The Better Question: Is Biohacking Actually Healing?

Biohacking vs. true healing 0:00

Because what we've seen is that we can get to the point where the body will actually want to embark on a deeper level of detoxification and phase three, which is by working with the bodies in the encapsulation level, right? So an encapsulaton would be the bodys, again, intelligence, innate intelligence going by design to protect you if there was a toxin that was noxious enough to create some issues for you. And a lot of times those toxins are things that you got early on in childhood and even infancy.

that the body has walled off, put them in a little secret compartment, and are usually in the form of cysts, tumors, nodules, lipomas, sometimes stones, about the same as plaque. And those are the things that body actually did intentionally. Then the only way that you can actually get the to body to open up that conversation though is by increasing sufficiency in surrounding material organs using glands. to make it safe, the body go, oh, I guess it is okay here. It's clear now. I can start to let this toxin go.

Welcome to the Resiliency Method, The Truth About Healing. You can't cold plunge your way to health, and you definitely can sauna your away out of chronic deficiency. Welcome to the resiliency method, the truth about healing podcast. I'm Dr. Erica and today my practitioners Lyric Turner and Susan Hoffman are joining me for a short wrap session on why biohacking, a more masculine approach to wellness keeps you stuck. and symptom management instead of actual healing. So when you're already walking around in a chronic inflammatory state or with deep deficiency in your body, adding more stress to your bodies through cold plunging, intense saunas, or punishing hit glasses isn't building resilience.

Cold plunges, saunas, and stress load 2:04

It's actually breaking you down further. We're revealing why no pain, no gain expired in your 20s, what hermetic stress does to your already stressed body, and why movement and breath restore what exercise destroys. If you're biohacking hard, but this are still symptomatic, this conversation reveals what you are actually missing. Welcome back to the Resiliency Method, the truth about healing podcast. I am Dr. Erica and I'm joined today by my colleagues Lyric Turner and Susan Hoffman. And we are here to wrap with you about biohacking.

Yes. Let's go. Okay. So I'm going to start this conversation off because this was actually something that was a big aha for me when it came to kind of like understanding. And the more that I hung out with other practitioners, functional medicine, doctors, things like that, really successful practitioners. There was this like, sort of emerging track that I was seeing, which was there was a lot of practitioners that were really into biohacking. And then there's a lotta practitioners, that we're really like into wellness, maybe the use of supplements, things like that.

There was almost like this distinction in the two tracks. It's not like one wouldn't go to the other, but I started to see that and then somebody was at a conference and somebody talking about the market space and how people are approaching healthcare and such. and pointed out that the biohacking was really the masculine approach to wellness. And the supplement wellness world, you know, gut terrain, all the things was, really, more of a feminine approach. Yeah. I thought that was so interesting because it did sort of become clear.

That's kind of what I started seeing was there's a lot of men loving the And the beauty was then we could kind of start to see these things, the yin and the yang come together and create more of a cohesion. And that's what we've done, right? We encourage some of the biohacking as adjunct therapies to helping the body to heal faster, more efficiently. But we also see that there's a time and place and definitely that we really can't hack our way to health in the ultimate end, You can't cold plunge your way to hell.

You brought it up. Let's talk about cold plunging. Well, from a Chinese medicine perspective, cold punching is not very good for you. Yeah. Why? It's very hard on the spleen. The kidneys too. And really anywhere where there's an underlying deficiency. Yeah. So you're taking a deficient, you know, taking various glands and organs that are already deficients and then you are putting them into megastress mode. You're adding dampness and cold to an already cold, deficient body. So it's so good for you.

This research says. I know we would disagree with that. Yeah, I mean, in the big picture and I still, you know, somebody comes in and they love their cold plunging and then they come in, and love the cold plungeing. And I think a lot of that's coming from the adrenaline rush that comes with those endorphins that are releasing. Yeah. That feels so good. You know and the vasoconstriction definitely helps with increasing blood supply to different areas. First it constricts it, then increases it. But you say that, you know, somebody's really committed to their cold plunging.

