Transcription
Hey, good evening, good afternoon, good morning, depending on what time zone you may be in. So, Dan Kiley's here, very excited to be doing a talk today on neurotransmitter balancing. And if you're new to these talks, welcome. You know, I'd be happy to tell you everything about what we're doing at the Kaos Institute a little while. And we will have an artfully produced and pradana and placed advertisement in the middle of today's programming. And I'll tell you about Cal students doing what we're doing here in the classes we have. And if you've been doing these free things for a while, then welcome.
If you're wondering why I look so fantastic today, it's because I just got out of an eight-day juice fast. I'm just glad I survived eight days without food, drinking vegetable juice all day. I'd never done that before for that long, and I've done five days before, but eight days is a pretty long time. So I did colonics every day, vegetable juice, two hours of really amazing exercise in the desert. I was at Palm Springs at a place called We Care Spa. Anyways, highly recommend eight days of juice if you ever are so inclined. It is not a bad thing to do for your health.
Let's see. Anyways, I'm back. We're going to talk about natural neurotransmitter balancing. And I'm going to do it kind of divided into two sections where we're going to look at some of the basic kind of underpinnings of how all this stuff works. And then I want to spend some time going through some actual labs so you guys can see how that works. So we'll have kind of a mimicking of what my real classes are like when you guys sign up for the training program, which you're all going to do after this class, right?
So, um, we have a group starting towards the end of September, Kalish Method Mentorship. And we'll get into that in a little while, and I'll tell you what that's like. But basically, the structure of the class is similar to what we're doing tonight. We have lectures every week. You listen to me doing a lecture, then we have a live Q&A call where we review cases and design programs together. And then we have this amazing community. I'll show you some of the features on that later, too.
All right, so let's talk a little bit about natural neurotransmitter balancing, a little bit of the background of structure behind, you know, how I look at this. And I think that, um, I'll just say it out loud, do you know, because I can, because I can talk and there's no one to mute me here, which is that there, there's a couple of things that I think are important for all of us. And then that, and you know, just mistakes I see practitioners make a lot of time, which are worth avoiding. Number one is not having a structural framework by which to explain things to patients. So patients get overwhelmed, as we get overwhelmed by all the labs and stuff. And then I, you know, so here's like my structural framework for why people have neurotransmitter problems.
And then another big problem we'll talk about when we get to the interpretation part of the class, in the second half of the class, is people, you know, design programs that are too weak, too low dose, too, I'll just say it, chicken. You know, it's just like people are chicken and they don't design programs that are, you know, therapeutic, that are aggressive enough. I'm not talking about hurting people. We're not allowed to hurt people. But I'm talking about, you know, putting a program together that's gonna move the needle in that person's life and not underdosing people, especially when it comes to neurotransmitter programs. And there's really easy ways you can just gradually taper people up. All these years of doing this, even though I hit massive dosages of some of these amino acids for the people that need it, no one ever gets sick. No one ever has serotonin syndrome. No one ever goes to the hospital. And no one ever freaks out. If you do these programs properly, the only thing that happens, worst-case scenario, is someone will get a little drowsy for a few days, or someone will feel like they drank an extra cup of coffee for a few hours. That's the worst that happens. And so if you are responsible and taper dosages up, you can get up to therapeutic amounts. And for some people, a therapeutic amount is a huge amount, more than you would think in terms of, you know, at the various amino acids. And we'll talk about, you know, I'll show you maybe just start off right off the bat with one of the actual products that we're thinking about here.
I'm starting to do everything backwards now. And by that I mean, I have this whole new way I start to look at functional medicine. This all happened in the last maybe six months. And by backwards, I mean, let me show you, because I'll do it right now. So by backwards, I mean, look at things this way. First of all, well, usually in functional medicine, we have this sort of sequence of events, right? Where we look at things in this way. We look at a complicated patient, basically, and then we're kind of overwhelmed already, just from that. And then we look at a complex set of labs, and then we kind of freak out because we're like, not sure what to do. And then we put together complicated supplement programs. And the more complicated it gets, the less likely it is to work, right? Because people can't do things that are really complicated. Patients can't follow through.
So if we're thinking about the opposite, let's start the opposite. Rather than starting with a complicated patient, let's start with the end. The end is what you end up doing supplement-wise, okay? And there's just a few things you need to master to master what I'm talking about tonight. You need to master the use of tyrosine. You need to master the use of herb or a plant called mucuna. You may need to master or 5-HTP or tryptophan, or both. And we can talk about why you use one or why you use the other. And then you need to master the use of a multivitamin. And that's not a joke. It is kind of half a joke. Like, how hard is a multivitamin? Everybody gets the multivitamin. So right off the bat, one out of the four problems is solved. Everybody gets a multivitamin. Why? Because it has the stuff that you need as cofactors, the B6, the calcium, the vitamin C, life and stuff, right? And then I'll throw one more thing in here, just because it's important, is you need to master the use of sulfur amino acids for phase 2 liver support and for production of catecholamines and for production of categories. And this, keep it simple, then maybe just of caught dopamine, okay?
