Izabella Wentz, PharmD is an author and pharmacist who previously spoke on the Functional Forum and specializes in helping patients overcome thyroid dysfunction. In this episode, she joins James to talk about her personal journey with Hashimoto’s thyroiditis after years of debilitating symptoms.
Her most recent book, Adrenal Transformation Protocol, was released on April 18, 2023. The book focuses on resetting the body’s stress response through targeted safety signals, and it features a four-week program that has already helped over 3,500 people.
Dr. Wentz is also an advocate for spreading awareness about how thyroid dysfunction can produce psychiatric symptoms, which is often overlooked by conventional health care providers. Check out the full episode to learn more about:
- The stigma around the term “adrenal fatigue”
- Dr. Wentz’ experience addressing adverse drug events and drug-induced nutrient depletion
- The mental health and adrenal connection
- Options for supporting patients with thyroid dysfunction
- How to help your patients achieve lifestyle changes
- And much, much more!
Dr. Izabella Wentz: I mean, shockingly, it does help when you do things that make you feel good, that you feel good, right? It’s a shock. I feel like in medicine, we’re focused on giving people really bitter tasting herbs and things that are just nasty to take. And we’re like, “This is the pathway to healing.” But it doesn’t necessarily have to always be that way.
I first came across pleasurable activities in my work as consultant pharmacist. And it was a way that psychologists help people overcome depression. It was schedule pleasurable activities and things you look forward to throughout the day. Then as I began to work with clients, I would have them do this exercise where they would take a piece of paper, divide it in half, and write down things that make me feel better, things that make me feel worse. And they would write down, “Rainy days make me feel worse. Spending time in sunshine makes me feel better. Spending time in nature makes me feel better. Scrapbooking.” And they would list out a bunch of things.
And I ended up essentially making that a prescription for people on how to add that into their life. And when you think about the physiology of it is when you do pleasurable things, you can shift out of that fight or flight state and you can get a person back into more of a thriving state rather quickly.
James Maskell: Welcome to the Evolution of Medicine podcast, the place health professionals come to hear from innovators and agitators leading the charge. We cover the latest clinical breakthroughs and health technology, as well as practical tools to help you transform your practice and the health of your community.
This podcast is brought to you by the Lifestyle Matrix Resource Center, who provide a range of options to help you deliver successful, effective, functional, and integrated medicine. To find out more and to get started, go to goevomed.com/lmrc. That’s goevomed.com/lmrc.
Hello and welcome to the podcast. We’ve got a treat for you today: Dr. Izabella Wentz. You may know her from her book, Hashimoto’s Protocol. She has been a leader in the field of thyroid. She’s known as the thyroid pharmacist. And she has sold a lot of books, and she has a big following in that space.
She has a new book called the Adrenal Transformation Protocol.I’ve got a copy of it. I’ve had a chance to read it. There’s some cool, innovative stuff in there. We’re going to talk about that on this podcast. We’re also going to talk about her role as a pharmacist and the potential role of pharmacists in the transformation of healthcare.
And she got into some really great clinical information on like deprescribing PPIs. And these are the kinds of conversations that we want to be having inside our communities and are happening in communities across the country. If you want to get connected to one of those communities, go to FunctionalForum.com. You can see we’ve got communities growing all over the country, and we’d love for you to be part of it and always looking for leaders as well. So, FunctionalForum.com. Thanks so much for tuning in and enjoy.
Okay. So, a warm welcome back to the Evolution of Medicine Podcast, Dr. Izabella Wentz. Izabella, great to have you back.
Dr. Izabella Wentz: Hey, James, so great to see you again.
James Maskell: Well, I’m excited to have you back on here. And I guess I just want to start with something that happened a few months ago, which is you were launching your new book and I guess somehow in that launch process that you were doing, I know you have a very sophisticated marketing engine. But I guess at some point in there, you were pushing people towards a keynote that you did in the Functional Forum 2017. It’s an awesome video. It was at that super cool venue in Boulder that we’ve done a bunch of events, eTown, and you did a great presentation on the connection between thyroid and mental health.
