In this Functional Forum episode, James Maskell and Matt Wiggins bring together leading clinicians and researchers to explore the frontiers of precision and functional medicine.
They discuss SUPAR, a powerful biomarker for systemic inflammation that could reshape early disease detection. The conversation then turns to a groundbreaking cognitive decline trial showing major improvements in patients treated with functional medicine protocols compared to standard care.
The episode also explores the biology of loneliness and the “cell danger response,” the reversibility of trauma through epigenetic mechanisms and psychedelic-assisted therapy, and emerging ideas about measuring masculinity as a clinical health indicator.
Together, these insights point toward a future where chronic disease may be detected earlier, treated systemically, and in some cases reversed.
About the Guests:
This episode features multiple leading voices from the Functional Forum community, including clinicians and researchers in functional and precision medicine:
Matt Wiggins – Health innovator focused on bringing advanced biomarker testing, including SUPAR, into clinical practice
Dr. Kat Toups – Clinician involved in cognitive decline research using precision functional medicine approaches
Dr. Molly Maloof – Physician and educator specializing in metabolic health, loneliness biology, and cellular stress responses
Dr. David Rabin – Psychiatrist and neuroscientist studying trauma, epigenetics, and psychedelic-assisted therapy
Dr. Brad Jacobs – Clinician exploring novel frameworks for men’s health and masculinity as a clinical metric
Dr. Ryan Adler – Advocate for integrating cognitive health protocols into mainstream clinical practice
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About the Host:
James Maskell is a healthcare entrepreneur and founder of The Evolution of Medicine. For over 20 years, he has worked to scale functional medicine through community-driven models, group visits, and practitioner infrastructure. His work focuses on moving medicine upstream – toward prevention, lifestyle intervention, and systems-based care.
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Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/FunctionalForum
Evolution of Medicine™ Mission Partners:
TrueNeura: https://truneura.com
Fullscript: https://goevomed.com/fullscript
Big Boost Marketing: https://goevomed.com/bigboost
Freedom Practice Training: https://goevomed.com/fpc
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Transcript:
One in two people are lonely in our country, and it’s worse for our health than 15, smoking 15, 15 cigarettes a day I spent the last few years accidentally becoming an organismal biologist studying with Sue Carter, one of the, um, most cited women on the science of oxytocin neurobiology, and Helen Fisher, one of the most cited women on the science of love.
And I started really understanding just how fundamental human love is to our existence, and why we evolved it and what we, well, why we need it in order to thrive, in order to survive, and why it’s a huge longevity advantage. There are certain forms of toxic and unhealthy love that can actually create a lot of disease. Is that relationships can heal us or harm us. They can be medicine or they can be poison.
Hello, and welcome back to season two of the Functional Forum. For the last 12 years, we have brought practitioners together all around the world to talk about innovation, clinical excellence, and building the practices of the future. Season two is no different in terms of the content, but we have upgraded our venue, and this is the coolest functional medicine event that has ever been put on.
I’m so glad you’re with us. Enjoy. Hello, everyone. Welcome to the relaunch of the Functional Forum. I’m so glad you’re all here. So, uh, in 2014, in February 2014, uh, we had an idea. I lived in New York, and I realized that the functional medicine community, I would go out and meet all of them, and I realized they didn’t know each other.
And so we decided to put together, uh, an event to connect people, to try and make it aspirational and cool to practice functional medicine. You know, that turned from a stage show in New York to, uh, 400 communities around the world of practitioners getting together and learning about functional medicine together.
And ultimately, you know, you see what’s happened over the last 12 years. We have a really exciting moment where I think understanding that health-focused care is becoming like table stakes to talk about the future of medicine. It’s like the foundational baseline. And y- as all of you know, it hasn’t been the baseline.
I’m sure you go to other meetings where it’s not the baseline, but I think anyone who’s thinking properly about what the future of health looks like knows that we were right, and you’re gonna have to adapt to it. Right? So that’s, uh, so that’s the beginning of it. And so, uh, that’s how it started. And, you know, I live about, uh, f- Two hours away.
And, um, I wanted to introduce you all, you know, as, uh, the first person who’s gonna speak to the person who created this vision. So I was here, um… Matt and I have actually known each other for about, uh, 11 years. And, um, Matt is actually a serious healthcare entrepreneur. Uh, many of you guys are sort of aware of the sort of movement towards value-based care, Medicare Advantage, and so forth.