So, leave like three or four things you need to learn how to do: tyrosine, mucuna. Those go together. Tyrosine is a precursor to dopamine. Mucuna is the precursor to dopamine. 5-HTP or tryptophan are their precursors to serotonin. And then the multipack or vitamin, you know, multivitamin. And then sulfur amino acids. In fact, if you want to make it even simpler, we can move this around a little bit since you can see there's two dopamines there. Well, if we just do this, use multiple, you know, get the use of tyrosine or mucuna, figure it out for the dopamine. 5-HTP or tryptophan, figure it out for serotonin. A multipack and some sulfur amino acids. That's it. That's like the entire component of every brain program that I do. And we're talking about helping people with everything from tremors in their hands to ADD, ADHD. I mean, this stuff really, really works. And remember, you want to not namby-pamby around. Don't be all chicken about it. Get the therapeutic dosages happening. The dosages up to a therapeutic level. And do your lab testing, you know, figure out your labs. I base all these assessments on organic acids tests. I'll show you just a quick example here. Here's an organic acids profile and the portion of the test that we're talking about. It's all right here in black and white. You can see it right here. You know, transmitter metabolism markers, your six markers here, super important. Tell you everything you need to know about designing these programs. And so that's what we want to talk about tonight.
But when I say doing backwards, we're starting with the punch line. The punch line is learning how to use tyrosine and mucuna. Learning how to use 5-HTP and tryptophan. Learning how to use multipacks or my multivitamins. That's easy because everybody just hits the multi. And then the sulfur amino acids, okay? And okay, now you figure out this is the product side that you need to master. So let's go back up to my little diagram thingy here. Remember, we're flipping this around. So we start out, you're starting with the supplements first. Just understand those four or five products. Then you can figure out what simple lab values correlate with those products. And then you can figure out how to design a program. So understanding the supplements that your, that are in play, the simple lab values that just showed you, we're going to review those later. And then you can design programs that are really effective, okay? So one, two, three, just like that. To do, it's really only like three or four things. And then we're going to spend an hour talking about them. So now it's going to get kind of complicated, but we're not going to get freaked out because we're going back to this understanding that all we're trying to figure out is how to use tyrosine or mucuna, how to use 5-HTP or tryptophan, how to use multipacks. Okay? It's kind of a joke because everybody gets the multipack. We could even just take that one off. You don't have to freak out about there. Now we're down to two things. And then everybody gets some sulfur amino acids for the most part, too. All right.
So that's what we're learning about. This is the thing. Is it when you go through this complicated process of lab analytics, and then at the end of the day, you realize what the solutions are, it's really only two things. Okay? And I'll just do a little, you know, like life update. So here's my teacher right now. Richard Lord is the man that wrote this book called Laboratory Evaluations for Integrative and Functional Medicine. He's the man that designed the organic acids testing originally. He's the guy that did the Ion Panel or what we now call the Nutri-Eval Panel. It's all his work. He designed the GI Effects test. He's pretty much the leading scientist in our field. And Richard and I speak every Monday, and we go over this stuff. And part of my life mission now, which I have chosen to accept, that was a Mission Impossible joke, if you haven't seen the film, you should go out and see it. Part of the life mission that I have now, which I have accepted, is to, you know, represent and talk about Richard Lord's work and teach everything that he's teaching to me. So that's kind of what part tonight is about. So I was going to say in memory of, but he's not dead yet. He's still alive. So that would be inappropriate. He's definitely alive and kicking.
All right. So, um, four different types of neurotransmitter imbalances. Now we're getting into complicated things. We're not going to forget all that. We're looking at is like a couple of things that we're trying to decide. We try and decide 5-HTP or tyrosine. We're trying to decide mucuna or tryptophan. Okay? That's the limit of what we're doing here. Near. So four different or three. What says three? Says four. That's a little schizophrenic right off the bat. But I think of it as three or four, right? So neurotransmitter deficiencies can occur. Neurotransmitters can be screwed up because of damage to the neurons. You can have genetic factors. And you can have gut-related problems, okay? So there's three or, depending on four, depending how you want to count them, different things that can go on here. And so if there's a deficiency, that's pretty straightforward. It means there's not enough of a given brain chemical, okay? Newsflash, how does that relate to the lab? Well, these first three markers here, phenylacetate, homovanillate, 5-hydroxyindoleacetate, are simple markers for insufficient levels of neurotransmitters, okay? This is that simple. Homovanillate is low. That's low dopamine. Boom. You nailed the whole case. And if story, you don't think about anything else. You just have to get that dopamine level back up. It's really that simple, you guys. In fact, seeing a low homovanillate on a test means it's so, it means, think about how would you feel if your dopamine levels were low? Like, you would be all anxious all the time. You would have ADD, ADHD. You would be a little obsessive-compulsive. You'd be depressed. You'd be sad. You'd be all screwed up. So, you know, people that have low dopamine, they're walking around in a haze of brain fog and memory problems and confusion, simply because this marker is so low, simply because they don't have enough dopamine. And the whole thing is given away with that one marker, homovanillate. That's a profound problem that affects people generationally. It affects moms, and then their kids, and then the grandmothers. It affects people throughout their whole lifespan in different ways. So anyways, simple, simple way to find things. Low homovanillate, right off the bat, means that you're deficient in dopamine.
Then we cut back over here. So a straight-up deficiency, there's not enough of whatever that chemical is. So there's going to be all kinds of symptoms. Common symptoms of dopamine or low serotonin would be compulsive overeating. So people get fat. People are completely exhausted and tired all the time. Of course, they become depressed because they simply don't have enough of these brain chemicals.
Second type, common type, right? Is that there's damage to the brain. There's neurotoxin exposure. There's brain cell damage. And the result of that is fatigue, weight gain, depression. It's the exact same set of symptoms as the last slide, but for different reasons. How many people have neurotoxin exposure? How many of your patients breathe? Was that kind of a joke, but kind of not a joke, because when we breathe, we inhale air, and much of the air on this planet right now is full of potential neurotoxins. And then when we don't breathe, perhaps we eat. And we eat foods that perhaps have chemicals, water, air, food, you know, whatever. Maybe whenever our exposure is to lead, or mercury, or cadmium, or benzene, or toluene. And then the list goes on, right? There's literally, I think the last study I saw, something like 82,000 neurotoxins that we're potentially exposed to, depending on where you're living and how much you're breathing and what you're eating and whatnot. So anyways, we have a lot of patients, perhaps all of our patients, that have some level of neurotoxin in their body. And these neurotoxins cause very real physical effects.
