Shownotes Links:
- Dr James Neuenschwander/ Dr Neu’s Website: Bio Energy Medical Center
- Medical Academy of Pediatric & Special Needs (MAPS) Website
- MINDD Foundation Website
- MINDD FORUM Sydney May 1, 2, 3 2025 MORE INFORMATION
🎧 Related Unstress Health Episodes:
- Dr Leila Masson on Children’s Health A to Z, Asthma, Eczema, ADD, Fussy Eating and more
- Dr Leila Masson – An Integrative Approach to a Healthy Child and You
YouTube Timestamps (Concise & Key Points):
00:00 – Welcome & Introduction
02:35 – Why are chronic illnesses in kids skyrocketing?
06:50 – Dr. Neu’s journey from emergency medicine to integrative paediatrics
12:15 – The role of gut health in neurodevelopmental disorders
18:40 – Environmental toxins & childhood disease
25:10 – How modern medicine fails children
32:00 – Nutritional strategies for neurodiverse kids
39:45 – The future of integrative medicine
47:20 – Advice for parents & practitioners
52:30 – Closing thoughts & call to action
Healing Chronic Illness in Children: Dr. James Neuenschwander on Root Cause Medicine
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:00:01] Hi, Dr Ron here, and I want to invite you to join our Unstress Health community. Now, like this podcast, it’s independent of industry and focuses on taking a holistic approach. To human health and to the health of the planet, the two are inseparable. There are so many resources available with membership, including regular live Q &As on specific topics with special guests, including many with our amazing Unstress Health advisory panel. Now we’ve done hundreds of podcasts all worth listening to with some amazing experts on a wide range of topics. Many are world leaders, but with membership, we have our Unstress Lab podcast series where we take the best of several guests and carefully curate specific topics for episodes which are jam packed full of valuable insights. So join the Unstress Health community. If you’re watching this on our YouTube channel Click on the link below or just visit unstresshealth.com to see what’s on offer and join now. I look forward to connecting with you. Hello and welcome to Unstress Health. My name is Dr Ron Ehrlich. Well, today we continue our exploration of children’s health. And as I’ve often said, children are the canaries in the coal mine. So what is going on with children is of interest to all of us, whether you have kids or not. And we’re going to be visiting one of the most respected paediatric integrated paediatric physicians in America, with my guest today being Dr. James Neuenschwander, that’s great pronunciation, German pronunciation. He’s often referred to as Dr. Neu. Now, he is, as I mentioned, a very prominent figure in the world of integrative medicine. He focuses on paediatric special needs and earned his undergraduate and medical degrees from the University of Michigan. Now, since 1988, Dr. Neu has been practising integrative medicine and is the founder of the Bio Energy Medical Centre. Ann Arbour, Michigan. His practise emphasises the treating of illnesses at their root cause. And this is really what distinguishes an integrative transformational approach to health care as opposed to the allopathic transactional approach, which results in a prescription medication. Many of us may be familiar with that. Well, he uses a multidisciplinary approach. Dr. Neu is a board certified emergency. medicine, integrative and holistic medicine. And he’s also board certified in anti -ageing and regenerative medicine. He holds fellowships with the American Academy of Anti -Ageing Medicine and importantly, the Medical Academy of Paediatric Special Needs. The acronym is MAPS. And we talk about that organisation who are collaborating very closely with the MINDD Forum. Now, James is that speaker for the MINDD Forum coming up in Sydney on May 2nd and 3rd down at Darling Harbour. This is the second in that series. You may recall we had a conversation last week with Dr Leah Hechtman, but this week from the physician’s perspective, we’re exploring some deep philosophical questions about how people approach medical practise and how satisfying and exciting that is, and Dr. Neu is certainly a very passionate and inspiring practitioner. Now, within MAPS, the Medical Academy of Paediatric Special Needs, Dr. Neu serves as president of that medical board, contributing to its education and training of medical practitioners in caring for children with the autism spectrum disorders and related chronic complex conditions. Now, as I’ve said before children are the canaries in the coal mine and when we talk about an increase in chronic degenerative diseases people often defer to the fact that we’re getting older but kids are not getting older but they are getting sicker and we explore many of those issues here today. I hope you enjoy this conversation I had with Dr James Neuenschwander, welcome to the show Dr. Neu.
Dr James Neuenschwander (Dr Neu) [00:04:37] Well, thank you for having me.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:04:39] I know you are coming out to Australia and that is for the MINDD Foundation, which I’ve been a proud supporter of for many years. And it’s always a great conference, a great forum that’s on here in Sydney. And I look forward to you being here. Of course, I’m fascinated by everyone’s, particularly a health practitioners journey. And you started in internal, oh, no, emergency medicine. Did you? And now you find yourself as an integrative paediatrician. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Was there a defining moment that prompted the shift?
Dr James Neuenschwander (Dr Neu) [00:05:18] Well, yeah, I mean, it goes way back to when I went to medical school, because I originally went to medical school to learn how to heal people, as naive as that may sound, but that’s really what I thought they would teach me is how do you heal people? How do you cure disease? And believe it or not, that is not what they teach in medical school. They teach you about drugs and surgery and radiation and that sort of thing. and I actually started in general surgery because it turns out. I was very good at it, you know, there’s nothing like opening up somebody and taking disease out of their body. That is a wonderful thing. But then, you know, you look at somebody wakes up from operation. Yes, I’m sick. Okay, I’m sick. So you just have to get used to that. You know, somebody wakes up from an operation where you took out half their colon because they had colon cancer. And the first thing they’re going to ask is, what do I do to make sure this doesn’t come back? And they don’t teach you that medical school. So somewhere in the middle of my residency, I had an epiphany. and sort of learned that there was this entire world of healing out there that I knew nothing about. And so I started investigating that and then I realised, well, I can’t really stay with my surgery residency. I ended up going into emergency medicine because it also fed that crazy part of me, you know, the blood and guts part of me, but it allowed me to pursue this whole journey of how do you really heal people? And I founded my practise back in 1988 and the tagline was you know, healing illness at its source. And the idea was, you have all these symptoms up here, how do you get underneath that, and actually help somebody. So I had a lovely practise of adults. We did a lot of hormone replacement. We did, you know, we’re dealing with chronic fatigue and chronic Lyme and that sort of thing. And then in the early 2000s, you know, this is when the autism numbers were going through the roof. And my wife had a friend of hers who had a child on the autism spectrum. And she, you know, was just chit -chatting with her one day. And she said, oh, how’s your son doing? And her friend said, oh, he’s recovered. And, you know, in the world of psychiatry, you don’t recover from psychiatric disorders. You treat them, but you don’t recover. And that was her response. It’s like, how do you recover from autism? You know, what did you do? Oh, we did methyl B12, we detoxed, we did chelation therapy, we did IVs, we did this, we did that. And she’s thinking. Oh my God, Neu does all that, right? And so she comes home and she says, honey, we’re saving the babies. And she dragged me kicking and screaming into the world of integrative paediatrics, all right? Where I have been ever since. I mean, I still see adults. Paediatrics is probably 30 % of my practise, but I still see adults. But the whole thing is that, you know, you change a child’s life at two, three, four years old. You’ve just made an impact for the next 80, 90 years. You changed my life, I’m almost 65. I mean, I hope I got a few more years left, but it ain’t gonna be 90 more years, right? So that’s the real beauty of it. And kids are just healing machines, and the more you deal with kids, it’s just amazing what kids can do when you give them a chance to heal. and going back to that original healing illness at its source. I mean, it happens in such an amazing way with kids. And that’s what got me involved with the Medical Academy of Paediatric Needs and became president of MAPS. And then, Leslie approached us with MINDD and why don’t we look at maybe joining our two camps together because we have common goals. And that’s how I’m here and why I’m coming to Australia in a month and a half.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:08:56] So yeah, fantastic. Well, we’re going to be talking a lot about MAPS as well And I want to but but you said so much there that we could dive into I mean, you know the idea that the medical education You rather naively thought was about healing people. Whereas the reality is it’s about managing disease Yeah, which is a great business model. It’s actually interesting to see that model juxtaposed over practitioner health and burnout within the profession because it must be, I mean, burnout is characterised by being disengaged, ineffective, and exhausted. And if you were treating chronic disease, that’s exactly how you would be. But this is such an empowering thing for practitioner and patients. Right.