I'm usually having them kind of doing that neutral effect, which is to do sauna with it. You're going to. Yeah, to at least create some kind balance between the cold and the hot. And let's talk about sauna for a second. Everybody thinks that the sauna is so great. Let's. Talk about that in terms of what do we notice with patients? Yeah. The sauna can be really amazing. tool to use, but at the right time and place. And now when you're adding a sauna or dry sauna and it's the heat and at that, you know, the inappropriate time, then you up regulating, um, You know pattern already like, I mean, it can actually like make you feel worse.

Exercise, deficiency, and the limits of no pain no gain 6:30

I'm able, for me personally, like I went through a period where the sun just even just being in the was upregulating me, it caused skin, some weird skin stuff happening, but that was that up regulation happening. from the heat. At the wrong time. Not that sauna's not good for you, but ultimately a lot of us are walking around with that chronic inflammatory state, which anytime you have inflammation, we don't rag on inflammation. We think inflammation is actually useful. However, it's in the context of a controlled burn versus an out of control forest raging forest fire that's taking down the hillside, right?

So, you know, inflammation is the body's natural design at play to increase temperature and to help kill off pathogens and material in the. But if you're in that chronic state, inflammatory state with the, body, You probably aren't going to feel so great actually going into the sauna on the regular, because it's just adding more heat to that already pretty warm and heat laden body. Ultimately, and also might be a reason why some people actually do feel better with cold plunging because they're bringing down some of that internal temperature, at least for a period of time, right?

But we've also seen where our recurring cold plungers can also start to, especially men can start, to suffer some impacts of cold, in their lower body, even their testosterone levels. So it is something to really keep a monitor on, keep an eye on making sure and checking in every once in a while with urinary, not just blood, uritary levels of your testosterone levels for men if you're doing that. Yeah, I would say another thing that, you know, just to be careful with these biohacking, things that people do that are causing this, that's kind of like good stress on the body.

And I would say, from my research into it, we already are so stressed out. We are already dealing with such high levels of stress just with our modern lifestyle. It's almost impossible for us to not have that amount of stressed. So adding that additional stress onto the buddy, particularly when you're so deficient, to our practice is already, you know, we know right off the bat they're so deficient. And so adding that extra super stressful thing onto the body is ultimately long-term not healthy.

Stress is stress, as far as the bodies concerned. It doesn't matter where it comes from. Even exercise you can overdo and that can be a stress. Yeah, absolutely. So some people think, well, if I exercise and I'm fit, that I am healthy, And that could not be more mistaken. Yeah, and that actually can start working against someone, especially when you're dealing with chronic deficiency in your body, which then in turn over time can turn into also mitochondrial insufficiency. And then you are taking a body that is kind of running on fumes.

Because you hear the only way to health is diet and exercise, diet, exercise. You're feeling guilty because you aren't exercising enough, but every time you do, you feel like crap. Right. And so it's this endless vicious cycle of, let me just beat myself up a little bit more because I don't feel good and I can't get to the gym like I should. Yeah. How many female patients were we seeing who come in who were like going to their HIIT class or their orange dairy class, you know, four or five times a week and, um, their hair's falling out and right there.

the breaking out and menstrual cycles are missing on. Yeah, there's stress hormones are so upregulated. Right. And let's talk about exercise for a second. So the more traditional Eastern cultures, ancient medicine perspectives, and this was a hard one for me to get my head around when I was in architecture school. It'd be like, if you were doing Qigong and I'm like well I am going to yoga and that room is going be hot and somebody is gonna have to wipe me up off the floor after I've done because that's how you exercise.

Right? Well, I didn't even think about that, but I just didn' think it counted unless I felt like crap. And I was like destroying myself and sort of like it was a self-punishment or something. And if I wasn't in self punishment mode, it didn't count. That was my thinking when I got to grad school.

