How Trauma Damages Your Physical Health & What You Can Do To Heal | Dr. Mark Hyman
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- Coming up on this episode of The Doctors' Pharmacy. - And we see papers coming out almost every day on the role of ultra processed food, not just in obesity and heart disease, but also in mental health crises and anxiety and depression and worsening PTSD and aggression, violence. I mean, these are really good studies in randomized controlled trials and observational data that ultra processed food is just bad for us and especially bad for our brains.

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Before we jump into today's episode, I'd like to note that while I wish I could help everyone by my personal practice, there's simply not enough time for me to do this at this scale. And that's why I've been busy building several passion projects to help you better understand, well, you. If you're looking for data about your biology, check out Function Health for real-time lab insights. If you're in need of deepening your knowledge around your health journey, check out my membership community.

Hyman Hive, and if you're looking for curated and trusted supplements and health products for your routine, visit my website, Supplement Store, for a summary of my favorite and tested products. Welcome back to another episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy and Health Bites, where we take juicy little bites into current health topics. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman. Today, we're diving into a topic that's especially relevant, trauma.

We're not just talking about the big life shattering events, but the smaller daily stressors, what experts call little t trauma that can accumulate and deeply affect our health. Whether it's relationship issues, work stress, or even just the constant pressure of social media, these experiences can take a real toll. Now we're going to explore how these kinds of trauma can impact your body from your brain to your gut.

Now, it's not just about emotional upset. It's about understanding the biological changes that trauma triggers. We're going to unpack the science behind trauma and discuss how functional medicine approaches can help in healing and managing its effects. We're here to provide you with the resources you need, but not only to help

but to thrive. Whether you're dealing with the aftermath of a major event or just the wear and tear of your daily life, this episode is for you. So let's get started and dive deep into how we can hack our body's trauma responses. We often think of trauma in terms of dramatic events that leave visible scars, but it's so much more complex than that. Trauma can stem from monumental big T events like natural disasters or personal assaults and abuse.

as well as the cumulative effect of smaller everyday stresses known as little t trauma. Today we dive deep into the science of trauma exploring not just the psychological impacts but how trauma physically reshapes our body and our brain. From the way our genes express themselves in response to stress to the changes in our gut microbiome, trauma leaves a lasting imprint on our physiological well-being.

Understanding this can help us unlock new pathways for healing. So join me as we uncover the connections between mind and body in the context of trauma. We're going to look at everything from our diet to our microbiome and how that can influence our mental health and discuss innovative approaches to treatment that go beyond traditional methods.

So let's jump in. Now when discussing trauma, it's really essential to recognize that not all trauma is the same. It can be categorized as big T trauma and little t trauma. Now big T trauma refers to major, often life-threatening events.

It includes experiences like natural disasters, serious accidents, physical or sexual assault, and other significant life-threatening events. This leaves lasting, deep scars that affect every aspect of our life. Now, little t trauma might not seem as dramatic, but it's still impactful. It encompasses subtle everyday stressors and events that accumulate over time. Examples include ongoing stress at work, car troubles, relationship difficulties like divorce or cheating,

financial hardships, and feeling constantly overwhelmed. Though these might not seem as severe as big T trauma, they can add up and they can take a serious toll on our health and well-being. Both types of trauma disrupt our body's natural balance, leading to chronic stress and chronic inflammation and chronic disease. So let's dive into how this actually translates into biological effects in our body. What actually is the mechanism through which stress and trauma disrupt our biology? Well, it

It has to do with a field called epigenetics. And this is a really important framework for understanding how our life washes over our genes and regulates not what genes we have, but how those genes are expressed and whether or not they're turned on or off. And those gene expression patterns determine who we are in any one moment from our physical health and our mental health.

Now, trauma, especially early in life, can impact the expression of certain genes that regulate really important regulators of our biology, including what we call the HPA axis. That's our hypothalamic pituitary axis, how our brain and pituitary

interact with our adrenals and regulate the stress response. These genes also affect immune system function and a lot of immune system dysregulation is seen in trauma. Our neurologic system, like the vagus nerve, and that can be affected by trauma in a big way and become dysregulated. Now altered gene expression can lead to the increased susceptibility to a lot of diseases and problems, including depression, anxiety, PTSD, which is really common from trauma,

and even health risk behaviors like addiction. It can also lead to other trauma-related issues that are related to chronic disease, and we'll get into that in a minute.

