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

A woman comes to me and she's having panic attacks. She has B12 deficiency. I give her injection. With the first injection, her panic is gone. And I'm like, "Oh my god, what else am I missing? " Today's guest is Dr. Robert Hidea, a true pioneer in functional psychiatry and has been doing this work for more than 46 years, helping people with some of the most complex and treatment resistant cases. Now psychiatrists are looking at the brain, doing imaging, doing something called QEG, which is like a brain wave test that maps out things that we never saw before and that we're now making sense of. Talk about some of your more recent work around the whole adoption of this technology of improving neuroscychiatric treatment with QEGs. What is it? Why do we use it? We can follow and detect the information flow patterns in the brain. So we can see this and study a person's brain and then correlate with the symptoms. So when you're seeing these patterns, it tells you like which area of the brain is working, which not working, what to target, — how it correlates with symptoms, and so you can see almost like diagnostically in a way you can never see before. — Yeah. Oh, it's mindboggling. — And you're the only one doing this — to my knowledge. Yeah. — So what do you think the most common things that are causing these problems of sort of anxiety, depression, cognitive fine? — I hate that question. If you said to me, what are four things that you could tell a person to do to help themselves? I would say diet. Be careful what comes into your mind. You need to really communicate with God or the universe or whatever you think this greater thing is. Some kind of exercise, whatever is appropriate for you is really critical and I would say relationships are essential.

essential. Hey, it's Dr. Heyman. I'm so excited to share this episode with you today. But before we dive in, I want to get your help. Please take a minute to hit that subscribe button. Whether you're watching here on YouTube or listening on your favorite podcast platform, it truly means the world to me and it helps my team and I bring you this podcast every single week. Plus, I don't want you to miss a thing. So, thanks so much for being part of this community and I'm glad you're here. Bob, Dr. Hidea, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me, Mark. It's great, great to be here. Holy cow. I don't know where to start. We were the OG functional medicine neophites learning functional medicine together at the first training session applying functional medicine clinical practice in gig Harbor Washington in what was it 1998 — 98 y — and we were one of the first cohorts to go through the program there were more teachers than there were students in the class and uh we became best friends there and uh it's been almost 30 years that we've been doing this functional medicine stuff. — And I want to say thank you to you for what you've done for functional medicine. You know, I'm the scientist, the clinician working, you know, in the trenches, you know, learning and expanding and doing all this. And you're out there. — I'm just a big mouth. — Yeah. And you're doing a great job, man. job. You're spreading it to the world. And it's fabulous. This is really needed. — I want to be the mind virus that didn't fix every — Yeah. It's amazing. We know. Think back then. And we were just sort of joking before the podcast that, you know, people were laughing at us for what we're doing and were making fun of us for talking about things like leaky gut and mitochondria and the microbiome and we didn't even call it that then and we called it the gut. And now it's sort of mainstream. And just last week, I got a

call from the chief medical officer of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, or CMMI, which is the innovation hub within Medicare that looks at new solutions to chronic disease and problems. and she called me to tell me they were launching a $100 million effort with 30 different sites, $3 million or so each to study functional medicine and lifestyle medicine in the treatment and prevention of chronic disease in my lifetime. I never thought that would happen. — And in the website of Medicare, it says the word functional medicine. I'm like, wow. And we've come a long way. And you know you are a psychiatrist also an everythingist at this point — as you say accidental psychiatrist I'm an accidental internist — internist. Yeah. So like you can't look at the body without looking at the brain. You can't look at the brain without looking at the body. And you can't look at the mind without looking at the brain which is sadly what most psychiatry does. And we're in this

extraordinary moment in revolution. I mean you're 73. I'm 66. We're kind of old now but — but getting younger. — Getting younger. And we we've seen the trajectory of uh science emerging over the last decades. And now there's people we've had on the podcast like Sabani Seti and Chris Palmer talking about metabolic psychiatry and realms of psychedelic psychiatry. We've talked about with Rick Dlin others and uh you actually you know do ketamine assisted therapy which is in that realm. you know, you really got in front row seat to what's happening in the field of mental health uh but from the lens of functional medicine uh and your book way back when which I think was even before you we you — it was before functional medicine

