Your Skin and Autoimmune Diseases with Dr. Tom O’Bryan

Dr Trevor Cates:            Hi, there.  I’m Dr. Trevor Cates.  Welcome to the Spa Doctor podcast.  I’ve had a lot of questions about skin conditions such as psoriasis and vitiligo and other skin problems that are triggered by issues with the immune system.  So I ask my guests today to come on and talk about autoimmune conditions, how they impact our skin and overall health and what we can do about it.  My guest today is Dr. Tom O’Bryan.  He’s an internationally-recognized and sought-after speaker specializing in the complications of gluten sensitivity, celiac disease and the development of autoimmune diseases.  He is the founder of the TheDr.com and visionary behind The Gluten Summit.

Dr O’Bryan holds faculty positions with the Institute for Functional Medicine and the National University of Health Sciences.  He has trained thousands of practitioners around the world in advance understanding of the impact of food-related disorders and the development of individual autoimmune diseases.  Today Dr O’Bryan is going to clear up the misbelief that autoimmune diseases can’t be treated.  He covers the signs of autoimmune conditions, the most common triggers and things you can start doing today to avoid your risk or if you already have an autoimmune condition, things you can do to start overcoming it.  So please enjoy this interview.  Dr Tom O’Bryan, it’s so great to interview you today.

Dr Tom O’Bryan:         Oh, thank you.  Thank you very much.  It’s a pleasure to be with you too and so unusual to be on the other side of a screen because it’s so nice when were together in person but it’s really a pleasure to be here.  Thank you.

Dr Trevor Cates:            Yeah, absolutely.  So I want to start off by talking about autoimmune conditions.  Let’s talk about what they are, maybe in some – also if you could give some examples of skin-related autoimmune conditions that would be really great and then we’ll dive into the causes, what we can do about it and all of that.

Dr Tom O’Bryan:          Sure.  Autoimmunity is when your immune system attacks self.  It attacks ourself.  Your immune system is the armed forces in your body.  It’s there to protect you.  There’s an Army, an Air Force, a Marines, a Coast Guard, a Navy, an IGA, an IGG, an IGE, an IGM.  There are many different branches of our immune system.  They’re all there to protect you.  Now autoimmunity – what most people think that the most common cause of dying is cardiovascular disease and that’s what so many government statistics tell us and then number two is cancer.  The National Institute of Health tells us that 22 million people a year are diagnosed with cardiovascular disease, 9 million people a year are diagnosed with cancer but 24 million people a year are diagnosed with autoimmune diseases and we know that only about one out of three people with an autoimmune disease gets diagnosed.

They just don’t know.  They think they’re, you know, getting old.  I feel lousy and they don’t go to a doctor and get a diagnosis.  So that’s like 72 million people out there and one of the statistics that’s come out in the last 10 years and there are many studies on this is cardiovascular disease is also autoimmune in its initiating phases.  So what that means is that the immune system is attacking self and in the cardiovascular cases attacking your blood vessels and it causes all this inflammation and it progresses into plugging up your pipes and then you get cardiovascular disease.

So autoimmune disease attacking self is the number one mechanism in getting sick and dying in the world today.  It’s the underlying foundational problem that can manifest as cardiovascular disease.  It can manifest as psoriasis.  It can manifest as vitiligo and that’s a really good one to talk about because my daughter had that when she was a teenager and that’s how I get her to clean up her act.  You know, growing, growing up with me being a nutritionally oriented doctor was not easy for my kids.  They would soak their kale in ranch salad dressing so that they would eat a bite of kale, right?  They had to be bribed that way but, but in their high school years they explored and experimented and stuff and when my daughter would push the boundaries too far with junk foods she’d get vitiligo which is you lose the color on your skin.  You get these white patches and it can be just one or two or it can be really bad.

It’s an autoimmune mechanism and so I’d say, “Honey,” the first time I’d say because she panicked and I said, “Do you want to get rid of this?”  “Yes, Dad, yes.  What can I take?  What drug can I take?”  “Well, there’s no drug, honey, that works for this.”  “Well, what, what cream can I…?”  “”There’s no cream, honey.  You have to clean it up from the inside coming out and when you clean it up from the inside and you reduce the fire inside, the inflammation that’s going on, it’ll go away.  It’ll take about two months but it’ll go away if you do what I say and don’t cheat.  If you cheat, you have to start over two months from the day you cheat,” and it cleared up and then maybe three or four times over the next 10 years, it would happen again.

