Can Functional Medicine Help With ALS, MND?

James Maskell:

There are awesome, amazing practitioners doing incredible work out there in the world, and you need to hear about it. There is a doctor in the uk, a PhD, who runs a virtual clinic and has been helping people with motor neuron seed. What you’re gonna hear in this session is that practitioners like you are making an impact in stabilizing these kind of conditions by bringing back network sufficiency if you have any sort of mental health focus in your practice.

This is just a huge thing that’s happening in society. Um, we have very exciting pending information, you know, pending on the first even. Hello and welcome to the Evolution of Medicine podcast. This is season two, episode eight, and we are gonna go back to doing something that we used to do all the time.

We are gonna interview someone interesting. For the first seven episodes, it’s be mainly me. But that’s because I really wanted to sort of share a new vibe for what the Evolution of Medicine season two looks like. But ultimately, there are awesome, amazing practitioners doing incredible work out there in the world, and you need to hear about it.

So for this first week, we are going to talk about a disease that is called different things in different countries. In England, it’s called Motor neuron Disease. In America it’s called ALS or Lou Gehrig’s Disease. And ultimately it is an area. Where there hasn’t been a lot of hope in conventional medicine, almost no hope.

But there is a doctor in the uk, a PhD, who runs a virtual clinic and has been helping people with motor neuron disease. And the reason why this is mission critical now and why we’re bringing it out is I’m a big rugby fan, a Love England rugby, and there was a big moment in the UK last month where one of their big rugby players from my era, Louis Moody.

Was diagnosed with motor neuron disease and if you follow Dr. Daniel Amen or you are up to date with like this world, you’re starting to see that playing contact sports, like rugby, which I played for like 10 years of my life, can [00:02:00] cause lasting damage to head concussion. Or otherwise, but you were gonna see more and more of this, sadly, because rugby only became a professional sport in 1995.

Before that, it was an amateur sport, and ultimately we have basically like 30 years of people smacking each other’s heads consistently. And I think that this is maybe just the tip of the iceberg for rugby. Obviously this has been a big issue in football. They changed the rules in American football to stop people running into each other because of issues like this.
But the good news is, and what you’re gonna hear in this session is that practitioners like you are making an impact in stabilizing these kind of conditions by build, bringing back network sufficiency, which is one of the topics that we are talking along. So I’m really excited for this week’s guest and hope you enjoy.
Hello and welcome to a special episode of the Evolution of Medicine Podcast. We are now gonna be speaking with Dr. Kirsty Lawton. She is a nutritionist, she has a PhD and she is running a clinic in the [00:03:00] UK that does telehealth appointments. On the topic of motor neuro disease called ALS or Lou Gehrig’s Disease in the US and is leading the charge to really build a community of practitioners and support the growth of understanding and what we can do about all types of neurodegenerative disease.

There’s a lot of good stuff in here, no matter what you’re interested in or what kind of cases you’re interested in, so enjoy. So a warm welcome to the podcast, Dr. Kirsty Lawton. Welcome. Thanks so much for having me, James. So, yeah, as I see on social media, it seems that, uh, your clinic in the UK that specialize in neuro issues is really blowing up and lots of new practitioners joining and just such an interesting time because I’m really interested in neurological issues as a sort of a, an area in which functional medicine, you know, can be shown to be most effective.

And I just wanted to touch in to see. So tell us a little bit about. The history of the practice and what’s happening right now and, you know, anything more that you’d like to about the journey so far? [00:04:00] Sure. So I’ve been a, a, a nutritionist starting out as a conventional nutritionist for 25 years. And I think like a lot of people in our field sort of.

Started to question whether I was able to help people in the way that I wanted to, and so decided to make the switch to a functional approach. So having completed a degree and a PhD, I decided to go back to the Institute for Optimum Nutrition and retrain, and decided to come and set my practice up in the uk and it has grown significantly.

My specialism personally is motor neuron disease or ALS . The nomenclature is in the UK we refer to motor neuron disease, of which the most common type is ALS . And in the US we refer to ALS . So I think for the sake of today, I’ll just refer to ALS , and then everyone knows what I’m talking about. So that’s my specialism and has been for a few years now.

Prior to that was Parkinson’s and prior to that was actually pediatric health and brain health. And then I was still getting so many inquiries [00:05:00] from people. Without ALS , and I’m a real sucker. I really wanted to help as many people as I can, but I was just running out of time and really wanted to keep my focus because there’s so much going on in the ALS field at the moment, and I think it’s one of those conditions that you can’t be part in.

