#28 – Dr. Mitch Fleisher: Nature Is Your Most Powerful Medicine

You are at the intersection of wealth, health, and happiness. Welcome to the Wealthy Wellthy Life.

Hi, I’m Krisstina Wise, and welcome to the Wealthy Wellthy Life, where I interview thought leaders who teach a countercultural approach to money, health, and happiness, because great riches don’t matter if you’re sick, and good health doesn’t matter if you’re broke.

Today, I tackle health wealth with Dr. Mitch Fleisher. Dr. Mitch is a double board-certified physician specializing in homeopathy, nutritional medicine, hormone therapy, and several other areas in the realm of integrative medicine. He has served on the faculty of multiple top tier universities and medical institutions, such as Stanford University, the University of Virginia Health Science Center, the New England School of Homeopathy, and more. Now he serves as an integrative medicine consultant to several major healthcare institutions and corporations, and is the chief medical officer and vice president of HR Wellness Consultants, a cutting edge firm focused on safe, natural, and non-toxic solutions for healing. He also runs a private practice in the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia, and as you’ll listen, you’ll conclude, like I did, that Dr. Fleisher is a brilliant doctor with countless insights.

In this interview, we talk about his transition from Western medicine to a more integrative approach. We delve in deep, deep into what is homeopathic medicine and what’s the difference between functional medicine and conventional medicine, and where did these two approaches intersect. We also discuss nutraceutical therapy and how foods and supplements can be used as powerful medicine, and finally we talk about the big pharmaceutical companies and how they are not serving us in the way that nature can. I hope you enjoy this episode.

Dr. Fleisher, thank you so much for being here with me on a Saturday. I appreciate your time and you coming in. It looks like you’ve come into the office to share your knowledge with my audience.

Thank you, Krisstina. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Well, I’m really looking forward to this conversation today. What I really work to do through the Wealthy Wellthy Life Podcast is to introduce my listeners to thought leaders, to introduce them to thought leaders themselves and to the information from true pioneers, to introduce new science, new knowledge, new information that’s really starting to bust some of the old belief systems we’ve had that’s based on old science or certain agendas, maybe pharmaceutical industries, or governments. Who knows? It’s not about conspiracy theory by any means, but really seeing, you know, we used to believe some of this stuff to be true and we just don’t believe it to be true anymore.

So, you, the reason why I’m really looking forward to talking to you today is because you’ve been doing this for a while. You’re a true pioneer in this integrative holistic medicine space. If you don’t mind, you’re an MD, so you went through traditional conventional medical school, and then “saw the light” at some point. Do you mind, very quickly, sharing some backstory?

Sure. Well, actually, I was introduced medicine early in my life because my grandfather and two of my uncles were physicians, and actually, my great great grandfather was the only Jewish physician to a tsar of Russia before they killed him. So, I have a long history in my family, and actually, my grandfather, Sam, he used to take me when I was about 4-5 years old on house calls back in those days. He was a urologists, but after World War 2, a lot of the general practitioners were killed in Europe, so he had to be a GP and he did house calls, and he would take me with him. He used to have jars of different body parts in the backseat of his Studebaker. That just so fascinated me. I said, “Grandpa, what’s this?” “Oh, that’s Mr. Milton’s testicles,” things like that. It was very funny, but it was very a good memory and that inspired me. I also had a family physician when I was growing up that was an inspiration to me.

I knew I wanted to be a doctor since I was about four and a half years old, and I got interested in high school in reading herbal books. In fact, my first introduction to naturopathic medicine when I was at 17, and one of my girlfriends gave me John List’s Herbal Treatise on naturopathic medicine. I read it cover to cover. I was fascinated. I began going into woods around where I lived and collecting plants for different medicinal reasons.

I knew that I wanted to go into a more holistically oriented system of medicine even when I started college. I applied to 21 medical schools, got accepted to 19. I decided to go to Stanford because it was in California to get away from the East Coast. Actually, what I was thinking, when I was in college, I was going to go into Ayurvedic medicine and traditional Chinese medicine because those seemed to be most comprehensive systems of healing at the time, and I wasn’t aware of a really as comprehensive Western system appealing. So, I didn’t like the idea. I experienced some acupuncture and I had some couple of needles on the door and some will pop on my foot and said, “I don’t think I could do this to kids. This really hurts. I got to find something else.”

In my first year at Stanford, actually, the first day, I met some other students who were interested in a more alternative approach and we started a small study cell with Stanford Medical Students who exchanged money and brought speakers from the community after hours, after regular classes to come talk to us into different subjects, and it was at one of the sessions in December of 1975 that Dr. Bill Gray, who’s considered the father of the Renaissance of homeopathy, we brought him to speak, and he had been a graduate of Stanford and was completely into holistic medicine.

After hearing him speak, it just completely spun my world around 360 degrees and I arranged a preceptorship with him between my first and second year of medical school when I spent three months virtually every day of the week sitting in his office and watching him taking homeopathic cases doing classical constitutional homeopathy more tertiary care level and treating diseases that I’ve just been taught in medical school were incurable, like Huntington’s chorea, steroid-dependent asthma, ulcerative colitis, all kinds of things. He was giving remedies and these people were coming back and they were phenomenally better. My mind was completely blown.

I said, “Okay, I’ve been studying in an earnest,” and went off every weekend for months on end to a study cell in Mill Valley, California where several other young aspiring homeopaths and doctors and nurses went, and actually, that become the crystallization of the Herring Family Clinic that started in Berkeley, California that later began to spread homeopathy through California again, because homeopathy almost died at that time. There were like less than two dozen homeopathic positions the entire United States when I was in medical school and it was very hard to find a homeopath. Very hard to. No one was advertising, it seemed like the AMA was successful in trying to crush it.

Well, before you carry on, I’ve never really thought about that before, but why is that? What happened where this more conventional Western approach took over and started to squash what’s been around for centuries?

Well, Krisstina, that’s a really, really detailed question, and there’s an answer to it. Probably the best thing that you could do, there’s a really excellent book on the history of medicine written by Dr. Harris Coulter, CO-U-L-T-E-R, it’s called the Divided Legacy. There’s three sections, from Ancient Greece, Middle Ages, to modern era. The third one is all about the battle between homeopathic medicine and the AMA.

Just to give you a brief history, the first national medical association in the United States of America was the American Institute of Homeopathy founded in 1844, and that was for homeopathic positions, but they opened the doors for all kinds of doctors: the allopaths, herbalists, the Thomansonians, the electric doctors, all different kinds of practitioners that were here in the 1850s and ’40s, and ’60s. What happened three later in 1847, the second major medical organization was founded. It was the AMA, American Medical Association. In the founding charter of the AMA, which is still there, is that, “We allopaths are coming together to crush the scourge of homeopathy.”

It was really a trade union and they didn’t like competition, but they weren’t very big back then because people didn’t like to be poisoned with calomel, which was a form of mercury. They didn’t like to be bled to death, or needled, or the rest of the kind of things — you know, the old sawbones cutting things off rather than trying to heal it. They believed in a system that man was pre-amended over nature. It’s the reductionist theory of healing rather than the empirical system of healing which Ayurvedic medicine and Chinese medicine, homeopathy, naturopathy are based.

One of the big fundamental differences is that in homeopathic medicine, naturopathic medicine, and holistic medicine, we believe that there is an innate vital force, vital prints of wellness that we need to respect, and this God given defense mechanism needs to be respected and stimulated in order to naturally heal it. One of the big issues is that the allopathic traditional conventional orthodox medical system does not believe that nor adhere to it. They believe that they are the ones who are in control and their medicines are the ones who do the “healing” and we know, unfortunately, that that’s not the case. Because, if you just cut, burn, and poison the body, it will be cut, burned, and poisoned.

That’s really interesting. So, fundamentally, it’s philosophically totally different.

It’s a stagger diametrically opposite as you could potentially get.

Exactly, and what does allopathy mean?

