143: Exporing the SHINE protocol to heal CFS, fibromyalgia, chronic pain and more with Dr Jacob Teitelbaum

00:00:08 Chazmith: Welcome to Our Power is Within Podcast. I'm your host, Chazmith, and my mission for this podcast is to inspire you to take your power back, and to realize that you are the healer that you've been looking for all along. Healing is possible in mind, in body, and soul.

00:00:24 Chazmith: Today's episode is sponsored by Jeannie Kulwin Coaching. And for those of you who already aren't familiar with Jeannie, she's a stress and mind body coach based out of LA, who's been a guest on this podcast twice. Check out our most recent episode, number 120, where we got to have a fun and transformative conversation on the power of emotions. Or check out episode 95, where she gave us simple and practical action steps to begin implementing in our life right away, to make positive impact. Jeannie battled fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, and dozens of other mysterious symptoms that drained her mentally and physically for over 16 years. Her life forever changed when she discovered mind-body healing. Fueled by her incredible recovery, Jeannie left her unfulfilling teaching job, and now fully supports clients through their healing journeys.

00:01:14 Chazmith: If you've been feeling stuck, Jeannie's one-on-one customized coaching support could be the missing piece for you, especially with an experience- and results-driven coach, who I personally find to be so cheerful, upbeat, and supportive. She's the only person I know who does a free 45-minute call. So I highly recommend reaching out to her via her website, www.jeanniekulwin.com. That's J-E-A-N-N-I-E-K-U-L-W-I-N.com to book your call today. And you will find all the links in the show notes.

00:01:49 Chazmith: I had such a fun chat with our guest today, Dr. Jacob Teitelbaum. Dr. T really specializes in helping people recover from chronic illnesses, like CFS, fibromyalgia, and pain. Today, he gives us all these wonderful tips that are a little outside the norm of what we generally focus on in this podcast, but he goes in depth into his SHINE protocol, and how it might support you. He has so many wonderful free resources, and he seems like he genuinely cares about helping people find the right support that they need. We also get to hear a little bit about his personal story, and what motivated him down this path of holistic healing for himself and his clients. So, please enjoy.

00:02:35 Chazmith: All right, Dr. Jacob Teitelbaum. Thank you so much for being here with me today.

00:02:40 Dr. Jacob: Chazmith, it's a joy to be with all of you today. Because having been a doctor now in the medical profession for 50 years, I'm going to tell you right now, most doctors only know what the pharmaceutical industry voices in our head tell us to do. And when it comes to pain management, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, it's dismal. There's just almost nothing. All of these things can be effectively treated. And today I'm going to teach you how. You don't have to be sick anymore.

00:03:08 Chazmith: I love it. That's what people who are listening want to hear. So I'm really curious, though. I know that you've been a doctor a really long time, as you just said, how did you come to really focus and specialize specifically in this chronic illness and pain community? Just that focus, I guess, how did you get there?

00:03:29 Dr. Jacob: Yeah, it's the old fashioned way. I found myself on the other side of the white coat. In medical school, I came down with what I call the drop dead flu, really nasty viral syndrome. And the context of a very stressful time, med school was easy. I was paying my own way. I was working full time. During med school, all that was easy. But the universe decided to throw some more chaos in my life. Nasty viral infection, non-functioning six weeks later, I had to drop out of medical school because I was paying my own way and couldn't work. And I was homeless sleeping in parks. And this is the universe, but a holistic, homeless medical school sound in my park bench. I never heard the word holistic. I was a Jewish kid. I wanted to be a healer. To be a healer, you're a doctor. That was the one pathway. There weren't other pathways. And naturopaths came by. Naturopaths? What the heck is a naturopath? Herbalists, energy workers, but energy. I learned chakra work, the whole thing. And people came on my park bench. Sometimes they had pizza and I even ate. And they taught me the bits and pieces of what I needed to learn to recover.

00:04:35 Dr. Jacob: A year later, I was able to go back to med school, got my honors in medicine. And I'm a science geek. They called me the phantom in med school, because two in the morning, I'd be in the medical library going through the stacks, pulling studies and research and stuff. And I found there was this enormous amount of researchers. I said, why aren't we taught any of this? And most of the professors would go, because there isn't any research on it. I said, but here are the studies. I don't have time to look at that pseudoscience quackery. And they'd run away. I'm like, what? Here we are. Evidence-based medicine. That's what we do. That's a PR line. We say, no, we do what the pharmaceutical industry tells us to do. And they have slick advertising, masquerading as science. But there are about 10% of professors who go, that's no nonsense. Give it to me. Let me look at that. They come back a week later. What else got? Those are the ones who eventually go into holistic medicine. Having to get myself well is how I started to become... And being a science geek, is how I started to become aware of all this research outside of what the industry wanted us to learn so we could spend all day writing out prescriptions for their expensive stuff.

00:05:50 Chazmith: So then you just kind of, through that, carved your path and ended up finding your way in the niche of chronic pain and chronic illness.

00:05:58 Dr. Jacob: As I said, I'm a science geek, and I had the chronic fatigue syndrome and the fibromyalgia. So I had the myofascial muscle issues. And I like massage. I like to give a massage. I'm quite good at that. I know the muscles, but I feel very well and can release them. So all that came together for pain management and chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia.

00:06:20 Chazmith: That's awesome. All right. I didn't know for sure, but that's usually the story you hear is somebody suffers from their own experience of something, and then they find their way to the other side. And then, that helps steer them in a new direction. So when you see clients, just so people who also might not be familiar with your work, you've written a ton of books. One of your most recent books, Fatigued to Fantastic, which was just recently re-edited or republished or something.

00:06:48 Dr. Jacob: Well, From Fatigued to Fantastic first came out in 1996. But the fourth edition, it's really close to the sixth edition as it goes, and now Penguin is the publisher, came out in '21. And if you have pain, if you have fatigue, if you have fibromyalgia, From Fatigued to Fantastic is the book. I hate to sound arrogant with it. I wish that wasn't the truth. I wish there were a thousand others, but it's the book that will teach you how to get well from these things.