You have to just really be all in with it. And so I made the decision to expand. So I have another practitioner who works in A-L-S-M-N-D, but also takes on. Autoimmune conditions and does lots of work with people on their test results as well. And then I’ve got a Parkinson’s specialist now and I’ve got a specialist in Alzheimer’s and dementia, a pediatric neuro specialist, and I’m about to onboard, uh, which is really exciting.

A brain and spine injury specialist are focusing on brain trauma, brain injury, stroke, and such as. Well, it’s amazing. And my understanding is this is all virtual as well, right? Yeah, so the clinic’s based in the uk but you know, I think since, especially since the pandemic, but even before then, telehealth is, is the way forward.

You can reach as many people as you want. You don’t have to have that specialist in your hometown anymore. And, and especially with my client. When I set the practice up here in Rutland, in England, I live in a very old cottage, and so I have a beautiful clinic, but it’s just never going to be accessible for people.

But also a lot of my patients are housebound. A lot are on arrest, A lot are, are paralyzed now, you know, and so it, it’s. For them. They have me in their living room with them as frequently as they need. And so the clinic’s based here, but we actually work globally. So I’ve got clients in Canada and and on the west coast of the US and I’ve got clients in Australia as well.

So, yeah, which is exciting. Really. That’s really exciting. Well look, I wanted to talk about, particularly about ALS and MND because that has come up in the news recently. So, Louis Moody, who’s a famous rugby player from England, from, you know, two decades ago, and, you know, is a, it’s, it is a very, like, well-known and well loved player, has just been announced that he’s been diagnosed with it.

Ultimately, you are seeing right now in rugby, sort of the first generation of people that played professionally as opposed to, you know. When I was growing up until 1995, it was an amateur game. And so we’re seeing the first generation of like, okay, what does head injuries look like? You know, what is the effect on it?

So I’d love to, you know, hear your opinion on, you know, what the state of MMD is and, and to the degree to which this is sort of putting it on the map. And then second, like what is really possible with MND through a nutrition and a functional lens and what is possible with, you know, in conventional medicine.

Yeah. I mean, really sad news about Louis Moody. Um, I have mutual friends with him and, you know, my heart goes out to his family because it is a really challenging diagnosis. Um, mostly, and we had this conversation before about the narrative around it, which I’ll come to. I think we have to consider, you know, whether there are a particularly high percentage of sports people developing ALS and, and if that is the case, then why, you know, there there’s a cluster of of skiers.

There’s certain sports like contact sports. Um, but, but I, I have a lot of very active clients that have done a lot of marathons, people that are really quite fit and healthy, that have developed ALS and we’ve got to really consider the why. And I think a lot of what I’ll be talking about that today is the why we seem to stop with conventional medicine of, oh, this is happening, let’s make a drug for, and it’s like, no, there’s a why.

You know, that’s the joy of functioning medicine, right? You keep asking why until there’s no more why’s to ask. Um, and so when it comes to sports, there’s research considering. Pesticides on the grass or any particular bacteria on the grass, you know, if we’re rolling around on the grass or whether it’s related to head injury.

Um, there’s some other theories out there as well that I would love more research on to do with. Core body temperature or cortisol levels. You know, we know when you do exercise that we can end up raising cortisol. So, so I think we need to consider that. And obviously there’s genetic factors as well.

What’s really interesting for me is every single one of my patients, and I’ve probably got 50 to 60 patients at the moment, um, with ALS , is. Is no two present the same. No two have the same life history. No two have the same blood markers. There is some similarities in genetic snips, which I’ll come onto, but I think we’ve just gotta really keep on digging and try and look for the commonalities.

If there are rugby players developing this condition, what do they have in common? And that’s really, that’s really where we’ll find the answer to the why in terms of what can be done. Uh, I was chatting to Ben Brown the other day on the n in his. He leads the NMI in the uk, the Nutritional Medicine Institute, and he said to me, you know, Dale Bredesen, um, in the end of Alzheimer’s, which at its time was so cutting edge because the thought around Alzheimer’s was the narrative.

There’s nothing that can be done. And he was really the first to suggest that a proactive, early, multi-component personalized intervention could potentially reverse. A condition that was previously thought of as incurable. And the Recode program is seeing amazing results. And so we have to consider if Recode or if something similar to Recode can be applied to other neurodegenerative conditions because they do all have a lot of commonalities, mitochondrial dysfunction, protein aggregation in the cell, oxidative stress.

