qEEG & MCAS: Hidden Keys to Healing

Tom Moorcroft, DO

Welcome back to this episode of, Reversing Mast Cell Activation Syndrome and Histamine Intolerance Summit. I’m your co-host, Dr. Tom Moorcroft, and today I am really pumped. We have a great conversation coming up with my friend, Dr. Cheng Ruan. He is the founder of the Texas Center for Lifestyle Medicine, and he’s been treating brain health for patients in Texas for quite a long time. He’s the creator of www.tclmuniversity.com, which is a self-education program for the public on functional medicine principles. He’s been featured in a lot of really big places like “Forbes Magazine,” and he’s spoken internationally on the topic of brain health, CBD, and environmental health. Dr. Ruan sits on the board of multiple health information technology companies and helps to deliver valuable integrative medicine tactics to the insured Medicare population. And today we are going to really deep dive into a lot of the topics that have been core to the work that I’ve done and so many people who have helped others recover from Mast Cell Activation Syndrome and histamine intolerance. So Dr. Ruan, thanks for joining us. How’s it going?

Cheng Ruan, MD

Thanks for having me on. This is one of my favorite topics and a lot of myths to dispel. So I’m super pumped I’m here. Thank you.

Tom Moorcroft, DO

Yeah, me too. Yeah, it’s one of these things as we were kinda getting started today, I was just mentioning to Dr. Ruan that as an osteopathic physician, my background has a lot to do with sort of the structure and function of the body and we’re always looking back to that piece. And so as we dive in, I mean, one of the most important things that comes out of all areas of functional medicine and just life in general to me is breath. And so I thought maybe we could just dive in and say what’s that relationship between breath and histamine?

Cheng Ruan, MD

Man, there’s such a huge relationship. It’s actually the fundamentals. So, I mean, let’s define breath, right? So breath is more than just in-taking air as the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the lungs. But how did the air get into the lungs is actually a more important story for mast cell activation than what happens in the lungs. So most people know the lung’s job is to get air in our body, extract oxygen, and then it delivers to our body and exchanges the carbon dioxide, which we breathe out. But in reality, there’s a lot more that goes on from the air that goes into our nose or our mouth, and then eventually ending up in the lung. So all mammals, all mammals, have these things called sinuses and sinuses are exactly what you think they are. They’re in the face and they’re little holes and caves everywhere. And these sinuses are actually really important as it turns out. What we found out during COV!D-19 is that there’s organisms that live within the sinuses and these organisms dictate how well people do with COV!D-19. And these are the same organisms that correlate with people with mold issues, mold toxicity, and other Mast Cell Activation Syndromes as well. So what’s up with that? That’s weird. How are sinuses affecting that as well? 

So as it turns out, as air goes into the nose and it gets filtered through the sinus cavities and all the structures within it, and as it goes through these things, there’s receptors and these receptors are, its job actually is to activate different signals and one of the most important signals is something called nitric oxide. So nitric oxide, yeah. So nitric oxide’s job is to help deliver bluff flow to the brain so you don’t get brain fog. It’s to help deliver bluff flow to the gut so you don’t have chronic intestinal malabsorption or constipation and stuff like that. Its job is to provide bluff flow and air to all the places that the body thinks are optional. What the heck’s an optional spaces? Optional means that if you don’t have that particular thing, you can still live. For example, you don’t need most of your gut to live, you don’t need your joints to live. So, especially with mast cell issues, these people tend to have a lot of joint pains and gut issues and stuff like that and that’s actually from a depletion of this nitric oxide. So the actual air that comes into our body filters through our sinuses is involved in suppressing histamine, it’s suppressing mast cells and elevating serotonin which makes you happy. And elevating melatonin at night which makes you sleepy, right? And so it is like the primary function. Breath is actually the primary function of how mast cell works. Isn’t that cool?

Tom Moorcroft, DO

I love it, man. Because it’s like the whole thing. It’s even, like as you were mentioning, as COV!D came out, we were kind of saying like, “Hey, this nitric oxide can help turn off “some of the inflammation from COV!D.” But it’s so much more, like you’re saying. And I see a lot of people like Raynaud’s type of things, where they have poor circulation in their extremities.

Cheng Ruan, MD

Yeah.

Tom Moorcroft, DO

All those other things that you mentioned. And I mean, I think that these are just critical areas that people need to be aware of. And how do you work with it though? I mean, telling everybody, “Hey, breath is good,” but what should the folks be looking out for and doing to help optimize that and to improve nitric oxide?

Cheng Ruan, MD

So you know I work in the inflammatory mental health space and the brain health space. So whenever someone comes to me with memory issues or Alzheimer’s, or Parkinson’s, and anxiety, schizophrenia, depression, no matter what it is, we just kind of start with breath, right? And the reason behind that is that in all these pathologies there’s a recognized decrease in nitric oxide activation. And so lo and behold, most of these people have airway issues. So in answer to your question, I tag in people who are smarter than me.

Tom Moorcroft, DO

Right.

