Why you should listen –
Sidney Baker is a doctor, author and lecturer who helped in founding functional medicine and Autism organizations and developed patents and inventions within the medical information technology field. Dr. Baker raises HDCs and probiotics including grain beetles for consumption by patients with autoimmune problems. He has a longstanding devotion to the idea that the patient, not the diagnosis, is the target of treatment. On today’s episode of Bulletproof Radio, Dave and Sid talk about Autism causation and treatment, pediatrics, eating beetles and worms, autoimmunity, activated charcoal, C-Sections and more. Enjoy the show!
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Speaker 1: Bulletproof Radio, a state of high performance.
Dave: Hey it’s Dave Asprey with Bulletproof radio. Today’s cool fact of the day is that the Amygdala, part of your brain that’s the fighter flight part of the brain is on average 13% larger in young kids with Autism compared to kids without Autism. Interesting how actually the structures in the brain change in size based on what you’re going to have to do with your brain or what your brain is setup to do.
It’s no coincidence that I’m talking about autism and the cool fact of the day because today’s guest is a former faculty member of Yale Medical School and pediatric specialist who is the co-founder of the Defeat Autism Now Protocol and the CVO of autism360.org This is one of the guys on the forefront of fighting what’s become and epidemic. In fact I’ve seen some studies that one in eight kids that are being born today have something in that spectrum. It depends on which statistics you look at but whatever it is they’re getting bigger and it’s very frightening.
This is something that matters to all of us because the things that make kids autistic don’t help the rest of us perform better either. This is the conversation that has to do with underlying things that are probably making you weak and things that really make babies weak.
This is going to be a very fruitful conversation. Today’s guest is not only an expert in Autism but he’s also the author of Detoxification and Healing: The Key to Optimal Health. He’s one of the leading clinicians in the field of autism who practices functional medicine in Sag Harbor, New York. His name is Sid Baker or Dr. Sidney Baker official yes. Sid welcome to the show.
Sidney: Thanks for having me.
Dave: Why did you decide to go into pediatrics and then autism? What drove you to do that?
Sidney: Pediatrics came first, I was going to take a residency in psychiatry. I took an internship in pediatrics at that time and I decided that if I was going to be a psychiatrist I wouldn’t be able to touch people which I was pretty good at. I liked children and my mentor was a pediatrician so I figured just go on with my internship and residency in pediatrics and that’s how I got launched. I did a mini-residency in Ob/Gyn because I wanted to find out where babies came from.
Dave: How long ago was that?
Sidney: That was 1966 in there, a long about 50 years.
Dave: How much has the practice changed over the time of your career? It has to just be astounding for you. You’re one of the celebrated guys who developed integrated medicine as we know it today. You’ve really played a substantial role in it but you’ve watched this just unimaginable amount of transformation in medicine. What’s it been like to watch that, what’s changed?
Sidney: It’s been very discouraging because mainstream pediatrics and mainstream medicine has changed very little I think. Certainly surgery and lots of diagnostic techniques have introduced all sorts of wonderful ways of seeing people. The ways that doctors have of seeing their patients in a way that I’ll refer to in a moment has changed very little. Especially as regards to information and technology which is the most important tool for being seen by doctors in terms of the details that make a person an individual.
I’m quite discouraged at how slowly my profession has let go of some of the old language that we’ve been taught and unable to latch on to the new language that has to do with the way human beings can be seen as individuals and have the individual be the target of treatment rather than the disease.
Dave: What lead you to start Defeat Autism Now? This was very disrupting, I’ve been following the problems with Autism for many years. My first book was a about epigenetics and what do you do before pregnancy to reduce the incidence of autism. Given everything we know, I’m not saying I know that this is all clinically studied. I’m just saying directionally this is what the evidence says is most likely to help because I was concerned about this.
It runs in my own family, Asperger’s does and I was concerned about my own kids and I took just a passionate view into this. 1300 references went into that book and that’s really what lit up my understanding of a lot of this stuff. At the same time I was doing that work for a selfish reason you started Defeat Autism Now. I’ve had family members who have run the spectrum, who’ve had great results with some of the things you talk about. What was the spark that lead you to create Defeat Autism Now?
Sid: It came in stages, when I was in my first part of my career as a practitioner I was attending physician in a residential place for a people with serious disabilities. I was doing a routine examination, manual examining a little 14 year old boy sitting on the end of the table who was autistic and he was the first autistic kid that I ever examined early in my career. I went to look in his eye with my opthalamscope and he hurled off and slugged me right between my eyes and my eye glasses went in two pieces.
In retrospect I realized that he was saying to me in a very articulate way this non-verbal kid. He was saying to me, “You’re looking at me, you’re looking into me but you’re not seeing me.” I became intrigued by the accuracy of his blow and I was so to speak struck by it that I should maybe think more about what this is all about. This was 1971 or 1972. Subsequently when I became Director of the Gesell Institute I saw a lot of people with developmental problems but I kept my regular practice which had made me think about things in a new way.
I saw a little girl with eczema all over her and I treated her with some anti-fungal medicine that why her neighbor who said, “You’ve got this thing after you took antibiotics and now it’s all over her, look at her she’s a mess.” The first thing that I could tell you about this is sick is she knows about antibiotics and funguses. She came to see me and I treated her with some Nystatin and it went it way completely and her autism went away again and this was in a matter of six weeks. Well again I was struck.
Over the next few years I become more and more interested in the biology of autism. At a certain point as I became more puzzled by the Gastroenterology, the immunology and the other ologies. I said to the mother of one of my patients an autistic boy, I said, “Boy I just I’m overwhelmed by all these different bio-chemical and immunological things that are entering into this landscape. I wish I could get some smart people together and have a conversation about this.” She said, “Well if you want to do that I’ll help pay for it.”
