Welcome And Guest Introduction

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome to Hormone Heroes, where I share testimonials from real people who have experienced bioidentical hormone therapy. Men and women share the symptoms they have experienced and the difference proper hormone replacement has made. I'm your host, Dr. Kelly Hopkins, and I have been in the functional medicine space for over 30 years, with a focus on hormones for 20 years. Please keep in mind this podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Please consult with your physician or practitioner for medical advice. Let's get started with today's guest. Hello and welcome to the podcast. Today I am extra excited to have Dr. David Bilstrom on the podcast. He is a specialist in functional medicine. He's a medical doctor. He is quadruple board certified. And he specializes in autoimmune and chronic diseases in adults

From Rehab To Functional Medicine

SPEAKER_00 1:05

and children. So welcome to the podcast, Dr. Bilstrom.

SPEAKER_01 1:09

Oh, my pleasure to be here.

SPEAKER_00 1:11

So just to get started, tell us a little bit about you, your practice history, and how you got to where you are as far as what you focus on.

SPEAKER_01 1:21

So I've always been interested in chronic disease. My original area specialty was uh as a physical medicine and rehabilitation doctor, my subspecialty was spinal cord injury rehabilitation. So everybody that I would see was either paralyzed from the waist down, neck down, basically, and incredibly complex group of folks. Every organ system is affected with these kinds of things. They become really sensitive to medications, things that we wouldn't even think twice about might kill them, kind of a thing. But there aren't a lot of medicines to help in a lot of these different areas that they have problems with. And so I started looking 35 years ago for geez, wouldn't it be something lovely to have something else that could help these folks? And wouldn't it be lovely for it not to have side effects? Because so many medications have just side effects that become more problematic than the problem you're trying to fix with them in the first place. And oh my gosh, is there so much out there that I did not learn in my traditional Western allopathic training? We're fortunate that there's been this absolute explosion of medical knowledge, scientific knowledge, the last 40, 50 years. It really started back in the 1850s, but it's just building steam over time. I used to lecture that uh by 2021, medical knowledge was going to double every 73 days. And hit that and we keep going. And so fortunately, we know so much. It's not the stuff that most physicians, medical people learn in their traditional training. For the most part, you got to go kind of search it for yourself. But then there's also integrated medicine, functional medicine that I trained in that talks a lot about this kind of stuff. And so we really have a great idea where chronic health issues come from. And because of that, we have a great idea how we can make them go away. And it doesn't involve medications mostly. They're kind of put more of a bandage on a symptom. They don't really fix the underlying mechanisms.

SPEAKER_00 3:09

Sure. Tell us about where did you go to seek your functional medicine education?

SPEAKER_01 3:15

So there's two different ways that medical people can train in functional medicine. The one I did was called the A4M, the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine, and there's also the Institute for Functional Medicine, both excellent training programs. Oh my gosh, it is I find it just so fascinating, the information that gets shared with these kind of training programs.

SPEAKER_00 3:36

So as you were working with your spinal cord injury patients

Acupuncture As A Turning Point

SPEAKER_00 3:40

and you were seeking out these alternative methods that didn't require just straight pharmaceuticals. Tell us a little bit about your journey and what you found started to work for these people.

SPEAKER_01 3:52

Well, the first thing that I discovered was acupuncture. And as I started looking into things that might help these folks in their side effects, acupuncture kept popping up for just about everything bladder, musculoskeletal, neurologic, you kind of you name it, it can help. And because as a rehabilitation doctor specializing in spinal cord injury, we would ultimately become these people's primary care provider because their needs are so unique that most primary care people just would kind of throw their hands up and go, I don't know what the heck's going on. Including here's a decongestant that you can buy with a counter that might kill these people. But Tails would think twice about it. So I said, Well, you know, maybe if we need to optimally help these folks with acupuncture, maybe it needs to be somebody who really knows spinal cord injury already. And so I decided to train on my own. And truly back then, there wasn't very many people, very few docs that were uh doing acupuncture anyway. So I trained out a UCLA and ultimately became board certified. But when I came back and started using it, it worked so much better than I ever thought it was. You know, I think I was still stuck a little bit in that Western allopathic mindset where, you know, well, you know, it's been around 4,000 years, 5,000 years. You know, how great can it be? And I'm like, like, oh, 5,000 years. Yeah, it's gotta be probably pretty great, right? And pretty quickly I started doing up like a hundred acupuncture treatments a week. And for everything. And I did that for a decade and more. Big hospitals, outpatient clinics. I was able to kind of use it for things that just about nobody else gets to use, especially being in these big hospital systems and all these places. And so, but it got me really thinking, you know, I didn't learn any of this acupuncture stuff in my traditional training. What else is out there? And then, oh my gosh, is there a lot out there, including that's how I ultimately became board certified in integrated medicine and then functional medicine, actually reverse functional medicine, then integrated medicine. And there's just so much knowledge out there about this kind of stuff. And I still like it to this day, you know, pretty much everything I use or anything we need to use to prevent and reverse these chronic health issues like autoimmune disease, really, you're using things that don't have hardly any side effects. You know, the worst thing that happens is nothing happens. But fortunately, 99% of the time, something really good happens.

SPEAKER_00 6:11

Wow. And the percentage of success, you know, even in pharmaceuticals and trials and things like that, very rarely can anything pharmaceutical brag at those levels of success. So, how did you get into the autoimmune aspect of your practice?

