In this week’s episode of the Evolution of Medicine Podcast, we dive deep into the groundbreaking work of Beth Lambert, executive director at Documenting Hope, and Dr. Heather Tallman Ruhm, medical director at Documenting Hope. This powerful conversation centers on reversing autism, addressing chronic pediatric illnesses, and how integrative medicine is playing a critical role in improving children’s health.
Lambert and Dr. Tallman Ruhm share their personal journeys and the transformative impact of their research on families dealing with autism. They discuss the importance of understanding autism as a spectrum and the various factors—from environmental toxins to total body load—that contribute to chronic illness in children. You’ll also hear about their ongoing research studies and the vital role of community support in helping families navigate these complex challenges.
Lambert and Dr. Tallman Ruhm emphasize the power of integrative medicine, and the growing network of practitioners dedicated to addressing autism and chronic illness in children through a holistic lens. Their work is pushing the boundaries of pediatric health and providing new hope for families. Tune in now to learn more about the future of pediatric health and the essential role of community support.
When you listen to this episode, you’ll learn:
- That in some cases, autism can be reversed
- Early intervention leads to better outcomes
- Each child’s health journey is unique and care must be individualized
- Environmental factors play a key role in the development of autism
- Genetics are important but not the sole cause—understanding the total load on a child’s system is crucial
- Community support is essential for families facing autism
- Documenting cases is critical for scientific validation and future treatment models
- And much more
Highlights:
- “Autism is reversible in some cases.”
- “The earlier you start to course correct, the better.”
- “It’s not just one thing that causes autism, it’s about the total load on the body.”
Beth Lambert:
First of all, you hear that something like autism is lifelong and then you contrast that with somebody’s experience where their child had autism and even a severe case of autism. And then you look at that child recovered from that case and they’re going on to live their best life, they’re going to college, having a girlfriend, having a boyfriend, doing all these things that people told them they would never do. You want that for every affected child because you know that there’s a lot of suffering, a lot of challenges that come along with that diagnosis. And if you can alleviate that, you give them an opportunity to live their best life, which is amazing.
James Maskell:
Alright, so a warm welcome to the podcast for the first time we have Beth Lambert, the executive director of the project and we’ll get more into those details. And also Dr. Heather Tallman Ruhm. Welcome.
Beth Lambert:
Thank you. Good to be here with you, James.
James Maskell:
Yeah, really excited to be with both of you. And I guess where I want to start is that we’ve actually known each other for a long time. Heather, I think I met you first more than a decade ago, and I guess I just want to feed back to you that it’s been amazing to know so much ahead of time, but I would also say that knowing what I know through the work that both of you have done, I think made me sound insane for a decade. Because when we first started, and I remember when I was working and living in New York for the first time, I was like, Hey, autism is really reversible. And in some cases that’s possible because I knew practitioners and doctors that were doing it. And I would say in 2009, 10, 11, 12, when I lived in New York, first of all, people were not aware of how much of an issue autism is.
They were still thinking, oh, this is a canard. We’ve been measuring it differently. All of those old things were still in their infancy and I think the most people still agreed with that. It’s very hard to agree with that today, seeing as the exponential curve has continued. But then secondly, to know enough about it to actually reverse it, which is what a lot of the practitioners that I was working with were capable of doing. Starting any sentence or coming into any conversation with that sort of communication I think made it difficult for people to think that I was not insane. Whereas now one, everyone realized that autism a huge deal and are aware of the vast expansion of the autism population. And secondly, now obviously we have a study and it got a lot of traction in the news recently showing that it has been reversed. And so a thank you in a certain way because I recognize that the way that I have parented and the way that I’ve looked after my own children and the way that I’ve advocated for children’s health over the last decade has been actually influenced significantly by both of you. But also I did recognize that those early years where I had a window in to an extremely niche world put me in a position where a lot of people probably thought I was crazy and that’s fine too. So thank you both.
So let’s get into it. So we met, I remember the beginning of 2013, so this is the year before the functional forum started. We did an event that I put on called Non-Suppressive Pediatrics at the Integrative Manual Therapy Center in Connecticut. And there’s actually some interesting history about that. Then in fact, Tom Gia Mateo was meant to be the first keynote for the first ever Functional Forum, and he pulled out with two days to go because of something. And I had just met Kelly Brogan six months before and I asked Kelly to step in and Kelly came on and keynote it and was incredible. And that was the beginning of the Functional Forum, but a year before all of that we’re doing this event in Connecticut and talking about different way ways of thinking about pediatrics. And Beth, I just remember you coming to that and standing up at the front of the room and saying like, “Hey, this is what I think we’re going to do” and maybe take us back to then what was going on then and give us a sort of an overview of what’s happened since then.
