All Episodes
Previous Next
Jan. 25, 2023 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
01:01:44
Dr. Basima Williams and Mike Adams talk about achieving personal health REVOLUTIONS...
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
All right, welcome folks.
Mike Adams here of brighteon.com and today we're joined by a first time guest.
Now what's interesting is I mentioned what she's doing a few weeks ago in my podcast.
I mean, I must have mentioned just a couple of sentences because she does this functional medicine and it's kind of a telemedicine arrangement where she helps Really a small number of patients in a very in-depth kind of way to revitalize their entire lifestyle, food, biomarkers in their blood, everything.
And we had a ton of interest from that.
And I got requests from people to say, well, why don't you talk to this doctor or can we hear more?
And so...
That's what we're doing right now.
She's our guest today, Bashima Williams from beingfunctional.com, and that's spelled B-E-I-N-G, being, like a human being, beingfunctional.com.
Dr.
Bashima Williams joins us right now to talk about all of this and more.
Dr.
Williams, thank you for joining me.
It's great to have you on.
Mike, thank you so much for having me on and allowing us the opportunity to really share with your listeners what functional medicine is and just how they can take control of their own lives and their own health.
And they can definitely be a lot more active in their own health.
You know, and not just relying on traditional medicine.
Yeah, I want to talk about really what is functional medicine and how people are becoming more advanced in their understanding of medicine now.
I think taking more responsibility for it, but isn't that part of the functional medicine philosophy is that you're not just outsourcing your health to a doctor or a shot or a pill.
You're actually owning The whole health experience and the results.
Is that correct?
Yes, that is very correct.
I think with this information that we have available to us at our fingertips, especially with, you know, everything you can look up online and everything.
And also intuitively, my patients know that there's something else out there.
Now, functional medicine looks at root cause of illness rather than just the illness.
So rather than just prescribing a prescription, which sometimes is definitely needed, there are prescriptions that are really focused on more lifestyle changes rather than just a simple fix.
Therefore, it does take longer to see patients.
For example, I see my patients for one hour.
It's not a five- or ten-minute visit.
We go through everything.
We go through their sleep habits, their exercise habits, their diet, and we prescribe a tailored plan for our patients.
So it's really, really helpful in that sense and definitely different from just practicing traditional medicine.
You know, that's really interesting.
And by the way, when you say traditional medicine, are you meaning conventional medicine?
Yes.
Okay, because I just want to be sure we're not confusing it with traditional Chinese medicine, TCM.
No, no, no, no.
You're talking about just kind of pharmaceutical general practitioner mainstream medicine when you use that terminology?
Okay, great.
All right, just to be clear.
And you are a licensed physician, and you offer these services, as I understand, in four different states currently.
Is that correct?
Yes, three currently, California, Missouri, and Florida, and we're working on Texas.
Okay, great.
Okay, great.
Yeah, you're going to have a lot of interest from Texas.
So here's something interesting.
Even though I'm not a doctor and you are, because I talk a lot about health and nutrition, people sometimes come up to me and they ask me questions like, hey, I have this symptom.
What can I do for that?
Like there's one thing, you know, and my answer often to those people is, well, if I were to even begin to answer that question, I would need your food log for the last week.
What do you eat?
I would need the log of what you put on your body.
What's in your bathroom, your skin care, your laundry?
What are you exposed to?
What are you ingesting?
What are you eating and drinking?
Or smoking, perhaps.
I need to know all of it if I were to even have an answer.
But I'm not a doctor, so I can't even give you an answer.
But there's not just like this allopathic mindset of, oh, I have this one thing.
Give me one thing to...
Stop that one thing.
That is not the way to get to health, is it?
That's right.
I just had about 300 thoughts in my head right now while you were talking, including if I can just go back to when I started practicing medicine.
It was about 25 years ago.
About 12, 13 years into it, I was being asked the same thing from my patients.
Hey, what if I change my diet?
And I'm like, well, let's try it.
So we were experimenting a lot.
And then I started looking into it more because my patients who were, for example, giving up gluten or dairy, something so basic, were actually in less pain.
Their joints hurt less.
And so what was the science behind it?
That was really what was driving me and also driving me equally as hard is the fact that my family history has a lot of heart disease.
And so I thought...
What can I do now so that when I'm 60, I'm not having a heart attack?
Or when I'm 70, I'm still being functional, which is, you know, hence the name being functional.com.
What can I do now?
And so the way medicine was being practiced early on in my own practice, because this is what we're taught in medical school, Is there's an illness and there's a prescription for it.
And very little time is spent on nutrition and lifestyle changes and things of that sort, as you mentioned.
And also, hence that one-hour visit.
It It takes a long time for us to look at toxic exposure, dietary changes that we have to make, exercise.
We even get into the spiritual and the social community that people have because we know that diseases definitely increase when we are not socially communicating and being with other people.
So definitely...
So much more fun doing functional medicine than it was my first, you know, 12 years of medicine.
And, you know, it's an additional three years of training.
Who has time for that when they're already in full practice, which is why there aren't a lot of board-certified medical doctors who are also certified in functional medicine.
I think that with information and the way, you know, our younger generation is growing up with all of this information that we have, Now, I think they're more exposed to it.
So I'm hoping that, you know, in the next five and 10 years, there'll be more and more people like this.
But right now, you know, we're doing this virtually for a reason.
And we're super busy for a reason.
People want functional medicine and they don't have access to it.
So we're doing it virtually so we can increase access around the country.
Yeah.
That's amazing.
I think that's the future of medicine actually is a lot of telemedicine.
And there's another interesting thing.
I'd like your response on this, but I brought this up.
Are you familiar with that AI system called ChatGPT that's being talked about everywhere now?