She happened to be affluent and I happened to have lunch with Bernie Rimland a couple of weeks later and I said, “Bernie can we get some people together,” of course Bernie knew everybody. I didn’t know many people, I knew John Pangborn who’s was bio-chemical tutor. In 1995 we got witty people in a room and there was parent’s and physicians and scientists all in the same room. It was an unusual meeting in that regard, not unique. We just loved it, we had a great time for three days. We come up with the results of an effort and a serious effort to find common ground. As you perhaps know many meetings involved academics are mostly pissing context and this was really a serous thing to …
If somebody said something and didn’t agree with someone even the high ranking academics who were there like Sudhir Gupta who had four professorships from the university of California, a brilliant immunologist, a leader in the field. If somebody says something about homeopathy of chiropractor he let it go. Everybody just wanted to find what we can agree on. I had a piece of chalk and blackboard and I tried to make a diagraph of what we agreed on and that become the basis of what now still stands out there’s a pretty good map of the universe.
Dave: That was what became the beginnings of defeat autism now?
Sidney: That was it, that was Bernie bless his heart. He called it Defeat Autism Now which I hated but I loved Bernie so but if he wanted that we had that. I thought it was a terribly masculine name. Also very military, going to defeat it you know. It had some other objectives to it we’ll working to our prospect .
Dave: It’s a bit of a side note but just something that drives me crazy. There’s a new movement now where people are doing this thing. They’re calling it fuck cancer and they’re wearing T-shirts that say that. I know what the F word means and when you do that that’s an act of reproduction. Telling people to reproduce their cancer is probably not the right way, just saying here. Yeah that whole militaristic thing doesn’t seem like that’s the way people get stronger it’s never worked. I’m with you there.
Sidney: It also buys into the whole thing that makes me crazy is which we may come to considering that a disease is an entity therefore it’s something you can go after which is completely the opposite of what we came up with which was or what nature put in front in front of us which was a spectrum. Which is a much better metaphor for what we’re talking about.
Dave: If someone is listening to this, I don’t have autism which I don’t think I have it, although I may have ADD which is in the direction of those things and I may not know it or I don’t have anyone with Autism in my life now. Why should they care about what we’re talking about? What’s in this conversation for every single person listening?
Sidney: Great question, it’s because autism is simply the worst case of all chronic illness. Just all chronic illnesses is one things it’s all connected. We’re living in a systems environment but even if you don’t think that way the evidence is that all chronic illness has to do with some very fundamental changes in people that have to do with something called loss of immune tolerance. Tolerance is a very important feature of complex systems, tolerance and diversity are two complex virtues of a complex system.
Life is a complex system, your body is a complex system and when it loses tolerance an allergy and autoimmunity are sort of example if the listener is wondering, “Well where is he going with this?” Talking about allergy and autoimmunity is the examples of what loss of immune tolerance gets expressed as. A way of putting it is that it makes people sensitive and what we see in our children who have autism is that they’re exceedingly sensitive. That their senses hearing, taste, touch, feeling and all those things even feeling yourself in your own body which is a sense. There are 12 senses, not just five.
These senses are too delicate they do not have the usual blanket between us and the world so it crowds in on the person and makes them funny, makes them sensitive to a lot of noises and things like that. The immune system and the brain are part of the same system. The immune system is doing the same thing, it becomes excessively sensitive to things and it reacts to things in ways that are similar to the way we react to germs that has caused inflammation.
When inflammation affects different parts of the body the digestive tract, the skin, the brain. It swells up, it changes its capacity for functioning and that gets expressed in difficulties that have to do with the way the body moves. In the case of speech, a lot of the problems in speech in autistic children it’s not that they don’t know the words. They can’t move their tongues probably because a certain part of the brain that moves your tongue which does all kinds of automatic things in your body.
Imagine if you had to think about where you’re going to put your tongue when I say, “This boy.” If I had to think through how I’m going to put my tongue and my lips. Speech is an automatic function and like moving your bowels, if you had to think your food through your digestive tract you’d go crazy with that. This is all an automatic thing that’s in the brain stem. It’s the lower part of the brain called the reptilian brain is all you need to run a really good reptile. This part of the brain is injured in our kids.
It gets injured because that part of the brain is open to the blood, in a reptile that part of the brain needs to taste the blood as is goes by to see what’s going on in the environment. It’s an old fashion system and it’s not appropriate to the modern world where you’re digestive tract is all screwed up with different kinds of poisons in it. Two kinds of poisons environmental poisons and you actually say your body and your blood and your digestive tract, poisons that are in there because they come from the environment.
There are cells the poisons that are made by germs that live in the digestive tract and those germs get screwed up by antibiotics it gets a bit crazy. This is what made that little girl with eczema. Her immune system got sensitive to something that made her skin breakout. Instead of putting her on a diet to find out if she was allergic to lemons or cheese I simply said, “Well let’s just try some nystatin and bingo it went away.”
Dave: Nystatin for people listening, nystatin is a very common anti-fungal agent that’s exceedingly safe and one that played a substantial role in me getting my brain back as well and just for people listening who aren’t medical.
Sidney: The lesson is that autism is a collection of things that spreads off in every direction that’s why the word spectrums comes in. The word spectrum has entered our language like a Trojan horse bringing that notion into our vocabulary so that we learn to think about illness in a different way. We start thinking about it as a thing that attacks people and instead we think about it as a complex expression. All kinds of imbalance in people but in particular with autism it leads to an increase in sensitivity which is associated with auto-immune inflammation and allergic inflammation.
Dave: When I was a kid I had OCD, ODD, ADD and most of the symptoms of Asperger’s syndrome. I’ve gone through and I’ve actively packed those things in various ways and turned down my autoimmunity and changed my brain. One of the things that is brain stem mediated that I have not yet fully mastered, is sensory processing of sounds? I found because I do this sort of things. There’s spectrums of sounds where my brain doesn’t hear very well on the left side versus the right side and my ability to discriminate human voices in a loud environment doesn’t happen in the brain stem the way it’s supposed to happen. I have to think and concentrate just like you’re describing. In order to hear in a noisy bar.
It takes a huge amount of effort for me to be able to hear what someone is saying whereas as far as I understand normal people without my brain they can magically just pick up what the person next to them is saying despite the fact that it’s really loud. Which seems like a mystery skill to me. When you come across these kids or adults like that and you get rid of the toxins and things like that. Do you also get to rewire the brain or is it stuck that way?