00:07:18 Chazmith: And when you have clients that come see you because of reasons like CFS, fibromyalgia, and pain, what do you see are the most common reasons that they end up with these disorders?

00:07:31 Dr. Jacob: Well, it's important to understand that pain, and CFS, and fibromyalgia, these are not outside invaders or enemies. Sometimes in CFS, it's an infection. But rather, it's more like the oil light on the car's dashboard, on their body's dashboard, telling you that something needs attention. So for example, if your oil light went off and you went to the doctor, the doctor said, boy, that must be pretty annoying. Let's put a band aid over that thing. And then you come back, and the band aid would fall off, or else the motor would burn out. Then you go back to the doctor, the band aid fall out. They say, well, let's take a hammer to it, knock that oil light out of there, because it gets no stuff out of there again. And then the motor would burn out. They figure, oh, God, what lousy luck you've had today, as if the two are unrelated. If you give your body what it needs, the pain goes away. And the same with CFS and fibromyalgia, which are an energy crisis. You address the things that are causing energy drains.

00:08:29 Dr. Jacob: So for people with CFS and fibromyalgia, and even for those with muscle pain, which is an energy crisis too, most people don't realize, muscle pain comes from low energy in the muscles. So the muscles get locked in a shortened position. You've come home after a heavy workout, and your muscles are tight because they don't have energy. They get locked in a shortened position. They hurt. So what causes low energy in the body, and how do you replace energy? We have what we call the SHINE protocol. Lack of sleep drains energy. That's the S. H should be hormones and hypotension. If you have low thyroid, low adrenal, low estrogen, progesterone, testosterone. If you have low blood pressure because your autonomic system, the control center, we'll talk about that in a bit, isn't working. Infections, inflammation for the eyes. And [less] nutrition. The average American diet has lost half of its vitamins and minerals. All calories are there, but the vitamins and minerals are lost in food processing. Virtually everybody is nutritionally deficient. It's the first time in human history. People are obese and malnourished at the same time. Then we're not getting enough exercise.

00:09:40 Dr. Jacob: So these are the key things biochemically. Then you've got structural issues. You've got mind-body issues. If you're in fear and wide, like you don't know what you're afraid of, but you're watching this, what we call the news, which is a big fiction on both sides. God bless them. They're nice people. I'm on the news day in and day out. If they quote me correctly, 20% of the time, that's a lot. They're making this stuff up. The editor tells the reporter, we're going to do a story. This is a conclusion. Find the experts. You have to have three experts that you quote, or at least say you're quoting. Funny how many times I look at it. I'm at the checkout counter at the supermarket, and I pull one of the magazines. I'm just going through things. I read this thing. I said, what asshole says this? And it says, says Dr. Teitelbaum. What the? It's fiction, but it's meant to scare you to death and make you hate each other.

00:10:35 Dr. Jacob: Now, the immune system picks up on the fear and it's on high alert. Now, your inflammatory system is on overdrive. Whether you have autoimmune pain, neuropathic pain, any kind of inflammatory pain, the mind-body issues, or whether it's just on high alert from childhood because they had an abusive alcoholic parent, for any of these reasons, this all feeds into the pain. It all feeds into the fibro. It's all treatable by you.

00:11:05 Chazmith: So, you see people that, perhaps the onset is of this wide variety of reasons. Anything from like you said, childhood trauma to widespread fear to a natural infection. So it's something that could be mental, something that could be physical. But you're saying that, regardless of what might have created the onset of these diagnoses or disorders, we want to approach treating it the same way?

00:11:32 Dr. Jacob: No, your body knows how to heal. You just need to give it what it needs to do so, and you need to get the hell out of its way.

00:11:43 Chazmith: So, we do the SHINE protocol, but we also need to do the emotional work.

00:11:46 Dr. Jacob: And the structural work, and in some cases, biophysics. Those are four domains of healing. Biochemistry is all the medications. And again, what your doctor gives you is not based on science. What your doctor gives you is the most expensive and profitable, but the doctor has taught that that's what's most scientific. But the research, it's not so. If you look at medical committees, the research shows that what is recommended is based almost entirely by which drug company donated the most money to that medical group. Then there are people who sit at the committee, and then they say, oh, our new patentable, very expensive, this should be [everybody], every doctor [inaudible], and that becomes the medical guideline. Same for pain.

00:12:34 Chazmith: So when you work on implementing the SHINE protocol for people, which I'll have you go into a little bit more depth, each part of SHINE, you're not recommending or prescribing actual chemical pharmaceuticals? You're helping people with–

00:12:48 Dr. Jacob: I guess I am.

00:12:49 Chazmith: Oh, you are. Okay.

00:12:51 Dr. Jacob: Oh, yes. I'm not against medications. I'm just against the insane way that they used. If they're used safely and scientifically for good reasons, I will include medications along with the natural products, along with the herbals, along with the nutritional, along with the mind-body. I'm not in the school of thought that medicine's the devil. Just, they're used in a way that's utterly insane and kills thousands of people each year. I'm against that. But there are times to use the medications.

00:13:22 Chazmith: Is the goal that eventually people would be able to wean off medications, because you're setting their body up to allow natural healing to where eventually they don't need the medications anymore? Do you see more people need them long-term?

00:13:36 Dr. Jacob: My goal is to get people pain-free. It's not to get them off the narcotics, not to get them off their medications, just to get them pain-free. But this remarkable thing happens when people get pain-free. Half of them choose to wean the stuff off. The other half is like, usually when people are pain-free for 18 months and they're chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia gone for 18 months or so, I pop the question, are you ready to come down off of your supplements and medications? It's like, half of them, oh, God, yes. And the other half are, the only way you're getting anything of these away from me is out of my cold, dead fingers. It's funny. I tell them either way is fine. What we use is safe. If they haven't, not been pain-free and liking it, choose to stay on it, that's fine. Getting them pain-free is most important. Getting their energy back is most important.