Dr James Neuenschwander (Dr Neu) [00:09:42] And if you take the paediatrics model, right, so you have a child come in and it’s their third visit, they have sinusitis or ear infection or whatever, and they’re two years old and you’ve already given them two, three rounds of antibiotics and you’re going to put them back on antibiotics and you know when they leave your office, at some point, they’re going to come back with the same problem. I can’t imagine how frustrating that is, right? So for me in my practise, you know, whoever comes in, I mean, it’s, it’s never that, that protocol medicine. You know, doctors, since I’ve practised, medicine has just become completely protocol oriented, right? You don’t even need a doctor, you just need to know where you’re at in the decision tree. And then the protocol tell you what to do next. And doctors are putting themselves out of business because guess what, AI can do that. So it’s like, Oh, why do we need these doctors are high priced and they’re you know, That’s a lot better than a doctor can, right? hoity -toity and we need to get rid of them. But in my practise, like, I opened my doors in 1988, however long that is 37 years, right. And I tell people After 37 years, I had a gal in my office today, 16 years old, thought I had her figured out when I saw her on her first visit, did my workup. The workup turned out completely different. It turns out she has secondary Addison’s disease, which is like her adrenal gland isn’t working, her cortisol was almost zero, and I have no idea why, right? I know it’s sick that I like revel in trying to figure this stuff out. I mean, if she wasn’t sick, I wouldn’t have to do this. But still, the challenge, the challenge after 37 years, it’s not mundane, it’s not routine. I think I know, oh, you have POTS, you have mould toxins, blah, blah, blah. No, she doesn’t. Guess what, Dr. Neu, she’s got something that you didn’t even think about, right? And so that’s what’s exciting about what I do. I never get bored. Somebody this morning said, when are you gonna retire? It’s like, never. You know, as long as this thing up here works, I love what I do!
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:11:45] And you’re getting very good at what you do after 37 years. No, no, I mean, that’s true, isn’t it? I mean, with that kind of an attitude, I think that’s part fundamentally the problem with those that practise. I think we just did a programme on transactional procedures versus transformational procedures in healthcare. And for those people practising transactional medicine who must be seeking certainty because that gives them security. you’ve just identified something that’s far more stimulating than that, is the embracing of ignorance.
Dr James Neuenschwander (Dr Neu) [00:12:20] Yeah, and the embracing of the unknown. You know, people say, how did you learn all this stuff? Do you use their book I can read, a podcast I can watch? It’s like, no, come sit in my office knee to knee with these patients. They will challenge you every day. And so I have to go, I mean, I just discovered a new genetic mutation associated with autism today too. That’s one day, right? And so I have to go through all this and go, oh, okay, now I have to go study this and read about it. But that’s how we learn. My patients drive my education. and this is what you know we start talking to doctors about what we do and they become very envious wow i wish i had a practise like yours you can do this this is what we’re about we want to get you re -engaged by when you why you went into medicine in the first place because nobody goes into medicine to make a buck i mean it’s a secure profession but you could do far better in a whole bunch of other professions if it’s all about the money We go in here to be fulfilled. We go in here to help people. We go in here to make a difference in other people’s lives. And you don’t get that in corporate medicine. You know, if every problem is a pharmaceutical, answer, A, you don’t need a doctor. You just need AI to tell you which pharmaceutical, right? And B, how is that helping the patient? We all know these pharmaceuticals have toxicity. And it’s one thing if you’re using an antibiotic for a week or 10 days, but it’s another thing. If you’re writing a prescription for a patient with high blood pressure. and they ask you the common sense question which is, oh, how long do I have to be on this? Oh, that would be the rest of your life, right? And then it’s like, oh, why are we doing this? And we’ve gone from a paradigm, when I trained, I mean, I’m this old, the University of Michigan is a big regional educational centre or a referral centre, all that sort of stuff. They had one CAT scanner. MRIs had been invented, but they weren’t in clinical use. That’s how old I am, right? And I remember taking an anaesthetised pig off the gantry of the one cat scanner they had to put my patient on it at two o ‘clock in the morning because they also did research with the same CT scanner, right? So things have come a long way. And at that time, you had to know how to diagnose by just talking to somebody, you know? You weren’t counting on all this technology. And then also the saying was, If your patient’s on more than three drugs, you’re not a good doctor. You know, now it’s the opposite. If your patient’s not on at least three drugs, you’re not a good doctor, right? And I don’t know when that shifted, but I think they forgot to teach medical students critical thinking, right? You know, I was always taught, oh, well, what do you think’s going on with this person? I think they have a pulmonary embolism. Okay, what else could it be? You better give me 10 other what else’s, otherwise you’re not gonna pass this course, right? So you have to have that, They don’t teach that in him And so that makes it all just, you know, you’re just a automaton, you’re just a robot spitting out the information, and you’re doing that with your patients. And no wonder these doctors are like, you know, when do I turn 65 so I can retire? When do I turn 60 so I can retire? Right?
Dr James Neuenschwander (Dr Neu) [00:15:26] because it’s not.
Dr James Neuenschwander (Dr Neu) [00:15:26] That’s not fulfilling. That’s not why they went into medicine in the first place. So we’re trying to give that to doctors. We’re trying to say, hey, you, you know, if, and I say doctors, any practitioner, but if you have a degree on your wall and you see kids in your practise, you are the person we are looking for because we want to reinvigorate your practise. We want you to remember why you went into medicine in the first place and give you the kind of fulfilling life that we have doing what we’re doing.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:15:57] And I think and I think that is exactly how we are going to turn public health around by actually and and and the stat the statistics on practitioner health not just physical but mental are pretty shocking pretty shocking and I believe I this is my mission over the next few years is to transform practitioner health and the flow on effects to their patients and public health are going to speak for themselves. Look, there’s a lot we want to unpack here. And one of the things you said was MAPS. You there’s something about the name that gives it away. Tell us a little bit about MAPS and how you feel it’s changing the landscape with children in general, with autism, neurological challenges. But just tell us about MAPS.