If you want to stop for a moment and talk about movies, one of my favorite opening scenes, probably my favorite opening scene in any film, if you haven't seen this film in a while, it's worth watching it again. It's called Gladiator with Russell Crowe. And it depicts the point in the Roman Empire where Marcus Aurelius is on his deathbed, one of the greatest Roman emperors, right? And his son Commodus is about to take over the Roman Empire. Not a good thing, right? Commodus really kind of drove things into the ground, not unlike the current situation we're in with the emperor of the United States. But we won't go into politics. So anyways, it's a great movie, right? And the opening scene, Russell Crowe is like, he's got his little gladiator outfit on, and he's in charge of the Roman Empire. And they're fighting the Gauls because during the end of Marcus Aurelius's reign of the Roman Empire, oh, and for many years, I can think probably most of his time as a Roman Emperor, they're constantly fighting the Gauls. Gaul is what the area we call France and Germany right now. And the Roman, the entire Roman Empire, the army, all the legions are lined up, and they have their catapults, and their arrows, and their spears. And, you know, it's the equivalent of what the US Army was is like right now, right? So, well, it's, it's the most elite fighting force in the world, obviously, that Roman Empire. And the Gauls are on the other side of this field, and they're getting ready to attack. And they're kind of during the Romans. And then Russell Crowe looks at these guys and he says, "Unleash hell." And they just want arrows start flying, and catapults start launching, and there's this massive barrage that completely wipes out the other army. It's an awesome scene. But that's kind of like what's happening in our patients' brains. They're literally neurotoxins or chemicals and heavy metals that get into your brain tissue and destroy neurons. So just like in that movie, when you have like, you know, a six-foot spear that goes right through the neck of some, you know, soldier, I mean, that guy's pretty much dead. You know, it's not going to be a lot of like resuscitation of a guy with a six-foot spear sticking out of his neck. And, you know, you're watching the film and it's not real, but you're thinking about that guy's definitely dead. So when neurotoxins get into the brain, they kill neurons. They don't like upset neurons. Those neurons are not crying or, you know, you know, somehow feeling like they've offended. Neurons are dead. They're being destroyed. And this is a really major problem, perhaps one of the major problems of our era, right? Is neurotoxins and endocrine disruptors. So anyways, you can count on a certain number of brain cells in any patient that you're working with being dead or gone.
Third type, genetic. What else do you want to say? You know, you can do, run the gene testing, use all kinds of fancy ways to assess this. You can also see tendencies for functional genomic problems. What Richard Lord calls, was back to the book here, right? What Richard Lord now, but it's not in his book, is like a new term he uses now, functional genomic problems. Means that you can see in the functioning of the organic acids or the functioning of an ion panel, and the functioning of an amino acid profile, whatever it may be, that the person's got a functional problem, right? That they don't have enough of a given neurochemical and too much inflammation related to the brain. And that's happening because of some genetic tendency. And you can interpret organic acids levels and you can see where the genetic problems are with a basic organic acid test. And who knew that was even possible? It's pretty cool.
Type four, dysbiosis. So, just to mention that because in functional medicine, you do, you guys know that gut causes everything. And, you know, we always have to kind of nod and give appreciation to the gut. If you have major gut problems, you're going to have major brain problems.
So now, the conditions, the things that you see that walk in the door: people are overweight, tired, depressed, they eat too much, they binge eat, they crave, anxiety, panic attacks, insomnia, extreme body pain, fibromyalgia type symptoms, restless leg, migraine headaches, ADD, ADHD, cognitive decline, drug dependency, drug depletion, traumatic brain injury. There's a lot of them.
Now, the neurotransmitters themselves, there's a bunch. There's like 180 of them. We're just going to talk about two because these are the two sort of key neurotransmitters or, you know, sort of master regulatory neurotransmitters. And this goes right back to our earlier discussion here. What are we really doing tonight? We're just figuring out how to use two different things: the stuff that helps me improve dopamine and the stuff that improves serotonin. And the basic, what do you call it, like precursors and, you know, products upon which, you know, all the brain chemicals are dependent, okay? So the sulfur amino acids, and that's, I was joking about, maybe it wasn't very funny, but a multivitamin. That's for everybody, okay? Multivitamins and some sulfur amino acids are basically for everybody in order to make all this work. And we're just then picking a lane between dopamine and serotonin support. And as we get into this, you can see here we go. Sorry, I'm flipping around there. Yeah.
So what we're actually looking at are the neurons and how they're conducting their signals. And they use neurotransmitters to do that. And these neurotransmitters are made from amino acids. Again, there's really only two groups. We've got the group that is producing the catecholamines. So the production here ends up being for dopamine, norepinephrine, and epinephrine. All three of those, conveniently, are made by L-DOPA. And L-DOPA, if you go one step further up here, you would see tyrosine. It's not in this diagram, but tyrosine converting into L-DOPA, then to dopamine, norepinephrine, and epinephrine. All these chemicals, at the dopamine, epinephrine, or epinephrine, are all made from tyrosine. And we can use tyrosine to fix this side. We can also use L-DOPA, which is the fancy word for the plant that we call mucuna. So when we use mucuna, we're seeing giving an herbal form or plant-based form of L-DOPA. When we give tyrosine, we're giving the amino acid to boost up this half of the equation. Why do we want to do that? Well, you could have a deficiency. That's the first one we talked about, not enough neurotransmitters. So you want to just give the tyrosine to mucuna to bring the levels up. You could have the whole Russell Crowe warrior, you know, throat, you know, spear in your neck kind of thing, where there's a lot of dead neurons. So you need to get neurons firing better. They could be neurotoxic damage. You have it. It could have a genetic issue. There's whether it's just the person who's just born without having the ability to make enough neurotransmitters, okay?
