98. Functional Medicine Approach to Categorizing Toxins and Understanding Detoxification | Wendie Trubow, MD, MBA

Hello everyone, I'm Dr. Darsha, and I'm Dr. Altamash Raja, and welcome to Medicine Redefined. A podcast where we will explore the often overlooked but necessary components of health, what we consider to be the fundamentals. We will investigate topics and practices that can give you and your patients the best chance to optimize a healthy lifestyle. It's time to move the needle forward and put the health back in healthcare. Our guest today is Dr. Wendy Trebo, a functional medicine gynecologist that has been practicing functional medicine since 2009 in the Boston Massage She Sits area. Through her practice called Five Journeys, she is helping women optimize their spiritual health, work, home, and relationships. She's the author of a book called Dirty Girl, Ditch the Toxins, Look Great, and Feel Freaking Amazing. And in this episode, that's exactly what we're going to be talking about, Toxicity. If you are a recurrent listener, you might have noticed that we've been talking about Toxicity more and more. We discussed it generally with Dr. Burkhart, and even specifically when we talked about the residents of East Palestine, Ohio, and how their water has become contaminated. But this will be an interesting episode because we're going to be talking about the functional medicine approach. We're going to categorize Toxins, how we need to understand them, how they enter our body. But then we're also going to be talking about how we get rid of them and how long the process can actually take and why we need to do that with a safe provider. Now stick around to the end of this episode and you're going to hear a lot of the resources that I talk about so that you can even learn more from Dr. Trebo. All right, without further ado, let's get to this episode. Dr. Wendy Trebo, how are you? I'm great. Thanks for having me on. Both of you. This is great. It's our privilege. You know, during my research, when we were trying to figure out which way we could take this conversation, just because you seem like a person who can wear many hats and you can talk about so many different things, I suppose the places start is really, I'd love to kind of learn about your journey, kind of going through the medical specialty that you chose, and then also how did that pivot into a lot of things that you talk about just trying to general wellness and toxicity, et cetera, which the bulk of this conversation is going to be, but you know, it's an interesting pivot, and I'm curious to see what point that was and why. Yeah, so let's back up. I come from a family of physicians and never thought I would be a physician ever, period ever. Went into sales. I was selling multimedia, like slides and videos and my clients were asking me medical questions. Wendy, can I ask you a question? I was like, I was 22. I'm like, sure, what do you want to know? And they would ask me their medical questions. And I'd be like, I'm 22 years old. I'm your sales rep for a video. You're buying a video for me. And they're like, I know, but you just feel like you should be my doctor. I'm like, OK, the universe is speaking to me. So I went to med school, and my dad is an OBGYN. So like within the first month of school, I went to the head of the dean, and I said, so listen, my dad's an OB. There is not a snowballs chance in a warm place that I'm ever going to be an obstetrician or surgeon. So how about you just let me skip those rotations? And I, because I'm going to do like pediatrics or geriatrician, geriatric medicine. She's like, yeah, that's not how it works here. But thanks for asking. Nice to meet you. And I was like, OK, so then I put OB at the very end of my rotation because I was never going to be an OB. And then I delivered a baby and was like a junkie for my next hit. And I said, OK, that's it. And at the time, not knowing now, then what I know now is I'm not constitutionally set up to be awake for 36 hours and still be a functioning human being. That from a constitution standpoint is a total mismatch. I'm like strong like a mouse thing. You need to be strong like a bull to do obstetrics, and I am not strong like that. By the end of my call, I'd be like, yeah. So but anyway, I went into OB because it had everything I really love to do. I love to care for women. I love to do surgery. I love delivering babies. I love being in the office. I love the variety. It was primary care. It was reactive. It was interesting, right? You know, I got to see women of all ages. So I went into OB and GYN and it practically killed me. I actually was in OB for nine years and really was not doing well. And so my husband said to me after the birth of our second child, he said, so why don't you go see my mentor who is a functional medicine, like the founding father in Boston, a functional medicine. That was my husband's mentor and he said, go see him and I said, okay. So he did this massive workup on me and said, ultimately, I had celiac disease and a whole slew of food sensitivities. That was my entry into functional medicine and it won 80 fixed my health, you know, like just huge massive and I'm happy to talk about the personal stuff in my story. I'm happy to share everything and anything. And that was the moment where I went, well, I want to do that for people, right? I want to alter their health in a profound way. And so my husband was already in practice at a place that he was going into practice at a place that was like open to functional medicine and then he opened, I guess we opened our own place in 2008. And I gave notice in 2008 over Thanksgiving weekend because I was like, I got to do this. This is who I meant to be because I had already experienced the benefit of it. And so I gave notice on Monday, I found out Tuesday, I was pregnant with our third child and had like this panic of what did I do? I just left my page job for my unpaid job and it all worked out. But it was the moment where I realized that there was more possible and how I could care for people and the difference I could make and that there are a lot of people with good hands. And if you leave women and babies alone, most of the time they'll deliver themselves. Like you're just really there to make sure nothing goes wrong or intervene when it does. So there's a lot of people who could do that. And there were very few people who could listen the way I listened and get to the root cause and fix the problem and transform people's health. So I left obstetrics in 2009 and went into 100% functional medicine. That's a bold move. Yeah. It was terrifying actually. I bet. I think this term, we've had multiple functional medicine providers on before and I think it's a word that can be a powerful and a lot of people are familiar with that concept. But in your definition as somebody who practices routinely, how would you define it for someone who's maybe never heard of it? Yeah. I think it was named because it's a rip on how typical medicine is that typical medicine is relatively dysfunctional. The system is relatively dysfunctional. And I think it was named to be, you know, the opposite like this is functional. So really functional medicine is all about figuring out what the problem is and fixing the root cause. For example, your headache is not a Tylenol deficiency. And your asthma is not an albuterol deficiency. And your high blood pressure isn't a metoperol deficiency. Like your problems aren't actually deficiencies of medication. Here are indications that something's wrong. Those medications mask the symptoms, but they don't fix the problem. So functional medicine aims to understand what's the problem and what's the right fix for the problem. May or may not include medicine depending on what your body needs. Yeah. Wendy, I am curious about possibly your work up right from the dysfunctional and traditional healthcare standpoint. And then you were diagnosed with celiac disease. You know, as a functional, as a future functional medicine provider, you know, I would love to get certified. I'm just curious to understand what was the difference between the traditional system that you went through and then going to go see this provider and you know, your, your husband's mentor. What was that like? Very different experience. So first off, you know what it's like, I think I more male than female in terms of, I never went to the doctor and complained, but I went for my annual and she like, how sorry? I'm like, I'm tired. Oh, I'm so tired. And what got stepped over was that I had had 20 years at that point of iron deficiency, but I was pan-deficient. So my vitamin D was extremely low. My magnesium, my iron, my calcium, my minerals were all low. I took iron and nothing happened and nobody thought to say, well, why is that? So when I, when I, so my typical annual workup would be like a little bit of lads and they go, yeah, you're still in the