SPEAKER_01 6:30

So let me say something real quick, if I could. So you're right about the pharmaceuticals, but what we have, what we're using in the these kinds of things we're gonna we're talking about is you're basically just trying to get the body in a position to fix itself. Yes and so this very high success rate when you do medicine this way is really totally because the body is so darn smart, its natural default mode is always to move towards wellness. So if you get stuck with something that you don't want, it's because something's gotten in the way. And all you get it out of the way, and the body says, hot dog, I've been waiting for my opportunity. Could be 80 years, could be eight months. It's like I've been waiting, and off it goes. So the success rate is really wholly because the body is so good at healing itself, but it's really easy to be told or to think, Well, I got this chronic health issue, you know, you can't make it go away. Sure. Well, that is just not the case because the body's so smart, it can fix about anything.

SPEAKER_00 7:28

So, how do you approach a patient? And I just I do want to say, and we'll get into this later, that Dr. David Bilstrom is available virtually. So he gets to travel around and he's not stuck in an office anymore, which is fabulous. And so I just wanted everyone to know that's listening that he is available. He's

Why Chronic Disease Is Reversible

SPEAKER_00 7:50

not limited by his geography. So that's wonderful. Tell us how you go about approaching if if someone gets online and they tell you that they would like to become a patient, walk us through what that would look like.

SPEAKER_01 8:03

So knowledge is power and every step of the way. And so the first thing I do is ask people to fill out a fairly lengthy health questionnaire and ask them to do as best they can in filling it out because you can really see a timeline basically of when this stuff started and how it progressed over time until somebody finally got the thing that brings them to me and they're diagnosed as something that they don't want. And this, because you can see things that have happened before they were born, like a family history, right? Kind of trends, you know, because things run in family. So family history tells me a lot. And then what happened during the pregnancy in this person? You know, was there any kind of complications, blood pressure, blood sugar, preterm birth is a huge driver of chronic disease, C-section birth versus vaginal, breastfeeding versus formula. Geez, I had to stay in the ICU for a couple of days as a newborn, jaundice around the time you're born, huge driver of chronic disease. And then things like early and recurrent use of antibiotics as a young child, and then in women, kind of what the menstrual cycles were like during as you started your cycles in your teenage years, and you know, all these things, to and you can really say, Well, this is you now, but I can see how you got there, I can see this timeline. And so by going back, it's like, well, I know what to fix based on what happened to you as a child.

SPEAKER_00 9:25

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_01 9:25

And we're getting at the heart of the matter. What kind of started this multi-decade journey? Because typically, by the time a person has a symptom, geez, I just woke up this morning and my right knee hurt. I can't figure out why. And then it stays hurt. That was 10 to 20 years in the making. So it's not like the first day of your symptom is the first day this happened. The body's been fighting this fight, trying to reverse the whole process, trying to keep you going for decades usually or generations, mostly generational stuff, but we can see that and know exactly where to go and not just kind of start chasing symptoms of your current thing, because that's just you know, putting bandages on

Intake Strategy And Timelines

SPEAKER_01 10:05

bullet holes, basically. But we can see this whole thing. And so I go through somebody's history and I can already tell really what's going on, even before I get a chance to talk to somebody. But then there's always information we can kind of glean from a great conversation. And then I like to say that uh let's test so we don't have to guess, because we probably have a pretty good idea of what's going on just by talking to somebody the very first visit. But you know, you may say, Jesus, a thousand articles about how important zinc is. And this person who has a disrupted gut, they can't absorb nutrients, they're probably really low in zinc. Well, you don't know unless you test, right? So you may give somebody zinc going, okay, this would be great for them, or magnesium. And they go, Yeah, it didn't help Harley at all, didn't need to do anything. But we test and we go, oh, well, actually, you know, you're fine in zinc. You're defining in magnesium, that's not your issue. So I'm kind of glad we didn't waste your time doing that. We can see on the testing what exactly we need to do because even though we know where this stuff comes from, everybody is a complete unique individual, right? Sure. 10 people with the same diagnosis that might bring them to you, they're 10 different people and they're histories. And so you know where to look, you know where this stuff comes from. But it's really nice to be able to be, you know, very specific to really figure out exactly what the body needs and what it doesn't need.

SPEAKER_00 11:22

So as you're consulting with a patient, you're deciding based on their history and their symptoms what sort of testing you're going to utilize. Can you give us some examples of testing you like to do?

SPEAKER_01 11:36

Sure. Yeah. And it's also a multi-year thing is I try to make this in a way that people feel comfortable with how this goes. It's kind of like what they would expect a little bit, but also how can we do this testing? And it's not going to be all out of pocket. You know, how insurance covers some testing. How can we make this as accessible as we can? And so I like to do blood work. You know, I think most people are like, oh, a doctor wants to do blood work. That makes sense to me because other doctors I've seen have want to do blood work as well. We just do blood work that looks in places that are different than what most people are looking for. Because what we're looking for is why you got this stuff. So we look for things like vitamin deficiencies, hormone deficiencies or imbalances. We look for the infections that drive chronic disease. Uh, we'll look for toxicity and and those kind of things on a blood test. And truly, the blood test that I would like to see, and what I talk about in my book, for example, can be run in any lab in the country and most other countries as well. That's nice. And so it's not like you got to go in some specialty lab and do special stuff. You just go get your blood drawn. Some places take a few extra vials because they may see a test being ordered that they're not familiar with, and they go, oh, geez, we might mess this up. We better pull an extra vial or two of blood just in case we have to redo it. But other than that, it can be done in any lab. And then the gut is such a central mechanism with everything. I love to run a test they call digestive stool analysis, uh-huh. It's a poop test where you poop, you take a couple samples, you mail it off. It gives us incredible information about the gut. And these are tests that a couple of them are becoming available and being run by more traditional docs, but just a couple of the tests that you're going to get on this digestive stool analysis. Otherwise, it's totally different stuff that even uh like a gastroenterologist,

