In today’s podcast, we sit down with Dr. Terry Wahls. Dr. Terry Wahls is an Institute for Functional Medicine Certified Practitioner and a clinical professor of medicine at the University of Iowa where she conducts clinical trials in the setting of Multiple Sclerosis. In 2018 she was awarded the Institute for Functional Medicine’s Linus Pauling Award for her contributions in research, clinical care and patient advocacy. She is the author of The Wahls Protocol: A Radical New Way to Treat All Chronic Autoimmune Conditions Using Paleo Principles, and the cookbook, The Wahls Protocol Cooking for Life. Learn more about the current study Efficacy of Diet on Quality of Life in Multiple Sclerosis at https://wahls.lab.uiowa.edu/.
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Audio Transcript
(Note that this transcription was auto-generated so there may be some errors)
00:00:37:13 – 00:01:01:14
Nathan Crane
Hello and welcome, everybody. Welcome to the podcast. I’m really excited to have Dr. Terry Walz here with us. Dr. Terry is a clinical professor of medicine at the University of Iowa. She has done clinical research and published over 60 peer reviewed scientific abstracts, papers and posters in addition to being a doctor. She was also diagnosed with M.S. back in 2000.
00:01:02:01 – 00:01:24:15
Nathan Crane
Her story of battling M.S. using a more holistic approach is what led to her discovering the Walls protocol for Mars and other autoimmune conditions. Really excited to have her on the podcast and really dive into her story and and the Walls protocol and yeah, so we’re going to dive right in. Dr. Terry Walls, thanks so much for joining us.
00:01:25:06 – 00:01:26:09
Dr. Terry Wahls
Hey, thanks for having me.
00:01:26:20 – 00:01:36:06
Nathan Crane
Absolutely. So you were a practicing physician and when you were first diagnosed with M.S., is that right?
00:01:36:24 – 00:01:37:08
Dr. Terry Wahls
Correct.
00:01:37:21 – 00:01:40:05
Nathan Crane
So tell us a little bit about that. What was that like?
00:01:41:16 – 00:02:13:04
Dr. Terry Wahls
So, you know, at the time that I was diagnosed, I was in the Marshfield Clinic, central Wisconsin. I had a very busy private practice, and I was working on my MBA access into physician leadership in addition to being in private practice. And, you know, I, I developed weakness on my left leg, saw the neurologist said, you know, this could be bad or really, really bad and be a physician.
00:02:13:05 – 00:02:39:21
Dr. Terry Wahls
I had a pretty good idea of what really, really bad would look like. And so for the next three weeks, I’m going through the workup. And in my mind, you know, this is shocking. I’m actually praying for a rapidly fatal diagnosis because I don’t want to become disabled. I don’t want to become a burden to my family. Because you had.
00:02:39:22 – 00:02:43:17
Nathan Crane
Seen you’d worked with patients and you seen that or what was. Well, thoughts behind that.
00:02:44:04 – 00:02:58:12
Dr. Terry Wahls
You know? Well, my thoughts was that I’d already had 20 years of worsening electrical face pain that would be eventually diagnosed as trigeminal neuralgia.
00:03:00:13 – 00:03:05:01
Dr. Terry Wahls
And so it’s like, okay, whatever I have is a progressive problem.
00:03:07:10 – 00:03:41:07
Dr. Terry Wahls
And it’s going to end in a severe level of disability. If my neurologist is saying very, very bad, I’m like, okay, this could be totally disabling. And I certainly have seen people with neurologic diseases that could no longer use their hands. I could no longer walk, couldn’t longer do their own self care. And I’m like, Well, that’s not the future that I’m watching for myself.
00:03:43:03 – 00:04:06:12
Nathan Crane
Yeah. So, you know, it’s interesting about that, right? Is is I think some people have like people may have complete opposite thoughts around that, where some people would be like, well, you know what? If I’m still alive and can contribute in some way, I will learn to deal with it. And then in other cases, like if I don’t have function of my body and other people have to take care of me, like I don’t want to be here, you know, I don’t cook.
00:04:07:05 – 00:04:25:00
Nathan Crane
Where does that or like, where does that come from? You Like, where does that where did that decision come from for you? That’s just like looking. I don’t if I can’t function, I can use my hands. I can’t. People, other people have to take care of me. Well, I just would rather it and trigeminal neuralgia.
00:04:25:22 – 00:04:56:07
Dr. Terry Wahls
And let me describe that. I think that’ll make it easier for people understand what I was facing and what I’d already imagined in my head, because I’d watched my father develop some a thing called monitor. Itis multiplex a very painful condition involving pain in his lower legs that would ultimately also add motor weakness, difficulty walking. He had severe pain.
00:04:56:07 – 00:05:09:06
Dr. Terry Wahls
It was became very, very difficult to sleep due to his severe pain. His pain was continuous and relentless. And I saw that build over 20 years for him and he died.
00:05:11:07 – 00:05:42:00
Dr. Terry Wahls
And actually, quite fortunately for him, he died of a pulmonary embolism while he was undergoing a treatment for his severe pain. I’d already had 20 years of worsening trigeminal neuralgia. It’s electrical pain that would come here at my temple or on the other side. It would radiate down across my cheek to my jaw. It was also deep behind my ear, my.
00:05:42:00 – 00:06:20:07
Dr. Terry Wahls
It would be just an instant of this intense electrical pain. They would come in periods that originally lasted just for a day. Then it got to a point where it last several days and several weeks. I had seen neurologist pain clinics. I’d gone to the world famous Mayo Clinic, saw their pain service, and it was clear that the treatments we were being offered would ultimately fail.
00:06:20:09 – 00:06:50:10
Dr. Terry Wahls
Then they’d go on to the next treatment and these episodes, once they turned on, I would build over a period of days, two weeks, and would slowly fade. The intensity of the pain. If you can imagine, like I grew up on a farm, we use cattle prods to move recalcitrant hogs and cattle to get them loaded on the truck and the animal squeals when you zap them.
00:06:50:10 – 00:07:27:21
Dr. Terry Wahls
With this 10,000 volt cattle prod, then they leap at what the the jolt would be triggered once it was turned on by light, by sound, by a breeze, by chewing, by talking, by slowly. And, you know, over the years, you know, the pain became what happened more and more severe. Now I’ve broken bones. This is way more severe than a broken bone.
00:07:28:13 – 00:08:15:00
Dr. Terry Wahls
I’ve had major surgery. It’s way more severe than major surgery. I’ve had two children have been an active labor. It’s way more painful than active labor. It is the most intense pain I have ever known. And if you look at, you know, the descriptions of traditional neuralgia, because it involves the facial area, and if you look at the what’s called the homunculus, the part of the brain that responds to our sensory input, the face has the most representation of pain fibers in sensory input in the body.
00:08:16:05 – 00:08:45:11
Dr. Terry Wahls
So it’s sort of like you take the pain pathways and you dial them up to maximum intensity. Just for a moment. And what happens? People have traditional neuralgia. It starts with that as an intermittent problem. It becomes, you know, more severe. So you get all the way dialed up in your pain and it’s at first it’s just fleeting, just for instant.
00:08:46:07 – 00:09:24:18
Dr. Terry Wahls
And you have these episodes that come more frequently and then it transforms from being intermittent to constant. And when that happens, people kill themselves. Because if you imagine how, how do you function when all of your sensory input on your face is transformed into the most horrific pain that you’ve ever experienced? And when I was going through my workup, I was like, I watched my dad.
00:09:25:15 – 00:09:46:17
Dr. Terry Wahls
I’d already had 20 years of experience of my pain, getting more frequent, more severe. It was when I thought, Oh my God, is that what I’m facing? Will my pain become permanently on? Like my father’s pain eventually became? Wow.
00:09:47:04 – 00:09:52:07
Nathan Crane
Yeah. I mean, I can’t even imagine. It just it sounds horrific. Sounds terrible.
00:09:53:01 – 00:10:07:11
Dr. Terry Wahls
Yeah. You know, it absolutely was. And I also had two very young kids. My son was eight. My daughter was five. How old at the time? I’m eight and five.
00:10:07:20 – 00:10:08:24
Nathan Crane
How old were you at that time?
00:10:09:15 – 00:10:10:05
Dr. Terry Wahls
45.
00:10:10:10 – 00:10:17:12
Nathan Crane
You were 45 and you had already been dealing with this building over 20 years up to that point. So started correct in your twenties?
00:10:18:00 – 00:10:41:13
Dr. Terry Wahls
Yeah, you actually, I should take that back. I was 42 I and I was 22 when my face pains first began. It took about five years to, you know, have enough pain. That’s like, okay, I have to take the time to go see a neurologist and begin the workup process, how long it would.
00:10:41:17 – 00:10:44:20
Nathan Crane
Take them to diagnose it.
00:10:44:20 – 00:11:14:14
Dr. Terry Wahls
You know. So I first saw a neurologist when I was about five years into electrical face pain. They didn’t they called it a neuralgia. They first called it occipital neuralgia, gave me some medications, which helped a bit, but I developed a drug rash, so I had to stop that. They tried a few others that it helped. And I finally realized, like, okay, I’m just going to have to endure this.
00:11:15:08 – 00:11:50:03
Dr. Terry Wahls
Then I had an episode of Dim Vision when I was out rollerblading in Wisconsin on a hot August day After work, I lost vision in my left eye. I took off my water skis and walked, you know, the five miles back home, I saw a different neurologist whose uncle went through a big workup and no clear diagnosis. And they just said I had autonomic dysfunction of the retinal blood flow.
00:11:50:11 – 00:12:23:19
Dr. Terry Wahls
So don’t push yourself so hard, particularly in hot weather. And it became apparent that, you know, I’m an athlete, I hadn’t had kids yet, so I was still racing and training. And if I raced, my visual acuity went down and if I raced, the color perception was just a little off, a little different between my two eyes, you know.
00:12:23:19 – 00:12:50:19
Dr. Terry Wahls
And I thought about, you know, going to another eye center, getting another second opinion about all this, you know, But life was busy and I a I just put up with it, you know, and I moderated my physical, the intensity of my training, the intensity of my races. You know, at that point, you know, I’m still very much an athlete.
00:12:51:00 – 00:13:16:02
Dr. Terry Wahls
I’m doing the Burka minor, the 55 kilometer ski race in northern Wisconsin. Lots of fun. But I can tell I can only go at moderate intensity for me if I go all out at full intensity, my vision is not quite as sharp.
00:13:16:02 – 00:13:23:01
Nathan Crane
Now, is that generally a worsening condition as well? And has that stayed the same for you over the years? Worse and gotten better.
00:13:24:05 – 00:13:59:18
Dr. Terry Wahls
So that it originally it was clear that I couldn’t race as hard. I couldn’t take heat saunas, hot tubs that also did my visual acuity. And you know, I accommodated my training. I had a couple of kids and you’re on it now. I’m working on my treadmill and my NordicTrack. I’m biking, pulling the kids behind, so I’m not doing as many races.
00:14:01:02 – 00:14:02:22
Dr. Terry Wahls
And then I see that.
00:14:03:13 – 00:14:05:06
Nathan Crane
Cross-Country skiing Is that the race.
00:14:05:06 – 00:14:10:03
Dr. Terry Wahls
Is cross-country skiing? Yeah, Cross-country skiing. Yeah. You know, I did.
00:14:10:04 – 00:14:12:01
Nathan Crane
But that’s hard work.
00:14:12:11 – 00:14:38:10
Dr. Terry Wahls
Yeah, I did my work about her pregnant. That was pretty fun. And then, you know, Ski and my kids were like, water skiing behind me. So I did it. Pull them in the sleds or they’d hang on. And you know, that that was clearly a men’s foot. And then I begin to see that skate skiing is hard. And so I just go back to classic skiing.
00:14:38:11 – 00:15:05:07
Dr. Terry Wahls
I think, Damn, you are getting to be a slug, Terry. Now, why would I think I’m a slug? I’ve worked out every day, you know, since I moved off the farm, I’ve I’ve done, you know, workouts every day. You might say Quando or running or, you know, biking. Then I kids, I was doing indoor workouts, but I never missed a day.
00:15:05:16 – 00:15:40:11
Dr. Terry Wahls
But it I think you like her. You know what? I’m getting older. I have to be more disciplined in my workout. I seem to be losing strength. And then the next thing that we noticed is that walking around and my wife Jackie, and I are walking and we could tell that the footfall sounds just a little bit different on my left leg when my left foot hits the ground, while my right foot hits the ground.
00:15:40:11 – 00:16:13:18
Dr. Terry Wahls
And Jack commented on that and I said, Yeah, that is a little odd. But, you know, that’s a pretty lame chief complaint. So like, I was that going to go see my physician for that? And then Jackie, being a very resourceful person, so let’s go for ice cream. So she walked we walked a mile and a half to the ice cream shop, got our ice cream cones and walked back now.
00:16:13:18 – 00:16:41:10
Dr. Terry Wahls
And she was wise to do this when somebody else was watching the kids, because about a half mile from home, it’s very clear there is something terribly wrong with my left leg. It is enormously difficult to pick it up. I’m dragging it. It is incredibly hard to walk. So we get it and we sit down and access. Okay.
00:16:41:21 – 00:17:03:13
Dr. Terry Wahls
I think you’re saying you’re going to your doctor. Yeah. I can’t ignore this. And you know, the next day we begin the workup. It was very apparent to me that there was something something, something bad that was happening.
00:17:03:13 – 00:17:05:12
Nathan Crane
And this was what year is this?
00:17:06:06 – 00:17:41:20
Dr. Terry Wahls
This is the spring of 2000. And, you know, this comes exactly at the time that I’m in the process of moving from March for actually, I was at the University of Iowa in I had just accepted the position at Iowa and we were making plans for the move. And now suddenly I’m like, in this work up, Now I’m like, Holy, oh my God, can I just resign a position?
00:17:42:06 – 00:17:54:16
Dr. Terry Wahls
Now I’m about to be diagnosed with something that’s really terrible and I won’t be able to work in my new job and like. So I was certainly catastrophizing all of this while going through the workup, trying to figure out what it is that I have.
00:17:54:18 – 00:17:58:17
Nathan Crane
I imagine. Yeah. I mean, I must have been scary at the time. And plus.
00:17:58:19 – 00:18:00:04
Dr. Terry Wahls
It was it was definitely very.
00:18:00:04 – 00:18:07:15
Nathan Crane
Scary. Plus two decades of worsening, you know, health conditions without exactly really knowing what was going on. Right?
00:18:08:01 – 00:18:46:19
Dr. Terry Wahls
Correct. You know, so it was it was called lexapro neuralgia with it tried a variety of drugs, that kind of pain clinics. And what was happening was I was now on daily Gabapentin when the pain would come and break through, I’d go in, get to the pain clinic, get injections, and, you know, I’d have a pretty brutal one week period where the pain, like was trying to get it stopped, you know, And at first when this would happen, no, no, I’m a farmer.
