Light Deficiency Syndrome And Common Nutritional & Lifestyle Mistakes In Those With Thyroid Disease

Leland Stillman, MD

Thank you for having me. It’s great to be here. I am a general internist. I practice in Florida and I specialize in helping busy, successful people recover from chronic illness of all kinds and get back to living their best life. That’s what I do.

Dr. Kelly Halderman

Yeah, definitely. Your story is very interesting. I was reading through your bio, and I do follow you if you don’t follow Dr. Stillman, he is a machine when it comes to pumping out amazing content. But I was reading about your background in that even before you went to medical school as a child, you struggled with some asthma, maybe some ADHD and and really that kind of lit the fire. But what really caught my eye in your bio is when you said you have little interest in treating disease and you’re more determined to cure disease. Can you talk to us about that?

Leland Stillman, MD

Yeah, I find it very boring talking about how we’re going to manage things. So medicine, you know, when I got the way I got trained, always talking about management. What’s the management of this? What’s the management of that? And I always remember thinking, well, you know, why are we not getting rid of the problem right? If a plumber came over to your house and said, listen, you got a leak in your attic, we’re going to manage it with some buckets. An antique humidifier you would like call another plumber. Right. Fired. Right. When people have this idea, like, oh, no, the thing is off, we’ll have to live with it forever. We’ll have to take pills and supplements and drugs and go to doctors and have surgeries and just forever and never, never, never. And it’s a really, really I mean, I just it’s what I love to do is getting people out of that nasty kind of vicious cycle with a real laundry list, combination of strategies and tactics.

Dr. Kelly Halderman

Right. And that is really a great focus because the topic is thyroid disease. And I was diagnosed with hypothyroidism Hashimoto’s. I was trained in the medical model as well and I thought it was just the life of measuring my age, my 44 and being on medication and.

Leland Stillman, MD

It’s such a like empty system. Nothing burger is hard and you have hypothyroidism. Really. What is it? Well your thyroid stopped working. Well, why? Well, we don’t know. Oh, right.

Dr. Kelly Halderman

That we don’t have a good answer. Right here. Take place. Take these pills. Come back in three months, will recheck your dosage there and give you another prescription. Right.

Leland Stillman, MD

Okay. Very, very empowering. You know, really, we, we, we we make it in a hopeless a hopeless situation in the Alabama model, which, you know, you practice and you’re an internal medicine doc like you. You know how that goes. And, you know, even when you’re doing rotations and things with endocrinologists, they don’t have a better answer either. 

Dr. Kelly Halderman

Right. I know.

Leland Stillman, MD

Or they’ll give you one really long, drawn out academic one and you kind of go to sleep and you wake up. You wonder what you missed.

Dr. Kelly Halderman

Yeah, for sure. For sure. So let’s kind of kick this off by talking about the number one nutritional mistake people with hypothyroidism may be making.

Leland Stillman, MD

Not getting enough protein. So I now do a combination of practicing medicine and teaching people and it’s really coaching that kind of, I don’t know, it’s the lawyers have these really like detailed semantic definitions of what these things are. I just explain how things work and then people fix themselves based on that. And so what Jim’s number one or maybe number two piece of advice for people is to eat more protein because what he’s found coaching and training people over the years is they don’t eat enough protein. And he and I were coming at this from a very different you know, parts of the or I guess, perspectives before we started working together. He was a strength and conditioning coach. And, you know, strength and conditioning coaches are often working with athletes who want to build muscle, increase their vertical jump, you know, increase in their burn through their whatever. And so they want to put on muscle, right? But then there’s all kinds of people coming into the gym who want to lose weight and gain muscle. Or if they aren’t gaining muscle, they at least want to lean out. And that basically means gaining muscle, which a lot of people don’t realize. And he just started to, you know, tell people to eat more protein because he would look at what they were eating and it was not adequate for them to do these things. 

And, you know, he noticed that people would start to do things like come off their environments and he wasn’t telling them to do this. They just didn’t need them anymore because they weren’t eating of protein. Animal protein in particular is rich in the amino acid. Tyrosine tyrosine is the precursor for thyroid hormone. And sure enough, we’re running a thyroid hormone program coaching program right now and we’re having people send us their nutritional reports. And you look through the nutritional reports and you see, wow, you know, you had 200 grams of carbs today and you had 90 grams of protein. And you you will see that a lot of these people, if you test their tyrosine levels in their blood, have low tyrosine levels, not all of them, but a lot. And you increase their protein load and a lot of problems go away. Their fatigue, their blood sugar ups and downs, their difficulty sleeping, their mood lability, their brain fog. A lot of it gets better and then you start to see them pack on muscle. And then as the muscle comes on, things like their glucose intolerance or insulin resistance start to wane as the muscle comes back online and starts burning that glucose, they start feeling better, looking better, looking better. It makes them feel better. It’s a beautiful thing and all they have to do is sit down really focus on getting solid, high quality protein.

