In this talk with ​​Rachel Jennings N.D of Heal Yourself Institute, we discuss how to solve chronic health problems, adrenal fatigue, and mitochondria.

This transcript was automatically generated, please excuse any errors.

0:03

Hello everyone and welcome back to the high energy woman online event where our vision is to help women step into their power to heal, to supercharge your energy and to break free from feeling burnt out. We really hope this conversation will inspire you to take action to live life with more passion and more purpose for the things that are meaningful to you. Today, I could not be more excited to highlight Dr. Bruce Hoffman. Dr. Bruce Hoffman is a Calgary based integrative and functional medicine practitioner. He is a medical director at the Hoffman Center for Integrative Medicine in the brain center of Alberta specializing in complex medical conditions. He was born in South Africa and obtained his medical degree from the University of Cape Town. He is a certified functional medicine practitioner is board certified with a fellowship and anti aging and regenerative medicine practitioner, a certified Shoemaker mold treatment protocol practitioner, a certified Ayurvedic practitioner, as well as certified in Family Constellations, and eyelids trained in the treatment of Lyme disease and CO infections. He is the co author of a recent paper published by Dr. Alfred’s group diagnosis of mast cell activation syndrome, a global consensus. It’s quite the bio. And it’s quite demand. So I’m super, super excited to be chatting today. Dr. Hoffman. Excellent. Thanks very sure. I always like to start, the first very first question is very apparent, it’s a personal question.

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Really just tell us your personal journey that led you to do the work that you do today.

1:58

Um, the personal journey Well,

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I never came to medicine. The I didn’t come to medicine the right way. I, I was interested in literature and poetry and thing arts. And I was actually employed by the circus and by an opera company, when I got a phone call from my mother, this is after I graduated from high school. And she said, Oh, by the way, you got into med school. And I said to her, What are you talking about? She said, Oh, you didn’t you know, I applied for medical school for you. Oh, my Wow.

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What are you talking about? Well, there was a scholarship and I applied and you got in. So you start med school in six months.

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And so I found myself in med school scratching my head when not knowing what on earth was going on. But it’s, it’s the most

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the best serendipitous event on my lap. Because when I was a younger boy, before that I was I learned a lot about philosophy and religion, and poetry and literature from a high school teacher of mine. And he exposed me to the arts. And that’s why I wanted to pursue the arts. I was sort of geared to do that. But once I went to med school and learned to become a family physician, and then started to study Chinese medicine, I have better I was able to bring all my love of arts and poetry and literature into the process of working with complex illness patients. So I was able to finally marry my love of medical arts with medical science and do what I do today. So I thank my mother for getting me into med school.

3:46

Hell, I was doing this for years. I was like, What the hell is this?

3:50

Well, I guess maybe you’d be like a circus performer still. So it’s amazing that you’re doing what you’re doing today. But I couldn’t I love my life. I love my work. I love my page. I love I mean, just 15 minutes ago, you very kindly allowed me to prolong this interview because I was just on a, you know, another conference.

4:10

As you know, you never know enough you always feel ignorant. You keep studying and studying and studying and never getting ahead. It’s just an ongoing issue. I’m 65 now and I you know, I love what I do, and I love learning more and more all the time. I think that’s the true definition of a great doctor is constantly learning and innovating and changing selects amazing. I counted last month. I’ve attended 278 conferences since since 2007. Oh my gosh, I love that. I love that

4:54

you probably a couple of assistants that you’re probably got all the time right attending conferences.

5:00

Oh,

5:01

that’s so great. Um, I know you have so many talents we really talked about, you know, you dealing with lyme patients with Lyme and mold and chronic illness. If we could start off really talking about histamine, and really giving people just a brief explanation of what histamine is and what it does in the body. Sure, sure.

5:24

Well do talk about history, what is step back a little bit and talk about the so called mast cells that everybody now my, my South African accent gets, people say, what do you do? So, I think the correct explanation and mast cells, they say, in masks, yeah. So, my cells are these little they 1% of the white blood cells, and they vigilante cells, in the sense that they sit on the art on the interface between outer and inner environments. And they also reached the innovators and multiple tissues in the body, the brain, the brain is richly integrated with myself. And they release the contents whenever they become provoked.

