March 21, 2019

https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/podcast/lifestyle-podcasts/bioregulatory-medicine/

[0:00:00] Introduction

[0:01:23] About the Podcast

[0:03:43] Podcast Sponsors

[0:06:36] Book and Guest Introduction

[0:09:33] Dr. Thom’s Diet

[0:11:31] Bioregulatory Medicine

[0:20:48] More on Biofield and Kirlian Photography

[0:25:32] Self-Healing Qualities of The Body That Can Be Enhanced by Bioregulatory Medicine

[0:29:09] The Flexner Report

[0:38:05] Podcast Sponsors

[0:41:13] Diet in Bioregulatory Medicine

[0:50:03] How Mistletoe Is A Component of Bioregulatory Medicine

[0:57:57] How to Find A Practitioner

[0:59:24] Protocols Unique to Bioregulatory Medicine: Contact Regulation Thermography

[1:03:50] Zyto Scan

[1:06:57] Vega Analysis

[1:12:59] Tissue Cell Salts

[1:18:30] Neural Therapy

[1:21:30] Closing the Podcast

[1:23:35] End of Podcast

Dickson:  This is the only type of medicine, the only type of healing that has ever existed since man has been on earth. The American Medical Association was formed mostly in part, “If you didn't follow our methods, you were excluded from the club.” It was only the club of the leeches and that thing. Though, those two foundations started to fund the 31 schools. They didn't allow anybody into the school unless you borrowed money from Carnegie and Rockefeller.

Ben: I have a master's degree in physiology, biomechanics, and human nutrition. I've spent the past two decades competing in some of the most masochistic events on the planet from SEALFit Kokoro, Spartan Agoge, and the world's toughest mudder, the 13 Ironman triathlons, brutal bow hunts, adventure races, spearfishing, plant foraging, free diving, bodybuilding and beyond. I combine this intense time in the trenches with a blend of ancestral wisdom and modern science, search the globe for the world's top experts in performance, fat loss, recovery, hormones, brain, beauty, and brawn to deliver you this podcast. Everything you need to know to live an adventurous, joyful, and fulfilling life. My name is Ben Greenfield. Enjoy the ride.

Hey. Before we jump into today's show, I want to tell you a couple of things. First of all, in my opinion, it takes my guests and I a little bit of time to warm up on this show, which is on bioregulatory medicine. We really scratched the surface of what he goes into in his book. Everything from cancer profiles to digital pulse wave analysis to what's called contact regulation thermography, different forms of hormone analysis that I hadn't heard of before, neuro scan what's called anthroposophical medicine based off the teachings of Dr. Rudolf Steiner. I went through his whole book and I had so many protocols I wanted to ask him about. We got through half a dozen of them, but I really want to encourage you, after you hear today's show, if you like what you hear, definitely grab this guy's book. I will put it in the shownotes for you. Again, we warm up in today's show, but I really think looking into bioregulatory medicine and educating yourself on this is pretty important.

As you may have heard, I'm actually bringing a bunch of people over to Switzerland this summer to spend two weeks doing all the protocols that are in this book, actually living at a health retreat where we get to do all the different types of therapies and almost this detox that we don't get access to here in the states. It's designed to reboot your liver, reboot your digestive system, reboot your endocrine system. We'll be doing a lot of hikes in the Swiss Alps in the sunshine. We'll be eating these amazing organic meals three times a day. We'll be served these wonderful meals. I'm taking my wife, my boys are going to be there. We'll be in the Italian Court of Switzerland. We're already putting a little Italian learning language sticker all over the house to start to learn our Italian. It's going to be one of the highlights of the year. You can get in. There are just a few rooms left, but you can get into this thing if you go to greensmoothiegirl.com/bengreenfield. Green Smoothie Girl is Robyn Openshaw. She's who I've partnered with on putting this retreat on. It's in Switzerland. It's in this summer 2019, late June early July. Ben—if I can talk, greensmoothiegirl.com/bengreenfield. Check that out and enjoy this show.

This podcast, like all of my podcast, is brought to you by Kion, my playground for all things health and wellness. It's a company I created to scratch my own itch to find pure and efficacious shotgun formulations of supplements and functional foods. Every single product that I have there is research backed. It's real-world tested by me and my team of ragtag. I think I was trying to say “ragtag.” My ragtag team of trench testers there at Kion. We have an amazing team. We try all this stuff. We hike, we rock climb, we compete, we weight lift, and we try every single product for you. We figure out what gives you explosive diarrhea, then we mix that stuff and give you the good stuff. We created this entire company. You get a 10% discount on anything at Kion. Very simple, you go to getkion.com. That's getK-I-O-N.com. You use code BGF10. That gives you 10% off of anything at Kion, getkion.com, my playground.

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Let's go talk with Doc Dickson Thom about detoxing ourselves. If you like what you hear, you can also go in detox with me for two weeks in the Swiss Alps. Go to greensmoothiegirl.com/bengreenfield to get in on all that goodness that we talk a little bit more about during today's show.

As you probably know, I tend to get pretty, pretty enumerated and enchanted and intrigued with all these different forms of medicine that tend to fly under the radar of allopathic medicine, perhaps things that we don't do a lot here in America, for example. Also, things that are more advanced techniques from diagnostics and treatments. Because of that, I'm always exploring these books on medicine. I recently read this fantastic book called, “Bioregulatory Medicine.” I'm going to let my guest on today's show define for you what exactly bioregulatory medicine is. It went into all these things that, really, I haven't talked about a lot before in the show like biomodulation and bioresonance and electrodermal testing and neuro scanning and, also, just the self-healing and regenerative properties of the human body when it's placed into the right conditions, the right biological terrain, so to speak, which we'll explore on today's show.

Now, as we go, you can access everything that we talked about from the book, “Bioregulatory Medicine,” which was written by my guest today over at bengreenfieldfitness.com/biomedicine. That's bengreenfieldfitness.com/biomedicine.

My guest on today's show is Dr. Dickson Thom. Although, I just learned when I was speaking with him before we started recording that if I want to sound like a sophisticated German, I would pronounce it Dr. Dixon Tome. His book is called “Bioregulatory Medicine: An Innovative Holistic Approach to Self-Healing.”

Dr. Thom graduated from the University of Toronto, a Faculty of Dentistry in the '70s. Then, he got his Doctor of Naturopathic Medicine from the Ontario College of Naturopathic Medicine in 1986. In 1989, he got another Naturopathic degree from National College of Naturopathic Medicine in Portland, Oregon. He was a full-time professor and the past Dean of Naturopathic Medicine at that National College of Natural Medicine in Portland where he taught things like gastroenterology and neurology and endocrinology, X-ray for over 25 years. He's now the medical director at the American Center for Biological Medicine and the American Center for Alternative Medicine in Scottsdale, Arizona. I'll link to his place down there in the shownotes as well. It's thebiomedcenter.com is the website for his current practice down in Scottsdale. He is well informed, as you can imagine, with that deep history in natural medicine. We're going to take a deep dive into some of his expertise today. Dr. Thom, welcome to the show, man.

Dickson:  Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here.

Ben: Yes, sir. I'm just curious. I didn't tell you I was going to ask you this question, but I'm going to launch it at you right now. I'm curious how a guy who is as steeped in natural medicine as you eat breakfast right before you come on and do a big podcast like this. Are you a fasting guy, bacon and eggs, green smoothie? What's your weapon over there?

Dickson:  I'm doing the intermittent fasting, partly ketogenic, part paleo, trying to keep moderate carbs more of the seed idea. Basically, trying to eat fast for a 16, 18 hours a day and then eat within a 12, six, seven, in the afternoon. A tough thing. It's better from biochemistry. It's better for balancing metabolism. As a physician, for so many years of seeing so many patients with now more and more problems related to metabolic problems, this seems to be one of the ways that we're able to help people move more into a place that we call homeodynamics or homeostasis, which is really what biological medicine is really all about, how do we get people back to balance and allow their own body to be able to do its own level of healing.

Ben: So, coming full circle of what did you eat.

Dickson:  What did I eat today?

Ben: Yes.

Dickson:  What I ate today is basically a protein. A couple of eggs, as you said turkey bacon. I pretty much avoid carbs, like olive oil or coconut oil, coconut drink, coconut milk, and that kind of stuff. It's a typical morning.

Ben: Eggs, turkey bacon, and avocado. That sounds pretty good. I could get on that there with you. I like it. I'm glad you didn't say Captain Crunch, or we would have had to tune you out for the rest of this episode.

Dickson:  No, that's not on the menu.