understanding biological psychiatry — I didn't know it but I had discovered functional medicine yeah — in 1987 — that's right — and uh maybe even before because my internship there was a woman who had low potassium And I decided to give her bananas instead of a instead of kite. You know, they did they were not happy with me. — No, — that's right. Food is medicine. And you basically have seen you've seen the development of this field and how so much of our ideas and concepts around mental health are just wrong. — And that in order to treat people, you need to think about treating the whole system. And that there are ways to fix the brain that change your mind. — Mhm. And that's not something that is really done in psychiatry. And you have therapy, you have psychiatric drugs, they suppress symptoms, but they don't really deal with the root cause. And — you know, as functional medicine doctors, we are root cause specialists. That's what we do. We like dig and dig until we find the thing that's or the things that are off. And then we try to correct them. And we also then try to do things with modalities that we're going to talk about which help map out where the dysfunction or imbalances are and then how to correct them by supporting the body's own indogenous healing system the built-in repair system that we have which is available like we just don't know how to activate it. What's really tragic is that there's so many people suffering with mental health issues and they're not able to access the care. They don't know that this is even an option for them. They don't understand that there's a way out of their suffering that has nothing to do with talking to a therapist or not that that's bad, but I've certainly used them or taking psychiatric drugs which generally don't work or cause a lot of side effects or have a lot of sort of symptom suppression that don't really do the trick. — Mh. maybe you kind of walk us through sort of the the original insights that you had around how to think differently because as you mentioned before I wrote a book called the ultra mind solution in 2009 which was a good a decade more than when we first met and where I basically was seeing all these people and treating their bodies and their mental symptoms would get better their ADD or their dementia or their depression or anxiety or whatever was going on or bipolar or schizophrenia. I'm like, well, what's going on here? — Mhm. — And I realized, oh, the body is connected to the brain. — I the neck it's called is the neck. I think we missed that lecture, right? Well, they didn't give that lecture actually. — It's true. And we don't really think about, you know, in psychiatry, what happens below the neck, but that's where all the action is typically and it's systemic. So, can you kind of walk us through the kind of origin story of how you began to understand this? what maybe some of the original cases you had were and what you've learned over the last 30 years. give us sort of a bird's eye view of the life and mind of Aenda. — Okay. So, uh quick thing that happened in medical school is I took 6 months off of medical school to study medicine on my own and you know I had the two years under my belt and I took six months off and I said you know let I'm memorizing stuff. Let me let me get this right. So I took six months off and I was studying about 10 hours a day. I had a whole thing that I laid out and I stuck to it and I was, you know, very diligent and very amazing and I actually came to actually understand the body and basic physiological principles. I wasn't just memorizing. — Fast forward, I go in I'm going to be a surgeon. I have a great mentor who teaches me how to do hypnosis in 10 minutes. I'm like blown away by the results. I switched to child psychiatry. I go to Georgetown. Then I go to NIH where they were doing cutting edge research. And then I go into practice. and I'm in practice doing basically psychopharmarmacology — and I'm doing cognitive behavioral therapy which is at the time cutting edge therapy — which I learned from really one of the top uh doctors in the country. So a woman comes to me her name is we'll call her Joanne and she's 50 years old and she's having panic attacks. I'm like well this is a piece of cake. I mean I'm just you know I'll do some cognitive behavioral therapy. Uh well that didn't work. Uh, so I'll do some, you know, meramine or Xanax came out. At the time they were telling us to use 8 milligrams of Xanax. — 8 milligrams. Jeez, it's like a horse's dose. — So my working hypothesis was she's 50 years old. She has an unhappy marriage. Her only child is going off to college. She's having separation anxiety because she wants to leave her husband. And panic is basically separation anxiety where you think you're going to die and then this deep parts of the brain you trigger the adrenaline in the brain the locus surrealis gets activated and you're like I'm going to die and you have panic your brain says mortal threat. So a year into treatment I'm dancing Saturday night out of bar mitzvah and my pager goes off and look go find a phone booth back in the day right. Okay, call. Hey Joanne, what's going on? I'm having a panic attack. Okay, talk to her. And then I'm like, what is going on here? This is a year. She should be better. So Monday morning, I go into the office early to look at her chart. I had one lab at a CBC, a complete blood count. — Psychi blood test. God, that was heresy back there. — I had one turned out to be crucial. The size of her red blood cells, the MCV, the mean it was one, not really high. It was 101, the range 80 to 100. I ignored it because two reasons. One, I was taught to treat train wrecks, — right? A little out of the range. Don't bother. — Yeah. — Because I was trained in the hospital. Yeah. — They treat train wrecks, right? — Yeah. — And the second thing is I didn't know what it meant. — So I didn't. — So that was it. So I went to the National Library of Medicine. I looked it up and it says, "Oh, could be a B12 deficiency. Do a shillings test. " no longer available, but at the time I never had done it, but I did it — and she has a B12 deficiency. I give her injection. With the first injection, her panic is gone. — And I'm like, "Oh my god, what else am I missing? " Because people are in the system. They're just in the system. They go around this, you know, revolving door in the this doctor, that doctor, you know, this medicine, that med. That's when I was like, I must be missing a lot of stuff. — Yeah. — You know, and then there were a series of things where my mother-in-law was, — when the doctor says it's all in your head, it means either you're crazy or the doctor's missing something. And I would say nine times out of 10 or more, it's the doctor's missing something. — This is very true. You know, we in one sense this is very simplistic, but you have the software, which is, you know, how you think about things critical obviously, but then you have the hardware is how's the brain functioning? Does it have the nutrients? Does is the inflammation low? Are the circuitry is it working properly? Etc. Well, you got to have good hardware to deal with the software, right? If the hardware is broken, you know, then you you're not really going to get too far. You're going to be in therapy for 100 years. You're not going to get anywhere. — So, I always say it's a lot easier to get enlightened if you're not mercury poisoned or B12 deficient, your thyroid's working, and your gut microbiome is healthy. It's a lot easier to — Yeah. If it's working, like, how are you going to run the race if you know you got rocks on your back? You know, you can't do it. Well, that's an

can't you can't do it. Well, that's an amazing story. I mean, I I've you know, that's just one example. It's not that everybody with panic attacks has a B12 deficiency. That's the problem in medicine. We like, oh, you have panic attacks. Oh, that causes B12. No, that's that the symptoms in psychiatry are all based on like categorizing people according to a specific category and a disease, but it doesn't tell you anything about the cause. — Right? The DSM is uh good for insurance companies. That's they call that the diagnostic and statistical manual for psychiatry — which kind of is organized based on — categories — descriptions but it doesn't tell you about ideology or cause at all. — No. I sat you know remember Thomas Enel was head of the National Institute — National Institute of Mental Health and I had dinner with him once I said so Thomas um what do you think of the DS75 and he goes well I think it has 100% accuracy but 0% validity. I mean it's really good at categorizing people according to symptoms but not telling anything about what to do and I think this example of the panic attack is so key because there are many reasons for panic attacks that's just one and it's and when you start looking at the biology you kind of have to do a deep dive to see what's going on I mean I had a I was remember writing my book Ultramind solution I was talking on the phone some guy was fixing my stereo or something in the office and he heard me chatting he's like oh yeah I was so depressed and then I took the B complex and I was cured and I'm like well yeah if you have folate deficiency or B6 or B12 those affect your neurotransmitters and it works but it's not mean everybody with depression has that right so you kind of had that insight you saw this — yeah and then I had ser my I really now don't get me wrong alopathic medicine is great for certain things as we know I don't want to throw that out of course — but you know I saw really horrible care of my mother-in-law my father at the major hospitals in the in New York City and they misdiagnosed lost my mother-in-law. She had um mixedma and they wouldn't treat it because the reference range they didn't look at her — clinical thyroid low thyroid — low thyroid and the reference range said, "Well, no, she's not abnormal. " That was the same test we use now, but the reference range was up to 10. — Yeah. 10, right? — And she was 11. They didn't want to bother treating it like — it should be in three and a half — or two and a half even. And if you have a psychiatric problem, maybe even lower. And if you have certain genetics, even lower. Yeah. — So, it depends on that. So anyway, whatever you you're just forced to learn because there's nobody out there to help your patients. I I would send people to endocrinologists, but I'd get back nothing. So I had to actually learn myself what to do. — So you're the accidental internist. I'm the accidental psychiatrist. — It all comes around to the same stuff. — Yeah. — Cuz the body's one big interconnected. — Those things travel together. — Now, there's this whole field of metabolic psychiatry we've talked about on the podcast, which uses like ketogenic diets and nutrition more aggressively. What do you think about those? — I think it's great. It depends on the patient. You got to see what each person needs. It really does have to be personalized. And one thing, let's say this, understand this. The people should understand this. There's a book called MAD in America. And it traces the history of psychiatry in America over 250 years. And what you see is that there are fads in psychiatry and probably in medicine as well. And so you see that, you know, maybe 100 200 years ago, you know, we thought that the problems were demons in our heads, right? Yeah. Anyway, so we okay, exorcism for everybody. And then actually they started putting people in giant centrifuges and spinning them around and they said, "Oh, hey, it works. The studies show it works. " So the hospitals got together and they made these centrifuges that had like they could spin 12 people at a time. That's great. The money at the carnival. — Yeah. Exactly. And so bigger and bigger. And then after about 30 years, the science they start say, uh, you know, the study's not holding up. uh this is questionable whether it works and then out comes a new model insulin coma you know right and then we had the psychopharmarmacology revolution in the 50s right and I don't want to say meds are bad because I wouldn't want to practice without them but it's so overused — uh you know and so there's always feds there are feds so the metabolic medicine