You know, when she in college, undergrad, you know, maybe a little too much celebration after finals were over or something.  Who knows but – and she‘d call and say, “Oh, dad, my vitiligo’s back again.”  I’d say, “All right.  Are ready ?[inaudible 00:05:27]”  “Yeah, so send some stuff,” and I’d send her some probiotics and you know things like that.  But it’s your immune system attacking cells and the analogy I give is that when you pull at a chain, the chain always breaks at the weakest link.  It’s at one end, the middle, the other end, at your heart, your brain, your liver, your skin, your kidneys, wherever you’re weak link is.  When you pull at the chain too hard, that’s where the symptoms are going to eventually show and what’s the pull on the chain?

The pull on the chain is inflammation and so it’s the inflammation that if the weak link in your chain is your skin you then get skin problems.  If the weak link in your chain is your brain you then forget where you put your keys because your brain power is not quite there.  If the weak link in your chain is your heart all the sudden you’re breathing hard walking up and down the stairs.  Your heart’s not pumping blood quite the way it’s supposed to be.  So the symptoms which are really important for people and they want to get rid of the symptoms, they’re the manifestation of where the weak link is but the mechanism is the same.  The foundational mechanism is the same and so autoimmunity – my, my goal and my passion in life is to carry this message out that if we understand the foundational problem, take a step back from your symptoms whatever they are, take a step back and understand there’s a foundational problem here and when you address the foundational problem then the symptoms start going away and it doesn’t take long.  Your skin clears up, you know, energy comes back, sleep is better, all those types of things.

Dr Trevor Cates:            Yeah, and I just love that you’re talking about this for, for multiple reasons.  One of the things is that I think there’s a misbelief that, that autoimmune, autoimmune  disease can’t be treated, that there’s no – if you have an autoimmune disease you just kind of have to live with it and that it’s, it doesn’t – you know the conventional approach is it doesn’t always make sense why you get triggered.  They don’t really – they say, “Well, we don’t really know why you’re having a hard time right now so let’s just suppress the symptoms,” and so what you’re talking about though is that you can actually get rid of these symptoms, that you can actually calm down the inflammation, you can actually address these root causes so that’s – I just love hearing this.  It’s very exciting for me to hear that so let’s talk about what some of these triggers are because I imagine that you want to try and identify the triggers because if we can address those, eliminate those then that’s going to be part of the, the healing process.

Dr Tom O’Bryan:       You bet.  You bet and happy to do that.  I’ll just give you one big example first to reinforce what you just said.  Dr Dale Bredesen runs the Buck Institute at UCLA.  That’s the Alzheimer’s Research Center at UCLA.  He published a paper in November 2014 so coming close on two years ago reversing Alzheimer’s in nine out of ten patients within five years.  Card-carrying, in facilities, can’t live on their own, Alzheimer’s patients within five years, they’re back home.  Nine out of ten people.  The tenth one was too far gone and how did he do it?  A 34 point checklist.  Do they have this?  Do they have this?  Do they have this?  Do they have this?  Is this pulling on their chain?  Do they have food sensitivities?  What about gluten?  What about diary?  Do they have elevated homocysteine levels?  Do they have B vitamin deficiencies?  Do they have small intestinal bacterial overgrowth?  Do they have bad bugs in their gut, dysbiosis.

Just this checklist of 34 things and when he went through – all his team goes through all 34 things with their patients and whatever they find, whatever the test results showed that’s what they dialed down on and they fixed that and then they do the next one and then they do the next one and then and these people get educated.  Do they get enough sleep?  Do they have some quiet time?  Some meditation type time?  Whether you call it mediation or prayer or mindful walking.  Whatever you call it.  Do they have that?  So there’s 34 things on the checklist and that’s the way it is for all of us and it’s not necessarily 34 things.  There’s two or three main things usually that when you address those, people start turning around pretty darn quickly.  So the most common fuel on the fire and that’s my term for it is fuel on the fire because inflammation is a fire at the cellular level.  It’s always a fire.

The most common inflammation comes from food sensitivities.  Things we put in our mouth.  Whatever’s on the fork two, three, four times a day.  If the weak link in your chain is your stomach and you feel lousy when you eat French fries you’ll stop eating French fries because you just feel terrible every time you eat it but if that’s not the weak link in your chain and you eat French fries but the bad fats cause the inflammation that’s pulling on the chain and the weak link in your chain is your thyroid, you’ll got thyroid symptoms which means cold hands and feet, you can’t wake up in the morning, you wish you had 20 more minutes in bed, sometimes you wear socks to bed.  It’s hard to get up and get going.  Sometimes a little depression.  You can’t lose five pounds even if you don’t eat for two days, that your metabolism’s too slow and it may be because you’re eating too many bad fats that are causing the inflammation that’s pulling on the chain of your thyroid.

