Is Histamine Intolerance The Cause Of Your Mysterious Symptoms?

it's a spectrum illness and you can have mild moderate and severe forms of it and uh there's a whole variety of different things that are involved and you sort of have to treat each person individually looking at their their unique situation their history their genetics yeah their gut microbiome [Music] welcome to doctor's pharmacy i'm dr mark heim that's farm soothing f-f-a-r-m-a-c-y a place for conversations that matter and if you feel like crap you may be suffering from a rare condition which may not be so rare called histamine intolerance which we'll get into you word of

antihistamines which is when you have an allergy but a lot of people make too much histamine which is what causes all the allergies and they just feel like crap and they have swelling and fluid retention and they have all kinds of issues we're going to talk about in depth with my friend and colleague at the ultra wellness center dr todd lepine graduate dartmouth medical school internal medicine doc he's on the faculty of the institute for functional medicine teachers all over the world uh well not now he's doing it all virtually like most of us but

he's one of the leading thinkers and contributors to the field of functional medicine we've worked together for over two decades started out at kenya ranch a long time ago and uh he's one of the smartest dudes on the planet in functional medicine i'm so happy to have you again on this special episode of the doctor's pharmacy our housecall episode thank you mark okay histamine what the heck is histamine why should we care and and tell us tell us why it's so important and why it contributes to so many people's unnecessary suffering so histamine is uh

is found naturally in the body the body makes histamine we also consume histamine and uh the interesting thing about histamine is it is also part it's released by mast cells as part of our first response to uh offending organisms are like a white blood cell what type of exactly what type of white blood cells yeah and the also interesting thing is that histamine actually works as a neurotransmitter and when you think about this this is really an interesting thing as i as i was preparing for this i've sort of stumbled upon some things which i

thought was really quite fascinating is that when you take antihistamine what happens to you you get drowsy exactly so histamine when it's when it's at high enough levels it stimulates the brain histamine is actually involved in the sleep wake cycle um and well i mean you know tylenol pm or admiral pm it's it's tylenol advil plus right benadryl which is an antihistamine right so so so it's a balance like you know too much histamine is bad too little histamine is is also bad so when you actually totally block histamine you actually get sleepy it'll actually

in involved uh with the sleep wake cycle and uh modafinil which is the the drug that people take that actually works on histamine it's part of visual pro vigil exactly we're actually part of that works on on the histamine so it it keeps the histamine levels higher so it keeps your brain sort of awake if you will incredible so most people you know are familiar with certain histamine conditions right if you get hives yeah if you have a peanut allergy yeah if you have this condition we call dermatographia which it sounds weird but essentially if

you scratch your fingernail on your skin it'll create a red welt yes yes that's it that's a that's literally write your name on your back and it'll kind of have raised like centers and that's that's actually a poor man's way i oftentimes will use that with patients uh to determine how much histamine their body their having in the connective tissue because the mast cells are in are the type of white blood cells that are in the connective tissue of the body and when they have excess amounts of histamine in them or they release histamine too

easily you will get this thing called dermatographism where you can take your your finger and stroke on the skin and you will form a red line and it'll stay there and sometimes it'll get really wealthy and raised and that will tell you that there is a problem with excess amounts of histamine in the body yeah and it's something that you know we've all experienced and when you get a bee sting or something like that you'll see this raised well but but but what happens for some people they don't necessarily get the hives and they don't

get the these raised welts on their skin but they do suffer a whole range of symptoms so when someone walks in your office what are the clues that alerts you the fact that they might have a histamine problem because by the way most traditional doctors don't even know anything about this syndrome yeah if you have allergies taken in histamine but that's about it yes but there's a whole host of problems that people suffer from that are mostly misdiagnosed poorly treated and creates so much suffering which is unnecessary yeah and there's a there's a term out

now which um when i was in medical school we didn't even have it it was called it's now called mcas mast cell activation syndrome that gets a real medical diagnosis it's a real medical diagnosis i mean we're seeing a lot of it now and the question is is why are we seeing so much mast cell activation it's it's a really it's a and i've been puzzling on this myself yeah i never took that class in med school i know it right it's true it's a big thing we're seeing we're seeing a lot of it and

