The Proposed Key Clinical Takeaways are as follows:

1. Endotoxicity and oxidative stress effect on sleep.
2. Nutritional protocols for concussion, Alzheimer’s, and brain health.
3. The emerging area of innovative sleep tools.
4. Review the physiology and neurobiology of sleep.
5. A functional approach to improved sleep.
6. The gut-brain axis effect on sleep.

While there is some very valuable information in this lecture about the importance and centrality of sleep for brain health and whole body health, including Dr Rob’s own whole body protocols and favorite supplements PLUS all the recent research showing which herbs are outperforming sleep meds, at the end of the lecture having spoken about the connection of sleep to detox and brain detox and alzheimer’s prevention he heads into Recode, Dr Dale Bredesen’s new reversing Alzheimer’s protocol and also Ketoflex his ‘anti-alzheimer’s diet. However some points to note on these:

The Problem with ‘Recode’

You don’t need keto or intermittent fasting for BDNF!

And he says keto is intermittent fasting here, used interchangeably, again I’ve seen David Jockers use these words interchangeably last week at his fasting summit but they are really two different things because you can go 12 hours from supper to breakfast like we used to do in the normal Irish way of life when I was growing up and still not be ‘fat adapted’ changing your metabolism over to burning fat instead of carbs is true keto so all this fluffy middle of the road stuff is confusing, at best, but on a deeper note is being just too casual with keto and I’m hearing many deaths and injuries associated with it.

BDNF brain derived neurotrophic factors do NOT require keto

What I’d like to draw your attention to here is that the very reason Dr Silverman gives for using the Bredesen Recode protocol has already been overturned by him in a previous lecture ie the production of BDNF is not exclusive to ketosism, there’s a long list of things will produce BDNF outside of keto!

In one of Silverman’s earlier lectures at FMU, The Impact of Concussion on the Gut-Brain Axis, Silverman gave us a list of 8+ things that will increase BDNF.

8 Things that wil increase BDNF outside of a ketogenic diet

And they include things like:

• Turmeric
• Walking/exercise <—not high impact for elderly!
• Prebiotics
• Probiotics, he entions Lactobacillus brevis and Bifidobacterium longum
• DHA is what Silverman suggests but I’d go with Prof Basant Puri and EPA
• Low level laser
• Whole coffee extract <—new kid on the block, has it stood the test of time?
• Alpha lipoic acid
• Ketone bodies ie BHB betahydroxybutyrate powder <—only 1 out of 9 and a supplement potentially, not a diet!

In his previous lectures in the brain health series at FMU he mentioned the ketone BHB betahydroxybutyrate as increasing BDNF and that it can be got in powder form as a supplement. In no way is the ketone route to increasing BDNF superior to all the other ways to increase BDNF! So this list eliminates the need for keto altogether!

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Keto being used for ‘compliance’ not out of necessity

In addition we have had a guest lecture by Dr. Mary Kay Ross who works with Dr Dale Bredesen and though she likes to put people with cognitive decline or any sort of dementia onto keto she actually admitted it wasn’t necessary but was being used for compliance!?! And yet the title of her lecture was ‘the functional medicine approach to reversing cognitive decline’, however it is not ‘the’ functional medicine route – there are varieties of opinion within functional medicine!

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The Dangers of Keto – Not Enough Warnings

I personally object to lumbering people with an extreme keto lifestyle unnecessarily which many doctors and scientists are calling a fad that omits a major food group, puts the body into a survival alternative metabolism which is unnatural to sustain long term and causes all sorts of problems long term.

‘Doing it wrong’ myth, ‘Ancient Fasting’ myth, Deaths and Injury reality

In fact many deaths and injury are being reported with short term exposure to keto including Dr Michael Murray who said at his Healing Power of Food Summit that he had to pull the plug on keto he was losing muscle and all his biomarkers were going the wrong direction – and he was doing it properly. It’s a bit of a backpaddling myth out there at the moment that when things go wrong blame the person for doing it wrong, no, keto and the new type of fasting lifestyle currently trending does go wrong for many people who do it ‘right’. On that note, they do claim this fasting is ancient, but actually when you know the history of healing and original sources you see this ‘Intermittent fasting’ and keto is a completely new take on fasting at the moment that was never done before unless you were in an ancient monastery!

*Note Dr Murray despite dropping a clanger like that against at his summit was not standing up to keto at all, he had way too many keto speakers dominating the summit, with a handful of people against keto thrown in and some of them did not directly say so, you had to join the dots – it’s like people are afraid to speak out and there’s one big ecumenical hug, except for people like Naveen Jain or David Katz who will come straight out and say ‘keto is a fad’.

There is also a long list of people and conditions now beginning to be admitted to as not suitable for a ketogenic diet at all and these range from being on certain types of diabetic meds, any sort of thyroid issue – while last year they were saying huge percentages of people had undiagnosed thyroid issues and it wasn’t being measured properly either, where on earth do you go with that then if David Jockers will ‘occasionally’ say ‘get your thryoid tested first’ and Elle Russ says ‘keto will screw your thyroid if you do it wrong’ – also it’s been known to cause a long list of problems such as hormones, heart, blood sugar, and other things people report to me because they know I speak out against it.

The worst report I heard was from a nurse called by the ENTs to revive a comatose post partum woman who was emulating precisely what David Jockers said his wife did to get back in shape after pregnancy – I saw that coming as soon as I heard him suggest that to the masses – but back to my point that keto is being recommended unnecessarily and with high risk And most practitioners are not being warned about that in enough time.

Medical research student saved by her own studies AFTER being told to go into ketosis!