00:14:31 Chazmith: And the people who generally are in the spectrum of, okay, I want to wean off this, do you find that they're able to stay pain-free with energy? Or do you find that they backtrack?

00:14:41 Dr. Jacob: It depends. If they go back to what made them sick in the first place, go back to the same toxic job and toxic situations, then they're more likely to go back on again.

00:14:51 Chazmith: Like anything. We have to change the lifestyle and not go back to the same patterns and habits that got us sick.

00:14:57 Dr. Jacob: We need to let go of these images of what we've been told we should do by everybody and their brother. What we should do to be good people and make them happy. And instead, listen to our own psyches and our own souls, our own hearts, and say what feels the best to us, what's authentic to us. If we're following our authenticity, the body doesn't usually need illness. It'll have it sometimes to teach us certain lessons, and it's part of the tempering process, I think, for the spirit that we go through. We're in this, I think, a big virtual reality game which we're creating. And can you imagine the old Mario Bros game starts, and okay, we have to rescue the princess. There she is. Okay, all done. It's boring. We have things in our lives we create for the challenge, and the sheer joy and learning of overcoming those challenges. That's okay. But the thing is, if you're stuck in a level and you keep pounding your head against the same wall, and the hallways over there, you're going to need to get it sometimes. See what feels the best to you. See what's authentic. And that is a good... Those are like the lights on video games that point this way, this way, this way.

00:16:13 Chazmith: When you have people that come to you, and they think they're just going to, like, oh, he's a doctor. He's going to help me with sleep and nutrition, and I'm going to get some good pills to take. When you approach the mental aspect and this whole part about becoming authentic and living a life aligned to truth, do you ever butt up against resistance? Are most people open to having to change these things too?

00:16:36 Dr. Jacob: Well, people are open when they're ready. If somebody comes to me, there are some exceptions. But if I start with, well, this is a product of the mind and the whole thing, and they're going to shut down immediately and the whole thing. But cancer is a product of the mind, heart disease, the breath, it's all... The mind, body, it's one piece. It's not two different things. It's all one thing. So I don't start the conversation with that because people will think I'm telling them that they're crazy and it's not real, which is the farthest thing from the truth. This is everybody's field of cancers and all these other diseases. And even with cancer, I'm going to talk about mind and body components. If you're in cancer, there's a helpless, hopeless personality component. With multiple sclerosis, people tend to have repressed rage. I'm going to be discussing those things, not at the first visit.

00:17:24 Dr. Jacob: If people have done a lot of spiritual work and they're at a certain level, then sometimes I will discuss it early on because they're able to hear it. I say, and in addition to treating the physical components, if you don't treat the mind and body, you're just going to create the same... I can make this go away, but then you're going to find yourself getting hit by a truck. And I guarantee you, it'll be the other person's fault. You know, you'll find some way to recreate the thing, unless you address why your psyche needed it at some level. But I'm not going to start there with people. Your listeners, I think, are probably a little more knowledgeable about the psyche and they've grown up a bit. I suspect that you're able to hear it much more with the audience that you're getting. If you're talking about things like somatic experiencing, your audience is way ahead of the... "Well, Trump, no! Biden, no!" This whole thing there. They may get caught up in that, but they're... Just not their whole life. They're seeing that there's a big world beyond what the media is feeding them.

00:18:24 Chazmith: Even just, I can think of how I could talk to my family and say, hey, there could be this mind component to this, like our mental, and they're like, instant resistance. The walls instantly go up. No, it's got to be physical. There's no other explanation. It's like, well, we're not saying it's not physical, but there's just more than the physical aspect, and there's ways to treat it beyond the physical. But I'm liking how you're saying that you actually are approaching really, a very holistic, and when I use the word holistic, I mean, well-rounded spectrum. You're looking at mind, body, chemistry, spirit. You're trying to help somebody address all of it.

00:19:03 Dr. Jacob: It's a comprehensive medicine approach. So we're treating, we're using the whole toolkit, and using the toolkit based on what works, what's safe, and what the science shows. Medicine uses only the hammer and sometimes, the saw. Those are the only tools in the toolkit. And they use it based on what's most profitable to the drug company or the medical products industry. That's what drives our continuing medical education has been described, as I mentioned earlier, by a past editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, paraphrasing, "a slick advertising, masquerading as science."

00:19:38 Chazmith: And it's a bummer. It's a bummer because a lot of people, I think, then have this one experience in the medical field, in the medical industry that maybe is not productive or helpful or supportive. And so then they want to go completely to the...

00:19:51 Dr. Jacob: Or it's abusive.

00:19:52 Chazmith: Yeah. And then they go to the extreme other side, and to where you think all medicine is bad. And I think that there is a time and place. We've seen and witnessed that medicine absolutely saves lives sometimes, because we didn't do things we needed to do to save our life before we let it get to that point of no return essentially. But I think I've seen and witnessed friends that have utilized things like brain retraining, and nervous system regulation, and polyvagal theory techniques, and all this stuff. But with medicine, I've seen where people resisted medicine, and then they decided to use it in collaboration with other stuff, so they could heal their traumas and regulate their nervous system, but also had support. And then they made a lot of progress that way. So I don't think it's one-size-fits-all. And I think it's nice to stay open-minded. And sadly, like we're already saying, some people have such horrible experiences that it almost ruins their perception of what could be possible done appropriately.

00:20:53 Dr. Jacob: Understandably, they're angry, they're bitter, they're hurt, they're understandably afraid. But if you want to build a cabinet, and you have a toolkit. And it's that I'm just going to use the hammer, I'm just going to use a saw, or I'm just going to use a screwdriver. There's no one tool that works best all the time. It's good to have the whole toolkit, to have all of these things, but to wisely pick and see what feels best to you, use your intuition, what combination works best when. And the healing arts are the same thing. If you're going to say, well, what's best? Naturopathy, or MD, or osteopathy, or acupuncture, or the NLP, or the NRA? There's no one thing that works best. If you've got pneumonia and you want to do the somatic experiencing for your child and stuff, yes, that'll help. But I'm going to give the antibiotics. Then I'll give you the other things that cause the immune system to [inaudible].