and it's not like it's it's there's one cause for mast cell activation there are multiple causes and and i actually even in when i deep dived into the literature one of the things that i stumbled upon was the effects of emf on mast cells emphasis emf is electromagnetic frequencies so like your cell phone background cell towers wi-fi absolutely absolutely and there's some there's some work by a woman uh johansson out of uh i think it's sweden who's done some work on uh the effects of emfs on mast cell degranulation and there's some good studies showing

that emfs are one of the things in susceptible individuals that cause their mast cells to release more histamine that drives this uh uh allergic inflammatory response so that's fascinating and so what when one of the sort of symptoms that that you see people coming in with well they often times uh will react to every food they they're sort of the people who they can't they they have a more and more restricted diet because the more foods that they they eat it'll trigger because lots of foods contain histamine uh or will get broken down uh histidine

is an amino acid and that uh um when you when you consume foods that are high in histidine uh things like uh meats have a lot of histidine your body will actually break it down into histamine and normally the body can process that but when you have problems with either too much ingestion or too much production of a histamine or not enough breakdown of the histamine then you'll have problems with histamine intolerance and these are you know typically a lot of people who have food allergies and mark yeah i think you you've done this yourself

yeah this is uh really interesting is the old old way of treating food allergies was what chromal and sodium yeah right remember that using that yeah and that it's actually quite it's actually a pretty good uh uh treatment for people who are really really reactive to foods and the way that chromoly and sodium because chromoline is actually used for patients with asthma yeah you inhale it's an inhaler it's inhaler exactly and it's a it's a very effective uh drug for really bad cases chrome and sodium can be very very helpful for patients who have a

severe of uh histamine responses to foods and it's true and people can come in with all sorts of weird symptoms that just are misdiagnosed they have headaches they have migraines natural congestion sinus issues fatigue brain fog brain fog digestive problems menstrual cycle problems nausea vomiting and if it's really severe uh you can get really bad cramping you can get edema tons of fluid retention palpitations anxiety your temperature regulations off dizziness so a lot of people come in with all these weird symptoms i don't know what's wrong taking antidepressants yeah exactly so so but but there

is a there is a way to diagnosis and so if you're suffering from any of these issues it may be that there may be a chance that it could be a histamine issue yeah and and uh you know when you have someone who comes in with all these symptoms and and by the way a lot of people have edema and food retention you just stick your finger in their body in their tissue because it's puffy and swollen you can get edema in the legs you can see just people carrying a lot of extra weight and

fluid there's often some type of histamine activation there well sure because well the mast cells which are the one the cells that contain this mean they're actually found in the spaces the interstitial spaces uh in the connective tissue of the body so that's why they get puffy because those are where those cells that are high in histamine reside and it can it can really be something that leads to chronic fatigue syndrome this mast cell activation issue it's it's a big deal and most of the time it's just completely missed yeah i mean if you ask

the average doctor say doc i think i have mast cell activation syndrome can you please get me the test and diagnose me they're going to know yeah you know let me check your histamine levels so so when you have a patient with this how do you begin to think about uh diagnosing this because you know it can it can be a big it can be a big deal for people and i i want to share a case later you're going to share some cases of some patients who suffered for decades decades and finally get better

when we treat them yeah well again we talked on the last podcast about the role of leaky gut in the microbiome interestingly when you have dysbiosis some of the bacteria will actually cause more of your your body to produce excess amounts of histamine so that's another thing where when the histamine up is in excess in the digestive tract that can be related to food consumption which are high foods in the histamine or the bacteria are actually causing the breakdown of histidine as an amino acid to go into histamine so dysbiosis is one of the things

that can trigger uh excess moisture oh nasty gut thing again we're always talking about the gut here on the doctor's pharmacy podcast and especially in our household episodes because it's such a fundamental thing and it's connected to everything and the microbiome is is so critical in so many aspects of our health and i remember when we started doing this todd decades ago and we'd say oh people have a leaky gut or there's problems with their gut floor they have dysbiosis they would just laugh at us they literally would just doctors would just laugh at us

and think we were completely crazy insane and and yet it is now one of the most important areas of research in medicine is the microbiome and understanding leaky gut and you see all kinds of papers in scientific literature using the term leaky gut wow this is i i like it i really remember sitting it was it was in 1997 and i was at canyon ranch and i was having dinner with some guests and there was some doctors in the crowd and we were having nice dinner and we were i was talking about leaky gut and