Sidney: You get to rewire the brain, so much to say. Yesterday I saw a boy and the first time he came to see me from Canada, front British Columbia. His dad had a video to show me on his iPhone of him playing the Cello. This boy had absolutely incredible pitch, he could tell you in a phrase listening to a Mozart symphony what the key of the symphony was. He could listen, he could tell what all these instruments are doing in the orchestra at the same time, just amazing.
This kind of sensitivity is where it’s working for him in that way because he has become so finely tuned that he’s a genius. He has a very bright future because he has a special skill and he will keep that. You know Norman Doidge? and the book The Brain’s Way of Healing. If people who are interested in this and you want to find the book that is the most important, an envelope in which to put the problem you just placed with sensitivities or difficult with sounds.
Norman Doidge had a daughter who had all kinds of difficulties with sounds and also had behavioral problems that were really way out there. She was a very handicap person. Even though she was a good person she had problems in her mood and behavior. He finally took her to a Tomatis, a person in France who treated her with sound therapy. Which is a popular and a successful way of handling children with sensory problems in the autism spectrum and she became a perfectly fine young woman.
That’s what got Norman Doidge on the, he’s a psychiatrist in Toronto on the trip of writing these books, he’s written a bunch of absolutely wonderful books about how the senses of the royal road to the brain. You and I were brought up thinking that the brain is inside this big bone and you can’t really get at it. You can biopsy people’s livers and skin and all that and you can put a flashlight down their esophagus or up their butt but you can’t get into the brain very easily.
Then there’s this thing called the blood brain barrier, it makes it sound like wow I will never be able to this drug into the brain. What Doidge’s book points out is that of course the senses are the masters of the brain. In some ways the sensors were evolved in some ways before the brain did. The brain came along afterwards in a sense of getting bigger but the senses provide access to the brain that is much more intense than any biopsy or endoscopy because it gives a way of providing a therapeutic signal that then encourages the brain to rewire itself. It’s called neuroplasticity.
What we were taught, I was taught was you hurt your brain maybe if you’re less than five years old you can get some of it back. Which is wonderful but not so now even at my age entering my 80th year, I can keep my brain developing and rewiring by doing certain kinds of exercises like walking and keeping my eyes open. Which is the way the human species evolved. Walking faster in the woods and staying alert. This just in his book right away you see the example of the sensory input of just walking and looking is good for your brain in ways that are measurable as regards rewiring and that means new neurons and new connections between neurons.
The gate is wide open if we just get people to understand that this is not, this autism came along with a bad reputation. When I was in secondary medical school at the Yale Child Study Center. They showed us a movie and we hardly saw any movies when we were medical students everybody would fall asleep. There as a movie and a dignified doctor crosses a mahogany deck and there was Jane and George Smith parents of a kid who of course was in the other room.
The doctor was saying. “Well I want you to know the most important thing to know about little Georgie is that he’s stuck this way and it’s really very important for you to know, don’t look for answers.” I remember exactly where I was sitting in that room when I saw that. I’ve forgotten just about everything else that I’ve learned in medical school but I remember that intensely. I was shocked and especially in retrospect I was shocked, more so as I metabolized that experience and I thought where did they go, where do you go?
You go to this care center and you have the worst cancer in the world they say, “We have a protocol for you.” You have a kid who’s not developing, “Well you’re screwed there’s nothing you can do.” This reputation is one of the many factors that have troubled the whole thing and the whole understanding of autism which is more screwed up than any other. There’s no other illness that I know of that’s so intentionally misunderstood by some people and so controversial that side that gets people who really ought to join.
Dave: One of the things that irritates me about the whole conversation is people say, “Well what causes autism?” It’s like what causes wind? Lots of things right, but they stack up and if you get a wind storm it was a whole configuration of things. What do you say when someone says to you, “What causes autism?” How do you answer that question?
Sidney: I answer it by pointing to I can’t call my friend because he’s from the 72nd story that I retire and I worked in the trenches but he’s an acquaintance. His name is Yehuda Shoenfeld he’s arguably the top immunologist in the world, you wouldn’t think in a such a competitive environment of egos that anybody could actually be the top guy but he really in my estimation he has written many, he’s edited many big books.
The first sentence in one of his books is also the first sentence that he uttered when we were at a think tank together. He was opening a meeting and I was going to talk about helminthic therapy at the end of the meeting. He said, “Until proven otherwise some would say that all chronic illness are autoimmune.” Then he says, “If you read the 52 chapters,” it was the first sentence in one of his big books. “If you read the 52 chapters in this book written by experts in immunology and infectious disease from around the world you come to the conclusion that all chronic illness is after all infectious including autoimmunity. What are you doing to make that … “
Dave: Yes, I absolutely agree with that cool.
Sidney: He’s making a sandwich and at the top of the sandwich is autoimmunity and underneath is the microbiome. Where the germs are that we’re supposed to become well acquainted with and have a friendly relationship but when they get out of balance it screws you up and gets the immune system screwed up. It gets it doing inflammation that is ill advised but it’s getting bad advice from the distortion that’s been created by a chemical environment and immunological environment and a microbial environment that has shifted dramatically in our population over the last 100 years.
Dave: Undoubtedly some of the reason that I weighed 300 pounds and had a lot of these autoimmune issues is and probably still do have a few, but far fewer. Is that I was on antibiotics for 15 years for chronic strep throat and sinusitis. That was itself caused by living in a water damaged basement full of toxic molds. I’ve been studying the interaction of what happens when something in the environment changes that causes a change in the microbiome that then causes autoimmunity. It is a shockingly complex problem. If your parents or someone is sitting hear saying, “Well how do I apply this to myself? Given that incredibly complex world what do you do?
Sidney: First I’d say it’s not that complicated.
Dave: Alright good.
Sidney: Not that complicated because under the banner that you would have shown for bless his heart this wonderful brilliant man has given us saying all chronic illness is autoimmune. Then you have to say, “Okay, what is autoimmunity?” Autoimmunity and allergy are loss of immune tolerance, now how do you restore immune tolerance? You go find a part of the world where nobody has immune intolerance, where they’re not allergic and they don’t have autoimmunity.