00:21:58 Chazmith: And then, can you break down the SHINE Protocol for us? Because this is one of your primary protocols and ways to approach healing for people, right?

00:22:07 Dr. Jacob: Yes. So, for those of you out there who have fatigue or also widespread pain, which is when you have the combination of exhausted and can't sleep, that's a paradox. You're exhausted, you sleep all day and all weekend. But when you can't get good restorative sleep despite being exhausted, that tells me the sleep center, called the hypothalamus, it's a little almond-sized control center, and the brain in this area is offline. And that circuit breaker is like blowing a fuse from an energy crisis. But when you have that and widespread pain, you have tripped that circuit breaker. And that circuit breaker trips when energy levels drop below a certain level in the body. That area uses the most energy for its size of anywhere else in the body. It goes offline, not damage the circuit breaker, shuts down energy, takes you out of the game to protect you from harm. So you can feel tired, achy brain fog, can't sleep. Sounds like you've got this. And our research are published or randomized, double-blind, perceived with controlled study. We've done over eight studies on effective treatment for these illnesses. They are very, very treatable. That includes long COVID, which is just post-viral, another form of post-viral chronic fatigue syndrome with long COVID. We've done three studies in the last two years on post-viral chronic fatigue syndrome. Very, very treatable.

00:23:33 Dr. Jacob: The approach, you remember SHINE, as you mentioned before, bears repeating. You got to get people sleeping. How do you get somebody sleeping when the sleep center's not working? There are many things, you can do the meditations, other exercises, music. You can take a hot bath with two cups of Epsom salts an hour before bedtime. Give yourself a half hour to cool down after. Put some lavender in it. There's a lot of little things you can do. You can set up routines. It's like when we have babies and children, we have bedtime routines. Adults need... we're just big kids when it comes to that. Set up a bedtime routine. There are herbals. There's two mixes that are awesome. One is called Terrific Zzzz, which is a mix of four essential oils. There's Revitalizing Sleep Formula, which is a mix of six nutrients and herbs. Both of those can be used together to keep most people sleeping like kittens. The Melatonin EP120™ 10 mg sustained release melatonin. This way it works throughout the night. If they still can't sleep, then the medications are worthwhile. In the question, do you have trouble falling asleep or staying asleep? If it's staying asleep, just a very tiny dose, two and a half to five milligrams of flexeril, 25 to 50 of trazodone. Now, again, you're not going to hear about these [meds] because they cost about a nickel a piece, as opposed to [balsamroot], which is about eight bucks a piece. I almost never use, but that's what's the cover of these major magazines. They don't have the covers anymore. They have a two-base ad for these medications, the eight dollar pill ones. There's all kinds of medications, but again, tiny doses of several things work better than a high dose of one. Virtually, I can count on my fingers and the thousands of people I've effectively cheated with CFS and fibromyalgia. I can count on my fingers the number of people I've seen, why couldn't, get good [inaudible] sleep for.

00:25:23 Chazmith: Wow. So you are trying the natural. You try going holistic and natural first, and then if that still doesn't help support them, then you go into a low dose of medicine.

00:25:33 Dr. Jacob: Say for natural, but safer and more effective, but there are times for the hammer.

00:25:40 Chazmith: So you work on dialing and sleep.

00:25:41 Dr. Jacob: Yep. So S is critical. You can't get pain relief if you're not sleeping. How are you going to recharge your battery and your energy if you're not sleeping? So even though the sleep center's not working, you need to facilitate sleep because the body would need to support it until once people are feeling well for nine months, the circuit breaker goes back on. Then their own sleep center can take over. You wean people off slowly.

00:26:06 Chazmith: Okay. Wow. Nine months. Nine months of feeling better.

00:26:10 Dr. Jacob: Nine months, yeah. Usually it's 18 months of treatment and nine months of feeling back to themselves.

00:26:19 Chazmith: Very cool. Okay. And then H?

00:26:18 Dr. Jacob: H would be two areas, hormones. This control center also controls the version of the entire hormone system. It controls thyroid. Now, many of you, especially with chronic pain, you're tired, achy, weight gain, cold and tolerant. Different kinds of pain, maybe infertility, all these different things, constipation, although you can see diarrhea from the other things that go on in the disease, make you feel like you're [opposed to] [inaudible] for low thyroid. You look it up, and you go to the doctor, and he's saying, I need a thyroid test. I'm low thyroid and the doctor does a thyroid test andI say, you're in the normal range. And I say, symptoms are all low thyroid. The test is normal. It's in the normal range. Now, and here's something, an analogy I like to use. When I'm lecturing, I lecture four or five hundred doctors at a time. I love to ask the doctors the question, where do these normal ranges come from? And most doctors, they would rather the person stays home and just send the results. And if they're in their normal range, there's no problem. That's the mindset.

00:27:19 Dr. Jacob: Well, then these normal ranges are very important. I came out of med school, nobody said so, but with the impression that there's a group of wise old elders with long silver beards, long silver hair that would sit around the table or the top in the field to go, well, let's see. Well, if the test is in this range, there's no problem. You don't have to worry about it. It’s [inaudible] then. And there's no such group. And finally, I just went and looked up where the normal ranges come from. And they come from something called two standard deviations. That's the statistical term. What it means is you take a hundred people, and the 95 in the middle are defined as normal. So if I want a normal range for shoe sizes, I take a hundred people and the normal range would be about size six, or five, or six, five and a half to 13. That would be the normal range for shoe sizes.