Now, this can happen even before our birth because our genes are influenced by how stress influenced our mother and father. Now, this is kind of mind-blowing. There was a study looking at parental Holocaust exposures and found an association with the downregulation of glucocorticoid signaling and the innate immune function in adult offspring. What that means is that if your parents were

victims of the Holocaust, then your own stress response is different and your immune response is different in a worse way if you're an adult. So if you're a child of a Holocaust survivor, you have significant changes in your gene expression related to your parents' trauma. And that really is describing something that's really quite

scary in some ways because it's not even what happened to our lives, but it's what happened to our parents' or grandparents' lives. And that leads to intergenerational transmission of stress and even trauma. In other words, the trauma of the Holocaust was written in the epigenome of the parents and was passed down to the offspring

affecting how they handle stress. Now, just a little background on epigenome. Your genes are fixed. Let's say you have 20,000 or so genes, who you are in this moment. This is called the exposome. Now, these epigenetic changes can occur at a really young age. We see this phenomena called adverse childhood events or experiences called ACEs, A-C-E-S.

This is a well-described tool to understand how traumatized someone was in their childhood and how that trauma could affect them later in life. And there's a simple questionnaire. It's called an ACE questionnaire. We'll link to it in the show notes. You can take the questionnaire. It's very short. And you can kind of get a score. And the higher your score, the more likely you are to have changes in your biology as a result of the trauma. Now, these adverse childhood experiences cause epigenetic changes.

and affect, for example, DNA methylation, which is the way our epigenome is controlled, and that alters gene expression. So your epigenome is controlled by this chemical process called DNA methylation. We've talked about methylation before. But essentially, it's basically a chemical reaction that involves methyl groups and is regulated by often B vitamins, B6, folate, and B12, that affect which genes are turned on or off.

Now, a review paper that was titled Epigenetic Modification in Stress Response Genes Associated with Childhood Trauma is an incredible review of the literature on this. And basically that in English means there's changes to our epigenome that relates to stress response genes, and that's associated with trauma in childhood. Now, what are the examples of epigenetic modification? Well, these epigenetic changes affect how different genes, for example, produce different proteins and how they're expressed.

For example, genes that are really involved in regulating different enzymes or biological proteins, these proteins regulate our biology. So when you have abnormal gene expression or epigenetic changes that are adverse changes related to trauma, for example, it affects the way a lot of proteins are expressed that regulate our mood,

our behavior, and even our biology at a deeper level. So for example, MAO, or monoamine oxidase, is an enzyme that is made by a gene because genes basically make

proteins. That's what they do. One third of all the proteins they make are enzymes. Now, monoamine oxidase breaks down neurotransmitters like dopamine, serotonin, and noradrenaline, which are important for regulation of your emotions. So if this gene is not working well, you don't get the proper expression of MAO, and you get altered neurotransmitter function and altered emotional regulation.

There's another gene called NR3C1, doesn't really matter the name, but this encodes for receptors for cortisol, for the stress hormone, right? For glucocorticoid receptors. It also plays a role in blood sugar control.

Now, childhood trauma affects methylation status and affects the stress response of this particular gene. So you end up having altered stress response receptors and a heightened response to stress. We see this. We see this in Holocaust survivors. They tend to be more anxious, depressed, more likely to have PTSD. And the offspring also have this, which is passed down generationally. And it goes down multiple generations, not just to the child, but often even to the grandchildren and the next generation.

What is the conventional approach to treating trauma? Now there's many other things obviously we can we talk about related trauma But those are those are the big things that we think about what is the conventional approach to trauma and does it actually work? Okay. Well, let's talk therapy. It can be cognitive behavioral therapy or we call CBT or dialectical behavioral therapy or DBT which can be helpful. They're helpful, but it's not a cure, right?

right? My mentor, Sydney Baker, said to me, it takes a lot of aspirin to make you feel better if you're standing on a tack, right? So if you've got, let's say, bad gut flora or environmental toxins or eating too much sugar or crap, you can take all these treatments, but they're not going to work as well as if you fix the underlying thing and then maybe they'll help or maybe you won't need them. So we also have other things besides therapy. We have drugs,

And drug therapy for mental health has just been a dismal failure. And when you look at the data carefully, they just have marginal effects. They can manage symptoms sometimes, but there's just some studies, for example, of the antidepressants like SSRIs, like Prozac, Zoloft, Lexapro, Celexa, Paxil. While they can be helpful, they often are no better than placebo in terms of improving the symptoms over the long term. And they do have side effects.