Cheng Ruan, MD

And so these are actually biological dentists and ENT surgeons, ear, nose, throat surgeons. And there is a subset of us that we get together and go over these cases. We kind of recognize that there are roles for each of these people. So I’ll give you example, right? So we had a patient with actual diagnosed mast cell activation by an allergist, which is really rare. Most people just from what other diagnoses from other functional medicine providers, but there’s a tremendous amount of histamine. And as it turns out, one of the things that was sequestering the body’s production of nitric oxide is periodontal disease, which means that there’s tooth infection, right? And when that’s taken care of, an ENT friend of mine actually showed me the CT scan. I was like, “Hey, this is a super narrow airway.” And then the sinuses are also super- There’s barely any space for air to go through. 

So this person ended up having to go get a sinuplasty, which basically is these little balloon, they dilate up, it’s like a two millimeter balloon, but they dilate it up in these different areas. And then all of a sudden, for the first time in 15 years, a lot of the IGEs and the blood work and eosinophils, they start going to zero for the first time in years. Asthma goes away for the first time in years. Starting to recall memory and a lot of the attention issues start getting a lot better. And so that’s one of the many aha moments, right? Where we realize that there’s a lot of things to optimize in the skull, right? You know, I’m not skull doctor, but dentists are. The teeth is part of the skull. ENTs, stuff like that. But we really need to focus on this thing called a airway, our entire airway, as a primary function, not just to suppress mast cells, but it’s life. It’s breathing air literally into us so we don’t need the mast cells to put our brain in fight or flight, you know?

Tom Moorcroft, DO

Right. Well, I think so much of what we’ve been covering in this summit too, is bringing the information that mast cells have a role. And like you said, we don’t wanna just suppress them, we want them to be able to self-regulate and have them working when we need them to and have them calm down at other times, you know?

Cheng Ruan, MD

Exactly. Exactly. Mast cells do have a role. Mast cells are there for a reason. We gotta be thankful for our mast cells, because if we don’t have them, we don’t know that we can’t tolerate something or something’s wrong. Our Spidey senses go away. I tell people, “Mast cell’s your super Spidey sense,” you know?

Tom Moorcroft, DO

Yeah, yeah.

Cheng Ruan, MD

Except it’s saying there’s danger all the time, you know? But there’s a role for it but we just have to meet it halfway, right? Our body has these mast cells and we have to get to the root cause as to exactly what’s upright in this. Why is your body kinda going to persistent fight or flight?

Tom Moorcroft, DO

Yeah. Yeah. And it’s like Beth O’Hara running this whole amazing summit. She talks so much about them being sentinels that are out there and they’re just like, they need a break, right? They don’t need to be on all the time. So it’s so critical.

Cheng Ruan, MD

Yeah.

Tom Moorcroft, DO

And I’m just so happy that we can all be talking about this using different language but the same idea, you know? And one of the things a lot of people who follow the work that I do and who are looking at mold and Lyme and the interaction with mast cells, know that we talk a ton about the need to work with our airway, work with a biologic dentist, and also see people who are skilled in cranial osteopathy and such. And it all goes back to what Dr. Ruan’s saying. It’s like it opening up the face, allowing the breathing to go and so I think that that’s a big part in, like you were saying, that mast cell piece. So in your role, in the work you’re doing, you’re really looking like you’re saying at mental health, cognitive things, reversing Alzheimer’s, the whole nine yards, what are you seeing in people with brain disorders and as it relates to histamine intolerance? I mean, there are particular patterns of things you see. Are there things that people should be looking out for?

Cheng Ruan, MD

Yeah. We’ll get real specific. Every day I read these brain mappings called quantitative EEGs, and these are basically electrodes that we put on the brain and we actually look at patterns. And we take this information and the artificial intelligence literally recomputes it, puts it into a 3D imaging so it lets me know what disease states or what symptoms these are correlated with. So if I were to take a look at somebody with a lot of mast cell issues, their brain looks like it’s on fire. They have a lot of high power, it’s called the beta region. And beta is like, ah. It’s like the anxiety state, right? It’s anxious or excited or frayed. Like something’s revved up, right? So something’s just super revved up. 

Now that revved up state also looks like somebody’s brain who’s had infections. Whether it’s gum infections, periodontal infections, chronic sinus disease, also looks like something with major histamine issues and mold toxins or other environmental toxins. All the brain patterns look the same and they all correlate with anxiety, insomnia, and depression, right? And then 2018 was my big aha moment where we were asked by the VA Hospital here to do a project to scan military veterans with PTSD. And the PTSD veterans all had the same issue as well. I was like, “What’s going on here? What’s going on here?” Is that depending on who you talk to and depending on where the patients go for their doctors, they’re gonna have different diagnoses, but they have one sort of same thing. It’s the brain is always on fight or flight or alert phase, right?

Tom Moorcroft, DO

Yep.

Cheng Ruan, MD

Fight, flight or freeze. And as this turns out, most of these military veterans have some sort of mast cell issues or they have sleep apnea that’s causing a huge amount of cytokines, a huge amount of histamines to be released. They got something that’s going on. And the physiologic type of body that they have are these people with airway diseases. And so that’s where really I kind of fit all those in together. So that’s why we just start with airway and we find so much pathology there. And by the time they get that treated, things get a whole lot better. We stopped using the words mast cell anymore, right? Now it’s just like a little bit here and there becomes a whole lot easier.