00:18:47:24 – 00:19:10:19
Dr. Terry Wahls
It was a farm. You never missed your work because that was just the nature of farm work. So my my things would be happening. I would be trying to see patients and you have to really concentrate and not grimacing or grunting or having any kind of vocalization. What? I had this terrible electrical job.
00:19:11:06 – 00:19:41:01
Nathan Crane
Hey, I just want to take a quick second and thank you for listening to this episode. I hope you’re enjoying it so far as a special thank you for tuning in this episode. I want to give you my number one Amazon bestselling book, Absolutely Free. You can go download it right now at becoming cancer free dotcom. If you want to learn evidence based strategies for helping your body become a cancer fighting machine for not only cancer reversal but cancer prevention, go grab a copy of the book again.
00:19:41:01 – 00:19:51:11
Nathan Crane
I’m just giving to you for free. You can go download it at becoming cancer free dot com. All right, let’s get back to the show. Oh, my God. And it’s like getting electrocuted by.
00:19:52:01 – 00:19:55:05
Dr. Terry Wahls
Getting electrocuted and doing so while.
00:19:55:05 – 00:20:08:06
Nathan Crane
You’re seeing a patient evaluating some minor like recommending whatever pharmaceuticals or whatever you’re saying to them and all of a sudden you’re just like, could you imagine like, I mean, you know, again, like, that’s just that’s just wild to imagine.
00:20:08:06 – 00:20:25:08
Dr. Terry Wahls
So, you know, I really can’t straight are not grimacing, not grunting and what would happen I couldn’t talk so there’d be a momentary gap in the fluid fluidity of a sentence and then I start over. Mm.
00:20:26:01 – 00:20:28:18
Nathan Crane
Eventually, most of the time it was like a flash of pain.
00:20:28:20 – 00:20:38:07
Dr. Terry Wahls
A flash of pain? Yeah. Yeah. And then, you know, my boss, I said, Terry, you got to stop trying to work when you’re having your back. This. This is crazy.
00:20:38:10 – 00:20:57:06
Nathan Crane
That’s hard to tell and that’s hard to tell in Iowa. Farmer I mean, you know, I grew up in Montana and I didn’t grow up on a farm, but, you know, my I was around some farms and some cattle ranches and my, my dad’s family side. My aunt had one. And, you know, I did some branding on cattle growing up and we did a lot of fishing and hunting and things like that.
00:20:57:15 – 00:21:25:11
Nathan Crane
And, you know, even then it’s like, you know, we were taught the importance of hard work. You know, young people today, unfortunately, in a lot of places, are not taught what hard work means. You know, they’re just kind of given and handed everything and babied and coddled and, you know, it was like when I was growing up and I’m sure even more so for you growing up on an Iowa farm, you know, a couple of genera of a couple of generations ago, right?
00:21:25:11 – 00:21:40:05
Nathan Crane
Two or three generations ago, it was even more so it’s like we were independent. I was an independent as a kid. It was like, figure things out, you know, watching ourselves at home. Like if you had to stay home, I was sick or something like that, ten years old, like I was home alone all day and my parents had to work.
00:21:40:14 – 00:21:57:12
Nathan Crane
You know, when I was 15, it was like I was I had to buy my first car and do it by washing dishes at a, you know, 15 years old, had a job going to school and washing dishes at a restaurant in the evenings to to be able to pay for my own car. You know, it was like we were taught the value of hard work.
00:21:57:24 – 00:22:15:19
Nathan Crane
And and today, you know, kids are not taught that kids are are not taught to to work hard and to, you know, go through the challenges and to things get tough and they just give up, you know, And the parents are like, okay, I’m sorry, let’s try something else. It’s like, no, you need to go through the hard work.
00:22:15:19 – 00:22:23:03
Nathan Crane
So you as an Iowa farmer, I can imagine, you know, someone saying, hey, you know, you’re having some pain, stay home. And you’re probably like, Yeah, right.
00:22:23:19 – 00:22:39:18
Dr. Terry Wahls
Yeah. That’s just not what you do. Yeah, this is your work, you know, these are my patients, and it was better for me to see them and take care of them than expect someone else who didn’t know their story, didn’t have that relationship, didn’t have all that context.
00:22:41:01 – 00:22:58:01
Nathan Crane
Yeah. And so let’s take a step back for a second. And what was it like growing up on a farm in Iowa? In what what year was that when you were, you know, two teenage years on a farm in Iowa? Give us the experience of what that was like.
00:22:58:20 – 00:23:28:13
Dr. Terry Wahls
Okay. So I have two older brothers and we had milk cows, we had sours and little baby pigs, and we raised the pigs up as feeder pigs to slaughter. We had hay to that. We build filter burns I haystacks to build both the dairy cows and the beef cows. We also had a little pony when I was a little girl.
00:23:29:07 – 00:24:07:05
Dr. Terry Wahls
Then we got an apple of summer that was pregnant. So we had apple juices, which are a light horse. Lovely, lovely for a trail rides and so plenty of work, plenty of opportunity to learn skills. You know, I know how to build a fence, Bill. Hay, oats, straw, corn. We you know you’d get up at 530 at night.
00:24:07:05 – 00:24:10:17
Nathan Crane
What age? Where you starting this kind of work? Like what was the earliest day?
00:24:10:17 – 00:24:35:22
Dr. Terry Wahls
Oh, forever. You know, as soon as you were walking, you accompanied parents to the barns, and I played in the calf pen while my parents did the milking in. Then as they got a little bit older, then my job was to go out and get the cows and chase them in and I would help carry the buckets back and forth.
00:24:37:17 – 00:25:02:10
Dr. Terry Wahls
And so I always remember helping with the barn chores morning and night, and that probably began as soon as I was walking, because the alternative was to leave me alone in the house while my parents did the chores and they didn’t want to do that. So the kids came out to the barns and we were doing stuff to be helpful.
00:25:03:03 – 00:25:35:09
Dr. Terry Wahls
And then when you’re bringing crops in, you’re doing stuff to be helpful. So in the healing process, my mom and I were in in the barn and Mom’s taking the bales lifting up overhead to me, and I’m the highest one up and I’m packing the the bales as we get up to the roof and harvesting corn, my dad’s up.
00:25:35:15 – 00:26:12:18
Dr. Terry Wahls
He’s the one who’s operating the heavy equipment. And my mom and my brothers and I are driving it up in unloaded into the corn elevator, into the barn in the corn cribs that would hold the corn and similarly for the oats. Then in the spring and in the fall, there’s a repairing fence, building new fence. And driving these posts and building the corners, building the gates in.
00:26:12:18 – 00:26:42:09
Dr. Terry Wahls
You have a lot of daily chores that need to happen. Then you have episodic seasonal chores that need to happen and skills that will happen because you’re watching your parents do all of this. And then as you get older, you get either stronger, more reliable, then they teach you. And it’s your job to do this stuff. You know, another sort of interesting seasonal task is chopping thistles.
00:26:43:04 – 00:27:11:04
Dr. Terry Wahls
So my dad would we’d have a spade in the fire and then my dad would assign it feel to you. And it was your job to go walk through, you know, 15 acres, 20 acres, 40 acres and chop all the thistles out of that field. And then he would drive around, and if there were any thistles left, when you said there were none, you know there’d be consequences.
00:27:12:13 – 00:27:32:05
Nathan Crane
That’s like that’s like my daughter, her chores. She’s 11 right now. Her chores are, you know, cleaning up the dog poop in the yard, vacuuming things like that. And sometimes I’ll check on her work. I’m like, did you do everything? Yes, I did. It Really? Did you go over here? Here? What if I go out and find, you know, a because we’re also teaching and good money management.
00:27:32:05 – 00:27:52:02
Nathan Crane
So she has a Oh, yeah. So she earns, you know, $7 for and she has seven different accounts, a savings account, a personal account, you know, for play an investment account. So learning the money management skills, I wish I learned as a kid. Right. So she gets a dollar for each account and then she saves her play money and can buy whatever she wants.
00:27:52:11 – 00:28:09:05
Nathan Crane
I’m like, Well, I’ll bet you your play money. You know, if I go out there and I find one, you know you’re going to give me your play money. Or if I don’t find anything, then you’re going to double and then she’ll question, you know, like I’m like, well, so you better go check, go out there and double check.
00:28:09:05 – 00:28:18:18
Nathan Crane
Yeah. So she’s a little more after, you know, and catching her a few times. Like, what is this? What is this? What is this? She’s a little bit more pays attention.
00:28:18:18 – 00:28:46:01
Dr. Terry Wahls
But you know, it’s interesting. So Jack had her chores growing up. I clearly had a huge chores, which when I was really young, I resented when I went off to college, I was immensely grateful. And we talked about how it would be vital for Zach ends up to have chores and they’re going to have chores. We would be making work for them if we didn’t have work, but they were going to have have real work.
00:28:46:01 – 00:29:15:05
Dr. Terry Wahls
And then as I’m diagnosed and becoming disabled, we’re talking like, you know, God, listen to us. You know, our kids had chores and real work and just like, you know, the work I saw on the farm that I understood, I had an important role to play that Zach and Zeb would have an important role to play in how our our household life existed.
00:29:15:05 – 00:29:32:18
Dr. Terry Wahls
And, you know, in the same way that growing up when I was really young, I various times was quite resentful of some of the work I had to do on the farm. And, you know, and I think that’s just developmentally what kids do. We miss that work, right?
00:29:33:00 – 00:29:39:00
Nathan Crane
And our parents want to play and have fun and not your responsibility. And it’s like, you know.
00:29:39:00 – 00:30:04:13
Dr. Terry Wahls
That that’s what kids do. And of course, our kids resented work and chores, but now as adults, they talk about how valuable that that chores and work and understanding that the work they did in our household really had meaning because of the circumstances of my life.
00:30:04:21 – 00:30:25:20
Nathan Crane
Well, I think that’s important. Well, in your case, especially more so. Right. They I’m sure they even have so much more appreciation for that now. Maybe even more then, but more now, right? Yeah, But I think that’s you know, it is important to to to communicate these things. You know, the like I’m a y person, I love the Y behind everything.
00:30:25:20 – 00:30:40:23
Nathan Crane
So I was like, go do this. I’m like, y you know, like, I want to understand the Y behind before I just go do something and I try to teach my kids the same. I try to, you know, respect my kids in that way, like give them the way. They may not like what I tell them to do even with the Y.
00:30:40:23 – 00:30:43:02
Dr. Terry Wahls
But it but I, I completely agree.
00:30:43:08 – 00:30:55:08
Nathan Crane
Yeah. At least they understand the deeper y behind it, you know? And that’s that’s important. You know, if you’re telling kids like, you know, don’t do drugs, y you know, don’t drink alcohol y it’s like it’s bad for you. Well, not they need more information than that.
00:30:55:09 – 00:30:56:10
Dr. Terry Wahls
They need a lot more than that.
00:30:56:10 – 00:31:14:04
Nathan Crane
You know, it’s also fun. Like they need to know the truth. Like, those things are also fun and they feel great and they’re amazing. But, you know, they can lead to some really terrible life experiences, addiction, death, etc.. So, you know, I think I think I like to look at the full way of things as well. And I think.
00:31:14:05 – 00:31:44:19
Dr. Terry Wahls
That, you know, kids both of my kids went through a period where they’re complaining, you they’re very upset that they have to do the laundry or they’re doing the cleaning and, you know, stopping their little feeds and saying, none of my friends have to do these things. This is so not fair. You know, And I would you know, I would be very empathetic.
00:31:44:19 – 00:32:04:23
Dr. Terry Wahls
Oh, yeah, I can understand. It’s so not fair that you have to know about dishwasher soap. It’s so not fair that you know about laundry and that you and your friends don’t. And but, you know, these are your choices, what you have to do and and it’s so not fair that I have mass and I can’t do these things anymore.
00:32:05:10 – 00:32:30:15
Dr. Terry Wahls
But, you know, that’s life. And so I’m going to go to work and do everything that I can. And you go do your chores because our family needs you to do them. Okay? And then, you know, both of my kids, you know, at about the same age, what that would have the same conversation. Stop their feet and say, I think you are glad you have M.S. so you can lecture me about my chores and responsibility.
00:32:30:15 – 00:32:31:20
Nathan Crane
It must have been teenagers.
00:32:32:15 – 00:32:38:12
Dr. Terry Wahls
No, no, no. They were about ten. Oh, wow.
00:32:38:12 – 00:32:39:07
Nathan Crane
That’s crazy.
00:32:39:15 – 00:32:46:21
Dr. Terry Wahls
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, they get they got chores early in life, and so they’re like, Wait, this is not fair.
00:32:46:21 – 00:32:51:22
Nathan Crane
I was just thinking of the attitudes. Sounded like a teenager, but they must have been a little bit more mature for their age. Yeah.
00:32:51:22 – 00:33:38:00
Dr. Terry Wahls
You know, one of the things that. That we did as a family, I came across this book teaching Your Children Values by Steve and Lynn Iyer, and I really love that book. So that’s got that. When Zach was three that was just born. And the principle of that book is that every day you have a conversation about a value with your children and there’s ways to do it that’s age specific, You know, for preschoolers, elementary, junior high, high school kids, and you pick one value and you talk about it for the whole month and then the next month, the new value.
00:33:38:00 – 00:34:12:05
Dr. Terry Wahls
So we had started that when I started reading kids reading to the kids every night and what that taught me anything is that children can be remarkably insightful about values. And we would at first talk about the value depicted by the book. Then we talk about the value as we saw it being played out by people’s choices or our or our own choices at school and at work.
00:34:13:14 – 00:34:42:05
Dr. Terry Wahls
And by the time the children are eight, they really are very astute by what actions show courage, fear, love, compassion, fidelity, perseverance. And as a result, I, I think both of our kids were far more mature and insightful than their peers. Mm.
00:34:43:19 – 00:35:11:21
Nathan Crane
Yeah. I mean, that’s that’s the difference of having, you know, emotionally intelligent, emotionally invested, deeply responsible, you know, deeply caring parents who are, you know, really thinking through and doing everything they can to to help their children develop. And I think that’s that’s that’s a really challenging thing in today’s world because of how fast paced everything is. You know, both parents usually working full time jobs.
00:35:12:17 – 00:35:36:15
Nathan Crane
You know, they’re just trying to make ends meet. Right. And you wake up, you know, kids go to school. You know, kids are school all day. Parents are working all day. Kids get home. You know, parents go home, make dinner like, you know, get ready for the next day, go to bed, that sort of thing. And there’s, you know, so much stress with bills and, you know, payments and mortgages and credit cards and, you know, trying to plan a vacation once a year or whatever.
