Meet Dr Dale Bredesen
Dale Bredesen, MD, received his undergraduate degree from Caltech and his medical degree from Duke University. He served as resident and chief resident in neurology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and as postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Nobel Laureate Professor Stanley Prusiner. He was a faculty member at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) from 1989 to 1994 and was then recruited by the Burnham Institute to direct the Program on Aging. In 1998, he became the founding president and CEO of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging and adjunct professor at UCSF. From 2013 to 2023, he returned to UCLA as a professor and director of the Easton Center for Alzheimer’s Disease Research. He is currently Senior Director of the world’s first precision medicine program for neurodegenerative diseases, which is at the Pacific Neuroscience Institute.
The Bredesen Laboratory studies basic mechanisms underlying the neurodegenerative process and the translation of this knowledge into effective therapeutics for Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative conditions, which has led to the publication of over 200 research papers. He was the principal investigator for the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at UCLA. He established the ADDN (Alzheimer’s Drug Development Network) with Dr. Varghese John in 2008, leading to the identification of new classes of therapeutics for Alzheimer’s disease. His group has developed a new approach to the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease, the MEND protocol, and this approach has led to the first description of a reversal of symptoms in patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and early Alzheimer’s disease. Dr. Bredesen is the author of two New York Times bestsellers: The End of Alzheimer’s: The First Program to Prevent and Reverse Cognitive Decline and The End of Alzheimer’s Program.
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Podcast transcript:
Beating Alzheimer’s- A Proven Path with Dr Dale Bredesen
Welcome urban monk, the podcast it’s back full swing. Excited to share Dale Bredesen. Uh, Dr. Bredesen’s work was foundational. His lab at UCLA is the first of its kind demonstrating the reversal of Alzheimer’s disease. Yes, that’s right. He did not find a miracle pill for a single vector solution. He realized that it’s complicated and therefore it had to be solved with what lifestyle, but lo and behold, it worked so really important work, really important thesis. In that we’ve been doing this wrong, man.
We’ve been chasing the drugs because guess what? You could patent those and make billions of dollars. Oh, wait. You’re not making the billions someone else is, but that’s not necessarily the way we need to solve these problems. Dr. Bredesen’s lab. Solved this problem and has a solution around Alzheimer’s that is scientifically validated. Proven to work, enjoy the show.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Welcome to the podcast. I’m a big fan of your work. I’m excited to have you here.
Dr Dale Bredesen: Thanks so much, Pedram. Great to be here.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Yeah, great to be catching up with you. Um, as, uh, another chapter of your life has commenced, your UCLA days have now, ended and now you’re doing some interesting work, , that I wanna talk about, but I wanna, I. Introduce my audience to you and your work a little bit. Um, just for, for those who don’t know you, um, obviously you’ve been a, you know, the voice in Alzheimer’s, but if you could give me maybe the, the bird’s eye view of how you started, how you came to studying, uh, Alzheimer’s, and how that kind of became your work over the last couple decades.
Dr Pedram Shojai: It
Dr Dale Bredesen: Yeah, great point. You know, I actually got interested in the brain as a freshman at Caltech. I read a book called The Machinery of the Brain, and I thought, wow, you know, I was kind of hooked. I had been interested in computers before that and I was interested . And how the brain is similar to a computer.
Dr Dale Bredesen: And of course when I went to medical school, I found out brain diseases are the ones that are the least treatable. And all these things from Alzheimer’s to Lewy body to ALS and on and on and on that are just, uh, death sentences. So I got interested in lab work and say, okay, how can we actually get to the point of doing something? And the big surprise, after 30 years in the lab. Is that these diseases aren’t what we were taught. And so we started translating the research into, you know, could we actually do something? And the exciting part is we could, we started seeing people getting better for the first time. Uh, published that back in 2014.
Dr Dale Bredesen: So, uh, that’s where we are. There’s been a lot of controversy, a lot of pushback because people simply don’t wanna think of these. As things that are beyond their typical monotherapy, you know, pharmaceutical therapy. So they keep telling you there’s nothing you can do. There’s nothing you can do. But again, we see it again and again and again.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Yeah, it’s, it’s really easy to go big brother on this and say, well, of course no one’s interested ’cause there’s no drug and there’s no, you know, billion, billion dollar . Or patent on this deal. Um, and you, you broke, you broke the concrete on this one, right? Back in 2014. You demonstrated, um, very specifically that there is a, a, a possibility and not just a possibility.
Dr Pedram Shojai: There are results in reversal. So let’s talk about what happened in, in that, because that, that’s groundbreaking and that changed everything as far as I’m concerned.
Dr Dale Bredesen: And definitely changed, you know, what we were thinking about. So what had happened was we were literally searching for drugs for years in the lab, and we noticed that amyloid precursor protein, so the one protein sitting in neurons sitting, especially at synapses, the thing that gives rise to the amyloid that characterizes Alzheimer’s disease, which is just a tiny piece of this overall receptor. This thing has a really interesting property, so it is a switch. So I know it’s interesting to me, you have done so much on balance. I don’t think there’s a better disease to talk about balance than Alzheimer’s disease. It is balance within brain signaling. It is balance of evolutionary, uh, approaches versus what, how we are living today. It is all about balance. It’s really, uh, very interesting to me. So what we found is. This molecule that sits here, when things are good, you have enough nutrition, you have enough blood flow, you have enough oxygenation, hormones, nutrients, all of this. It is cut at a single site and it gives you two fragments.
Dr Dale Bredesen: One for outside the cell, one for inside the cell, and it’s really about connection. So your brain is in a mode of connection. You make synapses, you keep synapses, you make and keep new memories. But that same molecule, when things are bad, you have inflammation, you have less blood flow, you have less sleep, you have, uh, invasion by pathogens from your oral microbiome or from leaky gut.
Dr Dale Bredesen: Any of these things, the same molecule will now be cut at three different sites. Producing four peptides, so you can literally follow the molecules here. And two now are for outside, two for inside. And what they are are talking instead of connection, it’s protection. So you literally, just like you go from sleep to wakefulness, you flip from connectivity to protection. And so that’s why you’re making this amyloid that has been vilified in Alzheimer’s disease. It is actually a protectant and sequestrant it literally. Covers pathogens and kills them. So it is part of your innate immune system. So all these drugs that are trying to rip the amyloid outta your brain are missing that.