Tom Moorcroft, DO

So I think this is just such a key point, Cheng, because it’s a lot of the medical system is like they might not buy into mast cell or chronic Lyme or chronic mold because a lot of it looks is overlapping. And I think what I hear you saying, and I really wanna drive home for everyone, is we’re really looking at what is the true root cause.

Cheng Ruan, MD

Yeah.

Tom Moorcroft, DO

And I hear you say that. I mean, in medicine, we talk about ABCs, right? And the number one thing we look at in medicine is airway.

Cheng Ruan, MD

Airway, yeah.

Tom Moorcroft, DO

Yeah. And so if we start with those basics and then we start and we follow it down, then maybe there’s some mast cell leftover, maybe there’s some mold leftover, but I think I hear you going back to the fundamental structure of the body and how it functions is paramount to what maybe external toxin is coming in to essentially attack it.

Cheng Ruan, MD

Exactly. If you work on that, magical things happen, right? But it’s not necessarily a short road or easy road. You just have to have someone guide you through it. So the flip side of that is, it’s not just about toxins coming in. It’s about the ability to detoxify, right? And you know as well as I, body structure is so important for detoxification. Most people think, “Oh, it’s my liver or it’s my kidneys, “or it’s my skin. “I gotta sweat in an infrared sauna.” No, it’s symmetry. Symmetry is first. If you’re walking around and your shoulder’s lopsided, your neck is crooked, that actually impairs the way for detoxification. If you have Obstructive Airway Disease and then this little thing right here called a sternocleidomastoid, the anterior scaling, where they meet, feels like, “Oh, this is super painful and tender. “My massage therapist, my neck is always tight.” Well, that’s fascia. As fascia tightens, you’re not able to detox from here and up. So a lot of the environmental toxins and mold, they get stuck up there. They can’t go into the detox pathways like the lymphatics and the glymphatics and all this stuff, right? And so people get stuck in that phase and they ended up saying that, “Oh, I have all this stuff going on. “I have molds and I have Lyme, I have heavy metal toxins. “I have X, Y, and Z.” I was like, “Well, it’s really one structural issue.” And yes, we have tests that test for all these things. We don’t necessarily have them individually. You’re just not able to detox from them. So we still start with like symmetry and fascia and airway breathing.

Tom Moorcroft, DO

One of the things you reminded me of, man, is we have so many people with that head forward posture and when you’re talking about that connective- Yeah, yeah. I mean, we’re all on this, on the phone and the screen.

Cheng Ruan, MD

Yeah.

Tom Moorcroft, DO

But we’ve got this unbelieve- The fascia, guys, that is like almost this saran wrap that all of our muscles and our other tissues and our blood vessels grow in and are supported by. So as we put stretch on this, we’re actually collapsing things like lymphatics. And I love talking about the glymphatic system, that brain detoxification pathway. But everybody asks me, “Hey, what’s the best brain detox supplement?” And I’m like, “Having an open drain.”

Cheng Ruan, MD

Yeah. So true. Yeah. You gotta let the faucet loose a little bit, you know? And I think supplements are kind of an easy target, right? But I view supplements like IV medications, too much is also bad, right?

Tom Moorcroft, DO

Right.

Cheng Ruan, MD

And we don’t wanna be dependent on supplements. “Oh, if I don’t take this supplement, I don’t feel well.’ That’s not how our body should be functioning. We really have to have a progression towards the return of function. But as you said, you gotta drain this stuff, you know? You gotta look at cranial sacral release, myofascial therapy. If you have Obstructed Airway Disease, maybe myofunctional therapy, which is basically a tongue related issues and tongue ties. And those are things that have to be dealt with. And guess what? We find a lot of these in brain disorder patients, mostly in Alzheimer’s disease and it’s really rare to find someone with progressively aggressive memory loss in Alzheimer’s and not have some airway issue that’s really there. And the neck always looked the same as well. I’m like, “You know, let’s kind of address that first.” So I agree with you.

Tom Moorcroft, DO

Yeah. I mean, you hit on a couple of really emotional things from my personal life. And it’s like my father had this long-standing obstructive sleep apnea and when he was on top of the machine, he was doing pretty good but as he got a little lax with it, cognitive function went way down because his airway was collapsing and he’s not draining. And then on the opposite end of the age spectrum, my little one used to every time she went to sleep, she was three at the time. Every time she fell asleep, she’d be drenched in sweat. So everybody I know is like, “Oh, it’s babesia, Dr. Tom.” Because that’s what you do. You know, you cheat? And I’m like, “No, it’s not.” You don’t only have babesia or malaria when you go to bed, right? But it didn’t matter lying down or sitting up, and she actually got myofunctional therapy and went to a functional biologic dentist and put in a functional appliance and immediately, and this is the really, I think what I love about what you’re hearing and the reason I’m sharing this, I would love to get your feedback on this is, she had a functional appliance put in and that night she stopped having the sweats, right? So it wasn’t just changing the airway shape, but there was a piece of the nervous system that was being supported. And so I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what you’ve seen, not just from the physical structure, but when we’re working with the nervous system and things that calm down the nervous system, and maybe some of the tools that you use to calm the nervous system down.

Cheng Ruan, MD

Yeah.

