Transcription
Hello people. Well, could some kind soul raise their hand, just so I know that this recording is actually going? You can all can hear me up. Thank you, Laura. And I would just assess, based on the names I'm seeing up here, we have people from all over the world. That is too bad that we don't have time to just chat about stuff in general, but we got it because we got to talk about adrenal fatigue.
So, I'm Doctor Dan Kelly. Super excited to be doing this presentation. This is a class I teach all the time in my mentorship program, which usually people pay ridiculously large amounts of money to take. And now I'm just teaching it for free. And why, you may ask, is Dan teaching his best stuff for free? Because I have so much new content in the mentorship that what used to be like the crown jewels of the program are now like, "Look, you know, well, adrenal programs, we've got so much new stuff."
So, I'm gonna talk a little bit about things that are going on around the Kalish Institute. Then we're going to jump into some program protocol design, things that you can actually use for real, for real. Okay? So, I'm gonna give you a little update. We have a class that's starting in about a month, and I have built in the mentorship, within the one-year mentorship, this whole new Fundamentals of Functional Medicine course. I spent months and months and months and months on this thing. So, it is a, and I'm going to cover a little bit about it today. It's, it's basically, you know, the fundamentals of patient interaction and program design. How you actually get people to take stuff, how you design programs. And, you know, what I found after all these years of teaching the full year mentorship is that some docs just never got this. I got this information sitting at the feet of the master, Dr. Glenn Frieder, and just watching him work for four or five years. And, you know, it's not intuitively obvious how to figure all this stuff out. So, ways, I've built up a whole new section of the mentorship, and it's the best work I've ever done. If you guys have been thinking about doing the class for a while, we didn't change the price at all. You get this whole new, you know, $3,000 section in the course as part of the one-year class. The mentorship starts April 24th. You get a grand off if you sign up using this promo code here. You want to talk to someone on my team about it? Please do, because it is bigger and badder than ever.
In addition to this whole ridiculous fundamentals class that I put together as part of the mentorship, I've also been working with Dr. Richard Lord for the last two years. And for a few of you that don't know Richard, not familiar with his work, he was the original scientist that developed Organic Acids Testing, the scientist that developed the GI Effects test. Really, probably the most prominent scientist in terms of lab design and lab analytics in our entire industry. And Richard's been working with me for two years now to really up my skill level in terms of how to interpret and do these tests as well. So, I'm pretty excited about that connection. And so, you know, whereas the class for the, the year-long class for, you know, 12 years was really kind of the world about Dan and how I do things, now I'm really been able to incorporate Dr. Lord's materials into the class, and it's brought it to this whole other level of clinical expertise. And anyways, it's a goal in the era right now for me for freshly, and I'm super excited about that.
So, one of the reasons why I'm teaching this class is I have all of Dr. Lord's new material. And I figure, well, I can give away some of my precious stuff from the past. And that's kind of what tonight is all about. And when I start off by talking a little bit about misunderstandings. We'll look a lot about labs tonight. And probably the most important thing is, you know, who not to do this stuff with. So, the adrenal programs work extremely well with people who have an adrenal problem. But, you know, what you want to rule out are people who have major mitochondrial problems are not going to respond very well to an adrenal program. And people who have a primary thyroid problem will get some benefit, but not that great. So, if you're convinced that the patient's main life problem is thyroid, then adrenal protocols help a little bit, but they're not life-changing. And similarly, if you've identified based on the labs that the patient's main problem is mitochondrial in origin, then, you know, I wouldn't encourage you to pursue these kind of programs either. But for the right patient, at the right time, this can be really life-changing work. And I just stacked the PowerPoint deck tonight with a ton of slides that we're not going to really talk about, just in case you all want to review this later, because we usually post the, there'll be a PDF somewhere of the slides that you can, you can download. But I want to, because I wanted tonight, focus, focus mostly on program design.
But anyways, when I'm talking about the adrenals, we're talking about the three nodes in a context of all these different body systems here, okay? So, we've got the stress-related problems, GI-related issues, toxin-related problems. And I'm always trying to explain this in terms of models. And neuroendocrine, GI, and detox as a model, right? But then when you want to go to that next level of program design, you want to start to think about, well, how am I going to set up a program that a patient can actually do? And it's got to be number one, in order for us to survive on the streets of functional medicine land, as I have for all these years, is you got to, like, be clinically impactful. Like, you have to change people's lives. If they come to see you and six months later, they're like, "Yeah, they don't really feel like their life has changed," then they're not going to refer patients, and we'll be out on the street, not able to practice. So, number one, you have to generate programs that are life-changing. But at the same time, they have to be realistic. And patients, after you, you know, have to build that, do them. So, you can't give everybody everything that you want. You should start to think about program setup. What are the goals that you have? Where the goals of the patient has? What are the patient needs? They, somebody who's going to want to take a lot of stuff or just a few things? When I show you the adrenal programs, I'll show you how I prioritize all that.