Beth Lambert:
Yeah. So if you go back to however many years ago that was well over a decade, my experience had been that I had met parents who had reversed all kinds of conditions in their children and definitely autism. And it was part of a book that I had published recently, or it was recently then it was 2010. And it was something that I felt like people needed to be talking about desperately because the prevailing idea was that whatever your condition, whether it was autoimmune or autism or what have you, it was likely genetic and lifelong and you’re just kind of stuck with it. But I was like, we have to raise the alarm bells. I’ve met these families who have reversed these conditions and we got to talk about this. And that’s where I began this idea of, well, we’ll just document it. We’ll just get a group of families who have a diagnosis and we’ll help them.
We’ll help them with supplements and doctors and nutrition, and then we’ll start from the beginning when they have their diagnosis and document over time as they work to reverse these things in their kids. Well, that was the idea, that was the big idea that became documenting hope. But it took a lot longer to actually execute on that idea because on one hand we sorted out with this idea we’re going to get documentary film about it. But the thing is, if you’re going to make a documentary film about it, people would challenge you in the scientific community. They’d be like, oh, well you just fabricated those stories. That’s not really what happened. Those kids didn’t actually have the conditions if they got better. So then we had done on this path that was like, well, let’s document it scientifically and how can we do that? And then we realized in that process that it’s a lot harder to document the reversal of these conditions than we thought because when you are talking about a condition like autism, it’s not like one thing causes it, so there’s not going to be one thing that you can test to prove that these kids get better.
So it ended up being a very long journey to try and figure out how do we effectively do a prospective study over time to demonstrate that these kids can improve when you change their diet, when you change the environment, when you give them personalized therapeutics. Ultimately we ended up with a couple of studies. We have two IRB-approved studies and as you just mentioned, we have a paper that got published in peer review, which isn’t our study. It’s a case report of a set of twins who have reversed their autism. This is a family that’s in our community that we have gotten to know because we have a membership community where we help parents learn how to reverse these conditions with their kids. So that’s really the origin story here, and we’re continuing this journey of looking for ways to document prospectively and retrospectively how kids can get better. And so that’s where we are.
James Maskell:
Wonderful. Dr. Tallman Ruhm. So you and I met I think a couple of years before that and I was very excited to meet you because at that moment many of the practitioners that we were working with were not MDs, and it was very rare actually to find an MD that was willing to talk the language and to understand, to try and understand what was going on. And I met a number of them over time. And actually, one of the reasons for the Functional Forum in 2014 was my partner Gabe and I were like we were trying to get people into bioenergetic medicine. That’s what I’d been doing for six years before and just realized that the only doctors that would ever show any interest, the ones that already had training in systems biology and root cause resolution through functional medicine education, and ultimately it was wonderful to meet, especially someone interested in pediatrics. It’s such a conservative specialty. So how did you get wound up into all of this and what’s been the journey for you?
Heather Tallman Ruhm, MD:
I am a family physician and when I entered medicine, I really had the idea in mind that you go into medicine to bring into people’s health things like nutrition and lifestyle changes that can support healthy living. And that isn’t necessarily what all you learned either in medical school or in residential training your residencies. So in medical school it was phenomenal. You learn all about the biochemistry and the physiology and the anatomy and the connection between systems and then you head into residency and you kind of break that into silos and forget the connection a little bit. And then you have application of solutions that is not about diet and lifestyle, but as Jeff Bland would say, “Addressing silos like a pill for an ill or a surgery for an ill” and that kind of thing. So it was very disillusioning I guess, and discouraging at that level of my training that where was the nutrition, where was the lifestyle?
I came from a healthy background, athletic background. I saw what was possible when you integrated nutrition and lifestyle. So when I moved through my practice, I was drawn to groups that worked in integrative medicine and worked in the healing end and really the hope end and as you said, systems biology, how all the systems are interconnected. So there were groups like now it’s the American Academy of, what is it for now? It’s A4M. Now, there were the early groups that were looking at that whole biological dynamic of systems and they were mostly doing it in adult care, but in my practice, I was in family medicine, so I was in pediatrics as well. And as I was practicing in an integrative clinic, I got more pediatric cases and more recognition that there was a body of doctors and scientists that were actually working on the biological aspects of healing kids with autism specifically and other chronic conditions of today.
And that was an incredible entry into that possibility that we can not only help reverse conditions for adults, but for pediatrics of in conditions that we once thought irreversible or at least when they came onto the scene. And then I met Beth, she had finished writing a book Epidemic Answers, not Epidemic Answers, sorry, the name of the organization she founded, but it was A Compromised Generation. And as I heard her talk about what she was discovering, it just made perfect sense and aligned with what I was seeing in pediatrics and what I was seeing the community of people that were helping to get at the root of what we’re talking about is autism symptoms, the symptoms that are associated with that name or diagnosis we call autism. And that has as changed somewhat over time and given people perspective on why they’ve had certain challenges in their lifetime and maybe even have been treated unfairly because of that.