Tom Moorcroft, DO

Because I think that’s also another key piece.

Cheng Ruan, MD

Yeah, that is a very important thing. And it’s not just in kids. A lot of women who are, I hate to use the word middle age, let’s say perimenopausal period, right? Tend to have like, “Oh, I have these night sweats.” A lot of the night sweats are not necessarily just from hormonal changes. They’re actually from worsening obstruction, which also happens during perimenopausal period. But let me kinda give you my two cents on what’s really going on. So the sweating, okay? Whenever someone sweats, there are certain things that has to happen to allow the sweat glands to sweat and that’s called the sympathetic parasympathetic system shift. So the sympathetic system, sort of the fight or flight, parasympathetics, it’s like kind of rest and digest. So whenever you’re going to sleep, you’re supposed to be in this sort of parasympathetic niceness, right? And then unless the brain thinks something’s wrong. So you can see the brain flipping from the nice theta region, deep sleep, all of a sudden to beta. 

You see the brain doing this on the EEG. Literally can see it. And as that happens, it’s there for a reason. So not only do your mast cells get upregulated, your cortisol gets released, your melatonin gets suppressed, so you don’t get good quality sleep. And then your progesterone decreases and progesterone is sort of one of the master hormones, the precursor to make testosterone in men and estrogen in women. And then your thyroid starts being inhibited, the conversion of thyroid becomes inhibited. Because all the sudden, your brain’s trying to protect your life, you know? And I have this with my five year old too, so I identify. And so what happens is that why would the brain perceive some danger that’s really there? And as it turns out for a lot of people, it’s this sort of airway disease and it’s maybe the tongue is a little too big for the width of the mouth, or maybe the person’s born with a really high arch, a really crowded palates, maybe really large adenoids. Maybe the person’s born either missing- We’ve had patients born with missing sinus cavities or really small sinus cavities.

Tom Moorcroft, DO

Oh wow.

Cheng Ruan, MD

Especially in one of the hereditary disorders, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, that’s really, really common. So there’s something physiologic in there that’s physically there. It’s not mysterious at all. And there’s therapies now that can deal with this, right? So oral appliance, one of them, mandibular advancement devices. There’s another one called Homeoblock, which actually shapes the entire upper airway. So there’s a lot of advancements in the biologic dental field at this point to support that. And what’s really cool is I have before and after brain maps of people on these appliances with diagnosed Alzheimer’s disease, right? And you’re able to see that cognitively their imaging looks better, their function looks better, their speech is better, their attention is better. They’re like, “Oh my goodness. “Did we take some magical supplement?” And the answer’s no, we we restored symmetry, we turned our faucet on for detoxification to allow the lymphatics and glympathics to drain. And so in pediatrics, this is called ADHD. In adults it’s called Alzheimer’s disease. If you look at the diagnostic criteria, they look pretty dang similar it’s because the disease pathological, the pathophysiology disease is actually very similar, if not identical in a lot of patients.

Tom Moorcroft, DO

Well, it’s interesting, ’cause here we are talking about ADHD and Alzheimer’s and dental things and fascial and the airway in a mast cell summit. And I just wanna go back and just re-highlight what you were saying is you see the EEG changes and this is so critical. You actually have objective evidence in the brain that shows that mast cell and Lyme and PTSD, along with ADHD and Alzheimer’s, have very similar findings in the brain. And the original trigger may be different, but if we get underneath of it and we look at how the body functions, we can make a change. And so now think about this, guys. You’re working on your Mast Cell Activation Syndrome by doing the work that Dr. Ruan’s talking about, you’re improving your mast cell regulation, your tolerance of different foods. And oh, by the way, your brain fog goes away and your attention gets better and now you’re helping to prevent future Alzheimer’s. But it’s all the same system.

Cheng Ruan, MD

Yes.

Tom Moorcroft, DO

And this is the part that’s gets me so stoked is the whole dang system is set up for you to succeed and to live a healthy life. And there’s so few people I hear actually understanding that. So I just wanted to super props, man, ’cause this is the kind of medicine people need.

Cheng Ruan, MD

Yeah, absolutely. And you know what? And you know as well as I do that if someone goes on Google right now and types in Mast Cell Activation Syndrome, there’s all sorts of different integrative medicine forums and stuff on it. But there’s very few on exactly what we just talked about now, which is airway and stuff like that. And people are-

Tom Moorcroft, DO

Well, I have this great antihistamine you should use.

Cheng Ruan, MD

Yeah, exactly. That’s once again, covering up symptoms, right? They’re like, “Oh, but it’s okay.” You can use either NAC or stinging nettles or some sort of mast cell stabilizer, but that’s still a supplement that’s stabilizing something that should be there in the first place ’cause your brain is on alert, right? And we can’t- And this is what we tell patients. In my practice, we have Jenny Marino, she’s a mind-body medicine practitioner and she works with a lot of mast cell patients. We can’t establish a great amount of success in mast cell activation without dealing with the mind-body, without looking at the cycle, social, emotional trauma that’s been there. We can’t deal it without breathing techniques, Wim Hof breathing, and also the nostril breathing and stuff like that. It is so difficult in that population. And so I take insurance, right? And we have Medicaid plans as well as Medicare plans in our company, which means that we see people who can’t really afford supplements, stuff like that. But breathing is free, right? 

