Opening reflections on psychedelics and functional medicine

One of the sort of hidden fears that I carry in myself is that, because I see so many incredibly gifted functional medicine practitioners having these experiences with psychedelic medicines and turning towards psychedelics now.

And in some cases, hanging up the white coat and the, you know, the functional testing and the deep work that's so important. So I sincerely hope that that is not where we're headed, is that people find functional medicine too difficult, too detail-oriented, to long, and too much of a slog.

I mean, psychedelics aren't going to fix the inflammation in your gut from having a fast food diet. Hello and welcome back to the podcast. This week we feature Dr.

Will Vandevere, who is an innovator on the cross-section of integrative medicine, psychedelic medicine and psychiatry. He has a new book, which is called Psychedelic Therapy.

And in this episode, we're going to be doing a deep dive into all things psychedelics. Which psychedels could be used for which conditions. We're gonna talk about some of my own experiences, his experiences and we are going talk The biggest thing that I think we need to think about in functional medicine, which is how do we get people who don't want to participate in their own health, but want get better?

How do change that internal circuitry? So I this is a critical conversation. Enjoy. So a warm welcome back to the Evolution of Medicine platform. Dr. Will Bandev here.

Welcome, Doc. Hi, James. Great to be here again. Excited to have this conversation. It was almost 10 years ago when we did this actually incredible event in retrospect called The Evolution of Psychiatry.

You and Dr. Janet Settle were speaking about the sort of work that you were doing on the cutting edge of integrating psychiatry and some of the early phases of psychedelics as well as integrated medicine.

And then Isabella Wentz gave a great talk on thyroid and mental health. And that talk that she gave is actually like the most watched talk, on our YouTube channel, by like 10X.

I think like half a million people have watched that. And so, yeah, it was a very special night. E-Town is a really special place. You know, Boulder has a lot of talent and I'm really excited to check back in.

Dr. Vandevereu2019s path into integrative psychiatry

I know that you've been on a journey essentially following all of those threads, right? Since then, so the integrated psychiatry thread and the psychedelic thread, which we're going to talk a little bit more today.

So give us the sort of the journey since then I guess. Well, I think it's timely to be talking about this because while a lot's changed in 10 years, and I have a book, Psychedelic Therapy, coming out tomorrow.

We're recording here on March 30th. So what has happened is the blossoming of psychedelic medicine. partner, Keith Kurlander and I, who wrote the book together.

We started this Institute, Integrative Psychiatry Institute just after that time together at the Future of Psychiatric 10 years ago. And we started out by training people in prescribers, licensed physicians, nurse practitioners, PAs, therapists in integrative medicine for mental health.

Then we proceeded from there to start a psychedelic therapy training. we trained roughly 3000 people now in that modality. And what I'm really excited about is how to bridge these two newer traditions in the field of mental health and how they can help each other be more effective for patients.

It's funny you say new traditions because you could probably go back into looking at other cultures and see that this is ancient medicine. Absolutely.

Yeah, for sure. And we could get into that work. I've had the privilege to sit in a number of indigenous traditional settings. In particular, with ayahuasca in South America has been a significant healing path for me in the past.

And those settings have their own sets of, you know, intentions, outcomes, views about what illness and what wellness are. They're different in some ways from the clinical work that we do in one-on-one work and even group work in a Western psychiatric framework.

Yeah, interesting. Well, look, I'm excited to jump into all of this because, you know, we did actually one of our most popular forums. We did on medical cannabis in 2017. But for the last few years, have really not talked about this topic at all.

And I am excited talk a lot more about it because I feel like it's an important part of my journey. I want to start by just sharing something maybe I never shared with you, but like my whole career was turned upside down through psychedelics.

So 2004, 2005, living in London, I'm in an investment banking program. I grew up in this community, but I thought my parents are insane and I am doing investment And there's a number of psychedelic experiences, mainly psilocybin, but also MDMA, where I really just was sort of drawn back to a voice inside of me that was like, hey, I'm not sure if you're this investment banker guy.