I spend two years as a Peace Corps volunteer and physician in Chad Africa. Where there was thousands of people over a whole year and I didn’t see anybody with an autoimmune disease, I didn’t see anybody with allergies. The only people who wheeze were people who had hookworms migrating though their lungs but they’d formed allergic to them was because the hookworms are trying to get to the gut. I came away with a sense that the difference between people living the old fashion way with a different kind of hygiene meaning soap and water and toilets and our culture which has all kinds of chronic illness but they don’t have that.
Over the years this developed into the understanding that people who live the old fashion way, who have a different kind of microbiome which somewhat larger germs in them than bacteria, they don’t have autoimmunity. Then about 15 years ago Joel Weinstock at the University of Iowa got a bunch people who have ulcerative colitis together. They were about to have a colostomy and they were already knocked on drugged out ulcerative colitis and autoimmune inflammation to the gut. He said, “Okay let’s give them the eggs of the pig whipworm. Because the pig farmers in Iowa don’t have autoimmune disease is because they have infection from these gut little germs that live in the pigs.
Dave: I did that nine years ago, I drank pig whipworm eggs so 100% with you.
Sidney: I’m with it and I got on the boat very early in the game. This has opened up a way of understanding the restoration of immune tolerance by restoring the microbiome. Nowadays what we do, we meaning I and a few other doctors. We’re training other doctors to do this now is I raise these things called HDCS. A much less expensive and easier way to get the same kind of thing. I think they’re more effective. Then you can get these online just as you used to be able to get as you can get TSO as well, what you were just talking about.
Dave: What does HDC stand for?
Sidney: Are you’re ready?
Dave: Yup.
Sidney: Hymenolepis diminuta cysticercoids.
Dave: It sounds delicious.
Sidney: It’s great and we call it HDCs, I call them primobiotics. I have a patient who had skin problems allover her. She was a very dignified woman about my age who used to be a foreign correspondent for a large news agency, she’s been around quite a bit. She said and was calling these things little dudes that I used because of her story that goes back to William Parker at Duke University who taught me how to do this. She said, “Well Sid that’s too cute a name.” This is serious stuff you know, this is changing the immune system in a very good way and look at me I’ve benefited from this. They’re sort of like probiotics right?”
I said, “Janette thank you that is such a gift from you to me.” She said, “I will think about something.” I thought of myself primobiotics. That’s what I call the ones that I raise in my little ranch here and I raise these things and give them to my patients and the patients of other doctors. For the mass market, the mother of one of my patients who became interested in helminthic therapy she asked me to introduce her to William Parker and she started a company called Biome Restoration and it’s biomerestoration.com
You can go get these things and take a swig and the probability in this adventure is very high considering it’s a medical kind of therapy. It’s really a nutritional thing because this is in your food supply already. The little creature that come from the grain beetle, the grain beetle lives in grain. When you eat your bread or your rolls, your pasta. It comes from grain silo originally and this is contaminated with beetles and you can’t get rid of these beetles. It’s already in your food supply except these are the living version of it. They’re tiny and they’re tasty. The chances of getting better from autoimmune allergic problems or these things is like way over 50/50 which is pretty good odds than the doctor’s odds.
Dave: You’re basically just eating beetles?
Sidney: This morning I was up at 3:00 and I sat there with my microscope. I have a little scalpel and some tweezers and I take the beetle apart, get the abdomen, open it up, take the stuff out and look under the microscope and I see these little guys they’re very cute. It’s really fun to do, I love this is four hours of work with a microscope. It’s tedious but they have a little round head and two little dots with a little thing in the middle and another thin down here so it looks like a face. It’s very haunting.
There they are looking back and they have kind of a tail as they get older they get longer tails and I try to select the ones with the long tails that look really good and put them in a little salt water and I send it, FedEx to my patients here and there. We sent out a whole bunch of FedEx packages today. This whole idea if it comes under the banner of Shoenfeld’s statement that restores immune tolerance and all chronic illness is autoimmune. Which I haven’t got a pretty big idea.
On the other hand it’s the kind of idea that the medical profession doesn’t like. It says that there is a treatment, one treatment for many diseases and if you want to get a ticket out of town maybe on a tarring and feathers but it cost you. You say you have a treatment for more than one disease. It’s coming around because you look at TV they have these drugs on TV, the nice lady dancing across the screen and saying for your rheumatoid arthritis and your colitis or whatever this could kill you but you usually should take it.
They are advocating there is things that are different autoimmune things ulcerative colitis and these things before you get from all of them. Of course the toxicity of those is enormous but the stuff that we’re talking about is safe and it’s good for autoimmune problems and allergies. It works dramatically and if you take the basic decision making formula for medical decisions. I call it BROCS B-R-O-C-S. B for benefit, R for risk, O for odds, C for Cost and S for stakes.
When the stakes are high it changes the whole construction of this word because if the stakes are high even if the odds are low and we’re not talking about low odds here but you know there’s one in ten what the heck. If there’s no risk to it, you go for it. If the cost is minimal. Some of these things that they have on TV that are for your autoimmune things are like thousands of dollars a month. We’re talking about pocket change to make a transformation in people that is just stunning. I’ve trained two doctors now to do this ranching that I’m doing and I’ve got a couple more coming in the spring.
Dave: Is there reason not to just eat the whole beetle?
Sidney: Yes because, I’ll tell you because I was with them this morning. I have my petri dish and I have my little ranch with the beetles in it. I have them come out and I say, “I’m sorry but you have to volunteer to help humanity,” and I cut them in half and take their abdomen and looked under the microscope. I had to get 220 of these things was my quarter this morning, my assistant and some ways my boss in this exercise she asked me and she told me, “I’m the one she’s going to get these viles with lots of little guys in them.” I open a beetle nothing in it, open the next beetle nothing in it, next beetle two HDCs in it.
You can go through five or six beetles and have … it’s like fishing. You can stay out there all day in your canoe and you don’t catch anything and then all of a sudden you go out on another day and the boat you’re your way over your quarter. The difference between one beetle to another is very big and William Parker as the researcher behind this, he’s validated this. There’s a very strange and threatening and maddening distribution curve of how many HDCs in a given beetle.
Dave: Is there any reason I wouldn’t just eat 50 beetles. I’m actually being very serious and I’m not trying to be flipid. It seems like if that’s the problem I’m sure I can pure chocolate on them and they wouldn’t be that bad.