amictique, some iron, I'm like, okay. And then when I went to the functional medicine doctor, I had blood work that looked at all of my minerals, nutrients, hormones. I had blood work that looked at food sensitivities. I had stool testing to look at the balance of the microbiome and what was happening in my gut. And I did a saliva test for adrenals. So I did a massive workup. And that was really only phase one because after phase one, I had a tremendous alteration in my health. I got so much better that I didn't even go on to phase two. I did phase two on myself many years later. So it was just a very different approach. It wasn't like, okay, you got a problem, see you in a year, it was, we need to understand what's happening in your body because you don't, by the time I got diagnosed, I was only getting out of bed because I was the sole breadwinner and that, you know, I needed to go to work. That was why. A couple of things that you mentioned, I want to follow up on, you know, I love the fact that you talked about when you were mentioning, you know, medication is not being a deficiency. I've never heard it like that. I really like that. I might steal it from you. Carat it. But you also mentioned at the end of that, that the functional medicine approach, the root cause, searching for the root cause approach, may or may not include medicine. I think it can be a polarizing topic and, you know, a lot of people that I follow on social media, social media is interesting and people will just kind of throw labels at functional medicine providers. And you always hear stories of patients who are just doing $100,000 work up for something that might not be clinically meaningful or couldn't get significantly in any way, right, with their health. And you also talked about how we're not trying to mass the symptoms, which I love that. And we're trying to fix a problem. I think the issue does become though that there are some times that we don't quite have the fix because we don't understand the science like truly, I don't mean in the traditional model. I think even, you know, as much as we'd like to, some of the things are kind of on the cusp, some of the things are novel, right, in our world, we talked about orthobiologics a lot. And the science just hasn't quite developed yet, right? And I love this concept of trying to understand deeply, but also this idea of shared decision-making where you tell the patient what the science shows, which your experience is, what the best, you know, external evidence is, and then coming together with a plan, and considering all types of harm, right, the psychological harm of knowing, not knowing, psychological harm of doing extra tests, the financial harm that might come from the additional tests, et cetera, et cetera. And then together we make that decision. The challenge becomes is like when somebody has, let's just take like a really advanced cancer, right, or maybe even like stage two cancer of a specific type of cancer, which might be amenable to chemotherapeutics, right? And then the patient says, well, it's a doctor or somebody at fault in social media said that, you know, I don't need that, and I'm going to abandon that and I'm going towards herbs and whatnot or whatever insert approach, alternative approach. And I think that's what gets the physicians and the really heavy scientific-minded folks excited, not necessarily in a good way, and gets upset because I think a lot of people physicians, no matter what we say, we do go into it for, quote unquote, the right reasons. And we want to help people and something that particularly upsets me is when people like that who are vulnerable, extremely like cancer states and that kind of stuff, get advantage taken of, right? And so I know that's a long way to get my question is, I suppose when you have people come at you from that perspective, what are your thoughts on that? It's so interesting that you ask me that. So I have a couple patients in my practice who have either advanced cancer or aggressive cancer. And let me talk about the patient with aggressive cancer. She's 31 and had breast cancer, which it's real, like it's really increasing and initially had a lumpectomy. So she had the area that was of concern removed and opted not to do any other treatment. Within eight months it had recurred. So it's particularly aggressive. At that point she opted to do, and we talked about it, but she opted to do a mastectomy. And I said to her, you're never going to regret doing a mastectomy, but you might regret not doing a mastectomy. So this is no longer at the lumpectomy stage. If you've recurred within eight months, you have a particularly aggressive form of cancer. So you're going to want to be aggressive in your response. Now what I said to her at the intake, which was about nine months ago, was when you have a mechanical problem, and I'll refer to cancer as a mechanical problem, because cancer often needs to be excised removed. It's mechanical, meaning it's not energetic. I don't want to go down the rabbit hole of, is it energetic, is it electrical? Like there are certainly, it has those things, but you have a mechanical issue. You want to take the mechanical problem out, fix the mechanical problem, and then what you want to work on is, how do you get the system optimized so that you don't recur? How do you get the system optimized so that you can stay cancer free? But you first need to get rid of the cancer, right? And then from a functional medicine, so she had a mastectomy, she had the chemotherapy and radiation, she had the full thing. And through the treatment, what we did was we supported, hold on, let me take a little diversion, ultimately, because there is data that supports that high dose vitamin C will be toxic to cancer cells. And there is data that shows that high dose of marijuana will be toxic to cancer cells. So there are what we would consider to be alternative treatments that have good data behind them, but that's not for everyone. Okay, so let me go back to the main thing that I was talking about. So with the patient I'm referring to, I supported her through that whole process and through the process, what we were working on was, do you have toxins? Because if you have toxins, they create the state of massive inflammation. And cancer when you think about it is the end result of uncontrolled inflammation, right? It's the uncontrolled growth of something that stemmed from inflammation. It's an inflammatory process. So what we've been working on this whole time in between her chemo and in between when she feels well enough and doesn't, and now that she's done with the chemo radiation, the surgery to reconstruct her breast tissue, now what we're working on is, how do we get rid of that super high level of mercury that she has and the multiple environmental toxins she has and the multiple strains of mycotoxins? Because those are all individually inflammatory and she's someone who's demonstrated from a genetic and lifestyle standpoint that she's particularly vulnerable to that, right? So yes, I don't believe in praying on people. I think that's terrible. I think if you have cancer, you're going to want to be in the mainstream and utilize functional medicine as the adjunct to support you, make you feel better. You know, hyperbaric oxygen is great for your cells, getting a sauna. So there's a lot of ways that you can help your body, but first, if you have a mechanical gliss, you need to treat it. That's a lot. No, no, no. Thank you for that. And I appreciate the real life case study as well as kind of referencing, you know, what some of the data shows in terms of these alternatives, you know, it's interesting. I don't even look at them as such, you know, I come from, I guess, you know, Asian background and maybe more Eastern culture and so a lot of my family will talk about these Eastern medicine versus Western medicine philosophy. And to me, it's just medicine period, right? And it's just it all is, it's the umbrella of medicine. And it's just good. There's this thing in my opinion is good medicine and bad medicine, which can also be subjective, depending on what you talk to you, but again, I don't really look at it as Eastern versus Western. And so all of those, I think are fair game and the kind of approach that you took, you brought up the concept of toxins, something that you're extremely passionate about. You highlighted some of them that are worth investigating and addressing. But when globally people are talking about toxins, toxicity, certainly in medical school, we learn about these acute toxicity things that you need to take care of, right, in reverse. But generally people are talking about these low level toxins that can, for lack of a better word, infect our lives and cause a lot of these chronic illnesses inflammation. And I suppose maybe taking a step back, we should think about what is it that we need to know, generally when