6:11

And they release over 1000 mediators of inflammation shook tazers, the last days is all sorts of proteases. And they release histamine. Histamine is the most well known the most common, and the one which usually gets people to start thinking that whether they have sort of a histamine intolerance to versus a mast cell activation syndrome. And a mast cell activation syndrome is is characterized by those individuals who not only have histamine release, but they have inflammation in general. And they also may have a whole release of growth factors as well. So it’s not just the histamine that gets into the practitioner. It’s this whole cascade of multiple symptomatology and multiple organs. That sort of fits the criteria for what we call consensus to criteria. There’s two criteria for the diagnosis of mast cell activation syndrome. There’s sort of the original, my consensus one by Aiken, which said you had to have this tryptase Elevate, after a flare. But we in the consensus to the Efrain group, we say that you just need a whole constellation of symptoms that respond to treatment. And if you happen to have an increased

7:34

set of lab data, that’s all to the benefit, but they’re not essential for the diagnosis of my cell activation syndrome, whereas the consensus one the more stricter criteria, so you’ve got to have that chip days increased to make the diagnosis. So you’ve got these two sort of standards of care, so to speak, and many things in medicine have two different standards of care. As we know, like Lyme disease, the IDSA versus islands, there’s two standards of care as it is with myself two standards of care out there right now. Hmm, interesting. So I was gonna my next question was going to be about mast cells. But we covered that a little bit. So what what do you think triggers the release of histamine is good in the body? But what triggers the excess? And the issues created with too much histamine? Well, that’s a fantastic question. Because the answer is

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look around

8:42

you know, anything that’s a bloody pus, you we have a homeostatic mechanism, and anything that the body can’t hold me aesthetically, self regulate, will then create an escalation in the ability to regulate and has the potential then to trigger muscle activation, anything, it doesn’t matter whether it’s physical, electromagnetic, mold, lime infections, or thoughts.

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We have 60,000 thoughts a day. And every, every, you know, Deepak Chopra made that statement famous, he said, and then, you know, 90% of the thoughts we have today are the same as yesterday. And so we self perpetuate our internal dialogue creates a sort of chemical messenger cascades that then triggers receptors on every cell in the body, which then turn on DNA and messenger RNA and, and then that lead to the expression of my cell activation, if you will. So, our very thought processes and that brings into account you know, the whole

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people who’ve undergone particular traumatic experiences and traumas the big catchword now but it’s incredibly real people with

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Early adverse childhood experiences seem to have a much harder time in the ability to self regulate their disability, inability to self regulate the OIS isolating and waxing and waning between sympathetic overdrive. And what we now know as dorsal vagal collapse or small dangerous bonds when the system just gets overwhelmed with inflammatory triggers and just shuts down. And that’s the basis of many chronic diseases and many people who stuck in the cell danger dorsal vagal response can’t get out

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of perpetuating these inflammatory cycles. And, and that’s who we see, I mean, those of us in this field and there’s many, many of us

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those are our patients and they don’t feel they don’t fit the you know, n squared d squared criteria name of Disney’s name of jug is just forgetting that playbook got that’s yeah, that’s that’s 30 years ago thinking I

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really love that you brought it Robert navios cell danger response because we talked about that briefly on the on the event about mitochondria and things like that. So I love that you really brought that in. I think that’s the missing piece. People don’t really realize that histamines and then just an inflammatory condition, ya know, that my the mitochondrial shutdown is the probably if I had to, I work in layers and levels from Spirit to toxicology based on Ayurvedic model. And

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the, if I had to look at level two, which is the biochemical piece,

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the mitochondrial destruction, mitochondrial autophagy, and cell danger response is probably the deepest insight we now have as to why people get stuck in these inflammatory cycles or cancer cycles

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because the cell danger responses different cell data one, two and three, these different levels of you get into the cell inflammatory response, then you get the proliferative, then you get the repair. And there’s different diseases that different sequences of the cell dangerous bone, and all we see right now people shut down and

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just not running just and with COVID Oh, my goodness, me. Here we go. Yes, the viruses just totally burned out. Yeah, it’s interesting what you saying that histamine? So um, I know some people do. I don’t know if you do clinically do LDA or LDI therapy in your office? No, but um, you know, type of incident. I think he’s on your Summit

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is the great sort of proponent and expert in that field.

