2020 Podcasts

314:How to Properly Filter the Air In Your Home

The #1 place where we're toxic is our homes, and one of the top questions we get is “what air filtration system do I use in my home?” After many years and many trials, you will learn what system I am committed to. This air purifier is the only one I trust for biotoxin removal, and to top it off, it's more affordable than most high-end units out there.

Kyle Knappenberger, director of Enviroklenz, is a leading authority on the Dangers of Environmental Toxins. This is a familiar topic that we always seem to have endless questions about, and Kyle will sort out examples of environmental toxins, the lasting effects of these toxins, and you'll hear about solutions for mitigating these pollutants all around us.

More about Kyle Knappenberger:

Kyle Knappenberger is the Director of Technology Support and Quality Assurance at Timilon Technology Acquisitions, LLC. Kyle holds a Bachelor of Science Degree in Microbiology from Kansas State University. He earned his degree while research and testing water purification and techniques. For over a decade Kyle has been working on using safe metal oxide technology for odor control and toxic chemicals. He has been involved in several key product development programs related to indoor air quality, including those for disaster restoration and individuals dealing with multiple chemical sensitivity. Kyle co-holds six patents related to the mitigation of chemical and biological contamination.

The #1 place where we're toxic is our homes, and one of the top questions we get is “what air filtration system do I use in my home?” After many years and many trials, you will learn what system I am committed to. This air purifier is the only one I trust for biotoxin removal, and to top it off, it's more affordable than most high-end units out there.

Kyle Knappenberger, director of Enviroklenz, is a leading authority on the Dangers of Environmental Toxins. This is a familiar topic that we always seem to have endless questions about, and Kyla will sort out examples of environmental toxins, the lasting effects of these toxins, and you'll hear about solutions for mitigating these pollutants all around us.

Show notes:

Enviroklenz: Save $200 on the regular price of an EnviroKlenz Mobile Air System Bundle. Bundles include (2) Air Quality Monitors and (2) EnviroKlenz Air Cartridges, for everything you need to monitor your indoor air and keep it clean for up to 1 year.

Order your Examinair test kit which includes a full home assessment and consulting session, please call 888-600-0642 or email support@revelationhealth.com and ask for Ashley Smith. Mention CHTV for a special discount.

CytoDetox: total detoxification support where it matters most – at the cellular level.

Dr. Pompa's Beyond Fasting book – now released!

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Transcript:

Dr. Pompa:
Ashley told me one of the top questions that we get is what air filtration unit does Dr. Pompa use in his home? I can tell you that I have switched. For years I paid a lot of money for an amazing unit, but here’s the good news. On this show we’re going to talk about why I switched and what technology I switched to that our military uses in chemical warfare. It can filter out a biotoxin from a mold, which is really the first unit to do so.

Here’s the best news of all; it’s way cheaper! Let’s hear about this. If you don’t know, the number one place where you’re becoming toxic is our homes according to. Every source tells us this. You better filter the air in your home. Stay tuned for this episode of Cell TV.

Ashley:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I am Ashley Smith. Today we welcome Kyle Knappenberger, director of EnviroKlenz and a leading authority on the dangers of environmental toxins. This is a familiar topic that we always seem to have endless questions about, so we decided to bring Kyle on the show to sort out examples of environmental toxins, the lasting effects of those toxins, and he’ll offer solutions for mitigating these pollutants all around us. You will also learn which air purifier Dr. Pompa uses and trusts in his own home. Let’s get started. Welcome, Kyle Knappenberger, and, of course, Dr. Pompa.

Kyle:
Hello. Thank you very much.

Dr. Pompa:
Glad to do this show with you, Kyle. It seems like it’s been a long time coming. Ashley, before you get off, you said that one of the number one questions you get is what air filtration system does Dr. Pompa use, right?

Ashley:
Yes, all the time.

Dr. Pompa:
You know what? We switched. We had two different units, and I literally switched to the unit we’re going to discuss today, the EnviroKlenz, because of the technology. I put it through the test, and I can talk to you a little bit about that. We had Warren put it through the test. It came out better.

Here’s the exciting part; it’s actually cheaper than the one that I was using in the past. This is an amazing unit. Kyle will bring that science. Let’s start here as far as—look, one of the things that I tell people, most of our viewers are people looking for answers for different health conditions.

I’m a big teacher about the fact that if there’s something upstream dumping toxins into the river, I don’t care what vitamins you take. I don’t care what nutrition you do, what tests you run. Your dietary changes might help a little bit. If someone’s still dumping toxins up the river, you’re going to be killing fish downstream. That’s an analogy of people not being able to fix their gut. That’s an analogy of people simply not getting well.

Oftentimes, Kyle, we find that it’s a toxin in the home, whether it’s mold, whether it’s high levels of formaldehyde, what we call VOCs, volatile organic compounds, coming from building materials, things that we bring into our home, flame retardants on computers, furniture, drapes, mattresses, all of these things. Then we have what we use in our laundry and our dishwasher. All of these things add to a level of toxicity that the Environmental Protection Agency says is seven times higher in our homes, meaning the amount of pollution in the worst day in LA. I don’t know how close that is.

Kyle, let’s start here. I think some of your background even went into water filtration. You can tell your story. How the heck did you get into this and go from there.

Kyle:
I’ve actually been involved in this now for a number of years by both passion and luck. I was doing research when I was school. My background is actually microbiology, which is the water purification. I got involved in a project that was looking at different techniques and technologies for water purification when I was in school. What I didn’t quite know at that time was that the technology was university related, government funded technology that was being looked at for some pretty heavy-duty things like chemical warfare agent mitigation through a university incubator company.

When I graduated, I ended up going to that company and working on a project for mitigation of extremely dangerous toxic chemicals. They wanted to look at different biological aspects. Could these things be used for biological warfare agents in addition to chemical warfare agents? I’m talking more science here, but it was earth mineral metal oxide technology. It’s safe materials that were being looked at and evaluated for breaking down some pretty harmful toxic chemicals, some of the most harmful ones.

In your opening there you mentioned things like pesticides and VOCs and different compounds. Chemical warfare agents are just really bad pesticides when it comes down to it. The National Institute of Health really just defines a pesticide as something that is designed to kill or inhibit or somehow disrupt something that’s living, whether it’s an animal, a pest, mold, fungus, noxious weeds, you name it. They’re meant to disrupt the function of that normal person. That’s what chemical warfare agents are. I’m getting a little sidetracked here, but these are the worst of the worst types of chemicals. They’re affecting the nervous system.

Dr. Pompa:
The ones that we’re literally developing to kill humans are the worst of the worst. It takes the ones we’re using to kill plants or weeds to the whole next level. Those do kill humans slowly, but these kill humans immediately. You were doing research on these metal oxides.

Kyle:
This technology and these products, there’s a long commercialization story about iterations of the technology through different products for first responders, police, fire, helping them detoxify or essentially decontaminate or contain or neutralize harmful chemicals that they may be encountering. Then continuing to bring this technology closer and closer to daily applications for the average person that may want to reduce their personal exposure and their personal environment space to harmful chemicals that may be coming into their environment or that may be in their environment because their environment inherently contains different building materials or compounds that potentially could be problematic for them. They’re just wanting to reduce their exposure to it. You mentioned the EPAs, five, ten times higher indoor air quality issues.

The reason for that is we’re not getting good ventilation. We’re not having fresh air exchange. I’m sitting in an office here that’s 15 by 10 or something like that. There’s pressed wood materials in here, sealants, adhesives, all sorts of different things. Depending upon where you live, even things like tighter energy regulations on homes are actually problematic for people because that’s reducing the exchange for fresh air.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely. One of the studies said the older the home, the less VOCs. We can talk differently with mold. Because there is air exchange, your heating bill is higher. The fact is that there’s a lot more air exchange. We’re building homes much tighter.

The fact is we build them tight, and then we have all of these indoor pollutants that are just inherent to a home, washing clothes and fabric softeners that have neurotoxins, flame retardants, and formaldehyde form insulation, etc. If a home breathes, it gets rid of it. When a home is sealed, it doesn’t. It doesn’t take long for that environmental VOC to build up. Most people don’t smell those things. I walk into most homes, some of them have no smell. I walk in and smell high levels of VOC, especially in newer homes.

Kyle:
We’re sealing them up with sealants. You’re not letting that fresh air in, so the adhesives, the pressed woods, the aerosol components that you have, the paints, all these things are just not exchanging with the environment. Where do they go? They don’t go anywhere. You’re breathing them.

That’s one of the things that our company is hearing from people that are trying to better their day-to-day lives. They’re making decisions on the things they eat or the things that they buy or bring into their home, making different lifestyle choices. You can’t decide what you’re breathing. You need to breathe. You don’t know what’s down the river or downwind or upwind from you.

It’s blowing into your environment, and you can’t really seal up your home and not let that in. You need that air. What do you do about it? You can make decisions on what you bring into your home, but these are just some of the things that you can do. There’s other things that you can do as well.

Dr. Pompa:
I’ve obviously gone to great lengths to only bring healthy things into my home, etc. I bring fresh air in. However, I still have a filtration unit that has the ability to truly get rid of toxins. We’ll talk about the technology and change that I made for using block carbon, HEPA. People have heard of these types of filtration and why this type of unit is very different.

The bottom line is this; if we want to have good health today, our indoor air is the big factor. Politically the outdoor air gets all the attention. If these EPA is correct and the environmental group too, they are all saying the indoor air is actually the bigger problem. No one’s doing anything to change that as we’re building buildings tighter for greater efficiency. We’re making our lives more toxic.

I’m all for cleaner outdoor air; however, who’s talking about indoor air? This is where we spend most of our time, and this is the air that’s really affecting our health and could be one, if not the biggest reason, you still don’t feel well. I’m teaching people how to do cellular detox.

Let me tell you something, a very simple concept here, folks. If you have a bathtub upstairs, the water is running. For some reason, maybe there’s hair blocking the drain and the water is running at a level that is faster than can run out of the drain. It’s going to overflow. You’re going to have water damage pouring down into your house.

That’s the human body example. Our buckets overflow if we have more coming in and less going out. We can help you get less out. Ultimately, if too much is pouring in, that bucket is still overflowing. How do we make our internal environments cleaner?

I’m a big proponent of adding units into your home that do create air exchange. They’re called energy return ventilators. Even then if you’re bringing in outside air, arguably you could still be bringing in some bad things too. How do we filtrate our home from molds, which is another subject?

HEPA filters take out spores, but they don’t take out the toxin. The toxin is what really makes people sick. I see that mistake all the time, Kyle. Then how do we filter out effectively these VOCs, flame retardants, and the things we’re exposed to?

Kyle:
That’s where having products and technologies that can capture chemistry, that react to chemistry—a lot of these things that are problematic for people, they have issues whether it’s respiratory, skin. We hear about people that are sensitive to chemicals that are in their environment. They’re bothering all different routes of entry into them. What they want to do is the correct thing, which is reduce what they’re exposing themselves to.

In the indoor environment, you mentioned the ventilation, which is a fantastic way to help with that. Then there’s a lot of times that we get contacted by people that are in situations where they’re living in a polluted area, and they really don’t want ventilation. It kind of is a catch-22.

Dr. Pompa:
I live in a big city. I wouldn’t want any ERV. I happen to live in the country, so that’s a good idea for me.

Kyle:
What we’ve done, I’ve mentioned my background in that technology for these earth mineral metal oxides, high surface area materials that are very good at interacting with and binding to different chemistries. That’s what we’ve essentially done is taken all of this technology and deploy it in a way that is friendly for a consumer. That’s through an air purification device.

Dr. Pompa:
Let’s back up one second. You actually started for a specific reason on your background, looking at these military devices to filter these bioweapons, biowarfare weapons. That’s where your background started. They were using these metal oxides, different minerals from the earth to do this successfully. For example, the Gulf War; if they were hit with a chemical exposure, they would have tents or places where they had units like this. Am I correct on this?

Kyle:
That would predate some of this. Essentially what we do have is this technology is deployed for chemical warfare decontamination applications. Immediate response to a chemical threat or a chemical weapon is really just a hazardous chemical that’s being deployed can cause problems.

Dr. Pompa:
This material is designed to basically get rid of that.

Kyle:
Yes. It’s being used by Special Forces, military groups, HAZMAT responders around the world. It’s specifically for those types of applications. What we’ve done though is continue the evolution of those materials, which are safe. These are safe earth mineral metals oxides. They just have a high surface area, which means they ultimately have a really high capacity and affinity for harmful chemicals.

We’ve deployed it into different delivery systems for different types of applications. One of the most important applications you very well pointed out is indoor air quality. We need to be talking about this more because we’ve got these things. We’ve deployed this technology and the things that are familiar to consumers like air filters or air cartridges that go in air purifiers so that air is circulating in their environment.

What is it doing? Air is circulating. You’re bringing particulates. You’re bringing the different things that are in your air, whether they’re particulate matter or chemicals, odors, vapors. It’s all the same thing. Everything in the world is a chemical. The question is is it harmful to you?

If we’re going to be bringing that in through our air purifier and you have this technology deployed in that air purifier, then what you can do is effectively remove it and contain it inside that purifier, inside that air cartridge. You combine this technology with high quality HEPA filtration. You can then address multiple aspects of indoor air quality all at one time. That’s an important thing.

There’s a lot of different air purifiers out there that work in different ways. The thing that we really like to focus on is let’s keep it as simple as possible. Let’s bring the pollutants to our technology or to our device. Let’s have that interaction occur in that device and not out in the environment and keep it there and retain it there so we removed it from our personal environment.

Dr. Pompa:
For the person listening to this, most of them are familiar with HEPA as the standard. Your filter has a HEPA unit added onto this new technology. Let’s do this. Explain the difference of your technology versus HEPA, and we’ll start there.

Kyle:
I’ll start with the HEPA first, if that’s okay. The HEPA filter is a high efficiency particulate removal. It’s going to be able to—

Dr. Pompa:
Particles, whether it be dust, whether it be—

Kyle:
Dander, allergens, any particulate matter that is 0.3 microns and larger, which is a lot of the stuff that people are concerned about. It’s exactly like you mentioned, the dust, dander, pollen, allergens, those sorts of things. That is a very effective way to do that. That’s based on size of the air quality problem. Those things are all sized based. It comes through the HEPA filter. It’s going to [19:53] it out. What the HEPA filter does not do, and that’s where our patented technology is being deployed in a combination system like this, a lot of the things that you smell are going to go right through a HEPA filter because it’s smaller than 0.3 microns. You’ve got gases, vapor—

Dr. Pompa:
The biowarfare chemicals, if you sprayed it through a HEPA, you’re dying. It’s not going to help you.

Kyle:
A biological one, something like anthrax spores, would actually be caught by a HEPA filter. The chemical warfare agents, the VX and the GD and all those really bad things would go right through that. They’re chemical gases and vapors. It’s the gases and vapors or the odors, those things that people generally smell are going to be smaller than 0.3 microns. They’re going to be going right through there. If you have a system that’s deploying these two things in combination, in tandem, you now are addressing two major things that—

Dr. Pompa:
You put on the HEPA to take out the particular things. The HEPA will take out, for example, mold spores, the particle; however, there’s a toxic component, the biotoxin component. That’s really the one that makes people sick. The spore gives people the allergy. The biotoxin is what my clients and patients and doctors see that really are very sick. That goes right through. Then there’s this other technology that is metallic oxide technology from the earth, natural stuff that gets this other chemical component, the biotoxin.

Kyle:
It’s getting the chemical component. It’s not going to discriminate against the source of that chemical component, whether it’s biological based, mold VOCs, or you had a house fire and had a bunch of corrosive gases released into your home because of burning synthetic compounds or PVC pipe. If you have a structure fire, there’s just horrible chemicals. It’s obvious why fire responders have the highest rate of cancer by profession is because they’re exposed to all these things that are released during a fire in the product of combustion. Guess what? Those are things that were in your home to begin with and potentially were releasing gas at lower levels.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s why I think every home needs this type of filtration, especially in your bedroom. That’s my first place I recommend. We’ll talk about square footage and filtration. I was a fan because a lot of the clients and people that are very sick do react to the chemicals.

HEPA doesn’t get rid of the chemical component. Carbon filtration does. The filters that we were carrying in the past had HEPA and carbon. How is this different from carbon filtration? It does have a chemical component to it.

Kyle:
The carbon is an absorptive material. It can be useful in a lot of different applications. I don’t want to be overly negative on it. It has drawbacks in that it’s generally not a chemical mechanism that is occurring between a carbon absorbent and the chemistry that’s involved in there. There’s a lot of times desorption of whatever you caught that can reappear in your environment. You could do a great job overnight while it’s cooler of potentially removing a lot of different things from your environment. Then the next day if it gets into the upper 80s in your home, now you’re all of a sudden possibly reabsorbing those things right back into your environment.

Dr. Pompa:
To give people an analogy of that, you can tell me if I’m correct on this analogy or not, carbon acts more like a sponge in that it absorbs. Unfortunately, if it gets warmer, that could squeeze the sponge. You could start releasing chemicals. A sponge only has so much capacity before its filled. Then it’s not working and releasing chemicals. Is that a good analogy?

Kyle:
That’s an analogy I use myself quite often. Carbon is a sponge. Sponges can be wrung out. In our technology we use the phrase not absorbent, we use adsorbent. We often talk about adsorptive neutralization to work into that our technology is really is different.

There are chemical mechanisms occurring when the two come into contact with each other. It’s not just the sponge’s pores being filled up with something. It’s our adsorbent materials and the surface interaction to retain the material on our technology so that it doesn’t come off or that it is more effective in that brief period of time that that chemical contaminate is passing through the filter. It is more reactive. I’m using the term reactive in a good way here. It wants to grab onto that thing and retain it so that it can—

Dr. Pompa:
It’s more of a chemical reaction that changes the chemical, if you will, as well as hold onto it. It doesn’t overflow as quick, and temperature change and things like that don’t squeeze the sponge, so to speak. Is that correct?

Kyle:
Exactly, yeah.

Dr. Pompa:
Number one, it’s going to be able to hold onto far more chemicals for longer without letting go of chemicals. Number two, you don’t have to change the filters as often.

Kyle:
We have a pretty good lifespan on what we’re deploying. A lot of times when people are comparing different devices, they’re not always comparing apples to apples. There’s air purifiers out there that may have multiple pounds of another absorbent in there. They might claim pretty long lifetimes. It’s because they’ve got this huge device with multiple pounds.

We’re deploying our technology very simply in an easy to use air cartridge system that’s easy to change. They’re typically going to get several months, half a year out of use of this. Of course, this is all very dependent upon specific environmental conditions, as it would be with any type of absorbent or adsorbent technology out there. We feel that the way we’re doing it, we’re using safe materials. We’re using the technology that is going to be able to effectively grab onto and retain and break down different chemistries and keep it on the surface, keep it in there in a simple, easy to use device that is easy to maintain. You can turn it on and forget about it for a long time because you’re not being prompted to have to change it. You’re not thinking about what’s in your air because it’s removing everything for you.

Dr. Pompa:
I love the simplicity of my unit. Here’s what I get. I wanted to test the technology for what I was using. I got certain chemicals that I knew that if this is really working, then I’m not going to be able to smell this particular chemical. Certain chemicals smell and certain ones don’t.

I literally ran certain chemicals through it, and it worked. I was very impressed. My old technology, I could still smell a portion of the chemical. Number one, it worked better than my other unit at a fraction of the cost. You can get one of these filters—we can talk about the pricing. I think we have some type of affiliate deal.

These things are under $1,000. I was spending $3,000, $4,000 for these filter units before. This one works better. I keep it running in my bedroom. There’s a whisper level and a low level. I’ve never had to use it higher than that. If I had a bigger area, I could turn it up.

It works really well, and it works for people that have mold exposures because it does hit the biotoxin, not just the mold spore. Again, remediate your mold. I’m not saying that. A lot of the people that watch this show or listen to this show are extremely sensitive and even low levels of biotoxins from mold make them sick. They have to filter it out. This technology is the best I’ve seen for that. I was very impressed with the tests that I’ve done on it.

Kyle:
You mentioned something that is important to remind people of. We talk to a lot of folks, and they’re asking about where do I deploy my EnviroKlenz air system? Where do you spend most of your time? People will think I’m in my living room. It’s where you sleep. You might sleep six to nine hours, but that’s where most of your time is.

It’s in generally a smaller room. You probably have less air exchange. That’s just a really good spot to deploy that. You mentioned the lower whisper setting on the system. What’s great for most smaller rooms is the lowest setting. It accomplishes a couple of things.
One, it’s a nice quiet white noise-type of device. When you’re actually running it on low in a smaller type of room, since the speed is actually slower, you can actually improve each air pass efficiency against the chemicals, odors, and vapors. You’re not blasting air through there really fast. Obviously, as you move it into bigger rooms, you might need more air turbulence to actually effectively move air in the environment. I often just recommend people if you’re in a room that’s less than 20 by 20, just run that thing on low. It’s going to do a wonderful job for you. It’s going to remove all those different things and particulates, chemicals, odors, vapors. Now we can have this system deployed in order to attack those things.

Dr. Pompa:
What is the square footage? My bedroom is maybe the average size room, 400, 500 square feet. I don’t know.

Kyle:
That’s well within the capabilities of these.

Dr. Pompa:
What is the capability?

Kyle:
This is where the analytical person in me versus a marketer person, it truly depends upon the volume, not necessarily the square footage. It’s based with the volume that you are needing to treat in that area. A lot of times in an average home it can treat areas up to 1,000 square feet, which is really nice. I do want to let people know that if you have a whole bunch of rooms, 1,000 square feet divided over a whole bunch of rooms, you don’t get the air movement between the rooms that you necessarily would.

Deploying this system you maybe get a general living area in that type of setting or in the bedroom. It can treat those types of areas. It can move that much air to do that. Again, every home is different. The concentrations are different, the flow of the home. A lot of people have now the more open floor plans. You can treat much bigger square footage areas than if you have an old home with a bunch of rooms.

Dr. Pompa:
The basic cost of that unit is what?

Kyle:
I have to apologize that I don’t have the exact quotes. They run in the $700, $800, $900 range. We have different packages and programs that are available. You mentioned the one that Ashley has that information for.

Dr. Pompa:
We’ll put a link up. We have a discount code on there with the link.

Kyle:
Those are really great because what you often get is the system, the HEPA filters, cartridges. We even have packages that include air meters so people can actually see their impact that these systems can have over time. Making improvements to your air quality include a lot of different things about fresh air, air purifiers, removing sources, treating sources in the environment. If you start doing all of these different things over time, you can really start to see the change of your environment.

Dr. Pompa:
I have people that just their sleep changes within days of using the unit. The other thing I love, and I think everyone should get this, for the average HVAC system, that’s your heating and cooling system in your home, everybody has the little filters that you go to Home Depot and buy. Those are typically just filters that filter out particles. That’s important. You can replace that filter with one of your filters that have this new technology medium in it as well as the regular filtration. I’ve done that.

I recommend everybody does that. You probably don’t know the price. You’re the scientist here. Let’s put it this way; it’s more expensive than what you buy at Home Depot, but worth every penny. That means every bit of your air is being filtered through that.

Kyle:
That is correct. That’s actually what I have deployed in my home as well. Every three months we’re changing it. We have a lot of particulates. It’s removing the particulates very efficiently with that. Now what you’re doing, as you mentioned, the ones that you would buy at a big box store or a hardware store, they’re removing particulates.

Now we’ve just included the ability to remove the chemicals, odors, gases, different things that are often considered the environmental pollutants. That’s what we’re doing with that technology. It’s a great way. While your system is running, you’re both exchanging air often with the outside, but you’re turning over all that air in your home very efficiently. It’s a good way to treat a lot of different things from day-to-day odors from cooking and household—

Dr. Pompa:
For us it’s about health on this show. That’s what I have. I have that and my unit. Maybe Ashley can look at what that actual price is for that. It’s very inexpensive.

Ashley just told me the link. It’s getcleanair4you.com. It start at $699. That’s almost 30% off. We appreciate that, by the way, Kyle, giving our viewers a discount. We’ll also when we have the information find out how the AC units are. It’s way less than that.

Kyle:
They’re $99 or something.

Dr. Pompa:
I was going to say, I remember it being about $100 for that. Again, I upgraded when I bought the other ones. I probably pay about $30. This is far better because it actually gets rid of the chemicals that are really dragging us down every day.

Kyle:
It’s an added capability. You’re already removing particulates, depending upon if you buy the $4 one or the $30 one. Those more expensive ones do a good job at smaller and smaller particles, which is the nice thing.

Dr. Pompa:
They don’t do the chemicals or the biotoxins from potential mold in your HVAC, and that’s what I want. I so appreciate you coming on, giving us the new science, the new technology that protects our soldiers from chemical warfare. We need this technology to protect us. We appreciate your research through the years to bring us this technology, Kyle. Thank you.

Kyle:
Absolutely. I’m pleased that I actually over the years have worked with a lot of people that are smarter than me that originated this technology. I’m happy to be along for the ride and also to help further it as we continue into the future, bringing in new applications such as the air purifier.

Dr. Pompa:
They may have been smarter, but you brought it to the average man. That’s a big need. That we appreciate. I think you’re being humble as well. Thank you, Kyle. I so do appreciate you bringing the science and the technology. You definitely made my life better. You’re going to make thousands of others better. I appreciate it.

Kyle:
Glad to hear that. Thank you.

Ashley:
That’s it for this week. We hope you enjoyed today’s episode. This episode was brought to you by CytoDetox. Please check it out at buycytonow.com. We’ll be back next week and every Friday at 10:00 a.m. Eastern.

We truly appreciate your support. You can always find us at cellularhealing.tv. Please remember to spread the love by liking, subscribing, giving an iTunes review, and sharing the show with anyone you think may benefit from the information heard here. As always, thanks for listening.

313: A Simple Way to Test Your Home for Mold

Episode 313: A Simple Way to Test Your Home for Mold

By now you know your home can be riddled with mold and other hidden toxins that are preventing you from getting well. In-home assessments can be pricey and inaccurate, and I know many of you are looking for a less expensive, more effective way to have your home evaluated.

