Transcription
Hey, hello, welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome. We're gonna talk about H. pylori today, myths and realities. They ask you to accept a few kind of outrageous ideas. Want to talk also about program design. So, I think it's very important and about the components that go into making up a really successful functional medicine practice, of which there are many. And I saw practice, I don't know, I don't even know what day of the week it is. I practice all day today. So, I can tell you, I saw patients all day today. So, the stuff is still very real to me. And I want you guys to be equally confident in how all this works because we don't have enough functional medicine practitioners right now. And there's a lot of patients. And people like me are kind of old and we're ready, they like, you know, do something else with our lives. I think you guys got to step in and make all this happen. So, let's talk about the subject first, and then we'll do, we can look at program design and kind of integrate into this.
So, um, you know, a few years ago, I had a group of doctors. Oh, wait a minute. I'm supposed to introduce myself. Hang on a second. Okay, in case you haven't been to this class before, Who am I? I'm Dan Kalish. What does that mean? Okay, I'm faculty, IFM, Institute for Functional Medicine's Practice Implementation Program. It means that I've, you know, kind of been able to get on the faculty of the most, the way I describe it to non-functional medicine people, it's kind of like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, all wrapped into one, 'cause there's only one IFM, right? There's really one premier Institute of training, and I'm on their faculty, which is a huge honor. And but what it's very interesting, what I teach, I teach practice implementation. I don't teach complicated stuff. It seems like this is how you do a practice. We're going to talk today about the research study that I did with the Mayo Clinic a few years ago. And my current role in this world is the most exciting professional role I've ever had, which is working with Dr. Lourdes, who's a scientist that develops a lot of labs that we use on a regular basis. And every week, couple, three times a week now, I work really closely with Richard and we're developing all kinds of curriculum and great stuff. Okay.
And then for those of you that get inspired by what we're doing tonight and want to learn more, well, have a GI Masterclass. So, we're gonna offer to you all at half off, and you'll get emails on on that, so you can check out more information. It's 49 bucks, and that gets a lot more detail about, you know, the approach to GI and all this. And today's class is kind of narrow and focused around H. pylori, which is my favorite pathogen personally. So, just a little review on the Mayo Clinic study. So, oh man, the year I broke my arm and blew out two discs on my neck. So, that was like at least ten years ago. A group of doctors from the Mayo Clinic took the Kalish Institute mentorship program. And this is the true story. So, they signed up, and there's like five of them. This is a big deal for a little schleppy guy like me, okay? It's like a really big deal. Five Mayo Clinic physicians are gracing the Kalish Institute's platform. And so, I was on deck. It was like Wednesday night at 6 o'clock, and I had to do this webinar for this new class. And on Tuesday, I slipped and fell, and I shattered my left arm, broke it in a whole bunch of places, and I blew out, herniated two discs in my neck. And so, I'm like, not feeling very good. I didn't go to the doctor, of course. I didn't go to the doctor. I'm just like, I'm gonna have to teach this class, I gotta get through today. And my good friend, medical doctor friend, Morgue and Camp, I called him that evening after I taught class. He's like, "Dan, you just go to the ER right now. Don't you take the phone. Just go to the emergency room. You broke your arm." Anyways, so I'm powering through this class with a broken arm and a bunch of herniated discs, who knows pain pillows and stuff. And anyways, turned out really great. We bonded, we connected. They went through the program. Sue Cutshall is at Mayo Clinic in Rochester. Labor's terms, the director of the Integrative Medicine Clinic at Mayo in Arizona, at Scottsdale. And in fact, Larry took the class twice, which is kind of cool.
So, anyways, a few years go by, and and we're like, "Hey, we're Mayo Clinic, we do research." "My, hey, I'm Dan Kalish, I treat patients for the H. pylori and gut problems." So, we teamed up and we created this program, the study. I got financed, one of my patients financed it, actually. And we did a study on 25 women who were highly stressed, and we did adrenal and gut testing. Now, unbeknownst to me, I wasn't planning this. This is like a research study. It wasn't planned, you know? But 8, 9 of the 25 women had H. pylori. Nine of the 25 women had H. pylori. And when we went through this whole six-month process, and this was a year of my life, like full-time work to do this study, eight out of the nine women were devoid of their H. pylori. Nine started off with H. pylori, eight of them at the end, we cleared the H. pylori using the exact same protocol that I'm talking about in the class tonight. If you guys are interested in the Mayo Clinic study, I'm happy to send it out. It's a copy of it. And won't bore you with all the details, but basically, we did the same thing we're talking about tonight, which is looking at the stress response, fixing the HPA axis, and then doing a gut test. And for the, you know, nine women out of the 25 that had H. pylori, treating them and seeing what the results were in terms of them improving. So, couldn't get a better stamp of approval than the Mayo Clinic validating that this stuff works. And that was kind of a peak of my career. And, um, let's talk about what we actually did today. And this is a long slideshow. We're gonna cut through it and just skip around because I want to show you some cases as well. And I want to talk about program design also.