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I did his conferences, and I’ve done a lot of LDI LDA courses, but you’ve got to have a number of staff to sort of help you coordinate it all. And I’ve already got too many stuff.

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Yeah, I’m trying to go fishing not make more work. I think you’re trying to go to another conference is what you’re trying to do.

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Yeah, I serve I don’t fish. Sorry.

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Yeah, no. So that that became a sort of stumbling block, but I wish to goodness, I mean, some of my greatest colleagues do fantastic work, they use LDI. And I think it has its place, but you know, like anything monotherapies, without the, without the algorithms, and all the interlocking bits and pieces. I’m not a big proponent of monotherapies for anything.

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I get patients phoned me up and say, well find my stuff and they want, I’ve got mold. I want to I want you to prescribe colas, tyramine and then Alright, fill out the questionnaire, we’ll do a two hour interview. And we’ll see what other issues are co morbid or coexistent. And this usually 50 other issues that play the mold diagnosis is just somewhere in there, but it’s not it. And, you know, we spend our lives trying to sort out people’s beliefs about what they have and what may be truly going on. And even then it’s we sort of pushing a mystery into a mystery. Yes, we do know certain things. We have landmarks, we have ability to objectively measure

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or moving towards the strange attractor of who knows, right? Everybody’s so individual, right? Like now your data, everything, it’s just bio individuality. The only thing the only thing that the only thing that stays true is that is if you keep asking the questions, and you keep in dialogue with your patient, you have to stay present to what they telling you because, you know, there’s this now this whole concept that’s been introduced that if there isn’t ever

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evidence for what the person seeing then there must be only in their mind

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that that paradigm is given the recipe that must be stemmed out, you know, that’s just ridiculous. And patients are, you know, I’ve yet to see a patient who lingers or who’s a hypochondriac. No, they just may have a heightened sympathetic drive, and they may have increased anxiety neurotransmitters, but that’s a byproduct of the entire Gestalt that leads to that expression, it’s not that they have a DSM five diagnosis of

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some sort of psychiatric condition. It’s, it’s the, it’s the in our bodies are the endpoint of our entire lived experience. Mm hmm. And that’s how we’re gonna get filtered through ancestors. And

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then here, we sit with this, you know, this finite, which is not finite, but the so called finite system that’s not expressing expressing either wellness or disease. And we just got to be humbled to the mystery and listen, listen, listen, and, and, and try and interrelate with what we’ve been told and what what’s being exchanged, and then objectively measure, and then build from the basement up what we can, you know, do you ever see patients come in who tried all kinds of different things for mast cell? And let’s just say they have puffy eyes running, you know, runny eyes, histamine issues? And, you know, just nothing works?

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How do you like, what’s your kind of philosophy on treating those patients that they’ve tried everything? And just nothing seems to be kind of shutting off that response? Well, that’s a complicated question. Because

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first of all, when you’re working with complex illness, and people who have my salary activity, one of the first things you’ve got to do is to stabilize micelle expression.

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And that can be whack a mole, like in nature, because there’s, you know, there’s 1000 Different mediators. So which one do you work, you know.

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So what we try and do is we try and remove as many triggers of the micelle exposure. And my cell expression, of course, food being one of the most

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one of the huge drivers of my cell activation, particularly in the gap, which then leads to a whole cascade of immune dysregulation and permeability issues.

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So we, we try and remove what we can, and then we stabilize mast cell activation. If you find that somebody, and then you try and restore the cell danger response, you’re trying to work through mitochondria and immune dysregulation, and hormonal and you’re the whole cascade, if you still struggling,

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very often those people have ancestral or early developmental trauma.