Ben: Let's get into the topic at hand, bioregulatory medicine. I think a lot of people aren't going to be familiar with that term or exactly what it is. You use terms like bioregulatory medicine and even terms like biofield and biological terrain in your book. You can take as deep a dive as you'd like, but I'd love to hear about what your definition of bioregulatory medicine exactly is and some of these terms like biofield and biological terrain.

Dickson:  Indeed. Indeed, this may be a bit of a lengthy answer because I'm going to give a little bit of a hysterical perspective. In reality, this is the only type of medicine, the only type of healing that has ever existed since man has been on earth. If we go back way into the history of medicine and we look at Babylonia, or we look at China, or we look in Egypt, in India, we're talking thousands of years ago, what they did and we tend to think that medicine was so rudimentary they didn't really know anything. Using Chinese medicine as the example and the whole idea of how Chinese medicine has survived, what is Chinese medicine? Chinese medicine, people think, “Oh, it's acupuncture, herbs, and that type of thing.” But what it really is it's about balancing energy flows. If we look at, Ben, what the Greeks talked about in the last 2,000 years of how medicine has evolved, we've got into this so-called scientific method. It wasn't until, which I'll talk about in a bit, The Flexner Report which is 100 years ago that medicine really met a huge shift in the direction of what is biological medicine, bioregulatory medicine. The so-called new field, or an emerging field of medicine, is known as a biofield. A biofield is a word that basically is used to describe energies that the body is associated with.

It is well known that, for all intents and purposes, the body is one huge electromagnet. We have voltages. We have electrical charges.

Ben: If I can interrupt there, I don't know if that's generally accepted. I think a lot of people don't really understand the concepts of, for example, Dr. Robert Becker delves into in the book, “The Body Electric,” that the body is an electromagnetic organism. You may want to clarify for some people who might not really be familiar with that idea.

Dickson:  I think, people can hopefully agree that the body at least gives off energy. We always talk about “How is your energy? Are you fatigued,” or that type of thing? We know that energy is being promoted and made somehow in the body to do all the things that we do. How can we basically move any muscles if we don't have some type of gasoline or some type of fuel in our muscles themselves? It comes down to that it's really an electrical charge. If we bend our arm, we're basically creating as electrons. These electrons are creating a battery that's running every piece of equipment that we now have in society. This idea that there's a field of energy that we have electromagnetic energy associated with it. Then, we'll look back into what the Chinese have talked about. The Chinese have talked about these subtle energies. The Chinese call it Chi. Naturopathic medicine calls it [00:15:00] _______. It's the subtle energy that maybe not be as easy to measure. Although, things like Kirlian photography are able to pick up these subtle energies and measure that. In fact, there are energies that are associated for the body itself. People may not be familiar or not familiar with the idea that some people have the ability to read these very subtle energies and are able to influence these energies. These are the energies that allow all our organ systems to function and to interact with each other.

Ben: With perhaps the simplest example being just either the electron transport chain in the mitochondria or the potassium sodium electrochemical gradient across the cell membrane. I think those are two simple examples people may have even seen in high school biology. I just don't think they think about it when they're standing next to their Wi-Fi router or under fluorescent lights that electricity interacts with the human body and vice versa.

Dickson:  Not very much. Now, of course, with the exposure to Wi-Fi pretty much everywhere, we're constantly being exposed to cell towers, we're constantly being exposed to in our homes with routers and Wi-Fis. The effect that that type of energy is having on us on a long-term basis. I typically think that Europe is way ahead of us, the United States is ahead of us. For example, they're banning of cellphones for children, knowing that the cellphone radiation in a child where their brain hasn't fully developed if they hold it up to the rear literally can be transported directly through their entire head. In some countries in Europe, cellphones are basically not allowed for children until they're 18 years of age until there's some more maturation of that type of thing.

The idea by a regulatory uses this concept that our body is really about energy. It's about physiology. It's about biochemistry. It's about physics. Breaking it down to that aspect, if we look at physics, you can talk about Newton in the 1700s who came up with Newton's law. Unfortunately, to this day, conventional medicine still believes that that's the model of how medicine, how the body heals, how we have to repair itself. Long before Newton came along, the Chinese had come into this idea of energy. Then, in 1927, we had Einstein and Max Planck basically came out with their idea of quantum physics, quantum mechanics, which ultimately led to the discovery and the utilization of the atomic bomb and the realization that how much energy gets packed into every cell. Every cell in our body has an organelle in it that will make energy, as you mentioned, the electron transport chain. If you have an oxygen present within the mitochondria, they have the ability to make these little packets of energy that we call ATP up to something like 38 packs of energy when there's sufficient oxygen. If you don't have any oxygen, they can only make two parts of ATP. People say, “Oh, is that why I'm tired?” Well, maybe one of the reasons you're tired, generally speaking. It's still based on electrons as you mentioned, the potassium sodium pump is the way that the minerals move across cell membranes. There's a lot of aspects of that that we have to put into this picture.

When we look at bioregulatory, what are we really talking about? We're talking about the idea that there are multiple systems, multiple organ systems, within our body. While we tend to think of them that they may be individual, you have a heart, you have a cardiovascular system, you have an endocrine system, you have a digestive system, you have a lymphatic system, and you have a nervous system. Unfortunately, what's happened in medicine is that we have all these specialties. All these specialties don't really talk to all the other specialties. They'll look at their own individual organ. When you're trying to grow a new heart cell, let's say you have something wrong in your digestive system and you go to the gastroenterologist and they say, “Oh, this is what we found. This is the problem,” you can't just have one specialist repair what's necessary. If your house is blowing down in a hurricane, you don't say, “Let's get some nails and we have a new house.” You have to have every single piece of the part in order to build a new house. That's the same with the body. In order to rebuild a digestive cell that may have been damaged or repaired or something, food poisoning or something, let's say, you can't just say, “Well, just eat food X,” which is why I'm against these so-called miracles that show up on the internet thing. I'll take this if you have Y or disease X. Or, if you have cancer, this is the miracle. There is no miracle in the body. It's about balancing every single organ system. The real focus of bioregulatory medicine is not to look at people's symptoms, it's not to treat diseases, it's to try and understand which of the organ systems are the most out of balance electrically, and what can we do to be able to facilitate all those cells getting back into balance again. We're not specialists. I'm not a specialist of anything. I feel I'm a specialist in health, but I'm certainly not a specialist in disease. Disease simply means something is out of balance. It's out of ease. Our goal is to how we put it back in ease.

Ben: Now, you talk about the biofield when it comes to actually being able to measure all of these elements of the human body that are an interplayed together. Can you define a little more specifically what the biofield is? You even talked about Kirlian photography for example, which I think gets an eyebrow raised in modern medicine. I'm curious if that's how you would actually measure something like the biofield or if some of this stuff is a little bit more quantifiable beyond this light photography.

Dickson:  By definition, we could say that the biofield is used to describe the field of energy and information that basically surrounds us. Our body has a confinement by our skin, but the reality is our energy isn't confined by our skin, or energy emanates. When you're in the room of a lot of other people or when you're in a relationship for a long time, people start to say you start to look alike, talk alike, feel alike, because you're transferring energy back and forth between the individuals without physically touching them. The biofield is this information, this energy information, that surrounds us, both the electromagnetic energy and as I said this subtle energy. The whole idea of biofield is pertaining to us as living individuals to then look at these energy fields that extend beyond our body and how are we able to create a proper balance for what's going on.

Now, Kirlian photography is one of the ways it's been around for a period of time that has allowed people, and we have very sophisticated imagery now, if we go back to the microscope back in the 1700s before they were able to see something that's at a microscopic level, it was some abstract idea. Since the 1700s, when Leeuwenhoek invented the microscope. Now, we have these atomic microscopes and you can literally see within cells, what’s in organelles, et cetera, what's happening. Kirlian photography or that type of imagery is a way to be able to measure those types of things. We are creating much more of an understanding of why and how the body gets out of balance and the things that can interfere with that. It'll still come down to if the body cannot create enough electrical energy through sodium-potassium pumps and that type of thing, it's going to not be able to create enough energy, it's not going to be able to communicate with other cells because there is an interaction between cells that they literally can talk to each other. Now, those types of things with the scientific, that way the information can actually be measured now.

Ben: How does Kirlian photography actually work?

Dickson:  It works on the aspect that it's literally picking up energy waves. We look at the electromagnetic spectrum. One that people are most familiar with, of course, is visible light. We look at the rainbow. The electromagnetic spectrum on all levels from the idea of X-rays on one end and microwaves and pictures that we ultimately take radio waves and those types of things. It's a different frequency that everything is associated with it. Through the technology, the Kirlian photography was developed, it's able to pick up these very subtle energies that can't be seen, can't be felt. Going back to, once again, Einstein is it a light particle or is it an energy wave type of thing. I can't explain it more than that because I'm not a physicist.

