How Advancements In Stem Cell Therapy Can Help Your Thyroid Disease

Hi everyone, this is Dr. Kelly Halderman, welcome back to DrTalks on our series on thyroid health today, we have an awesome functional medicine doctor joining us. Dr. Thomas Santucci, welcome Dr. Santucci

Thomas Santucci, DC

Thank you so much.

Dr. Kelly Halderman

I’m just so happy that you could be here today. You do some cool stuff. You’ve always been my go to for really cutting edge therapy is and your mind, I just want to tell the person who’s watching right now. Dr. Santucci is a genius. You know, he he literally his mind works so fast and you process things so fast but you’re so articulate and you’re able to take these so, you know, such complex ideas, you know, bio chemistry and really teach them well. So I’m excited because a lot of the things that we hear about, you know, from helping our thyroid with different different nutritional supplements, there’s a lot of path of physiology that goes into that and I’m happy for us to be together today. So you can kind of walk us through that. So, thank you again, I would like to start off by talking about you talk about your practice, how you got into medicine, What are you, what are you doing over there on the west coast?

Thomas Santucci, DC

Well, it turns out lots of things this all kind of started when I was in a car accident. So I was in a head on collision with a truck and pretty serious you know, 100 mile an hour combined thing, broke my neck, broke my back, broke my hips, everything. So I became an orthopedic specialist as a result of that had lots of things, nobody thought was going to be fixed. But as a side effect of all that, I ended up with three autoimmune diseases. And this was 30 years ago. So 30 years ago if you were a white male and you had three autoimmune diseases, they assumed you had AIDS. And so I was like I don’t have AIDS, I had a car accident. So that prompted us to kind of put our mind around the whole chronic acute autoimmune contribution. And what we noticed is that thyroid was first and so everybody starts with thyroid because it’s a primary neuroendocrine system. So I had a car accident that actually turn up my thyroid. Well if you look at the literature about a third of the people who have bad traumas have thyroid problems, no one’s looking for those connections. 

So before I was a doctor I was a strategic planner. So we would do equations with 5000 variables and dr land if you do four things you’re all fancy. So we just were like, are you telling me these things aren’t connected? So I made this neat chart mostly for myself initially and it’s a chart that has thyroid in the beginning part of it, but it also has no joke Cognitive problems. That also has rheumatoid changes, muscle problems, skin things, lung problems, peripheral neuropathy, G. I issues and blood. And what we realized or what the theory was and now it’s been exonerated 10 years later, 20 years later is that all of these are the victims of an autoimmune disease. And so we’re very much in the business of what can you do about it. It’s good to understand things. He’s wonderful. You know, isolating variables is wonderful but really fixing patients is way more wonderful than that. So we really got it down to what’s causing these things. And so we made a list 22 things of the triggers that caused autoimmune disease. 

And a lot of this is Jeff Buckley in the functional medicine institute a lot of you know we have similar kinds of breeding in that. So I did all the functional medicine courses for 10 years. So every single one of them and I fly to L. A. And I learned something and I have been all of the gut biomass and then you know then I learned about the liver and then I learned about immunity and whatever the thing was that no one had put it all together. Medical research was a lot of correlating the multiple heads of a hydra. So the snake has 10 heads and they go look at that one and this one are related and I go of course they’re related, they’re the same thing and I would be like why don’t you guys see the pattern in this thing and you say what the pattern was and they go that’s interesting, you know? But they didn’t do it. So I made this thing and we really got it down to six main triggers for autoimmune disease. 

This is when we’re really in the neuro endocrinology, we’re in the biochemistry. So and it was food antigens first. So what’s happened, you know, why is our D. N. A different, why is this new generation so different? Why is the world so different? And so something happened with the environment And that’s an easy thing to say and depending on like what your particular dentist. Some people think it’s E. M. F. Some people think it’s quite phosphate, some people like me think it’s gluten and dairy. So we were doing brain scans on people with neurofeedback and getting 30% better answers. We took people off of gluten, so 20 years ago, as everyone probably knows by now, the molecules just changed, the food industry changed and we’ve got the Gm mode wheat and we’ve got the changes in dairy, you know when a lot of us were kids. 

Well I’m this is my 70th year, which is really strange to me because I’m just not ready for it. I don’t feel 70 I don’t think I act 70 I’m noticing other people are getting old, it’s a little distressing, but when people were born, when I was born, a cow lasted about 20 years and gave one gallon of milk a day a cow last five years and gives five gallons of milk a day and I’ll just tell you something that stuff isn’t milk. And so anyone who thinks that they can drink milk is deluded it’s just not okay. The gluten thing we did 500 H. L. A. D. Q. B. One gene type tests and 498 of them came back with positive antibodies. So this chart is your own immune system attacking you. And so in medicine and it’s really interesting I don’t I don’t know how we did this to people. We took people with 100 and 40 I. Q. And we told them they weren’t allowed to figure out. So in medicine we label things idiopathic so I hate the word idiopathic means I can’t figure it out and I’m not gonna try and I’m like no no you should totally try you know because then you maybe fix it. So we made a theory. It’s all a theory because you’re not allowed to like know any of this stuff so we said it might be food and it was gluten, dairy eggs Soy and that match the testing we could do and we would get DNA markers and the number of antibodies and we were hitting you know home all the time but it could also be metals and so metals especially you know everything from lead overdose to arsenic you know rat poisoning we found in people, we found uranium, we found strong 23 in people medals leave a gray brown exceed eight on the skin. Like I usually diagnosed by visual, you know, observation and then we run a metals test a conference if you’re an element profile and then we confirm it, you know, it’s all very scientific, but you have to have the instinct and you have to be looking for it. So from a practitioner point of the things I love about what you’re doing, Kelly is that you don’t, you don’t take the simple route. 