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You’ll see that all the time, you know, and I then I use another colleague of mine, whose name is Mike Walden. And he’s written a book, it didn’t start with you.

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It’s all about inherited ancestral and early developmental trauma and he has a gift of being able to in two hours work out the the antecedents, mediators and triggers of hyper reactivity to internal and external influences. And many of these people have tragic, you know, ancestral inheritances or early developmental traumas, never seen never heard neglect abuse traumas. And then there was heightened sympathetic amygdala overdrive with dorsal vagal you know, with the vagus being realized they always in the sympathetic adrenaline noradrenaline, which activates histamine

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and so unless you down regulate that system,

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you always going to be whack a mole in the micelles and, and it can be you know, there’s that Toby this video I don’t know if you’ve seen it of a guy who gets on a bicycle. And he you and he turns right the bicycle goes left. And so it’s it’s this video, it’s on YouTube, you just read backwards bicycle just typing.

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And this guy, he thinks it gets on the stage. He says, I can do that and he can’t and it takes him nine months to learn to ride the bicycle the wrong way around.

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That’s probably the whack a mole you talk about right? Well that’s the neuroplasticity in order for people to reprogram you know they in their belief systems, the internal dialogue their defenses, they downed wood expression of the you know, when we look at brains of people who have been through

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aromatized you can see this heightened beta brainwaves and low alpha and increase theta. To change through neuroplasticity, it’s, it’s literally like going to the gym, you’re not going to get big biceps. So I just doing a couple of, you know,

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biceps, cause you gotta go for it and the same changing for people who have not learned to self regulate very well, to learn to self regulate and be in their bodies, and not dissociate and fragment or resist or project and not have this very rigid defense system that keeps any therapeutic intervention from being taking hold. That requires a lot of heavy lifting. A lot of neuro biofeedback and we refer to Somatic Experiencing practitioners to do fabulous work body workers. There’s a whole cascade of different people on your team to try and assist people deal with traumas down regulate their brainwaves up regulate the vagus tone, feel their bodies, be in their bodies know when they go out of their bodies know when they’re dissociated. Know when they fragment, learn the attachment styles, learn the eye or very profiles, learn the Myers Briggs learn, know yourself, you

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I love that you’re going here. And then not take yourself too seriously. I’m thinking of Annie hoppers work with a limbic system and, you know, being vata or Pitta or Kapha. And I didn’t know that stuff you’ve got if you’ve thought, or you, you know, your Vita and you go on a Pitta diet or Kapha diet, it’s toast.

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And if you don’t know your attachment styles, and you don’t know your Myers Briggs styles, you’ll be blaming yourself, you’ll be sort of beating yourself up. And meanwhile, it’s just a sort of a constitutional preference that you’re going to born into. Learn to modulate those behaviors when you get to know yourself.

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I love that you are Vedic principles there. Oh, I use them all day long about it when a patient walks in the door immediately does instinctively have to know if they buy to Peter Kafka because of either patient, provider patient, you know, they’ve full of ideas, and they implement your ideas for short periods of time, and they get bored and they want something new.

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And they always react to everything. Of course they they always you know, my Sally? Yeah, that would be me that would be mass selling.

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And then the pitches are, you know, the more aggressive fiery types always you have to be on time and if you late and they get mad, and they blame you if things don’t go well then you got to be the best in the city or the best in the country. Otherwise, you’re not good enough and your waiting room must be tidy and must be nice chairs and

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probably not a pig. Ah, are you?

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Well, I got Peter in, okay.

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puffers are more sweet. You know, they the earthen water they, they tremendously sweet and loving and kind. They’re very kind. They’re very loyal. They,

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they do every, you know, they, they come to every appointment, and they are very nice and very kind. But they, they very difficult to budge. They don’t,

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don’t do a single thing you ask them to do, but they come back, they come back to the next appointment.

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I love that you brought personality types and constitutional types into this because I think like you said, it’s really the underlying, you know, factor about how people are going to respond and what they’re going to do. And if you if you treat, if you even Myers Briggs, if you treat, you know, an extrovert a certain way if you don’t read them, right, or thinking type, or feeding type, oh my goodness, you get a feeding type person wrong. You’re like, Hell how?