Dr James Neuenschwander (Dr Neu) [00:16:48] So MAPS was started in 2012 and prior to MAPS, there was an organisation, so MAPS is the Medical Academy of Paediatrics and Special Needs, all right? So that was started in 2012. Prior to that, there was an organisation called DAN, Defeat Autism Now, and the idea behind DAN was to bring together parents, practitioners, and researchers in one place and talk about what worked. Hey, did you try this? What’d you get? Oh, I hadn’t heard about that, but I’ve done this and this work. so we could share information. Because this was at a time when people said, what the heck’s going on? You know, what’s this autism thing? I never saw an autistic kid in my training, you know, my medical school, my undergrad, my medical school, and my residency. I never saw a single autistic kid. You know, now you can’t go anywhere without seeing an autistic kid. So it was like, what’s going on? What’s causing it? What can we do to help these kids? What can we do to treat it? That was DAN. DAN fell apart. And MAPS was sort of the resurrection, the phoenix that rose out of the ashes of DAN. But MAPS was strictly practitioners. So we kind of eliminated the parent part of it and it was just practitioners. And MAPS moved on from there. Now, I joined MAPS from the very beginning and I became the president of MAPS probably three or four years ago now, moved it to become a nonprofit, independent. organisation and moved us also from just treating autism to any chronic illness, any paediatric chronic illness. So we deal with asthma, we deal with autoimmunity, we deal with gut issues, we deal with allergies, all that stuff. Plus, all the neurodevelopmental stuff, autism, ADD, you know, the seizure disorders, all the bipolar, all those things that you see with kids. So that’s where we came from, and the idea is… You know, not to throw out the baby with the bathwater. We do still, you know, they still allow me to prescribe medications, so if I think that’s the most appropriate intervention, I’m gonna do that. But the idea is, you have this toolbox that you were given in your training, right? You have the certain toolbox. What we’re giving you is the integrative toolbox to put together with that. And then you can run with that. The biggest thing that we create with MAPS is a community. You know, when you go to one of our conferences, it is embracing. I mean, we are speakers, you know, we don’t allow people to fly in, speak and fly out, right? We want our speakers there the whole three days. We want our speakers at breakfast, lunch and dinner. We want access. We want people to interact. Cause I always say you learn more in the hallway than you do in the lecture hall. because in the hall, they’re gonna tell you what they’re really doing, because they don’t have to worry about CME and citing things and everything else, and they can give you brand names and all the things we can’t do on stage, right? So it’s the community of MAPS, and it’s combining MDs, DOs, NPs, nutritionists, chiropractors, the whole health coaches, the whole gamut of practitioners, because we all come from a different perspective. And, you know, again, I’ve been practising forever. I remember watching a lecture and she was a chiropractor who said something about a meridian, you know, some kind of collagen meridian, we all know this connects to that and it goes, Excuse me, I didn’t know. Medical school, we don’t learn that stuff. You know, so it’s really a fantastic community. it to hold things together, and we support each other. And then we also when we do our conferences, you know, we’re not looking for the, you know, the superstar speakers, we really don’t go there. We allow our membership because we have phenomenal membership, we allow our membership to submit, you know, proposals for talks. And every time it’s like, I, who do I say no to, right, because we have to cut, we always get far more proposals than we have time slots. So it’s become a really amazing organisation. COVID almost killed us. I mean, I think we were down to 40 people or 50 people. The first conference we had, after they shut us down, we actually had a conference in September of 2020. Did not get a lot of love for that, but we did. And we had about 45, 50 people. Greatest conference ever, but it’s 45 or 50 people. You know, I think for our spring conference, we’re up to about 450. And I assume you’re streaming live nowadays, are you? Yes, yes, yes. For people outside of the US, you can actually sign up for remote. And then, you know, in the US, we ask people to come to at least one conference per year. So you can do one in person and one remotely. Our international clients, you know, again, we understand it’s a couple of minutes to fly from Australia to… Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:21:40] No, no, but but I think the the one of the nice side effects of the probably one of the only nice side effects of the pandemic was this legitimising online learning. And and so this has opened up a whole new world. You mentioned one of the things I love is connecting dots and often talk about the importance of connecting dots in health care. And in your work with children, what underlying connections have you discovered between seemingly unrelated symptoms, how do these connections inform a treatment approach?
Dr James Neuenschwander (Dr Neu) [00:22:16] Well, first of all, you know, I call it systems biology. You know, that’s our approach, right? So everything is related to everything else. If you have five symptoms, you don’t have five problems. You typically have one problem that’s manifesting five different ways, all right? So when we approach issues with kids, I mean, a lot of it goes back to the digestive tract to start out with, right? Because this is the foundation of everything. This is where we’re getting our nutrients, primarily where our immune system lives. This is where the majority of the cells in our body exist. And so we start there. So you can have a kid that comes in, they’re banging their head against the wall, they’re non -verbal, their belly’s bloated, they have rashes, and they have asthma, all right? And you look at that kid, and for me, this is like, they either have yeast or they have clostridia. They’ve got a bacterial dysbiosis in their gut. And so you fix that, and all of a sudden, they don’t have food allergies, they don’t have asthma, their skin is cleared up, their belly’s flat, and they’re happy, right? So the idea that you can have one system, like the digestive tract, the GI tract, you can have one system that can mess up the brain, you know, make you crazy and agitated and, you know, give you headaches. And you know, a lot of these kids that are nonverbal, they’re not gonna say, gee, mommy, I have a headache. They’re gonna go bang their head against the wall. right, or do one of these numbers, you know, where they put pressure on their head or something like that. So you have that, you have the immune system that about 80 % of the immune system exists in the digestive tract. So when that’s inflamed and irritated, the whole immune system is inflamed and irritated. Now you’re getting rashes, you’re getting histamine release, you can get hives, get congested, sinus stuff. You know, if you have any problems with the lungs, you can start having wheezing and that sort of thing. And then of course these organisms ferment. You know, they create toxins, which again, make your brain crazy, but they also will create gas. So now you have bloating and you have belly pain. These kids will be leaning with their belly over the edge of something to put pressure on their abdomen and that sort of stuff. And then they wake up in the middle of the night because the bloating wakes them up and they can’t sleep. And you know, you get this laundry list of symptoms and it’s one problem causing it all. So that’s part of what we’re trying to do is to say, okay, you know, you go to a doctor and you have five symptoms. Now, I don’t know how it is in Australia, but in the U .S. that means you’re getting referred to five specialists. That’s how we work, right? It’s the modern health system. Right. You know, I’m a GP. Basically, I’m just a traffic cop to tell you which direction to go. Right. And then, you know, it’s my joke is always you go to the and you have pain in your right hand. you know, they evaluate your right hand and all this sort of stuff. And then you say, oh yeah, I’m having trouble with my ankle. Oh no, no, no. I’m just a right -hand orthopedist. You’ll have to go see a left ankle orthopedist for that. You know, because they become so hyper specialised, nobody’s looking at the whole picture. So that’s part of what we’re trying to teach is, you know, you can have all these symptoms, but there’s symptoms that underlying root causes what you’re looking at. And biological systems usually do not have more than one, maybe two underlying causes. that explain everything else. And your job at the practitioner is to try and connect those dots. How do I connect all these dots with one underlying thing, right? And that’s the trick of it.