So the second side of this talked about the dopamine side. The second side, serotonin. We have tryptophan that goes to 5-HTP that goes to serotonin. Having B6, critical cofactor. You'll notice also in the tyrosine slide here, B6 is hanging out. So B6 is anytime you're using amino acids to do anything, you really should include B6 in the program. That's sort of an essential component.
Now, people always ask, you know, what's the difference between tryptophan and 5-HTP? How do I know when to use which one? They're somewhat interchangeable. Each of them have characteristics which make them somewhat unique. So I'll just tell you what, what I've learned about them over the years. Number one is 5-HTP converts to serotonin at an unlimited rate. Meaning the more 5-HTP you give, the more serotonin that person will produce. That is a convenient and good thing. Tryptophan, when it converts into serotonin, there's a natural break in here. Well, sorry, I drew it in the wrong place. There's a break right about here in the pathways. And that break means that if serotonin levels climb up to a certain point, there'll be an inhibition of tryptophan converting into serotonin. So there's a feedback loop here. If your serotonin shoots up to a certain level, tryptophan will no longer convert into serotonin. So there's a ceiling or a limit on how much tryptophan can get serotonin up. So that's a negative on the side of tryptophan. However, there's a positive on the side of tryptophan. And this is a question, and we might as well have a short quiz here, which is, and if anyone knows the answer to this, you can raise your hand or type it into the inbox, okay? Here's the quiz, ready? And who, where'd I get this question from? Richard Lord asked me this question a couple of years ago. Did I know the answer? No, I didn't. That's why it's a good question because it's a hard question. So what's the rate-limiting step? What's the rate-limiting step in all protein synthesis except for collagen in the human body? That's a big statement, right? In other words, for every single protein that you want to produce, and what proteins make up every little cell in your body, right? What's the rate-limiting step? What nutrient limits the body's ability to convert amino acids into proteins? Okay, what, kind of giving it away, the answer obviously is tryptophan. Tryptophan is a rate-limiting step in the production of all protein synthesis in the human body, except for collagen. So, tryptophan is required for any kind of cellular repair that's really important. 5-HTP doesn't have that role. So there's pros and cons to each one of these, and you can use them both interchangeably. You should be familiar with them both.
I already mentioned this. This is the catecholamine production pathways for dopamine, right? Epinephrine, norepinephrine. We got our tyrosine or L-DOPA. Then all three catecholamines, dopamine, norepinephrine, and epinephrine, are made from the exact same ingredients. So that whole pathway gets stimulated with that same simple thing that I mentioned, which is right back to here, which is you just need to learn how to use tyrosine and mucuna for that entire realm of correction. In my practice now, who, out of all my really hard cases, up to 20, 30% of them are helped dramatically just by me knowing how to use tyrosine and mucuna properly, just by that one simple thing.
All right, there's a bunch more PowerPoint slides. We're not going to cover them all because I want to get to the point where we can review some labs. But, you know, they're here just so it looks like I know what I'm talking about, basically.
How do you get deficiencies of neurotransmitters? Good question. Stress burns them up. Bad diet. I mean, how many people do you have that don't eat enough protein? That's not so common, but it's possible. You know, someone's just eating bread every day and never eats protein. Bad digestion. That can happen for sure. They have some GI infections and aren't absorbing well. Drug depletion. I've been on any depressants for a long time. That'll deplete your neurotransmitters like nothing else. Stress can do it, right? Your dreams get whacked out. Your thyroid gets whacked out. Your brain gets whacked out. You have all these hormone imbalances that can cause it. And then protein, you know, lack of protein in your, in your diet can cause it. You need the protein to make the serotonin. So that can be part of it.
And here's another schematic on how all this stuff is made. So when we're measuring these chemical compounds in the body, it's very difficult to accurately measure serotonin in the blood or urine. And so a long time ago, people figured out that you can run, you can run a test for the urinary metabolites of serotonin or dopamine and get an accurate sense of what's going on within the brain cells themselves, okay? So it's a handy sort of assessment tool to have. And we're going to skip over some of these slides too.
Here we go. So neuron damage. Talked a lot about this, right? You have a spear going through your neck. Not a good thing. Brain cells that are dead don't just like come back. So when people have a neurotoxin exposure, we have to then go ahead and fix that problem. And you can also see with gut-related problems on organic acids. It's a really important marker, D-lactate. If that's elevated, it means that their neurotoxins are coming from the bacteria in the gut. And now you've got a gut-brain connection. You've got a, you know, damage or destruction of neurons coming from the gut. And where did you find that marker? We're right back to our organics profile here from Genova. And lo and behold, number 44, D-lactate. You see that right there? D-lactate is a marker for bacterial overgrowth. D-lactate itself is a neurotoxin. So when this number is high, you've got neuron damage generated from gut dysbiosis, okay? Handy-dandy marker. D-lactate tells you right away if that phenomenon that's going on or not. And it's a common problem. Oh, and last thing, I shouldn't forget is, you know, some people just get banged around and they have head injuries. They fall off a horse, hit their head, car accident, hit the windshield, stuff like that is gonna cause problems with neuron damage as well.