Matt, uh, was at the forefront of that when I first met him in New York years ago. And, um, and also Matt has, as you can see, you know, taste, right? And, uh, and has built this whole place. If you wanna see an interesting vide- uh, picture, if you go right to the front, you can see the picture of this place as it was burning down.
So this used to be an art warehouse. You can see the front of it there. Uh, but this is the first kind of re-imagination of it. And I came to, uh, the JPMorgan pre-party that he hosted here, and I was like, “This is the perfect place for a functional forum where people can connect, um, connect with each other.”
So I’ll share a little bit more about the format that we’re gonna have. But, um, first and foremost, you know, he is, uh, the host of this event. He’s also, uh, the principal at Super, which you’re gonna be hearing a little bit about. So please welcome our host, Matt Wiggins.
Thanks everybody for coming. I hope you can hear me. Um, we’re sitting next to the Waymos. I think you saw the Waymos upstairs. They were not always my neighbor. Um, it used to be a 1940s redwood warehouse that was built before you had to have fire suppression systems. And so the neighbors, uh, caught on fire in the middle of the pandemic, and they burned from over here, and they slowly burned down this beautiful space that we had built and had a great time in for 10 years in San Francisco.
And the only thing that is left is that front facade. And actually, tomorrow morning, I have the building department coming in, talking about what we’re gonna build in that front facade. So it’s a, it’s a full circle moment. Um, this is indeed, uh, a temporary space. All of this can be rolled out at any moment.
These are trailers which I bought in the middle of the pandemic with my insurance money, and we decided we were gonna make an art space that worked for the type of lifestyle that I enjoy when I come back to San Francisco, which is the hummingbird sauna trailer, the hot tub, the tearoom, and the Japanese wabi-bari trailer.
You can see I’m a bird guy. So we’ve got the hummingbird sauna trailer. We’ve got the Japanese crane over here. If you go to the tiny home over here, which actually was burned when we first had it, um, there’s a cardinal on the front of it. That’s the cardinal tiny home. And then this right here was designed, was designed in CAD, and I was so interesting- interested in the Trump tariffs that I wanted to buy something that I could design in China and have assembled here.
And so this is the birdcage And you can see the CNC birds in the, uh, uh, at the top of it. And, uh, I’m really appreciative of James and the Functional Forum. I’ve, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve watched him, uh, evolve his, uh, his group for a long time, and it’s been an incredible group. Um, when I was in college, I got sick with Ménière’s disease, and I, uh, uh, pivoted my political science degree to go study medical anthropology.
And I got over to Switzerland, and I began to learn about European biological medicine. And, uh, Thomas Rau, Dr. Thomas Rau, if anybody knows Rau, he’s a legend. And I, and, and I really got deep into the idea that, uh, root cause analysis was an important piece of the whole healthcare system. And I, I, I, I’ve spent fourteen years building, um, the first value-based pair- value-based care company on the back of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, which was put in place by, uh, Obama with a big, uh, uh, uh, initiative in 2010.
And what we were able to figure out is that if actually coordinating care across an episode of care, which is the minute you get to the hospital to the ninety days after you leave the hospital, is an important part of driving savings because you’re coordinating all the different sites of care and making sure we’re working as a team, right?
And one of the things that I’ve always liked about functional medicine, um, and actually, when we had this building here, I had a friend of mine, Dr. Stephanie Daniels, who’s a functional medicine physician. She worked out of the back. And so I’m a big fan of functional medicine. It’s the closest thing I can find to European biological medicine.
I’ve been a friend of Jeff Bland’s for a long time, and I look at him as obviously a savant in many ways, and he’s one of the people that very quickly puts together ideas when they come to him, and he factors it into how it’s gonna be effective for the people who are practicing. What I wanted to, um, what I wanted to explain is I, uh, I found myself without this place in 2020, and I decided to just get out of America for a moment, and I went over to, I went over to, uh, Spain, and I found myself in Ibiza, and I found myself with a Spanish girlfriend.
That’s why we’re eating paella tonight. And, uh, jamón ibérico flown in from Spain. And we’re doing that because one of the things that I also found over there when I was sitting with a, uh, a friend was, uh, was I, I was, I was talking to a friend who was opening a longevity clinic in Copenhagen And he said, would you ever be my backer in this Copenhagen clinic?
I said, absolutely. I’ve never been to Copenhagen. I want to go check it out. And so we opened a longevity clinic. And this is 2021. And what happened after that is some really amazing scientists walked in and said, we like your guys’ style. You know, just like everybody likes James’ style. I’ve always liked James’ style.