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:25:37] But, you know, having a few having quite a few grandchildren myself between the age of eight weeks and nine years old, I know that nutrition and children, those two words don’t often go well hand in hand. In fact, when we were growing up, I would venture to say that wasn’t even an issue, really, because you only ate food. But nowadays we have such a choice of processed food. convenience of addiction of how do we how do we ensure and particularly with a neurodiverse child yes we get adequate nutrition that must be the biggest change
Dr James Neuenschwander (Dr Neu) [00:26:16] Must be the biggest challenge. Right, so a lot of these kids have, they’re very picky eaters, they’re so certain foods, it’s a lot of sensory stuff, so part of your job as a practitioner is to figure out are there barriers for them trying new foods, all right? So an example would be zinc. With zinc deficiency, things don’t taste the way they’re supposed to, how you feel about broccoli is not how they’re gonna feel about broccoli. repairing those nutritional deficiencies can improve the palate and make them more likely to try new foods. The other thing is, if you have brain inflammation because your gut’s messed up or you have chronic infection or you know, PANS – PANDAS type syndromes, you’re just gonna be agitated. You know, I’m gonna say black, you’re gonna say white, just because you’re agitated. So we get that calmed down. Kids, I always hate using the word compliant, but they’re gonna be more compliant. And then the important thing is you have to understand that processed food is heroin. It just is heroin. You have to look at it that way. All my kid wants is Froot Loops. All right, well, if all your kid wanted was heroin, would you go out and buy it for him and shoot him up? Of course not. You have to be looking at food that way. What you need is real food. And sometimes you have to sit it out as mean as it sounds. Sometimes you have to let the kid withdraw from the sugar, withdraw from the processed foods. How long is that going to take? It’s like a heroin addict, five to six days. The trouble is the kid will stop eating and the parent will cave in 12 hours.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:27:54] Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, but but it’s an interesting one, isn’t it? Because trying to get diversity in, you want peace. I mean, there’s something about peace within the household, relatively speaking, because low blood sugar doesn’t always bring out the best in a kid.
Dr James Neuenschwander (Dr Neu) [00:28:11] No, and, you know, again, if you don’t have the stuff available, you know, it’s like, you know, with kids, it’s like, you know, I want Kool -Aid. Okay. Well, we have fresh orange juice, we have water, and we have grape juice. Those are your choices. I want Kool -Aid. Well, here’s your choices. You know, give the kid a choice, but it ain’t going to be Kool -Aid, right? And the more you start moving them away from those kinds of foods. the more diverse their diet’s going to become. It’s not easy. I don’t want to pretend like this is a piece of cake. It’s not. The other things you can do, depending on where the kid is at developmentally, where they’re at from a neurodevelopmental point of view, is get them involved with the food prep. You know, you get a kid involved with making a salad or making dinner or making dessert, whatever it is, they’re much more likely to have an interest in at least trying it. Now they may not like it, but at least they’re gonna try it, right? So that’s also part of it. Food needs to be a core of the kitchen. And again, when I was a kid, we had McDonald’s, we had Lay’s potato chips, we had all the packaged foods, but they weren’t the garbage that they are now. They are designed to be addictive for everybody, not just for kids, but for everybody. And you always want to look at those foods as heroin. My child is addicted to heroin. It may be a potato chip, it may be a French fry, it may be a fast food, a hamburger, but they’re addicted to heroin, what am I gonna do about that, right? So offer alternatives, but sometimes, you know, it’s tough love, cold turkey, we have to break the habit, so.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:29:47] So we have to be. So we have We have to be persistent, but we also have to be patient.
Dr James Neuenschwander (Dr Neu) [00:29:52] And also, you know, this is a big part of why we supplement, supplement, supplement. Because when you are eating, you know, chicken McNuggets and French fries and fruit roll -ups and, you know, just really garbage foods that have no nutritional value, you’re going to get deficient in everything, right? So it’s really important with these kids that early on. you start with a good nutritional supplement that’s gonna cover all the things that they’re missing. Because I’m telling you, the better their nutrition, the better that food is gonna taste and look, the less agitated they’re gonna be, the better their gut is gonna be, and the more likely they are to try something, right? Because that’s really what you need. And then you figure out what they like. Okay, they like carrots, they don’t like broccoli. All right, let’s not do broccoli, right? How about cauliflower? How about Brussels sprouts? How about cabbage? I mean, you… You just wanna find out what they like to add it into their diet. It’s not easy, but you also wanna remember, parents have recovered their children on the autism spectrum simply by giving them real food.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:30:58] Hi, Dr. Ron here, and I want to invite you to join our Unstress Health community. Now, like this podcast, it’s independent of industry and focuses on taking a holistic approach to human health and to the health of the planet. The two are inseparable. There are so many resources available with membership, including regular live Q and A’s on specific topics with special guests, including many with our amazing Unstress Health advisory panel. Now we’ve done hundreds of podcasts all worth listening to, with some amazing experts on a wide range of topics. Many are world leaders, but with membership, we have our Unstress Lab podcast series, where we take the best of several guests and carefully curate specific topics for episodes, which are jam packed full of valuable insights. So join the Unstress Health community. If you’re watching this on our YouTube channel click on the link below or just visit unstresshealth.com to see what’s on offer and join now. I look forward to connecting with you. You mentioned zinc and we’ve done programmes looking at zinc and immune function and viral, antiviral and all that, particularly during COVID, but you mentioned it being an indicator of bad taste or having taste issues.
Dr James Neuenschwander (Dr Neu) [00:32:25] Yeah.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:32:25] You said just briefly and I picked up on it that this methylated B12 was really positive and B group vitamins are other things that are very good for neurodevelopmental brain health.
Dr James Neuenschwander (Dr Neu) [00:32:39] Right, one of the –
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:32:39] What are some of the things we should be looking at in a good supplement?