So, actually, let me introduce that subject right now because this is like things that I think is hard to learn. So, when you're, and you're running a practice, right? You have to think about a variety of different things. You have to do, you have to be, you have to master lab interpretation. You have to master, and you got to hang out. Only way to do that in this industry. You can't go to a block, you just gotta hang out with people that know how to interpret labs. That's what I did. I spent six years with Dr. Timmons learning how to interpret labs. I'm at the end of my career now. I've spent the last three years every Monday and now every Monday and Thursday with Richard Lord learning how to interpret labs. You just got to hammer that over and over and over again. And this takes years. It takes decades. You got to master lab interpretation because that's the heart and soul of functional medicine as a science behind it. You have to understand the physiology enough that you can explain it to patients and understand what the labs mean. So, the biochemistry and physiology, you got to get that down. You got to understand how folate works. So, this whole thing just is not gonna work. You can't just give people a bottle of folate and keep your fingers crossed because if it doesn't work and they get sick, you got to understand the mechanism so you can see what's going on. And then you have to understand the logistics and operational side. And I've seen so many super, super smart, I mean, some of the smartest functional medicine doctors fail because they can't run a business. And it's sad, but oftentimes there's an inverse relationship, right? They were super brilliant on the science side, but they just can't even figure out how to get a credit card machine to take a credit card. And then lastly, and probably most importantly, is patient communication skills, which I would just call communication skills in general. You gotta be able to communicate to people, understand how to sell them stuff that's, you know, communication. Like, why should they buy the tests? Why should I buy these supplements? Why should I pay for your consultation fees and all this? So, these are like, not necessarily things that are all learned at the same time. And the personalities that are good at one of these things are not always good at the others. But you got to be good at all four of these, and then you can be super successful. You can make as much money as you want. You can help as many people as you want. You can work as little or as much as you want. But if you fall apart on one of these, the whole thing falls apart.
So, in the Kalish math mentorship, we try to emphasize all of these different skills simultaneously, right? So, you can develop and, I don't like the word holistic, but you can develop in a, like, complete fashion, right? In an integrated fashion, so that this stuff comes together in a really good way. Okay, that's the goal. And if you get super strong on one of these and you're weak on the others, it's not gonna work as well. If you want to, you know, you can, you can, if you're really good at patient communication and sales, you can kind of wing it on the other things. But, you know, in general, you want to have a more balanced approach. And so, when I do these talks, and we're going to talk about each part, Laurie, in a minute, I promise. I'm trying to speak in the same language with which you would describe this to a patient. So, you don't have to translate this. It's not a technical talk. I can talk technically, and I do with Richard Lord, very technically every week. But what I try to do in these classes is speak in the way that I would speak to a patient. So, when you run your first or 10th H. pylori test and get a positive back, you can, you know, have a sense of the language that you can use. And that was my experience working with Dr. Freda, Dr. Timmons, Dr. Boots, was like sitting by the bedside and listening to them talk to patients and getting my patient communication skills by being at the feet of a master and just listening to them. I mean, once I heard Glenn talk about, you know, whenever B6 deficiency is like 10 or 20 times to 10 or 20 different people, I kind of had that script in my head. So, we want to be able to do these things efficiently. Okay. So, master lab interpretation, understand the biochemistry and physiology, the logistical operational side, and then patient communication. Those are like the big ones you gotta learn.
And then just one more note on program design because as more and more practitioners are coming into functional medicine, I see these same problems over and over again, which is, and when we look at program, the program for tonight, I'll talk about this so specifically. Don't do too much. And the quote there from Dr. Budding, one of my mentors, is, "People pay us for what we know, not for what we do." Prime example, my best friend Bjorn. I sent him to Dr. Budding. Budding was a chiropractor, but also a brilliant nutritionist. And Bjorn is a guitar player. He was living in Los Angeles at that time, going to this professional guitar academy and learning how, you know, rock and roll, blah, blah, blah. So, Bjorn couldn't play guitar because he couldn't lift his left arm to do the guitar thing. And that was like, kind of career-ending injury. So, I sent him to talk to Dr. Budding. Budding looked at him, took like 90 seconds to figure out exactly what was wrong. He adjusted one thing in his, in Bjorn's neck, and Bjorn could play guitar again. Okay. That cost Bjorn like almost a thousand dollars. That very short experience, but it was okay because he could play guitar again. So, in other words, you were paying that much money to Budding because he had like 40 years of experience and he could just look and see what was wrong. So, Bjorn was paying for what Budding knew, not for the 30-second adjustment. He was paying for that accumulation of 40 years of knowledge so that he knew exactly how to target it and what to do. So, you don't have to do a lot in functional medicine either. If you just know who needs thiamine at 300 milligrams, you can fix a lot of people that are depressed. But you got to know that. Now, it's not doing a lot because what the main problem I see is that practitioners do too much. They run these labs and they give so many supplements, it's insane. It's the point where there's twenty or thirty products floating around. And if you can just figure out that that person needs thiamine and give them 300 milligrams and get them better, just like Budding figured out there was this one point in Bjorn's neck that was off that made him not be able to play guitar, then you got it made. So, getting that specific is really what the goal is, not doing too much. Okay.