00:35:36:15 – 00:36:13:04
Nathan Crane
Like there’s just so much going on in people’s lives today just to survive and so much stress around it, not to mention eating a very unhealthy diet, not exercising, becoming overweight, being unhealthy, and then health problems occur in the family. And so now you’re dealing with that. And so the stress of that and then, you know, a lot of kids are just kind of raised without a lot of, you know, conscious parenting awareness, you know, and those kids and also the parents, whatever, however they were raised right, they are often just being projected to those children, those dysfunctions as well.
00:36:13:12 – 00:36:25:07
Nathan Crane
And so then we just see this repetitive negative cycle, whereas in your case, you know, you you took charge of that and became very, I would say, intentional how you raise your kids.
00:36:26:05 – 00:37:09:21
Dr. Terry Wahls
And then, you know, we start out being a very athletically oriented family when the kids are toddlers very young. And within three years of diagnosis, I mean, it took recline wheelchair and we’re we’re we’re we aren’t backpacking anymore. We’re we’re camping sort of car camping thing with my tent recline wheelchair and we’re doing a little bit of hiking as I’m rolling in my wheelchair and I have to keep thinking very, very deeply about, okay, what does it mean to parent?
00:37:10:17 – 00:37:13:09
Dr. Terry Wahls
As I becoming more and more disabled?
00:37:13:19 – 00:37:20:21
Nathan Crane
This was 2000. You were early forties and then you were diagnosed, right? EMS And then immediately by.
00:37:21:03 – 00:37:31:05
Dr. Terry Wahls
48, I mean the wheelchair. And you know, at that point, Zack’s 11, Zev is eight.
00:37:32:16 – 00:37:35:21
Nathan Crane
It’s like same kids, same age as my kids 27.
00:37:35:21 – 00:38:04:23
Dr. Terry Wahls
And you know, when I talk with Zeb, she’s like, she can’t really remember the athletic. Terri Mm. Yeah, the athletic mom. What she remembers is the reclining wheelchair. The thing, you know, imagine what it felt like for my kids, because when my general neuralgia turns on light, sound triggers the pain. The pain may just come on randomly because of a breeze.
00:38:04:23 – 00:38:37:07
Dr. Terry Wahls
Chewing, swallowing, speaking. They want to comfort me, but touching me triggers the pain. And so how traumatic that was for them to watch these episodes of what they they knew were really horrific pain. And so I’m trying as hard as I can to not grimace, to not scream, to not vocalize. So I don’t want to traumatize them so they can see me wincing.
00:38:37:07 – 00:39:09:19
Dr. Terry Wahls
They can see the tears streaming down my face because I can’t turn that off. You know, I can concentrate so hard to not grimace that move, not grunt, but I might be in the midst of trying to say something and I stop talking because I’m so for a couple of seconds, I can’t talk. I’m completely still. Eventually it gets so that my knees sort of buckle.
00:39:09:19 – 00:39:19:20
Dr. Terry Wahls
You know, that was definitely traumatic experiences for them. Watching the level of pain that I that I would episodically endure.
00:39:20:13 – 00:39:31:05
Nathan Crane
Dealing with all that, dealing with all that pain for so long. I mean, did you ever did you ever think about just ending your life? Did you ever think about just ending it well?
00:39:32:06 – 00:40:06:13
Dr. Terry Wahls
So in 2007 at my Nader, I can’t sit up in a regular chair. I have a zero gravity chair with my knees higher than my nose. I have one at work, one at home. Now, fortunately, I’m my mind is still clear, so I’m still staff in clinic. The residents see the patients talk to me and I even at the I staff, the committee that reviews research, it’s called the IRB Institutional Review Board.
00:40:07:02 – 00:40:37:20
Dr. Terry Wahls
And that’s my my work. I have these episodes of pain that is more frequent, more severe. I’ve come to terms with the fact I’m going to become probably bedridden by my illness because I can’t sit up more than 10 minutes anymore in a regular chair. I’m going to probably become demented because I can tell I’m beginning to have some brain fog.
00:40:37:20 – 00:41:07:05
Dr. Terry Wahls
It’s harder to function at work. My pain is more frequent when it turns on. I go get infusions of really high dose steroids. It takes five days to get this really high dose steroids to get things turned off. I, I go into the painkiller I and get daily injections. While that’s happening and so in my head are like, okay, it’s going to turn permanently on.
00:41:07:05 – 00:41:45:08
Dr. Terry Wahls
I don’t know how soon, but that’s coming. And when it’s on, I can’t talk or I choose not to talk. I don’t swallow. So I’m just drooling because talking or chewing or swallowing triggers, no, Another jolt of pain. So. Nathan and this is a big conversation that Jack and I’ve been having like I change my living will so that if I stop talking or swallowing, there’ll be no IV fluids, no tube foods.
00:41:45:08 – 00:42:20:08
Dr. Terry Wahls
I change my medical power of attorney and and in my documents, I make it very clearly that if I stop speaking or swallowing or it’s my intent, there’s no IV fluids, no two feet. So I find great comfort in that. Okay. So no one will extend a my suffering by giving me I.V. fluids. And yes, I would eventually fade away.
00:42:20:23 – 00:42:52:11
Dr. Terry Wahls
I can’t volitional me and my life because my kids are watching. My kids need say I need to see that you always do the best you can given the circumstances you face, and that if I made any other choice, I would be teaching my children that when bad things happen, when life is difficult, you give up. And what I want to teach them is that, yep, life is difficult.
00:42:52:11 – 00:43:42:09
Dr. Terry Wahls
So what? You still do the best you can in the If I want to show them that resilience, you can’t just give up because things look difficult. So there’s no question to me that Zach and Zeb saved my life, that Jackie saved my life. Had I not had my children, had I not had Jackie, you know, certainly as I saw the trajectory of my life and I said, no, I’m not going to wait for the children of neuralgia to turn permanently on.
00:43:42:18 – 00:44:01:04
Dr. Terry Wahls
And historically, over all of the time, that choice, general neuralgia, has been described that that is the most common outcome when the pain is permanently on, people kill themselves.
00:44:01:15 – 00:44:24:10
Nathan Crane
Well, so you were simultaneously diagnosed with M.S. Talk a little bit about what M.S. actually is so people understand like what that is. So you have to diagnose this going on and RMS is progressively getting worse as well as the trigeminal is actually getting worse.
00:44:24:11 – 00:44:59:16
Dr. Terry Wahls
Yeah, Yeah. So multiple sclerosis first described in the 1800s, it’s a neural logic problem that when you do the autopsy of the brain, the spinal cord, there are these white scars and there’s multiples. So the it’s multiple sclerosis or multiple scars of the brain. It’s spinal cord. As we’ve gotten smarter. So we’re able to do MRI’s, we can detect these lesions, they’re called now enhancing lesions.
00:45:00:09 – 00:45:33:11
Dr. Terry Wahls
And we can see that this come and go in, that people will have acute symptoms at multiple locations in their brain at different time points. So that’s episodes separated by space and time. We now know that there’s an immune attack that’s going on in the brain and spinal cord that lead to these symptoms that the brain can heal sort of and we get.
00:45:33:11 – 00:46:12:00
Dr. Terry Wahls
So relapses, we have symptoms, remissions were things greatly improved in about 80% of the folks are diagnosed with relapsing remitting a 10% will have instead of ever improving just have this slow, relentless decline. And of the folks who have relapsing remitting, eventually the relapses disappear and all you have is this progressive decline. People have multiple sclerosis within seven years out of work.
00:46:12:00 – 00:46:56:09
Dr. Terry Wahls
If you have a manual job that requires you to physically do stuff, then you’re out of work. Usually within three years. The time from diagnosis to problems walking is usually ten years. The time from diagnosis is to wheelchair is usually 15 years. However, that conversion to problems walking is also tied to age. So it’s around 45 that the problems walking tend to show up and it’s really quite rare to not have problems walking or need a walker or a scooter.
00:46:56:18 – 00:47:29:06
Dr. Terry Wahls
By the time you’re age 50 there is a seven year earlier death. There is an earlier onset of cognitive decline and frailty. We have drugs that are really very good at treating off the acute relapses. These are called a disease modifying treatment. Steam teeth, and they have lengthened the time to need a wheelchair excuse me, by about five years.
00:47:29:24 – 00:47:41:13
Dr. Terry Wahls
So that’s super helpful. However, you still end up losing your job, needing the wheelchair, getting demented and dying early.
00:47:41:13 – 00:47:48:15
Nathan Crane
So that’s all I mean, all the drugs do at this point is just slow it down a little bit. Five years.
00:47:48:17 – 00:47:50:12
Dr. Terry Wahls
Slow it down a little bit it and.
00:47:50:16 – 00:47:52:19
Nathan Crane
I have and I’m sure they have side effects as well.
00:47:52:19 – 00:48:05:07
Dr. Terry Wahls
And they have side effects. And, you know, I was thrilled to take those drugs to try and slow down the time to wheelchair to job loss.
00:48:05:12 – 00:48:06:14
Nathan Crane
Did they help, you.
00:48:07:11 – 00:48:36:18
Dr. Terry Wahls
Know, but yeah, but maybe they did. Maybe I would have been in trouble sooner. I really only had two relapses. So from a DMP point of view, it was a huge success. So instead of having 2 to 4 relapses a year, I’d had two relapses in seven years. So if I was in a drug trial, that would have been called a huge success.
00:48:36:19 – 00:48:45:06
Nathan Crane
No, Is that that was that was before you started down the path. Yeah. Diet and lifestyle changes. That was just the drugs per minute.
00:48:45:06 – 00:49:09:03
Dr. Terry Wahls
I just goes all in on the drugs. Okay. And you know, I did my research, found the best medicine in the country, saw their best people, took the newest drugs. I took a continue the decline as I was decline. They they said your functions once lost are gone forever. So let’s be as aggressive as possible. And I was fine with that.
00:49:09:14 – 00:49:38:10
Dr. Terry Wahls
I then took my to own a form of chemotherapy that I knew there was a 2% chance every time I took the drug of turning into leukemia. But you know, being disabled was worse than being dead in my mind. Like, you know, I was fine taking the drug. My physicians had talked about the work of Ashton Embry, who advocate for the paleo diet.
00:49:39:00 – 00:50:18:19
Dr. Terry Wahls
I first big deal. I went from being a vegetarian, low fat vegetarian to back to eating meat. I continued to decline, took chemotherapy. Then Tysabri, the newest biologic drug, was released. I took that. I continued to decline. Then I switched to up and you know, I’m in the equine wheelchair. It’s getting really hard to sit up and that’s when I asked myself, Are you really doing all that you can in your what?
00:50:18:19 – 00:50:52:05
Dr. Terry Wahls
I was first diagnosed, I started reading, going to PubMed, reading all that I could, and I was just getting really upset because I saw the timeline to job loss, dementia, disability, the progressive nature of the illness. And Jackie said to me, You got to stop reading. It’s just upsetting you. So for the first four years or three years, I stopped reading, but once I hit the wheelchair, so, okay, I know how bad it’s going to be bad.
00:50:52:14 – 00:51:25:14
Dr. Terry Wahls
I might as well go back and read. And that’s when at first I was reading looking for new drug studies or off label a drug studies. And then I had a big aha like, you know, maybe I should be looking for things that I could I could access. So then I started looking at first for supplement studies and I was reading supplement studies for M.S. and also thought, you know, I don’t really have relapses.
00:51:26:15 – 00:52:02:13
Dr. Terry Wahls
I should be reading about things that are progressive across the word that many studies for progressive M.S. So I started reading for Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s, ALS. And I say that mitochondria were at the root of all of those diseases, and mitochondria are probably the root of disability programs. And and so that was like 2005. I’m like, okay, this is a mitochondria problem.
00:52:02:22 – 00:52:20:04
Nathan Crane
Which at that at that point I mean there was very few if anybody certainly in the, you know, holistic world, functional or even integrative world and certainly a conventional world. Anybody talking about mitochondria, right. Correct. Was correct. The net now you hear it talks about everywhere all the time, which is fantastic. But then it was like.
00:52:20:11 – 00:52:21:06
Dr. Terry Wahls
Nobody was talking.
00:52:21:06 – 00:52:23:18
Nathan Crane
About that. Nobody was talking about mitochondria at all.
00:52:23:19 – 00:52:27:12
Dr. Terry Wahls
All of the drug attention was for immune suppression.
00:52:27:18 – 00:52:28:10
Nathan Crane
I mean, suppression.
00:52:28:10 – 00:52:29:04
Dr. Terry Wahls
Because.
00:52:29:04 – 00:52:31:09
Nathan Crane
Most is an autoimmune disease, right?
00:52:31:15 – 00:52:32:01
Dr. Terry Wahls
Correct.
00:52:32:01 – 00:53:06:12
Nathan Crane
Correct. And so talk a little bit about, you know, an autoimmune disease. What is an autoimmune disease? What actually happens? Yeah, because there’s a group I mean, I think there’s over 100 types of diseases now that could be classified under an autoimmune disease. Correct. The last statistic I heard, actually, if you actually grouped all of those diseases into one and called them autoimmune disease, which is what they are, the the amount of diagnoses and I believe correct me if I’m wrong, the amount of deaths from autoimmune disease in general is actually higher than heart disease, cancer, diabetes, all of.
00:53:07:06 – 00:53:07:09
Dr. Terry Wahls
Have.
00:53:07:14 – 00:53:08:05
Nathan Crane
Today, right?
00:53:08:15 – 00:53:08:22
Dr. Terry Wahls
Correct.
00:53:09:12 – 00:53:13:11
Nathan Crane
So this is this is like the big elephant in the room that.
00:53:13:18 – 00:53:41:22
Dr. Terry Wahls
In if you look at the graph, some really interesting graphs that look at the rates of EMS, type one diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease, rheumatoid arthritis, they were hardly any at the turn of the century. Right. And they they begin to tick upward at about World War Two. You know.
00:53:41:22 – 00:53:43:11
Nathan Crane
Cancer. Cancer fits in there.
00:53:43:11 – 00:54:23:05
Dr. Terry Wahls
As rheumatic increase. And of course, our genes don’t change that fast. Exactly. But what we eat and do and how we live has radically changed. So all these environmental factors are certainly contributing to that, to these processes, these autoimmune processes. If we add in people who have an autoantibody that is higher than the reference range, so it’s detectable, it’s abnormal, but not so abnormal that I can make a organ specific diagnosis that’s about 50 million people.
00:54:24:01 – 00:55:01:20
Dr. Terry Wahls
If we have the people who have an autoimmune diagnosis that’s 25 million. So now we’ve got 75 million that have autoimmune processes and the cancer diagnoses are about 20 to 23 million. The heart disease again, about 20 to 23 million. So this this is a huge, huge problem where the body has begun to have ah, immune cells that are specifically attacking and damaging structures that we think are healthy in normal.