Ben: We know that cells communicate using photons of light. There's a great deal of infrared communication that occurs between cells. That's, to my knowledge, pretty recent research that shows that form of cellular communication can occur. It's likely that photography that is able to capture light photons is potentially capturing that ability for cells to communicate.

Dickson:  Absolutely. I think, as time goes on, the scientists and the physicists become much more sophisticated and we'll be able to pick up much more energy. The whole idea is are we going to be able to find the magic of health, the magic of the human body. I think we're a long way away from that because there's a lot of things that the universe holds a secret from us. We'll continue to do so. We have to do our best to understand what we do know. We have moved a long way since the Egyptians and the Greeks, but still, have a long way to go.

Ben: You talk in the book a lot about this idea that the human body is capable of, under the right circumstances, self-regeneration or that has self-healing properties to it. What exactly does that mean? What was an example of a self-healing or self-regenerative property that would be enhanced by bioregulatory medicine?

Dickson:  It's a great question. In fact, if it wasn't for the fact that every cell in the body has the ability to self-regenerate, to heal itself, we would basically be exposed to the first bug, first germ, first trauma and we wouldn't be able to survive it. Again, something that many of your listeners will already experience which is a broken bone. If we're to fall down and break our wrist, we go to the doctor, the orthopedist basically put a cast on. They take an X-ray at three weeks, they take an X-ray at six weeks and say your bone is healed. Does that suggest that the cast healed the bone? Well, the cast didn't know anything. All the cast did was immobilize it so the body, the intuitive aspects of nutrition, of oxygen, of blood, of hormones, and everything else that's necessary for healing, basically was able to form a callus where the break was. Then, the bone was actually healed in about six weeks. We know that that bone is actually stronger now from where it healed than when that was originally.

What's also interesting when you think about self-healing is that technically, everything we know about nutrition. We could put in a petri dish. We could put two pieces of bone in that petri dish, very proximate them so they don't move, with all the nutrients, but yet it doesn't heal. There's more to it. This is what we call the subtle energy. This is the Chi energy. This is the vis energy. This is the biofield energy that's necessary for the self-regulation to heal. If you damage your macula in your eye, within two days it's repaired itself. The cells of your digestive system are turning over about every three weeks. It always said that the bone is six weeks. Every cell in our body eventually regenerates and repairs itself. Our skin turns over every few weeks. That's what self-regeneration is.

Ben: There's a little interesting one. There's even a mythology behind that. I forget, I think, it's the Greek mythology, the guy who gets his liver pecked out by an eagle every day and it regrows overnight. That's actually been shown that, I think, a good quarter of a liver can regenerate back to its full size within half a year.

Dickson:  That is correct. In fact, doing liver transplants, you could take a young child who has some type of genetic liver disease, it was a very tiny liver, but you can take an adult liver and you can just slice off a piece of that liver put it in the jar, and that liver will grow. In an adult, if they had [00:28:32] _____ of some type that you could resect that out, in fact, I've had several patients in this situation, they resected part of the liver and within six months the liver's back to its normal size. It's the only organ, however, unfortunately, we have that will do that. If we cut our arm off, it doesn't regrow again.

Ben: It's interesting because even nerves can regenerate. That's a lot of times approach used in a multi-modal approach in Alzheimer's and dementia, things like huperzine or apigenin or lion's mane mushroom, they'll use to actually stimulate nerve regenerative effects and heal up nerves. I believe that many of those are the same type of compounds that are used in some of these more natural forms of medicine, like naturopathic medicine or bioregulatory medicine.

In light of all of this, the fact that we know that the human body works via an interplay of all these complex systems that we shouldn't treat just one system at a time, we know that the body operates based on, in many cases, not just cell signaling as far as neurotransmitters and nerve synapses or exosomes, for example, but also via photons of light packets and even protons themselves. I'm curious why don't more Western medical practitioners use this approach? I know that you mentioned the Flexner report which I believe has something to do with this. I'm wondering if you can get into that. why isn't bioregulatory medicine something more people are aware of our practice?

Dickson:  That's a great question. I'll talk about the Flexner report because of the whole aspect that it’s really–The Flexner report, let's start to give a little bit of background on that. In 1857, the American Medical–I think before 1857, the American Medical Association was formed. It was formed with the idea that there will be a club, like-minded physicians who practice in a specific way would have, basically, the idea of sharing information, et cetera. When you look back at the history of medicine in the 1800s, you look at the most common types of the recognized forms of medicine at that time was bloodletting, which is how basically George Washington died. It was the use of purgatives. It was the use of carminatives. It was the use of leeches. Bloodletting, all that kind of thing. Now, also at that time, coming from Europe, urine medical was the concepts of energy medicine. Specifically, it's homeopathy, through Hahnemann who in 1822 published one of his first books, “The Organon,” with the whole idea that we could use the law of similars, like yours like, that type of thing of using different types of medicine. It became that style medicine over the 30 and 40 years throughout Europe and was now coming to the United States. The patients who were going to see a homeopathic physician were having better success than the conventional medicine doctors who are using cathartics, purgatives, leeches, et cetera. Because people doing those such as Washington died from the treatment, as opposed to the homeopathic which were much more a gentle and were actually allowing people to get better.

In 1857, the American Medical Association was formed mostly in part, “If you didn't follow our methods, if you did homeopathy, for example, if you did eclectic herbal medicine, for example, you were excluded from the club.” It was only the club of the leeches and that kind of thing. Through that rest of the 1800s, there were these for-profit medical schools. Obviously, there were many times not properly trained. There was not good schooling and that type of thing. It was commissioned via Carnegie in the early 1900s. Then, in 1910, Carnegie who was not a physician and he was not a medical educator and he was not a scientist, he was a Bachelor of Arts person, was hired by the Carnegie Foundation to look at the 155 schools that were medical schools that were in Canada and United States at that time. He visited all 155 schools in something like 163 days. He was a busy man. Then, at the end of that, he published a report. That report basically laid the foundation almost to this day of how medicine was being taught, how medicine was being practiced.

Ben: That was the Flexner report?

Dickson:  That's the Flexner report.

Ben: What did he report?

Dickson:  There were some very positive things that he reported. He reported that there wasn't present enough education for people. They needed a minimum high school education. There needed to be standardization of what they were being taught, et cetera. He suggested that they reduced 155 schools to 31 schools. He said we needed to have some type of prerequisites to know a little bit about you the high school diploma, you needed to be studying anatomy and study physiology, et cetera. There were some big good things that came from that and that is still taught. In fact, it's not in every medical type of an institution nowadays.

However, on the other side of the coin was what he also reported that some of these very unfortunate things, and not to offend any of our listeners, but one of the things he reported is he felt that blacks were inferior. He basically said all schools teaching blacks, medicine should be closed. The idea was that there was the germ theory at the time and that blacks living in their inner community had certain diseases and we carry those diseases into upper-class white who were the people that they basically wanted in the medical schools. Because medicine had continued to face competition from osteopathic medicine at that time, the eclectic medicine, naturopathic medicine, homeopathic medicine, electrotherapies, et cetera, he basically said, “I don't believe in any of those.” He basically said, “You can no longer teach those in any of the medical schools.” In something like 1900, there were more homeopathic doctors than there were conventional doctors. 1923, all the homeopathic schools are closed. I believe there was two that were left. By 1950, they were all closed. They've been the few that have been open since.

For all intents and purposes, in 1910 medicine totally changed and it's still taught that way. Why do Western doctors, first of all, they don't know about it, I would bet most don't know about the Flexner report? If you're not taught that the whole idea that energy medicine is the root of all illness because that's not what's taught in the school. We're still following the Newtonian idea that “Oh, it's broken. Take it out, put a new part in.” That's not how the body is ever going to feel. We just talked about the arm. You can't just put the two pieces of the bone together and say, “Well, I haven't healed.” There's an energy that's associated with. That's the biofield energy that we talked about earlier.

Ben: What you're saying, to interrupt, about the Flexner report is that his report led to the shutting down of all these complementary and alternative oriented colleges and programs like homeopathic colleges or some of these natural medical schools. What was left in terms of approved medical education programs, they're actually funded by philanthropic organizations like Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation, but those foundations also had a lot of money in the pockets of pharmaceutical companies.