00:28:07 Dr. Jacob: Now, can you imagine you come to our home in Hawaii, and we got our shoes mixed up because there’s a volcano, and we leave our shoes at the door so that we don't track lava in. And it's heaven, by the way, for anybody who's been coming. And say we got our shoes mixed up, and now you're wearing my size 12 and I'm wearing your size eight. I go to the shoe doctor. And the shoe doctor is going to say, no, honey, it's a size 12. It's in the normal range. There's nothing wrong with the shoe. But it falls off my foot. They look at you, the test is normal and start to imply that you're crazy. And meanwhile, I say, I can't even get my toe in this damn thing. And they go, for guys say… for you it's honey. And for guys, you’re well, sir. It's in the normal range. It's smack dab in the normal range. It's an eight for God's sake. Five to eight, six to eight, six to 13 is normal. I say, the toe doesn't fit. And they just say, like, you’re crazy. This is an exact analogy to what's going on.

00:29:05 Dr. Jacob: Of all these people, what the research shows is that thyroid function goes down 50% with these illnesses. But that's not low enough to put you from a shoe size of eight to six, but not enough to put you in a four where it's abnormal. So you're looking at your T4 blood test. The TSH is one of the most horribly useless, unreliable, utter pieces of crap testing ever created by mankind. He said subtly, the TSH is totally dependent on this hypothalamus working properly to have any meaning. When it's not working properly, it's like trying to get an outside temperature by putting a thermometer in your oven and turning it on. It's meaningless. I was lecturing in Italy at the main world conference of fibromyalgia and [Professor Gunther Nick] was main researcher on thyroid, and hypothalamic diseases, and fibromyalgia in the world. And I asked him point blank, [Professor Nick], is the TSH reliable test in fibromyalgia? He said, absolutely not. But doctors sometimes just [inaudible] the use. So tired, achy waking, cold and tolerant. If you have two of those [unexplained] fertility, any one or two of those, I will give it with a pain and fatigue. I will give a trial of thyroid hormone and preferably the desiccated thyroid because the regular Synthroid doesn't work in certain types of little thyroid. But your doctor doesn't know that because what was pushed by the companies was the Synthroid and see how you feel. If you feel dramatically better, well, then we have an answer and keep the 3T4 in the normal range for safety. 

00:30:44 Dr. Jacob: For the hormones, thyroid, adrenal, your test has to be so low that it can kill you before the doctors will do that. How do you tell low adrenal? Adrenal is a stress handler. Those are the alarms that set off cortisol and adrenaline during times of stress. So you can fight or flight, fight or run. It's very high tech tests that you need to know. I write this down a lot of that. It's very high tech to tell if you have low adrenal. Do you get irritable when hungry or hangry? That's low adrenal. It's because the stress is making your blood sugar drop. The cortisol normally, the adrenal stress hormone comes up to meet it to keep your blood sugar from dropping so you can handle the stress. When your adrenals are weak because you've been stressed too long and they exhaust or because the control center is not working, blood sugar drops the stress, the cortisol kind of comes up a bit and it just drives it down. Then you get that feed me now or I will kill you moment, that irritability, and that's low adrenal. So supplements like licorice tea, if you don't have high blood pressure, Adrenoplex is my favorite supplement for that. Increasing salt intake. You want to avoid sugar but you want more salt. These all help adrenal function and let your loved ones know that when you get into that irritable [and] hungry thing, they should not try to hug you. They should not try to console you. You will claw their eyes out. They should feed you. Give them a card that says, when I get irritable, please just feed me. 

00:31:18 Chazmith: That's so funny. 

00:31:20 Dr. Jacob: That's low adrenal. That's the high tech one. If you ask a doctor about low adrenal, they'll go, no, the stress is normal. You're not going to die from it. Normal range, like you say, is 6 to 22. If you're running at a 7 or 8, they say, no, you're fine. Most people are running 18. I'll give you another analogy of what the normal range is. The normal range for income, any income over $8,100 a year, over $8,000 a year is normal. Using our medical definition, poverty is 16,000. 8,100 a year is normal medically, unless it's the doctor making that income. It's an emergency, damn it. But if it's your income, that's normal. Sorry, honey. 

00:33:03 Chazmith: It’s crazy.

00:33:04 Dr. Jacob: It's crazy. So hormones, reproductive hormones, if you're entering your 40s and you're finding, it's about time Perimenopause starts to hit those ovaries, start to make less of the hormones. Then when they kind of totally poop out in terms of making the main hormones, then the period stopped. That's called menopause. But you will be estrogen progesterone deficient, many women, for 5 to 12 years before menopause hits. The test will be normal for those 5 to 12 years. How do you tell? If your symptoms, I'm not talking about regular PMSC kind of irritability, which is low progesterone and low fish oil. So you need to increase those to bioidentical progesterone, not the poisons that they give. But if you find the headache, fatigue, brain fog, pain, insomnia, these are worse around your menses, then you need bioidentical hormone support of your menses. Or you can consider edamame or the other natural progesterones you can find over the counter. But around your menses, which is when these hormones drop, that's when your body most needs support. 

00:34:17 Chazmith: Gotcha. Is there anything that people can take that is natural for their thyroid? 

00:34:22 Dr. Jacob: Well, the iodine, and I use triiodide. I do not go over six and a quarter milligrams a day because long term, I think that can suppress thyroid. You can use some tyrosine, which is tyrosine and iodine. That's what thyroid is made of. But if you have Hashimoto's or if you have other causes of low thyroid, most often isn't going to be enough. It's a place you can begin. But I like to give the prescription thyroid. Although you may need to find a holistic doctor to do that, I don't treat anymore. After 50 years of medicine, I've retired to do most of teaching now. So I stopped treating people last year. But you can find holistic doctors at IFM, Institutes for Functional Medicine, dot org. Or if you're in a state where naturopathics are licensed, and even better, naturopathic.org. Because you go to your regular doctor and say, I have symptoms of these things and the tests are wrong. I want you to treat me [anyway]. They're going to [treat] you at their office. Find a holistic doctor who really knows. 

00:35:24 Chazmith: Gotcha. Okay. So that covers "H". What's "I"? 

