In this solo episode of The Evolution of Medicine, host James Maskell explores emerging conversations in healthcare, focusing on low-level toxicity, electromagnetic fields (EMFs), and practical ways clinicians can support patients in reversing chronic illness.
The episode highlights personal experiences, clinical observations, and actionable strategies for reducing “electrosmog” or electromagnetic fog exposure in everyday life, alongside broader insights into optimizing environmental health for longevity and functional medicine.
James Maskell explores EMFs, low-level toxicity, and “electrosmog” in functional medicine, sharing practical strategies to reduce exposure, optimize patient health, and support longevity on The Evolution of Medicine Podcast.
James Maskell is the founder and host of The Evolution of Medicine Podcast, focused on functional, integrative, and longevity medicine. He explores innovations in healthcare, chronic illness reversal, and strategies for building thriving practices and healthy communities.
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Transcript:
We in the functional medicine space need to really understand where longevity and where we can bring the most value. And I’ve been talking about this and really sharing my thoughts, is that we need to pivot towards the harder cases. The harder the cases that you work on in your clinic, the less likely that you know it’s that a patient will be able to just go to chat GBT, get answers, implement those answers and get better.
You know, what you need is physicians who understand physiology, who understand the healing process, who understand through the lens of function. And you need team based care. You need people on the team who are actually going to get patients to participate in their own health in a way that a human relationship can in a way that attunement can in a way that possibly computers maybe never will.
Hello and welcome to the evolution of medicine podcast. This is episode 13 of season two. My name is James Maskell. I’m your host, and once a month I am going to spend some time doing a solo episode to catch you up on everything that I think is interesting that’s happening in healthcare. Well, not everything. I mean, healthcare is moving at such an incredible rate, with so much going on, and we’ll be talking about this through this episode, that it’s really impossible to capture everything that’s happening in healthcare,
but what I try and see is the lens that is most instructive for practitioners and clinicians looking to reverse chronic illness, and, you know, working in the fields of functional, integrative longevity medicine. And so this podcast is really for you. I want to send a special welcome to all the people listening from the for the first time, from the doctor talks community. We’re super excited to have you here.
And every week, we are interviewing innovators and people who are bringing this new paradigm of healthcare to life. There’s lessons in here, clinically, there’s lessons practically. We talk about marketing, we talk about technology, we talk about tools to make it easier to run your practice and have more of an impact on your community. But let’s start off with the news.
Typically, this is something that I love to talk about, because there’s so much going on, and I don’t think there has ever been a more wild news cycle as it relates to health and as it relates to functional medicine. I want to start somewhere totally random, which is, you know, the the idea of electro smog. Now, if you’ve gone to functional medicine and other conferences for a long time, you know that there’s an idea that low level toxicity over a period of time can cause dysfunction, and that toxicity might be chemical, but it might be Electrosmog, too, and different people take these kind of threats to different levels of seriousness, right?
So how do you think about it? Like I’ve heard people talk about that the wearables as an example, are a net negative because of the EMF. I’m not so sure about that, but I’ll just share from my own experience when I had my second child, we were living in a rental house, and as part of the preparation to have a child, we actually had someone come in and test the bedroom where the baby was going to be born and and would sleep, to test the sort of the energetics in the room.
And ultimately, we found that there was some leaky energy coming from, you know, one of the outlets. And what we did is for the until we moved out of that house, which is about when I think my daughter was a year a year old. Is we actually know it was what? So seven months old? I think? Yeah, we turned off at night. We turned off the mains, so we went into the garage and flicked off the electricity for the whole house, so that we wouldn’t have that right next to the bed.
So that’s what what we did, and that was on the advice of our pediatrician, and we’re super grateful for that advice. It was quite jarring to hear the electrometer that’s measuring the electrical output, you know, go crazy near the, you know, and close to where that was coming out, see how close it made it to the bed. And so, you know, that gave us a peace of mind for myself and my wife.
But ultimately, you know, most people know nothing about this and wouldn’t, probably take those sorts of you know, wouldn’t, wouldn’t take it that seriously. You’ve seen a lot of news, maybe about the wireless air air pods, and you’ve probably seen, you know, some of those videos showing how much energy comes out from those. I choose not to use those myself, or as little Bluetooth near my ears as possible. But this hasn’t really been mainstream. In fact, you will see.
See that they’re sort of like making fun of anyone who’s talked about this, including the current Secretary of Health and Human Services who’s talked about this topic for years. So it was very interesting to see, and I’m going to bring this up on the screen if you’re watching on the YouTube to see this quote, unquote, conspiracy theory start to make rounds about the health or lack of of the San Francisco 40 Niners home location, Levi’s Stadium, because the 40 Niners have had a disproportionate number of injuries.