And when we started teaching those people in groups, these are virtual Zoom groups, about breath and what we really see, that group outperformed our conventional groups of just doing low-dose Naltrexone or Ketotifen, and stuff like that. We’re like, “Whoa, whoa, timeout, timeout, timeout. “Can we just not prescribe these things “and put everyone into these breath groups?” Because we did this because people couldn’t afford a lot of these things, but now this group is actually outperforming our original group. And part of my job is to make sure there’s cost savings for the patients too. That’s what I do as a Medicaid, Medicare practitioner, right? So we wanna make sure what is the biggest benefit we have for the least cost. And breathing is there. Now, not saying there’s no place for supplements or medicine. There actually is. There’s a huge place for it. Even CBD and stuff like that. But you can’t overstep that primary, foundational, you know?

Tom Moorcroft, DO

Dude, this is like you’re preaching from my book too, right? I love it. Because all of the things have a time and a place potentially. But the most important thing is the stuff that you guys can all do at home that is free or next to free and you can do it all the time. It’s not only that breathing is free, but you have to do it. And in the work that we’ve done, so much of it is mouth breathing. Well, how do you not breathe through your mouth? Well, you close it or you tape it while you’re sleeping, but you have to breathe through your nose. And I heard you mention a few breath techniques. And I have a question about one of the ones that we also use. But what kind of is the role that you see for things like exercise, meditation and yoga? Yeah, they get better results, but why? What is that inner relationship?

Cheng Ruan, MD

Where do I start, my friend? So let’s talk about exercise first, right? Which is gonna be similar as yoga and similar to Chi Gong and Tai Chi. Whenever the body moves, the lymphatic moves as well, your detox mechanisms move. Whenever the body moves, you’re able to sweat and detox from that as well. That can in turn lower the ability of your body to hyper-produce a lot of these mast cells, but also creates a whole lot of balance. Exercise increases nasal breathing. Huh, who would’ve thunk, right? Which means that you get to increase nitric oxide during exercise, which suppresses histamine. Yeah, that’s another one, right? And then, what did you say? Exercise, yoga and what? Oh, meditation. Is that what you said?

Tom Moorcroft, DO

Yeah. Meditation, belief, all of it. I want it all right now, man. We want the master plan.

Cheng Ruan, MD

All right. This is the cool part about meditation and you guys wanna know about this. It’s actually on my website, www.tclmuniversity.com, which stands for Texas Center for Lifestyle Medicine University. Midway down, there’s a class called “Mind Sculpting Master Workshop.” We actually go through this whole thing in significant amount of detail with Jenny, my body medicine practitioner. Let’s tie in meditation for a second ’cause people think meditation and they think it’s kind of woo-woo. But let me tell you the actual science behind meditation. So if I were to get someone to meditate and we have the EEG on, which we do all the time, and I get them to close their eyes. So those people with a lot of brain firing and beta frequency, a lot of the mast cell releases, they kinda get stuck there. But the minute we tell them to do breathing, mindfulness and meditation, you can see the brain patterns go into instead of the high frequency region to the lower frequency region. The minute they do that, look at their face. Before they may be a little bit ghastly white ’cause they’re always in fight or flight. You see the bluff light will return to their face. And the second thing that’s really, really common and you’re gonna laugh at this, is that people start wanting to poop. And the reason behind that-

Tom Moorcroft, DO

Totally makes sense.

Cheng Ruan, MD

Yeah. Their nitric oxide, right? With the mindfulness and meditation, they actually redirect bluff flow to the liver, to the gut for the healing process. And all of a sudden, the gut’s like, “Oh, I need a detox. Can I just poop?” Right? And so a lot of times some- In our courses, people kind of have to excuse themselves in the middle to go poop. And now it’s just funny ’cause we all cheer each other on ’cause a lot of people have chronic constipation from mast cell issues. It was like, “Yeah! Go poop.” You can actually detox now. So actually it becomes a bit of a running joke. But that’s how powerful meditative processes are. And what’s really cool. It’s free and the more you do it, the better you become at it. And that’s the really cool part about all this.

Tom Moorcroft, DO

Well, and I think that’s a really key point too is I hear a lot of people say, “Meditation’s not for me. “It’s too hard. It’s this or that.” Right? And I found the same thing. But so you’re just saying that we should just start and no matter how good or bad we feel we’re at it, you can get objective measurements on your qEEGs that show in real time, even if we think we suck, we’re actually doing a better job than we were a minute ago.

Cheng Ruan, MD

Yeah. Yeah. We do this thing called home neural feedback where we use this program called Mind Lift and then there’s a device called the Muse 2 headband. You actually can send to people and we can actually ask people who are doing these meditative things on my software, no matter where they are in the world, me and my colleague, a behavioral neuroscientist by the name of Francesco Amico in Dublin, we’re literally seeing what’s happening and we can see each area of the brain start improving. In fact, this is one of the first things that we do to show patients, especially with mast cell activation, is like, “Hey, you just did 19% improve “since seven days ago “and all you did was three minutes a day. “That’s really good.” And that correlates, that has a significant correlation with down regulation of cortisol surges, mast cell activation and stress reduction and clinical outcomes as well. But yeah, there’s a lot of objective evidence here.