Sidney: Well there’s another reason and that is there are we call this helminthic therapy and helminthic is a fancy word for a worm. These little guys that we’re talking about are the larva form of what happens to an egg from a worm that’s in a wrap which lives in the silo along with the beetles in the wheat or corn or everything. The egg of the rat tapeworm gets loose and is eaten by a beetle.
Now it turn into an HDCS and now it goes around and comes back into a wrap, it can become a tapeworm but the ones you eat rarely become a tapeworm and if you get a tapeworm with you on the then you won the lottery you can keep it because now it’s your own pet tape trying to keep your immune system in shape or you can go take like a pinworm medicine kind of thing and get rid of it. Everybody knows about pinworms, it’s not that different really it’s tapeworms. This type of tapeworm doesn’t go crawl into your brain or your eyeball or stuff like that so it’s a very safe kind of guy.
The reason that you don’t want to do just get some beetles is that there are two types of tapeworms that come into wraps and there’s one kind the regular one which is the HDCs and there’s the HDN the nanana meaning the small and that’s not good for you. You don’t want to get the wrong guy.
Dave: You open the beetles and soon as you find beetles have the wrong guys in them, they don’t have a smiley face basically?
Sidney: We raise these and we’re very, very carefully how we raise them and make sure that they only have the HDCs and not the other kind. That needs special consideration.
Dave: It sounds like an application for automation and machine imaging in order to get those things at scale because it sounds amazing.
Sidney: It comes from England, they’re imported from England. They’re produced in somewhat more elegant way and under the microscope when you look at them they just have the heads of the guys and they’ve been sort of marginalized in some ways but they still work. They’re much cheaper and they’re readily accessible by people who just don’t need a prescription or anything.
Dave: I have to say I am intrigued, I have a friend and a guy who consults with me on his nutrition stuff. A very, very entrepreneur who takes pig whipworm eggs every two weeks. I’ve considered going back on the protocol. I spent something like $600 or $1000 when I first tried this. I had to fly them in from Thailand, the first studies had just come out. I don’t think I can afford $600 a month for pig whipworm eggs but I was intrigued to keep doing it.
I’ve managed to reduce my autoimmunity so much but it’s not gone and I’m quite interested in doing this. Do I need to go to a doctor, get a prescription? How do you even ask a doctor for a prescription for pig whipworm eggs, is this on the PDR. What do you write on the form it seems?
Sidney: You have to find you know, I’m sure you’re connected with some of the right doctors.
Dave: No, I’m married like that’s no problem.
Sidney: You should try the HDCs.
Dave: I absolutely will but I’m thinking so there’s hundreds of thousands of people hearing this who are thinking, “Okay I have allergies, I have environmental allergies, I have food allergies. I want to try HDCs. How would they go about it?
Sidney: They go to biomerestoration.com and just buy something. It’s easy.
Dave: It’s that straight forward. Are these the ones you do or these are the ones that are automated from England?
Sidney: They work but mine are better and mine are farm fresh. Those are shipped, it takes a while to get here from England and the woman who has the company is my friend. I don’t have an interest in it except we’re friends. There’s work and that’s what everybody should get. Mine are more appropriate for what you might call a consultative triangle. You have a doctor who’s like my friend like Mark Hyman.
Dave: Mark’s a mutual friend I love Mark.
Sidney: You go to Mark and you say, “Can I get some HDCs from you?” And Mark says, “Yeah.” You pay mark, mark pays me, I ship to you and that way I’m clean and sending things to somebody who’s not my patient because they’re not a drug they’re more like a food. They’re like a probiotic.
Dave: It’s like sushi kind of?
Sidney: I wanted to stay on the high road while we get this thing started and not have any eyebrows raised. As you know my profession can be quite mean spirited about people who are sticking their necks out and so my neck is so far still connected to my body but I’m hoping to stay that way.
Dave: I appreciate your caution there and I’m really intrigued at using these essentially parasites as ways to modulate immune function because my experience is that almost everyone that I meet has these nagging health issues and they tell themselves, well I used to tell myself until I hit the wall. That, “It’s not that big of a deal it’s just a little thing.” One of your case studies here is a little girl with really dried and cracked and callused feet. You gave her HDCs and she got better? What happened there?
Sidney: She’s an example in the paradigm of functional medicine. Jeff Bland is the one who laid out the chemistry.
Dave: He’s been on the show too, an amazing guy.
Sidney: I came along and I wanted to medicalize it in the common sense realm. In my early days as a practitioner I ran into a lovely woman who from the Cape Verde Islands. Who had horrible migraine and I thought I was being clever just kind of the neurologist in our group and he said she needed this medicine. The medicine made her terribly sick, she went to chiropractor which in those days I didn’t believe in but now I do of course. The chiropractor said to take magnesium and vitamin B6 and they were completely cured. It was amazing.
Then of course my colleagues at Yale said, “Do you mean to tell me that magnesium is the cure for migraines?” I said no, “It’s the treatment for this woman not for the disease.” That is the whole problem in language here. That made me think, “Well jeez then maybe she was sick because she had an unmet special need to get something which if she got it would hasten nature’s brain impulse towards healing.
Then I had another patient, I was just coming into my practices. He was a dad in a family, I was taking the interview and I said, “You have any surgery and any allergies?” “Yeah I have allergy.” I said, “What is it?” “Eggs.” I was writing down egg and because I overheard sometime in those days because they were just starting this new health plan. “What happens if you eat eggs?” Well he told me this amazing story was horrible sickness and so immediate that it wasn’t that hard to figure out when he figured it out finally. I had said to myself well there must be other people out there with all sorts of different things that are causing the problem because they’re allergic to it and they haven’t figured it yet.
That was the avoid side of the paradigm. The paradigm says for chronic illness maybe there’s something you neither get or avoid or be rid of, that’s detoxification. In which if you take care of it then it would favor nature’s strong impulse towards healing. The nature doesn’t he healing and it’s a paradigm that say’s it’s common sense and I thought well, I’m not going to run in many people with problems like that, but I should be able to be on top of it for my patients and make sure I cover all the basis and be thorough.