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Yes, it is. Most of us doctors are, you know, thinking types. And so when we when we, when we download our database on a feeling type basis is like, what the hell is right? Yeah, but doctor, that’s not how I feel. Okay.

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Yes, I’m definitely feeling tight. So I actually don’t know a ton about the Myers Briggs. I’m gonna look into that about the concept or those constitutional types are feeling tight. It’s interesting. They pay us draw Hmm. So you talk a little bit about diet being so important. So I know you know things you know, high histamine foods like tomatoes and what are some of the

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Super, super high histamine foods that you would have people avoid even just for a short period of time leftovers for sure.

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The protein histidine breaks down to histamine the longer you leave it particularly in fish, you know,

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there’s a particular disease Grom broad poisoning, which is eating old fish. It’s a histamine reaction, you get the red face and everything. Go to er think you like when you take nice and you get the red face? That’s a histamine flush. Same thing. Yeah, Okay, interesting. Yeah, yeah, I do.

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Citrus is big.

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is a big one. And then all the yeasty foods, of course.

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I have a we have a cheat sheet. One, one pages, all the things you can eat. And then the other pages will things you can’t even eat. You know, we’d combined paleo autoimmune, low histamine, because the Paleo autoimmune diet lowers the inflammatory component. And then we start to subset it into low histamine, low FODMAPs, low oxalates bla bla bla. So you’ve got to know all those diets, you got to know all the diets, the lectin diet, the low lectins, you got to know them more than you got to know how to use them or

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they’re interested. If you don’t know those diets, you can’t really you can’t work with patients with the multiplicity of presentation, because you’ll get all types all kinds, you know, I oxalates, high salicylates. Hi, FODMAPs. Hi. So those are all all in the same patient, then you got not much food list, right? Yeah, maybe yeah, I would say a beat or something.

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Yes. And then in many people have that heightened amygdala, you know, they have early trauma, where the amygdala is highly sensitized. And the mere thought of the food will trigger my cell reaction, they don’t have to eat the food.

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Just the thought will trigger the response, because the amygdala is just firing all the time. Yes. So you talk a little bit about the foods do you do you use any certain nutraceuticals that are really good I’m taking core certain are things that really down regulate the histamine response, one of them.

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Oh, wow, that’s a lot. Everything and anything that works from vitamin C to quesiton, to Dao to luteolin, to like cumin, C to PE A, the I have, like 30 that we could potentially use but I, I tend to use his Dao natural D history as my foot one two punch. And then I use Barbara protect or quesiton and then I start going down, you know, PE A, you know, all the rest of them. Okay, I use I use pharmaceuticals a lot of the time to Oh, interesting. I prefer pharmaceuticals in the beginning stages of complex ill myself patient because they work and they get they just calm the system down so you can get things done.

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h1 h2 blockers and mast cell stabilizers and anti leukotrienes and like singulars I use them liberally. Wow, okay, interesting.

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No shame and no fear just

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just for a short period as long as it’s needed long as is needed while you regulating that system. Remember nine months to change neuroplasticity to change the system? Guy minds. Wow, it takes a long time I patients asked me how long what’s my prognosis? Doc, I say

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I have no idea. However, on average, it takes about six months to a year to get the mitochondria to your you can’t put

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this pathogenesis there’s disease and they Salya Genesis that Nivas spoke about healing and what caused the disease is not often what heals the disease. And you’ve got to really put into that cell danger response you got to put in the healing nutrients and all the missing building blocks of which there’s 50

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Kind of, you know, you got to remove the pathogenesis and you got to put in the healing nutrients and, and that’s process a lot of them are fat soluble and fat soluble nutraceuticals they, they don’t they don’t want to be pushed upstream they want to be is you got to sort of seduce them into place you know? Yes, yes. That’s interesting. I know. Dr. Clean heart talks about parasitic infections and that’s one of this where he sometimes where he starts because that can also cause that as well. Yeah, he’s he’s big on parasites is one of the primary drivers of these chronically stuck people. Very interesting. So if you’re

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Okay, we’re switching gears just a little bit. Um, do you treat I wanted to chat with you a little bit about adrenal fatigue or cortisol issues, since like the conference is really all about women, you know, with energy issues and burnout and brain fog. And do you treat that in your office? I’m sure you do.