There are some people like me, who the more I spend on something, the better I feel it is. So, if I'm at a nice restaurant and there's a hundred and seventy-eight dollar bottle of wine, and I order that bottle of wine, I'm thinking, "This is going to be a really good bottle of wine." And if I order a $17 bottle of wine, I'm thinking, "This wine is probably not going to be that great." In my mind, the psychology is, "Hey, if I spend more, it's gonna have to be better." Okay? Not everybody thinks like that. Some people are the opposite. Some people actually feel better about themselves and the world in general if they spend less money on themselves. Okay? Usually, that doesn't pan out so well, because most things that are cheaper are as good quality, right? So, certainly when it comes to supplements, you want to be really careful about people who are cost-conscious and reduce their program down to like two key products that are going to work, rather than giving them five cheap things that aren't going to work. Okay? So, you can have a clinically impactful program that's cheap. You can have a clinically impactful program that's expensive. Either way, you can make it work. Okay? So, you just need to, you know, assess who you're talking to. Do they want a lot of supplements or just a few? Do they want changes to happen fast? Now, my assumption is that everyone wants to have fast changes. But you ask people, some people are get freaked out by changes that are too fast. So, you may have patients that actually want gradual changes. And so, just make sure that you check in with the person. So, you know, as you're designing the adrenal program, what are the good things that you want to set up for them? And then, of course, there's a report of findings and sequencing in terms of how to be sequence all this.
Well, I always lead off with the adrenal or neuroendocrine programs. So, that would be the first step. Adrenal, thyroid, sex hormones, neuroendocrine. That also would call include neurotransmitter programs. Because these programs, for a variety of reasons, are nice to lead off with. They make people feel better. And there's reasons why you want to control for inflammation, all this other stuff. That it's not a bad place to start. So, just think about as you're designing programs, you know, take it from the patient's perspective so that you're, you know, well aware of what they're doing. And I think that most common mistakes that I made in my early years were that I was just right out every supplement that I thought they needed and not check in with them about what was realistic. And again, you can have a life-changing program with two or three products. They don't have to spend a lot. However, some people who want things to go quickly and who feel better if they spend more on something will be happier, believe it or not, if they buy more stuff from you. So, you don't want to hold back on those people because they don't interfere the healing process. There's not about us making more money, it's us about us, you know, figuring out how to design a program that's going to be life-changing. So, you want to include their perspective, their pains, their gains, their life goals. Because if we get a benefit from the program, but it's not what the patient wanted, and, you know, not everybody's gonna be happy about that.
And then under lifestyle factors, I think the most important thing I can say about lifestyle is that every supplement that I give and every program that I recommend is tied in to a lifestyle change. Okay? By that, I mean, I mean, you think about, you know, you're doing an adrenal stress program, and the person's working, you know, 120 hours a week, and they're in a bad marriage, and their spouse is an alcohol abuser, and, you know, violent. I mean, they're clearly, you know, not going to get better, right? So, we have to tie every supplement program we use into lifestyle changes and try to, you know, emphasize that the areas of stress that a patient can change need to be changed as part of the program. And it could be something as simple as blood sugar control, where you just set up the adrenal program, let them know, "Hey, part of this program is related to blood sugar control," and the supplements aren't going to work very well unless we start to get you eating three meals a day and those kinds of things. So, always tying their program, lifestyle changes into the supplement protocols, that's just the basic thing that we want to do.
And then we'll talk about next is designing supplement programs that people can actually do and that are going to work. And thinking about how that ties in to products and symptoms and conditions and all the things that they are struggling with, right? And here's all the common misunderstandings that we want to avoid. And I see these every day in practice from patients coming in from other doctors. They're on too many programs or too many supplements. That doesn't work. There's no follow-up. The dosing, oh man, I see this one more than anything. The dosing is too low. So, these are related. They're on tons of different supplements, but none of the individual supplements are at a therapeutic dose. I can't tell you how often I see that. Let me say that again, because this is a mistake that we're all making. They're on a ton of different supplements, but the dosing of everything is too low. So, nothing's happening. You know, just horrible, horrible mistakes that people make. They're just so, you know, easy to avoid if you're thinking about it. And then the things that we want to understand, the idea is program design, how to sequence things, all these kind of, you know, basics that we think about when we're looking at programs.
So, let me, and we talked about this already again. I put a bunch of slides in here you guys can reference later, but I want to start with programs here. The more, just like reference slides for you. Patient comes in with symptoms. We're looking at body systems. In this case, adrenals. And then we're wondering what the underlying cause is. And so, the adrenal hormones themselves are never an underlying cause, unless there's a rare case of an adrenal tumor, like that. But how often do you see that? The adrenal problems are a reaction to various forms of stress. So, we don't want to ever blame the adrenals per se. That could be emotional, spiritual stress. Could be dietary stress. Could be gluten, GI infections, toxins. Any of these variables will push the adrenals over the edge. So, again, the adrenals are rarely, rarely, rarely an underlying cause. They're gonna be in the scheme of how I look at things here, you know, pretty far down the line. Right? There's an underlying cause, there's damage that occurred, and then eventually, when these body systems start to fail, and then people have symptoms. So, we're kind of in this box tonight, dealing with correcting the body systems.
So, what does that mean? Does that means that an adrenal program by itself is most likely not going to address the underlying cause of the problem? An adrenal program in and of itself is likely not going to address the underlying cause of the problem. If they're still in a bad marriage, if they're still having a bad diet, if they still have toxins, then the adrenal program's not going to correct that. So, you may say, "Well, then that makes no sense, why are you doing it first then?" Well, let me skip back here a few slides, because stress is a leading factor in triggering this whole cascade of problems. And so, we can get a huge benefit by treating the stress response early. But don't let it fool you. You still need to deal with the underlying cause issues, which could be gut-related, or toxin-related, or emotional-related, or wherever it may be. Okay? But just treating the adrenal glands by themselves is really rarely going to solve the complete problem.