Have you heard of this?
A little bit.
Well, ChatGPT...
Is that the AI? Yeah, it's a Microsoft-funded AI learning system.
And they recently had this ChatGPT system take the final exam of the Wharton Business School MBA, and it passed.
And then there was a lot of speculation.
Well, it could pass a medical school final examination.
And I said in my podcast, I said, well, you know...
If you're practicing medicine like a robot, you're obsolete, right?
If you're a glorified human vending machine working for big pharma where it's just match this symptom with this drug and X equals Y, yeah, you're obsolete, but...
If you're, like you are, a functional medicine doctor, which means you have to have a holistic picture, you have to express compassion, empathy, understanding for people's lifestyle and their decisions and their specific challenges.
Not everybody can implement everything that you want them to implement right away.
Now, you're human.
In this, you're not only being functional, you're being human, and that means that no AI system can ever replace your kind of medicine.
So I think that this relationship that you offer patients will outlast any kind of automation that will ever come into existence.
I agree with you 100%.
I actually just listened to that podcast that you had and I 100% agree with you.
The bottom line is I followed my passion in terms of what I know I was being called to do.
And when you do that, when your passion and what you're good at kind of meet, you're going to have things like empathy.
You're going to have things like a drive to really figure things out.
And then you're going to get really good at, you know, certain things.
You can't be great at everything, but you're going to be really good at certain things that you have passion for.
But I 100% agree with that statement.
And, you know, the AI lawyer, the AI doctor, if you're really rigid and, you know, it's right now.
We see it right now.
The joke in medical offices is Dr.
Google diagnosed me with blah, blah, blah.
And, you know, a lot of times they're wrong.
But, you know, equally as important with, you know, we can't rely on a machine, obviously, to diagnose and treat.
That's what, you know, is where we went to medical school.
We touched people.
We examined people.
You know, you can't do that with a machine.
But also, you know, after 25, almost 25 years of practice, Knowing, you know, virtually, knowing what my limits are are actually really, really important.
There are some patients that I actually, you know, as a virtual medicine, functional medicine provider, we actually do ask our patients to maintain relationships with a physical doctor as their primary care because we're going to need that touch at times.
We're going to need that personal exam at times.
So, yeah, it's crazy what's happening out there.
So is your, beingfunctional.com, are you accepting new patients right now?
And if so, only in those four states, I would assume.
Is that correct?
Yes.
We're going to open up our practice right now primarily in two separate ways.
One is we are focusing on a preventative healthcare visit, which is really close and dear to my heart, sort of the reason why I went into functional medicine to begin with, because preventing disease is a lot more fun than having to treat diseases later.
And if we can prevent a heart attack or a stroke, that has huge life implications to not just the patient, but to everyone involved in the care of the patient.
So if we can use advanced biomarkers now to look and see and predict what a person's heart attack rate, heart risk is, for example, measuring something called an ApoB protein.
If we can assess that now and better assess their risk in 5, 10, and 20 years from now, why are we not doing that?
And if we can use maybe even some genetic studies that can better assess risks for certain illnesses that we can do something about now, Why are we not implementing that?
So preventative health care is huge in our practice.
It's probably about 50% of our practice focused on the top killers in this country, primarily cardiovascular-related.
And then second is just a functional medicine consultation.
So the typical person who has bloating...
IBS has been told, they have IBS by six doctors.
So a lot of gut issues.
We focus a lot on the gut because 80% of the immune system is there.
And if the immune system in the gut isn't happy, there's probably secondary problems, migraines, eczema.
Joint pains, things like that.
So we really focus on gut health.
And we also focus on hormones.
And when I say hormones, women's hormones, men's hormones, and also thyroid hormones, adrenals, all of that, all those hormones.
So when somebody signs up with you as a new patient, as I understand it, you send them to a lab or two.
They get a couple of blood draws.
They get this analysis that goes to you.
You or your husband, who's part of your practice, as I understand it, can analyze this.
You're looking for the markers of hormone levels and certain blood markers and so on, and combined with information from the new patient, Diet, lifestyle decisions, stresses, sleep quality, all these things.
Then am I correct that you're able to paint this picture of what's going to be the most effective at bringing this person back into balance with their health goals?
You're 100% correct.
And we also utilize other things.
Like, for example, I'll just focus on cardiovascular illness.
We'll do advanced testing even.
We'll do carotid dopplers.
We'll do carotid endometrial lining thickening.
What about D-dimer tests, the microclotting test?
Sorry to interrupt, but can you order D-dimer tests?
A lot of people are concerned about shedding from other people.
D-dimer, I mean, we can definitely order that if a patient wants it.
I do not order that on a regular basis because it's too nonspecific.
So specifically for that test, the levels are...
It's not specific to one thing.
Typically, we order a D-dimer when we suspect a PE in the ER. However, that is not something that, you know, that's more acute medicine.
If I were to ever order a D-dimer, it would be at the request of a patient if there was a reason for ordering it.
And usually those reasons are more urgent and would require generally more in-person evaluations.
Okay, fair enough.
Thank you for providing that answer.
I know some people will ask about that.
What have you heard?
Because I know that when I mentioned you a few weeks ago, some people reached out to you because I heard back from some people.
But without giving anybody's name, obviously, because you protect patient privacy, what generally have you heard from people about being able to connect with your brand of functional medicine versus maybe their other previous physician experiences?
So like I said earlier, I think it's mostly a patient's intuition to knowing that there's something better out there that can complement the current conventional doctor, if you will.
And that is, you know, that's where we bridge that gap.
And so, yes, we had a lot of patients reach out and we had a lot of interest in preventative healthcare.
That was probably our biggest draw.