It’s not iodine, it’s not by rocks and it’s not this part of the five part thyroid cascade, which we can all do in our sleep. It isn’t some simple thing and it’s not the same for every person. It’s whatever your deal is. And so part of the investigation, you know, the root cause medicine thing means there’s a big onus on the practitioner to be a detective, which means in the console, you better be frowning, you better be like looking down and praying to God and after you find two things looking for another one because that’s how many things there are, it’s not simple and yeah, I have this can’t approach to fire, take this pill. That’s just so idiotic. And you understand why that is because anything you sell on the internet has to be usable across a broad spectrum, which means it doesn’t work for a third of the people right away and it’s bad for a third of the people, you know, so we don’t believe in that. I believe strongly in a clinical approach. I ultimately think the patient is in charge and responsible, but with clinical help. And so I like the teaming up kind of a thing. 

One of the funniest things I ever saw was Holistic oncologists is have this deep partnership with my patients and I respect their input as long as I do the 10 things that I say exactly the way I say it, it’s good and I was like, that’s called you dictating the medicine. Well, in this one we need a partnership. So I need them to change what they eat, but only after I show them and convince them probably a lot of sales in this. A lot of cheerleading, it’s I’m sorry you’re poisoning yourself three times a day. It makes me sad. I wish it wasn’t true, but it is true. So now your autoimmune disease comes from somewhere. You know, everything comes from somewhere. 

We may be too obtuse to figure it out, but it came from somewhere and it’s these super increases are probably environmental and that’s just me trying to be common sensing. So the next thing with stress and again, we’re in the Silicon Valley with patients in New York, we have patients that are, you know, they’re GHT a cortisol, the hormones that create stress or the control stress are off the chart there really, really bad. So we thought oh if you’re breathing and you’re in the Silicon Valley then your cortisol is high. Well we’ve seen cortisol levels that the next stage is a heart attack and you’re dead next week. So we’re like this is a really serious thing and just because it’s obvious, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be testing it. So there’s a lot of that kind of thing when we’re looking at hormones. We actually started in a men’s and women’s health clinic as part of one of our things we’re doing in my clinic at advanced region. So when we’re looking at it, especially testing like low testosterone, low testosterone is a concomitant, a side effect of some of this neuro endocrine stuff going down there as we know. And one of the problems with neuro endocrine issues is that you’ve got three biochem, wet chemistry systems that interrelate. And even when people can say that they can’t think it because if your stress system, your neuro endocrine systems, your neuro sexual systems, I’ll call it, you know the sexual binding globulin and those kind of like sort of fancy molecules. And some of the lifestyle stuff are all in what one would chemistry and we understand that they inter relaxed with each other and we all charge that show that and we can say it pulling it apart is really tough. 

And so I always thought, you know, I used to have an icon in my clinic, like a logo, there was an octahedron, eight things taken eight at a time. And our job is to go in and go okay. That one that that one really the thing that’s running the show and my intervention is this and it’s almost never the same for two people. So when people go, I have the thyroid answer, I just know they don’t you know, I know that they haven’t dealt with the individual and then at the same time it can’t be your answer. Remember in biochemistry and functional medicine, you can tell the new people because the guy at 20 things wrong to give him 20 supplements. You know, it’s just wrong, you know, it’s like what’s the key? So part of our job is what is going on here and then what’s my most direct intervention. So in doing this it was really helpful because you get to certain items here, you get to things like peripheral neuropathy and peripheral neuropathy. By definition there’s a brand of it or a sub classification that’s called idiopathic neuropathy. It has the word right in there. 

And so it says we can’t figure that out and I was like spend an hour and you’ll figure it out, you know? And so thyroid the same thing. So thyroid kind of matches the migration that my clinic took. So what happened was, you know, we did the 10 years of functional medicine and I’m an advocate, I love it. But I’m also an advocate of physical medicine. I like orthopedics, I think we missed that in this country. So I developed a model that was physical biochemical neuro and energetic or neuropsychological depending on where you go with that energy at the top at the top level. And what I see is by the definition or the letters behind the practitioners name, they do one of those things pretty well and what I think is incumbent upon us as informed generalists. But I think we all need to do now is skip over to another person’s discipline and what happens. 