There are also other drugs like benzodiazepines, beta blockers. SSRI treatment is based on this whole theory of serotonin, that you have low serotonin, that leads to depression. And yet there was a huge study, a huge review published in one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world called Nature in 2022 that basically said there's not enough evidence to support the fact that the serotonin theory of depression is right.

Now, some research suggests that there is a beneficial impact of these SSRIs, but it actually might not be due to what we think, which is the reuptake of serotonin inhibition, but due to their effects on lowering inflammation in the brain. So they might be unintended anti-inflammatory compounds. Basically, all we have in traditional therapy is talk therapy.

of various kinds and drugs, which has lots of side effects and unfortunately don't work that well. So what's the functional medicine approach to treating trauma? How do we deal with the root causes? How do we treat the body as a system? How do we understand this network effect in the body and understand how we deal with the causes and remove those that are impeding our brain's function and our overall health? And how do we add those things in that help our body function better? What do we need to

to add and what do we need to take away in order for your brain to function better? So I encourage you to check out my conversation with Dr. James Greenblatt. We talked a lot about this in our podcast. Now, one of the fundamental principles of functional medicine is this simple idea that we have to identify the impediments to health that are existing in any individual. And there may be different among different individuals causing the same disease or symptoms, right? Like I always say, the body has only so many ways of saying, ouch.

So we have a limited set of responses in the body to a very limited set of insults. And we can identify what those are. So my mentor, Sydney Baker, basically talked about this simple idea that we have to get rid of the bad stuff, put in the good stuff. We have to identify the things that our body doesn't like, that doesn't agree with it. And we have to identify those things the body needs that it's missing and add those things in in order to thrive.

So the lists are quite short, right? So there are very few things that are factors that are driving poor health. It's either too much bad stuff, not enough good stuff. So what's the bad stuff we have to identify? It's toxins. And this can be biological toxins, like mold toxins,

It can be metal toxins like heavy metals. It can be chemical toxins like plastics, pesticides, petrochemical toxins, which are ubiquitous. It can be allergens, and this can be true allergies, or it can be food sensitivities. It can be infections of all sorts, bacterial, viral, tick infections. And I would lump in there also imbalances in the microbiome, which is not classically an infection, but this idea of dysbiosis in the microbiome, bacteria being a role.

It can be stress, physical or psychological stress, or poor diet. And those five things influence our biology. They wash over our biology. They cause dysregulation. This is called the exposome.

And then there's stuff that we need that we're missing, right? It can be the right food, whole real food. And it may be personalized based on your genetics and your own unique situation. It's the right level of nutrients, optimized level of nutrients, which again are different for different people. Some people might need a thousand units of vitamin E, some people might need 10,000.

It's the right balance of hormones. It's the right kind of light at the right times of the day. It's clean air. It's clean water. It's sleep. It's deep restful sleep. It's restorative activities like meditation and relaxation.

It's movement and exercise. It's connection and love and meaning and purpose. These are the ingredients for health. And when you don't have these, you don't thrive, right? So it's basically taking out the stuff that your body doesn't like and adding in the stuff your body likes. So when you look at

this metabolic dysfunction in the brain. What is going on? What is this whole field of metabolic nutritional psychiatry? What are the factors going on? Well, there's a lot of stuff happening. There's insulin resistance, there's nutrient deficiencies, and there's a lot of things that

are really not helping your mitochondria and your metabolic health of your brain. And we have a huge driver of poor metabolic health because of the diet we're eating, because of the standard American diet, and that leads to mental health crisis. So you also need to sort of look at why is this happening, right? What is the bad stuff that's causing this mental health crisis?

and this consequence of trauma. Well, it's ultra-processed food, right? That would be the top of my list for many reasons. And the data is so clear on this. And we see papers coming out almost every day on the role of ultra-processed food, not just in obesity and heart disease.

but also in mental health crises and anxiety and depression and worsening PTSD and aggression, violence. I mean, these are really good studies that have shown clearly in randomized controlled trials and observational data that ultra processed food is just bad for us and especially bad for our brains. And this includes the refined carbs in it, the sugar,

And all the additives and chemical ingredients that alter our brain function. We have other things that we need to get rid of, right? Environmental toxins, which is harder to do. And you can go to the Environmental Working Group, ewg.org, that shows you how to reduce your exposure in skincare products and household cleaning products. And also products that are related to...