Targeted Testing That Matters

SPEAKER_01 13:25

a stomach and bowel doctor isn't going to run. But it gives you fantastic information, really helps you pinpoint what's going on with the gut and what needs to be fixed. Oftentimes, we'll do saliva testing for hormones, things like cortisol, the stressed hormone, melatonin, but then also the estrogens, testosterone, DHEA, those other kind of hormones. You can test those in blood. And for many decades, we tested uh levels of these kind of hormones in the bloodstream. But sometimes you can get fooled in the blood because in our bodies, all the action going on is inside the cells, whether it's a brain cell, heart cell, gut lining cell, skin cell. That's where all the action is. So when you pull blood and test hormone levels, you're testing hormone levels in the bloodstream. Right. But we don't know what's actually getting into the cells. And this has to uh uh is also kind of pertinent for a couple of different minerals like zinc and magnesium, like I mentioned, because I don't check serum magnesium and serum zinc, which is what's in the bloodstream. What we check is what they call red blood cell RBC zinc and magnesium because historically magnesium and zinc are very hard to get into the cells, even if you got in the bloodstream. So we want to do that blood test to look at magnesium zinc inside the cell. A little bit like that with hormones, is you want to see what's inside the cell. And the body is so smart. And so you may see a blood test with a very low hormone low, but you do a saliva test and that's perfect on the inside. And you're like, oh my gosh, the body's so smart, it hardly has any of this important hormone, but it's getting every bit of that inside the cell. Or you might also see, oh, you got like way too much of this toxic estrogen, one called estrone. We need a little bit, but too much is really irritating the breast tissue and other kind of stuff. You go, oh my goodness, you can't detox. Estrone levels are really high. You're not getting these little toxic estrogens. Well, but you look inside the cell on a saliva test and you're perfect. And you go, oh, that body is so smart. It's putting that stuff in that's gonna fleck the cell. So you kind of get fooled sometimes with blood, but blood is a really good way to do it. But eventually, uh, you probably want to do a saliva test if you really need kind of the nitty-gritty information about hormones, including if anybody's on a bioidentical hormone restoration therapy that's topical, like a pat cream, vaginally, these kind of things, the very best way to test those levels is with a saliva test.

SPEAKER_00 15:46

I completely agree. And we, when our patients are on cream, saliva testing is the way to go. Most often will not show up very high in serum testing. I'm just completely fascinated. What else?

SPEAKER_01 16:00

Uh well, we can live in a very toxic world. And so environmental toxins are a huge driver of chronic disease. And we also are a society of messed up guts. So the main organ of detoxification is the gut. We basically got to most toxins out. There's a few toxins that we can pee out and sweat out and breathe out, but most of we got to poop them out. But with disrupted guts, we're not going to be very efficient at getting rid of toxins and they tend to accumulate over time. And so we'll see potentially that on blood tests, like toxic levels of estrogen have accumulated in somebody who's not even using, you know, estrogen restoration therapy. Other toxins will accumulate. You can see on the blood test. The heavy metals, toxic heavy metals like lead, mercury, cadmium, cesium, which is a radioactive one, even uranium, tend to run really high in a lot of folks with chronic health issues.

SPEAKER_00 16:51

And how do you like to test for your heavy metals?

SPEAKER_01 16:54

I usually do it with a provocative uh urine test. Okay. Heavy metal urine test. I don't run that right away because inherently you start fixing folks and the body starts fixing stuff, they're going to become better detoxifiers. And I guess start getting rid of some of these toxins over time. Once