Dr James Neuenschwander (Dr Neu) [00:32:45] always say start with the folate. You know, if the folate in a substance is folic acid, then just put it back on the shelf. Nobody, you know, they haven’t done their homework. So you want folate in a methylated form. You want B12 in a methylated form or an adenzo form. You know, the classic B12 is cyano B12. That’s a man -made product. That’s not a naturally occurring B12. You want vitamins optimally in their activated form. B6 in the form of P5P, even riboflavin, which is B2, there’s a riboflavin 5 -phosphate that’s more active. So you want to look for that. The second thing is the minerals and not just the major minerals like zinc or magnesium, but the trace minerals, the manganese, the lithium, You know, those kinds of things that… play a big role, but you only need very minute quantities of those minerals, but you want that in there as well. And then, again, if you’re dealing with a kid that’s on the spectrum or a kid with neurodevelopmental delay, chances are they have problems with detoxification and they have problems with brain inflammation. Those are two very common factors that we see over and over again. You know, they talk about autism being genetic. Well, there’s no autism gene. You know, there’s about a thousand genes associated with autism. and a lot of them have to do with the child’s ability to detoxify. So we have a set of genes that make you susceptible to an environment and the environment’s getting more toxic from that perspective, right? So you wanna have things that support liver detox. These are things like sulphur and glutathione, alpha -lipoic acid, and N-acetylcysteine (NAC). There’s a million articles on NAC and what NAC can do for brain function and brain inflammation and that sort of thing. And then I am a fan of You know, part of what we try to do in my practise is work on membrane health. You know, the health of the cell membrane, the mitochondrial membrane, the nuclear membrane, the ribosomes, all those things. And those are really dependent on phospholipid content. So you’re also looking at sources of phospholipids, the phosphatidyl phospholipids, and then also the plasmalogen phospholipids. You know, all this stuff gets overwhelming, and so you start looking at, you know, is there a supplement that’s gonna have these nutrients? Is there a supplement that’s gonna have these fatty acids in it. so that we can start feeding this child’s brain, feeding this child’s gut, feeding this child’s immune system, right? If the gut is the key, you know, one thing that drives me nuts is a lot of these kids are low on iron, right? They come in, they’re low on iron. So what’s the answer? Low iron. Oh, let’s put them on an iron supplement. Are they taking iron in their diet? Oh, I don’t know. Do they eat red meat? Oh yeah, all the time. Do they eat any leafy like spinach, kale, oh yeah, they eat a lot of that. You know, they’re getting a lot of iron in their diet. They are? Yeah, why is their iron low? I don’t know. Maybe they’re not digesting and absorbing that iron. Oh, that makes sense, right? So again, get to the root cause. You know, a wise man once said, you know, there is no disease on this planet that is caused by the lack of a pharmaceutical, right? So again, you have to look at if the iron’s low, are they really low iron? Or do they have the genetics that interfere with their ability to absorb iron, because that exists. you know, genetic gene pools that were created in areas where there was high iron, they’re not necessarily the most effective people at absorbing iron. But the real issue is, is there inflammation? Is there a problem with the absorptive capacity that intestinal tract? So.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:36:23] You were talking about you were talking about cell membranes and you touched on mitochondrial health and we’ve done a lot on mitochondrial health now again, not just watching and young children nowadays with the food they’re exposed to the environmental toxins they’re exposed to. But they’re also being warned to stay out of the sun and they can also no problem sitting in front of a screen or having phones around. But the sun, the sun, that’s dangerous. It’s evil, it’s evil. What a public health message to set us up for failure, huh? What do you think of that?
Dr James Neuenschwander (Dr Neu) [00:36:59] No, I mean, you know, same as wearing shoes, sorry, but you know, we should all be barefoot and half naked. You know, we’d be a lot healthier. I mean, you know, the thing with the sun is, is it’s early morning and late afternoon, you know, it’s mad dogs and Englishmen, the midday sun, right? You don’t want to be out in the sun in the you know, 10 to two range. Because that’s when you’re going to get the heaviest solar radiation. But you know, even even the eye stuff, all you need to wear sunglasses when you’re out in Good. No, you should get up in the morning, you should watch the sunrise without sunglasses, right? Because those are the rays of the sun that are going to feed your eyes, they actually make your eyes healthier, right? And it’s the same with the sun exposure through the skin and the vitamin D and everything else that goes on with it. And then this whole idea of being barefoot and grounding, I mean, that’s critical. You know, we have so many electronics. there’s almost no place you can go on this planet now and not be exposed to some sort of EMF, some sort of electromagnetic field, right? We have satellites that pretty much cover the world, and if you can take your sat phone and get a signal, you’re being exposed to EMF, right? So there’s no place in the world you can do that. That is new. I mean, maybe whenever Marconi came up with radio waves, that was maybe 130, 140 years ago, but prior to that, there was no EMF other than the natural EMF from the earth. and from the solar radiation, right? So this is all an experiment. You know, what happens when we blanket the environment with this, and particularly when you have kids, like I said, that don’t detox very well? They can’t necessarily handle that, whereas the next person might. No, it’s, you know, again, it’s, my wife always says, oh, we need to get a regenerative farm and raise animals and plants. It’s like, Been there, done that, ain’t going back. All right, so I understand it’s a modern world and we have to figure out a way to make our way through that modern world. But a big part of it is the better our nutrition, the better our minerals. Minerals are really important for dealing with EMF. The better our ability to detox, the healthier our gut, the less of a problem those things are gonna be, right? And again, it’s the trajectory of illness that I’ve seen just in my career. You know, 37 years is not exactly a very, very long time, but I’ve just seen how sick people are, particularly kids.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:39:28] Yes, well, that’s what I wanted to just take a few steps back because we did dive in and talk about this, but it might be worth reflecting for our listener on the current state of health of our children. I mean, you know, whenever we talk about this increase in preventable degenerative diseases, it’s often said, oh, well, we’re getting older, but our kids are not getting old. And so, they are the canaries in the coal mine. What’s it like down in the coal mine? What are these canaries telling us? Yeah, well, they’re telling us we’d better…
Dr James Neuenschwander (Dr Neu) [00:40:03] change our ways because, you know, we’ve already seen a peak and decline in life expectancy, at least in the United States. And we’ve seen a significant increase in chronic illness in kids. You know, they won’t, the last numbers we have are from 2008. That’s the last time our government looked at our chronic illness numbers in kids. At that time it was over 50%. I have no idea what it is now. You know, it’s the same with autism rates, our last autism rate numbers. from the United States, a one in 36, and those are kids born in 2012. Now, they reported them in 2020, because it’s eight -year -olds, so they’re supposed to report every two years. We haven’t seen a report in a while, right? So, you know, again, they play these games, so we don’t even know how bad the numbers are. But, you know, I always say, when I went to school, we had maybe one overweight kid in class, that was it. You know, now almost every kid is overweight. That’s the number one chronic health issue. Things like type 1 diabetes happened, but things like juvenile rheumatoid arthritis were rare. Now, I mean, I’ve got friends. Their kids have JRE. When did that start happening? And then you’ve got these kids that are nine years old and they have type 2 diabetes, You know, the adult.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:41:24] diabetes, the obesity diabetes. It used to be called late onset but not anymore. No. Late onset diabetes it used to be called.