Look at this. Thank you, James, for convening. By the way, the government definition of the company that we built was an awardee convener. Because the only thing you really need to do is you need to convene. And all our job was to do is make sure that we could convene the people in healthcare that were taking the dollars from Medicare and figuring out how to take better care of the patients.
So here we are convening again. And I’m over in Copenhagen. And these amazing physicians and scientists come up to me and they’re like, hey, we’ve been studying this biomarker for 25 years. And we discovered it in 1999. And we’d like to talk to you guys about helping us figure out how we should take it to market.
And I said, well, what’s the biomarker? They said, well, it’s a protein. And it’s called soluble urokinase plasminogen activator receptor. I was like, okay, we’re going to call it SUPAR.
And the reality is SUPAR has been studied for 25 years in Copenhagen. They’ve got 1,200 research reports on it. It is the biomarker for systemic chronic inflammation. And so with my Meniere’s disease, my little alarm bells go off. And it’s like, okay, this is interesting because I have only known CRP and IL-6 and some of the other things that are for acute inflammation.
What if there was a biomarker for systemic chronic inflammation? And what could you do with that? And then going back to running this, we had $15 billion of Medicare spend under management. And we were looking at the risk pools and realizing that we were sitting on top of a great data set that showed that 70% of the costs in the U.S.
healthcare system are tied back to chronic disease, heart disease, liver disease, kidney disease, cancer, right? And so if you look at that and you look at the 65% to 70% that goes back to that, what if you could just test a level of inflammation before it leads to chronic inflammation, which leads to chronic disease, which leads to the cascading effect that goes down and ends up as something that we need to worry about?
Because we don’t know why someone shows up at a site of care, you know, a skilled nursing facility, a hospital, because we’re not doing proactive looks. And so I You know, in an earlier part of my career, I, I designed, uh, technology for Medicare risk adjustment, which is a very weird part of the healthcare industry.
It’s how insurance companies get paid. And one of the things that when I did have the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, we had a, we had a nice little rocking party. Yeah. It was great. And, uh, Dana was there. Great hat, Dana. And, and, and, and, and, and, and we had, uh, we had a lot of Secret Service at the front because there were a lot of HHS people here.
And it was a moment where we got to sit with them, some of the people who are running DOGE and some of the people running HHS and say, “Hey, look, we’ve done retrospective analysis for a long time. It’s not working. It’s– the Medicare Trust Fund is going bankrupt in two years.” There’s a whole world of functional medicine.
There’s a whole world of testing and understanding what’s going on inside someone’s body that can happen ahead of time. We should probably shift from retrospective t- audits to maybe getting out in front and finding a way to do a mass accreditation of functional medicine doctors so that they can receive Medicare money, they can receive commercial insurance, which they do.
But there’s an opportunity, and so what I like is my dream and the reason I’m getting back into this is I think there’s an opportunity to do a national biological risk stratification for people, and that comes from people who understand all the biomarkers that are absolutely necessary and can test them in their practices because it’s already part of their functional medicine practice.
That is a total mind shift. And so Supar is, is my attempt to bring something to the United States that’s pretty cool from Denmark, and we’re just starting next week. Uh, we’ve signed up about eight hundred clinics, and we’re slowly gonna roll it out. Um, these Danes own all the IP, so you probably haven’t heard of Supar, which is one of the things it was like, “Okay, guys, you’ve, you know, you’ve had this for a long time.
Why don’t we spread it out here? You’re using it and calling it the king biomarker already in Denmark. Why don’t we get– why don’t we let the king biomarker over here?” The whole Greenland thing was a very interesting thing for my partners. Oh, yeah. That was definitely something where I had to use my political science degree that I never got.
It’s like, this is gonna be fine. There’s a lot of people on both sides who would love to see this biomarker. So yeah. I’m gonna get off the horn, but I just wanted to give you guys a little bit of context, and I wanted to give you some context of this space. Um, we don’t rent it out for events. We don’t have anyone living here full-time.
I sometimes crash in the movie room when I’m in the city, but don’t tell the city that. And I wanna keep opening it up because I think it’s important to be a convener. And in this time, what I’m going for, I’m not spending any money on, on Facebook ads. I’m not spending any money on ads that you’re gonna see on your phone.