you're talking to the masses, could be men, women, both, or just women, since that's more of your area of expertise. And then why are they important? Why should everybody be considered of that for themselves? Okay, there's a massive question. That sounded like one of those really lovely, you know, how big is the problem? Questions? And it's a massive question. So let's call. I know you're up for it. I know, hit me. So first thing that I say to people is ignorance is bliss and knowledge is power, pick where you live on that spectrum. Oh, that's good. Okay, you could steal that too. Have it. That's fire. I love that. So you have to understand, you know, every single person who comes to my practice, I'm going to offer them toxins evaluation because in my opinion, what I've seen, that once you've dealt with the gut and you've dealt with food sensitivities and you've dealt with blood sugar issues, if you're not feeling freaking amazing, you have a toxins issue, particularly for people who have diabetes, if you have diabetes, you want to look at toxins. If you have heart disease, you want to look at toxins. If you have cancer, you want to look at toxins. If you have weight that you cannot get off, you want to look at toxins because they're stored in the fat. And if you can't lose the toxins, you can't lose the fat because your body knows if you lose the fat, it's going to be toxic. So I think we should start from the beginning, right? And just look at basic issues. I think you guys are going to be into this because it feels like you're going to like this. So every year, we produce thousands of chemicals, thousands and most of them are not registered. Most of them are not tracked and most of them are not evaluated. They're just out there, you know, somewhere between 500,000 and 2 million chemicals. Take your poison because they're not registered, so we don't really know how many there are. What we do know is that the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, and I were the same age. We were both born in 1970 and they are tasked with overseeing toxins. But only when a company says, hey, I think there might be a problem. So they're not just going out and looking for trouble. They're responding when someone says, I think there might be trouble. However, if you are producing a chemical that's critical for one of your processes, why on earth would you report that? You have no incentive. But okay, people have reported and the EPA is in the process of evaluating. They can evaluate approximately 400 products with any given year. But remember, we're producing thousands of them every year. And they've banned nine chemicals since they were born in 1970. And I know, right? Nine chemicals. And the last one was in 1984. So I'm not even clear if either of you was born in 1984, right? You're like, were you born? No. So it's your whole life you've been here and the EPA hasn't banned a chemical. But we know that there are thousands of chemicals that are super toxic. Think about, think about what just happened in Ohio where there was a trained irrelevant. And people are being exposed to toxic chemicals. We know there's a toxic, but they're not banned. So the problem is massive. And then when you take the next step, a lot of this relies on ease of use and plastic. And we are dependent on plastic. If you, there's this great New York Times article where the guy tried to go a day without plastic. And he had something like 260 violations. And there were things like he couldn't buy a piece of fruit because there was a plastic, right? A sticker that tells you the number, so he couldn't sit on the train seat because it had plastic. So I'm looking around my office and my microphone has these plastic bands around it. I'm sitting on a chair that's not 100% leather that has plastic. There's plastic in the frame around my mirror. There's plastic in the in the ring light. It's inevitable, but all of these plastics and chemicals off gas and they alter our hormones and they alter our body's ability to be balanced. So it's everywhere around us. We paint the room. We get VOCs, volatile organic compounds. We do construction. We get warriors doing construction on homes built before 1978. And you're getting exposed to likely lead paint because the paint changed in 1978. But anything built before then has paint in the wall. It has lead in the walls. So the ways in which we're being exposed are just non-stop. And even in my lifetime, the ability to dye our hair, make ourselves up, have beauty in ways that we never would have expected 50 years ago have altered the phones we use. Everything has chemicals. So the new car smell, 300 chemicals. So everything is exposing us. So the problem is massive and then the question is like what do we do about it, right? Or maybe the question is do we want to drill into what are the specifics on your body, in your body, and around your body? Do you want to drill into that? So that's what I was going to ask, right? So you brought up a lot of pollutants from the environment, you know, water and things. Is there a way to categorize it? And you mentioned micotoxins, for example, right? So we're looking at kind of organisms, pollutants, how do you break it down for your patients? Yeah, I very early on, it's so funny, so we wrote the dirty girl book and my husband, when I started to talk about this, he was like, I don't know, that's too simplistic. I'm like, no, I promise you, this makes sense. So when you think about toxins, think about what are you putting in your body, okay? That is the water you drink. And when you think about water, 1989 study showed from Massachusetts, go Boston, that one out of every six deaths was attributable to either a problem with air or water. That was in 1989. We're way past that because we've gotten much worse. So air and water are critical, but we're sticking with what's going in you. So water. If you're drinking from a single-use plastic water bottle, every time you use it, there's two major issues. One, you're drinking hormone disrupting chemicals. And two, it never degrades in the environment. So you've left a present for your offspring that's pretty nasty because they're going to have to deal with the problem and it's never going away. Then you also want to look at the food that you're eating because if you're eating non-organic food, it inevitably has been sprayed with some type of herbicide pesticide or insecticide. Glyphosate is the most commonly used herbicide in the world. It's used doubles approximately every seven years. It was originally manufactured as a key-lating agent. It was discovered in like 1970-ish and has become the number one herbicide. But in 2010, it was patented as an antibiotic and any listener knows an antibiotic kill stuff. But here's the problem. Glyphosate doesn't kill indiscriminately in your gut. It kills the bacteria. What it does is it's really cool. It interrupts something called the Shikamate pathway, which is the pathway that you go from ingesting a substance to making your core amino acids. It doesn't impact our gut, my group, our gut directly, but what it does is it impacts the bacteria in our gut and unfortunately the good bacteria are the ones that rely on the Shikamate pathway and bacteria like salmonella do not rely on the Shikamate pathway. The good guys are getting killed by this antibiotic called Glyphosate that we're eating and the bad guys are not killed. So here we are. We're throwing off our gut bacteria, but remember we rely on them for our serotonin and for production of minerals and nutrients and for communication. There's, we're outnumbered 10 to 1. Cells in our body versus cells in our gut. There's 10 times more cells in our gut than there are in our body. So we're totally outnumbered. It's this parasy, not parasitic, but this symbiotic relationship. Okay. Anytime you're eating a grain, it likely has mycotoxins because they get moldy when they're sitting around. Coffee is very moldy. So grapes are moldy. But then if you're drinking something like wine, you get this double whammy because it's concentrated glyphosate, it's sugar that feeds the Candida in your gut and it's a toxin. So that's what's putting in you and we have to talk about alcohol because it's a toxin. Like think about it. If I said to you, guys, I have the best drink for you. It's a toxin. Okay. And it's going to impair your liver's ability to do its job and it's going to make you feel terrible tomorrow if you drink enough of it. Would you like some? You'd be like, who is this crazy woman who's trying to kill me? Except every time you take a drink, that's what you do to yourself. So the things you put in your body can help or harm. So then the solution is no more single use plastic water bottles, eliminate or to significantly jukewarm alcohol, which is totally unpopular and most people stop listening to the podcast at this point. So I apologize for your listeners. And then the third