I think you might be this like community guy because you grew up in community and you had an insight. into something that very few people had had. And part of that actually was holistic medicine too, like having a homeopath and having chiropractor at a time when no one else knew what that was.

It was those nudges from the universe that were like, make the change, and I made the changes. I listened in 2005, I moved to America, so I'm working in an integrated clinic and the rest of the journey is history.

But I don't know if it wasn't for those moments, whether I would have been pushed over the edge. And I actually told that story when I did the keynote at the Integrative and Personalized Medicine Conference in London.

So I was saying to the crowd, well, that was illegal. Yes, it was a legal and was doing illegal things in Fabric Nightclub in 2004. But look at the gift that this has provided for the rest of my life.

Jamesu2019s personal psychedelic turning point

I don't know if I've ever told you that story, but it's been here since the beginning. Thank you for sharing that. You know, it's remarkable how effective these tools can be to show you a deeper truth about yourself.

And I think it takes courage and strength to listen to the call and respond. Some people might have heard what you heard and gone back to their trading desk and suffered in silence or resentment for decades, right?

But you listened and look what You've created in the world. It's very beautiful. Thank you. Well, look, I want to share a couple of observations. So, you know, this has been in my mind ever since I saw you guys speak there.

And I think for a long time, there was this huge gap between integrated medicine and psychedelic medicine, even though Andy Weil was at the sort of the middle of both of them at a time ago.

But like, certainly there wasn't a lot of crossover. The Integrative Medicine for Mental Health Conference has been the first time that I've seen those two things come together.

And I saw you there, Rick Oblin there. I enjoyed that there's that place to come. But I was invited to speak at the Mexican Association of Lifestyle Medicine, which is really an integrated medicine conference.

They do more than lifestyle medicine there but amongst those doctors, they really saw no gap between these things. This was just different elements of And what would you say, this is different elements of health creation, right?

This is a different element of salutogenesis. And so I'd love to get your thoughts on that, because I think you have been pioneering the sort of bringing together of two areas that I feel are very aligned, but have not really been aligned in the minds of clinicians necessarily.

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Enjoy. Right. Well, it's great to hear that there is a group of doctors who's already thinking that way. And I assume that they're maybe not American doctors because it is not as common here.

Bridging functional medicine and psychedelic therapy

Yeah. So we have some work to do in North America, I think, to bridge the gap. I guess the place where the conversation starts for me is looking at root causes in the practice of medicine.

And of course, you've been championing that, IFM champions that. Kiki and IMMH have championed that and what I started to notice in my practice in the early 2000s was that the conventional tools left too many people lacking, and that was clear.

Prescribing medications, doing talk therapy, it wasn't enough for enough people for me. The first stop on the train of evolving, transcending and including those tools was functional medicine.

So I start learning about gut-brain connection because of a An interaction with a patient who was tested for celiac disease by a naturopathic doctor, stopped eating wheat and all of his panic and anxiety melted away.

And then he tapered off the medicines I was prescribing him for those conditions and he still had no anxiety. So it was first the gut brain and then it hormones and environmental toxins and detoxification pathways and other things that we think of nutritional deficiencies in functional medicine.

And yet still there were people who didn't get well, even with the functional medicine handled. Then I trained with Peter Levine in somatic experiencing and also in EMDR.

And these things are wonderful tools for, I would say, more simple trauma, car accident, fall from a ladder, assault, so on. These tools I found didn't get to deeper developmental trauma or the kind of trauma that starts early enough that it impacts who you know yourself to be and how you understand the possibilities for your life.

And so when I got involved in clinical research of MDMA therapy back in 2012, I started to see the power of psychedelic therapy. I also saw, and this is very true in circles of people who use psychedelics for spiritual purposes, is that Oftentimes, people have a state change, they have big change in the ceremony or in psychedelic session, and there's not enough attention to converting the state into a trait change.

We're all after long-term changes. And that's part of the beauty of what the promises of psychedelic medicine, if it's done the right way. But where the missing piece is often is that the integration isn't attended to in a deep enough way and for integration, I think functional medicine is ideal because we can go into the assessment of a client who has a treatment resistant condition and we map out targets for functional medicines in the preparation and the screening process.