Neuroinflammation often accompanied with like dysfunctional microbiome genes that are impacting our liver pathways. So we’ve, we’ve got all these things in common and so hopefully if something’s working really well in the Alzheimer’s dimension field, know the research doesn’t look directly at ALS , but sometimes we’ve got to not go from.

A to B, but we’ve gotta think, right, well here’s mitochondrial dysfunction and the research might not be on ALS , but it is on mitochondrial dysfunction. And so we’ve gotta indirectly support people with this condition. I’m really hopeful that the event, the trial where the outcomes will hopefully come out in December as a pre-print and then April as a full print, you know, will help the whole field move forward.

Because ultimately I don’t think there’s been a lot of. Placebo controlled studies in the functional medicine space, mainly just ’cause it’s not easy to run a placebo test for something that’s multimodal or a placebo group, but ultimately, you know, those outcomes, which I can’t really talk about, but I’ve seen, you know, at different conferences ultimately will show like it’s not placebo and we know it’s not placebo.

You know, there’s a big gap between the placebo and the effectiveness of the program and you know, ultimately the. The phrase that Dr. Breon used recently that I really took to his network insufficiency, and it’s really like the network in the brain or the network in the body breaks down over time and then you get, and then you get Alzheimer’s, or then you get these other conditions.

Would you say that that is, from the way that you think about it, the way that you see it? 100%. You know, there’s a lot at the moment looking at cell danger response, looking at anything that can hijack that. Web inside the cell that connects everything. You know, we think, we still think of our biology image of a cell, but it’s, the cell is so much more detailed than that.

There’s more than one mitochondria. You know, we all have that image from our textbooks, but these cells, they have this huge. Web inside each of them and, and everything has its portal and things have to get across the cell to reach certain points. And we have to think about anything that can be massively disrupting that and driving protein aggregation, you know, instead of thinking there’s a protein and it’s.

Misfolding. If we get rid of the protein, we’ve fix the problem. Like what’s caused it to happen? Why is that protein misfolding? Why can’t the cell clear that debris? What is triggering the mitochondria to close their doors and say, I’m not gonna produce any energy for you for a while. You know, we’ve got to think about all of that and look at environmental.

Factors and, and stress and other factors in the body that might be driving this network dysfunction that we are seeing because that’s what it is. And especially with ALS A lot of patients, we have two very clear types really if, if there is a type, we’ve got the sort of upper lumbar, which affects the sort of swallowing and speech, and then we’ve got limb onset and it is almost like.

Starts with a foot drop on one side, as though the battery isn’t working, the charge isn’t getting from where it needs to be, all the way down to the foot to make it function. Motor neuron can be quite an old cell and they can have up to about 2 million mitochondria in them, and they are really. Some of them are over a meter in length, and so that’s how much energy it takes to send that message for movement.

And if those mitochondria start closing down, then that charge, you know, that signal is not gonna reach where it needs to be. And we need to figure out why that is. Do you think that this disease is particularly susceptible or not susceptible, but do you think it’s, it’s particularly well looked at through sort of like a, a bioenergetic component given the role of like energy transfer that’s happening as a core part of the function?

I think so. I mean, I think it, because I’m currently doing my master’s at the University of Sheffield Medical School, and that’s under Professor Shor. It’s one of the biggest MND Centers, neurodegenerative Research Center in the uk, and the masters is in neuroscience and neurodegeneration. And there’s loads and loads of research going on looking at metabolomics.

Looking at mitochondrial function, looking at reasons for oxidative stress, what’s stopping that network from functioning optimally there? There’s a huge amount going on in the field with that where I’d like to see the research happen, and I’m sure Dr. Verison and every functional medicine practitioner in the world will agree with me as I just would love the lens to come out a little bit more and look at those key drivers.

Diet, lifestyle, environmental factors that could potentially be impacting that. Yeah, absolutely. Well, that’s what, well, so give us an idea of what the workup looks like. Like how is your workup maybe different from some other patient that you take in who didn’t have a neurodegenerative disease? What other information you gathering outside of sort of like the core functional medicine workup?

It sound, it might sound strange, but I get someone who comes in who has ALS and then I actually like to. Ignore that diagnosis and, and here’s why. Only 10% of people with ALS , as with Parkinson’s have a genetic mutation that’s driving the condition. And so that means 90% of people, it’s sporadic. And so what that means is.