Fitness buff one day away from coma after keto fitness challenge

This man also explained that his blood normalized and looked great just like everyone is saying but then he was in hospital with an IV in his arm being told he had one more day left before they’d have been trying to revive him from a coma…and they don’t always revive!

**I get a lot of testimonies, this is just a snippet for you to sample.

Irresponsible proponents of keto slow to change

Certainly the main proponents of keto who are gaining extraordinary momentum in the digital marketing groups are NOT doing enough in terms of warning and precautions even right up to the latest summit on fasting last week by David Jockers and Health Talks Online which I refused to promote. I did sign up to it and was bombed with emails telling me I was about to be fast tracked onto keto, not one question as to my history or health, just get in and oh, pay an extra $59 discounted from the regular $97 to be even more fast tracked seeing as I had already ‘bought’ the summit – no, actually I got a refund.

And no, that’s not what functional medicine or healing is about, I’m surprised it has not been shut down by the FDA except to note that even conventional circles are seeing keto as a bit of a money spinner $$$

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The Problems with Bredesen’s Ketoflex include the following:

1. Not distinguishing between a healthy and a healing diet: Note this is an ‘anti-Alzheimer’s’ diet so therefore aimed at healthy people who want to prevent becoming ill – yet much of what is on this diet is what an ill person would be doing, and even then under particular individual needs must scenario only. So he has not differentiatd between a healing and healthy diet. I’ll give you an example of a preventative diet by someone in his 80’s now whose dad died from Alzheimer’s at the end of this paragraph.
2. He equates keto with intermittent fasting but a 12 hour gap between supper and breakfast is not keto, you are not switching into a fat adapted metabolism away from carbs, you can still eat food without having to measure everything and without being afraid of apples, oats, white potatoes, carbs as this sort of break was natural to us growing up in Ireland and sometimes we’d take toast for supper, and we always had carbs during the day – not keto! Dr John R Christopher and the western Master Herbalist tradition would have done a sort of stint like that, not religiously and often had a fruit breakfast, even orange juice – carbs still being the main fuel and not fat, and not fear and they’ve gotten better healing results than anyone.
3. Sparing on meat: He promotes Plant Based – well plant-high we can agree on but it’s been proved over and over that some people will only do well with meat in their diet and not pigeon portions either. And we’ve had Patrick Holford of Optimum Nutrition UK say he just had to include salmon in his diet, he couldn’t get his nutritional needs met as a vegan. We also have the Paleo Cardiologist Jack Wolfson in the guest lecture series at FMU for all you meat eaters, to see how he stays heart healthy safe with meat, maybe much higher meat than most peeps!
4. Lack of Resistant Starch: He promotes non-starchy vegetables but we’ve just had Alan Christianson give an hour lecture at Murray’s HPOF summit on white potatoes being a ‘cure-all’ resistant starch, put some butter on there and you amp up the butyrate and you’ve got a diet we’ve been on in Ireland for hundreds of years and thriving on. Dr Max Gerson MD had white potatotes on his cancer therapy protocol over 100 years ago, to be eaten twice a day! And Dr Michael Murray has just added them to his diet at 60 years of age because ‘the research on them is pretty recent’ lol, what does that tell you about culture, the history of healing, and the ‘research’?! And also what does it suggest to be putting healthy people on it now to avoid Alzheimer’s? Illogical on all fronts! Theory on Bredesen’s part, and Silverman here unfortunately in his attempt to showcase him. Silverman is one of my favorite speakers but he has bought into this more than he needed to.
5. Glycemic Index vs Glycemic Load : He states foods with a GI under 35 but that falls into the glycemic index vs glycemic load fallacy- it’s the fiber that makes all the difference and ‘glycemic index’ is a total fallacy.
6. Fear of Fruits, Veggies, Juices: This error then leads them further to not want to eat most fruits and many vegetables and bans fruit juices but this is jumping from one fallacy to another and tying again into the current low carb keto fad currently in fashion out there – a world where you have to be afraid of good real food really raises a red flag immediately as to the philosophy behind the diet, and yes they are philosophically based not nutritionally based eating. And look at the older schools of healing that had entire Incurables Programs based on fruit juices including the so-called ‘sweet’ ones eg Gerson therapy uses carrot and apple juice but with a proper juicer nothing less than a double masticating Greenstar to extract the nutrients and within a healing protocol; the Master Herbalists used all sorts of fruit and veg juicing again with a good juicer nothing less than a Champion single auger; and then Ann Wigmore cured her gangrene with a humongous amount of wheatgrass juice /yes false bio circulating about her out there at the mo, she cured gangrene not cancer. I personally used the latter 3 protocols on my healing journey and beat the odds to survive 14 years and counting, I wouldn’t have managed on keto and that’s why I’m so concerned to expose it and it’s lack of basis in our history of health and healing.
7.  Dodgy meal replacements: You’d be better off on something like Vitalerbs or Jurassic greens and EPA than a keto shake or MCT powder, these latter things have not stood the test of time. Real food, even a soup blended would be better. There are other ways to make up protein shakes for ill people but remember he is still talking ‘prevention’ in healthy people here and their digestion should be working! And vanilla or chocolate flavored bone broth is not natural, don’t kid yourself, they shouldn’t even appear in the same sentence.

Here is a very interesting testimony from a man now in his 80’s who said when his dad died of Alzheimer’s 30 years back he had wanted to prevent it happening to himself in the future, and given it was in his family and he is now a very fit alert 82 year old travelling the country with his wife and starting a new business online learning websites – he is living proof how simple it is to lead an anti-Alzheimer’s diet with just fish oil! His total monthly supplement bill now in his 80’s and despite Alzheimer’s running in his family is around $12. Now THAT is prevention!