Dr James Neuenschwander (Dr Neu) [00:41:31] And then you’ve got all the hormone effects or the toxins in the environment. You have girls going through puberty when they’re eight years old. They start their period at seven or eight years old. And then the other side of that equation is you have women, I mean, optimum menopause is in your mid to late 50s. People forgot that because everybody’s going through menopause in their 40s. That’s environmental, right? It didn’t used to be like that, right? And so you have chronic disease rates that were maybe in the six, eight, 10%. range in the in the 60s that are now over 50%. And again, I don’t know how high because they stopped measuring it for us. Those numbers are, you know, 15 years old in the US. So I don’t know what they are now. But still, it’s a crisis. And I always like to say, you know, it’s job security for me, because I’ll never run out of patients to take care of, because they’re not doing anything about chronic illness. And until you look at the underlying issue. you know, I have high blood pressure. Why do you have high blood pressure? Nobody ever looks, right? You know, and I can’t tell you, you know, there’s a type of diabetes that happens in adults that’s actually type one diabetes, but it happens in adults. And then, you know, in kids type one diabetes, they get a viral illness within two weeks, they’re in ketoacidosis in an emergency room, right? Very rapid onset. With adults, it’s a slow slide over the course of years. And so these people come in and it’s like, They’re fit. They’re thin. and they’re diabetic. And it’s like, that doesn’t make any sense, right? And then you work them up and you say, oh, we call it latent autoimmune diabetes of adults. You know, type 1 .5, type 3, whatever you wanna call it, but it’s an autoimmune diabetes like type 1. It’s just a slow onset. And it’s like, well, how did you know that? It’s like, it’s not why do I know that? It’s why doesn’t your doctor know that? You know, they put you on type 2 diabetes medications. I’m not gonna fault them for doing that. But when you didn’t respond and get better, why didn’t they look deeper, right? And we all learn about this. It’s just nobody pays attention, because it’s not part of the decision tree. It’s like, oh, that’s a branch way over here that we forgot about. But again, it’s an issue of cleaning that environment as much as you possibly can, minimising the electronics. Your children will be much more pleasant, by the way, if you don’t get those damn electronics, because it just buzzes.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:44:00] the right you talk about you talk about heroin oh yeah electronic devices are a dopamine hit that is you just would not leave you wouldn’t leave your kid with the syringe of heroin and just say you know just inject that will wouldn’t do that
Dr James Neuenschwander (Dr Neu) [00:44:16] And I think the cell phones are even worse than the video games. Yeah, I honestly believe these kids are like, it’s right up against their face. At least the video game was across the room.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:44:30] Now, now I have had the pleasure years back of interviewing Liz Mumford, who’s a very well -known, internationally well -known paediatrician, and she wrote, she did a review of autism over the last 20 or 30 years. I forget the journal it was published in, but I remember the figures was something like 1975, the numbers were about one in 10 ,000 or 5 ,000, and you mentioned one in 36. And a lot of people would say, yes, but Dr. Neu, that’s because diagnosis has gone up. What is your response to that? It’s a good thing you’re not.
Dr James Neuenschwander (Dr Neu) [00:45:05] sitting in the same room as me because my hands would be wrapped around your neck right now. Well, my first response was when I trained in medical school, it was one in five or one in 10 ,000. I didn’t see a single autistic child in all the medical school or in my residency. I went to a high school with 1 ,500 kids. There was a special ed room. None of those kids were autistic. I have a good memory. I remember all that stuff. So that’s 1 ,500 kids, zero autism cases. So if it was one in 36 back then, where were all the autistic kids? They weren’t there. The other thing is I’m 64 years old. Show me one in 36 64 year olds that have autism if we’re so great at diagnosing now, we should be able to diagnose all the 64 year old adults with autism. They don’t exist. So this idea that we’re better at diagnosing, they’ve changed the diagnostic criteria. So maybe 20, 25 % of the increase is from that. But if you look at the numbers, one in 10 ,000 to one in 36, That’s a 28 ,000 % increase in autism. 28 ,000. What’s 20 % of 28 ,000? 5 ,600 or something like that? Okay, take the 5 ,600 off. It’s still 20 ,000 % increase. That’s real. The other thing is, what did we call kids that did this? What did we call kids that didn’t have eye contact, that were non -verbal, that were stimming, that were banging their head against the wall, that had all these GI problems? What did we call that? because that diagnosis should have disappeared if this diagnosis has increased that much. If this one went up 28 ,000%, then something else had to decrease 28 ,000 % if you had the same thing happening, right? So it doesn’t make sense. And people that are saying that, it’s what they do to parents. There’s nothing wrong with your kid until they diagnose, oh, there’s nothing wrong. There’s nothing wrong. And then four years old, oh, he’s autistic. It’s like, I’ve been telling you that since he was 16 months old. We could have been doing something about it for the last year and a half, two years, right? So it’s gas lighting. If there’s no problem, we don’t have to do anything about it. And there’s a huge problem. And the trouble with gas lighting is, one in 36 is what it was in 2012. What is it right now? One in 18, one in 16, and even in 2012, it was one in 22 boys, and it was one in 12 African -American boys. One in 12, that’s almost 10%, right? eight and a half percent. You tell me that 8 .5 % of African -American boys in 1965 in the United States had autism?