I’m just spending money on people who wanna have dinner parties, Supar Suppers. And you can go, and you can have 12 to 20 of your friends, and we’ll send you the tests, and we’ll get a mobile phlebotomist out there. And, uh, we want people to have conversations about inflammation at the dinner table because if they’re not, they’re not thinking about it with the people that matter.
And so thank you for being pioneers in this space. Being a functional medicine doctor is a wild endeavor. You basically have to be an entrepreneur on your own, figuring out where the other crazy people are, and I’m glad the Functional Medicine Forum is here to be a convener of the types of people that are willing to go and take a risk and go outside of the system, recognize along your path that you might not wanna get, get pigeonholed, and you wanna stay at the front edge of research.
You wanna stay at the front edge of, of where things are going. Just wanted to take a moment to thank our mission partners for helping bring this podcast to you. As you know, we are in the business of building a network of clinics that can reverse cognitive decline, and our partners in that are organizations.
You can find out more if you go to goevomed.com and look at the mission partners. But first and foremost, TruNeura. If you go to truneura.com, you can get a demo. Um, this is the underlying software that will connect this network of clinics, and we have an incredible mastermind session, a lot of cool stuff coming out of that company.
Um, you can see here, uh, Fullscript. Thanks to Fullscript. With Fullscript, where we’re gonna help you take advantage of the tools that they have, um, to compete with things like ChatGPT and Function Health. It’s gonna be awesome. Go to goevomed.com/fullscript. Uh, Big Boost Marketing. If you need patients for your clinic, uh, or if you have any marketing needs, goevomed.com/bigboost is our premier s- uh, supporter in that world.
And then please, uh, also check out Freedom Practice Coaching, built and scaled a very successful brain health practice and has been instrumental in helping practitioners with the non-clinical aspects of running a practice doing this. These are our mission partners. These are people that I know well.
These are people that are top of their sphere, and really excited to bring you, uh, the rest of the podcast. Enjoy. If you’re interested in building the future of medicine, you couldn’t have a better analogy than right here. Behind me, you have this incredible female figure, this incredible piece of art that represents the feminine.
And just over there, you have a Waymo Depot where Waymos are coming together and being organized by AI and providing maximum convenience and automation If we can bring those two things together, we have a future of medicine that you will love, that’s good for doctors, that’s good for patients, that’s good for countries, and good for the planet, and that is the future of medicine that we’re all building here at the Functional Forum.
Over the years, you know, we’ve had, um, different formats for the Functional Forum. If you guys watched in the last 10 years, it was mainly a stage show. And this doesn’t really set- it’s… Even though this is kind of a stage show happening, doesn’t really lend itself. So what we’re gonna do tonight is something a bit different.
We’re gonna have five speakers who are gonna come in and share a little bit about a unique angle of what they’re doing in functional medicine, and then you can go and choose to have dinner with, with them. You can line up. We got a few different places where we’re gonna have dinner. There’s one in here, Matt’s office up here.
There’s space at the back here. We’ll kind of work out how many people wanna do it. So, um, I’m just… First of all, I have the only piece of bad news that I’m gonna share, and you’ve probably already worked it out, but Dale Bredesen’s not in the building, and I’m really sad about that. He, he actually emailed me at 2:00 in the morning last night.
But I wanna say something about Dale Bredesen, and you can watch it here on the video. Dale, I’m speaking to you. I wanted to tell him, in front of a community of his peers, I wanted to thank him because 10 years ago, I put on a Functional Forum at UCSF. Was anyone else there, there? We had, uh, Stephanie was there, and Chris Kresser, and Dale was there.
And in the last 10 years, that man has gone above and beyond to showcase what is possible with functional and precision medicine. And ultimately, the dedication that it’s taken, the effort that it’s taken to prove it time and time again, and what I was having him come and speak about is that recently was the first randomized controlled trial that I understand in the history of functional medicine, and basically shows what all of us have been seeing in our practices, that if you apply personalized medicine correctly, most people get better, right?
Yep. And so I would actually like, for the cameras and for everyone here, can we have a warm round of applause for the life’s work of Dr. Dale Bredesen?
But luckily, there’s actually no bad news ’cause although Dale is amazing, in San Francisco lives the physician that led that trial. She was one of the six trial sites. So you can have dinner tonight if you want with the, the, the leading, uh, the lead investigator of that trial- Please welcome to the stage Dr.
Cat Toups. I just wanted to thank James, who’s worked tirelessly to] bring, bring us together for so, so many years as well. And it’s so exciting for me to once again be back with everybody here and, um, I’ve s- know so many people here and then so many new faces. So welcome to everyone for being such a great community here.