And most commonly it is, you know, you read all these studies and you listen to these health related podcasts and you have all these amazing pieces to this great, beautiful puzzle, but you have no idea how to put it all together.
And that's what my job is.
My job is to help you filter out the things that don't matter with the things that really are important and really to tailor a plan of action that is individualized for you.
Not for your neighbor, not for your friend, just for you.
And so we all are individuals and we should all be treated that way.
Yeah, that's a really important point.
Instead of us being seen as just another statistic in a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study or live trial on humans for an experimental injection or pharmaceutical to treat us as humans, which also means to treat patients with dignity.
And that's something that is lacking, unfortunately, in a lot of mainstream GPs today.
There's this kind of arrogance where they treat patients with disdain.
A patient comes in, and even if they've done a little bit of research, like, oh, I think that maybe this is what I'm experiencing.
Or I did look at Dr.
Google, as you say, and found that this symptom might be called this.
So often they're treated with disdain, even though in many cases it's people just trying to understand.
Even if they're wrong, at least they're not walking in blind.
You know what I mean?
When you're going to Google to figure out what you have, There is a problem.
And there's a disconnect with communication, for sure.
Well, plus Google banishes all the best information about holistic health, too.
On top of that, there's that factor.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't know.
I know that for my patients who are looking at Google are definitely desperate.
Interesting.
And are so thankful when we talk to them.
That, you know, they're so worried they've got this horrible illness and they're so relieved when we tell them, no, you don't have that because of these negative findings or these negative things in your history or these negative clinical exam findings, you know, whatever it is.
But you might have this.
And so we start, you know, obviously that's what we're trained to do.
We're trained to take the most important part of our visit is the history of Taking is that one hour we spend with our patients.
To your point, that disconnect between physician and patient leads more and more people to try to self-diagnose because one, either they're not being heard or two, they don't have confidence in the competency of their physician.
And so then they start looking.
And so that's where a lot of my patients come in where they have been looking and they haven't gotten answers they want.
You know, we're here to help in those areas.
And certainly if a patient wants to sign up in our practice, and I'm very honest, if I'm not the right fit for you, I will probably know who is, and I will refer you to that person instead.
You know, we want our patients to get better.
At the end of the day, that's what our passion is for our patients.
And, you know, like you said, that's something a computer can't do.
So if someone contacts you, goes to your website, signs up, makes an appointment, and then the first thing you hear from them is where they have symptoms that sound like, let's say, acute stage 4 liver cancer, you're not going to say, oh, just eat more carrots or whatever.
You're going to direct them to who you think maybe can handle that acute situation more appropriately.
That's what I'm hearing from you.
Is that right?
Correct.
But your philosophy is catching things early.
So even if someone starts to have early symptoms or fatigue or sleep quality, hormone changes, even sexual activity changes can be precursors of hormone changes that may impact their life.
That's the time to start talking about what are you eating, what's your lifestyle, what's your level of exercise, those kinds of things.
And that's where you really can help a lot as I'm understanding it.
Yes, we can help a lot with, you know, so for example...
Hormones, which I will tell you, probably about 8 out of 10 of my patients, and this is just not in any journals or anything, but about 8 out of 10 of my patients, when we start to talk about hormones, and this is just an example of what's out there in the public and what you might research, they're so afraid to go on hormones because of breast cancer risk.
And those studies are so antique.
And yet that's in their head because they remember when their mom was on hormones and they stopped taking hormones all of a sudden because of these reports from the WHI study, for example.
So when I look at hormones, I do look at hot flashes, night sweats, vaginal dryness, irritability, mood swings.
Insomnia, weight gain.
We look at all that, but we also look at the invisible things, which are very, very important to me.
The invisible things, you know, the heart attack rates increasing, the osteoporosis, the dementia increasing.
Those are the things that's when we say functional medicine looks at root cause and prevention.
What we're trying to do is we're trying to take this person who's 55 and talk to them about hormones, because when they're 65, we don't want them in our office with cognitive decline to the point where they're no longer being functional and independent on their own. we don't want them in our office with cognitive decline And so that's a really big part of our practice.
So that's just taking hormones as an example.
But really, you can do that with anything.
Okay.
I have a ton of questions for you, but on a practical note, let me go to your website, beingfunctional.com.
For people who want to reach out to you, I see you have a button there, sign up to be a patient.
I assume that's the right button for people to click.
Yes.
So you can choose two things.
One, you can either choose a functional medicine consultation.
So if you have gut issues, hormone issues, thyroid issues, and you need a more in-depth evaluation, you can do a functional medicine consultation.
That's an hour with me or with my husband, Mike.
And then, and we'll vet that most of the time if it's a patient who fits, you know, my strengths better than or Mike's strengths.
So we can work around that.
We'll do that on our end.
That's about a $2,500 package, Mike.
I want to be up front with my patients all the time.
There's no hit and there's no...
There's no surprises at the end of the treatment or anything like that.
But that includes all the lab analysis, the lab draws, the lab analysis, the reports.
And that's usually over the course of about a year.
Functional medicine patients require probably about three or four visits.
Okay.
And then the second type I see on your website is a preventative wellness visit.
That's a preventative.
The reason why we put that package together is at the end of the day, if we can prevent heart attacks and strokes or at least decrease or early detection to save heart muscle, things like that, just more medical things from our perspective, if we can have a chance at doing that, Then we, you know, that makes us feel so good.
So we put this package together that includes a set of labs and two consultations, one before and after.
And the one after you'll have a full detailed plan of action.
Again, that's individualized for you based on your risk factors.
So that one includes two visits and your labs.
And that one is $1,900.
That's actually, I know it sounds a lot and this is all, you know, cash pay practice.
That's what most functional medicine doctors do.