Well it turns out that as soon I started talking to people’s chronic illness there was over and over again it fit the model of what was then called clinical ecology, now The American Academy of Environmental medicine or orthomolecular medicine. Which is Linus Pauling and the question of getting right stuff. This is the field of chronic illness and it takes a different way of thinking and also takes a different way of handling data which is as you know maybe something that I’ve been very involved in.
It all has to do with the problem in our language, it has to do with the thinking that the disease is the target of treatment and diseases are things and we have to stamp them out and we have to treat the disease of all these drugs rather than the individual is the target of treatment. Then the little girl with … she was a little girl I was a Director of Gesell Institute. She was referred to me by a psychiatrist she’d been seeing for three years for horrible temper tantrums, just crazy. She came from a pretty normal family in Greenwich Connecticut. She made no progress with this treatment with psychotherapy.
I saw her and as I did a physical exam it turned out that her feet were peely and cracked and shiny and fishers between the toes kind of things. Very dry weird feed which is the sign of unmet needs for Omega-3 oils. On the other hand her hair was perfectly lustrous and her skin above was fine. In her it showed up in her feet. She’d been taking cotton socks and steroid creams for three years in the whole time that her head was being treated at the other end with psychiatry and I gave her some flax oil, a tablespoon a day. Six weeks later she was fine, she was a normal kid. That was another one of these experiences that got me and showed up my self-confidence let’s say that it was okay for me to think in a new way.
Dave: What would you do if someone came to you and said, “I’m allergic to eggs help?”
Sidney: At first I would say how do you know? If they said, “Well I had it on a blood test and it said I was allergic to eggs.” I’d say, “Well, but do you eat eggs?” Sometimes the blood test shows that you have antibodies but it doesn’t prove anything. It gives you a working list to consider. If they have an allergy to eggs I would first of all say, “Well how bad is it and what happens with it and what’s the sequence of events, what’s the evidence and is it the egg York and the egg white and all that?”
If it gets nailed down to be yes every time they eat eggs they have hives or something and they have to be so cautious about it that they can’t eat out because there might be egg in something. That was the problem with my patient because he described this thing he goes to a dinner party. He tells the host just please don’t put any eggs in anything. The eggs are in it and he ends up on the floor with writhing and pain and just really broken up. Then I would say, “Well there are medicines you can take that block allergies that are actually pretty safe not the antihistamines but there are things that you can take like Cromolyn they’re pretty effective. Really it just happens that I have these stuff called HDCs and you should give it a shot.
Dave: You’ve seen HDCs reverse egg allergies?
Sidney: Yes.
Dave: This is something I haven’t talked on the radio before but I’ll just go there. One of the prime foods that I recommend for people is raw egg yolks or very lightly cooked egg yolks. I know they’re on your list of good foods as well. They’re such a super food on the bullet proof diet, they’re in the super food, the bullet proof zone. They’re also, eggs are a pretty common allergen. When I was testing various things you could do, I went on the Eskimo deity just during the development of my book. I went on 80% 90% fat and protein, one serving of green vegetables a day for three months and no starch whatsoever and no sugar.
By the end of three months I had ruined my sleep quality, I had no tears, really dry sinuses and I gave myself an allergy to eggs that I’d never had before. It manifested as a rash, a really bad bright red rash around my lips. Which was really irritating and they’d be like chapped and dry for a week after I had one egg. The working hypothesis there is that you need a certain amount of starch in order to make the polysaccharides that mucus is made of. I’d lost the mucus lining in my stomach on this relatively extreme diet, kind of see what happens when you’re in extreme ketosis right.
I’d say I’m 80% done with my egg allergy but I still have a little bit of a symptom when I have eggs sometimes so I tend to not eat them even though I love the. Given that story there you think HDCs would be the sort of thing to cause the immune system to self-regulate or is there any light you could shed on that given your experience?
Sidney: Well it’s a small light but it’s a small issue because now you have shown that your body is working its way toward getting over this thing . It needs a signal that is the kind of signal that the HDCs do that has to do with the restoration of what we call tolerance. If people understand these things with different words then it makes it easier for them to grasp on to it and their whole problem is the loss of tolerance. As we said at the beginning on both on the sensory and the immunological aspects of things.
The restoration of immune tolerance is now, it’s a well-established from live stocks, research and from what William Parker is doing at Duke. That this organisms restore immune tolerance in a very large number of people and if they were widely used as William Parker wants to do, he’s working on trying to figure out … and this has to do with cancer as well mind you. This is a cancer research.
If you can restore the immune tolerance in people the net worth to the population would be just enormous. The amount of money that’s being spend on things that we’re talking about, all these expensive drugs and so on. On the television they don’t say this will cure you, they say this will reduce your symptoms. They have all these words that sound sort of good but when you pass the word it’s not like this is going to get you better. You get two more years of life or that kind of stuff which I don’t mean to knock it but really.
There may be a shift and there may be a new technology comes along. I’m sure there are people including in Israel now trying to figure out what is the chemical that’s released by the HDC that makes the immune system happier. For right now the old fashion way seems to be working and I think it’s extraordinarily valuable turn of events in medicine.
Dave: The theory behind Helmin therapy as I understand it is that we evolve to have certain of these organism as part of our, some of these larger none just bacteria or fungal organism present in our body. That they have a function there and that the loss of those has triggered some of this lack of immune tolerance. Then by restoring this or maybe some of the signaling molecules or something that they do that we can have just better health.
Sidney: Yes, the book to read is by Moises Velasquez-Manoff, the title is The Epidemic of Absence. It’s a perfect title because it says this isn’t because there’s an epidemic going because there’s a bad mosquito that’s stinging people which is horrific but it’s because we are lacking something we belong or we should have. Obviously if 100 years ago it would become fashionable everybody had their thumbs cut off when they were born it would have caused a lot of trouble in our species because everybody would be going around with no thumbs and it would be handicapping.
Then if somebody came along and said, “I have this great idea let’s stop cutting off thumbs.” Then there would be a lot or religious objections to it or something else like that, but hat finally the guy was putting the thumbs back would get the credit. That’s the same thing with these things, this isn’t that we’re introducing something new to people, we’re putting something in there that has always been there.