the woman this one was an allergist so her specialty was allergy and things like this to me and she looked at me and she said you're just completely nuts there's no such thing as leaky gut you know this is just a bunch of you know what and and i just was like looked at her like oh boy you know and it's now you know 25 years later and medicine's really come along it takes a long time but people are still struggling and you know and i think the obvious you know the obvious uh the worst

sort of case scenario of a histamine reaction is obviously anaphylaxis yeah but that it doesn't have to be that so talk about how how we begin to diagnose it we look at what test besides a sibo test well you can measure histamine in the blood uh you can also measure uh tryptase which is another marker for mast cell activation um you can also measure there's another test uh which uh in my in my uh preparation for this i've not measured i haven't found the lab that does it but it can be measured as n-methyl histamine

which is a breakdown product of histamine that that's another one that can be done and then um again i think one of the the tests for me is dermatographism i i find that a very uh helpful uh clinical test uh to determine if a person's uh mast cells in interstitial spaces are overly uh reactive uh and uh releasing lots of histamine yeah and we also do a test for uh dao deficiency yes yeah so talk about what that is an enzyme right yes so dao is a diamine oxidase so this is an enzyme that our

body has and it helps to break down histamine so histamine has to be you know consumed it's used and then it has to be detoxified and if this enzyme is lacking in a person for whatever reason the enzyme may be turned off you will have problems with uh detoxifying histamine especially in the gut so and there are uh enzyme products that you can use uh dao enzymes that you can use that patients have respond very very well to you yeah we do that here at the ultra mana center you give people his tao and enzyme

support and it's interesting there's a lot of things we do every day that block dao production absolutely alcohol black tea green tea which is a good thing mate energy drinks these all block the ao production so it's going to increase your your your histamine intolerance yeah exactly yeah and then you know you can you can use um uh his antihistamines and the other thing we had another podcast earlier on migraines and this is i found this also very interesting is one of the things that is a histamine blocker is butterbur and butterbur is used in

migraines and the reason why butterbur works in migraines is it actually is working as an antihistamine level because you can get a an allergic brain if you will you know we know we know about that where you get fuzzy in the head and you get uh you can get headaches and things like that so excess amounts of histamine has an impact on the brain yeah and and you know there and so when you see these patients you can do some of the genetic testing look for these do deficiency issues you can look at histamine levels

you can look at some of these byproducts you can do test for dao deficiency you can look at some of the other factors that might be causing it like leaky gut food sensitivities all that is really part of what we do here at the ultra wellness center when we check these patients history and we look at their lab tests and then you know so when they come in you sort of you have this suspicion because none of this is hard to diagnose you have a suspicion like it's pretty easy to sort of test and and

and try different approaches that allow people to see if it's an issue so what are the dietary things that we'd start with because a lot of histamine triggers are in the diet yeah right and so we can have a low histamine diet so what what's a low histamine diet well um foods or what actually are what the same what are the foods that have the highest histamine that we should be avoiding yeah so so basically the way to think about it is bacteria produce histamine so if you have food that's old if you have food

that's sitting in the refrigerator for a couple of days guess what happens the bacteria actually break down histidine the amino acid into histamine so no leftovers leftovers exactly exactly leftovers just like the next day and then fermented foods fermented foods are fermented by bacteria so anytime we have food that's old or fermented things like parmesan cheese uh aged uh uh meats uh et cetera cured meats etc they have high histamine and that's part of the fermentation process and yeah we talk about fermented foods being so good for you like sauerkraut and kimchi and natto and

miso and exactly and this is where this is yogurt this is where these these really good foods in someone who has histamine intolerance is like putting gasoline on a fire and they'll say well i'm getting worse it's like well no you should be getting worse these are good foods for you no you have histamine problems what is that saying what's good for the goose isn't good for the gander right i think this is so so critical what we're talking about here todd because functional medicine is personalized medicine absolutely it's precision medicine and it's not like