Dr. Kelly Halderman

Okay. So because we’re Americans and we’re always looking for our shortcuts, I did hear you say that we need more tyrosine, so I know I’m going to get a question. Yeah, we just take tyrosine in the pill form.

Leland Stillman, MD

So you could do that. But what you’ll see is that tyrosine, because it feeds forward into these catecholamine magick and thyroid hormone pathways, it’s going to turn on your metabolism. And so if you were to do that and you drive that to those tires, independent pathways would with that amino acid, you could get into a state where you’re feeling revved up and amped up with great energy, but you’re not gaining any muscle and you might even lose muscle mass. And that’s one of the things about hypothyroidism is those people need to eat a lot of food in order to just not drop weight and become malnourished. And obviously you need to treat the hypothyroidism, you know, otherwise, you know, you can’t treat hypothyroidism with a lot of food, but you have to you can at least compensate for it by eating a lot of food.

Dr. Kelly Halderman

Do you have any? So okay.

Leland Stillman, MD

I was going to say that the other proteins that you need are amino acids that you need or amino acids that drive fundamental physiologic processes that you’re also low in. And so your people will feel better with all of these on board. And so using the tyrosine as a supplement alone is not the optimal strategy.

Dr. Kelly Halderman

Got it. Okay. Would you give out a number of an ideal.

Leland Stillman, MD

Yes. Of protein. So I like it does depend to some extent on your weight and your height and your goals. So let’s say you have a six foot tall, you know, 250 pound man, and he will do well with 200 grams of protein a day, which is a lot it’s like five steaks, lean steaks, two not fatty steaks. Let’s say that you’re a 98 pound cheerleader. You may need, you know, three steaks, let’s call it 90, 90 grams of protein. And you have to take that into account, because I’m not going to tell someone who’s five foot two and 300 pound to eat the same amount of protein as a guy who’s six feet tall and 250, even though that person weighs more. So the key is and a lot of us will use this sort of like rule of thumb, you know, 0.75 grams of protein per pound of body weight. But that falls apart when you’re looking at people who are really overweight because you’re going to be telling someone who’s five to, like I said, eat 300 grams of protein. That’s not going to work.

Dr. Kelly Halderman

So I’ve got to a personalized. Right, exactly. That’s right. Okay. I believe in principles, not protocols.

Leland Stillman, MD

I love that.

Dr. Kelly Halderman

It seems like you do, too. So moving on to then common nutritional deficiencies other than that nutritional mistake, which is huge, I mean, that you can take that and run with it with protein. I’m sure the majority of our audience is probably not paying attention because we’re just look at the food that we’re consuming. And so, again, that leads into those nutritional deficiencies in a patient with hypothyroidism.

Leland Stillman, MD

Yeah. And the number one nutritional deficiency I would say that I see in hypothyroidism and this is tough because there’s a lot of very common deficiencies. I’ll give you the top and the top sort of list and then we’ll go into exactly which one I think is tends to be the most common. But it would be zinc B-6 sometimes, but rarely copper, magnesium, potassium iodide. Personally, if I had to pick one that I think is most commonly truly deficient, it would be B6. And I, you know, it’s based on organic acid testing, not the serum levels for those who want to read more about this. And it’s remarkable how much you can improve someone’s energy, their brain fog, their sleep just by giving them a little bit of this B vitamin back so that they can transform their nutrients into active thyroid hormone. And are you a fan of the p5p. I love p5p Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I think that’s a far superior form when I’m telling people to look at the back of their, you know, vitamins and supplements. 

Dr. Kelly Halderman

Mm hmm. I have a whole course on, you know, which ones to choose and why some companies choose the cheaper forms and.

Leland Stillman, MD

Yeah, right.

Dr. Kelly Halderman

That so okay. B6 is at the top. What would be the next one?

Leland Stillman, MD

Probably magnesium, but it’s tough because it’s got to be a time between magnesium, potassium and iodine. I don’t know which one I see more commonly. Probably the magnesium is the most consistent, but the potassium in the iodine, I mean, if you don’t get those right, people would just not get results. And then you give somebody potassium and iodine together and you can just put people on cloud nine. I’ve even had somebody get I mean, they were actually getting like palpitations and hypothyroid symptoms from combining those two things cause they did tell them to stop. But yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s very powerful. And people don’t realize this. They don’t realize that their levels of these things can get really, really low. And then they need large doses in order to recover from that, let alone changes to the things that are causing them to waste them. It’s funny, I just got back a lab testing on a woman who’s had like seven or eight pregnancies or seven or eight children. I don’t know any pregnancy she’s actually had. And her mineral levels are extremely low, which is not surprising to me, because she literally made, you know, a whole pack of other, you know, almost a soccer team of other people. And they require a lot of minerals in order to be made. So a lot of women don’t realize that.