But really for the amount of care that you're getting, it's, you know, it's actually a really good price.
I think we have to put it in perspective.
It's cheaper than one night in a hospital bed in an urgent care wing.
After a heart attack.
I mean, it's way cheaper than that.
I've seen people go into a hospital just one night and, oh, it turns out it's appendicitis, boom, $25,000.
They had to have an emergency surgery or $10,000 in procedures and lab tests as the doctors are hunting for what's wrong with this person.
That can add up quickly.
And sometimes insurance doesn't cover what you think it's going to or you have a big out-of-pocket payment up front.
So what you just described, you said it's cash pay.
Insurance doesn't cover it, but it sounds like it can save people a lot in the long run.
Absolutely.
That's our goal.
Um, we are very, um, conscientious of it.
You know, as medical doctors, we want to be conscientious of cost and where we can get the most, you know, sort of bang for our buck, if you will, but also for us do the most amount of change in people's lives.
And that education that you will receive is priceless.
It's dependable.
It's accurate.
it's based on science, research, and medical evidence.
It's not based on just, you know, hokey pokey stuff.
Also, um, um, no one who's ever worked with me.
I don't know how to say this, but no one has ever worked with me at the end of their visits with me and they felt better.
No one has ever complained about the price.
So I always take that to be a really good sign that we're doing what we're supposed to be doing.
Yeah, really good point because quality of life is priceless.
Even just quality of sleep is priceless.
There's a saying in traditional Chinese medicine, actually, and it's about, sorry to be so kind of graphic, but can you poop and pee and sleep?
Because if you can't do those three things, or one of those three things, your quality of life becomes insane.
And you've got to reestablish those three things in order to even think about whatever else is wrong with you.
But I also want to comment on, I love the fact that your attitude is helpful, it's positive, it's healing for people because...
Especially in the cancer industry, there are so many people that go to conventional cancer doctors and they get this crazy, insane pessimism.
Like, oh, you're going to die in three months if you don't agree today to this radical thing.
And a friend of mine who's actually in the preparedness industry over a year ago called me.
Instead, he's been diagnosed with stage 4 kidney cancer, a large tumor, bad cancer, and he said, like, what...
What did I think that he should look into?
And I said, oh, really?
Okay, you've got this diagnosis.
That's interesting.
Have you looked at this and this and this?
Go read this, check this out, and do that.
And at the end of it, he said, you know, Mike, you're the only person that I've called, and he talked to all his friends and family members, you're the only person who didn't say, oh, it was nice knowing you, sad you're going to die.
And guess what?
By the way, today, his tumor is virtually gone.
He's active.
He's 67 years old, jogging, super fit.
The doctors can't believe what's happening.
But because he did the kinds of things that probably you would also recommend after an analysis, but he did those things.
And a diagnosis is not a death sentence.
I think you get that.
No, it's not.
Yeah, you're absolutely right.
And with our, you know, having hope just in and of itself is very therapeutic.
Taking control back, I think, is extremely valuable for my patients, knowing that their destiny is in their hands, not in the hands of someone else.
I have a great appreciation for lifestyle effects on certain things like tumors.
And certainly, cancer is not one of my strong suits.
I do have a great...
I have several people that I do refer my cancer patients to.
I think that that's such a special area.
And there's so many programs that, you know, when we treat cancer patients, it's not, here are these supplements, here's this diet.
It's also supportive care, emotional care.
It's learning to do things like meditation, which, you know, and a lot of times our patients who are diagnosed with something like that, you see such an evolution that And, you know, they say sometimes when something bad happens, you become better.
And that's where we see that a lot is in our cancer patients and even in our post-heart attack patients who decide, again, to take ownership of their problems.
So basically, we want to empower our patients to take control of their own life.
We just want to help them along the way.
Yeah.
And we want to, you know, we want to give them a, you know, the trust of a physician who sort of has had all that training, but also just a place that they can safely ask questions and get the answers that, you know, things that have been vetted out all the, you know, vetted out all the garbage and here's what really works.
And this is what really works based on not just our experience, but also really backed by science.
That'll make sense.
And I'm probably going to get complaints for showing this because it's almost gone.
But this is my daily prevention right here is my superfood smoothie, my turmeric.
And I want to ask you about the power of daily habits because part of the allopathic approach to medicine is that, oh, you wait until it's broken.
And then you take something.
You take something very yucky tasting and potent.
And then that's supposed to fix the thing that's broken.
And then you go back to To what you were doing that caused the problem in the first place.
And I have to say, the power of daily habits.
You know, I take resveratrol every day as a supplement, by the way.
I drink turmeric every day.
I have healthy fats every day.
And I don't eat canola oil.
I don't eat soy, corn oil, any of those garbage oils.
I haven't had them for literally decades.
And it's that daily habit which you can educate people about.
That you extend that over a decade and you are on a completely different trajectory than someone else with the same genetics, the same chronology of age but different habits puts you in a totally different outcome.
Your thoughts?
100% right.
I want to share a personal story with you, if it's okay.
I am a very driven person, so I can easily work from 6 in the morning until 7 or 8 at night.
And I love what I'm doing, so I can do that.
And I have no problems doing it.
I have a lot of energy.
Everyone tells me I have too much energy.
I don't drink caffeine most of the time, most days.
But But what I found was I was giving too much of myself.
And so why am I telling these people about lifestyle when I'm not You know, interjecting my own daily habits.
So I actually, sort of about three years ago, sort of took control of that.
And I found that if I can take control of my mornings, then I invest in myself first, and then I can give more to others.
So I wake up in the morning, you know, I have my Bible study time, my prayer time, and then I go work out, and I sit in my sauna for 22 minutes.