00:55:02:07 – 00:55:37:15
Dr. Terry Wahls
If I was looking at them under the microscope that like, okay, there’s no damage here, but yet we are damaging these tissues. If we look at it at a on a molecular basis, however, we can see that there may be a molecular side. Change has been added to some of these molecules. So my immune cells can’t see that molecule as having been damaged.
00:55:37:15 – 00:56:13:22
Dr. Terry Wahls
And so it needs to be removed and repaired or or another reason that this can happen is that a microbe that I’ve been infected with, that I’m now finally recognizing as foreign, I need to clear has an amino acid sequence that matches some structure in my body so my immune cells in the process of clearing that microbe also damage parts of me because it looks the same as the microbe.
00:56:14:02 – 00:56:16:19
Nathan Crane
Like your thought, like the cells of your thyroid, for example, the.
00:56:16:19 – 00:56:18:07
Dr. Terry Wahls
Cells in my thyroid, the cells.
00:56:18:07 – 00:56:21:03
Nathan Crane
The thyroid, and you end up with Hashimoto’s or something similar.
00:56:21:05 – 00:56:21:16
Dr. Terry Wahls
Correct?
00:56:21:16 – 00:56:40:17
Nathan Crane
Correct. And now, isn’t it isn’t it true that something in that case, those cells, whether it’s a microbe or it’s it’s a it’s a protein from from even a food, for example, actually has to leak through the gut into the bloodstream for that autoimmune process to occur.
00:56:41:04 – 00:57:08:10
Dr. Terry Wahls
Well, we certainly we have the food we eat gets the gist. But all the microbes in our gut and so we have a large number of microbes, some of those microbes, particularly some of the yeast, if they overgrow, can lead to leakages of the barrier. So sort of have here with my fingers, so being tight together sort of open up.
00:57:09:09 – 00:57:47:10
Dr. Terry Wahls
And then when that happens, food particles, bacterial particles can leak into my bloodstream in incompletely digested food, proteins in my bloodstream will be recognized by immune cells as well. No, no, no. You’re too big. You’re you must be a microbe. I therefore should attack you. And so this is part of the reason why we think gluten sensitivity, for example, is increased because the gluten is getting into our bloodstream when it should have been completely digested.
00:57:47:19 – 00:58:11:21
Nathan Crane
Right. So that’s the big problem. The gluten protein. The gluten itself, especially today, maybe not 200 years ago, we don’t know for sure. But certainly today in most people is causing kind of little micro terrors. Yeah, that in that tight junctions, right. Like you said, it’s supposed to be a tight junctions called tight junctions for a reason. They start to get kind of like little terrors where those proteins can slip through.
00:58:12:00 – 00:58:19:05
Dr. Terry Wahls
They can open up a town, what microbes are in your gut, and not just gluten and toxins.
00:58:19:23 – 00:58:23:13
Nathan Crane
You know, alcohol can destroy the gut lining, right?
00:58:23:13 – 00:58:31:22
Dr. Terry Wahls
Alcohol can aspirin, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, things like even paraffin can.
00:58:33:00 – 00:58:34:05
Nathan Crane
Antibiotics, even.
00:58:34:11 – 00:58:36:09
Dr. Terry Wahls
Antibiotics. Absolutely can.
00:58:36:17 – 00:58:54:12
Nathan Crane
I mean, I grew up so I grew up on antibiotics, right? So I grew up. Yeah. And every time I was sick, it was like, you get cold, you get sick or strep throat. I get strep throat a lot. For some reason, I always had a sore throat. And so I’d go in, go the family doctor, always. They’d check, prescribe me antibiotics or be on antibiotics for a week.
00:58:54:21 – 00:59:26:19
Nathan Crane
And then I was fine. Right. But I was on antibiotics so often as a kid. That’s a very diet, very stressful lifestyle, cigarets, alcohol, drugs, you name it. And no wonder I was sick so often continuously in my early years with gut issues and digestive issues and all kinds of problems was constantly destroying this important, you know, microflora environment in my in my gut that is essential for so many health processes and functions in the body.
00:59:27:16 – 01:00:02:08
Dr. Terry Wahls
Now, another one I talk with my tribe about the autoimmunity. It begins with having genes that make me more vulnerable to and, you know, at least for us, there are about 300 different genes that will increase the risk, most of them ever so slightly, just a half percent, 1%. So let’s step one, Step two is been exposed to some of these microbes that increase the risk about immunity, such as Epstein-Barr virus, the coronavirus, chlamydia, Lyme.
01:00:02:18 – 01:00:31:04
Dr. Terry Wahls
There are about 16 different microbes. And really, Nathan, all of us will probably have been exposed to at least one of these microbes and many of us multiple. So that’s step two, and that’s where that molecular mimicry comes in. But that’s not enough clearly there, because the vast majority of folks who have the genetic vulnerability, the exposure to the microbes never get autoimmunity.
01:00:31:23 – 01:00:57:10
Dr. Terry Wahls
So the third step are all of those environmental factors. Did I have early antibiotics or have a leaky gut? Did I have adverse childhood experiences? You know, my sister died when I was nine. That was a huge adverse childhood experience for my family, a big struggle for for many years. Did I have toxins? We were a conventional firm.
01:00:57:10 – 01:01:00:23
Dr. Terry Wahls
There were a lot of agricultural chemicals that I was exposed to.
01:01:01:06 – 01:01:04:18
Nathan Crane
You guys used pesticides on the on the food, I’m sure. On the.
01:01:04:18 – 01:01:36:02
Dr. Terry Wahls
Crops. Yeah. Yeah, on the crops. I helped my dad spray for a variety of of thistles that that. Okay. And thistles. We got to spray the bore thistles. We had to chop. So we had a wide variety of agricultural chemicals that I was exposed to. I’m an artist through high school and college. I’m doing painting. It’s my undergraduate degree, so a lot of solvents there.
01:01:36:08 – 01:02:05:17
Dr. Terry Wahls
I also did metallurgy that’s led to I went to medical school. I am thrilled as an artist, get to do gross anatomy. But that’s like, you know, the artist’s dream to get to go dissect cadavers. So I had these beautiful notebooks because after gross class, I would go back, unwrap cadavers and make these beautiful drawings. So I probably have three times the formaldehyde exposure as my classmates.
01:02:05:17 – 01:02:05:18
Dr. Terry Wahls
Oh.
01:02:06:03 – 01:02:10:19
Nathan Crane
That’s funny. You call that as an artist dissecting cadavers.
01:02:11:13 – 01:02:14:09
Dr. Terry Wahls
Like, Oh, my God, that was so, so exciting.
01:02:14:09 – 01:02:16:18
Nathan Crane
I never heard it put that way before. It’s funny.
01:02:18:23 – 01:02:46:04
Dr. Terry Wahls
In then, you know, in medical school, I used to be outside deep tan playing vitamin D, you know, I’m in medical school residency. I am very little vitamin D plus. Then I’m trained that the sun is the problem, that all that sunlight leads to skin cancer. So now I’m using sunscreen. So I’m vitamin D deficient for.
01:02:46:04 – 01:03:11:01
Nathan Crane
And you’re putting chemicals and you’re putting chemicals on your skin, which I actually theorized in a in a presentation I taught a while back that, you know, the the chemicals combined with the ultraviolet radiation is actually what I believe worsens and leads to higher rates of skin cancer versus just, you know, spending 20 or 30 minutes a day in the sun, not getting burnt and never having to worry about skin cancer.
01:03:12:00 – 01:03:23:02
Dr. Terry Wahls
I completely agree. And then stress, you know, medical school residency is a little bit stressful.
01:03:23:02 – 01:03:24:17
Nathan Crane
That much sleep a little bit.
01:03:25:13 – 01:03:30:21
Dr. Terry Wahls
Not much sleep a little bit bad for you, you know, is the pain.
01:03:30:21 – 01:03:31:15
Nathan Crane
I mean, the pain.
01:03:31:15 – 01:03:34:05
Dr. Terry Wahls
And the pain with and then.
01:03:34:05 – 01:03:34:21
Nathan Crane
Yeah. Wow.
01:03:35:11 – 01:04:09:04
Dr. Terry Wahls
So I’m in medical school in 1972, 1982. And at that time, there are no protections in terms of, well, if my colleagues figured out that I’m a lesbian, could I be thrown out of medical school, out of residency? You know, times were very different in the sixties and seventies and having to deal with the social stigma and the concern.
01:04:09:17 – 01:04:11:11
Nathan Crane
Your parents knew already or No.
01:04:11:24 – 01:04:12:17
Dr. Terry Wahls
No, no.
01:04:12:18 – 01:04:14:08
Nathan Crane
Yeah. So that was a big a big.
01:04:14:15 – 01:04:16:04
Dr. Terry Wahls
Big deal, you know, And then.
01:04:16:06 – 01:04:22:10
Nathan Crane
We were holding inside that fear, that worry that that of judgment, that concern. Absolutely.
01:04:22:16 – 01:04:38:04
Dr. Terry Wahls
Yeah. You know, and my father was certainly a very devout, a deeply conservative Christian. And so his his faith would have certainly been very rejecting.
01:04:40:02 – 01:04:43:17
Nathan Crane
So did you ever end up telling them about it or what what happened?
01:04:43:17 – 01:05:12:23
Dr. Terry Wahls
You know, it actually is pretty interesting. I, I was in private practice, my partner of many years, and I broke up. I was depressed. I had lost a lot of weight. And I remember my father calling me, What do you mean? And he was telling me that he’d gone through hard times and that you just get through that.
01:05:12:23 – 01:05:45:00
Dr. Terry Wahls
And he talked about we had some hard times at the firm. And I said, Well, this is not about hard times at work, Dad. And he said, You know, I know, I know, Terry, I know you’re kind of gay. And so we had this remarkable conversation for the next hour, maybe hour and a half. That was the first heart to heart conversation had with my father was really quite remarkable.
01:05:45:00 – 01:06:24:12
Dr. Terry Wahls
So he came around and and then, you know, when I decided to have kids, my parents were horrified. They thought, oh, my God, that my child, I would have rejection, that I surely would be fired, that the community would not accept a single parent lesbian mother, but they came around and they ended up being really quite pleased and they were quite pleased and we’re proud grandparents.
01:06:25:14 – 01:06:54:09
Dr. Terry Wahls
And then when they saw that, in fact, you know, the community, the clinic was fine. And you and also I had to learn, Nathan, because when I’d gone through that breakup and I finally came out and talked to my medical assistance in the nursing section, yeah, you know, I’m a lesbian. Yeah, I’m depressed. I get jolted and I’m having to work this out.
01:06:54:18 – 01:07:33:18
Dr. Terry Wahls
And I would joke about being gay and surviving my break up. And what I came to realize is when I would just talk about my life as it really is with my colleagues, with my staff, they were fine with it. They were perfectly fine with it. They’d see me be fine with living my life right. And when my parents saw that I was fine with living my life in that my community was fine with me, living my life, then they were fine with me.
01:07:34:07 – 01:08:04:05
Nathan Crane
Isn’t that so funny? Because it’s so true in so many areas of our life where we create this kind of not only facade to try to protect ourselves from the the fear of judgment, right. Yeah, But it’s it’s almost a make believe fear, because when we actually talk about the thing that we are hiding or afraid of the most and actually bring it out and share it, not only do we feel incredibly free, but most people don’t care.
01:08:04:05 – 01:08:05:18
Nathan Crane
Like, you know, you not.
01:08:05:20 – 01:08:06:18
Dr. Terry Wahls
Know the real you.
01:08:07:04 – 01:08:28:23
Nathan Crane
Right? Yeah. Especially if they see that you’re okay with it and you’re not, you know, it’s like, look, it’s who I am, take it or leave it. And they’re like, okay, You know, most people are like, fine with it. And could we live with these fears for so long, hiding them, so afraid of judgment when in fact, if we just share it and bring it out, there’s actually nothing to be afraid of.
01:08:29:15 – 01:08:30:01
Dr. Terry Wahls
Yeah.
01:08:30:11 – 01:08:46:14
Nathan Crane
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I’ve experienced that multiple times in my life. I mean, public speaking is a great example. When I first started public speaking ago, it was like I was so afraid on stage. I had so much nervousness up there and it was like the first thing I would say was, Man, I’m really nervous right now, you know?
01:08:46:14 – 01:09:03:21
Nathan Crane
And it would just it just like, calm the room down, Like it would calm me down or I’d say something and people would laugh and it was like, All right, boom. The nervousness is gone. Now, when you address it based on usually we can diffuse it immediately. So I wanted to ask. Oh, go ahead.
01:09:05:13 – 01:09:08:19
Dr. Terry Wahls
It becomes easier when we talk our life as it really is.
01:09:08:22 – 01:09:30:23
Nathan Crane
Yeah. Yeah. So I wanted to ask you about well, going back to your son. I saw your son actually wrote a book about growing up, my two moms. I thought it was interesting. I haven’t read it, but I saw that there was that he wrote that book, which is pretty cool. So. All right, let’s go back. You’re in a wheelchair.
01:09:31:07 – 01:09:56:13
Nathan Crane
You are basically you’ve tried everything, pain management, drugs and pharmaceuticals. You know, you’re just and it’s progressively getting worse. And you start researching, you start finding supplements, you start, you know, learning about mitochondria. And then and then what happens from there? You’re basically your health is declining rapidly, but you’re on this search for solutions, which is which is.
01:09:56:13 – 01:09:57:11
Nathan Crane
So first of.
01:09:57:11 – 01:10:24:21
Dr. Terry Wahls
All, you know, five or six, you know, I’m reading, I’m experimenting, adding a few supplements in July of, oh seven, my chief of staff calls me into his office, tells me he’s assignment to the Traumatic Brain Injury Clinic and I’ll start there in January. He describes the job. I won’t have resonance. I’ll have to examine these patients to do their primary care.
01:10:24:22 – 01:10:56:19
Dr. Terry Wahls
I come home, tell Jackie, and she goes, There’s no way you can do that job physically. And it’s like, Yep, I know. And so in January I’ll go and either I can do it or I can’t. And then we have to apply for medical disability. I am like, okay, I’m probably going to have to take that disability. Two weeks later in the packet that I’m reviewing for research is a study in spinal cord injury using electrical stimulation of muscles.
01:10:58:05 – 01:11:24:16
Dr. Terry Wahls
And I think, wow, I wonder if that would help me. So I do a quick search, find 2012 abstracts. It doesn’t take long to read them all. And then there’s just a handful that are for cerebral palsy patients. And so I ask my physical therapist if I can have a test session, says, Well, it’s for athletes. It’s really quite painful.
01:11:24:16 – 01:11:47:16
Dr. Terry Wahls
You have a lot of pain. I can probably grow bigger muscles, but I don’t know that your brain can talk to those muscles. I might be making you worse, but I convinced them to give me a test session. It hurts like hell, but when it’s over, I feel great. It’s the best I’ve felt in years. And Dave says, You know, I think it’s the endorphins.