The genetic issue. People, some people are born with this problem. Usually, they've been struggling for all kinds of time, you know, years and years and years, years and years. So. And then there's gut dysbiosis. So, you mentioned king. So, which reading the guy, we're not going to get into. But I want to show you some of the dosages and treatments that we can have here for for the neurotransmitters.
All right, so we're going to hit our advertisement phase right now. And then we're going to get into reviewing some of the labs. And I'll show you a brief version of how you can interpret these labs and start to design some programs. So we're starting a new class, a one-year mentorship class, starting towards the end of September. And it's been a good year for us. The Kalish Institute is doing really well. We've got educational programs all over the place. We've got a lot of updated information. Got a major revamping in the class now. I developed a whole Fundamentals of Functional Medicine course, which you get as part of the mentorship, which is, you know, heavy into program design and patient education. And we're really, you know, doing a good job educating doctors. You know, it's a year-long class. The payment plan is around a grand, twelve hundred bucks a month. It's not particularly burdensome. If you have the ability to afford that, I would encourage you to do it. Within the class itself, we have the live weekly calls. We have the Q&A sessions, right? We're reviewing labs. We're about to do a version of that right now. And then we have this amazing, you know, world that I've built over the years of content. And so within the content, we have things like a case study library. We have around 2,000 cases in here, maybe more now. And you can type in anything, like you can type in dopamine, for example, into the case study library, and it'll pop up dozens and dozens and dozens of cases. Restless leg syndrome and dopamine, OCD and dopamine, chiropractor has stage four cancer and dopamine, not a good thing. Female with Hashimoto's and dopamine, right? So case study after case study. And each one of these case studies, back to Roy Daddy's fret and and bubble and dopamine. So each one of these case studies has a video. They're all transcribed, so you can read about them. And like, just a single case alone, you know, you can go on and on and on and learn tons of information. So we have all kinds of clinical information in the case study library. And then we also have another resource section where we have all kinds of information just on practice building. So if you're struggling with something like what EMR system to buy, type in EMR, and you'll have all kinds of discussions and interviews, people talking about what are the best EMRs. If you have a legal question and you're just not sure what to do, type in legal, and again, endless discussions. Like more information here. Look at that. This just goes on and on, right? So you get all that as part of the mentorship. You get the live weekly calls. And we're starting a new class in a couple of weeks. So come join us if you have an interest. And if you're curious, you can set up a consult, talk to Mark or myself, and we'll get you all set up for the class. All right, so that is our latest.
Now let's look at some labs. So this is just actually, these are taken from class. This isn't just like classes, exactly like class. So in class, you know, you would submit a lab or two or three, whatever you have on your plate that week. And then we go over them. Let me just show you an example here. Um, in real time. Well, here, let's just start at the beginning here. So here's Pam. I don't know when this one came in, probably last year's. Might that patient has chronic fatigue, depression, agoraphobia, food intolerances. And then we got a lab. So here's our organic acids profile. And we're going to skip the parts that aren't relevant for today. Oh, man, but look at that. Wow, that's depressing. Anyways, this is not part of tonight's test or test. So it's a class, but that's a mitochondrial problem. Well, that is not good. Okay, but we're not supposed to be talking about that. Sorry. Okay, we're going to skip forward to the brain part. So here's the brain part, right? And it's really simple. These first three markers are stress-induced deficiency problems. So again, homovanillate is low. That's low dopamine. End of story, okay? These last three markers here under the neurotransmitter section are inflammatory markers. They reflect inflammation in the body that's impacting the brain. Kynurenate, quinolinate, and picolinate are inflammatory markers, okay? So again, if there's a problem with the latter three markers, you've got an inflammatory problem. And I'll show you a diagram that attempts to explain that. And here it is. And, you know, most of you, you're probably familiar with this whole idea that, you know, inflammation is related to brain function. And here's our kynurenate pathway. And it's really pretty simple in a way. You have inflammation that drives kynurenate. Quinolinate gets dragged in there, and picolinates in the mix here as well, okay? And so the more inflamed you are, the more these markers of inflammation go up. And the more your brain gets messed up in the process of that happening. More inflammation there is, the more agitated this whole L-glutamate system gets. You get enough agitation in here, and that whole NMDA receptor system goes. It's like something, yeah, it's like a bunch of water balloons getting shaken up and shook it up, and then they start popping, right? Eventually, when things are bad enough, and the magnesium levels drop enough, brain cells start blowing up. And it's not a good thing. So people try to calm the system down with magnesium and other kinds of treatments. We also want to obviously determine where the inflammation is coming from and try to correct it, okay? So these first three markers are related to stress and utilization. These last three markers under the neurotransmitter section are inflammatory. So in this patient's case, you have a high kynurenate, that implies there's a problem with serotonin that's inflammatory related. And you have a low homovanillate, that's a dopamine deficiency. So this problem, this patient has a problem on both the serotonin side and the dopamine side. Well, that makes it easy, doesn't it? Because then we don't even have to decide which side to treat. What if you both? I didn't do that on purpose. This is just a random lab that got picked for me. But anyways, that kind of makes it easy. So remember, we're back to the diagram number one from the beginning of the class. You just need to figure out how to use this stuff and this stuff. And now we've got a patient needs them both. So how would that program look? Well, pretty easy, just using both.