People have a cluster of symptoms, parts of their body are failing and we don’t really know why. So to me, as a diagnosis, it would be like me coming to you and saying, my legs have stopped working. I have fasciculations. I’m struggling with my speech. You replying. Okay. I’m going to diagnose you with your leg not working, changes to your speech and fasciculations because you’re, you’re just repeating back what I already know that the cluster of symptoms I have has been put together and it’s been given a name.

It’s typically a diagnosis of ruling things out, and that can take a really long time. For people to get that diagnosis. And what’s quite exciting is just this week some research has come out, um, potentially identifying a protein that can help people get their diagnosis faster, which is really essential because a lot of my patients in and out of neurology for one to two years.

And of course, if you think about this diagnosis, what is so awful about it and why time is such a factor is, is typically most people will live two to five years. And so to have to wait two years for a diagnosis is tricky. But once they have that diagnosis and they come to me, I go back to my roots of functional medicine.

So I do an incredibly thorough timeline. I do encourage all of my clients to do genetic testing because actually if we do know that they have. Some of the specific genes. Then there are certain trials going on. There’s gene therapies being produced, and it’s good to know and it’s good to keep an eye on that for them.

There’s research going on, for example, at FSU, looking at metformin and C nine of 72, and. If I know someone has the C nine or 72 mutation, which really drives up oxidative stress, first of all, I know I can really focus on that oxidative stress and do everything I can from a nutrition lifestyle perspective to bring it down.

But also I can keep an eye on what’s going on with that research. But for the rest of my patients, it’s thorough, thorough timeline all the way back to their younger years. Looking for any potential trigger, any environmental trigger, any pathogenic trigger, and then doing things the way we would do it.

You know, start with the gut, move to the liver, move on to the immune system, move on to the mitochondria, and just really take it one system at a time and look for anything that is dysfunctional and try and support that through diet. Supplements. So that’s the approach. The thing that is different is ALS patients are so incredibly sensitive and you really have to know what you’re doing and doing things in the right order and at the right speed as well.

Because I’ve had a lot of patients come to me who have gone into another practitioner’s office and they’ve run a test, and the test has come back with lime or metals and they’ve gone straight into a hardcore detox. Or, you know, removal protocol that may work with another patient. And these, these patients have just spiraled and declined a really quick rate.

So it’s learning everything that you learn as you work through the ranks of functional medicine, and then really just doing things very methodically and always watching for a change in symptoms. I would say isn’t, yeah, there’s a, there’s a lot to unpack there. I really appreciate it. You know, one of the things Gal Mar at a recent mental health conference was talking about, you know, the DSM and he said, don’t confuse a description of the disease with an explanation.

I think you’re really hitting on the same kind of idea. It’s really, you know, you have to try of explain how we got here rather than just saying like, this is what it is. So I appreciate that. And then, you know, the order operations that you’re talking about, how do you balance the fact that on one hand you have this order of operations that you’ve seen work and you have.

Very sensitive patient with the fact that you have this sort of like time that’s running out because ultimately there’s a short timeline there. How do you, how do you find balance between those two things and how do you know when you are pushing too hard or, or not going fast enough considering, you know, the downward trajectory that you spoke about and the timeline.

 

Yeah, so with my clients, and you know, here’s the thing. Really big on not giving false people. We know it’s a really awful condition, but my full intention, and by the way, there are research reversals of ALS out there, Dr. Bed Luck at Duke University, document them. But my role is to just try and slow that progression and try and keep people behind the typical curve of decline.

Um, we have something called the A-L-S-F-R-S. Which is a globally used scoring system for ALS and MND, and so people will track themselves with that. Tracking weight is essential. It, there seems to be a real correlation between. Weight loss and speed of decline. And I do sometimes wonder if that’s related to the toxins that we hold in fatty tissue.

And so if the weight is declining too quickly and toxins are being released back into the system and they’re relocating, if the liver pathways aren’t optimal, if that’s maybe part of it, but there’s definitely a correlation there. Um, yeah. So, yeah. So, so you said there have been some reversals that are documented.

Have those reversals been in the paradigm of network sufficiency or are those in some other paradigm with experimental drugs or gene therapy? No. So Dr. Richard, bad luck is a neurologist at Duke. He’s been working in ALS for. A very, very long time. He runs something called ALS Untangled, which is a website, and him and his team will go through all of the various supplements and note down the research and, and suggest whether they’re effective or not effective.