So those people don’t need necessarily more thyroid medication unless they have a thyroid deficiency, formal deficiency then they do but most of those people have normal hormone levels but their doctor shotgun hormone in any way to try to help them feel better and the culprit is there throwing gasoline on the fire with something that they’re eating.  So the most common gasoline on the fire is the foods that we eat.  That is by far the most common but there’s a new kid on the block and this new kid on the block, it’s really a big emphasis in our docu-series that’s coming up soon, the new kid on the block, Trevor, is environmental toxins that I want your listeners just to listen to this next statistic and know that it’s accurate and just imagine what this means. Every day in the United States 250 pounds of chemicals per person per day are being dumped on us here in the US.  250 pounds per person per day and that does not include petrochemicals, pharmaceuticals, pesticides and there was one other category I’m not remembering but it’s 250 pounds per person per day.  Never before in the history of humanity has this happened and this is, this has just going like this in the last 15 years.

Dr Trevor Cates:            How do we get exposed to those?  A hundred and fifty pounds?

Dr Tom O’Bryan:          Yeah, it’s in the food chain.  When I have my shirts dry cleaned the chemicals they use in dry cleaning, the antibiotics they’re spraying on the food, the glyphosate that they’re spraying on our crops, they’re spraying it on the cracks in the sidewalk to kill anything from growing on the sidewalk, right?  The weed killers.  How is it that golf courses never have a dandelion?  You know, it’s all the stuff they dump on there weekly on the golf courses and guys who – you know there’s a direct correlation between how much you golf and your risk of prostate cancer.  The more you golf the more at risk you are of prostate cancer.

That’s why it’s so important for people to consider taking your shoes off when you come home.  Leave the shoes at the door.  Why?  Because all of that stuff that you’ve been walking through all day, it gets in your carpet and then if you have children crawling around the floor or young kids or you walk around barefoot every once in a while but someone else is wearing their shoes in there, then you, you have more exposure to these chemicals plus the flame retardants in all of our clothing today, the flame retardants in our bedding that we lay in for 6/8 hours completely surrounded and wrapped in these materials, it’s in the air, all the exhaust fumes.  It’s, it’s, it’s unbelievable but it’s 250 pounds per person per day in the US.

Dr Trevor Cates:            So does this is include personal care products too because we get exposed to chemicals in those as well?

Dr Tom O’Bryan:          Yeah.  That’s exactly right.  That’s exactly right and when you look at some of the – and no one has really – you know there have been fringe doctors talking about this and other doctors you know my friends and associates and functional medicine we hear them talking saying oh, yeah, that’s important but then we don’t pay any attention to it or very little attention you know but it’s the new kid on the block and it’s just getting worse.  It’s getting worse.

Dr Trevor Cates:            Yeah, and I, and I guess you’re saying it’s the new kid on the block because it’s not like environmental toxins are new but it is – we are exposed to them in so much, in such a high amount more than ever because we’re exposed to new things and then there’s all the stuff that has ever been sprayed and left behind that we’re also exposed to even things that are banned that are no longer in use.  They still exist in our environment and our water and they get in our fish and our food.  So yes, this is, this is something that is very important.  So how do these toxins impact our immune system then?

Dr Tom O’Bryan:          Well, let’s talk first about a common one that’s huge and that is Bisphenol-A.  Bisphenol-A softens plastic so that means in our water bottles it’s there and soft contact lenses are thick with Bisphenol-A.  Credit card receipts are high in Bisphenol-A.  So you get the receipt and you fold it up, you put in your pocket, now it’s on your hands, and it goes through your hands and gets in your blood stream.  When they look at newborn infants now, nine out of ten newborn infants – the average is over 280 chemicals that’s going into the newborn.  Bisphenol-A, 10 out of 10 have Bisphenol-A.  One more source of Bisphenol-A and then we’ll go into its impact is our coffee cups at Starbucks or any of the other coffee shops.  The inside lining of the coffee cup and the lid, the lid is loaded with Bisphenol-A so you take a coffee cup and you put a lid on it and the heat of the coffee steams up, condenses on the underside of the lid and drops back down into the coffee full of Bisphenol-A plus you put the coffee cup up to your lips so all the heat is hitting the underside of the lid and funneling down to the little opening so you’re getting lots of Bisphenol-A.  So what you have to do is you go to a coffee shop with one of these.

Dr Trevor Cates:            Right.

Dr Tom O’Bryan:          You know, stainless steel things, say fill it up.  Premium, you know.

Dr Trevor Cates:            Yeah, and the – yeah, so these – what you’re talking about is what like the paper and with the plastic tops that you’re usually get there not bringing in your own and also the lining of cans.  A lot of food cans are lined with Bisphenol-A.