Then the other pet peeve I have is people underdose or, you know, underdose. They just underdose. They just don't give enough. They figure out the right thing and they don't give enough of it. So, you've got to be at a therapeutic dosage level. Now, I was really lucky because I learned from Timmons and Freda, and those guys were doing, those are natural paths, right? The natural paths in the '70s were insane. They just did whatever they wanted to, and there was no thought of liability or lawsuits. So, if Glenn thought someone needed something, he just did it. He was completely fearless. Timmons was even more fearless. Okay. And so, when I was learning how to do this work, I just thought everyone gave, you know, gazillion milligrams of vitamin C or 200 billion milligrams of vitamin E. I didn't know that that, I was learning from these people that were, you know, really aggressively dosing. But you have to get to therapeutic dosages. Underdosing somebody with the right programs is not going to work. Okay. So, those two things, don't do a lot, just be really specific, and then get people the right amount of the specific thing, don't underdose. If we can figure those two things out, you'll be super successful. Those are the two main problems I see in our industry right now. Okay.
So, now let's look at GI stuff in general, and then specifically H. pylori. So, I want to make one huge assumption here. So, there is an argument to be made that for some human beings, H. pylori is a neutral organism, and having H. pylori is not causing any problem. There's an argument to be made that some people have H. pylori and it actually could be protective or be good in a way for stimulating the immune system in a positive way. Those are not the people that we're talking about tonight, and I don't want to get into an argument about that. We're just talking about people that you have identified that have H. pylori that need to get it treated. Like those nine women that were stressed to have their minds in the Mayo Clinic study, they all got better symptomatically with the H. pylori treatment. But we're assuming that you're screening people, and that if someone has H. pylori and it's protective or neutral, you're not going to just kill it because it's there. You're going to H. pylori and people who need the treatment are going to benefit from it. So, assuming that we're in that group, right? Then we want to make sure that we sequence the treatments properly, and that we get all these tests done. So, I'm going to skip a lot of slides and go right to the protocols so we can look at some cases and not run out of time. Okay.
So, when we're looking at H. pylori, we want to make sure that there is an attention amount of attention paid to the stress response because like no other infection, H. pylori flares when people are under stress. In fact, that's such an obvious connection that, you know, the entire worldwide scientific and medical community was fooled for for decades, hundreds of years, thinking that ulcers were a stress condition, not realizing that the vast majority, 90 plus percent of people with ulcers have H. pylori, right? So, when we're stressed, our immune regulation weakens, and a chronic low-grade bug like H. pylori can flare up and cause symptoms. If you have H. pylori and you're not under any stress, you may not need to treat it. It may be either neutral or protective, right? We're talking about people who are stressed and the H. pylori is becoming a big problem. In which case, we need to make sure that we attend to and deal with the neuroendocrine system and de-stress the person with a supplement program as a precursor, as a warm-up, before we go in and treat the H. pylori. So, that's kind of the assumption. The easiest way to do that is with cortisol testing. You can do it with meditation. There's other ways to do it too. And well, we're assuming that you've got a good stress reduction program going. And then we're looking at the H. pylori itself. It's a nasty little bug. It's my favorite bug because I think that of all the things that I've done GI treatment-wise, it's the most straightforward to get rid of, and you tend to see the biggest benefit in people, considering that it's not that hard to figure out that someone has it, and it's not that hard to get rid of it. You can use medications, right? But we're kind of in an era, I think, where antibiotics are kind of frowned upon unless you have to use them. And we really want to make sure that, you know, we're doing the gentlest treatments first. So, if someone has any kind of GI symptoms related to upper GI problems, reflux, indigestion, heartburn, bloating, if a person has a problem like SIBO, overgrowth, small test, that's kind of redundant, isn't it? If a person has SIBO, if they have some other kind of yeast overgrowth, chronic yeast or candida overgrowth, if they're simply stressed out of their mind, male or female, then you're usually going to want to get rid of the H. pylori. If they have a lot of fatigue, they can't sleep well, if they're symptomatic in general, you're gonna want to get rid of it. If they walk in and they say, "Hey, you know, I'm healthy, I'm great, you know, I disco dance, I've got fancy cars, I live the life that I've always wanted to live, I'm married, I have kids, the kids are all perfect, we have a dog that's beautiful." If their person is just in great shape and they have H. pylori, leave it alone. But if they're suffering, they have autoimmune problems, they're tired all the time, they're depressed, you're gonna find that people get better if you treat it. Okay? Not just if they have GI problems, because they might have something like malabsorption of amino acids and proteins, right? From the lab, from the H. pylori damaging their stomach acid, in which case they may just have a detox problem or a neurotransmitter problem. I've had a lot of patients with H. pylori with sleep disorders. So, the range of H. pylori symptoms can be digestive related, but not necessarily. What does it do? It damages the stomach lining, and it can really mess up your ability to break down and digest food properly in the stomach, which then leads to problems lower down. So, the H. pylori is notorious for causing stomach acid issues that then will lead to bacterial overgrowth lower down in the intestinal tract, even parasitic problems, etc., because you don't have that normal acid in the stomach that kills organisms coming in. H. pylori can destroy that. You can get it from food and get it from kissing. And it's a nasty little bug. You know, I think it's one of the more underrated bugs in terms of the amount of inflammation and tissue damage that it can cause. If you Google later on, Nobel Prize H. pylori, you can take a look at the this image here. The Nobel Prize Committee, when they awarded the Nobel Prize for those docs in Australia, those researchers in Australia that discovered H. pylori causes ulcers, it's really quite an interesting little report. Probably take you two minutes to read. It's just a page or two, and it has some really nice graphics too that are on the page right here that I used still to this day that's really helpful. And not everybody's gonna have GI symptoms, right? That's the tricky part. But what we're thinking about is there's an emotional stress that either allows the person to acquire H. pylori or triggers H. pylori that was already present, and now all of a sudden they have a problem. Okay.