Gut Health And Stool Analysis

SPEAKER_01 17:10

I've have the gut in a good place and I think the gut isn't leaky anymore, no more. I think permeability disorder that makes it hard to detox. Now we could probably do some good formal detox if we do need to. And so let's go ahead and do this provocative heavy metal test for these toxic metals. I use DMSA, a thousand milligrams. And so because most of the toxins that are going to whack us tend to be fat soluble, they get into our fat stores and then they start creating problems. And this is why the brain is so sensitive to these kinds of things, because the brain is 60% fat. We're basically all a bunch of fat heads, and which is good, except that's where fat-soluble toxins go and start messing it up. And so at any one time, you're not going to have much of these kind of fat-soluble toxins within the water portion of our bodies. So, like our urine, that's the water-soluble part, sweat, those kinds of things, you're just not going to find them in blood, too. You're not going to find them in the blood because that's the water portion of the body, water-soluble portion. And so, if you ever find these kind of toxins like lead or mercury in a blood test, oh my gosh, you are so filled to the brim. Your fasters are totally filled to the brim and it's spilling out into the water-soluble portion of the body, you poor thing. If you find a blood test, you don't find it, you're like, well, that didn't tell us anything because you could be almost chock full enough to be killing everything, just hasn't spilled in yet. Same thing with urine. If you do a urine test, it is really fascinating test looking for toxicity once where they compared blood urine, provocative urine, where you give the body a chelating agent like this DMSA that mobilizes toxins, uh, the fast stores and gets them into the kidneys and the urine, so you can test, and then hair. And like the previous studies I showed, you're not going to find toxins in most people in the blood. You're not going to find it on a urine test unless it's provocative. It's really the provocative urine test and the hair that is by far the best way to look for toxins. And so what I do is we say, okay, wake up in the morning and pee, wait an hour, take this chelating agent that you spread a prescription for, and then collect your urine for six hours and then mail some off. Some people do longer than six hours. I find six hours totally fine because in the population who have these chronic health issues, you don't need to do a 24-hour test. They got enough toxins, you're going to find them in six hours. Yeah. So I have to stand around the house collecting jugs of your urine all night long. And then you get a lovely test. And it's remarkable. I mean, how many people have like high uranium? And you go like uranium, really? And I'm like, I know. It's crazy how toxic this.

SPEAKER_00 19:46

How do you like to chelate once you've discovered toxins in people?

SPEAKER_01 19:51

So I typically use something called heavy metal protect, HM Protect. And it's kind of got all the things that we tend to use for detoxification, these kind of things.

SPEAKER_00 20:04

Is it a capsule?

SPEAKER_01 20:05

It's just a capsule, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:06

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 20:07

And the old product actually had DMSA

Hormone Testing: Blood Vs Saliva

SPEAKER_01 20:10

in it. But back about 15 years ago, the powers that be said, well, technically, this DMSA is not a naturally occurring substance. So we can't offer it as if it's a vitamin or a supplement. It has to be prescription. Well, no company drug any makes it. And so now we got to compound it. Whereas before, we'd have a bottle of basically the HM Protect, but with DMSA in it, and just give a person four capsules. Go home and do your study. Eh, well, now it costs like 50 bucks.

SPEAKER_00 20:41

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_01 20:41

Get the DMSA for this test. But the products out there, like this HM Protect has like everything that we've always used. And so I tend to do is you don't want to overwork our detox pathways. Because when you use this HM Protect, I use four capsules typically a day for three days, and then nothing for seven days, sometimes 11 days, and then back to three days again, sometimes four, because you work the detox pathways really hard on the on days. You're re-mobilizing toxins, you're really having to run your detox pathways, dump them in the gut, and poop them in the toilet. You can't do that every day, I find, because you can overwork the detox pathways and then they kind of shut down. And this is how people accumulate these toxins in the first place is that their detox pathways are working hard every day to clear these toxins. And they get overworked and they get beat up and then they stop working, and then all the toxins accumulate. And so you work them hard three to four days, you let them rest seven to eleven days, work them hard on and off. Now, because these chelating agents mobilize these toxic metals out of our system through the urine when you use the DMSA testing, but through the 80% through the gut, when you're using this HM protect kind of classic way of detoxing, you actually will chelate out important good metals like zinc, magnesium, iron, these kind of things. And so typically on the off days, when you're not doing the detox, you supplement with a multi-mineral supplement. So you build up the good minerals so you don't deplete them as you're trying to get rid of all the toxic metals.

SPEAKER_00 22:17

Interesting. Can you give us the relationship between autoimmune disease and what you're finding that causes a lot of autoimmune? Is it food sensitivities? Is it toxicities? Is it genetics? What are we looking at?

SPEAKER_01 22:33

Yeah, you know, the body is too smart to be one thing. One big major issue, like toxicity, the body goes, Yeah, I can deal with that. And then you get hormone deficiencies and imbalance. Yeah, I can deal with that. Vitamin is okay. Infections, okay. Cortisol's off, okay. Epigenetic things have happened through generations that have turned on bad genes, turned off good genes. Well, the body can deal with that. Gut disruption, well, I can deal with that. But you put them all together and the body just gets overwhelmed. And then all this stuff happens. And so truly, you need to take care of all the different things that have contributed to the body actually self-destructing. So, like autoimmune disease, you're making antibodies attacking your own body parts. You're basically self-destructing. And you know there's a lot of bad mojo going on if the body's actually self-destructing.

SPEAKER_00 23:21

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_01 23:22

I could be one thing, it's going to be overwhelmed by a variety of things. And so this is where you want to be real comprehensive. Now, I also say that the body is super, super complicated, but it's also super, super logical. Everything really makes sense. And you don't have to be a medical person to see the logic behind how this all works. But you also don't have to go chasing everything because the body's going to take care of most things all by itself. So what I tend to see nowadays is people that are trying to figure this out for themselves, they do their homework, they do their reading, they start taking supplements, but they kind of are still on the same sort of wavelength of more traditional allopathic medicine. So it's like one supplement for one symptom, kind of like one medication for one symptom, and then another medication or supplement for another symptom and another one for another. So they come in and I've got 40 different supplements. And I can look at the supplements they're on and go, oh my gosh, you have so educated yourself. I am so impressed with the homework you've done. I can see that you have really done your homework because you wouldn't be on these things if you hadn't really read about this stuff. But I can also see where they've missed some of the real big central mechanisms, such as what we're kind of you know referring to here. And I go, well, this is why you're still not great, because you're kind of the old method of one pill for one ill kind of a thing. It's just a sub versus a prescription medicine. And so what I'll tell folks is when you know this stuff starts going sideways, it's just like one problem after another after another. And as you can imagine, if you got,