Phase three detox and encapsulated toxins 11:15

No pain, no gain. They're doing these like, you know, she hung moves with her breath and I'm like my gosh, that's like such a waste of your time. The more that I actually got into working with clients, and this took me a while, I started to say, ah, it's about movement. It's not, and even in the context of Qigong, It is about using your breath to help improve that chronic deficiency that you have. And they saw that as being a longer term strategy for your health was to actually use your breath to help restore and overcome some of that loss of mitochondrial sufficiency that you would lose through the aging process.

So movement is what is key, guys. Building muscle, making sure you're out walking in nature, calming your nervous system, not asking it to be under more stress. Right. But actually finding that nice balance of restoration with movement is what's the best. Once you get beyond that, you know, middle age, I think we probably expire in that American view of, of it doesn't know pain, no gain probably expires on most of us in our twenties, if not definitely by our thirties. So it's being strategic to write about those kinds of things.

What are some other tools that we see to be useful? in terms of what we would recommend to clients that would be, you know, we call them hacking or we can call it adjunct therapy. I mean, something that we're finding to be really helpful, especially in phase three of our program is molecular hydrogen and inhaled molecular hydrogens. Inhaled, molecular hygiene therapy, can I just drink it? The hydrogen water? Yeah, It doesn't actually test well. Yeah. And it's not really the point, right? The hydrogen inhalation is for what?

We're using it actually to break a plaque in the body. I don't know if anybody else is using that that way, but that's how we use it. pretty powerful. Yeah, yeah. Because what we've seen is that we can get to the point where the body will actually want to embark on a deeper level of detoxification in phase three, which is by working with the bodies in the encapsulation level, right? So an encapsulaton would be the bodys, again, intelligence, innate intelligence going by design to protect you if there was a toxin that was noxious enough to create some issues for you.

And a lot of times those toxins are things that we got early on in childhood and even infancy that the body has walled off, put them in a little secret compartment and are usually in the form of cysts, tumors, nodules, lipomas. sometimes stones, what else do I miss, plaque. And those are the things that the body actually did intentionally. Then the only way that you can actually get the buddy to open up that conversation though is by increasing sufficiency in the surrounding material, organs, tissues, and glands.

to make it safe, the body go, oh, I guess it is okay here. It's clear now. I can start to let this toxin go. However, now this person's been in this body for about sometimes 40 to even 70, 80 years old. And that encapsulation is getting more solidified, more dense. A little shell that's much harder to break up. Yeah, and we're seeing that that inhalation of hydrogen to actually be useful and starting to moisten and start siphoning off those encapsulations and at a very slow and precise rate so that the body will continue to open up and We're supporting that detoxification with not any fancy finder or key later.

It's just simply through what? Yeah with supplements though Well at that point we were using a lot of Well, protomorphogen, so our stem cells are, we're using a lot of B vitamins. B Vitamins, minerals, and then in particular fatty acids. A lot those encapsulate toxins are stored deeply in the brain. They're stored in body fat. There's stored and encapsulations along the nervous system, the vagus nerve. And we're liver, fatty liver. Fatty liver isn't just your diet and lack of exercise. There's encapsulated toxins in there that's contributed to that non-alcoholic fatty-liver disease.

So it's been pretty incredible to see some of that integration. And then we love our old acupuncture. I know you've been working with someone to do some adhesion therapy to move things through. And we talked about how that's going to be important to slow that down as you get into those encapsulated toxins. Right. Yeah, we love that. We also love the Flo-Presso. Flo Presso is wonderful. test really well on a lot of people at this phase. And specifically for that lymphatic movement. Are you tied to treatments, protocols, and gurus who promise results but don't deliver?

You're not alone. For years, I struggled with my own long-term illness and I know how frustrating it feels when nothing seems to work. That's why I developed the resiliency method. It's a science-backed approach to combining the best of Western and ancient medicines to restore your body's natural intelligence. Patient after patient has discovered what's possible, living stronger, brighter, and more spiritually connected than ever before. Whether you're facing autoimmune issues, hormonal imbalances, weight struggles, or just feeling stuck, you don't need another quick fix.