*I’ve learned in my own case and from the research of Prof Basant Puri way back in 2004 that fish oil won’t work for some people with CFS or ME or any active virus they may not even be aware of in the body, the virus prevents the breakdown of omega 3 to EPA so taking EPA directly in the form of a supplement he formulated called VegEPA at 4g a day reverses cognitive decline and that quantity can be reduced after 6 months. It works very fast in some people to halt that decline, it takes longer to restore what was lost. And other people will have more detective work to do for their cognitive decline.

Prof Puri insisted on EPA not DHA because it is more stable! And it converts to DHA in the body, I’ve never taken DHA at all and it worked for me. The American research now in 2019 is way behind that pre-2004 research in the UK and the supplement lines coming out really should focus on EPA!

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I’ve Recovered from 3 types of Dementia without Keto

And I can add that I’ve recovered from 3 types of dementia as listed on the Bredesen scale, including the case study mold induced form in the Dr Ross guest lecture. I did so without keto and without Bredesen type protocols and with primarily 4g EPA as in vegEPA for the rapid cognitive decline while doing Gerson style high nutrition and juicing and detox and for the other types one was food sensitivity related and then the extreme prolonged mold exposure and I responded better to wheatgrass, herbs, garlic for that, and Master Herbalist herbs and detox which is Western Herbalism – systems based herbalism which now Jay Davidson is beginning to admit is core to his new detox protocols.

– there are many others getting results with different protocols out there but Bredesen happens to be in the limelight at the moment.

• Prof Basant Puri of Imperial College London had the product vegEPA on the market at least as early as 2004 and was recommending 4g per day pure EPA without any DHA back then and getting fantastic results with that – that’s what I used to halt rapid cognitive decline and reverse it and I find it worked much faster than even Dr Michael Murray expects his current omega 3 formula to work, currently in the pipeline at his lab. Prof Puri was not functional medicine, if anything fmed should be improving on his results but to date I haven’t seen anything proposed that is better than that 4g EPA in these protocols.
• There are also two other groups working on reversing dementia in the UK, mentioned by Patrick Holford last year.
• And there is an ALS group in the US who have rejected keto in favor of AKG and AAKG type supplements and the body’s natural metabolism of protein, carbs and fats.
• Take a look at what Naveen Jain of Viome has to say on the endothelial lining not doing well with keto. Also David Katz calling it a fad. Alan Christianson spending an hour talking about resistant starch and white potatoes being the new ‘cureall’ as they are so good for immunity and cancer prevention – not possible to eat them on keto! And then people like Joel Fuhrman and the iThrive docuseres reversing diabetes without keto.

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Beyond Keto

We have some practitioners promoting keto within FMU, we’ve even had a series by Joe Mercola on how to do keto, but we also have those who do not use it – who use Mediterranean type diets, and then we also have those who go beyond keto, for example a recent guest lecture by Dr Michael Jurgelewicz of Designs for Health showed many other ways to upregulate everything in the body without having to use keto – look out for his lecture in the archives inside. He simply looks at what they are aiming for and knows there are other well known ways to achieve that, as well as new supplements. Natural or supplements or both – the education is there to go whichever route you choose but for sure ‘one’ route like keto is not for all or necessary.

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Full Education – Covers ALL Opinions

That is what is missing on the Health Talks Online and other summits and docuseries, they invite their similarly minded friends, the summit is costing in excess fo $30k and they are getting more and more pumped towards selling their own products and creating their own inner membership circles, less actual clinical work with that, but I’m hearing it is just not working out for attendees longterm as regards resolving their health issues.

As you can see Functional Medicine University has ALL the opinions, all the different routes you can choose to take, all the different modalities too. And it’s focused on clinical practice where doctors and practitioners actually practice 😉

Be sure to join Functional Medicine University for the full training in healing modalities and protocols as well as the continuing education and the core CFMP training. Winter enrollment is now open Jan 21st-28th, read all about it here, and there’s an exclusive $250 cashback voucher if you use the link from this site to enroll.

*Sleep Matters guest lecture by Dr Robert Silverman is free to view during winter enrollment week, just remember to come back and use the voucher link here before you enroll in order to qualify for the $250 cashback, this link alone tracks it.

 

Rachel Fresco’s lecture would lead you to believe Biocidin is a cure all miracle product but having studied herbalism myself and more importantly having survived using herbs instead of antibiotics for over a decade with an extremely weak immune system prone to infection, I caution people on two fronts here:

1. Where is Biocidin on the ‘richter scale’ of Potency?

Fresco admits Biocidin will not knock down an established UTI which is a bit of a red flag for other strong established infections and which pans out in my own experience where garlic worked better. Leaving the situation to really be that Biocidin is known to be a quite good adjunct to other protocols including other herbs, and in some cases it may be fine on its own. I’ve heard practitioners say for example certain tests in mold cases were showing decreases in certain markers while using it. However would those same results have been got using garlic? Is anyone looking at that?

SO that tends to show where Biocidin sits on a ‘richter scale’ of potency imo. Notice, that is my opinion and experience. Will the million dollar double randomised placebo controlled clinical trial back me up – well that isn’t even on the table or in the planning, meanwhile life goes on and decades and lifetimes will pass before clinical trials can get round to asking all the questions. I tend to look at the history of medicine and healing and my own experience in a situation where I was told I’d be dead 16 years back and even today am being told by integrative functional medicine cardiologists who quote studies ‘there is no known therapy for what I have’ blah blah rubbish.