Now, I live in 40 Niners country. I live about 15 minutes away from where they first discovered gold in California. So you know, this is why it caught my eye. But it says the theory, which has yet to be scientifically proven true, is that excessive electromagnetic field exposure, EMFs can cause negative harm to the body, quote, low frequency electromagnetic fields can degrade collagen, weaken tendons, and cause soft tissue damage at levels regulators call safe.
This was from an ex user, and this has gone totally viral. So ultimately, you know, a lot of 40 Niners fans frustrated at losing in the NFL playoffs. Have you know, charged this up, and it’s really making it into the collective consciousness. So it was in the New York Times in the Washington Post, or the San Francisco Chronicle. And, yeah, I’d love to know your thoughts. What do you think about this? Do you try and avoid please let us know in the comments. If you’re watching on Spotify, you can comment. If you’re watching on YouTube, you can comment, or feel free to get in touch with us or write us on an email.
Yeah, this is just the first time that I’ve seen that this has made it into the mainstream, because it’s a sporting issue, and there’s nothing more mainstream than sports. So this was kind of interesting and exciting, and I’d love to get your thoughts on on it, but it was very interesting for me, after 20 years of sort of being in and around this space, to see this coming out into into the public domain. All right, so then let’s talk a little bit about the first week of January, because it was arguably the biggest news week in the history of health.
On the first day of the year, like Monday, the fifth, I think it was, there was the announcement to the childhood vaccination schedules changing. And you know something, if you’ve been following the functional Forum and the evolution of medicine for a long time, you know that we are interested in really understanding where chronic disease comes from. And over the last few months, you’ve seen very interesting studies coming out comparing vaccinated unvaccinated unvaccinated children, and looking at, you know, large differentials in autoimmune disease and add and these kind of areas.
So we’re very, you know, very open to the idea that the totality of the American vaccine schedule has not been tested as safe and in its entirety or individually. And ultimately that is that is growing in popularity. And ultimately you can see that with the big changes that happened to the vaccine schedule now, a lot of states are pushing back. A lot of doctors are pushing back on it. And look, I understand that this is extremely controversial, but I also understand that we have extremely sick children, and we have rates of autoimmunity, rates of chronic illness that are off the charts.
And, you know, I grew up in England, so I had a slightly different recommended schedule, and also I missed a lot of vaccines from my parents, because they were concerned about this even then. So this has been part of my life forever. Wherever you stand on the situation, I think that a better understanding of how each of these vaccines came to market, and you know how the totality of the schedule, what it means for children, I think, is healthy.
One thing I saw, actually, as we, I was walking in here today, is that a new lawsuit has been has been put on the American Academy of Pediatrics, a RICO lawsuit, which is racketeering, which is quite interesting. And essentially, I don’t know if you’ve seen all of that information, but the RICO lawsuit is alleging a number of very interesting, very interesting things, and I’m just going to read some of what they say here, which I think will be interesting to look at.
The suit alleges that the AAP violated racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act Rico by making false and fraudulent claims about the safety of the census, DC, Control and Prevention, CDCs, child, him, Child, immunization schedule, immunization schedule while receiving funding from vaccine manufacturers and providing financial incentives to pediatricians who achieve high vaccination rates.
Yes, for too long, the AAP has been held up on a pedestal as if it were a font of science and integrity. Instead, Holland said the AAP is a front operation in a racketeering scheme involving Big Pharma, big medicine and big media ready at every turn to put profit above children’s health. It’s time to face facts and see what the AAP is really about. Now, the thing that’s interesting about this is that it will lead to a lot of document disclosure.
I mean, we’re even seeing in the, you know, Blake Lively versus Justin Baldoni situation, which I don’t care about at all. But what you notice from that is that as soon as you have a lawsuit, you have, you know, all of these, you know, all the documentation, the discovery starts happening, and a lot of interesting stuff comes out. So, you know, I can’t wait to see what comes out from this, and I think it’s an interesting moment.
So, you know, this is all happening, right? And this is a big deal. And then two days later, on the seventh of January, we have eat real food. We have, you know, the biggest announcement in this you know this from the Health and Human Services. So if you go to real food.gov you can see here, real food starts here. It starts here. Better health begins on your plate, not in your medicine cabinet.
New Dietary Guidelines for Americans defines real food as whole nutrient debts are naturally occurring, placing the back at the center of our diets. I’ve seen a number of people in our world who you wouldn’t think would support this, support this, because there’s so much of it that’s right. And you know, you could argue that there’s other things that are wrong with it.