00:35:28 Dr. Jacob: One other thing for H is hypotension. Especially for those of you who are on COVID, this center controls sleep, hormones, and autonomic function. We're a big bag of water. We stand up. Gravity sends all our blood down to our legs. That autonomic system is developed so we can be an upright species to send that blood back up to our brain and heart and muscles and everything else. That system malfunctions after, in chronic fatigue syndrome, long COVID, things like that. And for those of you who have any of these, you can email me. My email address is fatigue, F-A-T-I-G-U-E, doc, D-O-C. So fatigue doc, connect fatiguedoctor@gmail.com. You can ask for the CFS or fibro or if you have neuropathy or CRPS, ask for neuropathy or CRPS information sheets and the low blood pressure information sheets. I'll send that automatically if you have fatigue or pain because that's often a hidden cause of it. They give you two tests. You can do it at home in 10 minutes. It'll tell you if you got it. And then it'll tell you how to take care of it. Most doctors, I just don't even think to look. And most doctors are really good people, by the way. It's just we don't know that our education is predominantly drug company marketing. And once we get out of med school, it's the same, but it's really slick. It's really well done. I mean, they're good people. Pharmaceuticals, I've never met anybody there who wasn't darling, but it's just their job is to convince doctors to write their medications. 

00:36:57 Chazmith: Right. They're just paying their bills. Okay. So now we're going to go to I. 

00:37:02 Dr. Jacob: So “I” would be infections and inflammation, numerous infections. Medicine is trained to pick up acute infections that you can culture, put on a petri dish, say a urine culture or strep throat, or you can put a swab in and culture it out. You'll see by the next morning, millions of colonies will be… you can see with the eye and you make a diagnosis. And I can tell this mucoid colony, it looks like this bacteria. And that's what they're very good at. But other things that we can't test for... instead of saying, well, we don't have the proper testing yet, but medicine says if there's no test for it, it doesn't exist. I can't see you, so I'm invisible. And that's the medical approach. So things like chronic Epstein-Barr or chronic HHV6, chronic COVID. So whether the infection just trips the circuit breaker and then is gone, or whether the infection throws your immune system off, and now you get jailbreaks of old viruses like EBV, HSV, different viruses do jailbreaks, which has been seen in COVID. It demonstrated that the Epstein-Barr virus reactivates in many people who [are on] COVID. Now, the blood tests are meaningless. The blood tests just say if you've ever had Epstein-Barr in your life, 95% of adults are going to have a positive test even though they're healthy. Means nothing. But if you have flu-like symptoms that flare with your fatigue and pain, I talk about in the book, then a trial of antivirals. And those are natural ones. I will prefer the [Feng varicella brux] combination for four to six months. That works really well for the viral reactivation. So all kinds of infections, Lyme disease is one, but again, the Lyme tests are not reliable either way. Negative or positive, the tests are not reliable. I will treat, based on symptoms. 

00:38:51 Dr. Jacob: So there's many, many different infections. And the book talks about if you have these symptoms, suggest, suspect, and use this approach. And then it just goes through each of that. But good holistic doctors... there's a tendency for some doctors to call everything Lyme disease, and they will use lab that I've only seen have a negative result on two people in 30 years. So when you have a test that's positive on everybody, I think if I sent my hubcap in, it would come back positive for Lyme. So you got to be careful, because you're so desperate for diagnosis, that it’s not, you're crazy. That, when someone says, here's the test that's positive, I got that. That's it. That's the answer. Maybe, maybe not. You'd have a definite real physical disease. That's a loud question. But you've got to realize the testing in both ways. Holistic tests tend to be positive on everybody. The standard tests tend to miss the vast majority of people. So that would be the infections and inflammation. Inflammation, again, if your psyche thinks that there's an attack coming, if it feels unsafe, it will direct the immune system. If you have surgery, and your body is there, oh my God, something's coming in and it's taking out a tooth and it's, oh my God, it's crushing me. It sends all the things and suddenly a big swoll in the face for two weeks. That's not mostly from taking out the thing. I've done this where I had a tooth that I have pulled recently. I went and reformed to a quick hypnotic state. I let my psyche know, this is his friend coming in to help repair. Just ignore it. Let it be. It's a friend. Let it be. It's common. 

00:40:28 Dr. Jacob: The dentist is saying, you're going to be out of action for two weeks, the whole thing. I was back at work a half hour later. There seemed, no swelling because the same with the burn. There's a good reason, I'm not a surgeon. I'm a butterfinger. I burn myself a lot too. When I was in med school, one of the places I worked was in Children's Hospital. I was later to work in the burn unit. I asked a psych professor to teach me hypnosis to help with the dressing changes, so it wouldn't hurt so much for the kids, so I can put them in a quick hypnotic state. He taught me that if you got a burn and you go into a quick hypnotic state and you let know, he'll quickly know in three, that is fine. You won't blister. The skin may turn white and fall off from being killed from the burn, but that whole blister is your immune system's response to a perceived attack. If you can go in, number one, turn off that frigging TV that's telling you that everybody in the world is your enemy and wants to kill you. They're just trying to sell advertising. They're trying to get you to watch 24/7. Turn it off. It's a fiction.

00:41:28 Chazmith: Yeah, because you're saying any time that the psyche perceives, threat of being attacked. You're talking even on whether it's a physical, actual surgical situation, or whether it's even perception based on our thoughts and belief systems of the world around us.

00:41:46 Dr. Jacob: Yes. Even those watching TV. Because again, if you think I'm wrong, just notice in the news, they're trying to scare you to death and they're trying to make you hate, even better. Have you noticed you've not had a more divisive time since the Civil War? That is again, by design. They're good people again. Everybody in the media too, they're sweethearts. But the institutions, the current thing is make everybody afraid and make them hate each other. Create divisiveness. That's good for business. Damn, that other side is doing it. If we don't do it, turn it off. Then let your psyche know that because you are safe. You want to know what the news is, look out your window. That's the news. Go for a walk in the park. That's the news. Let your psyche realize that it's safe. There's all kinds of tools. You can probably go for six hours on tools people can start with. If you're talking about polyvagal theory, then the whole concept of how to feel safe is at the core of it. I like somatic experiencing more because he puts them into English and makes it accessible to people. The polyvagal is high, medically used for most people. But you do these things to feel safe and that will settle down the inflammation. On an herbal point of view, it takes a special kind of curcumin because it's poorly absorbed, but there's one for pain. If I was on a desert island and had to take one thing for pain, it wouldn't necessarily be codeine. It would be curamin, C-U-R-A-M-I-N. It's an herbal mix, four things. It's a pain relief miracle for people. Curcumin, Boswellia, DLPA, and nattokinase. That's what I start people on. I say give it six weeks and it settles inflammation way down. I seem to knock out pain in people with the narcotics, tend to knock out pain and it's healthy.