And what this has given us the opportunity to do in the research now is to not look at reversing necessarily a diagnosis title, even though maybe that will happen, but it’s what are the things that are making life difficult for somebody in terms of symptomatology? What is it that is this constellation of things? Just like if you were to have lupus or MS or down syndrome, whatever you have, whatever diagnoses you have, what can make your life and health closer to what it can optimally be in the sense of daily function, in the sense of joy, in the sense of participating in society and relationships and community. And I think it’s the deprivation of that that we saw in conditions like autism at the time that really made you look for those avenues of hope. So there was the shift.
James Maskell:
Yeah. Well, I had a doctor on recently who works in the Alzheimer’s space and she said that the first time she was able to take someone who had previously had major cognitive impairment and turn the lights back on, that was what hooked her into the work. And I can imagine for kids, once you take a child that’s on a pathway downward and you can turn the lights back on and they start moving in the right direction, I imagine that’s quite addictive as well, right?
Beth Lambert:
Oh, for sure. That’s exactly what it is. When you see, first of all, you hear that something like autism is lifelong and then you contrast that with somebody’s experience where their child had autism and even a severe case of autism. And then you look at that child recovered from that case and they’re going on to live their best life, they’re going to college, having a girlfriend, having a boyfriend, doing all these things that people told them they would never do. You want that for every affected child because you know that there’s a lot of suffering, a lot of challenges that come along with that diagnosis. And if you can alleviate that, you give them an opportunity to live their best life, which is amazing.
Heather Tallman Ruhm, MD:
That gets us into, Beth, the topic of total load on the human body. And so when I was talking about diet and lifestyle, that is just really the entry point where we can have control of our own lives to the extent we have the knowledge and have a ability to become of what kind of things are adding to our system’s burden. The system of systems, if you’re pushing or there’s one area of the body is kind of weighted down that the other part of the body is impacted, whether it’s lack of sleep, which we see not only in the individuals we’re talking about, but in their whole caretakers, their families, and we know how that can be detrimental. There are plenty of books written recently about the importance of sleep, for instance. So what if you can give somebody the opportunity to sleep again? What if you can give the opportunity to have fluid movement or strength or any of those kinds of things through lowering those things in their environment, in their diet that are creating dysregulation or getting people off course.
And so in a kind of way, in a very simplistic way, and you’ve heard me lecture before too, it’s in a simplistic way, what can you lower of the burden? What can you raise of the kind of deficiencies or the support that a child is not getting and then whatever got derailed at a given time in life, wherever that was, how can you kind of reorient that? And so whether that’s structural, functional, chemical, whatever that is, it’s kind of a simplified way to look at things as a total load and relieving that total load. So kind of the Goldilocks sweet spot of more of what’s supportive, less of what’s harmful, and then helping to guide back onto track something that maybe fell off the track, like I said, structurally or otherwise.
James Maskell:
Yeah, it’s pretty amazing. I guess can you just talk to obviously in that early years, so from 2007, I would say until 2007, until 2013, I met a lot of practitioners that were doing this work, serving those practitioners, and then also met a lot of the kids through being part of that journey. And I would say, can you just talk to I guess the spectrum? I know that the further along that a child is on the spectrum and the longer that they’ve been there, the less likely it is to sort of bring a child all the way back to complete normal function. I mean, I follow in some cases these kids on social media and I see some of them having a job and working and then some of them still struggling. And I just love for people and practitioners to understand how that spectrum starts and the journey to reverse and what that looks like.
Beth Lambert:
You want to go ahead, Heather?
Heather Tallman Ruhm, MD:
You can talk to bioindividuality first and other things. Go ahead.
Beth Lambert:
Yeah, I was just going to say that with human development, the earlier you start to course-correct, as Heather was talking about, whatever got derailed, the earlier can get back on track. I mean, there’s that neuroplasticity piece that’s always there. There’s always the opportunity to reverse the process, but it is harder as you get older. But having said that, I’ve actually, I feel like I’ve been schooled by stories of people who have done huge strides towards healing even as adults, like adults with autism who have become aware of the fact that their symptoms, that they always just chalked up to their diagnosis, were secondary to gut dysbiosis and were secondary to cellular toxicity or to retained d infant reflexes or cranial nerves or all these kinds of things that you start to discover. So I think that’s an important thing to note is that while it’s commonly believed that the older you get, the harder it is to reverse these things, I don’t thinks totally true.
It is definitely possible. It’s easier when you start earlier for sure. But I think that getting into the bioindividuality piece, that’s where it gets tricky. And Heather, you might want to talk about this because there is no one size fits all to this, especially with regard to autism. People ask us all the time, I’m sure you get this all the time, too, Heather, that people are looking for the protocol. What’s the thing that you did, which is the doctor that you worked with, which doctor did you see that was the expert that taught you how to reverse autism? And that’s not how it works. How it works is each child who developed autism got there through a particular path or trajectory that’s different from the next child and their path back to health is going to be different than the next child. So that’s one thing I think it’s really important for us to get across is that this whole thing is a function of myriad environmental factors and exposures and experiences. So the healing path is going to be very specific and very different for each individual.