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Do I treat anything else? I mean,

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the adrenal cortisol, you know, the HPA axis is sort of secondary. It’s a driver of this whole cascade of mitochondrial shutdown. Those are the it’s not you know, people say Oh, I went to see my naturopath I got adrenal fatigue, no, your adrenals are fatigued because of a constellation of multiplicity of factors that are just pushing your system into the shutdown cell danger response and the adrenal the adrenal issues a subset within a subset you know, you got to you got to pull out like as a stupid saying is you got to you know, grab 30 nails in your feed you pull out as many as you can. But if you only pull out 25 You still got five it still hurts. So the adrenals will correct once you reduce the allostatic load once you start taking the bad things out and repairing and balancing the system the adrenals will self correct

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the adrenal issue I think is a very much a secondary issue and I I measure the cortisol awakening response of measured on measure serum cortisol in the morning pm ACTH saliva cortisol 24 hour urine cortisol urine cortisol metabolites, measure them all but I don’t they all self regulate once you start to write the ship

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they come back on board when the system is more regulated. When you say right the ship do you mean down like down like regulated nervous system? So it’s not constantly in a sympathetic state, though the whole the whole, you know, the whole person, okay, hormones, you know, mold whatever early ancestral trauma belief systems defense mechanisms, early developmental trauma, structural problems, brain autonomic nervous system vagal tone, nutrient deficiencies, micro macro, removal of toxins, removal of heavy metals, removal of infections, removal of parasite,

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the whole concept the whole saga of life

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seems like quite a bit, right? What is it? We’re looking for one thing, but apparently it’s not. One thing isn’t.

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Do you think hormones like low progesterone or you know, any issues with hormones play up play a major role, huge.

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hormone dysregulation is is always at play, you know?

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Woman fourth woman, particularly the estrogen progesterone ratio. I mean cortisol, you talk about adrenal cortisol gets made from progesterone, and progesterone regulates estrogen. And many women have estrogen overload you designer by Zenner, estrogens, weight and so forth. And so, estrogen progesterone dysregulation with PCOS and hyperinsulinemia those conditions are epidemic.

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And hormone regulation is crucial, which is one of my postgraduate things is hormone therapy. Okay, do you do saliva or blood or urine dried urine for hormone testing? Are all your

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saliva and urine all three at once? Interesting gametime because hormones are bound to proteins in the blood. They then get dropped off at receptors saliva, and then they get metabolized through genetics and organs urine. So you gotta measure all three components to get an idea where you’re at. I shudder when people come in with a with all due respect, a Dutch test and say, you know, this is I’ve got this No, you don’t necessarily let’s look, you know, let’s look at the blood. Let’s look at the saliva. Let’s look at the urine. Let’s take your history and then work it out. You know, what is your insulin doing? What your LH FSH doing? What you know, what’s your hemoglobin a one C? What’s your freestyle liberal showing with your blood sugar? All of these interrelated factors have to be taken into account to take single hormones and just replace them. I gave that up 20 years ago. Don’t do that. Yeah. Wow. That’s interesting. I haven’t heard that strategy. That’s amazing. So I want to ask you quickly about cell membrane health. Um, do you use things in your office like faster time

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choline or I know

35:03

there’s some other things some other lipid replacement do you use those in your office? My middle name is phosphor title

35:13

wow I’m thinking of plasma and plasma halogens I guess word yes. Yes. Okay.

35:21

Yeah so we do you know we do the body bio fatty acid test, we do the IgM mitochondrial test, we do the David good enough plasminogen test. I had the good fortune of working with Justine Stanger, who works for body by and Dale good to know the plasma origins and she’s an excellent chef and nutritionist and health coach. So we have can objectively identify fatty acid deficiencies, mitochondrial destruction, all the toxins that are sitting as adults on DNA and on cell membranes. We can measure cell membrane voltage cell membrane phosphate title, choline, phosphate, tidal ethyl el Amin levels, we can measure Plasma halogens, and you just look at those and all of a sudden, everything starts to make sense.