Allopathy comes from the term “alios pathos”, which means contrary suffering. It’s the principle of contraries in that you give antibiotics, antihistamines, anti-neoplastic, anti-anti-anti. It’s working against the life force. In certain situations, it’s useful.

For example, you’ve got a gunshot wound, it’s nice to take the bullet and then sew it up. Or, if someone comes down the mountain near my home with a compound fracture, I’m not just going to give him remedies or herbs and send him home. No. Of course, you’re going to clean the wound, you’re going to set the fracture, you’re going to sew them up, and then I would give them homeopathic remedies and herbal remedies and nutritional substances that would accelerate their own body’s ability to heal the bone and the skin and prevent infection. Whereas the traditional doctor, might give a tetanus shot full of mercury and aluminum hydroxide, another like chemicals and various animal viruses. Or, they might give antibiotics or non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs like Ibuprofen, which have been shown to inhibit, actually, bone healing.

There’s a different approach to acute and chronic healing where in homeopathic and naturopathic medicine, Ayurvedic medicine, these alternative complementary systems, we understand and appreciate the fact that we have an innate God-given defense mechanism that you have to understand and appreciate and respect. By reading the pattern of physical, mental, emotional symptoms, we can determine what precise remedy is indicated and needed to give you on a given situation rather than just a cookbook approach, which is basically the allopathic approach. It’s very cookbook.

Very much so. So, it sounds like at the end of the day that the AMA and the allopathic approach was just a stronger force.

Well, what happens around the — after the Civil War, with the advent of the industrial revolution and some of the large chemical companies, Merck and others that came around, they started producing large amounts of chemicals inexpensively, and they realized that they could start making medicines or drugs inexpensively too. But, the only way they would make any money is to sell large material doses of these things. If people took infinitesimal doses of things, they wouldn’t make any money. So, naturally, they leaned towards the allopaths, who gave large doses of things at a regular basis, and suppressed the symptoms rather than treating the root cause of the disease, and that was keeping people addicted to different medicines was very profitable. That’s the basis of allopathic medicine, and big pharma essentially.

That’s where big pharma came from, those post-Civil War, industrial revolution chemical companies that became drug companies. They began flowing money into the coffers of the AMA and the JAMA, their journal, and eventually they started manipulating political situation. On the first decade or so of the 1900s, they influenced the creation of what’s called the Flexner Report, which was basically a rhetoric reviewing medical schools throughout the United States. It was basically — Flexner was a corrupt sociopath — not a sociopath. He was a sociologist who left the United States and went to England. He might as well have been a sociopath. But, he didn’t even write the report. He just put his name on it. The AMA wrote it, and the Carnegie Foundation wrote it.

Now, Andrew Carnegie was actually a promoter of homeopathy, but his lawyer and relatives were not. They were into the big moneymaking AMA and big pharma. So, they took his money and perverted it for homeopathy and they put in the Flexner Report, and the Flexner Report basically said the only schools in medicine that made any sense were the allegedly scientific schools that practiced orthodox traditional allopathic medicine, and so the government began closing everybody else down. They required licensure and you could go to a homeopathic medical school or a Thomasonian or a naturopathic school, but you couldn’t get a licensing examination. Well, eventually, they would come arrest you for practicing medicine without a license, and it eventually shut everybody down, and the last homeopathic medical school in the United States, which was in Philadelphia, which actually was originally founded first, the very first homeopathic medical school in the United States was in Philadelphia called the Hering Heilkunst.

It was started by Constantine Hering, who was a medical student at University of Leipzig in Germany, which is considered and is still now one of the best medical schools in the world. He was requested by his professors to check out this homeopathy that was created by Dr. Samuel Hahnemann and defame him, basically. He studied it and became one of the greatest homeopaths in Europe. Then, he came to the United States and Dr. Constantine Hering founded the first medical school that later became the Hahnemann Medical College. It was teaching homeopathy until about 1944 when, basically, the last homeopaths disappeared from America or were in hiding. Actually, that school was then taken over by the end Pennsylvania a number of years back. But, they still have the largest homeopathic library in the United States that you can still access if you know where to find it.

The third volume of Harris Coulter’s book, Divided Legacy, tells this detailed legacy of the fight between the AMA and homeopathy and the political forces that came to be that suppressed all of holistic medicine in the United States so that big pharma could be preeminent, essentially. It’s all about money and power. It had nothing to do with healing.

That’s fascinating.

I believe, firmly, in healthcare for the people, not profit. A big problem with allopathic medicine and big pharma is they’re just the diametrical opposite. They are healthcare for profit, not for the people. Now, there’s some good parts about it. I don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Again, if I’m treating that person who has some sort of physical illness – a cut, or wound, or something like that, or a fracture – you’re going to do what’s important that’s sort —

There’s a place for it. I mean, there is a place for it.

Yeah, you don’t throw it all out. What I do in my practice and I’ve been doing for a little over 30 years is integrative medicine. I take the best of what allopathic conventional medicine has to offer when it’s appropriate. Like sometimes someone is so sick and they’re so weak that sometimes you need a little bit of an antibiotic and then I’ll give them alternative therapy along with that to support it and to get them out. But, the most important thing is to consider what’s important for the given individual in that moment. Not to just apply your system because that’s all you know, but to keep your mind open and recognize what the individual needs and give them what they need.

Yeah, and it does go back to where you started that, philosophically, you, the doctor, has to fundamentally believe that our body is designed to heal itself, that when you give it the right assistance and tools and help through herbs or supplements or change of diet or lifestyle, or whatever it is, that when we give our body natural remedies for healing itself. But, if you don’t believe that, you can’t offer that type of advice, because it’s counter to what you believe in. If you don’t believe the body can heal itself, then clearly, you’re going to be in this other camp entirely.

Yeah, over the years, I’ve seen, very frequently, I have the wives of doctors, regular doctors, who don’t believe in homeopathy come to see me, but their kids first and then themselves. Then, after they’re healed, they bring their husband doctor kicking and screaming and not believing. The beauty of it is you don’t have to believe in homeopathy for it to work because it’s a science, not a belief system.

Well, this is true. Was there a little bit of tension going on when you were there? Now, you’re in medical school, you’re at Stanford, you’re over here off this side in the underground learning more the homeopathy, and like you said, the exact opposite. So, how’d you manage both of those at the same time?

It was a little bit schizophrenic, but it was okay. I was involved in the study cells, I was learning that, learning what I needed to learn to get through the whole system, and I had in my mind, “You know it would be beautiful if we were to integrate these things.” That was my idea, but I was about 25 years before my time before they even considered integrative medicine. They now have an integrative medicine clinic at Stanford, but they didn’t back then. We taped a lot of our lectures. We had acupuncture, some naturopaths, some allopaths. It was really quite good. It may still be in the library there. I don’t know.

But, yeah, it was really fascinating to see, on the weekends, and working with other doctors, to see true healing and to see the exact opposite in the standard medical system. But, I was committed to go through that process and try to integrate the two of them, and that’s what most of my career has been based on that matter, and learning to communicate with other physicians and helping them wake up to this, because sometimes it’s not easy. You have to wake yourself up and get to a point where you can there then be a beacon of life for others.

So, was it your own experience when you were here at school that you’re working with an integrative doctor on the side when you’re seeing counter to what they’re seeing in the conventional system that this can’t be healed, so on and so forth. But, over here, you’re seeing, “Oh my gosh, no. This is being healed and that’s being healed.”

Well, Krisstina, I had a really amazing — you know, the first couple of months working with Dr. Gray in the study group, I had my skepticisms about the whole thing. I said, “How could such a small molecule, even non-molecular amount of anything really work?” because I had been really into — I love chemistry minor in the. How can this really work? I was trying to put my mind around it.

Then, I had this experience where a couple of friends and I went to Baja California, made a mistake of eating in a fruit stand in La Paz and I got a really bad case of Turista. I had the runs for weeks on end and the Stanford Medical Clinic gave me this brand new drug that had been out called flagyl, or metronidazole, didn’t do a thing for me, and I was getting to the point where everything I eat came out undigested, and I was losing on — I got down to 137 pounds, which is pretty skin and bones. I was so tired, I couldn’t even fall asleep. I’d fall asleep in class and it was getting bad so I was a little nervous.