I work out for about an hour, hour and 20 minutes or so, sit in my sauna for 22 minutes.
Have a little meditation time, shower, get ready for my day, and I'm ready to go.
I'll have my, you know, green, I have green juice.
I don't do turmeric.
I do juice turmeric, though, sometimes, fresh, organic turmeric.
It will give you orange back teeth, by the way.
I know, I know.
As long as the front teeth look good, Mike, you're good.
Yeah, the front teeth are fine.
The back teeth, you'll get, if you have dental work, it'll turn orange.
That's right, no one sees them except your dental hygienist and your dentist.
That's like turmeric proof.
That's how you know you're a turmeric veteran.
Yeah.
So, you know, I'd love to see what the insides look like on you one of these days.
I've never had that kind of question posed to me before, but thank you.
I'll take that as a compliment.
I bet it's pretty clean.
Well, it's going to be orange.
That's for sure.
It's going to be orange all the way.
Yeah, no kidding.
But I freak out my dentist.
I have to warn them in advance.
Nevertheless, I grew up on a lot of processed food, actually.
And so I had a lot of dental work when I was younger.
And only later in life did I get turned on to nutrition and prevention and health and so on.
And since then, teeth have been great, but I'm still dealing with the old cavities.
Right?
You know, kind of the previous stuff.
And I think you probably run into that a lot with your patients where even if they radically change their lifestyle and they get healthier, sometimes you still have to overcome what you've been through or perhaps, you know, damage that's been done before.
You know, bone density even that you weren't paying attention to for many years and now you're paying attention.
Things like that.
A hundred percent.
The sooner you start, the better it is.
So, you know, I know it's really easy to say I'm 18 or I'm 20 and just postpone it, but the earlier you start, the better it is.
So we actually do consultations on, you know, a lot of families, you know, a lot of times the mom will see me and then she'll say, oh, hey, can you see my husband?
And, oh, hey, can you see my kids?
Usually that's the order it is.
Interesting.
But, you know, I have to tell you, Mike, the biggest compliment I got yesterday was from my 19-year-old daughter who said, Mom...
You need to make a cookbook because you actually know how to make vegetables that taste good.
And it dawned on me, what in the world are you getting in college?
What are you eating that you would actually call me just to say that?
And so, yes, there's a lot to unpack there.
But I think one of the biggest things we need to unpack is that We are being sold convenience in so many levels.
We are being sold fast foods because it's fast and it's time-saving, and that's what we're being sold.
We're not being sold on the lack of nutritional value that it has or, hey, you know what?
Sitting in a kitchen for an hour cooking is actually therapeutic.
So that's how I end my day.
I try to finish.
I have a hard stop around 4 or 5, so I can spend an hour in my kitchen because, for me, that's meditation and therapy, and plus it's great food that you can make.
Usually, most of my meals are done in about 15 to 20 minutes, to be honest, because I know how to chop things up really fast because I've been doing it my whole life.
That's how we grew up.
You know, in another country, we didn't grow up with fast food stores and all this other stuff.
So we learned how to do everything growing up.
So that's really, really important.
But then also...
We've been sold convenience in a doctor's office.
Like, hey, I'll take this pill if I get to eat whatever I want.
But that's all lack of education.
I think that if we really educated people, we would soon find out that you're just delaying something bad happening later.
But the sooner you start, the better.
You can't start soon enough.
This is, I think, you brought up something that's a great demonstration, the difference between allopathic medicine and functional medicine or holistic medicine.
So if a patient says, doctor, I'd love to eat ice cream and donuts and I want to have more ice cream and donuts, an allopathic doctor will say, great, here's more insulin.
A functional doctor will say, let's talk about the ice cream and what's behind that desire and how do we balance that in the rest of your life so that perhaps you're not getting 30% of your calories from donuts and ice cream, right?
I mean, it's about getting deeper into what's behind these things rather than just saying, oh, we'll hit it with more insulin and continue with that lifestyle, right?
Right.
Right on everything you just said.
So definitely, you know, it's a challenge.
I think of this one patient who came to see me when I started my functional medicine practice.
I was still in a more traditional, conventional practice, but I was seeing patients during my lunchtime for functional medicine on my own.
Just because I was so fascinated with it, I couldn't believe the results I was getting.
So I just worked through lunch and just saw these patients.
And one of my patients referred someone else to me.
So when I saw her, I assumed because of the reference, she wanted to get off of her, you know, some medications that she was on.
And I thought she wanted to do the same thing that her friend did, which her friend actually was able to get off of most of her medications.
And when I started talking to her about functional medicine, she's like, can you just write me my scripts?
Right.
Oh, okay.
Like, all right, well, I guess we're done in about five minutes.
So, but you know, you have to give the patients what they want.
Not everyone wants to do this.
And that's okay.
Not everyone is ready for it.
There are some people that want it so bad.
But like you said, Why are they still eating the pizza?
Why are they still eating the ice cream?
Why are they still, you know, drinking soda when they know it's not good for them?
Why is that?
And a lot of times you're 100% right.
I would say about 95% of my patients, it's a mental issue that they have to overcome.
And you do that by what you said earlier.
You start stacking healthy habits together and, you know, you kind of put yourself in a position where you're more likely to succeed.
I don't mean to turn this into a mental health episode, but in my experience, talking with a lot of people over many decades about nutrition and health, and I just want to know if you have seen this yourself, You start peeling back the layers of what's behind the ice cream, what's behind a self-destructive activity.
And you know what it usually comes down to in a mental health aspect is self-worth.
And it's often an adult who as a child I know it sounds like, like, whoa, how are we getting so deep so quickly?
But honestly, I've seen that over and over and over again.