There's a whole bunch of different ways to test for it. PCR, stool antigens, blood antibodies, a million different ways to teach for it, to test for it. I'm going to show you a couple right now. Here's a classic test. This is from Doctors Data, their GI 360. I shouldn't say classic test, but an essential test. It's a relatively new, they just released this format in April. I'm sorry, in October. And here on this test, you'll see, against the Doctors Data GI 360, you'll see like the most easy thing to figure out, right? You'll just see in the, "No H. pylori detected." Okay, that's very subtle. They, you have H. pylori, either it's there, it's not. Not all the labs are that great at finding it. These guys are really good at finding it. They're going to report it when they see it. And that's pretty easy. I'll show you another example here of a different version. This is the GI Map test, many of you've probably familiar with as well. And you'll see on here, let me blow this up so you can see it better. There you go. That's a GI Map from Diagnostic Solutions. Same thing. Just scroll down to page two, and it's just there in black and white. H. pylori. It'll either be detected or not. You know, if they have a problem, they have their problems, they don't. These guys go to, you know, these do these variance factors, additional information, but basically, any of these lab companies that we use, it's a, it's just going to be printed on the page. Just not a lot of deep interpretation you have to do to figure out the person has H. pylori or not. Where it gets really tricky, where it gets really tricky is how you're going to treat it and the sequencing of it. And that's what I want to talk a little bit about. So, I guess we should talk about the testing too, just a little bit. Well, I think the testing is easy. That we have to talk about that. Let's get into the treatments. Okay.
So, you know, conventional medical doctors and some of the integrative docs also, if it's warranted, will use a Pro-Bac, these are antibiotics to get rid of it. I think the vast majority of people that I know and hang out with nowadays try to use, you know, natural treatments if they can. The natural treatments, in my experience, having done maybe a little under a thousand H. pylori cases, probably in my practice, the natural treatments almost always work. It's been here since I had to send someone out for antibiotics. If you sequence this right, and that's a really big if. So, if you sequence this right, you know, things should go pretty well. And all, you know, for those who that are answering asking questions, um, I'll do questions at the end. So, go ahead and type them in if you want now while you're thinking about them, and I'll cover them at the end. All right.
So, let me just show you like a simple workup. So, we're assuming that there is an adrenal problem. Let me show you some examples of adrenal problems so you can just see the scope of what we're into. And we get into here. This is from this morning's class. We had some really good cases this morning. I'll just show you. So, now you got to imagine in the mentorship class, you have this whole massive curriculum that you listen to, and then every week, we, you know, the different doctors submit labs and we really go over them. So, I'm just want to show you a couple of adrenal lab examples here so you can kind of trigger your association with adrenals and H. pylori. So, if a person has a cortisol waking response like this, which is poor, 8% increase, 8 expected, 50. Okay, that's a poor adrenal response first thing in the morning. And you can see the cortisol here in the morning is quite low. Okay. There's a couple of major HPA axis problems there. And then on top of that, if that wasn't bad enough, the DHEA levels are quite low. So, what does this have to do with H. pylori? Well, all gut infections get worse when we're stressed because when we're stressed, we become catabolic and we start to break down gut lining tissue to supply ourselves with fuel. And that, and we also get a weakening of the immune response as cortisol doesn't regulate secretory IgA very well. And that combination of a poor immune response and a damaged gut lining allows H. pylori to proliferate and grow and get bad when we're stressed. So, if you want to kill H. pylori really consistently and get rid of it in an easy way, but in a consistent, straightforward way, like the Mayo Clinic study, eight out of nine times, it's like, remember when, like, two out of three dentists recommend whatever toothpaste? And no, nine patients got H. pylori better. You know, what do we do there? There was no magic. We did an adrenal panel and an adrenal program. And for that, we'll have another class someday and we can talk about that. And we did the H. pylori herbal support program. Okay. But you gotta adjust the adrenals as the opening round of getting rid of the H. pylori. It's not going to work. And let me just show you another couple quick adrenals because these things should just be a boom, boom. You should take H. pylori, do an adrenal lab. Each brother, where you doing adrenal lab? Okay. Here's another one. On my new star students, Monserrate, sent in a bunch of labs. That was not so messed up. So, that's not look at how it. That's a bad example. Let me find one that's more messed up. Yeah, we had a hundred pages of labs this morning for the 9 AM students. They're really on it. Let's see here. Let me just find one more adrenal lab because I want to sear this into your memory. And some more GI testing. There we go. Jason, and what was going on with this patient? Almost doesn't matter what's going on symptomatically. Oh, she had estrogen dominance related problems. Let's see. He aged was found but not elevated. Let me see. Let me just scroll one more a little bit here. Here we go. Here's a good one. Okay. So, here's a, this was a woman with estrogen dominance problem. So, here's her adrenal renal test. Cortisol is dropping normally as it should, then shooting way up at night. Okay, that's a stress response. That's going to weaken your secretory IgA, which allows infections to proliferate. Those immunoglobulins won't be there for you. And it's going to cause a degradation in the gut lining because you're catabolic, I can breaking down the gut lining. And those are the perfect conditions for H. pylori to proliferate. So, as the first step to treating H. pylori, you want to address the adrenals with a good solid adrenal program, and then you can get down to killing the H. pylori. Okay. So, you see the H. pylori on the lab, check the adrenals, get them on an adrenal program, and then start doing some killing of the H. pylori. Okay.