And I think that video had done well because it was a good video, but recently, it jumped up to almost half a million views and incredible, over a thousand comments. And it was amazing to see if you go into the comments just how many people this was validating for who were like, “I didn’t know what was going on, and I had all these unexplained symptoms.”
And first of all, I just want to say what an amazing job you did in that presentation. And secondly, thank you for including it in your marketing because ultimately, it’s a big number of views for us on the Functional Forum, and I think a new bunch of new people have showed up. So, really appreciate you and the power that you’ve built to really share the message.
Dr. Izabella Wentz: Oh my gosh, it’s my pleasure and such an honor to be a part of it. And thank you for the opportunity to share. My passion is letting people know with thyroid issues that they can take charge of their own health and giving them some solutions. Part of that is recognizing that they have thyroid issues. Most people don’t get diagnosed until they’ve had some kind of autoimmune thyroid dysfunction for five, 10, 15 years.
It’s like you’re 50 years old and you’re gaining extra weight and you’re tired. That’s when the doctor might think to check you for a thyroid issue. They may not think of checking a woman in her 30s who’s having multiple miscarriages and having trouble conceiving, but that can absolutely be a symptom of thyroid disease and autoimmunity and Hashimoto’s autoimmunity. And they may not check a teenager or a 20-year-old with mental health issues that is struggling with anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder.
I’ve seen people misdiagnosed with depression, bipolar disorder, sometimes even schizoaffective disorder, when actually they had Hashimoto’s and other antibodies that were driving that response.
James Maskell: Well, I think that video is so relevant. Because I saw a stat the other day just as a graph on what percent, how much medication for mental health issues American women are on. And the number, it’s an exponential curve. And so, if you look at all the different pieces, I mean there may be so many reasons for that. And I think what you’ve really identified is a core reason, and it speaks to the bigger thing that’s available to us in functional medicine, which is that there are physiological foundations to psychological illness, right?
Dr. Izabella Wentz: Absolutely. I feel like we’re getting much better at identifying some of the root causes, such as trauma. So, absolutely trauma has a key role in psychological issues as well as physiological issues. Then there’s also the physiology. How does that affect our mental health? This is a really, really big topic for me. It’s a big part of my heart is letting people know that they’re not crazy, that sometimes it’s something that’s out of balance. And they don’t need to be institutionalized. They don’t need to be put on medications for the rest of their lives.
Sometimes, it’s a nutrient deficiency. Sometimes, it’s a thyroid problem. Sometimes, it’s something else. Sometimes, it’s an adrenal issue. But I always encourage people to keep working and digging and trying to figure out what might be triggering their conditions.
James Maskell: Beautiful. Well, look, I know many of the practitioners listening have used your work and your book and your books over time to be an education guide for their patients to be able to go, “Okay, wow, this might be affecting me.” And then the functional medicine practitioner can do the intake and see what’s going on for them. So, it’s been a really great asset.
So, I wanted to talk about your new book because obviously you’ve spent a lot of time talking about thyroid and ‘s, that’s been your jam. And now I’ve got the book, and I’ve had a chance to check it out, and it’s on the adrenals. And I just guess wanted to start that conversation for our practitioner audience. In that book, I guess, what are you sharing with the patient community that the practitioners may find useful and that will hopefully be sending patients into offices all around the country as patients get educated, see themselves in the content that you share and look for this root cause approach that you’re known for.
Dr. Izabella Wentz: So, I focus on the root cause of why people get into this adrenal dysfunction state. So, stress. So, typically, if you look at mainstream media, they’ll talk about, “You have high cortisol, that’s an issue, and we need to lower your cortisol.” And working in functional medicine, we know that we can do testing with adrenal saliva tests or DUTCH tests, and then that can give us a pattern to see if the person has not enough cortisol, too much cortisol, if they’re on a cortisol rollercoaster, and we could adjust that.