I totally understand that, if you want to make that argument. But ultimately, just eat. Just eat real food as the title or as the headline, you know, that will be up in schools with that upside down pyramid. You know, I think is a big deal just the name. Now, if we look at the upside down pyramid by itself, it’s interesting that they chose to make an upside down pyramid, because in my mind, it’s sort of, it’s sort of saying, like, hey, the last pyramid was upside down.
Like, otherwise you wouldn’t make that the same way. And, and, you know, so aggressive have the, you know, the the Health and Human Services being in the meme wars, you know, rolling out that amazing South Park clip that you’ve probably seen. And actually, maybe we’ll just show that video right now. So let’s show the video that was posted when the new food pyramid came out. Check this out. Yeah, so you can see that, you know, part of, part of part of the the war is the meme war, and ultimately,
you know, when South Park put that out, I remember thinking like how interesting it was, particularly, you know, in the world that I find myself in where you see that the ketogenic or the Keto flex diet are proving themselves to be quite effective in randomized control trials for both mental health and for cognitive decline, for brain related issues, and we have a spate of brain related issues.
And how do you facilitate a Keto or a Keto effects diet without more protein and more meat and more fat, as ultimately like that’s one of the, one of the big ways in which, then we come back a bit. So I want to stop. I want to go right after the video again. All right, so you see the degree to which the administration is using meme culture to be able to get the word out. And I actually think that this is, you know, reasonably healthy and useful
Look, just as a qualifier. It doesn’t really matter what I think about the nutrition guidelines. I’m not I’m thinking about it through the lens of functional medicine and through the lens of an economist trying to think about the reversal of chronic disease at scale. And you know, part of the reason why I’m excited about these guidelines, I see a lot of things in there that I’ve never seen before spoken about in any meaningful way. They talked a lot about the microbiome.
There was a whole section on gut health and the importance of gut health and good microbes. And they have recommendations of fermented food, which I’ve never seen before. Second, you know, if you’re in the world of reversing cognitive decline, or metabolic psychiatry for mental health issues, you see the power of the Keto and keto flex diets, right? And so, you know, there’s a big, big push in that direction as well. So, you know. So ultimately, we have a huge mental health crisis.
We have a huge brain health crisis. And so I think this can be potentially very healing. Now, I know again, that there are, you could be personalized nutrition advice and public health guidelines are at Nate in, in their by their very nature, out and so, you know, we have to take. With a pinch of salt. And I understand that if you’re a practitioner, you think that there are many individualized things that can’t be seen here, but that’s the nature of of public health, is that it’s for everyone.
And what I’m really excited about is that eat real food with pictures of real food will be in every school. It’ll change the way that school and army for food is, is bought and is served. And I think it’s a, it’s a, it’s a big net positive. And if you look at the Eat real food gov site, you see 90% of spend, spending goes to treating chronic disease, much of which is linked to diet and lifestyle. And so there’s, there’s a lot of these. You know, this kind of information here, it shows the old pyramid.
We can solve the crisis introducing the new pyramid. So we have protein, dairy, healthy fats and fruits and vegetables and whole grains there at the bottom. This website is really cool. Eat real food, real food.gov. Check it out. Have a tool around. I think it’s very, very interesting and valuable. All right. So that was just the first few days of the year with these huge changes that have probably been a year coming, and starting the year with real momentum towards real transformational change in healthcare,
all focused around reversing chronic disease at scale, which is exactly what we’ve been all about here at the evolution of medicine for 12 years. And so I’m really excited and feeling that momentum. So next up, I want to talk about more big news that came out in the world, and we’ll talk about chat GPT health. Now, if you followed the functional forum for years, you know that, like the dream is that functional medicine could become the standard of care one day.
And ultimately, no single announcement in the 20 years that I’ve been involved has made me as sure that that will happen, the truth will out, than this chatgpt function, agreement and announcement. Why is that one chatgpt is used by hundreds of millions of people worldwide. And chatgpt health is being launched and partnership with function health. Function health, you know, was started by Mark Hyman and is built with that name at the center of it, a functional is built with that is built with that name, you know, at the center of it, and is getting a lot more data from patients about their health.
So simultaneously, I have never been more confident that functional medicine or something, that functional thinking could become the way of thinking, the way that medicine is done, from that announcement. But simultaneously, it doesn’t make me feel, I think, that there’s a concern for the future fate of the functional medicine doctor, because chatgpt is so ubiquitous and, you know, managing that much data can be, you know, is really tricky.