And he has a very strict protocol of where he will take people. You know, who, who are. Certain point on the A-L-S-F-R-S and may have to have regained back a certain number of points to be considered a reversal and then tracked over time. And so, and he’s doing a great job of really reviewing that and monitoring people.

Um, I’m on the medical committee for a group in the US called Healing ALS , which is a non-profit. Um, it’s very much a, a community for people. I give a lot of free lectures through their, um, they have a sort of. Stepped approach and I’m on the advisory committee for that. And that’s something we’re constantly updating and constantly changing.

There’s some other great functional medicine practitioners on there. Diana Noland is on their Coco Newton, Dr. Lee den. So you know, we, and we, we’ve got a sort of. Further sort of advisory committee like Bruce Hoffman, so you know, we’re, we are doing what we can through that as well. Yeah. And about a year ago we have this registry and we get everyone to track themselves using an A-L-S-F-R-S and we, we just decided to do a little bit of retrospective analysis.

So we didn’t ask anyone to do anything in particular. They were just following the steps. Obviously, the people that complete the registry are likely the ones that are committing more to the steps and it’s, it’s like change your diet, takes supplements, clear out your environment, make sure you’ve got no tooth infection, make sure your air’s clean, you know, sort of very normal.

Steps in the world of functional medicine. And when the results were reviewed over a 12 month period, what we found was 20% of people had an improvement in symptoms. 20% had stabilized, 20% had only lost one to four points. And this is a system of 48 points and people are expected to lose one point a month.

So 12 points in a year, and the average loss. Was about N 0.3 point per month compared to one point a month with the people who were following a diet and lifestyle program. Now healing ALS is now planning to carry out a bigger research. They’re, they’re currently trying to get approval for a thousand person study and they’re working really hard on that.

And hopefully in a few years we’ll have more data. And as I said, that was retrospective. It was just a little look at our data. And so I think we have to consider that though, as opposed.

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So goevomed.com/truneura. These are our mission partners. We have some really exciting new partners that we’re gonna be announcing soon. Have you ever wished that you had a VA that was trained in your, that was pre-trained in your EHR and knew how to use Serbo before you, you know, even used it? We’re gonna be talking about that soon, if that’s interesting.

Get in touch with me, James, at go Evo. Meg, we’ve got some exciting things coming up. This has been our mission partners. Let’s get back to the interview. Well, I’d love to get your thoughts on like how effective the treatment could be depending on what the cause is.

Because I know for myself, like I grew up playing cricket a lot and I remember coming to America when I was 25 and having some testing and seeing my pesticide numbers were high and you know, cricket, the ball rolls around the ground and you play on these really lush surfaces and then you like lick the ball or like get your spit and you.

Put it on there and you shine it. So I was like, okay, that makes sense to me. I was in this sort of loop of pesticides for that. Obviously with rugby and with skiing, there’s probably a more obvious, or boxing, there might be a more obvious thing to like, you know, consistent head trauma and I guess.

Like from your perspective, is there other, when you look at the different sort of major causes across the different people that you work with, is there more hope for, for people where the causes are one set of causes versus maybe physical, like functional versus physical, should we say?

Yeah, I think that’s a really good question and a difficult one to answer because everyone really is so individual. Definitely I’ve seen some people with a slightly faster progression who do have a specific genetic mutation, but apart from that, it really does depend on the individual. I think a lot comes down to environmental factors.

It’s really interesting what you just. Said there about your cricket ball because Dr. Ray Dorsey released his book, the Parkinson’s Guide, just a month or so ago, and, uh, that covers so much around the toxins that we’re exposed to that are really big drivers of Parkinson’s. And, and there’s a huge amount of research on that from persistent organic pollutants to pesticides, to industrial chemicals.

PCB, heptachlor, dioxins, you know, all for Parkinson’s disease. And I do think that there is a little bit of a crossover there as well into ALS . And again, if we don’t have the research in ALS , we need to look at the closest potential condition and, and the drivers of that. And definitely there’s a higher percentage of people with ALS that were military.

So we have to consider military bases. I worked for military for 10 years, so I was aware of military bases and the chemicals used and you know, and such. And so we’ve gotta ask whether there is a chemical component there or is it related to cortisol or trauma. As you know, elevated cortisol plays havoc on the body.