One day I came home and I had this little desk where I had materia medica, which is an encyclopedia for homeopathic remedies, on my desk that that could be a little packet of remedies, little box of remedies they have given me. I just flipped the little book, and the page I was there, I started reading and I said, “Oh my god, those are my symptoms.” It was one after another were my symptoms. So, I took the remedy that I was reading out and took a dose of it. Then, a few minutes later started feeling really sleepy. I had not been able to sleep before that and I’d not been able to eat well before that. I had lain down on my bed. It was about dusk and I figured I’d take a little nap. So, I wake up and I’m in a pool of sweat. My sheets and towels have sweat, my clothes are sweating, and it looks like about the same time, but I figured I only slept for a few minutes. I stood up, it was the first time I didn’t feel lightheaded standing up, and I was hungry for the first time in a long time. I ate a bowl of my rice and beans and broccoli and it stayed in my body. After a single dose of the remedy called 30c. After that single dose of the remedy, I proceeded to just completely recover, and that completely blew my mind and I’ve just studied homeopathy more in earnest because I realized there was something to this.

And it’s been a very gratifying practice in medicine because it’s a very profound system of healing. Before I came on this interview today, I had an acute case of something like an acute onset of the shingles, herpes zoster, and after 30 years of practice, you get the sense of “Bam!”, you know the remedy in your head and you needed ranunculus bulbosus, which is the buttercup, and I know he’ll probably be healed with the first few doses.

So, you completed med school at Stanford, it looks like you’re double board certified. What does that mean?

Well, I’m board certified in family medicine in family practice, and I’m also board certified in homeopathic medicine. That’s with the DHTs, the Diplomatic Homeopathic Therapeutics, and Diplomatic American Board of Family Medicine. So, I have my foot in both worlds.

You sure do. So, when you finished med school and, I guess, residency and everything, did you come out of the gate, really, with this different philosophy and way that you are going to practice medicine that did include both?

Yeah, and in fact when I was in my residency, I was treating people on the side of my home homeopathically and I’d started taking an advanced homeopathic post-graduate course. I would fly from Virginia to California for six days each month for 30 months. It was like a second residency program, and I worked with Dr. Gray and precepted with other physicians so I could see their approach and just study my brains out, and it was very gratifying. It was after I finished my residency I was asked to stay on as an assistant, associate professor of medicine at Medical College of Virginia After finishing a practice program at Blackstone, I was there for a number of years and I made an arrangement if I could practice part-time homeopathy and part-time allopathic medicine, and it was very gratifying.

I would precept the young doctors, medical students and resident physicians, and I had some cases in which I gave them an alternative. We would see a patient and I’d say, “Here’s the allopathic diagnosis, here’s the homeopathic diagnosis. This is the way you’d standardly treat as they taught you in the medical school and this is another approach.” Several of them opted to see what would happen if we used this other approach, and I got a few converts there, at least opened their mind if they didn’t become full-blown homeopaths, and that was very gratifying to do that, which led me to want to be more involved in teaching and being more of a liaison between the fields over the years, which I’ve done, which has been very fun.

What year was this? We talked about a little bit before the show started, integrative medicine and functional medicine and more of this holistic approach is becoming a little bit more — I wouldn’t say mainstream by any means, but accepted, people are hearing about it, there’s a lot more medical doctors, MDs, even going into functional medicine. But, I’m guessing there weren’t too many of you when you started this.

Right. I was in medical school in the 70s and residency in the 70s and 80s, and I’ve been out here practicing since, and there weren’t a lot of us, no. There weren’t any integrative medicine programs that entered the medical schools. It was still a dirty word to use homeopathy.

I remember some experiences when I was rotating internal medicine clerkship at the Palo Alto Veterans Administration Hospital, one of the chief residents made this comment that this intern had given a patient with congestive heart failure a very small dose of a water pill called Lasix, furosemide, and the resident dressed him down and said he gave a homeopathic dose of that, and I just cringed because that completely had nothing to do with the word “homeopathy”.

Homeopathic doesn’t have anything to do with quantity. It’s quality. Because the term homeopathy comes from “homeos pathos”, or similar suffering. It’s based on the law of similars. Basically, that a substance that can create certain symptoms in a person given to during an experimental or clinical trial. That set of symptoms that are created can be used to prescribe that medicine for someone with a disease process, and what you want to do is give a similar — give the remedy that matches it similarly. Where we’d take a homeopathic case is we’d look at not just the physical symptoms. We don’t separate mind, body, and spirit. We’re all one continuum, really. It’s a continuum of the most dense energy, which is physical to where it was refined spiritual energy and everything in between.

In a homeopathic case taking, both in acute and especially chronic care, you look at all the physical symptoms, the unique way someone experiencing them, what makes them better and worse, the common sensations, then you look at the emotional symptomology, like the emotional body, their anxieties, worries, fear, despairs, regrets, everything they’re experiencing from as young as they can remember to their present state, and then you look at their mental body. You look at the way they think, what they don’t think about, their beliefs, their disbeliefs, their delusions, their dreams, their daydreams, and then you take all the symptoms physically that’s unique to them, all their emotional symptoms and mental symptoms, spiritual, and you look at the synergy, the crossroads that they all meet, and then that group of symptoms that describes the whole person, the “holos” that if you took something away it wouldn’t be them. When you take that group of symptoms that describes everything they’re experiencing on all levels of their being, you analyze that and compare it to remedies in nature, and there’s thousands of proven homeopathic remedies.

But, we have ways now in which we’re able to understand how do you even give unproven remedies from the animal, plant, mineral kingdoms. When you give that precise remedy prepared in a bioenergetic pharmaceutical process, it acts as a bioenergetic stimulus or catalyst to give your God-given innate defense mechanism the energy and information that it would have done to begin with. It’s like kick starting your own healing engine and then the healing is profound on all levels. You get a gentle but deep permanent cure, and that’s what I’ve seen over the years of practice. It’s much more work than regular allopathic medicine. Much more work, but it’s very, very gratifying.

So, you’re probably not able to listen and diagnose within 15 minutes?

Well, sometimes. You know, after about 10 or 20 years of doing this, just by observing someone, your mind starts going, “Oh, here’s a differential diagnosis of remedies they could be,” but without taking a whole case. I wouldn’t do that. But, no, I’ve taken acute cases in 5, 10 minutes, but I can extract the critical symptoms and say, “I can see in my mind, it’s going to be this remedy, then I look in the books and say, “Sure enough, it is,” and prescribe.

Then, more chronic and intense case taken when someone has severe autoimmune illnesses, whether it’s Raynaud’s phenomenon or rheumatoid arthritis, or Lupus, or they’re suffering from various different cancers and different toxicities, then you can take a much longer case, because you really want to understand very deeply what’s going on. It’s not going to be an instant thing, and it’s different than some people think that homeopathy is getting electrodermal testing and probing the fingertips and charting dials. That’s not homeopathy. That’s called homotoxicology or electroacupuncture role.

True constitutional Hahnemannian homeopathy is sitting down with someone and deeply understanding them on all levels of the being: physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and finding a single remedy from nature that’s their specific key that they need at that given time to turn on their healing mechanism. When you’re willing to do that and find that correct remedy, and then use that in conjunction with a nutritional set of therapy that’s designed to fit their constitutional nature, help detoxify them, and nourish all their cells, tissues, and organs the way it needs to be nourished and detoxified, then you see healing that is phenomenal. It’s very gratifying. It’s a lot more work but it’s very gratifying to experience it with my patients.

I would think so too, and I’m guessing that you probably see a lot of patients that have been through the traditional system, and maybe for a long period of time and it’s not worked, and then they make their way to you finally. Maybe even as a last resort or hope, and then you see the healing and they experience the healing in complete reversal, I’m guessing you probably come across that quite often. I can also imagine it must feel pretty amazing.