So what I want to say about it is I feel that it is a calling to practitioners. Has been reinforcing what we’ve been saying for the last weeks and months on my blog and and here on the podcast which we talked about, we talked about this exact conversation with function health and sort of the goat, you know, the direct to consumer lab testing market back on, I think, episode two, and we talked about it then, because I really felt that this was a real transformation in the ability of the consumer to get what they want.
And you know, if you go back 10 years ago, was some of the reason why people were going to functional medicine doctors access to these new, interesting tests. Of course it was. And so now you don’t need, we’ve disintermediated, disintermediated the doctor and those tests. So you can just go and get those tests directly, and you could get then chatgpt to, you know, help you understand what it means.
And so we in the functional medicine space need to really understand where longevity and where we can bring the most value. And I’ve been talking about this and really sharing my thoughts is that we need to pivot towards the harder cases. The harder the cases that you work on in your clinic, the less likely that, you know, it’s that a patient will be able to just go to chat, GPT get answers. You know, implement those answers and get better.
You know, what you need is physicians who understand physiology, who understand the healing process, who understand through the lens of function. And you need team based care. You need people on the team who are actually going to get patients to participate in their own health in a way that a human to human relationship can, in a way that attunement can, in a way that possibly, you know, computers maybe never will.
And so that is the challenge for longevity in practice, I do think that there’s going to be a flow, continue to be a flow of people into functional medicine. And clinics, because they’ve been sort of opened up to these ideas through some of these technologies, and are looking for a human to talk to about it. But I also feel like these technologies are getting exponentially better, so I don’t know how long that goes on for.
So if you’ve thought about this, if you’re interested in this, I’d love to hear your take again. If you’re on Spotify, or if you’re on YouTube, feel free to comment below. Make sure to subscribe for future episodes. I’d love to get your thoughts on it. Claude, for health. Very interesting, too. A little bit more Doctor focused. One of the things that we are going to be doing here in the next few weeks coming up is what we call, we doing a challenge with one of our mission partners, fullscript, and in that challenge, we are going to challenge practitioners with fullscript accounts, of which there’s 125,000 of them around the country to and around in Canada as well,
to take advantage of some of the new, awesome tools that fullscript has brought out to be able to combat this issue specifically, which is, how do you put your practice at the top of the funnel? So it’s not chat, GPT and function health, but it’s your practice. You know, getting lab data, helping the patient understand it, you’re in a good position to do it hasn’t been easy. Interpreting lab data is probably the, probably the best top of the funnel for for functional medicine practitioners.
And so we’re going to be sharing with you exactly how to use the new fullscript tools to be more relevant. So if you don’t have a fullscript account, you can go to goevomed.com/fullscript, and sign up. I want to thank two of our other mission partners, freedom, practice, coaching. I’m going to be sharing, you know, some of some incredible interviews that they’ve done recently. On my blog. You’ll see a session that we did wihttp://goevomed.com/fullscriptth Seth Conger about packaging care, especially as it relates to cognitive decline, and why the model drives the outcomes.
So if you want to find out more about that, go to goevomed.com/fpc, we’ve got an awesome group of practices that are both functional medicine and and brain focused and and freedom practice coaching. And we’re building an amazing cohort there are very successful clinically and and business wise groups. So that’s that.
Thanks so much for big boost marketing, another one of our mission partners, who is the man. If you haven’t, if you have any questions about marketing, your practice, go to goevomed.com/bigboost . And you can find out more about that. And then lastly, I want to talk about true neuro something that happened this already this year that I think is remarkable. As you know, earlier this year in actually, on December 30 of last year, was the release of the preprint of the first randomized control trial in the history of functional medicine.
So this was under the sort of, there’s a this was an extension of the work of Dr Dale Bredesen. And if you know dr Bredesen, you know he wrote the book The End of Alzheimer’s, and you also know that he’s been inspiring functional medicine doctors to follow his methodology through the Recode program to essentially reverse cognitive decline. There’s been 100 cases of reversal. Then there was a study that came out in the Journal of Alzheimer’s in 2022 showing great outcomes, but it wasn’t randomized.
And so what’s just come out is the pre print of the randomized control trial. Now one of the six trial sites principal investigators was Dr Christine Burke, who’s the co founder of true neuro and she was taking the mastermind group through that on in the first week of January, and one of the things that we were talking about is how to get the word out there, because so many of the patients that you may see have the following thing in common, where you say you could help them, and then they go and ask their neurologist, and their neurologist is like, no, none of that works.
You don’t want to do that. And ultimately, to me, this preprint really shows that a randomized controlled trial shows that almost everyone improved, and no drug trial has ever, no randomized controlled trial of any of the infusions, any of the monoclonal antibodies, has ever shown improvement. So ultimately, you know, we’re at a moment here where it’s a moment where maybe it’s not okay to, you know, to try and steer patients away from lifestyle focused brain interventions if they have issues.