I used to work a lot with pregnenolone and DHEA and doing some adrenal testing to figure out how to balance the adrenal curve. And then, I got into this situation where I had certain people who would perhaps over convert DHEA to estrogen or other less desirable metabolites and would grow chin hair or people who just weren’t comfortable on the hormones, weren’t candidates for the hormones. Then I was like, “Okay, let’s see if we can think about lifestyle changes.”
And so, I was like, “Okay, you have to quit coffee, quit all of your caffeine and you need to sleep for 12 hours a night. That’s what it’s going to take you to heal. Do this for 30 days.” And then, I would lose a lot of people. They’d be like, “I don’t want to talk to you again. I don’t want to see you. This is terrible.”
James Maskell: Yeah. You’re not fun, are you?
Dr. Izabella Wentz: Yeah. Going through a group program, and they would quit because I said no caffeine. And the program that I came up with at the Adrenal Transformation Protocol came out of desperation when I was a new mom, and I found myself with crashed adrenals with really low levels of cortisol throughout the whole entire day on a DUTCH test when my son was about eight months.
And I had been doing a lot of nighttime caregiving throughout that process where I was like, “Man, I know my cortisol is probably shot.” And it was, but then I was like, “But what do I do about it now?” Because I was like, I can’t take DHEA. I don’t want my son to grow chest hair. And use all these hormones. And I wasn’t comfortable taking a lot of supplements, and I also wasn’t going to quit coffee because that was helping me get through the day of caring for my son and doing whatever else I needed to do.
And then the sleep just wasn’t realistic. You can get a night nanny, but usually you get one of the night nannies and that depletes your life savings very, very quickly. They’re absolutely worth their weight in gold, but they’re very, very pricey.
And so, I wanted to find if there was anything that I could do as a nursing mom and that perhaps would fit in my lifestyle to get myself out of that adrenal dysfunction, a low cortisol state back into a thriving state. And then it helped. And so, I piloted it with over 3,000 people. And the approach is very gentle. It’s very adaptogenic. It focuses on mitochondrial health and really a lot of easy-to-do lifestyle things to shift people out of that adrenal dysfunction. And people going through it actually enjoy the process because it focuses a lot on pleasurable activities.
James Maskell: That’s great. I want to just talk to you about a phrase that when I came into this world in 2005 seemed to be everywhere around. And in 2016, we did a Functional Forum in San Francisco, and I had Chris Kresser to speak. And his goal was to crush the phrase “adrenal fatigue” because that phrase had been used so much all across the early functional medicine world.
And his viewpoint at that point was that it wasn’t really fatigue. It was like you said, dysfunction. There wasn’t a fatiguing muscle in there. That wasn’t a good way to describe it. And it was actually alienating us from mainstream medicine because they could see that adrenal fatigue wasn’t a real thing. And so, it would be a hallmark of quackery to say adrenal fatigue in the conventional space. And so, what he was saying was like, “Look, we need to really align with conventional medicine on this because it’s not fatiguing, and we need to describe it better.” And you can see that it is HPA dysfunction or otherwise.
So, I just wanted to get your thoughts on that because that seemed like an important moment in the evolution of medicine, and it seemed like an important moment for our industry because it’s like, “Look, if we want to go mainstream, we have incredible insight into something that is helping a lot of people, but if we don’t talk about right, it’s going to be hard for us to make it into the mainstream.” Do you agree with that?
Dr. Izabella Wentz: Absolutely. And it’s just silly to me how terminology works, but it’s absolutely true. So, I know when I first was coming onto the scene “leaky gut”, if you said that word, that was a trigger word too. But yet if you look at intestinal permeability in PubMed, leaky gut doesn’t exist, but intestinal permeability does. And so, you have to use the right terminology to come across as, I guess, believable.
And so, I feel like adrenal fatigue is a convenient term to use because it can describe a person who’s fatigued and that fatigue may be driven by their adrenal dysfunction. And when James Wilson, I believe, he first coined the term, he actually did believe that the adrenals perhaps were in a mild stage of Addison’s, which most of the research we have to date shows that this is actually not the case, that the mechanism of action is this hypothalamic-pituitary axis driven.