So, and we'll, I'll do a few more minutes and we're going to do a case or two and then I'll open it up for questions. So, you guys can ask questions. So, let me just grab a program here and show you guys. Wellness program. And I will also put into the handouts the Mayo Clinic study. You guys can download that if you are so inclined. Oh, and I will take a reminder moment for those who that joined us late, of which there's 32 people that joined late. Let me go, not that I'm hyper monitoring things, but let me just go back and remind everyone. Oh, yeah, yeah, that we have a GI Masterclass that gets into extreme depth on this. It's half off. We're gonna send out notices on this tomorrow, so you guys can sign up for that if you want. It's 49 bucks, half off the usual hundred dollars. And if you have questions about the mentorship, you want to learn more, you can contact us at info@kalishinstitute.com. And we've got a mentorship class starting right now. If you're interested in joining, I'd be happy to talk to you about it. Okay.
So, let's look at the actual treatments. So, number one, the adrenals. We talked about that already. Yet, on the adrenal protocols, we'll have some other class for that one of these days. And then second thing, either antibiotics or herbal products to knock the H. pylori out. And then third thing, recolonization, repair of the gut lining tissue. So, first step is the adrenals, stress, and diet. If you don't get this under control, you'll probably knock the H. pylori down, but it'll come back. And it's all in the preparation. If you prepare thoroughly, this will go really well. If you prepare thoroughly, you'll get the H. pylori, eight out of nine times, okay? Almost every time. If you don't, and you go into the killing phase for the H. pylori too early, your odds are, the odds are against you that's going to work. And that's it. It is kind of a little bit like a war, you know? And, you know, if you go into a battle unprepared, it's just not going to work. You know, you just, you don't want this to be a fair fight. You want to just surround and crush the enemy in this particular case. All right.
So, let's look at an actual program. Oh, and to answer Alexandros question for right now, we're doing mentorships on an open-ended basis because of the Cova thing. We're getting a lot of people kind of signing it randomly. Usually, we have the mentorship start dates. But if you're interested in signing up, you can do it at any time. We had just added, there's a couple people that have been signing up every week from the group that I'm talking to right now, from you guys. And I'd say I appreciate that very much. By the way, the way that I can afford to see her and talk to you and do free stuff is because people sign up for the class. As much, you probably know, I don't take a salary or income from the training program. It's kind of like a volunteer draw, basically. I know the class seems well expensive, but it costs a lot to run all this stuff. Let's see. So, now we're going to say, we get the person on an adrenal program. I'm just making this up because we don't have an adrenal lab here. But say, DHEA, so I'm pregnant alone, and they're like, feeling better. You got them on some blood sugar support, and and you got some, you know, herbal adaptogens, and already they're feeling better. You're like, "Okay, this is great." Then you would segue over to the killing part, right? A month or two into the program, mastic or something very similar. And you want to get the dosages up, a thousand milligrams three times a day, depending on what kind of products you're using, you know, maybe one pill, maybe ten, I don't know. So, you have to look at the ingredient list. And then you want some kind of great anti-inflammatory, anti-inflammatory repair product. I think that the, you know, often what's used is either DGL, deglycyrrhizinated licorice root, or glutamine powder. So, sometimes either a pill or powder, you want to give those along with the mastic on a regular basis, calming down the inflammation in the stomach, allowing the mastic to get in and kill. Some companies have the mastic packaged together with anti-inflammatory stuff. Some people have it separate. Some people have zinc carnosine. I mean, there's a lot of different H. pylori formulas. You want, you know, a killer agent like the mastic along with the anti-inflammatory support. But that starts a couple months into this, right? So, it would be started adrenal program below, and then in 60 days, 60 days, gotta wait, start clearing of H. pylori. It's the preparation that makes all the difference. And when you start the adrenal program, that's code word for diet, exercise, meditation, all the things that we want to calm that person down. Remember, because this is stress-mediated. So, you can't just go ahead and kill it. It just doesn't work like that. It's just, you'll be wildly unsuccessful if you do that. You know, and I'm, people will be able to help maybe, you know, in an, and I am for lucky. If you do the preparatory work properly, then I just want to mention a couple of other clinical tidbits along H. pylori lines. And why this happens is beyond me, but you will often see H. pylori paired with infections such as parasites. In this particular example, we have Entamoeba coli and Endolimax nana. You're often going to see H. pylori paired with candida overgrowth. And why? Well, the H. pylori damages the stomach lining, don't make a lot of stomach acid. Bugs can get in or bugs can proliferate in the absence of these normal digestive processes. So, H. pylori opens the door for a lot of other potential infections and problems. And it's one of the more infection, you know, more the more important infections, I think, to get rid of in the overall scheme of things.