We co-evolved with these things, this is part of our body and it’s part of our immune system now exactly how it works. That this conversation goes on with these microorganisms is mind boggling because believe me there are some individuals who take one HDC, one of these little critters and that’s enough to change their immune systems. It’s just stunning. When I did my TSO, this is years ago and I got onboard very early because I had a patient who’s mom was very inquisitive and I told her the story about Weinstock and she said, “Oh you can get these things now from Germany,” she went over to Europe and got them. That was before you could get them online.
I got on the ground floor and my wife had a thyroid autoimmunity thing and she was standing in the kitchen taking her first dose of the TSO I said, “Let me have a taste,” because I was just curious of course it tastes like so I took 1.5 ml teaspoon, I take a taste of it. It tastes like salt water. I thought nothing more of it was may a number of years ago. I had had allergies terrible all my life, ever since I went to camp and when I was six years old and I always had a handkerchief and I had running nose and itchy eyes and everything. Four days later my allergies stopped and that was … I didn’t take another dose of TSO until next year. I was a cheap date.
Dave: That is incredible.
Sidney: I showed you how amazing it is. Now of course I’m not naïve enough to think that well it could be a placebo response, of course intention counts and I’m all for it. We wouldn’t get anything done without intention. Somehow intention works a lot better these days with HDCs and TSOs and stuff like that.
Dave: What an elegant way of saying it. I’ve had a few people had just profound results for hormone therapy and so I’m really intrigued to try this and I’ll report back for our listeners what results I have there. I feel like I’ve eliminated the vast majority of allergies that I’ve suffered from, I always had them as a kid. I still react to toximolds, still react to eggs and a couple of other things but I’m feeling pretty free from all that stuff, the seasonal stuff is mostly gone but not always so I’m going to play with it?
Sidney: Your history of antibiotics as a child of course that’s the thing that …
Dave: The smoking gun.
Sidney: It’s a typical story and it not only involves that but in most birth basis our inception.
Dave: I didn’t have that but I was born with a cord wrapped on my neck so I got a healthy dose of birth trauma but I probably the vaginal bacteria.
Sidney: Yeah that’s what you want and that’s a key thing for people are trying to have a section because now section is very common.
Dave: We can’t stop that.
Sidney: They should really know about something that I labelled to the amusement of my colleagues in the think tank at the paraneo picnic.
Dave: Did you invent that Sid, I didn’t know that?
Sidney: I didn’t invent it, I invented the name of it.
Dave: Well still okay respect, I tell people about that this is so vital.
Sidney: You’re going to have a birth by cesarean section it means the baby is not going to come out through your vagina. The vagina is full of good germs so like the Basilus kind of germs. It’s the natural normal germ population of a healthy vagina. The baby gets bathed in this as the baby comes out through the vagina and it gets all over her skin and allover in his mouth and so on. Even if this happens quickly very quickly. I deliver a number of babies in Ob-gyn training and elsewhere. Sometimes a birth can happen pretty fast and well how could he, he didn’t have time to stop and eat that.
He gets these germs from the mother and these are the gift to begin his or her own population that constitutes the flora or microflora of the bodies inside. If the baby is deprived of this and has to get his or her flora from the nurses and from there mother’s skin and those other places. It doesn’t work as well and the research is overwhelmingly positive. Nobody can deny that what I’m saying is true this is not like the idea. What’s the answer to this?
At the very least someone should figure out someway when soon after the baby is born. If I were the mom or if it were my daughter I would say well just stick your finger in there in the vagina and give it to the baby. There’s no big deal oooh oooh but really that’s and better …
Dave: If I caught my own kids coming out if you’ve seen what happens in birth that’s not a big deal.
Sidney: Exactly and even a little bit of poopiness is probably not off the chart but at least the vaginal flora, a good finger well should I call it a perineum as a person’s crotch right. I thought of paraneo picnic it’s a celebration, celebratory eating for the baby. Then of course breast milk is extremely important because the milk of the mother feeds the germs and the germs feed the baby. That’s a simple way of putting it, it is a very simple system but it’s so important for people to understand that because the idea that the baby is digesting the milk is not actually true now we understand that.
The germs, the flora of the baby they lived on these bacteria and largely certain kind of Basilus and they’re the only germs that know how to eat the lactose in milk. Then those germs break down the lactose and feed the baby. The idea that formula is the same is not so.
Dave: It’s just not, we actually put a little bit lacto Basilus infantilis probiotic on my wife’s nipples for the first nursing just to make sure that the right stuff was there with the natural breast milk. Breast feeding is amazing and there are still sometimes when it just it won’t happen if some mothers don’t produce milk and things like that. There’s great debate online about what do you do if you’re not producing milk and you need to feed your baby. It’s a tough one but the average formulae out there sure has some room for improvement and do you have any advice there for people who need to replace milk with something else?
Sidney: Well not soy milk.
Dave: Thanks for saying that of course not.
Sidney: It’s a tough issue I don’t have an easy answer.
Dave: That’s alright and a better book I did my best there, I did a bunch of research and there are some things you can do with raw liver and egg yolks and it’s not ideal but it’s worth paying attention rather than just buying a can of whatever is on sale at the store and assuming it’s going to work, it requires deep thought we’ll put it that way.
Sidney: One of my patients, the father of one of my old patients who had a new baby is a very savvy guy but not a doctor and the baby was having a terrible time with feeding and it was getting a special formulae because it wasn’t regaining weight and they didn’t want to use the breast milk. I can’t remember what the story was but you got in this enormous battle with the doctors and he did his homework and documented all this and they gave him a very hard time. This was in a fancy hospital and they were not up to date on all these kind of stuff. It really made it difficult because this was such a simple solution, you give the baby the breast milk from the mother and then supplement it with looper germs and all that.
Dave: I have two more questions for you.
Sidney: Yes.
Dave: The first one is about activated charcoal and full disclosures I manufacture the finest particle size, acid washed activate charcoal on the market. I use it myself extensively. I am familiar with it and most listeners, most many listeners may know that and I felt a huge difference in my own just quality of thinking by binding endotoxins and things like that. What do you use it for, I know it’s in your presentation deck? What’s your take on activated charcoal, what’s it appropriate for, what’s it not and we didn’t talk about this ahead of time I have no idea what you’re going to say. I want to know what you have to say.