Your food, for example, the Dirty Dozen, Clean 15 list for what fruits and vegetables are least or most contaminated. And the list goes on. Fish, meat, whatever you need to do that you have control over, you can do to reduce your exposure. And of course, there's other kinds of toxins like toxic relationships and

however difficult that may be, it's important to either reduce or cut those relationships out of your life. Life's short. And then you want, of course, you want to add in the good stuff, real whole nutrients, food, high quality animal protein with all the amino acids you need to actually help your brain and mood. Lots of anti-inflammatory fats like omega-3s and olive oil, lots of fiber, lots of low glycemic polyphenol rich vegetables and fruits with all the colorful compounds that are modulating your biology in a beneficial way.

lots of antioxidants in there, help protect your mitochondria and protect against oxidative stress. So a lot of the phytochemicals in plant foods are incredibly important for mitochondria. For example, from pomegranate,

If you can metabolize the pomegranate, Elijah tannins with your gut microbiome, the microbiome will produce something called urolithin A that has incredibly beneficial effects on mitochondria, rejuvenating them, make new mitochondria, clean up old mitochondria. And so this is just from one plant. I'm just giving an example, but there's so much we can do just by simply upgrading our diet. Now these antioxidants protect us and they also feed the gut microbiome.

microbiome in your gut. So healthy bugs love these phytochemicals and that helps strengthen your gut barrier. You also need a lot of things like zinc, which is high in animal protein and it's a common deficiency in mental health disorders. It's crazy. I heard a patient of mine once tell me about her brother who had schizophrenia and turned out he had a significant zinc deficiency and he had very high amounts of zinc

and he'd read about this in the scientific literature and took high dose of zinc and cured his schizophrenia. Now that doesn't mean that all cases of schizophrenia are caused by zinc deficiency. They're not. And this is one of the fundamental problems in medicine today is, you know, because you know the name of your disease, you think you know what's wrong with you. You don't.

The name of the disease just describes people who share a common collection of symptoms. It has nothing to do with the cause. So you can't say you know what's wrong with you because you know the name of your disease. That's just a starting point, not the ending point. The other thing that's really important for your brain is omega-3 fats in your diet because they're critical for brain health. In fact, 60% of your brain is made up of fat and most of that is omega-3s.

Now, ketogenic diets are interesting because they have shown a lot of promise in fixing metabolic dysfunction. Now, a lot of metabolic dysfunction is because of the high sugar and starch and processed food in our diets. And metabolic dysfunction is caused by that. And one of the best ways to fix metabolic dysfunction is a ketogenic diet. That's about 70% fat. You're

Your car can be a hybrid car, runs on electric or gas. The same thing with your body. Your body can run on electric or gas. The gas or the dirty burning fuel is the carbs and the clean burning fuel is the fat. When you use this diet, it's been used in medicine for a long time in epilepsy, fixing irritable brains, right? But guess what? Anybody who's got a mental health disorder has an irritable brain, has an inflamed brain. And so in bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, depression, it's extraordinarily helpful and it helps the brain recover

quote, body improve and corrects a lot of the mood symptoms. People say brain-body, mind-body, body-mind. It's the same thing. There is no body-mind. There is no mind-body. It's one system. It's bidirectional. The brain affects the body, the body affects the brain, and it's happening in dynamic time all the time. Now, the research on this is coming in

at a staggering pace. And it makes me really excited to see it because I saw the smoke signals and read the tea leaves about 15 years ago when I wrote my book, The Ultra Mind Solution. But now when I go back and look at it, it's still really relevant. It's just that there's just been hundreds of more studies validating what I saw and what I found.

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Now, there was a small pilot study at Stanford Medicine found that a four-month ketogenic diet intervention led to significant improvements in psychiatric symptoms and metabolic health in patients with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. Now, these are almost untreatable conditions, right?