Dr. Kelly Halderman

That’s right. That’s very true. So touching on iodine. This is a hot topic. This is, you know, one of those topics that is debated left and right. And I think that I think it’s because we’re missing the point where I’m not in the no iodine and I’m not in that really high doses. Give us an idea of do you have I know you’re doing testing, which is fantastic. Do you think people can get enough iodine from their food? And I know, again, that’s a tricky question because you may have people come in and their levels are, you know, not too bad, but can you talk a little bit more about that?

Leland Stillman, MD

So funnily enough, I actually don’t get iodine levels very often in my practice, and there’s a couple of reasons for that. One of them, it’s very inconvenient. It’s not that inconvenient. But the other piece of it is that I care more about how the patient responds than and the clinical picture in general than what the I-9 level is, because you can have a high iodine level in your urine, for example, because you’re not hanging onto it. And then you can have a high iodine level in your urine because you have a lot of it, and then you can have a low iodine level in your urine because you need all of your absorbing, but you still don’t have enough. And then you can have a low iodine level in your urine because you’re actually repeating yourself and retaining it. And so I don’t tend to get lost in all that because it’s such a small part of what I do for people when I’m looking at a case that I think Will and I want to go back to why iodine is so important. People think when they hear it and they think thyroid hormone, that’s actually very simplistic, that the truth is that iodine goes into the cell and complexes with all these proteins and amino acids and constructs. 

And so and because it does that, it has all these other effects on our metabolism and our physiology and ourselves. That’s why we see lots of benefits to having a higher iodine content in the diet. It’s not that it’s all just going into thyroid hormone, it’s that it’s going into these other processes and it’s affecting how the cell functions. And so I don’t want my patients to have a low total body iodine level in large part. That’s because we live in a world with lots of cancer causing chemicals. And iodine has got a very strong track record of reducing our risks of cancer in literature. So that’s one of things I want my patients to have absolutely tiptop levels of. So what I’ll do is I’ll titrate people on to a dose that they can tolerate, you know, and see how they do, starting with, you know, one drop of loopholes or a little bit of seaweed here and there. I’ll see how they respond. And then obviously, if they have any kind of side effects, I say, look, stop it right away and I tell them to get on some kind of maintenance dose, which is always through food. I want them to be eating. You know what the Japanese eat, which is about 2.4, 2.5 milligrams of iodine a day, and you get that from about five grams of seaweed, which is a big sheet of dried kombu, which you can throw in a super stew or you can get seaweed powders and you can drop them into sauces and put them on roasts or whatever you want to do. And that’s how I get my iodine. I experimented for a long time with high, high doses because I wanted to see what would happen. I used, I think, 50 milligrams daily for four weeks and I get all my thinking in the core of my knowledge on iodine From the book by David Brownstein. Dr. David Brownstein Iodine. I came up with the subtitled It’s a great book, really goes through all the details and really, you know, showed me that he had already done the thinking in the hard work of really proving this out and testing lots and lots of people with high, high doses to make sure that it was safe, effective and well-tolerated. And it’s really it seems to me, based on my experience, that it’s one of the biggest myths in medicine that high doses of iodine are dangerous. I don’t think it’s fair to say they’re dangerous and have lots of medications that cause form or adverse events than iodine. And yet, you know, I don’t over the counter and these medications are by prescription and controlled by doctors, they still may cause more damage than I do. I mean, in my career, I’ve never seen anyone in the hospital admitted with an iron iodine overdose. And I worked in hospitals for four or five years after training. So I had seven or eight years to to pick up at least one case.

Dr. Kelly Halderman

And I think two very excellent points. And the first is how you laid out where the testing for iodine in how it can be misleading. I think that is so relevant to heavy metal testing because you do that’s the challenges and then they’re like your levels are high, but it’s like, well, what if they’re just excreting properly? We live in a toxic environment. So I absolutely love that point that you are really not in that reductionist view and that you’re applying, applying a safe modality to having the patient be an actively involved. Like how do you feel you’re really, really helping to then teach them? Because that’s like the definition of doctor, right, is to really teach. Teachers. How to be their, their, their own health guides. So I love I love that. And then, yes, Brownstein is definitely one of the people that have a lot of great information out there. Dr. Brownstein, about iodine and the safety. But, yes, there’s plenty more pharmaceutical medications that get us into trouble. But I think that people are all over the place with their needs for iodine. 