Dr Tom O’Bryan:          That’s exactly right.

Dr Trevor Cates:            Yeah.

Dr Tom O’Bryan:       That’s exactly right.  So what does this stuff do?  Bisphenol-A was originally designed – I think it was in the 1940s.  It may have been the 50s as a substitute for estrogen and it’s called an endocrine – that means hormone.  An endocrine disruptor because it was found to be a disrupter of your hormone balance.  So how does it do that?  Bisphenol-A sits on the receptor sites.  Now what’s a receptor site?  The way hormones get inside ourselves is that they – there’s a catcher’s mitt that sits on the outside of the cell facing the bloodstream and there’s an estrogen receptor site.  Estrogen goes by in the bloodstream and it goes right into that catcher’s mitt.  Thyroid hormone will not go into an estrogen receptor site.  Only estrogen will go into an estrogen receptor site.  Thyroid hormone goes into the thyroid receptor site on the cell surface but every hormone has its own receptor site.  When estrogen in the bloodstream comes into the receptor site, the receptor site then opens the door and lets the estrogen in, the estrogen goes into the cell and it gets broken up and used the way that it’s supposed to be used.  Then the remnants are gotten rid of like exhaust.

Bisphenol-A comes in and it comes into the receptor site, it opens the door.  Bisphenol-A goes inside this cell so it acts as if it’s an estrogen, the cell acts like it’s got estrogen but you can’t break down this stuff.  So it stays in the cell going boing, boing, boing, boing, boing, boing, boing, boing.  That’s polycystic ovaries or ovarian cysts.  They’re endocrine-disrupting mechanisms that cause these, these terrible conditions that women get and commonly they’re caused by imbalances in hormones that have been disrupted and Bisphenol-A is one of the most common endocrine-disrupting hormones.  Also let’s take another chemical, a very common chemical.

There are only two receptor sites that are on every cell of your body.  There’s only two.  Vitamin D, every cell in your body needs vitamin D.  That’s why it’s so important to have the amounts of vitamin D and thyroid hormone.  That’s means there’s a receptor site for thyroid on every cell of your body.  Thyroid hormone is the thermostat that controls the temperature in the cell.  We call that your metabolism.  How hot the cell works.  So thyroid hormone comes into the thyroid receptor site, opens the door, thyroid hormone goes right in and it does its thing but as you know many people are diagnosed with thyroid problems.  Their thyroids are working right but when you do a blood test, they’ve got normal thyroid hormone levels.  Many people that happens to especially women.  How can that be?  But the symptoms are clearly thyroid related and so what doctors do is they prescribed thyroid hormone.  But wait, the blood test was normal.  There’s a normal amount of hormone there already.  Why are we giving hormone?

Well, it’s going to help and so it’s symptom relief which is not a bad thing but it’s a short-sighted thing, right?  So there are three chemicals travel in the bloodstream if you’re exposed to them and they go right into thyroid receptor sites.  They won’t go anywhere else.  They go into thyroid receptor sites but they can’t open the door so they just sit in the receptor site.  Now the pitcher is throwing a fastball to the catcher, right?  But the catcher’s got three baseballs in the catcher’s mitt.  So the hormone comes into it and bounces right back out.  It can’t get into the cell so your cell has thyroid deficiency symptoms but the blood says you’ve got plenty of thyroid hormone.

So one of those three chemicals that will sit in a thyroid receptor site, they have an affinity for the thyroid receptor site.  The first and the most important one, chlorine.  Look at how many hundreds of millions of pounds of chlorine are being used in our culture today, in our society today.  Look at your newspaper, your computer paper.  They’re chlorinated.  Some of the clothing we wear has been chlorinated.  The tissues that I blow my nose with.  This paper is chlorinated.  So we get these minimal amounts of chlorine exposure, tiny, tiny little amounts all day every day and they sit in the thyroid receptor site and then thyroid hormone can’t get in the cell so you have the symptoms of thyroid dysfunction.  Maybe you’ve got an extra 20 pounds you can’t get rid of that you’re exercising as hard as you can and it’s just not coming off because your metabolism has slowed down.

So the first one is chlorine.  Now what do you do about that?  The most common place where we get chlorine exposure is in the shower.  The steam, we inhale the steam and it goes right into our lungs and right into our bloodstream.  So what do you do?  You get a chlorine shower filter.  It costs fifty bucks and you unscrew the shower head, you screw the filter on then you screw the shower head back on.  It takes five minutes, doesn’t need a plumber and it’s done, right?  So that at least is going to help.  That doesn’t do anything about the tissue or the many other exposures we have but it’s all these little things people.  You know, you, base hits win the ballgame.  You don’t need home runs.  Just keep getting base hits.  You know, the little things that you learn about that will make a difference.  So that’s chlorine.