Tom Moorcroft, DO

I think that’s the thing. So many of us sit down and think that one or two 5 or 10 minute meditation sessions or breathing sessions, we’re gonna just notice this massive shift in our physiology.

Cheng Ruan, MD

No.

Tom Moorcroft, DO

And you’re stuck in a mindset that these things have to be quick. And like Dr. Ruan said a little while ago, some of this stuff, it’s not a short, easy road, but it’s so, so worthwhile. But you can actually see them changing, which I just think is so key. ‘Cause even if we don’t feel like personally we’re changing, objective measurements of our brain show we are.

Cheng Ruan, MD

Yes, exactly. And these objective measurements, you can see these things before you kind of feel it yourself. But over time though, as it becomes more and more there is correlation with patients feeling themselves as well, right?

Tom Moorcroft, DO

So the change starts before you actually can feel it though. Or before most people will notice it right away.

Cheng Ruan, MD

Yeah. And let me tell you why. You know, I think most people watching this have suffered some sort of trauma in the past and most of it actually comes from medical because the medical world doesn’t necessarily recognize that what we said is a thing, right? And so there’s a lot of PTSD.

Tom Moorcroft, DO

So betrayed by it, right?

Cheng Ruan, MD

Right. There’s a lot of people that just not validated by the medical system, that’s why they’re watching this summit in the first place. So what they have to do, and if you’re watching this, what you had to do was battle for yourself to become your own caregiver and find all this information, you end up on the summit learning all these great things on the summit. So if you’re one of those people, what’s happening is that you are now a doer, okay? And if I tell you to meditate, well, that’s also doing something. But instead of objectively doing something, in meditation you have to sit there and technically do nothing, right? So a lot of people who try to meditate have too high of a expectation. Instead of saying, “Oh my God, I can’t get into meditative state. “I’m thinking about all these things.” 

Well, that’s meditation. You’re actually taking thoughts and you’re thinking about them and then you put it over here, take another thought, you think about it, you put them over here. That’s meditation. Meditation’s not necessarily just turn your mind off, think about nothing. It’s really hard to do so. So the people who says, “I’m a poor meditator.” I’m just like, “Man, you’re just so hard on yourself. “That’s just too hard on yourself,” right? But just like exercise, it takes time. You can’t go out and run a half marathon without training. It’s just really hard to do. You’re gonna break your joints. The same thing with the brain. The brain has to recognize, “Okay, there’s a meditative process.” And through meditation, you’re allowed to cry, you’re allowed to laugh, you’re allowed to be pissed off. And that’s doing meditation, right? So if you think about it as that and accept the feelings that we have and love them as our own that’s meditation. Self-appreciation is actually meditation.

Tom Moorcroft, DO

Dude, I love it. It’s like everything you’re saying are these things that I feel is so true, ’cause we’re getting down to that root cause. And for me, meditation, one of the definitions I really like is to become familiar with. So I challenge people to become familiar with this state that they wanna be in. Because like you said, you’re moving those thoughts and you’re recreating a way of thinking. But the first time, if you’re not feeling well and you wanna become familiar with feeling well, maybe you don’t remember how to do that. So just get used to it. And the part that really gets me because this totally was me. You literally just summarized me. Like that pissed off part. I didn’t cry much in meditation, but, man, I got pissed.

Cheng Ruan, MD

Me too. Me too.

Tom Moorcroft, DO

Almost, “Why can’t I do this?” I’m like, “I achieve everything.” And it was literally the part that I sat down and worked on meditation and I got pissed off was my, ultimately in hindsight, was my signal that I was actually changing my physiological state, changing my belief systems, because I was challenging my status quo. And for me I didn’t cry or laugh about it, I got mad. So whether you’re doing any of the things that Cheng just said, crying, laughing, or being mad or whatever your variation is, that means you’re challenging your comfort zone and you’re moving into that place you wanna go to. So that’s a sign it’s working. So dude, just brilliant. I love it. So as we kind of bring all this together.

Cheng Ruan, MD

Yeah.

Tom Moorcroft, DO

We’ve kind of touched a little bit on where trauma and even betrayal from the medical system or even the thought that our body might betray us is there, so could you talk a little bit more about that? And then maybe what kind of belief systems should we be focusing on and how can we accelerate this process at home?

Cheng Ruan, MD

Oh yeah. It’s my favorite topic, man. This is something I talk to patients every day about in a lot of different disease systems. But if you were to go into a movie and you will watch the movie and a scary scene would come up and if that scene is super scary, you have the moment of fright. During that moment of fright, your nitric oxide just shuts down. You stop breathing. Your face goes ghastly white because your blood flow is now directed to fight or flight muscles instead of your face and your gut and you might feel a little queasy. Your stomach might feel not so great, might feel a little nauseous after that fear. And same thing happens when you have trauma. But then when you have a trauma that occurs once and your brain plays it over and over again, it can’t tell the difference between real trauma and what it just created. Physiologically, it’s the same. You still have the same mast cell activation, right? And your brain can’t tell a difference between a movie and not a movie. It can’t tell a difference between something that happened once versus something happened 10,000 times. Because 10,000 days in a row, you’re thinking about it for decades, right?

