Yeast, Parasites, and the Root Causes Most Doctors Miss

Introduction and Dr. Trowbridgeu2019s Background 0:00

everybody's on this Ozempic thing. You don't understand. These drugs can rot your organs from the inside out. And now there's a class action lawsuit on blindness from Ozmpic. Well, you want to risk that? Go ahead. Hi there, welcome back to the Healthy by Dr. Jenn podcast. Today we're going to be talking to someone that has been practicing integrative medicine probably longer than anyone you know. So today we have Dr John Trowbridge. He is educated in biological sciences at Stanford and medical medicine at Case Western Reserve.

he pursued post-graduate training in urological surgery at the Texas Medical Center and now he resides in Houston, Texas. Beyond graduate studies in immunology, he also completed master level education in preventative and nutritional medicine, and he's recognized internationally as an expert in integrative medicine. He received the Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award from the International College of Integrative Medicine and was honored as a fellow as the American College for Advancement in Medicine, And was named top doc in advanced medicine by Marquis Hoo Hooves.

So he is a pilot also, which he loves. And he has authored over five dozen CDs and DVDs on integrative medicine and written books also. So we are so excited to have him for his expertise and honored. Welcome. Thank you. What a pleasure to be here. Holding these interviews is such a great way for you to share with the world what's really happening. Yeah. Well, so what do you think is happening with integrative medicine? Because you've been doing this a really long time. I'm worried about what's happening because everybody is trying to figure out how to make a living in medicine.

So they're going to an integrator medicine conference. and come back and having had an hour lecture, they're now going to be an expert in that particular area. No, you can't take conventional medical thinking and apply it to integrated medicine because you miss the whole concept of the integration. And it's worrisome in this regard. I have patients who tell me, well, nobody's ever done that. Well, of course not. They're not practicing integrated medicines. they are just doing a little snippets of what they think they understand.

What Real Integrative Medicine Requires 2:23

Yes. Okay. Because this is something that I've been talking about lately because it is bothering me because I, you know, we just moved to Nashville and everyone calls themselves functional medicine here and they've had a weekend long training, but people don't see it that it's advertising and it almost like functional and integrative medicine is almost just becoming like conventional medicine. Exactly. You know, and you kind of hit it like they're just expecting to know it all. So what do you think, you know because I've had many mentors, for me it took a long time to get into this medicine.

What do think would be, what would the perfect recipe for integrative medicine? The perfect recipe is to get good conventional training so you understand physiology, pathophysiology, the biochemistry of how it works wrong. That's a good fundamental place. Because people who don't have that don' understand the workings of the system in order to impact it really well. After that, plan on taking several years To study this, it is not easy because you've got to go back and look at, you know, that's why I got a master's in nutrition.

Cause I needed to figure out what I was really doing. Okay. And the, the story is, is you have to become a perpetual student and doctors. Sometimes they just don't want to study anymore. They're ready to get out and practice and make a living and whatever. It's much more fun to be a student of integrated medicine. Because you're learning every single day. Oh, it's humbling for sure. Absolutely. I'm like, oh, I call it when I go down PubMed rabbit holes. Exactly. And studies or forums or, you know, our text messages that we have with colleagues.

So it, like you said, is continuing learning because now it is being kind of advertised as you go to a conference, get a certification, and you can But it's called practice because you have to keep doing it and keep learning. I love to have the complicated patients come in that are a challenge for me because that's where I'm really going to learn. A lot of background and experience I can see virtually anybody, but when I look at them and go, what do I need to know here? That's the fun part of continuing practice.

And this is still happening. You're still learning from your patients today. Oh, gosh, yes. Absolutely. People ask me, well, when are you going to retire? And I go, what would I do? I'm having too much fun practicing medicine. That's what I say. I probably won't ever retire fully, but maybe slow down when I get older. But I think that that's important because the mentorship aspect is getting missed. Yeah, and talking to colleagues about difficult cases and walking through it with the patient and learning together sometimes.

Sometimes I've had patients ask me about stuff like bee venom treatment. You know, this was a couple of years ago and I'm like, you know I don't know but I am going to learn it you and we are going see if it's something you should do. So that happens a lot. You know, it helps if, if you really will learn something in order to educate others to speak at meetings, to write articles and books. I'll have patients tell me, well, you know so-and-so does integrated medicine. And I go, okay. So how many books have they written?