Today's guest offers a groundbreaking solution to this ongoing issue. I'm excited to be speaking to America's Healthy Home Expert, Caroline Blazovsky. For almost 2 decades, she has been helping clients diagnose problems that may be lurking in their homes. Her method has earned her a national reputation as one of the top home consultants in the country.

If you want to upgrade the wellness of your living space, and suspect there's something lurking behind your walls, this is an important episode you don't want to miss.

More about Caroline Blazovsky:

Caroline Blazovsky is nationally recognized as America’s Healthy Home Expert ®. She is a home investigator and media personality promoting healthier homes throughout the U.S. She has been featured in AARP, Shape, SiriusXM, House Smarts TV, The Jenny McCarthy Show, Reader’s Digest and hundreds of podcasts, radio and print interviews.

She is a council-certified Mold Remediator (CMR), and Indoor Environmentalist Investigator (CIE) with graduate Sustainable Design education from Boston Architectural College. She is also credentialed through the National Environmental Health Association as a Healthy Homes Specialist (HHS). Caroline is a member of the AAAS, ACAC, NEHA, as well as a founding member and scientific contributor to the national IAQA Public Education Committee. She resides as President of My Healthy Home ®, a company specializing in indoor air quality products, consultations and services.

In her spare time, she is a graduate candidate in Public Health at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California. Her focus is working with physicians, homeowners, other building professionals and the public to improve wellness through home environments.

Show notes:

To order your Examinair test kit which includes a full assessment and consulting session, please call 888-600-0642 or email support@revelationhealth.com and ask for Ashley Smith. Mention CHTV for a special discount.

CytoDetox: total detoxification support where it matters most – at the cellular level.

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Transcript:

Dr. Pompa:
You’ve heard me say this if you watch a lot of Cell TV. If you still don’t feel well, there’s an upstream cause. No better place to look, in your very home. Is your home toxic? Is it making you sick? Is it keeping you from getting well? On this show, you’re going to learn an affordable, effective way to test your living environment and see if this is why you still don’t feel well. I believe every one of us need this test, and wait ‘til you see what I discover in this show about my home that led me to even do a second show about this topic. I can’t wait for you to see this episode of Cell TV.

Ashley:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I am Ashley Smith, and today we welcome Caroline Blazovsky, who is also known as America’s Healthy Home Expert. She’s here to discuss simple ways to improve the wellness in your home. From how to test your home for toxins and mold to ways to improve and even heal your environment, Caroline has more than 19 years of experience as a council-certified Mold Remediator and Indoor Environmentalist Investigator with a focus on working with physicians, homeowners, building professionals, and the public to improve wellness through home environments. Let’s get started and welcome Caroline Blazovsky and, of course, Dr. Pompa to the show. Welcome , both of you.

Caroline:
Hi, guys, thank you so much for having me.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, we love having you. This topic, oh, my goodness, we are just getting blown out. This is what we do on Cell TV. We talk about getting to upstream causative factors and no bigger than our homes, no bigger. This has been a recent topic on Cell TV. So many people are asking how do I make my environment safer with filtration units? The question of testing our homes, how do we know if we’re in a safe environment? How do we test for mold? How do we test for chemicals? How do we know? You’re bringing the answer, 20 years of experience, Caroline, so thank you for being here.

Caroline:
Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Dr. Pompa:
I’d like to start with people’s stories. I mean, you don’t look like the person that I would expect to be the expert. This is a compliment. Testing chemicals in homes, I mean, how did you get here?

Caroline:
It’s been a long road, but back in my 20s, I had allergies just like most people. I worked in Manhattan, in New York, and I started to just wonder what was causing it. Then you go to a typical physician. They gave you a decongestant, and they send you on your way. I was very inquisitive. I’ve always been the kind of person to get my hands into things and get to the bottom of things. I had a background in communications and media, and then I just changed fields completely. I went back for a complete overhaul in education and started working with mold. I did mold back 20 years ago when people used to look at me and say, my God, what are you talking about? You’re crazy that mold makes people sick. That’s my passion, and I liked it. It just grew and grew and grew.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s amazing. I mean, look, I’ve been teaching and talking about detox for 20 years. You’re teaching testing on how to know if our—this is the perfect combination, man. You got to share this show.

Caroline:
It’s so fun.

Dr. Pompa:
Listen, okay, so let’s start with the basics. I’m not sure what shows people saw, so it’s estimated that indoor air is four to seven times more toxic than outdoor air. Talk a little bit about that because this is a big issue, and then we can talk about how this impacting beyond allergies in people’s health.

Caroline:
There’s so many things that can go wrong in a house. That’s the first thing, but what I want people to realize is, whether you live in New York City, or you live in a suburb, or you live in the country, you can really create the environment that you want. It’s a misconception that people often say, oh, if I move to the country, I’ll be healthier. That’s a misconception. You can actually be exposed to more particulates, smoke, pesticide out in the country than you can in a very populated area. Studying homes for 20 years, I’ve worked with people all over the country. What’s so interesting is you can go to Pahrump, Nevada and still have 250 volatiles in your home, even though you’ve tried to avoid everything altogether. These things have become prevalent in our society that we carry them with us as we go. Not to scare people, but the chemicals that we are exposed to and dander and proteins, we carry them on us, and we exchange them with other people. We’re in this community together, and so it’s important that we all start making our homes better to influence other people and work together as a community to impact each other.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, okay. Yeah, that’s great. What are we talking about here? When we’re talking about chemicals in our home, there’s a lot more than we talk about, I mean, a lot more things that we don’t realize, right? People look at dust, and they want that filtration because of dust. Talk about what’s in that dust. I mean, there’s a lot of things that can drive inflammation and make us not feel well. Really, people watching this right now, they just want to make sure their environment’s safe. They don’t feel well, and they want to make sure their environment’s not causing it. What is in the dust?

Caroline:
Dust is a combination of a lot of things. It’s particulate, but there’s also dander. We shed dander. You and I are not hypoallergenic, so we’re shedding dander all the time. What happens is this stuff builds up in our homes, and if we don’t know how to clean properly or we don’t know how to vacuum—and there are methods to this effectively, and a lot of people just don’t understand it or just were not educated on it. We want to get rid of this dander, but we often blame pets, right? We say, oh, people have pets. That’s where the dander is, and it’s not. We’re all accumulating that dander, so we have to clean effectively.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s the pets and the people, right? I mean, all of it is there. Then the chemicals that are in the home are there as well, right? Of course, you have running laundry every day, people using regular laundry detergents, your dishwasher, bringing things in with flame retardants. There’s a certain level of chemicals from the building materials. All of that ends up in your air and in your dust.

Caroline:
Exactly, you’ve got every product that you bring into a house. For example, if you have your soap, your detergents, even wine, people who store wine, people who use bacterial wipes, people who decide that maybe they are avid plant—agriculturists, painters, all of these things accumulate in your house. Everything that you bring in puts off a volatile organic or a VOC, and what we want to look for are the levels of VOCs in homes. There’s a certain level—I like to go with 500 nanograms per liter, which means nothing to anyone, but that’s the standard that I use as a health range. I want to see everybody under that range and the closer—or if you’re feeling that you have health issues, I like you to be even lower but 500. Most homes are coming in in the United States around 1,500 to 2,000, and the chemical load that we’re exposed to is just amazing.

If you have open paint cans in your home, that’s a really big one. People often think, oh, I’ve got two, three paint cans in the corner. It’s not bothering anyone. The top is sealed. It’s not. That’s always continually outgassing. All of these things that we store in our homes just create havoc. Then you get high volatile organics, and then you get high dander counts. Then you get high mold counts, and then you’ve got someone who’s sick and doesn’t feel well.

Dr. Pompa:
Wow! Okay, yeah, again, if I was watching this show and I know my viewers very well, their big question is, okay, you all can talk about what’s in it. I really don’t care. All I really want to know is is my home safe for me, and if it isn’t, how do I make it safe? We’ve done shows on filtration. We’re going to do more of those shows, but let’s talk about that. You have been testing homes and doing this for 20 years. I mean, there’s so much controversy about mold testing, this type of testing. You’ve went through it all.

Caroline:
That’s right.

Dr. Pompa:
You’ve put together what I believe is the most cost-effective, inexpensive test that looks at all of these parameters correctly, so let’s talk about that. How do we test for these things, and what does that testing look like? Where do we start?

Caroline:
Okay, so the first thing, I like to talk about mold, and even though it gets overplayed a lot, I like to clarify things because I think it gets really misunderstood.

Dr. Pompa:
I agree.

Caroline:
Molds do three things. They’re the fuzzy thing you see growing in your shower or on a piece of fruit, right? That has a protein and also a beta-glucan, which causes inflammation in the body, one. Two, molds also produce volatile organic compounds. Just like we were talking about paints producing VOCs, molds also do as well, so that’s like smoking. I always say it’s mold, smoking cigarettes in your house. It’s putting off this VOC into the air. Thirdly, if you have toxic mold that we often hear about, it produces the mycotoxin. If you get this great combination going with this mold, then you basically create health issues. That’s how it all transpires.

There’s three different ways to test for mold, and one is to take a spore trap, which is an air sample. Another one is to take a VOC sample. People often say, well, what if I have mold, and it’s in the walls? I don’t see it, but I’m sick. It might be behind my bathroom shower. That’s when the VOC test comes in. We actually can take the gas from mold, test for the gas itself, and then parlay it to a level to find out if you may have mold behind the wall, which is fascinating. I mean, we’ve been doing this for years, but most companies don’t do it.

The other thing that you can do is also do a mycotoxin test, and that’s looking at all the levels of mycotoxins. Say you have a mold issue that we can’t find. If the mycotoxin’s high in the home, we can correlate it back and see if there is something that we’re missing, so with those different types of trifectas of testing, we can really achieve a pretty good analysis as to whether you have a mold issue or not.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, and mold’s the hardest. I appreciate that. Just for people to be clear, mold produces a spore. Yeah, you can do an air trap and collect the spore. I know you do this too. You test the outside air and the inside air because you could be getting a lot of spores.

Caroline:
That’s right.

Dr. Pompa:
Every house has mold, right?

Caroline:
Yes.

Dr. Pompa:
You’re going to compare that, but you’re taking it to another level in testing the VOC, the volatile organic compound. That’s that smell. I have a nose for mold. I go there’s mold. I mean, I’m smelling the VOC, right? That’s what I’m smelling.

Caroline:
That’s right.

Dr. Pompa:
Obviously, you’re testing it even better than my nose. That gas that’s given off you’re going to pick up if you have mold behind the wall, which is awesome. Then you’re testing for the mycotoxin, aka biotoxin, that the really lethal molds put off that make people really sick. Looking at all three ways in your experience has been the best way to do it.

Caroline:
Exactly, not everybody needs all three tests. Usually, it’s a matter of one or two. What’s interesting about our VOC test which we do, volatile organic compounds, we obviously look at chemicals in our VOC test, which is called the predict, but we also look at the mVOC in that test, which is interesting. We do a VOC panel, but at the same time, when we pull your air sample, we’ll also look for a VOC for mold. I’m doing a double check. If you do our standard mold test and it comes back negative, I automatically go to a VOC test where I’ll run the VOC behind it or next to it, so I can see if there’s anything we’re missing, which is great.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I love that.

Caroline:
I’m looking at your VOCs and mold at the same time, and I’m assessing that.

Dr. Pompa:
I love that. I have to say this here early in the show. When I immediately saw all of the testing that you’re doing—and of course, I work with people who are very sick and challenged. Often times, they’re bringing in experts, $2,000 and more, to figure out if their home’s safe. One of the first questions I asked after I saw what tests you’re running was how much is the test if they do everything? You told me $450. I was like that is the best price for this testing I’ve ever seen. I think that’s the test behind you on the right, on your right.

Caroline:
Yeah, that’s our Examinair. That’s examineair.com. They can go and look at it too. We have a separate website for it altogether. That’s molds. That will do your dander counts. It’ll tell me your dust mite levels, how well you’re cleaning. That’s going to tell me your particulate, if you choose the option to do a particulate sample, and those are things that range from feather, cellulose, fiberglass, things that get into your environment from building construction, ash, fireplaces. If your fireplace is backflowing and you’re getting stuff that can be coming back and making you sick and not even realizing it, we can pick that up, so there’s a lot in there. Then the VOC test is separate, but that’s the one I usually start with because it gives me a really good assessment as to what’s going on at first, how well they’re cleaning and what else is going on in the air that could be contributing.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, and Revelation Health is going to carry all of the testing that you offer. My doctors, if you are a client of one of my doctors, ask them because they may be carrying it too. I’m sure like us they will give you some type of a discount, or some type of code, or something to get the test. People are going to want to get the test. I thought I just muted my mike there. I apologize. I whacked it with my hand. I got so excited.

I think when we look at mold testing too and this is one of the big criticisms that I have is that you get people that you just know are in exposure, and they have an expert come out. They do a few tests, an air sample, maybe a tape test. It’s clear when in fact it is behind the walls. Having that three parameter way of looking at it is a really, really accurate way of doing it. Now, the other thing big problem—go ahead.

Caroline:
The other thing I just want to add is that these things can go both ways too. We talk a lot about—you’ll probably hear about the ERMI test, right? A lot of people will say…

Dr. Pompa:
I was just going to ask that, yeah.

Caroline:
Yeah, and I go both ways. I’ve seen the ERMI work tremendously well, and I’ve also seen it work not so well. People have to understand what the ERMI is. ERMI was always used for educational purposes. It wasn’t meant to be testing. I feel that the fundamental behind it is it wasn’t really based on science. It was based on, well, someone has a lot of mold. Someone doesn’t. How do we determine that? That was one thing with it.

The other thing with an ERMI is that it’s not necessarily giving you a true spore count. It’s giving you pieces of DNA that they group together into a—to call it a spore, so what happens is we track DNA from mold in all the time. If you go running down the road and you walk through the grass, you bring it in. I’ve seen it happen where you get false positives and false negatives.

Dr. Pompa:
I’ve seen it too. It’s like a better history of what the house has been exposed to.

Caroline:
Exposed to, right, it can be, or it can come in from other places too.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, exactly. That’s why I always say, if you get the ERMI, get some type of air samples as well looking outside and inside.

Caroline:
Exactly, there you go.

Dr. Pompa:
Compare the two. If there’s a correlation, if stachybotrys are on both high, then maybe—I would look into it. Yeah, that’s how I’ve dealt with that.

Caroline:
Exactly, yeah, and that’s absolutely right. That’s why I like this test. It gives us a basic overall, and then if we see nothing and we still suspect mold, then we do a VOC, which is going to look at chemical load anyway. When you’re looking at patients, you want to look at, okay, what are they exposed to on a mold level, but chemicals, what are we exposed to on a chemical level? We know that that’s going to promote even more inflammation. Then I double check it, and it works real effectively. You’re running more information, but you’re not repeating something unnecessarily.

Dr. Pompa:
I’ve had it so many times too where, okay, we think it’s mold. We think it’s mold, and it ends up being another toxic source of something else in the house.

Caroline:
That’s right.

Dr. Pompa:
To your point, high dander levels are causing inflammation. Whether it’s mold, or dander levels, or another chemical in your home, it will drive inflammation, and now you don’t sleep as well in that home. You don’t feel as well in that home. That’s the thing I like about testing everything like you’re doing because it may not be what you think.

Caroline:
Absolutely, and a lot of people—I get clients all the time. They’re like I’m sure I have a mold issue. I’m sure I have a mold issue, and I try to explain to them we’re talking about there’s formaldehyde in homes. There are volatile organics. You’re talking about it could be radon issues. You have water issues. I mean, there’s so much more than just mold, and usually, when it’s just mold by itself, you’re typically not going to be sick. When you start looking at houses in people who have mold exposure and are sick, they also had high volatile organics. They also had high pesticide exposure. It’s not just one thing, and I need people to really understand that. We need to go down—sorry.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely, here’s the point. I mean, of course, everybody has dander. Everybody has mold in their house. Everybody has chemicals, right? There’s a certain point that creates sickness. Now, it’s funny. I’m an expert in the body and what makes people sick, and I make an analogy of the perfect storm, meaning that we’ve all had heavy metal exposures in our life and still do. We all have had mold exposures.

When I hear a sick person’s story, it’s this perfect storm. They’ve already accumulated a certain amount of heavy metals, and they are living now in a mold exposure higher than normal. Then they get the emotional trauma, or it could be two chemicals and an emotional, or two physicals. The point is is it’s three stressors that come together and bam.

Caroline:
That’s it, trifecta.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, and then that creates the perfect storm. The genes get triggered, and now you’re sick.

Caroline:
That’s it.

Dr. Pompa:
What I do is I, basically, peel it back and look for those stressors. Your home could be part of that stressor, but you talk about the trifecta in the home the same way I talk about it in the body.

Caroline:
Isn’t that amazing, though? That’s what it is. It’s incredible to put the two of us together. What it’s showing is that, however that exposure happens, once it does, you’ve got to monitor your food and monitor your environment. It doesn’t mean that I want you to live in a bubble, absolutely not. I want you to come home to a place where your body can decompress from everything that you’re exposed to at work. People work in bad environments. You go to the grocery store. You think they don’t have mold at the grocery store? Of course they do.

You’re exposed to all of this, but you don’t need to come home to it. Your body needs to decompress and be in a good environment. We can go back out in the day and have offenders, and then come back and decompress again and get rid of it and detox.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely, so to your point, it’s this trifecta in the home that, obviously, then creates a problem: high dander, too high a mold, too high of VOC. Bam! Now it’s unlivable. When you assess this test, give us a way how you assess it. Again, you’re going to see these—all of these things in everybody’s home, and I know you said about 500. I’m 500 on one thing but not other things. How bad is my home? How do you assess this test?

Caroline:
I usually look at—with tVOCs, when we’re looking at chemical load, those are things like benzene, toluene, how much gasoline you’re exposed to. Maybe you drink wine in the house, and you have exposure to volatiles that way. Disinfection wipes, those are huge. People love to use disinfection wipes, and let me tell you, they are the worst offender in indoor air quality that you can imagine.

Dr. Pompa:
We don’t use them. We don’t use them.

Caroline:
They’re terrible. They leave behind D-limonene, which is a citrus-based volatile organic, and they really create a lot of havoc. I try to tell people stop using them like crazy. Don’t use them all over the house because your VOCs quickly get up to 1500 just from disinfection wipes.

What’s interesting about the VOC test, Dr. Pompa, is you can see everything people are doing in their house. It’s almost scary. I talk to my client. I’m like, “Oh, you drink wine a lot.” They’re like, “How do you know that?” You’re using the disinfection wipes. You have mothballs. You have gun solvent. All of this, when you start to know the compounds, it puts together this picture, and you know your client so well. It’s amazing. It’s really amazing.

People get freaked out. They’re like, “Oh, my God, how do you know this about me?” It’s like CSI, but that’s what it is. They don’t need to tell me. I can see what they’re doing, and I can tell if they’re lying. I’ll say, “Oh, you’re using disinfection wipes.” They go, “No, I don’t.” The husband will say, “I don’t use that,” and the wife has them stored from Costco underneath the cabinet where there’s big barrels of these disinfection wipes, and they don’t even know that they’re there. It’s really fascinating what you can find out and know about these.

Dr. Pompa:
That brings me to the next question. I mean, part of the solution is, okay, you see these high levels. Then, obviously, we’re backtracking into where are these exposures coming from? You already started talking about some of the surprising ones like that. In our home, we don’t use any regular cleaners, right? We use all plant-based types of cleaners or laundry detergents.

Caroline:
I want to say this. Because something’s green, does not mean it’s healthy. People think that, oh, I use green cleaner. I use essential oils. That’s okay, absolutely not, adds to your VOC level, puts you over the edge, stresses the body. For volatile organics, I would say, if you’re using essential oil, you only want to use it 15 minutes a day. You cannot put it in a diffuser and let it run rampant because your volatile organics climb.

Formaldehyde is a naturally occurring thing. People get worried about it, but it’s in wood products. It’s naturally occurring. It doesn’t mean it’s good for you. Same thing, D-limonene, a lot of the essential oils, pinene, which is pine, which comes from building products, all of that’s natural, but that doesn’t mean it’s good for you in high concentration.

Dr. Pompa:
Especially because we build homes that are just totally sealed up.

Caroline:
That’s right.

Dr. Pompa:
Those things build up over time.

Caroline:
That’s right.

Dr. Pompa:
That becomes a real problem.

Caroline:
People don’t realize they do it. They’re not realizing their essential oil can contribute to that. They just think, oh, it’s natural. It’s okay.

Dr. Pompa:
What’s your favorite cleaner that you use day in, day out?

Caroline:
I mean, most of my clients, I really recommend use a mild detergent if you need it. I like Oxiboost products. Natural Choices is a line. I like the Sun & Earth line, very mild stuff. I mean, I clean my whole house. I’m a neat freak by nature, so vinegar and water goes a long way. I mean, you really need don’t need to use all these cleaning products. You want to try to stay away from them.

Dr. Pompa:
I hate fragrances.

Caroline:
Yeah, me too.

Dr. Pompa:
They’re the biggest culprits, actually. It’s funny. Even the natural things like Meyers, they’re loading them up with unhealthy fragrances. They did a study that people would look at a very obvious dirtier shirt versus an obviously more clean shirt, but one had scent and the other didn’t. They said which is cleaner? People did this, and they won over this as opposed to the visual. Nine times out of ten they’d pick the dirtier looking shirt because it smelled fresh. I hate that.

Caroline:
Oh, my gosh, don’t even get me started on fragrance. I tell all my clients no.

Dr. Pompa:
You went into my next question. I’ve been in the homes. You know who you are out there. Okay, so they have all of the fragrance things everywhere. It’s the candles. It’s the plug-ins. First of all, I go what are they covering up? Typically, it’s a mold, nasty odor, a damp odor, right? They have a mold problem. Talk about the homes you’ve tested with all the air fresheners and fragrances.

Caroline:
Your house should smell benign. It really shouldn’t smell like anything.

Dr. Pompa:
Thank you.

Caroline:
If it starts to smell like something, then you need to investigate what that is. If it’s a chemical, if it’s mold, pet, all of that is a sign that something ‘s not right, so don’t cover it with a fragrance. I’m okay if you want to use fragrance, something natural, maybe some lemon, a cinnamon stick 15 minutes a day to just freshen air. I’m okay with that. You can’t be using these things that are continuous. They launch your volatiles up and cause problems, even natural ones do. Then the other ones can contain things like benzene, toluene, all your petroleum families, and those are obviously linked to carcinogenic situations. You really have to watch the fragrance. It’s really, really unhealthy. It’s not as good for you as you think it is, and you really have to moderate it. If you’re someone who’s a fragrance person, 15 minutes a day is my guideline.

Dr. Pompa:
Again, I’ve been in homes where the couch is—we’ll just be nice and say very old. You can see it. Then you sit on it gently, and it still creates the little—the thing. I have a nose like an animal.

Caroline:
I do too.

Dr. Pompa:
I’m like, okay, this thing is—so furniture, old furniture must be major culprits to some of these dander and off-gassing.

Caroline:
It’s dander. It’s dust mites. I mean, you’ve got to remember dust mites are like little creatures, and they produce proteins that cause inflammation. All of these things—I look at the body as I want it to have as low inflammation as possible. For any disease state, that makes sense, right?

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, no, absolutely.

Caroline:
What I find is, when people are chronically sick and I reduce their VOCs, they feel better. It’s not necessarily that maybe the issue goes away, but the volatile organics are—your body’s got to clear all of that stuff. The harder it has to work—and if you already are comprised in some capacity, reducing the VOCs takes the inflammation away, and then the symptoms feel better. It’s so important. I mean, I have story after story about people who were sick and had issues. We fix things in the home, and they get better. I mean, this isn’t made up stuff. This is legit science. This is the problem. We fixed it. The symptoms went away.

Dr. Pompa:
Caroline, look, I train doctors, and they’ll put people on a lot of—not the doctors I train, but many in functional medicine, they run thousands of dollars’ worth of test, all the new genetic testing. They’re putting people on all the supplements from the testing, and they never asked them about silver fillings in their mouth that are vaporizing mercury in their brain. They never asked them about their environment, their home that they’re going in every day. You’re 100% right.

We have a stress bucket. When that bucket gets full—and genetically, yeah, we have different size, but when it gets full and starts going over, good luck. This is to your point. What I found is, once that bucket gets full, you have to deal with the person’s day in, day in environment, where they’re sleeping for eight hours a night.

Caroline:
That’s right.

Dr. Pompa:
You better make sure that environment is clean. That’s why I’ve done shows on even EMF now. EMF is a new toxin to say that we have to deal with. It fills your bucket. The air that we’re breathing, this dust that contains all of these things that we’re talking about, you better deal with that. If your goal is to feel better, you have to empty that stress bucket, and your internal environment is a big part of it.

Caroline:
That’s absolutely right. I want to say too—and this is something that I saved for your show. It’s something new that we’ve been doing that nobody even knows. I was one of the first people in the country to do this. Unbeknownst to me and the Indoor Air Quality Association, I’m the first one to do it, but we started looking at glyphosate, which was a big issue. We were testing it in water for years to find out—and for people watching, glyphosate is Roundup. We were watching it in water, which was an easier test to do, but last year was the first time I actually tested it in air quality.

I had a client who was very sick, had cancer, lymphoma. They swore. They said, “I really think it’s here.” They pushed me, which was nice, right? My client pushed me to expand out of my realm and go into something else. I said, “Okay, we’ll test the water.” The water was fine. The glyphosate came back. I took a filter, first time we’ve ever done this. We sent it to a lab that we specially designed to have this filter tested for glyphosate, which was never done before.

Sure enough, it came back on the filter. It came back 110 parts per billion and also with ampho, which is the metabolite that breaks down from—glyphosate breaks down, which told me that it had been there for a while. My client was not using it, but the neighbors were using it.

Dr. Pompa:
Wow!