It flattens the immune system, disregulates our metabolism. So there’s. Disregulates our gut function. We’ve got a couple of different things there, but environmentally for Parkinson’s, there was a study that came out just not so long ago looking at a golf course in the US and, and looking at the root of Parkinson’s and noting that if you lived within a certain number of miles to a golf course, you were much more likely to be diagnosed with, with Parkinson’s disease.

So very interesting. And I think if you were to ask healing ALS what they. See most commonly, we do see a lot of mold. We have to then question whether the mold is opportunistic, the body is weakened by something and then the mold takes hold. Or whether it’s living in the moldy environment that creates the symptoms.

Yeah, present. Uh, there’s a lot of research out there considering certain viruses enter a viruses hs. V Zoster Epstein Bar, HHV six. But again, are they opportunistic? Is it something going on in the body that’s making the body weak? And of course, a weak host will always have higher viral activity because the viruses will thrive in the weakened environment.

Yeah. Interesting. And are there particular, like I know. With, uh, in this Alzheimer’s world, right? You’ve got the first blood biomarker, P 2 2 17, that is giving you sort of that information. And I was just reading about multiple sclerosis, where similarly, there’s sort of this prodromal period, right, where you don’t really see the symptoms as much, but it’s happening in the background.

And I know in that world there’s an opportunity for early detection by looking at. The damage to the myelin and that can happen seven years before the diagnosis revealed by a spike. In the MOG protein, you’ve got the immune activation markers, so IL three playing a central role in recruiting immune cells that trigger early brain inflammation.

And this is leading to a potential where there could be a new diagnostic tool and they’ve identified, I think, 21 proteins that could form the basis for a predictive blood test for ms. Do you see, like, what are your thoughts about sort of predictive, because ultimately. The solution or, or the, the reaction when you hear about this Louis Moody thing could be that the RFU could get ahead of it and start to like test people ahead of time rather than just waiting for the ball to drop.

Yeah, and there was an announcement just this week, as I mentioned, there is potentially a new biomarker being tested. It’s still very much in its clinical trial stage, but to try and provide, uh, not only early diagnosis, and this is really exciting. Not only early diagnosis. But suggested speed of decline based on this particular marker.

I suppose other things are, if you do feel that there is some kind of genetic predisposition as having the tests for those key genes, so C nine or 72, Todd bp, and it can be really scary getting tested for something that, to find out whether you have the predisposition to it, you know? So, but the truth is that’s where all the research is.

In research labs with little transgenic mice, they have to be programmed with something. So they program them with the dysfunctional gene, you know, so every research institute that’s studying ALS is typically looking at that 10% that have that genetic predisposition. What’s interesting. Since I started working with ALS I do nutrigenomic testing in the UK through Life Code gx, and I always look at methylation, detoxification, neuro pathways with my patients, and I’ve seen some patterns.

And so I think we need to start looking at things like that as well, like what pathways are potentially impacted by genetic snips that are having some kind of knock on effect in this. Wonderful big factory that we call the human body, you know? And, and if some of those production lines aren’t working, what’s the knock on effect of that and how might that be affecting things down the line?

And I’m actually, I’m in the third year of my masters and I’m doing my dissertation on choline. And the reason I chose choline in ALS is because. I’ve seen a sort of 95% downregulation in CHDH genes in the seventies on the PEMT gene. These are genes that produce and support the conversion of choline in some of the key pathways in the body.

Now because my research is mine and in a private clinic and retrospective, I’m not able to use that currently in my, in my master’s. Dissertation, but we’ll hopefully publish that in the future. But I’m really taking a deep dive into choline, and if you think about choline, phosphatidylcholine, cell membranes, every mitochondria has an outer and an inner membrane.

Things need to get in and out of the cells. You know that we need to be able to clear debris and we need to be able to let nutrients in. And if we don’t have a really health. The cell membrane, how can that happen? So that might be one piece of the puzzle. And then if you add in a massive likelihood downregulated snip in those pathways, then I think that’s worth looking at.

There’s been lots of really interesting research coming out of Japan as well, looking at vitamin B12 injections that are really high dose and being helpful for people with ALS . But of course, I’ve looked at that research and gone, did you test. Because what I’ve seen in my own research, and this is just in my clinic, is really high levels of Downregulated foot two, which is the gene that helps with like the absorption and availability of B12.