Um, I am here to tell you about our recent clinical trial. Um, this is, uh, we just published a preprint at the end of the year, and we’re still working on getting the final submission ready for the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease. But, um, I’ll just cut to the chase of the exciting news. This study validates our first proof of concept trial.
Um, and this trial was a randomized, um, trial. We had two cohorts of patients. Um, two-thirds of the, uh, patients received active precision medicine, functional medicine treatment, and one-third we called it standard of care neurology. So whatever the traditional neurologist might do early in the course of mild cognitive impairment or dementia was okay, but really in the– most people are not doing much of anything.
So we compared these two groups. We looked at all kinds of different, uh, measurements, both to qualify and that we tracked in the study. Um, the patients, um, had to meet criteria based on their MoCA testing and their neurocognitive batteries on CNS vital signs. Um, they had to have a study partner who did the ratings all through the study that corroborated their, their deficiencies.
Um, they did self-rating scales. So we did quite a bit of, of rating, and we validated things from all angles. Um, we incorporated all the new brain biomarkers in our study. We’re still analyzing that data, but I believe all but one of our patients had abnormal amyloid levels. So we had 73 patients in this study.
Um, and, uh, some of the other markers, um, we’re s- we’re still analyzing. But, um, but let me just cut to the chase. Basically, the, the magnitude of the effect sizes that we saw were even better than in our proof of concept trial. In our first trial, 84% of people got better. In this trial, it’s gonna be over 90% of patients-
that got better. And I, I can tell you that in my own site, we had six sites around the country doing this study. Um, in my cohort, every one of my patients got better, and all but one of them was testing completely normal by the end of the s- the nine-month study. So it’s, uh, i- it’s, it’s a intensive process and, you know, trying to teach people all the factors that are involved.
But when we can identify all of the underlying contributors, um, we can work fast and furious. And to see this kind of change in nine months is just unprecedented. Um, we, uh, the preprint, uh, publication that’s out, I would say even if you just look at our graphs in there, they will tell you the story of, of, of every single measure separating, you know, between the two groups.
Um, in our overall, um, neurocognitive index of the neuropsych battery, our treatment group improved 14 points, and our standard of care group declined four points. So again, a, a huge separation there that I think the p value was .001. It was less… It was, you know, it was very highly significant. So, um, so anyway, I’m looking forward to a dinner conversation with whoever wants to talk about this.
There’s, you know, a lot involved. Um, James has made some copies of the preprint for the people that are, are coming to the dinner conversation, but it can be found online. And then hopefully in the next couple months, we’ll get through the peer review process. But, um, anyway, thank you so much for having me and-
um, look forward to chatting with some of you. Ladies and gentlemen, Kat Toups. So for season two of the Functional Forum and the Evolution of Medicine platform, we don’t have sponsors. We only have mission partners, and these are organizations that are dedicated and proven to help you build a successful practice.
We’ve got Big Boost Marketing, one of the leaders in helping you understand bringing new patients into your practice. Freedom Practice Coaching, that has been around for 12 years, helping practitioners building the models of the future. Three, we have True Neuro, which is helping practitioners launch a brain health program and reverse cognitive decline.
And then Fullscript, which is the infrastructure layer for delivering whole person health. You can find out more about them in the Mission Partner segment, and we’ll have the link below. Brad tonight is going to be talking a little bit about the cross-section of health and healthy masculinity. So Brad, let me, uh, let me give you the mic.
Dr. Brad Jacobs, everyone. Great. Thank you. Hey, everybody. What a great space. Yeah. Man, I just want to, uh- Yeah … thank Matt, wherever you are. This is amazing space. And yes, we would like to hold anti-inflammatory dinners here, so- Um, and we’re, w- I’m fully inv- we have a phlebotomy service. We can dial the whole thing in.
Uh, so my name is Brad Jacobs. I’m a physician, um, and, um, been doing functional medicine since, I don’t know, I was born roughly or something like that. Um, uh, born and raised as a martial artist and spent my life, um, doing that, frankly, which is really what brought me to precision medicine because the ancient wisdom has always been precision-oriented at the individual level.
Um, I’m most interested right now in looking at men and masculinity. I’m really interested in reimagining what it means to be a man in this day and age. We have a lot of different art forms of that right now that are showing up politically in particular, as well as sort of celebrities, and s- particularly in the longevity space, particularly as it relates to E- Epstein files and what we’ve seen there.