Well, that’s what my experience was over the last few decades. But, the last 10 years or so, more and more people, because of the internet, which wasn’t around when I first went to school or college or medical school, they’re more educated. I had more and more patients coming to Novo. I mean before they do other approaches and it failed those approaches and they just want nutritional homeopathic therapy because they’ve had a relative or a friend that has suffered through the other system and failed. What we are in Virginia is a hotbed of Lyme disease, Borrelia, and I’ve seen many, many patients over the years who have third-stage Lyme disease, which is neuroborreliosis where it’s become now an autoimmune problem – not so much an infection – and they’ve been on months and months and months of antibiotics, and as soon as they get the PICC line out, the symptoms all go back because it wasn’t treating the root cause of the problem. Then, we take their homeopathic case, and then we give nutritional therapy to support their immune system to help fight them. But, we give IV therapies to help optionate their tissues or detoxify, and then we see turnarounds and they get back to their life, and that’s really gratifying to see that.

Absolutely, and that’s true medicine, in my opinion, to be able to truly heal the body and assist and participate in that would be magical.

It gives you a lot of respect for the God-given defense mechanism and that this is the vitalist theory that underlies Ayurvedic medicine Ayurveda means to pass the, that’s the older system. That whole idea – like cures like – and all of these different principles of healing really came out of Ayurvedic medicine thousands of years ago, and that’s what was the underpinning of traditional Chinese medicine, naturopathic medicine, Hippocrates, his treatise on healing was based on the original Ayurvedic principles. So, it’s all grown out of that ancient wisdom that kind of call the shots. Basically, it’s spiritual healing translated into the physical, mental, emotional realms. It’s treating the whole person, and that’s what true healing’s about.

So, there’s a lot of different specializations or terms. I can’t say I know the difference between, or even if there is a difference. But, there’s the homeopathic, the integrative, the complementary, alternative, functional. So, are all these the same or are they all different?

Well, you know, it’s slightly different. Back in the 60s and 70s, what we call integrative medicine now was called holistic medicine. Some spell it with a “W-H”, some of them with an “H”. That was the way it was. Or, humanistic medicine. But, essentially, homeopathic medicine is its own system, and it is a very profound system of bioenergetic medicinal medicine. But, medicines can be used homeopathically even if they’re not prepared as potencies.

You can actually — I had a case when I was a resident and this young women came in. She had chronic sinusitis recurrent. So, the standard treatment was to give them amoxicillin. I gave her amoxicillin and she had this remarkable transformation. It didn’t make any sense when I saw her in follow up. Basically, more than just your sinusitis went away. I said, “This can’t be just an antibacterial effect. Why was she emotionally better? Why was her anxiety better?” Why did her rashes get lighter? Why did her stomach get better? You fix that just the opposite. So, I did a little bit of research, and there was this book written by Juani, a French homeopathic physician, and he did provings on different allopathic drugs, so I looked at the proving – and I’ll explain what that means in a second – of amoxicillin, and sure enough, they were all of her symptoms. The material dose of the drug I gave her, 500 milligrams three times a day acted homeopathically, not only allopathically, and cured the infection, but also cured it more deeply by stimulating her vital force.

That would have been better if I gave her a homeopathic preparation of it, but I was amazed that it’s not the amount of the substance. That has nothing to do with it. It’s not a quantitative differentiation. It’s qualitative. Homeopathic means “similar to”, so we want to find a remedy that produces symptoms – physically, mentally, emotionally – very similar to what the body and mind are already experiencing. Then, what that does, if you give that energy to someone, it’s like you’re giving a little spark of God from that substance, wherever it is, and it gives an innate — there’s an intelligence to each substance, and it helps the body and mind understand what it needs to do. It stimulates its own body’s ability to heal itself. It recognizes the way in which it’s out of balance.

If we had three or four hours, I can go into the details of this, but it’s really based on the high-energy physics. Basically, it has to do with recognizing that all illnesses are actually occurring at the energy level of the body first before they manifest in the physical level. The symptoms that are generated are generated from our vital force, from our energetic defense mechanism, and depending on the environmental influences, on their diet, on their genetic influences, all of these many, many factors, it will affect the exhibition, or the way in which these symptoms physically, mentally, emotionally come out at that given time, and it may change over time. You have to take all of that into account. But, by giving that stimulus at the right time and taking away the toxic influences by doing detoxification nutrition at the same time, then you allow your own innate intelligence to heal itself, and that’s the beauty of homeopathy and naturopathic medicine, Ayurvedic approaches. We recognize and we utilize this principle of nature.

There’s a lot of different names for it. You’ve probably heard the term “chi”, or “ki”, or “prana”, or vis vitae or vital force. They’re all the same thing. It’s this life force that we’ve all been given by the divine that if we learned to recognize the pattern of symptoms that are exhibited and read them correctly, and then use what nature has given us to be able to stimulate that given individual or that pattern of symptoms, then we have true healing in the real sense of the word. Not just suppression of symptoms, not putting your finger in the dike, but stimulating the core of our being to radiate out. It’s like the analogy that you have for people who ask me, “Well, why can’t I take all these things at the same time? Why can’t I use all these different energetic therapies? Acupuncture, homeopathy, polarity therapy at the same time?”

Well, what I explain is that imagine yourself like a clear mountain pot, and if you look into it, you can see the turmoil underneath, all that turmoil going on, and what you want to do is read the pattern of the turmoil and find out exactly what you need from nature and take that one perfect pearl and throw it into the pond, and then that waveform radiates out through gradually over time and brings everything back into balance because you’ve stimulated the innate intelligence with a very clear purified concentrated energetic stimulus and then it knows what to do. If you do a lot of different energetic therapies at the same time, or allopathic therapies, it’s like throwing a handful pebbles in there, it creates a lot of chaotic wave patterns and then nothing really ever heals.

Probably just confused.

Right. What you’re trying to do is de-confuse the body.

Exactly. Just give it the one thing it needs. So, that’s the homeopathic, naturopathic. What about like an integrative complementary. Is that more of where you’re using both the allopathic and the more homeopathic disciplines at the same time?

Well, first of all, integrative — basically, we need to integrate the different things. So, when I have someone typically come to me and they’re on a whole bag of medications or a whole bag of different herbs, it’s pretty common what happens. I don’t just stop everything. You first take a really good history and go really deep. You get the right lab work that they haven’t had it done to find out what the metabolic imbalances are. If it’s someone who’s diabetic and he’d been on the medication for a long time, or they’re hypertensive and have been on medications for a long time, it’s dangerous to just stop things because their systems got acclimated to being poisoned and you just can’t stop it like that. You have to build them up.

The integrative approach is using the best of both worlds. So, I will give them the correct indicated homeopathic remedies, nutritional supplements, detoxification to help their own metabolism function again, and then as they tolerate it, wean them off the medications that are simply a crutch. So, you’re using them together. It’s a not uncommon phenomenon. The complementary medicine basically is to complement things. So, I would sometimes use a homeopathic medicine or herb along with someone’s medication for an autoimmune disease until I can wean them off that drug. That’s complementary. Alternative means to see something different, an alternate.

Everything in homeopathy, naturopathy, Ayurveda, all those symptoms are alternative to conventional orthodox medicine, the standardized system. And holistic just means treating the whole person.

Is that the same as functional medicine?

Functional medicine is another term that’s become very popular that’s taking to account the fact that you have to treat the functional systems of the body. You just can’t cut the thing out or burn it or poison it. You have to respect that there are certain systems of the body that have their own intelligence. One of the main principles in functional medicine is recognizing that we are, in fact, what we eat.