medicine it's precision nutrition yeah so it's really important to understand that even though this way of eating may be great for some people with fermented foods and eating avocados and having you know delicious shellfish bone broth bone broth that's another one right we think all these are great foods but you might be killing yourself of course alcohol and beer and all that is a problem wine but but you know we we are we're uh we're really here focused on what is right for you yeah and i think dietary dogma really interrupts personalization um approach nutrition

some people do great on vegan diets some people do terribly some people do great on keto and some people do terribly yeah so there's no one-size-fits-all approach and what really frustrates me todd and probably i imagine you too is that you know there's all these people out there on the web and internet and promoting this and that approach and this and that diet and they're not seeing patients yeah and and the thing about seeing patients is it's incredibly humbling if you've seen tens of thousands of patients you know you you can't be dogmatic you can't

say this is the way you have to be vegan or you have to eat meat or you have to eat fermented foods or yeah it's like you go wait a minute everybody's different yeah and what what what works for one may not work for another yeah one man's food is another man's poison that's right and even good quote good foods you know we're talking about good foods yeah and so i think i think this is a really important point particularly people have histamine issues which is a lot of people at some level or another they

should consider trying a histamine-free diet and also other other foods that we think are also great maybe triggering histamine like papayas and chocolate oh my god chocolate which i love would be terrible to get this condition dried fruit certain nuts food dyes additives you know wheat germ which was supposed to help food right tomatoes bananas all these things may they really cause increased histamine production yeah and and sadly you know in order to get this under control sometimes you need to be restricting some of these foods for a while for your body to heal it's

not forever that's that's the thing is is is i i think you're absolutely like an elimination diet is not something that you do forever and a low histamine diet is also something that you don't necessarily have to do forever and i think that the key thing is really working with a really good well-trained experienced functional medicine nutritionist who can help you navigate all of the nuances of what to eat what to avoid uh what what to take in terms of supplements can be very very helpful absolutely you know the things that we want to focus

on if you have a histamine intolerance or foods that are low in histamine like fresh really fresh food is the key right not old food like you said fresh meat freshly caught fish that fish has been sitting around for a while or canned fish is not necessarily good fruit that's not citrus fruits eggs are great not gluten grains get away from the gluten but quinoa and and black rice not dairy avoid dairy but you can have coconut milk or almond milk lots of veggies but no tomatoes avocado spinach or eggplant right so you've got to

be smart about this and it's a little complicated and often you need help with the nutritionist yeah all the good oils and fats that we like those are all great so you know it's pretty much how i eat i mean i do eat avocados and certain things but i really pretty much eat protein vegetables and it works so well for these patients hey everybody it's dr hyman thanks for tuning in to the doctor's pharmacy i hope you're loving this podcast it's one of my favorite things to do and introducing all the experts that i know

and i love and that i've learned so much from and i want to tell you about something else i'm doing which is called mark's picks it's my weekly newsletter and in it i share my favorite stuff from foods to supplements to gadgets to tools to enhance your health it's all the cool stuff that i use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health and i'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter i'll only send it to you once a week on fridays nothing else i promise and all you do is

go to drhyman.com forward slash pics to sign up that's drhyman.com forward slash picks p-i-c-k-s and sign up for the newsletter and i'll share with you my favorite stuff that i use to enhance my health and get healthier and better and live younger longer now back to this week's episode so todd when you see a patient like this tell me about a case that you might have had where it sort of uh kind of got you thinking about this and allowed you to to really drive down into into really the diagnosis and the treatment well you

bring up an interesting thing because you know as i uh have seen more and more patients and i i think we are seeing more patients who have you know histamine intolerance call it mast cell activation syndrome uh to what degree is there are certain individuals who can be a little bit more predisposed towards this so people who have earlier dan law syndrome you know the hyper mobile people can actually have for whatever reasons will have a higher incidence of histamine intolerance the other thing in the case that i recently had was a patient who came

in to me with severe mast cell activation syndrome it was on a whole bunch of different medicines including chromium which we talked about earlier to to decrease uh food reactions to histamine and i i saw the patient and uh he gave a very interesting history had um this skin lesion which sort of like morphed into this um uh almost like a an uh scarring type uh ulcerated uh lesion on his uh back area he saw multiple dermatologists had a biopsy had part of the area removed and was ultimately diagnosed with a some type of form