to get to your question if you don't want so I think — for sure we're on to something here in functional medicine. There's no question about that. No question at all. But you have to also recognize um we have a chronic disease epidemic in the western world for sure. It's spreading uh and we're going to actually succeed because we're identifying now through functional medicine the root causes and it's going to permeate the system. It will it take 10 more years, 20 mill years, 30. It's going to permeate. Diseases change over time. If you remember in training, thyroid problem. Oh, thyroid problem on the fifth floor. Everybody runs up to see what it is. Let's feel the goiter. It was so rare. Now, what is it? One in five women have Hashimoto's thyroiditis. You know, I mean, the disease changes. So, as we treat the chronic illness epidemic, we may have other things to deal with. So, things do more for over time. And we have long co — right now who would have thought that was coming.

— So you basically kind of mapped out this field of biological psychiatry even before you know you kind of found function medicine but you've evolved the model over the years — and you treat people with dealing with their diet with their gut with nutritional status with detoxification with their hormones — infections. Yeah. All the all like tick infections whatever it is you have to deal with. But what I think is really interesting about your work is that you've evolved into using certain modalities which typically have not been used in psychiatry. You know, I always say this on the podcast, but like the joke is the neurologists pay no attention to the mind and psychiatrist brain. But now psychiatrists are looking at the brain, doing imaging, — doing something called QEG, like an electronogram, which is like a brain wave test — that maps out things that we never saw before and that we're not making sense of and using modalities that people aren't typically using. So I let's sort of talk about some of your more recent work around the whole adoption of this technology of improving neuroscychiatric treatment with QEGs. What is it a quantitative EEG? How does it work? What does it do? Why do we use it? How does it connect to imaging? Like what kind of imaging do we do? And what kind of things are you seeing? Essentially, the quantitative EEG is uh we put a cap on a patient patient's head. We measure the electrical output at 19 points and it goes into the computer. It's really AI driven. This is standardized against a age and sex match control through the NIH database. And what we do is we get all this information over the course of 15 or 20 minutes with eyes open, eyes closed. And then the computer takes that. — So you just you're just in there like quietly laying down and they — Yeah. Your eyes are closed. It's painless, non-invasive. You do it we do it at home all over the country actually. We send the equipment to people's homes. It takes about an hour and what we get back from that is a basically a wiring map of the brain. We can actually see all the networks in the brain. We can see the surface areas of the brain and how they're functioning. Wow. We can follow and detect the information flow patterns in the brain. So for example, dissociation, you'll see the information flow from the frontal lobe on the right side to the parietal of the brain. These are two different parts of the brain that is not flowing. there's a dissociation right and so we can see this and study a person's brain and then correlate with the symptoms and then we also do imaging like the neuroquant MRI which tells us the size of different areas small areas in the brain and we correlate all that data with the patient with their symptoms and we say okay here's what's going on this network is out of whack or this is it's working too hard or like your worry network is just like it's not resting, you know, or you have trouble with the salience network. So, you can't decide what's important. You get overwhelmed, you can't process things properly. — So, so when you're seeing these patterns, it tells you like which area of the brain is working, which not working, what to target, — how it correlates with symptoms. And so, you can see almost like diagnostically — in a way you can never see before. — Yeah. Oh, it's mindboggling. I could see if someone has a metabolic problem, — and you could tell which areas of the brain are not working or weren't working. So what do you kind of see and what do what are the kinds of patterns? So if someone's like having depression or they're having bipolar or they're having whatever. — So in depression for example, you'll see that the frontal loes are not talking to each other. The information not flowing from left to right and right to left, right? So that's something we can treat actually, you know, with a light to the brain specifically targeted to those areas. Or for example, a guy I had who had schizophrenia and I didn't know till he was paranoid. Okay, I did his QEG. I could see this tract that went from the front of the brain to the back of the brain, the visual part of the brain. And this helps you, this tract helps you assess the veilance of a person's face. And I said, "Oh, this is strange. " Right? So I treated it with a laser. We could target it. Exactly. And after two or three treatments, he says, "You know, I'm reading much faster. " And I didn't realize that whenever I look at someone, their face was getting distorted and uh they looked like they were looking at me with disgust. And it actually he says it he said this I remember him telling me this that it actually doesn't make physical sense that their face would look that way given how their body is. In other words, he could now see that is the distortion and that was gone. — Wow. — That was the basis of his paranoia. — That's amazing. — Amazing. It's in it's astounding. You see the patterns in the brain waves that correlate with different areas of the brain that are dysfunctional that are not aligned for various reasons. So what are the reasons that people's brain is not firing? I think of like almost like an arhythmia for the heart, right? So your heart rate is not normal, your brain waves are not normal. What's causing that? — Well, there's many causes obviously. So it could be head injury. You know, you could have had a head trauma you don't even remember or maybe you had one when you were a kid and that part of the brain where you had the trauma got segregated. In other words, it couldn't wire when you were adolescent and a young adult. brain rewires and it couldn't really rewire with the whole brain. So, you had to reroute all the information highways in a different way and now you don't have certain skills and you don't even know because you're just so used to it. You know what I mean? Could be that. It could be toxins. It could be certain infections have a tendency to go to different parts of the brain. Myopplasma goes to certain it goes to the basil ganglia for example. I've seen it. And then you treat the myopplasma and you actually see the QEG change over time. It's slow. If you have an infection that affects your brain function, it won't really normalize for 3 months. It's gradual but it you know uh it will normalize but won't takes a while. Different infections go to different places. Um it's strange but that's what they do. We know pandas you know strep infection with some kids you know goes into the yeah OCD in the basil ganglia and the cordate nucleus etc. So, you know, we're seeing deep into the brain in a way that we could never see. And uh you know, there's so much information in these scans. So, I can say, "Oh, this you have, you know, you have six networks that are out of balance. " Let's say, but which one of these is bothering you the most? That's where we're going to start. — Yeah. — Right. And that will help reduce your stress, enable you to function better, you know, and oh, now I can start to cope with my life. if I can organize things now, you know, that kind of thing. — So, so you're basically seeing the abnormalities, but then you have to trace back what the causes are. — Yes. We're always doing the root cause medicine — thing. Is it a gut thing tox always doing the root cause? Yep. — Right. So, you kind of can see the pattern in the brain which gives you a more targeted therapy. So, you do the root cause analysis and the treatments, — right? But you also then do other