And so, definitely, I would say HPA axis dysfunction is the term that is the more correct one, and it’s the more accurate term. I’m not going to say burn the word adrenal fatigue on fire or cancel it. That’s not my mission in life is to necessarily cancel things. But I feel like my preferred term is generally adrenal dysfunction because it tends to be a little bit easier to say than hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis dysfunction. And it also tends to be a bit more accurate than adrenal fatigue.
But I have mixed opinions when people say adrenal fatigue doesn’t exist because a person that maybe finds information about adrenal fatigue, and they may identify with the symptoms. Then, they’re kind of told that it doesn’t exist. They might just be hearing something like, “It’s all in your head, or this isn’t a real thing.”
James Maskell: Absolutely. Yeah.
Dr. Izabella Wentz: I think the intentions are to say, “This isn’t 100% accurate. It’s actually adrenal access dysfunction.”
James Maskell: Yeah. That’s good. Well said. So, you mentioned the new book and you’re focused on adrenals and you tried your protocol with 3,000 people. And you mentioned there that there’s some joyous activities, things that are fun to do. And I’d love to just get your take on that because in some of the work that we’ve been doing for the last few years in coaching in groups and so forth, just really comes to the idea that if you could find ways to have people really cultivate joyous experiences into their lives, that’s a very interesting pathway and avenue for healing and probably underappreciated possibly by doctors. But I’d just love to get your take on it, and why it ended up being, I guess, an important part of this protocol?
Dr. Izabella Wentz: I mean, shockingly, it does help when you do things that make you feel good, that you feel good, right? It’s a shock. I feel like in medicine, we’re focused on giving people really bitter tasting herbs and things that are just nasty to take. And we’re like, “This is the pathway to healing.” But it doesn’t necessarily have to always be that way.
I first came across pleasurable activities in my work as consultant pharmacist. And it was a way that psychologists help people overcome depression. It was schedule pleasurable activities and things you look forward to throughout the day. Then as I began to work with clients, I would have them do this exercise where they would take a piece of paper, divide it in half, and write down things that make me feel better, things that make me feel worse. And they would write down, “Rainy days make me feel worse. Spending time in sunshine makes me feel better. Spending time in nature makes me feel better. Scrapbooking.” And they would list out a bunch of things.
And I ended up essentially making that a prescription for people on how to add that into their life. And when you think about the physiology of it is when you do pleasurable things, you can shift out of that fight or flight state and you can get a person back into more of a thriving state rather quickly. If they’re enjoying themselves, they’re releasing neurotransmitters, and they’re having more oxytocin. And they’re going to be supporting the production of their healthy neurotransmitters.
And it can be very, very effective and quick to get a person out of that stuck zone. I know we’ve all had these clients where you’re like, “Take this supplement.” And they’re like, “I can’t. I am sensitive to this.” And they get their mind stuck in this pattern of negative thought patterns and everything is bad and everything is dangerous. When you give them an opportunity to just do something that they enjoy and pleasurable that that can really start rewiring some of those thought patterns, and they feel better, and they’re more open to trying additional things.
James Maskell: That’s beautiful. I love that. And it’s like you have to go from zero to one to get people to actually participate in behavior change. And so, if you can actually give them something that’s easy and enjoyable, and they get some momentum, then next you can give them the nasty herbs.
Dr. Izabella Wentz: Yeah. Absolutely. And I mean, like I said, I used to start people with, “You quit caffeine, and then, do cold plunges, and then do this and do all this exercise.” And they’re going to be like, “I’ll see you later.” So, yeah, I learned I don’t take away their caffeine. We really focus on giving you more energy first. That way, your relationship with caffeine changes, and you’re not like, this is water, but you’re not dependent on it. You’re like, okay, I can have it or I cannot have it.
James Maskell: Yeah. That’s great. Well, what are some insights for our practitioner community from the book? I know I’m sure many practitioners after this will buy it and have it in their office and have a few copies to give out to people. But what are some of the insights that if a practitioner were to do that they would be giving to their patients if they recommended it as supportive reading of being in their clinic?