And so we were talking about ways to get the word out to neurologists, Senior Living, to other. Practitioners and I, we would create this sort of letter template. And one of the doctors in there, Dr Ryan Arnold, who’s an awesome doctor from Central Coast California, he said, Look, I wish, rather than one letter that we could all send individually, what if there was one giant letter that we could all sign, kind of like the Declaration of Independence.
And I thought to myself, that’s a really, really good idea. So what I want to share with all of you, which and I would love for all of you to sign, is what we are calling the declaration of cognitive interdependence, and I’ll just read the first few lines for you here. We hold these truths to be self evident, that the human brain is not an isolated organ, that cognition is not an individual possession alone, and that the loss of cognitive function in one person creates a measurable burden on many we affirm that human beings are cognitively interdependent.
You can read the rest of it. It doesn’t take you that long. I’d love for you to go there and sign in. But essentially, what we’re what, what the purpose of this document is to get all practitioners, clinicians who have had success, or are having success in, you know, improving brain health with lifestyle medicine, functional medicine, precision medicine, even just well organized longitudinal care, to be able to sign this so that ultimately we can see that this is not something that is fringe.
This is something that is happening, you know, all over the country. And ultimately it’s an invitation to primary care doctors to neurologists, to the medical profession to come and learn and join because we can’t afford for 17 years to go by until this becomes the way that most medicine is practiced. There’s too much suffering, too many people, probably your parents, maybe you listening to this, maybe your grandparents, who will be suffering in the meantime.
And it doesn’t need to be like this, and it does create a massive burden. We’ve all experienced it. Both of my parents have now passed, but they lived on different continents than me, and that is an abnormal situation. But ultimately, I know that everyone experiences this, and everyone has experienced the pain on suffering of memory loss, also missing dementia, and ultimately, I think there’s a lot more that we can do about it now, and that we know that.
So if we can know better now, we’ve got to do better. So this was co created by the true neuro mastermind, and we’re super grateful to true neuro for being one of our mission partners. Go to goevomed.com/truneura, get a demo and see why dozens and dozens of clinics are coming to Truneura to organize their data and to again, you know, have a really wonderful experience for patients as they go through a process of reversing their cognitive decline.
There are also precision psychiatrists, doctors trained in metabolic psychiatry using the software. We’ve got all kinds of practitioners that are really focused on building brain focused practices, and I highly recommend that you join us. So this has been so much fun. My hope with these episodes is to catch you up on the things that I think are important. We’ve talked about this Rico lawsuit, we’ve talked about OpenAI and chatgpt. We’ve talked about the changes in there. If you are interested in my blogging and my thoughts, check out the trueneura substack. It’s truneura.substack.com/
I’m blogging there twice a week, and last week, I wrote an episode an article called there’s an invisible handbrake on the functional medicine industry, and I would love for you to go and read that, because that is just thinking that I’ve had about why functional medicine hasn’t become the standard of care, and what’s at risk if we don’t rapidly change the way that we Think about scaling care or think about the information in our heads and what to do with that information.
So thanks so much for joining us. This has been the evolution of medicine podcast. We have some killer interviews coming up the rest of this month and coming up next month, and once a month, probably in the last, last week of the month, we’ll do an episode like this to wrap up everything that’s been happening coming up in the next few months, where we’ll be so I highly recommend the plmi conference April 17 and 18th in Chicagoland is brain focused this year.
So there’s Bredesen, there’s both perlmutters. Dr bland Of course. Ashley cough will be there. There’s number of great presenters there. I’ll be there. You should definitely try and come to that. I’m probably going to be at maps, the the pediatric maps, which is coming up in the 12th to the 14th of of March. In Charlotte, North Carolina, that’s coming up in March, and then later on in the year, we should have some exciting news coming up soon about things that we’re going to do around the Institute for Functional medicines Annual Conference, which is in San Diego again this year.
So thanks so much for tuning in. I hope to see you in person at some point. But please send us any feedback. Send us any thoughts. Thanks so much for tuning in, and we’ll see you next time. So that was the podcast with Dawson. What an epic session. And just a reminder that coming up in April, we will have version two of our reversing Alzheimer’s Summit.
You’ll be able to hear from Dawson, and we’re gonna have updates on some of the new studies from Dr Bredesen and be charting a path forward for the reversal of Alzheimer’s and cognitive decline. Thank you so much for tuning in to the evolution of medicine podcast. We’ll be back again next week, and thanks so much for tuning in and we’ll see you next time you.
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