All right. So tyrosine usually comes in 500 milligram capsules. The opening dose for me is usually 3,000 milligrams. That we, and milligrams, three times a day. 5-HTP, I always get it in 100 milligram dose. The opening round would be 300 milligrams. You give 100 milligrams three times a day. Remember, this patient needed both dopamine and serotonin support. How do we know that? Because we looked at the lab and we saw, oh, homovanillate is low, that's low dopamine. And then kynurenate is high, that's the inflammatory marker, that means there's a serotonin problem, okay? So we can use both, and that person will get better if you get the dosing adjusted right. So if you open up with this amount of tyrosine, ultimately we're talking about 3,000 milligrams of tyrosine for the first few weeks. And we're talking about 300 milligrams total 5-HTP for the first few weeks. You get a week or two into it, they're not responding. You have to pick a lane and increase the dose of one of these products. Pretty straightforward. And a week or two is enough time to determine whether it's working or not. Remember, if you do this in stages, and you start with this amount, and then you gradually increase it, you know, you really won't run into problems.
Let's look at another lab. Once you see a bunch of these, it's another patient. Al, he sent this in. It's a male, he's 43. He's on a bunch of supplements, joint pain and body aches, fatigue, low testosterone. He's tried HGH and testosterone in the past to help with body aches. And here's his lab. So again, it's kind of painful, but we have to kind of cruise through the energy part. But his, look how messed up his mitochondria are. That all these markers are low. These markers are low. So he's got this mitochondrial collapse problem. I have a talk on that if you haven't heard it yet. And then we look at his neurotransmitter metabolism markers. We're right back to neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitter metabolism markers. Remember, it's an indirect measure. These are the measure, these are the metabolic byproducts of serotonin, dopamine, etc. Vanillylmandelate is low. Homovanillate is low. 5-hydroxyindoleacetate is high. How easy is that? So when these markers are low, it means that dopamine, epinephrine, and norepinephrine are low. When this marker is high, it means that you're burning through or using up your serotonin. So in effect, you still do the same treatment with a 5-HTP or tryptophan as you would if the levels were low. It doesn't really get much easier than that. In other words, let me say that again. If homovanillate is low, you do tyrosine. If homovanillate is high, you do tyrosine. If I have 5-hydroxyindoleacetate is high, you give 5-HTP. If 5-hydroxyindoleacetate is low, you give 5-HTP. Either way, you give the same product whether that marker is high or low. It's not that complicated.
Now, in this case, both the catecholamine, catecholamine markers are low. So that's probably someone who's really severely depleted. And to take things one step further, the kynurenate marker is high. And that's another indication that they need 5-HTP. So we go back to Pam. And here we are again. It's the same, actually, same exact program. We just do it because this person needs both the serotonin boosting power of 5-HTP or tryptophan, and the tyrosine boosting power to boost up the catecholamines. Now, just as an example, let's say you want to use tryptophan with this person instead of the 5-HTP because you heard that tryptophan is a rate-limiting step in the production of all proteins except for collagen. You would get tryptophan in a 500 milligram capsule and give one or two along with your tyrosine, okay? Another way to do it. If you want to get all fancy, and the person has a sleep problem, primary sleep problem, you can instead of giving the 5-HTP or tryptophan during the day, you can use a 5-HTP or tryptophan at night. And then this will double as a sleep problem solution. So let's call it a sleep solution. You would give your, you know, three-ish, three plus, whether say three 5-HTP, three plus tryptophan at night. So again, it's the same lab, same, you know, person suffering, but they have a sleep problem. So instead of giving the 5-HTP or tryptophan during the day, you give it at night. So it helps with their sleep a lot, okay? Just getting it into their system in a slightly different time.
So let's look at one or two more. We got a few more minutes here. Hopefully, you're having fun. Julie sent this in. 84-year-old female who is retired, on thyroid medication. She has memory problems, lightheaded, feels weak, has always had anxiety. Okay. And then we're going to skip over all this other stuff because we're not talking about mitochondria. But I guess I am talking about mitochondria. Just look how cool this is. All these markers are high. Remember, we just saw all these markers low on the last one. That's interesting. All right, that'll be for another day. And we looked in at her, you know, transmitter markers. Neurotransmitter metabolite markers. Vanillylmandelate is high. That's high levels of the byproduct of epinephrine and norepinephrine. What do you do for that? Tyrosine. Remember, if it's low, you do tyrosine. If it's high, you do tyrosine. 5-HIAA, 5-hydroxyindoleacetate is high. You give serotonin precursors, 5-HTP or tryptophan. Kynurenate is high. Same thing, right? It's the exact same program as we just looked at, just slightly different labs, slightly different patient. All right, let's skip ahead. Let's get one or two more here. See here's one. 36-year-old. Intermittent. There you go. Oh, Al, again. Different class, same doctors. 43-year-old female nurse manager. What does she have symptom-wise? Fatigue and hormone imbalances. And this little note from the doctor: "I've been working on her adrenals. Difficult to get her cortisol down. Still has fatigue." Whew, that's interesting. Hey, let's read that again. So again, this is a case study. These are out of one of the classes I've taught recently. "I've been working on her adrenals. Has been very difficult to get cortisol down. Still has fatigue, which is not improving despite adrenal treatment." Hmm. So let's look and see. The adrenal program is not helping. And then we look, can we see? Is there something going on with the brain? Well, these three markers are nicely evenly spaced in the normals. So there's not a lot of or any really stress-related neurotransmitter-related problems. But what about the kynurenate? That's high. That's an inflammatory marker. So there's a lot of inflammatory related neurotransmitter problems, but none of the stress related ones. Interesting. And the adrenal program's not working. So it's not a stress-related problem. It's inflammatory. By stress, I mean emotional stress related. And here's what we talked about before. I'm not even making this up. This is like a real lab that another doctor sent in. Look at the D-lactate marker. Anything above a two is considered high. Anything above a four is considered critically high. So that's 16. So remember, D-lactate elevates in response to bacterial overgrowth in the gut. And D-lactate is a neurotoxin. This person has an adrenal treatment that's not working. Okay? They have a neurotoxin in their gut coming from the gut, which is massive. Sixteen, eight times what we consider elevated. Four times what was considered the critical range. And when we look at their neurotransmitter markers, we see that there is not, like we've seen on every one of these other ones, we saw problems with these three that are stress-related. This is not a stress-related case because look, they're all three normal. What's elevated is kynurenate. That's the inflammatory marker. And the inflammation is coming from the gut. Oh my God, I can you believe that? That is so cool. So this is why the adrenal program didn't help. It's not a stress condition. It's a gut condition that's messing up the brain. That's amazing. If you know how to interpret these tests, it's a few simple things like we're covering tonight. You could have spotted this right up front. You could say, "Hey Jane, your brain looks great in terms of how you're responding to stress. These are all normal. However, you have a really high kynurenate that indicates inflammation in your system that's impacting your neurotransmitters in a really bad way. And further, we see on your D-lactate level, an astronomically high level of D-lactate, which is a direct reflection of gut bacterial overgrowth causing the production of a neurotoxin which is damaging the brain. I think you have a gut-brain connection problem." Boom. You just nailed the whole case. I mean, you got to now figure out what's screwing up the gut. But man, that is deep. That is deep that you figured that out.