is wherever possible, aim for organic and minimally processed because the more you process your food, the more inflammatory it gets. That's in your body. Now on your body. You're both guys. So I'm going to make a broad generalization and say you probably don't put as much on your body as the women in your lives because we wash our hair, but then we have to condition it and then we have to put stuff in it to keep it lying flat and then we have to heat it. But by the way, we have to color it and then we have to do our faces and all the products and you know, our skin needs to be smooth and we need to get our nails done and we should get a massage every once in a while and our clothes need to be dry clean. So by the time we left the house, we've been exposed to like 250 chemicals, which is ridiculous, ridiculous every day. And that's just the low hanging fruit stuff. So the things you put on your body are the things that are touching your skin or that you're putting on your skin. So that's products and clothing and those because your skin is your largest organ, it can either detox you or talks you up. All right. I want to pause because this has been a lot. We have one more category and that's a massive category. Questions, comments, concerns. No, I think everything you're thinking makes sense and I'm liking this breakdown. I think it logically makes sense for me and yeah, I love it. Okay. Last category. Worst of all around you because some of it's in your control and some of it's not. So this is where the air quality comes in. And if you live near a farm, a highway or a golf course, you're getting exposed to environmental toxins unwillingly because the highway puts out hundreds of chemicals, especially as the tires hit the pavement that degrades the plastic. It's airborne, it's micro particles, but also the exhaust from cars. And then the golf course because for some reason, they like the golf course to look a particular way. So guess what they spray? They spray a boatload of glyphosate and it becomes airborne and you get that glyphosate. And then they have to spray a lot of glyphosate because nature likes variety. And golf course is like a monoculture, which is one type of grass that looks exactly the same. But nature doesn't like that. So nature tries to make it more diverse and man is like, no, we're not doing that. We're going to make it one. So that's not so good for us or the earth. Then if you live near a farm and it's not organic, they're also spraying herbicides, pesticides and secticides and it's drifting and you're getting exposed to it. So around you would be chemicals from factories, the off-gassing from factories. But this is also where furniture, room fresheners, your bed, anything that's in your environment comes into play, your construction materials, your car, what you spray on your grass to keep it nice and clean, it just kind of goes on and on. And it's anything around you that can make you sick. This also includes EMFs, electromagnetic frequencies because some people are particularly sensitive to them. So this is harder because this is where you're fighting the battle. It's manageable to level up around your beauty products as you run out of things. You just say, okay, I'm going to go to environmental working group, get the cleanest possible thing. But how do you clean your air, right? Walking to the car, you can't. So you can control the space that you occupy at work and you can control the space at home. If you live near a highway, a production plant, a golf course, or a farm, I would say maybe don't open your windows during spray season, right? Or keep your windows closed more so that you can control the air quality because that, again, is implicated in one and every six deaths and that data's old is probably worse. Again, so I'm just going to recap here. So there's in you category, right? So that's the water, the food that we ingest. Possibly even some cosmetics, I guess. You can put toothpaste, tampons, things like that. We haven't even talked about for women, vagina actually being a very permeable area in the body that can really absorb a lot of these toxins, but we can save that a little bit later. Then you're talking about on you. So that's more the cosmetics. And again, primarily women possibly be more effective than men, just given beauty, all those kind of things hair. And then it comes to the things around you. So now this is the battle that we're all trying to fight, which is tough. And we rely things like on the government to kind of help us out here, but not to make a political. I think everyone will get the message when I say that you are responsible for your health, you know, when I say that not to be critical of an individual, but to just realize that, hey, this is why we're having this podcast. This is why we're talking about this so that we can really take control because no one really is out there looking for you. So okay, awesome. Love that recap. I'm guessing the next logical step in this pathway would be to understand how, I mean, you talked a little bit about how we understand symptomatically that we might have it. But are there certain tests that you would look at at this point? How do you go about with your patients to see whether they have a high toxic load? Yeah, I love this. So when you think about evaluation for toxins, you know, most people, unless they stroke my 31-year-old who's strolled in with cancer, I was like, we're going to toxins for you. We're not going, we're going, we're going directly to the, the complicated stuff. Back up a step. You can't deal with toxins until you've dealt with the foundation of your life. Toxins are not the foundation. Toxins are the top of the pyramid. So here's toxins, and then here's all the other stuff which you have to start with. So when someone comes in, we're evaluating, excuse me, evaluating your adrenal health, minerals, nutrients, hormones, detox, ability to detox, liver health, gut health. We're evaluating all of that. Are you sleeping? Are you a stress ball? Do you move your body? What are your relationships with others and yourselves like? All of those things are your platform foundational health. And only when we've optimized those, keeping in mind that the gut's going to be irritable if there's microtoxins and if there's metals involved, the gut will, you won't be able to get a full handle on the gut. You won't be able to get a full handle on Candida if there's metals. But you'll be able to get 80% better, right? Optimize the foundation. Let's talk about toxins. So toxins, I'm always listening for like, what's going on for you? Do you have mercury fillings? You guys don't have mercury fillings because they eliminated them before you had teeth. But a lot of people who are born in my generation had mercury fillings or their parents had mercury fillings. And when you are born and every one of us has been born to someone who's female, we get 50% of our mother's toxic burden at the time. And then if we're nursed, we get even more. So pregnancy and nursing is a detox event for women and a tox up event for children. So we all get what our moms gave us, that's one. So what I'm listening for is I talk to people is, you know, if you put people in a big broad category, there's a lot of overlap. So I'd rather not say, oh, this symptom is this toxin because there's so much overlap. What I'd really much rather do is say, okay, how would I distinguish it out? So there's four tests that we do. There's heavy metals, that's a pre-test, which is just a baseline, get up and pee, and then a provoked test or something called DMSA. And that pulls metals out of your bones and your organs and your brain and your fat and binds it so that you can measure approximately what's there. It's not an exact science or holy grail, but it gives you like a, yes, you have it and it looks like it's a high level or, hey, nothing's showing up. In which case, if you're sick as sick as, you know what, then we might want to repeat that just to make sure that it's real. So metals is one. Do you want me to talk about specific companies? Sure. Okay, so I, in our practice, we're using doctor's data, which is just the one we use. It's cheap, it's easy, and then we get the DMSA from a compounded pharmacy. So you have to see a physician for that. You can't just sort of roll off the street. And for microtoxins and environmental toxins as a group, which is like a 17 page report and glyphosate, we're using great planes laboratory. They have a bundled kit. You can do it. It's about $660. You can do it separately and each, it's like 300 to 30 and 120, but they give you a discount if you do it together. So we tend to do that. And then we haven't talked about Lyme. Lyme typically falls into that top of the, top of the tear unless someone's really screaming that they have Lyme and look like a Lyme patient with recurring relapsing fevers and migraining joint pains and brain fog and