And then, what are the three major sources of stress for the adrenals? Emotional, dietary, and inflammatory. You talked about that for days. Took me years to come up with this. But, you know, when people ask, "What, why would I want to work on my adrenals? Why would they be a problem in the first place?" Well, you could be under emotional, dietary, or inflammatory stress, and any of those will cause a problem.
And then, let's start to look at programs real quick here, not wasting any time. So, and, and that's if we're just getting all the negative stuff out of the way, just clear the air here, right? So, be careful. You don't need to use high dosages. Just tiny little dosages are fine. When we're talking about these programs, make sure that you know what you're doing. You know, is based on testing. Use the DHEA, I'm pregnant alone together. And don't get too freaked out about things you read on the internet, because half of it's not true. All right?
So, let me just show you. Let's just cut to the chase here. I'm gonna show you what a basic program looks like. Then I'll show you how you can manipulate the dosages. So, the two lead-off products are going to be DHEA. And I like to use it in liquid. You can also get it in pills. Liquid or pills. And pregnenolone. Again, I prefer the liquids, but you can also get it in pills. So, the various adrenal labs will tell you how much DHEA and how much pregnenolone. We're assuming that you're aware of all that. Don't do it in here, like if the person has estrogen-related breast cancer, don't use DHEA. If the person has prostate-related problems, you may not want to use DHEA. If they're under the age of 16 years old, you for sure don't want to use any DHEA. So, you know, we're assuming you guys have some basic knowledge about when it's safe to use these things. But by and large, for most of the adults that we work with, this can be a really fantastic combination. And then along with that, some kind of blood sugar support product. Every company has a gazillion of those. You can, if you really want to get into this, add in some adaptogenic herbs. And these are obvious things that we do, probably most of you use already. You can use some extra vitamin C, because the adrenals use extra, you know, burn through a lot of vitamin C. And then some kind of a multi. So, my complete adrenal program would include these six products: DHEA, Preg, blood sugar support, herbal support, vitamin C, and some kind of a multi-pack. And then the DHEA and pregnenolone dosing, we're going to talk about tonight about how you adjust that up or down based on the lab. Because that's, that's kind of like the secret sauce part. Again, assuming that you've cleared the person, they're okay to take these hormones, you feel comfortable doing that based on their history and whatever, and that you're pretty sure they have an adrenal program problem based on the lab. Obviously, if they don't have an adrenal problem, we wouldn't be doing this.
So, I'm going to skip around a little bit on the slides. We'll come back, but I'm going to skip forward to the good part here. So, you guys see again, I have ten more slides and, you know, ten times the slides in here that we have time for. I'm assuming much, you kind of know all the basics already. But let's look at the actual protocol part, and then we can kind of fill in the dots if you don't know some of these other things. So, there's three stages of adrenal exhaustion. Simply put, there's high cortisol states, or as well as high, it's cortisol when it's dropping, and as cortisol when it's low. And we vary the amount of DHEA and pregnenolone based on what the stages. And then there's two other products you need to know about, but we'll cover those in a minute.
So, stage one is characterized by high cortisol. There's pregnenolone to support that. And then there's DHEA also. Why do we use DHEA? Because in the stage one, the DHEA levels are low. You can use more DHEA in a stage one, because DHEA has a lowering effect on cortisol. Okay? So, that's super important. High cortisol, you can use more DHEA. With a stage three that has very low cortisol already, using large amounts of DHEA could drive their cortisol down more, which would be bad, because that would make them feel better in the short term, but we're getting, but worse overall. So, the higher their cortisol is, the more DHEA you can give. The lower their cortisol is, the less DHEA you want to give. And then, of course, stage two's are kind of in between. And I'll show you some examples that in a second. And then we use pregnenolone in different amounts for all these different phases.
So, let me just show you some examples and then loop back around to, uh, okay. So, here's your stage one. This has got a high cortisol with low DHEA. So, we use a certain amount of DHEA, a certain amount of pregnenolone for that example. And then a stage two, or the CS go to stage three. Stage two's are harder to figure out. We're not gonna figure that out tonight. But stage three is easy, because the total cortisol is low and the DHEA is low. Okay? Say, stage one is high, stage two is dropping, stage three is low. And then I'll just show you some backup on this. Let's look at the actual program first, and then I'm gonna do a stage one program first.
So, if you're using the DHEA in a liquid form, it would be one drop. If you're using it in a pill form, it would be 4 milligrams equals one drop. So, you can do it either way with this. So, with a stage, and this is again, a stage one, remember, stage one is a high cortisol stage. Stage one. So, you want to give more DHEA. How much is more? Well, I give around 4 drops, or I guess if you're going to translate that, that would be 16 milligrams. Well, that's, uh, three times a day. Now, that's an odd number. Obviously, you probably end up just giving 10 milligrams. So, actually, we know, maybe just make that easier for you guys to do all the math. Let's just say you get a 10 milligram DHEA. So, 4 drops or 10 milligrams. 4 drops or 10 milligrams. And then 4 drops or 10 milligrams. So, a couple of things about this. First of all, it's not very much DHEA. It's a 10 milligram dose, or 4 drops, three times a day. The key is that you spread it out throughout the day. So, you never give it all at one time. If you took all that DHEA and you gave it in the morning, first thing, you'll find it has a much different impact than if you spread it out in a low dose throughout the day. Spreading it out in a low dose throughout the day is kind of magic to this, because it keeps the levels pretty stable, and it won't cause a big bump at any one time, and it helps reduce any risk of conversion. And most importantly, it helps reduce the risk of a sudden large amount of DHEA causing a problem and interfering with DHEA production. Okay? So, again, this is a stage one.