Caroline:
I don’t mean to cut you off. I want to say that we are so interconnected as a society, and what we are all doing impacts each other. We really have to look at this and say, okay, I know I’m using something, but it really makes someone else sick too. I think we have to come together as a collective and say, look, we want a better world. Maybe this is idealistic, but I think we need to understand that what we do to each other affects each other. That’s a perfect example.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, there’s no doubt. I want people to understand that glyphosate—obviously, now you see the commercials, right? I’ve been talking about glyphosate for ten years, but no one was listening. One of the things it does is it opens up the blood-brain barrier and the gut barrier, so the toxins that you’re exposed to now become more lethal because the glyphosate opens it up. Now it’s crossing into your brain.

Stephanie Seneff, 2012 study, she’s a senior scientist at MIT. That study showed that. That she believes that—this massive rise in neurodegenerative conditions from Parkinson’s, dementia, and Alzheimer’s, autism, she believes that—the chemicals that we’re being exposed to daily and even from utero that are in us, that the glyphosate’s opening up and allowing them to go deeper into the brain. Again, it’s no doubt opening up our gut leading to the leaky gut, food allergies, the food intolerances. Your test is now testing for that in the air.

Caroline:
Yes.

Dr. Pompa:
By the way, I want to point put—you just said something, though. We have people that want to get their water tested, and you do that as well, correct?

Caroline:
Mm-hmm. We basically handle everything pertaining to the home so if you want to test for whatever, and let me reiterate. Not everybody needs every test. What I do is I try to say do one test a year. Unless you’re sick and you really got something going on that we really need to assess. Start by doing one thing a year, and put yourself on a regiment just like you go with your blood test. This year I’ll do mold. Next year I’ll do VOCs. Next year I’ll do radon. Then you have a really good assessment as you move forward that your house is healthy.

A lot of the things don’t have to be repeated. I mean, mold, I’m an advocate of repeating it every three years at least because you want to know, if not more frequently.

Dr. Pompa:
I’m so glad that you were recommended to us. By the time this show airs, we’re going to have all of your testing on the Revelation Health website. I mean, it’s a real—and I’m going to use every one of your tests. Of course, I’ve done different tests, but I’m going to run every one of them. We’ll do a post-show. I’m willing to expose, hey, the things I miss. I am.

Caroline:
We’ll know if Dr. Pompa’s lying.

Dr. Pompa:
No, right, hey, I’ll be the first to be like I didn’t see it. I didn’t know, right? No, it’s fun for me, honestly, because I’m all about discovery. I learned everything doing things—from pain to purpose is my story. I really believe so strongly the only way to get your health back is to look upstream. Get rid of everything that’s upstream. In your home, your air in your home is part of what could be upstream keeping you sick, not healing, so I want everyone to hear that very clearly. Your water and air are two places that absolutely affect you. You may not be drinking your water at home. That’s one of the reasons why I have whole water filtration, house filtration. You’re showering in it and your dishwasher and everything.

Caroline:
Also, water, people think you have to drink it. They often say, well, I don’t drink my water, but you shower in it every day. A lot of these contaminates go right into your body. Arsenic can go right in through your bloodstream through your skin. Your skin’s your largest bodily organ. All of these things, whether you put lotion on your skin, you forget your body absorbs it all. It goes right into your bloodstream within 20 seconds.

People, think, before you put something on your skin, go do I really want to put this on? It doesn’t mean that I don’t want you to use things. I mean, I use makeup. I use hair products, but I think about what I’m doing. I try to balance every day and say, okay, well, I’m going to do this now, but maybe for two weeks I’m not going to do it. It’s just a balance that you constantly have to achieve, and it’s really important to do it.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, man, air quality, I actually do worry about my air quality. Salt Lake’s down here, which is one of the most toxic places on the planet. Because of inversion, it gets trapped in, the pollutants, right? Now, we live up here, but every once in a while, a little bit can seep up. I mean, literally, you see—you go have way down the mountain at about 4,000 feet, and you literally see the air change. Every once in a while I see it coming up close, and I get nervous.

Caroline:
What I tell people too is so when you—what we found with particulate— and I went back to school at University of Southern California. I went to Keck School of Medicine, and I took classes in public health. I’m working towards my MPH. I had to do Continuing Ed anyway, so I figured I might as well go there because I really like their program. What we found is a lot of the studies showed that high particulate level increase disease state. For example, if you had the ApoE4 gene for Alzheimer’s and you work—they took mice and exposed them to high levels of particulate. They grew the amyloid plaque much quicker.

Also, when people have cardiovascular disease, if you expose them to higher concentrations of particulate matter—and particulate matter for people, it’s your pollution level. If you live in the city, you’re going to have all this particulate that affects you. What I recommend to my clients is 65 and over always need HEPA filtration. That’s going to help improve your cardiovascular function much more effectively. They did studies in Sweden and all over that basically shows, if you use HEPA filtration, your cardiovascular function will improve more than medication, which I think is huge, so over 65, HEPA filtration. You’ve got to make sure you’re changing these filters. You have to follow the instructions on a filter.

I have a lot of clients who go, “I have filters all over my house.” Then when I test, the filter is holding that debris, right? You’re not getting rid of that. That’s a no-no. You can make your problem significantly worse with filtration if you don’t utilize it properly, so you’ve got to follow the instructions. Most of the time, I don’t even recommend filtration. HEPA, I will, but I don’t want people storing that stuff in the corner, and when I test the air, it still is in your airstream. You really want to get rid of the toxins, get rid of the stuff, and make it healthy to begin with. Then we can supplement in.

Dr. Pompa:
I agree. I’m going to do a whole show after this one on air filtration, right? There’s some new technology there too, but I agree with you 100% on that where I see the same mistakes with the air filtration. I want to do a whole show on that. To your point, R1 of my 5Rs of how you get well, how you fix the cell is removing the sources. You can do all that, but if you have a source in your home, you have to get rid of it, and therefore, starting with the testing is the way to go. Then you know what you’re looking for.

Now, let me ask you something about the test. Okay, let’s just say it shows a high level of X chemical, right? Does it give you an idea of where X chemical could be coming from?

Caroline:
Yeah, so what we do is we break down the top 20 contaminants. When you do a VOC, you’ve got all these VOCs in there. We take the largest offenders, and we reduce those. For example, say you have cans of paint in the corner, and your volatiles come back at 1500. Three hundred of those volatile organics are coming from paint cans, so we break that down for you and show you. If you take those off, now you’re at 800, let’s just say, by removing 350 volatile if you’re at 1200 or something.

We show you how to exactly take those off to get that number lower, and once you do that, I mean, you don’t really have to test volatiles again. As long as you don’t start introducing stuff back into the environment, you should be fine, and I allow you a certain amount of stuff. It’s not like I’m saying, hey, live in a bubble. I don’t want you to have anything. It’s not even possible. I mean, people who go live in the middle of nowhere—I have chemically sensitive clients that said I’m going to go live in Pahrump, Nevada. I don’t want to be exposed to chemicals. I don’t feel well around them. They’re still exposed to 250 volatile organics.

Gasoline is prevalent. We carry it with us. If you go to a pump and you pump gas, you are covered in gasoline vapor. You’re covered in that volatile. You don’t have to touch it. It doesn’t have to leak out of your car. Just simply the vapor gets on your clothing.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, of course.

Caroline:
Then what do you do? You go home, and you sit on your couch. Then your pet sits there. All of this gets transferred all over the world, and we basically have these things in our environments all the time.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, and I want to point out to people it’s like—look, to your point, it’s unavoidable to a certain point, so we have to deal with what we can control we have to control. I didn’t know about paint cans. I thought if they were sealed—why would they off-gas? You taught me something. I had no idea.

Caroline:
A lot of my clients, they’ll come, and they say I have that brain fog feeling. Nine out of ten times it’s the paint cans. Everyone is storing paint cans, and they feel stoned.

Dr. Pompa:
I have paint cans that I’m going to—I have some stored downstairs in my…

Caroline:
That’s it.

Dr. Pompa:
I have to get rid of.

Caroline:
It comes all the way upstairs. If I take an air—it’s in a basement, and I take an air sample. It’s there. Then people go, “I walk around, and I feel stoned. I’m not clear.” I said, “Take your paint cans out of the house for a week. Then call me back and tell me how you feel.” They go, “Oh, my God, my brain fog cleared up.”

Dr. Pompa:
I can put it in my garage. I mean, there’s obviously way more ventilation.

Caroline:
As long as it’s not—if it’s connected to the house—anything that’s connected to your house—picture your house as a big bucket. Everything that’s connected, it goes through the walls. It doesn’t stay in the garage because you put it in there. It goes everywhere.

Dr. Pompa:
Where do you put them?

Caroline:
Shed, you need a shed, outside shed or a storage unit. I have a storage unit, like a heat—one that has heat and air conditioning. We put all of our stuff in a storage. I mean, look, I do this for a living. My house, I don’t have any of the stuff. I live exactly like you do. I live this way. That’s my life. I’m sorry.

Dr. Pompa:
My life was really good until I discovered paint cans, okay? Now I’m going to—I almost want to measure my house before and after my paint can.

Caroline:
You can.

Dr. Pompa:
We’re going to have to do Part 2, Dr. Pompa’s paint can discovery.

Caroline:
It’s amazing to see the changes when people start changing things. It’s incredible. I can really see stuff, so [00:39:04].

Dr. Pompa:
Now I want to develop these boxes that we put in our garage that seal, that have no way of—there’s a market here. I’m just thinking another business idea.

Caroline:
Like we need anymore. It’s like, oh, my God.

Dr. Pompa:
Come on, Caroline. Yeah, you should be the one to do that, though. You’re like, oh, you’re telling everyone, and then you develop this, right?

Caroline:
I would love it. I would love it. Listen, I got into this business to help people. I’ve been fortunate to make a career. Twenty years of being in business. It’s not about the money for me. It is about making a difference in people’s lives. It always has been. I’m fortunate to do something that I love, and it’s fun. I mean, it really is fun.

Dr. Pompa:
No, I love it too. I love making a difference. I love exposing these things like that, like paint cans. I mean, I’m exposing people about their darn laundry detergent for years and their dishwashing detergent that gets on your plates and your food. I mean, my gosh, you’re eating this stuff, right?

Caroline:
Oh, it’s so bad, right?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, it’s so bad.

Caroline:
You don’t think about it. Once you start thinking about it, then it opens up all these other things, and you’re like it’s [00:40:07].

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, I’m going to have to change it to the toxic top 11 because I have to add paint cans to it.

Caroline:
That should be up there.

Dr. Pompa:
I have to rewrite my article. No, that’s great information. I feel blessed. I tell you, we’re going to do Part 2 where Dr. Pompa tests his home.

Caroline:
I love it. I love it.

Dr. Pompa:
I’m going to tell my story. Caroline, thank you so much for your testing. Thank you for making it affordable. Thank you for making it available. What a blessing. This has been a missing piece of the puzzle where we can go to one place and get everything we need and done right, so I appreciate that.

Caroline:
Exactly, and thank you for having me. It’s so fun to be here. I want to tell you a quick story when I started out. When I first started out and I was getting my bearings, I started testing homes. I think it was my first or second client. She was really sick, and she’s like, “I’m so sick in my home. Nobody can figure out what’s wrong with me.” I said, “Okay,” I said, “so we’ll do some volatile organic testing.” I think at the time it came back that she had methylene chloride, which is a—it’s associated a lot with gun solvent. When people clean guns in the house and they store guns in the house, that’s a big thing, so it easily builds up.

I said, “Look, there’s other chemicals here too that indicate that somebody has a gun in the home, or there may be a gun in the home.” She said, “I don’t know who you are, but you’re a fraud. You’re making this up.” I was just like—I’m right out of the gate. I’m like, oh, my God, but I think I’m right. I’m like, oh, my God, am I in the right career? What am I doing?

I talked to the lab. I said, “I really think there’s a gun here.” They’re like, “You can’t influence them. They’re just going to have to deal with it.” She was just so—just upset, so she calls me two weeks later. She goes, “I want to apologize.” She goes, “My husband was cleaning guns.” She goes, “We have a gun. I never knew we had it, and we’re storing it.”

He was storing it under the bed, and she was getting so sick from the solvent. Took it out and she got better. After that, she referred clients to me. Those kind of stories, I mean, they’re just—I have thousands of them. People have to realize everything you do in that house can affect you, so you have to think.

Dr. Pompa:
Wow! Yeah, that’s powerful. Yeah, it wakes me up to another level. That’s for sure. You need to test your homes. This is where we spend our time. If you want to get well, be well, downregulate inflammation, which is the cause of all disease arguably, then we have to pay attention to these things that we’re living in every day. There you go. Yeah, appreciate it. This is great information, great testing.

We’ll put the links here, folks, that you can get the testing with a great discount. Thank you for that, Caroline, and we’ll have it on our website. Thank you.

Caroline:
Thank you.

Ashley:
That’s it for this week. We hope you enjoyed today’s episode. This episode was brought to you by Cytodetox. Please check it out at buycytonow.com. We’ll be back next week and every Friday at 10 a.m. Eastern. We truly appreciate your support. You can always find us at cellularhealing.tv. Please remember to spread the love by liking, subscribing, giving an iTunes review, and sharing the show with anyone you think may benefit from the information heard here, and as always, thanks for listening.

312: The Menopause Reset

Episode 312: The Menopause Reset

I'm excited to welcome an incredible superstar, Dr. Mindy Pelz. Dr. Mindy’s passion is educating women on keto, fasting, and diet variation to impact their hormonal health. She is here today to discuss menopause, and how she was inspired by what worked in her own life and in her practice that led to writing a book on the topic. What she has created has been incredible for menopausal women and she’s here to share her amazing tools with you today. You can find Mindy on her own podcast and YouTube channel and in her vibrant FB group, called the Resetter Collaborative.

More about Dr. Mindy Pelz:

Dr. Mindy Pelz, DC, is crazy passionate about helping families stay healthy. For the past 22 years, she has been in the health trenches with busy, overscheduled families. She has built one of the largest holistic health clinics in Silicon Valley with patients coming to her from all over the world for her customized ketobiotic, fasting, detox, and nutritional approaches. Her focus is to give families simple, science-based effective health tools that have all members of the family thriving.

Her bestselling book, The Reset Factor, was released in 2015, giving people all over the world access to a clear step-by-step path to creating a healthy, vibrant, energy-filled life free from disease and suffering. The launch of her book ignited a “Resetter tribe,” an online group of like-minded people all supporting each other, exchanging health ideas, and cheering each other on to better health. Once a month Dr. Mindy leads her Resetter tribe through a free Fast Training Week, where all community members practice different styles of fasting together.

Currently Dr. Mindy’s passion is educating women on how to do keto, fasting, and diet variation to impact their hormonal health. You can find much of her information laid out in a very simple and easy-to-approach, motivating manner on her youtube channel.

Show notes:

The Menopause Reset Book: Get Your Free Copy!

Dr. Mindy on YouTube

Join Dr. Mindy's Resetter Collaborative on Facebook

CytoDetox: total detoxification support where it matters most – at the cellular level.

Dr. Pompa's Beyond Fasting book – now released!

If this episode has taught you just one thing, I would love if you could head on over to Apple Podcasts and SUBSCRIBE TO THE SHOW! And if you’re moved to, kindly leave us a rating and review. Maybe you’ll get a shout out on the show!

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Transcript:.

Dr. Pompa:
Wait until this interviewer, Dr. Mindy Pelz. She’s one of the HCF Platinum Doctors. You’re going to see her energy come out in this one. Perimenopause, menopause, I take her through every lesson. We talk about all the myths that she believed. Oh, she was eating eight times a day. Wait until you hear her story, but also, what she did about it, her solutions.

She talks about her new book. The Resetters is a group that she teaches on—in what do you call it—Facebook is the word. Hearing it from Dr. Mindy, you’re going to love it. Such solutions she gives you to this massive problem of hormone dysregulation. Stay tuned.

Ashley Smith:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m Ashley Smith. Today, we welcome one of our own superstar docs, Dr. Mindy Pelz. Mindy’s passion is educating women on keto, fasting, and diet variation to impact their hormonal health. She’s here today to discuss menopause and how she was inspired by what worked for her in her own life and in her practice. It led to her writing a book on the topic.

What she has created has been incredible for menopausal women. She’s here to share her amazing tools with you today. You can find Mindy on her own podcast and YouTube channel and her vibrant Facebook group, which I will link to in the show notes, as well as how to preorder her book. Let’s get started and welcome Dr. Mindy, and of course, Dr. Pompa to the show. Welcome both of you.

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
Thank you. I love this. I love being here. It’s like being back with family.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, well, listen, I’m going to start with a thank you because it’s funny, you may have started when you interviewed me with the same thing, but I’m flipping it because I could never reach the amount of women that you’ve reached because see, I wasn’t—I always say you have authority in what God gives you victory over. You were a menopausal, premenopausal mess, so therefore, you own it girl.

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
Yes, I was.

Dr. Pompa:
You own it. You can bring it to women more than I could ever.

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
Do you know that as I was writing this book, I’m like, I feel like I should be 25 years old, not a woman going through menopause? This is crazy. It’s a message that women need to hear.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, exactly. Look, they’re going to hear it from you because you’re going through it, been through it, the whole thing. It’s just like people that have unexplainable illness go, oh, I’m going to hear it from you because I know you had every symptom I had.

Take us back to the story because we have some funny stories, just like when you were sitting at my seminar. You had your bag of snacks. You’re always snacking away until one point, you’re looking around going, no one’s eating. It’s like no one’s eating, so you put it away.

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
No, you totally taught me that, yep.

Dr. Pompa:
It was funny. Anyways, take us through your evolution into this because I walked it out with you.

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
Yes, you did.

Dr. Pompa:
When you figure something out, man, you just take it to the masses. You’ve done it in such a beautiful way, so tell us.

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
Thank you. Yeah, I think that it started in my early 40s. When I hit 40, I was doing my lifestyle. I was eating breakfast, and having eight meals a day, and working out, and running long distances and marathons. I thought I was healthy.

Then when my hormones started to decline in my early 40s, my mental health was really the first thing to go. Depression, anxiety just kicked in a way that I had never experienced before. Then, insomnia; I think that was probably the thing that put me over the top the most was I just wasn’t sleeping.

I went searching for answers. It was like, take this pill or do this one magic thing. A lot of my friend group was like—who are a couple of years older than me were like, oh yeah, just buck up. Buck up little camper, this is menopause; get ready.

Dr. Pompa:
You’re going to need these hormones. Here’s my doctor.

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
Yeah, you’re going to need these hormones. You’re not going to make it through without an antidepressant. You might want Ambien. I got a lot of recommendations for Ambien for sleep. I was in disbelief that someone so healthy could have such a dramatic turnaround.

I’ve told this story before. I think my enlightening moment was when I meet a friend who was an OB. I asked her about my symptoms. She turned to me and said, “Mindy, I have a practice full of women like this. My medical textbooks have failed me. I have no idea what to do with them.”

That’s really when I found your work. It was like, okay, if every woman is suffering with this in their 40s or as they go through menopause, then what is it? There has to be a toxicity piece; there has to be an environmental piece. Something we’ve been taught has gone awry. That’s really what I’ve spent the last seven years with your help going through and figuring out.

Dr. Pompa:
I think you made a lot of the classic mistakes that we see. You learn from it, so let’s dig in. What did you actually do? Lesson One, let’s start there, Lesson One. I want you to express your failures and the things that—

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
Absolutely.

Dr. Pompa:
—this was a victory, so Lesson One.

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
Lesson One was I ate all day long. To your point, I got up and had breakfast. I never left the house without snacks. I had my snack pack everywhere I went, which is our joke because the first seminar I sat in at your place, I’m just eating around looking like why is—why aren’t we taking a lunch break? Why is nobody eating? Lesson Number One is I ate all day long.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, okay, yeah, solution? That’s easy: eat less often.

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
Yeah, here’s the funny thing on the solution is when I first learned—well, a, I was mad at you that we weren’t eating. I was like, what do you mean we’re not eating? Don’t you know that’s—breakfast is the most important part of the day? We should be eating to keep our metabolism up. I had all those beliefs.

When I first learned of intermittent fasting, my first thought honestly was, oh yeah, I could try that for a day. I could do that once. Let me try that.

I soon learned that there was a fasting window and an eating window. As soon as I shifted that and I really leaned into knowing that I needed to fast a certain amount of time and then I would open up my eating window, my energy went through the roof. My mental clarity, that was amazing.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, you taught your body, your cells, to start using your own fat instead of feeding the machine 24/7 with high insulin levels, which make your hormone levels worse and your glucose levels. All of it was just way up here, so obviously. Second mistake and second lesson?

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
Okay, well, the second one, and I see it now, was actually, I was a long-distance runner. I was a workout queen. I wonder if part of that contributed to the lead and toxicity coming out of my body. A lot of pounding on pavement.

I’ve since learned that our generational toxicity in my family is lead. Lead lives in the bones. As my hormones were shifting, I was also increasing the number of miles I was doing in my running shoes. I think that was really set my lead up through the roof.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, and just for a teaching moment, lead creates more hormone resistance, which made her feel worse, which made her—every symptom she described get worse driven by the toxins. You’re 100% right; lead comes out of bone during—as soon as you start entering perimenopause, you start losing bone, and you start losing lead because estrogen’s dropping, bone is remodeling, and outcomes the lead. Then you’re doing like you said, everything you were doing was creating even more of the lead to come out.

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
To me, the heavy metal detox is where I got my sleep back.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, this is still problem to, solution to, or lesson to, solution to.

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
This is still in the second one. I really had never known—I didn’t know anything about heavy metals. I didn’t realize. I did the Master Cleanse. I did the drink the gallbladder. What’s the cleanse where you drink the oil so that your gallbladder pushes out a bunch of stuff?

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, yeah, nasty.

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
Nasty, I did all of that, but I never did a heavy metal detox.

Dr. Pompa:
You never did it at the cellular level at all and using real binders, and chelators, everything that we teach, everything that we’re passionate about. Okay, Number Three. This is great. I just [00:09:30] going on. I can promise you we didn’t rehearse this.

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
Okay, Number Three, I’ll go in the order of as I learned it.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s right, yeah.

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
It was really the power of the microbiome. I was a very monoculture eater. I would eat the same foods all the time. Even when I first learned fasting and feast-famine cycles, when I would eat, I would always be eating the same foods. There’s two lessons in this one.

The first was that I would eat the—I would eat a lot of meat. I was paleo. I wasn’t eating enough diversity of vegetables, but I also was restricting carbs so much. I didn’t have any variation in my diet at all. It was the same meal over and over again. In fact, if you put that same meal on my dinner table today with my children sitting there, they’ll scream and run away because we would serve the same steak over and over again. That really tanked my hormones, eating that monoculture, one—similar foods all the time.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, and you picked up too the low carb too long, your discipline actually you realized worked against you. I remember looking at your hormone tests. It was a 24-hour urine hormone. I guess I looked at it—Andrea sent it to me. I said, “My gosh, Andrea, she needs feast days.” I just looked at your hormones and said, this girl needs some carbohydrates, periods of it. Do you remember that time?

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
Oh, I totally remember that. At that point, before I did my DUTCH test, I was the fasting queen. I went from eating all day long to keto and fasting.

Dr. Pompa:
You went [non-verbal].

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
Yeah, because that’s what I do, I’m extreme. I just jump in and let me just keep doing—let me just go all in. I was doing so much keto, so much fasting, but the symptom—the heavy metal detoxing had really helped with the sleep, so I was sleeping better. The fasting really helped with my energy. I had insane energy. I didn’t crash at 3 in the afternoon anymore.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s why you were so dedicated because this is working.

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
That’s right. The symptom that showed up, and I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced this but women who have gone through menopause have, is there’s this level of anxiety when your progesterone—and I think you can get it with a lot of metals too where you cannot relax in your own skin.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I had it.

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
I remember that the pivotal part was I was watching—we were on vacation. I was watching my kids play on the beach at sunset. There should be nothing to worry about. I had such levels of anxiety. I couldn’t get my body to relax. That’s when I ran the DUTCH test. All my hormones, estrogen, progesterone, testosterone were lower than a postmenopausal woman.

I gave it to you. You were like, you got to eat pasta. I remember you said something like that. Here I was—

Dr. Pompa:
Something really opposite, yeah.

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
I’m like, eat pasta? No, I’m gluten-free. It’s a good lesson for us all. I had my badge of honor like, no, I don’t eat pasta. Then you shared Merily’s story and how, Merily and I, we go to Europe all the time. She eats this. Now that I’ve dined with you guys several times, yeah, she goes to town. All of our docs, when we sit down, everybody goes into feast mode in a big way.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, yep, feasting is as important as famine. You know what’s funny is everyone has to learn it, especially us disciplined people that wow, I don’t beat myself up over the feast. It should be planned. You also learned the power of the five-day feast before the cycle.

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
Yes.

Dr. Pompa:
Talk about that variation because you found the weekly variations, but doing five days of feasting was transformational for you.

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
That was exactly what—you mapped out at that point, here, let’s look at the cycle. When does your body need estrogen? When does it need progesterone? In those moments, you’re going to have to come out of ketosis. You’re going to have to eat more carbs. You’re going to fast less. I started off with the week before my cycle. It took a couple of months, but I would—I started to do some research on okay, well, what foods should I be eating to raise progesterone?

Dr. Pompa:
You talk about that in your book too, right?

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
Yeah, I call it my 28-day hormone reset. How do you reset your hormones for your cycle?

Dr. Pompa:
By the way, I love how simple you make everything. You’re brilliant at that, honestly. You take my work and you just—you make it so absolutely easy to grasp. I so appreciate that. You have to agree with us. Go ahead, finish.

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
Yeah, it’s the lead. The lead has forced me to take things and make them simple so I can remember them.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, but it works for everybody. Go ahead. You had just restarted.

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
The week before my cycle, I would come out of ketosis. Now, it doesn’t mean I would go to eat bad food, but I would lean into things like beans, and squashes, and potatoes, and even citrus fruits and tropical fruits, things that really help you build progesterone. The first couple of months, I was a little nervous. A lot of people are really nervous, especially if you have weight to lose. I didn’t have that, but I was feeling so bionic in every other way with my keto that I was struggling to go okay, is this really the right thing to do?