modalities that are kind of incillary like neuro feedback, hyperaric oxygen, laser therapy which is something you kind of innovated. I'd love you to kind of talk about this hammock moment. I like what is this about and like how did you kind of get all these pieces to come together? — It was from uh God or the universe or whatever you want to call it. So, I was uh actually forced to take a vacation because we had paid for this place in somewhere in the Midwest and uh they wouldn't give us our money back. So, I was like, "All right, we got to go. " So, we took a week off and uh very sparse, very sparse. It's like nothing to do, right? So, uh just hanging out there and my daughter was with us and we went into a sweat lodge and that was unbelievable. It was great. And then the next day I'm in a hammock for 6 hours like and I'm actually at the time retired cuz I had retired in 2014. — You had? — Yeah. I missed medicine a lot but I was retired and uh I'm in the hammock for 6 hours and I'm reading a book uh Deuts I think how to heal the brain or I think that's the name of the book. Anyway, so I'm reading about Russia. In Russia they're using lasers for the brain. They snake it into the body up into the brain and they lay — through. — Yeah. Like through the arteries, through the veins. Not the arteries, but the veins, right? Into the brain, and then they're talking about how it works. And I'm like, "Oh my god, this could really help the brain. This is amazing cuz it's giving ATP. It's doing a lot of different things we could talk about, but I was blown away. " Then I'm like, "Well, I don't know. How would I even know where to point this thing anyway? " And uh the next chapter is QEGs. And I'm like, "Oh my god, this is how I would know. " And so I studied QEGs and lasers. Laser I should define is just focused light. It can be very low potency or high potency, but it's very target, very focused. So we could control the wavelength, how the frequency of the pulses and you know a lot of parameters about it. So I I'm oh I could learn QEG and then I could probably know looking at symptoms where I need to apply the light to heal the brain. — Yeah. — And so I studied for three years and I started to do it in 2017. — So you didn't you weren't doing QEGs, you just read about them and then you

started learning about — and I hired a mentor. I studied for three years. — What are they used for now in medicine? — There's a difference between EEG, electrophilogram that neurologists do all the time — for seizures and things like that. — Yeah. to see if you have a seizure or something like that. Uh and then there's a quantitative EEG which is AI. It takes all this data that you could never analyze yourself. Like all those squiggly lines that you see, correct? — 19 lines of this. You can't put that all together. So the AI actually puts it together and gives you visual patterns and network analyses and analysis of the electrical patterns and different surface areas, the whole brain really. And uh and that's the quantitative it's quantity EEG and it's all AI driven. — Wow. And you were telling me that you could basically just send out a helmet that — it's not a helmet or not a helmet. It's — or some kind of a box. It's a computer and various things. — You have to hook it up to your own brain. — You don't brain. You put the cap on. Put — the cap on. — We wouldn't want people to think they're hooked up. You just You just — put this cap on with gel. And then we have the tech who shows up on the screen. — Yeah. — And uh tells you what to do and make sure the connections are good. And then you just basically look at the screen for about 15 20 minutes depending how much time we want. And with then you close your eyes 15 20 minutes, take it off, wash your hair, pack it up, send it back to us. — That's amazing. Yeah. — So really anybody can get this. — And then you get the report and then you identify the patterns and then you design a program. But you also have to do the sort of — we do it. That's part of what we do. But then I want to I got to get clinical data, right? Know what's bothering you — and then I want a neuroquant MRI so I can correlate it. There's a strong — explain that because you're talking about waves lengths of the brain and then you're talking about structural changes through a quantitative analysis of a brain on MRI. — So the neuroquant is telling us about the structure of the brain, right? Is it big? Is it small? Is it inflamed? Right? Is atrophied? Has it shrunk? And then the QEG, the quantitative EEG that we do that we put that cap on you that tells us about function. We have structure and we have function. And then we correlate them and look at your symptoms and then we can say okay this is where we need to focus. — Are you the only one doing this? — To my knowledge. Yeah. — No one else is using laser and — there are people there's a lot of uh they call it photobiomodulation. Yeah. Right. So there are people making these helmets now right — the red light therapy and different 810 or whatever and the helmets that they put on uh for neurodeenerative disease and that kind of thing. The thing is I think that is a nonspecific like we're very targeted. We're very specific and we're very personalized. That's kind of a non-specific. So uh and I don't know I think it's definitely debatable whether that penetrates the brain. It's highly unlikely that it penetrates because — the laser — no the laser penetrates about 2. 6% of the light gets through that we know. Some people say 4. 2% about 2. 6 let's say. But the LEDs, which are basically these lights that are very weak, you're not going to get much going into the brain, but you may still get some general benefits because, you know, you have all the blood flow and the mitochondria and the cells and everything. So, you know, so this is really key. You just said a big word, mitochondria, and I think, you know, there's a lot of work in this field around mitochondrial health and the brain, whether it's Alzheimer's or Parkinson's or autism. Suzanne Go has been on the podcast has done tremendous work in understanding mitochondrial dysfunction, autism as a way of both understanding the disease and also treating it. Chris Palmer at Harvard has wrote a book called brain energy about the brain energy system and how that's so dysfunctional as a driver — and it's basically an energy deficit in the brain that leads to mental illness. And by restoring healthy brain energy through ketogenic diets and metabolic health, you can correct a lot of psychiatric problems. So you kind of come at this the same way and one of the treatments that you use the laser — actually works by increasing mitochondrial function and ATP