And I’d die to have experiments. Absolutely. No, this low dose. Yeah. And it’s kind of honestly, it’s almost like it changes to as my body changed, you know, like hormonal fluctuations. So again, it’s it’s not just applied this dose the rest of your life, just like thyroid medication. Here’s your dose and we’ll maybe tweak it. But, you know, it’s really not that paradigm. And so I really, really loved and appreciate that you practice this way. This is the type of practitioner that I definitely want to highlight, and I want people to be able to reach you, which we will do at the end. But you did also say potassium. And I have not heard a guest on this podcast. I’ve interviewed really 35 amazing practitioners. I haven’t heard anyone say that. And I will tell you, it’s like something is is do you really want to know this with us in potassium? So do you want to know why? I do. I do.

Leland Stillman, MD

Okay. So potassium is the redheaded stepchild of the supplement industry. It gets no love out in supplement world doesn’t. And the reason is very simple. You can get 1600 milligrams of potassium from a large potato. And in order to equal that amount of potassium from a potassium supplement, you would have to take, let’s say, potassium citrate. You would have to take 16 capsules now in order to really change the needle, move the needle on someone’s potassium status, you have to change the amount in there in taking by like one to maybe three grams at least you might need to change it by four or five and someone is eating very little. And so people don’t think about it, they don’t study it. My favorite book, one of my favorite health and wellness books, just for the title alone, is Potassium Everything You Wanted to Know But Were Too Tired to Ask. I think it’s the cleverest title because that’s the number one symptom of potassium deficiency. Right? And it’s one of those things that also doctors I think when I look at the magnesium and they look at the Canada, the calcium and the zinc and Billy Collins Low and the serum. But potassium is like never low in serum. And when it is low in the serum.

Dr. Kelly Halderman

Big trouble.

Leland Stillman, MD

Oh, boy. Those people are really sick, right? They’re really they’re like in the hospital, they’ve got really deep problems, like maybe lots of vomiting and gastroenteritis, but mostly that’s that serum potassium stays nice and buffered in a narrow window. And what people don’t realize is how much the sheer quantity of potassium there is in the body. There’s loads of potassium in the body. I can’t remember what it is off the top of my head, but it’s quite a lot. And because of that you can dig yourself a very, very deep potassium hole. And so you might need three, four or five, six months of potassium coming in at high doses in order to replete your body. Whereas if you take, you know, let’s call it a two milligram dose of copper every day, your total body copper’s max about 120 milligrams. Right. 60 days. You can, you know, let’s you know, absorb all of it. Let’s be clear. But let’s just say you had a 60 milligram deficit and you are at 50%. You get to tip top levels. So with potassium and the other thing that people don’t realize about it is it competes with sodium. So the more sodium you have in your diet, the more potassium you may waste. 

And so that sodium potassium ratio really matters. And that’s why that’s one thing in the literature that I think is pretty clear. You want the sodium and potassium ratio to not be inverted. You want your your potassium intake to be higher than your sodium intake. And there’s case by case, you know, examples where that I may not stress that for various reasons, but I think it’s important for people to understand. And so because no one’s ever going to make a fortune off of potassium, you don’t hear a lot about it. And no one’s out there researching all the wonders and benefits of potassium. But when you start using it in clinical practice, it’ll be part of this, you know, of a lot of protocols and regimens that you put people on and really get you great results. And one of the things that it does and I really haven’t had the time to go into the science on this, but I’ve seen it clinically is that it seems to sensitize themselves to thyroid hormone. And so you give somebody with low thyroid hormone levels potassium, and all of a sudden they just wake up and it’s pretty powerful to see that happen.

Dr. Kelly Halderman

I’ve never heard that either. So that was quite a clinical pearl for us, Doctor. So I’m thank you. And again, no one’s ever talked about that. So it’s just case in point that we need to give potassium more love. Of course, if you have kidney disease or, you know.

Leland Stillman, MD

Thank you for adding that disclaimer. Yes. If you’re on dialysis, if you have chronic kidney disease, if you have problems processing potassium, please consult your doctor before making any changes to your diet, lifestyle or supplement regimen.

Dr. Kelly Halderman

There you go. Perfect. So then if we’re going to look at the clinical results that one of your patients, let’s say they come in, they have hypothyroidism, they have all the symptoms, not to be pejorative in the echo chamber here of allopathic approach. But how could a patient expect, you know, to be worked up and then to be feeling after we are correcting these nutritional deficiencies? Great question.