My experience fighting strong infections including bacteria and viruses:

• When I’m fighting a tooth infection and abscess [because the dentists are too afraid to operate and I can’t have another anaesthetic] I find huge amounts of organic garlic brings it down every time, but when I used liposomal Biocidin it did not, in fact I lost a few days and the infection ran away and got worse meaning I had to work even harder to bring it down. These infections are life threatening so I’m not going to be ‘polite’ about it, if someone pushes something as more powerful than it actually is. The implication yet unstated in clear terms fact that LSF Biocidin cannot take down an established UTI backs up my experience on this front.
• I’ve also used Biocidin throat for other infections and again garlic won when it didn’t touch them.
• I’ve heard the podcast between Kara Fitzgerald and Susan Blum where they discuss RA rhumatoid arthritis and they were fighting Klebsiella with botanicals, they added Biocidin to their protocol but suspected it was not strong enough by itself.
• Currently Tom O’Bryan and Rachel Fresco are recommending Biocidin as a preventive for flu – in my opinion that’s wrong on a couple of levels – as not only is it hugely expensive when less expensive herbs will work and one of the things she was recommending was spraying it on childrens clothes! But again I’m not so sure it’s going to boost the immune system as well as Echinacea either, at a fraction of the cost. My experience, when I lived at the nursing home in my 30s all the old folk got the winter vomitting bug and it passed in 3 days, with me I lost the ability to move my middle fingers and toes, the virus did a lot more damage, and it was 9 months before power returned to them. However I rang a master herbalist [Jill Davies] in the UK who suggested Echinacea, that’s all I used and I haven’t had a cold or flu since 2007 and I don’t take anything else even though I’ve been in contact with others who were infected.
• UPDATE: It’s now 2020, and I’ve tried using Dentalcidin, their new product in managing my lost filling that keeps getting infected [dentists still won’t take me on as a patient] and I find this product to be better for teeth and gums than the Biocidin itself and a gamechanger to my oral health though I still need other things from time to time, horses for courses. I’ve found it to be invaluable as a long term use product and it led to way less infections and overall improved gum health over time. It’s easier to take every day than high dose garlic [though expensive for some patients so clearly ‘alternatives’ and ‘competition’ must exist in health care models and is an issue for where tax dollars go in society]. On those occasions I do still get a big infection I still need to go up to garlic and salt rinses no matter how much Biocidin I throw at it, but those are few and far between now instead of all the time. It did not happen overnight, it’s better as a long term thing to take, has a different function for long term health in terms of biofilms judging by the excellent state of my gums after many months usage and easier to take than high dose garlic every day. Horses for courses, in an emergency you need more but for a chronic problem this Dentalcidin [and the toothpaste] is key.

2. Making Herbs Inaccessible and Unaffordable?

The other thing that worries me about the promotion of Biocidin is it is being marketed as a ‘superior’ herbal both in terms of composition and ‘quality’ and in particular being put out of the reach of consumers who must now go through a practitioner to get that herbal remedy [thankfully I’ve managed to find one shop prepared to sell it otc or I would not be able to access it at all]. And if doctors and practitioners limit their herbal knowledge to one product like that it passes an extra burden onto the rest of us.

There is another herbalist [Ronda Nelson] in another herbal tradition doing the exact same thing, promoting her line of herbs as superior and practitioner and exclusive, in fact she goes so far to say hers will work and all others won’t even those are based on and almost carbon copies of the Master Herbalist Dr. John R. Christoper! She actually has a series of lectures at FMU and enough students spoke up to get her to tone down that message by the end of the series because many of us have experience with herbs that work in well established other brands that are easily accessible.

However FMU has invited a herbalist from yet another tradition and he is pretty quick to state that yes while quality is an issue with herbs, there are good companies out there. He doesn’t like to name names. But I won’t hesitate to name some of the ones I’ve had fantastic results with in my personal life, and on whom those ‘superior’ brands have based their formulas today, ‘based’ being a polite word for plagiarized in this context. Good brands include Christopher Original Formulas, by Dr. John R. Christopher – they are fantastic, wild crafted herbs and when they can’t get wildcrafted they use organic! Some of the range is available at iherb but the full range can be got direct at places like Vitalerbs.com and DrChristopherShop.com. In the UK Jill Davies PhD has a very powerful set of tinctures based on her teacher Dr. Christopher but made with UK and European equivalents to American herbs – both of these are in the Master Herbalist tradition, and were around before that Australian company with the similar formulas came into existence. HerbPharm is another company, and some others available at iHerb have worked well for me too.

I’m the sort of person needs to see results with the herbs I use as I’m dealing with a health situation that needs those results. I have been given poor quality herbs by a Medical Herbalist once before, she copied Jill’s formula but bought non-organic cheap herbs and they didn’t work, and I nearly had a stroke. Quality is serious.

The big picture shows herbs have been the medicine of the people from the beginning of time, this ‘practitioner only’ direction where LSF Biocidin costs 100 euros excluding practitioner consultation costs presents a new direction and again in my experience of dealing successfully with an incurable extreme condition with inexpensive accessible-to-all herbs, it’s a worrying development in the history of healing and humanity for ‘doctors’ /  licensed practitioners to take over herbs and make them inaccessible and unaffordable. The Medical Herbalist who made the mistake with me was actually licensed.

Conclusion – Is Biocidin worthwhile?

• Well according to people using it for certain conditions and testing the markers, as in mold, it is useful. But like I said other less expensive things may work just as well for some things. Dentalcidin is useful long term for chronic oral conditions and oral health.
• Dr. Fresco gives a list of things they’ve had success with and are performing studies on and they are currently using it with Lyme disease with good results.
• Sometimes people can’t take huge therapeutic levels of garlic or some other herb, in that case Biocidin is an easer option.
• Bio-Botanicals Research have a GI cleanse protocol which as a Master Herbalist myself I can recognize as to some extent mirrored on the protocols of The School of Natural Healing, so I’d expect it to be effective for that reason alone as the SNH has a proven track record over many decades. It would be good however for people and practitioners to have the choice and informed consent that cheaper accessible options exist, yet it is also understandable that doctors nervous of and inexperienced with herbs may want a ‘clinical’ version of these things. My concern is they go on to acknowledge where these new protocols came from and don’t snuff out the original source or patient-access to other ‘non-doctor’ versions that work.