And one of Kelly’s and my great fun stories is we took the advanced neurologic training together and we almost got kicked out of it multiple times. But you know, we actually learned a lot and Kelly comes in with a very, very, very strong pharmacologic you know, details of the systems open to new information, really clever medical kind of point of view with the functional medicine and then we were adding the functional neurology to it. I was coming in with much more what’s the newest coolest technology and what can I do that that leverages me the orthopedics and kind of a non medical mindset, you know, a problem solving mindset that’s much more business than than it is medical. So when we’re working on the physical exam or physical exams were just better than other people. I mean we really did get some stuff that, you know, I’ve kept to this day and I was like, okay, that’s one of my fond memories of great medicine. So it doesn’t matter where you come from and it doesn’t matter what your first education is. One of the best functional medicine doctors I know is a sand script guy. Where’s the dress? You know, it’s like now that doesn’t matter, but in the day it did and and you know, he’s fantastic biochemist. So what happens when you begin to learn a whole other discipline is that you realize that every single discipline is a thing that they think they can’t fix. But these other guys think they can like the acupuncturist think they can fix a ton of stuff. The conventional neurologists don’t think they can fix everybody thinks they can fix what conventional endocrinologists think they can’t fix, You know, because that’s just a funny group. 

I accept them deep in my heart, but oh my God, I wouldn’t want to be one. You know, it’s like they just have labeled so many things as un addressable that are really pretty strong, you know, candidates for therapy. So going into it, we basically were doing biochemistry. So for about 10 years and we were happy with that. We were testing for antibody responses. We were testing for what are the triggers for antibodies. We were looking at the deeper cause we’re getting a lot of people Well certainly thyroid You know because thyroids this primary system without energy, you can’t do anything. One of my cliches is that you know fatigue at a certain level is indistinguishable from depression. I had it in my own, it took me about eight years to fix myself with the 22 doctors. So thank you God. But when your energy is at that certain level even if you don’t have a reason to you will have a bad day. 

And so a lot of thyroid people part of the therapy is showing them that there will be a better day so sort of shining a light on the emotional part of it and I used to say you know well you know and again my dad was a psychiatrist so I had enough of that growing up. The biggest joke in our family was how does that make you feel? Because like nobody cared. But now I go you know I’m gonna do physical biochemical neurologic, you’re gonna do the neuro emotional energetic part. But I’m gonna put you in a position where that’s possible but we definitely think it’s necessary. So it’s not like we’re discounting any of those areas. So one day I was we were doing brain scans and neurofeedback. So it was we’re doing Q. E. G. Brain scans and you know delta theta alpha beta waves and there began to be correlations of those kind of results with depression and we were doing the biochemical testing and they were all the thyroid patients and I was like thyroids depressive you know and so it’s nice when you’re doing brain scans and you actually have those numbers for you know in this case they waves and beta waves and these are just frequencies with the brain that you’re measuring with a cap on the patient’s head and it’s pretty straightforward. 

And there’s a barren patterns you get good at looking at it and saying oh this person is here and they’re going here and it’s called Brainwave Entrainment. So if you look at what we’re talking about here, thyroid is a primary neuro endocrine system which means hypothalamus is talking to pituitary is then communicating to a relatively dumb organ. Thyroid is not your heart or your liver or your small intestines. It just does what the brain is telling it to do. And so why not go to the brain? So we were doing neurofeedback and it was an interesting coincidence I had a patient that was super sensitive to all chemistry and we couldn’t give her any pill. We couldn’t give her a supplement. We couldn’t do anything. So I used neurofeedback. But I was testing so I was testing the thyroid. I did the neurofeedback and I balanced out the thyroid. And if you sort of think about it for a second that’s so obvious it’s not funny and yet no one had done it and I was just like because no biochemists do neurofeedback you know it’s like they didn’t they didn’t you know everybody stayed in their little, they did so one of the good things, there’s a lot of terrible things about being a chiropractor. One is the instant you get the degree your I. Q. Goes down 50 points and you lose all your friends. So as a Georgetown University strategic planner, I was really the smart guy and I had to like do 66 years of education to become stupid apparently. 

So you know family hid their kids from me all that kind of stuff for a little while we changed it. But so one of the things that that happens in that world is there’s not an assumption that You can do anything with anything. So. Long story short I knew that I had to get other education so I just kept going to schools and colleges and courses and whatever. So at 30 years I have been to 17 colleges I know I think part of it is a hopeful attitude and a bad memory, you know like the two things but we’re running brain scans on people and looking at that and seeing what we could do with it as as life progressed we there’s a couple of things that changed whole industries in chiropractic chiropractic neurology, changed everything. We now know, you know, 100 and 22 nerve pathways. It’s the training that Kelly and I took and it really changes you, you know, you’re going okay, you have this biochemical understanding, but I have a neurologic understanding and as you speak, I can see the neural pathways, you put those two things together, you just know more than others people, nobody does this, I’m just telling you. 