And then on the pregnenolone side, we keep the dosages pretty mellow. So, that's typically going to be around, drops, which would be around, again, to the math, I'm going to round it off for you, around 25 milligrams. So, either eight drops or 25 milligrams, again, three times a day. Small amount of DHEA, small amount of pregnenolone. And then your other supports: your blood sugar, adaptogenic herbs, vitamin C, and multi-pack. Okay? So, that's a basic stage one protocol. Super simple.
Now, let's go back and look again at what this means. The contextualize this. So, remember, a stage one was high cortisol. Sorry, I'm late. There you go. Stage one is high cortisol and low DHEA. So, we're going to use a little extra DHEA in this one to help knock down that cortisol. We're going to use a little pregnenolone to help as well. And then we'll look at a stage three in a second. And now, if you're wondering, "Well, why is he saying all this stuff?" And we just show you some diagrams here. So, why do we do all this in the first place? Well, when the cortisol levels are high, we find that pregnenolone helps come over and support cortisol quite nicely. Nobody uses pregnenolone. It's like there's no pregnenolone advocacy group, you know? It's, I mean, really, if you, I don't know if you twisted my arm pretty hard and we're like, "What's your favorite supplement of all time?" It'd be somewhere between pregnenolone and transfer factor, probably. But anyways, pregnenolone's right up there. It works incredibly well. Hardly anyone ever reacts to it poorly. And it's like the key thing for fixing cortisol. And pregnenolone got lost in the shuffle of supplements company marketing somewhere. And what ever talks about it, it's really the most underutilized thing on the planet. So, anyways, pregnenolone is how we rectify the cortisol. And then, of course, here's your DHEA. We use DHEA for that. Now, theoretically, pregnenolone should convert down to DHEA as well as over to cortisol. But when you're stressed, that doesn't happen. So, typically, we use pregnenolone and DHEA together. Similarly, DHEA can go down to these pathways, but I can't go back over here. So, DHEA cannot help with cortisol. Pregnenolone could theoretically help with DHEA. But again, the person's stressed out enough, the pregnenolone is going to be diverted over this way. So, anyways, we use them both together. It's a wonderful combination in super low dose.
Now, just go back and I'll show you a stage three protocol. Hopefully, this is not overwhelming or too confusing. So, we did a stage one. Got that. You know, now let's just do one right below here and we can compare. Now, we're going to do a stage three. And don't worry, a stage two is right in between. So, remember, we said stage three, the characteristic is that the cortisol is low. So, we don't want to use as much DHEA. So, you can cut it down to like 2 drops, or 5 milligrams. Two drops, or five milligrams. Two drops, or five milligrams. So, why are we using such a tiny little baby amount of DHEA? Well, because DHEA can lower cortisol. So, we want to be very careful about how much DHEA we give. But they still have low DHEA. So, want to get their DHEA back up. Okay? So, that's a way to do it. And then on the pregnenolone side, preg, then my favorite is when people say, "Pregnant Ohlone." It's not pregnant only, it's not like rigatoni, it's pregnant alone. So, now with a stage three, they're desperately low in cortisol. And so, we can bring their pregnenolone levels up. So, you can go 15 drops, or 50 milligrams of pregnenolone in a stage three. And I promise, this works great. I've been doing this for 25 years. My teacher before me did this for 20, 20 plus years. He's the one that taught me all this stuff. We did a study on this with the Mayo Clinic, and we showed that it was safe and effective. Nobody had any really major problems, bad happened. In fact, most of the people in the study actually got amazingly better. And not everybody. Some people didn't really get better at all, but the majority of people, it was like statistically significant enough. I think the main thing in the study, here's a copy of the study. The main thing about the research study is that we just showed that this stuff is safe. You know, nothing bad's gonna happen if you do this. You keep these doses just super low. If you guys haven't seen this yet, I'm happy to send you a copy. This got published last year, when was two years ago now, a year, year and a half, two years ago. Evaluation of Functional Medicine Approach to Treating Fatigue. Sue Cutshall and Larry Bird's drummer for the Mayo Clinic. I'm Dan Kalish. I'm the one that did all the actual patient care. The exact same protocols we used in the study are the ones that I'm talking about tonight. Nothing better, or nothing less, nothing more. Just the exact same stuff. Okay, pretty effective.
So, stage one, more DHEA, less pregnenolone. Stage three, less DHEA, more pregnenolone. Right? And why are we doing that? Well, the thing, the way to remember that is that DHEA lowers cortisol. So, if your cortisol is already low, you want to be extra careful there. And then on top of that, you can add in, of course, for the stage three, you do the blood sugar support, you do the herbs, and you do the C. This is depending on how much stuff you want to give the person. And you can do some multi-packs. Now, remember, we talked about how if the patient is a, like, "I can't handle as too much stuff, it's too expensive." Just work your way down the list. You can just do DHEA and pregnenolone. A blood sugar's important to stop there. You don't have to keep adding everything. But if the patient is a "more is better" kind of person, and you know, keep adding things in till you really get there.