Dr Dale Bredesen: You really wanna know why it’s there. So we had the first patient, actually, I gotta call, this is a, a person who worked for the CIA. I got a call years ago. Uh, she’s by the way now, now a brain health coach, uh, and doing great. Uh, and so she was at that point just about to turn 67. She’s now 79 and doing great.
Dr Dale Bredesen: Just did a hundred mile bike ride a couple of weeks ago. Uh, and she, you know, I was, uh, sent, she was sent to me. I’d said, look, I haven’t seen a patient in 20 years. We are working with transgenic mice and cells and fruit flies, what we called alts, slimers and uh, and Alzheimer’s. These are the things we are working with.
Dr Dale Bredesen: And I said, but you know, I’m happy to talk to her because we were trying to do a clinical trial that had been turned down because it was more than one variable. We said, yeah, it’s more than one variable disease. So when she came and we spent two and a half hours going through this whole idea of here’s this new idea, this is what our research has shown us. I thought I would never hear from her again, but three months later, I got a call from her at, at my home on Saturday morning and she said, I’m doing absolutely great. My memory’s better than it’s been in 20 years. Her mother had died of Alzheimer’s. She was actually, uh, getting ready to commit suicide. She was hoarding pills. She talks about this actually. In the book, the first survivors of Alzheimer’s, she was patient zero. And so, um, she’s done well and she’s now, you know, 11 plus years out. So the idea was, let’s quit thinking about this as a simple disease like pneumococcal pneumonia, and let’s start thinking about this again as more of a balance so that this is really about a network insufficiency. It’s driven in humans largely by two things, reduced energetics, increased inflammation, so anything that, again, it’s a supply and demand. You are balancing this ability to make, to keep your a PP. On the connection side and not on the protection side. When you have to protect yourself from pathogens, from toxins, from reduced nutrients, from various exposures, from poor sleep, all these things, you flip that to the other side, you’re now making the amyloid.
Dr Dale Bredesen: You’re making the tau, which by the way, the, the, uh, phospho tau is also a very nice antimicrobial, in this case, protein. And so this is all about Not molecules trying to give you Alzheimer’s. These are molecules trying to protect you. And as I said earlier, you can literally follow the pathways. Estradiol, for example, binds to its receptor, enters the nucleus, turns on hundreds of genes.
Dr Dale Bredesen: One of them is the one that cuts the a PP at a single site, gives you the connection side. On the other hand, NF kappa b. Associated with inflammation also enters the nucleus, changes a transcription of hundreds of genes, and two of them are two that actually cut to give you the four downsizing peptides, the protective peptides. So it’s a beautiful story and it actually makes a lot more sense than saying your protein just folded up incorrectly because when you remove the, the incorrectly folded up protein, you don’t get better.
Dr Pedram Shojai: It’s funny, the, the metaphor of a guy cover covering his head when he is getting punched at and blaming him for trying to protect himself, um, is what we’ve been doing for . Or 20 years.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Um, and so what is it? The brain doesn’t feel safe. The brain goes into shut down and protective mode. You mentioned energy, uh, and you mentioned inflammation.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Let, let’s follow those two, if you will. Is it energy being drawn off into a wartime economy because, you’re, you’re fighting all sorts of other things and just not getting enough available ATP to the brain? Um, or is it the energy specifically just getting mis misch channeled, not necessarily being a deficit.
Dr Dale Bredesen: Both. So what happens is you, your brain is getting energy. It’s gotta have the blood flow, it’s gotta have the mitochondrial function, it’s gotta have the oxygen saturation, it’s gotta have something to burn. Ketones or glucose, of course, are the only options. So it’s gotta have all those Things to make it be supported. And what happens is, just as you said about the wartime economy, you can either use those for connectivity. So again, very much like what happened to our country, by the way, when the pandemic hit, we now have an insult, which is now SARS-CoV-2, and we’re being told. Shelter in place. Socially distanced, don’t go into work.
Dr Dale Bredesen: And what happens? We go into a recession, same thing happens in the brain in Alzheimer’s. You’re now switching from this. I can make new synapses. I’m gonna learn new things. I can store new information to wait a minute, I’ve gotta put my resources into protection. I am under assault. And so now I have to protect myself.
Dr Dale Bredesen: So I’m going to make Amyloid. I’m going to make phospho. I’m going to make things that kill pathogens and that sequester them away from me and I’m going to pull back so that I will be protected. I’m gonna live with a slightly smaller brain with fewer synapses so that I can survive.
Dr Pedram Shojai: I’m assuming there’s the usual suspects, right? Um, the, the internal pathogens, you know, obviously you mentioned, um, SARS two, but you know, Epstein Barr, all these things that, that can, you know, lie latent in the body, you know, the bacterial infections. What about environmental toxins? What about the things that are kind of jumping into our houses and creating, uh, some of these issues are, are we seeing that as well as the body is going into defense mode?
Dr Dale Bredesen: Absolutely. So it’s interesting and we, we had our, our first treatment way back in 2012. Uh, and we noticed that there was a group of people that were not getting better and we didn’t understand that, you know, that there were these various toxins. And so I started calling their spouses and looking into their histories and what, what would, what had we missed here?
Dr Dale Bredesen: Because initially we were looking at nutrients. We were looking at support, but we were not looking at toxicity, and we started to realize, wait a minute. These are people who have grown up or been exposed to very toxic areas. So it basically boils down to three things. It’s inorganic, toxins, metals, mercury, things like that. Uh, you know, air pollution is one of the ones, unfortunately, second organics. So toluene, benzene, formaldehyde, glyphosate, all these things. And then number three, Is biotoxins, things like trico theses, uh, and uh, okra toxin a, uh, and gliotoxin and things like this. So any of these are, your brain recognizes as toxin exposure. And it’s interesting, the amyloid that you make not only is a good antimicrobial peptide, but it is also a very tight binder of metals, especially divalent metals. Like copper and zinc. So it is produced. Also binds iron by the way. Uh, and so again, you are responding with something that is part of your innate immune system. And just as in, uh, covid, you know, you die from cytokine storm because you’ve got your innate immune system really active, but your adaptive has not yet been able to clear the pathogen In Alzheimer’s, you die of cytokine drizzle. Because you’ve got a lower level, but, but you still are not clearing whatever it is that is now activating, which, unlike with covid, it can be many different things as you indicated.