So, what I’m in favor of the big picture is having these people called informed generalist, you know, it doesn’t matter what your initial training is, it matters that you learn something across the board, anyone who doesn’t think that acupuncturist knows something about energy, the rest of us don’t know is deluded anyone who doesn’t think that chiropractors know more about orthopedics isn’t paying attention now, I think we have an opportunity now in medicine because we should all be more efficient, you know? So I think the way I’m talking about it, where you have the person that the person who should make the most money by the way is not the specialist specialist make third more and you better believe the kids in medical school, know that I think that first guy that informed Generalist can actually figure out what’s going on and then hand it off to the little guy who sticks a new heart valve in or whatever it is that you need to get done is the second guy instead, we got a bass Ackwards. 

Anyway, so when we go into those rooms and it kept happening, oh, we can’t fix this and I would go, I can. And then they go, oh no one understands this. And I said, oh, here, here it is, it’s, it’s right here they, that other room. They figured it out. And so I didn’t do a good job of like communicating that because I was like, it was overwhelming. I’d be in a group of 500 doctors and two of us thought what I thought now it’s getting to be more clear where we’re all beginning to realize that there’s an answer somewhere and I think that that’s a primary tenant, there is an answer somewhere and we all have to kind of start with that as the premise, you know, God wants us to figure this stuff out, whatever rationale you have to you or you’re smart enough to do it or there’s somewhere in the world has that answer, That’s one of mine. So when they said, you know, my left leg will never work again. I was like, really in the whole world, in Japan, they haven’t figured in Western Europe, Germany, they’re smart. You know, like they haven’t figured it out. And then it usually took me about two hours of research and I figure out how to fix it lots of times over and over and over. So all of a sudden life progresses and so we’ve done neurofeedback and I really I stopped doing that regretfully actually because I thought the psychiatrist is going to take it over because it’s sort of their thing. And they could have objectified a whole thing that’s really an art form and they could have gotten some quantification in in the thing they did. So I walked away from that and the regenerative medicine came up and I’m a huge stem cell advocate stem cells. I’ve done stem cells on Alzheimer’s patients. 

I’ve done stem cells on myself. I’ve done stem cells on cognitive decline in members of my family who are now tolerable. You know, it’s like it’s really fixed some stuff. And so the stem cells, we were doing inter nasal stem cells for cognitive decline. Always measuring the biochemistry and fixing as a matter of fact reversing the symptoms of thyroid disease. So we were getting normal TSH, because the pituitary hypothalamus was that so it was amazing to us because I view stem cells as kind of a background kind of a thing. It’s very very very good. We’re looking at a and independent research profile, independent research board clinical trial for Alzheimer’s using stem cells as a primary thing inter nasal because think about what a stem cell does. So first of all, you know, if we look at it, it addresses this primary antigen problem. 

So the addresses the autoimmune issue. So people take vitamin D. You know D. Three. So it balances out the cell mediated immunity. I’m sure you’ve covered this on your show. So mediated immunity and natural immunity, the so called th one th two systems. Well stem cells do it better. So with and this is everything I’m saying has science behind it because it accumulates to this thing that says that’s too good to be true. Well, making a human body out of two cells is too good to be true. We are miracles. And you know, I really start with that. And so were miracles. Were using the same thing, the omnipotent stem cells that can create a human body and all we gotta do is fix some stuff. You know, it’s like I’m not having a hard time here, I’m thinking this is a doable thing. So long story short we were going into nasal stem cells and balancing out the immune response and it actually alters the white blood cells to change to balance out the system. 

And no matter what. So you get a let’s just use illness for a second, you get a virus. So a virus comes into you. It wants to replicate a million times you create a million white blood cells whose First you either get the cold for you know, two days or half a day or 12 days, depending on how fast or slow. So cellular reserves ends up being this big thing, stem cells replicate themselves and they replicate, damaged tissues, their cytokine directed. And what that means is if something’s inflamed, they will go after it and they will stop the inflammation and they will repair the cells I, you know, especially being 70, I’m looking at that and going, yeah, repair some of my brain cells, you know, like, I’m pretty sure that 60’s and 70s were kinda hard on them. So, you know, I want some more of those and so we’re doing it in disease processes and you can’t say the direct effect because nobody can measure it and whatever, but the person couldn’t talk and now they can or they couldn’t drive or they couldn’t write or, you know, story after story after story. We had so many of those things on our website that basically the FBI made us take down our website because they said we were making medical claims and I was like, I’m not making any claims, I’m a scientist, I’m trans, you know, showing what our patients have said. They still made us take it down. That was about eight years ago, maybe the environment sort of, improving. It’s hard to tell where we are with the pa politics of the thing. 

Anyway, so now back to thyroid. So we’ve got a situation where we’re going to balance out the immune response, which is like a really good thing parenthetically, we would take the person off of gluten and dairy, and we would look to see whether any of those other triggers were were in in actions, we think something caused it but stem cells are innately anti inflammatory so they are going to go in and just put out the brain on fire. A lot of stuff. The promoter talked about a lot of stuff that we’ve all kind of had as our background. I like the background stuff but I don’t like it when people turn it into a religion. Like I don’t think, you know one thing is the cause of everything, you know like sometimes when I say see how many things are attributed to like one system. I’m always I’m always like what about the other four systems? Like are you really think and then individuality not that you know pre biotics can’t help a certain number of people but you know some of the people on T. V. And that we’re getting the streaming for are out of line.