Leland Stillman, MD

It is a pretty great transformations and a lot of what we do depends on what what the person wants as a person, because we have people who come in to the practice who are in states where we’re not licensed and those people we coach and we do group coaching, which is if you’ve never tried group coaching, try it. It’s amazing. You’ll learn things from the other people. You’ll learn things from Jim and I. It’s been really transformational in my practice and a lot of people have come in skeptical and left very happy that they did it. It gives you an opportunity to have way more touch points in time with the practitioner that you just cannot get when you’re doing one on ones. We started doing it because we were just totally swamped with interest and I there is no way I keep seeing people just one on one. So we have this group coaching model where we really teach people what we know and how things work and they put it into play on their own initiative obviously after consulting with, you know, appropriate practitioners. And then we have, you know, patients obviously who we work up with a variety of different tests. 

And that does depend on, you know, because we can get pretty, pretty crazy with lab testing. You know, I have some people recently had a guy come in. He said, look, I just want all the tests. I was like, well, you know, if you really want all of them, I guess we can do that. Might run out of blood. Just kidding. But we you know, I did a broad spectrum, right? We did an allergy panel and we did some nutritional panels with organic acid testing and blood minerals and hair tissue, mineral testing and, you know, hormones and biomarkers and anti-ageing markers and all kinds of different things. And that whole panel probably runs 2000. That’s with the best pricing I can get it retail. That would be like for 6000 depending on where you go. And then I have people coming in and say, look, I don’t have a lot of money. I want good functional medicine care. What can we do? They work with my pay and we get them how much they want to. And we basically have sort of a hierarchy of which labs are most important. And the good news is that most of the most important labs are pretty reasonably affordable. So, I mean, if even if you just put $75 into lab testing, you can get I mean, vitamin D, magnesium routine labs, plus a bunch of markers that may be relevant to your case. But we do tailor that from patient to patient.

Dr. Kelly Halderman

And I’m sure you’re not just looking at highs and lows. You’re looking at patterns and things where your average train doctor would just be like, okay, you’re good. So we talk about are labs appropriately normal or should they be abnormal because of the situation and then they get missed a lot of that detail in the thyroid book that Dr. Eric book division I wrote about where it’s really it’s much more than highs and lows. So yeah, you can spend a smaller amount of money with some a practitioner who really knows how to understand your needs and understand what’s going on physiologically. So awesome. Yeah, I hear that.

Leland Stillman, MD

And a big, big part of that turned out to just be that after I’d seen enough patients, I kept saying the same things over and over again. And I knew that we were I mean, with 80 to 90% of people, I knew that what they needed. I knew what they needed before I got the lab testing. And that’s why we moved into this group coaching model is it’s just people just haven’t seen behind the curtain. They don’t know the secrets to how they’re getting, what they’re getting. They have a lot of information out there in the info space, which may be helpful, but they haven’t had someone who has really taught a lot of patients sit down and really teach them, and that’s how we get people results. Oftentimes we just give them insight and knowledge and then they look at what they’re doing and they understand why they’re getting what they’re getting. And you know, to your point on labs, you really can’t just look at what someone’s eating, which is what mostly the labs get interpreted as like a vitamin D isn’t just about how much fishy, it’s about how much sun you get. And it’s not just about how much supplementation you’re on either. 

And the same thing with your minerals, right? The minerals are not just about, oh, well, do you have a lot of stress or do you eat a lot of magnesium? It’s do you go in the sauna? Do you do cold plungers? Do you re mineralized your water or do you drink spring water if you drink well, water what’s in your well water is iron. Copper is manganese. Molybdenum is it you know, is it soft? Is it hard? Because all of that plays a role in the mineral balance and that plays into the autonomic balance of the body and it plays into your, you know, your basic fundamental structure of your cells and their function. And that’s why living, you know, Jim says who I coach with, you know, Jim says small hinges, swing big doors. And he’s really right because you’ll make a tiny, tiny adjustment what seems totally inconsequential for the right patient and it’ll be life changing.

Dr. Kelly Halderman

That’s great. And I would expect with coaching, with the group style is that a lot of the questions are similar in that, you know, we, we’re struggling with the same things and that also they find support. They find that they’re not alone and the things that they’re struggling with other people and that’s building community. And I mean that’s like the number one thing we need to and accountability.

Leland Stillman, MD

Yes people you know they know that when they come in on Tuesday and say, hey, you know, how are you doing? How are your habits? How are your habits going? You stick in your habits. Are you fell off the wagon. All right. What are we going to do this week to get you back on it? And a lot of that’s troubleshooting. You know, people just don’t they don’t think about the fact that the reason they fell off the wagon is that they had the wrong tactics. And we need to give them good tactics. They stay on the wagon. Everyone knows they need to stay on the wagon. It’s how you do it that counts. And everyone’s got a slightly different wagon, you know, and it’s a different life and different challenges.