And so I would love for those researchers to go back and just run a snip test on all of the participants and see if there’s any correlation between the people that did well with the injection, bypassing that absorption and availability. Certain pathways in the liver as well. So we don’t always need to look at like the one big cause, you know, we can start looking at like all different pathways, all different genetic pathways and think is there anything here that might be causing a knock on effect all the way down the line.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Well, I’d love to just ask you, I mean, this is the Evolution of Medicine podcast and, and I’d love to just get your thoughts on like, what does an evolved ALS medical system look like? Like you had, you can basically like write policy for the future of the NHS and how the NHS is gonna deal with ALS and you now can order whatever services and whatever order you want with the goal of creating.

You know, the most health for the most number of people, you know, at the most reasonable costs. You know, how, how do you reorganize care and what goes in what order? In order to get us to a point where this is not the scourge that it is today. Um, I think first of all, so going back to the incurable, with all respect to people that work in this field, but to say.

There’s nothing that can be done. I could say there’s nothing that could be done. It would save me 50 hours a week of work and research. My clinic is probably one of the only clinics I know that actually employs a researcher. I have a dedicated researcher to research to see what can be done. It’s, you can say there’s nothing that can be done.

And what that does is it just sucks the hope out of everyone. It’s like there’s nothing that can be done. Palliative care is coming in, and I know some phenomenal practitioners in the MHS working in this area. You know, like phenomenal kind people who would love to be able to say something different to that.

My first thing I would do is change the narrative because actually it’s really limiting to say there’s nothing that can be done just because there’s no pharmaceutical solution and I, so I would change the narrative. Two, we don’t have any medications that offer a cure. But working with a practitioner on diet lifestyle and ensuring your environment is not causing you further harm may extend your life.

So that’s where I would start. And then I would the option of functional medicine support for every patient that wanted to take that route. I am a really big advocate for my body, my choice. And there are big companies that produce a lot of PG feeds and these feeds. If you look at the ingredients, it’s like I was sent one the other day and it’s sugar, corn, oil, sugar, maltodextrin, canola, oil, and sugar are the first five ingredients after water.

We tell people to stop consuming ultra processed foods that is now in 2025, undeniable that they cause harm. And then that’s what we are feeding people who are trying their best to heal. How can you heal when that is what you are putting in your body? Right? So I would really advocate for, and I understand why.

I understand there’s the concern of safety. There’s the concern of blocking tubes and everything. Educate on it. Run training courses for carers, teach people how to make more wholesome food to really nourish people so that I would also change and I would just bring in a multidisciplinary approach, and a lot of that does happen already, but I would add a functional twist to it.

Again, I wouldn’t want to insult the people that are doing an incredible job. There’s some fantastic m and d centers. I’m so proud of where I’m doing my masters. They do so much work. So much research and they’re very patient focused, but everyone is missing the why. Everyone is looking down a microscope, looking at the cell going, the mitochondria aren’t working.

Why? What causes them to stop? Metals, pesticides, pollutants, environmental factors, chemicals, pathogens, like I would get everyone to ask why. In my dream world of being president of What role for the current a LF system though, like for the people who are doing, like in the NHS today, who aren’t functional medicine trained who are just like neurologists or otherwise, what, like where, where are they adding value today and what would you take out of that system to combine these two things?

There’s no right answer and I don’t have an opinion. I mean, again, you know everyone that is in the field. That has chosen to work in ALS Cares and they, they wish they could do more. So I would like to retrain people and change the narrative that we potentially can do more because I don’t ever believe that there’s nothing that can be done and Okay.

Maybe may I want to slow decline. Maybe that’s not possible, but there’s still things I can do. I can still make sure someone bowels are working well, that they’re not horribly constipated or having horrible diarrhea I can help to support their sinuses, mucus production, itchy skin. All the things that really bother people on a day-to-day basis.

You know, functional medicine, even if it can’t slow decline, at least we can try and make the quality of life for people a bit more comfortable and really listen to the patients as well and just really support their, their needs. Or had a patient recently who, who was kind of told that if she didn’t opt for the peg feed that her community support wouldn’t be provided.

And it’s like this particular person does have allergies. Even if you don’t and, and it’s that, oh, well we can only provide you with another food if you can prove that you’ve got an allergy. I have the right to put anything I want in my body. I have the right to choose not to put something in my body that I don’t want to go in it, and so should every patient.
So I think that’s where I would really focus nutrition. I think we forget that nutrition is. So important. Nutritional medicine is so powerful, it’s really disregarded, and I would really bring in a much more nutritional medicine approach. Well, look, I really appreciate you leading the charge on this. Like there’s not that much I see in the us.