01:11:47:24 – 01:11:50:09
Dr. Terry Wahls
So we at Eastham to physical therapy.
01:11:50:23 – 01:11:52:24
Nathan Crane
Like to to all your muscles or what were.
01:11:52:24 – 01:11:59:19
Dr. Terry Wahls
You. Oh, we did it to my abdomen and my back and my butt muscles. Okay, so a three of muscle groups.
01:11:59:24 – 01:12:05:14
Nathan Crane
Yeah. Especially sitting, sitting down all day in a wheelchair, right? Yeah. Trying to support the core.
01:12:06:03 – 01:12:18:04
Dr. Terry Wahls
Trying to support the core because I can’t. It’s really hard to sit up. I can sit in a desk chair for 10 minutes, otherwise I’m in a zero gravity chair. You’re with my knees higher than my nose.
01:12:19:08 – 01:12:26:06
Nathan Crane
While not using any basically not using any muscles, not me. So So the atrophy is going to be terrible, right?
01:12:26:17 – 01:12:46:01
Dr. Terry Wahls
Right. So I remember I cannot sit up more than 10 minutes. I have I can do a mat exercise about 10 minutes. If I do longer than 10 minutes, I can’t go to work. So I’m in a really pretty terrible shape. I begin have brain fog, which is why John Deere called me and said, Are you going to go to this new job?
01:12:46:02 – 01:12:49:08
Dr. Terry Wahls
He’s probably doing that to force me into medical retirement.
01:12:49:14 – 01:12:51:19
Nathan Crane
That’s what I was asking. Do you think that was that.
01:12:51:21 – 01:13:21:06
Dr. Terry Wahls
That that’s what that’s you know, and he was right. I think he was absolutely right. There’s no criticism of John for for doing that. And so I’ve discovered this Eastham I’ve started doing Eastham. And I think I’m maybe three or four weeks into that. And then I stumble on the Institute for Functional Medicine’s website and the course they have on neuropathy action.
01:13:22:04 – 01:13:57:15
Dr. Terry Wahls
They’ve got faculty. Jane Lombard, Catherine Wallner are the faculty. They’ve got good credentials. I order the course a big case book, audio, synchronize PowerPoints and a lot of mitochondria stuff, a lot of biochemistry. I’m really thrilled with it. It’s a lot that I’m dealing with, with my, you know, brain fog. I have a longer list of supplements. I add.
01:13:57:15 – 01:14:19:08
Dr. Terry Wahls
And then and now in retrospect, I said it’s embarrassing how, how long this came. But I suddenly had this Aha. Like what if I redesign my paleo diet based on this long list of supplements I’m taking and I figure out where they are in the food supply because then I’ll probably get other things that are good for me as well.
01:14:20:05 – 01:14:49:20
Dr. Terry Wahls
Because, you know, I’d been meticulously buying the paleo diet, you know, no grain, no legumes, no dairy. So clearly gluten free, dairy, free. But now a much more specific where these things are in the food supply, that’s a few more months of research. And I start this new way of eating. December 26th.
01:14:51:15 – 01:14:52:11
Nathan Crane
27.
01:14:52:20 – 01:15:33:09
Dr. Terry Wahls
27, January 2nd, I go to the Direct Ranger clinic. The first two weeks I am watching my my new partners do the exams and like, okay, I should really do that. The third week in January, I start and now I have to examine the patients, write the notes, and then on the first day it’s okay. At the end of the first week I’m doing this, Jack, I tell Jack like, you know, I think, I can do this.
01:15:35:03 – 01:16:06:00
Dr. Terry Wahls
This really wasn’t too bad. And then at the end of the month, I tell Jackie, you know, I I’d like to sit in a regular chair for supper and we so we, we, I have supper in the, in a regular chair at that. And that doesn’t sound like a big thing but it really is a big thing. Yeah.
01:16:06:00 – 01:16:34:02
Dr. Terry Wahls
And then in February it’s clear that my pain is less, my mental clarity is better and my fatigue is gone and I’m not sleeping at night. And I realize I just I can’t sleep. And Jack says, Stop your provigil. So we start my provigil. I can sleep. I’ve been taking provigil because of the fatigue and like, okay, I don’t need that anymore.
01:16:34:21 – 01:17:02:08
Dr. Terry Wahls
I and then I and this is radical. I have a letter that I want to mail in instead of going down in my wheelchair, I have walking sticks in my office and I walk to go mail the letter down the hall and people are like, Oh my God, that was your walking. If they haven’t seen me walk at the hospital, you know, in about four years.
01:17:04:02 – 01:17:35:05
Dr. Terry Wahls
And, you know, my physical therapist says, you know, you’re definitely stronger. He advances my exercises. I’m adding more esteem. I can exercise now twice a day. I id I they says, you know, it’s 45 minutes of stem. Each muscle group will grow the muscles and you can stimulate as many muscles as you have time to stimulate. So then I’m like, Well, I’m working full time.
01:17:35:05 – 01:18:01:01
Dr. Terry Wahls
So I go start doing this at work. So I take my it’s a pocket device so I can take it. And I’ve stimulated my muscles at work. I’m doing isometric contractions and I’m doing the current at a level that I can tolerate. So I’m not grimacing or grunting. I can still have a conversation and so I’m gradually increasing my exercise.
01:18:01:01 – 01:18:31:00
Dr. Terry Wahls
But you stem throughout the day. And then in May, I it’s Mother’s Day. I tell Jackie that I want to try riding my bike and I haven’t done that in six years. So we have an emergency family meeting, she tells my son, who is six foot five. He’s six years old, you know, big athletic guy, my daughter who’s 13.
01:18:31:17 – 01:18:59:02
Dr. Terry Wahls
She’ll tell Zach, you run on the left, jab, you jog along on the right and she’ll follow. So I get in a position and there’s no cars coming so I can push off. The bike wobbles just for a bit. But I catch my balance and I bike around the block. But my six year old boy, he’s great service.
01:18:59:04 – 01:19:34:13
Dr. Terry Wahls
Great. Jackie’s great. And I cry still talking about that because you see that that is when I understood that the current understanding of progressive multiple sclerosis is incomplete and who knew how much recovery might be possible. So after that, I kept biking a little bit more every day. Yeah. And in October, Jackie signed me up for the courage.
01:19:34:13 – 01:20:07:17
Dr. Terry Wahls
Right. 18.5 miles. And you know, at that point, the longest I biked was eight miles. So this was a pretty big jump. But when I finished that and across the finish line, you know, my kids are crying, Jake is crying, and I’m again. And that fundamentally changes how I think about disease and health, the way I practice medicine and the focus of my.
01:20:07:17 – 01:20:09:15
Dr. Terry Wahls
Did you did you shed a tear there, too, Nathan?
01:20:09:19 – 01:20:33:19
Nathan Crane
You’re making me cry over here. I mean, I mean, it’s just like it’s like in my case, you know, the the simple joy of teaching a child how to ride a bike. This is kind of where my, my mind went to was like, Here you are reclaiming your life again, as if, you know, a parent teaching their child how to ride a bike.
01:20:34:01 – 01:20:56:06
Nathan Crane
And here’s your children helping you, you know, to ride a bike again in your later years in life. And it’s just like, oh my gosh, it’s so incredible and so inspiring. I can only imagine for you what it must have. You know, what it must have been like to to have that opportunity back to say, hey, actually, you know what?
01:20:56:07 – 01:21:07:05
Nathan Crane
Something’s working here. I’m reclaiming my health. I’m feeling better. I’m, you know, having hope again, probably for the first time and who knows how many years. How incredible.
01:21:08:21 – 01:21:09:06
Dr. Terry Wahls
Yeah.
01:21:11:01 – 01:21:32:09
Nathan Crane
So what were the big changes? And we can get into the walls protocol a bit because I know you know, the book you’ve written about this in the work, a couple of books, a few books you’ve written about this. They go into depth into what you’ve later come to, you know, call and design walls protocol, which goes into depth of like all the things you’ve done, the diet, lifestyle changes, all of that.
01:21:32:09 – 01:21:41:21
Nathan Crane
But I want to get into some of that. What were some of those big changes that that you made in the diet that you started to see some some huge results and such a, you know, just a few months really.
01:21:43:06 – 01:22:22:07
Dr. Terry Wahls
You know, so I’d already adopted the paleo diet in 2002, so I’d done that for five years. But the Paleo diet really focused on what to remove. It was when I was focused on what to add and the big changes. I ate a huge amount of green leafy vegetables, kale, collards, spinach, romaine lettuce, parsley. I had more cabbage, onion and mushroom vegetables.
01:22:22:17 – 01:22:58:08
Dr. Terry Wahls
I had more beets, carrots, berries. And it was really interesting. So I’m recovering and I’m like, I can go to scientific meetings again. So I’m going to scientific meetings presenting a research embrace covered is if I couldn’t eat the huge volume of greens that had been consuming, my mental clarity would begin to falter at 36 hours. I thought, Wow, that was really interesting.
01:22:58:14 – 01:23:01:13
Nathan Crane
Now are you eating these mostly raw, mostly cooked balls?
01:23:01:18 – 01:23:35:14
Dr. Terry Wahls
I would say it was probably 5050. Okay, So then I learned that I had to travel with a head of cabbage in. I traveled with powdered greens so I could keep up my vegetable intake. I also would back to eating liver every week and heart gizzards, tongue, you know, having more oysters, mussels, clams. And I’d made the decision if it wasn’t organic.
01:23:35:14 – 01:24:07:20
Dr. Terry Wahls
I’m not eating at it was adding fermented foods. I was having a lot of nutritional yeast as well. I and I had this list of foods that I needed to be consuming. When I decided and I started talking to my my better and patients about diet and lifestyle, I was like, okay, I only have a few minutes with these rats.
01:24:07:20 – 01:24:33:14
Dr. Terry Wahls
I need to have a an easy way to teach them how to eat what so when they go home, they could remember I and that caused me to think a lot about what are some of the food rules I could use to get people to be successful copying what I’ve done and to get the nutrients that I wanted to be sure that people had in.
01:24:33:14 – 01:25:09:19
Dr. Terry Wahls
That’s how over a period of a year there was protocol spawned with the three of greens, the three cups of sulfur rich cabbage, onion, mushroom, family, vegetables, three cups of deeply colored beets, carrots, berries. And I, I recognize that some people are deeply committed to being vegetarian or vegan. So we talked about if that’s where people were coming from, how to make that give that as an option and to give them structure so they could be more successful.
01:25:09:19 – 01:25:41:17
Dr. Terry Wahls
But I also created a protocol that were clearly for the omnivore. I call that the was Paleo there. We talk about the benefits of organ meats and wild fish grass, fish meats. We talked about fermented foods for everyone, some seaweed for everyone. And if you are going to have nuts and seeds to soak and germinate them. And then we talked about a lower carbohydrate version that is more ketogenic.
01:25:42:23 – 01:26:12:11
Nathan Crane
Hey, I just want to pause a second. Ask you, are you enjoying this episode so far? Are you getting good value from this content? If so, then I know you’re going to absolutely love healing life at Healing life dot net. You get exclusive and premier access to hundreds of the top world’s doctors, experts, cancer conquerors, and survivors. Exclusive interviews that I have done with all experts and doctors that are not available for free online.
01:26:12:11 – 01:26:34:13
Nathan Crane
They’re only available at healing life dot net. So not only do you get access to all of those, but you actually get to speak with these doctors and experts and ask them any question you want about health and healing. And this is available exclusively to healing life members. You can try it out for free. Go to healing life dot net, and you can start your free trial there.
01:26:34:21 – 01:27:02:10
Nathan Crane
And whether you’re interested in learning more about detox or cancer, diet and nutrition and nutritional science, about diabetes, about heart disease, autoimmune disease, anti-aging, longevity, all of these topics are covered in depth, and more are continuing to be added at healing life. And again, you get to talk to these doctors yourself. So I invite you to set up a free trial at Healing Life dot net and I hope to see you over there.
01:27:02:13 – 01:27:36:19
Nathan Crane
Now, let’s get back to the show. Now. It makes sense. I think what you did was I to highlight something you did because because a lot of people in the holistic health space, people who anyone who starts to go down a more natural path can get into this kind of trap, this same trap that we have fallen into, unfortunately, with the, you know, kind of conventional medical model, which is, you know, let’s get very myopic into one molecule or one particle or one thing and attack that one thing with one drug or this or that.
01:27:36:19 – 01:28:07:16
Nathan Crane
Right. One organ or what? Instead of looking at the entire system and in supplements, we can do the same thing, right? Where it’s like, well, we take this supplement for this problem and this supplement for this problem, this other. And it doesn’t exactly work that way because we have all of these very complex, interconnected, integrative, you know, biological physiological systems that are all dependent and work not only synergistically and harmoniously together, but need multiple sources of input for them to work properly.
01:28:07:20 – 01:28:36:19
Nathan Crane
And so I think what you did was really fascinating and incredibly intelligent, which was, all right, I’m taking these supplements that have all these different nutrients in them that have shown to see some benefit clinically. But why don’t I go to the source, right? Why don’t I go the source of where these nutrients come from which which led you obviously to the greens, the vegetables, the dark leafy greens, you know, the cruciferous vegetables, the brassicas, you know, highly nutrient dense lots of minerals, lots of vitamins.
01:28:37:08 – 01:29:04:21
Nathan Crane
You know, obviously the the anti-cancer molecules, the or the anticancer effect, I should say, with the sulforaphane and you know, so many benefits from all of these vegetables dark, leafy, dark, leafy greens in the berries as well, which we know are incredible for brain function, neurological function, immune system. Right. So going to the source and maybe talk a little bit about that, why it is so important to have these whole foods, real foods in your diet.
01:29:06:06 – 01:29:36:19
Nathan Crane
Significantly, there’s nothing wrong with supplements, but supplements are meant to supplement right like a supplements like 10% or 20% of what you’re doing. The 80% plus should be coming from real whole food because you’ll never get even if a supplement says 350% RDA of vitamin K like yeah but you know that has been processed and taken out from its original source and you don’t get the fiber with it and it’s basically not a living thing any longer.
01:29:36:19 – 01:29:50:22
Nathan Crane
Like, you know, the energy of it as well. If you want to look at energy, the energy of a living plant versus something is processed and turned into, you know, you can measure these things, you know, the energy isn’t there. And we are energetic beings, Right? So, yeah, talk a little bit about.
01:29:50:22 – 01:30:26:01
Dr. Terry Wahls
Yeah, you know, our vitamins that were first identified as critical for health A were based on technologies that were available basically 100 years ago. And we now have technologies that allow us to analyze the changes in metabolites of 6000 different compounds as we’re trying to understand how the fluctuations of these metabolites in our bloodstream are associated with improving health or declining health.