— right that's one of the main things that it does so when you basically put the laser pointed to a certain area the photons that light particles or waves or whatever they are go into the brain and they actually go to the mitochondria are like little batteries right and we have hundreds or thousands in every cell and they have you know four points where they function and the electrons like floating down there like a wire, right? And the mitochondria do so many things, but one of the things they do is produce energy. Without that ATP molecule, we're dead, right? So, the photon from the light actually knocks off a nitric oxide molecule and then the ATP flows through. It's more complicated than that, but the ATP now instantly flows through. Now, you have more energy. Now the brain says, "Oh, now I have energy. I can do some repair work. Fix the potholes, you know, do the work that needs to be done. " Then you have the nitric oxide bringing more blood flow. And then you have changes, Mark, that are amazing like misfolded proteins, you know, proteins in the brain that don't fold right and they cause problems and they're like viruses. They spread, right? And it actually reduces that and reverses alpha nucleon folding in a dimension protein. — Yeah. Yeah. And tower protein, you know, all these things beta amaloid, you know, and so there's the acute effects of the light, the laser, which we're directing to specific places and then there's effects that occur over time. — Basically, you do like the the QEG, the brain imaging, the functional medicine assessment and work up for causes, — right? and you design a comprehensive plan and then you use various modalities. Laser therapy is one of the key ones. It's kind of new and novel, — right? There's a lot of research on this way. — laser in the brain or just general laser in tissues, laser in body, laser in the brain. — I haven't seen anything about it used like I've seen the transcranial magnetic stimulation. Yeah. — Which is also used for depression and mental issues. But this is really different than that. Yeah, I personally think it's better because the TMS, the transraanial magnetic stimulation is basically like a shock. You know, it's a magnet that's shifting everything in one direction, then it shifts back to the other direction. So it's a little bit of a shock the cells and the outcomes although now they're modifying a little bit but the outcomes they don't they're not durable really after 6 months is a high relapse rate you know and it's a lot of money and expense and time and it's — a laser you don't see the relapse rate — it depends on the person so now if you're treating a young person well as an example um this woman the first patient I ever treated with the laser she had facial blindness this and I didn't even know she had fa what I didn't even know it existed. Okay. And I'm treating her because she has a little early dementia and you know some memory problems and she has a little bit of a temporal lobe seizure and um anyway I treat her with the laser based on the QEG and where I'm going to treat her because she's having trouble finding words. And she tells me after the first visit, like five minutes she says, "Oh my god, I can remember the I still hear her voice. face of the person I worked with this morning. " Now, she had built up a whole structure cuz she was going to people's homes to do environmental consults. So, she'd take pictures of their faces, the house, everything. Everything was documented cuz she couldn't count on her memory for FA. She'd come to the door and see someone. She would like, "I never saw you before in my life. " — And then with the laser, 5 minutes later, she says, "Oh my god, I remember the face of the woman I treated this. " — That's pretty amazing. — The woman and her husband and he had this mole on his face. And I'm like, "Wait, wait, wait. This what are you talking about? This doesn't make any sense. " — Yeah. — I couldn't figure it out. But what I figured out eventually is that the brain has a lot of cells that are kind of alive. They have a heartbeat, but they're not doing their job. I say that they're in a liinal state. They're kind of on the border between alive and dead. And if you give them the energy, they wake up. And so her cells woke up. She was cured. That was it. — That's amazing. — So I published it. It was the first ever cured acquired rognosia facial blindness. — And how long do you have to apply the laser to this head? It's a matter of how much energy you want to deliver to the so we kind of measure the area we're treating the square how many centimeters squared we calculate how much energy want we want to deliver and then I decide on the other parameters you know pulse frequency etc there's a lot of different parameters and uh and then we start slow we always get certain imaging

before to make sure there's no reason not to do it you have to make sure they don't have an aneurysm or that there's no tumor or there's You know what I mean? Uh, and then we apply it and uh, and in some people it actually really boom, they're on the road. They're done. They're — Is it 5 minutes? Is it an hour? Is it — No, no. It's maybe, it depends. It could be 10 minutes to 20 to 25 minutes. — It's a short treatment. Oh, short. — And you just need one treatment or do you need multiple? — For most things, you're going to need multiple treatments. — Like, but so, for example, for the visual thing, the guy needed three. I just did it on a guy who's 80 with Parkinson's. I did the visual thing and he needed three and that was cured. It was cured. Not the Parkinson's was treating the Parkinson, but this was a different visual track that was causing trouble. — Uh but if you have someone with a chronic uh condition than for example, one guy with Parkinson's we were doing twice a week and now we're down to twice a month. — And you combine that with other stuff like hyperbaric oxygen therapy and neurolog speech therapy. In other words, you want to it's like going to the gym, you know, the brain gym. — You're going to the brain gym. Before you go to the gym, if you want to work out your biceps, you have to eat the food and then you got to work them out, right? — This is a real revolution. Are there any other colleagues doing this? — Uh, no. Um, that's why I want to do these educational cons. I want to train uh people who need this. I have people coming from all over. — So, people listening and are curious about this, they can ask their doctor to work with you. — Yeah. The you can go to my website. and it's whole psychiatry. com and we have an educational consult model that we've been doing for about a year and basically you go to your doctor and you say cuz people feel weird asking their doctor you know so they go to the doctor and say you know you've helped me a lot or but we're kind of stuck here or I'm on too many meds or have these side effects or I want to see if I can get to the root causes of my problem and there's this guy Dr. Hidea who's doing this method. Here's his website and he does these educational consults. So your doctor stays in charge and I you come and visit me and physically in person and we'll spend probably four or five hours together and uh I'll do physical and go over all the records and we'll have the QEG uh the imaging for the structure. We have all that when you come and then I process all that. I say, "Okay, here's what I think is going on. " the root causes. Here's what's going on in your brain. I'll show you and I'll show the doctor. I'll share the screen and then I'll say, "Okay, these this is the workup. I want to confirm my hypothesis about your immune system or you know this or the other thing, right? So, you'll do these tests and when we get all these tests back, I'll sit down for about typically four to six hours, go through all the data, which probably I won't have to do in the future when your company is in my office. I'll go through all the data and I'll come out with a plan which I will make a sequential plan for the patient put it on paper present it to the patient they come back to my office for the presentation the doctor's on Zoom and then they the doctor will consult with me as you know needed going forward and the point of this is to help a lot of people around the country and to train the doctors in this kind of methodology that's my goal I want to train people this can't stay with me. Um, and just to be clear, it's all based the clinical the basic science. It's all there. The lot you just go do a AI search on photobiomodulation of the

brain. You'll see there's hundreds if not thousands. — Yeah. It speaks to an interesting thing which is that there's a lot of advances in medicine and science, but they kind of languish outside of medicine because doctors don't adopt them. — Right. — It can take decades. — Decades. Similar. — Right. I was going to mention that. — Right. For people don't know this guy, he actually learned in the late 800 1800s I think that handwashing prevented purple fever. Well, a lot of women were dying after — well all the midwives were washing their hands and the doctors and — the doctors weren't right. But the doctors didn't want to learn — and they were like when he said you know maybe we should wash our hands guys they were like oh you're a heretic. How could you imply the doctors would cause our patients to become sick and you're banished from medicine and he died in disgrace. — You know what he did? He uh sent out a letter to a 100 hospitals about handwashing and they were insensed with him. — Yeah. — And they didn't start washing their hands for 50 years. — It was tragic. — And one of our presidents died because the doctor didn't wash his hands. Really? McKinley was shot in the stomach. — And you remember Mc Bernie, the Mc Bernie's point from medical school with the appendis, you know, the appendix point where you push on the stomach. was named after the surgeon Mc Bernie who got called to see McKinley after he got shot and he stuck his finger in the wound. — Oh. — And he got infection and he died from the infection. It wasn't from the gunshot, — you know. That's how the Roosevelt became president. — And yeah, it does take a long time. I mean, you know, we've been doing this for 30 plus years. Socialist medicine around for 40 years, right? — Now only now we're seeing it in Medicare language on the website after decades. Right. It's sad because so many people are suffering and I think that you know the work you're doing to understand the biological mechanisms are really important and the kind of there's a lot of ways into repairing the brain and what but the modalities you use are actually different than using a drug because drugs typically interrupt or suppress or block some something in the body. These actually enhance the body's own repair systems like hyperbaric oxygen and neuro feedback and laser. Can you talk about these as sort of therapeutic levers that you use in