And sometimes I've seen people, they go talk to a competent therapist, they address some childhood issues, and then they can talk to someone like you and actually have the self-worth attitude to start taking that advice to get healthy.
It's like they had to overcome this mental block first.
Have you ever seen that?
All the time.
We see it all the time in our practice.
In fact, when we spend that first hour with our patients, we actually do something called a timeline, where we start with infancy when they were born.
You know, were they vaginal, spontaneous vaginal delivery?
Or were they C-section?
Were they bottle-fed?
Did mom and dad get along at home?
Was it a peaceful home?
Was it a hectic home?
Was there alcohol involved in the home, especially early on?
What kind of food did mom cook or did anyone cook?
Or did you go out to eat all the time?
Was it free pantry of junk food after school every day?
Antibiotics over and over again.
So we go, we timeline people from birth all the way to where they're at right now.
Wow.
And we elicit from that timeline something called antecedents, certain things that people are predisposed to.
Like for example, if you're genetically predisposed to Alzheimer's dementia, you bet we're going to get out all of our sort of big anti-dementia think protocols that we're going to use because we want to preserve your brain function.
And, um, What if you had a triggering event?
What if you went to Brazil and came back?
And these are all real-life patients I'm thinking about.
I had a patient who went to Brazil, came back, and for 10 years had diarrhea.
And it turns out he had really bad parasites.
Once we treated that, the other reason he had finally come to a functional medicine doctor is he started having some peripheral neuropathy in his fingers, and that too started to get better.
So we timeline and then we look at mediators of illness.
What is promoting that specific illness?
So for example, lots of antibiotic use, proton pump inhibitors, poor diet from birth through now, and somebody who hasn't changed like you have.
I mean, I love that drink that you drink every day.
And I think that having that habit like you have is really making it foolproof for you because that's just something you just automatically do.
And some people automatically go to a drive-thru at McDonald's on their way home.
But you can change that to, hey, I can automatically go home.
And it's all a mindset.
So absolutely, we look at childhood trauma and things like that because we do have to refer you out to a therapist.
I can't do therapy.
Obviously, I'm not...
I'm not a certified therapist, but we can find these people that need that level of care.
We also work with health coaches in our office.
We work with dietitians who are not only RDs, but also certified in functional medicine.
A lot of the diets that we use to help people heal are therapeutic diets, so you kind of have to know that.
So yes, it takes a village to get better.
It is not a one and done.
There's no magic here.
You will have to do the work.
And when you're ready to do the work, those are the patients I want.
If you're not ready or you think this is going to be easy, then you've been sold a bunch of lies and you have a bunch of lies that has been running your life.
You know, the lies of convenience and the lies of, I'll do this later, without addressing sort of the root cause.
Yeah, but I want to interject on that when you say it's not going to be easy.
And I agree with you in the sense of...
Just the initial learning curve and some habit changing.
But I got to say, after you get through that transition, living a healthy lifestyle, you are not giving up anything.
From what I drink and what I eat, there's not any moment where I feel like, oh, I wish I could have a giant piece of that wedding cake or, oh, I wish I could drink a six-pack of soda.
You don't miss it.
In fact, your body rejects it.
Once you get those toxins out of your system, the phosphoric acid, the partially hydrogenated soybean oil icing, all the refined sugar overload, too much salt in the food, you get this out of your system, your body...
Actually begins to value healthier food and cuisine, all the different tastes and the colors and the sensory input and the olfactory awakening that happens with food and so on.
I don't lack anything.
I have a more fulfilling sensory experience, I believe, eating healthy than people who are living on junk food and Pop-Tarts.
There's no comparison.
I think one of the biggest experiments I have my patients do is increase self-awareness with how food makes you feel after you eat it.
And if you are tired and dragging and want to take a nap, that's probably not a good food for you.
And if you continue to have energy and you're vibrant and your brain is still working past lunchtime, then that's probably a good thing to do.
So a good thing to eat.
So yeah, absolutely.
I think the trade-off is, you know, again, the convenience.
You actually have to cook a little and you actually have to spend some time doing, you know, preparing.
But the truth is, your reward is phenomenal.
Freaking amazing.
I mean, you've got more energy, you get better sleep, you have less pain.
It's like, why would you not want that?
But again, it's that communication and educational aspect that's really missing right now.
That's what we're here for.
We're here to kind of walk people through that.
And I know I've kept you a little longer than I had planned, so I thank you for spending time, but I also want to give a disclaimer to the audience that even though Dr.
Williams here is a licensed physician, don't interpret any of this as personalized medical advice to you personally.
Because these are just general answers, right?
So you need to be seen, advised, perhaps diagnosed, and so on if you want personalized medical advice.
And that's what Dr.
Williams does at beingfunctional.com.
But get competent help in whatever your health challenges are.
But I agree with what you just said, Bashima, which is that self-awareness, that people need to be aware of how am I feeling?
How does that food make me feel?
How does this habit make me feel?
exercise habits, sleep habits, and so on, or sedentary habits, you know, sitting in front of the TV, binge watching a Netflix thing for six hours.
How does that make you feel?
Actually, probably not that great.
You know, the blood's not really moving everywhere that it should be.
So that self-awareness is key.
And combined with expert advising and the lab tests and looking at the quality of your blood, you can make remarkable gains.
That's my take.
I agree with you 100% I do want to I would like to interject a couple of things.
Number one, we would be happy to see you in our office at beingfunctional.com.
Also, if you are a person who wants to be seen in person and you live in California or Missouri and you want to fly to Missouri, you can call my husband's practice, ultrawellnessmedical.com and the number is 636-333-9820.
Also, Because we're only two people right now in our practice, and while we are growing, we are going to limit the number of people that actually come into the beingfunctional.com to 300 and to the ultra-wellness medical to 200.