of a scleroderma sort of like a malignant scleroderma which is sort of interesting and like oh what's what's that related to but he was also having all of these these histamine type reactions and then when i uh asked them a bunch of questions you know i started thinking about well guess what lyme disease is also associated with histamine intolerance because lyme bacteria resides in the connective tissues in the body it sort of hides there and that in turn can actually activate those mast cells uh which uh mast cells are the first line defense uh or

one of the first lines of defense against infectious agents and when i asked him because he had a lot of you know fatigue and brain fog type symptoms too but you know maybe that was related to something else so i asked him about you know potential exposure so lo and behold he ended up having a low cd57 count which is oftentimes a marker it's not diagnostic of lyme but it tells you that the immune system is not working so well and uh when i did advanced testing on him he had actually had conventional lab testing

i think we talked about that in another podcast how regular conventional lab testing for lyme disease is not that helpful um but uh i i did a specialized t cell eli spot test on him and his uh uh lime eli spot test lit up like a christmas tree wow right so he had lyme disease he had lyme disease which was actually triggering a lot of his uh mast cell activation type symptoms um so uh so i work i've been working with him for a while and he did very well uh we i put him on

a supplement which is a combination of quercetin which can help with uh uh it's like a natural antihistamine natural antioxidant turns out it's really good for covid too it's yeah yeah exactly very very powerful uh a phytochemical and i he did very well uh by adding uh nettles along with quercetin as a sup in supplement form uh he also worked at the nutritionist got on a uh low uh histamine diet dramatically made a huge huge improvement uh his brain was working better um and his energy was better but he still wasn't 100 better so that's

where i went to the next level and uh he's you know currently actually being treated for lyme uh and it's in the medical literature and i sort of stumbled upon this because i had this patient come into me and um she had uh the same thing she was um had severe mast cell activation she was on zolair she was on injections for like 20 grand a year yeah yeah exactly yeah 20 grand a year 20 minutes all the histamine which could be controlled by diet and these other things exactly and and her condition actually uh

turned out to be the same thing it was actually uh undiagnosed lyme disease and this is i think you know one of those things where you have to think about it not that lyme disease causes everything but lyme disease is such a tricky uh condition that you've got to be thinking about anybody who comes in masquerader it's like syphilis exactly it's like the great masquerader and people can come in i've seen people with parkinson's symptoms i've seen people with um brain fog i've seen people with rheumatoid you know sero-negative rheumatoid arthritis chris christopherson and alzheimer's

quote alzheimer's exactly exactly i've i had one patient with fibromyalgia who was you know quote-unquote fibromyalgia whatever that means i mean just it means you heard all over um and uh so lyme can actually mimic fibromyalgia yeah so you really got to think about it and it doesn't present is one you know neatly neat little boxed uh diagnosis it's really you gotta really think that sort of speaks to the one of the foundational concepts of functional medicine is that one disease can have many causes yeah right like histamine intolerance could have many causes yeah and

one cause like lyme disease can create many diseases right like you know lyme disease can cause neurologic issues and joint issues and skin issues and chronic fatigue and alzheimer's and mast cell activation syndrome and you know uh you know pots and all these weird diagnoses that doctors treat as if they're the thing but actually it's something else right you know what's also interesting about histamine is that you know there are there are processes in our body you mentioned this dao enzyme that breaks down histamine and a lot of things interfere with it you talked about

some of the foods that interfere with it but they're also a lot of drugs that interfere with histamine uh breakdown through this dao enzyme uh antibiotics antidepressants antipsychotic medications diuretics even things like muscle relaxants pain meds gi meds meds for reflux like the acid blockers tb meds and even over the counter stuff we use all the time like aspirin and and uh and naparasan like a leave alterin anti-inflammatories all can be really driving this inhibition of this enzyme that breaks down histamine so you might be taking all these drugs you might be eating all these

foods you might be nutrition nutritionally deficient all these things can really be driving this histamine intolerance and and what's interesting is that in order to actually uh have the ability to break down histamine using dao you need certain nutrients right there's certain nutrients that really play a role like vitamin b6 vitamin c copper magnesium manganese zinc calcium b1 b12 folic acid all these are critical nutrients and many of us are deficient if you look at the nutritional testing we do here at the el chobano center i don't know about you todd but when people say