psychiatry and a little bit more about each one and how they work you the laser but I think you know it's about energy right and improvement — y so hyperbaric oxygen in a general sense you could think of it as a general tonic for the body right — because you know you're treating actually the whole body it's not targeted necessarily to a part of the body right and in hyperbaric oxygen you're doing so many things you're increasing delivery of nutrients Right? oxygen. You're actually increasing nerve growth factors, your stem cell growth, right? Capillary profusion, right? So, it's really helpful unless you happen to have besia as an infection, then it's maybe not the best idea because they love oxygen. — Besia loves oxygen, right? It lives in red blood cells and they love oxygen. So we don't do it if you have obes but we'll do it for lots of causes and we don't use it in everybody but we'll use it for people with tremend — and you have it in your office or you just send — we have it in our own we have a couple of chambers in our office and um and we uh — people have to live there near you to do it cuz it's — some people move for a few months or a few weeks 6 weeks to 3 months or even 6 months to get the treatments and uh and some people will buy a Hbot and put it hyperbaric oxygen chamber put in their house for example And then uh you know with the laser treatment has to be done in my office but as I train people in this which takes time to train them uh then I'm hopeful that people will actually be able to do it with their patients in that city where they are you know uh but right now I'm the guy who's doing that. — And are you seeing results using this sort of extra combination of things in addition to functional medicine that you weren't seeing before? uh by seeing results in situ in other words you've been doing functional medicine psychiatry for decades right so with the advent of these new technologies that you're applying or these old technologies applied in new ways — what are you seeing as is the improvement over what you were doing before first of all I can reach conditions that I could never reach so for example um schizophrenia schizopeeffective disorder Yeah. — What uh you know depends on the resources the patient has their willingness for treatment. For example, a lot of times these are infection based you know you can actually normalize things. You can treat this particular area the super marginal gyrus with the light you know which is helpful. I'm seeing people with Parkinson's disease now which I never bothered treating before. Now I can treat it with the neuro feedback, the hyperbaric and with the targeted laser. And you find this is fascinating that Parkinson's like everything else. This is a kind of a waste paper basket diagnosis is multiple types of Parkinson's. I have a guy who came to me with Parkinson's and by looking at his QEG and then taking his history, his QEG was the tip off. It turned out he fell off his bicycle twice in the same place and you could see it on the QEG. So all I had to do is laser that and he's been stable now for six, seven years without any laser, without anything. Most people aren't feeling at

their health. They're just overwhelmed by the science and what to focus on. There's a new study every week, a new supplement, a new headline, and instead of feeling empowered, you're left wondering what actually matters. And that confusion is not failure. It's just what happens when there's too much information and not enough context. And that's why we created office hours. This is your one-on-one time with me where we slow down, we make sense of the science, and we talk through what I'm actually seeing work in my practice and in my own life. Every episode, my goal is simple. Leave you with clarity and clear actions that you can implement right now for your health, for your family's health. This is our space to learn, our space to grow, and to take control of our health together. office hours is live now and I'm glad you're here. No. And are you

seeing the same thing working in like psychiatric conditions like bipolar and things like that? — So with bipolar disorder, you have to be careful using the laser. They have to be stabilized before you do it — because they can respond with too much activity and you could actually precipitate a mania. So you have to actually make sure they're on a stabilizer. If it's bipolar one, the severe type, you have to have the medicine to stabilize them for sure. bipolar too. You can stabilize most of the time with lifestyle and you know treat the infections and the hormones and all that sleep and you know all of those things. Um and then there are things like severe depression, treatment resistant depression, I mean which nothing touches. And then I have a guy who's now 45 who depressed since he's 12 and started treating with laser and uh he's been doing great for a couple years. uh hadn't done that well for a long time now. The laser has to be recalibrated now so he's not doing as well. Uh but uh you know that's uh yeah no there's amazing things that we can do and neurological things that's the other thing you know for Alzheimer's. So one of the nice things about this is like people will come to me and they're like not ready for the whole million tests and you know the four and a half hours and the whole thing. So, I could just say, you know what, I'm just going to jump in with these non-invasive things. I'm going to do my quantitative EG. I'm going to look at the volumes in the brain. I'm going to take your history and you, you know, see what's going on, do some objective testing with a computer, see where your cognitive abilities are, etc. And then I could just jump in and treat. You don't have to do anything. The neuro feedback, you watch a movie. You just watch a movie. That's all the — Don't you have to like actively engage with it? — No, you can't control it. your brain takes. — Well, I've done neuro feedback before and I had to play a video game where I basically had to use my brain waves, right? — And I had to calm myself and I can get a certain relaxed brain wave. Then the video game would work. If I was stressed, it wouldn't work. — No, this is different. Your brain, you say, I want to watch this video. — Your brain tags it as a reward. And now you're watching the video and we control the settings, right? So let's say the default mode network we want it to function in this frequency we want to downregulate it or upregulate it right so we set the bar and we say okay when your brain default mode network goes here you get to watch the movie and when it doesn't the movie gets gray or goes black where the sound goes down right so we start easy you're getting reward re all reward and then gradually make it a little harder and a little hard and it takes about six or seven sessions and then your brain says okay I know how to do this you cannot control it this is all — automatic your brain is like I want the report