The other two chemicals that bite on thyroid receptor sites just to complete the thought are bromide and fluoride.  What are you brushing your teeth with?  If you read the studies or you read the history of fluoride, you will see it was just a waste product.  It was a byproduct of industry and they said well, let’s see what we can do with this stuff and that’s how they came up with using fluoride and there’s a lot of question about the safety of fluoride and some of the complications of fluoride but it binds to your thyroid receptor sites.  That’s why thyroid autoimmune disease as one of the mechanisms as to why thyroid autoimmune disease is the most common autoimmune disease of all.  It’s the most common and it’s partially because our thyroids just can’t work right.  They’re so overwhelmed by the amount of insult they’re getting and your immune system comes by and says, whoa, what’s this?  What’s that inflammation in the thyroid receptor site?  I better fight that so immune system comes in and it starts attacking the chlorine thyroid combination that’s called a neoepitope.  It’s a really big word.  It’s a good Scrabble word, right?  But your body starts attacking it and then you eventually develop the autoimmune mechanism to thyroid from that.  So it’s all these little base hits that are going to help you win the ballgame.

Dr Trevor Cates:            So the idea is that we want to try to reduce our exposure to these chemicals and then – oh, and I wanted to mention that bromide – my understanding is one of our most common sources of exposures is like packaged foods like breads and things because of…

Dr Tom O’Bryan:          That’s exactly right.  They put in the bread and they put in the rolls so I’m not sure about this but I’m, it’s consistent so when you get a blueberry muffin at the coffee shop there’s likely bromide in it…

Dr Trevor Cates:            Right.

Dr Tom O’Bryan:          …because the flour had bromide in it.

Dr Trevor Cates:            Yeah, so we want to reduce our exposure to those but what about the – you know the exposures that we’ve already had?  What if people didn’t know about any of this before now or you know we, I mean we all to a certain extent get exposed to these things.

Dr Tom O’Bryan:       Yes, we do and that’s a really good question because it’s an area that we don’t want to deal with.  We don’t want to hear about it.  You know, just give me the pills so I can feel better.  Well, things have changed.  You know, that’s not going to work anymore and the whole concept of detoxification and how do I – it’s kind of like you know if your car has been sitting for three months and then you start it up and you floor it and there’s all this black smoke that comes out the back end of the exhaust pipe, right, because it’s been sitting.  That’s what’s happening in your body and you need to get the black smoke out in a sense you know.  That’s what detoxification is.  How do you do that?  Well, there are many, many ways.

There are many great programs out there to do that.  I don’t know that one is better than the other.  There are some really good ones and there are some sleazeball ones but you know so you want to be careful.  So you do these podcasts.  I’m sure you’ve had people talking about detox on there so your, your, your people can find out a safe detox protocol but you want to get introduced to the idea you’re detoxing for life.  My good friend Dr John Klein, we’re on the faculty of The Institute of Functional Medicine together and John’s area of expertise is detoxification and he wrote the book Detoxified for Life I think three years ago.  It’s a really great book because he makes the argument that we need to include some of these detoxifying foods in our diet every day, every day and we need to make sure we have enough water to wash everything out so it doesn’t stagnate there you know.

That’s other reason why you want to, you want to pee often and you know you want to – excuse me but this is what we need to know, right?  You’ve got to drink like six to eight glasses of water a day depending on your body weight and so that means you’re going to be urinating more often.  Well, yeah, you’ve got to flush out this stuff.  You got to get rid of it.  You’ve got to have good bowel movements.  If you don’t, you have to work with someone to help you get good bowel movements you know.  This is not commonly talked about but you should be able to go to the bathroom and come out and say, oh, god, that felt great.  And that’s not something we talk about but we really need to recognize that we’re, we’re being poisoned now.  All of us are being poisoned.  Every day we’re being poisoned and this is not alarmist.  This is fact.  There are so many studies on this.

You know, I’ve been traveling the world for the last 11 months interviewing world leaders on this whole topic of autoimmunity and where it comes from and we’re going to be airing all this coming up in a few months.  It’s called Betrayal and you should hear what the scientists say.  You know, when I talk to them about vaccines, what we’re doing to our kids.  We have a million people, a million children a year every year diagnosed with autism now.  When I came out in practice it was one child out of every 4,800.  Now it’s…

Dr Trevor Cates:            It’s one in 43.