You know they’re just selling stuff on the internet, you know whatever. So the other thing that that happens with stem cells is they’re very specific about what they fix. So if you do an I. V. Let’s say of stem cells you can’t say oh I would like it to do the carpal tunnel, here’s my list? Carpal tunnel and then I would like my eye a little bit better and then I’d like the Paris these in my foot the funny feeling to be corrected. They go do what they do, you don’t tell stem cells what to do. And so I sort of viewed it as a general kind of thing. But if I’ve got a neuro endocrine problem, I assume I don’t have a brain stem problem. I assume I have a pituitary hypothalamus problem. And so far and with no information about how the stem cells are actually working. Those are the systems that have been improved in the thyroid cases and bad thyroid cases. 

The other thing is if there was another problem and one of the things that we understand and thyroid thyroid is the recipient of trauma thyroid is the recipient of other systems failing. And so I can give the body a bad enough glucose situation, insulin, glucose, glucose gone situation meaning screwed up dot diabetes. And I can mess up the thyroid. It’s pretty easy you know, it’s a pretty robust system considering how many bad things we do to it. So the stem cells have this way of generally improving all of those things and kind of like a correlation. So I view it as like a super super super strong tonic. So for my, you know, memory loss patients, the cognitive decline patients, the dementia patients, the Alzheimer’s patients, we do it as a background after we do the neuro endocrine and the toxicity interventions kind of like all at once. So the last thing that stem cells have is a characteristic. Again, their anti inflammatory that balance out their immune system, they replicate themselves, they replicate other cells, meaning they repair things is they’re anti pop topics, so, which means they kill cancer cells. And that’s the one, there’s a ton of research on it and you know, you say that and you know, the common vernacular, like Five years ago we first started doing stem cells, they were like, is it gonna grow eyeballs on my feet and you know, like, is it tear it hygienic, and is it gonna really do horrible things? And those are valid questions, but the reality is they didn’t cause any of those problems. There was 100 and 10,000 safe transplants. It’s, you know, going to the dentist actually has a bigger downside than doing stem cells. So now we’re looking at it and going, what we need to do is to change the environment. We’re having a conversation about probably the most prevalent undertreated misunderstood neuroendocrine condition called thyroid and you know, I’m suggesting, and there are people who are just wizards at it. 

Some of the people on your show are just wonderful and the level of detail that they can understand, not just the cascade, but also, you know what to do about it, kind of our religion, but if we added stem cell can common it and I mean, to any chronic acute condition, it’s gonna work better. One of the things that we believe is that everyone has to exercise. And so we have a lot of either depressive or disabled, too strong a word, but unable to people where they’re just, you know, not really capable of doing very much. They’re walking with a walker, they have a cane or they just don’t want to go outside. And when we do the stem cells, we notice that there’s like a line in the sand where we go, okay, you know, we’re going to detox the metals and we’re gonna fix the diet and we’re gonna do some stuff, but by the end of this month, you’re gonna walk a mile, and they’re always flabbergasted, you know, and I was like, I dragged my left leg for two years when the thing didn’t work. 

You know, it’s like, I’ve done the rehab, I know how to do this and it was fun because, you know, they’re like, oh, you’re worse than me. And I was like, right, but, you know, this is just a process. So, I think from a practitioner point of view, you know, we get things, especially if you’re, you know, a more seasoned doctor of, you know, how can you just, you know, work smarter, not harder. And I think that’s a mistake. I think we should get our hands dirty. I think we should track the patient visit by visit, I think we should come in and be responsible with the patient for the outcomes. And I really think that there’s kind of a, there’s it’s not a clinical failure, but it’s not a sin, but it’s not a common, we’re just missing the mark. So clinically, I think we should take responsibility for patient progression. 

I think we should measure it. I think we should expect it. I think we should put a plan together that accomplishes it. Which means you have to do ahead a lot more work than most people are doing most doctrines. And then the patients really have been programmed. I mean, I probably spend a third of my speaking time convincing people it’s possible for them to be well, you know, that it’s just not part of our our psyche. And I was like, and I make jokes about it, but I was like, you know, do you really think God’s plan for you in the last third of your life, you’re gonna just have a horrible physical presentation. Do you think that that’s natural? And you know, we look at some of the people and and I’m glad to see it, you know, we’re seeing some of the practitioners really big models, you know, and I was like, you know, if you actually did what, you know, Dr. Kelly does or you do what I do, which is a lot of work to maintain this status and there’s serious pushback and, you know, there’s there’s no perfect social proof. But this is what I perform at this level. And so I have patients now, you know, after all this time and they come in, they go, what are you doing? And I go, what’s the question, what’s the new thing in your clinic and can I do it? And I’m like, right, but also, you know, I just finished raising teenagers and you know, no deaths reported. So we view that as a positive thing but

Dr. Kelly Halderman

Great work.