Diversity of Opinion and Choices at FMU

Notice FMU invites speakers from many different backgrounds. Here I’ve mentioned 3 different herbalists from different herbal traditions each with different products all guest lecturing at FMU. And Dr. Grisanti has invited them as part of a wider speaker audience who are not herbalists, so you will find herbal and non-herbal protocols presented side by side as options that you can choose according to your own persuasion, different modalities, tools in the toolbox. Dr. Grisanti also invites people to submit topics and speakers that they’d like to see present at FMU.

That is one of the things that sets FMU apart from the other functional medicine training centers, imo, because he’ll give the herbal solution to hormones as well as the opposite ‘bioidentical solution’ to hormones, and you can choose. Whereas if you paid $16k elsewhere to become a CFMP and were only taught ‘bioidenticals’ then what are you likely to use going forward lol?! Yes, I put ‘bioidentical’ in inverted commas because coming from the Master Herbalist tradition myself I know the natural herbs will work instead of them and it is controversial just how bio-identical they really are. I’ve heard Decker Weiss recently tell people at the men’s wellness summit they needed to be on hormones and in his 50s he need them, omg, sad that. Just not necessary and the lab tests exist to prove it. But I digress 🙂

The second thing that really sets FMU apart in my opinion is the focus on being a medical detective, finding the problems and solving them. The fees are much lower at this training course precisely because the focus is on the message and not on milking you as a cash cow. Bear in mind Spring Enrollment is coming up and I also am offering $250 cash back on the already low course fees, approx 10% off. See the payment plans here.

If you’d like to share your experience with herbs and brands drop me a line in the comments below.

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bonus free viewing of the lecture till april 23rd/ Spring enrollment

**For two weeks only i.e. till the end of the FMU Spring Enrollment period April 23rd, 2018, Rachel Fresco’s recent lecture on Biocidin was available to view for free. There will be a selection of different guest speaker lectures free to view during the enrollment period in each quarter.

Remember however if you are enrolling this term and would like the $250 voucher then check back here to collect it when enrollment goes live, it is the full CFMP certified functional medicine practitioner training fully online and at the best price – payment plans also available.

Next enrollment Oct 2020.

Mary

Post Viral Syndrome, Ulcerative Colitis, Parasites, the Autoimmune Connection

Highlights from Episode 4

1. Post Viral Fatigue Syndrome Turned Around With Functional Medicine

A 30 year old man with no known health issues suddenly bedridden and needing to use a wheelchair for doctor appointments after catching a cold, labeled with the dummy diagnosis of ‘post viral fatigue syndrome’ and offered no medical solutions. Dr. Stephanie specializing in functional medicine turned his situation right around by looking at what weaknesses were in his body systems that led to the simple cold virus having such a devastating impact on him. His doctors had left him debilitated and could do nothing for him, whereas functional medicine was getting him back on his feet again, literally as well as metaphorically.

‘Post viral syndrome’ is what’s referred to as a trash can diagnosis, when doctors don’t know what is wrong but unfortunately it also means they stop looking. Cardiologist Dr. Stephen Sinatra openly admits they give this diagnosis frequently to heart patients when they have chronic heart failure and their tests don’t say what is going on. That was true during his career in the US over the last 40 years and it is true today in Ireland in 2018. However again functional medicine tests DO show the moving parts in the biochemistry and physiology of the person and help getting that needle going in the opposite direction of disease because they pick up so many extra things that point to the underlying causes behind the current illness manifestation.

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2. Dr. Jay Davidson’s Parasite and Detox Adventures

Jay Davidson’s accounts of his parasites when he started Mimosa Pudica for the first time – he’d tried many parasite cleanses before but saw nothing, this time there were 20 inch worms hanging from his rear, and that was the start of a ‘beautiful’ journey where he just about made every mistake in the book, having got rid of them but stopping too early and ignoring the eggs in the lifecycle, which hatched out every few weeks and had him starting all over again to chase the parasites. Dr. Jay is pretty graphic in talking about itchy butts and washing his boxers every morning, and any doc who refers to the male anatomy as giblets can’t help but become endearing.

Mistakes, Discoveries, Wisdom

It’s encouraging to see someone at his level make a lot of the mistakes the rest of us make and work through them and overcome the problems.

• It’s also encouraging to see him reach for some very old very effective protocols like coffee enemas and blow the dust off them and bring the science of why they work into the equation, to match what many of us already know from experience.
• It is excellent to see him place emphasis on the affinity of parasites for the gallbladder area – something I’ve discovered in my own journey when I accidentally took too much parasite syrup one day, but not something you hear people talking about.