Then we can have psychedelic medicine sessions to handle the trauma and get somebody back on the road and then we do the functional medicine that they couldn't do prior to the psychedelics session.

So that's one big piece is the bucket, the root cause bucket in my view has two sections to it. One is, uh, The body and the other is mostly psychology or trauma.

And if we don't address both buckets, then, we're going to leave people empty handed at the end of the day. Yeah, I think that's really well said. Yeah.

I'd love to give you thoughts on this too, because I had a little bit of experience in the HEAL community project where we actually did six month integration circles with a ketamine clinic.

And I, think we realized that we were way out of our depth at that point because, you know, so much of obviously my psychedelic experience is like as a healthy, attuned, healthy person, just like looking for deeper truth and understanding of myself.

I wouldn't say that's the average person who's showing up for treatment resistant depression in Utah. And so it was actually quite like the coaches would come back a little bit like harrowed as to what had just happened.

Ultimately there is a lot of safety and connection and that needs to happen for patients who are looking for this because nothing else has worked compared to the sort of like well-healed, should we say.

Right. The betterment of well people is a different avatar to be working with, for sure. And the folks who have deeper dysregulation in their system can become that person over time with the right support.

But you're right that what gets uncovered for people, is often very surprising and bigger and more difficult to work with in the beginning. Well, there's all kinds of studies going on and there is a future.

I know we could talk a little bit about what happened and as far as the MDMA becoming legal and being able to be used and sort of the roadblocks that exist with that.

But I'd rather have a different conversation, which is for everything that you've experienced thus far, let's imagine it's five years time and it is Portugal and everything is legal.

And you have the ability as a psychiatrist to use any tool. And I just love to get your thoughts as to like, how you see the different psychedelic tools and what they can be most useful for from your current experience and also drawing from what you've seen in the literature.

So it looked like what does an evolved, you know, psychiatric toolkit look like?

Choosing the right psychedelic tools for different conditions

and how would you fit them into the range of psychiatric illnesses that you're treating or even any chronic illness? Because I believe that if you want to get someone to radically change the way they see themselves, that could be part of any physical For sure.

Absolutely. Well, you know, to some degree it depends on going back to the question about who is the avatar, right? So if we're looking at a person who's acutely suicidal, who has a lot of suicidal thinking, ketamine is clearly highly effective in reducing those thoughts.

And that can be more of an urgent intervention. I think that the use of ketamine across the board for treatment-resistant depression will decrease significantly in five to 10 years when we have availability of things like psilocybin, N5MeO, DMT, and ibogaine, you know, all the other things.

So I thing ketamin will come into more of a narrow use in the acute kind of emergent setting to prevent loss of life and hospitalization. That's one thing.

The ongoing treatment of treatment resistant depression, I would much rather use a tool like psilocybin where one to two sessions can provide six to 12 months of relief.

And so the person is not facing a question a lot of ketamine patients face, which is, am I going to go on maintenance ketamines? As an integrative practitioner, my goal is to move people through the acute interventional aspect of any pharmaceutical.

and help them move more into lifestyle modification afterward. As far as trauma goes, I still see MDMA as the drug of choice if the person is medically appropriate for that treatment.

And there are people who don't meet those criteria based on cardiovascular risk or maybe they have an untreated bipolar illness and that needs to be handled first and so on.

Some of it is obviously the right kind of screening, but I think If we're looking to have the biggest bang for the buck, I think we are going to look for tools like MDMA and psilocybin that are showing out in clinical trials to provide, if not lifelong change, 6, 12, 18, 24 months of change.

I think that's really, really powerful. And I guess one of the things that I heard from Rick Doblin when I had him speak at IMH was this sort of gap that exists.

On one hand, you have a lot of therapists who are working in building very structured protocols to try and get the medicine move forward. But that ultimately, if you'd been doing this for any time, you realize, okay, that was cutting edge like 15 years ago or 10 years, and now you know that there are these other tools.