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:47:42] Hmm. No, I had a feeling you might have a very strong view of – You know, that was that was I planted that question there, knowing that you would have a very comprehensive and passionate answer for it. You know, I think one of the interesting things that we’re observing from afar is what is going on in America at the moment. And because what goes on in America at the moment has ripple effects from a health perspective, certainly, I mean, geopolitically, obviously, from a health perspective. people look towards the FDA and once the FDA signs off on something, it’s it’s it’s going to get approval in Australia and the UK, et cetera, et cetera. And now there’s this, you know, if you read the mainstream media, you’d be, oh, my God, this nutter Robert F. Kennedy Jr., I mean, what the hell is he going to do with our health system? Well, as far as I know, your health system is probably the worst in the world and the health outcomes probably the worst in the world. It is the worst in the world. Not only do you spend double than everybody else. Probably the worst in the world. It is the worst. but you have the worst health outcomes. And yet this is what people are wanting to protect. What’s your view of the future? Can America be made healthy again? Well,
Dr James Neuenschwander (Dr Neu) [00:49:02] The answer is, I don’t know. I mean, can it? Yeah. Will it? I don’t know. But you know, the whole thing with the US, and this is, you know, we are notorious for spending huge sums of money on things that don’t work or don’t make a difference. So, you know, for instance, cancer. Cancer is a good example, you know, that we’ve been stuck on this mutation theory of cancer. You know, the mutations in the nucleus is causes cancer. So they have to do the human genome project. They did the cancer genome project and they evaluated 10, 12 ,000 different tumours for the genetics. Okay, we’re going to find, you know, a gene or a group of genes, a sequence of genetic defects that’s going to underline cancer and then we can create drugs to go after that and we’ll cure cancer, right? So after spending 10, 20 billion dollars, I don’t know how much it was, you know, They go through this in 2010, 2010, they publish the results and they go, there is no. code. There is no sequence. Every tumour is different. A tumour within a person has different genetics. There’s no one gene that’s common to all the tumour cells in one person. You can have a tumour here, a tumour here. They can have different genetics. So that’s not what causes cancer. There’s a whole metabolic theory of what causes cancer. Otto Warburg told us about that in 1933 when he said all cancers have altered mitochondria. And I would venture to say all chronic disease has altered mitochondria, not just cancer, right? Because the mitochondria determine what the cell does, not the nucleus. The nucleus is gonna code for proteins and that sort of thing. But if you’re talking, how does a cell die? Mitochondria tells it. How does a cell recycle? Mitochondria tells it. So the mitochondria is intimately involved in those processes. And they’ve done studies showing if you take the nucleus from a cancer cell, put it in a normal cell, the normal cell stays a normal cell. But if you do the opposite… take the nucleus from a normal cell, put it in a cancer cell, it continues to be a cancer cell and creates cancer, right? Not the nucleus. And we’ve spent, now 15 years ago, they published this. We don’t know, cancer is too immensely complex for us to even understand it. That was one of the conclusions. And it’s like, well, no, you don’t understand it because that’s what caused the problem, right? And yet, to this day, they are still developing drugs. to target those gene mutations and they’re all 30, 40, 50 ,000 a piece. If one person has five mutations, are you gonna do five $50 ,000 drugs that don’t work? That’s why we spend more money than anybody else on the planet, right? There’s 29 industrialised nations. We’re number 35 on the list. We’re not even number 29, we’re number 35, right? And when you talk children’s health, you know, the neonatal death, you know, how many infant mortality, how many children die within the first year of life. We have more of those deaths. We have more deaths in the first day of life than all the other industrialised countries combined. Wow. And we’re supposed to have the greatest health system in the world. You know, what they’re trying to do, what MAHA’s trying to do, what Bobby Kennedy’s trying to do, is just say, look, let’s just cut to the quick. We need transparency. Transparency all by itself would cure about 80 % of the problems. If you’re reading a paper on how great sugar is for children, then you should be able to say, Oh, it’s funded by Americans for Better Nutrition. Who’s that? Oh, that’s Nestle and the sugar companies. And it’s like, well, that would maybe change your mind about the validity of what you’re reading. And the same thing with the journals. The journals are rejecting articles because they’re being influenced by their advertisers. Oh no, you can’t publish that. They’re saying something bad about one of our drugs. Well, then the journals shouldn’t be taking that money in the first place. And they should be saying right up front, we judge articles based on the opinion of our advertisers. Right? And then we, yeah, can you imagine that? And then also, you know, conflicts of interest. When you are an author on an article, you should have to publish where every penny comes from. And not just for you, but for your department, and the research, and everything else. Because again, if everything is covered by Pfizer and you’re reviewing the Pfizer drug, maybe I’m not going to trust your opinion as much as I would. somebody that has no link with the
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:53:33] But this is an interesting point because, as you mentioned at the beginning, and I agree with you and I know many practitioners that practise transactional prescription based medicine and I know many integrative doctors. And the thing they both have in common is they want the best for their patients. I think we can agree on that. But the but the person who’s transactionally filling out prescriptions believes they are practising. what is called evidence -based medicine, and almost those three words, I think they’re three words, they’re evidence -based medicine. Yeah, they’re three words. Almost those three words are an excuse for doing, for practising the way you are. And I think it’s the work of John Ioannidis in Stanford who says, evidence -based medicine is very difficult to distinguish from evidence -based marketing. This is a story for the majority of people, including practitioners, that is very easy to miss. But once you hear it, very difficult to ignore. What do you think of that?
Dr James Neuenschwander (Dr Neu) [00:54:35] You know, Ioannidis is the one who wrote that article in 2007, 2008. I think the title was something like, Why All Research is Wrong. That’s right. You know, you can find whatever evidence you want. And, you know, what he did was he went and looked at, you know, the 80 % of all the articles based on bench science couldn’t be duplicated. Even 20 % of all prospect of placebo -controlled, double -blind, gold standard studies were wrong, you know, proven to be wrong. but yet if you’re gonna do the evidence -based medicine, you know, yeah, and the issue is who’s providing the evidence and how is that evidence provided? I always say, you know, in the United States, and I don’t know what it’s like in Australia, but in the United States, in order to get FDA approval of a drug, you have to have two clinical trials showing benefit from that drug, all right? So now we have two drugs, they both have two positive clinical trials, but what you don’t know is that this drug, the company did two trials and they were both positive. This drug, the company did 20 trials to get two positive trials, but they didn’t publish the 18 failures. Which drug do you wanna take? And as a practitioner, which drug do you wanna prescribe? This one, right? But we don’t know that because there’s not transparency in the whole process, right? And so, you know, without that, that really compromises the doctor’s ability to prescribe. And then, you know, my whole thing about evidence -based medicine. is I would challenge almost every doctor that I run into that’s in corporate medicine. When was the last time you read an article? I mean, actually read it, not the abstract, but actually read an article. You can tell me the methods, you can tell me how many people were involved in this trial, you can do this, that, the other. It’s almost zero, all right? So, you know, if you’re a serious practitioner, if you have a practise like I have, if you’re not reading, you’re not learning. and you’re stuck, and you’re just gonna be fed the pablum that you get from whatever conference you go to. And look, go to the conferences and look who has the big booths, right? It’s not the integrated practitioners. It’s Pfizer, it’s Merck, it’s Sanofi, it’s all those big companies. That’s who has the huge booths at the American Academy of Paediatrics conferences. And what are they selling? You go, oh, what drugs do you guys have? Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaccine. They don’t even have drugs anymore. right? They just gave up, right? And so, you know, we’re, we’re stuck in this, this, um, programme where what you’re taught is governed by the people that are making the drugs. Right? I don’t have a seat at that table, you know, I offered to speak. They didn’t want me for some reason, right? Because, you know, they’re not, even though the practitioners would be interested, how do I get out of this rat race? How do I go from this corporate model where I have 10 minutes per patient? to go do what you do were my shortest appointments, half an hour. I spent an hour to an hour and a half with new patients because I want to get all the details out of them. How do I do that? And that’s part of what we’re trying to instil in practitioners. There is a world out there. There’s a way to rescue yourself and a way to rescue your patients and really make them healthy. I mean, patients disappear from my practise and I see them 10, 15, 20 years later. It’s like, where you been? I’ve been fine. I don’t need to come see you.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:57:52] Yes. Yeah, no, inspiring, inspiring. And it’s a message that is just music to our ears. Look, I wanted to finish with some practical wisdom, if you like. And you’ve already given it to us, really. But I wondered if we might just condense it and share a few pearls of wisdom. Firstly, for parents beginning their journey with their children. What would it be? And then we’ll go on to the health practitioners. But let’s start with the patients with parents first. Sure.