severe fatigue. That would move them up to doing that in the foundation. So we're looking at, you know, if you have done all the foundational behaviors and you're just not amazing, then we're going to look for toxins. Or you're someone who's done all the foundation and now you really want to make sure that you're optimized to prevent or to lower the risk of Alzheimer's, dementia, degenerative diseases, autoimmune diseases, cancer. If you want to pull off your risk, you got to pull off the toxin. So we'll do the evaluation for those people too. I love this conversation, optimization, right? My wife always makes fun of me. She was like, when we were even thinking about coming up with a name for the podcast, I think she would just take jabs at me. Something with optimization all the time because I think that's where we live, right? And I like this conversation for the three of us and a lot of other people who understand the foundation speech that you spoke about, the pyramid that you pointed to. And since we're talking about the how and the technical aspect, I also want to ask you about the how and getting people to buy in for that aspect of it, right? So a lot of times I will hear friends, family, whether it's something they see in social media or the news media outlets, what not, they'll come at it with this inverted pyramid. Again, toxins being at the top of it, now it's at the bottom. Something a previous guest said, Dr. Austin Perlmanal is when I asked him, when we're talking about exercise, nutrition, sleep, all that kind of stuff, where he's like to start. And I really thought this was a powerful approach that humans, making change on things that we like to do is far easier, which is a no brainer. And so he likes to start with sleep because almost everybody likes to sleep. But at the same time, we also like to party and people like their alcohol, like we spoke about, and people like Netflix. And if that's happening late at night and the alcohol and party are late at night, we're compromising on sleep. And we like our desserts and cookies and all that kind of goods up, so you like sweets and you like putting all this junk inside your body. And if you're combining all those things and we like just crashing on the couch, we don't like to move as much. It's hard, right? There's a lot of inertia to get there. And so you'll have these people who come in and they don't have those foundations checked off because they're not interested in that. But it's okay to spend extra four bucks to get the cleanest beauty product because, you know, hey, at least I'm making some change to there. As opposed to question for you is, how do that seems like a challenging discussion to me? Like how do you get those patients to say, listen, I understand that the other part is hard and you don't want that, but we're not going to move on to the top of the pyramid. And let's flip this pyramid and let's focus on this first. I think there's two parts to what you just asked. So I do believe that everything is better than something. So if you're going to do what you can do around toxins, that's better than doing nothing. You can enter this conversation and this rotary in a million different places and it's never bad to get in the game. So whatever you can do is impactful and meaningful, do it. You're not going to regret it. It might not be enough to keep you from developing a chronic illness, but it will be potentially enough to keep you from developing it early. You know, maybe you'll push off your illness. Then in terms of how do I get the people who aren't interested, interested, I don't. I really believe you cannot open a closed mind. And so I mean, look, people have to pay money to see me. So if you're going to pay money to see me every month, you're going to be engaged in some way. So 99% of the people who see me come to me because there's a problem. We're fixing something. This is not just how do we optimize. A very small portion of people are really all about optimization. They're not fixing something. They're like, I want you to keep me healthy, literally one to one to 3% of my population. 97%. I have a problem and you need to fix it. So I'm not persuading anyone because I mean, I have family members who are like, what do you do? Why are you doing it? It's so weird. They don't get it. And that's fine. It really is. Like I can't persuade people if they, if that's not their jam. You know, it's just talking to my, my, our prior marketing manager struck out on her own and she's, she's doing freelance now. But she shared with me that two years ago, her, or a year ago, her boyfriend's mom did this program that we have. And it's a four week program and it's, it's like a, it's called feel freaking amazing and some mini courses, four weeks. And in that course, she went from having daily headaches and having like this rash and really irritable bowel to no daily headaches and the rash went away and her irritable bowel went, and it's gone. So she's a year past the program. If it were me and I had experienced that resolution, I'd be like, sign me up. I want to do this every day because I don't want to have those problems, right? But no, she's back to her old ways and she's eating just how she was before she did the program and she has the same issues that she had before she did the program. So you cannot open a closed mind and if someone's not ready, they're not going to do it. It's only when things get what I'll call bad enough that they'll react and bad enough is like, I got a diagnosis or I was told I'm going to die or, or, you know, I can't run after my grandchildren because I feel too terrible. Something happens and people decide, okay, I don't want it to be this way any longer. But until they get that in their brains, it's very hard to make an impact because it's not their philosophy. They're going against their own philosophy, which is, I'll wait till there's a problem. So Wendy, I want to flip Altamash's question actually or at least reframe it. The more I look at social media, the more I'm looking at data, the more I'm reading other articles, I'm wondering whether how much of toxins are coming down towards that foundation of the period. Much of a direct or true, high indirect impact it has on not being able to sleep well, on not being able to reduce weight. I don't know if you've read a chemical hunger by slime mold, time mold. It's a very long, ten-part article, but it is fantastic and this organization goes through a lot of data talking about the rise of obesity occurring around the same time as in the 1970s, which is when I guess there were some laws that passed in terms of our water having more toxicity in it. They started noticing a trend that the more toxicity in the water, the more environmental pollutants, the more hormone disruptors you have, our population has just become more and more obese. They've done metabolic board studies, looking at nutrition, they've looked at calories and calories out. There's a lot to sift through, but overall they talk about how the obesity issue is primarily driven by hormones because of toxins. How do you look at toxins within that pyramid? Do you see it at the very top as optimization or do you see it as, hey, this is just as important with the exercise, nutrition, sleep, etc. Right. I see it as important as the food they're eating, the movement they're doing, their sleep and their stress reduction. The problem is that it's because it's kind of challenging to do toxin removal from your body, and if your body's not in reasonably good shape to do it, you're going to make people feel even worse. If you take a human who feels kind of crappy and then you challenge them a lot by detoxing them, they're going to hate you. There's more that you just have to get them up to a level where they can stand the intervention. The other issue is that when, so how do I say this? When you're doing heavy metals removal, there can be a number of moving parts. You have to bind the metals, you have to improve liver detox, you have to make sure it leaves the body, you have to replace the minerals and nutrients you're losing. Those are all discrete steps and you have to do them every day. It's hard for people to do every day. If they have brain fog, you have to fix their brain fog before they'll be able to manage the program. The other part to that is that if you're doing microtoxins removal, often these are binders, so people need to fast on either side and not take supplements. You just have to get them feeling well enough to be able to intermittent fast, so if they roll out of bed and they have to eat, and then they have to eat two hours later, you never have a window where they're healthy enough to do the treatment. I consider it to be 100% foundational, but you just can't deal with it until they feel better and until they're slightly more stable, balanced, centered. Awesome. I want to circle back to when you're talking about when