I’ll tell you what, after about three months of following that, things—the anxiety stopped. My cycle normalized. That’s the other weird thing is that here at—that was about 47. I thought, oh, I’m definitely—I’m close to complete menopause. My periods were all over the place: spotting and then I’d miss them for two months. Since I added that in, it’s like my periods are almost more regular.

You can tell they’ve become shorter. They’re definitely moving towards that more menopause state, but that the craziness I had before, the spotting—the other thing with low progesterone is you hemorrhage. When you actually start bleeding, it’s horrible. It’s like you almost go, I shouldn’t leave the house. There’s so much blood coming out because the progesterone—you don’t have the progesterone to regulate all that. It really took me about three months. Then I just regularly did that, and wow, what a difference it’s been.

Dr. Pompa:
People have to understand that the chronic insulin spikes is no good. When you go through when you’re low carb like that, your insulin can get so low that you need that higher insulin to help make some of these hormone conversations. It transforms your hormones the rest of the month. You experienced it. I think it’s brilliant by even supporting it further by certain foods. You’re eating high carbs for five days before the cycle and then eating certain foods of high carbs. It’s a win-win.

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
You know what’s interesting too is I’ve talked to a lot of women about that, eat for your cycle. The first thing I would say is why don’t we teach girls this when they go into puberty? Why don’t we teach women in general that as you first—as your cycle first shows up, why don’t we teach women that hey, there’s certain times of the month; instead, we villainize on, oh, I have cravings, PMS cravings.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, yeah, and I failed on my diet. I hear that all the time. Listen, I do good on my diet except for right the week before my period and the week right after. I’m like, no, your innate intelligence knows. Have a strategy with that.

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
That’s right.

Dr. Pompa:
Kick yourself off.

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
That’s right, but we—but that’s what we have been taught is that it’s this, it’s PMS. Then you go into perimenopause and you're taught, it’s just because you're perimenopausal. When you tap into your hormones and you understand them, that really made a big difference.

The other time I tapped into it, I don’t know if you and I have talked about this, I then started to look as I got closer to 50 how your skin dries out, and the wrinkles start showing up, and your hair maybe gets a little flatter, and mucous membranes are more dry. I even noticed that in my joints dry out when estrogens—at the time you’re supposed to be secreting estrogen, it’s like you feel this dryness. Estrogen’s supposed to kick in about Day 12, Day 13 of your cycle, so there’s a little two-day window there that I’ll up my carbs as well. That’s helped.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, absolutely. Feast-famine, our bodies—if you listen to your body, it really does—my wife’s dialed into it. She just knows. You’ll see her eat like a—well, the theory is she eats like a linebacker, so I’m not sure. That just means a lot, I guess.

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
It’s eerie.

Dr. Pompa:
Anyway, but she only does that—she has a really intuitive innate intelligence. She knows when to eat and she’s eating. There’s days where she just doesn’t eat; whereas, I have to think about it a little more. She’s down in.

Backing up maybe, but okay, so that’s the feast five days, as important as the fast. You talked about your love for fasting, but periodically, you do five-day fasts. What has that done for your health? How did you adapt with that in your schedule?

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
Yeah, I think to your point about Merily, now that I’ve tuned into my cycle—and it’s shifting. My cycle, you can feel it. I always say instead of it being raging mad as I finish off my years ovulating, I feel like we’re slipping into the sunset. It’s just slowly quietly going away.

When I want to fast, I usually do it around the—when I first start my cycle. Wow, it’s so much easier. It makes me get a little bit of an insight of maybe what it’s like for a man to fast. It almost feels effortless because when I do it at the right time with my hormones, it’s incredible.

It feel natural. I feel alert. I sleep well. For me, I use it for—I’ve used fasting a lot not only just for prevention, but I use it to heal musculoskeletal injuries. Anytime I have a knee or an ankle issue, just boom, go into the fast at the right time and it goes away.

Dr. Pompa:
I do it, too. Animals do it instinctively. It’s funny; I used to tell people, don’t fast during your cycle, the beginning of your cycle. I used to tell people that. You know what changed me? Reality.

I actually had a woman ask me. I’m like, well, normally, I don’t recommend it, but I had a woman, it’s the only time. Then she’s like, oh my gosh, it’s so much better. I heard that enough, I’m like, okay, I don’t know where I got that from. Old day, I think my education in the 90s. They were like don’t fast during the cycle. You’re weaker. I was like, okay, it was bad information.

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
I think you actually bring up a really valid point that women are taught once you start bleeding, that’s the time you go into nurturing. It’s the old red tent theory; you’re supposed to move away and nurture yourself, but there’s a lot that’s going on before that. Actually, you need more nurturing the week before you go into that phase then actually once your body is ready to shed.

Dr. Pompa:
Carbohydrates and food can be that nurturing.

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
It could be that nurturing. You never knew that—I never knew that a potato with beans on it could taste so good that week before.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, or that good old squash, or good old sweet potatoes, or yam. Come on, forget about it.

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
Yeah, amazing.

Dr. Pompa:
Load it up with butter.

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
The other funny thing I was thinking too is that now, here I am, a couple of years ago a little more than I do today, but here I am in my late—I’m 50 today, but in my late 40s, I’m tracking my cycle more than I did as a teenager so that I can eat for it and I can fast [00:21:58].

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, well, you’re into it. I track things all the time, not even because I have to, just because I want to know.

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
I had to go to my teenage daughter and be like, what app do we use to track our cycle? It’s like okay, now, this is what you do if you want to eat for your cycle is you’ve got to track it.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s awesome. Alright, is there a Lesson Four? Is that where we are, four? Yeah, we got stuck on three.

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
Okay, here’s the other one. Again, I don’t know if you and I have talked about this. What I realized is that, and this is one of my big messages to women going through this process, is we have to honor the fact that you literally have a major organ in your body that’s shutting down. Your ovaries are like I’m done. I’m not going to give you eggs. I’m not going to give you estrogen, progesterone, testosterone. I’m out.

You still need estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone, so it has to come from another organ. It hands it over to your adrenals. That was my last piece that I realized like, holy cow, what have I been doing for stress? How have I been managing my own self-care? We’ve talked a lot about adrenals not being an adrenal problem; it’s an HPA axis problem. I totally agree on that.

I think the things that women got away with when they were in their 30s and 40s, that rushing—Dr. Sonya taught me this, that rushing women syndrome where you’re just like go, go, go. It doesn’t really work so much as you go into menopause because your adrenals are like, what? I have to make sex hormones now? If your adrenals, that whole HPA axis isn’t working well, you’re going to suffer. That was me.

I really have had to prioritize downtime. I’ve had to really look at—force myself. It sounds silly, but force myself to go on vacation more. I’ve had to prioritize monthly massages. I had to change my workouts. I don’t run long distances anymore. I just had to go into a more self-care place.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I was just going down solutions and other strategies. You started giving some there. I think being locked into this sympathetic drive that you did get away with in your 30s is a really important point. Do you have any other strategies you’ve learned and that you have in your book?

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
There’s some supplement—great supplement strategies. Thanks to you and Dr. Shane, Femicrine has saved me. I absolutely love to lean in on those supplements. Systemic has a great protocol. I actually use Fpms a lot more that week before to calm me.

I think the thing that really hit me the hardest was, awareness wise, was realizing that the lifestyle for a woman going through menopause has to be different than she had the rest of her life. I didn’t want to do HRT obviously. I didn’t want to do even bioidenticals. I really wanted to cure this with lifestyle. There are some supplements that have helped, but it’s that—the detoxing, the slowing down the rushing, the eating for my cycles, fasting long periods when it’s appropriate. All of that, it’s been game-changing. I feel healthier at 50 than I did at 43.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, I’m in my 50s and I would say the same, even in my 30s. You and my wife and many others in our group really tell the story opposite of what the world story is that, oh, you’re going to need hormones. You’re going to need this and that. You’re doing it without hormones. Again, I know it’s in vogue, bioidentical hormones, but I always say you just don’t win that game. It’s just like, oh, it helps, but it doesn’t. Then it’s doing this and then it does this.

You have a female group around you. Not the group that our group, outside of that, you have another group. How many are taking hormones at your age?

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
That’s a really interesting question. Bioidenticals you’re right are definitely in vogue. I know that there are several people in our group even that feel if you fix the cell and you do bioidenticals at the same time, that it’s—that can be a journey. That works for many women.

For me, again, I don’t like—I like to work with the intelligence of my body. I don’t want to mess it up too much with anything that could be synthetic or manipulative to especially hormones like you’ve said. It’s like a symphony. They’re so complicated. I just don’t want to mess them up.

I’ll tell you what we’re seeing in our Resetter group is that women either postmenopausal or women that are in the experience, they jump into fasting very much like I did. Their hair starts falling out. I had this too when I first started fasting; they get that thyroid storm where they get the really anxious and heart palpitation. They get insomnia.

They go into these states where I believe, I’m curious your thoughts, I believe the heavy metals reveal themselves. You and I talked about this where when you stimulate autophagy, the cell’s going to clean up, but then sometimes what ends up happing is the cell actually dies. Then those metals get released.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s right.

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
You taught me that. That I see across the board. Menopausal women jump into fasting. They love it, but they don’t want their hair falling out. Some of them actually gain weight because those metals get redistributed. They gain weight.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely; they message, Mindy, is, well, women with thyroid issues, or premenopausal, perimeno, they shouldn’t do fasting, or they shouldn’t do low carb. No, it’s not the truth. It’s just the fact that there’s this toxicity issue that plays a role that you need to just go upstream and look at that. Your Resetter group, I want you to talk about them a little bit because they’ve been—this is a large group of women mostly; there’s some men.

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
There’s men.

Dr. Pompa:
Thank you for the men.

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
Yeah, they make themselves known.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, exactly, but that really, we gain as a group a lot of information from. It’s like, well, try it out. Hey, I tried this. Just like I have a group that follows and we’re able to try and learn as a doctor group. Talk about the Resetter group.

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
You know what? I’m so happy that you brought that up because, as a practitioner, you understand the importance of seeing these theories across so many people. My takeaway from fasting—we have 27,000 in the Resetter group on Facebook, and then we have a 100 plus thousand, some people don’t like Facebook, so they go over to YouTube. They join us in our fast training week over there. Once a month we fast together.

There’s some clear observations that everybody has. One, we are incredibly mineral deficient. Everybody—or we’re incredibly toxic, one or the other. Everybody who goes into this fasting lifestyle, what I find is that if they do it too much, if they’re too rigid, their hair starts falling out, their anxiety goes up.

Again, like you said, they throw the baby out with the bathwater. They’re like, oh, this fasting stuff doesn’t work. Fasting reveals your imbalances. It shows you what you need to work on, which leads me to my next thing that I see so much.

I think the Number One organ outside the brain that needs to be healed for people is the liver. We have got so many people with toxic livers. Those are the ones whose pathways are just—they’re so closed. They’re getting rashes, and they holding onto weight, and they’re constipated. Again, same thing, then they see a video that says keto and fasting is no good. They just don’t realize that their detox pathways are really struggling.

Dr. Pompa:
The liver, it holds anger. The liver holds toxins. The hepato-biliary, so it holds bile; it makes bile. That holds toxins. It holds emotions; it holds physical toxins. Yeah, the liver is just—it is, it just gets abused. We have a lot of strategies there.

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
The liver and the gut break down estrogen as well.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s right; hormone conversations are there and how it breaks down toxic estrogen and all of it.

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
I don’t know if you’ve ever had this, but one of my first experiences with the longer fasts, I had so much anger coming out for no reason. I’m like, why am I so angry? Now, when I do it around my cycle or whatever glimmers of my cycle I’m getting, I don’t get that anger. Between that and the detox, anger does not—is not an emotion that shows up for me anymore.

Dr. Pompa:
The liver is a big player. On the mineral note, remind me, I’m experimenting with this amazing mineral product; can’t talk about it here because I’m still in experimental mode, but I need some other experimenters.

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
Send it my way because I’m literally convinced after all these people fasting that everybody is so toxic, everybody is mineral deficient, and the liver is just destroyed.

Dr. Pompa:
Think about it; I always say, look, when you have heavy metals, in particular, they actually take the place in and around your cells in all the key places in the body of where minerals actually should go. There’s a lot of people even taking minerals and they’re not getting the actual benefit from it. It’s because of the heavy metals blocking.

When we pull the heavy metals out, now we create mineral gaps and even autophagy will. Now, you have got these mineral gaps where it’s like, well, you better fill that with something because now you just pulled something away, but now you have to fill it with something. You’re right; it’s true.

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
That’s restless legs right there. That’s the other thing we see a lot. It’s just all that hormonal imbalance. That toxic load just reveals itself as you start to fast, but it really does it for the menopausal women. It’s a mirror as to what you need to work on.

Dr. Pompa:
Take us through your book a little bit, just what you’re taking people through.

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
Yeah, basically, it’s called The Menopause Reset. What I wanted to do was give women a lifestyle they could follow as they go through their perimenopause journey, their menopause journey, and even I’m really hoping that a lot of postmenopausal women will read that and go okay, I can go back and do this lifestyle now. One of my concerns for the world right now, especially for women, is as we lose those hormones, those hormones are protective. They’re protective against heart problems, dementia, Alzheimer’s. When they go awry, that’s—we’re seeing more disease in postmenopausal women than in perimenopausal women. If we could give women a lifestyle that they can live once they acknowledge, hey, you know what, my hormones are going down, we could save so many lives in that postmenopausal time period.

That’s what the book’s about is helping women understand their hormones, and then teaching them how to do fasting and keto for their time of life, teaching them how to detox and what toxins to look out for. We talk about the rushing women syndrome and things they can do to help their adrenals handle that overload. Like you said, I like to put it all together in steps. I’ve got steps at the back of every—

Dr. Pompa:
You’re great at it, yeah.

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
—so that people don’t get overwhelmed because this is totally different than we’ve been taught. We’ve been really taught you just ignore it. When the menopause symptoms show up, you medicate it. My concern is if we don’t change that conversation, then what’s going to happen is we’re going to end up with more disease in postmenopausal women.

We have a really cool opportunity to help women do menopause different. What we know about the body, it’s like literally two organs that were there for you all the time are done. You’re going to have to adapt to the fact that these two organs no longer work for you. How is your lifestyle adapting to that? That’s really what the book is about.

Dr. Pompa:
Awesome, and we have a link here, folks, to get a pre-order of that book. Thank you for that. What do you think if there’s—we know there’s many different causes of all these epidemics, hormonal epidemics today. What do you think the Number One, just one, the Number One, what do you think it is?

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
Toxicity. I had this thought the other day: we live in the most toxic time in human history. There is so much that has evolved in our modern world. Our phones have evolved, our computers, our technology has evolved, but we’re literally living in a body that was the same as it was in the caveman days.

What are we doing to adapt to that? How are we taking care of this differently because this—we don’t get a 2.0 version of this. We get the same version that the cavepeople had. We are going to have to change and adapt for this modern world. You’ve got to start with toxins. I think that’s the starting point.

Dr. Pompa:
If you had one tool, you could only use one? We have several. I teach them all through therapeutic approach, but you only have one. Every woman coming into your clinic, which one would it be?

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
Oh, God. I’m going to do the one that changed my life the most. That was heavy metal detoxing. That really gave me my sleep back.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, me, too. Yeah, changed my world.

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
Yeah, really changed my brain. That was really how I discovered you. Yeah, totally different person after going—understanding that process and getting that out of me.

Dr. Pompa:
One big thing in your life that happened that made you today, what was it?

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
The most recent was this experience. I don’t put up with poor symptoms in my body very long. I was pretty depressed, and anxious, and even suicidal. I felt like I can’t—I heard your story about the dread that you had at night. I was like that’s me. If this is how me is going to be for the rest of my life, I don’t want to do me. This doesn’t feel good.

That really launched me down finding you. Then the pain to purpose journey I think is so important for us all, whatever your pain to purpose journey is. When you are suffering and you pull yourself out of that suffering, it’s so important that we turn around and teach others because there’s more people suffering. For me, this was the most pivotal experience definitely of my adult life.

Dr. Pompa:
Andrea, who is one of the—the head coach for all our doctors says you and I are brother and sister in this mission. You are, nobody else is like my sister. You’re an amazing teacher. You teach with passion. Everything has come out of your own battles. Every time I watch you, I go, I just—I tear up to some degree because I just think gosh, she is bringing it. I could never do it without a Mindy I’ll tell you. Thank you.

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
I wouldn’t be here without you. You saved my life. Your story was what really helped me understand that I wasn’t going crazy. I’m just so grateful.

Dr. Pompa:
Now, your story. That’s what we’re doing here. We’re going to do better together. We’re going to bring this message to the world. Women are going to hear it better from you; I don’t what anyone says.

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
Again, I still go back to, wow, I’m in menopause. I feel like I should be 25 years old. That’s the whole gig about menopause is it sneaks up on you and you don’t realize that it’s there.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s true.

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
Many women are suffering, so many women.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s unbelievable. This is a problem. I overhear conversations that often time I butt into because, in the conversation, the walk away is that every one of their friends are talking hormones. Every one of their friends get all of these symptoms. It’s just normal.

I always butt in and go, oh no, hold on a second. That’s common, you’re right, but it’s not normal. There’s something you can do about it. Go to my website.

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
No, that’s right. This is why we’ve got to—this is why we have to shout it because we’ve got to wake people up and teach them.

Dr. Pompa:
What my son just realized is the sun was going down. I had perfect light. It was getting darker and darker in here. It’s like [non-verbal].

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
That’s why you keep those Millennials around.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh yeah, the technical—anything like that. He was here to rescue me without even knowing he was here to rescue me. No, listen, I’m going to be interviewing Duncan. I need to cut up on Duncan, Dr. Duncan. He’s in our doctor group and one of the Platinum Doctors. He was like gosh, Mindy has her thing. It’s like, what’s mine? You gave him his.

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
I know.

Dr. Pompa:
What was it?

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
I told him, I said, the thing that is the most inspiring, the thing to do is teach what you have overcome, which you are a perfect example of that. He calls me up one day and he’s like, I figured out what—my message to the world. He’s like, I think I need to help old guys like me. I said, “You’re right.” Yeah, and he’s doing it.

Dr. Pompa:
Anyways, he does. He has a great message which we’re going to do that interview too because hey, Duncan is there, man. We’re not forgetting you old guys out there. We have a message for you with Dr. Bring It.

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
Stay tuned; the old guy podcast is the next episode of Cellular Healing.

Dr. Pompa:
We’re cutting on Duncan, but I’m going to bring this up. Maybe he’ll cut on you. He’s like, I didn’t realize I was that guy. I’m like, you’re that guy, man.

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
Yeah, you are that guy. Good friends let you know you’re that guy. Yeah, so I guess I’m that gal.

Dr. Pompa:
You are, yeah, you’re that gal.

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
Now that I’ve struggled through menopause, well, now I know. I’m super happy to change it for other people and save lives. We’ve got to help the postmenopausal women, too. Go back, redo your lifestyle. You can redo it. I’m sure you see this with fasting. I’ve seen women come out of menopause once they clean everything up.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, absolutely.

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
It’s never too late. You can go back, redo your lifestyle so that you don’t get the diseases that you see in your 60s, 70s, and 80s. That’s so important.

Dr. Pompa:
You give every woman hope, honestly. You had every symptom they had. You know what? You are a world-changer, Dr. Mindy. You are, you’re a world-changer. You were called for it. You were called to it. Most importantly, you answered the call. Some don’t, you did.

Thanks for being on Cell TV. Thank you for being in our group of Platinum Doctors at Health Centers of the Future. That’s no doubt what your health center is. Reach out to Mindy, follow her. She’s amazing.

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
Thank you. Again, I wouldn’t have figured out all those pieces without you and Cell TV. Originally, Cell TV was what gave me that light.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, absolutely.

Dr. Mindy Pelz:
Keep up this good work as well.

Dr. Pompa:
Giving back. Thanks, Mindy, bye.

Ashley Smith:
That’s it for this week. We hope you enjoyed today’s episode. This episode was brought to you by CytoDetox. Please check it out at buycytonow.com. We’ll be back next week and every Friday at 10 AM Eastern.

We truly appreciate your support. You can always find us at cellularhealing.tv. Please remember to spread the love by liking, subscribing, giving an iTunes review, and sharing the show with anyone you think may benefit from the information heard here. As always, thanks for listening.

311: An Integrative Approach to Pain and Neuropathy

Episode 311: An Integrative Approach to Pain and Neuropathy

I love taking CHTV on location, seeking out special healing modalities to bring to you. I'm especially excited about this one, because I'm visiting my friend Dr. Phil Lenoue. You might remember him from Episode 290, which was about Ultrasound Guided Neurofascial Hydrodissection.

This therapy intrigued me so much, I had to fly to Spokane, Washington to experience it for myself. Unlike many other approaches, this concept is very accessible; and it is where you’ll want to start when targeting chronic pain, neuropathy, and fascia (to name a few). Get ready to change your world with this inexpensive therapy… and stay tuned as Dr. Phil does a live demo.

More about Dr. Phil Lenoue III:

Dr. Phil Lenoue III, DO, RMSK was born and raised in Spokane, WA where he graduated fromGonzaga Prep. He later attended Carroll College in Helena, MT where he played football and was part of 4 national championship teams. He was in the inaugural class at Pacific Northwest University (PNWU) College of Osteopathic Medicine and graduated in 2012. In 2015 Dr. Lenoue III completed his Family Medicine residency in his hometown of Spokane. In 2015 he joined his father to establish Lenoue Integrative Medicine where he has been practicing for over 4 years.

Dr. Lenoue III has extensive training and experience in treating musculoskeletal injuries. He has attended numerous training courses in osteopathic manipulation, diagnostic ultrasound, ultrasound guided injections, prolotherapy, ozone therapy, and regenerative medicine. In 2018, he became an appointed faculty member of MSKUS and earned his RMSK certification earlier this year.

Dr. Lenoue III believes in an integrative approach to address the mental, emotional, and spiritual needs of each patient.

Show notes:

Patients: You can contact Dr. Lenoue here or at (509) 951-9253 to to learn more about him and regenerative medicine.Relevant Cellular Healing TV Episodes:

285: Ozone Therapy For Pain, Autoimmunity, and Cancer

274: The Proper Way to Address Cavitations, Hidden Infections, and Root Canals with Dr. Gerry Curatola

263: CHTV in Mexico: Innovations in Stem Cell Medicine

184: Secrets to Fixing Chronic Sickness

Learn more about The Godfather of Ozone Therapy: Dr. Frank Shallenberger

American Academy of Orthopedic Medicine – a non-profit organization that provides educational and informational programs on the diagnosis and treatment of musculoskeletal injuries and diseases and interventional pain managementPractitioners: If you'd like to learn about these injection techniques, you can visit MSKUS.com – Education and training in the area of Musculoskeletal Ultrasound

CytoDetox: total detoxification support where it matters most – at the cellular level.

Dr. Pompa's Beyond Fasting book – now released!Help Us Spread The Word!

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Transcript:

Ashley Smith:
Hello everyone, welcome to Cellular Healing TV. This is an exciting episode because Dr. Pompa is on location. We always love that when he goes out to seek amazing things. This week, he is a Dr. Phil Lenoue. You probably remember him from episode 290. It is the episode about ultrasound—guided neurofascial hydrodissection. I know, Dr. Pompa, you were so excited about it. You had to fly to Spokane, Washington to actually experience this for yourself. We are very excited. We're going to learn more about it and also get to watch you go through this amazing therapy. Welcome, both of you; welcome, Dr. Phil and Dr. Pompa.

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
Yes, nice to be here.

Dr. Pompa:
All the way to Spokane.

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
Thanks for coming.

Dr. Pompa:
You know it's a good therapy when I do an episode, and I spend a lot of time reading about it and getting excited about it. I got on a plane, brought my wife and my son Isaac, who’s sitting over here because he has these knee things. They call it Jumper’s Knee just to make it simple, but it's a fasciitis the patella, patella fasciitis, is that exactly what we thought? We actually ended up finding little tears.

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
A tear, yeah, [00:01:21].

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, we'll talk about that, but go ahead, yeah so—

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
Yeah, so with Isaac, he came in. He's had this pain for how many years, Isaac?

Isaac:
Knee pain? Probably since I was 14.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, 14, and he’s—

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
Several years, then?

Dr. Pompa:
Nineteen, so yeah.

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
Several years, and then when we did the diagnostic ultrasound, we saw this huge thickening of his patellar tendon, right near his patella. Then he also had significant fascial defects, which we call his tears, through his patella tendon.

Dr. Pompa:
Which is part of what we're going to talk more about. I was so impressed, honestly, with this process and this procedure. I've been injected. I went to the best of the best. This procedure of neurofascial hydrodissection fascinated me because a lot of stuff that was left on me was fascia related. I knew it. I just didn't know exactly what to do about. When I heard about your work—and you were trained by some of the best in the world on this.

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
Yep.

Dr. Pompa:
I was like, that’s it, I'm going. My wife, you're going to see a clip of her actual procedure. Then you'll have a better understanding of what we mean by this. If you watch part one, which you should absolutely do, you’ll have even a better idea. I want to bring some different light to this. The bottom line is my wife had a cavitation surgery. She ended up blocking or lymph.

She ended up having something taken off her face. It left her with this fascia issue, drainage problems, backing up into her sinus. Can't breathe on the one side of her face. You went in and did some amazing work on her. You're going to see that clip too. Really exciting episode. Stay tuned.

Look, if you have chronic pain, if you have conditions that aren't healing, the bottom line, I'll make it very simple, is that if you go in and separate the fascia from the nerve or the muscle, which he did on me as well as my son Isaac, and you separate it off, and you open up that nerve, whatever's at the end of that nerve and those tissues, then they can heal. Very similar to chiropractic. You open up a nerve, you take pressure off a nerve, and healing occurs. It was really cool because he found a few of those on me up in my upper cervical, which explained things that could never explain.