Toxins, Heavy Metals, And Detox

SPEAKER_01 24:55

you know, a self-destruction thing going on autoimmune, you got about everything else whacked as well, right? Everything else is talking about. So it's like one thing after another after another, and pretty soon you got everything involved in the body. Well, you go to a more traditional Western allopathic person, and they're like, How can everything be whacked at the same time? This is very confusing. I'm I don't know what's going on because everything seems to be off at the same time. For somebody like myself, that makes it easy. The only way that everything can be thrown off at the same time is some really important central mechanisms are off that are throwing everything off at the same time. So somebody comes in and feels terrible and they got all this different stuff going on, and this is they got, ah, we know exactly where to look, right? With what we're talking about today. And then you take care of that stuff, and somebody may say, as I'm trying to explain this concept at the very end of the first visit, let's say they'll say, What do you think about me starting this supplement for you know this brain fog? Or, you know, what about you know this skin thing that I got, or what about this sleep thing? Or and I go, well, you know, I can tell you did your homework because that would make sense, but how about we hold off? Okay, because if we take care of these central mechanisms, we're in a position to fix everything. And then if a vent down the line, if this is great, this is great, this is great, this is great, this is great, but that's still not great. Well, then let's talk about maybe using that supplement, giving that one thing a little special attention. But if we go away by taking care of the central mechanisms, we go, oh, we didn't need to give that special attention anyway. We saved you time and money because you didn't need special attention for that thing. You fixed it all by yourself by taking care of the central mechanisms.

SPEAKER_00 26:34

I love that. I noticed that you do offer classes for practitioners and also for patients. Examples for the practitioner are is it a nurse practitioner-free master class? Is that what I'm looking at?

SPEAKER_01 26:49

Well, it's really for any medical folks. Okay. You know, nurse practitioners by training tend to be more holistically minded than how physicians, medical doctors, MDs, and DOs are trained. And so by training, nurse practitioners are taught to treat the patient, not necessarily the disease. You want to treat the patient with the disease, not the disease. Thus, you don't just throw a bandage medicine. You want to treat the patient who has this thing, right? Where that's not quite where medical doctors, MDs, and DOs are really focused on their training. And no fault to them, that's just not how we tend to be trained. And the way the system is, if you had six minutes to see somebody, well, you don't have a chance to get to know the person, right? All you got is like, well, what's your main complaint? I'll give you a medicine. And if you have another complaint, which people always do, by the time they need one medicine, they got other things going on, you got to come back for a second visit. Because I don't have time to talk about more than one. That's just how the system is, and it's really not great. It's a shame. But uh, you know, doctors do the best they can with what they have. But, you know, I'm really trying now more than 10 years to change the way that autoimmune disease is dealt with worldwide. No more, you know, bandage medicines. If you watch any kind of TV, you're seeing like six, eight commercials an hour for medicines that suppress the immune system. You know that they suppress the immune system. They're being used for these autoimmune diseases, and you know that they suppress the immune system because, oh, side effects include increased risk of cancers such as lymphoma and skin cancer. And you go, well, there's only one type of medicine that increases your risk of cancer, all cancers, and that's medicines that suppress your immune system. And, you know, you don't want cancer coming from a medication. Jeez, it's hard enough to keep cancer away as it is. And so what I would like to do is teach people how to do this either themselves if you're non-medical, or ideally eventually get a person in every community that knows how to reverse and prevent all autoimmune disease.

SPEAKER_00 28:46

That would be incredible.

SPEAKER_01 28:47

Cancer is the flip side of the same coin that's autoimmune disease. So basically, cancer and autoimmune disease, same thing. Okay. Everything that drives autoimmune drives cancer. Everything you do to prevent autoimmune prevents cancer, and vice versa. And so we need somebody in every community that knows how to do this. And until that time, communities are not going to know that we know where the stuff comes from. They're not going to know we know how to reverse this. You get somebody in that community that can teach the community. People go, oh, that's just so nice to know that we know where this stuff comes from and we know how to make it go away. What a great option. And it's not just medicines, and that's all you that's all you can do, kind of a thing. I can't be in every community. Now, as a 100% virtual person, I I technically could, but we need somebody in every community that knows how to do this.

SPEAKER_00 29:33

Sure. And you are the author of the book, The Nurse Practitioner's Guide to Autoimmune Medicine, Preventing and Reversing All Autoimmunity. And you've developed a course called the Autoimmune Paradigm.

SPEAKER_01 29:46

Can I share with you what paradigm stands for?

SPEAKER_00 29:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 29:48

Because the autoimmune paradigm, the experts course kind of says it. So paradigm stands for preventing and reversing autoimmune disease in a global mission.

SPEAKER_02 29:58

I love that.

SPEAKER_00 30:00

It took me a while to figure that one out, but I'm like, what a great way to use the word paradigm. We all need paradigm shifts. That's true.

SPEAKER_02 30:10

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 30:11

And then for patients, you offer a seven-day free email course, which is fantastic. And something called autoimmune hope. Tell us a little bit about those.