And you may have seen Sarah and/or me speaking up and out about that. Um, I feel pretty strongly about that, and there’s been a- an absence of men speaking out about that, which I think is… doesn’t serve us well. So I’m focused on measuring masculinity, actually. I think it can be measurable. I think it’s a vital sign.
It should become a vital sign for men to see where they’re at. I think you’ve can physiologically look at it as well as psycho-emotionally. So I’ve started some men’s groups around this, and I’m actually collecting data, looking at this longitudinally, and I’m really excited to bring together people that are interested in exploring that space.
So thanks for listening, and I’ll take, uh, back the mic and give more time to the group. I hope you’re enjoying the Functional Forum, and if you like this content, you will love the Evolution of Medicine podcast. Every week I’m doing interviews, news segments. I’m bringing out information that is critical to the work of the modern practitioner.
If you go to goevomed.com/podcast, you can see all the episodes we’ve done. We bring out an episode every week. I’d love for you to join us. All right, so, uh, next up, Molly, why don’t you come up here. So everyone knows Dr. Molly Malouf is a longevity leader, and um, the la- last year at A4M, you know, many of you know I wrote a book on, um, on group visits, group medical visits, and community as medicine.
And, uh, Molly gave a keynote at A4M, uh, which was called, uh, the- Love and Longevity … Love and Longevity. And, um- And it was such a great topic because I feel it’s just such a, a sort of a missing conversation in what root cause dynamics really mean. So if you’ve ever dreamt about having dinner with Mollie Manouf, tonight could be the night that you can.
And Mollie, why don’t you tell us what you’re gonna talk about? Sure. Nice to meet all of you. I feel really honored to be here, um, and especially Matt. I just love this space. Actually, fun fact, guys, I used to live here before it burned down. Oh. I lived up th- up there in this room, and it was… I actually had a place down the street, but I subleased it because I really didn’t have enough friends, and I was isolated, and I was like, “I need to have people.”
So I moved into Safehouse so I could have community. And fast-forward many, many years later, I’m back here, and life has changed a lot, right? This was 2019 before- when I left, and now it’s 2026, and we all went through a pandemic together. And I don’t know about you guys, but when I got really isolated during the pandemic, I experienced real damage to my health.
I really didn’t feel like I changed my lifestyle that much, but my- but I felt like my physiology was shifting. And what I didn’t really know at the time was even though I was studying mitochondrial health and studying metabolic health and studying metabolic flexibility and studying, you know, what we eat and how we exercise and how we take supplements and how we feed our gut and all of that we do, I missed something really important, and that is that mitochondria are social organelles, and we are social creatures.
And this is a basic property of life itself, our ability to socialize, our ability to connect. And when we disconnect, especially when we all together disconnected during the pandemic, it creates huge, huge damage on a cellular level. It puts us… It helps, it helps alongside all the other things that were going on, but it pushes us into the cell danger response.
It literally changes our metabolic function, and it changes the way that we perceive others. It actually creates maladaptive social cognition and can actually set us up for illness and disconnection with our relationships. And as we know, one in two people are lonely in our country, and it’s worse for our health than 15- smoking 15, 15 cigarettes a day.
So we’ve got a really big problem on our hands. And, um, so I spent the last few years accidentally becoming an organismal biologist, studying with Sue Carter, one of the, um, most cited women on the science of oxytocin neurobiology, and Helen Fisher, one of the most cited women on the science of love. And I started really understanding just how fundamental human love is to our existence and why we evolved it and what we…
wh- why we need it in order to thrive, in order to survive, and why it’s a huge longevity advantage. But on the flip side, I learned a lot about the downsides of love. There are certain forms of toxic and unhealthy love that can actually create a lot of disease, especially if you, if you b- if you become attached to a person who is emotionally or physically abusive, for example.
So basically, what I’ve learned is that relationships can heal us or harm us. They can be medicine, or they can be poison. And, um- I have this really long presentation that I’m probably gonna try to give a few slides tonight if you wanna sit at my table, but mostly I’ll just be sitting and telling you guys about what I’ve learned, and it’s very much an honor to be here.
Before you go, Molly, I know you’ve recently had an insight as to, um, the, uh, your, your fish recommendations, and I’d love for you to share that- Oh, gosh … because you are a local here and everyone lives here, so I’d love for you to share that. Sure. Okay, so QuickSilver’s here, and fun fact, I got my QuickSilver results back.