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And I really use that as my baseline the you know, I use the ion panel from Great Plains from Genova for the macro micronutrients, I use the methylation panel from health diagnostics, or use the body by a fatty acid per AGL plasminogen plus then the hormones and everything else but those become my coal panels to look at what’s going on at this cell membrane, mitochondrial level and those until those get repaired the job’s not done.

36:48

Very interesting I did a body biome I think was from Meridian Valley labs years ago. I think what body bio first came out at least that portion of the company

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but yeah, that’s been a huge game changer for me as well. Fatty Acids crucial crucial the body bio fatty acid, which goes to Kennedy Krieger but they put their software

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that that tests wow, I mean, that’s changed lives. People come in everybody’s fish oil overloaded they all got

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you know, they Mica 60s. Oh, shut down. Yes, I was gonna ask you if you use fish oil, but I assume that’s a big no, I take people off fish all day long.

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But I use it when it’s needed. For sure it is needed. Okay, everybody’s taking fish oil, mica three saturated

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and Amiga three shuts down Vegas six shuts down. A lot of the cell membrane precursors or the Omega six fats are necessary to make

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phospholipids with great integrity, and arachidonic acid for immune regulation. So if you overdo your omega threes, you got immune issues and you’ve got cell membrane issues.

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I’m thinking all the autoimmunity out there people are just you know, wow. I love that you start there. Um, I wanted to ask you about I don’t think people really know what plasma halogens actually are. I just recently learned of them. So what’s a like a kind of an elementary explanation of what they are? Well, as I understand them, they sort of the end products as phosphate, phosphate lipid production, and they modulate the immune response, and inflammation.

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Dr. Goodenough, who’s a Canadian, Saskatchewan by chemists sort of put them on the map.

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And he’s manufacturing them from some obscure gets him from Ukraine or China or somewhere, the raw material and then he makes them and he’s fact in his facility. I’ve only recently started doing the test and with Justin’s help, sort of learned how to plug it into clinical practice.

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But it’s a sort of recent, recent progression in my work, it’s only the last six months, so don’t have a huge database to say.

39:13

The benefits outweigh the costs because the cost is high.

39:19

Like many people do report tremendous improvement in things like brain fog, and energy. But I don’t have a huge phospholipids Yes, Omega six fats. Yes. I can vouch for those changing lives. Those margins, I’m still in the infancy of using them to see what clinical outcomes. Okay. I think they’re going to be a major player in the future. Hmm, very interesting. Very interesting. So what did they ask you? This is a personal question.

39:49

What does wellness mean to you, Dr. Hoffman?

39:54

Well,

39:57

it depends if you’re in the first month of life.

40:00

For the second half of life, we’ll say the second half if I think you might be in the second house.

40:08

Well, I happen to be

40:13

what’s glass half? Empty? Yeah.

40:19

All right. So we have a trajectory, the first half of life is taken up by drives, we have an innate capacity to become something with somebody, and we drawn towards some illusionary desire to fulfill our destiny on earth. And we have this sort of sense of immortality, if you will, because we don’t really think of N days, right. So we taken up. And so we sort of have a slight inflation, we have a slight increased sense of ourselves and our capabilities and possibilities. And all the hormones and the genes drive us to become and fulfill the drives to be seen by parents drives to be seen by the opposite sex drives, to educate, create financial security, and then pass on the genes. So in the first half of life wellness is to maximally fulfill those criteria, and keep your body as healthy as possible. But in the first half of life, it doesn’t matter what you do, you can be sort of, you can be a reprobate and still kind of get through quite well.

41:31

They can half of life, well, then then that’s when the rubber hits the road.