01:30:26:24 – 01:30:53:23
Dr. Terry Wahls
And we have much greater appreciation that it’s the food that you and I eat that is then acted upon by the bacteria that in other microbes that live in our gut, that then these compounds are absorbed into our bloodstream where they go to the liver. And if you have a healthy liver, the liver will say, yep, these are the good ones.
01:30:53:23 – 01:31:24:21
Dr. Terry Wahls
We’re going to hang on to those and these are the ones that are problematic. Those out or put them in the bile and dump them out. I it that it’s that rich biochemistry that that we can have from the food we eat and the microbial action on that food that allow us to make all of those biochemical reactions that we need to keep life going.
01:31:24:21 – 01:31:55:11
Dr. Terry Wahls
It’s a very complicated process. In every one of our cells, we have tens and, hundreds of thousands of chemical reactions that are happening every second that are cycling back and forth. It’s like sort of a yin and yang. You may be able to keep me alive sort of with just total parental nutrition, with vitamins, minerals. But I’m not going to thrive.
01:31:55:23 – 01:32:55:11
Dr. Terry Wahls
If I’m going to thrive, I need to be able to do that rich biochemistry in order to do that biochemistry, I have to have a rich, diverse set of inputs. And so this is where having more food that’s real food as opposed to food that has been processed, the more we’ve had a lot of emulsifiers surfactants compounds put into the food to make the food have quote, nice mouth appeal or a long shelf life or that has additives that are stimulants to my brain to increase my dopamine, create craving so that if I’m not taking that processed food on a regular basis, I have craving withdrawal, you know, and you can think of big tobacco.
01:32:57:00 – 01:33:46:05
Dr. Terry Wahls
They were very good at learning how to manipulate their product to create craving addiction independence. Those scientist were purchased, bought up by the big food company, and the big food companies. Take the food scientists, those young, hardworking PhDs. Instead of going into academia, they go into the big food industry and they can use their scientific knowledge to create more food like molecules that will be stimulating to my brain, enhancing my pleasure, enhancing my dependance and craving, which is why the processed foods have become so addictive.
01:33:46:19 – 01:34:11:10
Dr. Terry Wahls
And I would also add that we’ve allowed these food companies to target our children and make our children dependent on these compounds. They’re are starving them for nutrition, but making them loyal customers for a product that will destroy their health as people and as adults.
01:34:12:00 – 01:34:34:13
Nathan Crane
Well, now we see just about every chronic disease on the planet skyrocketing in children. Yes, at younger ages than ever before. I mean, cancer is the number one cause of death in children. Now, aside from childhood accidents, I believe, which is children never used to have cancer. And now, you know, children are dying from cancer every day.
01:34:34:23 – 01:34:37:20
Dr. Terry Wahls
Autoimmune disease in autoimmune disease.
01:34:38:00 – 01:34:39:04
Nathan Crane
The city. Right.
01:34:39:04 – 01:34:41:05
Dr. Terry Wahls
Anxiety, depression, rage.
01:34:42:10 – 01:35:04:12
Nathan Crane
It’s in these foods are as addictive as drugs. And they if you can imagine, like when you go to any fast food restaurant, for example, you go, oh my God, it tastes so good. And it’s you know, I love that hamburger, that cheeseburger and fries or whatever it is. And you go that fast food restaurant and it’s like you feel so, you know, you’re like, I can’t wait to go get my my, my burger and fries.
01:35:04:12 – 01:35:04:17
Dr. Terry Wahls
Yeah.
01:35:05:01 – 01:35:30:24
Nathan Crane
What what has happened for you to to feel that way? There’s as you were just talking about, was literally a room of scientists sitting around saying, how do we get the perfect formulation of sugar? Sweet, you know, a sweet flavor, salty flavor, oils. How do we get this perfect formula to make the consumer as addictive as possible, addicted to our food as possible.
01:35:30:24 – 01:35:45:12
Nathan Crane
So they come back and they want more and they want a second one. They got to eat their three times a day, four times a day. This is literally what they’re getting paid to do, to do. This is their job. And, you know, I’m not saying they’re bad people. I’m just saying this is what’s going on behind the scenes that a lot of people aren’t aware of.
01:35:45:18 – 01:36:07:22
Nathan Crane
And it’s true in the in processed food that you buy in packages, the Swedes, the candy bars, they all have these food scientists and they’re putting millions and millions and millions of dollars this research to make you as addicted as possible to these foods that we know are contributing to massive proliferation of chronic disease on the planet.
01:36:09:10 – 01:36:51:22
Dr. Terry Wahls
And I’m holding up my phone because we have a similar group of scientists who are superb at creating pleasure enhancers in social media, in our apps and video gaming, so that our children are young adults, and adults are getting addicted to gambling, to pornography, towards social media, and we are destroying our society because these things are not regulated, they’re not controlled.
01:36:52:07 – 01:37:34:09
Dr. Terry Wahls
Know we’ve had controls on tobacco consumption, we’ve had controls on consumption. You know, and one of the things that I would love to do is to have these compounds that know that are accelerating chronic disease, accelerating sedentary behavior, have to pay for the diseases that they’re contributing to. I it’s complicated. And unfortunately, we’ve created a political system that has diminished the power of individuals in amplify the powers of corporations.
01:37:35:10 – 01:37:42:21
Dr. Terry Wahls
And I know that that’s a separate conversation about how our society will resolve those tensions. Yeah.
01:37:43:18 – 01:38:04:13
Nathan Crane
Yeah. I mean, a fascinating thought, right? Thought experiment. If you create a product that is a known carcinogen, processed meats, known carcinogens, right. They contribute to cancer. If you create and sell a product, it’s cigarets, alcohol, whatever it is known carcinogens contribute to cancer. Then You know, you are taxed a health cell, what’s called a health tax, Right?
01:38:04:13 – 01:38:30:17
Nathan Crane
Like you are deeply that you are helping people get addicted to these things that cause disease, which is very not only disruptive to their life and ends their lives early and creates a lot of pain and suffering, but also their children, their family and the entire community, we all pay for it together. They pay for it through health care, through sickness, through, you know, the bad political decisions, all these things relevant.
01:38:30:17 – 01:38:51:04
Nathan Crane
And so, you know, is a tax enough to to reduce or, you know, and then do you and then you cross in the line of, well, you know, now we’re you know, of choice and all of that. But I think at the very least, you know, educating people about this as as you do, as I do, is as many of our colleagues do, I think that’s number one, educating ourselves.
01:38:51:15 – 01:39:05:14
Nathan Crane
But then number two is like maybe like the cigaret companies had to do. You know, these cigarets can cause cancer, like, right on the packet. Yeah, maybe that would help, but people still smoke Cigarets But I think a lot less than before, right?
01:39:06:01 – 01:39:37:23
Dr. Terry Wahls
Is less than before. And we can think about when in the sixties and seventies. In early eighties, if you went to a bar, there was tobacco everywhere. And when I grew up seatbelts in cars were very rare and when I grew up people didn’t wear bike helmets. But society evolved and we did graduate, restrict tobacco use and into fewer locations.
01:39:37:23 – 01:40:12:02
Dr. Terry Wahls
And the harms of secondhand smoke became known. I in cars were designed for safety. So now we have seatbelts and airbags and helmets on. Wearing bikes has become a thing, so it is possible that we can make societal decisions that will find a way to make it more attractive to do the right thing. MM Well, we restrict marketing to children.
01:40:12:13 – 01:40:22:14
Dr. Terry Wahls
Will we decrease subsidies to wheat, corn, soybeans, increase subsidies to vegetables.
01:40:24:06 – 01:40:40:11
Nathan Crane
Organic organic farms as well? Instead of the convention? No GMO, highly pesticide, highly chemicals. So I mean, just doing that, just switching, you know, the subsidies from, you know, the GMO, highly pesticide to organic farms could make a huge difference.
01:40:40:11 – 01:40:43:01
Dr. Terry Wahls
Or even just taking away the subsidies.
01:40:43:13 – 01:40:47:22
Nathan Crane
Just take them away. Yeah, you don’t even have to switch them. Just take them away. You could take them away.
01:40:49:02 – 01:40:54:01
Dr. Terry Wahls
You could look at growing protein lower down the food chain. Well.
01:40:54:12 – 01:41:19:22
Nathan Crane
Some people would say, well, what about the farmer? Well, well, unfortunately, today most of the small farms have gone away and they’ve been taken over by these massive, massive corporate conglomerations. Anyway, number one, who just raped the land, you know, destroying the fertile soil, putting so many chemicals on it and killing all the diversity of the biodiversity and to the small farmers who are still there trying to make a living.
01:41:19:22 – 01:41:53:01
Nathan Crane
Yes. If you took away their subsidies, they wouldn’t make a living. But what’s very fascinating is there are farmers who are being educated in this regard who are switching to organic farms, getting out of those mono crop, highly chemicals, pesticide fertilized crops. And they are not only seeing better overall crop production within a couple of years, but they’re actually making more money because they have to because they’re not just dependent on the corn or the soy or, you know, the wheat, which is primarily going to animal feed anyway.
01:41:53:12 – 01:42:02:17
Dr. Terry Wahls
There are more there is a much more rapid growth of farms under 25 acres that are these small intensive farms.
01:42:02:19 – 01:42:05:06
Nathan Crane
Well, you have one yourself, five acres.
01:42:05:06 – 01:42:31:23
Dr. Terry Wahls
Well, well, I have a tree farm, so we’re still farming. We are farming walnuts and an oak trees. Nice. But there are there has been a much more rapid expansion of these small farms and farms that are an acre, a half acre that are this very intensive farming. And there are an explosion of farms in the urban setting.
01:42:33:01 – 01:43:09:22
Dr. Terry Wahls
There’s interesting farmer here in Iowa who’s growing crickets and crickets as a source of fiber and a protein that if we re-imagine farms as urban farms, I think growing your protein lower down on the food chain will probably be in the end more profitable and less ecologically taxing on the planet. So I think there are some very interesting innovations happening in the farming world.
01:43:10:07 – 01:43:37:08
Dr. Terry Wahls
I also see the regenerative farmers that are recycling chicken and cattle and have this intensive foraging that is being rotated through the soil areas and rapidly improving the fertility that soil. Yeah, I’m going to go. So I love that.
01:43:37:16 – 01:43:56:19
Nathan Crane
Well, yeah, I mean, and I’ve been I, I’ve been primarily the whole plant, but it’s like primarily vegan in my diet for over a decade. And even when I did my deep research and documentary series on sustainability, there are some vegans who say, Oh no, you got to stop all animals on the land. And Darren, it’s like, that’s one of the dumbest things you could ever say.
01:43:56:21 – 01:44:18:14
Nathan Crane
Like, yeah, if you actually take care of animals properly on the land and they’re rotating, they’re able to move around like animals, you know, any kind of animal on the land for the most part, as long as they’re not overgrazing is, is essential to the regeneration and health of that land. They fertilize land, they move seed around, they take down invasive species.
01:44:18:14 – 01:44:36:02
Nathan Crane
They’ll eat it. Right. They’ll I mean, they help animals on. The land are meant to be on the land like what happened to Yellowstone when they took the wolves out. Right. Because, oh, you got to get rid of the wolves. And then what? You know, and then the deer population overtake the place and start destroying the wildlife. They Oh, we got to put the wolves back in.
01:44:36:07 – 01:44:56:22
Nathan Crane
Well, yeah. Don’t you think. You know, they’re essential for the carnivores are an essential part of the natural cycle of herbivores, carnivores, omnivores. We need all of that in nature. Working harmoniously, you know, for the planet to be able to regenerate. You take any one of those out and put the other one in excess, it’s going to be a big problem.
01:44:57:14 – 01:45:45:21
Dr. Terry Wahls
Yeah. The regional farmers do a lovely job. Yeah. Intensively grazing and then rotating and so you have intensive fertilization of the soil and you rotate and so you need all of that manure. Yeah. I grew up. We understood manure was vital towards improving the fertility of the lay of the soil. And so I’m sure, you know, my father grandfathers, grandmothers all down the ancestral farming line are thrilled that I’ve talked so fondly of manure, of microbiome, of how that is an essential part, restoring the health of the soil and the health of the individual and the health of us.
01:45:46:05 – 01:45:46:14
Dr. Terry Wahls
Yeah.
01:45:47:09 – 01:46:06:18
Nathan Crane
I want to show a picture from your website really quick so people can see what what we’ve been talking about, people who are watching this. Anyway, if you’re listening, I’ll describe it. But those who are watching, you can see a picture. This is or you can go see it at Terry Walmart.com, basically. This is Terry. Can you see this?
01:46:07:11 – 01:46:08:22
Dr. Terry Wahls
Oh yeah.
01:46:08:22 – 01:46:19:02
Nathan Crane
This is Terry in a in a wheelchair as we’ve been talking about. This is October 1st, 2007. Right. And this is when you were really probably at your worst, you say.
01:46:19:09 – 01:46:21:02
Dr. Terry Wahls
Yeah, that was my worst.
01:46:21:06 – 01:46:45:18
Nathan Crane
Still trying to basically survive and at the you know, headed downward spiral and potentially heading towards, you know, medical disability and all the terrible things that were to come. And then here this is one year later. So you would change your you were starting to build it. Here you are one year later, October four, 2008, looking healthy, smiling, vibrant on a bicycle.
01:46:45:18 – 01:46:48:22
Nathan Crane
Like, how amazing is that? That’s incredible.
01:46:48:22 – 01:46:55:16
Dr. Terry Wahls
That what that’s that’s the bike that went 18.5 miles. Mm.
01:46:55:16 – 01:47:10:13
Nathan Crane
And so in one year you were able to I mean tell us. Okay, so that one year period are after one year. What were all the things he did your diet obviously or you talked about. We do more exercise more.
01:47:10:13 – 01:47:41:07
Dr. Terry Wahls
EASTHAM So I was progressively doing exercise in Eastham, and I had I was seeing my physical therapist a year, three days a week, and I had done that for years, literally. So that was a huge I paid attention to meditation again, I had done Transcendental Meditation for years during medical school. I quit. I have no idea why I quit.
01:47:42:01 – 01:47:55:13
Dr. Terry Wahls
And then, you know, when I was diagnosed with Amazon, I knew that stress made my face pain worse. I have no idea why I did not go back to methylene. Then I was like, Oh my God, it clearly should have been.
01:47:56:09 – 01:48:24:00
Nathan Crane
Could it have been that? And a lot of a lot of medical doctors I’ve talked to over the years who have become, you know, trained functionally or holistic medical doctors later on, you know, talk about the kind of the the taboo or is a better word I’m saying. I was sent my tongue as a as a medical doctor, you know, even talking about natural alternatives or therapies, you can be considered a quack in your you know, around your colleagues and so forth.