Dr James Neuenschwander (Dr Neu) [00:58:19] the very first thing that I would do is look at what’s going into your child’s body. You know, clean up the environment, get rid of the electronics as much as you possibly can, clean up the water, make sure they have clean bedding, they have clean clothing, you know, that’s not treated with flame retardants and everything else, and then look at their food, right? And I always say the best thing you can do is just feed your child real food that you All right? I know that’s hard, I know it’s a commitment. but that makes such a huge difference. If you’re going to be buying food from outside of the home that somebody else made, look at the ingredients list. You know, I have a few rules. I have the five ingredient rule. If there’s more than five ingredients, you know, unless it’s fruit salad, you probably don’t wanna pick it up. I have the don’t eat anything that isn’t real food. You know, if you’re reading the label and you go, what’s that? You probably wanna put that back on the shelf. Don’t eat anything that has artificial colorings. They’re all toxic. Don’t eat anything that has preservatives in it. They’re all toxic. They’re all antibiotics. That’s what preservatives are, right? And you very simply, you can alter your child’s life simply by doing the basics. You know, parents always, you know, oh, I want to do a stem cell transplant. It’s like, whoa! How about talking about food first, right? So diet, environment, water, change that.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:59:38] you change your child’s life. No, no, absolutely. And that hierarchy of intervention from starting from the very simple, affordable, effective, right. Before we start jumping into heroics. What about for practitioners who might be listening to this? And I have many practitioners who do listen to it. I’m pretty sure most of them are integrative, but for those that be sitting on the fence and thinking, hey, okay, let’s
Dr Ron Ehrlich [01:00:01] How do I get into
Dr Ron Ehrlich [01:00:02] is more holistic.
Dr James Neuenschwander (Dr Neu) [01:00:04] Well, you know, I mean, first of all, obviously, I’m going to make a plug for MINDD and MAPS, because that’s a good place to start. You know, it’s a good place to get a foundation of education. You know, we have a whole fellowship programme that you go through that, you know, you go to in -person conferences and we’re doing a couple of those modules at MINDD this year, and then most of it’s done online, you know, so most of the modules you can do online, but it just gives you that foundational education into integrative medicine. And then the trick is how do you transition from your practise into an integrated practise? And I always say, if you’ve got three months, at least to my neck of the woods, if you’ve got three months and you hang out a shingle and you say you’re an integrated paediatrician, you’re going to have a full practise in three months. There’s that demand out there for this. You just have to make that leap. And maybe you say, OK, I’m going to cut back on my regular job and work in three days a week there. I’m going to open a practise and do integrated paediatrics two days a week. Well, very rapidly, you’re gonna need three, four, and five days a week. You know, that’s my recommendation. And I always say, look, why did you go into medicine in the first place? You have to get back to that love, that passion, that reason why you did it. because this will feed that this will feed that it will grow it’ll become one of those baobab tree it’ll be huge right because that’s why you went into medicine you didn’t go into medicine so you could see a patient every 10 minutes and feel like you’re spinning your wheels and write the prescriptions the way you’re supposed to and know full well it’s not going to work all right we offer you a programme where you can make a difference you can cure your patients you can go learn what I thought I was gonna learn in medical school. How do you cure patients, right? And that’s what we’re all about.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [01:01:52] Well, that’s a great note for us to finish on. And I just want to thank you not only for all the work you do, for the wonderful knowledge and wisdom you’ve imparted with us today, and the wonderful, passionate, inspiring message. We’ll have links, of course, to the MAPS site, and we’ll look forward to seeing you in Australia for the MINDD Forum in May. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Dr James Neuenschwander (Dr Neu) [01:02:13] It has been my pleasure. Look forward to meeting you.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [01:02:16] Well this is definitely something that I’m feeling very passionate about in in the last two years and in the coming years and that is practitioner health and how they choose to deliver health care to their patients the impact that that has on their physical and mental health and bearing in mind that this burnout this issue of burnout mental health is a huge and growing problem amongst those delivering our healthcare system. And it is not surprisingly that when one chooses to take a transactional approach, you are just on a treadmill where patients are constantly coming in with a need for prescription. Now, I also happen to be on the board of the OrthoMolecular Medicine News Service. And we recently on our editorial board shared an article which came out about the use of AI in medicine and comparing. a score of empathy between general practitioners and AI. And the results were quite interesting. Both conducted their appointment over a 10 to 15 minute period, which is pretty standard in the allopathic traditional medicine model of modern medicine where prescription is the result. It’s typically an eight to 12 minute consultation. Well, if a patient places in all their symptoms and all of their medications and all their medical history, AI processes that within 30 seconds or 60 seconds and comes up with perhaps all of the various pharmaceutical options, bearing in mind the complexity of side effects, which would be very easy for a doctor to miss. AI won’t miss that. and saying, bearing in mind the medication that this patient has and their medical history, going back 10, 15 years in their records. Again, a very difficult thing for a medical practitioner to do. AI consultation comes up with a recommendation. And if you put a prompt in to also include any alternative or complementary recommendations, AI will be able to… search the literature and come up with the solution there and all of that would be done in the space of one minute leaving the AI consult the next 12 minutes to express empathy for their patient, listen to their patient and modify their treatment accordingly and the patient experience in this particular study found that AI came up much higher empathy than the general practitioner who are, as we’ve already observed, suffering from burnout and struggling to keep up. So that is the future of allopathic medicine. But an integrative approach is all about connecting the dots and using AI constructively along with your own life experience. Look. If this is the way medicine is practised with prescriptions, I think it’s not going to be long before GPs make themselves redundant because they can’t possibly keep up. But if they took an integrative approach, which included their own health, then not only would they be a winner, not only would the patient be a winner, but so would public health be a winner. So I am extremely optimistic for the future of delivering health care to people. incorporating an integrative approach that uses AI as a tool. But if your approach has been to be a prescription based transactional practitioner, I would suggest that those days are numbered. Anyway, it’s inspiring to see a practitioner like Dr. Neu, who is so excited and learning all the time, connecting the dots all the time. as a model for health care and that is certainly as far as I’m concerned, the future of health care for practitioner and patient alike. Well, great discussion. Don’t forget the MINDD Forum coming up in May 2nd and 3rd in Sydney. We will have links in the show notes to that registration and I’d encourage you to go along. It’s always a great forum. for patients, for people in the public, and practitioners alike. I hope this finds you well until next time. This is Dr. Ron Ehrlich, be well. Feeling stressed, overwhelmed? It’s time to unstress your life. Join the Unstress Health community and transform stress into strength. Build mental fitness. From self -sabotage to self -mastery. And together, let’s not just survive, but thrive. expert -led courses, curated podcasts, like -minded community and support and much more. Visit unstresshealth.com This podcast provides general information and discussion about medicine, health and related subjects. The content is not intended and should not be construed as medical advice or as a substitute for care by a qualified medical practitioner. If you or any other person has a medical concern, he or she should consult with an appropriately qualified medical practitioner. Guests who speak in this podcast express their own opinions, experiences and conclusions.