You basically can give people a chemical straitjacket that dumbs them down and numbs them out, and we say that's treatment, but that's almost punishment, I'm concerned. They lose who they are. What if you can get back who you are simply by changing your diet? On average, participants had a 31% improvement in mental illness severity based on validated clinical metrics and ratings. 79% of participants with symptoms at baseline

showed meaningful improvement in their psychiatric condition, especially those who adhered to the diet strictly. So the more strict adherence to the diet, the better off you did. On average, participants not only got better mentally, but they lost 10% of their body weight. They reduced their waist circumference by 11%, had lower blood pressure,

lower body mass index, lower triglycerides, lower blood sugar, and improved insulin resistance. That's amazing. These are hard things to treat, but simply through food as medicine, you can do that. Now, the participants also had other great side effects, right? Like better sleep, better mood, better energy, and overall quality of life.

Now, the proposed mechanisms include providing an alternate source of fuel, like ketones for the brain. And when ketones are the fuel for the brain, it works better. It reduces neuroinflammation. It increases GABA, that relaxation neurotransmitter, like Valium. And it helps regulate mood. It enhances mitochondrial function, because your mitochondria love fat. They don't like sugar so much. I mean, they run on sugar, but it creates a lot of exhaust and byproducts, and it's a lot harder to metabolize.

You know, it's like how your, your, uh, your car, if you're running on gas, you produce a lot of exhaust and a lot of noise. And when you have an electric car, it's like quiet and there's no exhaust. It's kind of like that. So how is this all working? I think we're still trying to figure it out. I mean, it's probably has to do with the impact of all this on our brain metabolism, on the mitochondria in our brain, uh, the weight loss and improvements in metabolic biomarkers obviously help because it improves our levels of inflammation. Now there's always more research needed, uh,

and we need maybe to understand better than mechanism, but it doesn't matter if we're seeing improvements. We should be applying this. It's safe, it's effective. There's no side effects.

And yet, you know, scientists and doctors will be slow to adopt this because it's one difficult to implement because people don't like to change their diet. And they go, we don't have enough data. We don't know. But that's nonsense. If something like this is working, we should be applying it at scale. And by the way, there should be like billions of dollars flowing into this research, which it's not because it's about food, not a drug. And unfortunately, the NIH and the National Institute of Mental Health

don't fund research like this, although they need to. We need to focus on gut healing. So not only improving our diet, but also learning how to heal our gut. And I always talk about tending the inner garden, healing the gut. It's really important. And it's done through a whole process in functional medicine we call the 5R plan or program.

But a short form of it is just get rid of the bad stuff, right? Food sensitivities, junk food, get rid of bad bugs, use probiotics to inoculate the gut with good bacteria like bifidobacterium, bifidobacterium infantis, longum, lactobacillus, different forms like Helveticus, Plantarum. They've been shown to reduce cortisol and symptoms of anxiety and depression. There's actually this whole class of probiotics called psychobiotics, right?

like psychoactive drugs or psychoactive bacteria that produce beneficial compounds. But you can also get this through your food, like yogurt, kefir, fermented veggies, like sauerkraut, kimchi, probiotic supplements. Also, you want a lot of prebiotics. This is non-digestible fiber that your body can't eat.

But your bacteria love it and they feed and they grow on it. It grows the good bugs. It increases these important compounds we talked about before, these short chain fatty acids. It reduces inflammation and helps prevent a leaky gut. So basically you need the pre and probiotics. And what are those? Well, there's inulin. Inulin is from chicory root, garlic, onions, leeks, asparagus, green bananas,

Jerusalem artichokes. These are all prebiotic foods that you can include in your diet. Psyllium is also helpful. And then you need gut healing nutrients like glutamine, zinc, carnosine, licorice root, slippery elm, bone broth.

glutamine, all these help heal the gut. And you want to avoid the foods that are potentially issue, right? Processed food, dairy, gluten, alcohol, and certain drugs like anti-inflammatories are all damaging to the gut. So you want to get rid of those. What supplements should you use to actually address nutrient deficiencies? One of the things that's important is to look at your nutritional status. Most people don't know because what we say is that these nutritional deficiencies are

are not like something that's going to cause rickets or scurvy, but they're low-level deficiencies or insufficiencies that end up causing dysfunction in your body in a way that lead to what we call long-latency deficiency diseases. These are diseases that may manifest later. Like, for example, if you have low vitamin D at a severe level, you'll get rickets in the short term. But if you have sort of moderately low levels—