Thomas Santucci, DC

Thank you. It’s turning into a thankful task. It wasn’t for about 10 years of very, very, very difficult stuff. Glad to have the functional neurology and the developmental delay courses because, you know, like it saved my my sanity, but at the same time, I’m like looking at it going that wouldn’t have turned out so good if I wasn’t involved, you know, like twice a week with some kind of a a parenting intervention, especially when I wasn’t invited. And I think doctoring needs to be that more. You know, there’s way too much indifference and there’s, you know, it’s sort of seen as professional to not intervene or not give your opinion or not. You know, kind of get into it with the patient and you know, I treat a lot of borderline, you know, they have neuropathy and so what does that mean? It means that, you know, it’s another autoimmune disease. 

They’re probably have a thyroid issue in addition to the things, the juices to low, but they’re not getting the signals, the signaling, the glucose, the oxygen is not making it to the feet or the sexual organs. And obviously the brain, they’re all peripheral kinds of things. And the amount of either I don’t understand you or you’re making me think too hard or I just don’t want to do it. And you’re just like, my wife making me do stuff I don’t want to do. There in that, in that patient base is extreme. We don’t back off at all. Were like, no, you know, the last patient was on a gurney there on spine force now, which is a neuro rehab thing that measures and they’re at 80%, you know, it can be done. And I think that it’s kind of like, well, what do you expect at your age? Or, you know, we don’t really have an answer for that. Or frankly, you’re too much work and I don’t want to deal with you.

Dr. Kelly Halderman

Well, that’s a dime a dozen. I mean, you know, like, really, there’s that’s just taking the easy way out and, you know, full circle where we started this conversation, the term idiopathic, you just wash your hands and put that label on and you’re done and you walk away and that may be not be able to sleep at night because even things like Hashimoto’s, you know, we we gave it a great diagnosis. We gave things, you know, multiple sclerosis. Here’s your diagnosis. But I would go home at night and go. Doesn’t anyone want to know why are we not smart enough? Do we not have any sort of idea of, like, digging into the things that could have caused it? But that’s not that’s not the paradigm. That is not. So if you go to Mcdonald’s expect fast food, right, like you’re not gonna get anything different. So, you know, like if we’re going to dig deeper into our illness, I mean, I have Hashimoto’s myself now, I want to come out and see for some stem cells Dr. Santucci. You know, I really do take care of myself. I will say this. I mean, I’m definitely very well optimized, but I think that what you said about the stem cells and, you know, like gave us a really good basis of understanding the connection with thyroid because we we tend in Allah path world chop things up and that’s why I think stem cells get get a bit bastardized because it sounds too good to be true. And then you throw it out, you threw the baby out with the bathwater and we carry on with our junk diagnosis and our labeling of idiopathic, I mean, it just makes me want to vomit. So really the way that you can take it all and be that. How do you put the generalists there you go, the informed generalist, that’s who you want on your team. Especially if you’re suffering with thyroid disease because you know, the al empathic model, you’re going to be put on Synthroid, you’re going to be monitored, Your dose is going to go up. It’s just not a lot to work with there. You deserve better. 

You deserve to really get to the root causes and for someone who has the knowledge and literally you just leveled us up. I haven’t had any doctor on that’s talked about stem cells and really even going into the neurofeedback, you know, I am remiss because I don’t use that anymore. But I think, like boy, that was a very powerful tool should go back. But you know, I think with the stem cells in your clinic, especially when you’re looking at neurodegenerative diseases because you know, if you have a diagnosis of thyroid disease, like your body is in that cell danger and you’re all that is like the canary in the coal mine, like, hey, let’s start digging out. You continue to ignore that and you and I talked with Dr. Eric on a different podcast about shoving Synthroid into a system that’s sick. What do you end up with? Well, there’s papers that would say that you’re at more risk for a cancer diagnosis and you know, other different mechanisms as well. 

I think that this is something where it seems that it will move the needle. That’s what I’m interested in. I’m interested in having guests on who are knowledgeable, who maybe talk about things that seem good to, you know, too good to be true, but they have done their homework, they know the literature, they’re doing this in practice, they’re seeing these results, they’re seeing objective data and then they get very good reviews, subjective data from their patients saying I finally feel better like and that’s what we want, like you said, you cannot do what you have been put on this earth to do if you are sick in bed and tired. And I just I think like you our mission is to get people to do what they’re supposed to do here and not be sick and really help them. And I like your approach to because you’re being the definition of a Dr. Dosari to teach and that is being that person who gives the client of patient tools lifelong tools, so 

Thomas Santucci, DC

Right. And I think one of the things is we have to unlearn some of the things and I just I was educated by Jesuits and Jesuits believe that you know, you push hard enough on the rock, the rock moves and if not get two or three more people to push on the rock, not that it’s you know in our job, you know what is physics, physics is trying to figure out what’s going on, you know, and we’re supposed to be in that world and so this it got taught and agreed to by a board and so that’s the truth in California, there’s massive pushback on that kind of stuff because two doctors just sued the government then basically said you couldn’t do that in medicine, meaning there’s no confirmed truth. It’s a moving target. And especially with our patients have an analogy that if you analyze an apple and breaking into enough parts, it becomes applesauce and so you’re right, it doesn’t work. And so, there’s such a skepticism, I get a thing. I think it was a mis mailing, but I got a thing from AARP and one of the things that was, which was rude and weird, but one of the things that they did was here’s how to make sure you’re not being scammed and I was kind of like, and here’s how to also make sure you never find the answer to something. So I do think people have to be judicious, careful wise. It says that in the bible, you should be wise, but it doesn’t mean you don’t do new things and whole early adopter curve. 