Dr Dale Bredesen: It can be oral bacteria, it can be sinus bacteria, it can be Lyme disease, it can be tick-borne illnesses, it can be mycotoxin. Any of these things, uh, are all potential things that will, that can give you the cognitive decline that is ultimately diagnosed as Alzheimer’s.
Dr Pedram Shojai: You know, it’s funny, a few years back I was looking at some, some work on people going on immunotherapy. It turned out it was a food allergy. And so now you’re sitting here punishing the immune system for trying to do its job instead of taking out the noxious agent that it’s, you know, ringing the, the, the alarm for.
Dr Pedram Shojai: So this is a fundamental shift in thinking. I obviously know why, you know, it’s an too many inconvenient truths. I understand why they didn’t, , fund the grant, right.
Dr Dale Bredesen: Yeah.
Dr Pedram Shojai: But, so if we have to now look at this as kind of a systems ecology approach, um,
Dr Pedram Shojai: let’s start with energy because we, we are already there.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Where do we eke out more energy? Where do we get this ATP to get back up to the brain to at least, you know, turn the lights back on and tell the brain that it’s safe and that we could go back into rest, rest, digest, and peacetime economy.
Dr Dale Bredesen: This is such a great point because yes, you can see what we’re doing. We’re bringing up the energy, we’re bringing down the inflammation. We’re getting rid of the toxicity. You know, these are things that, uh, Jeff Bland and Mark Hyman and the functional Medicine group have been talking about for years. What our research showed is This is the theory behind the neurodegenerative state. You have a supply and demand. They are different for each neural subsystem. Um, if your supply and demand for your motor modulation subsystem is off, you’re gonna get Parkinson’s. If your neuroplasticity system is off, you’re gonna get Alzheimer’s.
Dr Dale Bredesen: If your motor power is off, you’re gonna get a LS. Each one of these has its own P it has its own, uh, Achilles heel and has its own requirements. So the, so the way that we deal with these things and the way that we then change the energy is say, okay, why is this person’s energetics, uh, unsupported or not supported enough? And you may have talked to, uh, professor Rick Johnson who came out with a paper. Actually, David Perlmutter and I are both co-authors on his paper, but it’s really His work over the years on what happens with fructose. Now I’m not talking about eating an apple, I’m talking about large amounts of fructose. And as Rick showed elegantly, um, this actually leads to a pathway where you’re saying, aha. It is fall. Your body is saying winter is coming. I am going to get ready for lesser uh, uh, access to food. And so I’m gonna turn down the a TP by about 10 to 15%. I’m gonna store fat. And Rick did a beautiful job of just listing.
Dr Dale Bredesen: Here are all the physiological changes and imaging changes with fructose, and here are all the changes with Alzheimer’s. They just line up beautifully. So again, it comes back to if you don’t have enough energy, and one way to get that, in our society you eat for high fructose corn syrup, you have too much glucose as he pointed out.
Dr Dale Bredesen: You can also get there through glucose or salt. Hey, you know, where have we heard this before? This sounds like a American life. Um, you get there through insulin resistance. You get there through high carb diets. Um, you get there through processed foods. You get there through sedentary lifestyle through too much stress.
Dr Dale Bredesen: And again, the amygdala plays a big role here. Stress is an issue in these people. As long as you have that, uh, you know, you’re on high alert all the time. Your Innate immune system remains on high alert. You eat a bunch of saturated fat, you are on high alert. Uh, great for if you suddenly get exposed to pneumococcus, uh, you know, pneumococcus. Um, but since we’re u they usually, that’s not the problem anymore. What’s happened is we are killing ourselves slowly over the years by not Taking care of our energetics and not taking care of our inflammation. And those things are over the time, you know, it’s multiple pathways, but they all end in the same thing, which is the plaques and tangles that the neuropathologist says, ah, this person died of Alzheimer’s disease. And I should mention, you know. 45 million Americans are slated to die of Alzheimer’s, of the currently living Americans. So it actually dwarfs the pandemic just in terms of real numbers. It’s just that, of course, it’s slower than, uh, death by Covid. So the great news is. We can do so much about this. I’ve been, you know, arguing to people, Alzheimer’s is now optional. Look, nobody has to get this. Just don’t wait until it’s very late. When you get Alzheimer’s, you go through four phases. You go through an asymptomatic phase where you can already see changes on a PET scan or spinal fluid. And the good news is now there are even some simple blood tests you can do, which is great.
Dr Dale Bredesen: This is brand new. We should all have these blood tests. So that’s an asymptomatic phase. Then you go through SCI, subjective, cognitive impairment, and on average that lasts 10 years. So we have a tremendous opportunity to prevent and reverse this problem. The third of four phases is called MCI, mild cognitive impairment, and they shouldn’t call it mild ’cause as, as one patient said to me there, there’s nothing mild about it. It’s a relative, they should call it relatively late stage Alzheimer’s disease. Um, it’s like telling someone, you know, Pedram, don’t worry. You know, you just have mildly metastatic cancer. Uh, yeah, there’s nothing mild about that. And then the fourth and final phase, uh, is Dementia where you’re now having trouble with your activities of daily living.
Dr Dale Bredesen: So if everybody would get into those first two phases, we recommend everyone. If you’ve turned 40, get a cognoscopy, uh, just like getting a colonoscopy when you turn 50. Great idea. You’ll get some blood tests, a simple online cognitive assessment, and then if you’ve got symptoms, you wanna include an MRI with volumetrics. So the reality is we can do a lot for people and very few people should ever get. Full on Alzheimer related dementia.
Dr Pedram Shojai: What are the new blood tests? Um, and where can you get ’em?
Dr Dale Bredesen: Yeah, great point. Um, so the new blood tests are, and there are several and they each, it’s interesting ’cause each one tells you something different. So really, you know, the era of going in and getting a spinal tap for Alzheimer’s really should be ending. Now it’s kind of barbaric. So number one is P Tau two 17. So it’s a phospho au, specifically at residue 217, and that’s carried out by a kinase called GSK three Beta Kinase. Typically, and again, what happens when you’re signaling in your brain is saying, Hey, things are not good. Pull back. Well, what is tau? Tau sits on the microtubules and sta it’s like bolts. It stabilizes your microtubules. So when you get a signal, pull back, pull back. What happens is your tau gets phosphorylated. That changes its shape, it pops off, and your neurites can collapse more rapidly. So what you’re really measuring is, is your brain’s telling itself. Pullback pullback. It’s synaptoclastic signaling as opposed to going forward.