For example, and this is been in homeopathy for a long time is that we have more bacterial cells in our body than human cells. It’s about 50 trillion cells in us. Most of it is actually bacteria, and we live in symbiosis, or balance with those bacteria. There are certain bacteria that we call probiotic, or for life, and there are others that are not so good, like the bifidobacteriaceae, lactobacilli, peptisorb toxoid, bacilli. There’s a lot that are good and they actually live along the tube of our intestines and our small intestines, which is the main absorbent surface is not just a smooth tube.

Actually, if you look at a microscope, it looks like a shag rug. You have millions of these finger-like that’s called microvilli, and those are the things, the little tubules that secrete enzymes and that absorb the food, digestive food, and it goes into the lymphatics or lacteals, and that goes along the lining of the bowels to the liver, which is the first immune organ and digestive organ.

In the cricks along these different villis is microgel layer where you have the probiotics living, and they produce B Vitamins, amino acids, digestive factors, immune factors that our body, over the millennia, has gotten used to that we need to function correctly. We give them a place to live and they give us substances that we need to survive and function right. Now, when you take antibiotics, when you use steroid medications like prednisone, when you’re big in a crappy diet, when you’re under a lot of stress, on and on, all these different factors, the different drugs will kill off the good bacteria, the probiotics in the microvilli cricks.

Then, the not so good bacteria. They have the bifidobacteriaceae, E. colis, serratia, citrobacter, on and on can get embedded into that gel layer, and they produce different kinds of toxins: endotoxins, exotoxins, lipopolysaccharides that are quite toxic to us that will completely screw up our immune system, our hormonal endocrine system, our central nervous system, so forth and so on. There’s so many people walking around with all of this, what we call, auto-intoxication, or dysbiosis. Dysbiosis is the term for imbalanced bowel flora. So, your bacteria are now poisoning you and killing you, and you can take a wheelbarrow full of probiotics and you can’t get rid of it.

Around the turn of 1900s in the previous century, homeopathic physicians and researchers at the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital did some fascinating research. They recognized that each of their different patients with chronic diseases in the different wards tended to have stools that looked and smelled different. So, they were, “They must have different infections going on here,” so they cultured them, and then they made homeopathic nosodes. A nosode is a homeopathic preparation of a disease substance, and they called them homeopathic bowel nosodes, and they give them different names: Pattersons, and Bach, and the rest of it depending on what disease it was, and they would then did provings.

Proving is the term that comes from Prüfung, German for testing, and that is when you give a homeopathic preparation to a group of volunteers, and what you do is you take a homeopathic case before they take the substance. So, you know all the physical, mental emotional symptoms they entered into the study with. Now, they take the remedy over a course of time until they start exhibiting physical, or mental, or emotional symptoms due to the remedy, and that’s taken for several days or a few weeks, and they keep a very diary of just what they’re experiencing. They don’t hypothesize. “Oh, I must have gastritis or meningitis.” No, they don’t say that. They say, “I have this burning stomachache that’s better, and worse right here in my left side then when I drink cold milk, worse when I’m in the sun,” all that kind of thing. They write down exactly what they’re experiencing empirically. That’s the difference between reductionism, which theorizes, does armchair theorizing about what’s happening, and empirical medicine, which sees what really is happening and reports on the truth. That’s the difference between allopathic medicine, homeopathy, Ayurvedic medicine. One’s reductionistic, theorizing, one’s seeing the truth of what’s actually happening.

So, then all that information from those patients is collated, the symptoms they arrive to the study are subtracted. So, what’s left is the symptoms produced by the homeopathic substance. That’s then put into books called Materia Medica, that’s an encyclopedias of symptoms, and then to repertories, which are books that are of the clinical symptoms with rubrics. You might have a rubric like the patient I took today: chest pain, stitching, burning, and itching, worse from touch, and it would have a group of remedies that create that pattern of symptoms. That’s a clinical rubric.

So, that’s the way we apply it. We go to our repertory, we take someone’s case, we go to the repertories, we found all the remedies that create that symptom, we cross it, find which ones create the totality of symptoms. That is I want to be able to find a remedy that has all of your symptoms. You don’t have to have all the symptoms of the remedy, God forbid, that you would be a mess. You just want a remedy that has all of your symptoms predominantly, and that’s most similar to what you’re experiencing.

So, first we repertorize, then we go into our books, and we read the remedy in depth so we see, “Oh, yeah. This really fits.” so we might ask further questions of the patient to confirm the right prescription, and we give that remedy. At acts, we call that “the true homeopathic similimum”. That is the most similar remedy that acts as a biological catalyst stimulus to bring everything back into balance over time. They might need repetitive doses over time, they may shift through different remedy states. It’s much more complex than that. I’m trying to make it simple as possible.

But, basically, you’re always paying attention to what’s really going on with the patient. Each time I see with someone, I retake their case, and I say, “Okay, what’s changed, what’s improved, what’s not better? Do I have to give the remedy again, do I change the remedy? Is there an interfering substance that I have to get out of the way? Is there some kind of virus that’s happening in the body that we didn’t know about before?” Test for that, maybe give her no score for it to help nullify that energy.

So, it’s a gradual process of peeling off the layers, the illness until you reach your original state of health. That’s the process.

Wow, thank you. That’s very helpful, by the way. When you’re prescribing, I’m guessing you’re not prescribing a lot of pharmaceuticals. So, what do you prescribe? Is it, “Well, here’s a mushroom.”?

Well, first of all, you individualize your prescription. Don’t just throw it, “Here. Go to the pharmacy, take all this.” No, no, no. You find out what’s going on with somebody. If someone comes in — let’s say they come in, they say, “I have chronic sinusitis.” One way to find out how big of a problem is it, how limiting to their system is it, one of the first things I do when I take someone’s older symptoms is you want to find what’s the core in someone. You want to find out what’s the symptoms that limits their life the most. Because there’s a homeopathic principle that was enunciated by Dr. George Vithoulkas and Dr. Gray in the 1970s to a very famous book, “The Science of Homeopathy”.

We understand that all true healing has to do with eliminating limitations to health on the physical, mental, emotional level. What that means is we look to find out what’s limiting someone physically that is people usually limited by pain, or might be missing a limb or something like that. Pain is the most limiting factor, usually, in one way or another. Is it to the point where they’re debilitated and they can’t do anything with their life and they’re on disability? Or, do they just have occasional? So, we can put that in a certain hierarchy.

Then, we look at what’s going on emotionally. What is the most debilitating there? Are they someone who has generalized anxiety disorder or obsessive compulsive disorder and they can’t step on a crack or they’ll break their mommy’s back? How severe is it and how much does it limit their life? The same thing mentally. Are they schizophrenic and they’re so delusional they can’t function in life?

So, what we seek to do is find out what’s the most limiting factor physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, and then remove that. We find out what’s the core. Is the core on the physical level, mental level, emotional level, spiritual level, and work from there and work outwards. In most cases, even if someone comes in with a simple physical illness, there’s always a mental emotional correlate and you have to have your mind open, your eyes open, your ears open, all your senses open to be able to pick it out and sometimes pull the red thread that this brings the underlying picture.

Because, most people are having, actually, an acute exacerbation of an underlying chronic miasm. That’s what most people, and their miasm in homeopathy means in chronic inherited or acquired disease tendency. Hahnemann, back in the 1700-1800s elaborated on this and he found that there were three major miasms based on chronic diseases throughout human history that contributed to an illness, and some caused hypofunctions, so it will be low functions, like low thyroid, low adrenal, all the body not functioning well, you get heavy and you don’t digest well, all of these different factors. There’s many different symptoms involved in each miasm, and then there’s one that’s hyperfunction where you have all kinds of exudation, a lot of mucus and snot, and you’re coughing and you’re wheezing, and you got rashes, and you got warts and moles. Everything’s over-expressive. Then you have the third one that’s destructive miasm when people ulcerate or get cancers or things are breaking down, or dysfunctioning.