I used to think that just by showing other doctors that they were late on the adoption curve that they weren’t getting, you know, a whole segment of people well, and then they would just change once they understood the light of the, of all that wisdom and that didn’t work. So, my wife makes fun of me because I can empty a cocktail party by saying a medical cocktail party by saying everybody deserves individual care. You know, it’s just now she’s like can we just get one drink and an order before you polarize the entire room? It’s hard. Well that shouldn’t be a weird thing to say, you know, it should be, you know, we know that we have biochemical individuality. So some of those functional medicine tenants, you know an incident triggers and modulators. 

We like it doesn’t have to be more complicated than that. Where did it come from? And what makes it worse and what’s making you individually different to it because we know you can take a mild poison line up 20 people, three people will not know anything happen, the middle group will be mildly sick and three of them will die. Well that’s our biochemical cellular reserves its D. N. A. It’s You know, belief systems, its strength but whatever it is but they’re not the same people. And so when people say, you know this is what we do for that. I’m always amused because I was like by definition you’re not getting 40% of the people. Well they said no no that’s it, we’re at 60% and I was like we ran a 95% on that kind of stuff. And then if you didn’t get it right the first time then you moved out enough of the complicating factors that the idea would present itself and then something I want to throw out. And for the biochemist, the biggest mistake in biochemistry is to assume like the thing that was actually wrong and you tested that. It’s not the thing that is actually wrong, meaning I looked at it 100%. 

I totally know what you’re saying and that cliche as we leave, no stone unturned. I have seen people say that and miss all the stones, you know, and I was like, I think you have to be super humble when you’re going to do differentials, always assume an X ray, you find one weird thing, go find the other two weird things because they’re they’re, you know, it’s just it’s a cliche. But in biochemistry I always get a little nervous when I I go, oh no, I got this one. This is arsenic poisoning, I can see it, I’ve seen it before and then I go, shut up, just stop because it is arsenic poisoning. But it’s also something else. And then don’t be breaking your arm, patting yourself on the back that you got the diagnosis because you don’t have to diagnose because there’s five things wrong with this poor person. So in my own sad story, I had 22 things wrong with me, my medical records say that I am grandiose self absorbed, crazy, all that kind of stuff. And then when they actually found out that I actually had 22 things wrong with me, that comments were all there? Then I’m a stoic. And I confronted on it. And I just was like, I’m none of those things. I told you exactly what the deal was. You just don’t have a model that could handle a person with that many things wrong because you know, like you’re six minutes off of diagnostic time if that, you know, and one of the things that I saw and I got to interview the doctors after I fired 22 doctors in a week. Because I realized I wasn’t gonna get well and I was probably gonna die if I continued that way, I got rid of them all. And you know, I’m the son of a doctor, I’m a reasonably polite person and I’m like, I’m doing the exit interview and I’m like, you know, so I appreciate you putting together a plan, but it’s just not working. And it’s been two years and it looks like I’m getting worse. And you know, I’m an ex marketing statistics person. So I had this line of the degradation of my health systems and here you’re dead. And so I was like, okay, I’m intervening trajectory was not pleasant. 

No. And it was dismal. You know, like whatever. I’m having this real honest conversation with him. And the guy goes, you misunderstand completely. And I said, oh, which thing? And he goes, oh I never had a plan that I thought was going to fix you. Oh yeah. And I was like, why the hell am I coming here? And I realized they’re like, we don’t know how to fix what you have. And I was like, I’ve been coming here once every two weeks for two years and more than one doctor. So in business, if you take everything on yourself, you’re considered an idiot. Like the team can always outperform the individual, but in medicine that’s not true. And I know that’s a popular thing to say or not, but the person who has to be the spark plug is the patient. 

So I spend a lot of time turning the patient into a spark plug and just the simple, just the simple ascertain ation, there must be an answer somewhere on this earth that can make me well and then what I do is I convince them they don’t have anything more important to do than to get that, you know, and it’s, you know, to this country, another country, emerging things. Prayer don’t care will go wherever it is. And this, I have a priest conceived notion on something that nobody fixes is a terrible beginning position as also this can be fixed or this is lethal no matter what. A lot of the oncology patients, we have to unlearn, you know, you know like Kevin Conners basic position is that this is a natural system that has natural ways that you can buttress, you know, we worked with him for a while. 