You might get osteoporosis when you get older. That's an example of a long-latency deficiency disease. And most people walk around have no idea what their deficiencies are. In fact, at the company I co-founded and the chief medical officer of Function Health, we have found that 67% of people tested

have a nutrient deficiency, not at the level of optimal health, but at the level of a deficiency disease. That's 67% of people. That's a lot of people. And this is, I think, a health-forward population, not the average Americans. And functional health is a personalized health platform that allows you access to

a large amount of your own lab data, over 110 mile markers for 499 a year. It gives you autonomy to know what to do about them and insights from the world's top knowledge experts on how to support your health, including me. Now, for example, there's other things that might be in excess that are too high. For

can be a factor that's connected to altered mental health, including depression, anxiety, stress, psychosis, bipolar disease, irritability, ADHD, and autism. So these are things that can be fixed. In fact, taking extra zinc and reducing your copper intake can help correct these. Now, copper is important. It's an essential nutrient. It's necessary for immune function, for endocrine function, for nervous system function. It's involved in converting dopamine to norepinephrine. And when levels are high,

it can be a problem. Like if it's in the right amount, it's good, but it's too much, it's bad. Just like anything, too much vitamin D is bad if it's too high, too much vitamin A, but you need these, right? And this can lead to overstimulation and hyperactivity in different neurological pathways and neurotransmitters. Now, this is not uncommon in women. Estrogen itself can cause you to retain copper and accumulate copper in your body. It's also due to the large use of oral contraceptives, exposure to xenoestrogens, environmental chemicals,

to growth hormones, copper fungicides, zinc deficiency, which is common. So high copper actually reduces zinc absorption and vice versa. And they compete for absorption. So you get the high zinc in your diet or you can get high, take zinc supplements that actually can correct copper excess. So zinc deficiency is also linked to lots of things like depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, eating disorders.

So, you know, taking a good multivitamin can be helpful. Sometimes extra zinc, making sure you're not taking too much copper. Measuring copper and zinc levels are really important for assessing this. Another supplement that's really important is omega-3s. And the data is very good on this for positive changes in mood, behavior, aggression, even dementia. So I encourage people to take omega-3s. Vitamin D, also very important for your brain and your brain function. Magnesium glycinate or magnesium threonate, which is

The form that crosses the blood-brain barrier helps reduce anxiety, produce calmness. I always say that magnesium is the relaxation mineral. B vitamins are really important in neurotransmitter function, particularly B6. L-methylfolate, methylcobalamin, that's B12, folate, the right forms. Zinc, very important. So these are critical components

compounds that we need to regulate our mood and behavior. Also there's mind-body approaches and there's other neuro regulatory approaches that you can use that are a little bit different. For example, EMDR, which is eye movement desensitization response. Essentially it's using eye movement to actually help to regulate your stress response.

And it was developed by the American psychologist, Francine Shapiro. It involves guided eye movements while the patient recalls traumatic memories. And also walking can help activate EMDR in a similar way. It helps us process our emotions. It's hard to take a walk. Acupuncture can be helpful. Reiki, energy medicine, yoga, meditation, breath work, all can help calm your nervous system. They're adjunctive therapies. Now, psychedelic therapy is one of the most exciting advances in the field of mental health, particularly in the field of trauma therapy. And more and more data is coming out

from academic centers around the world that are deeply looking at this in a psychedelic research renaissance that for me is really exciting because up until now there's been not a lot of useful therapies that have been able to be applied to people with really serious trauma and other mental health disorders. And these seem to work in unique ways that we don't quite understand.

You don't need a lot of different therapies. It's not like a drug you have to take every day. There's just episodic every few months or a few sessions can make a profound, long-lasting difference. And I think they do this in part by affecting both the structure and the function of the brain. We'll talk about that in a little bit. So what are psychedelics? How do they work? What do they do? How does it actually make a difference? Well, there's psilocybin, which comes from psychedelic mushrooms, uh,

DMT, which is a compound dimethyltryptamine, which is, by the way, released at birth and at death. They can be from ayahuasca or what they call the toad, which is the Sonoran Desert Toad. MDMA, which is often referred to as ecstasy in the past, but now has real medical therapies. LSD, ketamine, ibogaine, which comes from the iboga tree, which has been effective for addiction and trauma.