Okay, let's see here. Now, that's a majority of this story. So, let me just review that real quick. We can, Sam, have some questions at the end too, if we have time. I might just show you, oh, sorry, again, I loaded this up with tons of slides that we're not going to talk about. There we go. So, oh, that's my buddy Jim. That's not a, that's not an adrenal slide. Anyways, meditation is important. Okay? So, remember, stage one is high cortisol. We use DHEA and preg, but not much DHEA. Stage three is low cortisol, low DHEA. We use double the pregnenolone and half the DHEA. That's the difference.
Now, one final thought. You can also use specific supplements to lower cortisol and specific supplements to raise cortisol, depending on the time of day when the cortisol is high or low. Okay? So, let me just show you what that means here. Did you do, am I show you? Well, actually, I have it on the slides here, and I can just show you here. And by the way, I just made, make a comment about meditation. So, it's gotten really bad for me. I spend, used to be two hours, I spent like three to four hours, or maybe five hours a day meditating, you know? Anyways, someday we'll have to talk about that. I'll do a seminar on it sometime. But one more to say, one thing. Meditation is, meditation is not just sitting there and spacing out. Meditation is a space, you know, is a, it's a time when you're spiritually connected, not disconnected. People get it backwards. You're not trying to empty your mind, you're trying to fill up your mind with better stuff. Okay?
So, if you ever see a high cortisol, you see these high cortisol here, you can use FOS-serine to knock that high cortisol down. Incredibly effective. Every time he has some FOS-serine type product. So, just keep that in the back of your mind. Seren can be used to knock down high cortisol. Okay? So, that would be for your stage one, when the cortisol is high. This is in addition to the other stuff that I showed you. And then for your stage three, with the low cortisol, you can use licorice root to bring it back up. Okay? Again, I use a liquid licorice root. You can buy it in a pill if you prefer the pills. So, the low cortisol states, we can specifically use licorice. The high cortisol states, we can use FOS-serine.
So, let me just elaborate on the program real quick here. I'll show you. So, if we're gonna add in one more thing here for your stage one with high cortisol, I'll put this in all caps: FOS-serine. And you give it right before the time of high cortisol. So, let's say that the high cortisol is at bedtime, you would give the FOS-serine at dinner. Again, the high cortisol is at bedtime, you give the FOS-serine at dinner. Similarly, for stage three, let's say that they have low cortisol. So, as stage three is, so you can use the licorice specifically before the low cortisol. So, let's say they have a low afternoon, let's say they have a low noon and afternoon cortisol, you can give the licorice root with breakfast and with lunch. Okay? So, you give the boosting, cortisol boosting product, licorice root, right before whenever they're dipping down in their cortisol. And if you have a high cortisol, you want to knock it down, you give the FOS-serine to knock it down. All right?
So, maybe review all that one more time. So, sort of sinks in. Hopefully, stage one is characterized by high cortisol. So, we use more DHEA, less pregnenolone, all the general support. And then whenever you see a high cortisol, you give FOS-serine to knock it down. Incredibly effective. It works every time. If it's a, you know, you've ruled out all the other problems, that's not a mitochondrial case, there's not a major thyroid case, you know, they don't have an alcoholic husband or whatever it is. So, at this point in my career, I'm more interested in when these programs don't work, because when these programs don't work, I know there's something going on that's, you know, be interesting to me personally. That's how effective they are. Okay? If you're in a stage three and you're plagued by low cortisol, when I drop the DHEA down to 5 milligrams, remember, you can't give it all at the same time. If you give 15 milligrams all at the same time, it has a completely different effect. What same story I always tell the patients, if you decided drinking water was the best thing you could do for your health, which I do believe it, it probably is one of the best things you do for your health, if you all of a sudden drank all the water that you needed for the entire day at one time, your stomach would just blow up and you wouldn't feel very good, right? The spread. And that doesn't mean water is bad for you. So, if you take a large amount of DHEA at one time, 15 milligrams, 100 milligrams, 200, whatever people do, that could cause a lot of problems. If you take five milligrams three times a day, we're trying to mimic a normal level in your system from the DHT that's missing. And just giving these small amounts pulsed in throughout the day, it's the pulsing it in part that makes the big difference with this. Same with a pregnenolone. We're just giving a small amount of the pregnenolone spread throughout the day. And again, the drops seem to work a lot better. Just so you know, the drops that I use, I forgot to mention this, are 1.2 milligrams per drop of DHEA. And similarly, 1.2 milligrams per drop of preg. But the drops are absorbed so well that you have to do this little factor when you want to account for, though, if you're going to use pills. Okay?
So, again, stage one, characterized by less D, more DHEA, and less pregnenolone. And the FOS-serine is the extra special guest there. Then stage three, less DHEA by half, double the pregnenolone, the same basic support agents here. And you can use the licorice root if you have the super low cortisols. All right?
So, now, let's see. That is the fundamental personal lesson. Here, I'm going to mention, let me see here. We'll talk about a training program for a second, and then want to show you guys some more examples so we can just go through some samples here so you can see. As I, once you see this ten or twenty times, I should be able to figure it out. All right?