Dr Tom O’Bryan:       Yeah, and if it continues at the same rate – I was just talking with Dr Stephanie Seneff the other day from MIT on this.  She’s a numbers person.  She’s the numbers geek and she loves being a geek of numbers you know but she said Tom, if it just continues at the same pace that it’s going, increasing at the same pace, nothing new, just the same pace by the year 2046 it’s going to be one child out of two are going to be on the autism spectrum.  This is where we’re heading.  This is, this is no like projection like maybe it’s going to happen.  No, it’s happening now.  A million kids a year in our country.  It’s not that vaccinations necessarily cause autism but when I interviewed the world experts on that specific topic, four of them.  I interviewed four of them.  They all said the same thing.

Some of us – somewhere between 25% to 33% of us carry a gene HLA-DRB1.  That’s a big gene.  That’s a gene, HLA-DRB1.  If you have that gene, you are very sensitive to the carriers in vaccines.  Whether it’s thimerosal or it’s aluminum.  You are very sensitive to having an acute reaction in your brain to the vaccine and so what the scientists say, they all say the same thing.  I’m very much in favor of vaccinations.  However for those children that carry HLA-DRB1 gene perhaps it would be wise to slow down the introduction of these toxins and prepare the child’s immune system a little bit more, perhaps making sure their vitamin D levels are high, making sure they’ve taken vitamin C, a few things to strengthen these young not yet developed immune systems.  They’re like walking a fine line you know and trying to give us a direction.  They’re trying to state the facts without sounding fanatical on it but this is what we’re up against now.

Who’s going to pay for these million kids a year when they’re 18, 20, 22 years old and they’re outside their parents’ home and they’re 5’1 or 5’10, they weigh 185 pounds and they’re not functional in society.  Who’s going to pay for these people?  You know, I mean we got a mess coming because we have our heads in the sand.  So the big picture concept, the, the new kid on the block is this whole world of toxins that we’re being exposed to that our bodies have no protection against.

You know, my friend Mark Houston is a very famous vascular biologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville and Mark said this a few years ago and he’s absolutely right.  He said we have the exact same immune system is our ancestors millions of years ago and what did our ancestors have to fight?  What did their immune systems have to protect them from?  Bugs, parasites, viruses, molds and fungus and so the immune system’s designed to protect you from bugs, parasites, virus, molds and fungus.  That’s it.  We have the same immune system.  It hasn’t genetically changed.

We don’t have a way of protecting ourselves from Bisphenol-A or mercury in the fish or lead or DDT or PCBs or polychlorinated phenol products.  We don’t have any protection from this.  Our immune system can only react as if it’s a bug, parasite, virus, mold or fungus.  That’s all we can do and it’s overwhelmed.  That’s why there is this confusion and your immune system gets betrayed.  You think you’re being betrayed by your immune system but you’re not.  Your immune system’s trying its best to protect you from all of these toxins that we’re being exposed to.  So my book which – can I give a plug for my book?

Dr Trevor Cates:            Absolutely.  Tell us about your book.

Dr Tom O’Bryan:          This is my book.  I just got a copy yesterday.  This is the first copy.  I’m so proud of it.  It’s called the Autoimmune Fix.  It’s on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and all those places now.  It’s in the pre-order stage so it’s 40% off.  It’s 16 bucks right now and this is the story of the book is what is autoimmunity, how does it manifest.  There’s a whole lot of examples of skin problems in there from psoriasis, acne can be autoimmune, eczema, vitiligo.  We talk about this concept of pulling on the chain and that’s the weak link and here are the genes that might be the weak link genes for skin conditions.  Here’s a blood test that you do called Transaminase 3.  There are nine transaminases.  Transaminase 3 is for your skin.  So if you have elevated antibodies at Transaminase 3, you got a problem.  Your immune system’s attacking your skin and so you just check to see if that’s the case because with whatever else you’re doing in your protocols, you also want to include stop pulling on the chain but if there’s a problem inside, you’ve got a deal with the problem inside and what’s pulling on the chain.

Dr Trevor Cates:           Right, and a lot of the chemicals that we’re concerned about in skincare products are hormone-disrupting chemicals as well and endocrine-disrupting chemicals like parabens and phthalates that are found in fragrance.  These, you know, they act similarly to what you were talking about with the catcher’s mitt and the estrogen receptors.  So yeah, I mean it’s, it’s something that I think it’s so important to talk about and I’m really glad that you, you have that information in your book and how it affects the immune system and how it leads to these autoimmune diseases, how we can turn those kinds of conditions around and I know that in addition to the genetics and the environmental factors, you also talk about, a lot about nutrition and how that plays a role in all of this as well.  So can you talk or just you know cover that like just briefly because I know we will get more information in your book but just kind of touch on a little bit.