Dickson:  What's interesting when you look at it is that, in fact, those two foundations started to fund the 31 schools. They didn't allow anybody into the school unless you borrowed money from Carnegie and Rockefeller, which meant that when you graduated you basically had to basically pay them back. Guess what? Carnegie and Rockefeller were into pharmaceuticals. They were the lump sum of the first pharmaceutical companies. This is what they were teaching. This is what they were promoting. This is what's been promoted since 1910.

Ben: Wow, it's crazy. That's one of the reasons that a lot of docs don't learn this stuff is it's simply not part of the medical education that tends to be funded, in large part by the pharmaceutical industry, but began with this Flexner report shutting down some of the education on more of these natural bioregulatory concepts.

Dickson:  Exactly. What's interesting, as I said, they even wanted to close the schools of Osteopathy. But now we know some of the osteopathic associations at that time somehow did fight back. Now, whether you have a DO behind your name or an MD behind your name, it's exactly the same, because the osteopathic schools basically said, “We'll teach you exactly. I'll teach exactly what we do in the osteopathic schools is we all do some also physical manipulation which they're excellent at. Then, they learned some aspects of that, but it's still very conventional, it's still very the idea that it's pharmaceutical based, it's the same concept that is taught in basically every medical school, even though they osteopaths were, by the Flexner report, were supposed to be close.

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Now, that we've established what bioregulatory medicine actually is, I want to get into some of the brass tacks here, some of the actual ways in which it's practiced. The first thing I wanted to actually ask you about is diet, because the way that you describe diet in the book is a very seasonal approach based on the master fuel sensor, mTOR which tends to be, for example, I believe, more active during some of these summer months and things change in the winter and times of calorie restriction. I'm curious if you can get into the science behind this seasonal eating approach and how that would actually work with something like bioregulatory medicine.

Dickson:  Once again, what I look at, there's 1,001 diets. There are 10,001 diet book that have been promoted in that type of thing. I always look back at what did our indigenous cultures eat and what did they have, what did they survive on? We can go back to Weston Price who basically was a Canadian dentist too in 19s and 20s, went to seven areas of the world that at that time had not been westernized. He went into the Eskimos and the Aborigines in Australia and places in the Alps that hadn't been touched. He looked at their diets. The diets of those people were always indigenous to the food, the plants, the animals, fish, or whatever was local to that specific area. That's obviously what they had. They didn't have high-speed transportation to take something growing from Mexico and eat it in Spokane, Washington type thing, or up in Juneau, Alaska. What he found was is that there was a very common overlap to what these people ate. Though we talked about the Eskimos, he said, “What the heck did the Eskimos eat? They don't. Do you eat a plant-based diet?” They said, “What was growing up at the North Pole? There wasn't. There's not.” They're eating walruses. They're eating polar bears. They basically had almost an entire meat diet that was high in omega fatty acids. Yet, they didn't have any heart disease. Then, you go into somewhere where the Aborigines are, almost from the desert of Australia and say, “What were they growing?” Once again, they're eating local animals and local plants. Some of the herbology that has evolved through these generations, the aborigines and the Maori in New Zealand have been there for thousands of years before the white man had ultimately appeared and introduced these types of diets. If we look with the Chinese, the Chinese are very resourceful. The Chinese continually anything that's local to the area, including insects and scorpions and trees and all that kind of stuff.

We look at what we do and what's how. If we look at that and we look at the evolution of the human body, if we look at the evolution of our nervous system, of our endocrine system, our lymphatic system, et cetera, et cetera, what supported that? What supported that was the phase on different seasons. If you were in Europe, you had different foods in the wintertime than in the summertime. If you were in South Africa, you had more or less similar foods year-round. What the Chinese had found, because parts of China get incredibly cold, is that during the winter time, when we tend to hibernate, of course, we put on a few pounds because we're protective. We also eat more nutrient foods just like a bear. Basically, we're leaving off our body fat. Then, the body has evolved to be able to do that in colder climates the body has to generate a lot more heat. It's preferred that in the wintertime or in the colder months, we warmed up foods. In the summertime, where it's hotter, when we don't need to generate as much heat, we can eat cooler foods, salads and raw vegetables, and raw fruits, et cetera. Typically, from a bioregulatory aspect, we look at not only how a person's digestive system is, but where do you live, where did you grow up, where did your ancestors come from, what did your genetics actually allowed you to be able to do? Yes, we have the ability to eat lots of raw foods, but since we're in the winter time in this part of the world, we should not be eating very many cold foods. Especially, if you're going to be the cold food, whether it's a fruit or whatever, eating something out of the refrigerator is not a good idea because in the refrigerator, the food is going to be above [00:45:49] ______.

Now, we say, “What temperature? How does the body digest this?” We have a normal body temperature. Our normal body temperature is 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. If you will say, “Where'd that come from? Is that a made-up number? Who has 98.6? Where did that number come from?” That number came from the fact that the enzymes in our body necessary to digest our food functions at about 98.3 plus or minus 0.3. So, 98.3 to 98.9. If you eat a food at 40 degrees, put it in your body, the body says, “What the heck is that? I guess I have to cook the food in my own digestive system.” People say, “No wonder I get tired after I eat this food because it takes a lot of my energy.” 40% of your blood is being shunted into your digestive system for a couple of hours to digest this food.

Ben: It does not, contrary to popular belief, cause you to lose more fat when you do that because you've amped up your thermic effect of food. Simply, it's not a good weight loss strategy to chew ice, for example. What I like that you get into in the book is how we have this master fuel sense or mTOR, the mammalian target of rapamycin, and it facilitates anabolism like protein synthesis and growth. That actually is something that tends to be more active under the sunlight during the summer. Then, during the winter, you have a different master fuel sensor, AMP, activated protein kinase, or AMPK, which is more of the enzyme responsible for stimulating the recycling of soluble materials. It's almost like we were designed to build muscle, and even, perhaps, fat in the summer, then break it down in the winter as we cycle between mTOR activation and AMPK activation.

Dickson:  That is the evolution that the body has had to be able to survive. Now, we have the scientific knowledge and we've done the research to be able to show that. Of course, if you go back into your ancestors and if you go back 200 years ago, it's like “Why do you eat soups? Why do we broth in the wintertime and eat raw plants in the summertime?” It's because of what you're talking about. The body had to adapt via these mechanisms the same way why do we have so-called LDL which is a so-called bad cholesterol. What did that evolve for? Why is it bad? Why did we have LDL? LDL is the plug, it’s bad because it plugs up your arteries. If you go back 1,000 years and say, “Well, there were no hospitals. There were no doctors who you're going to show you up.” If you are under stress and you were about to be bitten by a tiger or whatever, it started bleeding, the only way you plugged the hole was to raise your LDL. It's a natural evolution, just like people–the blacks from Africa who migrated up to Europe. They had dark skin so they would be able to protect themselves from the sun, but once they moved to Europe, they didn't have that. There's an evolutionary aspect of the ApoE4 which has to do with Alzheimer's and heart disease and a whole bunch of things. The fact of why we have what we do and why we've modified what we do. We live in a society where we move around a lot, we can food moves around a lot. We should still be looking, for the most parts, for things that are the most indigenous to what our backgrounds are and indigenous to the areas from what we're eating. You just described the two areas. Exactly, we add fat in the summer so we can burn it off. That's what a bear does when it goes to sleep all winter.

Ben: I have three books that I think are fantastic for people who really want to take a deep dive into both eating according to our ancestry and seasonal eating. One is called, “100 Million Years of Food” by Stephen Le. One's called “The Jungle Effect” by Dr. Daphne Miller. Then, one's called “Returning to An Ancestral Diet” by Dr. Michael Smith. I like all three of those books to really wrap your head around, not only how to eat like your ancestors, but also how to eat seasonally. I'll put a link to those books if you go to bengreenfieldfitness.com/biomedicine. That's intriguing stuff. We talk for hours about it, or you could go check out those books.

I want to talk now about some of the things that you use in your practice, or some of the things that a bioregulatory medical practitioner would use. I realized, again, we could talk for a very long time about each of these, but I just love to hear a basic overview of some of the things in the book that I found most intriguing. The first was a compound that I don't see talked about a lot, but that you harp on in the book, and that would be mistletoe. Why is it that mistletoe would be a component of bioregulatory medicine?

Dickson:  Mistletoe is an interesting compound that's obviously been around for forever. If we look back historically, I always like to look back historically of we're from and why are they still in our culture and what does it come to mean. Most people idea of mistletoe is you hang the mistletoe at Christmastime and you kiss under the mistletoe. Is that a legend? What did that can ultimately come from?