Dr. Kelly Halderman

Well, you perfectly teed me up for my next question. Which are the tenants, the, you know, the lifestyle mistakes and factors that people maybe with hypothyroidism or maybe just in general, like what are we what are we missing here?

Leland Stillman, MD

The biggest thing that they’re mostly not doing is getting adequate light. They need the stimulation of light on their skin, but also in their eye. And this isn’t a well known or publicized area in the medical literature, mostly because the early research done in the mid 1900s and early 1900s never was properly followed up. And because it didn’t have a clinical application that made anybody a lot of money, it got forgotten. But it’s very, very clear that hormone levels in mammals are strongly influenced by light. And sure enough, when you get people who never get any sun who are wearing sunglasses all the time, they never get in the sauna, they never do anything with light therapy out into the light. You’ll see really big changes in how they feel, function, perform. You know, they may be able to get off of some of their medications or reduce the doses. And it’s because the fundamental signal for our hormone production is light hitting the retina, which then creates an electrical signal through the retina into the hypothalamus, which then signals the pituitary. What to make of your hormones. 

And people just don’t think about the fact that when they’re wearing a pair of sunglasses, they could be blocking 97% of the light that’s hitting their eye. I mean, when you really think about it, what is seasonal affective disorder? It’s really light deficiency syndrome. That’s how I look at it and that’s how I explain it to patients. And it’s very clear from the literature on Seasonal Affective Disorder that the more morning light you get and the higher your tryptophan and certain other nutritional markers that you have in your diet, the higher your melatonin and serotonin levels are going to be. And that’s just about, you know, what’s going in and then how it’s being activated by light headed retina and, you know, when you think about it, how are we not giving the world seasonal affective disorder? By living in very dark, very dim, very poorly lit offices and, you know, indoor spaces. And people don’t realize because there are people, you know, accommodates to the earth that constricts and dilates in order to change the amount of light coming in so that you have consistent camera vision and you’re rarely, if ever, blinded by the light, so to speak. And because of that, you don’t realize that you might go from a room that’s four or five lux that’s a measurement of visible light that seems like it’s brightly lit. It’s got tons of fluorescent lights. You can see everything. There’s no dark spots or shadows like a modern day office space. It’s indoor and, you know, cubicles or whatever. And they go outside into bright sunlight and they don’t even notice the difference. 

But that indoor office environment, maybe four or five, maybe ten lux, very light, very low light. And they may go outside and outside, maybe 100,000 or 200,000. LUX So the full difference, the amount of light to be exposed to is hundreds of thousands. They never think about this because there are people just accommodates or rather constricts and dilates in order to change the amount of light that they’re getting. So it all looks the same, but it’s very important to understand this is not the same for your brain. And that’s one of the keys to getting people well, is helping them to understand how the light that hits their eye and their skin is fundamentally wiring. They’re driving their biology because if you don’t figure that out, you’re going to have tons of incurable patients who you just chase around with different doses of drugs and supplements or herbs. And you biohackers and whatever, while you know other people are using light and getting better results.

Dr. Kelly Halderman

Yeah, that’s definitely something that’s underappreciated. And I love your acronym and we’re going to put that, as you know, one of the key points in this discussion because I know I used to live in Florida and now I live back in the Twin Cities. And you don’t have to tell me, Dr. Stillman. I really do. I miss the sun. I mean, we really are designed to to be out in the sun. So I have to specifically go outside in the cold and really try and get the most that I can for several minutes beyond what I would get, you know, down, down where you’re at in Florida. So I do what I can in that department, but I also use a red light. I have a sun. Can you comment on red light devices?

Leland Stillman, MD

I love them. They’re great. They’re very powerful. I so ran an infrared light or two of the most healing frequencies out there. I will use, you know, I’ll use red infrared lights. And in any case, where the patient is amenable to buying them, pretty much okay. And I want them to start at 5 minutes and go up to 20, and that’s usually pretty effective. And it just depends on what we’re trying to treat. You know, we have different devices for different applications. You know, the big panel behind me, you know, is better for large parts of the body. I’ve got a little pen that, you know, is called the tend light. That’s a small cylinder that, you know, it looks like a big pen. And then, you know, you can use that to treat headaches that are focal or joint pain or bruises, nicks, cuts, scrapes, whatever. And so that’s how I approach it. I try to incorporate it in every in every case.

Dr. Kelly Halderman

Okay. So, yes, absolutely light is important. Any other major lifestyle mistakes people are making. And how long do. You have the. I know like how about I mean, you’re really great at your content and I’ve noticed your sleep content really has actually improve my sleep. I know we are both a fan of the Aurorae and so objective, objective measurement, but that’s right. Just a little bit about sleep.