00:43:43 Chazmith: I have a question about that because there's so many different types of pain. You can literally have true muscular pain because you went and did something that you don't normally do and you worked your muscles really hard and you get pain. Or you could have hurt yourself. You could actually fall in it. 

00:44:00 Dr. Jacob: There are seven key categories of pain. You're looking at muscle pain and muscle pain is low energy in the muscles. You can get trauma and there are other things too. ‘Cause the muscles get locked in a shortened position. Anything that puts energy in, whether it's magnesium to raise energy, whether I put an acupuncture needle and turn it and create an electrical current, which is energy. Whether I do massage and create a piezoelectric effect of mechanical energy. Anything that puts energy helps those muscles release. Then you've got inflammatory pain is the second main kind of thing. That's what we're going to use. Now the curamine seems to work as a general analgesic, but also for inflammation. Fish oil also decreases inflammation. Cutting down white flour and sugar decrease and increase inflammation. It helps the inflammation. So you want to get rid of those. Grass fed beef is less inflammatory. So you've got the inflammatory pain as a second. You've got neuropathic pain. Those are the big ones. There's a chapter, you can email me. A chapter from my book, Pain Free 1-2-3 on neuropathy. If you ask for that chapter, I'll just email it. You can buy the book, but it's outdated now. It's about 12 years old. The From Fatigued to Fantastic really covers each of these seven kinds of pain. Allodynia pain, which is more an NMDA receptor thing or light touch hurts. The sympathetically maintained pain. For those of you, if you have CRPS, which to me is one of the most horrible pains there were, reflex sympathetic dystrophy, they're now treatment. Email me and I'll send you the CRPS information. That one took me 30 years. Every pain conference I went to, I asked the specialist anything for CRPS. And now we have a mix of… there's Bisphosphonates, there's a little bit of Naltrexone. There's a whole bunch of things that are working really well for CRPS. 

00:45:57 Dr. Jacob: And then there's the other things like the sinus and gut pain and the sinus pain is almost vast majority of the time, if it's not allergic and seasonal, it's going to be candida or I should say fungal. It's an immune response to fungal elements. But then it gets blocked up and gets a bacterial infection then give me antibiotics and antibiotics make yeast infections worse. So the sinusitis becomes chronic. We're treating it fast backwards. So anyways, blah, blah, blah. But so you have the different kinds of pain. Each one is like a different light on your car's dashboard. Oil lights just put an oil. The temperature lights may need coolant. So each pain is a different one. My phone app is a free app, Cures A-Z. So C-U-R-E-S, capital A dash Z. And there's a $2 upgrade. It's a one-time thing. But most of this information is in the free app. And just look up muscle pain, neuropathy, and other different things. It'll just have a quick boom, boom, boom. Here are the key things for it. So this is a way of getting information out to people. 

00:47:00 Chazmith: Yeah, that's fabulous. Thank you. 

00:47:03 Dr. Jacob: Welcome. 

00:47:03 Chazmith: Okay. So that's inflammation and pain. So now I think we're on N. 

00:47:07 Dr. Jacob: "N" for nutrition. Take a good multivitamin. I like Clinical Essentials, which is excellent. It'll have the magnesium, which is critical, critical, critical for muscle pain. It'll have high levels of B vitamins and it'll have pretty much all of the other ones that you need. Again, cut down sugar. Save your sugar budget for the best and just savor. Chocolate is a health food, by the way. Chocolate's healthy. Coffee is a health food. Tea is a health food. But increase salt unless you have high blood pressure and decrease sugar. Eat with common sense. Have you ever noticed the more processed the food is? If I take, I'm going to make a shirt and I start with raw cotton plant and I process it to make cotton fibers and I process it to make… every step of processing, it then costs more because it's an improvement. But with processed food, you get the whole food. It's the most expensive. And each step of processing, it costs less. I wonder why that might be. [There’s always good stuff that’s been removed]. There's nothing left, but junk that's loaded with sugar. So use common sense when you're eating. When I used to lecture to third graders every year when I lived on South Pacific Bay, it was the lesson, food is food and junk is junk. How do you tell the difference with the ingredients? You guys are not the third grade anymore. You know the difference. Food is food and junk is junk. It doesn't mean you can't have junk once in a while, but don't have it as the main dish all the time. Use some common sense with that. And take, again, the Clinical Essentials tablets, really good multivitamin, easy to find at Amazon. My website is endfatigue.com. Most health food stores will have it. The stuff's available everywhere. And then other nutritional things, we just finished a study using a form of red ginseng called HRG80 Red Ginseng. Get the chewable tablets. They're four times as effective as the capsules. I'm sorry, I kept the cost, but they have something, gamma polydextran, it's a natural component that increases absorption about eightfold. I personally will take half a tablet myself. If I have a really busy day, I just feel the energy go way up. 

00:49:20 Chazmith: Wow. Different than, like caffeine energy? 