Sidney: It’s a very important question and thanks for introducing yourself as the charcoal guy I’m very impressed. If you look on Amazon for activated charcoal like 600 brands it’s a mess to figure out which one so now we know which one to take. Here’s a scenario, you have a person such as the boy I saw the other day who has lots of symptoms of neural muscular irritability, in other words is uptight in various ways both muscular and nervous, hyper and all that. It’s a very common symptoms in the population of people who’s listening to this conversation.
These are an indication of unmet needs for magnesium and you can take magnesium pills then. If you’re going to do that then you may also be a person who would want to try a little bit of an anti-fungal probiotic of course that causes polarity. Which is a type of yeast but it kills other yeast. When you do that and if one of your symptom from being uptime was being constipated which is not unusual you want to find out how much magnesium you can take before you come close to having an accident.
Dave: We call that disaster pants in the bullet proof protocols. Disaster pants is the accident that happens with too much magnesium.
Sidney: You want to take magnesium to bowel tolerance it’s called and so the dosage stuff is in the material and that I’ll put in my drop box.
Dave: We’ll share appropriately in the show notes just come to the transcript it will be there for you.
Sidney: Then the idea is you need the magnesium to make sure you can poop and now if you have a die-off reaction when you take the anti-fungal medicine because the yeast die and they release their toxins. They make you more constipated often because the yeast don’t want to be in the toilet. One of their tricks is to keep you from pooping. When they get mad when they’re being killed by these other yeast they release these toxins that makes you even more constipated and now you’re feeling awful, you can’t poop, you need to take a lot of magnesium but in the meantime you take activated charcoal to get rid of the die-off reaction because it serves the toxins. Then once you learn how well this works eventually you find that if you’re just having a bad day you can take some activated charcoal.
Dave: Exactly.
Sidney: That’s the take home from it my parents learned this about their kids. They figured this out in the heat of the battle but then later on they’re having a bad car trip. Johny is in the back seat he’s going nuts and I gave him a little activated charcoal and bingo it works and it’s not a medicine, it’s not dangerous you shouldn’t take it all the time because it absorbs your food as well but it’s really a wonderful thing.
Dave: The kid behavior thing pulls me away. I have an eight year old and a six year old and if they’re just acting out of sorts I know them and they’re good kids and when stuff is just not right you give them a little bit of activated charcoal and like 10 minutes later they’re themselves again. There is a biochemical reason for it and I don’t necessarily know what it was but whatever it was it just stuck to the charcoal and they pooped it out and I’m okay with that right.
Sidney: Well you know all about charcoal that’s great.
Dave: My next question for you is the question that I’ve ended very episode with on bullet proof radio and I’m really interested to hear your answer and if someone came to you tomorrow and they said, given your entire life, your entire career everything you’ve done. What would you tell me if I said I want to perform better at everything I do as a human being? The three most important things I need to know to just do everything better. What piece of advice would you have?
Sidney: I would say find a way that is pleasurable for you to stay active physically that is whether it’s swimming or bowling or walking, especially walking do a lot of that.
Dave: You don’t have to there’s just a street goes by our drive way and people run around here and say I don’t like it here in the summer time even in the winter and some of them have the most gruesome expression on that basis. I’d say if you can’t smile little bit while you’re doing this don’t choose that thing, choose something that makes you happy while you’re doing thing. I think that’s important. I think that meditation or some aspect of that kind of practice is good where you’ve got yourself into this other space and have another relationship with your body where you have a way of being both in and out of it in a comfortable way. I think that’s great.
Sidney: Going by the dietary guidelines of the IFM meeting in 2014 which I’ll put and I think is important.
Dave: By the way almost exactly in alignment with the bullet proof. I saw that I’m like, “hallelujah this is good,” full endorsement there.
Sidney: That’s really, really important. These days people say, “Oh there’s been so many changes in the way diets, this diet and that diet and everything and so the IFM meeting in 2014 and all these big wigs from all the academic basis all the people to do research on Mediterranean deity and the vegan diet and that diet and then the moderate advisory said, “Everybody has come up to the podium for the afternoon and find common ground and see what we agree.” The list that I’ve put out there is that common ground and now this is a keeper, I don’t think it’s going to change much anymore.
David promoter’s book is a good representation of it as well. He was there, he was out selling his book that day.
Dave: He’s been a guest on bulletproof radio as well and in fact there’s a quote for him on the back of the last cook book I did. I love David Perlmutter he was on stage during that event?
Sidney: He wasn’t, he was out selling his book.
Dave: He was out selling his book you’re saying okay cool
Sidney: The thing he put in his book very much reflected the consensus and more reasoning behind it.
Dave: Excellent so you had exercise that you like, you had meditation and you had eat stuff that’s compatible with humans.
Sidney: Yes exactly.
Dave: That’s a great list.
Sidney: And smile.
Dave: Alright you got a bonus one given all of your accomplishment. Dr. Sidney thanks for being on Bullet Proof Radio. Where can people find out more about you, is there a single URL or somewhere that I should send them?
Sidney: No, I’ve put all my publications on the link that I put up for them with the stuff there.
Dave: Thank you, if you’re listening to this now I’m sure that there’s a bunch of stuff that you wanted to get out of this while you’re probably taking notes frantically except you’re driving. All of this will be transcribed for you, all you need to do is go to the bullet proof website and go to the podcast transcript for this episode and you can search it, you can find HDCs holding to all of the relevant companies and technologies we talked about including the auditory process from Alfred Tomatis all that stuff we’re going to link that for you.
There’s a special presentation from Dr. Baker that we’ll have as well that contains the specific things we talked about. You don’t need to worry about losing this info, it’s there it will be there next year or two. It will be there and we’re going to go extra work on this one to make sure that it’s got just a full set of info because this is really valuable stuff from one of the luminaries in the field. Dr. Baker thanks again from being on bullet proof radio it’s an honor to get to interview you for this long and thanks for your work.
Sidney: Well it was a tremendous pleasure I think you could tell I just loved it and so thanks very much and hopefully you can stay in touch.