Dr Dale Bredesen: Synaptostoblastic signaling by analogy with osteoblastic and osteoclastic, and so that’s the first one. P TAU two 17. Second one is P TAU 180 1. It’s same idea. It’s a different site on the tau molecule. It’s not quite as accurate as two 17, but it’s the second best one. So these tell you whether the process of pulling back associated with Alzheimer’s is ongoing. Don’t worry if it’s high, you can bring it down. It takes about six months. You gotta do, you gotta go on the protocol, do the right things. But just like you measure an improvement in your LDL particle number, you can measure an improvement in your P TAU 217 and 181, and then the third one is NFL, which is Neurofilament light. Now, that tells you something different. That tells you whether you have neuronal damage that’s less specific. It’s not just Alzheimer’s. It can be from anything. It can be from frontotemporal Dementia can be from head trauma, it can be from a stroke, anything. Then the next one is GFAP. Which is glial fibrillary acidic protein, and that tells you something different still.
Dr Dale Bredesen: So these are all complimentary. That one tells you if your astrocytes in your brain, the things that support the neurons are activated and they get activated when there are problems. The good news about that one is it’s a relatively early marker and it is associated with some inflammation in the brain.
Dr Dale Bredesen: So again, good thing to know. And then the final one is a beta 42 to 40 ratio. So your ratio, these are two different of the amyloid molecules, one’s 40 amino acids, one’s 42 amino acids. That ratio changes as you’re heading for Alzheimer’s, and it’s a relatively early marker. That’s an, it’s another one. So those are good tests. And um, a group that does the two 17 and, and all of these, uh, is called neuro code. Um, you can also get, uh, the p TAU 180 1 from LabCorp, for example. Um, and then you can get the 42 to 40 ratio you can get from, uh, prosivity and you can get from Quest. So these things have now just become available. I think this is something where, you know, we all just like 60 years ago saying, Hey, you know, we, we need to know our cholesterol. Um, now, you know, we need to know these things because we need to know, are we on the way? And the great news, if everyone finds out, we’ll, you know, you don’t ever have to let yourself keep going, going, going. The old way was people said, well, don’t go in to see a doctor because it’s probably not Alzheimer’s.
Dr Dale Bredesen: And by the way, if it is Alzheimer’s, there’s nothing we can do anyway. Um, that is the, you know, that, that, that’s the outdated view now.
Dr Pedram Shojai: I love that. Um, yeah, I remember in the eighties, uh, the, the way. Way we dealt with the crack epidemic was we, we went to the schools , right? And, and got people to not do it and got way upstream. So, so phase one, phase two, this is, uh, a slam dunk. You, you get the test, you, you start making the lifestyle interventions and you’re in good shape.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Um, if you’re already in MCI, um, at, at that point, is it, is it, um, sixes like, you know, how, how likely is it to turn the tide if someone’s in phase three?
Dr Dale Bredesen: Great point. So you’re in phase three. That was what our trial was about. It’s freely available online. We published it last year in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease. 84% of the people improved. Now, to be fair. Um, that was a trial where we had doctors who were very good at doing this. Um, this is not easy, you know, as you know, functional medicine is not simple prescription pad medicine. Um, these sorts of precision medicine approaches. You wanna get someone who’s been trained, we’ve trained over 2000 physicians from 10 different countries in all over the us. Uh, and so you want to get someone who’s good at it and who’s gotten good results in the past and work with them. And you can get better from MCI. The final stage with dementia, we see people improve. The difference is with SCI and even into MCI, we can see people come all the way back. We have people who go from MOCA scores of 18 out of 30 to perfect thirties out of 30. We’ve never seen anyone go from zero to 30. That’s one of the things we’re working on. When you have an end stage Alzheimer’s patient, what would it take to bring them completely back to normal? They’ve lost a lot of synapses. We have seen them. I. Get much better. They go from zero to nine, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but they talk again. They become continent again. They interact again.
Dr Dale Bredesen: They take care of themselves. So they essentially go from dementia to MCI. They can still take care of themselves. They can still become part of the family, which is wonderful, but it’s hard. We cannot bring them yet all the way back. So again, please come in the first couple of phases. It’s much easier to get full return.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Coming back to the other side of your assets and liabilities, uh, equation you talked about inflammation. Um, so energy up, inflammation down to me. A lot of times those things, um, have the same lifestyle measures that, that counteract each other. Uh, let’s talk about that and then I’m curious about the role of the mitochondria and the signaling, um, from the mitochondria in this whole process.
Dr Dale Bredesen: Yeah, great point. Um, so the, the thing about inflammation is it is in some sense, as you said, uh, intimately related to the energetics because it is putting a drag on the system. It’s a little bit like saying, you know, you don’t have the legs you once did to pedal uphill. Now we’re gonna put a couple of bricks on top of you and see.
Dr Dale Bredesen: Now it’s much harder to pedal uphill. That’s what inflammation is doing. Again, it’s also saying Put your resources into protection and not into growth and maintenance. Now, it’s interesting, people have said over the years, why the heck would the brain, when it does, when it isn’t quite all there, why would it give up memory?
Dr Dale Bredesen: Isn’t that such an important thing? And that’s the the first thing that goes, as you know, in about two thirds of these patients. And I think that the answer is, again, very much about evolutionary balance. What happens is by the time you’ve reached adulthood. You have learned a tremendous amount. You can get along very, very well with what you’ve learned. So when we see people who are having memory problems, they’re still very functional. Uh, they can often do their jobs very well. Um, they can drive, they can interact, they can play sports, they can do because they have had a lifetime of learning. It’s really not such a big problem just to not remember what you had for breakfast. Um, now that’s what signals us. Okay? That’s the canary in the mine. Something’s wrong here. But on the other hand, if I said to you, Pedram, tomorrow morning, you can wake up and you either can’t learn new things and you could just have all the stuff in the past, or you lose the ability to read or to speak, or you know, all these more
Dr Dale Bredesen: Fundamentally important things. The people who come in with executive dysfunction, which is the other third, they have trouble with calculations and planning. So the ones who come in with planning problems are the ones that lose their jobs very early on because they can’t simply have post-its there.
Dr Dale Bredesen: They just can’t organize. They get a new. Phone, they can’t figure out how to make it work. Those are the ones that are really impacted more. So I think that that’s why, you know, evolution has said to us, you know, I gotta take something away. We just don’t have the support and we have too much drag with the inflammation. So I’m gonna take away something where you’ve got a lot of history, you got a lot of knowledge, don’t worry. So as you said, inflammation and my gosh, this has been a tough one because it’s coming from everywhere. The big surprise to me when I, when I was trained in, in medical school. We were taught that uh, there are certain organs that, that are sterile.
