker 00

  And then there's prevention.

• 1:00:01Speaker 00

  Right? You know, you have a problem in your family history, there's vulnerability. You know, correct your diet, exercise, you get rid of the toxic influences in your life, you know? And prevent.

• 1:00:14Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I think about prevention.

• 1:00:17Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I- is treatment. In other words, we kind of define treatment and prevention sort of separately.

• 1:00:22Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 1:00:23Dr. Mark Hyman?

  But I think if you do the same things you would do for prevention, you're also going to treat the problem.

• 1:00:26Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:00:27Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And like if you eat healthy, you exercise, you sleep well, you get, yeah, your diabetes is going to go away.

• 1:00:31Speaker 00

  Right, right.

• 1:00:33Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Your autoimmunities can go away if you do all the right things. If you do the things to get healthy.

• 1:00:36Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:00:37Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Then automatically, I always say if you, when you create health, disease goes away as a side effect.

• 1:00:42Speaker 00

  And it's, think of it this way also, if you have, say you're, you're working with someone in functional medicine and you know, you're correcting your diet. Well, guess what? Your kids are going to see.

• 1:00:52Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:52Speaker 00

  And you're going to be helping generations. Right, right? So it's, I think really we are, it's, it's a revolutionary time. People are taking control of their health more now. They see the system is, is broken. It's not totally broken. There's a lot of good stuff going on, but it's, it's very limited with this chronic disease model.

• 1:01:13Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And what are you seeing among your colleagues in psychiatry? Are they friendly to these ideas? Are they resistant? Do they like hear a quack for get out of my space? You know?

• 1:01:22Speaker 00

  I think, you know, I get this thing from the New Jersey board, right? And they're, no ideas in medicine. Let's talk about B vitamins.

• 1:01:34Speaker 00

  And I'm like, all right, well, that's a start, you know, but like I might at this rate, at this rate, we're looking at a hundred years. I'm like, I want it, you know,

• 1:01:44Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You want it now.

• 1:01:44Speaker 00

  I want it now. And, and the other thing is not everyone has the bandwidth, Mark. You have the bandwidth. I have the bandwidth. You have the curiosity, you know, you want to get to the truth of it. You get to the root of it and you're just going to follow the science. You're going to follow what, what the truth is. You're not wedded to a model. I'm not wedded to functional medicine. If something else comes back out that's better, of course, great.

• 1:02:06Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Wedded to the truth.

• 1:02:07Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly. But a lot of people are, they're, they're too algorithmic in their thing. They're too rigid. They're afraid. They don't have the bandwidth. They can't handle the anxiety of not knowing. Right? But we live in uncertainty. You know, that's life.

• 1:02:22Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Well, thank you for all you've done for the last decades to advance this field. You were kind of the OG functional medicine psychiatrist when there wasn't any. And there's Abraham Hoffer, who was, we both got to know, who was a sort of pioneer really of functional medicine.

• 1:02:34Speaker 00

  You know, he told me with my second book, I'm very, I was very honored. He told me, he said, I had lunch with him at a, at a functional medicine conference.

• 1:02:42Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yes, I think I might have been there.

• 1:02:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think you were there. And he said to me, he says, Bob, you wrote the book I wanted to write.

• 1:02:48Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:50Speaker 00

  He, he, he saw this.

• 1:02:52Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Well, he, just for those listening to kind of close up, he was, you know, a psychiatrist in Canada back in the 50s and was a kind of a colleague of Linus Pauling and was sort of experimenting with schizophrenia by giving them high doses of certain vitamins and believed that there were certain pathways that were stuck that he could unlock. And that led to the development of sort of this field and in, in general, functional medicine. In fact, Linus Pauling went on to write in 1969, a key paper in Science Magazine called Orthomolecular Psychiatry, which was sort of in a sense, the original paper describing how we use nutrition to optimize your biochemistry, to change your brain and your mood and your

• 1:03:33Dr. Mark Hyman?

  cognitive function. It was sort of so far ahead of its time. That was like 1969. But I remember Abraham Hoffer. He was quite a guy. And I'm so glad I got to meet him. And I actually got to meet Linus Pauling too, back in the day. Yeah. He was, he was, yeah, he won the Nobel Prize for, for folding of proteins, but also.

• 1:03:54Dr. Mark Hyman?

  For, or the peace prize for the nuclear test ban treaty in the sixties. Yeah. So he prevented the above ground testing of nuclear weapons. And, um, nah, he was part of the whole movement that I was a part of, which was in medical school called the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. And, and I got to kind of hear him speak. It was, it was pretty inspiring.

• 1:04:16Speaker 00

  Wow. Wow. Great. A journey, yeah.

• 1:04:18Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. Amazing. But a journey. Yeah. So thanks Bob for being on this journey with me. It's been great. And, uh, anybody wants to know more about your work, find out more, where can they find you?

• 1:04:28Speaker 00

  Oh, they can go to like, it's like Whole Foods, you know, only it's whole psychiatry.

• 1:04:32Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Okay.

• 1:04:33Speaker 00

  Uh, and, and we have, there's a lot of information on there, the videos, there's all kinds of information. And then there's a contact form and, uh, if you want an educational consult, you know, look for a functional medicine doc in your area and, uh, and, uh, you know, contact us and we'll help you find someone if you can't find somebody. We have a, a network that we're building and, uh, and then we'll meet, typically we'll meet on Zoom for 15, 30 minutes. Make sure this is right for you. Uh, that's the right fit and then I think I can be helpful. And then we go from there.

• 1:05:08Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Well, I know I'm going to get my QEEG. I want to see what's going on in my brain. That's what's happening.

• 1:05:12Speaker 00

  I, you know, I do it, I do it regularly and, uh, I don't know if it's, cause I do the laser on myself, by the way. And I don't know if it's that or 25 years of mountain biking, but my doctor told me my brain looks like a 55 year old.

• 1:05:26Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Amazing.

• 1:05:27Speaker 00

  Which is thank God.

• 1:05:29Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I can only hope, I can only hope. Well, thanks for being here and thanks for coming all the way Austin and.

• 1:05:33Speaker 00

  It was a pleasure seeing you, Mark. It's been too long.

• 1:05:36Dr. Mark Hyman?

  If you, when it comes to supplements, you only want the best for your body, the kind with the highest quality, cleanest and most potent ingredients you can get. That's exactly what you'll find at my supplement store. Where I've hand selected each and every product to meet the most rigorous standards for safety, purity and effectiveness. These are the only supplements I recommend to my patients, and they're also what I use myself. Whether you want to optimize longevity, or reduce your disease risk, or you're looking to improve your sleep, blood sugar, metabolism, gut health, you name it, drhyman.com has the world's best selection of top-quality, premium supplements, all backed by science and expertly vetted by me, Dr. Mark Hyman. So check out drhyman.com, because when it comes to your health, nothing less than the very best will do. That's drhyman.com, D-R-H-Y-M-A-N dot com.

• 1:06:19Dr. Mark Hyman?

  If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social media channels at Dr. Mark Hyman. Please reach out. I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to the Dr. Hyman Show wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at Dr. Mark Hyman for video versions of this podcast and more. Thank you so much again for tuning in. We'll see you next time on the Dr. Hyman Show. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center, my work at Cleveland Clinic, and Function Health, where I am Chief Medical Officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guests' opinions. Neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests. This podcast is for educational purposes only, and is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical

• 1:07:03Dr. Mark Hyman?

  professional. This podcast is provided with the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, please seek out a qualified medical practitioner. And if you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, visit my clinic, the Ultra Wellness Center at