That's our capacity right now for what we're able to do.
Yeah, I would assume that's probably, that's going to fill up your calendar for the year.
I would think.
Yeah.
You know what?
It's a blessing because we are doing consulting work.
We are no longer primary care.
So now we can actually help people get better and along that journey, help them help educate them for forever change.
We don't want repeat customers.
We don't want people to keep coming over and over and over.
We want to treat them and educate and empower.
But I also want to just mention the Institute of Functional Medicine's website, ifm.org.
There's a button there for find a practitioner that you can also use to find a local practitioner that maybe you want to be seen in person or maybe you want to be seen virtually but in another state that I can't serve you right now.
That is definitely an option for you.
We are growing and so as we grow we'll hire more doctors but then there's quality control issues and all that other stuff that we definitely want to be mindful of.
We want the same quality with the same passion You know, kind of everything what we've already talked about.
We want to be well aligned with our future partners.
But right now, this is what we're capable of doing.
Would you put New York high on your list?
Because I know a lot of our viewers, believe it or not, are in the state of New York.
Not necessarily New York City, but upstate New York, Long Island, and so on.
And you've already got California, Florida.
You're working on Texas.
New York would be the next most popular state to just consider.
It's just a suggestion.
Yeah.
Well, thank you for that suggestion.
Yeah, it's like giving you more work to do, you know.
It's just like, here we are.
We're growing, so we're good.
Yeah.
I mean, thank you so much.
We're late, too.
Yeah, this has been such a pleasure talking with you.
Yeah, it's been great.
Thank you for spending time.
And for those folks watching, just as an example of what this can do, I don't know what your day has been like, Dr.
Williams, but here we are.
It's like 10, 15 p.m., I did three interviews before this one today, plus a bunch of other stuff.
This is like my typical 16-hour workday.
And I feel like I could talk to you for another hour because this is so fascinating.
But we got to wrap it up.
But you know what?
Good nutrition powers you as far as you want to go and good holistic health practices and getting good advice about what to do.
So thank you, Dr.
Williams.
It's great to have this conversation with you.
Yeah, it's good having it with you, too.
And I'm going to have to borrow that comment you made about the traditional Chinese medicine.
You know, if you're not sleeping, if you sleep, eat, and poop well, you're probably pretty good.
Is that what it was?
Sleep, eat, and poop?
Yeah, you've got to be able to poop and pee and sleep.
And actually, sometimes they say and eat.
You've got to eat, too.
If you can eat, poop, and sleep, you have the bases covered for the most part.
Eat, poop, and sleep.
It'd be nice to be able to walk as well so you don't need assistance with the other three things.
That's right.
Exactly.
Exactly.
I love it.
It's so true.
It's so fundamental, but yet so true.
So thank you so much for that.
Well, thank you.
And thank you for what you're doing.
And the website, again, folks, is beingfunctional.com.
And I'd really love to invite you back.
Down the road, after you get some patience from this interview, I want to hear the feedback.
I know I'll hear from people too, but I want to hear it from your point of view, how you're able to help people and set them on a path that empowers them to have really improved health outcomes because it's all possible, folks.
We're living proof of it.
You change your habits, you change your outcome.
It's that simple.
You just got to know how to change.
Mike, I really wanted to know, what are your daily habits and how we stack habits and things like that?
What do you do every day that keeps you so alive at 10 o'clock at night?
Okay, number one, I walk in nature every day.
So I probably only miss one or two days a year due to extreme weather.
But other than that, I'm walking in nature.
So I'm hearing the birds, the crickets, the frogs.
I'm surrounded by trees and grass and I'm walking my animals.
So I have all this interaction with animals.
Secondly, the only water I drink right here is rainwater.
I don't drink city water and I don't drink well water and I don't drink distilled water or filtered water.
Frankly, it's all, well, it's rain water that is, of course, sanitized, you know, UV light.
And I believe that a lot of people get extra minerals in their water and they end up with Frankly, things like calcification of arteries and kidneys and so on because of these inorganic forms of calcium that are in the water, calcium carbonate and so on.
So I think that's actually huge and not a lot of people talk about that.
Thirdly, I avoid all artificial fragrances of all kinds in everything and people hear me talk about this a lot.
Laundry detergent, fabric softeners, personal care products and I even have rules like this.
At my lab, at my studio, at the warehouse, no one is allowed to bring in artificial fragrance that I can smell.
And since my nose is like a mass spec instrument, if you're wearing it, I'm going to send you home.
Because I'll smell it.
And everybody learns that very quickly after they're sent home a couple of times.
And they have to change their laundry detergent.
So I avoid all these fragrances.
I avoid these toxins.
I take iodine.
I take vitamin D. I take resveratrol.
I take MSM. There's a long list of supplements that I take.
Astaxanthin, non-GMO vitamin C, and so on.
But I don't consider supplements a replacement for the food habits that I have.
So food habits, I do the smoothie every day.
And, you know, avocados, bananas, coconut water, whey protein, flax seeds, plus some other...
I blend in kale, fresh kale that I grow in my hydroponic systems.
Kale is real easy to grow.
I take a big leaf like this and I stick it in the blender every day, so I'm getting blended raw kale with the enzymes in it.
In addition, I use a combination of chlorella and spirulina, just a small amount, in the smoothie.
Makes it a little green and orange, both.
In addition to that, I sleep well.
I'll sleep a full eight hours sometimes.
Seven to eight is my typical habit.
I'm not one of these people that can get by on four hours.
I don't try to do that.
I don't oversleep and I don't undersleep.
I get just the right amount of sleep, get up, ready to go.
I do resistance training, kettlebells.