Mistletoe, itself, basically is one of the four plants traditionally that were adopted by Christians to celebrate Christmas. The idea of the evergreen leaves was to symbolize life that does not die. It's sign of eternal life which is from the spiritual or religious aspects. Then, the Druids back in the Middle Ages, they venerated the oak because they believed that had magical powers against evil. It started off somewhat mystical we'll say. Certainly, in religious ceremonies, there was this belief that the leaves did symbolize life. There did become, supposedly I think from Greek mythology again, this whole idea that kissing under the mistletoe is that a person [00:51:54], then kissed her, and dah, dah, dah. All that kind of stuff. What do we typically and what does it typically been used for and it's basically used routinely, all throughout Europe and virtually any cancer clinic you go to in Europe, you'll find that mistletoe is one of the therapies along with every other treatment that they typically do.

Ben:  When you say it's a therapy, how's it used? In a supplement form, or is it an injection or some other delivery?

Dickson:  All deliveries. It's used as a supplement. It can be used as an herbal form. It can be used as an injectable form. It could be done IV. It can be done IM. It can be inhaled. It's put in various forms, basically, depending on what we're attempting to use it. We get extracts from it. We have available to us mistletoe herbal formulas in Europe, you would basically find it in injectable forms. The FDA is not as keen on to being herb. Maybe, I don't know if it's the FDA but they may be the oncology aspects is not as open in the United States, but if you ended up in a clinic in Europe for cancer, I guarantee you would be exposed to it.

Ben:  I'm actually going to Paracelsus Clinic in Switzerland. I'm leading a retreat over Paracelsus Clinic in Switzerland this summer. I think, they actually use a lot of the protocols that you talked about in the book, like colonic hydrotherapy, and hyperthermia, and ozone. I believe they do some mistletoe therapy as well. If I'm not mistaken, is it a lot of times used for an autoimmune type of issues?

Dickson:  Mistletoe can be used as many herbs. I tend to feel that we tend to try and compartmentalize things and a lot of pharmaceutical medicine is we take extracts of plants. Bioregulatory medicine, instead of using the extract, why don't we use the whole plant? What's a great thing about our nature was when nature has a poison plant, right beside it has the antidote. If an animal happens to eat a poison plant, guess what? It's going to eat the plant right beside it also, which will basically antidote the poison. The idea that we can use an herb for a single extract instead, it's basically it's about regulation, it's about creating eternal life, which comes from the spiritual or the mystical aspect of what it's doing.

As a use for autoimmune, we say, “Well, what's an autoimmune disease?” An autoimmune disease, people think it's a hyper reaction. We have over 80, 85 autoimmune diseases that have been identified in our body. People think, “Oh, yes. If we react with the immune system. The reality is autoimmune doesn't mean it's hyper-reactive. It means it's out of balance. It's the balancing between the different aspects of the immune system are not functioning efficiently and properly. You can take natural herbs. You can take natural substances. What are they're attempting to do, they're not trying to suppress? Now, if you look at the standard treatment of autoimmunity, it's like using prednisone or a medication that basically stops a reaction. We don't try and stop anything. We try and support it. We try to make it more in balance. From bioregulatory perspective, if somebody has a fever, our goal isn't to say, “Oh, take an Advil or Tylenol to lower your fever because that's going anti.” The word allopathic means opposite medicine. We're not doing the opposite medicine, we're doing the supportive medicine. If somebody has a fever, what I would suggest that they do is they tell their level of comfort they should maintain the fever. If you're uncomfortable at 102, uncomfortable meaning you're thinking that it's going to be a problem, especially with children, people are always concerned. They're thinking, “Oh, if they have a high fever, they potentially may have a febrile seizure. It's true. Sometimes, they do. It's more based on not what the temperature is, it's how fast the temperature rises. What we would more support is well let's support because we know that what is the best antimicrobial thing we know in the world? It's called heat. That's why we cook our food.

Ben:  That's also why people get a fever when they're sick.

Dickson:  Totally, because it's the body's natural way to basically fight the microbe, the virus, the bacteria, whatever it is. You can say if you're going to cook your turkey dinner, would you rather cook it at 100 degrees or put it in the oven at 450 degrees? If 100 degrees, it'll cook but it'll take you five days. Put it at 450 and it'll take you 15 hours. We can basically allow the body to create the fever and you'll be done in 24 hours. Or, basically, you can try and keep suppressing the fever and be sick for seven days. It's like, yes, you're not comfortable for a day, but, man, it's the best way we can try to get our immune systems in balance. Whether it's mistletoe or the many other potential herbal or other supportive therapies that we have available to us. Everything that we do, as I said, is not about the symptom. It's about understanding the organ system. It's about understanding the physics, the biochemistry, and the physiology. That's what we're really supporting because that's how the body gets out of balance. If we support the physiology with our treatments, it's the best to put it back into that. It's not to stop the reaction. I always say to people who have a headache, “If you have a headache and you take a Tylenol, and so what happens with the headache?” They said, “Went away.” I said, “No. That means the headache was due to Tylenol deficiencies if it went away? Of course, now you still have the headache, you just can't feel it.” It could be your blood sugar or blood pressure or neck or sleep or whatever else. That's really what we're trying to address in bioregulatory medicine.

Ben:  With mistletoe, in many cases, if people are interested in either the injectable form or an extract or some type of protocol for it or a few other bioregulatory medical tactics I want to ask you about. Is there a directory or a place to find a practitioner who's well-versed in these types of protocols? Is there such a thing as a bioregulatory medical practitioner directory or something like that?

Dickson:  Unfortunately, not yet, but it's coming. In fact, what I've been working on for the last year is a curriculum to be able to teach physicians who are interested in expanding their knowledge base into this type of an approach. We're creating a curriculum which will basically involve teaching practitioners, in fact, teaching an entire clinic, entire office: the nurse, the MA, that support staff. That's how we can introduce these types of therapies, and then make them aware and available to their patients.

There is a couple of institutes, the Marion Institute in Marion, Massachusetts, the Bioregulatory Medicine Institute that's in Louisville, Kentucky, have sites and they have a lot of information available; and probably, the two most present available pieces of information that you could use.

Ben:  I know in the back your book, you've got a list of a few different bioregulatory organizations and clinics as well. One I think was the marioninstitute.org and the Biological Medicine Network at that website.

Dickson:  Correct.

Ben:  I'll link to that one and to your clinic in the shownotes for people. Let's talk about a few protocols here that I think would be very interesting to people that I hadn't heard of before until I read your book. Contact Regulation Thermography or CRT, what is that?

Dickson:  CRT is the aspect of measuring 119 points on the body, basically. What we know from Chinese medicine is that, we know, that there are multiple points in acupuncture. There are 900,000 points on the body that they would basically stick acupuncture needles. What are they're doing? They're finding energy points on the body. Contact Regulation Thermography, CRT, is a diagnostic tool where we basically are measuring 119 points. Those 119 points link to about 15 different organ systems that link to over 20 different types of tissues. The preparatory aspect is you don't shower that morning, you don't brush your teeth, you don't wash your hair, you don't eat breakfast, you don't drink water, et cetera. You come in basically like you get out of bed type of thing. We do that 119 points, then what we do is we stress the body. We put the body under some form of stress. What we use during the test is cold. The person sits basically in their underwear. Basically, their skin is all exposed for 10 or 15 minutes which is a stress to the body. Then, we go back and we remeasure the same 119 points. Then, what we do is we graph the before, we graph the after. We have the before points. We have the after points.

Typically, when we stress these different points, what should happen is that there should be a slight change in the temperature. We say about half a degree, more or less, of all the different points for measuring. When we compare the points, we can say, “Well, when you're not stressed, when things are pretty even, this is what's happening.” Now, as soon as we stress these points, we say, “Oh, your digestive system isn't working properly, or your nervous system isn't working properly, or your lymphatic system is really congested, or you're not getting good blood flow into your teeth, or you have prostate congestion, or you have breast congestion, or you have chest congestion.” We're able to be able to pinpoint very accurately, in a quick and efficient way, an aspect of seeing what truly happens when your body is perceived by stress. Stress can be anything. Stress can be a happy thing. It can be a sad thing. It can be going to work as stressful. It can be almost in a car accident. It can be hearing bad news. Whatever. Of course, if you don't feel these things, people say, “Oh, I didn't know my digestive system wasn't very helpful when I'm under stress.” The patients who have irritable bowel syndrome, perhaps, say, “Oh, gee, if I'm going to go out and do something, I'll have a loose bowel per se.” We diagnose an irregular bowel, but most people are not aware that their digestive system is not in good place, or they have congestion in one part or the other. What it allows us to do is to focus a specific organ system to start our therapies. We have so many different systems, you can't treat them all at the same time. You have to prioritize them. The CRT is, then, a method that we can utilize to see. Then, after a few months of therapies, we can repeat the same contact regulations thermography.