Dr Tom O’Bryan:       Sure, sure.  This all started for me 36 years ago my wife and I, my ex and I could not get pregnant and I was an intern at the time and I called the seven most famous doctors I’ve ever heard of, holistic doctors and I said what do you do?  They all told me what they did and I put a program together and we were pregnant in six weeks.  Now we lived on campus in married housing and our neighbors asked if I’d work with them.  They’ve been through artificial insemination and nothing had worked and I said well, sure.  I don’t – it won’t hurt you.  Sure.  They were pregnant in three months so we were hot to trot.  I wanted to get out and practice and help every couple get pregnant they wanted to get pregnant, right, and there’s not much in medicine that’s all for every but in my clinical experience this is an every.

Every couple that had hormone-related problems, every couple had some foods that they were eating that they didn’t know their immune system was fighting because it didn’t make them sick when they ate it.  They didn’t know.  They didn’t – every couple.  It might be Coca-Cola.  It might be wheat.  It might be dairy and it turned out the most common ones were wheat and diary, most common and that got me into the whole world of wheat and wheat sensitivities and I started reading the studies on that back in the early 1980s and I have been diving into that ever since and as you know, I travel the world and I’ve been talking since 2004 professionally onstage teaching doctors of the potential complications of a sensitivity to wheat with or without celiac disease.  It doesn’t matter.  It’s actually worse if you don’t have celiac disease.  Studies are now showing that.

So I’m all about the science and I talk about – so that got me into this whole world about the category of what’s called food-related disorders and how foods that you have a problem with – you don’t know you have a problem with them but you do, that they trigger all these internal responses that eventually manifest as you need to take Advil every morning when you get up or before you go play tennis.  Then you’re fine but your joints are just hurting.  Oh, they’re inflamed but you take the Advil and you’re fine.  Well, that’ll last for a few years until it doesn’t work anymore and you’re much worse off you know.  So however it manifests, the mechanism is that we’re throwing gasoline on the fire.

First off, we don’t know there’s a fire going on because our doctors don’t check for that to see about that level of inflammation in your body and where might be manifesting.  There are simple tests that’ll tell you.  Is your body attacking your thyroid right now?  Is your body attacking your joints?  I did these tests on myself back in 1997 when they were research only and found that I had elevated antibodies to myelin which is what causes MS.  That’s the saran wrap around your nerves and my immune system was attacking myelin.  I had elevated antibodies to cerebellum.  That’s an area of the brain that controls balance and our muscle movement and that’s why old people can’t walk very well.  They have to hold the railing going up and down the stairs because their cerebellum’s been shrinking for the last 40 years.

Would I have founded practices that 26% of all the people that have a sensitivity to wheat – so first I test for a wheat sensitivity and I found 64% of everyone that comes into my practice, if you test them properly as a wheat sensitivity and of those people 26% of them have elevated antibodies to their cerebellum.  That means the immune system’s attacking your brain and 22% had elevated antibodies to myelin.  Your immune system’s attacking the saran wrap around your nerves.  That’s MS.  SO you wait 10 years, 15 years and you can wait if you want then you’ll see that all of a sudden your vision’s getting really bad or your coordination with your arms and your legs is bad and then you’ll learn that you’ve got this diagnosis.  Well, it’s been going on for 20 – nobody gets Alzheimer’s in their 60s and 70s.  You get in your 20s and 30s.

Matter of fact I just interviewed Dr David Perlmutter for Betrayal for our docu-series and he’s a very famous neurologist and he quoted the studies that show that children that carry the gene of susceptibility for Alzheimer’s already have indicators of Alzheimer’s beginning in their brains before the age of ten.  It’s beginning decades earlier and if you have the gene it doesn’t mean you get the disease but if you have that particular gene it’s called APOE e4, if you have an APOE e4, it just means you don’t need to throw gasoline on the fire.  You can just throw charcoal lighter fluid on the fire and you’ll get the big bonfire.  That’s what having APOE e4 means.

So I’ve got plenty of patients with APOE e4 and we measure their brain inflammation.  It scares the hell out of them.  Excuse me but it does.  I say, good, I’m glad.  Now do this, this and this and we’ll check in six months and they come back in six months and their brain inflammation markers are now down to normal and I say you can’t cheat.  If you do, they’re going right back up and you’ll kill off brain cells but as far as I know from all the tests you’re good.  You’re not killing off brain cells right now and then they’ll come back and I say every year you get this test done, a simple urine test, cost about a hundred fifty bucks or less I think to check APOE e4 and if you have that gene then you check for the markers of inflammation in the brain.  It’s called 8 hydroxy 2-deoxyguanosine.  It’s a simple urine test.  I’ll say it once more.  If people go back to listen to it, they’ll write it down.  8 hydroxy 2-deoxyguanosine.  Simple urine test.  That one’s under a hundred bucks and it tells you is there inflammation.