Dr Dale Bredesen: Of course, of course the brain should be sterile. You shouldn’t have bugs running around your brain. Well, guess what? Now it turns out you have a gut microbiome. You have an oral microbiome, you have a sinus microbiome, and yes, you have a brain microbiome. And so what do they find in there? And it’s still not clear whether you should have nothing.
Dr Dale Bredesen: And it’s just that patients are getting sick when they have something in their brain or whether in fact, that’s part of normalcy. It’s not yet clear. But what we do know is when you look in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients, what you see is you see oral bacteria like P gingivalis. You see herpes simplex from the lip, for example. You see, HHV six A, which is a herpes that comes probably through the sinuses. You see Borrelia things that are coming from Tick bites and things like that. By the way, you see candida in the brains. So the pathologists have taught us a lot about what is actually in there. And you know what’s fascinating, Pedram, uh, some of these are coming from the gut, and so they’re tending to go up the vagus and you’re ending up in the brainstem. The ones that are coming through the sinuses are going into what’s called the rhin encephalon, the nose brain. And so these are giving you different patterns depending on where these things came from.
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Dr Pedram Shojai: So following the breadcrumbs, if you will. I remember, uh, what Sarkis mes manian back in Caltech, um, a while back, was talking about these, these nodules in the gut microbiome working their way up 15 years
Dr Dale Bredesen: Yeah.
Dr Pedram Shojai: So they’ll hop up the vagus nerve. Get into the brain, but you had, you had alluded to kind of differential neuronal plumbing, if you will, and where, where it hits is where you, uh, where we see it in the patient.
Dr Pedram Shojai: So if it comes from the gut, do we see a particular type of dementia, if it comes from the sinuses, have we, have we been able to differentiate the, the outcome based on the origin yet?
Dr Dale Bredesen: To some extent, there’s a lot more work to be done and even subgroups. So for example, in people with Alzheimer’s, you can present as a PCA posterior cortical atrophy, which is mostly about visual Perception and visual analysis, and that’s five to 10% of the patients you can present with PPA primary progressive aphasia.
Dr Dale Bredesen: As I mentioned earlier, you can present as an amnestic patient or a non amnestic patient, and the non amnestic ones tend to be more about toxicity. So there are these different things, but is a gen. So yes, there’s a lot more to learn there, but as a general rule, things that are coming from the gut, like as with Dr.
Dr Dale Bredesen: Mazmanian work, um, these are things that are going to the Brainstem and you’re getting things like Parkinson’s where you’re getting, you know, Lewy bodies and you’re getting dropout, uh, in the substantial nigra, pars compacta, which is now, , sending its, uh, axons, uh, up to the, uh, uh, putamen and caudate.
Dr Dale Bredesen: This is the nigro stri AAL pathway. On the other hand, when you’re seeing things coming in through, uh, the, the nasal route, for example, you’re getting more of a cortical presentation. So, yes, I, I do think that this does reflect to some extent where the access as, and interestingly in Alzheimer’s, of course, there’s more and more about the gut relation to Alzheimer’s as well as Parkinson’s. And one of the interesting things there is that the first. Thing to go in Alzheimer’s, um, is the locus saurus, which is a brainstem nucleus. In this case, it’s different than the one that goes in Parkinson’s. Of course. It’s a thing that is pre with, is projecting your, uh, norepinephrine, um, up into your forebrain. And so what happens to these people? They, uh, become a little more passive. They’re, they’re, they don’t have that same projection. They’re slowed down. And then of course, you, the second thing that happens is your enteral cortex. So now you’re looking at . Things projecting into the hippocampus. Now it’s all about memory. So you ultimately, you know, you’re getting things that are related to the neuroanatomy of where this is coming from, where it’s projecting to. And then other things like what are your genetics? And then also, which, you know, which neurotransmitters. In Alzheimer’s, it’s more about acetylcholine and it’s about, uh, memory.
Dr Dale Bredesen: Whereas of course in Parkinson’s it’s more about dopamine and it’s about motor modulation.
Dr Pedram Shojai: So we end up back. Kind of at a familiar picnic table all around lifestyle and
Dr Pedram Shojai: bringing up energy, bringing down inflammation, and looking at, you know, the culprits, you know, and the usual suspects there.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Um, you developed a whole protocol around this. If we could go high level, obviously there’s a lot of nuance to this and I highly recommend people read your book.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Um, but if we can go high level and talk about what is in this protocol that is turning . The tide in this disease that we thought was incurable.
Dr Dale Bredesen: Great point. So it, it boils down to two pieces. There are the basics and there are seven basics that you’re aware of. Um, and then there are the specifics. So, so what you wanna start with is diet, exercise, sleep, stress, brain training, detox, and some targeted supplements. Those are the basics. And the diet that has actually worked best for this illness is a plant rich. Mildly ketogenic diet. You can do it as a vegan, you can do it as a flexitarian, uh, but you wanna have a plant rich, lots of phytonutrients, lots of polyphenols, et cetera. And you wanna get into mild ketosis. And you wanna be metabolically flexible. So what happens in the brain? I. As we talked about earlier, you only have two things that you can burn in the brain.
Dr Dale Bredesen: You can burn glucose, you can burn ketones, and unfortunately, these people have lost both. So as you start having problems with your cognition, you’ve lost the ability to. To burn glucose because of insulin resistance, which is so common. There are over a hundred million Americans who have insulin resistance, and in fact, if you look at a PET scan of someone with Alzheimer’s or pre-Alzheimer’s, what you see is exactly that, a reduction in glucose utilization in the temporal. Parietal regions of the brain. So it’s showing you this problem. On the other hand, because your insulin has stayed high, you’ve got this insulin resistance. You prevent yourself from making ketones. So now you’ve lost both. So when I see patients who are having cognitive decline, this is an energetic emergency. I want to get. So typically we start by just giving them some exogenous ketones. Their brain is literally starving. It cannot make these things that it requires. And then we have to look to see do they also have sleep apnea? Are they dropping their oxygenation at night? Do they also have some vascular disease?