41:38

The drives are the first half of life, withdraw, hormones withdraw. And the ego drum is to become somebody that you’re not so driven, right? So that’s most soldier, who are you really? How much did you leave behind in your pursuit of the first half of life? what pieces do I have to go back and retrieve to fulfill who I’m really meant to be authentically myself? So then it’s not just the absence of disease, it’s really, am I living at my most maximum capacity as a human being fulfilling my destiny and fate for this one tiny life I’ve been given.

42:20

So there’s a gradation of disease management, sort of homeostasis, and then am I living that which are meant to live at my highest capacity. So I will think of it as stages of from disease to self actualization, there’s a whole spectrum of possibilities,

42:41

I guess of cynicism to throw it into.

42:46

You need a dash of humor as well write

42:50

it

42:51

in all halves of your life.

42:55

You can look back right when you’re in your 20s on 40. When you’re in your 20s or 30s, for me, at least. Oh my gosh, what was I thinking? And so I can imagine at your age, do you look back even at my age and think Oh,

43:08

no, I look like my son that loves to tell me I’ve only got 20 summers left, and what am I going to do with the remaining summon? And then the other day, I just went and got a big statue in my god and like to time statue, and I thought, Well, I’m gonna leave that for my son’s because I’m gonna be gone. He’s gonna have to move that off my property.

43:31

That’ll show you.

43:36

Oh, well, I really loved that. We talked a little bit about mast cell and a little bit about adrenal fatigue and mitochondria and hormones and phospho lipids rounded it off with classical lipids. So yeah, I love your perspective about the total body approach, you know, with the limbic system and the nervous system so and the soul, who are we rarely and what are we meant to fulfill? And who are we meant to become? Because you know, at birth, like acorn and the oak tree, the oak, the acorn knows it’s going to be an oak tree.

44:10

So in the pursuit of life and all the pleasures and pains you know, can we truly identify with who we meant to be? Do we know our soul from a young age? And can we fulfill and spread out into all the areas that it’s meant to become without without too much hubris and arrogance? Just can we live you know, an authentic life?

44:31

In the absence of disease, hopefully?

44:35

Do we know our soul?

44:38

Do we know who we are? Do we know so can we can we live with ourselves? Are we okay? You know,

44:45

that could be a whole a whole 40 interviews in itself. Do we know our soul?

44:52

I’m not that I lucked out with one of the great they’re one of the great traditions I caught

45:00

right into my work is the union card Young’s tradition of

45:04

union psychoanalysis, which is dream analysis, which the hypothesis is that our unconscious drives us towards fulfillment in the second half of life, while we fulfilled the conscious ego drives, does it, then through dreams and synchronicities? Can we fulfill the parts that we’ve forgotten? And that’s driven through the unconscious through dreams. And so I use lies and refer to Union analysis a lot for people who are struggling with sort of existential issues of Who are they and what they meant to be. So, integral part of the work that I did in fact, I only went to med school. In the end, once I realized why I was there was to become a union analyst that I never did. I did this. Oh my gosh, I love that part of your story.

45:53

That’s amazing. If people are interested in finding out about that, what’s it called Young called Young Carl Jung and Freud, Freud and Jung. Yeah. And Jung broke from Freud and set up his own thing and became psychotic and wrote the Red Book and yeah.

46:09

Okay, Carl. Yes, I’ve read. I’ve read one of his books before. So that’s amazing. I’m gonna pick that up again. So thanks for the little gentle reminder. It was his book memories, dreams and reflections, which made me want to do psychoanalysis. And I think my mom said, Oh, he wants to do psychoanalysis. Send him to med school to become a psychiatrist. So you can go do it. I think that was her reasoning.

46:31

And it wasn’t wrong.

46:34

It’s funny, I’ve learned maybe that was the unconscious mind at that point. Right.

46:40  

Well, thank you so much, Dr. Hoffman for the time. I know you had a probably a long conference today, so I appreciate it. No, no, thank you. And thank you for putting the date the time later do

46:54

of course, of course. Alright, well, we will put all your information where people find can find you and all that good stuff. So I know you’re in it. So thanks. Okay. Bye for now. Thanks. Bye now. See you Bye

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