Heather Tallman Ruhm, MD:
Yeah, absolutely. What got us there, when you think about body burden, what makes up a child’s body burden and that isn’t necessarily just in one lifetime could be from generations certainly in utero and whatever exposures, experiences beyond that. And then of course the tendency to want to bundle everything into genetics. Let’s find that one gene or the one vitamin that causes scurvy. It’s not that simple anymore. It’s not just one thing that you can usually reverse the rest. It’s like Beth said, it’s a constellation of things that are very individual. And so it’s really in a bigger sense, it’s about looking at patterns and what kind of patterns you’re seeing in your child or in yourself, what is being communicated by the physiology. I think one of the things we often think about is we chalk up certain behaviors in psychology and in psychiatry behaviors as a certain kind of mental health description or diagnosis, but just like the body may be acting up or we are acting out in a certain way, it’s usually an expression of something and it can’t just be chalked up to a gene or a nutrient or a something, but if we start to see patterns, we say, what is it that the body is trying to express?
It’s constantly trying to heal, it’s constantly trying to express its needs. And if we’re just trying to shut it up or counter it or block it, we’re missing the opportunity to learn from the individual what is it that has got them stuck? Is it something chemical? Is it something physical? Is it the environment? Is it an emotion? What is it that makes them uniquely vulnerable at this time to that presentation? I don’t know if that’s answering the original question.
James Maskell:
Yeah, I mean to answer the question, I would just say I just want to feedback to both of you that for all the practitioners that got into this, either because they had a child who suffered and then they just took it on themselves to learn of which there were many, and that’s what a lot of my customers when I was a sales rep, but there was lots of practitioners on that end or doctors or other practitioners that saw this and wanted to learn because once you’ve seen one recover, you’re like, I need to understand this. Working in conjunction with these kids was so deep and rich in lessons. For every one of those practitioners that then was able to help all of these other kids who may be at different levels of chronicity is an incredible gift. I mean, the healing prowess of all of the practitioners connected to all of these kids went through the roof just because very tough cases, lots to learn, lots of understanding about the physiology, lots of understanding about reversing chronic illness, and I think there’s many gifts from this, but one of them I think is that I know practitioners personally who are incredible at what they do, and the only reason why they ended up doing it was because of their own children’s suffering.
And so I’m grateful for that because it really created a resilient network of practitioners, many of which Beth, who ended up in your network, I guess, right?
Beth Lambert:
Yeah, I mean I am grateful for the fact that that network has grown. If you think about going back 10 years or more that the network was reasonably small, and as you said, there weren’t as many medical doctors. There was a lot of naturopaths or chiropractors maybe, but I feel like that the community of medical doctors has grown maps, medical academy pediatric special needs is training a lot of physicians and broadening the tent of practitioners at their training. So that is something that’s really great because when I started this in 15 years ago, there was a handful of people that you could refer parents onto when you started getting their attention that, oh yeah, there’s something you can do. You can work on nutrition, you can get these functional medicine tests, you can do all this stuff. But then they’re like, all right, who I go see?
And you’re like, well, there’s this person, this person, and this person. You had three people. It wasn’t really that bad, but you get the picture. And now I feel like there’s so many more and there’s more professional organizations, there’s more community around it. So that’s really encouraging because while the parents have a lot of work to do on their own, a lot of this does land on the families. Families can do a lot of this work on their own. It’s so wonderful when they can find a practitioner who has that experience that you’re talking about who can guide them on that journey. And thankfully, there’s many more today than there was just a decade ago.
James Maskell:
Beautiful. Well, I guess let’s get into the studies. You mentioned that this case series got a lot of attention. It was in the news. I was shocked to see that because it certainly press before and now when we spoke, obviously it sounds like there are at least two other major studies in the work. So can you talk me through what’s happened so far? What else is happening in the background and anything else that you can share with the community?
Heather Tallman Ruhm, MD:
I think we should put into context for the listener if they don’t already know. Some people are very involved with us already, but there, as Beth described, there were two IRB-approved studies, right? One is a massive survey for families that they can fill out, and we’re in the process of moving it from one platform to another to make it much richer dynamic experience with the parents who are willing to take it. It’s quite long, but that’s a collection of all of the things that are impactful in one’s health stressors in the environment. So you can imagine it’s kind of like an intake form for a medical visit for your first one, but it’s on steroids. So we’re learning from the details that are coming in, the different conditions, what they tend to associate with in terms of impactful experiences. If the child signs, symptoms, exposures, you name it.