oh you don't need vitamins and oh you know people are eating a healthy diet they're fine nonsense i mean we don't we don't guess we test yeah and we look and see the amount of nutritional deficiencies exist are just massive even in our population which is a relatively affluent well-educated population imagine how bad it is and i i've seen what i call virgin patients you know people have really never seen a functional medicine doctor who have you know lower socioeconomic status underserved patients and they and they they have massive deficiencies yeah and and i think

you know we we really can you know take out the bad stuff whether it's foods or drugs and we can add the good stuff which is the right foods and the right the right nutrients and that's really what's so powerful about functional medicine yeah um so i i just recall a case i want to share a little bit of this guy who just was the most complicated patient he he for years and years had tremendous swelling everywhere he'd get these lesions all over his body and he would have skin breakdown he had fluid retention no

matter what he ate he couldn't lose weight and he was always puffy and swollen and it turned out he had this histamine intolerance syndrome and we diagnosed him and we put him on a low histamine diet we gave him the chromoline which chromoline is a mast cell inhibitor so it basically blocks the release of histamine from these white blood cells and you can take it before you eat and it's very safe yeah it's very it's very very communication very effective it's prescribed for food allergies but it's incredibly effective for this i i give them he

he was also really severe so we gave him an i meant other medication zantac which is a histamine blocker it's another histamine drug even though it's for acid stomach and we gave him other other other supplements like quercetin we gave him the histidio we sort of piled a lot of stuff on in order to help him for severe cases you got to do that and he was so severe and it was amazing what happened to him and after 35 years of misdiagnosis and suffering and struggling he was seeing the best doctors he lost 35 pounds

without really trying all the fluid went out of his system yeah it was all fluid flowed yeah it was interstitial fluid fluid yeah i was like the michelin man yep and he he's got healed he felt better it was just really quite an amazing case and it you know i think it was one of the more extreme cases of histamine intolerance i've ever seen and he had to be very extreme but you know there's there's a middle ground depending on where you're at and what you need to do so if you are think you're suffering

from any of this stuff then it's really important to get properly assessed and treated and and people go from doctor to doctor doctor and they don't get an answer and if you're really struggling it could be this phenomena of histamine intolerance yeah absolutely yeah it's i think it's it's a spectrum illness and you can have mild moderate and severe forms of it and uh there's a whole variety of different things that are involved and you sort of have to treat each person individually looking at their their unique situation their history their genetics yeah their gut

microbiome yeah absolutely this guy had the bc as well we had to treat he had really infections yeah did he have did he actually have lyme or did he just have obesity he had babies and he also had bacterial overgrowth in his gut yeah so people had leaky gut people have irritable bowel people have inflammatory bowel disease they tend to get more of this histamine problem too so you just got to look for all the clues and it's it's really really powerful when you see patients like this and they recover simply by understanding how their

system is out of whack and it's really about getting them back in balance and often over time by healing the leaky gut by providing the nutrients they need by sort of reducing the trigger foods by adding in the foods that are are beneficial these patients do get better yeah and it's i'm sure mark that was very a rewarding case because you know when there's nothing uh i think that drives doctors is helping to relieve suffering you know when you see somebody who's suffering mentally physically for years and they're not getting answers and they're saying oh

it's in your head here take an antidepressant that's that's bad medicine yeah well you know i i hate to to vilify doctors too because you know we just we just don't learn about this stuff right yeah it's like you know you expect a doctor to speak chinese but they never were taught chinese yeah well you know i was but i you know i i one of my one of my sayings i say to my patients is you know i went from being a medical student to a student of medicine i mean unless you're a physician

and you're constantly learning you know the stuff that you learned in you know the the old joke was you know whatever you learned in medical half of it was wrong but we don't know what happened is that's right that's right the dean the dean of our our medical school got off the first day of medical school good news and bad news half of what we're going to teach you in five years is going to be wrong and the bad news is we can't tell you which half exactly exactly right exactly yeah so uh but we

we're really in this uh i think this is extraordinary beginning of a new era of medicine i i think we are emerging from the dark ages of medicine too yeah and and i say that in all seriousness because you know traditional healthcare traditional medicine is focused on a paradigm that's based on diagnosing diseases by symptoms yeah and by geography where is in your body and what is the symptom and then we group people into categories according to symptoms you know you have depression you have rheumatoid arthritis you have dementia you have diabetes but there can