01:48:24:00 – 01:48:29:01
Nathan Crane
Was it was there some of that? Was that like meditation was just like it was so taboo. It was just like, well, whatever.
01:48:30:02 – 01:48:54:00
Dr. Terry Wahls
You know, I think it was that I was busy. There’s only so many hours in the day and I quit during medical school and train because I, I didn’t have enough time to do everything else and I didn’t want to stop running. So I was like, okay, I got more fun out of run. Then out of meditating. So I kept that part going, Yeah.
01:48:55:05 – 01:49:23:04
Dr. Terry Wahls
And then as I could do less and less, the demand for my time and you know, that sense of time pressure was still very keen. So. So anyway, it’s meditation. It’s aware that I should. For a long time I thought getting 4 to 6 hours of sleep a night was an advantage because I know there’s a lot of stuff I wanted to do.
01:49:23:20 – 01:49:54:10
Dr. Terry Wahls
And I began to realize that, no, no, no, I should try to get 7 to 9 hours. So I would stay in bed and I would meditate rather than get out of bed. So attending to sleep, meditating is the exercise that you stem. And I would keep what everyone know that as a prior athlete, I understood the importance of training my physical therapist.
01:49:54:10 – 01:50:26:01
Dr. Terry Wahls
I saw a treated athletes. He treated me like the other athletes, you know, without the a training plan. And I did that. And then because I’m sort of an intense person, I trained a lot more than what he told me I could. And so I basically was training in some capacity from the moment I woke up to the moment that I went to bed.
01:50:26:10 – 01:51:06:06
Dr. Terry Wahls
And keep in mind, Nathan, I was doing this not recover, because I had been taught that once you hit the secondary progressive phase of multiple sclerosis that functions once lost, do not come back. And that I was doing all of this to keep the things that I still had a bit longer because the trajectory seen was I have a progressive disease that is progressing, my pain is progressing, my weakness is progressing, My hands still work, so I could still feed myself, dress myself, you know, wipe my own.
01:51:06:06 – 01:51:29:19
Dr. Terry Wahls
But that was worth a lot. I would keep that going as long as I could. I still walk around in my house with my walking sticks, although Jack and I were talking about the fact I’d have to bring a scooter in the house because we weren’t sure how much longer I’d be able to keep walking around the house with the walking sticks.
01:51:29:19 – 01:51:58:23
Dr. Terry Wahls
And that’s where I was at in 2007. So as I was recovering. So I’m walking with my walking six around the hospital walk. If I can, six around the block, then with one, then with nine. One of the things that happens when you have a progressive disease or a progressive neurologic disease is as you come to terms with the fact, okay, I’ve got a progressive disease, it’s going to get worse every day.
01:51:58:23 – 01:52:30:02
Dr. Terry Wahls
I don’t know where it’s going to end or how bad it’s going to be. I’m going to let go of the future. I will stop imagining my future. I will just live for today and it will be whatever it’s going to be. So I am remarkably better, but I’ve let go of the future so each day I can get up, I can walk around.
01:52:30:02 – 01:52:52:21
Dr. Terry Wahls
Today’s a good day. I don’t know what any of this means. I don’t know how long it will last. I don’t know what I have. Look, let go of my future. It was the day. And so I did all of that. I was. I was training from the moment I got up and. And only an athlete would do shit like that.
01:52:53:01 – 01:52:53:12
Dr. Terry Wahls
Really?
01:52:53:18 – 01:52:55:18
Nathan Crane
Yeah. Yeah, I can 100% relate.
01:52:56:11 – 01:53:32:04
Dr. Terry Wahls
So. So I, I meditating. I visualizing I’m doing my Easter, my doing physical therapy, and I’m doing that while I work. Mind you. So I have to work and I am sort of multitasking. You know, I come home, have supper and I do my now I get through exercise, I, you know, do my exercise with the east and I’m meditating and visualizing this.
01:53:32:04 – 01:53:40:03
Dr. Terry Wahls
This is an all out effort because I’m I just want to hang on to what I got.
01:53:40:08 – 01:53:44:18
Nathan Crane
Yeah. It’s not I mean, it’s not what you’re talking about is not easy. Like, none of this was easy for you, right?
01:53:44:18 – 01:53:45:15
Dr. Terry Wahls
None of this was easy.
01:53:45:15 – 01:54:06:24
Nathan Crane
I mean, you’re talking about challenging things like people that I see today are they know they should do all these things you’re talking about, but it’s a little hard. So they’d rather sit on the couch and watch TV night. Yeah. Instead, they should be doing some physical therapy or meditating or walking around the block or doing doing these things.
01:54:06:24 – 01:54:18:24
Nathan Crane
It’s like, well, that’s too hard. So I’m going to sit here and hope that things get better on their own, which they never will get better on their own. It just doesn’t happen. We have to take action.
01:54:19:02 – 01:54:28:16
Dr. Terry Wahls
We have to take action. So people say like, so that was such dramatic recovery that you got in one year. No one else has done that. Well.
01:54:29:04 – 01:54:30:22
Nathan Crane
You’re like, Yeah, I was busting my ass.
01:54:30:22 – 01:54:31:17
Dr. Terry Wahls
I’ve worked for.
01:54:31:17 – 01:54:32:16
Nathan Crane
It very.
01:54:32:22 – 01:55:06:24
Dr. Terry Wahls
Incredibly hard. I mean, incredibly hard. You know, basically all my working hours for four years, by the way. Yeah. Wow. But that level of recovery happened and I certainly can’t imagine that there’ll be many people willing to put that level of intensity that I did. However, I will say that in my clinical practice we do work with people who are willing to work really, really hard and.
01:55:06:24 – 01:55:36:06
Dr. Terry Wahls
The people who I see who are most successful are former athletes because they’re like, okay, give me a training program. And we will work with them on Here are the elements of the training that you’re going to do it. And we have to, with my former athletes, I had to go through this too. Is there is you have to work closely with a physical therapist who understands this to pace the training.
01:55:36:06 – 01:55:37:16
Dr. Terry Wahls
So you don’t overtrained.
01:55:37:17 – 01:55:38:08
Nathan Crane
Exactly.
01:55:38:23 – 01:56:21:07
Dr. Terry Wahls
So there’s training schedule, recovery time and what’s going what exercises going to do. I worked very, very closely with a physiotherapist who who trained athletes and that was sort of interesting challenge for him because he so I have profound disability and but I was willing and so we the device he devised, this program that I faithfully did so saw him three days a week and sometimes I would go back to their facility another two days.
01:56:21:13 – 01:56:51:22
Dr. Terry Wahls
I could be there five days a week. I it was enormously intense. We have had other people who are wheelchair dependent get back to walking. There’s this lovely, very inspiring story. A woman whose son was getting married. She wanted to build a walk him down the aisle. She’s wheelchair dependent. We start working with her. We have a physical therapist in Eastham going.
01:56:52:19 – 01:57:18:13
Dr. Terry Wahls
She is able to walk him down the aisle. She’s able to dance with him at the mother son, dance in the wedding. Now, mind you, she couldn’t walk independently yet, so she was walking with her son, her husband on the other arm. She’s thrilled and she’s dancing with her son. She couldn’t dance independently, but she can dance beautifully with her son.
01:57:19:11 – 01:57:37:01
Dr. Terry Wahls
And she was a Division one athlete who was willing to do a couple hours every day for a couple of years to get to that goal. From wheelchair Dependance, unable to take even a few steps to walking and dancing in two years.
01:57:37:20 – 01:57:55:23
Nathan Crane
Well, it’s such a great you know, for anyone who has any athletic background. I mean, if you played soccer when you were ten, right, it’s may not be as much of a mental kind of pull back, but you can find some way to tap into that when it comes to healing and say, look, how do I approach? It’s like training.
01:57:56:05 – 01:58:16:04
Nathan Crane
How do I approach this? Yes, this is Elaine Gibson, a good friend of mine. She’s in her seventies now. She was diagnosed with stage four cancer. The doctor told her, hey, you will not see your grandchildren grow up. They were a terrible, terrible thing to be told. Right. But she was a former and she had already been on a health journey.
01:58:16:08 – 01:58:40:04
Nathan Crane
Health path had been learning about, you know, juicing and a healthy diet and exercise and all these kinds of things. Meditation. And so she told me, she said, look, I just I went training and I started meditating an hour every morning and green juice every day and Whole foods, you know, raw plant based diet and exercise and sauna and detoxification, removing all the chemicals in my house and meditating another hour every night.
01:58:40:04 – 01:59:02:23
Nathan Crane
And it was just like she looked at it as training, training, training. Training for what? Training to to achieve your goal. What’s your goal? In her case was was to be healthy, to outlive that fake. You know, expiration date, as I call it that prognosis And and not only did she do that, but she was able to to completely reverse stage four cancer in a very way.
01:59:02:23 – 01:59:25:19
Nathan Crane
And so you know that’s such a great, great mindset tool you can use if you’re a former athlete. Would you say what would you say aside from that approaching like training, did you have a deeper reason to live, a deeper reason to commit to the training? Did you have something that something that was really pulling you forward to go through all that hard work?
01:59:26:02 – 01:59:52:24
Dr. Terry Wahls
Yeah. And was it just that was my veterans taught me this one is really need to know your why yeah and seconds my two kids and Jackie my was not to be a burden I wanted to be part of their lives yeah and I yeah so I was doing all of that because I didn’t want to be a burden and I wanted to be part of their lives.
01:59:53:16 – 02:00:18:22
Dr. Terry Wahls
And then, you know, when I got on my bikes, like, yeah, I could really be part of their lives. I and what I want everyone who’s listening to know is, you know, I jog in the neighborhood. Now let me repeat that. I jog the neighborhood. No, I’m not fast. I don’t go really far. The longest the farthest I’ve gone is two and a half miles.
02:00:20:18 – 02:00:53:19
Dr. Terry Wahls
But In 2007, I could not sit up at I could not sit up at a table to eat. I could sit up for 10 minutes. And that would meet the definition of being bedridden, which is like, Oh my God. Fortunately, I didn’t appreciate that at the time. I could still walk a few steps with my walking six. We hadn’t yet put the scooter in the house, but we were talking about the fact that we would probably have to do that.
02:00:53:19 – 02:01:01:20
Dr. Terry Wahls
And was that going to what? Doorways were going to have to be redone?
02:01:01:20 – 02:01:07:04
Nathan Crane
And so do you still have some symptoms today of of either the neuralgia or the.
02:01:07:05 – 02:01:41:12
Dr. Terry Wahls
So if I come to your home Nathan and you accidentally give me gluten, dairy or eggs in 6 to 8 hours, I’ll have the traditional neuralgia. Well, if my physical therapist does a strength assessment, they will find that my group medius on my left leg is slightly weak compared to my right leg. And I actually I just had saw my physical therapist a couple of months, so that was the only weakness.
02:01:41:24 – 02:01:49:13
Dr. Terry Wahls
She said, You know, and I’m not even sure if I would have detected that if I didn’t know that. You’ve told me in the past that your left leg is weak.
02:01:49:20 – 02:01:57:12
Nathan Crane
Well, most people have some kind of slight imbalance in one part of their body or another, so I don’t know if I would count that one.
02:01:58:05 – 02:02:23:01
Dr. Terry Wahls
Yeah And so when I saw my neurologist interested in the strength assessment said, okay, how about I do a few pushups for you? Because what so I did 12 pushups just like, Wow, that’s pretty good. So I said, okay, so how about I’ll stand on one leg? So I did that for one minute and I did other leg for one minute because okay, no, no, that’s fine.
02:02:23:01 – 02:03:06:15
Dr. Terry Wahls
We’re good. You you are better than 67 year olds or healthy. Wow. Wow. So I think you are clearly very healthy Now, if do my MRI’s. So I have these old lesions in my brain. I and yeah, still have them. They continue to get a little bit smaller. My neurologist is very clear. So what matters is the rewiring and clearly you have rewired your brain so that you have very, very few, if any, functional limitations.
02:03:06:15 – 02:03:28:20
Dr. Terry Wahls
And the MRI is helpful to say, yep, you got new lesions that are asymptomatic, we should be worried about you, but you don’t have any new lesions, have great function and so we’ll do a surveillance MRI every couple of years and the reports keep getting better over time.
02:03:28:20 – 02:03:46:18
Nathan Crane
This is incredible because, I mean, according to conventional medical science today, m.s. Is an incurable disease. And, you know, I mean, you have basically regressed it to the point of living an incredibly healthy.
02:03:47:13 – 02:03:48:07
Dr. Terry Wahls
Vibrant life.
02:03:48:08 – 02:03:52:14
Nathan Crane
Vibrant life, you know, I mean, some would say that’s cured. Yeah. I mean, it’s incredible. Well.
02:03:52:23 – 02:04:29:12
Dr. Terry Wahls
You know, I’m very careful to not claim cure. It’s very well managed. It’s regressed. If I ever went back to my previous diet, I you know, if I went back to whole wheat bread, which was quite delicious, I, I would have incapacitating pain if I went back to eating eggs, which are also quite delicious, incapacitating pain. If I went back to my yogurts or cheeses, I’d have incapacitating pain.
02:04:29:22 – 02:04:42:22
Nathan Crane
I mean, three. So three three main things that you have found that trigger the neuralgia. What if have you thought I’m sure you’ve thought about this, if you knew that 20 years prior, could you have, you know, reduced all that?
02:04:42:23 – 02:05:14:00
Dr. Terry Wahls
Yeah. You know, I’m actually talking with another neuroscientist about the goal of preventing M.S. Would to identify people who are in that prodromal state. And I had been clearing that put straight for 20 years before my diagnosis. It had known and I could have stopped the gluten, dairy and eggs. I probably would have never had M.S. and my children, when they’re older, would have been manageable.
02:05:14:00 – 02:05:14:16
Dr. Terry Wahls
You also, on the other.
02:05:14:16 – 02:05:16:07
Nathan Crane
Hand, you wouldn’t have to, you know, Go ahead.
02:05:17:01 – 02:05:52:00
Dr. Terry Wahls
I’m really grateful that I have tried herbal neuralgia. One, it allowed me to discover the last protocol and I bell to craft a message that has reached millions around the globe and probably hundreds of thousands of practitioners. And I had this amazing biosensor I know moment to moment is my central nervous system happy, calm, repair in itself, or is it pissed off at attacking me?
02:05:52:00 – 02:06:18:12
Dr. Terry Wahls
So if I have no pain, if the sensation my face is normal, I know that my microglia are happy and my oligo dandruff sites are repairing my myelin good things. If the sensation my face begins to be a little off. I know that something triggered my microglia to be unhappy and I got to figure out what that is.
02:06:20:03 – 02:06:48:09
Dr. Terry Wahls
And so that’s allowed me to be very attentive to my self-care routine, very attentive to what I eat. And so if somebody invites me for a meal, I will turn and look I’ll bring the food. If you want to cook something, you have to read all the labels, because if you have gluten, do your eggs. I will have I’ll be incapacitated with pain and that will happen in about 6 hours.