Dr. Izabella Wentz: So, one of the things that I’ve found to be very, very helpful for people with adrenal dysfunction is I utilize the adaptogens and the B vitamins, vitamin C, magnesium, electrolytes. I think these are foundational things that make most people feel better, that have been stressed for a long time. A lot of them are part of the core approach to adrenal dysfunction.
For me personally, what I’ve also found to be helpful with my clients is that if you combine some of these core adrenal suggestions with mitochondrial support, your results can really rapidly improve and also personal transformation strategies. But giving a person specifically like carnitine can be incredibly helpful for brain fog. So, if you’ve got a person that has adrenal dysfunction and tons of brain fog, low motivation and they’re having a hard time with doing things, utilizing something like that carnitine can really help awaken them within just a few days. And that allows them to have a lot more clarity and perhaps some motivation to keep up with the program.
And they’re also going to start having less fatigue with that and a bit more strength in their bodies. I also utilize D-ribose. So, D-ribose has been studied in people in athletes to help them with recovery from extreme athletic events. And it’s been studied to help with that.
When you’ve got a person with adrenal dysfunction and especially in that low cortisol state, everything seems like an extreme athletic event. It’s like putting away your laundry, extreme athletic events. Walking from your living room to your kitchen, that was extreme. And so, giving them something like that can help them so much with their physical recovery as well.
James Maskell: Was there anything in your own state of having your son and then trying to do your protocol for yourself, was there anything that you did for yourself that you wouldn’t have done before you had kids and that you did it and it really helped and it surprised you?
Dr. Izabella Wentz: One of the things that really surprised me is really exposing both myself and my son to light therapy. And I don’t know. I was the person that had a hard time waking up in the morning and thought of myself as more of a night owl. And then I had my son and all of a sudden, he was waking up all throughout the night.
And I found if we spent the early morning outside typically within 30 minutes of waking up, you could go on a stroller walk. You could sit on your porch and drink a coffee with your baby next to you. Those are some of the things. But spending a ton of time in nature can really help you rebalance your cortisol response, and it tells your body that it’s time to be awake during the day. And that sets up your circadian rhythm.
So, you have this healthy cortisol production in the morning, and as time goes on, that drops and that you have that signal to your body that it’s morning time now. And in 10 to 12 hours, we’re going to have lower cortisol so you could produce more melatonin. So, that has been a strategy that is… I feel like I underappreciated before I had kids is how much the input of bright lights versus dark lights has helped. Sleeping in a blacked out room with blackout curtains and putting little dots over any bright lights that was a big game changer for both myself and my son too.
James Maskell: Beautiful. I love that. Yeah. Well, that’s really, really cool and interesting. Well, I’m excited that you are doing this again and moving in this direction. And I know that there’s probably some great clinical pearls in the book and I’m sure that for practitioners who are listening to this, they’ll find a way to get that.
I guess, I wanted to just change tack a little bit because for the last few years, I guess one of the things that I recognized is that we have a huge shortage of primary care doctors and frontline providers and practitioners in the country. Obviously, there’s this resurgence of functional medicine, but it doesn’t really meet the need. And I guess one of the things that I saw a few years ago is that really what needs to happen in this country at scale is deprescribing, because of the polypharmacy, there’s way too many drugs being used. It’s driving dysfunction. It’s driving shortened lifespans.
I mean, for the first time in America, you’ve got the curve life expectancy going down and a lot of that is polypharmacy, is overuse of medication, is opiates and all that stuff, but all kinds of other things too. And with so many people on so many. And I was just like, “There’s a lot of pharmacists. There’s a lot of pharmacists out there, and they may not have the best education in functional medicine, but they touch the patient regularly and they understand what they’re doing and they understand prescribing so they can pretty much understand deprescribing.”
And so, for the last few years, we’ve put an unreasonable focus, I would say, in certain ways on talking to pharmacists and going to the functional pharmacist conference and that kind of thing because I just feel like this is maybe the untapped resource to really make the transformation that we’re looking for.