Ben:  When you're doing it, is it like a scan, or you're actually directly measuring some thermometer or the temperature on different areas of the skin?

Dickson:  You were actually measuring–we're using a probe just like a pen and we're literally touching specific points on the skin that are related, like from Chinese medicine, to the different internal organs of the body. That's what we're measuring.

Ben:  You take the same areas where a Chinese medical practitioner might put a needle for acupuncture, and you're instead just measuring the activity in those specific meridians to identify whether or not treatment is needed for specific areas?

Dickson:  That's correct. That's true. People may be familiar with thermography, breast thermography, as opposed to mammography which isn't exactly the same thing, because that's looking at heats being generated in the body. We're looking at heat that's on the surface, that is being stressed by the cold. We're using that as a marker to see whether or not how stress is affecting your different organs.

Ben:  Got it. What about as zyto scan? What's a zyto scan, Z-Y-T-O?

Dickson:  A zyto scan is another energetic treatment or another energetic reading. Literally, it's based on this whole idea of biofield. You literally are putting your hand on a plate, we'll say. Basically, it's running. There's electrical program. It's a computer program that basically is running an electrical program. What it's doing is it's reading the energy that's basically coming from your hand on the plate. By going through a whole variety of–we can measure many different types of things. We can look at how you're being affected by certain foods. We can look at how your organs are in balance or out of balance? We can look at whether or not there are specific microbes that particularly are more active in your body at that particular point in time. It's another energetic scan. Once again, totally based on the whole concept of biofield and bioenergetic. It gives us another clue that we can combine with the CRT that tells us is there a specific area of the body that's out of balance that we need to be able to focus on.

Just as an example, right now we're on this side of the Rockies, since many of our patients come from the other side of the Rockies, and since Lyme disease is such a common factor. It's uncommon almost to not find one of the [01:05:25] _______ Lyme or Lyme chronic infections in somebody who lives east of the Rockies. In other words, it's pretty much in every state, but it doesn't mean everybody has Lyme disease. It just means at some point, you've probably bitten by a tick.

Ben:  Zyto scan would be one of the ways you could use to analyze whether or not you have Lyme, instead of a blot test?

Dickson:  I call it the soft diagnosis. Now, I use most importantly for diagnosing Lyme is what is the patient's presentation. We know that many people have Lyme get the bull's eye rash and that type of thing, but many people don't. They don’t even know that they were bitten. Now, the blot test and that type of thing, everybody will agree that there's no real great test, which is why in conventional model, Lyme is chronic. Although chronic Lyme doesn't exist. It's like, well, it does exist, unfortunately, but that's medicine. It's what it is. But, yes, the zyto scan is another way. I'll say to them, “Oh, that may not be active or the body, the immune system, which is constantly busy, is just keeping it in checked, which thankfully it does because we're exposed to things constantly all the time, or we all don't get sick.” Why not is because our organ systems, our immune system, lymphatic, et cetera, is able to keep the body in balance and things are just fine.

There could be an indication. It could be a soft way of looking at whether or not Lyme potentially may be part of a person's problem. 

Ben:  Got it. Then, one of the forms of scanning or quantification that you talked about. There's, I think, over a dozen different methods you discussed in the book. Some of them I had heard of, like heart rate variability testing and some more advanced forms of nutrient testing, and even electrophysiological testing of the brain using EEG and electromagnetic source localization. You talk about a Vega, V-E-G-A, which sounds like it could be a supplement, but it's actually some type of analysis. What exactly is Vega?

Dickson:  Vega, specifically, is the name of a German company that was formed in the early 1950s, Reinholdt Voll, who was a German scientist and a German physician, came up with this idea of electrodermal testing. He was one of the original ones who came up with the idea that we could measure on acupuncture points different electrical energies. The system was incredibly complex. In fact, if you weren't an acupuncturist, you wouldn't even know where to start testing points. Having his knowledge, one of his students was Helmut Schimmel. Schimmel was a medical doctor and a dentist. He said, “This is way too complicated. We've got to figure out an easier way to do this.” He used the concept of electrodermal testing, which is basically measuring electrical energies on a specific point. He said, “What we can do is we can put it almost into an electrical circuit.” What he used is he created energetic vials, homeopathic vials, if you like, of thousands of different substances. If you wanted to see whether you were sensitive to, let's say, gluten as opposed to doing a blood test, you could basically get a positive standard measurement. Vega was the machine that he went to the company he went to and said, “This is what I want. I want your scientists to figure out how to make this machine, this electrical machine, for me.” So, they did.

Vega, being electrical dermal testing. In this electrical box that has some electrical components in it, it's attached with a cord with it, with a probe, if you like. The patient holds on to that. The doctor, basically, is holding the person's hand and they're studying specific points on the finger. Then, into the circuit. You measure it fine. Then you put some type of resistance, you put a poison, a drug, or whatever, that you know the person can tolerate. Then, you put gluten in. If the machine go, “trrk,” fine. That means your gluten is not a problem for you. But, if you put it in and go “duh, duh,” gluten is interfering with your biofield energy. Gluten is a food. Yes, you take it out. Whether you want to do that, or test a pesticide, or test how strong an organ is, or if you want to test whether you're going to react to a specific medication, or if you're going to find this specific medication is going to be helpful for your high blood pressure, we call that filtering, we can put two things in. Xinhua came up with this whole method using this machine, this company, basically called Vega testing. Then, now, basically, it's all enclosed within a box because it's all energetic. It takes a skilled practitioner to be able to read it, to be able to do the test, et cetera. It's another way, we call it a soft diagnosis. It's actually quicker and easier, and more immediate than a blood test, or an X-ray, or any other type of imaging that we can do for somebody to gather information.

Ben:  I think, a lot of people are probably wondering at this point if there's actual clinical research behind this, meaning have there been studies in which someone has been shown to have a gluten intolerance or celiac or something like that via a test like Vega. Then, also, in follow-up testing been shown to have immunoglobulin responses to something like we intake, for example.

Dickson:  Once again, there actually have. Somebody who can read German, virtually all these studies are in Germany. The studies have been done way back in the 70s, many, many years ago. In fact, like I said, earlier you'll find mistletoe in many of the European cancer clinics. You'll also find Germany, since Vega is a German company that the individual specialists, if you go into a cardiologist’s office, you'll find a Vega machine, and the cardiologist will specifically test things related to cardiology. The endocrinologist will use the Vega machine to test specific things related to endocrinology. They're far advanced and they're far more open from the aspect that this type of measurements, not only have they been studied but they've shown to being clinically highly effective and you get immediate results that are painless. You can do it on a baby one day old. You can do it on somebody who was 95 years old. You can do it on somebody who was in a coma. Its compliance is really easy, and really, it's not painful. It's easy to do. It's quick. That type of thing. Yes, there are. Some of those studies have been published and are translated, I should say, into the English language. If you go way back in PubMed and those types of things, if you look at the [1:12:16] ______, studies according to [1:12:17] ______ and that kind of thing. I don't have that available at this point, but there's quite a number of those types of research available that have been done for sure.

Ben:  I know you discussed a few of the different studies in your book. You take a deeper dive into some of this stuff. By the way, I'm looking forward to doing a lot of these quantification procedures myself, because I'll be not in the German section, but in the Italian quarter of Switzerland when I'm at that Paracelsus clinic. I think they do a lot of these. I'll be there for a good two weeks. I'm going to have a chance to explore a lot of this. Hopefully, for those of you who are listening in, I'll get some good photos and things up on Instagram for you to see how this stuff actually looks and what I find out about myself going through that.

I want to talk to you about a few other therapies, in addition to mistletoe, of course, tissue cell salts. Tissue cell salts. I thought that was an interesting one. I hadn't heard of it before. What would be the indication for the use of these tissue salts, and what are they?

Dickson:  Tissue salts were discovered, or I'll say formulated, by a German, I want to say, and all this stuff, most of this stuff is out of Germany or Russia, Italy, that type of thing. Tissue salts were developed by Dr. Schuessler, who was a German physician, who found that when we basically, I'll call it cremate or whatever, when we take the ash of the human body, what he did is he analyzed it. He found that in the ash of the buzzard humans, didn't matter what culture or anything you came from, there were the same 12 minerals in the ash. He surmised that all our cells have these minerals in them that are necessary for health.