02:06:48:09 – 02:07:00:23
Dr. Terry Wahls
So. So if you if you still risk cooking for me, we have to talk about that. But I’m happy to bring the food and so you don’t have to have any stress.
02:07:00:23 – 02:07:22:02
Nathan Crane
Yeah, it’s just some of those some of those changes that, you know, you learn to deal with as you as you get healthier and learn to avoid certain things. When we travel as a family, my wife and my kids, we’ve been doing this for over a decade. We pretty much bring our own food wherever we go. We have a cooler and bags full of food, and when we get somewhere we’re shopping or cooking ourselves.
02:07:22:08 – 02:07:53:01
Nathan Crane
We do eat out, but it’s in. I’m a little you know, I don’t have to worry about that as much even though now I yeah, I think I’ve discovered a corn allergy that has been plaguing me for many, many years. So that’s something that I’m like really, really specific with now. But because we’re very particular with food, organic, whole food, avoiding gluten, you know, corn, dairy, these kinds of things, chemicals, pesticides, like, you know, it is a little bit of a challenge as you travel and go out and things like that.
02:07:53:01 – 02:07:56:01
Nathan Crane
But you get used to it and you find ways to do it where.
02:07:56:01 – 02:07:56:23
Dr. Terry Wahls
You find ways to do it.
02:07:57:03 – 02:08:06:10
Nathan Crane
It’s not a burden anymore, you know? And now, because there is such this big push for more healthy options, you can find a lot more help.
02:08:06:10 – 02:08:07:01
Dr. Terry Wahls
It’s much easier.
02:08:07:01 – 02:08:10:21
Nathan Crane
When you do. Travel is way easier now than it was 15 years ago. Right.
02:08:10:21 – 02:08:36:08
Dr. Terry Wahls
So it’s so much easier. Yeah. You know, the other thing that I do is because I do intermittent fasting. Yeah. And so I will fast for one, two, three, occasionally five days I can time my travel, my fasting time. If I’m just gone for 48 hours, I just like, you know what, I’ll just do my fast during that time periods.
02:08:36:08 – 02:08:37:13
Dr. Terry Wahls
It’s no big deal at all then.
02:08:37:23 – 02:08:57:09
Nathan Crane
Yeah, that’s awesome. Well, and the more you do that, the more you get used to it. And it’s like it’s not, you know, it’s not so challenging the more often you do it and actually start to feel good. And so that’s, that’s really smart. So it’s been wonderful talking with you, Terry. This is this has been great.
02:08:58:18 – 02:09:01:02
Dr. Terry Wahls
To talk about the clinical trial that we had going.
02:09:01:06 – 02:09:22:20
Nathan Crane
Yeah. And I was going to mention to, you know, encourage people to get a copy of of your book. That was protocol. You can get it at Terry Walmart.com. But I know you do. And I was going to mention that too that you are doing clinical research on the walls protocol, which is awesome. So yeah, talk a little bit about that.
02:09:23:06 – 02:10:00:21
Dr. Terry Wahls
So we have a clinical trial comparing the ketogenic diet, the modified paleo elimination diet, which basically is the walls elimination diet to usual diet and people with relapsing remitting multiple sclerosis. They come to Iowa City at month zero three and month 24. So we’ll look at walking function vision, function and function, and we will look at brain volume at the beginning and at the end of the study.
02:10:01:11 – 02:10:33:09
Dr. Terry Wahls
The beauty of be able to look at brain by one of the hypotheses they’re going to test naked eye has to do with the rate of brain volume loss because people with our Ms. our brains are shrinking at a rate three times as fast as occurs in healthy aging, which is why we get into problems with anxiety, depression and cognitive decline at a much earlier age than the general public.
02:10:34:13 – 02:11:02:13
Dr. Terry Wahls
One of the things that I’m testing is can we, by teaching people how to have a better diet, get them to healthy aging? I’m very hopeful that we can. I think that’ll be the most important outcome of the study. The other question, of course, is does improving the diet lead to improved quality of life, reduced fatigue and better walking and hand function?
02:11:02:13 – 02:11:39:13
Dr. Terry Wahls
If this will be one of the largest and longest dietary intervention studies that have been done in the setting of multiple sclerosis, We will enroll 156 people. We have at last count, 67, which means I have you know, about 90 that we’re still recruiting for. And we would love to get your audience to come join us and be part of that study so you can learn more about it at my website here.
02:11:39:14 – 02:11:54:19
Dr. Terry Wahls
While Starcom there’s a gold banner across the fund where you can click to screen for the study and then will contact you, get the records. So we can confirm the diagnosis and get you enrolled into into the study.
02:11:55:08 – 02:12:13:11
Nathan Crane
That’s awesome. So so in case someone’s listening or watching this, you know six months or a year or two years later or whatever it might be, I’m assuming if that gold banner is not the top that says, you know, we’re recruiting patients for the new study take survey, if that’s gone, I’m assuming that the you know, you’re not receiving any further patients.
02:12:13:11 – 02:12:19:23
Nathan Crane
So just so people are aware, but if they see the button, you know, then screen.
02:12:19:23 – 02:12:54:23
Dr. Terry Wahls
And probably what will happen, Nathan, is because we keep writing grants, we have new studies that will be doing so when we’re done with this study, I’m very confident that we’ll have more studies that will be doing. That’s because my my personal goal, Nathan, is, you know, I want to still be doing research and having postdocs when I’m 80, when I’m 90, when I’m 100, when I’m 120, and I want to be playing chess with my little people in my life.
02:12:54:23 – 02:13:11:04
Dr. Terry Wahls
So I want to be playing soccer with the little people in my life. I want to be guardian and picking berries with the little people and big people in my lives. So likely we’ll keep having banners for whatever study we’ve got going on.
02:13:11:16 – 02:13:29:07
Nathan Crane
That’s awesome. That’s awesome. Terri Walls dot com. You can also get a copy of her book there. I highly recommend it. She goes a lot more depth into the Walls protocol. But you just mentioned chess. I’ve recently become obsessed with chess. Do you play do you play chess often?
02:13:29:07 – 02:14:00:18
Dr. Terry Wahls
You know, when my kids are growing up, we play a lot of chess. My daughter learned to play chess at four. She Was beating Jackie at age four. We we laugh about that. I would play smack and simultaneously it which kept it pretty even with with both kids to have me trying to play them simultaneously that little timer clock.
02:14:01:05 – 02:14:31:17
Dr. Terry Wahls
So I’ve not been playing competitive chess with them since. But we do a Scrabble thing that we love doing is we’ve gotten into playing Euchre and both my kids have made playing cards. The woman card is just her most recent deck is the history makers. I’ve been trying to convince her that she should make a deck of cards.
02:14:32:04 – 02:14:44:07
Dr. Terry Wahls
The women in Medicine. And she told me that, yeah, that might be the next deck. And maybe this time. Maybe this time I would get to be in that deck. So we’ll see.
02:14:44:08 – 02:14:49:16
Nathan Crane
Oh, that’d be cool. Oh, are you familiar with Chess.com the app? Do you ever use it?
02:14:49:24 – 02:14:50:20
Dr. Terry Wahls
I have not.
02:14:51:03 – 02:14:54:14
Nathan Crane
Okay. All right. I was going to say, you can play people all over the world.
02:14:55:10 – 02:14:56:06
Dr. Terry Wahls
Oh, that would be fun.
02:14:56:06 – 02:15:04:02
Nathan Crane
Is really in that it kind of scores you next to people that are similar to your ELO rating and oh.
02:15:04:18 – 02:15:05:00
Dr. Terry Wahls
Yeah.
02:15:05:05 – 02:15:22:01
Nathan Crane
You play people that are a little less less as good as you, better than you. Right. And so it’s really fun. You can play all different kinds of strains all. But I was asking because like, that’s what I’ve been playing is chess.com and yeah you can, you can play with friends on there too, anywhere just on your phone.
02:15:22:01 – 02:15:22:18
Nathan Crane
It’s pretty cool.
02:15:23:22 – 02:15:27:15
Dr. Terry Wahls
And did you enjoy the Queen’s Gambit? Yeah, that.
02:15:27:15 – 02:15:30:00
Nathan Crane
Was a good series, actually. I thought that was really well done.
02:15:30:12 – 02:15:31:00
Dr. Terry Wahls
That was fun.
02:15:31:05 – 02:15:36:13
Nathan Crane
Yeah, that was really great. We actually, I actually. So I, I.
02:15:37:02 – 02:15:37:13
Dr. Terry Wahls
Love the.
02:15:38:01 – 02:15:56:23
Nathan Crane
First time I played chess. I was a kid and I just immediately loved it. Like anything that requires deep thinking, like, I’ve always been deeply interested in that. So, like, I played as a kid a little bit and then off and on over the years. And then I’ve never gotten serious about it, though, until like a couple of months ago.
02:15:56:23 – 02:16:04:22
Nathan Crane
I’m like, I’m actually going to start learning openings and defenses and watching videos on it. For some reason, something just clicked and I was like, actually want to?
02:16:05:02 – 02:16:05:19
Dr. Terry Wahls
This is fun.
02:16:05:19 – 02:16:08:07
Nathan Crane
I want to really learn this, you know? So it’s been fun.
02:16:08:07 – 02:16:24:10
Dr. Terry Wahls
Yeah. I think for people who are visual artists, it’s very fun. And I think this is probably why my daughter, who’s an artist, was so good at it because we can visually map things out quickly.
02:16:24:10 – 02:16:32:07
Nathan Crane
Yeah, that’s a good point. I’m a very visual person so that, you know, I’d certainly resonate with that special thing. I think what I love about too is a problem solving.
02:16:32:13 – 02:16:33:04
Dr. Terry Wahls
Yeah, Yeah.
02:16:33:08 – 02:16:56:10
Nathan Crane
Right it’s very much problem solving. It’s thinking ahead. It’s looking at all right, different moves in the future, you know, avoiding, avoiding challenges and solving and trying to, you know, achieve a goal. Like, I don’t look at it as this kind of war and attack to destroy my opponent like some people do. I look at it more like, hey, you know, getting somebody new Checkmate is like, that’s a goal.
02:16:56:10 – 02:17:11:16
Nathan Crane
And I use it as a metaphor for life, like my fitness goals, my health goals, my business. Yeah, right. And so I’m like the goal is to get the checkmate. And so how do we find ways creatively and uniquely to to achieve that goal? Right? So I think it’s.
02:17:11:21 – 02:17:49:08
Dr. Terry Wahls
It’s, it’s this is a lovely segway into cognitive training. We talked about cognitive decline being a huge risk for people with M.S. So what are things that you enjoy that you can have some problem solving, a new skill, whether it is Scrabble or euchre, hearts, Crazy eights, chess, learning a new language were some of the online training programs such as brain, age, luminosity.
02:17:49:08 – 02:18:19:19
Dr. Terry Wahls
I’d encourage anyone with a neuro immune condition or a mental health condition to think about any of these cognitive training, and it should be fun. Yeah, well, whatever. Whatever you’re doing should be a lot of fun for you. And if you can do as a family, which is when my kids got into playing cards, like, okay, so if chess is a thing anymore and cards are that, that’s fine.
02:18:20:01 – 02:18:31:13
Dr. Terry Wahls
And the view was it could get the whole family going. So get both kids and Jack, you know and it was Jack and I it’s lots of fun.
02:18:31:21 – 02:18:38:01
Nathan Crane
I made a note to look up euchre because I see it’s a card game and I’ve never played it. So I’m going to check it out.
02:18:38:20 – 02:18:40:21
Dr. Terry Wahls
Check out the woman cards up to the.
02:18:40:24 – 02:18:42:13
Nathan Crane
Room at Lumen cards. As I said.
02:18:42:20 – 02:18:44:24
Dr. Terry Wahls
No, the women of the woman cards.
02:18:45:04 – 02:18:48:11
Nathan Crane
Women cards. And it’s a euchre game.
02:18:48:11 – 02:18:54:12
Dr. Terry Wahls
Yeah, well, the woman cards are the playing cards that my kids made. And then.
02:18:54:15 – 02:18:56:17
Nathan Crane
Oh, they’re the ones your kids made. Okay.
02:18:56:19 – 02:19:07:11
Dr. Terry Wahls
Yes. Yeah, that’s the artist. And so she’s made four, four decks, and each deck gets more beautiful than the previous one.
02:19:07:11 – 02:19:13:13
Nathan Crane
Kids are amazing. Published authors have made deck cards. I just felt the woman card scheme. Is that it, though?
02:19:13:13 – 02:19:14:21
Dr. Terry Wahls
The moving parts that come out.
02:19:15:01 – 02:19:35:00
Nathan Crane
These are beautiful to hold, aren’t they? Oh, these are cool. It’s awesome. All right. Now I love board games, like with my kids. It gives us something to do. So we, you know, card games, board games, stuff like that I’ve been doing with my kids and now my son can read really well. And so, like, he can start to play more games with us and be more engaged.
02:19:35:00 – 02:19:37:19
Nathan Crane
So I’m like you said, we were a game last night.
02:19:38:12 – 02:20:09:13
Dr. Terry Wahls
So Zeb discovered a board game with Sherlock Holmes. Ooh, that is lots of fun. It takes about 3 to 4 to do a case, and so Zeb and I will start a case and work it together. And You know, it’s called. Well, I don’t know. There’s these box sets. Sherlock. Sherlock Holmes there. We’re on the fourth box.
02:20:10:17 – 02:20:12:07
Nathan Crane
I’ll look it up box.
02:20:12:10 – 02:20:43:01
Dr. Terry Wahls
Very, very, very fun. Sherlock. And then the thing that I’ve loved about the doing these cases, you read the entry, you get your interpretation of that information as you go through the case. We go back and reread the entries, and now you have a little bit more information, a little more context, and you have a deeper meaning of what the implications are of that nugget of information.
02:20:43:09 – 02:20:44:03
Nathan Crane
Oh, that’s cool.
02:20:44:15 – 02:20:46:02
Dr. Terry Wahls
Yeah.
02:20:46:02 – 02:21:07:02
Nathan Crane
Awesome. Well, Terry, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much. This has been wonderful. And your I mean, your story of, what you’ve done, where you’ve come from, where you are now, is just and then the work you’re doing now and into the future is is truly, truly inspiring. And I’m just honored to have this deep conversation with you.
02:21:07:02 – 02:21:15:01
Nathan Crane
I know you’re helping so many people out there, and I know this will go out and reach in and help a lot more people. So, yeah, again.
02:21:15:22 – 02:21:17:08
Dr. Terry Wahls
Much love to you, Nathan, as well.
02:21:17:18 – 02:21:22:05
Nathan Crane
All right. Take care.