So we do a few more. Hey, you know, if you take my class, we do this every week. And we have 2,000 of these case studies recorded already for you, okay? By the time you get through listening to three or 400 of these, you'll totally know what you're doing. You really will.
Jyothi sent in this lab. 57-year-old nutritionist. Main complaints: put on 10 pounds despite clean eating. Questions: Patient had treatment for Blasto. Repeat GI Effects results not back. Did food sensitivity up a lot. Oh, and here's this is a great question. Look, what a wonderful doctor this is. She's just being honest. She's like, "Wait, I start. It's a good question. Am I an all-knowing person? No. But do I do? Where do I work every week with Dr. Richard Lord? Yeah. So I know, like, I know some of these basic things now." So we're going to skip through all these other things because we're focusing on the brain. It's amazing how my step people get. All right, let's look at the brain now. Man, oh man. Vanillylmandelate is very low. That's a tyrosine problem. We already knew that. These are normal. And all three of the inflammatory markers are high. What does that make you think? When all three of these inflammatory markers are high, there's some source of inflammation that's just driving this patient's brain to craziness. We look at our D-lactate and we're thinking, "Whom, is it coming from the gut?" Is that inflammation coming from the gut? Nailed it. D-lactate high, generating inflammation, that's generating the brain problem. What else is going on? Yeast marker, Dr. Bennett, all super high. Got a yeast overgrowth. Excessive neurotoxins coming from the gut.
This person is like a Candida type case, all right. And there may be some other gut stuff that we don't know about. And what does that gut inflammation doing? It's causing a problem with the brain. Goes right back to what we said in the very beginning of the class. Let me see, I'm skipping around, sorry. But is that you can have neurotoxin damage that's driving the system to have a problem, right? So, and that neurotoxin damage can be coming from gut infections or from neurotoxins. You can have a deficiency state where you burn through or used up more of these than you should have. You can have a genetic problem, which we're not really talking about tonight because it's too complicated, right?
And let's see, we got a few more minutes. I want to do a few more labs. Hopefully, this is sinking in. Yeah, this isn't that hard. I'm telling you, if you see four or 500 of these cases over and over and over again, you'll have a general sense of how to handle this stuff. And this is just one skill set. Just knowing how to to deal with the brain-related problems makes a huge difference. So I want to give you some dosage ranges here before we wrap up. So I already said this once, but 300 milligrams on the 5-HTP, 3,000 milligrams on the tyrosine. Nice starting dose, okay? You can increase beyond that, but be a little careful, right? Be a little careful. Make sure that you have them on the multivitamin to make sure that there's some B6 in this whole thing, a hundred milligrams a day at least.
And then here are those different steps. If you're thinking about neurotoxin-related stuff, you know, I, but we're not talking about this tonight in detail, but you gotta obviously find the neurotoxins and get rid of them, all that kind of stuff. I'm going to show you one example of how to do that. Or like in the case of the gut problems, you got to figure out the gut problem and get rid of it. Like this patient had the yeast overgrowth, right? So it is, there's other steps to this obviously, more than just neurotransmitters. We're just doing the neurotransmitter part because that's what the talk is about tonight. But I just want to show you one other thing here, which is important. We talked about this in the very beginning, but I didn't really show it on the lab. I just want to find an example of it. Oh, I don't see an example here. Let's see, I'll find one in a second. So remember, you need to use Mucuna. And I didn't show you how to use the Mucuna. So we got one or two more wrap-up things here before we're done. Yeah, I just want to find one good example of this. It's not showing up here. One more time, let's try one of these. No, it's not showing up. I mean, I'll just make it up then. So be on the lookout for any brain-related problem where the patient has low sulfate. Remember, we said sulfur compounds are really important for the production of the catecholamines. So be on the lookout for any brain-related case that has low sulfate. Low sulfate will be down here. That's sort of catastrophic in a problem that you're going to want to address.