There’s maybe a few hundred functional medicine clinics that have focused on brain in different ways, and we’re hoping to really grow that with my work and advocacy in the next little while. I spoke with Dr. Bresson actually just the other day, and his next journey is to try and really understand what are the similarities and differences between Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

Alzheimer’s and L la ALS . Like what percentage of the program that he’s developed is synergistic? What percentage of it is a good across all ’em? And I would say, based on what you said today, I think there’s a lot of similarities. ’cause we have to build back the function. We have to build back the function of systems, basically.

And I think that that’s critical and I really appreciate. You know, all of your insight. And I would just say that, you know, if people are listening to this who are doing functional medicine, I think a lot of functional medicine people can be intimidated by these kind of diagnoses and they don’t have the sort of specialized knowledge to work on it, but it sounds like could be a partner clinic for them in, you know, taking referrals and working side by side with them on patients via telehealth.

Yeah, and we also have, you know, the healing ALS practitioners meeting every four weeks. It’s free to attend, you know, different people talk and they would welcome any practitioner that was interested because there’s a lot of people with this diagnosis, and it is really essential to do it the right way, and that can be daunting.

You know, and so having people to support you I think is key. I know for me, with my first patients, it was, you know, it was daunting, but I had really great support from a really lovely team of people that are like me, just really trying to make a difference with this condition. Well, it’s interesting that in the US you know, it’s known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

It’s famous. Baseball player and like I can imagine the same mechanism that I was talking about earlier with cricket, right? How do you keep that grass so perfect? You know, throughout every stadium in America, right? There’s some way that that’s happening and that’s, you know, the application of pesticides.

And I can imagine that in one particularly vulnerable person. You know, that ends up leading to a very early ALS diagnosis and maybe there’s a bell curve and everyone else is just sort of in the middle of that bell curve, which looks like dying of mystery circumstances when you’re 60, you know, that kind of thing.

And not knowing why or what the cause is. So I really appreciate you sharing it and you know, sharing your expertise. Can you share the website both for that monthly group and for your site so people can find you? Absolutely. So my website is www.younutritionclinic.com. That’s the clinic site.

We also have  www.nutritionandthebrain.com, and we have a weekly blog, so we call it Brain Bites. So every week we put out a little, uh, blog post on the latest research in Neurodegenerative Health, and that links to Nutrition in the Brain, which is my clinic, Insta. And then healing ALS is healing als.org.

And that’s an American organization. As I said, Diana Noland wrote the book, and when I say she wrote the book, I mean she literally wrote the book that we use is as integrative functional nutritional therapies. I use. The book as the curriculum book on the grab Dip in the UK that I developed in functional medicine.

And Coco Newton, who’s also on the medical committee, wrote the chapter on ALS . So the people at healing ALS are highly qualified and experienced, and we work together as a team to make sure the messages we are giving are evident. Well, thanks so much for leading the charge and really excited to, to share this.

And I will follow up with those people and you know, really excited to share this information, to inspire those people that listen to the podcast, to get the word out to practitioners that there is more that can be done in these spaces. And I would just encourage you, if you’re a practitioner and you’re interested in following this thread, you know, get in touch with us.

Or we have one of our mission partners at the Evolution of Medicine,Truneura. Which is trying to really organize the data around brain health in a way that makes it easier to really understand what’s driving the pathology and the person that you’re sitting in front of. And you know, we will continue to bring together tools and resources that make it easy for practitioners to get on this so that we can build the network sufficiency of clinics that can really solve these issues.

And thank you for your leadership, Kirsty, and look forward to our next conversation. Yeah, absolutely. And thanks so much for everything you do. I told you before that the Evolution of Medicine was the first functional medicine book I ever purchased and, and I think it’s still on the reading list for the students at Eye on, I left the course in sadly, to focus on the clinic in April, but we’ve kept it on the recommended reading list and we encourage all our students to join the Functional Forum.

So thanks for everything that you do. Really, you’re a real driving force in this profession. I don’t think it would be where it was without you. Thank you very much for saying that. I really appreciate it. And again, look, it’s a team effort and this is mission critical time for our expansion. So thanks so much for tuning in.

This will be the Evolution on Medicine podcast. I’ve been here with Dr. Kirsty Lawton. Thanks so much for tuning in, and we’ll see you next time.

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