Even though stem cells made such a massive difference, I still had these weird things that just weren't clearing out in my knee as well. You went and opened them up. My back, my disc from stem cells, healed my disc. However, I would still have this weird stiffness. He went in there, and he dissected off all this—you went in and you said gosh, it was all this fibrous tissue. It's miraculous the work you did, really.

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
Thank you, yes, glad to do it [00:04:20].

Dr. Pompa:
Give them a brief understanding of this, and then we can show them some of the clips as well.

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
Yeah, so our intention when we're doing this treatment is to help. Anytime you have an injury, you also have the fascia that gets locked down from the injury. You have inflammation a lot of times. As that inflammation goes away, what happens is the fascia will get tight. Especially if you don't move for a while, it will get tight and kind of stuck.

Dr. Pompa:
Let's back up because I don't know if we even talked much about it in Episode One. What is fascia, again?

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
That’s a great question. Fascia is a connective tissue that surrounds all our muscles. It surrounds all the nerves, connects from head to toe. When you're eating steak or chicken, and you see those layers that pull apart, that's the fascia. It can be anywhere from this loose fascia to this tight fascia. The dura that connects on the inside of the skull around the brain, that's more of the really thick, tight fascia; whereas, we also have a lot of looser fascia that surrounds over the top of the muscles between the plains of fat.

There's several different types of fascia. The nice thing is that with ultrasound you can actually—you're able to visualize the fascial planes. You can compare side to side. You can see where those fascial planes are stuck. You can also actually feel with the needle. We go in there with the needle and open up those planes to release the nerves, the arteries, the blood flow. That helps to restore normal function.

Dr. Pompa:
I have to say we did a Facebook Live if you haven’t seen it. My wife's legs were moving. You have to understand my wife. Everyone's like, “Gosh, it looks so painful.” She was like, “Actually, it was not that bad.” When you did it on me, I was like I totally didn't even feel it. I think in your face you might feel it more. Can it be done anywhere in the body?

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
Yeah, I mean, head to toe. I’ve done it head to toe.

Dr. Pompa:
What type of conditions have you done it for?

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
Very common with arthritis, people that have bone spurs on the inside of your knee, for example. The nerves can get compressed from those bone spurs. If you just free up those nerves that'll help a lot of times with that. People that have chronic neck pain, this pain in the upper trap—

Dr. Pompa:
You'll see that too. We actually have a clip on that as well.

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
Yeah, that was Facebook Live, yeah. You can do, also, carpal tunnel; any kind of nerve entrapment where you have constant numbness, tingling, sometimes weakness in your arms, legs. If you've had any chronic conditions, acute conditions like a car accident, then all of a sudden your scapula’s wingy. Sometimes, we can actually help bring that back.

Dr. Pompa:
I know one of the things you asked all three of us when we were in is you asked us all about past traumas. I've heard that traumas, whether physical, chemical, or emotional, can be stored in the fascia. What does that mean?

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
That's correct. Let's use an example of a car accident. Let's say somebody's in a car accident. They have a significant impact. What happens is they go forward. Often, we get the wind knocked out of us. We go, “Huh.” What happens is the diaphragm locks down. When the diaphragm locks down, a lot of times even months down the road, you still can't fully breathe like you could before the injury.

What happens is you no longer oxygenate your body as much. A lot of your lymphatic flow is dependent on that motion of your diaphragm. Therefore, at that point, you can start developing symptoms like anxiousness. You don't feel like you're the same. Your energy's lower.

An important part of this kind of treatment, as far as the hydrodissection, is also looking holistically at the whole body and making sure those lymphatic pathways are open up as they should be. Therefore, when you actually do the hydrodissection, you can make sure that all that fluid and drainage that you free up has some place to go. You have to unclog the pipes first.

Dr. Pompa:
Right, yeah, which totally makes sense because when you see my wife's face, that was the issue. She wasn't draining out of this area. It was backing up into the sinus, creating all types of problems, and going in there. Actually, it's going to heal now even without scarring because you're freeing that area.

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
Correct, yeah, and so with Merily, also, at our clinic we're trained in cranial work. She also had some restrictions. She had restrictions through her left nasal bone, which also affects from the drainage through her cranium. Some of the bones within the skull itself were locked down a little bit extra.

For those of you who are not familiar, there is subtle motion within the head. This is subtle expansion and contraction, which allows our lymphatic flow to work properly. If you've had trauma, if you've had a local surgery, any kind of fascial tension that locks it down, sometimes that can affect that motion. That’s part of the reason that we like to treat the lymphatics and do cranial work as part of this [00:09:02].

Dr. Pompa:
He does amazing work. I want to show that clip in a second. You asked Isaac when you said about that. When he was sitting there, to your point about your holding emotions here, you can tell, immediately, that there was something going on there. Then he explained how he actually hit a tree, skiing.

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
Correct.

Dr. Pompa:
It crushed him in that area, shattered his spleen, crushed—punctured a lung, damaged his kidneys, I mean, major trauma. That was one of the first things you said, just seeing him in that position.

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
Yeah, and this is this is a common thing that we see here. We see people that have had these significant traumas, like we said, whether it's a physical or emotional thing, divorce or something heavy. What happens is that trauma gets physically stuck in that tissue. You see these people, and you can tell they don't feel right, they don't look right. The nice thing is, as we'll show in our video, we start by treating the diaphragm. We try to get that physical trauma that's in the tissue out of there and retrain the breathing. Therefore, you can actually get back in and actually allow your body to heal.

Dr. Pompa:
We have a clip that we're going to go to of Merily because one of the things—you said you wanted to start there. You wanted to start by freeing up that in the diaphragm and also the cranium. Let's take a look at this clip.

[Begin Clip]

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
Hello, right now we're going to go over treatment of the diaphragm. This is important with everybody, especially people that have had trauma, lymphatic congestion, any difficulty breathing, or high impact type of injuries like car accidents, you get the wind knocked out of you, emotional traumas, anything that's heavy. Here, with Merily, we're working on releasing the diaphragm, so that therefore she can oxygenate her body, take deeper breaths, and also help with her lymphatic pump of her diaphragm. When I’m doing that, you’ll just feel some pressure here. Let me know if it’s too much.

Dr. Pompa:
You mentioned doing cranial work before we even get into any of the other work.

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
Correct, so I love doing neurofascial hydrodissection. It works great. A lot of times, if somebody has a restricted—a restriction in their lymphatic pathways through the musculoskeletal system, for example, the first rib’s elevated so that therefore the lymphatics can't drain properly. We try to work on that first, so that therefore when you do the hydrodissection their body can more rapidly absorb everything you do. They can recover a lot quicker. We combine the two, which works well.

Dr. Pompa:
What you doing here?

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
This is called a linea alba treatment. I have a hour long lecture on this, but we'll keep it brief. What we're doing is I'm putting in one finger underneath [diaphor], another one above her umbilicus. I'm actually just putting a little bit of pressure down here. As patients, some people feel a lot; some people don't feel very much. Typically, a patient after a car accident, this is about as far as they'll let me go. It feels very uncomfortable. It feels like they can't really breathe when I'm doing it. Then I'll just hold it there, and I'll just wait for her body to release. When it releases, it just feels like a softening. At school, they talked about melting butter.

Dr. Pompa:
This will indirectly affect the lymphatic flow, as well, in the cistern there.

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
Correct, yes, so cisterna chyli, like that comes up the lymphatic pathway through the back of the diaphragm. You're releasing the tension through the diaphragm, so therefore the cisterna chyli can have less pressure and pump more efficiently back up, including all the arterial and venous blood flow.

Dr. Pompa:
How does it feel, Mary?

Merily Pompa:
It doesn’t feel bad at all.

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
Now, we're releasing the diaphragm from a different angle. We're coming up underneath her rib cage. We're actually working on the fascial tube that surrounds the heart and connects up into the neck.

[End Clip]

Dr. Pompa:
All right, Doc, do you want to explain anything about that clip?

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
Yeah, so within the clip you can see that we're treating the diaphragm. There's two different angles that I use. The first one is actually below the xiphoid, which is the bottom of your rib cage, and right above your belly button. We're putting pressure down there to help re-expand that and actually free up the tension through the lower part of your diaphragm, but then also all those organs to your digestive tract, there's actually nerve plexuses deep to that. You're also helping to reset the digestion.

If people wonder why, after trauma, why their digestion goes south, a lot of times it actually can be from these adhesions and all this trauma that's stuck in the diaphragm. Then you can see from the video where I'm going up underneath the rib cage, we're actually working on that tension around the pericardium, which is the actual tissue around the heart. There's actually a big tube that comes up through the neck. We want to free that up, so that we can make sure that the patient can optimize their oxygenation.

Dr. Pompa:
Again, I think you had said you wanted to do this ahead of—before you get into actually releasing a lot of the fascia.

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
Correct, yeah because we do have patients that if—let's say that you release—there’s all this tension up in the face. They have a first rib that's elevated. What happens is that all that lymphatic tissue, it actually flows down and actually goes back into your circulation right above your first rib. If they have a first rib that's kinking the lymphatic flow, you might fix this problem, but all of a you'll get back up in pain [00:14:22].

Dr. Pompa:
That was interesting, though, because she had this chronic thing down here. You ended up treating this as well, which you said applied to this, so basically what you're saying.

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
Exactly.

Dr. Pompa:
I think some of the people watching are saying, okay, what do you mean? We kind of have it on the screen back there. Let's actually go to the screen because now you can actually watch on this clip. You’ll watch how this is actually done. In the first part, you explain what's going on. Then in the next clip, we actually see the needle coming in. Watch this, pretty interesting.

[Begin Clip]

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
All right, so right here we have images of Merily’s face on the right side. We have a cross—section, if you look at the anatomy over here on this face, right to the side of her nose at this oblique angle. What we're doing here is this is more up towards her forehead. This is more down towards her body. We're taking an oblique angle this way because the ultrasound orientation is right along that side of the nose, obliquely. That's the right side, even though we mislabeled it.

On the left side, what you can see is we took that same oblique angle. You can see the difference on the right to the left. On the right, you notice that you have this nice black muscle, thick muscle belly. When you go to the left, it looks all white. It looks thinned. It doesn't look as healthy. It looks more fibrotic. Most likely, when we get in there with a needle, it's going to feel crunchy. Then when you come down lower, you can see this plane, this white plane here. That's actually a plane between that muscle from above as well as that facial muscle below.

Within those fascial planes, that's where the nerves, the arteries, and the lymphatics flow. We're going to guide a needle down into that plane, open that up, open up the scar tissue this plane to help her body regenerate, form better tissue. It also looks like there's a little black cavity through here that you don't see on the right side, which may be from undermining from the previous surgery, which they needed to do to be able to get everything. We're going to put some little higher concentrated ozone in that area.

Then you can see at the very top you actually have this darkened tissue right underneath the surface of the skin. The skin’s at the very top up here. On this right side, you do not see that. That's actually the scar tissue, itself. We're going to come in there with the needle, also, and open up those fascial planes to help initiate the body to heal.

Dr. Pompa:
It's like three levels of injection.

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
Correct, so we're going to come all the way down one, two, and then three, and then four, and even with the back top one.

Dr. Pompa:
You'll see the needle coming from what direction in a minute?

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
You’re going to see the needle coming from the right down to the left.

Dr. Pompa:
All right, so we’ll check Mary. You can see he's coming in. Doc, which area are you going for? Then I'll show the screen.

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
Top right of the screen.

Dr. Pompa:
Do you feel that Mary?

Merily Pompa:
Just a little bit.

Dr. Pompa:
Just a little bit? Okay, now, let’s look at the screen. Here’s the needle. There it is right there. See the needle coming in?

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
You can see it go down in the bottom.

Merily Pompa:
Then to the left.

Dr. Pompa:
Now, where are you headed?

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
Down in that lower fascial plane. Is that all right, Merily?

Merily Pompa:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Pompa:
Then you’re going to inject the fluid.

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
Do you see that’s opening up some of those planes?

Merily Pompa:
Oh, wow.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, yeah, so you’re injecting a little bit as you go?

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
I’m injecting [00:17:48].

Dr. Pompa:
I can see it, yeah, it's opening it up.

Merily Pompa:
Do you hear, Isaac?

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
I’m backing up a little bit and injecting it back up. I need to reangle a little bit deeper.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, you can see it. It’s opening the fascia. Explain a little bit what you already know.

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
Yeah, so we have the fascia opening up right here. You can see that plane open up, also.

Merily Pompa:
Oh, yeah, it’s coming out my nose, I think.

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
You need it. It’s tight. It’s opening up [00:18:18] Merily.

Dr. Pompa:
All right, you can see it opening it up.

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
She needs a hand hold I think.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, that’s great.

[End Clip]

Dr. Pompa:
That clip was pretty cool because first of all, I asked her, when he came in with that needle that was bent, I mean, come on. I figured, oh gosh, [00:18:33] would be like, okay, forget it. First of all, it doesn't look as bad if it was a shoulder or your neck, but in your face, right. We used the most—oh my God, even your assistant was like, in the face. She said it really wasn't that bad. It didn’t hurt that bad. Then you could actually see ahead of the needle. I mean, how it was just pushing open that fascia. Maybe you have some words on that.

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
Yeah, the beautiful thing about hydra dissection, where we get the name from, from Dr. Clark, he's the one that originated it, one my teachers—is because what you have is you have your needle, and then you're using fluid that's in your syringe, which is typically 5% dextrose and or other things.

Sometimes we use exosomes for worse injuries. You push the fluid, and so even though you have a structure that's tight it right here, or a nerve right here, the fluid actually pushes out of the needle. The fluid actually separates the fascial planes. It's not the needle. That's what makes it not very painful at all.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, you can see the head of the needle, even in the clip, just opening it up, opening it
Up.

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
It’s a lot more gentle, which actually out of most of the treatments we do that's one of the most well-tolerated. People, a lot of times, they're like, “That's it? I'm done?”

Dr. Pompa:
What's amazing is one of the places you were going in and it just it just broke through. She felt that actually. I think that was a game changer. I guess the point is this. You could do all the work. You could do all of this great work. I mean, I've done exosomes, stem cells, basically, and yet that scar tissue in there still a problem, especially if there's an adhesion like that. That's where this work is actually magic.

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
Correct, yeah, and for an example for you, so Dan had some old [00:20:20] injuries. One of them looks like he had some septic arthritis around it.

Dr. Pompa:
Right, when I got my cavitation, it attacked probably an old injury, years ago, wrestling. It went there to that weak tissue. He looked. Listen, ultrasound’s a skill because I've had a lot of people go, “Oh, I can use it.” They're not that good at it. Dude, I don't know what it is, man. Some people just fast runners, some people are slow runners. You can get faster running, but you’ll just never be an Olympian.

This dude is amazing at ultrasound. You found something in me that nobody found. I knew it. I mean as soon as I actually—you went right at it. You said, “Oh, yeah, that's the problem.” Then you went right at it with the ultrasound. You’re like, “Look at that fact joint. I'm not trained in it. I was like, “Oh my gosh.” I mean, there was. To me, it looked exploded.

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
It looks like a grenade went in your facet.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, and believe me, this was an area that nothing helped. What did you see?

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
Yeah, so typically with the facet joint, you're going to see this nice, smooth little curve. You're going to see a little line in between. With Dr. Pompa, it actually literally looked like a grenade went in there and blew it open. It looked twice the size—two to three times the size of everything else.

Then what happens is when you have an injury to the facet joint, or if you've had chronic or septic arthritis, all the fascia connective tissue around that facet joint starts locking down. There's a lot of nerves that traffic through there, including a greater occipital nerves. People that have pain up there—

Dr. Pompa:
Number one, it can't heal.

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
Correct, yeah, it can’t heal. Then all those nerves get stuck in the fascia. You can have great treatment like you have into your facets. Sometimes what happens is those nerves are still stuck in that fascia. What we did is we not only went into your facet with the exosomes, but we actually came out and actually dissected through those nerves that were all stuck from those occasions from the original trauma.

Dr. Pompa:
Right, yeah, and that’s what took more of the time. You went in and literally just pushed it open. I could feel it. I mean, it was—yeah, it didn't hurt at all. Matter of fact, I said it felt so good, actually.

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
Yeah, it feels good on the [00:22:32].

Dr. Pompa:
It did. You’ve had this done, yourself, a lot.

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
Oh yeah, I just had a huge treatment last week, so yeah.

Dr. Pompa:
Exactly, you practice what you preach. As a matter of fact, in Part One, if you haven’t seen it, he literally does his own leg right there. You’ve got to go to doctors that do this stuff, that actually practice what you preach. I mean, I tell you what, this, to me is even a first step before you spend a lot of money on stem cells, which is far more costly. This is absolutely a more affordable approach, could just be the thing that just opens up the healing.

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
Definitely, I mean, even if you end up doing—because we do regenerative treatments, here, including stem cell treatments, [00:23:13], PRP. If you can free up those fascial planes and get those nerves functioning better; if you ended up still using those treatments, you're going to have better outcomes.

Sometimes people that come, and they're just like, “Hey, I only can come once. Can we just try to do all this at once?” What we'll do is we'll do—we’ll hydrodissect everything and treat the joints. We'll do everything together. The response is typically significantly better than if you just did it alone.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, well, like I said, you do a lot of stuff here, amazing work. I mean, you were trained by some of the best. I've done a show on the miracles of ozone. We talked about the ten-pass. Let's talk a little bit about that because that's something you wanted to do. You did those treatments, and then you wanted to do the ten-pass.

Tell them about that. If you didn't watch the show on ozone, watch it. We talk about why ozone heals. I want you to review that a little bit, why it's such a powerful treatment. You were like, “Dan, you need this treatment.” I mean, you were really excited about it. I've had ozone. I'm a big believer in ozone. I love ozone. Talk about the ten-pass, what it is, where was it created.

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
Yeah, so ozone, as Dan was explaining from the previous video, is very powerful initiating a healing response.

Dr. Pompa:
You actually had put some ozone in after I—

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
Correct, so we actually [00:24:33]. We had an aero dissection because we're actually putting air in. We actually put some ozone through those fascial planes, and you noticed a difference right away. A lot of times that just helps keep those fascial planes open and brings in more and more healing into wherever [00:24:47].

Dr. Pompa:
That’s where you actually inject ozone, but now this ten-pass is different.

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
Correct, so the ten-pass, so far, has been a game changer. It was developed by a Dr. Johan Lahodny out of Austria. He was actually OB/GYN and actually got really ill. Ozone brought him back to health. He was like, “I'm just doing this now.” What he developed is he had these patients that were getting better, but they just weren't quite turning the Corner. He developed this ten-pass treatment where you actually draw the blood out via IV, and then you actually ozonate it and infuse it back.

You repeat the process ten times at a pretty high concentration. You're actually able to give the body a significant more higher dose than you normally would. Typically the dose for MAH, where you just draw the blood, put ozone in it, is typically around 3,000 to 6,000 gamma or micrograms per milliliter. That's the units we use. Then the actual dose that you get with the ten-pass is a 140,000 micrograms per milliliter. It's about 23 to 40 times stronger dose of ozone that you’re getting.

Dr. Pompa:
What’s the ozone do?

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
Yeah, that's a great question. What ozone does is actually—one of the main things if you think about this. We all need energy. Our cells need ATP for energy. Published research has shown that it increases ATP production to up to 40%, which is huge. It increases blood flow, so nitric oxide production. It's a metabolic stimulant. I have one patient, who, he's 82. He has been trying everything to lose weight, doesn't eat a ton. Since he's on his like seventh treatment, he started to lose weight already. He has this old scar and wound that hasn't been healing for years. It's almost gone already.

Dr. Pompa:
Wow, that’s just by putting it in the IV. Yeah, so you put it in a vein. You pull the blood out, mix it, it goes back in.

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
It’s actually a really gentle process. I’ve had those IV Vitamin C [00:26:41]. This is smooth. It’s just like your own blood. What ozone also does is it’s antimicrobial. People that have Lyme, chronic infections, it’s really good to help with that, parasites, because there's no antibiotic resistance. It's just using your body's own immune response to clean things up. Dr. Lahodny has said in his lectures that he finds it increases stem cell production, and it activates mitochondrial function. Also, I know there's been a lot on NAD, recently. It improves your NAD to NADH ratio.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s huge, it’s an anti-aging ratio.

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
Yeah, and so it's a great way to just boost, overall, your cellular function. It works well for anti-aging purposes if you just want to feel real good. If you’re somebody that has a chronic illness or chronic fatigue, it helps to reboot your body. Dr. Lohadny has great results of people that have non-healing ulcers or wounds. Sometimes, these patients within one to two treatments, 48 hours later it's already 50% healed. It's mind-blowing.

Dr. Pompa:
That's incredible. Let's actually go watch this clip, so you can have an idea of what this actually looks like

[Begin Clip]

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
Hello, right now we have the Ten-pass machine. Merily’s getting hooked up. It’s running right now. What pass is she on, Lindsey?

Lindsey:
We’re going on number seven.

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
Number seven, so she's going pretty quick. What you can see here is we hook up IV access. The blood actually comes up into—this is called an [ICET], it’s a sterile tube, a little oval. The blood comes up and raises up to around 220 CCS or milliliters. Then what happens is we press a button which ozonates. This machine actually pumps ozone up through the top while it's spinning. It spins, which keeps the blood in motion, which helps with any kind of clotting.

We also use a little heparin which is an anticoagulant. Then as it ozonates, it actually infuses back all the way back into Merily. The whole process, like we said, takes anywhere from half an hour at the very least, but typically usually around an hour, wouldn’t you say, Lindsey, on an average patient, hour, hour and a half. Yeah, it's simple, works well, really relaxing.

Merily Pompa:
Yep, no anticipation of when's the needle coming out or when's it going in somewhere else? My legs are still, today.

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
It’s great. It works well. It goes quick. As you can see right here, Lindsay just actually hit the ozonate button, so you can actually see the blood’s going to start going down the level. As the treatment progresses, you'll actually notice the blood gives a lot more bright red.

Dr. Pompa:
Cool, thanks, man.

[End Clip]

Dr. Pompa:
See, that's pretty easy. How long does that procedure typically take?

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
The record right now, I believe, is 27 minutes.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh my God, okay, so that depends on [00:29:32] blood pouring out.

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
The longest was—I think it was two hours, but on average, I would say it’s about 45 to an hour.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s not bad.

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
It’s not bad at all.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, like you said, it's an easy procedure, but there’s a lot of power behind that one. I know people are like, “Okay, I want that neurofascial hydrodissection, the ten-pass.” You do even a lot more than that, here, obviously. We’re just tapping into it, the regenerative part, the medicine that you do is amazing. How do they find you? What’s your website?

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
Our website is lenouintegrativemedicine.com. We are in Spokane, Washington right by Gonzaga University.

Dr. Pompa:
Ten minutes from the airport, it was so easy, yeah.

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
Yeah, it's nice, easy access. We have two other providers that are trained in this, Dr. Jonathan Pasma and Makoto Yoshino. We all love helping people regain their function and just their quality of life.

Dr. Pompa:
You're a master, honestly. Again, I think it's the guided going exactly where to put it, man. You helped my family, dude, thank you. Watch Part One if you haven't, but always share these videos because people have chronic pain, man, for no reason. All this, unbelievable, this is the future of medicine right here. Thank you.

Dr. Phil Lenoue:
Thank you.

Ashley Smith:
Well, that's it for this week. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. This episode was brought to you by Cytodetox. Please check it out at buycytonow.com. We'll be back next week and every Friday at 10:00 a.m. Eastern. We truly appreciate your support. You can always find us at cellularhealing.TV. Please remember to spread the love by liking, subscribing, giving an iTunes review, and sharing the show with anyone you think may benefit from the information heard here. As always, thanks for listening.

310: Unconventional Cancer Care

Episode 310: Unconventional Cancer Care

This episode will share one doctor's unconventional cancer journey, and how his positive attitude, strategic diet variation, quality of life, and integrated protocols have shaped the outcome of his life. Dr. Al Danenberg was diagnosed with incurable bone marrow cancer shortly after retiring from his thriving periodontal practice. You will hear his amazing story about how he rejected conventional treatments and took his health into his own hands.

More about Dr. Al Danenberg:

Dr. Al Danenberg, a periodontist, was in private practice for 44 years. He incorporated ancestral nutrition & lifestyle with his leading-edge periodontal treatment for his patients. In September 2018, he retired from the practice of treating individual patients in an office setting. However, he continued consulting with patients by phone or Skype regarding nutrition, lifestyle, oral and overall health, and the importance of a healthy gut.

Dr. Danenberg received advanced training in evolutionary nutrition. In June 2014, he received his Certified Functional Medicine Practitioner (CFMP) designation as well as his certification as a Certified Primal Health Coach. In 2015, Dr. Danenberg was appointed to the faculty of the College of Integrative Medicine and created the college’s integrative periodontal teaching module. Then, in April 2017, he earned the designation of “ADAPT Trained Health Professional” from Kresser Institute, In July 2017, Elektra Press released Dr. Danenberg’s book, Crazy-Good Living, which is based on ancestral nutrition and lifestyle.

Show notes:

Contact Dr Danenberg

Dr. Danenberg's book, Crazy Good Living

Dr. Danenberg's articles about his Carnivore Diet:

https://drdanenberg.com/cancer-carnivore-diet-my-experiment/

Cancer & Carnivore Diet – My Update –

Order Dr. Pompa's Beyond Fasting book – now released!

Fastonic Cellular Molecular Hydrogen – support all forms of fasting with molecular H2!

Transcript:

Dr. Pompa:
In these stories, we learn a lot of amazing lessons. This episode of Cell TV, you're going to hear an incredible story about a doctor on death's door, what he's learned that we all need to learn as well. I'll give you a little tip he learned a lot a differences between the Paleo diet and how that helped him, but how it may have actually led to some things that caused his diagnosis, which you'll hear about.

He learned a lot about ketones, and he learned, and so will you, a lot about the carnivore diet. what that is, eating all meat? It's not what you think, and there's a right way to do it. It all lead, really, to diet variation. Anyways, interesting show—we even get into the bacteria the oral microbiome and its effect on the gut, and the gut’s effect on it. He has some great advice there too.