SPEAKER_01 30:22

So the free online, seven-day online email course is seven emails. You get one a day for seven days. You can go through them as slow or fast as you want. Each one is only about a six to eight minute read, but each one takes a real deep dive into why this stuff happens and just starts giving people's tools that they can start turning it around themselves. And then the Automie and Hope course is a more advanced course to take to get additional information about how you might be able to help yourself with this. Because, you know, if you got the ability to know about these central mechanisms, start impacting them, boy, you could start really making some big gains all by yourself before you even see someone like myself.

SPEAKER_00 31:01

Sure. And if you're educated as the patient, you can help lead your physician or practitioner in knowing what blood test to order or other kinds of testing to order.

SPEAKER_01 31:13

That's right.

SPEAKER_00 31:14

We haven't touched yet on the fact that you love to treat children and get them started early going down the right path. Tell us a little bit about your programs for children.

SPEAKER_01 31:25

Yeah. So this kind of ties into all the different stages of life that you can impact people in. So I use the term papaya, fenatal before conceiving a child, antenatal during pregnancy, pediatric, adolescent,

Chelation, Rest Cycles, And Minerals

SPEAKER_01 31:40

and young adult. Kind of comes back around and now you're starting to have kids again. And so you can really impact anybody all through those stages of life. So typically I would like to impact a child's life before they're even conceived. Love to see the parents optimize their epigenetics, detox, especially, well, we got detox both to optimize epigenetics, turning off bad genes, turning on good genes in every cell in the body and the mother and father before they conceive a child. When you do that, they're actually able to pass on cleaner genes to the next six to eight generations. Wow. Not just their child, but six to eight generations are going to benefit from doing that before conception. You really want detox both to do that, and especially the mom, because toxins pass from the mom across the placenta into the developing baby before they're even born. And so this is why children nowadays are born already with high levels of lead, mercury, flame retardants, pesticides, herbicides. It's really a toxic world. There's really specific things you can do during pregnancy that really help the developing child, including sunlight and how that actually drives fetal development and all these different brain parts and a healthy ability to deal with stress and healthy microbiomes, mix of good, bad bugs in their gut even before they're born. And then things you can do right away when a child's born, like start daily vitamin D. 2000 IU, big study out in northern Finland, showed that 2,000 IU a day, starting right at birth, just for even the first year, almost an 80% reduction in type 1 diabetes, you know, requiring insulin pumps and all that, 80% reduction. If you prevent one autoimmune disease, like type 1 diabetes, you're basically preventing all. We just know that from other studies. And they also saw that children never ended up getting schizophrenia. It's so good for the brain. And that all brain stuff is just brain stuff. So the same thing that drives schizophrenia, actually, the exact same part of the brain that drives schizophrenia drives major depressive disorder. It just shows up different ways, different people. You prevent one type of brain thing, you're preventing them all. And then in women, you love to have things in a good place. So when they start their menstrual cycles, there's no bad flows, bad cramps, PMS, ovarian cysts, fibers, endometriosis, all this kind of stuff. Because those hormonal menstrual things that I just kind of mentioned, plus infertility, fibrous breast disease, polycystical variant syndrome, are driven by a hormone imbalance called estrogen dominance, where women have too much estrogen, not enough progesterone. And in hormones, every hormone is so important. Every cell in our body, men and women, have receptors for estrogen and progesterone. Yes. Okay. But the balance sometimes is so much more important than one or the other. And so women with estrogen dominance, they get all these hormonal menstrual things. Super common nowadays. Almost what woman doesn't have hormonal menstrual things. Our world is so screwed up. But also because estrogen revives in progesterone palms, women develop excessive worry, anxiety. They can't sleep, their brains are running, maybe even panic attacks, nightmares, these kinds of things. Boy, is that common nowadays, too, right? But what we know is that estrogen dominance is a huge reason why 80% of the people that get autoimmune disease start self-destructing are women.

SPEAKER_02 34:56

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 34:57

And it is a humongo driver of cancer. Cancer is the flip side of the same coin as autoimmune disease. So the typical response for all these bad hormonal menstrual things, you know, you can't be sitting there in high school and, you know, bleed through your pants in middle class, right? You gotta do something, right? Well, you're this is a birth control pill. Okay. You're basically putting a woman in menopause with a birth control pill. Now, menopause is fine when the time's right, but not necessarily in a teenager or a 20-year-old something like this. But it's it's estrogen-based. So it's actually making the estrogenomas worse. And they may end up with a hysterectomy because of all this. Any change in the anatomy down there makes the estrogenomas worse. Right. So not only you get to end up getting autoimmune diseases, but we know that women with estrogen dominance, like these hormonom menstrual things before menopause, have a 5.4 times greater risk of breast cancer before menopause. Not twice the risk of breast cancer as anybody else, not three times, over five times the risk of breast cancer before menopause, and a 10 times greater risk lifelong of dying of a metastatic cancer, the kind that start one place and metastasize someplace else, 10 times greater risk your whole life. So with this hormonal menstrual thing, this estrogen dominance at those younger ages, we're like, we gotta fix this because you don't need the toleranal menstrual stuff. You don't need panic attacks and insomnia. You know, that's gonna be terrible. But what we're doing is we're now preventing you in a humongo way of ever having to deal with breast cancer and metastatic cancer and all the autoimmune diseases all at the same time.