And obviously, you started out in pharmacy and have moved into functional medicine, but maintain that background. And I guess I just wanted to get your thoughts on this topic because ultimately, I always tried to look for where are the scalable elements, and I don’t know if it’s scalable to have every doctor suddenly see the light and learn functional medicine because it requires a big dose of humility. And also, they’re just trained in a very different way.
One of the reasons why I love health coaches is because anyone could become a health coach. And so, you could build a super army of people that are really ready to make an impact with people. And then with pharmacists, I just see one, their profession is it’s difficult to make money doing what the profession does, even if you’re in an independent pharmacy or otherwise. And so, there’s this economic incentive to go and find another arrow for your quiver, especially if you’re independent.
And secondly, if the name of the game is deprescribing, you need people who are comfortable with medication and chiropractors and acupuncturists and those types of practitioners aren’t comfortable with medication because they don’t have training in it. So, anyway, I just wanted to get your thoughts on this topic because I know that this is something that’s in your wheelhouse.
Dr. Izabella Wentz: I love that you’re focusing on that. And in my past career before I became the thyroid pharmacist, I worked in public health on reducing adverse drug effects. And then I used to work with people in polypharmacy where I would go into their homes and look at their medications and I would make recommendations on what medications could be contributing to drug-related adverse events.
So, that was actually my specialty was adverse drug events before I became the thyroid pharmacist. And this is such a huge opportunity for a pharmacist that’s trained in functional medicine because it’s so interesting. I’ve been talking on podcasts lately about how, for example, if you take steroid hormones that could suppress your pituitary function, and some of that includes using topical steroid containing creams. And people were shocked. I was like, “Doesn’t everybody know this? Because every pharmacist knows this.”
So, it’s in the package insert. You learn about it in pharmacy school. And I feel like a lot of times, practitioners that maybe aren’t pharmacists are focusing more on the diagnostic aspects of the patient care plan, they may overlook some of these nuances. When I was a consultant pharmacist, one of the things I would do is I would look at everybody’s medication list and I’d say, “Hey, you’re taking levothyroxine. Why are you taking it with this medication? Perhaps you’re not having the best outcomes. I see that you’ve been on a steroid cream for such a long time, can we discontinue that, could be the cause of your weight gain.”
And you can really dial into looking at the person’s situation. My biggest recommendation was oftentimes stopping drugs for people. And I think that’s a great opportunity for pharmacists as well as looking at some of the nutrient depletions that can occur from medications because sometimes a medication side effect is a reason why another medication gets prescribed, and this can be a really a vicious cycle.
James Maskell: Well, I think that’s definitely an easy starting point for anyone and that’s why some of the teams and groups that we’ve been working with, we’ve talked about drug-induced nutrient depletion so many times, but it is such an obvious starting point for a pharmacist to get involved because you don’t have to have a whole education in functional medicine to be able to do that. You can just be like, “Well, you’re taking these and it causes these, so here you go.”
But then ultimately, we want people to get more education so that they can deprescribe effectively. In the groups that we’ve been running in Heal Community, we see that the role of the coaching in the groups is to help people do healthy new behaviors. The role of the provider, it’s the provider because it’s an insurance billable role, is to do the deprescribing.
So, they come in every four weeks, and they check in with the patients and see how they’re doing. And what we’ve seen is that when patients really start to get active and start to do these healthy behaviors, the need for the medication can go down quite rapidly. And so, that’s been interesting to see. I wonder if you have tips for deprescribing for the practitioners who listen to this. If you’re working with a patient who is on polypharmacy and that you can see that that’s an issue, what are you looking out for to make sure that you get it right?
Dr. Izabella Wentz: So, one of the things that I would look at is if a person is taking multiple medications, of course, is figuring out which of them were like the original medication. And so, doing a history of what was started first and then what happened after. And sometimes, I’ve unfortunately sequenced these timelines with my clients over the years where it was like I had a young boy with autism that was prescribed a medication for “hyperactive behavior.”