Then, what he did as a doctor, he started to say, “I wonder if somebody who has certain types of conditions would benefit from doing therapeutically some of these minerals.” He developed what he's called the Schuessler cell salt, or the tissue salts. There are 12 different compounds that are basically dilute compounds. It's like ferrum phos, which is basically iron phosphate; or calc fluor, which is the calcium fluoride; and kali phos, which is potassium phosphate. There's silicon. There are 12 minerals. How they're used therapeutically is that because these substances, which are diluted, in other words, most of the time they're diluted three times, and when we say diluted so that we typically call it a 3X or a 6X, which is from a homeopathic description, it means you take one part of the mineral, let's say calc fluor, and you basically dilute it three times in a dilute, and then you make that becomes your raw material. Now, it becomes a 3X calc fluor. You can also dilute it 12X, instead of 6X, et cetera.

What Dr. Schuessler found is if somebody had a broken bone or had osteoporosis, or had some type of musculoskeletal problems, hard tissue was concerned. Or, they were healing from some type of an injury. He found that in addition to whatever other therapies were used, if he gave the tissue salts along with it that the person would heal more quickly. The tissue salts themselves don't physically have the minerals in them. If you use calc fluor thinking, “I'm going to use that for osteoporosis,” you're also going to have to have a source of minerals. You have to give some calcium and magnesium and zinc and the other 25, 75 minerals that are in bone itself, per se. It enhances if we have a person who has anemia, for example, and they're taking iron. They say, “Well, how come my numbers aren't getting better?” If you give them something like ferrum phosphate which is the tissue salt of iron, what you do is you facilitate easily the absorption of the iron, so you do them in conjunction together, and you find that the iron is more efficiently absorbed. These, of course, have been studied for the 150 years because Schuessler rose in the middle 1800s. They're used routinely among bioregulatory docs and bionature pass, et cetera, because they do enhance the healing of whatever it is we're trying to support.

Ben:  Is it an oral delivery, these tissue salts?

Dickson:  Yes, they're literally tablets. They basically look like little white mints type of thing. They're these little pills, basically.

Ben:  Would that be different, then, for example, I use a hypertonic solution made by Quicksilver Scientific called Quinton minerals, would it be something similar to that? That's a sea salty tasting liquid in an old pouch.

Dickson:  Yes. That is actual minerals itself. What is in this little tablet is not technically the mineral. What this does is that if you take that cell salt with the ionic salt, you would enhance the absorption of those ionic minerals.

Ben:  Very interesting. I haven't heard of tissue salt therapy before. That's fascinating. Isn't there a form of therapy as well in European medicine in which salts or mineral solutions are injected?

Dickson:  We'd certainly do IV therapies and those are actual minerals themselves.

Ben:  It's not IV therapy. I was with a group of physicians a few months ago and someone was talking about mineral therapy that's done via some kind of injection. I thought you might know. If I can find it, I'll link to it in the shownotes; or, perhaps, if people are listening in, they can pipe in if they know what I'm talking about. It's some type of an actual injection of minerals. I forget what it is, but I'll hunt it down and put it in the shownotes for people over at bengreenfieldfitness.com/biomedicine, or maybe I'll think of it while you're replying to this one of the last questions that I have for you. That would be the use of another form of therapy called, what do you call in the book, it's neural therapy. N-E-U-R-A-L therapy. What's neural therapy?

Dickson:  Neural therapy is usually the injection of some type of a homeopathic remedy into specific areas of congestion, trauma points. People will have to say, if they have trigger points in their neck, with their back, they'll typically go to a massage therapist who basically or a role for somebody who will basically use their thumb and dig in there. What you're trying to do is you're trying to break up that congestion, that tight muscles, perhaps the muscle spasm that's very tense. Maybe, somebody has a headache as a result of that. They can't turn, they can't twisters. What we do is we literally inject usually a combination of a local anesthetic procaine, commonly, or lidocaine. Now, we'll use a homeopathic remedy, maybe Traumeel, or Spascupreel, or something like that that has homeopathically been known to be able to break up that fibrous type tissue. What it does, as all these things are doing, and what it allows is better energy flow. As soon as you have better energy flow, you have better blood flow. When you have better blood flow, you have better oxygen flow. When you have better oxygen flow, you have decreased inflammation coming into the area. You can bring all the other nutrients and things that we know about decreasing inflammation into the area.

Neural therapy is not just using the neck or back. It can be used any way. If you have somewhere, your knee is sore, your meniscus, or you have a torn ligament somewhere, you can use neural therapy. Literally, it's a subcu injection, meaning you just inject it under the skin, put it local and to the area of where the inflammation is. People may be familiar with having a steroid injection. Steroid injections actually break down the tissue. When we're doing neural injections, we're not breaking the tissue down. What we're doing is we're supplying needed nutrition and needed therapies energetic wise to basically be able to facilitate once again the healing. Neural therapies are the type of thing, technically could be done almost every day, because we're not going to destroy the tissue, unlike a steroid. We can't do it every three or six months because you'll eventually just destroy your tissue.

Ben:  Actually, there's a wonderful clinic in Pocatello, Idaho that I go to a couple of times a year for high-dose vitamin C injections. It's the clinic of Dr. Jason West. I didn't realize it was called this, but he's actually done the neural therapy on me before because he did a series of procaine injections, almost like teeny tiny little bumble bee stings, 50 of them, into the abdomen. It's a gut reboot. That's what that is.

Dickson:  That's what that is. That is absolutely correct.

Ben:  I got you. Wow. We only really scratched the surface of these therapies that you delve into in your book. This stuff's just so much fun to be able to discover, these new therapies and the things that are being done to, again, support the body's ability to be able to repair and regenerate. Also, things that really take into account this whole idea of treating the body holistically, taking into account the entire biofield. I realized a lot of people think this woo, there'll be some allopathic medical practitioners who jump in the comments section and tell me I'm an idiot and tell you that you're a quack. Ultimately, I know this stuff is helping a lot of people. This book, it's a quick read but was fantastic. I know you wrote it with four other co-authors in medicine. I really enjoyed it. It's called “Bioregulatory Medicine,” for those you listen in. I'll link to it at bengreenfieldfitness.com/biomedicine.

Then, also, if you're interested in anything else that I talked about like the Paracelsus clinic that'll be in Switzerland or some of these books on seasonal eating, I'll even put some helpful links to Kirlian photography, et cetera. If I can find that mineral injection I was referring to, I'll link to that as well. You can find all of that at bengreenfieldfitness.com/biomedicine, along with Dr. Thom's website, which is the biomedcenter.com down in Scottsdale.

I would imagine if somebody is in the Scottsdale or you wanted to travel there, you probably have a lot of these devices at your clinic, Dr. Thom.

Dickson:  Yes, we have them all.

Ben:  Cool. Maybe, I'll have to come in for a tour sometime and check it out. I like to discover stuff like this. Thanks for coming on the show, man. This is fascinating.

Dickson:  It's my pleasure. Anytime.

Ben:  Awesome. Folks, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Dr. Dickson Thom, signing out from bengreenfieldfitness.com/biomedicine. Have an amazing week and go leave your comments, your questions, and any other thoughts you have in the shownotes, if you want to continue this conversation even more.

Well, thanks for listening to today's show. You can grab all the shownotes, the resources, pretty much everything that I mentioned over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com, along with plenty of other goodies from me, including the highly helpful “Ben Recommends” page, which is a list of pretty much everything that I've ever recommended for hormone, sleep, digestion, fat loss, performance, and plenty more. Please, also, know that all the links, all the promo codes, that I mentioned during this and every episode, helped to make this podcast happen and to generate income that enables me to keep bringing you this content every single week. When you listen in, be sure to use the links in the shownotes, use the promo codes that I generate, because that helps to float this thing and keep it coming to you each and every week.

 

 

 

Over half of the world’s population is afflicted with some form of chronic or degenerative illness.

Heart disease, autoimmune disease, diabetes, neurological conditions, cancer, Lyme disease―the list goes on. The conventional, allopathic, treat-the-symptom-with-pharmaceutical-drugs model is rapidly falling out of favor as patients are searching for nontoxic, advanced prevention and healing modalities that actually work.

Bioregulatory medicine involves fixing this issue with a model that has proven effective for decades in forward-thinking developed countries, including Switzerland and Germany.

Our bodies have many bioregulating systems, including the cardiovascular, digestive, neurological, respiratory, endocrine, and so on. Bioregulatory medicine is a comprehensive and holistic approach to health that advocates the use of natural healing methods to support and restore the body’s intrinsic self-regulating and self-healing mechanisms, as opposed to simply treating symptoms with integrative therapies.

Bioregulatory medicine is about discovering the root cause of disease and takes into account the entire person from a genetic, epigenetic, metabolic, energetic, and emotional point of view. So while patients may have the same disease or prognosis, the manifestation of illness is entirely bio-individual and must be treated and prevented on an individual level.