Man, this is a show, I promise you, you're going to want to share. You're definitely going to want to stay tuned to this episode of Cell TV.

Ashley Smith:
Hello, everyone, welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I'm Ashley Smith. Today, we welcome Dr. Al Danenberg, who is a periodontist who spent 44 years of his career incorporating ancestral nutrition and lifestyle in his leading-edge practice. What makes his story so interesting, however, is what happened after he retired.

Dr. Al has a very unconventional cancer story, which he will share with you today. From his positive attitude to his integrated protocols, you will learn all about how he navigated his diagnosis of incurable bone marrow cancer and what his status is now. I know this story will leave you nothing short of inspired, so let's get started. Welcome Dr. Al and of course, Dr. Pompa, welcome.

Dr. Al Danenberg:
Thank you, Ashley, that was really nice. I should have written it myself. That was perfect. I love it.

Dr. Pompa:
Dr. Al, thanks for joining us. You and I spoke some time ago, now. Dr. Gerry Curatola actually brought us together, and said, “You need to interview him.”

Dr. Al Danenberg:
Yes, he's a good guy.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, I appreciate that so much. There's so many reasons why you're on the show today, and so many reasons why I hope people share this episode with people. Number one, you have an amazing attitude despite the diagnosis that was given to you of death, we'll talk about that, in 2018. We have a lot of proof that that didn't happen, as fact that you're here today. We're going to talk about that. No, really, I mean, it's more than just the diagnosis when people hear your story. My gosh, most people would have given up, so there's a story of hope here.

Also, you're one that dug into the research. One of the topics that I want to dig into today, as well, is the carnivore diet. You've done Paleo for many years, the Paleo diet, seven years at least, but ancestral diets for some time. You recently went into ketosis. We'll talk about the difference on the show of Paleo diet and ketosis and what you felt is the difference. Then the big difference of the Carnivore diet, what it is, and why you feel it's one of the pieces of the puzzle for cancer. Yet people would argue perhaps the opposite.

Now, I can't wait to bring out this interview because there's a lot of controversy over these topics. That's why I threw it out right at the beginning. Listen, let’s that start with your story, Al. Let’s start with that 2018 diagnosis. That was the diagnosis, but after you tell that then I want you to—my next question’s going to be the obvious because I ask it on the show. What do you think led to that diagnosis? Tell the story first.

Dr. Al Danenberg:
Sure, so the story is interesting only because I have felt amazingly healthy. I mean, I was what I would have called the 71-year-old poster boy for a primal diet lifestyle. I was exercising. I was obviously eating very well. Paleo, when I started seven years ago I was 35 pounds heavier than I was. By the age 71—actually, I had a stroke at the age of 59. Doctors told me I needed to be on seven medications for the rest of my life. That didn't make sense.

I tried to investigate other healthy areas of lifestyle. I just went to the wrong sources like the American Cancer Society. The traditional stuff that I thought could get me answers, they didn't give me answers. I was very moved by a course that I got it took at the Kabbalah Centre for Yoga and Health that was on nutrition for healthcare professionals. It was a five-day course, but it was on primal nutrition. I was around 66 years old when I did that course. I didn't realize anything about this topic.

I started Paleo at that time. Amazingly, it changed my life. I dropped the weight I got off all seven medications. I felt good. I had lots of energy. Again, I thought I was a poster boy for this at the age of 71. I was doing lectures around the country. I was actually at Paleo FX doing a seminar in April 2018.

Generally, I walk all the time. When I go to the airport, and I'm in Charleston South Carolina to get to Austin, Texas. Everywhere I have to go, I have to go through Atlanta. It's a big airport. Generally, I walk from concourse to concourse, unless my flights are really tight. I had this bag on my shoulder as I walked from concourse A, B, C, wherever it was. By the time I got to the plane, my shoulder was aching. I thought, I must have pulled a rotator cuff or whatever. Went to the lecture. Did my stuff. It was achy, but it wasn't fascinating.

Came home, got a little worse. Then April, May, June, July comes through. It never really healed completely. It went from my shoulder, to my back, and then to my chest. That didn't sound like a muscle pull. I went to see my physician, general physician. He said, “You got something going on.” Brilliant, right, I told him that. He took some blood work. He did basic blood work.

What's interesting is the only abnormal finding was an elevated c-reactive protein. Generally, my c-reactive protein was below .5. It was four to five. Some people say it's normal, but that to me is not normal at all. He did say he felt obviously there was some kind of systemic inflammation. It couldn't be determined if it was acute or chronic, couldn’t determine and where it was coming from. It's only a good biomarker for inflammation.

We did an MRI. When we did the MRI, he called me and he said, “Al,” and I've known him for 35 years. He said, “Al, do you want to come into the office? We'll discuss it, or I'll talk to you over the phone.” I said, “Just tell me what's on your mind.” He said, “Well, I'd be concerned if I were you. I think it's either lymphoma, leukemia, or possible myeloma.” I don't want any of these three doers. I didn't even know what multiple myeloma is. When I was in dental school, we had pictures of the skull that had a lot of holes in the skull. That was called multiple myeloma. I didn't know about this disease. Obviously, I'm concerned.

We did a CT scan. We called in an oncologist. We found a soft tissue mass on the side of my spine. We did a biopsy of that. It turns out that the diagnosis was IgA Kappa light chain multiple myeloma with innumerable lytic lesions. In other words, I had holes like Swiss cheese everywhere. Generally, in multiple myeloma, the diagnosis—there's a lot of different types of multiple myeloma, but one of the ways to diagnose the severity is how many lytic lesions you have. You have one, you have two, you have ten. The radiologist says it was innumerable. They couldn't even count as many.

The problem with that is that my skeleton is so fragile it can't support my weight, and because of that I had pathological fractures. When I went to my doctor, what I had was a vertebral fracture, I think it was T3 or something like that; a couple rib fractures; a small fracture in my pelvis. I'm walking around like this. My physician said, “Did you fall down the stairs? Did somebody beat you up?” I said, “No, I had no idea that I was in such trouble.”

From that point on, the oncologist told me that my cancer was not curable with conventional methods. He did say he wanted me to start a cocktail of chemotherapy and bisphosphonates. Being a conventional oncologist, this is what they do. I said, “That doesn't make sense to me. First you're telling me I can't be cured, so I'm going to die from this disease. Now you're telling me you're going to poison my body, destroy my immune system, destroy the quality of life that I have to do what? Get into remission, and be more miserable, and more degenerative? Then the next round of chemotherapy would be more caustic.”

This is interesting, I just found this out. The reason cancer patients, when they have chemotherapy infusions, have a port, this little thing that goes into a large vein, is because the chemicals are so caustic that if they go into a normal vein in your arm, and it leaks, you'll get necrosis on all of the surrounding tissue. You can't touch this liquid. It is acid. You're pouring this into your body, destroying all the DNA, the fast, reproducible DNA. Hair falls out, you're miserable, and then they're going to artificially rebuild my immune system. They haven't been able to do anything satisfactorily. They're going to do this artificially.

Long story short, I rejected all chemical therapy. I did some research. Found a few integrative physicians to help me with my protocol. The majority of the research I did, I went to PubMed, looked at all kinds of research that was being done and duplicated, not just being done by one guy, duplicated around the world. I started to pick and choose what made sense to me and put it together. Although they said I was going to have three to five, or three to six, months to live, my oncologist thought I'd be dead by December 2018, I was getting better.

The chemistries were stable. The holes of my bone never changed, but I felt great. The only thing that happened, which was pretty severe, is I’ve broken a lot of bones. I’ve broken my right femur in half. It had to be repaired. I broke my right humerus in half. It never was set correctly so I have this extra angle in my humerus. Looks like I have a huge bicep. I can really impress women with my right side, but not my left side. Then I had another fracture in my left femur, but not—it wasn't another fracture through and through, and another vertebral fracture, compression fracture.

Each time I had this it was terrible. I recovered well. I do have this great attitude, I think. I feel that my unconventional therapy has extremely dampened this disease to give me a level playing field without being in remission. I've never been in remission. I have this protocol that includes a very healthy diet, that recently I've changed. I'll talk about that.

The other thing is my gut microbiome is critical. I think I have an excellent control my gut. I enhance my immune system with some herbal extracts. I do pulse electromagnetic field therapy, which supports soft tissue healing and actually osteoporosis lesions in the bone. I have a product of that I use that's called, Salvestrol, that has the ability to react with a type of enzyme that is only produced, or in abundance is produced, in cancer cells that reacts with this enzyme to destroy the metabolites, destroy the cancer cells. I've just started some immunotherapy that is very specific for a protein on the surface of my malignant plasma cells that has been very effective for me. I'm doing well. This is a crazy journey.

Dr. Pompa:
We’ll talk about those things, obviously. Okay, so let's back up. One of the things that you said. Okay, you were doing the Paleo diet. You lost 30 pounds. Now, one of the things that I've learned over the years is when people lose a lot of weight, they also lose a lot of toxins when they lose the weight, which can create new problems. We'll talk about where you think this all started in a moment. Do you think that the dumping of the fat could have—and then, therefore, toxins, could have been part of how you ended up here. Not that wasn't a good thing.

Dr. Al Danenberg:
Absolutely, I think toxic load is the problem. I think our bodies are very well-designed to deal with most toxins in the environment, even mercury, as long as it's not overloaded, as long as the whole system is working effectively. What we'll get to is what I thought my initiating factors were to really put me over the edge.

Then I'm living like you are with toxins in the air, glyphosate in the food, chemicals that you think are okay in foods like preservatives, and emulsifiers that are not, dirty electromagnetic fields that are damaging our microbiome and DNA. I mean, there's so many—stress. God, I understand stress really well. I don't cope with it well, but this is of who I am.

Stress is a big, undiscovered by the general public, irritant to our overall health. There's so many other factors. You're correct. Although I didn't lose the 35 pounds quickly, it was over a period of seven-ish years. It was slow. You're right. The toxins are going to pour into my body. It's whatever [00:15:54].

Dr. Pompa:
Where do you think you got the toxins from?

Dr. Al Danenberg:
The original?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.

Dr. Al Danenberg:
I think dental school was my initiator. Here's the reason why. Plasma cells are very susceptible to low-dose radiation, ionizing radiation. That is what a dental x-ray is. When I was in dental school, four years of dental school, two years of graduate periodontal training. There were in my clinic, the way it was set up, there were in little four little modules. Each module of dental student had their own x-ray machine.

We had 120 students. It was a big class. A lot of x-ray machines all over the place. I am sure that there were a lot of times the x-ray machines were on, angled in the wrong direction. I didn't do what I was supposed to do. You can't feel, or smell, or detect radiation when you walk by it. We didn't have tags. We didn't have any radiation badges. It just wasn't done in those days.

I think I was exposed. It takes one malignant cell to not die properly to become a very virulent malignancy if other things are in play. I think that's one of the reasons. The second reason is that we were taught—and I'll mention something else about that in a moment, but we were taught in those days to place amalgam restorations, which are mercury restorations, called silver restorations by laypeople.

These mercury restorations, we took free mercury and put it in a powder and mixed it up. Then we took this glob of material, put it in a squeeze cloth. Squeezed the cloth so the excess mercury balls got off of the amalgam. We literally tossed the little balls on the floor. Everybody was doing it. Everybody was doing—this is 1970, ‘72 timeframe.

The dental school was the most toxic facility all over the country because every dentist was doing that. The free mercury is vaporizing and everybody's getting into it. We played with mercury in our hands like kids play with Play-Doh.

Dr. Pompa:
I want to point out to people listening because they're going to be saying, “Well gosh, I mean, why aren't all these people sick?” The dental field right now is the sickest profession of all professions. We can line up and look at all the different diseases. To your point, you aren't the only one poisoned.

Dr. Al Danenberg:
Correct, in my neighborhood in Charleston and the surrounding area, I know for dentists within the last three to four years that have died from glioblastoma. That is a huge number in a small community of dentists. There was a study that I used to research—I wrote a paper and why I think I developed this multiple myeloma.

There was a study that was done a few years ago that showed the cohort of dentists my age, in other words, the group of 65 to 75-year-old dentists now, were more risky and the prevalence of multiple myeloma was higher than the general male population of that group. There's got to be something to what I've just explained. I think it's either and/or the radiation from the x-ray machines, and/or the mercury poisoning that we got in different doses over a long period of time. Of course, we react differently, but this is how I react. I think that's the start.

Then unbeknownst to me, I went with my life. It wasn't a healthy lifestyle. That's why I had a stroke at the age of 59, I guess. The toxins in the environment were building up. I didn't know anything about it. When I went to dental school, no one teaches anything about nutrition other than what is vitamin B and what is vitamin A. That's the only thing that we learn. The medical profession is totally ignorant. I am going on my merry way, have a stroke, try to figure out what's going on.

No one has an answer until I go to this wonderful course at the Kabbalah Centre for Yoga and Health. That started my brain really working overtime to figure out where the knowledge is. Once I felt I learned, I was I was as nerdy as you can be. I was digging into the research, figuring out what's going on. I made a difference in myself, and I incorporated it in my practice, and put it to work with my patients and lifestyle changes. The people that actually accepted that got better.

Now, I'm a conventionally trained periodontist. I was in a conventional periodontal office. People were not walking in to see me because I was a nutritional periodontist, as I later became known. I would say maybe three to five percent of my patients even listened to what I said. Most people and are not that proactive unless they are in a state of a life-threatening situation. Sadly enough, they may become proactive. Sometimes, it's too late.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, and to your point, but let's move the conversation to what you've done. I mean, obviously detox is an important role here. Let's talk about what people really can do right now, and so much is focused on diet. This has been a passion of your study, obviously, even before the diagnosis. Let's start there because I opened it up with that.

Paleo diet was what you were accustomed to. That, I believe, is what you said. That alone, in some ways, kept you from dying right away. In some ways, the weight loss could have put toxins out into the body too, so an irony there. Tell us where you went from the Paleo diet. Tell us what worked, what didn't, what you learned. Let's start right there. Then we’ll get into the Carnivore diet.

Dr. Al Danenberg:
I think I learned a lot from the Paleo diet because I really removed the major offending foodstuffs that are contaminated in our society. The grains definitely went. The grains, not only metabolically, were a problem because what they did with the gut microbiome and the membrane of the gut. Also the fact that they were damaged with glyphosate because I was not understanding organic yet. Glyphosate was a huge factor, and still is a factor.

Dr. Pompa:
Let me just remind new viewers, glyphosate is the chemical that's in Roundup. If you watch TV, now, you see glyphosate causes right—it's a known cancer causer.

Dr. Al Danenberg:
Right, and it's like they just figured it out, but the research goes decades before—yeah.

Dr. Pompa:
Now, people actually believe it because there's billions of dollars being awarded. Okay, so glyphosate’s that chemical that they're spraying on most of our food supply, which we know makes other toxins more toxic, allows things to cross into the brain, into the body, passing the blood-brain barrier and other barriers. Okay, so go ahead.

Dr. Al Danenberg:
It also destroys the microbiome in the soil so that the plants are not able to absorb the nutrients that the microbiomes would have actually created. The residue is there. It is not destroyed. It gets into our gut. It passes the placental barrier. It gets into the fetus. Babies are born with glyphosate factors that are significant. It's really a problem. The other thing is glyphosate is sprayed. There can be a farm that is organic ten miles down the road. If the wind is blowing the wrong way, that spray—it doesn't take comment that many parts per billion to contaminate. It's a very potent drug. It's used all the time.

That, as well as the other chemicals that are on the plants that are getting into the surface and getting into our bodies, all of that I eliminated as best as I could. Then of course, the sugars. The grains and the added sugars, not the sugars that are in the natural fruits, so to speak. There's nothing terribly wrong with eating blueberries, but there is something terribly wrong with eating blueberries with powdered sugar on it. The added sugars are the real problem.

The two of those were of my biggest factors that I eliminated. Then, of course, with the Paleo diet you're eliminating the legumes. You're eliminating some of the—all the processed vegetable oils. Sometimes, if you point an autoimmune route, you're eliminating the nightshades. There's a lot of irritants that are coming out of the diet that has met—or coming out of the food supply, to make that diet really effective for me.

That's what I believe worked really well. Plus the lifestyle change—so the lifestyle change had a lot to do with exercise, sleeping restoratively, exercising efficiently with high intensity interval training. I was really doing that as well as some aerobic training and weight—body weight training. I was into the entire routine and feeling great, never knowing that there was this little thing growing inside of me that was going to pop out in a very ugly way. Here I am.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, all right, so then you got the diagnosis. What did you change?

Dr. Al Danenberg:
I went very strict Paleo, meaning that I went on the autoimmune part of the Diet. I didn't cheat whatsoever. There's a thought process where you can eat a diet 85 to 95% of the time and cheat 5, 10, maybe 15% of the time and get pretty good results. I may have cheated a little bit when I was not sick, but once I got this diagnosis I was 100% right on and eliminated all the nightshades.

I thought I was doing really well with the diet part, and then I included supporting my microbiome in my gut with a variety of other products that I take on a daily basis. Then I did some more research. Actually, I listened to a podcast with Mark Sisson and Dr. Paul Saladino. Dr. Paul Saladino is a physician. He's very into the Carnivore diet. He just wrote a book that's coming out. I think he's told me that it might be out by the end of this month or beginning of February called The Carnivore Code, which I think is going to be amazing because he's really geeky with the science.

That's what I really want. I want proof of what is going on. That got me started with the concept. Then I was looking on the internet, which is the source of all great information. I was looking and seeing all these people talking about the Carnivore diet, and this, and that, and their stuff. They're eating bacon from conventional sources. There's a lot of junk meat that they're eating. They're just eating meat. They're not even understanding organs. They don't understand bone broth. They don't understand a lot of the nuances that make the Carnivore diet work.

Dr. Pompa:
Let's just be clear. The Paleo diet, it's Paleolithic in the sense that it's meats, there's no legumes, there's no grains, there's never fine sugar, no dairy. Okay, so there's that diet. Then Keto, which is based on healthier fats. It's not Paleo in the sense that there's some dairy, etcetera, available with Keto, but it's a higher fat diet.

Dr. Al Danenberg:
Of course, reducing the carbohydrates to maybe less than 50 grams or something like that.

Dr. Pompa:
Right, exactly, it's restricting carbohydrates. Now there's carnivore, which is meat and fat. That's why when define meat fat, carnivore, meaning not any vegetables, zero folks.

Dr. Al Danenberg:
Right, no plants.

Dr. Pompa:
Right, so I mean by conventional standards I think if you asked 100 doctors, 100 out of 100 would say, “That's bad for you.” The media, “That's bad for you.” Ninety-nine out of a hundred people would say, “That's bad for you. There's no vegetables and fruit.”

Dr. Al Danenberg:
Let me tell you where my research led me. Interestingly, it's loaded with plant nutrients, and here's how it happens. These wonderful animals eat plants. The cattle graze on grass. Sheep, and pigs, and all these animals are herbivores, or they're big herbivores, or big in the plant world.

They're eating all this stuff, and they have a system in their body to digest the toxins more efficiently than we do. All their nutrients, now we're talking pastured animals, not conventionally raised animals, cattle that are raised on grain. I'm talking about cattle that are pastured and raised on grass and other things like that.

Dr. Pompa:
Let me use one example, Al, if you don’t mind. For example, so many people are vitamin K2 deficient, which is how you absorb calcium, etcetera, because they don't eat grass-fed anything. That's where you get it is grass. A cow eats grass, which contains K1. They, not us, have the ability to take that and make it into K2, which humans need.

Dr. Al Danenberg:
Very efficiently, yes.

Dr. Pompa:
Very efficiently, right, so therefore we get this. No, okay, that's one example. Obviously, we can get vitamin D very similar in those ways. That really, to some degree, even happens to minerals. They take a very non-ionized mineral and other nutrients. They eat it and arguably make it more absorbable for humans. Your point is is we're getting vegetables in the meat and the fact that we're eating, or at least what the vegetables would offer.

Dr. Al Danenberg:
Yes, and in a more biologically available form, so less concentration is still much more efficiently effected in our body. It's not in the meat so much. The muscle meat is in the fat and the organ products. We're talking about heart, and liver, and kidney, and pancreas, and brain, and things that are not on the typical plate of the average American consumer, even the average healthy organic American consumer. The Carnivore diet will only work if you're getting all of these and eating them when you're hungry, not forcing feeding.

Dr. Pompa:
Which by the way is another point, though. People that move into the Carnivore diet, especially done properly, to your point, they lose their hunger. Meaning that they really don't eat and have a need to eat as much, definitely not as often, which I argue is one of the cellular changes that takes place that saves your life.

Dr. Al Danenberg:
It’s very positive, yes. It's very positive. It forces you into intermittent fasting because you're just not hungry. It's a more efficient way to, like you said, for longevity, for mitochondrial health, for a lot of things. There are ways to get these organ eats if you don't want to eat them by preparing them. You can get desiccated organ complex, a desiccated bone marrow.

As a matter of fact, there is a company called Enviromedica that just put these products on their website. Those products are actually from New Zealand. They're grass-fed cattle. I'm sure there are many other sources for desiccated organ products. I'm very impressed with that. That's something that I use as a supplement.

I do eat liver. I do eat skin from chicken wings. I eat sweet breads, which are either pancreas or thymus depending on what they're getting from cattle. I am eating organs but not a huge variety. I can get what I don't get in the real organ meats that I'm eating from these desiccated products. I think that's very important for me to have a functional Carnivore diet.

Dr. Pompa:
Actually, you can add some of those sources to the show notes here. I've actually interviewed some others on some of these products.

Dr. Al Danenberg:
Oh, I'm sure there are many other companies. I’m just telling you—

Dr. Pompa:
They’re so good. They are so good to your point. Tell me, and tell our viewers and listeners, how you felt from the Paleo diet, to the Keto diet, to the Carnivore diet. Take us through because not many people have done it perfectly with all the diets. You have, you’ve done your homework. Talk about your experience with all three and the differences.

Dr. Al Danenberg:
My biggest problem was with the Paleo diet because I went with from a standard American diet. Anytime you start with the standard American diet, no matter what you're going to do, you're going to have problems for two to three weeks, end of story. Just deal with it. You're going to feel flu-like symptoms, achy joints, stomach aches, but cravings, crazy cravings.

I'll give you an example. There is a fast-food restaurant that makes chicken sandwiches. They make a chicken sandwich on a bagel. It is the most delicious sandwich I have ever had. When I was eating a standard American diet, I would have two or three of those sandwiches in one gulp. I didn't even realize I ate that much, but it was just delicious. When I started Paleo, that sandwich was not on my plate anymore. I craved those sandwiches. I could feel that my throat ached if I didn't eat a sandwich like that.

There are cravings that I had that were difficult, but I didn’t succumb to the craving. I had a lot of headaches. I had a lot of the aching that I told you about. The interesting thing is do that for two to three weeks and it almost ends as quickly as it started, and it goes away. I’d never had a craving like that. If I smell something that is good, I say, “That smells good,” but I don't have a desire to eat it.

The addiction to the carbohydrates, as you know, is more difficult to break than addiction to narcotics. There are tests that have been done on animal models that show that rats prefer the carbohydrates rather than the heroin. It's interesting, and it is a difficult thing to get over. Once I got over that, it was clear sailing. I had no problem. The first three weeks, I would say, was the most difficult. Then over time I perfected the way I would eat to the point where I got involved with intermittent fasting.

I currently do intermittent fasting. My last meal of the day is no later than—by the time I'm done, it’s no later than 7:30 or so in the evening. I generally don't eat until 12, 1, 2 o'clock when I'm hungry. Now that I've changed my diet, sometimes I'm just not that hungry at all. I'll eat maybe one or maybe two meals a day, and that's it. The amount of food that I'm eating is not much, but the density of the protein and fat that I'm eating on a Carnivore diet is very satiating.

Dr. Pompa:
I want to put something out. You were Paleo that many years, but you had mentioned in it, though, I was really never in ketosis.

Dr. Al Danenberg:
I didn't do it on a regular basis. When I checked my urine—like we mentioned, I never did blood ketone test. I just did the urine test. I never saw a change in the color of the strip. I was not doing that diet to become or go into a state of ketosis, and so I never really pursued it. I never really got into Ketogenic Diet because I really jumped right into the Carnivore diet, passing through that little phase.

Of course, I've been on the carnivore diet for so long. I think that's my eighth day now. I’ve got to tell you, I'm not an expert, but I can tell you I did get into ketosis as of yesterday, which is day seven. Day one through six, I was not in ketosis. Checked my urine constantly, and automatically it just jumped to the moderate to—not heavy, but between the moderate to heavy level of ketones on a urine strip. I know that I'm in ketosis. One of the things that I feel is a good energy level. With all the stuff that I'm doing, and dealing with my cancer, I think I have had good energy, but I feel better energy now.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, and I want to point out to people, in the beginning, the urine ketones will rise because you're making ketones. Eventually, your body starts getting very efficient with them, using them. You'll see the urine ketones drop. However, your blood ketones will be up. The Carnivore diet, you are going to force your body into seeing a lot of ketones, which are incredible for you. They reset your DNA. They help your microbiome. They help your brain. There's a lot of reasons that these ketones are healing.

Dr. Al Danenberg:
Let me just mention, the reason that I jumped into Carnivore is really for cancer. Although I love the concept of the Carnivore diet because it eliminates, especially, the—

Dr. Pompa:
What did you find with that? Why is the Carnivore diet so good for cancer? What was your findings?

Dr. Al Danenberg:
Yeah, so this is pretty interesting. There's no long-term study here. There are no studies that are in the works that are clinical trials in a controlled environment. Anybody and everybody could say there's no proof. Okay, I agree with that. I'm measuring my life in months, not years. All the research I read says in 10 years we’re going to know that the Carnivore diet is good or bad for cancer. I'm going to be long dead in 10 years, probably. That's not my story.