And just discovered that I had been eating way too much farmers’ market fish thinking, “Oh, I’m just gonna try to move away from fish oil and move towards eating fish.” I had 95th percentile mercury levels, and cad- I was eating a lot of dark chocolate, which we’re all like, “Oh, dark chocolate’s so good for you.”
Ni- uh, 95th percentile cadmium levels, and so now I am using a lot of QuickSilver products to detox. But if it can happen to me, it can happen to you. So guys, if you’re eating farmers’ market fish, honestly stay away from tuna. I didn’t eat almost any tuna, but I ate enough to give myself mercury poisoning.
I ate a lot of salmon. I don’t know if our salmon is poisonous or not. I really wanna get it tested. Um, but yeah, I’m now basically switching all my fish to Sea Utopia because they test all their fish. Um, but it’s really a challenge eating properly in the world we live today. If you are interested in building community and bringing together practitioners in your town, please get in touch with me at goevomed.com.
We are interested in bringing back practitioner communities all across the country, and we’d love to hear from you. You might be able to tell that this space has a lot of like, uh, what would we say? Psychedelic energy. And, uh, I wanna bring up Dr. David Rabin, who’s here. So Dr. Rabin, um, is a, uh, a psychiatrist.
He’s one of the co-founders of Apollo Neuro, if you guys have, uh, ever, you know, used that, um, played with it. But David is going to be, um, hosting a dinner tonight on the cross-section of, um, psychedelics and mental health, so please welcome Dr. David Rabin. Yeah. All right. Yeah, Safehouse, this place is awesome.
Woo! Matt and James, you- Matt, you guys have done such a incredible job. We, r- you know, were, were in touch around the time that the great tragedy happened here and, you know, nobody could have transformed this place better into the convening grounds that we are all in together today. So thank you so much for having us.
Um, I am a psychiatrist and a neuroscientist as, uh, James was describing. I’m actually a translational neuroscientist, so raise your hand if you ever heard of that. We got three. Awesome. So my specialty in neuroscience is literally translating things that we’ve learned in the lab, in discoveries, in the clinic that haven’t successfully made it into practical use or into practice of clinical medicine.
So, uh, one of those very elegant and simple discoveries was Eric Kandel’s discovery that won him the Nobel Prize in 2000. He’s a very famous Holocaust survivor neuropsychiatrist. Um, and he discovered that practice makes perfect, just like our parents told us. Guess how amazing is that, right? Like we knew it all along, but science just discovered it as of 2000, so now it’s real.
And practice makes perfect around fear and safety learning, which is really, really interesting because that’s how ancient sea snails learned from three hundred million years ago, which is really what won Kandel and his colleagues a Nobel Prize because it’s not just us, it’s conserved all the way back to these ancient mammals.
And so I study trauma, and I study addictions, and I study complex hard to treat mental illness, and I treat patients. I’m in practice in Mill Valley in New York, and I’m one of the few psychiatrists nationwide who’s also trained in ketamine and MDMA and cannabis and psilocybin therapy because when you look at the way these treatments work, they seem to work very similarly to the way the indigenous people have described using ayahuasca, which is that they help people feel safe enough to remake meaning around past traumatic events.
And so when you look at the data, um, how many people have heard of the transgenerational inheritance of trauma or a cross-generational inheritance of trauma? Okay, so lots of people now. So this is like a really common understanding, which is really good, but that also is hopeless if we don’t know that we can do something about it.
So in 2022, we published a paper in combination with MAPS and, uh, Rachel Yehuda at Yale– uh, Rachel Yehuda at Mount Sinai, Ben Calmedi at Yale, and led by Candice Lewis at, uh, Arizona State University to show that trauma is in fact reversible on the epigenetic layer of code. So we never knew that trauma was reversible in terms of the memory that’s stored.
Trauma is fear learning. PTSD is a disorder that comes from fear learning. Depression, anxiety, ADHD, also other disorders that come from fear learning. We can extinguish fear, as B.F. Skinner said back in, you know, the early 20th century. We extinguish fear by relearning safety. Psychedelic medicines work by helping us to extinguish fear learning on the epigenetic code by radical safe experiences, safety being the keyword.
And so that’s what I study, and I develop wearable technology that gives people s- gives us some of the benefits of that safety to heal on the go in real life, wherever we are, even if we don’t have access to the wonderful miracle that are psychedelic medicines, and it’s called Apollo Neuro. And so we have new studies coming out comparing lots of different psychedelic medicines, how they work, how they activate the safety response system, how we make meaning from traumatic experiences, and how technology and AI are here to help us cure mental illness in the next ten years.