It’s just huge. It kind of covers everything from the type of detergent you use to your belief systems. So that’s one study. The other one was the prospective study that Beth alluded to, which is actually taking children from a relatively early state of their chronic illness and then watching them over the course of 18 months. And that study has changed somewhat. We had our kind of pilot with two families involved with two different illnesses or chronic illnesses of childhood and then watch them documented their kind of progress with lots of different community involvement of different practitioners and specialists looking at the child from 360 degree of angles. And that was a huge undertaking, and that was an opportunity to now course-correct as it were or narrow it down and we’re focusing the next part of the study, which is upcoming, so expect another 12 children to be involved and defining one condition and dispersing that load as it were, across a larger group of practitioners, probably as Beth mentioned from the communities like med maps, that’s an ideal community of functional practitioners.
Those two are research studies, one both underway. So there’s the survey. And the survey is actually an introduction to the, that’s called the CHIRP survey, Childhood Inventory of Resilience and Prevention. And then we have the flight study, which is the prospective live study with real children documenting what can take place in the course of 18 months when you have that whole system’s perspective, bioindividuality understand how the body heals and know how to test those things and interpret that and get the right kind of supports for those kids. So that’s happening. Those things are happening concurrently and being modified and strengthened with each step, and they’re very complex and large, but we’re trying to reel them in a way that everybody can benefit from them. And then the case report that you’re describing, was it really a fallout or what we call a ripple effect from the research that we are doing?
And that is that somebody in the community took the CHIRP study for their children, took that large inventory and started to learn about the various things that might be stressors to their children from a broad range of things. So there’s kind of a feedback that comes in the report of all the things that have been shown in the literature that could be problematic. And so learning that then found a lot of the resources that are tied and linked to the resources that we have available. So really important books to read practitioners in the local community. And it was in the same local region as where we had started the prospective study. So because this family was kind of doing their own thing in parallel, but they weren’t officially part of our study, but they were doing in parallel and taking advantage of a lot of the resources that we availed to them and that other local practitioners or practitioners who were already part of our network availed to these children, some of those really amazing practitioners and amazing authors and things, they took that all in.
And as parents who had incredible just passion, drive intelligence, resources and love for their children, they just went in full in. What happened is that those twin girls who were, again, not formally in our study at all, but listening with one ear to what we were doing and involved with one Ear with what some of the resources we have and involved in those resources that come with documenting hope or what was epidemic answers, webinars healing together forum where parents can come together and converse about their conditions and meet with myself or other practitioners and learn more about what they can do for their children right now live. So they took part in all of that, and we are not at all taking credit for the outcomes. It’s just this amazing parent-driven research that was a ripple from all of the collection of resources we have as well.
So it wasn’t like they were, our study they happened to be doing in parallel with us using a lot of the same resources that we rely on and a lot of the same practitioners that we rely on to get their children better. And then they reported to us that they had seen tremendous improvement in both children over the course of a year. And that point we said, even though this isn’t part of our formal study, somebody’s got to document that. And we had a team of people that kind of knew the ins and outs of that already from our prospective study and dug into our pockets and said, we can put some of our resources toward documenting in a scientific way through a case report that this change happened. So it was just this opportunity that we seized. And it wasn’t for any promotion or self-promotion or parent promotion specifically.
It was this is an example of what’s possible with a lot of time, attention and awareness and resources from the community that are all working in the field of hope and recovery. And most of those people have been there, as you said, themselves, either with their own children or with children that they’ve worked with in their office. And going back to what you said, James, this is very, you can’t help but want to tell their story. Parents can’t usually get their story out, and we’re trying to facilitate the stories coming forth. Usually there’s a lot of expense and time and grudgey drudgery working on those details, but it paid off in more than we could have ever imagined because it brought people back to this kind of place of they’re not alone, they you’re studying that. I’m finding that can I be involved with that?
I want that same kind of hope. Where do I learn more? We’ve had people step forward asking for their cases to be reported on, and we don’t necessarily have the bandwidth or the funding to do all of them or any of them, but as Beth said, it’s hard to collect all that information in a way that can then be presented scientifically. And then you take those challenges and you learn because someone will say, can you call this reversing autism? And we don’t say that in our paper. We’re talking about reversing the symptoms, right? Because that’s what we can concretely show from the various scores on the children. And coming back to your point about what inspires us to do this work, I wanted to shout out to one of the practitioners that you worked with really early on, James, and is probably a big reason we came together, or at least at some point, wove our paths together.
And that was Millie holiday nurse practitioner. And long before I met you, I had heard her speaking at a forum conference or at least a cassette, that she was recorded on heavy metals and dental problems related to health issues and pediatrics. And so it was unusual for this nurse practitioner to speak at this mostly doctor conference. But the line that I’m going to slaughter with her accent, but it was so beautiful that it still almost brings me to tears, is when she saw the recovery in these children. And this was my first real glimmer. Long before I met either of you, I was living out in California and working at the Whitaker Wellness Institute, which was all about integration, all about hope and nutrition and lifestyle and nonsurgical and nonchemical interventions to the degree possible. So I was learning it in that context. And then I listened to her say as she was describing the children who had recovered from really difficult, difficult life experiences, severe allergies, severe tantruming, severe discomfort and pain, and she said in her beautiful South African accent, she said, “I am so honored to be a part of helping these children reclaim their lives.”