00:49:23 Dr. Jacob: It says not [lone] shark energy. It's healthy energy. But even, healthy energy, you want to tailor to the amount you want. You can step on a gas pedal and you can be going 90, you can be going to 45, depending on where and when. But red ginseng, usually most of ginsengs don't work anymore because the wild ginsengs got hunted almost to extinction and that's the ones that have the high potency. The HRG80 is acrophonically done in a brilliant way that restores the potency of all of the [antigens] and sennosides are the key ones. So it's called HRG80. Now you can go to endfatigue.com, you can go to amazon.com, you can go to your local health food store, get the chewables, try half a tablet first. It takes six weeks to see the full effect in the study anyway. But in real life, it's really quick. For me, it's minutes. And then E, exercise as able. Now again, if you have CFS and fibromyalgia with post-recession malaise, as able may be done. You may be bedridden, you may be in that 5% to 10% or you can go to the mailbox. But the doctor says, well, just exercise more. Yeah, then you're bedridden for three days after a post-recession malaise. But if you don't do any exercise because you're afraid of that crash and burn, if you do too much, you're going to decondition and that's not good. So see how much you can comfortably do starting slowly. Then after eight to 10 weeks on the SHINE protocol, as energy levels are starting to skyrocket, then you can start to condition instead of just crashing. But listen to your body. See what feels good, tired after and better the next day. That's how you know you're at a good place with it. 

00:51:04 Chazmith: Good and tired after, but better the next day. 

00:51:07 Dr. Jacob: And there you go. And you do these kinds of things. And again, there's mind-body, there's the structural thing. Any good chiropractor, massage therapist can address those for you. And the biophysics, where two key things, the acupuncture, a good chakra worker can do good stuff too. But for severe pain, look into frequency specific microcurrent. I think the website is frequencyspecific.com. They have people all over the country, practitioners, quite good. If you have a stubborn pain that nobody's been able to help with, look into them.

00:51:42 Chazmith: Lots of good resources here for everyone listening. I was going to ask you, okay, I got one more question. I was reading somewhere in some of your content about how there's been some evidence that there's impact on the brain when somebody's experiencing a chronic illness or disease or disorder or pain. What I'm curious about is, you've got evidence and research that shows that there's brain aging or excess inflammation, or I read enlarged or shrunken brain or something.

00:52:14 Dr. Jacob: A shrunken brain. What happens with chronic pain after many, many years? You can see shrunken of the brain. And if you have widespread pain, like five areas or more, the average pain age can be eight years older than somebody without the pain. So they have decreased brain function, but this is likely caused by what's called microglial activation. There are cells in the brain, they're like the gardeners, they kind of mild mannered, and they tend the cells and feed them the brain cells. And then if they see something like an infection or chronic pain stimulus of any type or the rest, these gardeners go from mild manner to be then like, craze and they start weaving and they're attacking and they start to kind of affect the healthy or the brain cells themselves too. But there's a simple trick. It's called naltrexone. It's used... most doctors only know it because it turns off narcotic effect. So you can't use it if you are on narcotics, but there's plenty of other ways to get to what's called microglial activation. But the low dose naltrexone, just three milligrams at night, after two months, shuts that down and can dramatically reverse pain and a lot of the fatigue and the other symptoms. If it was still patentable, this medication would be $24,000 a year and every doctor in the world would be giving it to everybody. But it's so old that it's 60, 70 cents a day. It's not patentable anymore. They're trying to rig the legal system as they are prone to do, to try to make it expensive and then they'll push it. But low dose naltrexone, most any… your regular doctor will know, most any holistic doctor, ifm.org, naturopathic.org. Give it two months, start at a low dose because it'll give you vivid dreams. Start at a tiny dose. Compounding pharmacy can usually guide you on how to dose it and make starter packs and it's, all can be easy. But that, I think, can totally reverse that increased brain age, not to mention massively decreased the pain and improved quality of life.

00:54:20 Chazmith: Have you seen, though over time when people do whatever they do to heal and they’re, years now later, they're living a healthy abundant life post illness. Do you see the brain naturally?

00:54:34 Dr. Jacob: Yeah, it’s, all reverses. And that's the nice thing about these things. The body heals itself if you let it.

00:54:41 Chazmith: Body heals itself if you let it. I think that's a really good place to finish up. I'm going to ask you the final question that I ask everybody. Does not have to be related to anything we've talked about today. But if you were told that you were only allowed to share one message with the world for the rest of your life, what would you spend your life sharing?

00:54:58 Dr. Jacob: Follow your bliss. If you get well today, using all the stuff we talked about so you can go back to what made you sick in the first place, I've done nothing for you. So as you're feeling better and even before, notice what feels the best to you and then see how it works out for you. This is what I call following your bliss from Joseph Campbell. And do that. Then instead of people like me having to come on and [inaudible] showing you, here's how to do it, here's the way. You have your own internal guidance sign that says, that's the way. And it works way better than anything I or anybody else can tell you. See what feels best to you. Follow your bliss. Worst case, you'll have a life that was, you've been deliriously happy. Not so bad. But I think you'll find a better fit to go way beyond that.

00:55:47 Chazmith: Yeah, I love that so much. Thank you so much. Thank you for being here with me today and sharing your wisdom and for all that you do and your continued efforts to keep researching and keep pursuing healing and ways to support the body's natural healing. I really appreciate it. I'm really glad I got to connect with you today. 

00:56:04 Dr. Jacob: You're welcome and likewise. Guys, everybody out there, there's nothing at this point virtually that I don't think there's effective treatment for. Now there's some cases where somebody has cancer that's throughout their body and the whole thing. And okay, at that point, just keep yourself as comfortable as you can. Make sure you have people around you. But for most things, there is effective treatment. It's just if it's not really expensive and profitable, the doctors won't hear about it. When your doctor says, sorry, I can't help you, tell the doctor, thank you for being honest. And then go find somebody who can. 

00:56:42 Chazmith: Friends, that is all for today. As usual, my hope is always that in each episode, you are in some way inspired or find some useful resource to help support you on your journey. As always, if you are ever feeling alone, know please that there are plenty of us available to connect with. You can leave me a DM, an email, or a voice memo on my website anytime you want. I love hearing from you all. And if you feel supported by this podcast, one way that you can actually help support future episodes is through a small monthly donation for as little as 99 cents a month. There's a link in the bottom of the show notes. And until next time, make this week great.