Dr Dale Bredesen: So one of the reasons I love EWOT, which is exercise with oxygen therapy, because you get the double Positive. You get both the better blood flow and you get the better oxygenation. So it’s really helping kind of perk that up. So it’s those seven things. And then beyond that, you look at the specifics. The good news, you do the basics.
Dr Dale Bredesen: You buy yourself nine to 12 months. This is something Dr. Christine Burke noticed. And she’s one of the ones who’s during the, the, the trial with us currently. She’s a fantastic, uh, functional physician. And so then During that time, you’ve bought yourself time to now look more deeply. Do you have specifics? So look at your oral DNA. Do you have pathogens that are likely to be in your brain? Do you have tick-borne illness? Um, the, there are things that hide out. You know, it’s been really interesting. We just sent a paper off people who had. Done well for over 10 years, these people improved and they sustained it for over 10 years, which as you know, is unheard of. And what happened to them was interesting. They would go along for several years doing well, and then sometimes they’d take a little bit of a turn for the worst. And then you look and find, ah, here are things that were missed, or here are things that have been, have been new. We had a woman recently, she did six years Perfect Mocha of 30. She did great. She’d already had an amyloid positive scan. She’d failed a drug trial. She did great for six years. Then she started going downhill again and we looked, she had three new things. It turned out she had a new leak in her house and had new mycotoxin exposure. Okay, that’s something we understand.
Dr Dale Bredesen: We can do something about that. Secondly, she had a new sinusitis from Cryptococcus Larycia, which is an uncommon one, but it’s one that can give you a sinusitis. Thirdly, she had undiagnosed severe sleep apnea. I still can’t believe that wasn’t, that was missed earlier, but it, it had been, and you can see she did well for a while. But ultimately it caught up with her. Those three things were treated. She’s back to doing great again. So these are the sorts of things that will impact this, this, this is a net or this disease is a network insufficiency, uh, very different than what people thought. It’s not about free radicals, it’s not about misfolded proteins.
Dr Dale Bredesen: Sure, those are all part of this, but that’s not the upstream cause.
Dr Pedram Shojai: We’ve covered this a lot on the show, but I think it’s worthwhile just for a quick second to talk. Talk about what insulin resistance looks like in its reversal. How long in your, in your experience with people on your protocol do you start to see the glucose numbers stabilize, the insulin numbers stabilize, and then how quickly you see that reflected in the brain, the state of the brain and, and the health of the brain.
Dr Dale Bredesen: Yeah, great point. And so, and this is, you know, you could argue that the, you know, number one problem, Um, is related to glucose fructose. It’s, it’s that insulin resistance problem with the reduction in energy that Rick Johnson has shown so beautifully. Um, and the, you know, this is a very common problem that it takes about Two to four weeks to make a difference. And it depends on how quickly you try to do this. You wanna be a little careful. ’cause there’s a very interesting paradox here. On the one hand, this is a disease of insufficiency, so we don’t want to make people fast for long periods, and especially people who are relatively Frail, which many are at the same time. We want to get them to be insulin sensitive. And how do you get that? Well, partly by fasting. So you, this is where the good doctors are really good about. Okay, we’re gonna balance, this comes back to balance once again. We’re gonna make it so this person. Does become insulin sensitive and that, and you can become more insulin sensitive by having less stress, lowering your cortisol, sleeping better at night, doing some exercise. Eating a a again, a plant rich, mildly ketogenic diet with lots of good fats. Um, some intermediate amounts of good protein, uh, and some modest amounts of, uh, of carbs. Uh, but with, uh, hopefully no simple carbs. These are, this is the way you get back. And so I know, uh, Dr. Anne Hathaway, who worked with us on, on the first trial and as part of the second trial, um, has been able to get people into, into ketosis very quickly, which is great, but be careful if someone is frail. Um, sometimes it’ll happen as someone will have a very low BMI and now they’ll lose weight. Because they’ve started to do the right things. Well, you, you can’t do that because they’ll actually, they can actually get worse. So make sure they have enough energy, but then over time get them and, you know, again, you can do it over a couple of months to become insulin sensitive.
Dr Dale Bredesen: You wanna make it so your Homa ir, which is a good measure of, uh, insulin sensitivity is down around 1.0, not up at 2, 3, 4. We see them, you know, very high. Where you, you’ve got these, you know, high insulins, one of the You should have an insulin of, you know, four insulin of, you know, four or five when you’re fasting. Um, one of the patients came in with an insulin of 32. Um, and just bringing it down, even though it came down to eight, initially, not to, not to four or five, made all the difference for him. He did much better. His MRI showed it. One of the things we’re seeing is MRIs improve on these people, uh, as well as the symptoms, their cognitive scores improve.
Dr Dale Bredesen: You know, it’s really striking.
Dr Pedram Shojai: I wanna revisit this question on the mitochondria, the energy. Sensitivity, um, of the system and you know, the mitochondria or they’re finicky, right? They’re, they’re really, you know, the, the environmental toxins really mess with them. And they also have signaling, they also have signaling with our microbiome or, you know, we’re just starting to unravel this, this really weird ecology that’s happening between like the bacteria and our body.
Dr Pedram Shojai: How much do we know about the mitochondria and their role in this whole energy system pathway that you’re talking about?
Dr Dale Bredesen: This is a, this is a tough one because they’re clearly very important and you know, if you’ve got great blood flow and you’ve got great, uh, ketones and glucose, but your mitochondria simply can’t use this to, to produce energy, you’re in trouble. Um, I do think this is one of the things that’s going to, in the future, uh, tell people when it’s time to have, uh, Stem cells. Um, and ultimately you may end up with, you know, mitochondrial transplants. Uh, years ago, uh, a company called MITO Core, I actually looked at this, looked at this possibility of, can we get people better mitochondria? And I think they were ahead of their time because it really is gonna be important.
Dr Dale Bredesen: Now, the good news is as you do the right things, you have mitophagy. So you get rid of your batteries that are relatively worn out and you make new batteries. But if you, but you’re absolutely right. If you are in a situation where your mitochondria are not functioning well and you’re not able to make new ones that function well, um, then that is really tough.
Dr Dale Bredesen: And, and that’s gonna be the rate limiting step, and that’s one of the points here we wanna understand for each individual. What the rate limiting step is. And for some people it will be their mitochondria. For others it will be their, uh, insulin sensitivity. For others, it will be the fact that they are living in a home full of mycotoxins. Um, you know, for others it’ll be that they were bitten by a tick 10 years ago and they don’t realize that they’ve had air Lithia ever since. Uh, so there are all these different things and you’ve got to look for them to get best outcomes as you pointed out. You know, a lot of people just doing the basics will do very well. But if you then fall through the cracks, and that’s the public health approach for the future, if you’re falling through the cracks, please don’t give up. Get in to see someone who can now look for these things that have been missed.