I want everybody to understand, I am not suggesting anybody go on the Carnivore diet for cancer treatment or any treatment. I'm not recommending anybody even to attempt it. I'm just telling you what I'm doing and the reason I'm doing it. I'm excited about it. There are several studies that you can find that are peer-reviewed in that they were in peer-reviewed medical journals, but they're only case studies. There's no control groups. There's not a bunch of people being investigated.

Two individuals in two different studies, one had a malignancy of the soft palate. Sixty-year-old woman did not elect to do chemotherapy or radiation therapy for the same reasons, I guess, that I didn't. It would have killed her, theoretically, in two to five years. That was the prognosis. she went on a strict ketogenic diet, I mean a strict Carnivore diet that was regulated by her physician team, a team of people.

Within 20 months, or 20 months after the study ended, there was remission that they could see on the x-rays that they used to identify the tumor size. They felt that this woman was in remission, and the lesion was gone in the mouth. That was impressive. No proof that the carnivore diet is a diet for cancer, but it was impressive.

Then there was some gentleman who I think is 27 years old in Australia, who had, again, a very malignant brain tumor that was not responding to medication and chemotherapy. He was told that he was going to die in weeks. Went on a very strict Carnivore diet, so strict that he was eating a variety of organ meats raw. That's not necessarily my recommendation, but that's what he was doing, and literally cured. After five years, he is totally in remission.

There is a hospital in Australia that is doing research and clinical trials on his protocol right now. Is that proof positive? Of course not, there are more case studies than these two, of course. I just didn't write them up in my article. That started me on the journey to investigate it. When I listened to the podcast, like I told you, with Mark Sisson and Dr. Saladino, I just got more excited about it. Then went into the fact that the plants have these toxins, these anti nutrients, especially oxalates, that are a significant problem that most people don't even know about.

Dr. Pompa:
There's phytates, oxalates—I mean all of the plants produce them to protect themselves from insects and other things, yeah.

Dr. Al Danenberg:
Right, that's their immune system. That works effects effectively because it destroys the gut and the microbiome of these animals, so that they get sick and die. They don't want to eat, or they are repelled not to eat these plants. These chemicals, sometimes they can be eliminated by cooking. A lot of times they may not be, but we don't know. The damage could be ongoing and cumulative over years not just all of a sudden.

The Carnivore diet eliminates them. If there was nothing other than the fact that it is an ideal elimination diet, that would be a fantastic diet. You could start with carnivore, and then reintroduce anything and everything that you want, and see how you’re doing. That's not the way I'm going. I'm going full carnivore to see how it affects the progression of my cancer.

Dr. Pompa:
I had studied the American Indians for a while. I was fascinated, some of which, because I lived here and became fascinated in Utah. Visited Wyoming where looking at the different tribes. In the winters, they would be on a Carnivore diet. The cherished meat was the organs, by the way. That was really with a the most of on their Carnivore diet.

It wasn't what people thought. The organ meat was the most cherished. That's what they really tried get from the animals and store up. Of course, the different fats were the cherished parts, not as much the muscle. When you look at other ancient tribes, one of which I visited in Africa, and also the tons of people, they would go through times where they were in a Carnivore diet.

Now in my book, Beyond Fasting, I make the argument for this, these times to reset our microbiome, to reset our DNA, to reset. There is a certain detox that happens during these times. I believe, personally, Al, and you may believe differently. Just periods of these times is all we need.

Dr. Al Danenberg:
I think it's absolutely correct. It's possibly tied into this hermetic effect where you throw a lot of stuff in one direction and then in another direction. It shocks your body.

Dr. Pompa:
That's it. I believe that’s the key. Diet variation shocks the body, and that's what forces the microbiome the change, which creates more diversity. I believe that one of the worst things people do is stay on the same diet. I believe adding in a Carnivore diet for some periods of time will change your world. I think in part—I was going to say, I think it answers the people out there going, “What about the Gerson Diet, and the all vegetables, and it helps? Diet change is magic in itself.

Dr. Al Danenberg:
What you just said is very vital for people to understand too. That is there is the standard American diet which is junk. It's created the chronic disease which is at 60% of US adults today. Over 70%, 60% of adults die from a chronic disease. It is terrible. I will tell you that periodontal disease is a chronic disease. The prevalence of chronic periodontal disease is amazing. Gingival inflammation, bleeding or redness in the gum is a disease.

There are studies that show that 93% of the adult US population has gingivitis. The other study that was done several years after that, one study, 2007 and the other, maybe 2014. I'm not sure of the dates. The big periodontal study, which is more infection and passing from gingivitis to periodontitis, meaning it's just not just bleeding of the gums, but it's damage to the bone structure of the jaw. That's at 47% for the average, and then if you're 65 years or older, it jumps to 70%.

These are epidemic proportions. These are chronic diseases related, actually, to the gut microbiome that changes the mouth. It's not the mouth that gets the gut infected. It's the gut that gets the mouth infected. Then it goes back and forth.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I was just going to say because when people have cavitations, infected root canals, these things—then it can go the other way. This then affects—

Dr. Al Danenberg:
Not only the other way but everywhere. What I profess is that all chronic disease he starts in the gut like the center of a wheel, and then the spokes move out. Along the continuum of these diseases that are related to the compromised immune system from the gut dysbiosis, and the chronic systemic inflammation that's part of the gut dysbiosis, it travels the body. Every organ system could be affected based on their genetic predilection.

Periodontal disease is one of them. Once it's in the mouth, it's more obvious. You can't see the gut so well. A lot of the tests from the gut is not that—they're not that good. The mouth is very obvious, at least if it's a trained professional. Then they say you've got this gum disease. It's going to cause cardiovascular disease, which is true, but that's not the only reason.

If you only treat the mouth and not the gut, you'll still have cardiovascular disease. It may have less prevalence because you have a lot of infection in the mouth that's spreading through the body in three ways. It's going, like you said, cavitations, infections that are embedded in bone, from poorly extracted teeth, failing root canals. That's true. It can spread in one of three ways, three through the sheaths of the nerves, which I believe is related to the meridians. It can go through the lymph tissues, which a lot of people don't understand, but that gets into the blood system. Then it can certainly pour into the blood system directly, just like gut dysbiosis can get into the bloodstream directly.

Once that happens, it can go anywhere and everywhere also. The big problem in periodontal disease is one of the very virulent bacterium called P. gingivalis. It's not just the bacteria that causes periodontal disease. There's several bacterium, bacteria, but this has a biofilm that surrounds it that doesn't allow the immune system to penetrate. Then it becomes an autoimmune disease, which is interesting. The disease goes from gingivitis, which is just pure inflammation, to periodontitis where the infection is damaging the bone. Then it pours into the bloodstream. The remnants of the cell wall which is LPS. Yeah, so it gets into the bloodstream. It's highly—

Dr. Pompa:
What was that, the bacteria?

Dr. Al Danenberg:
Yeah, the bacterial wall of the—

Dr. Pompa:
No, the bacteria that you were saying. It's an anaerobe that you were saying.

Dr. Al Danenberg:
Yeah, it’s called P. gingivalis. Porphyromonas gingivalis, and it is one of the most virulent of the [00:50:35].

Dr. Pompa:
It's horrible. It builds up these biofilms. We see it when we go into these cavitations and people have it. It has the ability to go systemic, get into the gut. I mean, these things into the bone, as you mentioned, and the nerves. How do you kill it?

Dr. Al Danenberg:
Here's the interesting thing. First of all, a lot of dentists want to kill the bacteria in the mouth. They'll use antimicrobial mouthwashes and preparations on a daily basis, which is extremely unhealthy because dental plaque, which is a biofilm, is one of the healthy biofilms in the body. You don't want to remove healthy dental plaque. That's going to be a stinger for a lot of people because they don't under—these are bacteria. You’ve got to kill them.

Dr. Pompa:
I’ve interviewed Jerry Curatola, who you know personally. [00:51:29].

Dr. Al Danenberg:
Certainly, and he agrees with me. You go to a dental office. The hygienist wants to clean your teeth. They want to put this vegetable dye on your teeth that will stain all dental plaque red. They'll want to scrub that dental plaque until there's no red. That's like walking outside with no clothes and saying, “I'm protected.” You're not protected. You have no clothes on.

The dental plaque will do three things. It actually is the gatekeeper for minerals to get into the root surface of the tooth. The saliva has all these minerals. It gets into the dental plaque. The dental plaque puts the minerals into the root surface to remineralize it as necessary. The dental plaque, in its healthy state, in its balanced state, which is maybe 700 or so bacteria, will produce hydrogen peroxide in a variety of compositions that kill other invading pathogenic bacteria. It's very protective.

This dental plaque will actually keep the area healthy. If the dental plaque is removed, or the bacteria in the dental plaque is destroyed, there is no protection to the root surface anymore. There's another interesting thing on the tongue. The tongue has a lot of anaerobic bacteria that causes much of the bad breath in the mouth. You can use a tongue scraper or an inverted spoon to get the excess bacteria off, and then that's not a problem.

When you use an antimicrobial mouth wash, you kill all of this anaerobic bacteria on the tongue. That anaerobic bacteria has a biological function that takes the—if you eat leafy green vegetables and other foods that have natural nitrates, it gets absorbed into the bloodstream. Sixty, seventy percent get into the saliva. The saliva then pours these nitrates, very biologically active nitrates, into the mouth. The anaerobic bacteria on the tongue changes the nitrates to nitrites. You swallow them. You don't think about it. You just swallow them.

The nitrates get into your gut, and the rest of your system, and it produces nitric oxide, which is critical for cardiovascular health, controlling blood pressure. There was a paper that was written just a couple years ago by several cardiologists. It was really for cardiologists. It said, “If you are putting your patient on blood-pressure medication, and you're not getting the results that you think you should get, make sure they're not using an antimicrobial mouthwash daily because it's destroying the cycle of the production of nitric oxide, which naturally reduces the blood pressure.

These dentists and physicians that are killing all the bacteria mouth with antimicrobials are destroying the bacteria in the tongue. They’re literally raising the blood pressure as well as putting the [00:54:38] more at risk.

Dr. Pompa:
The moral of the story is you don't kill these things.

Dr. Al Danenberg:
Daily, now, if you have an acute situation, like anything, you have to understand what you're trying to do. Yes, you may need to kill everything to get this pathology under control. You also have to understand that you have to rebuild right away the bacteria. You have to be on healthy supplements to support the gut microbiome that will in turn restore the mouth microbiome. They have to be probiotics that resist the stomach acid. The primary probiotics that resist stomach acid are the spore-based probiotics.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I’ve been talking about those on the show. Yeah, megaspore biotics, [00:55:31]. These are all the spore types of bacteria.

Dr. Al Danenberg:
They germinate in the gut. The other probiotics work only 50% of the time because the metabolites they make are effective, and they are not destroyed by the acid in the stomach. The acid in the stomach is critical. That's the first line of defense for microbes. If we didn't have a low pH in our guts, in our stomach, we'd be eating bacteria and viruses and all kinds of stuff that would really make us sick all the time. That's one of our major sources of stopping potential infections in our body.

Dr. Pompa:
Great stuff, Al, so appreciate it. Gosh, so much we could talk about. I can't believe it the time went that fast.

Dr. Al Danenberg:
Oh my goodness, look at that.

Dr. Pompa:
I know, right? It’s remarkable.

Dr. Al Danenberg:
A person who knows how to interview somebody—time flies. What can I tell you? It's a great interview. Thank you.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, there's so much here, from the—obviously, dietary changes.

Dr. Al Danenberg:
There is. I think there's an important takeaway. That is what you're doing, and what people like you are doing everywhere. The reason that you're being successful is because the public is demanding it. You can't go to a physician's office or dental office and see that they are doing their thing to get educated. They're only starting to become functional because the lay public is getting educated. They're demanding a response, or they're going somewhere else.

Fifteen years ago, you would go to your physician or dentist. Whatever they said to do, you did, and they were gospel. Now, you go to the dentist or physician and say, “Did you read this?” If they poopoo the idea, you walk, and you go somewhere else. I think that's a great thing, and the word is getting out.

I do think that if we get to treating the gut properly, and eating a healthy diet, and it could be any one that you want, like you said, alternate and really stimulate and shock the system but only with healthy food, I think we can cure chronic disease. There are several functional people that are saying that and writing books about it. I totally agree. The problem is getting people to be proactive.

Dr. Pompa:
It's true. That's part of my last question. With that said, I think that with the gut being the key. I can tell you from a group of doctors that I train, we never fix a gut just by giving bacteria. We fix a gut with the strategies that you were talking about here, changing the diet, forcing adaptation.

These dietary shifts, as dramatic as the Carnivore diet may seem, it takes these dramatic shifts the nature used to make us do. When we do it, we force a change in that microbiome through basically adaptation, hormeses, and therefore the diet changes the ecosystem in the gut, the diet change, I should say. I think this is an under looked thing, I really do. I'm one of the lone wolves talking about this. I think it's very critical.

Dr. Al Danenberg:
It's getting out, and I think that's good. The other elements, stress reduction, sufficient exercise, all of these little things that we never take into consideration are the big things in our life. There's not one way to do it. Of course the average person wants a pill, take the pill and they're healthy. It doesn't work that way.

Dr. Pompa:
I think this this is a bigger deal than we think, forcing these big dietary changes like you've done and have been successful with, obviously.

Dr. Al Danenberg:
I think so. I think so.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no doubt, last question, so rare—I mean, very few people watching or listening to this are in a place or will ever be in a place that you're in. You're at death's door. You're in that teeter. What would your advice to them be? In this state, you learn a lot. What would your advice to them be?

Dr. Al Danenberg:
If you were on the train tracks, and you heard a train coming towards you, would you get off the tracks? Most people wouldn't right away. They really want the train to be so close that they can see it, and smell the smoke, and then jump off the train tracks. That may not be the right method. You need to be proactive. What I would say is if you're in a standard America—eating a standard American diet, get rid of the toxic foods and get on a healthy diet.

If you have a practitioner that you can consult with, make sure that you know how to restore your gut. I would say well into the 80 to 90% of the population has dysbiosis, meaning an unbalanced unhealthy proportion of gut bacteria because of the foods that we're eating and every everything else in our lifestyle. We need to get that in place. I think those two items, that's not everything, but if you can get the diet right and get the gut right you will be well off to being proactive. You'll never know that you're preventing yourself from getting the disease I have because you'll never have it.

You’ll feel good, though. You have to deal with your peers, and the party, and the cakes, and cookies, and pizza, and beer, and all the stuff that you think is the way to have fun. That's not necessarily the way to have fun. You may be able to cheat it occasionally, but you really need to get a mindset into a healthy diet, healthy lifestyle, and a healthy gut. That's what I would say.

Dr. Pompa:
Yep, thank you Dr. Al.

Dr. Al Danenberg:
Read your book, too, right?

Dr. Pompa:
That’s it.

Dr. Al Danenberg:
I have a book too. I had a book that was published in 2017 called Crazy Good Living. It's all part of what we're trying to get out there for people to understand.

Dr. Pompa:
Awesome, well we'll put a link to that.

Dr. Al Danenberg:
Thanks.

Dr. Pompa:
We appreciate you coming on Cell TV. Dr. Al, you had a lot of great things, thank you.

Dr. Al Danenberg:
Thank you. Have a great night. I will see you soon.

Ashley Smith:
That's it for this week. I hope you enjoyed today's episode which was brought to you by Fastonic Molecular Hydrogen. Please check it out at getfastonic.com We'll be back next week and every Friday at 10 a.m. Eastern. We truly appreciate your support. You can always find us at cellularhealing.tv. Please remember to spread the love by liking, subscribing, giving an iTunes review, or sharing the show with anyone who may benefit from the information heard here. As always, thanks for listening.

309: Healing with Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy

Episode 309: Healing with Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy

Today I welcome two special healers, Drs. Jason and Melissa Sonners. This power duo are co-owners of a holistic chiropractic and health facility in northern new Jersey called Core Therapies. They are also the parents of 3 amazing children, and are truly living it to lead it as some of HCFs top platinum doctors. They are here today to discuss Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy (otherwise known as HBOT), and will share their mission around this amazing healing modality that they implement in their practice, as well as in their own lives.

More about Drs. Jason and Melissa Sonners

Dr. Jason Sonners, DC, DIBAK, DCBCN, CCWP and Dr. Melissa Sonners, DC, DACCP, CACCP are co-owners of Core Therapies Family Wellness Center in Northern New Jersey, a holistic center with eight chiropractors whose specialties include functional neurology, functional medicine, pre/post-partum, pediatric and sports injuries. Core Therapies also offers acupuncture, massage, infrared, sauna, spinal decompression, yoga and laser therapies.

Drs. Jason and Melissa Sonners are also the owners of NJ HBOT and HBOT USA.

Show notes:

Jason Sonners' book: Oxygen Under Pressure

Visit the Sonners' HBOT website

The Drs. Sonners' HBOT YouTube channel. They post educational videos every Monday and Wednesday. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss any!

Dr. Pompa's Beyond Fasting book. Newly released!

Transcript:

Dr. Pompa:
Have you heard of Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy, HBOT, as it’s known? This show is about it. I’ll tell you; we talk about a lot of different conditions that this could be a breakthrough. Look, when you lack oxygen into tissues and cells, they will not heal. Your body has the ability to heal those issues, but unless we can bring that intelligence into those tissues, healing will not occur.

Angiogenesis, bringing oxygen into tissues, Lyme disease, pathogens, all of that we talk about on this episode of Cell TV, so stay tuned. Oh, and by the way, these are two of my amazing platinum doctors. They, in fact, have a Health Center of the Future. This is a show you’re definitely going to want to share because there’s an answer here. As we see so many neurodegenerative conditions, autism, pain-related conditions, this is part of the answer. Stay tuned for this episode of Cell TV.

Ashley Smith:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m Ashley Smith. Today, we welcome two special healers, Drs. Jason and Melissa Sonners. This power duo are co-owners of a holistic chiropractic and health facility in northern New Jersey called Core Therapies. They’re also the parents of three amazing children and are truly living it to lead it as some of HCF’s top platinum doctors.

They are here today to discuss hyperbaric oxygen therapy otherwise known as HBOT. We’ll share their mission around this amazing healing modality that they implement in their practice, as well as in their own lives. Let’s get started and welcome Dr. Jason, Dr. Melissa, and of course, Dr. Pompa. Welcome, all of you.

Dr. Jason Sonners:
Thank you.

Dr. Melissa Sonners:
Thanks, Ashley.

Dr. Jason Sonners:
Thanks for having us.

Dr. Melissa Sonners:
That was such a nice intro; thank you.

Dr. Pompa:
It was a nice intro: healers, powerful duo there.

Ashley Smith:
I meant all of it; they’re lovely people. We’re excited.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, we may even be blessed by one of those little angels she talked about popping up.

Dr. Melissa Sonners:
Yeah, they’re somewhere.

Dr. Pompa:
There’s a little angel over there you told me, so if we’re blessed by that. We get blessed by my dogs every once a while, just uproar, so who knows. Never disrupt Cellular TV.

I love this topic, oxygen therapy, whether it’s Ozone, but oxygen, because when people start to not feel well, one thing across the board is that they’re lacking cellular oxygen in some aspect, hypoperfusion. As a matter of fact, we even do the toxicity test where we’re looking at a visual contrast test. The reason people fail, toxic people fail that, is because of hypoperfusion; meaning, lack of oxygen to the nerve. The one nerve we can measure is the optic nerve. Obviously, there’s a lot of reasons for that.

Oxygen therapies have been around a long time and have really progressed. Let’s start there. What the heck are we talking about HBOT, hyperbaric oxygen therapy? Let’s keep it very simple. What does that mean, guys?

Dr. Jason Sonners:
Yeah, exactly what you said, oxygen is just a very fundamental—I look at it as a nutrient. It’s just a very fundamental nutrient every cell in our body requires to just function normally let alone to heal if there’s some issue. There’s multiple different ways to deliver oxygen whether it’s just sitting here like we are breathing having this conversation. We could talk about some of the others like Ozone, or EWOT, and then there’s hyperbaric.

Just very specifically and super basic, hyperbaric literally means increased pressure. You’re basically placed in a hyperbaric chamber which is a pressurized environment. As a result of that pressure, it creates an increased gradient. Then that allows us to absorb higher amounts of oxygen as a result of being inside that pressure.

Dr. Pompa:
Maybe it’s worth explaining why people would lack oxygen in the cell and the nerve before we even get into more of why this is so helpful and what it does for different conditions. We get that, but let’s start there. Why is this occurring in so many people?

Dr. Jason Sonners:
The amount of conditions is virtually endless. It’s all about microcirculation. In order for us to get oxygen under normal physiology, oxygen is carried in the red blood cell. Our red blood cells are virtually 100% saturated or close to it. Then as long as we can get red blood cells into a capillary, which is microcirculation and that allows that gas exchange, we can get oxygen to whatever tissue we’re trying to get it to.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, but why does so many people even without being diagnosed have this problem of lacking the oxygen getting into their capillary, getting into their cells. What do you think’s going on there?

Dr. Jason Sonners:
Literally, with every type of you name it, toxicity, mild trauma whether it’s physical trauma, TBI, concussion, improper nutrient density, you name it, Step One, there’s a chronic inflammation cascade that we talk about a lot when we’re doing lectures. The beginning of that cascade starts with tissue damage which is ultimately again from all these different sources, but as soon as there’s tissue damage, there is microcirculation damage. As soon as there’s microcirculation damage, the ability to deliver oxygen to the cell or to actually pull waste products away from the cell becomes hindered. To me, that’s a lot of where the beginning of that chronic inflammatory process begins.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, it’s true.

Dr. Melissa Sonners:
There’s also the two different ways to look at it. We’re not just using it for a lack of oxygen situation; we’re also using it as Jason mentioned and as you brought up for the powerful effects it has as far as inflammation, detoxification, mold toxicity, Lyme, a lot of the stuff that you cover on your Cellular TV. Those are powerful benefits of the therapy as well.

Dr. Pompa:
I was just literally reading an article this morning, today. It’s about Alzheimer’s and dementia, which is affecting—my gosh, it’s scary when you really look at these numbers. The article was really focused on the fact that this amyloid plaque theory has been disproven, and yet, there’s so many billions of dollars behind it in medications, etc., that they’re not letting go of it. There’s a very powerful group that still is pushing that literally failed theory. The real theory is exactly what we’re talking about: microcirculation problems, oxygen decrease to certain parts of the brain; therefore, that’s why you see the results you do with this hyperbaric oxygen therapy.

It works so well because the real issue is there’s certain traumas caused by toxins, other like you said nutrients, whatever, a lack of blood flow, tissue damage, greater lack of blood flow, and now that can lead to inflammation and the real cause of Alzheimer’s and dementia. I think that many people watching this, the first sign is simply brain fog. That’s why when they do this therapy, they go, oh my gosh, it’s like I can think. We really just improved that capillary and that oxygen flow into the brain. What other conditions are you seeing that like, hey look, this is a gamechanger for?

Dr. Jason Sonners:
A lot.

Dr. Melissa Sonners:
Yeah, we see a lot. In our clinic in New Jersey, we see a lot of autism because autism is just really prevalent here. We see a lot of people for—

Dr. Pompa:
There you go; I knew the queen would arise.

Dr. Melissa Sonners:
—for toxicity challenges.

Dr. Pompa:
Did you see what she just did? She just showed her—that’s hilarious. That’s so funny. Okay, I shouldn’t egg her own. Okay, I’m sorry. I didn’t want to interrupt you; I just can’t help myself. Go ahead.

Dr. Melissa Sonners:
We see a lot of people dealing with Lyme also just being in the Northeast, a lot of people that have brain fog, chronic fatigue, inflammatory pain-based conditions, fibromyalgia, concussions. We see a lot of concussions. We see a lot of a variety of things.

Dr. Jason Sonners:
[00:08:59] also for various reasons, patients that are undergoing or are in different phases of cancer treatment of some kind. There’s a very broad base. Again, it’s not that—hyperbaric gets almost a bad name because people say well, you can’t have one thing that cures so many different conditions. That’s not what it is; it’s not doing that at all; it’s not curing any of it. It’s like we started this conversation saying that underneath so many of these chronic illnesses is a different type of damage to microcirculation leading to inability to nurse the cell properly leading to further damage, further chronic inflammation. If we could just break that pattern, actually get that healing to occur, that’s where it has an impact on so many different conditions, not because you’re curing the condition but because you’re getting to the underlying cause of the conditions.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, through circulation, the innate intelligence in our body knows how to heal. Your point, this doesn’t heal or cure anything, but if we can increase circulation to an area, now, we’re bringing in, of course, an increase in blood flow but also white blood cells, also things that really drive healing that are needed. Once the body’s innate intelligence can recognize that via increased circulation, now it can start bringing in stem cells. It can start bringing in everything that it needs for healing. The body’s ultimately doing the curing and healing. That’s why to your point; that’s why we can talk about this one thing is helping so many conditions without sounding like a “snake oil salesman.”

Dr. Melissa Sonners:
Yeah, and that’s part of why we have so much passion around it. It’s so congruent with our philosophy and our belief in the power of the body as you believe. The body can self-heal and self-generate, but we’re just giving the body extra amounts of what it needs, the fuel sources similar to fasting. We’re just helping you tap into our natural potential and the body does the rest.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s so simple. Now, you all are platinum doctors that are on our team of cellular detox docs. The platinum is that level that you’re very trained in all of the things that we’re so passionate about: obviously cellular detox, fasting, fasting strategies. Now, what have you seen this—because I talk about Health Centers of the Future, which is the name of my seminar organization that trains these concepts. Now, what have you seen but with the cellular detox, the fasting the strategies, and this HBOT therapy? Your clinics in New Jersey, this is a Health Center of the Future when you’re pulling all these things together.

Dr. Jason Sonners:
Yeah, it’s again something we talk about a lot when we’re doing some workshops and lectures. Every one of those therapies is great. If you’re doing metabolic therapies like diet variation and fasting, if you’re—and that’s just all your doing, you’re going to get some amazing results. If you’re doing really powerful and appropriate detoxification programs, you’re going to get results. If you’re doing hyperbaric, you’re going to get great results.