Most of what it’s measuring is inflammation in the brain.  So again if you got fire in the brain, you got a problem even though you feel fine, right?  I feel fine.  Okay, we’ll put that on your tombstone.  He felt fine for 25 of his last 35 years.  You know, so it’s like wake up people.  There’s a foundational problem underneath all of this and you can monitor that problem by monitoring your immune system.  If your immune system is attacking yourself that is the big problem.  That’s the big kahuna problem.  So if you monitor that and then you start asking the question why is that happening?  It’ll take you a while to learn.  This is going to accelerate that learning curve dramatically, dramatically because your doctors don’t know this.  They don’t know this stuff.  They know little bits and pieces of it but you’ll put it together for them and you’ll have your notes and stuff and you’ll find the doctors that do know about this.

That doesn’t mean you fire your doctor.  It means you add another person to the team, right, who knows about this kind of stuff and you start doing the biomarkers to see all right, looks like I’ve got some inflammation.  Where do you think it’s coming from, doc?  Well, let’s find out.  You have mercury.  Let’s look at your lifestyle.  Do you eat a lot of fish?  You know you have to investigate to find out but the days of having a headache and taking an aspirin and then forgetting about it are over.  They’ve over.  You know, we’ve got the autoimmunity mechanism is the number one mechanism in getting sick and dying in the world.  So that’s what this book is about.  That’s what the series Betrayal is about is to give you the tools so that you then can ask some relevant questions and my message to people is this is overwhelming this stuff.

It’s completely overwhelming.  I know it is.  I know it is.  I’ve spent 30 years in here.  I get overwhelmed when I look at this stuff but if you allocate one hour a week, just one hour a week.  You’re going to say, oh, I’m going to read a few pages in here one hour a week.  It takes you six months to get through this.  Who cares?  Who cares how long it takes?  Because by then now you, you’ve got it down.  You understand the questions to ask.  You know how to move forward.  Okay, I’m going to check this first for my daughter because she’s having these problems and you know whatever it is and you just create a game plan but go for base hits you know.  You’re not going to get this overnight.  This is a huge concept to get, huge but you can get it.

So between this book and between Betrayal, listening to the scientists and you know, listening to it maybe a few times, what will happen is you’re going to be more knowledgeable in this mechanism than most doctors out there and if you go to your doctor and you ask them these questions and they say well, I don’t know about that.  That’s a good doctor.  That’s the one you want.  If they try to poo-poo and it’s all nonsense.  There’s no problem at all.  Thank you so much, doctor.  I’ll see you for my next exam and you’ll find somebody else for this topic.

Dr Trevor Cates:           Tell everybody the name – for the people that are just listening and not seeing your actual book, they’re not watching the video, say what the name, the full name of the book is, when it’s coming out, where people can get it.  I’ll also have links up for everything on my website but just go ahead and share that information so people can get that.

Dr Tom O’Bryan:          Sure.  Thank you.  It’s called The Autoimmune Fix: How to Stop the Hidden Autoimmune Damage that Keeps You Sick, Fat and Tired before It Turns into Disease and it’s on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, there are like five or six different online sources for it.  It’ll be in the bookstores September 20^th.  This is the pre-order phase now and the pre-order phase it’s 40% off.  In Great Britain its 20% off.  I don’t know why but it’s different there and it comes out in October there.  But it’s The Autoimmune Fix and the docu-series that comes out in November is called Betrayal and I’m sure you’ll have some information on your site about that one.

Dr Trevor Cates:            Yeah, absolutely.  Well, Dr Tom, thank you so much for your information today.  Really appreciate all the research that you’ve done, the work with your patients and sharing all this valuable information with us.

Dr Tom O’Bryan:          Well, thank you so much.  It’s a real pleasure to be with you.  Thank you.

Dr Trevor Cates:   I hope you enjoyed this interview today with Dr Tom O’Bryan.  To learn more about Dr O’Bryan, his new book and his upcoming docu-series, just visit my website TheSpaDoctor.com, go to the podcast page with his interview and you’ll see all the information and links there.  Also I invite you to join the Spa Doctor community on my website or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes so you don’t miss any of our upcoming shows and if you haven’t done so already I highly recommend you get your own customized skin profile at TheSkinQuiz.com.  It’s free and based upon the answers, just a few questions you’ll get your own customized skin report.  This is something I created and I want to share with you.  Just go to TheSkinQuiz.com.  Also don’t miss out on our latest tips for glowing skin and vibrant health.  Follow me on Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and joint the conversation and I’ll see you next time on the Spa Doctor podcast.