The four pillars of health―drainage and detox, diet, mind-body medicine, and oral health are addressed by bioregulatory medicine using a sophisticated synthesis of the very best natural medicine with modern advances in technology. In addition to identifying the cause of disease, bioregulatory medicine promotes disease prevention and early intervention of illness through noninvasive diagnostics and treatments and incorporates the use of over 100 different non-toxic diagnostics and treatments from around the world. Forward-thinking patients and integrative practitioners will find bioregulatory medicine invaluable as they seek to deepen their understanding of the body’s many regulating systems and innate ability to heal itself.

My guest on today's podcast, Dr. Dickson Thom, is the author of the new book Bioregulatory Medicine: An Innovative Holistic Approach to Self-Healing.

He graduated from the University of Toronto, Faculty of Dentistry in 1974. He obtained his first Doctor of Naturopathic Medicine degree from the Ontario College of Naturopathic Medicine in 1986, and in 1989 he completed a second Naturopathic degree from the National College of Natural Medicine (NCNM) in Portland, Oregon.

Dr. Thom was a full-time professor and the past Dean of Naturopathic Medicine at NCNM where he taught clinical and physical diagnosis, gastroenterology, neurology, practical endocrinology, x-ray practicum and business entrepreneurship for almost 25 years. In addition, he was a clinic supervisor to hundreds of students and managed care for thousands of patients.

Dr. Thom is now the medical director at the American Center for Biological Medicine and the American Center for Alternative Medicine in Scottsdale, AZ. These clinics are state of the art and uniquely manage care for patients from around the world. For a complete description of these unique offerings, visit the web site TheBiomedCenter.com. Dr. Thom lectures extensively on health and business topics and has written and collaborated in the writing of many articles and books dealing with drainage, nutrition, and business. Dr. Thom studied extensively with Gérard Guéniot, MD and incorporates Dr. Guéniot’s work into his seminar lectures and his private practice in Scottsdale, AZ. In August 2009 he received The VIS Award from the American Association of Naturopathic Physicians in recognition of one who represents the Vis, the Healing Power of Nature, as demonstrated through their work, life, and community service.

During our discussion, you'll discover:

-Dr. Thom's daily diet…9:30

• Intermittent fasting
• Keto, paleo
• Better for biochemistry and balancing metabolism
• Homeostasis: what biological medicine is at its core
• A typical breakfast: Eggs, turkey bacon, avocado

-What exactly “bioregulatory medicine” is…11:50

• “In reality, it's the only type of healing that's existed since man has been on the earth.”
• Ancient Babylonians, Egyptians, Chinese, Indians: All about balancing energy flows
• Biofields: Energies the body is associated with
• Body is one huge electromagnet
  • Gives off energy
  • Movement creates electrons
  • Some people can read other people's energies
  • Electron transport chain in mitochondria
  • Electricity interacts with human body and vice versa
  • Deleterious effects of wifi, cell towers, etc.
• Physiology, biochemistry, physics
• Newton's Law: Conventional medicine still believes that's how the body heals itself
• 1927: Einstein and Planck came out with quantum mechanics; led to utilization of atomic bomb
• Multiple organ systems within our body
  • We think of them individually: heart, cardiovascular, nervous, digestive, etc.
  • All the “specialties” don't communicate with the other specialties
  • You must have all the pieces to rebuild a house; same with the body
• Thom describes himself as a specialist in health, not necessarily in disease

-More on biofields and the practice of Kirlian photography…20:45

• Our energy is not confined by our skin the way our body is
• People transfer energy with each other without physically touching them (long term relationships)
• Kirlian photography:
  • Microscopes allow us to see what before was not visible
  • Measures the body's biofields
  • Use electromagnetic spectrum on all levels; subtle energies that can't be seen or felt
  • Capturing the ability of cells to communicate

-The self-healing qualities of the body that can be enhanced by bioregulatory medicine…25:30

• The cast didn't heal a broken bone; it simply immobilized and made it possible to heal itself
• “Chi”, or biofield energy is necessary for the bone to heal
• Every part of our body – bones, organs, skin, etc. – self-heal and regenerate
  • You can replace a child's liver with a portion of a full-grown liver; both will grow and regenerate to full size

-How the Flexner Report, published in 1910, laid the foundation for mainstream medicine…29:35

• The Flexner Report, published in 1910
• American Medical Association formed in 1857
• Bloodletting and homeopathy were common practice at that time
• Bloodletting wasn't effective (it killed George Washington) but homeopathy was proven to be effective
• AMA excluded practitioners of homeopathy and other “unapproved” methods from their organization
• Abraham Flexner, who was not a doctor, a scientist, nor a medical practitioner, was commissioned by the Carnegie Foundation to examine 155 medical schools
• The good in the report:
  • Not enough education
  • Need prerequisites
  • Need standardization
  • Suggested reducing 155 schools to 31 schools
• The bad in the report:
  • Blacks were inferior, diseased; schools teaching black students should be closed
  • Schools can no longer teach homeopathy, electrotherapy, etc. simply because Flexner didn't believe in them
  • In 1900, there were more homeopathic doctors than conventional; by 1953, they were all closed
  • Western medical students are still taught based on the Flexner Report; although they've likely never heard of it
  • Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations' influenced the pharmaceutical industry, as well as who got accepted into the 31 schools

-The science behind a seasonal diet and how it works with bioregulatory medicine…42:15

• Weston A. Price
  • Foods consumed are indigenous to the location the people lived
• Ancestral approach to diet
• Eating cold food in summer, hot food in winter
• Normal body temp is 98.6°F
  • Enzymes necessary to digest food function at ~98.3 degrees
  • Put 40-degree food in your body; requires tremendous energy to digest
• Master fuel sensors:
  • mTOR more active under sunlight in summer
  • AMPKα in the winter
• Look for foods indigenous to your ancestors, as well as your current locale
• Book: 100 Million Years of Foodby Stephen Le
• Book: The Jungle Effectby Dr. Daphne Miller
• Book: Returning To An Ancestral Dietby Dr. Michael Smith

-How mistletoe is a component of bioregulatory medicine…50:34

• Mistletoe has historically symbolized life in religion and mythology
• You'll often find mistletoe in European cancer treatment centers
• Used in all deliveries: IV, injectable, inhaled, etc.
• Its use in autoimmune issues:
  • In nature, the antidote is right next to the poisonous plant
  • Autoimmune issue means out of balance
  • Not trying to suppress; try to support, make it more in balance
  • Allopathic = opposite medicine
  • You get a fever when you're sick; support the fever, don't suppress it
  • Go beyond the symptoms; support the physiology
  • A headache is not due to a Tylenol deficiency

-How to find a practitioner in bioregulatory medicine…58:30

• No central directory at the moment
• Thom is creating a curriculum to teach clinic staff to make them available
• Marion Institute, Marion, MA
• Bioregulatory Institute, Louisville, KY

-Protocols unique to bioregulatory medicine…1:00:00

• Contact Regulation Thermography(CRT)
  • Diagnostic tool to measure 119 points in the body
  • Link to 15 different organ systems
  • Stress the body (cold)
  • Remeasure same points
  • Graph before stress and after
  • Can quickly and effectively track how your body reacts to stress
  • Measuring specific points on the skin that are related to the various internal organs in the body
• Zyto Scan
  • Put hand on a plate, running an electrical program; reads the energy coming from your hand onto the plate
  • Can see how you're being affected by foods, microbes, etc.
  • Tracks specific areas of the body that are out of balance
  • It's a “soft diagnosis” for Lyme disease
• Vega Analysis
  • German company formed in 1950s
  • Electrodermal testing
  • Measure on acupuncture points different electrical energies

-Clinical research behind the efficacy of bioregulatory medicine…1:11:06

-Tissue cell salts: what are they, and what are they used for…1:13:30

• Developed by Dr. Schuessler
• Analyzed ash of human bodies
  • Same 12 minerals in the ash, regardless of where they were from
• 12 different mineral diluted compounds (3x)
• Tissue cells themselves don't have the minerals in them
• Orally ingested via small pills

-The practice of neural therapy…1:19:00

-And much more!

Resources from this episode:

–TheBiomedCenter.com

-Book: Bioregulatory Medicine: An Innovative Holistic Approach to Self-Healing

–My Switzerland Biological Medicine retreat

–Kirlian photography

-Book: 100 Million Years Of Food by Stephen Le

-Book: The Jungle Effect by Daphne Miller, MD

-Book: Returning To An Ancestral Diet by Dr. Michael Smith

–Dr. Jason West's clinic in Pocatello, Idaho

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