Dr Pedram Shojai: A bit of a personal story. We lost my paternal grandma to Alzheimer’s. I mean, she, she faded fast, so we got . Ahead of the game for dad, knowing that he had the genes and he had the proclivity and all that, missed something that snuck up and bit us, which was, he went in for his third lumbar spine surgery and they hypoxia during the anesthesia
Dr Dale Bredesen: yeah,
Dr Pedram Shojai: us in the ass.
Dr Pedram Shojai: And we’ve been, you know, chasing this thing ever since. And it’s like, I didn’t . I didn’t know. Right. And you know, I’m, I’m, I’m somewhat in the know, didn’t see it coming. Right. And so these are the things, these are the, the, the hearings. Right. It’s, it’s not if x then y. And that’s the challenge with this thing is, you know, it could be a lot of things.
Dr Dale Bredesen: Yeah, this is such a good point, and we recommend anyone who is getting ready for general anesthesia, please. You know, there’s a whole set. We have it, uh, in the guides and, and, uh, Julie G, who’s an a POE four four herself, uh, who was affected and has done very well now for over 10 years, uh, doing just great.
Dr Dale Bredesen: She’s, she turned 60 not long ago, and she’s done just . Great. And she has written all these guides for practical things. Hey, here’s what you do if you’re gonna go for anesthesia, you know, here’s what you can do. These are all available through Apollo Health, and so you do wanna make sure that your glutathione is, is high enough.
Dr Dale Bredesen: You wanna make sure that you’re doing well with detox, and then you wanna talk to the anesthesiologist. Do not allow hypoxia, do not allow hypotension. One of the common things is they say, Hey, every, everybody’s got some hypertension. Let’s, let’s just let this drift down. No, not during that. Yes, for the long run, you wanna be fine, but it’s common for people, unfortunately, to let people who are under general anesthesia become just a bit hypotensive, and that can cause strokes. That can cause It can, you know, contribute to this reduction in energetics. And then of course you’re giving a big bolus of a toxin. And so you’re saying, okay, body, if you were right on the edge of just being able to get rid of the toxins you’re exposed to on a day-to-day basis, here’s a big influx I.
Dr Dale Bredesen: These things and that’s a problem. So anesthesia is one of the most common things we hear when people have cognitive decline. Yeah. This person had anes general anesthesia, you know, six months ago, had an operation for three or four hours and they’ve never been the same since.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Yeah, yeah. You’re Robin Peter to pay Paul energetically and, you know, uh, deciding which long-term memories to trim . You could keep running your life and you just get punched in the face. Right. And , it’s, it’s, it’s hard to come back. So
Dr Pedram Shojai: you, um, aside from writing books, just ventured into the world that I’ve been swimming in for a decade.
Dr Pedram Shojai: And, uh, you know, I always take my hat off to anyone who dares get into film, um, . But you have a new documentary out on, uh, Amazon Prime, apple tv, Google Play called Memories for Life, reversing Alzheimer’s. Tell us about it.
Dr Dale Bredesen: Yeah. And you know, I, I actually didn’t venture at all, so I, I have no courage whatsoever. Um, I got contacted, uh, several years ago, uh, by a Japanese, um, film director. Uh, and of course in Japan, the government listed the 10 biggest concerns. You know, things, things like, are we gonna run out of fish? Number one was dementia, because it is of course, the longest living culture in the world, uh, the longest living country, uh, in the world on average. And so they’re very concerned about dementia. Uh, and I was over there a few times on their, their version of CNN talking about, you know, here’s a protocol that could actually help to reduce this. So one of the Directors called me up and said that NHK, uh, wanted to do a, a documentary, uh, and actually put together a documentary.
Dr Dale Bredesen: And actually they have Michael Buble as the, as the narrator. And, and Michael talks about the fact that this is something that he witnessed in his own grandmother. Uh, so he was very concerned about it and was was wonderful. To do this, uh, and to, he did such a great job. Uh, nar narrating this thing. So they went around and talked to various patients who’d gotten better, uh, both in Japan and in the us. Uh, and this has just come out as now streaming on Amazon Prime is in, uh, is streaming on, uh, Google Play and on Apple tv, and I think it’s coming out in Voodoo and Tubi pretty soon. So I really appreciate, uh, Yuki Tokagawa as the guy who did this, uh, and Michael Buble for the narration for the great job they did.
Dr Dale Bredesen: And interestingly, one of the patients, uh, who is from a famous family in New York, uh, said that she wanted to support this on her own. She’s done very well herself. She’s actually in the movie, uh, and, uh, she talked about, uh, her own, uh, journey. And so she was the one who actually jumped into this and said, you know, I wanna work with this. She kind of did it, even without mentioning it to me, she contacted, um, the director and, and they actually added additional pieces to it. So I think it helps people to see this is not. The end of the road. You know, this is, this is not something that’s impossible for the first time. There is something we can do, and I actually think we’re entering a golden age. New blood tests, new trials. Um, we published a successful trial. Dr. Heather Sanderson also published a successful trial, uh, using the same approach. Very excited about that. Heather has opened. Which is the first assisted living facility, which uses this protocol. She’s getting fabulous results. It’s down just outside of San Diego, uh, as I I mentioned the, the, the testing, um, better and better ways to look at this. Um, I think we’re gonna be able to combine certain targeted pharmaceuticals with these precision medicine protocols to get even better outcomes. .Now taking this to, um, other degenerative diseases, which is what we’re doing now, uh, over at the Pacific Neuroscience Institute. So very excited about that. A precision medicine program for all neurodegenerative diseases.
Dr Dale Bredesen: So I think we’re really entering, uh, a golden age where for the first time, these diseases will be preventable, reversible, and ultimately optional.
Dr Pedram Shojai: I love that. I love that this isn’t a curse. I love that this isn’t a death sentence, and I love that we’ve really turned the corner on that. Now, if you’re listening to this and you’re like, I don’t have any of this, um, you know, the, the first seven . Areas apply to all of us. We live in a toxic world. We live in a world filled with sugar and carbs and all the stuff.