He said during that conference that he thought the sort of combination of MDMA and 5-MeO-DMT would be the future of psychiatry. And I was very interested in that because I've experienced those tools and I'd love to get your thoughts on whether you think he's right and what you those two tools can do in combination that you can't do with a single…

Well, it's interesting. Five MEO DMT is something that I've been relatively conservative about because I have a couple of very close friends who are themselves very experienced with psychedelics and practice psychedelic therapy as practitioners who aren't new to the work, you know, decades into the works.

So very experience psychonauts who had major blowout experiences with EMEO DMT that lasted about a year each to sort of land the plane. And, you know, we don't say that there are bad trips.

We say they're difficult trips and there's difficult journeys that require more intervention, more integration. But, if you're in your mid-60s and you You have a very stable life and family and career and you know, you have an experience and it takes you a year to integrate that.

It does raise questions about, did it need to be that difficult or, was it too much? So I've just, and, it's only because I had those two close in friends have those experiences that I have been wondering, How far, you know, when you put the pedal to the metal, how fast is too fast?

You know what I mean? On the other hand, I certainly talk to people who have incredible experiences with the combination of the two. And yet we still also don't have much research that I know of to talk about what groups of people are seeing with regard to that combination.

I can share my own experiences. After the passing of my father last year, I had the ceremony about a week after with a close friend. And I guess all I could say from my experience is that I have felt whatever grief was living within me is not within.

I kind of had an amazing opportunity to feel my father's love in every cell of my body, which was a unique, amazing experience. I actually felt like it was the best hour of life while I was going through it and right after it.

There's always been some tension between my Father and my eldest daughter. Never really like landed the relationship. We lived on the other side of the world, so that was difficult.

But also just, I think, you know, my, father certainly would like to have had a closer relationship with her in the time that he was alive, but that didn't happen.

I felt like as the pivot between both of them, I was able to really clear that out of my psyche and create a more energetic harmony. As I said, as I emerged from that experience, it was the best hour of It was so meaningful to two people that are the most meaningful in my life, my father and my eldest daughter.

And so that was an experience that I'll never forget and it was really powerful. As I've sort of talked to other people about it, I guess I'm consistently reminded of the fact that the clarity of my slate gives me an ability to go after these things and go maybe a bit more aggressive than people who haven't had that.

that clarity and what luck that is for me and privilege that really is and I see that. Yeah, I hear you. I mean I'll share my own experience, not with 5MEO, but with Ayahuasca that is kind of a similar story where in 2017 I was nearing the 20-year mark on my first marriage and the marriage was in deep trouble.

And I, it was my now ex-wife and I were trying everything there was to try.

5-MeO-DMT, ayahuasca, and personal transformation

a Shipibo trained ayahuasca shaman for almost 10 years at that time. And I had planned this retreat for a while. So it wasn't sort of a Hail Mary for the relationship, but it was something that was on my schedule for that summer.

And when I'm trying to keep this succinct, I was in an isolation diet where I working with a master plant and drinking water and consuming the master plants for a week, fasting.

And there was an ayahuasca ceremony at the end of the week. I had been entertaining the possibility, this was sort of the third or fourth time that I was about to quit psychiatry again, because I wasn't deep despair about the possibilities.

And the new idea was I'm going to be an apprentice to my teacher and become an ayahuasca over time apprenticeship. And I knew that was a hard path, but I felt like it had more possibility in it at the time than returning back to psychiatry and with the things I wanted to use on schedule one and so forth and on.

And what ended up happening was I went back the ceremony again, I say again because I had asked this question many times to Ayahuasca, what is this path of apprenticeship right for me?

And the message was, look, your bridge, Ayahuasca is not really any different in its essence from other psychedelic medicines. They're all about consciousness, they're about helping people contact what you just described, cleaning the slate, moving forward with their lives, having the capacity that is a privilege to have and not many people have.

have and I need help with bridges into the conventional medical world and you could help me with that. And it's hard to put the feeling into words. It was such a powerful basically edict from consciousness of, look, this is what you can do.

This is where you're positioned and this where it can be of most service. And so from there I went and started this institute with Keith and that's what I've been doing ever since.