So, here are some sample tests. Let's just pick one here. So, now we're looking at the total cortisol, it's at a nine, which is low. The DHEA is a point one, which is very low. This would be a stage three. You would use the licorice root at breakfast and lunch to bring up these lows. You don't ever want to use licorice root at dinnertime because it can stimulate people at night. And remember, we would use the pregnenolone and DHEA in a stage three. So, that would look exactly like this stage three protocol. Either the drops, that would be two drops three times a day. I mean, in the liquid form, that's like two milligrams three times a day, right? It's not very much. It's a matter of fact, they don't even sell two milligram pills, right? So, this is like a lower dose than anyone ever anticipated using in the history of functional medicine. The super low dose. And then on 15 here, 15 drops. Okay? Or you can go up to the, as much as 50 on the pregnenolone. All right? And then because it's a stage three, you would also use the licorice root extract in this case with breakfast and lunch. But don't do it with dinner because it can keep people awake at night. All right? And then the generic support that we put in every program: blood sugar, herbs, by Missy, and then the multipacks. So, that's one example. And let's see here. Let me pull up another one. It's just another extreme. Let's see here. Hang on one sec. So, all right, here we go. You know, I had this. Here we go. This is a, could be going. So, total cortisol is 12, and the DHEA is 2, which we would still consider low, kind of functionally low. And in order to rectify that, you go right back to the exact same program, right? It's not going to change a whole lot. It's pretty similar. That's the beauty of having a system.
Now, let's look at some high cortisols. Here's an example here. Total cortisol 68, but the DHEA is low down at a 1. This is what we call a stage 1, high cortisol, low DHEA. So, we cut over to our stage 1 protocol, which is hiding here. Hasn't changed in the last 10 minutes. Here we go. Remember, more DHEA. 4 drops, or 10 milligrams, three times a day. Remember, the key point is it's spread throughout the day. So, you're not gonna get a sudden spike. Shouldn't get much in the way of negative side effects from doing that. And then pregnenolone is in a lower amount, 25 milligrams, three times a day. Or if you're using the liquid, eight drops. Remember, I prefer the liquid very much. So, in the liquid, it's 1.2 milligrams per drop. So, this is like really, it's, I don't know, about four, it's a little bit more than four milligrams of the liquid. Okay? So, super low dose. 10 milligrams of capsule. And then the other characteristic, or sort of special thing about about this stuff here, let me show you here. Where to go here? Sorry, Jimmy windows up. And here we go. Remember, if you have a super high cortisol, let's find another stage one. Well, there's a good way. All right? So, high cortisol in the morning, noon, night, and bedtime. Total, how it cortisol is high. You're surging with that much cortisol. You want to slow the train down, right? And we can use the FOS-serine to lower high cortisol. And so, in that case, I just showed you, they had high cortisol the time. So, you could give the FOS-serine literally, you know, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, maybe even before bed if you wanted to, to knock their cortisol down. In general, my experience has been that FOS-serine works, you know, within a month or two, within a bottle or two, cortisol is down. So, you don't have to do that for very long. It usually works pretty quickly. Most of these protocols I set up for six months. So, it'd be a six-month program, typically. Stage one, six-month program. Stage three, six-month program. I usually find is not a whole lot in the person's life is gonna completely change in a month or two. And so, it's worth, you know, pushing them to do a six-month program. In my clinic, we try to sell either three or six-month supplies of all these products. So, the person gets on the right track and and does the right thing, you know, from the reagan beginning, from the get-go. All right?
So, now, um, let me do a little marketing, self-promotional thing, and then we'll look at questions that came in. Okay? But by the way, you guys, that's the, that's everything that I do with you adrenals. I mean, I built my whole career around this in the earlier years of my practice. And uh, again, if you, if you're selecting people in the right way, I can show you maybe some advice about who not to do this with. You know, you're gonna have really great, great, great responses from people in general. If you're, if you're addressing the underlying stressor at the same time. Okay?
So, as a repeat, we have a new class as starting in a month or so. I completely revamped it. And I built a whole new section, which is what I call the Fundamentals of Functional Medicine. I don't know, something like 20 hours of content of how to design programs and how to explain all this stuff to patients. Because, you know, what I found in all these years of doing this is that, well, I have this five or six-year period of watching Glenn Frieder work every day and just through osmosis, I never went to a program design class. I never went to a patient communication class. I just watched Glenn year after year, patient after patient. And I watched Dr. Timmons too, year after year, patient after patient. I just learned this by observation. And now I realize that a lot of the practitioners that are, you know, in functional medicine, never had a five or six-year period of just watching two masters do this work. So, I built a class about it where I am trying to teach everything that I've learned about program design and patient interaction. And this seems to be one of the key things that's missing. And I can tell that because when new students come into the mentorship, something that they don't always have down, they're not totally confident with how to explain stuff to patients. Well, not, and they're a little shaky on their program design skills. So, I just want to kind of do a crash course in that and teach you all how to do that quickly. And for those of that are new to functional medicine, it's, it's an absolute necessity. It's also probably the most important part of driving the business and driving referrals.
So, anyways, I built this whole new section. It's called Fundamentals of Functional Medicine. It's included with a one-year mentorship. We didn't change the pricing at all. The mentorship is the same price. You should get a thousand bucks off the class if you enter that code there. Okay? And we're starting a new group in April. Also, the new class has got all of, you know, every live Q&A call, we're reviewing. I'm really looking at things fundamentally in a different way. Not just more about program design, but also about what Richard Lord has taught me on the on the actual lab interpretation stuff. And I can't tell you, like, there's something happening in my life now, which is, it's not about for my personal gain. Like, when someone like Richard Lord comes to you and says, "Hey, kid, you know, I want to teach you everything I know, and I want you to have all my intellectual property to carry on when I'm dead." You know, that's more like an obligation than it is a financial opportunity. And I'm in it now. I'm in the deepest end of the pool now. Put the best people. And my job is to try to carry this on for you.