Beth Lambert:
It was pretty good.
James Maskell:
Good South African accent. I probably didn’t do so well on that point. I guess I’d just love to get your thoughts on this, Beth. When I posted, as soon as I saw my friend, Dr. Angela Lucterhand, did a great video on it online, I shared it and I had people come back being like, well, I don’t want my autism cured. And these are people that are not in the same category of what we’re talking about. The kids that I saw, the repetitive behaviors banging their head against the wall, having to wear a diaper, whatever, you can’t help but want to help those people. You meet a kid like that, you’re like, please, is there anything that we can do to help a kid like that? I could see so much suffering. How tricky is it to navigate now where it’s sort of like there’s a spectrum and people are clamoring to maybe be on the spectrum and it’s like, “Hey, I’ve met you. This is not that.” How do you navigate that?
Beth Lambert:
Right. So that’s one of the reasons why I strongly believe we need some kind of subtyping of autism or a different way of talking about what we call the spectrum of autism. Because when you say that you can reverse autism, and you’re talking about these kids who are level three or severe as you described, maybe they don’t have the capacity to toilet on their own, maybe they don’t have the capacity to ever live independently. Maybe they are self-injurious. That is not the same thing as a 45-year-old man or woman who has a job who is able to speak, take care of themselves, has children, but maybe has some social anxiety and some sensory issues and some features that would classify them as having a level one or a lower kind of level of autism. Those are vastly different things. So we are making a mistake in the psychiatric community and amongst pediatric neurologists, anybody who’s diagnosing this condition, we’re making a mistake calling it autism because it’s not the same.
It’s just fundamentally so different when you’re talking about a severe child who’s developmentally impaired and you’re talking about an adult who’s functioning in the world. So I think what’s happened, I wrote a whole huge, super-long blog post about it because I think what’s happening is it’s getting wrapped up into identity politics, and we have words like neurodiverse and neurodivergent, which are very well-intentioned. They’re saying, “We want to embrace everybody for their differences.” Of course we do that. That goes without saying. If somebody thinks differently, that’s awesome. That’s part of the human experience, and we love that. We want that. But when that person that thinks differently is self-injurious and in pain and so debilitated by their symptoms, we need to not call that just a difference. We need to say, “Well, what’s medically going on with this person? What is underneath the symptoms? What’s physiologically out of imbalance?” Because we want to alleviate the suffering. So that’s how I talk about autism. I’m like, which autism are you talking about when you’re talking about I’m 45 and I’m embracing my autism? That’s fine. Which autism are you talking about? And that’s part of the conversation that I don’t think enough people are having.
James Maskell:
Yeah, thanks for clearing that up. I really, really appreciate that because that’s a conversation that I’ve had had many times over the last few years and coming face-to-face with, I don’t know what you just call level three autism, it changes you. And once, it certainly still inspires me to want to get out and do the work every day because ultimately, especially when it’s an environmental issue, you can’t help but feel for it. I guess does coming back to the genetic thing is a reversal or is an environmental reversal of an environmental illness, finally putting the stake in the idea that this is a genetic disease and how much, I guess what is the implication do you think, for this, for medicine as a whole, for chronic disease as a whole? And I guess what has been the ripple effects now of this coming out and now has there been a heightened interest in the work?
Beth Lambert:
I think Heather could speak to the genetics piece because she’s got some specialized training there. I want to say that autism is not just an environmentally derived illness. There are genetic components. The problem is that we lead with genetics with almost every kind of condition, whether it’s autism or depression or autoimmune disease. We lead with that as if that’s the cause. Genes are important and you need to pay attention to them. And I think what we need to do is not just pay attention to genes, but how are we interacting with the environment and what is that doing to our gene expression? And Heather, you could speak more about that because that’s an area you know a lot about.
Heather Tallman Ruhm, MD:
Well, yeah, I think that 10 years ago, the word epigenetics wasn’t really on people’s, just like the word “microbiome” wasn’t on people’s tongue or the word “autism” for that matter. Fifteen years ago, we didn’t have these words that are just commonplace to us now. But genetics, we used to think a gene with a disease, this is like a gene with a hair color. It just be one-to-one. And now with genomics and nutrigenomics and other things like that, it’s looking not for the gene that we still do. We still do. And occasionally we find a gene like a mutation we call it, that’s unusual in the population on a very particular gene that will manifest as a particular diagnoses. But even with that, let’s say down syndrome, very specific within that, what happens sometimes with that is that then they just get bundled. Every symptom gets bundled with down syndrome.