And there are hard days, but the hard are in the service of the execution of, of helping to deliver that gift. It's funny that you, you speak about it as though you're speaking to another person.

Is that how you experienced it? Yeah. Yeah, I experienced the same way. Ah, it's very interesting. I remember now that it felt like a conversation, obviously, even though it was only going on within my own head.

Yeah. Or maybe it's not. Who knows what's actually happening, like the physiology, you know, the level of, um, now that I've sort of got on this feeling of network and network sufficiency as sort like a way of thinking about functional medicines.

and thinking about the psycho-emotional elements, psycho social elements of what my last book was about. And then even looking at sort of institutional network sufficiency.

Oh, there's not enough doctors, everyone's, you know, all of those things and how they layer together. The layer in there, which is this like network, sufficency in like how we interact with each other as humans and like extra sensory perception.

and connection with each other. And it's the one that I had the least experience of, but I know that it is there. I just haven't, you know, I'm just not in it all the time.

Like I am in with functional medicine, and I m in in network insufficiency as it relates to reversing Alzheimer's or whatever that might be. But I now that there's, it s like, my favorite quote on this one is Russell Brandt.

He says, when my cat looks at, My cat doesn't know the internet exists, But the Internet exists. It's a really funny way of describing what it is. Just because we can't see it and we don't experience it doesn't mean it's not right.

100%. Yeah. It is such a huge limitation of Western medicine and the traditional sort of scientific method, the double-blind placebo controlled phase three trial, it leaves so much out of the equation.

So what are your hopes with this book, right? You've been doing the Institute, you've got no limiting factor there. I mean, the number of health professionals that want to be in this space, The story forever in functional medicine is someone gets sick, the tools don't really work.

They find some other tools, they get better and go. That's been the baseline for the growth of functional medical forever. Now with psychedelic medicine, it just happens 100x as fast, 100X as easy.

You don' even have to work that hard to get it. You don't have to change your diet, go anti-inflammatory for nine months. You can literally suck on the end of the pen, going to heaven and back in 15 minutes and be like, I'm cured.

So surely there's no end in sight here for practitioners who want to find out about this. And I think you could see when it has such a rapid transformational experience on your own psyche and your consciousness.

That you start to see it in every patient that you're working with. They're stuck there. This is what's holding them back. I bet, you know, a little bit of psilocybin would be good for Heather, right?

Right. One of the sort of hidden fears that I carry in myself is that, because I see so many incredibly gifted functional medicine practitioners having these experiences with psychedelic medicines and turning towards psychedelics now.

And in some cases, hanging up the white code and the functional testing and deep work that's so important. So I sincerely hope that that's not where we're headed, is that people find functional medicine too difficult, too detail-oriented, to long, and too much of a slog.

I mean, psychedelics aren't going to fix the inflammation in your gut from having a fast food diet. I guess the guy was thinking more of just sort of like the awakening of potential, right?

Like you said before, it's one thing to become awakened. It's another thing, to facilitate the consistent awakening in others. You hit the nail on the head earlier where it was like, can the psychedelics be a bridge?

to the patient wanting salutogenesis. One of the things that we face, if you look at, I'm just familiar with the Alzheimer's piece, right? What percentage of people want a cure for Alzheimer that revolves around them completely transforming their life?

Their relationship with food, their relationship asleep, the relationship without alcohol. It's not a high percentage, everyone else would just love to go to some hospital, have their blood transfusion done, and then the other side, they come out with it.

Well, sorry, that doesn't exist. The only way that we can do it today is to heal the human. Ultimately, so then the question is, either A, we have to find some miracle cure that's gonna do because 80% of people won't do, or we find a way for those 80 percent of the people to want to do.

And my feeling is that this is what this for. This is where, this what the psychedelics is for, is switch that around so that middle of a bell curve is now like, I'm ready to learn about and experience my own potential as it relates to health first and then really.

Yeah, 100% agree. It's sort of like we talk in the mental health circle, it's the conversation about post-traumatic growth or, you know, if you're going to face, here's, sort, of the metaphors.