• Part of his ‘jump in the deep end attitude’ can blow the other way at times too so I’m always urging caution when he talks about heavy metal detox – his detox summit last year had too much of an emphasis on heavy metals when really they are the very last thing people can detox out of their body AFTER they’ve cleansed the bowel, kidneys, liver, blood & lymph THEN go after metals if you are strong enough. He did not have enough precautions and warnings put in place for weak and very ill people last year, who formed a large percent of the audience listening, and his methods of provocation challenges were too harsh when really there are better ways to do it.
• So roll on 2018 and Dr. Jay has learned from some of the mistakes and this time round on his summit invited Dr. Chris Shade from Quicksilver Scientific, who has a better way to detox heavy metals involving getting the body to upregulate glutathione that is safer for everyone, involving making the body strong enough to deal with the metals INSTEAD of provoking the metals out loose in the body where they can recirculate and do even more damage. Of course coffee enemas are a big part of naturally upregulating glutathione. And though Dr. Shade uses liposomal glutathione, Dr. Jay is also using coffee enemas, and we just had a speaker at the Disaster Summit saying that she got better results from coffee enemas than the expensive supplements. Which is a relief for many people who cannot afford them. Dr. Shades detox programs are expensive and I’m familiar with the Master Herbalist Dr. John R. Christopher’s extended detox herbs, which are very effective.

*I’ve actually bought this years Heavy Metals Summit but have not viewed it yet, as there are just so many summits airing at the moment but will catch up with it later and post a review on it. However from the speaker lineup which now includes Dr. Chris Shade who does not recommend provocation challenges, certainly improvements have been made on last year.

Experience With Different Healing Traditions Over Time

This is where experience comes in and how your resources increase with the more schools of healing that you know, as well as the history of healing:

• While the Master Herbalists at The School of Natural Healing have always been using the proper detox format and quality wildcrafted herbs, and use garlic a lot in their protocols, they don’t use coffee enemas and not only miss out on the benefits of those for some patients but sometimes tell people not to use them. It’s unfair to tell somebody not to use something that may potentially do them a lot of good.
• And while a supplement like liposomal glutathione may get good results for some people, not everyone will be able to afford that, so it is good to know about other ways to upregulate glutathione naturally in the body, such as coffee enemas as described by Dr. Max Gerson, and I do recommend reading the Gerson Therapy book for their chapter on coffee enemas as they know more about them than anyone else, as they are used 3-5 times a day in their program. I’ve done Gerson Therapy myself and taken 1000s of coffee enemas so when I hear an inexperienced functional medicine practitioner today quoting Dr. Jay’s podcast on coffee enemas as ‘source’ and saying ‘you can’t do them every day’, well it highlights that we need to carry through good academic standards and get things from the horse’s mouth, quoting original resources as we go and not just current leaders that we see on the internet.
• Garlic is another way to upregulate glutathione naturally and Sayer Ji of Greenmedinfo highlights the new science behind the effectiveness of the age old use of garlic. That said, unless you study with people who have been using garlic therapeutically for generations, then you potentially miss out yet again. For example, a woman told me recently she ‘took garlic’ for her cold. How much garlic, was my question in response. She said ‘2 cloves’ and so I proceeded to tell her an antibiotic dose of garlic is a minimum of 16 cloves a day, depending on the strength of the infection, as much more can be necessary. At this point of course you do need to know that garlic is also a blood thinner, a good book highlighting drug food contraindications is Suzy Cohen’s Drug Muggers which shows people on medications can’t do therapeutic doses of some herbs and foods. And that’s where functional medicine training and knowledge of supplements comes in handy, when people are already on medications.
  

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3. Cured Her Ulcerative Colitis Naturally Yet Still Eats Wheat?

Another very interesting speaker at Autoimmune Secrets is an Indian MD ND who cured her ulcerative colitis yet continued to eat wheat.

She got off the standard American diet and got back to following her traditional Indian diet with lots of anti-inflammatory herbs such as turmeric, and adaptogenic herbs to modulate the immune system.

But many people out there today claim wheat is harmful to everyone and she proves what many of us know already and what Alession Fasano actually DOES say in the research – it isn’t harmful to everyone, a healthy person’s tract is designed to bounce back from eating it just like many other things it encounters daily.

But Some People Cannot Eat Gluten, Whatever Their Tests Say

Gluten is so harmful to so many people that the concern about it is valid. And whereas gluten sensitivity doesn’t even show up in tests for some people, going off gluten can sometimes reverse and heal the most horrific illnesses.

We had a lecture at FMU recently by Tom O’Bryan on this very point. He gave the example of a two year old boy with epilepsy and developmental issues, medications didn’t work but it began to turn around in just 2 weeks when gluten free. The cherry on top of that particular icing was the doctors made an announcement as a result of that experience to screen non-responding epileptic children for gluten sensitivity however as Dr. O’Bryan showed us, the science had published that recommendation and research back in 1992, 25 years ago!!!

A lesson from medical history – don’t wait for standard medical practice to allow this or that – they are 30-40 years behind the science in just about every field.

• I was told that 15 years ago by Dr. Vance Spence, vascular consulant and coordinator of all research on severe ME in the UK, and he isn’t even into functional medicine, he is a researcher doctor.
• And I see it in the work of Dr. Stephen Sinatra who got a woman off the heart transplant list using just a couple of supplements 37 years ago, yet cardiology has still not embraced nutrition.
• We see it in the case published Sept 2017 on the 2 year old boy ‘now going to screen for gluten sensitivity’

People are suffering and dying due to that stubbornness on the part of standard medical protocol and training to ignore the science and cuddle up to the pharmaceutical model of medicating symptoms instead of embracing solutions and exploring whatever root cause may be underlying illnesses.

Note while many of us land in the medical bin or need to work to pay for medications, the pharmaceutical industry is certainly growing year on year as is illness itself.

I speak as one of those for whom medications did not work and root causes were not explored and life down the toilet as a result for over a decade, meanwhile ‘the professionals’ become very questionable indeed for considering functional medicine training is merely ‘optional’ at this point. My own story is here.