How many lectures have the delivered? Have they been a professor in chief? Whatever. It turns out none. Okay, well, wait a minute, they're just, you know, milking the system in practice. They're not actually contributing to it. Yes, and that is when I go down my rabbit holes when preparing lectures. Oh, absolutely. Yes. And then you become an expert on that topic. I think if doctors out there are listening and they are just practicing because they went to a weekend course, apply to speak at places.

Go to more conferences. That is important. Share. Yeah, that's great. Exactly. So you say that conventional medicine stop asking questions About five questions too early.

Root-Cause Thinking and Personalized Care 6:30

At least five. What do you mean by that? So if you come in, you have heart disease, okay? But they immediately go toward treatment. I go, well, why do YOU have a heart? Because you know, everybody thinks of heart diseases as blockage. But that's just the blood flow. The muscle can have its own problems. That's cardiomyopathies. And the real question is, okay, so if that happening, then why did that happen? Then why that? And you go back until you find the fundamental reasons inside. Of course, often it's the gut.

Yeah. Okay. Often there's other issues going on. And if you address your treatment there, I tell people it's like, if I treat the roots, i don't have to treat every branch of the tree. And finding out the basis makes it so much easier to take care of patients. But I like how you said, like, you don't have to take care of the other parts of trees because that's how conventional medicine is. Everything is a specialist. Absolutely. And I'm like it's just root cause. I was so blessed when I had my brick and mortar in Ohio.I was like the only integrative practitioner and that was it.

People would just word of mouth, people would come to me and I just grew so much from that because so many weird cases. You have figure out what. Yes, and it was great. And you know, now the problem is when I go to work in the emergency room and I talk to someone, I'm like, well, what's your diet like? Let's get to the root cause. Yes. Yeah, And I remember this vet, he was a vet. He served our country in war and stuff and he kept coming in for chest pain. I got to The Root Cause, his mom was there.

We talked about root causes like sleep, like diet, because his cardiac workup was always negative. You know, and I so I was getting at the root and they were so grateful and it was just I Was like really like no one's talking to you about this stuff and you like But but they stop and why do you think that is do? You think doctors are burnt out or? Do you remember the roll top desks the old roll-top desk and had all the little holes at? the top A lot of times, doctors are trying to put you into a cubby hole.

You know, if we get a diagnosis, we stick you there, and then we never have to think about you again because you come up with a symptom. We say, well, people with your problem get that. The only problem is they're not looking for the developmental processes. They're looking at mechanics of how we work on the inside and they are dismissing anything that's happening to you because, you know, it's all personalized care. If it isn't personalized, I don't know. You know one size fits none. And that is the wonderful challenge of taking care of these patients because everybody has their own little unique twist and you have to figure that out.

Yeah, and that's what's interesting, because when I talk to people about what I do with patients, I'm like, it's not cookie cutter. I wish it was sometimes. Because there's protocols that I have for things, but it is always like everyone is on their different plan because I am adjusting it to their life because things come up. They can't be put in a hole. And who would want to be? Who would wanna be treated like that? Well, that depends because sometimes people just want the convenience of I go in and get a pill and I've done.

You know, I tell my patients when I'm finishing their first consultation, and I go, now you have a new job. And they go what's that? And I have to bitch, moan and groan. What does that mean? They go I had the theme, an idea, a style about how I am going to help take care of you, but that has to be personalized. So you get in touch and say this is happening or this the response I've had to something. You have let me know. They say I don't want to bother. It's not bothering me, it's allowing me to continue managing you.

I like to say you're on a short leash, because I want to be managing in between treatments. And so when I have you in the office, we'll have a different style, but in-between I need to know what's going on. Yeah, that's so funny. I just had a patient last week that opened up and they were like, just dumping all this stuff on me. And they're like... They're, like I feel so bad. And I was like, thank you for telling me all that because I really then got to narrow down where we needed to focus on for this visit and what was going on.

It's so beautiful and crazy, but if you actually listen to the patient, they'll tell you what's wrong with them. They'll always give us what we need. Absolutely. But I'm sorry, we don't have time, got to guess the next patient, you know? And no, that's not, and I have people say, well, your so expensive. And I go, Well, let's see. I've taken care of basically all of your complaints. You're not going to different specialists. Well but, And the reason that people stay sick, insurance, reimbursement.