Meaning, purpose, and the future of health behavior change

Like, I could give you complete resolution of your symptoms of depression with, let's say psilocybin, right? Chances are good that if we do it the right way, we're gonna have a really positive impact from that.

But then the question really I think ultimately is like, what for? Like what is your life for, like it's not as one spiritual, one Buddhist teacher I worked with like to say, it is not freedom from X, Y and Z, its freedom for A, B and C, Why do you need to not be depressed?

What are you going to do with your life? what's going make your suffering meaningful to Viktor Frankl, right? And so I think what is beautiful about psychedelics as you just described it is it's a catalyst that gives you a sense of meaning or divinity, something worthy of changing your diet for.

Otherwise, we're just playing this whack-a-mole egoic game of going for more pleasure and avoiding more pain. That's very interesting because now there's this other element coming in, which is like, hey, in 15 years, we may not need to work, right?

And work has given us so much meaning over the years. That's what's given most people their meaning is going and doing work. What happens when your Tesla robot can clean your house and like, you know, there's just like unlimited abundance because all of the constraints have been taken away.

that's being talked about as sort of like an edge future. And one of things that has come up is like well, if I'm on universal basic income and I don't have any reason to work, what am I going to care about?

And ultimately, there's a million things you could care. I have no deficit here, so it doesn't register for me. But I know for many people, if they didn't had their work and they don t have meaning through that way, they would struggle to find meaning.

I'll see what people do when there's constraints are actually taken away rather than just being able to conceive of them. Because if you've always had to work for every day in your life, just to put food on the table, you know, to keep yourself alive, You can't really imagine what you do if those constraints were taken.

And I think one of the reasons why it's going to be like a psychosocial, it is going be a huge moment for humanity is to think about like, well, what actually is meaning and purpose about?

Where does it come from? And how could we bring it back? And it seems like that's one of the sort of side effects for many people is really finding that for themselves typically with that in a conversation, right?

I agree. You know, it's sort like chapter two. If chapter one was Nietzsche declaring that God is dead, in other words, religion is not where you can go anymore for directions about your life.

And now it is up to you to create existential meaning, AI and UBI. create an even more dramatic challenge to the individual of, okay, well, I can't take refuge in or hide out in my job anymore as my reason why I spend eight hours a day under fluorescent lights and doing the thing that isn't really necessarily all that meaningful, but it's more meaningful than sitting at home and scrolling through social media.

What am I going to do? But I believe that human beings throughout time have been very adaptable species. And, you know, maybe there are obviously circumstances that we can't survive in, like a post-apocalyptic, post nuclear situation is probably not going to be a great environment for us.

But, we know how to colonize incredibly difficult environments and be resourceful and figure things out. I agree with you. It's a salutogenic challenge.

It is a hormesis for us to have to face that question of what do we do now if we don't have work? What are some of the stories or things that you talk about in your book that might inspire practitioners who are on the fence of it?

Maybe they've seen bad outcomes in some place or others. What do you see as some things you feel might attract a practitioner to think, I want to be involved in this movement?

Sure. Well, we have a lot of patient stories in the book. People who participated in clinical trials, people we've treated in our clinic with ketamine or psilocybin.

So I think those stories convey a of the depth of work. There are stories of people who had to go into the underground to get the healing that they needed.

I think those inspire a different crowd that bring this forward into the mainstream and bring it out of the shadows. Obviously, healing has been happening outside of regulatory market.

eons. It's interesting, it's sort of like be careful what you ask for because the regulated market and that situation has proven to be really challenging to work with and expensive.

And I know we have people who graduated from our program providing MDMA above board in Australia and it's, you know, $20,000 to get through that protocol in Austria.

So our work is cut out for us. But I think in terms of the book and what, The book is, I would say that the practitioner reader is kind of the secondary reader for this book.

The main audience is we're hoping that it will be popular for everyday people who are dealing with trauma or dealing interactable treatment resistant conditions, firefighters, law enforcement, people need help, and they might not even be aware that these options exist.