Tom Moorcroft, DO

Right.

Cheng Ruan, MD

And so what happens is that a lot of the mast cell activation gets primed and the more primed it gets, the easier it is to release. And we have to thank our bodies for that is because our bodies are trying to protect us. That’s how we survive. If we didn’t have these mast cells, we would not be existing. We would’ve gone extinct a while ago, you know?

Tom Moorcroft, DO

Yeah.

Cheng Ruan, MD

And so, recognizing the fact that a lot of the mindfulness that comes in is us dealing with the fact that this event happened once. But that’s it, okay? It happened once. It sucks. I’m gonna process that. And then as I process that, bring it into my subconscious, instead of letting it linger in my- Sorry, bring it into my conscious state instead of let it linger in my subconscious, I can deal with it. And that’s what the process of that meditative process is. So instead of that thought becoming a trigger for mast cells that thought can become a trigger for serotonin. Let me give you a really cool example. When I was young, so I was born in China. And one of the most painful thoughts I ever had was, so, well in China, there’s government handout foods for students. My mom was a medical student at the time at a university. I remember just kinda holding her hand and waiting for Youtiao, which is basically like fried dough and rice porridge from the university. And I remember one of the things is that I like to like roam around a little bit, but my mom would always pull me back into the line. And I thought she didn’t like me every time I did that. But this is a thought that I hadn’t thought about in like decades. 

And it came to me during a meditation and I’m like, “You know, why did I think about this?” And it’s because my mom recently said something that made me didn’t feel so great about myself, but it’s not her fault, it’s actually my fault. Because what I did is I internalized it and then tied to the subconscious thought of me waiting in line with her when I was three or four years old, right? And then during my meditative thought process, I’m like, “You know what? She is just protecting us. “And she does not want the authorities down there “to see that there’s a kid flaying around “and then pulling me away from her,” ’cause my mom wanted to keep me close to me. And that her pulling me close to her was an act of love. So instead of now that thought being something that triggers me, that thought triggers me to say, “Wow, I really appreciate my mother,” right? So you kinda get to flip it around. There are people with these thoughts in their subconscious mind that they can’t identify that unless they go into sort of this meditative state and dealing with it, they don’t realize that something’s there. So whenever I recognize that, I talked to my mom about that and then we had a really great conversation. Now our relationship is even more elevated. So something that used to be a mast cell trigger now is a happiness trigger. Does that make sense?

Tom Moorcroft, DO

Dude, that’s so rad. Well, because even you touched on it and I think about this so much is how much of how we experience our health journey is whether or not our symptoms are validated by the medical system.

Cheng Ruan, MD

Right.

Tom Moorcroft, DO

Have our practitioners accidentally, or hopefully not, but potentially even purposely betrayed us? Do we feel like our body’s betraying us? And what I’m hearing and in my experience is our bodies are never betraying us. They are always trying to do the very best they can in that moment.

Cheng Ruan, MD

Yes.

Tom Moorcroft, DO

And that might be overdoing it from a external perspective. So bring that back in. Love it, dude.

Cheng Ruan, MD

The external perspective is an expectation that’s set by someone in your early life. That’s always the case, right? And sometimes we’re the one or two generations separated away from a war torn country like myself. Or right now, if you look at Ukraine, there’s a lot of things that happens in generation zero that can be transferred to generation one. So there’s a lot of generational trauma that occurs. So that’s why a lot of people with these mast cell activation is having similar issues with the mother or father and the grandparents, and et cetera, et cetera. And it actually comes from a time of war, right? So if we look at genetics, well, we know that looking at the studies of the Holocaust, we know that the grandchildren of those people that were in the Holocaust have significantly higher cortisol reactions to sound, like loud sound like boom, you know? And we’re finding that in other war torn countries as well, two generations down, even though the grandchildren never experienced actual war.

So a lot of that traumatic event, the signaling of our brain, our body, is inherited from multiple generations up. And I challenge people to think, did it really start with you or did it start multiple generations up? And I guarantee you, if you ask around some more, you’ll notice it started multiple generations up. And if we start thinking about that in that regard and building relationships with multiple people in our family, in different generations, we can have that conversation, and that’s what creates a lot of power in resolution. So we can stop this generational trauma in our generation.

Tom Moorcroft, DO

It’s just so crazy having this conversation with you because every time we talk about one topic or the other, another piece comes up even from my world. And after my father passed away, we had had an okay time and then he had some pretty significant- There were a lot of really rough times. And he had a lot of trauma from the past and his generational stuff. And it was a tough time, right? And there were times where we didn’t speak for a while. There were times where there was yelling and screaming and all this other good stuff, like many people experience, right? But then he passed away and we were kind of on good terms. And so there wasn’t really that bad thing, but it wasn’t until three or four years later where I had this aha moment, just kinda like you were just talking about with your mom, where it came back to me. And I was like, “My dad always did the best he could for me.” Right? He was trying his best, but it didn’t work out. But what was really wild and made me think about sharing this right now is when you say you can change it, my relationship with him has continued to get better and better every day since that realization, even though he’s been dead for like six years.

Cheng Ruan, MD

Yes. Yes.