Yeast Syndrome, Candida, and Parasites 11:24

Because all these other doctors are covered and therefore they don' have, they're just paying with their health and their life. As well as taking time out of their day to go see these doctors and then they're getting all these toxic medications or whatever. You can pay for whatever you want in your life. In my case, I've found a wonderful way of helping people. That's what it costs. Our health should be the one thing that should. Be the priority. Yes. You know, we spent all of our life getting our money.

Okay. And then we spend all our. Money try to regain our health. Whatever. Yeah. It's, it's a bummer. So what led you to write the book, the yeast syndrome book. So I just think that that has such a big problem in America and that's such A fun title. Oh, thank you. Um You know in 1983 I was learning about chelation Wow 82 actually and and uh, I visited uh myelin pakovich in pittsburgh And I was looking at things on his wall and I said, what's this about yeast? He says, oh, you don't know about yeasts.

I go, no, he says there's a conference coming up. And so I scheduled to go there and go my gosh, this explains almost everything. Okay. So I started looking and started treating patients. Uh, the excitement that I had was. when you're right on, you are taking care of them and if you miss it, they won't ever get better, okay? And so I started collecting information and then I thought, the Yeast Connection was a marvelous book, and I got to see that as my friend was writing it and this is good, but his was different kind of book I wanted a little bit more reference to the literature and so on.

So that came out and I got denied by 17 publishers in New York until finally one of them said, okay. And, you know, so it has been a long selling strong backlister is what they call it. Yeah. Still published. Well, what do you say to people that they don't believe we can have yeast, candida, mold in our guts and that it's not causing a problem? What do say you to them? I say that's fine. You can believe whatever you want. It's just whatever is happening because the yeast is not the problem. Producing toxins, the toxins are affecting your biochemistry that is making symptoms and such.

The problem is your defense system. because you are tolerating it for whatever reason. One good reason is doctors prescribe antibiotics, but never probiotics to regenerate the good bacteria in your gut. And so we end up constantly getting sicker over time. The deal is that until your defense system is fixed, you will constantly suffer and you go to different doctors and such. Why not go the root cause and stop the need for all the symptoms to develop? Yeah, so with yeast and Candida, you think it's a defense problem.

Always. And because it is overgrown, because our defenses were down. It's been tolerated, exactly. Of course, one of the first things that yeast does as a toxicity is damage your defense system and especially the B-cell lymphocytes, and those are the ones that defend against parasites. of course yeast being a parasite. And then you have to start looking for the other parasites and viruses and whatever that can occur because you a wide open door with your B cells being sicker. So people don't realize that if you follow the chain, you can establish where it's starting.

Cut it there. You don' have have worry about the rest of your body will take care of it. God built this incredibly beautiful system to heal you if create the situation to do that. Yeah, if we get back into homeostasis. There is a good part, yes. Hope is not lost. Well, what about parasites? Because when you start talking parasites, people just give you a weird look. I mean, I've seen that a lot. Oh, absolutely. What do you mean parasites. Right, we're a very clean country. We don't have parasites just the rest of the world does.

Yeah. Of course you have to remember. We have to remember who's serving our food, preparing our foods, and whatever. And the sign says, employees must wash their hands after. They didn't know. I mean, come on, guys. Right. What you really have understand is that parasites are non-discriminatory. The problem is against your defense system is tolerating. Okay? And if you don't realize it, then people are going to end up with trouble. In general, I don't start with parasite treatment, but if I'm having someone who's stubbornly not getting better, you know, sometimes a parasite will do.

And incidentally, very difficult to diagnose because parasites are stealthy. They kind of have like our chemistry, so you can't really readily diagnose them. What you have to do is listen, look at their symptoms, figure out what you think is most likely and what is the most-likely treatment. If you've done that for years, then be pretty good at it. Yeah, and parasites, do you think though, because we are all exposed to parasites that we should a couple times a year do a parasite cleanse like we do, like I just did for my cows?

Yes, yes. Okay. Think about that. We treat all of our animals. That live in our house, that lick their butts. Exactly, yeah, they live out in the fields. No, we're attending to their needs and ignoring ours. And that makes no sense. So yes, I think parasite cleanses make sense, parasite treatment makes sense But the real question is, to what extent does someone want to be proactive? And to that extent, I get some of those, and there are ways to take care of these patients because you hardly ever have to see them.