Lymphatic support and practical adjunct therapies 16:58

You need a clear path forward. take the first step with a discovery call at drericaonline.com forward slash discovery that's d-r-e- r-i-k-a online. com forward source discovery or dive deeper with the full initial consultation at doctor erica online dot com board slash initial dash consultation because your health your clarity and your freedom cannot wait What are some of the downfalls with our traditional lymphatic devices out there in doctor's offices? They would just like work on the legs, you know, and then they're squeezing their legs.

It's not full body, not necessarily working with the way the actual lymph flow. So this device is a complete suit all over you, your chest, abdomen, arms, legs, and it works in a circular fashion according to the way that your lymphatic system circulates and then you get that whole therapeutic approach as opposed to just squeezing and letting somewhere else where it's backed up. Push it back down into your legs. I'm going to put you in a deep pair. Oh, it feels so good. It feels good, yeah. Feels so relaxing.

Yeah, I fall asleep every time. We also use foot baths. Foot bath. Not forever. Those work really well in phase one. Tim's a little bit coming back, so come back in in Phase 3 a bit. For some vaccine detox. Absolutely. Those are some of our favorites. Anything else you can think of? Oh, we like the Vegas nerve stimulators. Have the right time. We have guasha. Guasha, dry brushing, nasal rinsing. That was another thing I will fully admit. I used to like judge that stuff, I use to knock it, be like, what could this really be doing?

I was too, you know, certified yoga teacher, going through the thing and the whole process going, that can't be useful. And now I do it every day, nasal rinsing, dry brushing, wash, and it's fantastic for, again, that lymphatic flow. And, you know, we're doing a lot of work at the nervous system, let's face it. We're working on the brain and the nerve system. So your answer for that really is a lotta lymphactic therapy. On the regular, because the body will take, the nerves system brain will, take its garbage out through the sinus cavities.

through the lymphatic system. So that's an... Are you Vedic? Yeah. Old school. Yeah, we're all back in. Epsom salt baths. Bringing it all in and it works at the right time though, right? We found these things at wrong time can sometimes give you a non-desired response. We're always assessing that too. What's a better question somebody could ask about biohacking? Well, I would say, you know, to the guy who's coming in, he's like, ''I've got my barrel sauna out in the yard, and my cold plunge back right next to it.'' I guess I'd challenge him a little bit to ask, what is your goal?

Your end goal. Right. Yeah. A lot of times, they don't know if they can answer that question. Stress your body out so that it burns more brown fat or I don't know, like does something to your brain or, I'm not sure,

Strategy over shortcuts in health 20:48

really if they would quickly understand why. But I would challenge them to ask the question, what is their goal and is that ultimately addressing deeper deficiencies in the body? that can't be healed with cold plunging. And I guess too, you brought up the guy, the biohacking guy who kind of started the conversation there. No, we're not hanging on you guys. We're just bringing to life that a lot of times you really need more of a cohesive strategy on your health in particular. You don't hack your finances, you don' hack you vehicle.

There's a systematic way that you work with these things, but you have a strategy for all of them. So when it comes to your health, It's probably the most important area where you need a strategy and you'd need to coach and need good cohesion. You need efficiency, you to maximize your gains. And if you're just taking this kind of hacky one-off approach to it over time, that's going to have an impact. That's also going impact in reduced efficiency more cost and obviously less of a result. We want to also consider that the world of hacking may not be the best strategy.

And think of that in other contexts of your life where you feel like you're probably not going to take a hacking strategy, so why in the most important area of life would you on this one? There's no shortcuts. Thanks for tuning into the resiliency method, the truth about healing podcasts. If this episode spoke to you, follow, share, and leave us a review. Are you ready to go deeper? Book your discovery called now at drericaonline.com forward slash discovery and take your first step today.