So, you have hypofunction, hyperfunction, and dysfunction. So, you look and see where someone is in that whole, “Well, what do all those symptoms mean?” and where the center of gravity is so you direct a remedy that has that center of gravity along with the specific symptom pattern, the totality, and you realize that you’re going to be treating layers. You’re going to be peeling layers off, and when you take a really good homeopathic case, and usually my homeopathic cases last about two and a half hours, and I have an 80-question questionnaire that I get to my patients to fill up before they see me and I study that before I even see someone, and when they do that history, they complain sometimes, but it’s like having seen them for 24 hours. Rather than just getting an hour or two-hour slice of someone’s life, you’re getting a bigger piece.

The idea is to really, truly, deeply understand the patterns throughout the course what’s contributed to someone being ill through the course of their lifetime, what medicines have they taken they’ve reacted to, what’s their family history, what procedures they’ve had done, and what’s laid different layers on their system that you have to gradually kind of peel off. Functional medicine addresses a lot of the nutritional, and dietary, and metabolic disorders. Well, when you use functional nutritional medicine, which is really working in a biochemical process, restoring normal biochemistry and restoring mitochondrial function.

I mean, people may not know about this: inside of every single cell are these little tiny bacterial capped cells called mitochondria, which are the powerhouses of our cells. This is where we burn either sugar or fat, preferably fatty acids, right? Because then you produce ketone bodies, what the brain, and the heart, and the body loves. If you eat too many sugars, unrefined carbohydrates, you get hooked on your sugar, and you make a lot of organic acids and waste products, and it’s very inefficient and you poison yourself.

That’s where diabetes and free radical oxidative stress that causes atherosclerosis, not high cholesterol. That’s bullshit, excuse my language, but where free radical oxidative stress comes from. It’s the diet. So, you have to correct the diet, you have to usually correct the dysbiosis and we have, in homeopathy, very many tools. We have homeopathic battle nosodes, so when I have someone come to me and they have chronic indigestion or they have rashes or I find they have celiac disease and tegumental toxicity, we find out what imbalances they have in the bowel by special stool analyses, then I give them a nosode depending on what the analysis shows in their pattern of symptoms, and it helps their body recognize what they have got, what the imbalance is, and helps them to expel it.

So, then the probiotics they take will actually recede and get the right balance in. We get them on the right organic, non-GMO foods so their body can be nourished and we help correct the leaky bowel syndrome. Your folks know about leaky bowel, right? Okay, good. So, we’re looking at multiple factors at the same time. When you do that, when you look at all the possible causes, when you have to be a little bit of a Sherlock Holmes to really delve into why does somebody have these symptoms, rather than, “Here’s the diagnosis. Here’s the drug we throw at it,” which happens a lot in conventional medicine. That’s not the interest of a homeopathic physician, a good integrative physician. We want to understand why this given individual has this pattern to symptoms. We don’t care about the name of the disease. Oh, fine. You have Sjögren’s Syndrome, you have rheumatoid arthritis, you have Crohn’s disease.

That’s just a label. We want to understand why that given individual and over a dozen people who have the same label have their condition, and when you look at all the contributing factors. You look at their diet, you look at their dysbiosis, you look at heavy metals, you look at all immune reactivity, or allergic reactivity, environmental influences, social and emotional influences, and then you take all of it, you give them bioenergetic stimulation with homeopathy, or really well-done fire balling and acupuncture, which also can help stimulate. Then, you give them nutritional and biochemical support to rebalance their metabolism. Then, homeopathy, the bioenergetic and biochemical work together and stimulate and clarify and power the vital force to bring about true health and wellbeing. It’s not overnight. It takes time.

Absolutely. So, you’ve been doing this a few decades now, so you have a lot of experience of seeing a lot of different people. Now, at this point of your career, how much of it is kind of sourced back to the same thing that is probably, most likely, one of these two or three things? Or, is it still could be any number of things?

Well, Krisstina, it generally is multifactorial. I rarely see anybody that has just that one thing, and that’s pretty rare. Maybe if some child is born without vaccines, and some clean chew on the mouths and have been getting organic foods and breastfed from the get-go, those kids are going to be very healthy.

In fact, the children — one of the things I cut my teeth on in homeopathy, I saw a lot of patients in the first few years of practice complaining of infertility. Homeopathic medicine works miraculously in fertility. I’ve had dozens and dozens of cases over the years where, given the right remedy, take the case, really find the right true similimum, usually they’re pregnant within 3 to 4 months. Not by me. By their husband, but the remedies really work.

This is after people who have failed GIFT and all the different fertilization programs and they’ve got to spend tens of thousands of dollars on the OBGYN and the specialists and nothing’s worked. They get the remedy and, boom, they’re pregnant. The biggest problem they tell me is, “Okay, can you shut it off now? I’ve had four kids.” What’s really nice is that several of these children that were born back then, I’m now seeing their children. So, I have a real homeopathic family practice, because I have those, I have the kids, and I have the grandkids now. It’s really gratifying.

But, there are lots of different influences. I look at their diet and if they were living on Coca-Cola and Hostess Cupcakes, I say, “You know, kiddo, this is not good for you or the developing baby.” You change their diet, you give them the right remedy, you teach them about exercise and meditation. If they’re not doing any of that, you get them to lose weight if they need to, you get them to stop smoking. Or, the standard things, you give them tools to help them do that. You don’t just say, “Quit smoking,” and they can’t because they don’t have the wherewithal to do it. You give them integrative cam tools that help people do that. There’s strength in them mentally, emotionally, physically, so they can, and there’s things that work really well.

But, I don’t know if there’s any one thing. I see a lot of autoimmune disease, ton of it. More and more and more these days, I see a tremendous amount, unfortunately, of cancer, all different kinds of cancers in people, and I’m seeing what I think is not just an epidemic, but a pandemic of cancer, and younger and younger people, more and more severe. But, interestingly, I’m getting more patients coming brand new. They don’t want any traditional things because they’ve had relatives or friends die horribly from the other approach and they want to be clean, and I have a lot of patients who have managed to cure themselves of their cancers, which is very gratifying, or who are stable with it.

What’s very interesting is that a lot of people don’t realize, from the moment we’re conceived, we’re constantly developing cancer cells, neoplastic cells, but our immune system screens them out. Every single day, we’re producing cancer cells, but if we have a healthy immune system, it attacks them, kills them, gets rid of them, you keep on going. I find when people have not taken care of themselves and they develop some tumor somewhere, by using homeopathic treatment and nutritional therapy, and other integrative kind of approaches, we may be able to clear the whole — strengthen the immune system, detoxify them, so that this small tumor stays the same size wherever it is, doesn’t metastasize, and they can live with it for decades for the rest of their life.

It’s very interesting. You create like a symbiosis and have a lot of cases like that just by keeping the clean diet and keeping themselves energetically stimulated, teaching the right tools. A lot of what I do is a lot of patient education. I give a lot of protocols, I teach my patients what to do to help themselves with colds and flus, how to take care of a flare up of their program. It’s really empowering people where first recognizing that the greatest responsibility we have is personal responsibility, that we are responsible for their health. I’m not responsible for their health. I’m here to educate them, giving them the tools to do it, but I’m not going to be there with a scimitar and a whip and say, “You didn’t do it. How dare you?” I don’t get mad at them. I say, “Well, I’m really sorry you didn’t feel better.”

I got a lot of cases over the years. There’s certain remedy types that are very challenging. They tend to be like the very irritable intense business person who nux vomica, and they’re doubting Thomases. They don’t believe this. “How could anything ever help me that doesn’t have any energy, that doesn’t have any chemicals in it,” and they’ll challenge it, and I’ll tell them, “You know, your remedy is very sensitive to coffee and mint. I would really try to avoid that,” and I give them the remedy. Their symptoms get better, the chronic sinuses or hypertension, whatever they have gets phenomenally better and they say, “Oh, own,” so they go back to their bad habits and they come with their tail between the legs, “I’m bad again,” I said, “Didn’t I warn you?” And they get the remedy again, they get healthy again, and gradually, over time, they realize, “You know? There might be something to this. There might be something to actually taking care of myself and listening to this advice that comes from decades and centuries of healing knowledge. If I apply it to myself on a regular basis, I can stay healthy.”