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Streaming Free for 24 Hours & Options to Purchase Access to Calls

The Autoimmune Secrets Docuseries airs for free this week, from February 20th-27th, and with an encore replay at the weekend from Friday March 2nd to Sunday March 4th. Update: it has aired a number of times since, most recently August 2018, so watch out for it as it will likely keep coming around.

silver & gold packages available

Silver and Gold packages are available for purchase, the Silver package has the episodes that aired but for the full expert interviews you’d have to get the gold package.

Access to group phonecalls where you can submit questions to be answered by their panel of experts is available in both packages, though with the gold package there is extra phone access, more detail on forming your own protocols.
 

 NEW UPDATE:

If you order the Silver Package here’s the new bonuses you’ll get:

• [NEW!] Question and Answer Video Part 1 and Part 2.
• [NEW!] Monthly question and answer calls with our experts for 6 months! This is added into your membership area and transcribed for lifetime acces. (This was previously only in the Gold Package, and is valued at $297, but you can get it as low as 77 dollars today)
• Plus everything in the Silver package including, the 8 Episodes (Bonus Episode 8), the transcripts and Mp3’s of everything, & the guidebook.
• A free buddy pass that gives a friend or family member access to all of the above, including the LIVE calls, what an amazing gift!!

GOLD Package extras include:

 If you order the Gold Package here’s the bonuses you’ll get access to:

• [NEW!] Acceleration Protocol Interactive Webinar Series – Weekly calls for 6 weeks to go through specific protocols with you to ensure you’re getting the result you want quickly! This is added into your membership area and transcribed for lifetime access.
• [NEW!] 10 New Expert Interviews, in addition to the 60 Expert interviews, totalling 70 interviews equal to 60 hours of life-saving content, available in your membership area.
• Plus everything in the Gold Package including the 9 Episodes (bonus Episode 8 & 9), transcripts and mp3’s of everything, the guidebook. (Works out at only $1.81 per Episode/interview)
• The Live monthly calls with Experts for 6 months, also saved in your membership area, and transcribed for you to read for lifetime access!
• A free buddy pass that gives a friend or family member access to all of the above, including the LIVE calls and webinars, what a priceless gift!!

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other resources

I have included other resources for you above in terms of building your own protocols, eg with The School of Natural Healing, or Dr. Shade at Quicksilver Scientific. Group calls are ok if you have the money but it depends on your needs and financial situation, many ill people living below the poverty line may be best putting their money into solutions where the information is already freely available. And if you can afford it then working directly with an experienced functional medicine practitioner would be ideal.

If anyone takes the group calls and would like to comment on the standard of helpful information you can access there please comment below or email me at contact@functionalmedicinetraining.org, I’d love to know! I’ve just signed up to a Heart Bootcamp myself with Dr. Joel Kahn precisely because it gives me the opportunity to ask many questions that only an integrative cardiologist with functional medicine training can answer, these things have their place – but that’s also money that could be spent on actual solutions like botanicals or supplements if you’ve been on disability over a decade! *Update: I withdrew from the heart bootcamp ‘community’ pretty quickly, not only was I ignored as a difficult to treat case but told it was impossible ‘no known therapy for damage to vein lining’, well it’s not the first knockback I’ve got from the medical community, that’s where old naturopaths like Dr. Christopher and Master Herbalism saved my life to this day while ‘experts’ and official medicine still run for the hills! For the old timers like Dr. John Christopher there were no incurables, they put out protocols and herbs that could be accessed either for free or inexpensively, without whom I would not be here now. One downside of a docuseries like this is the amount of money involved in accessing the information, it’s aimed at those that can afford it. I’m surprised at the emphasis by the host on ‘charity’ work in Africa while charging people who desperately need help for information on immune system recovery. If you can afford it great, many of us can’t.

Make Real Medicine Mainstream!

All of which just highlights the need for this type of medicine to become mainstream and accessible and affordable to all, and a docuseries like this is the first step to making that happen by alerting people globally to what is possible. But it is not the last step.

We don’t have decades of life to waste while the medical profession comes out of the dark ages, reads 30 year old science, embraces functional testing and healing protocols, or for that battle with Big Pharma profiteering to drag on.

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Your Turn!

• If you can afford to hop onto this Autoimmune Secrets offer then go for it and let us know how you get on!
• If you are a licensed professional not yet trained in functional medicine then go ahead and get trained up, the opportunities are posted for you on this site and see the voucher below for up to 10% off your tuition fees.
• If you are discovering health and healing for the first time then make sure you check out some of the resources on this page and other summits coming up with information available for free or to purchase and consume at your own pace.
• If you’d like to become an affiliate for this event then click here to register.

10% off Functional Medicine University CFMP tuition fees, voucher goes live enrollment week only.

FMU enrollment is quartely, this voucher becomes active during enrollment week only, 4 times a year, next enrollment October.

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Herbs to Calm the Immune System

Dr. Christopher’s Immucalm: Marshmallow & Astragalus

This can get immediate calming relief for allergies but for some conditions it needs to be taken for a year. However people including myself have got great results with it. It is possible to buy it in bulk from certain suppliers in the US like vitalerbs.com or drchristophersherbs.com, none of whom I’m affiliated with, but my intention is always to bring awareness to good products and I do know the herbs from Wholistic Botanicals are top quality wildcrafted or organic if they can’t get wild.

Of course dealing with intestinal permeability is at heart of any protocol to fix autoimmune conditions, there are several ways to do that, more later.

Meanwhile here is an excellent video by Master Herbalist David Christopher of The School of Natural Healing explaning in a nutshell just how autoimmune disease occurs in the body and how he would go about calming it down and strengthening the body quite simply with strengthening calming herbs and detoxing the body and organs in the right order safely.