SPEAKER_00 36:28

Fascinating. And talk about a paradigm shift. We do a lot of hormone work in our clinics, but the fact that you're raising the possibility of metastatic cancer five times.

Autoimmunity’s Root Causes And Overwhelm

SPEAKER_01 36:40

Ten times metastatic cancer.

SPEAKER_00 36:42

Ten times. Wow.

SPEAKER_01 36:43

Five times breast cancer alone. Yeah, yeah. More than five times. Crazy.

SPEAKER_00 36:47

Crazy.

SPEAKER_01 36:47

Inongers.

SPEAKER_00 36:48

Let's talk about men for a second and give them a chance to get some benefit here. What do you see with testosterone deficiencies and things like that for men?

SPEAKER_01 36:58

Yeah, you know, I talk a lot about the importance of the hormone symphony. You know, all the different hormones all working together. And it's really easy for one hormone to get thrown off and it kind of throws off the entire symphony. Right. And so, like with women, you can't just look at like the Woodwin section and go, oh, I know what the symphony is, what's happening to the symphony. You know, it's like when you got to look at all the symphony and say, okay, who's messing everybody else up here? Oh, you guys are messing everybody up. So when you do like testing for hormones, you really want to take a broad look at all the hormones. And you can go, okay, uh, who's messing everybody else up here? What we got, oh okay, I got this. And then you have the symphony just really, really sounding beautiful. Now in men, it's kind of like, oh, you're not feeling well? What's your testosterone doing? I'm a caveman compared to women. Men are cavemen compared to women. We like we grunt and we, you know, all that kind of stuff. And women's systems are so elegant, beautiful hormones, symphony. Oh my gosh, just fascinating. And dudes, it's like, okay, what's your testosterone doing? Right. And so testosterone is so important for guys. And on a blood test on guys, you like a total testosterone between 800 and 1100, depending on the test, free testosterone, how much of that total is bound up versus how much is free to do the work, should be depending on the test, like 200 to 300, some labs is 20 to 30. A couple generations ago, you get a guy who is like 70, and their total testosterone would be maybe like you know 680. And you're like, that's pretty good. Not not when you were like, you know, a teenager at 20, but that's pretty darn good. They'd start making more of a protein called sex hormone binding globulin, globulin, a protein that binds up sex hormones. So for a variety of reasons, they start making more of that as the years go on. And so their total was good, but their free maybe wasn't quite as great as it should be, and then maybe not quite as great as the total, but it was it was pretty darn good. Nowadays, I'll see 20-year-olds, 18-year-olds with total testosterone is under 200.

unknown 38:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 38:58

Crazy how deficient guys have become. It's one of the reasons because testosterone is really important in guys, particularly with uh preventing heart attacks and strokes. We see guys in their 20s and 30s now with heart attacks. They're so testosterone deficient. My son played basketball in high school, and teenage boys, you know, 17, 18-year-old boys, they could sit on the couch playing video games all day long, eat nine meals a day and still have six-pack abs. Right. You know, say that like you used to. So I'll watch boys on a high school basketball game and they still wear those same jerseys, you know, the skin tight jerseys. I'll see guys running up and down the court. They play basketball like two, three hours a day. They have weights as a class in high school. Uh-huh. They got a spare tire around their belly. It is just bulging out their basketball jersey. And I go, oh my goodness. I bet you he's like under 200, you know, 250 on this testosterone. And there's a lot of health issues going, not only is obesity starting, but you know he's got insulin resistance, he's motoring towards diabetes. But the testosterone is so important for a guy's brain, also. We talk about when men are low in testosterone, they become grumpy old men. Guys become grumpy old men when they're 20 nowadays and 25. They're like bad in their 20s, and we're like, oh, the poor women they're married to and they're dating. So I test testosterone on all women, of course, with all men also. And it's just amazing how tank they can be. Now, what we think is going on here is several different things. One is electromagnetic fields, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, cell phones, all this kind of stuff. Guys putting their cell phone in their front pocket right next to their testicles really knocks down testosterone production. Cortisol, the stress hormone cortisol, getting stuck in the stress mode really drops testosterone production. And, you know, when you're talking about these things that drive chronic disease, those are physical stressors to the system. Now, we live in a terribly emotionally stressful world. That's enough to whack the testosterone production alone, let alone vitamin deficiencies and gut disruption, epigenetic disruption, all these kinds of things. And then red blood cell zinc deficiency. Low testosterone is not correlated with testing on blood tests for serum zinc, but red blood cell zinc, what's in the cells, correlates with that. If you got low red blood cell zinc, it should be more than 12, ideally, which is kind of mid-range on most tests. You're gonna have a hard time making testosterone. But you know, we have messed up guts, we can't absorb nutrients from our food. We get zinc deficient in a lot of folks. And so red blood cell zinc deficiency correlates with lack of testosterone production. And because we live in such a toxic world, we become bad detoxifiers, we accumulate toxins over time. What happens to guys a lot is they accumulate excess iron. The test I run is not iron, iron can really be deceiving. The test I run is called ferritin, which is not stores. And you want to be about 100. If you can't detox, guys oftentimes