All right, so, and we, I can take some questions too in a minute if you guys have questions, you can type them in. So let's go through here. We talked about the tyrosine, starting off with around 3,000 a day. Talked about the 5-HTP. I like to get it in the 100 milligram pills. A lot of these companies will include B6 in there, so you don't have to worry about it. Often it's with B6. And then the one last thing I didn't mention too much about is Mucuna. So many of these companies will have Mucuna in the product. It's usually called Dopa something, DopaBoost, L-Theanine, Dopa-Me, whatever. Dopa-Me. That was a joke. But Dopa-something. You know, and that's a herbal form of L-DOPA, okay? And depending on the product, you want to dose that one carefully. As a simple example, Designs for Health has Dopa-Boost. So Dopa-Boost can be dosed at either two or three capsules a day. And it's complicated with it, with the Mucuna, because it depends on the strength of the Mucuna in the pill. So I can't say, oh, just give 100 milligrams of Mucuna because Mucuna is rated in a percentage of L-DOPA, you know? So some Mucuna will be 10%, some Mucuna will be, you know, 60%. So in some Mucuna, if the Mucuna says 10% on the label, that means if you have 100 milligrams of Mucuna, you got 10 milligrams of L-DOPA. If the Mucuna is rated at 60% potency, right, that means if you have 100 milligrams of Mucuna, you have 60 milligrams of L-DOPA. So I can't tell you, oh, you just need X number of milligrams. So it depends on, on all that, on that math that you have to do. Anyways, Mucuna is an important part of this. Dopa-Boost from Designs for Health isn't easy to use product for Mucuna, two or three of those a day. And then sulfur compounds. Everyone has sulfur compounds. All the companies do. The thiamine, taurine, and the L-cysteine. All these are the sulfur compounds that will help with catecholamines too, okay? And those are usually dosed at around 1000 milligrams two or three times a day, okay? And then the multi is a multi, right? But you have to have the multi in there. It won't work because you need the calcium, the C, you need the B vitamins to make all this thing work. So a multipack or multivitamin plus a little bit of the sulfur compounds, especially if there's sulfur markers or low. And then here to give you some basic ranges and then just playing around with this and starting to taper people up or down. Now, in a lot of examples that we have them to use, we had both. But you might have a patient that only needs the tyrosine boosting side, in which case you take out, you know, the other stuff and you just do that. And you might also have the reverse. You might have a patient that only needs the serotonin boosting side. So you just use a 5-HTP. Usually, if you're doing the 5-HTP by itself, you give it at night so they don't get drowsy on you, okay? So there's a serotonin only program, you can do dopamine only, or some combination of the two.
All right, let's see. We're going to wrap up for tonight. The hours fly by. Always think I'm only going to do a half an hour, but then it always just flies by. So if you guys are curious about the class, we're starting one in a couple weeks. Contact my office. Mark can talk to you. I can talk to you. It's a pretty kick-ass course right now, kind of in our heyday. And, you know, I'm not going to live forever. It would be a day when I'm gone and you guys would be like, wow, I should have taken that class with Kalish while he was still alive. I'm 54, you know, the clock is ticking. You should feel some pressure to take the class based on the fact that my meditation teacher says I'm going to live to be like 120, and I'm 54. So time is short. Think about taking the class. If there are any questions, let me grab them here. We've got another minute or two. Is it possible to get a PowerPoint or recording? Absolutely. The whole thing is recorded and you're welcome to listen to it, share it with friends, no, no problem at all. How do you decide between 5-HTP or tryptophan? You know, if you're asking that question, I would just use the 5-HTP. Once you're really familiar with the 5-HTP, you can use tryptophan. If you feel like the person's super depleted across the board, they really need to have an encouraging boost for cellular repair, then the tryptophan is good. Okay, how do you treat D-lactate? Oh, yeah, yeah. So with D-lactate, you're then you need to find where, why the dysbiosis, the origin of the dysbiosis. So it may be they need an antimicrobial program to tune up their gut. They may have a parasite or some other infection that you need to treat. And then next question here, I've heard conflicting information regarding urinary neurotransmitter testing. So what we're testing here are urinary metabolites, not the neurotransmitters themselves. The testing of the actual neurotransmitters themselves is problematic. To see at least, okay, a Parkinson's patient taking L-DOPA, can they take tyrosine? Yes, they can. Shouldn't you take 5-HTP and tyrosine together? Yeah. You know, you can get away with using one of the amino acids by itself for four to six months. If the patient needs to be on it year after year, then you probably want to do a more, you know, complex thing. Seems like a pill for an ill? Absolutely not. This is a spiritual problem, and we're talking about lab reviews because what the class is about, anyone who has these problems, it's primarily going to be healed by spiritual healing. And, you know, my job primarily is as a spiritual healer. However, if I put on my business card, "Dan heals people through energetic means and through reaching out into the spirit world and taking away all your demons," I probably won't have a lot of patients. So this is not a pill for no thing. This is just like a scientific way of looking at how to prescribe supplements, but really what we're doing is healing people from our spiritual powers. That would be my summary of that. Product containing methionine and taurine and N-acetylcysteine? Yeah, I'll tell you my favorite. I use Designs for Health Amino Detox. Designs for Health Amino Detox, and it's got one of these cutesy names that I find annoying, detox, you know, D-letter D, but that's a great product. Designs for Health, Cavanace, fit anywhere in this? Cavanace is good. I don't, I use it when I have to. Usually, you don't have to with this stuff. Do I offer continued training from SHIP grads? Absolutely. We have all kinds of advanced classes. So Dr. Webb, who's asking that question, just set up a phone call with me. I'll tell you what we've got now, a lot of advanced stuff. What multipack do I like? I don't think it matters. Any of these good companies, Metagenics is good, Pure is good, Designs for Health is good. They're all good, you know, and I don't think it matters between multis. I don't think you can, you can't really go wrong with those. And choose one that you're, you know, finding is more convenient. Okay. All right, everyone, take care. Have a good rest of your evening. Thanks for listening in, and we'll be doing another one of these in a month or two. All right, bye for now.