people aren't ready for change. You don't even spend time. I think that that's something, it's a message that I'm being reminded of more and more. I'm going to go back to having a passion for this, and almost being sometimes more invested than the patient in front of me, and I have to constantly remind myself, and people whyser than me, such as yourself. I think about a previous guest, E.C. Sinkowski, where he fans of her, who also even talked about how, and she's a nutritionist, right, so when you're loved ones, when they come to you, they're just not ready for change, you just have to let them be. That one's particularly hard, right, because we care about them. So selfishly, we want them to be around for a long, long time. But she also wants posted a quote on social media Instagram, I think it was like, people only change when they're sick and tired of being sick and tired, and so what you were talking about, you know, exactly reminded me of that. And so on this note, you know, we're talking a lot about toxins, and I love the three categories that you have. I suppose this is a good point to talk about just how can we reduce that toxic load? What are some tools, tactics that we can take or apply and address the things that are within our control? And I'm not talking about running past a golf course or sprinting across the highway really quickly. I don't recommend anybody ever do that. But you know, what are things that people can do, maybe hanging fruit, so to speak, to address some of that? There's so much you can do. I mean, literally you have control of a lot of this narrative. So that's the good news. The bad news is there's a lot of details and so it can feel overwhelming. So the first thing that I always say to people is, Rome wasn't built in a day. The Great Wall of China wasn't built in a day and you're not going to transform your life overnight. So when you're looking at and stay systematic, right? So if you made one change a week at the end of the year, you'd have made 52 changes. If you can claim to have made 52 sustainable changes in your health, that's pretty amazing. So as humans, we want everything today and done and perfect, but the goal is not perfection. The goal is improvement over time and set that as your standard, first of all. I screw this up all the time, you know, I went, okay, I won't go down the rabbit hole. I screwed up all the time, be kind to yourself and just reset. So what goes in you, eliminate the plastic water bottles because they're bad for you. They're bad for the environment. That's a pretty easy one. Invest in a glass ceramic or stainless steel water bottle and either get a desktop or countertop filter or invest in a point of use, reverse osmosis filter or a whole house filter depending on where you are financially. Get the best you can in the finances that you all have, you know. If it's Britta and that's the best you can do, then be proud of it, right? Do anything is better than nothing. Any way you can eat organic or go by the environmental working group, dirty dozen and clean 15. The dirty dozen or the 12 foods that you want to avoid non-organic at all cost, given how contaminated they are and the clean 15 or foods that if the budget doesn't allow for all organic, those are the ones you can eat, not organic and you're okay. Always wash your food. This sounds sort of basic, right? But I actually use soap on my clean soap on my apples because I want to wash off even though they're organic, I want to wash off the residues. So anywhere you can eat organic, frozen foods are a great way to get organic because they're often less pricey than the fresh versions. Then the things on you, as you're running out of something, question everything, right? It's so easy, I'm sure you both grew up with certain house cleaning products and certain things that were just the way it was, right? Well I grew up with one and my mom said to me when I was a teenager, this is such a great product, it's so clean, I never questioned that. I literally never thought about it and then like a year and a half, two years ago I was like, I never questioned that. So I look it up, it's super dirty. Of course it's after I've just invested in like a six month supply. So lesson number two, if you've invested in it, use it up, right? Level up somewhere else, but question things and look it up, use environmental working group, look up what you're using. If it's not highly rated when you're running out of it, get something better. So again, to the best of your financial ability level up, the comment I usually get from people I'm talking to at this moment is what it's expensive. And my response is yes, it does add up, but it doesn't add up all at once. It's not like you're leveling up your entire life overnight and going for a more expensive choice. It's very gradual and it's very small and the cost of not doing it is extremely expensive. So it's worth doing. Then when you look at what's around you, you have control over your air in some ways. So invest in the highest quality air filter that you can and use it. If you're buying a bed, buy a bed that does not have flame retardants because flame retardants are endocrine disruptors. Endocrine is your thyroid, your adrenals and your female and male hormones. So don't disrupt your own chemicals by sleeping. These are like the practical tools. But then there's stuff that's free, okay, and all that stuff requires money or some investment. But getting enough sleep at night is free and the reason sleep is so critical. Most humans need about seven to eight hours of actual sleep. That is not time in bed. That's actual sleep. And usually we have 30 to 60 minutes where we're not sleeping through any given night. So you need to add on worst case, you need to add on an hour to your sleep time in bed so that you get enough actual rest, track your sleep if you can. And then the reason sleep is so important is that when you are sleeping deeply and at various stages in your sleep, your brain cells will shrink so that the space between them is greater and the toxins will actually drain out. It's fascinating. So sleeping is a detox event. Kind of cool. So get more sleep, move your body and sweat again, free. Sweating brings toxins out of your body. So any way that you can sweat, whether that's movement, epsom salt baths, regular baths, sauna, something heat, that's meaningful. Manage your brain. This is a hard one. But we have something like 30 to 65,000 thoughts a day and most of them are not positive. So the thoughts you're having will send you off into an adrenal overload, meaning I'll give an example, like four years ago, we went on vacation and we were in California and they had these massive like 15 foot barriers on the left hand lane. You couldn't even see over them. And we're in the left hand lane. My husband's driving and there's a car in front of us in the lane over, kind of like right of ahead of us. And then two lanes over, there's a car kind of right in front of them. So we're like in a diagonal line out of the corner of my eye. I see the car two lanes over, swerve into the lane next to us. And of course, I know that the car next to us is going to swerve into us and we have nowhere to go because of these barriers. So I said to my husband, oh my God, break, break, break, break, break, break, and he did. And so the car to our right swerved right in front of us and didn't hit us. We didn't hit the barrier, nobody hit anybody. We were totally fine except for me. I was not totally fine because I had this thought, oh my God, we're going to die in an accident and our kids are back at the hotel with my mother and my mother's going to have to deal with four kids who just lost their parents, you know, like the brain is crazy. So I went down this immediate pathway of, oh my God, we're going to die and my mom's going to have to deal with it and I'm never going to see my kids. And did I tell them I love them? And I'm freaking out. And nobody got in an accident, but it took me two days for my body to quiet down. I was jittery and anxious for two days. Nothing happened. Nothing happened. So the power of your, but the power of your thoughts are extremely powerful, good or bad, right? So it can be bad, powerful or good, powerful. So you want to work on training your brain in ways that it's good, powerful. So instead of being nasty to yourself, like you're so dumb, you always screw it up. You're such a failure. All those things we say to ourselves, they're very negatively powerful. So start to reframe it. I'm doing my best. You're working really hard at this. Nobody's perfecting. You shouldn't be either just stay in the game. Change your language because your language is making your adrenal stressed. That shuts your detox down and your gut. So it makes a difference to quiet the adrenals down. There's a lot of luck. It is, but it's powerful and I'm very appreciative of it because I think that a lot of is