They're proactive. Yeah, they're being proactive, so how many times a year would you recommend it? Or if you have an exposure or eat sushi or something like that, what do you... you know, once or twice a year, depends on your symptoms. And your lifestyle. Your lifestyle, and if you stay relatively symptom-free and eat cleanly, that's a problem now. You know McDonald's French fries have 17 ingredients, okay? And in England there are three and salt is optional. Right. Then you go, why are we killing ourselves with our food?

Well, we are because the FDA is controlled by the chemical folks. Yes. Until that changes, It's going to be hard to get clean food unless you raise it yourself. Back to the parasites, where do you think the biggest exposure of parasites for people are? Food, no question. Any specific food? I don't know. Good question. But I think basically, if you're eating air, food, water, that's where we get all of our contamination. And the food is the easy one. Yeah. It's pretty interesting since having a mini farm.

Deep Blood Fungus and Chronic Disease 18:30

thinking about how to prevent all these diseases with my chickens and my cows without using drugs. And with chickens, I give them a lot of like herbs in there and it gets expensive, you know, because I'm like buying bulk herbs, but, it's pretty cool. But we don't do this, for ourselves, we cook with less and less like oregano and like basil and things that are naturally anti-parasitic. Good things. Yeah. Well, since we're recording live. You know we can grow in five gallon buckets on our back porch.

Yeah. A lot of the vegetables that we'd like to eat very readily done. And, and people don't need to have a big garden. Don't have to take a lot time. It's amazing how much fruit or how vegetable a plant can produce and you've got a two or three of them, you got more than your family can eat. Right. We just got to get smarter. But a lot of this information is not readily available because it's not supposed to be. One other thing I wanted to ask you, I'm intrigued by this, deep blood fungus. What is that?

Well, this is an interesting concept. A doctor in Arizona had an interest in immunology, and I used to talk all the time. He realized that there were deeper infections that were not being looked for and therefore not found. Okay. And one of the first ones he found was pheneliformis mucii. That's a plant fungus. A plant root fungus, actually. And you know, you shouldn't be able to document that in human blood. Then he found others as well. How do you explain that to patients? So I came up with the idea of deep blood fungus and that's my term.

I have a couple hour lecture on the YouTube about that from years ago. But the problem was, and he had a very elegant laboratory set up to really do this, the insurance companies didn't want to pay for it and the patients didn' want pay. So unfortunately that is not available anymore. It has to be all you know symptom based and experience based but treating it is different than treating the yeast syndrome and I know that because I had some patients with yeast and deep blood fungus and look at this and you go wait a minute there's a different set here and the deep-blood fungus is associated with so many strange diseases, especially autoimmune diseases and especially those serious ones that that seem to linger in patients into, you know, the problem with conventional medicine, if we don't know what to do, it's cortisone and chemotherapy.

Right. And like, wait a second, guys, those seem be very drastic treatments when there's an underlying cause. Yes. Treat that and then you don' have to worry about the other issues. I love it when I get sick patients because I got the chance to really get them healthier. Yes, or monoclonal antibodies are like everything now. Yeah. Well, you know what's interesting though? You would find this intriguing. So histoplasmosis, right? Like from chickens and the poop and chicken dust and bats. Yes. Really interesting.

I just got chickens over the last year and I was cleaning out their cage a little bit or just in there without a respirator. Okay. because I just didn't think, because it was open. It was out in the open, it wasn't doing really crazy things and I was getting this chronic cough and respiratory and it's histoplasmosis that I'm at this level where my body cannot deal with it well and these are my symptoms. Because our body, if we have symptoms that are off, we had to figure out what was the root cause behind that, unless it is something obvious like food poisoning or something.

I took Iterconazole for a couple of days and got instantly better. Gone. Right. Yes. And I was like, and then the same thing happened. Of course, it's happening during my luteal phase where my progesterone's, you know, where, anyway, immune-wise, more susceptible. It changes, right? Exactly. Yeah. So, so cool. Then it happened, I just was, like honey, just don't feel good. I'm in my late lutes and I am like it is the chickens because I had done something else and just something so little in their cage.

And I was like, that is why I took an intracone gun. So it was almost like a deep... Do you see that that correlates? Isn't that kind of cool? That's a wonderful correlation. Untreated, you would go on and have the prospect of being able to develop deep blood fungus. Remember, it's your defense system. So anything that's banging on your defense system is making you more likely to develop deeper issues. Interesting. And those then are what the diseases of older age are, okay? The degenerative diseases are very often have an infection base.