Dr Pedram Shojai: So I would, I would read the Brets and protocol and, um, work to prevent this. Um, but if someone is thinking uhoh, I’m either phase two, three, or, um, you know, heading in that direction. How do you find a doctor? Do you have a directory? I’m assuming you’re not, you know, you had mentioned you haven’t seen a patient in 20 years.
Dr Pedram Shojai: You’re more of a research guy now. How does someone find help? I.
Dr Dale Bredesen: Yeah, and I work with a number of the physicians and the health coaches. Uh, but yes, you can look up, um, on, , mycognoscopyy.com. I encourage everyone if you’re 40 or over, get a cognoscopy. And by the way, you mentioned a really good point. The 20 somethings and 30 somethings, uh, like our children are not worried about this, and they, they shouldn’t be worried about it because they, they’re the first generation that doesn’t have to fear this illness, but they have to remember that these changes that ultimately become Alzheimer’s. You can see changes in the PET scans in the twenties and thirties, so they do start early. They just get diagnosed way down the road, so it is a good idea to find out Do I have insulin resistance? Do I have systemic inflammation? Uh, do I have methylation defects, high homocysteine, things like that. This is part of better health and better longevity and better performance, better energy for all of us. So I think, again, this is part of life. This is, you know, it’s Alzheimer’s is not really a Separate disease. It’s part of life when you’re not doing the right things. And so it’s good for, you know, for everybody to be aware of this. So you can see it on that. You can see@drbressen.com, apollo HealthCo, uh, dot com, any of those things, um, to see, you know where to go if you’re near one of the six sites for the trial.
Dr Dale Bredesen: We are still enrolling people for the trial. Those are a Hollywood . Florida, uh, uh, Cleveland, Ohio, Nashville, Tennessee, Sacramento, California, and then two in the Bay Area, Marin County, uh, and then over in the East Bay, uh, just outside San Francisco. Uh, so we’re still looking for people. If you’re within 60 to 90 minutes of those locations, uh, please let us know.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Love that. Um, I remember reading Emperor of All Maladies years ago, and one of the, one of the issues around trying to figure out why cancer levels were so high is, you know, everyone was smoking. So, you know, why, why would it not be nylon stockings versus the cigarettes? And if you look at the rise of Alzheimer’s, hopefully were, you know, already kind of cresting and coming down with all these new innovations.
Dr Pedram Shojai: But our great grandparents, . Weren’t getting it. Our great-great-grandparents weren’t getting it as much. And then we got into that better living through chemistry, spam and processed food generation. And they’re just getting decimated by this thing because we didn’t see what all the inputs were doing downstream.
Dr Pedram Shojai: And so now that you, you we know better. It is on us to not eat like our parents did , right?
Dr Pedram Shojai: That generation did flip. And we gotta go back to, you know, the fruits and vegetables and all the things that you had mentioned and bring down our stress, um, and avoid the iceberg. Um, but look, I, I don’t think any of us listening to this have not taken a hit.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Um, we, we have lived in the modern world. And so I think this is, is, you know, upfront and center and personal, right? I can’t, I can’t make good decisions. My life sucks and
Dr Pedram Shojai: I need my brain.
Dr Dale Bredesen: It’s the evolutionary mismatch that is the problem. And you know what’s really interesting, Pedram, when I was training, which is way back in the eighties, uh, the, they, we never saw people in their fifties with Alzheimer’s. This was a disease of your sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties. Now, one of the most common things we see. Is a 52-year-old woman going through menopause, developing Alzheimer’s, and unfortunately it is about two to one women to men. And in fact, the epidemiologists have shown recently that the biggest increase in Alzheimer’s is in the 40 somethings and the 50 somethings. I mean, it’s scary. And so yes, you’re right, something changed.
Dr Dale Bredesen: We’re eating differently. We’re living differently. We’re living in homes that are mold food. Uh, we’re getting exposed to these toxins. It’s better living through chemistry, but it’s not always better living. Uh, and so we really need to go back and look at what, what did we assume when we made these changes where the assumptions were incorrect?
Dr Pedram Shojai: I love that my grandpa grew up eating figs. I grew up eating fig Newtons very different.
Dr Dale Bredesen: quite different.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Very, very different. Uh, doc, I really, um, I’m a fan of your work. I really appreciate the work that you keep doing, right? I, I just love it when, uh, when, when guys don’t quit and keep trying to solve the problems. So I’m glad you’ve moved, uh, to the new digs and Marin and are, and are still going.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Um, and, uh, for my audience, anyone who’s listening, take this seriously, get proactive and if you have someone who is already in this, um, . Ecology, get them the help they need. Look up all the resources Dr. Bredesen had referenced here.
Dr Dale Bredesen: great to talk to you. P Thank you for all the great work you’re doing. Uh, you know, let’s, let’s all reduce the global burden of neurodegenerative diseases.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Love it.
Okay. I hope you enjoyed the show. Um, I really enjoy talking to Dr. Bredesen. Nice man. , accomplished. , scientists just doing the work and helping people. , important stuff. So if you have anyone who is starting to slide, get them, reading this book, get them listening to this podcast, get them doing something every single day.
You wait, makes it a little bit harder. To get the job done. Uh, turn this around the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. Next best time is right now. So help them understand that they can turn the tide in the sooner, the better. Uh, if you’re not subscribed to the show yet, please do so. Um, there is a lot more coming your way.
There’s a new format, um, as well, that’s gonna be part of it. So a lot that. He’s going to shift in 2024. Towards getting you. Better and better quality guests and getting you the information you need to navigate the waters. Um, what waters, the crazy waters of the podcasts out there. Um, A lot of people with voices. A lot of people have never seen a patient before in their lives.
A lot of people that have marketed their way into becoming health celebrities. Um, but they have no training. So I want to make sure I bring you. The most legitimate people out there. And also look, I’ve seen thousands of patients. Um, you know, I did the doctor thing for a very long time. And so, you know, as a doctor, you get to say what you want and get away with it.
As a doctor, you have to understand. That you have, uh, an oath you’ve taken and you can’t say things that may or may not work. You can’t say things that might harm people, right? So, uh, there is, uh, a growing movement out there to say, Hey, wait a minute. We are trying to help these folks, but there are people out there that could care less about helping these folks.
So just trying to help you navigate away from some of the misinformation. And also helping navigate you towards things that are high leverage that will get you feeling better as quickly as possible. So subscribe to the show. I look forward to seeing you in the next one.