report I want the movie going be a good movie wow uh and you also mentioned in some of your work about a case of a dental infection and schizophrenia so this is very interesting there's a woman I've been treating her since late 90s actually um and uh she has severe dental problems and she's just not going to go for anything. So I put her on — didn't go to dental — did not go — to the dentist. — She has so many so much infection in her mouth and as you know the infection causes changes in the brain chemistry course — right increases glutamate excytoxicity. So, she was going in and out of the hospital periodically for decades and I put her on two antibiotics to at least control the infection, you know, and she hasn't been in the hospital. She's doing great, better than she's done. And I've known her now for 26 years, something like that. Doing great and antibiotics. If you look at the genetic studies on psychiatric illness, they're called genomewide association studies, right? uh where they look at millions of people and look what genes show up in psychiatric disorders. — You know this, it's like the immune system and it's the hormones. Those are the big drivers of psychiatric — Yeah. inflammation. — Yeah. Mhm. So, we're treating the neurotransmitters, right? But, you know, we're kind of missing the boat. Again, not that these meds are not useful in — you got this woman eventually treat her dental infections. Well, she won't go, but she's stable and making doing art work and uh she's it's amazing. — So really severe psychiatric problems whether it's bipolar, you know, severe treatment resistant depression. — Mhm. Yeah. You can treat these things different. Yes. We treat like 40 different condition. I mean, you know, as you do, you know, these things all travel together, right? So what do you

think the most common things that are now today causing these problems of sort of anxiety, depression, cognitive decline? Like what — I hate that question. — Well, I mean what there's common things are common, right? So like you know there's so many there's always the outlier case, but like what are the things that really are — driving this? And I think — there's food, right? There's mental set, your mindset, right? There's hormones, there's infection, there's sleep, there's a social breakdown is a big factor, right? Antisocial media, you know, uh, you know, it's really a big problem. So the there are problems at many levels now. Now we have long co. So I would say if you said to me like look what are four things that you could tell a person to do, right, to help themselves, right? I would say diet, right? So assimilation really be careful of what you eat. Right. As you say, your fork is your best medicine. Right. Right. — Right. And also be careful what comes into your mind. What are you exposing yourself to? What are you listening to? What's on the social media? Who are your friends? What movies are you watching? What songs? Brain pollution, right? It's all information and it damages you. What? You know, we're floating in a cesspool of bad information. I don't really try not to pay too much attention to news and I just opened a you know a newspaper app and I was Rob Briner's like stabbed by his son and the Jews killed in Sydney and the people at Brown. I'm like what is going on? I just it's so depressing. I try not to pay attention. — Yeah, you can't pay attention to it. It's not good. I mean so I think you have to work on this. I strongly believe this and I think your previous uh podcast guest uh talked about this. Um you need to really communicate with God or the universe or whatever you think this greater thing is uh and be develop a relationship because the universe works with you. You work with it, it ask for help, you get help. Not always the way you want or when you think you should get it, but the universe has got you back. Got Yeah, I I think I have to be more specific because I was like, I really want to slow down some more time at home, but then I didn't say how and I got in a bike accident and busted up my feet. — Very careful. — I'm like, wait, I can't go anywhere, but it wasn't what I had in mind. Like, be specific. I want to be healthy at home. — Yeah. So, that so that's very important. So, assimilation, the food you take in, the information, the people, that's one thing. Then uh because then you have exercise, activity, and it doesn't have to be crazy exercise. I mean, you're biker, I'm a biker, right? But I've moderated and I wish I had moderated earlier even though I love it. Uh but exercise, some kind of exercise, whatever is appropriate for you. Um is really critical and I would say um we'll say relationships are essential. I think community, you know, they they say, you know, social media and the community and social media, it's not a community. People don't even know what a community means anymore. I myself recently moved from Maryland. I was at Georgetown uh Maryland and I recently moved about almost 4 years ago to New Jersey. Oh. — And I'm on the beach, right? And I have a whole community cuz I grew up with this community. I know people like people I'm walking down the street in this — Jersey Shore. Yeah. Bruce Springsteen, right? That's where he grew up. And people say, "Hey, hey doc, I don't even know who he is. Hey Doc, can I give you a lift? " It's like, and I stop and I'm doing something with my car. Another guy, there's the guy who looks homeless. He's near my car. Somebody else stops and says, "Hey, doc. This guy bothering you? " I said, "No, no, no. He's fine. He hangs around for a while. " or I go to synagogue, you know, and I have friends, I have people. I didn't realize how lonely I was actually in Maryland. I was pretty, you know, I had friends and I had my practice, my wife, my kids, and everything. But I didn't realize that I didn't have a community, you know, and so the I think people need to develop — is important. It's definitely one of the best investments you can make. — Yeah. — I always say community is medicine. Yeah, — it really is. It really is. But from a functional medicine perspective, there's a lot of things that are really going on now that are driving mental health issues like the microbiome changes, mitochondrial injury, toxins, — you know, nutritional factors, deficiencies. I mean, it's just so widespread, — the whole list. Yeah, that's really why, you know, I' been thinking a lot about the biomarkers of mental health, you know, and in function health, you know, the company I co-ounded, we do a lot of labs and we can see a lot of things that relate to mental health that people typically don't pick up on, whether it's marginal thyroid function like you were talking about or whether it's a, you know, B12 deficiency or whether it's, — you know, what's a big one? A big one is genetic glucocorticoid resistance. So um steroid corticosteroids which we make those are stress hormones right. So there are a set of genes uh five genes NR3C1 FKBP5 CR receptor 1 and 2 CR binding it be a test on that guys but — yeah I don't you know whatever it's these genes that basically when you're stress when you make your stress hormones when you're under stress whatever causing it the stress hormone goes to the cell and then it goes into the cell and knocks on the door of the nucleus the center of the cell where your genes are hiding knocks on the hey let me in. I got a message for the genes. Nobody answers the door or it takes a lot of knocks. So, you have the stress hormone, but it's like insulin resistance. You're not really reading the signal. So, now you're more vulnerable to PTSD, to depression, you know, uh even suicide — because you can't the cortisol doesn't hit the receptor properly. — It doesn't translate to the genes to tell the genes that you're under stress. So you don't make enough proteins to help you cope with the stress. — So it sort of breaks down some of the pathways that — hard to keep your body — can't respond to the stress. How do you, you know, now you have PTSD much more easily, right?