Yeah. Okay. Well, yeah, and it makes sense. Even cancer, because cancer is the immune system not operating properly. Exactly. There's a great deal of, quote, cancer that really is fungus. And that's why the anti-parasites and stuff are working so well. Exactly. Like ivermectin and fibendazole. Interesting, yeah. I mean, because I see this working out, but I've never heard of like that deep blood fungus kind of... And remember the The form of attack that is most deadly to us is the mitochondria in our membranes.

The mitochondrial energy factories, so we decrease the ability of cells to work and defend themselves. To do what they're supposed to do, yeah. And if your membrans are in trouble, you no longer have the abilities to keep things sorted out well on the inside, and you become sicker. You know, it's ridiculous to see that half the people are going to die by the time they are 76. Why? You should be well maintained. And membranes, you mean like mouth to anus. Every membrane, cell membrane's in your body.

Even cell membrane. Absolutely. Your organs don't get sick. You're organelles, the cellular parts get stick. Then whichever one shows up first is the specialist you go to and now you have liver disease or kidney disease, whatever.

Mitochondria, Clotting, and Ozempic Warnings 24:18

But you don' All you had is cellular disease Find out what's banging on those cells and why the defense system is not defending you. Those are the ways to treat patients. Yeah. Well, and that's why like mitochondria, like you said, your whole body mitochondrial needs to be healthy. And I try to explain that to patients, if you don't feel good energy, If you have adequate energy to make it through the day, then your mitochondrion are suffering. Then we have to find out why. You have so much energy.

Can I ask how old you are? This next week, I'll be 79. 79! Wow. Well, you are a billboard for what you do. Thank you. That's amazing. All right, well, thank you so much for this interview. I feel like we have to do a part two via Zoom sometime. Good idea. But I would love to some rapid fire questions. Please. What is your, and I mean, in all of the years practicing integrative medicine, what is you favorite biohack or therapy that actually works? Okay, you're a natokinase fan. Yes. Because if you take a look, the things that are devastating that happen are heart attacks, strokes, blindness, kidney failure, gangrene.

Those are clotting system problems. Natokinis is the simplest way for anybody to take care of that. It does not interrupt cloting. And, you know, babies are soft and rubbery and smell good and older folks are none of the same. Babies are alkaline. Older folks, acidotic. And that's where you make more fiber and randomly. It's like teenagers looking for a rumble, battle kinase. Oh, I had been taking that on and off since the pandemic and now I guess I'll have to add it back in. Okay, let's go. You convinced me.

My book on clotting systems was 55 years ago. And when I saw this 26 years ago when it first came in the country, I said that's the solution, that it. That's how you handle the fact that we still make abnormal clotting and such. And our bodies haven't changed. It's still the same. Absolutely. Still the the problems. We're calling it different stuff. Exactly. If you could eliminate one toxin from the world today, what would it be? without question, glyphosate. That's just, it's permeating all of our food sources.

It is damaging us on the inside. And unfortunately, patients don't understand the concept of inner damage. So everybody's on this ozempic thing. You don' understand. These drugs can rot your organs from the outside out. Now there's a class action lawsuit on blindness from ozepic. Well, you want to risk that? Go ahead. And then last thing, just one word. One word only that you would like to leave our listeners with. Oh, it's very simple. It's what I ask my patients. What do you do every day for joy?

Joy, yeah. Just for yourself, for Joy. People go, well, that's the wrong answer. Okay. Right. You have to be able to rattle off a dozen things because life should be joyful every minute of every date.

Joy, Final Advice, and Where to Find Dr. Trowbridge 27:18

If you're not having joy, Why bother going through the motions? You get to a point when you're older and you realize, joy, that's it. It's the only thing that matters. That's great. Well, thank you so much. How can everyone listening find you? Oh, it's very simple. On the internet, my website is HealthChoicesNow.com because if you don't know you have Health Choices Now, You don't have any, okay? If they want to call the office, it's 1-800-FIX-PAIN. And it is very simple and, you know, we're more than happy to, well, even do teleconsulting across the country.

It's very easy, but, giving people better is not that hard. Even with the, quote, most complicated problems, those are the fun ones. Because that's what everybody has missed. That's great. Well, thank you so much for your knowledge. You are a pleasure to interview with. Thank you.