It’s just so different when you bring them together that the synergy of these—one of the things because when we’re lecture to medical doctors and we’re talking about it and we want to say well, in research, we have to control all the variables. We can only change one thing at a time and make sure that this is having the effect. Sometimes, I think from a research standpoint, that has a place and it’s appropriate to do, but in the clinical environment, if you’re addressing the singular therapies one at a time—how many times I’ve had somebody come in, well, I tried gluten-free for a month. That didn’t work so I put it back. Then I was dairy-free for a month and that didn’t work so I put it back. Then I did this detox program but that had some [00:12:54].

You had to do all of it and you had to do all of it for some period of time to really nourish the system enough to actually get the changes you’re looking for. I’m amazed honestly in the last few years especially having brought in a lot of the different techniques that we go through in our groups to see the synergy of all those pieces come together for people. There’s nothing like it.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, and that’s the whole point of the Health Center of the Future. It’s like this multitherapeutic approach that I’ve been teaching for 20 years. It’s our passion; it really is.

Dr. Melissa Sonners:
I think what’s a big part of it for us too is anytime you’re doing a powerful, really effective, safe detox, you’re still going to sometimes get some kickbacks and some reactions. For a lot of people, we slow it down. We know how to do that through the group and our coaching, but also using certain tools in Health Centers of the Future like hyperbaric oxygen has made a lot of difference because it can help just minimize that detox reaction.

Dr. Pompa:
Listen, obviously, you know this. I’ve encouraged every one of our platinum doctors to have one of these units in their office. Let’s talk about what it looks like. Do you have one near you that you can spin the camera around? Some people have no idea what we’re talking about, honestly. I want to give them a visual if you have one.

Hold up a picture, anything, whatever you have available to you. Then you can start talking about the actual process. What does it look like when we talk about doing this? How long does somebody have to be in there? What’s going on? When they see this device, they’re like what is going on?

Dr. Melissa Sonners:
Yeah, we can definitely. Jason’s looking for a picture right now. We’re in our whole office.

Dr. Pompa:
I should have prepared you for that.

Dr. Melissa Sonners:
Yeah, it’s okay. Our stuff’s not right here, the hyperbaric machine, but we’ll make sure you guys have pictures in the postings and things like that. Essentially, for this purpose, we’ll talk about soft chamber. There’s soft chamber and there’s hard chamber. A lot of people that are seeking hyperbaric for the first time tend to go in what’s called a soft chamber. They’re usually about seven feet long, Jason? Is that the right length?

Dr. Jason Sooners:
Yeah.

Dr. Melissa Sooners:
You lay in this inflatable area. It’s nice and comfortable. It inflates over about five minutes. You feel a little bit of pressure in your ears just like if you’re flying. You just stay ahead of it; you clear them, chew gum, yawn, swallow.

Usually, people stay in there for about an hour. It’s a nice little sensory deprivation for a lot of people, too. There’s some white noise. A lot of people sleep, or read, take a little nap, relax, maybe listen to some music. Yeah, you got a picture?

Dr. Jason Sooners:
I’m not sure if you can see them or not, but that would be one version of a soft chamber.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, so that’s about seven feet long to hold your average human.

Dr. Jason Sonners:
Seven feet long, it’s 32 inches wide, so about the width of a typical doorway in your home. A soft chamber looks—I mean a hard chamber looks a little bit more like that. It’s the same length; it’s about seven feet, but it’s 42 inches in diameter.

Dr. Pompa:
The hard chambers, they go higher pressure, therefore, more oxygen. Definitely better used in a professional situation. Now, here’s one that you all sent to Daniel. This is my son. Most people watching knew he broke his back. This I used in one of my PowerPoints to show the different treatments we did to get him healing, remarkably by the way to everyone’s amazement. There he is in the chamber.

I don’t know if you can see that, but that’s him in the chamber. Yeah, so there he is inside there. Anyways, it was such a blessing because we know that increases the healing capacity, really sped up the healing. Thank you for that. I got to see it first hand and experience it first hand myself. It was a real experience I’ll tell you. Go ahead.

Dr. Melissa Sonners:
It’s good too I think to mention and like you showed those windows. It’s nice and light in there. I do feel that a handful of people when they hear about hyperbaric oxygen, and they’re curious, and they’re wanting the benefits of it, sometimes we hear people being concerned with claustrophobia. I want to address that because I would never want that to prevent someone from getting—

Dr. Pompa:
I’m actually slightly claustrophobic because on my football team, I was piled up on, everyone piled up on me. Since then, I’ve been claustrophobic. I had no problem with it because right above me was the zipper, you know what I’m saying? Meaning that I could stop and open it up at anytime myself. As long as my brain knew that, I didn’t feel constrained.

Dr. Jason Sonners:
I think that’s the most—exactly right when we show people that one there’s a lot of room in there, two, you have full control. You have windows; you have zippers; you have valves. From the outside, we can control it; from the inside, you can control it. As soon as you know that there’s way that—there’s a way out, you can open the door basically so to speak, it does; it does calm most people’s concerns that way.

Dr. Melissa Sonners:
Just like anything, working with a provider that knows that and walks you through in a slow way so that you feel a sense of control and safety. People are totally fine.

Dr. Pompa:
How long do you have to stay in to get a benefit?

Dr. Jason Sonners:
It depends on the goal. I’d say clinically the majority of people do about an hour. There are times when it’s more appropriate like a pre-workout or you want to—in some cases, where you’re doing neuro-rehab where you might want to just increase oxygen to the brain to get through an exercise rehab kind of a thing. You might only do closer to 20 to 40 minutes.

From a typical healing and recovery standpoint, the majority are 60 minutes. Sometimes, if we need a lot, if we need to a lot of sessions over long periods of time, we’ll have patients either do 60 minutes twice a day or even 90 minutes at a time inside the clinic or at home if they’re doing home therapy. It ranges a lot just depending on the goal. God bless.

Dr. Pompa:
I had to sneeze. Anyway, yeah, I think the next question—okay, first of all, hold up your book because we’re asking a lot of questions; I’m asking a lot of questions.

Dr. Melissa Sonners:
We’re not prepared.
Dr. Jason Sonners:
It’s not out yet.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, I thought you had it out.

Dr. Jason Sonners:
Yeah, no, the e-book just came out three days ago, so it is out.

Dr. Pompa:
Give the name to your book because they can start there.

Dr. Jason Sonners:
The name of the book is Oxygen Under Pressure. It is out like I said, the e-book’s out. Then the paperback comes out in about two weeks.

Dr. Melissa Sonners:
Yep, so you can go on Amazon now. If you just type in Oxygen Under Pressure, you can go ahead and order the digital version.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, okay, great, perfect. Yeah, no, that’s good because I’m sure they’re—you have so much more in there about this topic. I think the other question my viewers are wondering is okay, I want to do this. I want to try this. Where and how do they find out more or how can they find a clinic or somewhere to get one of these units?

Dr. Jason Sonners:
Right now, as powerful as it is and as helpful as it is, there really aren’t that many clinics, unfortunately. There’s still a lot—we still have people who travel easily two—we have our clinic in New Jersey; we have another clinic outside of Philly. Equally distant, it’s about a little over two hours away. People travel equally distant from both of those because that’s literally how far away most clinics actually are.

Dr. Melissa Sonners:
That’s part of our mission; we’re trying to get these in more practitioner’s hands and educating them on how to use them. For now, the book is a really good resource for people to understand how it works and why it works and to see if it’s a fit for them. Then from there, if they want to reach out to us, and we make sure all the resources are posted with this PO. We can certainly help find someone that’s reputable and in their area and who’s good and skilled at what they’re going in for.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, because there is—the protocol is a big part of it working for people correctly. Having people reach out to you is a great idea because you can point them in the right direction. Jason—

Dr. Jason Sonners:
We typically will; we’ll help depending on what people’s issues are or if it’s a clinic looking to build a business and treat patients around it. We typically will help them develop initial protocols, but also the thought process behind the protocols so that ultimately, they understand why we would recommend this or that or the other for a particular case.

Dr. Pompa:
We do get a lot of doctors that watch this. If they’re interested in putting this in—you’re the guy around the country that does this, so you travel a lot with it. I don’t know if Ashley’s going to put up your contact; I’m sure she will. You can give it now if you want.

Dr. Melissa Sonners:
Yeah, the best resources for sure are the website, hbotusa.com. We also have a—

Dr. Pompa:
Hbotusa.com.

Dr. Melissa Sonners:
That’s our company name. Then we recently started a YouTube channel with the goal of educating people on hyperbaric, both practitioners and the public. If you just go on YouTube and you search Hbot, so H-B-O-T, space, USA. We post videos on there every Monday and Wednesday. That’s a great place to learn about this as well.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, perfect, appreciate that.

Dr. Jason Sonners:
You can email us, too. Just support@hbotusa.com too if you’re looking for a clinic near you, or you want more information on how to get home therapies, or start a clinic, whatever those questions might be around all of this. I get a lot of emails; I’m happy to answer them.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s great.

Dr. Melissa Sonners:
Like you said, we travel a lot. We have a really fun life, really busy life. As you mentioned, we’ve got three kids. Our office in New Jersey is packed and full and fun. We’re opening clinics and traveling to speak on hyperbaric.

It’s such an important mission to us because the miracles that we see in our office every day are just crazy. Parents that are getting their life back because their kids are getting well again or, Dr. Pompa, as you know, as you went through with your struggles when you get your life back as a parent how that changes your family’s life. It’s a lot of work and it’s fun. We’re so committed to it. We’re pulled to this because of what we see in people’s lives and what’s going on. It’s such a congruent, amazing therapy and just helps the body work better.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, I love it. Most people learn from stories. Tell your story because you have Lyme. Obviously, for you all to get so into this, it affected your life just like everything we do: pain to purpose. Then even tell some stories just from the clinic that you’ve seen because I think that inspires people the most and gets people to take action.

Dr. Melissa Sonners:
Yeah, definitely. It was two years ago I think at this point. Again, we have the three kids. Ky was a year old; we had a four and a six-year-old as well. I got hit hard from nothing to down and out with a neurological form of Lyme. I literally felt like I lost my mind in the midst of a busy practice, and busy parenting, and breastfeeding, and up all night.

I struggled to find my way to our office which is two miles up the road, couldn’t remember our kids' friends’ names that spend a lot of time at our house; literally lost my mind overnight. It was really scary. At the same time, thankfully, we have access to these tools. We had just pretty much started our relationship with you guys as well, so jumped right into ketosis, and fasting, and detox.

The hyperbaric really sped things along. I literally would feel—I felt like I had cobwebs in my brain. I couldn’t connect the dots. I literally felt like someone is vacuuming that out of my brain when I was in there. I really attribute it to me getting my life back for our family very quickly. I’m super passionate about helping people with Lyme especially.

Dr. Pompa:
What are some other conditions and your office stories that changed?

Dr. Jason Sonners:
We started with this 12 years ago. We started because I herniated a disc in my back and had drop foot. Then 18 months later, my back was fine. I was working again, I was treating patients, but I never got the function back in my right foot.

I was at a conference. They had chambers. It looked cool. I had no idea what it did. I got in for 20 minutes, a half-hour, got out, didn’t think much of it. Then all of a sudden about 20 minutes later, I started getting pins and needles in my foot. I was like wow, is that—am I feeling that because of that chamber.

I went back, talked to the guy. I ended up doing about eight hours in the four days that were in Vegas at that time at that conference. I had left there with about 20% recovery in that neuropathy. We bought that chamber because I was like this is the only thing that’s changed my—the neuropathy in all this time.

I was doing a lot of nutrition; I was doing exercise; we were doing chiropractic, all kinds of things to help, but it was stuck. Again, microcirculation damage because the disc and the inflammation. That was a massive recovery there.

Our second patient was my step-father. He had MS. He was diagnosed with a primary progressive MS. We did 40 dives in 40 days. He had massive changes.

Again, in my head, I said, well, I had a neuropathy. It’s a totally different mechanism, but MS is any type of neuropathy, so there must be some connection here. We did that and he had amazing change. He’s got his gate back; he started doing stairs again; he got his balance back. Twelve years later now, had a change to relapsing-remitting because it wasn’t primary progressive. He’s doing great. He still gets around really well.

Our next patient was a stroke patient, eight years post-stroke. All she wanted to do was improve her mobility a little bit, but she started driving again. She couldn’t read because she lost partial vision in her left eye. She was able to read again. It goes on and on. We have kids that say their first words to their parents.

Dr. Melissa Sonners:
Kids that have been diagnosed with autism, have had injuries.

Dr. Jason Sonners:
Yeah, so—

Dr. Melissa Sonners:
There was one gentleman, he was one of my favorite guys. He came in. He had a mild stroke as well and had lost his driver’s license and just a sense of independence and control and a big part of his life. He did four sessions. He was so cute. He came in. We have this adorable picture of him jumping with his driver’s license.

It was four sessions. The power of that of getting your life back. I know I keep saying that, but that’s what we hear all the time.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, it’s why you’re here obviously. Whatever we’re doing in a clinic, it makes it that much better because we need that innate intelligence reaching those tissues. I’m sure you see great results too with diabetics, diabetic neuropathies, and things that literally won’t heal.

Dr. Jason Sonners:
Right; again, it’s the same thing; it’s damage to the circulation from glucose [00:28:46]. It’s the same as dementia. There’s dementia Type Three diabetes. We have all this vascular damage from blood glucose not being under control properly. Again, if you could restore—there’s a handful of mechanisms that hyperbaric, it just does every time: neovascularization is high on that list. We keep talking about microcirculation damage. The fix for that is to heal the vasculature.

One of the most important long-term benefits of hyperbaric therapy is literally angiogenesis. We have all this damage that’s accumulated over the years to the microcirculation, to an area of trauma, or to our brain, or whatever the case is. As we continue to get these hyperbaric exposures, this extra oxygen, and it stimulates angiogenesis, we literally go back and heal and regrow new blood vessels.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s it; I was going to say that’s what angiogenesis means. It’s not just hey, the therapy is there, but literally, as you do the therapy, you’re growing new vessels. You’re getting a permanent increase in circulation into those tissues, so good point. Explain why it works so well for infections, Lyme being one of them. Really, it can help with Candida. It can help with parasitic infections, pathogens in general. Explain that to people because I think they get the increase in circulation, but how does that translate into a better immune system or at least pathogen killing?

Dr. Jason Sonners:
One mechanism is that a lot of the pathogens are anaerobic. Many pathogens exist in these either very low or no oxygen environments. In fact, they even build these biofilms. We talk about biofilms all the time.
The biofilms protect them from medications or herbs or things like that. The biofilms also help maintain this very low oxygen environment.

One pathway is you’re literally massively increasing the oxygen exposure of your body, which is upregulating the oxygen exposure to these bugs. They just can’t live in that high oxygen environment. That’s one mechanism.

Another mechanism is that—there’s like ten. I go through it in the book. There’s ten different mechanisms by which hyperbaric works every single time a person goes in there. One of those is up-regulation of neutrophil and macrophage activity. A lot of times our immune systems is one of our most metabolically active systems. It requires an enormous amount of energy to continue to maintain, especially these chronic infections.

In order to keep rebuilding this army of white blood cells to help kill these infections, oxygen is a critical piece of fuel for that pathway. In order to keep the number of neutrophils and macrophages up—in chronic infections we often see low numbers of white blood cells. In order to keep those numbers higher and in order to keep the activity of the neutrophil and macrophage very high, that requires an enormous amount of oxygen. By dumping this excess oxygen into the system, we’re able to increase the effectiveness of our white blood cells.

The third way goes back to something similar to the first version, which is our microbiome. Our microbiome is the critical piece of our overall immune system. The majority of the healthy bacteria, the probiotic so to speak, are either aerobic—they require oxygen for function—or they’re at least very oxygen-tolerant. While we’re increasing the oxygen in the entire system, that makes it terribly uncomfortable or almost impossible for certain pathogens to exist.

At the same time it’s actually nourishing the healthy bacteria, the healthy part of the microbiome, so that we can increase the healthy bacteria while we’re decreasing the pathogens so we can create a better balance in terms of bugs. That’s also true of most mycotoxins as well. Whether it’s a Lyme issue or a bacterial issue, even viral, you’re going to see the shifts of oxygen really impacting the overall immune system. With something like Lyme, there’s two pieces; there’s killing the infection, but in so many of these infections there’s all the damage that’s occurred as a result of it. Once we’ve killed the infection, we’re not finished because now we need to continue to have that higher level of oxygen in the system so that we can rebuild whatever the damage was that occurred.

Dr. Melissa Sonners:
For the same reason, people are probably starting to hear a lot about hyperbaric oxygen therapy for people that are dealing with cancer. Same thing, a lot of the conventional treatments that are used for cancer destroy the system. What people are finding is they can get by with less of those treatments or if they get to a point where they’re wanting to continue them but their body isn’t handling them well, their body then has the strength and their immune system is stronger so that they can fight them.

Dr. Pompa:
I know it’s used with cancer very successfully. That was one of the questions I actually had. Are there any conditions where it’s not recommended or you shouldn’t do with hyperbaric therapy?

Dr. Jason Sonners:
There are a few chemotherapy drugs that their main side effect is the fact that they’re blowing through a lot of our antioxidant system like SOD, superoxide dismutase. It’s a relative contraindication. You just have to be careful and be aware. With people that are over oxidized, you just have to know that and understand the condition behind it. You might try to rebalance and pre-treat with some antioxidant use to balance some of that oxidation.
The only real absolute contraindication is pneumothorax, a blown lung. In order for you to be in the environment, you just have to be able to equalize the pressure. If you can’t equalize the pressure, you really just can’t be in there. Whether that’s equalization in our ears, you don’t feel pressure in your body. When you’re in an airplane, your ears pop, but you don’t feel the pressure in the cabin.

It’s the same thing. The only place you really feel it is our ears or you could feel a little bit intestinally if there’s some air pockets. If you can’t equalize with your lungs, you would feel it quite a bit in your thoracic cavity. That’s the only reason it’s a contraindication.

Dr. Pompa:
I didn’t feel any of that. Explain the difference when people would need the hard chamber that goes to higher pressures versus the soft chamber being okay. There’s certain conditions where you’d say absolutely hard chamber. I know those are harder to find because there’s a little more complications. Maybe explain the difference and what conditions would be right for each one.

Dr. Jason Sonners:
I would say that soft chambers, the limitation there is it’s less pressure and less oxygen percentage-wise. In the beginning we only had a soft chamber, and we weren’t even adding any oxygen to that. It was literally just compressed air. Those first few stories that I told you about , myself, my stepdad, those were just compressed air. Even that is still about a 30% increase in oxygen.

If you’re about 98% saturated right now with oxygen red blood cell-wise and you had a green tank of oxygen and a mask and you were breathing that, the best you could ever do is go from 98 to 100. Our oxygen carrying capacity is limited to how red blood cells carry oxygen in our body under normal atmospheric conditions. That’s in important piece because when you go into a hyperbaric environment, you’ll feel that 2% in no time. What you’re doing is dissolving oxygen into the plasma. The plasma doesn’t usually hold oxygen. Red blood cells do.

In the environment of pressure, you can dissolve oxygen into the plasma. That’s why you can get such massive increases. In a soft chamber, no extra oxygen, you’re running somewhere between 25 and 30% more oxygen, not 98 to 100, but the equivalent of 127. That alone is pretty remarkable. If you add oxygen to that system or as you get deeper and deeper in pressure, you create a larger gradient, which creates a larger amount of diffused oxygen.

In most cases, even the soft chamber alone, you’ll get there. What you could have done maybe a little faster because you had more pressure or more oxygen, you’re going to end up doing a little slower if you’re limited by pressure. The biggest thing is an acute Lyme condition or a really bad acute infection. Think about it; they’ll use in a hospital hyperbaric for gangrene, a really terrible anaerobic pathogen. Hyperbaric is one of the solutions for something like that, especially if it’s not responding to traditional care.

Same kind of thing; if it’s an acute infection and you’re really trying to have an impact on that infection, higher pressure definitely does a better job faster. Subacute infections like typical mycotoxins or chronic Lyme, if it’s not really that we’re going after the infection as much as the inflammation and the consequences of that infection, usually the soft chamber is enough. The degree of whether you’re going soft or hard chamber has a lot to do with how long you’ve had the condition, how acute the condition is, how severe the condition is, and then how much time we have to correct it or your access to it.

For somebody who can come to our clinic in ten minutes, sometimes it’s just go to the clinic. It’s easier. For somebody who would drive three hours to get to the nearest clinic, do some home therapy at lower pressure, but just do it more frequently so that you can get a similar response. Again, there’s so much variation, that’s why I think it’s really important that people be guided to some degree on how to do it.

I hear all the time I tried hyperbaric and it didn’t work. I did it once a week for a month or two, no change. Depending on the issue, most likely that’s just not going to cut it. You really want to make sure if you’re going after whatever that issue is, to use this tool properly to get the benefit.

Dr. Pompa:
I’m sure you cover that in your book. Melissa, you have something to say. After that, talk about some of the highlights of your book and some of the other things you cover in your book. Go ahead, Melissa.

Dr. Melissa Sonners:
About the book and about the pressure, the magic really is in the pressure. At this point you can access oxygen in a number of ways. You can even drink oxygen, which still blows me away. The magic is really in the pressure. That’s why we named the book Oxygen Under Pressure.

You can put on a green tank and get from 98% to 100%. Then it begs the question why would you want to be over 100%? Why do we want the pressure? We like to describe oxygen as a nutrient, similar to something like Vitamin C. We all walk around with pretty much enough Vitamin C. Then sometimes you might want to mega dose to help get over a cold or boost your immune system.

Oxygen is the same thing. A lot of us walk around fine, but there’s times when we might want to give the body just an extra boost to help do what it does naturally. That’s where the pressure becomes important and the influx of oxygen. You can only get that benefit through pressure. That’s a lot in the book too. Jason covers a lot of that.

Why do we need the pressure? What does it do? How does it work from a scientific level for people that want to understand that depth and also just keeping it really simple too for different conditions? How does if work for this? Why is it important?

Dr. Jason Sonners:
Many people think here’s ozone. I love ozone. I think ozone is a fabulous tool, and it has a very particular use. [41:42] is a great tool, and it has a very particular use. Hyperbaric is a great tool; again, particular use.

It’s all about what’s the issue? What’s the goal? How do we put it together? Just because they’re oxygen therapies doesn’t mean they’re working on the same system in the same way. They’re working on different systems in very different ways. In particular, it’s pressure that allows that massive increase in absorption. There’s no other way to get that level of absorption without implementing pressure.

The book is broken into two sections basically. The first half is really about chronic inflammation, chronic illness, the history of America or other industrialized nations too, just the road we’ve all been on where to so many degrees longevity has continued to grow. Centenarians are some of the largest population percentage growth these days. We’re getting this increase in longevity, yet we see quality of life suffering terribly. It goes into that. Why are we even wanting longevity without quality of life?

Dr. Pompa:
I don’t.

Dr. Jason Sonners:
How do we help fill that in? How do we help grow quality of life to match longevity? What are all the implications? What are all the issues in our world that have led us to this chronic inflammatory cycle?

It really breaks a lot of that down. It goes into how those things have created what would be considered an accelerated aging from a biologic standpoint. Even though we have longevity, which is chronologic aging, our biologic aging is much more accelerated than it should be.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely, which is so true. Most people’s cellular age, biological age is much more than their actual age, which is sad. There’s technology today like this that it literally doesn’t have to be that way.

Dr. Jason Sonners:
Then I go into what would be considered regeneration? How do we fill that gap? For us, it’s no secret. We use ketosis and fasting and other diet variation because it has a very specific effect on that exact same process. We use red light therapy. We use hyperbaric oxygen. We use detoxification because we live in this world.

When you combine that whole big picture, that’s where stem cells, that’s where that whole therapy is. We list through in the beginning of the second half of the book all the different therapies you should consider and then some resources for how to get those. Then ultimately we transition into the oxygen. You have a great book on fasting. There’s great information on some of these other therapies, and I think there’s just a lack of knowledge, a lack of understanding on hyperbaric.

The whole rest of the second half of the book is really just focused on what role does pressure and pressurized oxygen have on that whole process? What does it mean? How does it work? What’s the science behind it and the research on different conditions that help people?

Dr. Pompa:
It’s awesome.

Dr. Melissa Sonners:
It’s such an underutilized and so simply effective therapy. It’s insane. That’s why we’re committed to spreading the word on it.

Dr. Pompa:
I appreciate it. I appreciate you coming on Cell TV. I appreciate you being a health center of the future, which you are, as you just described. We have an answer, don’t we, to what the world needs. We’re not ever putting one thing on. It’s putting it all together is the brilliance that we do

I appreciate you being on that mission with me, that’s for sure. I appreciate you spreading this knowledge. Again, it’s a piece of the puzzle. We look at so many people that don’t feel well, can’t get well because they don’t have enough oxygen at the cellular level, can’t get that innate intelligence into those damaged tissues. This is part of the answer.

Dr. Jason Sonners:
You have to fix the cell to get well.

Dr. Pompa:
I’m so glad you reminded me of that.

Dr. Melissa Sonners:
We’re on our third outfit change.

Dr. Pompa:
What does the queen have to say?

Dr. Melissa Sonners:
What do you have to say?

Child:
Bye-bye.

Dr. Pompa:
There you go. We’ll leave it with that. We’ll let her say the good-byes.

Dr. Jason Sonners:
Thanks again.

Dr. Pompa:
I love and appreciate you guys. Thank you so much. Get Jason’s book and make sure you contact them. They gave the information lovingly, so I appreciate you doing that, talking to the people, leading them in the right direction. Thank you all.

Dr. Melissa Sonners:
Thank you. Bye, everybody.

Dr. Jason Sonners:
Thank you so much.

Ashley:
Well, that’s it for this week. We hope you enjoyed today’s episode. We’ll be back next week and every Friday at 10:00 a.m. Eastern. We truly appreciate your support. You can always find us at cellularhealing.tv. Please remember to spread the love by liking, subscribing, giving an iTunes review, or sharing the show with anyone who may benefit from the information heard here. As always, thanks for listening.