Weight machines, you know, different kind of lifting.
I already mentioned the walking, so I get cardio that way.
Oh, I do rolling.
I do body rolling every evening.
So I have a big roller, a foam roller, and I roll on my sides and I roll my legs and the IT band, as it's called.
So I do a lot of rolling, and that's also exercising shoulders and abdominal and so on.
That's kind of an overview of what I do, but it's all a daily habit.
Yeah, and you have to be intentional.
You have to be intentional about growing that kale.
So all the little steps that go into it, you have to be intentional about.
And I'm like you.
I could sleep.
I could probably be functional for four hours, but you know what?
I know how valuable sleep is.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
So I have to shut my...
I believe that sleep is also that learning integration time.
So I know that learning is a process of exposing yourself to information.
Yes.
And then while you're sleeping, your brain is reorganizing and creating the hierarchical structures of knowledge.
And so if you don't have good sleep, you don't learn.
Right.
So what I do during the day is I'm absorbing information.
Even if I'm on tractor equipment, I'm listening to audio books, I'm reading, you know, I'm reading hundreds of headlines and articles per day.
And then at night, I'm structuring that.
And then that's when it's learned.
So for me, it's like each day is a nutritional journey and a cognitive journey and physical skills, exercise, movement, and then plenty of rest to integrate everything and then wake up the next day and do it again.
I mean, I have challenges, too.
Like everybody, you know, I get injured every once in a while, especially in my martial arts activities.
So I'll deal with injuries, too.
Yeah.
But, you know, you work through it.
Yes, for sure.
Well, thank you so much for sharing that.
That was really helpful and good.
And you know what?
If you can do all that, we can certainly start making, you know, changes to our breakfast, for example.
And that's sometimes where we start in our own practice.
Yeah.
And when I travel too, I showed people this, but I bring a blender.
So I bring a blender, I bring the avocados, I travel with my food.
And that's why I don't travel by air, by the way.
Or one of the reasons.
But I haul like...
My grocery store with me wherever I'm going.
And then I can make what my body is expecting.
I've got my supplements.
I've got my water.
I bring rainwater with me wherever I go.
I also don't trust hotel water, obviously.
Oh, yeah.
I can't imagine the difference between the rainwater and the...
No, I've been invited before to go to really fancy resorts, and I go, and I'm like, this sucks.
My place is way better than this.
We have silver-infused pillows at home, and rainwater, and awesome nutrition, and super clean turmeric, and nature walks, and interactions with the donkeys.
So what am I at this spa for?
That sounds amazing.
That sounds amazing.
Well, thank you so much for sharing that.
That is really...
Well, thank you for asking.
Oh, yeah.
I love hearing...
I actually love hearing those stories about how...
And a lot of times it's those journeys, those first initial changes that then you start stacking on those habits that then all of a sudden a year later you look down the road and you've made all these amazing changes.
So thank you for that.
True, true.
And you may not know this about me, but 25 plus years ago, I was borderline type 2 diabetic, borderline obese, and suffered from chronic back pain at the time.
Oh, and I had crazy high cholesterol.
So that's where I came from.
And I will never be back in that place again.
That is awesome.
Just by the things I shared.
Yeah.
That is awesome.
And there you go.
The empowerment of you being able to take control of your own destiny.
Had you not made those changes, it definitely would have been a high risk for a heart attack, for example, at this point in your life.
And you may be horrified by hearing this since you are a doctor, but I don't have a GP and I don't go to doctors.
I don't do checkups.
I don't do visits.
Nothing.
Am I the first doctor you've seen in a long time?
This is true.
You're the first doctor I've talked with in a long time.
I am so honored.
I mean, what is my doctor going to tell me that I'm not already tracking, right?
Except for maybe blood tests, which is where you're an expert.
So I'm open to that.
But there's nothing a GP can tell me that I don't already know.
I'm way ahead of them on what's going on.
So I don't visit doctors.
No need.
And I also, I don't eat toxins.
So there you go.
You don't eat toxins.
And you know what you said earlier?
I just want to clarify for listeners, the exposure of chemicals can be ingested orally or breathed in.
So assimilation happens in multiple ways, you know, through your skin, through the air.
That's it, you know.
And so, yeah, if you're going to wash your clothes with, you know, certain detergents, you're going to smell them and that smell you're breathing it in.
Plus it's touching your skin.
So, you know, there's a lot to be learned and unpacked with everything that we said today.
But, um, but yeah, there.
Yeah.
And when you sweat, your sweat is an extraction solvent that pulls the fragrance chemicals out of your clothes and then it gets absorbed right through your skin.
And we've done experiments where if you put a jug of water next to a box of fabric softener, dryer sheets, the chemicals of the fabric softener go through the bottle into the water and you can drink the water and taste it.
So, yeah.
Where else do you think it's going?
It's going everywhere.
Yeah, I hear you.
Yep.
Pretty wild, but thanks for asking.
My pleasure.
Anyway, all right.
Thank you so much for joining me.
I really appreciate you.
Have a wonderful evening, Dr.
Williams.
My pleasure.
You too.
Okay.
Thanks for watching, folks.
As always, feel free to repost this, if you wish, on other platforms or other channels.
And, of course, check out more interviews on my channel on brighteon.com.
I'm Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, and also naturalnews.com for editorial content.
We appreciate you.
Be healthy.
Take care.
A global reset is coming.
And that's why I've recorded a new nine-hour audiobook.
It's called The Global Reset Survival Guide.
You can download it for free by subscribing to the naturalnews.com email newsletter, which is also free.
I'll describe how the monetary system fails.
I also cover emergency medicine and first aid and what to buy to help you avoid infections.
So download this guide.
It's free.
▲
Export Selection