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That Everyone May Feel Comfortable: Root cause medicine

* It is clear many of the people on the Autoimmune Secrets Docuseries belong to and promote one particular religion, I am not promoting that religion in any way, shape or form, and wish all speakers and event organizers would keep functional medicine and religion separate so that it is comfortable for everyone everywhere in the world to access the facts about autoimmune disease recovery and new medical trends without being held captive for people to share their own religious beliefs. Having lived in religious hotspots such as Northern Ireland and the Middle East myself, I know the importance of not getting into either religion or politics at a medical event and there is a bit of a trend among certain speakers in the health niche at the moment to take us for granted a bit, as we are here for the root cause medicine, only.

FMU no longer accredited by California Health Sciences

Despite connection still on the website at FMU, reality is the Health Sciences school has wound long some time ago and you are not being certified by a university or anyone except a retired individual chiropractor. Most fmed trainings are by individuals, most of whom would not hold your attention outside of a website set-up and the demand for courses to ‘help you make more money’ and a shoddily regulated Continuing Education industry  across the board quite frankly needs some re-examination as it’s no different from the system that has let you down in the first place aka big pharma.

Upcoming topics and speakers at Functional Medicine University

Upcoming Presentations

In addition to the core functional medicine training and past lecture archive, Dr. Grisanti claims to be constantly seeking out new topics, new speakers, hot topics, cutting edge topics, and that you have the ability to ask questions of these speakers afterwards through the FMU members forum. UNLESS you disagree with him!

If you get Alessio Fasano, for example, to show Tom O’Bryan is misquoting him with ‘extremism’ in the fmed lecture then your message from Fasano [who is touted as ‘source’ by  O’Bryan] will be wiped off the student forum, Tom O’Bryan then repeats verbatim the misattribution of his position on gluten to Fasano. Though Fasano had refuted it, and offered to speak, that offer to speak is taken up over a year later and you still get sent out links to Tom O’Bryan’s lecture, not the balance or correction regarding the science and false attribution of Fasano’s name to a position on gluten he does not hold  … at which point you will soon realise the only direction being put forward is the opinion of one man and his clique, often in direct opposition to the very experts they quote.

As for covid ‘cutting edge’, while 5 pioneer doctors [well, one herbalist in that] had solved covid by April 2020, we had to wait till late 2022 for a weak diluted version of their work – also way out of date – to be shared, compiled on some ridiculous blog site and scooped up in general by all the fmed platforms. Again all of fmed went to bad secondary sources on covid.

Similarly, no matter what herbalists got invited to speak through the years, we ended up again in 2022 with a DIY allopathic ‘this herb substitute for that med’ list disseminated ‘to practitioners only’. Ouch.  On just how many levels is that wrong… Again, not unique to any one fmed platform but what a constellation here.

Thus functional medicine education turns out to be an illusion, an indoctrination of fads, one platform inevitably one man forging a direction in things he often doesn’t understand and certainly has not trained in. A pseudo science that will harbour good and bad, and the ugly. Not at all speakers are bad and that is the tragedy of the thing, confuses you, you see a good speaker and think that is the baseline whereas it is the exception in online health speakers today across all health industry platforms. Not at all unique to one platform but common to all, in what ultimately is online marketing and online dynamics – you want courses, then people will sell them to you..! Original sources and real experts are lost, as is original thought and good research. As biased as big pharma, in its own way using the same dynamics of market and competition.

The lecture list below – the speakers are just guests labelled ‘faculty’, usually not trained in the area, it is entertainment with a mix of good and bad and worse if it trains YOU to rely on hearsay on all of these issues instead of digging deeper yourself… As I have stated elsewhere, this platform and all the other fmed and health platforms systematically refused to listen to real experts during covid and that is indicative of how all subjects are approached – buyer beware.

1. WheatZoomer Interpretation
   Tom O’Bryan, DC, CCN, DACBN  – I don’t actually agree with much of what Tom says, and I’ll elaborate further on that at some point [update: I forced the platform to speak to Dr Alessio Fasano after the constant misquoting of his research and work by Tom O’Bryan who has the gall to ‘certify’ people in gluten fads misquoting Fasano…and he’s not the only one.
2. Sudden Cardiac Death and Potassium
   Dr. Jeffrey Moss – Excellent speaker, disagrees with much of the fads in functional medicine nutrition but note he was around long before these…
3. Doctor’s Data Comprehensive Stool analysis
   David Quig, PhD
4. Understanding the Complexity of Estrogen Detoxification: How Genetics, the Liver, and the Microbiome Come Together
   Carrie Jones, ND (from Precision Analytical–The Dutch Test)
5. The Thyroid-Adrenal connection: understanding metabolism and fatigue
   Dr. Debbie Rice, ND, MPH (from Precision Analytical–The Dutch Test)
6. The Impact of Concussion on the Gut- Brain Axis
   Dr. Rob Silverman – always excellent presentations? [that is if you are new and ok with getting things second hand by a man not qualified in the area he is talking about as with all functional medicine speakers on these talk circuits for the most part – covid being such a great example].  I’d personally apply different protocols when it comes to solutions …
7. Bulimia/Disordered Eating
   Dr. Christina Bjorndal N.D.
8. Cognitive Reversal
   Mary Kay Ross, MD, FACEP
9. “Chemical Toxins, Mitochondrial Dysfunction and Microbiome Disruption – Dr. Kurt Woeller DC
10. Supporting the Brain from Cognitive Decline to Nootropics
    Michael Jurgelewicz, DC, DACBN, DCBCN, CNS [note all these ‘dacbn’ things are part of very easy qualifications for people in these circles that really ought to be questioned …

**I no longer recommend functional medicine training, the ‘industry’ needs an overhaul…

Check out FMU past presentations here.

For a bio on some of the speakers check out the FMU Board of Advisors here.

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