All right, so let me go and take a few questions now. Oh, I don't think you need to see that, do you? That's a little complicated. I mean, the fact, this is what I was studying this afternoon. This is a really interesting subject, but it's now we're talking about thiamine's effects on blood lactate and pyruvate. That is super cool. Okay, let's get back to where we were here though. Okay. So, let me look at questions and, um, and it's really as simple as this, you guys. A good adrenal program, all the meditation, diet stuff, you're getting that going for the first month or two, and then the anti-inflammatory gut repair with the mastic. That works almost every time. I've done this like probably close to a thousand times in my practice. I've been teaching this exact program for 20 years. It's really pretty effective. There are many other H. pylori killers, but that, you know, when you find something that works so consistently, I just kind of stick with it. All right, so let me answer some questions before we wrap up. And let's see, we got a ton of questions that came in. So, let me just start at the beginning. Do you treat H. pylori if it's showing up but not in the high category on a GI Map? You can. That's a judgment call. So, for those that they don't know this, the GI Map test here, we have our GI 360, this is from Doctors Data. Okay, they're just going to tell you, do you have H. pylori or you don't. So, yes or no, pretty straightforward. With the GI Map, they have a range here, so it's a little ambiguous, which is that, here we go. The way they take to find this is a PCR test or it's a little different kind of technology. And so, with this technology, they give you a number. Let me show you here, which, you know, may be a little confusing here. So, with H. pylori, to have the normal is anything below 1.0 E to the third. And 1.0 E to the third is a fancy way of saying three zeros, right? So, that's a thousand. So, any number that's under a thousand is considered normal. And this is 1.2 E to the second. E to the second is two zeros, so that's 120. All right. Yeah, two decimal points. So, this person's H. pylori came back at 120. Anything under a thousand is considered normal. So, it's considered normal. However, some people will treat any marker that shows up here because if there's no H. pylori detected, then they'll have, it'll say DL or underneath to take the limit or just be negative. So, that's a judgment call if you want to treat H. pylori's that are detected but in the normal range. It just depends on how sick the person is, see how much you think it might help. Let's see. Amy asked about how do you discern whether someone's H. pylori is protective, neutral, or causing dysfunction? So, if they have any significant symptoms of fatigue, depression, anxiety, GI problems, hormone issues, if they're suffering in some way, and they're stressed, it's probably worth doing at least the herbal program. Let's see. Val says, asking, you suggest doing three tests, organic acids, GI, and adrenals, but started the session that you don't need to test as much. So, when do you decide to test all three? So, I test in my practice. I test everybody for adrenal salivary hormone, a GI microbiome test of some kind, and organic acids or anion panel. In the training programs that I teach, the mentorship, everybody by the end of the year is doing all three tests. In the very beginning, are they doing all three? No, because it's kind of overwhelming. So, you might start just running adrenal panels on everyone, work your way up to doing adrenal and GI tests on everyone, and eventually, you want to get to the point where every new patient does these three basic tests and checking all the different systems. It's a minimal, minimal kind of workup, right? So, that's kind of what you want to end up, but it takes a little bit of time to get there. And there's a whole bunch of different labs. So, the lab companies, why just join them, right? Here, Doctors Data or Diagnostic Solutions. There's also the GI Effects test from Genova, that's a good gut test. So, here's from Carolyn, would you kill an opportunistic bacteria that's high growth in an ulcerative colitis case? Yeah, pretty much almost always. And that's the same basic approach. So, if you have, regardless of the bug, right? So, if you have, in this case, not H. pylori, but some bacterial overgrowth like Klebsiella, you're going to want to put the person on an adrenal program, do the diet, exercise, and meditation stuff for a good two months first, and then go after the bacteria with an antimicrobial. Yeah. So, for Chris's question about HCl and H. pylori, you have to be really careful giving hydrochloric acid to people with H. pylori because usually their stomach is already kind of inflamed and irritated. And of all the people that are going to respond poorly to H. pylori coming to HCl, it's gonna be your H. pylori patients. So, be a little careful in that. Here's a practical question from OB OB, which is, how do you price things? That's a really good question. So, I don't do packages, so I'm not the best person to ask about pricing packages. Other than to say that, you know, most packages should be in the three to four thousand dollar range. Most practitioners, if you're in the United States, should be at a minimum three hundred dollars an hour. That's absolute bare minimum. The higher end of the range is five hundred plus per hour. If you're charging under three hundred dollars an