And that led to him getting a higher dose of medication to additional medications to the point where he was falling asleep throughout the day and experiencing so many side effects that he got a new diagnosis of cerebral palsy, which is generally something you would get diagnosed with at birth or first few years of life, not as a 10-year-old child. And so, it took a matter of trying to figure out which of the medications was started first and what were the potential side effects and consequences.
And you could really draw out this map and start figuring out what parts of the problem you can disband. I typically focus a lot on with my clients, some of the low-hanging fruits, and I work with an autoimmune population these days is if you’re taking a proton pump inhibitor, that’s going to be causing you to be depleted in a lot of different nutrients.
And so, are there medications perhaps that you’re taking that are a consequence of a nutrient depletion? We’re going to be looking at like, do you need some more B12? What other kind of nutrients that we need to bring on board? And then what is the cause of acid reflux? So, most people are prescribed proton pump inhibitors because acid reflux. It’s usually caused by H. pylori, or it’s caused by food sensitivities. And so, I would look at doing something like a GI MAP test and then a food sensitivity test with those individuals or an elimination diet to seeing if that could be a medication that could be taken off of their medication list.
And then going through a process of giving them something like PEPCID, because we can have rebound acidity with the proton pump inhibitors if we just stop it abruptly. So, going through and thinking about how do we actually wean off the person safely? So, I would utilize something like PEPCID for a few weeks to wean them off of that. And then if it’s not H. pylori and it’s not food sensitivity, then it’s often might be low stomach acid. And so, I would utilize something like thiamine or to help raise stomach acid, herbal bitters or betaine with pepsin. So, I don’t know if this is the answer you were looking for.
James Maskell: Yeah. No, it’s great. I think this is just the content that I think practitioners are looking for. They want to have real conversations about how to deal with real medication. Because I think a lot of times in functional medicine, there’s a lot of great ideas and then you come face-to-face with someone who’s on five drugs. And you’re like, “Well, I didn’t really learn about this in the functional medicine training.” I didn’t really get into this and I can see that there’s feedback loops on top of feedback loops and you don’t know if you pull one thing out, you don’t know what the net effect is going to be.
And so, I’m glad to have these real conversations and these are the kinds of conversations that are happening in Functional Forum meetups around the country where doctors are getting together and talking about cases and talking about deprescribing. And yeah, I’m really grateful for your wisdom on that.
Well, thank you for being part of this. Congratulations on the new book and the journey here. And just really appreciate our friendship over so many years and just great to see you going from strength to strength. And it’s exciting to see the messengers taking the word out to different people and obviously the care that you’re delivering at the scale that you’re delivering with your group program and so forth is really exciting and look forward to what’s next.
Dr. Izabella Wentz: Thank you so much. It’s just always such an honor and pleasure to connect with you. Thank you for being such a powerful advocate for functional medicine.
James Maskell: Absolutely. Well, this has been the Evolution of Medicine podcast. I’ve been with Dr. Izabella Wentz. Check out her new book. We’ll have all of the details in the show notes. And as I said, many practitioners I’ve heard over the years have used Dr. Izabella’s books for educating their patients, for keeping them or getting them excited about the potential of functional medicine.
And I’ll also put in the show notes the link to that YouTube video because it’s got 500,000 views for a reason, which is that so many people are dealing with mental health issues. It’s got a physiological foundation, and I think you did a great job in showcasing how it happens, how it happens over time, what to look for in the intervening years. And yeah, it’s great stuff. So, thank you so much for tuning in. I’m your host, James Maskell. This is the Evolution of Medicine podcast, and we’ll see you next time.
Thanks for listening to the Evolution of Medicine podcast. Please share this with colleagues who need to hear it. Thanks so much to our sponsors, the Lifestyle Matrix Resource Center. This podcast is really possible because of them. Please visit goevomed.com/lmrc to find out more about their clinical tools, like the Group Visit Toolkit. That’s goevomed.com/lmrc. Thanks so much for listening, and we’ll see you next time.
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