I had several cases of multiple sclerosis who needed a remedy type that’s adapting Thomas, and after getting better and then spoiling the remedy and then getting better again, now they’re sort of recognizing, “Yeah, there is something to this, and if I follow these basic principles of nature and I apply it to my daily life, I’ll stay healthy.” Lo and behold.

Right. So, a couple more questions. I noticed when I did a lot of research on you and, number one, beyond just being impressed with your work, your knowledge, it’s shining through in this conversation. It’s amazing. But, you also mentioned this word called “nutraceutical therapy”. So, can you expound on that for a second?

Sure. Nutraceutical was a term that was coined to represent nutritional pharmaceutical medicine. It’s like instead of using a hypertensive drug like an ACE inhibitor, angiotensin-converter enzyme inhibitor, or a beta blocker, or a calcium channel blocker, conventional drugs, the lower blood pressure that are simply poisoning enzyme systems to the body, and in fact, that’s how all drugs work. All medicines are essentially poisons of different sorts, and they all work by poisoning different enzyme systems, because that’s how the body works. Enzymes are proteins that help life occur at the speed of life. Without enzymes, chemical reactions, we wouldn’t recover fast enough. We wouldn’t be able to speak, or think, or digest, or have a heartbeat without enzymes. They allow that to happen. All drugs, whether it’s aspirin, antibiotics, what have you, disturb different enzyme systems, and what we seek to do from a homeopathic, and naturopathic, and nutraceutical standpoint is, rather than poison the system, you attempt to optimize cellular physiology, the ability to detoxify and run in metabolic pathways by supplying it with the appropriate nutrients that help detoxify, and nourish, and empower the systems.

Particularly, very often, I’m giving things to help improve mitochondrial function, because what happens is when someone’s eating a really bad diet – a lot of sugar, unrefined carbohydrates, and Coca-Cola, and high-fructose corn syrup, and other nonsense like that – they’re causing excess free radical activity, and free radicals, for people who don’t know it, ROS, reactive oxygen species, like the superoxide, hydroxyl, oxide ions, these are all oxygen radicals that sort of rust the body, and they’re always produced. Whenever we’re burning fuel, whether it’s fat or sugar in the body, we produce free radicals and these are like sparks coming off a fire.

Now, normally, if we have an adequate amount of antioxidants in our diet from eating a lot of fresh organic fruits and vegetables, or taking good quality supplements, we’ll be able to quench these free radicals and keep them in check. Things like Coke in can, so forth and so on, lots of different things. A lot of people have inadequate diets. They’re not eating enough fruits and vegetables, they don’t even get anywhere close to the recommended five servings of fruits and vegetables daily that even the FDA and AMA recommend. They just don’t. If you don’t, you don’t get enough bioflavonoids, period. You don’t get enough of the antioxidants.

So, what happens is the sparks take over and start damaging the internal chemistry, the machinery of the mitochondria and they become inefficient and they don’t produce enough of the energy molecule of life, ADP, adenosine triphosphate, which runs all the chemical reactions in the cell. If you don’t have enough ADP, enough energy, you can’t detoxify, you can’t rebuild tissues, and things begin to degenerate and they get sludged and break down, and your cells get full of this brown pigment called liquefaction, which is an oxidized material, and then essentially, the cells break down and die, and that’s what happens to the whole body. Enough cells happen to, the whole body breaks down and dies.

Basically, all disease can be related back to a breakdown of the mitochondria. All functional medicine, all nutritional medicine, all detoxification really comes down to resuscitation and restoration of normal, healthy mitochondrial function and energy production. Ideally, you want to have a diet that maximizes the utilization of fatty acids. Why? Because fats give you nine, ten calories per gram of energy, as opposed to four for proteins and carbohydrates, so it’s much more efficient. Fats burn much cleaner. They don’t produce all kinds of waste products. Also you burn up your fat tissues, you burn up your fat stores, because fats will tend to absorb and hang onto a lot of the environmental toxins that are all lipophilic, that is fat-loving. Things like dioxins, DDTs, bisphenol A, BPA, BPS, all these different environmental toxins get absorbed through the air, your water, through your skin. It gets deposited into these tissues, and they’re either directly toxic to your cells and tissues, and can aberrate the immune system and lead to cancer, which are neurodegenerative diseases, kill you quick or kill you slow, right?

But, if you don’t do anything to burn your fat, if you don’t have a diet that burns fat on a regular basis to help turn over that fat cells and dump these toxins out, and you’re just accumulating fat, you’re going to get full of toxins and you’re going to get sick. It’s pretty obvious, right? This is a no-brainer. So, you want to have a diet that’s going to regularly turn over fat and you don’t have too much of it. It turns out that diet is a diet that’s low or has hardly any refined carbohydrates, any sugars, fructose or sucrose, or white sugar, particularly, it does arrive from sugar, or refined carbohydrates. That means, guys, you have to lay off the saltine crackers, and the donuts, and the croissants, and the pasta, which is white bread in the tube, and Wonder Bread, which kills your body in 10 ways, all that kind of stuff.

You want to concentrate more on carbohydrates that are complex ones, especially ones that have a lot of natural bioflavonoids and fibers in them, dietary fibers. Green leafy vegetables, green vegetables, yellow vegetables where all the nutrients are. Also, fruits, and you don’t have to worry about the sugar in fruits because that fructose is slowly absorbed because of the pectin and fibers in it. That’s fine. So, we have a balance of that. So, you have the smallest amount of energy from the carbohydrates, then you have a moderate amount of energy from proteins. Good quality, free-range organic beef and lamb and if you’re not a vegetarian, not farm-raised fish, but wild caught fish. In fact, the sardine in water is the cleanest fish in the world, the least toxicity and the best nutrients.

Then, you want the highest amount of calories to come from fat. Fat doesn’t make you fat. It actually does just the opposite, and the kind of fats you want are not polyunsaturated fats, PUFAs, like corn oil and safrole oil, and linseed oil, and all that stuff. You want the saturated or monosaturated fats, like virgin organic coconut oil, which is excellent for you. You want raw organic butter, or ghee. You know what ghee is? To clarify, but in India, they have therapeutic for centuries.

You want good quality animal fats, because these saturated fats, one, they don’t raise your cholesterol. They just do the opposite. Your body utilizes it to be able to burn it and create ketone bodies, and the body loves ketone bodies. The brain thinks more clearly on a ketogenic diet. If anybody’s ever done that in the audience, when they fast for five or more days and they’re eating a lot of green leafy vegetables and juices, and they’re eating very little carbohydrates, and they’re taking some coconut oil, or organic virgin olive oil, things of that nature, so they’re actually having a faster burn, they notice after the first couple of days when their detoxification process occurs, because the first couple of days, it’s always toxified. When those toxins come out, you might feel a bit yucky. That’s pretty typical. It happens to me too.

Once you get through that and your body’s starting to burn more cleanly and you’ve corrected your energy, such as your brain that increases your basal metabolic rate and make you burn fats instead of sugars, and you’re doing that spontaneously, your brain will be clearer than you will ever have felt before. You will feel emotionally calmer, you will have more energy, you’ll sleep better, because your body runs beautifully, like a Porsche on ketone bodies, not on the sugars and carbs. That kind of guide has been shown to dramatically improve all metabolic syndromes, improve type 1 and type 2 diabetes, really good for different forms of epilepsy. And definitely be the diet of choice, ketogenic diet for treating all kinds of cancers. Why? Because cancer cells are actually a healthy cell that’s lost its genetic control and reverts to a very primitive state, and all cancer cells revert back to a primitive energy system similar to yeast and bacteria, which is called non-fermentation, or anaerobic glycolysis where they can only use glucose. They can only use it, which is very inefficient. It’s only about 20% efficient as burning fat, and it produces a lot of waste products, lactic acids that when you build up, you’ll feel terrible. That’s lactic acid, right? That’s why people feel terrible when the tumors start growing and growing because there’s all these toxins. But, when you’re having a ketogenic diet and you’re burning fat, and your body’s in an oxidative state, that poisons cancer cells. It starves them to death because they’re being forced into a fat-burning oxidative state, and that’s inimical to the cancerous state, and they go into what’s called apoptosis, programs spontaneous cancer cell death.