Well, he’s genius in that, in the office and the mindset, you know, getting you off that I’m on a track, it leads to this, whatever I’ve seen like, you know, Ecologists predict a death date and I’ve also in pancreatic cancer. We got one that was supposed to die in five weeks. It was 62 weeks when they died after we intervene. Now they still died. We weren’t happy, but they could put a lot of post it notes around the house of how to deal with life without them there, you know, it was a much better situation. So that’s not our job. And then I had a very fundamentalist doctor, you know, say, you know, we’re dealing with cancer patient and you know, I understand my license doesn’t let me treat cancer. So I don’t treat cancer. I treat people who parenthetically also had cancer. I’m just supporting their systems, but you know, I walked in and fix the hormones and then we fixed the neuroendocrine system and then we fixed the liver and then we fixed digestion and they’re like, what are you doing? And some pretty strong brain sort of know neuro vestibular work that makes a person stronger in general. And I was like, I’m delaying this person’s death and it was interesting because their reaction was that’s not your job And I was like, you and I have a different charter. I think it is my job. And I have six tools to do that, and I’m gonna use all six of them. And it turned out that was the fourth stage cancer patients. She had a crusty exceed eight on her chest and it was like, terrible. And they’re like, you’re dead. And she’s now teaching nutrition courses in Mexico. So, I, you know, and so and that was stem cells. And again, we can’t even take credit for that, you know, that we had to say was nutrition and prayer, but because the oncologist was just so sure that, you know, the only thing that would work with the chemotherapy which was killing her slowly.

Dr. Kelly Halderman

Right, Right. So it’s a miracle. It’s nothing that you did in your clinic, which she did it, it’s just it’s just a spontaneous remission. You got the word, I only do spontaneous remissions. So, I like a spontaneous remission. I think that that was a very clever way of talking about what is possible. Well, Dr. Santucci, I could talk to you all day. I mean, you could go back and talk about functional neurology and our days and that, but I really appreciate you going through with your expertise for a thyroid patient on how stem cells could definitely help them if someone wants to get in contact with you and your clinic, how do they do so

Thomas Santucci, DC

Well a couple of ways we keep dancing around the website thing. So advanced region dot com is our kind of latest greatest. So we can’t actually say very much on websites these days with the way things are. Our clinic number is 4088718222. And you can ask to speak to me. So I’ve got this you know amazing staff at this point I have an M. D. A. D. O. A couple of nurse practitioners and really the medical assistance are the ones that do all the work. But I don’t do very much work anymore. So I just like do fancy consults and try to figure stuff out. So I love this kind of stuff. I love the you know kind of figure it out. We are getting more and more in touch with stronger and stronger stem cells. We can do them as bankable stem cells right now. We can do the knee injections and then the I. V. S. And the inter nasal. And I’m putting together an I. R. B. Too. 

Like again do alzheimer’s because I really think that that’s where my passion is going to be. I don’t want to die without fixing alzheimer’s it just seems like an obvious thing to do. So I’m interested in complex acute cases. You know like I really like it if they’ve been to 10 other doctors and they can’t figure it out because then, you know, maybe we can, we have a Partick kill a good track record in doing that. You know, I think that one of the things that’s happening now is we’re gonna start to take cases that are kind of proving our point. I never really did research and I never really did politics, I just tried to get people well and I think that this stage of my life, is that, you know, the beginning of getting a library of people where we can prove, you know, like video, this was wrong the day they walked in, like I had a patient that was pajamas and crawled on the ground. He actually ate out of a dog bowl. I mean, it was like that and now he’s like doing, he works for some hardware company doing loading or something and he’s completely better. 

So, but we didn’t take a movie of it and we didn’t do a case thing of it and whatever. So now I think that we’re interested in these kind of cases that we’re interested in communicating these kind of cases and I think it’s incumbent upon all of us as practitioners to kind of, you know, move the the rock, you know, that were, you know, 1000 canoes going to Hawaii and I just want to be on a big boat. So I’m actually looking for collaboration, I’m actually looking for, you know, the old prejudices are gone, you know, like chiropractors don’t hate mds anymore. Smart mds know that chiropractors can be smart, but saying someone is anything like we all went to fifth grade, right? You’re not 1/5 grader, you’ve learned whatever you’ve learned the functional side. I think that functional neurology has to merge with functional biochemistry or functional medicine. I think the functional medicine institute has to step up a little bit and there’s, we don’t have a political leadership role. So I’m thinking more and more that I’m going to try to do something like that for stem cells. 

We don’t even have enough association to like do stem cell interest, you know, and get the word out. So I’m looking at those kind of changes and roles, but I still have, you know, an 8000 square foot clinic in Campbell. So we’re interested. And then for the first time ever, I feel good about legacy. Like at one point I thought I would just, you know, when I wrote my first book on this, I was like, oh, I better put this down because I didn’t teach anybody any. It’s just me. Well now I’ve got four or five people that we are teaching it and they’re good at it, you know, and they have both sides of medicine and they’re doing it so a person can get well represented medicine in our clinic and at the same time. You know, there’s, there’s specialists who can do things in the functional medicine that go further than we would go in extreme cases. And it’s, you know, we’re beginning to sort of see the community mature.

Dr. Kelly Halderman

Right? Well, very good, well, very commendable. And again, thank you so much for your time. Dr. Santucci. I’ve enjoyed every minute of this. I’m sure I will be a viewer when this comes out again, take some notes, but you take care and thanks again.

Thomas Santucci, DC

Thank you.