Central Mechanisms Over Symptom Chasing

SPEAKER_01 41:50

will start accumulating excess ferritin. And this excess iron stores accumulates in a guy's testicles, slowing down testosterone production. So I kind of joke with the guys. I'm like, hey, you're getting rusty nuts. You're accumulating all this iron in your testicles, you're getting rusty nuts. It's never a good idea to let your nuts get rusty. And so you can do a ferritin test and a red blood cell zinc test. You do a testosterone, totalin-free, sex hormone binding globulin. You know, cortisol is stressed out about being low in a really important nutrient like zinc, being way too high in a toxic thing like ferritin and all these other kinds of things. And so what I tend to find is I don't use testosterone restoration therapy as much as I used to. There's nothing wrong with it because without testosterone, boy, you know, you're not gonna be a happy camper, you're not gonna have a happy life, you're gonna have terrible relationships because you're just a grumpy old man all the time. And your brain's not sharp and you can't make muscle and burn fat without testosterone. But you start somebody like really high ferritin, I'll say, Hey, go donate blood. Donate some blood, you'll give away some of this excess iron, ferritin will come down. Let's start you on a really good thing supplement. Okay, let's start managing stress better. Let's get this stress hormone cortisol stuck in the stress mode to go, oh, oh, that feels really good. There's adrenal adaptogen supplements, but there's also rotation, repetitive prayer, deep breathing, progressive muscle relaxation, yoga, tai chi, qigong, all these different kinds of ways of doing creating calm in the body. And take your cell phone out of your front pocket, keep it in your back pocket. So at least you got your glutes between uh your cell phone and your testicles. And what I tend to find is oy can guys start making testosterone better on their own. They may come in with like 220 the first time and we'll go, okay. Well, let's make these changes. We're gonna redo blood tests in three months, come back, we'll review the labs, tell me how you're doing, and they might be up to 480 by three months later.

SPEAKER_00 43:50

Which is incredible. That's double. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 43:53

Yeah. And you're feeling better. And you're I'm feeling better. I'm like, I make sure, or even look at your testosterone, you're making a lot more on your own.

SPEAKER_02 44:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 44:01

And because you fix these kind of things, that sex hormone binding globulin that's binding up what little testosterone they had, so they can't even use it. It's in the storage form. Sex hormone binding globulin is coming down, and their free testosterone is getting so much better, not just their total.

SPEAKER_00 44:17

Yes. And we notice our male patients that have a high alcohol intake, usually their SHBG is higher. So that's one of the first things we try to get them to detoxify.

SPEAKER_02 44:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 44:30

Oh my goodness, Dr. Billstrom, we could I could sit and listen to you for eight more hours. Yeah, I just feel like the depth of your knowledge is just insane.

SPEAKER_01 44:39

I would like I've been around for about a thousand years now. I'm a thousand years old, so I've had time to find out stuff.

SPEAKER_00 44:47

Yeah, right. Isn't that funny how that works? But I do want to introduce people to your website. It's dr davidbilstrom.com, and that's D-R-D-A-V-I-D, B-I-L-S-T-R-O-M dot com. A phone number where you can find Dr. Billstrom is 208-973-4301. And an email is office at dr davidbilstrom.com. I have just so enjoyed our conversation. I don't want to keep you any longer than I promised, but this is a very important podcast, one of the most important podcasts thus far. And I don't say that lightly, that I would love for our listeners to listen to. And I'm just so tickled you were willing to talk with us today.

SPEAKER_01 45:38

Oh, I had so much fun. Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_00 45:40

Yes. And you guys go enjoy your bike ride today. Uh enjoy the beautiful weather.

SPEAKER_01 45:47

I will. I'm going uphill all the way. Uh here in Boise, Idaho, there's a hill called Bogus Basin Road, and it pissed you up to the ski resort outside of town. And it's 16 miles. And I got up nine miles the other day, but it made me late for signing up for Medicare. I thought that was a good reason to be late

Training Clinicians And Global Mission

SPEAKER_01 46:05

for signing up for Medicare, 20 minutes late for the appointment, because I'm like, oh, I guess I've if I have to be late for a Medicare signup, going uphill for nine miles is probably a good.

SPEAKER_00 46:16

So how long does that take you?

SPEAKER_01 46:18

My wife tracks me, you know. She likes to know where I'm at because I tend to like do backcountry snowboarding and uh, you know, kind of get out there. And so I'll give you an example. I just started biking again. I had some health issues that really kind of knocked me down related to kidney stones. And so I'm getting back to exercising. So she said, Hey, I was tracking you. I saw that you were walking your bike uphill.

SPEAKER_02 46:39

And I go, Oh, that tracking happened is so cruel. It is. Well, I thought I was walking. So it could take me a little while, but uh through every time.

SPEAKER_00 46:48

And then going downhill is probably lots of fun. Boy, you can go downhill nine miles awful quick. Wow. Well, thank you, Dr. Bellstrom. We appreciate you so much.

SPEAKER_01 46:59

Oh, thank you. Have a lovely day.

SPEAKER_00 47:07

Thanks for listening to Hormone Heroes. Take a moment to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts so you don't miss the next episode. While you are there, help us spread the word by leaving a rating and a review. If you would like to share your bioidentical hormone story or need help finding a physician in your area, please email us at dr Kelly at hormoneheroes.org. That's D-R-K-E-L-L-Y at H O R M O N E H E R O E S dot org. We want you to be a hormone hero.