hour, it's just not a good thing. It's not good for you, not good for patients, not good for your business. Okay. So, in, and as you develop a package, you want to just make sure you're being compensated properly for your time. So, figure out how much time you're putting into the package, how much the labs cost, and then usually when you're doing a package, you add up your hours, add up the costs carefully, like all the labs, etc. Usually, people don't give supplements as part of the package because it's too complicated. And then plus 20%. The whole point of a package is that you're going to make more money, not less, right? So, then you got to add 20%, maybe 30% to whatever you're doing there, so that the package works. Let's see. So, DHEA with high estrogen? That depends. Probably not. It's probably not a good idea. So, two months. So, Alexandra again, two months with the adrenal programs before you start to do the H. pylori. The longer that you can do it, the more likely it is to work. And then another thing here, which is just, since apparently I'm able to just vent all my pet peeves and no one that can really stop me because there's no one between me and the mic. My other pet peeve, we talked about underdosing. I hate that. We talked about giving people too much stuff. Just don't give them too much stuff. Look, this is it. This is the whole program right here. It's the whole program. This has worked thousands of times. You don't have to do more stuff than this. This is a lot right here. You can fix a guy and do other stuff later, but this is enough. It's in it to get somebody better if you're doing the lifestyle factors. And then the sequencing of this is important, right? So, we're saying for now, an adrenal program to start off with, with the pathogen elimination program, those two, and then later on, getting down to detox and all these other things. But to make sure you have a clear, coherent, modular system, so you're treating people in the right order. And if you kind of see in my system, right, we do neuroendocrine testing, GI testing, detox testing, and then treat in this particular order as much as you can. Now, not everything, it can't always do that. Sometimes patients have got, you know, yeah, they want to get pregnant in three weeks, and you don't have two months to wait to do, you know, the other stuff. In which case, you just have to kind of compromise based on on what's realistic. So, is all the material in the GI Masterclass in the 12-month mentorship? Yes, it is. Is the adrenal master class updated? Yeah, it should be the same. I don't think I haven't changed those protocols in 20 years. So, it should be about the same. Can you start the mentorship at anytime? Absolutely. You can start at any time. Right now, what do I use for blood sugar? All the companies are good. Pure Encapsulations, Designs for Health, you know, any one of those companies are pretty much interchangeable in my mind. Usually, the blood sugar combination products will have myo-inositol, chromium, kind of stuff in it. Let's see. Emily, yeah, so I am, I've got the research paper in the handout section. If you can't figure out how to download that, we'll also email it to people. Okay, so you guys can have a copy of that. That's a great thing to share with patients. Patients like, "Is this gonna work?" I mean, I don't know. Dr. Koh did this study with the Mayo Clinic and it worked most of the time over there. Probably gonna work when we do it here. Let's see. Anxiety patients on meds, that's pretty, too, not too complicated. I don't want to make comments off the cuff from that one. Um, watch the difference between the internship, the mentorship is a year-long class. I teach other smaller classes, but the mentorship is the main kind of feature of what we're doing here. And then we have a business boot camp coming up. It's like a one or two month, like, get your business act together, figure out your telemedicine stuff class. We're gonna start that in July. It's very similar if you've done, if you've been around, if you take in, yeah, that's a, what is it, really? It's, um, it's like a crash course in getting your business together, business planning, and financial planning, that kind of stuff. Mastic retro, how long do you treat with a mastic? I forgot to say that. That's two months minimum. Stop. Give the person a break. So, two months minimum. Stop. Give the person a break. And then see if you need to do anymore or not. Okay. And towards the end of this whole process, you're also going to want to recolonize and repair. So, yeah, two months minimum and then stop and see if you need to do more. And sometimes the person might need another month or two. So, let's see. Arnold's asking, patient with all high fatty acid metabolism, carbon tablets of energy production markers. So, that you would do carnitine, magnesium, CoQ10, and a whole bunch of B vitamins to get that under control. Do you suggest stopping probiotics before the test? The GI testing? Yeah, absolutely. And prebiotics as well. So, stop prebiotics and probiotics for at least a week, preferably two weeks before the testing. No antibiotics for a week or two weeks before the testing.
For sure, see, yeah, Aaron is asking if the client comes in with severe GI symptoms, like if they're having diarrhea nine times a day and they can't even drive to work without having to pull over, then yeah, you can prefer to do the GI treatments immediately. If they're in really bad shape, absolutely.