be many many causes for each of those diseases and yet they all get treated uniformly right and and doctors don't understand how to navigate the the paradigm shift of systems biology which which is explaining how everything is connected yeah you know i remember this patient says i have a doctor for every inch of me you know yeah although audiologists right and it's no fault to their own it's what we learned about it is what you and i learned in medical school and it took us having some breakthrough to say wait a minute this doesn't make

sense anymore the body is a system it's an ecosystem everything's connected and i would venture to say mark you actually bring up a really good point cause i've seen all those patients who have they have a cardiologist they have a gastroenterologist they have a dermatologist they have an immunologist they have a neurologist and the more allergies that you have the more dangerous it is well then you get more piles of pills yeah and there's a pill for every yelp but you know the thing is that and they don't talk to each other if you if

you have a migraine and joint pain and you have eczema and you have irritable bowel and you have a little pre-diabetes they all get treated differently by different doctors by i mean they they get treated by separate doctors and and every doctor really does the same thing so we talk about second opinions there really is no second opinions in traditional medicine there may be nuances on how people do stuff but it's the same old same old and and functional medicine really is a true second opinion it's a true approach that it digs down into the

biology the underlying biology and that doesn't get hooked on the diagnosis exactly and you know i the the the uh this the teacher we both had sid baker one of the greatest thinkers in medicine i think in the 20th and 21st century you know he said we we do this phenomena called naming and blaming we name the disease and then we blame the name for the problem and then we tame it with a drug so you come in you're sad you're helpless and helpless and you have no interest in life and you can't sleep and

you're not you know eating and you don't want to have sex anymore the guys i know what's wrong with you you're depressed that's what's causing your symptoms it's not the cause of your symptoms it's the name of your symptoms they go i know how to fix it take an antidepressant but depression is not a prozac deficiency it could be a million things it could be the changes in your microbiome or a vitamin d deficiency or omega-3 deficiency or mercury poisoning or maybe you took too much acid blockers and you have b12 deficiency or maybe your

thyroid's not working i mean i could give you a million different reasons and and we have no road map in traditional medicine to get there from here yeah and that's what functional medicine really does it helps us navigate this complex territory of disease and sid baker goes well you're given the wrong map for the territory of illness and map of these labels so it's like if you're going to new delhi and you get a map of new york city it's not going to help you so get into trouble so we got to come up with

a new map and that's what functional medicine is folks it's really a new map for navigating the territory the landscape of disease yeah and and it is so gratifying after doing this for so many decades that's why you and i both work so hard on it because it's really not getting out there too enough people and yeah and a lot of this you can do on your own a lot of this is really doesn't need a doctor yeah and the the fun part of this is too is you know i i'm old enough to remember

when there was no internet you know we just have to you know we want to look something up we'd have to go to the medical library to do that and i can remember as a physician i was a primary care doctor in in stockbridge the local town doctor oh my god and when when uh the internet first came out and i could go on to the national uh uh library uh the pubmed yeah and i could do it through an old program called lonesome doc yeah that was i remember yeah i remember it and i

said oh my god this is this is a game changer now it's like i don't i i have the library on my on my laptop yeah you literally say i want to know about histamines so you'd go to the librarian and say you could pull all the articles it might be relevant on histamine or you look them up you know in a journal and you write them down and just you your level of ability to learn and process information you know and it's really uh yeah you know how i've learned so much is just digging

into the original research yeah exactly and the ability to access that information now like i can i do so much my research you know thank god i have a laptop and an internet connection because you can find amazing stuff and you know just give me uh a cup a good cup of coffee and uh some time and i can research amazing amounts of stuff and one thing you'll be a little history to wake you up a little history to wake me up and and and one thing will lead to the to the other and uh

it's like a rabbit hole oh you follow this trail and actually because it is all connected it it actually is all connected and sometimes you know uh you know chance favors the prepared mind when you're looking for certain things certain things will start popping up and you start oh yeah that's a connection there oh i see i see that how that's related to that that's right todd i think what you know what you're describing in your understanding and processing all this data is is a different set of filters yeah it is much broader than a