Leland Stillman, MD

The biggest mistake people make with sleep today is not understanding how powerful their light environment is and affecting how well they sleep. So, you know, I wear blue blockers which are very dark red in order to block the blue light from my screen coming into my eye after dark. And that protects my circadian rhythms from the blue and green light, from the screen, from, you know, pushing that back. And that’s really important for normalizing your circadian rhythms, normalizing your sleep, getting the most out of your sleep, optimizing your melatonin. Many people are not aware of this, and it’s leading them to have chronically poor sleep and they don’t understand why. And there’s really nothing you can do to fix this problem other than fix the light environment. And that’s one of the things that, you know, where it really hangs people up. You know, let’s say that you didn’t get enough protein where you could take protein supplements. Let’s say that you didn’t eat red meat. Well, you could take all the different vitamins and minerals that you don’t get from red meat in a pill. Let’s say that you don’t go out in the sun. 

Well, you can buy a sauna and red light therapy device and a sad light and UVB light. And you can put them all together and you can use them at different times of day. And I literally will do that in cases in like Minnesota, Washington, people who fly in to see me from from cold places were very, very serious about getting them into the right light environment artificially, because frankly and this is where I take my cue from, from indigenous peoples, no one has ever tried to survive in these cold places without sauna, sweat lodge and other means of getting really, really uncomfortable hot. Periodically it becomes like the focal point of life in these places, to the point that in Finland sauna is like a national pastime, more popular in Finland than baseball is in the United States. And people just forget this to like, Oh, I don’t know why I’m sad and fatigued and I just wish I had moved to Florida. It’s like, okay, install sauna by UVB light will change your life. So but all that stuff is ways that you can get around the fact that you don’t have light, but you can get around blue and green light bombarding your eyes after dark, ruining your circadian rhythms, wrecking your sleep. You just have to eliminate it pretty ruthlessly. In a lot of cases because people will get very sensitive to it. And when you do that, a lot of problems go away.

Dr. Kelly Halderman

Yeah, I’ve become pretty ruthless about protecting myself and my kids after dark, like you said, it’s unbelievable. And you know, we’re talking about hypothyroidism, but we all have families and we all have we. Yeah, we know. Young and I and the screen screens and how much they’re being exposed to.

Leland Stillman, MD

It’s a. Disaster.

Dr. Kelly Halderman

It’s a disaster. And so I have mandatory mandatory mom here made my kids install a filter on my phone that makes the screen with three clicks of the side button, makes the screen completely red. I mean, it takes some getting used to to really see, but it’s at least something for the kids because they don’t want to wear those glasses doctor some and they don’t think they’re very cool. And so and sometimes I don’t want to either, but I’ve really experimented with the help from my accountant accountability partner, my aura ring with protecting myself more. Yeah, I’m using that red light filter on my phone because it’s in there. Guys like figure, you know there’s a really great where you can just Google like how do I turn my phone into red for the background is really simple and you look at that and then you look at the data and it’s like very easy to understand how destructive it really is and how it’s not that hard. 

It’s not that hard to really prioritize late. And I love how you took sleeping light and you them together because in order to get good sleep at night, I got to get outside and I have to get some exposure from that sunlight. If it’s cloudy, I’m still out there and I’m out there for a longer amount of time, and then at night, I’m just being more respectful. I, I don’t I’m not I’m not, not a fan of Nutraceutical and supplementation, but this is so foundational and basic. Yeah. I mean you can’t really get, you can’t supplement yourself out of a light issue. And then I’m sure you have probably a lot of great posts and content on that. If you want to check that out, I’m sure you’ve you’ve you’ve hammered that point home. But it is it’s very, very important for over overall health. And I think we take it for granted. So, you know, lastly, I want to I want to ask you about your book, Dying to be Free. I have it on an order we I ordered on Amazon, but it didn’t arrive before our interview. So I haven’t gotten to read it yet. But can you tell us about the book?

Leland Stillman, MD

Yeah, so I wrote it because I saw a lot of things going on in medicine that I thought were were wrong. Basically, obviously, the conventional paradigm was totally ignoring natural integrative options and to the great detriment of people, the American medical system. It’s not some kind of you. It’s not some kind of crazy claim to say that the system is collapsing. It’s truly collapsing, and people are not getting good care. They’re not getting timely care. The care that they’re getting is bad, sometimes outright, often not because of any fault of the practitioners working in a very dysfunctional, overtaxed, overburdened system. And you know, every year Americans actually get sicker and now the life expectancy is dropping and yet the same people are in charge year after year after year, and they just tell us to give them more power and authority over our lives. And it’s clearly not working. And so we should abandon the strategy. And then I talk about what the real problems are with America’s health and what it’s going to take for people to get healthy and well from their diet to their lifestyle to what they’re eating, how they’re eating, you know, how they’re breathing there. I mean, sound and light and all kinds of different topics that I’ve studied and learned about over the years that I see making a difference in the lives of my patients. And then I share last year and finally in the book, thoughts on how people can, you know, take control of their health and how to find good doctors and things like that are excellent.