Most of the infections that we treat are chronic, right? So, so when do you treat the results of the ion panel? In general, you want to, with the treatment phases here, you want to do, let me show you here. So this is kind of the art of designing programs is that you want your program to address symptoms. So neuroendocrine treatments usually address symptoms. Energy gets better when you work with the mitochondria. Everything gets better. And when you work with the adrenals, everything gets better. When you work with the thyroid, everything gets better. Mood-wise and energy and sleeping, work with the brain. So the neuroendocrine system helps you in the beginning and get control of symptoms so you can get all the work done with the GI infections as the underlying cause, right? So in general, when you're doing treatment programs, you want to get enough symptomatic relief in the beginning that the person sticks around so you can do the GI treatments. As soon as the GI treatments are winding down, then you can get down to business and start to do all the other kinds of treatments. Now that you've got their absorption working well, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to do a ton of supplements and some one if your absorption is not very good, okay?
For the mentorship, Elyse is asking, do you start live classes right away? Yeah, you do. As soon as you sign up, that next Tuesday, you're thrown into this group of twenty overly excited, rabidly enthusiastic doctors, all types, that are driving to develop their functional medicine clinic. That's what the mentorship is. You're just thrown into this mosh pit of functional medicine craziness, and then you just kind of crawl your way around, and then you get really good at it, and then the year's over, and then you're done, and you can go out and practice. But absolutely, we start with live calls right away, okay? It's a little overwhelming, in a good way.
Let's see, when do you consider removing medications? Road to these protocols? Oh, that's too complicated for me to answer off the cuff here. That's, that would take a while. Do we test H. pylori after a certain amount of time? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So usually around the six-month mark, we test H. pylori, make sure it's gone. So the break in between treatments, usually at least two or three weeks. People get fed up with taking all these products, but you want to see how well it worked, okay? You can't find EnteraFOS. So for Tony, as SaraFOS, around now, you can do SaraFOS or just fostering.
Is the information in the business bootcamping of the year-long mentorship? No, it's not. It's totally different. It's just like business stuff for business. And, and this summer, the business bootcamp is going to be very heavily telemedicine-focused. So you guys who want to do telemedicine, I'm just going to slam that part out. That's part of why we launched that class this summer because we got a ton of people who are interested in doing telemedicine, and I just want to have an avenue for you guys to get up and running. We underpriced the thing. It's like a thousand bucks for the whole class, and you'll get a ton of information about getting a business up and running, not just telemedicine, but you want to have that as this, you know, primary focus for those of you that need to do that. So yeah.
So usually the way the sequencing and the timing works is like this is that you start, let me go back to this here. You start with the adrenal program for a month or two, assuming they're not super symptomatic. You then start at the pathogen or clearing of the H. pylori, and that goes on for two months. So two months adrenals, keep the adrenal program going, another two months with the killing of the H. pylori, and then once that's done, assuming that's successful, then you would want to repair the gut, get the microbiome working a little bit better, you know, maybe suit some detox if they need it, right? Some nutrient replacement after all that digestive stuff. So you're sequencing these things out. Usually, a typical program in my clinic can last up to like a year, six months to a year. You treat adrenals before treating for SIBO? Absolutely, yes. And don't treat SIBO and H. pylori at the same time. That's too much for people. That'll make them feel sick. With Mastic, you know, two months on the Mastic, and then stop, and then see how they're doing, and then retest if you need to.
Well, that's a good question, Tinea. Can you do a class for mental health professionals dealing with anxiety? Yeah, I would do that. That's a good idea. I'll take that into consideration. With the mentorship, what if you're not actually working right now? Maybe we won't have case study examples. You can test family and friends, test yourself. We have lots of people take the mentorship that are not in active practice. In some ways, it's easier. It's easier to learn and absorb everything when you're not going crazy with your practice. So Alexandra, if you want to talk more about that, you can, um, contact the office. I'm happy to tell you more about that. Now, probably like twenty, thirty percent of the people that are in the class are not in active practice. Maybe they had their second baby and they're kind of taking a break, or they're semi-retired and they're taking a break, or you just finished I have fam and they're not really working a whole lot, or, you know, so that happens frequently. In some ways, it's a little bit easier. And you have the business bootcamp. We'll do that on a, we'll repeat it if it's popular. If a lot of people sign up for it, then we'll do it again for sure because that's a kind of easy getting started kind of class, right?
So Jimmy, just remind you guys, going to wrap up for now, but hopefully, this is helpful for you. We'll get out copies of the Mayo Clinic study if you're interested in looking at that, and we'll get out some information on how you can sign up for the, what is it, the $49 GI masterclass. So the, when is the masterclass? It's, it's a bunch of hours of lecture, and then a bunch of protocol review, going through all these different labs. So you get a little more practical experience, and I've got to kind of divide it up into systems, like these three steps that you use. So it's designed for people that, you know, are still kind of working out how to get, you know, the best results out of the GI testing. The GI testing that we do is pretty complex, and one of the important skills to master. I want to thank you guys for all your time tonight, and I hope you have a good rest of your week, and we'll be back. We're doing a series of these throughout the summer, so there'll be more to come if you're interested, okay? Talk soon.