— Um, one of the things you talked about was you had like a 23 treatment resistant depression patients and you had 100% of the recovery rate. Like when you look at psychiatric meds, like if it's 30% remission, that's like I'm talking, excuse my French, like a miracle. — That's right. — And you're talking about 100%. that almost seems like uh you know too good to be true. So tell us about that. — With my second book which was the anti-depressant survival guide or program uh which was really functional medicine I had a four-page spread in the Washington Post health magazine and we had thousands of phone calls. I mean thousand. You couldn't put phone down without someone calling. So I couldn't really obviously treat everyone. So we screen people with looking for people with treatment resistant depression. — Yeah. — And uh basically people who had the resources meaning the support to do what I was going to ask them to do functional medicine. And I'm treating people and I was doing a lot of psychoarm you know I was hadn't dropped that too much. I was still doing a lot of psychop. So three years into this after the book I'm like wait a second everyone's getting better the diabetes is going away lession is going away — right — like maybe I'm lying to myself maybe it's selective attention to the positive maybe I'm forgetting the failures — so I hired a statistician and you know we're collecting data on everybody and I said you got to go over the data and tell me you here are all the patients. I've got the log. And he came back to me. He says, "No, you're not lying to yourself. " — Wow. — Everyone, the mean depression score at start. — It was in the severe range, the low severe range, they all were better by 10 months. And you could see — when doing just those combination of things and functional medicine. — Yeah. Just doing the functional medicine by four months when they're implementing the program. three months, four months, they start to get better and they steadily improve and their overall health, all the other things are getting better too. — Right. Well, that's the thing. You treat one thing, you treat everything. Right. — That's the thing. It's like we have such a siloed form of medicine where each specialty focus on their particular organ or their particular body part and their disease categories, but there's so much cross among all these diseases like they're all inflammatory most of these chronic illnesses

— right? And mitochondrial. It's We're really in a revolution in medicine, a revolution in psychiatry, you know. Um I can't believe you're still going at it this hard. — I you know, I can't stop. I love it. — Yeah. It's amazing. — And there's no end to what we can learn, right? — No. And we were just like at the beginning. We were the OG kind of we thought we like I remember when I took that I was like, "Oh, this is such an established field. " I'm like we were kind of the few guys who kind of started to poke our nose around — and uh we've been doing this for so long. And the reason we keep doing it is because it works, right? Like you just see miracles. I always say every day I get to be witness to miracles. — Things that I never thought were possible to cure or treat in medical school and things that you know people suffer from that they don't need to and that we have answers for. They're just not getting them. — And then there's prevention, right? You know you have a problem in your family history. There's vulnerability. you know, correct your diet, exercise your get rid of the toxic influences in your life, you know, and uh prevent I think about prevention uh I is treatment. In other words, we kind of define treatment and prevention sort of separately. — But I think if you do the same things you would do for prevention, you're also going to treat the problem. — Like if you eat healthy, you exercise, you sleep well, you get Yeah. your diabetes is going to go away, — right? Right. — You know, right? — Your autoimmune disease is going to go away if you do all the right things. If you do the things to get healthy, — then automatically I always say when you create health disease goes away as a side effect. And it's think of it this way also if you have say you're uh working with someone in functional medicine and you know you're correcting your diet. Well, guess what? Your kids are going to see. — Yeah. — And you're going to be helping generations. Right. So it's I think really we are it's a revolutionary time. people are taking control of their health more now. They see the system is broken. It's not totally broken. There's a lot of good stuff going on, but it's very limited with this chronic disease model. And what are

you seeing among your colleagues in psychiatry? Are they friendly to these ideas? Are they resistant? Are they like, "You're a quack for get out of my space. " You know, like I think, you know, I get this uh thing from the New Jersey board, right? And they're new ideas in medicine. let's talk about B vitamins. And I'm like, all right. Well, that's a start, you know, but like I might at this rate of the party — at this rate, we're looking at a 100red years. I'm like, I want it, you know, — you want it now. — I want it now. And uh — and the other thing is not everyone has the bandwidth, Mark. You have the bandwidth. I have the bandwidth. You have the curiosity. You know, you want to get to the truth of it. You get to the root of it. And you're just going to follow the science. You're going to follow what the truth is. You're not wedded to a model. I'm not wedded to functional medicine. If something else comes back out, that's better. Of course, great. — Wedded to the truth. — Yes. Exactly. But a lot of people are they're too algorithmic in their thing. They're too rigid. They're afraid. They don't have the bandwidth. They can't handle the anxiety of not knowing. Right. Uh but we live in uncertainty. You know, that's life. — Mom, thank you for all you've done for the last decades to advance this field. you were kind of the OG functional medicine psychiatrist when there wasn't any. It was Abraham Haer who was we both got to know who was a sort of pioneer really of functional medicine. — Well, you know, he told me with my second book, I'm very I was very honored. He told me he said I had lunch with him at a functional medicine conference actually. — I think I might have been there. — Yeah. Yeah, I think you were there. — And he said to me, he says, "Bob, you wrote the book I wanted to write. " — Yeah. — He saw this. Well, he just for those listening to kind of close up, he was, you know, a psychiatrist in Canada back in the 50s and was a kind of a colleague of Lionus Pauling and was sort of experimenting with schizophrenia by giving them high doses of certain vitamins and believed that there were certain pathways that were stuck that he could unlock and that led to the development of sort of this field and in general function medicine. In fact, Lionus Pauling went on to write in 1969 a key paper in Science magazine called Orthomolelecular Psychiatry, which was sort of in a sense the original paper describing how we use nutrition to optimize your biochemistry to change your brain and your mood and your cognitive function. It was sort of so far ahead of its time. That was like 1969. — But, uh, I remember Abram Huffer. He was quite a guy. Uh, and I'm so glad I got to meet him. And I actually got to meet Lionus Pauling, too, back in the day. Yeah, he was uh he was um yeah, he won the Nobel Prize for folding of proteins but also um for or the peace prize for the nuclear testban treaty in the '60s. Yeah. So he prevented the above ground testing of nuclear weapons

and um n he was part of the whole movement that I was a part of which was in medical school called the international physicians for the prevention of nuclear war and I got to kind of hear him speak. It was pretty inspiring. — Wow. Great. What a journey. Yeah. — Yeah. Amazing. So, thanks Bob for being on this journey with me. It's been great. And uh anybody wants to know more about your work, find out more, where can they find you? — So, they can go to like it's like Whole Foods, you know, only it's Whole Psychiatry. — Okay. — Uh and we have there's a lot of information on there, videos, there's all kinds of information. And then there's a contact form and uh if you want an educational consult you know look for a functional medicine doc in your area and uh you know contact us and we'll help you find someone if you can't find somebody. We have a network that we're building and uh and then we'll meet typically we'll meet on Zoom for 15 30 minutes make sure this is right for you uh that's the right fit and that I think I can be helpful and then we go from there. Well, I know I'm

going to get my QEG. I want to see what's going on in my brain. That's what's happening. — I you know, I do it regularly and uh I don't know if it's because I do the laser on myself, by the way. And I don't know if it's that or 25 years of mountain biking, but my doctor told me my brain looks like a 55year-old. — Amazing. — Which is Thank God. — I can only hope. Thanks for being here and thanks for coming all the way, Austin. And — it was a pleasure seeing you, Margaret. It's been too long. If you love that last video, you're going to love the next one. Check it out here.