And we have a colleague who has a Down syndrome child who she has addressed all their health needs, not just written things off to, that’s Down syndrome, and their seen her child tremendously and yes, go off to college. So even those cases that we think of as rare and pinned down to a certain gene, there’s really room to help in decrease suffering and improve vitality in those children or adults. But the genomics we’re looking at today is more about that epigenetics piece. You’re not going to change some fact that someone has an extra chromosome or something that’s not going to change per se, but you can still help their health in ways that you might not help it otherwise. But it’s looking at the genomics as to what factors are making a child or a person by looking at your genomics, your individual genomics, what SNPs or single nucleotide polymorphisms are you a little bit of advantage in your environment and which ones are giving you a little bit more of a challenge, or those are in areas, they’re in categories of areas like inflammation, metabolism, vitamin assimilation, or transport into certain parts of your body.
You could have B12 absorbed well, but you can see on the genetics that maybe it’s hard to get into the brain or you can see that there’s a vulnerability if there is exposure to a virus, that someone is more likely to have that cytokine storm or inflammatory cascade. So it helps you to navigate how people might be impacted by their environment and what might take priority in that environmental or nutritional intervention over other things rather than just kind of a shotgun approach that everybody should have broccoli. Now, maybe that’s one of those that maybe it is a little bit higher on the level if you talk about broccoli sprouts and what’s in them, but it’s that individual piece that we’re talking about. So genomics can play very well into that. I hesitate to say this, but as you’re moving upstream even further to what is it that’s impacting our genetics, right?
Something has derailing certain of our genes as well through generations. And so one of the doctors we work with is looking at the genetics of the parents and the children and seeing lots of de novo new genetic variants or mutations, call it what you will, they’re not matched with parent anymore. So that gets us back to that layer of environment again. So even if we look upstream from genomics or genetics, we have to say what is shifting that? And we know from an epigenetic standpoint, you can either turn on or off a gene, and that’s a kind of a cartoon version of describing it. But if you have a certain nutrition, then it will drive the genetics to act in a certain way. If you have a certain toxin, it may derive it to act in another way. But upstream from that is that there are labs now looking at how specific toxins in the environment, chemical or otherwise metals, et cetera, are adhering to the genetic SNPs.
So regardless of me looking at those SNPs, I think that’s very helpful. It can be, it’s kind of a study like another PhD study to tack onto your medicine, but it’s still valuable. Yet if those toxins are still in the environment, then that might even render the information we’re getting even less useful. So if you keep going above to what is the health of our planet and the health of the things living on it, the health of our water, the health of our soil, the health of our air, all of those things are playing how our genetics are not only expressing themselves, but how they’re changing with time.
James Maskell:
Yeah, very interesting. Well, thank you for that. I want to just wrap here, Beth, I want a couple things. One is practitioners who are listening to this, how can they be of service to the movement without being, I’m sure that it’s a lot managing people who have really good intentions that you have to try and find places for them. What’s the best way that people who are listening to this can help you and help these things move forward?
Beth Lambert:
Well, there’s a lot of ways to help, a lot of ways to get involved. One of the things we do have a practitioner directory. If you go to epidemic answers.org, we have a practitioner directory. So if you’re not in it, you might be in it. You can be listed that way and that way parents can find you. I will say though, one of the other things that we’re really interested in after the aftermath of the publication of this paper, we have received some people, as Heather had mentioned, who would like us to write up their case reports. But one of the critical pieces of that is that you need to have exquisite documentation. You need to have an ATEC score at the beginning. You need to have it at the end. You need to have lab documentation. So one of the things that I think is important for physicians to do is to encourage their patients and the patient’s parents to make sure that they’re documenting things, that they’re keeping track of things.
And if they have cases that are really well documented of reversal, we might be able to put some more case reports out there. And as we were doing this one, we had to go through the literature just to kind of review again, what’s out there. There’s not a lot. Nancy O’Hara published one, Sid Baker published one, Deborah Fine, published a bunch of papers on autism symptom reversal, but we have a lot more work to do here. So if there’s practitioners out that are doing the good work, connect with us. Go to documenting hope.com and reach out. You can get me at beth@epidemicanswers.org and just get in touch and help us get more of these case reports published and continue to document the process of healing.
James Maskell:
Yeah, amazing. And can I just give you another opportunity here? You mentioned Nancy O’Hara. That was one of the offices that I spent a lot of time in when I lived in Connecticut. You mentioned Sid Baker. I know as being just like the guru’s guru for a long time in functional medicine. I know a lot of people have sort of been involved in this project for various lengths of time supporting scientifically otherwise, can you just give, if you want, a brief roll call of people who have been impactful to acknowledge them? And I know that you’ll definitely leave out people who I’m sure need acknowledgement, but I just think for the community to know who’s been on the grind on this and has really allowed this to come together. And I’m so grateful actually to hear that your connection with Millie was so powerful because Millie is one of the reasons that I got inspired to come and join in this brief story.