it actionable. Right? And it's good because, yeah, one of the first things you mentioned, yeah, it can be overwhelming. But if we just reframe, since we've used that word today and people can say, wow, I have so many options to pick from, right? Where shall I start? And honestly, wherever it's easier, wherever you want to. And I want to come back to and highlight this concept of being kind to yourself that you mentioned at the outset. I think that's so critical. You know, we've talked to some recent guests about how we have different seasons in life. And sometimes it's not the season for your personal health being the best version. Sometimes you just have to maintain. I'll give you an example, you know, not too long ago, I had my first child. And we're trying to figure out the whole feeding situation as a new parent and, you know, nursing, and if that's not working, we're supplementing with bottles and whatnot. And then you go to the plastic bottles of like, oh, God, BPA. And this, I don't want to expose my child to this exposure, you know, you really appreciate as a parent. You're like, it's okay if I get exposed to it, but not my child, right? They're the most precious thing in the world. The problem is we get all these bottles, the different types of Mr. Brown bottles, the different size, the different nipple, etc. Doesn't want any of them. Doesn't want any of the plastic, excuse me, the glass bottles. And so what are we going to do? We're not feed this child, right? And so, you know, in that instance, just be kind to yourself. It's something I had to remind myself and, you know, we had to say, look, it's okay. It's okay. You're right. We'll do the best we can. And maybe this is not the time, right? We'll find other places. Let's think about, you know, nutrition elsewhere, let's think about sleep, all the things that you talked about. I don't know, actually, if you have, if you have any technical tricks, ticks, tricks, excuse me, because I think you do have a couple of children, right? If you, that was something that you experienced. Four. So, you know, hopefully, if and when my family expands, we won't spend too much time on this, is how did you circumvent that? Like, is that something that you struggle with? Yeah, I'm not particular, I'm Jewish, and I have no idea how I got away from being someone riddled by guilt, but I'm just not into guilt. So I'm a huge fan of you do the best with what you can with what you have and don't sweat the rest because it's not worth your, it's literally not worth the adrenal fatigue to sweat it. So I would go with what you said, which is you're doing your best and you're going to make sure that the shampoo that you're using on the baby is clean and that the products you're using are clean and that the bedding is clean, you're going to make sure of all that stuff so that the some impact of the plastic nipple and the plastic bottle is much smaller than if you're, if the baby's growing up in a much more toxic environment. So you just minimize the, you know, it's death by 1,000 cuts or take 900 Af, it's much less. Love it. I did want to ask about retesting, right? So let's say some of your patients or the listeners, they get some of the tests that you recommended, which we will put in the, put in the show notes, we'll link those. How often do you recommend retesting and are there specific, last or specific things that people should be doing? Yeah, this is a great question. The first thing you mentioned, you're going to put the tests in the show notes, which is great. However, my first plug is don't go this alone, you are not an island, you should, you cannot and should not be doing this on yourself without oversight because you can harm yourself. That's one. You know, I had a patient who, giving her all these supplements and I'm doing her microtoxins treatment. And I'm like, why is your vitamin D not responding? Why is your vitamin D worse than when we started? And I said to her, by any chance, are you taking your binders with your supplements? She's like, yeah, every day, like, okay, don't do that. Let's separate the binders from the supplements because the binders are binding your supplements, you're wasting all your money. You've wasted six months and you haven't gotten any benefit. So when terms of retesting, it depends what we're treating. And how bad you were. So for metals, our metals protocols go in eight and 12 week rotations. So you do it for the first round is 12 weeks, we make sure you tolerate it, we graduate you every month to a higher level. And at the end of 12 weeks, you retest because we want to see what happened. What I say to people is don't freak, but it's going to go up because your detox store is this big. And when you make your detox store bigger, you're going to see more coming out. So don't flip when the number goes up. You know, my first metals test, it was my mercury was nine and my lead was 12, and my second test, my first test, my mercury was like seven and my lead was nine. And I was like, and we like it under eight. So I kind of blew it off. I'm like, oh, it's not that bad. When I did the retest, it was higher after an exposure, and then I treated. And then my mercury went up to 41 from nine, it was like, okay, remember, this is normal. But it goes up. So for the metals, we test relatively, we iterate, we test every eight to 12 weeks. And then for the micotoxins, we give it two years. You know, it's a $300 plus dollar test. And often if you test, if you test too soon, the numbers go way up and people flip, they've spent $300 plus dollars and their numbers worse, they get really discouraged. And I'm like, don't bother retesting for two years because it's going to be worse. You're going to get discouraged. But I started with five strains of micotoxins four years ago, and I'm down to two. But that's how long it takes. And it's just, it's a marathon, right? It's not a sprint. It's a marathon. So you do your binding treatment every day, maybe twice a day if it's a good day book, try for once a day. Skip a day if you don't feel like it, you know, but it's a long term treatment. So I've tested, I think three times because at the beginning of doing this, I wasn't as clear as how much it goes up, but you see it goes up because you're mobilizing it, which is great news. And then it starts to go down. And then for the toxins like food sensitivities, if you have a lot of food sensitivities, we recommend giving about two years between tests so that you can allow the body to recover. The gut will test for stool testing about once a year, everything's kind of different. The glyphosate, it's a cheap test. It's under a hundred bucks. So that one I'll test a little more frequently. And then the environmental toxins test, it's about 200. And I recommend doing that about every six to 12 months, depending on how actively you're working on it. It's all of them up. Okay. So quick fix is not the name of the game when it comes to longevity and health span. It absolutely is not. Right. And we live in a society where, like you said, we're looking for that next pill to support our deficiency, quote unquote, which, you know, from functional medicine standpoint is not what we're looking at. We're really looking at that root cause. I am curious when the lab values go up, are you experiencing more symptoms? Not necessarily. Sometimes you feel better. I'll share with you. My first metals treatment in October of 2019, and God, I thought I was hit by a truck for the first six weeks of it. I was like, I'm so tired, going to bed at like 8.30 at night. I never go to bed at 8.30. I'm like the last person standing, you know? So I was going to bed for six weeks, super early. And then after six weeks, that fatigue just lifted and I said to my husband, my metals are gone. I'll finish the protocol, but my metals are gone. I want to know what the patients doing, but my metals are gone. And that's when I retested at the end and found that it was four times higher. So I felt amazing at the end of those six weeks. I was like, the second half, I was like, I feel great. Well, moving them and getting them out, you'll start to feel better. So you're not necessarily feeling cruddy when the numbers up. You know, you might feel amazing. Yeah, absolutely. Are you only seeing functional medicine practitioners at this point really work with toxicity in the way that you're describing? Or is there a way that people can go through the traditional, you know, medicine pathway? I don't know if there are any doctors really doing that. You really can't, unfortunately, because think of it like tools in your toolbox here. When you're in the traditional medical system, you don't have that specialty testing for, you don't have a relationship with doctor's data and great planes or vibrant America or genoma. You don't have those relationships. So you can't even do the testing. The testing you have is blood. And if you do a blood testing, your metals are positive, you have a big problem because the body knows that it's toxic. You will only show positive if you've had a recent exposure in this last six weeks. So if you haven't had any exposure and you're positive, it means your body burden is ridiculously high. So you should really almost never see the blood be positive. So when people say, oh, yeah, I went to my primary. They did a little finger stick for lead and it was negative. I'm like, cool, but you have osteoporosis and lead hangs out in your bone. So you have metals. We just haven't diagnosed them yet. So no, it's really hard to do in the traditional one, unfortunately. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, it's a challenge when you can't bill for it, right? I think that's just that's pretty much the simplest way to explain to people. And I really love how you highlighted the fact that the numbers don't correlate with how necessarily a person feels, how they function. A point that's worth highlighting again and again, because I think a lot of times people just start persevering over the data rather than the subjective information. And sometimes we dismiss the subjective information because at first, you know, as analytical as we are, Darshan, I hear in a lot of people who are more type A, you know, just focusing and being myopic and looking at the data, that can be a serious problem too, as you spoke about eloquently how the brain is so incredibly powerful. And this is why sometimes I don't encourage patients to just look at their report, right? Let's talk about if I'm ordering some type of imaging like an MRI of the spine or something like that one in our world is, you know, let's focus on your function. Let's focus on what the physical exam is. Let's look at that and let's not preservative whether or not the imaging got better or not. And so this, this reminds me exactly of that. And I think that's important for us to remember and I know some medical students and trainees are listening to this as well. This is a point that we bring up time and time again when we are teaching our trainees. And so... Yeah, treat the person. Not the... You're not treating the number. You're treating the person. Yeah. Not the result. Not the test. Well, when did we cover a great deal here? I think that we have a lot of actionable stuff that the things that people can apply, remember, start where it's easier for you to start what's, you know, and anything is better than everything. Is that how you said it? You said it much better. Anything's better than nothing. Anything's better than nothing. Yeah. Yeah, that sounds better. I want to ask you about a couple of things before we let you go here. You know, I certainly want to know what's next for you, but not too long ago you had a book right there behind you in the shelf, quote, dirty girl. Who is that for? What's it about and who's it going to benefit the most? Yeah, I mean, it's, we wrote the book because we went to France in 2019 and I came home and gained nine pounds. My hair started falling out and I was, I felt terrible and had a rash all over my face and I was like, effing perimenopause except my hormones were perfect and my gut was great. And about three months later, I heard a report that when Notre-Dame burned, it released 500 tons of lead dust into the air. Well, guess what? We were in France the week after Notre-Dame burned and I remember saying kind of so dusty and I came home and got sick. So I did the testing for toxins and found out that I was, as I mentioned, I had five strains of mycotoxins. I had a slew of environmental toxins including plastics, valleys, nail polish, VOCs. I had a ton of them and in the metals and I looked at my husband and I said, I am such a dirty girl. And then I said, oh, we're totally writing that book because I'm the poster child for healthy living. We eat organic, I exercise, I get enough sleep and I have all these toxins. So if I have this, what does everyone else have? So we wrote it with the goal of getting the word out that not only is this a massive problem but you have agency and you have the ability to alter your future. And so it's a roadmap for how do you alter your future and what are the steps you need to take. Obviously, you got to work with someone like a functional medicine doctor to get the testing. So we wrote that for anyone who's looking for a better path, a bigger way or a resolution to symptoms that they can't seem to get around. I love it. Wendy, Dr. Trebo, this has been a very informative episode. Something that I've been delving more into is toxins in the world of toxins and recently my wife and I just threw out her non-stick pants. So one thing at a time, you know, just got better pants now, starting to use less candles, opening up our windows as much as we can. And I know for the listeners, you know, when a lot of us go on social media, there's a lot of talk on toxins. But the problem is, I think you see too much of the extremes where you're seeing a lot of people just say, you know, toxins, the absolute worst thing in the world. But then you'll see others saying, you can dismiss this. It's not as important as we think. And I think this episode right here bringing you on, we really reached and struck a balance and really talked about those actionable steps. So I just want to thank you again for coming on and really provide that education for us. That's my pleasure. And I'm really grateful to the two of you for the work you're doing to get the word out there. People can be healthier because obviously you're educating just these really cool segments of populations who love what you do. So thank you. Yeah. Absolutely. So for the listeners, other people out there, if they want to work with you or they want to find out more information, where can they go? Our website is fivejourneys.com. That's the easiest way to work with us because you can get to the programs, the functional medicine, the nutrition, the supplements, you can get all of it there. Okay. Fantastic. And then our last question that we ask, which I'm excited for your answer here, from a functional medicine perspective is, how do we put the health back in health care? Oh, well, everyone should be doing functional medicine, right? If everyone were doing functional medicine and root cause analysis where the way it were, and you were, you know, how do we put the health back in health care, give physicians and providers and practitioners the time they need to hear the problem, give them the tools they need to fix the problem and the ability to have relationship with people so that it's a partnership. And it has to be functional medicine because that's where you get the root cause healing and transformation. All right. Thank you so much. For coming on. Excellent. My pleasure. Thanks to you both. All right. Thanks for tuning into this episode, everyone. I think Dr. Trabauda tremendous job in regards to giving us actionable tips from not only a prevention standpoint of toxicity, but also from a detoxification standpoint. If you follow the news, you will see that toxicity is something that is trending and being talked about more and more and quote unquote forever chemicals starting to be banned from a lot of manufacturers. So hopefully we're all moved in the right direction, but still you can only trust yourself and do the right thing to really improve your health. Now, if you enjoyed this episode, check out the show notes, please, because I do have a bunch of links in there. The first of which is a summit from Dr. Trabauda and her team. It is called the environmental toxicants auto immunity and chronic diseases summit, and that's going to begin from April 11th through April 17th, and they're also going to do an encore weekend from April 21st to the 23rd. So be sure to check that out. This is something you're interested in. The following two links are evokes from Dr. Trabauda, one specifically talking about how to live non-toxic, and the other is talking about preparing your body or detox. After that, you're going to see some other links about the resources that we talked about in this episode from a testing perspective. Now, again, I'm going to reiterate this. If you are going to go down that path of using resources, make sure you to have a guide of physician, a provider who can take you through that. And so with that, our medical disclaimer, everything in this podcast is for educational purposes only. It does not constitute the practice of medicine, and we are not providing medical advice. No physician, patient, relationship is formed, and anything that does in this podcast does not represent the views of our employers. We recommend that you seek the guidance of your personal physician regarding any specific health related issues. And of course, I want to thank our team, Harita Yehpuri, Ethan Zhu, and Iman Basiri for the production of this podcast, and we will see you all next week.