So, there’s a natural way to cure these different wide variety of metabolic conditions. The cancer is just a metabolic condition. That’s all it is. It’s just cells that have become uncontrolled, bratty, juvenile delinquents, and are not paying attention to the rules. But, you can bring it back in by feeding the foods that mom and dad want them to eat but they don’t want to eat. Off the Coca-Cola, off the donuts, off the Ritz Crackers and Frito Lays.

I think that’s what most people don’t realize, though, is diet, how important it is, and to be conscious.

We are what we eat.

We are what we eat, and food is medicine, and food is chemical reaction. It’s information, it talks to our cells, its gene expression.

That’s one of my favorite sayings, by the way. Hippocrates has a beautiful quote – who is the father of Western medicine from Greece over 2,500 years ago – his famous quote is “May your medicine be your food, and may your food be your medicine”, and I live by that principle.

Absolutely. Well, I do too. So, one more question. This is more of a personal question. So, my daughter, she is 20 now. Before I changed my world after being so sick and came to the dark side to heal myself, and now a little bit dangerous because I’m so passionate about people changing their lives.

Come to the light, Krisstina.

Exactly. So, anyway, my daughter has been on antibiotics for a good portion of her life for bacterial throat infections that come back, and now they come back more frequently, number one, because the antibiotics aren’t — you know, she’s almost immune to so many of them, one. Two, her immune system is very compromised. So, we’re working on it, but I’m curious — I mean, I’m just guessing her gut bacteria — and we are doing some stool samples and we’ll get some labs back and hopefully have more of a concrete idea. But, what sort of — I’m assuming that she — obviously, her gut bacteria is destroyed and that her immune system, so and so forth, exactly what you were explaining earlier, what sort of remedy do you offer for someone that you would diagnose that their guts a wreck?

Well, first off, you have to look at, as I was mentioning earlier, the way I would evaluate a case like that is I would take their entire history, what their pattern of physical, mental, emotional symptoms are that are unique to them. So, we look to find the constitutional homeopathic similimum that would act as a bioenergetic stimulus, then we would look at the diet to clear the history of recurring antibiotic use. You definitely got a chronic severe dysbiosis. She no longer has an intact immune system. Her natural killer cells, T-cells, are probably malfunctioning. Well, if you can concert them out with chronic antibiotic uses, you could also have the initiation of autoimmune disease, and that has to be tested for. Very often — did she get a lot of vaccines, initially, too when she was growing up?

She did.

Well, what a lot of people don’t realize is that vaccines, immunizations are not what they were told they are. They’re not these purified substances and you’re getting just the virus. In fact, viruses are dead. They only come to life inside of a cell. They have to grow inside of a cell. So, what does the big pharma do? What do they do? They take a particular virus, whatever it is, measles, mumps, or rubella, or hepatitis, and they grow it inside cells, and they use different animal cells. They use lungs, and kidneys, and brains, and different parts of different animals, and they grow it in these cultures, and then they don’t separate the virus out from those cell cultures. They just dump the cell cultures in a big aluminum vat, they throw some thimerosal, which is ethyl mercury, which is very toxic, we know, and we know it definitely is related to autism, for sure. They put aluminum hydroxide and aluminum ion, which binds to your brain and your kidneys and causes Alzheimer’s disease, and chronic immuno failure. They put formaldehyde, which is embalming fluid, in there. They put antibiotics that you’re not allowed to have, and soap, and all kinds of crap, and then they’re injecting this into your muscles, which is bypassing your nose and your mouth and not giving a chance for Ig antibodies to work, and your immune system goes like this, and it’s laying on more illnesses.

But, the other thing that’s happening with all those chemicals, is that many of these animal tissues that they’re growing the viruses in have their own viruses. In fact, they know that the polio vaccine, and the Salk and the Simian vaccine was contaminated with the Green Monkey Virus, the SID, which is related to AIDS, which we now know is probably not accurately with its own syndrome. We don’t really think that AIDS was really caused by them. We think it’s other different kinds of toxicities. You’ve been exposed to the epstein barr virus, the different kinds of herpes viruses, 2 through 8, CMV, whatnot, and many people don’t know they have these chronic infections. Now, if you have a compromised immune system, you’re not going to be able to tolerate it, and I find that many, many people who are allergic and autoimmune disorders, their allergic and autoimmune disorders and inflammation and reactivity will be triggered by an acute or chronic viral infection.

So, we have to look at all of this. We have to look at not only the bacterial imbalance, but you have to do special serum testing to look for the presence of antibodies to these different acute and chronic phase of antibodies that they just viruses, and then if you see them high, then you have to do special quantitative testing to see if you actually have the real ongoing infection. Look for viral particles, and you look for that, you check for autoimmune markers to see if your body is attacking itself in the special laboratories that all give us very precise ways of testing those. IgM, IgG antibodies. So, you look at all of this data and you see what’s going in the given individual, and then you give the appropriate therapy to help stimulate immune system to fight the virus, to balance the autoimmune analytic inflammation, and gradually bring it to health, and then you nourish it with the right foods that someone’s not allergic to.

There’s so many different factors involved helping someone. It’s not like, “Take this pill. You’re better.” That’s the allopathic approach. That doesn’t happen. Every illness, both maintaining your health is multifactorial. Exercising, getting the right sleep, eating the right food, meditating, taking care of your body, mind, and spirit. Health is health on the physical, mental, emotional, spiritual level, and you have to nourish yourself in all ways to achieve that.

It’s so important.

What I was speaking about it earlier is that we understand what the true definition of health is. The true definition of health is freedom from limitation, physically, mentally, emotionally. That is health on the physical level is freedom from pain limiting you from living your life and using your body the way you want it. Health on the emotional level is freedom from limitation to be stuck in any one given emotion, be able to experience the full spectrum of emotion from the deepest sad to the greatest joy, you can experience it all. Health on the mental level is the freedom to be able to use your mind to cognate, to imagine, to create, perceive, and be able to communicate clearly. Then, health on the spiritual level is what we call altruism. That let us be able to use the physical, emotional, and mental beings to be able to give back to life, give back to the world, and that’s the greatest form of health.

So, that’s one of the ways I evaluate someone where they are in life. I look at their degrees of freedom, physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and that lets me know where I need to intervene, and it helps to help me understand whether they’re getting better or worse, if what I’m giving them is what they need, and then I have to adjust accordingly to create freedom from limitation. That is true health.

Well, I love that. Well, one more question to wrap this up. I always love to do a little myth busting on every episode, every podcast. I’m guessing there’s a lot of myths you would love to bust, but is there one in particular that is sort of conventionally mainstream wisdom says this is true, and you’re like, “No, I really want to bust that one.”?

Well, yeah. One of the biggest myths in allopathic conventional orthodox medicine is they know better and they’re going to fix you, and they’re going to give the drug, and there’s no such thing as a life force, and just take this pill and you’ll be better. It’s nonsense, because the bottom line is this Krisstina, all true healing is self-healing, and what the true physician does is help support someone in becoming more self-aware of their physical, mental, emotional, spiritual symptomology, and utilizing natural medical tools to bring themselves back into balance in all ways.

Well, that’s beautiful. I love what you said there. It’s to help create a self-awareness. Alright, well thank you so much for your time. Oh my god, you’re a wealth of information. I was sitting here. I have pages of notes. So, thank you anyway. We’ll make sure it’s in the show notes. We’ll put all the links back to you so people can find you. I have no doubt that you might get a whole barrage of people saying, “Oh my gosh, can I come to the East Coast and visit with you?” But anyway, thank you so much for your time.

Thank you, Krisstina. God bless.

God bless.

May the Force be with you.