We are super excited to add suPAR to our mission partners, and that means you can use it in your practice, you can set up suPAR suppers. To find out more, go to goevomed.com/supar and we’ll send you where you need to go to find out more about it and to find out how you can lead your community to learn more about systemic chronic inflammation.
Check out suPAR. I recognize that we have a, um, brain crisis, and ultimately, um, you know, this, this got real for me. Like, I was the one guy in functional medicine whose story wasn’t, “Oh, I got chronically ill and had to make my way back.” I just knew that this was it as soon as I heard about it because I’d been in this, in the space for 10 years and realized that in the integrated medicine world, people don’t speak the same language, and we need a common language to bring this community together.
And I saw that functional medicine could be that language. I believe that it is that language, and that’s still why it’s the Functional Forum. It’s not the Longevity Forum, it’s not the Integrative Forum, because the common language is everything. So what we need is, like, in my judgment, the incredible work that Kat and Dr.
Bredesen and, and many others have been doing. You know, it, it showcases what’s possible. But it also, like, if we expect there to be another 100,000 Kat Toopses, I don’t think it’s gonna happen. Because, you know, Kat, the, the dedication that you have to your art and your craft and, and learning for, for all of these years, you know, I just don’t think that…
The doctors that already think like that are already here, they’re already in this place. So we need to make it easier. And so I wanted to bring Dr. Ryan Arnold up because he and I have become really close friends in the last few years. Um, he’s here from Thousand Oaks, California. Uh, Ryan has definitely the sexiest functional medicine website, so if you wanna have some website envy, go to clavahealth.com.
But Ryan is basic- is a, is a physician, a functional medicine physician who has built a brain health program into his practice. He has two locations and is growing quickly, and this is what I think isnecessary for the next stage of functional medicine because ultimately we need to build capacity to reverse these brain diseases.
Whether it’s mental health, whether it’s menopause brain, whether it’s cognitive decline, this is a priority, and Ryan’s doing it. Ryan, welcome. Thank you. Thank y’all. Um, thank you, James, and, and just wanna thank y’all for being here. I think it’s such an honor to speak amongst some of my, you know, uh, people I admire, like Dr.
Toops and Dr. Bredesen, who brought us to be here. I think that we stand on the shoulders of giants. You know, we, we get to apply these concepts to our patients. I started in a longevity-based practice when I realized that what modern medicine was providing was not moving the health pr- uh, conversation forward.
And what I then realized is that the ultimate longevity play is our brain and the brain health. And so when you see the, the work, and this study that they’ve published is Just the, the penultimate, uh, effort of many studies that have come before that have shown this, just not enough that, that the system would adopt it.
Um, I consider myself a survivor of academic medicine. 20 years ago, I, I, I’ve been in it for 20 years. Academic medicine is where you go to, you know, test good ideas and never practice them. And so we can live in a world now where we can practice and put these into play and not wait for the enemy of perfect to be, uh, you know, something that can actually save a life tomorrow.
So it’s exciting for us to be in this space. Um, in our practice, we have brought a team around this, kind of mimicking what Dr. Toups and Dr. Bredesen have, have advocated for, which is there’s no one perfect provider that knows this. It’s going to be a team, uh, of, of therapists, of nutritionists, of, of, of, you know, coaches that are gonna be a part of that.
And so that’s how we find success. You implement that. You, you develop the relationships. And, and leveraging the work that James and the teams through TruNeura and, and those platforms that have helped us speak the language of m- the business of medicine, which they don’t teach us as well in medical school, um, is important to help providers step out there and, and make that success.
So, uh, we’ll share our story and kind of what we’ve been doing in our practice and, and, and, um, I’m also looking forward to having those subpar dinners as well. I’m, I’m down for that. So we’re gonna, we’re gonna have that. So thank you. Thanks, Ryan. Thanks so much for being here with us for the Functional Forum.
I will tell you, it’s not nearly as fun watching it on YouTube as it is to be here in person. We’re gonna be doing a series of events over the year here in San Francisco, and also going to other places all around the country. If you’re interested in joining us, make sure you’re on the email list. I look forward to seeing you at the next event.
Thanks so much for being here. We’ll see you next time.
So that was the podcast. What an epic session. Thank you so much for tuning in to The Evolution of Medicine podcast. We will be back again next week. And thanks so much for tuning in, and we’ll see you next time.
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