Tom Moorcroft, DO

And so for all you guys listening, when Dr. Ruan says, “You can change this generational thing,” it happens like this and then it continues to improve. So at least for me, it was the awareness and then processing what it felt like inside of me. So that’s what I’m really hearing from what you’re saying is like, you’re not gonna go back and change the war, but you can change the generational impact on you, which changes it for everyone.

Cheng Ruan, MD

And you know what? You can see it in labs. That’s the cool part. There’s people who’ve been trying to get inflammatory markers down forever, interleukin-1, interleukin-17, HSCRP, and then when they go through some sort of a emotional shift or relationship shift, all of a sudden their labs get better. There’s people who are diagnosed with autoimmune diseases, with positive ANAs and all these different things in blood work, all of a sudden that goes back to negative and they don’t necessarily have these autoimmune disorders. There are people who are basically transformed in even the way they look. They had a lot of white hair and they start growing out darker roots after a relationship changed. So these are common phenomena that we see. And I’m a data nerd. So whenever I see something like that, I’m like, “What is the variable that changed that in the practice?” 

And it wasn’t really until 2019 that we realized it was actually working with mind-body medicine that people were having all these big major relationship change that these occurred. And then even cancer, like cancer growth, that also occurs as well. And it’s fascinating how- And my mom is an acupuncturist. And so everything thing I tell her, she’s like, “Duh, duh, duh.” You know? And so it’s fascinating how I went through med school, did my residency, chief resident attending ship and all that medical training. I kind of went back to my roots of traditional Chinese medicine and say, “Hey, healing occurs with a mindset.” And that’s the primary function of the brain. It can take you any direction you want. It can prime your mast cells, or it cannot. And we have to be able to really honor that.

Tom Moorcroft, DO

I love it, man. What a great way to kinda bring this all together, because it’s like data driven mindset and breathing medicine. I mean, really going back to the root. And it’s not even- The one thing I really wanna highlight about what I’m taking away from our conversation is it’s not just about root cause medicine, but it’s more like root cause health. Like you’re going back to the basics of how the body actually optimally functions. And when you feed and nourish that, all these other things just fall away. It’s brilliant, man.

Cheng Ruan, MD

Yeah. Yeah.

Tom Moorcroft, DO

That’s why your patients get so much better, so much quicker. And you have their data again to prove that it works.

Cheng Ruan, MD

Yeah. And the hardest part is to sometimes convince our patients that that’s the foundation. I’m not gonna talk about anything else but that. And I see the trauma that’s there. Sometimes they’re saying things. I’m like, “You know, just hold on a second. “I just wanna label that I can feel “that you have some trauma behind this.” And we talk about that. And to actually come-

Tom Moorcroft, DO

You gotta treat my Lyme, man, and my mast cells. What do I need to do for that?

Cheng Ruan, MD

Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, whenever people come out with mast cells, it’s like, let’s just take a step back. Before mast cells, I just came into the room and you were sitting in the chair and you turned to me like this, which means you can’t move your neck. Let’s talk about that first. That’s more important for your mast cells than any supplements or anything that we can give, right? Or medications, right? And so all this comes together and this is the concept of healing from mast cells is the entire premise of integrative health, you know? And we have to honor the way that we integrate all the information together to help the patients. And that’s what that is. And it’s a beautiful thing.

Tom Moorcroft, DO

Well, Dr. Ruan, thanks so much for sharing all this stuff with us. I’d love to give you an opportunity to just close up with anything we may not have touched on and make sure you let us know where people can reach out and get in touch with you.

Cheng Ruan, MD

Sure. For those of you who are listening, so reach out to me. I’m on Instagram and Facebook. So my name is Cheng Ruan, C-H-E-N-G, last name’s R-U-A-N. There’s an MD at the end. And you can find me on there. The website that I really want, that we worked really hard with my entire team, is www.tclmuniversity.com. It’s an educational series website and it’s very low cost for people who just don’t have the funds to and who can’t afford to go to the doctor to learn a whole lot more about all the disease states. Not just about mast cells. But there’s mind-body medicine, there’s brain health, cognitive health, cancer. Our cancer course is quite robust. There’s dysautonomia and POTs, which a lot of people listening on this forum have dysautonomia and POTS as well. And how to navigate that and how to speak with your doctors and et cetera. 

So it’s a great website to have. So the last thing that I really want to leave people thinking about is that there’s a lot of great speakers on this summit. There’s a tremendous amount, but the one that’s gonna benefit you the most is a conversation with yourself. It’s yes, you have this information, you have all the stuff like that. And whenever you’re thinking about, decreasing mast cells and stuff like that, there’s definite mind-body experiences to be had. Whether that’s through meditative journey or working out or yoga, something like that, something that you can do, there’s always something that you can do for stabilizing the mast cells and getting rid of the trauma. There really is. And I want you to really honor that and honor yourself and honor the relationships that you have with people as well.

Tom Moorcroft, DO

Brilliant. I love it, brother. Well, Dr. Cheng Ruan, thank you so much for joining us for this episode of the “Reversing Mast Cell Activation Syndrome “and Histamine Intolerance Summit.” I’m your co-host, Dr. Tom Moorcroft. Until next time, everybody, thanks for joining us.