Dr. Kelly Halderman

So it sounds like if someone could never come and see you, that you’ve really poured yourself into this this text, and that they can get some, some real good tips on how to really help their overall health.

Leland Stillman, MD

Yeah. So not only that, but we have, you know, if people can’t come and see me, they still the option of coaching with me, which is really the best place to start because on these calls you can ask me questions to try and understand what’s the best way for you to get your care. And that’s one of the things that I realized is that people would come and see me and I would think, well, you know, if you would just known that you needed to get this, this and this by understanding this, this and this, that, I can easily teach you in 10 minutes, you wouldn’t have needed to buy a plane ticket and come see me and whatever. And then some people think they don’t need to come see me and they can just do this or that or the other thing. And I said, Look, the best option for you is really to come see me, so come and see me. And the funny thing is, and part of why I live in Florida is that it’s some of the busiest airports in United States. It costs like 60, 7000 bucks sometimes to fly in to Tampa. And, you know, you can get really ridiculous fares here and back. 

And we see so few patients in person that we actually do hotel visits. So, Jim, my nurse and I will come see you in your hotel, do a quick physical exam, we’ll do a quick interview or review labs if needed. And then the coolest part of this is that Jim can actually coach you in training in person, which for a lot of people is actually life changing. They don’t understand how they’re in their posture or their biomechanics. Their strategy and the way that they’re using their body is really contributing to a lot of their problems and actually getting to see Jim in person. I’ve just I’ve seen him work in person. It’s just it’s really a profound and amazing. And so that’s what we do for a lot of our patients. And they come see us once a year and, you know, do you really need an excuse to come visit Florida? We live in so I live in Saint Pete and it’s some of the most beautiful beaches in the country. So, you know, treat yourself. It’s less than like a really fancy day at the spa, honestly, between the airfare and, you know, affordable hotels.

Dr. Kelly Halderman

I think part two of this interview will be down in Tampa. So thank you for commutation drop by.

Leland Stillman, MD

We’d love to see you.

Dr. Kelly Halderman

So how do people find out more about you, your practice, give us your website, your social and everything.

Leland Stillman, MD

So everywhere. I’m still an M.D., as in medical, as a doctor. And so it’s Instagram, Facebook, Twitter. I have a Substack blog called StillmanMD.substack.com StillmanMD.substack.com That’s where I have my most uncensored and candid thoughts and I publish, I think, a lot of really interesting, eclectic stuff there. It’s not like other health and wellness blogs by any means. There’s also a premium subscription where you get more content, particularly more behind the scenes protocol type stuff that I actually use in my practice. And then we have a monthly Q&A for members as well. And that prescription and that subscriptions only 20 bucks a month. And then for people who want to coach with us or become a patient, the website to go to is StillmanMD.com. And then you just apply for consultation in the top right hand corner. We get your application, you’ll get an email or a series of emails that will walk you through what your options are and you’ll get a I’m working on a series of emails that really people concrete examples of different people we work with so that they understand, okay, you know, I need to be coached or I need I really do need a doctor so you know what to sign up for so that you’re getting the best care and training possible.

Dr. Kelly Halderman

Awesome. Well, it has been a pleasure. Dr. Stillman thank you so much for your time. And to avoid adulation, a rant on my end, I would just say that you really you’ve taken medicine exactly where it needs to go. You’re really pioneering this. I hope that young doctors and doctors all over are really looking at what you’re doing because you’re really revolutionizing medicine in the way that we really need it so desperately to go. So thank you again for your time.

Leland Stillman, MD

Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Dr. Kelly Halderman

Thank you for joining me. Dr. Kelly Halderman on the thyroid series for the DrTalks podcast. I hope you found this episode informative and engaging, and if you did, make sure to subscribe to our podcast so you don’t miss out on future launches. Don’t forget to follow DrTalks on social media platforms, including TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram to stay informed about our latest updates and events. For more information on thyroid conditions and other health topics, visit our blog at DrTalks.com/Blog, where you’ll find a wealth of in-depth articles and resources to help you manage your health effectively. If you want to learn more about the latest medical breakthroughs or how to prevent, treat and reverse chronic conditions, sign up for one of our free summits at DrTalks.com/Calendar. You’ll find that DrTalks Summits features some of the leading health experts in the world, and they’re a great way to stay up to date on the latest research and protocols. Thanks again for tuning in. We look forward to bringing you more valuable insights in our next episode. We’ll see you next time on the DrTalks podcast.