Someone just asked, "How much is the class?" I let me just show you here. One-year mentorship. Let's see. I don't want to see the price wrong because I'm getting a lot of trouble. My staff was just like, "Shoot me." Okay. It's $13,490 for a year program. Or you can do 12 monthly payments of $1,235. And if you use that code that I just had, you get a grand off. You get a thousand dollars off. So, it makes it $12,500 basically for a year of the most intense content. You get a year of me yelling at you every week. We do live calls. We have thousands of case studies. We have this curriculum that's just out of this world. And now we have, you know, the mind-numbing expertise of Richard Lord coming in and sort of me channeling his work, basically. So, you guys, this isn't available anywhere else. I was, some of the senior doctors understand this. Those of you on a call might not. You just can't walk into somewhere and just have all this content thrown at you. It's really hard to find.
All right, so let me see here. I want to show you one other thing. And I killed it up. So, these are the cases you want to be on the lookout for. I'm going to show you on the Organic Acids what to look out for in terms of adrenal labs. So, if you see an Organic Acids test and you see all these low markers here, all these low markers under fat metabolism, carbohydrate metabolism, energy production. And if you, for most people that are this screwed up, if you go to the next page, you'll see it carries over. Look at all the B vitamin markers. See all these that are low? DL-amines underneath detected limit. Those people don't respond well to adrenal programs. Okay? So, if you get someone who's got the total wipeout here of the mitochondrial marker on Organic Acids, be careful. They're not gonna respond really well to an adrenal program. And believe me, I learned this the hard way over the course of a decade. So, if you're running Organic Acids, you can spot who your adrenal failures are before you treat them. And what would you do? Well, you put them on a mitochondrial program first. You'll get their mitochondria working. And then consider working with your adrenals later. And as I mentioned earlier, if they have a primary thyroid problem, this isn't going to work that great either. So, be on the lookout for those two areas that could interfere. If you're not running Organic Acids, then just try the adrenal program and just hope that it works. You know, if you're running Organic Acids, you can spot these folks ahead of time. Okay?
So, let us look at questions. Theresa just asked a question, "For a new client, you could only do one test, would it be the adrenal test or organic acids?" I do organic acids, knowing what I know now about organic acids, because
You can tell from organic acids about you can't tell adrenal function, but you can tell adrenal status. This is for Teresa's question. So if you, if you look at these markers on organic acids, that's adrenaline and noradrenaline here, or epinephrine and norepinephrine, right? So you're getting a glimpse at the adrenals and also at dopamine. But yeah, if you could only want to run one test, I think organic acids would be better.
And yeah, oh, the ion panel from Victoria, absolutely. The ion 20 is fine. If cost is an issue, the ion 20 is what Richard and I are working on now. So for those of you that don't know, you know, the ion panel is sort of the Cadillac of all functional medicine tests. Dr. Lord developed it over the course of many years. It includes fatty acids, amino acids, an organics profile, heavy metals, all these other markers, and really quite complex, extremely complex and interesting test.
Let me say, I'm just looking at other questions here that came in from earlier. Let's see. If cortisone, if cortisol curve is okay, but pregnenolone super low, then you can still do the program. Yes, yeah. So we usually post a PDF of the slides, not the actual slides themselves, so that should be somewhere when we're done with this. Thirty milligrams of DHEA seems like a lot. Yeah, if you had, I mean, this can go bad. If you have to screen people, you don't want to give it to somebody, you know, you have to kind of watch people and some people might have side effects. Was not completely, you know, totally stress-free.
Let's see. When a client is taking testosterone, for DHEA and pregnenolone not be used? Hmm. No, I think it's fine in these dosages that we're talking about. I've never seen a problem. I think you'd be okay on that. Oh, about there's new reference ranges on the labs. So if the DHEA is below a six or seven, then I usually treat it. Okay. If it's below a six or seven, then I usually treat it.
Let's see. Oh, multipack. Multipack is just like, you know, multivitamin and mineral thing with some fish oils, etc. Let's see here. Someone asked about low cortisol and high DHEA. That's complicated. Let's see. Kelly's asking about EMF exposure. So for some people that are super sensitive, EMF exposure could be enough of a problem, but you have to be super energetically sensitive.
Then someone asked about vitamin C. So vitamin C is 2,000 milligrams to 5,000 milligrams per day, total per day, divided up. So usually it would be like maybe typical, maybe a thousand milligrams here, thousand here. And some people get loose stool from vitamin C, so be careful if you use too much of it.
Let's see. Audra is asking, what do you do when overall cortisol is 21:00, low DHEA, but morning cortisol is low, noon, noon high, and evening and night normal? That's, that's stage three. So you can still use the stage three protocol, but you would do, forget the licorice in that stuff necessarily. You can use them all. I can show you how to mix and match. Should I show you? Because that's a complicated question. In other words, you can use licorice and fostering at the same time. Let's say the patient has a high nighttime cortisol, you can give Kourt, you can give the fostering before they, but, you know, dinner. And let's say at that same patient has a low noon time cortisol, you could give the licorice root in the morning.
So let me show you that because that was just what I said was complicated. So let's say that they have, I'm gonna write out here, high nighttime, low noon on the cortisol. Then you would give the licorice root in the morning to boost up that noon. And you would give the foss serine at dinnertime to knock down the evening. So you can use them both. Licorice to bring up, Foss Arian to bring down. You can use them in, in the same patient, even.