traditional doctor so a typical neurologist your cardiologist your gastroenterologist they'll read deep into their silo they'll look at all the papers in their framework but they don't look across disciplines and what's so fascinating when you look across all these different diseases they all have the same common root issues and we we talked about the matrix in functional medicine which is this this framework for looking at the body that is based on understanding that health or disease is either balance or imbalance in these basic functional biological networks in the body whether it's and and so across

the spectrum of diseases these same networks are getting out of whack yeah so if you're neurologist you know you could have leaky gut you could have mitochondrial issues you could have inflammation you could have nutritional deficiencies you can have hormonal disruptions same thing with diabetes same thing with rheumatoid arthritis and and so like you you go well these diseases are actually all the same right they're just they're just manifested differently depend on that person's unique genetics and predispositions and where the target goes yeah you know and so we we get so hooked up on the

diagnosis whether it's histamine or migraines or depression the diagnosis is just the first step in the process of unraveling what's going on yeah yeah exactly yeah and it was a holy grail when i when i was a medical holy grail is and you got brownie points for for being able to make the diagnosis it's called the differential diagnosis so you could look at the symptoms the physical exam the lab tests and the guy who wins the prize is the guy who can name that disease like jeopardy exactly and you name that disease and you win

gold star you get your gold star and then and then afterwards it's just cookbook yeah it's total cookbook paint by numbers it's it's it's sad to say i hate to break it to all people but you know doctors once one there is a bit of an art to it in which you do but you know if you have a diagnosis here's the standard of care here's the drugs you use here's the surgeries here's here's the steps you take and it's it's not that complicated so it's kind of boring it's formulaic it's very formulaic i mean

i used to practice emergency room medicine you did too and you know you think it's exciting and thrilling it's actually boring yeah because you know the kidney stone gets these three drugs the heart attack gets these four drugs the asthma patient gets this protocol the uh you know the migraine patient gets this cocktail and it's like after you learn it it's just it's kind of boring the key is making the diagnosis but in functional medicine the diagnosis is just a first step in understanding the complexity of what's going on then you go okay well why

yeah not not what disease do we have but why is this going on absolutely yeah you also you may you made me think of um a great book i oftentimes recommend this to my patients uh written by our friend jeff bland a fantastic book and i highly recommend reading it's called the disease delusion yes fantastic yeah we are deluded how we think of disease exactly and it's it's when you look at it from a systems biology uh and a broad approach he does a very great job of articulating exactly what you're saying and this is

why it's such an exciting time in medicine because all these silos are breaking down we can't deny it anymore the microbiome is blowing apart everybody's conception of disease i said you know when you're when your theory doesn't match the facts anymore you got to change your theory yeah and i think that's what's happening in medicine now and it's really really exciting it's a very exciting time i think you know the the knowledge is exploding and now that we have computers and uh bioinformatics and you know even artificial intelligence you know we're only going to get

uh able to do better uh analysis of things uh and really dial in the personalization of medicine absolutely and we're we're talking about a real personalization around using you know much less invasive toxic interventions because even the systeming thing we're talking about you know it's pretty straightforward when you when you look at it it's just getting rid of the bad stuff that triggers it adding the good foods that help you heal fixing really keep god taking a few nutrients maybe taking a few very low toxicity drugs that can help uh and and just people get

so much better so todd thank you so much for being again on the doctor's pharmacy this has been a great conversation about histamine about how it can masquerade as all sorts of things i would encourage you if you're suffering from all kinds of weird vague symptoms check it out uh learn about it listens podcast share with your friends and family come see us at the ultra wellness center we're here doing virtual consults ultrawellnesscenter.com see people from all over the world you don't even have to come here anymore because of covet it's been a great boon

to helping people access us without having to schlep on a plane or stay in a hotel or eat crappy restaurant food so it's actually good and i mean you'd miss seeing people in person but it is actually a good compromise uh and uh if you love this podcast please share with your friends and family on social media uh if you uh liked it also leave a comment we'd love to hear from you have you dealt with your histamine issues maybe you can share your thoughts about what worked for you and subscribe wherever you get your

podcast and we'll see you next week on the doctor's pharmacy you