All of these have been shown to induce significant structural changes in the brain and functional changes in the brain's neurons, especially in the prefrontal cortex, which is the adult in the room that often is missing in these mental health disorders. Now, these substances have been used for centuries. They've been used in all sorts of cultures around the world because they have profound psychological and spiritual effects, and they've been used mostly

in indigenous cultures for spiritual reasons, not as a medical therapy. But recent developments in scientific research have actually provided insights into how these substances actually affect the brain function

And in fact, how they can help heal your brain from trauma. Because trauma is not just a psychological phenomena, it's a physiological phenomena that's manifested in brain dysfunction and brain changes. Now there's structural changes in neurons that these psychedelics affect. They

They stimulate neurogenesis, so they help form new brain cells. They increase neuroplasticity and complexity of the brain, which allows new connections between neurons. They help the brain rewire neurons

its connections, which may be the explanation for how they can help you deal with long-lasting trauma from rape or sexual abuse or worse. They increased something called brain-derived neurotrophic factor. This is the miracle growth for the brain that helps brains heal and grow and repair. And there's these functional changes in the brain

are impressive. They decrease the activity in something called the default mode network. Now, this default mode network is really important in overall brain functioning. It's sort of believed to be the neurological basis of the ego. And so when your ego is present, it's sort of like the sense of self, the separateness, the meanness, the defense of me against the world. And often when people have mental health issues, they're very identified with themselves and their ego.

And, you know, if you look at sort of meditators like the, for example, Tibetan meditators who've been living in a cave for 40 years and they bring them out of the cave and they put them in an MRI machine and look at a functional MRI.

Their default mode network is really dialed down. So their ego is really dialed down and they actually feel connection and one with everything and a sense of bliss and love and connection, which is sort of ironic for someone living in a cave. But basically meditation helps you feel more connected. And this ego basically...

leads to a sense of separateness. But when you help suppress the default mode network, which these psychedelics do, it actually helps blur the boundaries between yourself and the external world and leads to a feeling of unity and connectedness and love. Now this can be a profoundly therapeutic experience for people, something they've never experienced before. It helps people gain new perspectives by increasing communication with neurons they normally don't interact with.

and allows for sort of updating of the rigid thought patterns and behaviors. Think of it like a software update for your brain, literally software update. And these psychedelic compounds seem to upgrade

and repair these glitches in your psychological software. Now, if you want to explore more about these therapies, you can go to clinicaltrials.gov. That's a database of privately and publicly funded clinical trials around the world. And you can search for trials involving psychedelics like psilocybin, MDMA, LSD, or maybe the condition you're looking to treat and learn what's happening out there in the world.

Oregon has legalized psilocybin therapy, allowing for the regulated use of psilocybin in licensed facilities starting in 2023. Outside the US, places in Mexico, Costa Rica are great. There's a place called Holos. There's a place called Beyond in Mexico. There's a number of these centers around these areas that can be really helpful. So

I know it's been a lot, but I think, you know, we have to face trauma head on as a society. It's affecting how we interact with each other. It's affecting how our families are and the health of our family relationship. It's affecting our ability to be productive and functional in the world. And unless we deal with our own trauma and our own wounds, which we all have, you know, even if it's just little t trauma from, you know, a parent that wasn't around that much, or maybe you didn't feel quite loved, or you had somebody who was a rageaholic,

These would be considered minor traumas, but they register in our biology and they need to be healed. So I encourage everybody listening to take this seriously, to learn how to look at their own trauma and their own wounds as a way of really upgrading their health. Because as I mentioned earlier, if you have any of these adverse childhood events, you

whether it's little or big T, it's going to affect your health and you can do something about it. And that's what this whole podcast is about. So as we wrap up today's episode, I hope you've gained some good insights into how both big and small traumas affect your body and our mind. It's clear that the impact of the experience go far beyond our immediate emotional response.

And they influence everything from our gene expression to our gut health, to our risk of cancer and autoimmune disease, diabetes, obesity, you name it. And remember, recognizing the effects is the first step towards healing. And there's powerful strategies from the perspective of functional medicine that can support your journey to recovery. It's also important to note that you're not alone in this. Seeking help and discussing your experiences can be really powerful, whether it's adjusting your diet,

exploring new therapies, learning more about how your body reacts to stress. Each step is a move toward better health. Keep tuning in for more insights into how you can take control of your health in ways that empower and rejuvenate. Thanks again for joining me today and see you next Friday for another juicy episode of Health Bites.

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This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Health and Wellness Center and my work at Cleveland Clinic and Function Health, where I'm the chief medical officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guests' opinions, and neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests. This podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. No, this

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