What do you do if the cortisol sum is within the reference range, but cortisol though first thing in the morning? Yeah, you could do. Yeah, you could use the licorice in the morning and the fostering at night. And in order to use this whole protocol, you need to have DHEA that's either low or borderline low. So if your cortisol and DHEA are both in the normal range, which is bouncing around, then you just reset the rhythm, but you don't necessarily have to use the actual hormones to do that.
Let's see. Edit is asking, if someone comes to you, alright, experiment already on pregnenolone, DHEA, how long do they need to be off them before you test it? Three days. You can do longer, but three days is enough.
Let's see. Paul, Paulo is asking, what about your organic acids only class? Oh my gosh, this is a great class to you guys. Thanks for asking, Paul. I appreciate it. How much does that cost? I don't know. This look it up together as a group so I don't screw up. Six months, organic acids, $49.95. Man, that is way underpriced, you guys. It's like a six-month class on the hardest lab out there. And I'm really, by the end of that, you're gonna understand 60, 70% of my practices. Organic acids now. I mean, you really gotta master organic acids. And no one else is teaching it, not at the level that I am. And I'm not saying that to be boastful or to make money, it's just simple truth. No one else is really doing this. Just look around. It's a really, really complicated test. And you can't just look at it and give somebody some Pete vitamins, magnesium, and think that things are gonna get better. Okay? You really want to learn how to interpret it. That's a really great deal. Okay, Paul, if you're thinking about it, you should sign up because you'll get a ton out of that. If you're a successful practitioner, you know, within three or four months of taking one of my classes, you should have made the money back. That's kind of the whole point of doing this.
Let me see. Anna has a question. How did you test so many times a day? Oh, the test is for saliva samples, you know, three times a day. Oh, how much licorice? Oh, yeah, that's a good question. So I use the licorice drops. So let me show you. I think may I ask this question? I use liquorice drops and I get them from a company called Bio Matrix and I'll use the liquid form. And I don't know how this translates into capsule milligrams, but I'll use ten drops per dose of the liquid per dose. Ten drops per dose. Yeah, that's Bio Matrix's name of company. So you could look that up online probably and see what the strength of that is.
What would you recommend for someone who gets to sleep at night but but wakes up throughout the night? If you test their melatonin, they may have melatonin problem. There's time-release melatonin that works well for that, or sometimes we'll use tryptophan.
See, Teresa said, I'm in organic acids class already. How much is just the fundamental medicine function, the functional medicine foundations part? So we say email the office and ask them that because I don't want to say the wrong thing. I'll get in trouble. They'll yell at me. So, but just email the office and Larissa is the boss. And as we say in my office, Larissa is the boss. I'm the owner, but I don't really run things anymore. I have people smarter than me that do that. And if you haven't talked to Larissa, she's wicked smart.
If we do the mentorship class, we need to do the organic testing or yeah. So the, the mentorship, the year-long mentorship includes everything that we're talking about. It includes the fundamentals of functional medicine, includes everything about organic acids, all the stuff on the hormones. It's the whole kit and caboodle, right? It's everything that we have.
Oh, main adrenal lab. I like to use Bio Health. This is just an emotional loyalty issue because my teacher, Dr. Timmons, started the lab. Let me show you. There are other companies that are just as accurate as they are. Here they are. Bio Health Laboratory. Again, he was like a, literally like a father to me in some ways. I was closer to him than my dad and, you know, at certain times in my life, anyway. So I love Bio Health. There are other wonderful salivary labs out there, so that's certainly not the only one. Let's see. And I'm open if you got, you know, if it's people, we have a lot of people in the class right now from New Zealand and Australia. They use a whole different set of lab companies. As long as you're getting accurate results, it's fine, you know.
All right, I think we're done. I thought, let me see. Between a lab and the mentorship class. So, and it was asking more about the mentorship class. Let me just show you guys since some of you were interested. I'm glad to hear that. There's a whole. So the actual mentorship, one year. There's a six-month version of the mentorship too. It's cheaper, but it's not quite as good. So you go to the website, you can click around, you can read about what's in here, but it includes the organic acids testing. It includes all the things to do with renal hormones and gut related stuff. There's a live call once a week. We go over all your labs. There's tons and tons of case studies. There's thousands of case studies and online community you learn from. It's pretty much like a functional medicine ecosystem that I've built here. You also get super, super connected with the other people and motivated to push yourself forward, okay, and make sure that all this stuff works. All right.
Now I think I got through most of the questions. I'm sorry we're out of time now. If you have a, oh, let's see. Um, here's one from Ed. Gianna meter says, so that's one less one. If you have a burning question that didn't get to answer, I feel free to just email the office. Bio Matrix makes the drops that I use for the drops. There are other companies that make it. Again, I just use Bio Matrix because I've been using them for a million years. If you want to use the liquids, liquids work a little bit better than the pills. If you've been out using the pills, never tried the liquids, you know, try five or ten patients on the liquids. I think you'll notice that there's a big difference. You guys, thanks for participating. We're up at our, our email the office if you're curious. If you're even contemplating the mentorship, more power to you. That's the whole point of us being here is to get you all trained in all these complicated areas. And I do believe we have a good thing going here. Class starts in about a month. And be super happy to talk with you or Mark Herbert, who does a lot of consults for us, can talk to you as well. If you're interested in the class, just get in touch. We'll reach out, okay? Have a good rest of your evening. Catch up with you soon. You.