I was tested by Millie in 2001, so five years before I moved to America. And she discovered in me that I had high levels of pesticides. And we worked that out that basically the way you play cricket, I played a lot of cricket growing up. You spit on the ball to shine it and whatever. And I was playing cricket in good stadiums that had obviously a lot of pesticides and whatever on there. And that was the beginning of, I was like, hang on a minute. No one ever told me that. And I had a test with her on that. So she’s a big part of why I ended up getting into this. And that was four years before I decided to make the move. But I credit that experience with helping me to realize there’s something else definitely going on underneath this chronic illness epidemic, and no one knows what’s going on, and nearly definitely knew what was going on and has the outcomes to prove it. So, Beth, who would you sort call on the roll call of people who have added significant value in this journey knowing that you will forget one or two, I’m sure.
Beth Lambert:
Yeah, no, there’s so many, right? I mean, there’s a couple names that pop up that’s really significant players. And Dr. Anju Usman, obviously is such a pioneer in this whole thing, Dr. New, Dr. Nancy O’Hara. They are the ones who are leading the way with med maps. Dr. Masson is one. I was mixing the two. And then we have a whole advisory board of practitioners who, some of them are pediatric-focused and some of them are just pioneers in functional medicine. If you go to documentinghope.com, you can see some of our advisors, and Heather, you probably have others that you would recommend, but we bring them all into our conference. So we have a conference every November in Orlando, and we ask some of these amazing practitioners to come and share their knowledge. So those are some of the people that came to our conference last year, and we have other ones coming this year. Heather, who would you include?
Heather Tallman Ruhm, MD:
Well, I’m going back a little further and thinking about, I mean like Sid Baker, that goes back, you said the gurus are the gurus. And I was thinking of the people who started doing blogs and podcasts long before they had even the name of blogs and podcasts. And those are the people like the Jeffrey Blands that were out there interviewing month after month individuals who were making a difference in heart health, in organ health, in emotional health or whatever. So a lot of, we tend to forget sometimes the people that were way ahead of us in that. And I think that it’s like the Jeffrey Blands that went out there and sought out others that were doing good work and then brought them to the light of other practitioners. So I think that’s happening now a lot in the podcast world.
But yeah, that’s the person, one person that came to mind. There are many, I don’t know where to begin, honestly, with the individuals. I think every time I go to a modern day conference, we’ve hosted our own now and we’re about to host a second one that’s in this field of hope and on the cutting edge of different changes and scientific breakthroughs. It’s just this amazing melting pot of practitioners that are passionate and driven to find ways to help people and are seeing ways to help them. So it’s big, it’s growing. It maybe isn’t big enough, but I think we can’t forget that we learn from both our successes and our failures. And a lot of what we have learned about what isn’t working has been as important as what is working. And that isn’t to credit people that are making mistakes. But it’s to say that most people, I think, that get into the health field are driven to help people and maybe don’t have the right tools, and it’s not made easy to find those tools. So it’s not the kind of who’s who and who’s not, who can help the others that have the potential for joining in this hope model.
Beth Lambert:
What’s a really good illustration of that is we were talking a lot of functional medicine practitioners, but there’s so many people that come in from a different field like Dr. William Padula who’s a neuro optometry, or you’ve got Dr. Svetlana Mosca Tova who pioneered the neurosensory motor integration technique. You have vision Dr. James Bronson, who’s looking at airway. So those are the really important players who are kind of on the periphery, but they need to be brought front and center because they’re looking beyond biochemistry, they’re looking beyond sort of the typical medical approaches, and they have this whole other perspective that I think that sharing in the community of all these different perspectives recently, I think it’s been really important. So that’s what we really strive for. Documenting hope is like the 360 view. Have we looked at all of the angles for this child? And that’s what Sid Baker would say, have we done all we can for this child?
Heather Tallman Ruhm, MD:
And also, there’s a great quote from Sid Baker that I hope to get right, and it is, “Are we are the same people with different diseases or are we all different people with the same disease?”
James Maskell:
Yeah, sure. I love that one. Well, look, this has been a great way to finish it. I would just want to thank both of you for being here. We’ll have all the details in the show notes, including the twin case report and how to get in touch with Beth with Epidemic Answers with Documenting Hope. Thank you, Dr. Tallman Ruhm, for being here. Thank you, Beth, for your primary work and keeping the pedal to the metal on this couldn’t be more important. I’m really grateful to know you, Beth. One thing I just want to say is that we’ve had this intro for the Functional Forum forever, and you got up and did a question, I think either at the Bobby Kennedy Functional Forum or maybe one of the ones that we did down in a BC kitchen at Deepak home base. And that little clip of you standing there always made it into the cut somehow. And every time I would watch the Functional Forum, over 120 episodes over 10 years, there you are in the intro stepping up and do your thing. So it always reminded me of that. And I’m grateful to know both of you, and thank you so much for your pioneering work.
This has been The Evolution of Medicine Podcast. We’ll be talking about reversing autism. We’d be talking about all the amazing work that’s going on in the space of chronic pediatric illness. And look forward to our next session, and we’ll see you next time.
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