Yeah. All right. Well, I guess the final question I want to just ask you is, well, it's just around the legalization of it because you've talked it there and I know there was some big roadblocks in the journey and everyone that's involved in it is frustrated with the path that it has taken.

I now there's at least in theory, support within the administration and you got people like Rick Perry sort of on the front lines.

Book stories, legalization, and the road ahead

What are your thoughts of the pathway to legalization from here? And what are some of green shoots that you see in the world today? Well, I certainly hope that the, um, trying to remember the name, the new name of the Lycos pharmaceutical company.

I don't remember that name in the New One, but it has a new named. And I hope they make their way through, uh, this final push to try to revitalize the NDA for MDMA and not have to do another phase three trial.

Uh, don' know where they're at in that, in, that process, But hopefully they are closer in than a full additional redo of a phase 3 trial I'm really excited about the Compass Pathways product, Comp360.

The new product Bratacillicin that was developed by Gilgamesh that acquired by ABVI last fall is really exciting. It's a 5MEO kind of cousin or analog that takes a 10-minute experience and turns it into a two-hour experience.

So I'm imagining that that's going to play really well with the logistics of providing mental health care and having a bigger window of opportunity to remodel beliefs and get into that critical learning pathway.

So there are 300 different individual psychedelic compounds in the FDA process right now at various stages. So, you know, going back to the five and 10-year plan, I think we'll have a massive range of different tools in near future.

It's hard to say how soon, but you were alluding to administration, RFK Jr., Mark Hyman, there are even Marty Makary. has spoken very positively ahead of FDA.

So I'm really hoping that something moves before the midterm elections because things can change dramatically if there's a shift there. Well, look, I guess I'm going to share my appreciation, Will, for the journey that you've taken and stepping in and coming back to psychiatry and playing this role because ultimately I do think you could be a very powerful bridge and I know that there's many others who are playing various different roles in this.

And I think that there's a lot that needs to happen and I'm feeling called towards it as well. I feel like one of the things that I see is sort of what you shared here at the beginning is that for functional medicines to really become the standard of care, everyone needs want it.

And, I do think, that the psychedelic tools are the most powerful for shifting what people want. And ultimately, if everyone wanted to be healthy, the world would look very different really quickly.

And if that was the priority, I think that could happen. So if you're listening to this and you are interested in this topic, check out Will's book, Psychedelic Therapy.

Also, feel free to write back to me at The Evolution of Medicine because we will have some upcoming events. I'm putting on an event in May called Funkadelic.

And it's really around this sort of cross-section of these two areas because I do believe that in order for a standard of care to emerge, that is participatory.

We do need some accelerants in that phase and this is the best that I've seen. So thank you for your work and I look forward to more work together in the future.

I think it is turning out that we're on a similar path and thinking about things in a same way. Not surprised at all and thanks so much for being who you are and doing what you're doing.

Well, thanks, James, for that. Thanks for having me and thanks for attending to the networks. It's so critical to help nourish these networks, these kind of mycelial connections between practitioners and payers and environments.

Well, thank you. That reminds me, yeah, this will come out before then. So April 22nd, if you're in the Colorado area, we're putting on a special event.

They're really about building networks of practitioners around reversal of cognitive decline. You know, ultimately, I'm excited to see what's going to come from it.

I've got some inside knowledge from friends and colleagues about what it takes to bring holistic medicine. and bring it into places where other people can pay for it.

And a network is much more powerful than individual practitioners for so many reasons, and that's where we're headed. So I'll see you there, if not before.

Yeah, I look forward to that. Thanks, everyone, for tuning in. This has been the Evolution of Medicine podcast. Have any questions, please feel to reach out.

So that was the podcast. What an epic session and just a reminder that coming up in April we will have version two of our Reversing Alzheimer's Summit and we're going to have updates on some of the new studies from Dr.

Bredesen and be charting a path forward for the reversal of Alzheimer and cognitive decline. Thank you so much for tuning in to the Evolution of Medicine podcast, we'll be back again next week and thanks so

Will Van Derveer, MD

Psychedelic Therapy