Latest / Everyday Ancestral with James Barry / This Virus Causes Cancer: The HPV Cure They’re Not Talking About | Dr. Doni Wilson

Transcript

This Virus Causes Cancer: The HPV Cure They’re Not Talking About | Dr. Doni Wilson · Everyday Ancestral with James Barry

• 0:00
  If I were to tell you there is a virus that both men and women most likely have but don't
• 0:09
  know they have until it's too late.
• 0:12
  Men typically only find out they have it once they get cancer and women only find out
• 0:18
  if they have it once they get a pap smear.
• 0:21
  This is what we're going to be talking about today.
• 0:23
  On everyday and sestral I'm your host James Berry and my next guest is Dr. Donnie Wilson.
• 0:29
  She is a powerhouse of a naturopathic doctor, professional midwife, clinical nutritionist,
• 0:35
  bestselling author of master your stress, reset your health and an internationally renowned
• 0:42
  speaker and thought leader in women's health.
• 0:44
  She for over 24 years has been on the cutting edge of healthcare, standing alone in her proven
• 0:50
  approach to helping women clear HPV, prevent cervical cancer, and transform their health naturally.
• 0:58
  Please welcome my next guest Dr. Donnie Wilson.
• 1:02
  You're a naturopathic doctor, a professional midwife, clinical nutritionist, which came
• 1:08
  first.
• 1:09
  It all kind of happened at the same time actually.
• 1:12
  I'm kind of one of those people who dives in, you know, there's some, and sometimes I'm
• 1:16
  the kind of person who starts at the shallow end and I tiptoe into the water and there's
• 1:21
  other times where I jump off the diving board in my life and this was one of those times
• 1:26
  where it just became very clear to me and I was only 21 years old when I decided I want
• 1:34
  to become a naturopathic doctor, I want to become a midwife, I want to help women with
• 1:38
  their health, I want to help humans in a different way than what I could observe in the standard
• 1:43
  medical system.
• 1:44
  So at age 21, I entered into naturopathic medical school and midwifery school at the same
• 1:50
  time.
• 1:52
  What led you down that path of naturopathic medicine?
• 1:55
  I would say it's because I grew up in a pharmacy.
• 2:00
  You see, my father was a pharmacist and he ran a chain of 1200 pharmacies.
• 2:06
  So throughout my childhood, I was always in the pharmacy because we were always moving
• 2:13
  locations and I was observing the pharmaceutical industry from the time I was born and then
• 2:20
  I worked in my father's pharmacy when I was in college and I started to have these thoughts.
• 2:28
  It happens when we're in college sometimes we're like, what do I want to do with my life?
• 2:32
  And I was getting a pre-med degree.
• 2:34
  So I was taking all these science classes which I really enjoyed and at the same time I
• 2:39
  started having this thought, wait a minute, what about nutrition?
• 2:43
  How does nutrients play a role?
• 2:46
  I was very curious based on my own health.
• 2:47
  I was having my own health issues.
• 2:49
  I had digestive issues like reflux and I had migraines and I had menstrual cramps.
• 2:55
  And I myself, every time I tried to take a medication from the pharmacy, I felt worse.
• 3:02
  Like I would have a reaction.
• 3:03
  I had reactions to birth control pills.
• 3:05
  I had reactions to medications that someone would take for migraines.
• 3:09
  I had reactions to the medications that were used to treat reflux.
• 3:13
  I couldn't take the medications.
• 3:15
  They were all causing side effects.
• 3:16
  And so I started really thinking, hey, what about, what could I change in my diet?
• 3:22
  Because I just started having those thoughts and experimenting it with myself, I decided,
• 3:27
  you know what, I'd like to take a nutrition class.
• 3:29
  Here I'm taking a pre-med degree and I decided to take a nutrition class just as an elective.
• 3:35
  And I fell in love.
• 3:36
  I was like, this is amazing.
• 3:39
  I need to know more about nutrition.
• 3:41
  I want to know about every vitamin, every nutrient, what they do in the body, how they can help us heal.
• 3:46
  And so I ended up getting a degree in nutrition alongside my pre-med degree.
• 3:51
  And that's when I started having the thought, wait a minute.
• 3:55
  I want to go to a medical school that includes nutrition.
• 3:59
  I mean, it seemed like such a out of nowhere thought.
• 4:01
  But really, it should be that way, right?
• 4:04
  Medical schools should include nutrition.
• 4:07
  But the truth is it, most standard medical schools, the doctors come out with less than 15 hours of training in nutrition.
• 4:17
  So at that age, somehow I was like having these thoughts of, I want to go to a medical school that teaches me nutrition.
• 4:25
  I must have said that out loud one day.
• 4:27
  And a friend of mine said, well, what about nature in public medical school, which I had never heard of?
• 4:33
  And I'm like, well, that sounds interesting.
• 4:35
  There was no Google at that time.
• 4:36
  So I couldn't just Google it.
• 4:38
  I had to drive there.
• 4:39
  So I had to go in my car, drive to Bastier University in Seattle, because I lived in Oregon at that time.
• 4:45
  I drove to Seattle, walked into the knee-jababling medical school and said,
• 4:50
  I want to study medicine that includes nutrition, because I believe food is medicine.
• 4:56
  They must have just thought that I came from outer space or something, but they were like,
• 5:00
  well, we do that here, you know, that's exactly what we do here.
• 5:04
  And so it was like a dream come true.
• 5:07
  I literally was like, I listened to my intuition and I found what I was looking for.
• 5:13
  And it was so clear to me at 21 years old, I was supposed to go to pharmacy school, James.
• 5:18
  I was entered into pharmacy school.
• 5:20
  I was supposed to start pharmacy school.
• 5:23
  And I called on day one of pharmacy school and said,
• 5:27
  I'm sorry, I'm not going to pharmacy school.
• 5:31
  I'm going to nature paddling medical school.
• 5:33
  How did your dad handle this information?
• 5:36
  I mean, he, I imagine he might have been a little heartbroken,
• 5:40
  because you're not following in his steps.
• 5:42
  Yeah, he was. It was really tough.
• 5:44
  It was really tough for him, I think, to understand my decision.
• 5:48
  Because of course, this is back in the 90s when this was much less known.
• 5:55
  My parents were afraid for my future, you know,
• 5:58
  is she choosing a career that's not going to help support her through her life.
• 6:02
  And so they were really afraid for me.
• 6:03
  And they were, they were not supportive of the decision.
• 6:07
  But I did it anyway.
• 6:08
  And I think that, you know, that's one thing about my personality.
• 6:12
  I tend to be someone who's, if I see something that makes sense,
• 6:17
  and I feel it in my intuition, even if people around me are saying,
• 6:23
  are you making the right choice?
• 6:24
  If it's clear to me, I'll choose it.
• 6:27
  And that's how I ended up going to nature paddling medical school.
• 6:30
  And I had, I had interned with a gynecologist during my pre-med studies as well.
• 6:36
  So I had spent a lot of time with a gynecologist in a hospital and in deliveries
• 6:40
  and all the things that gynecologists do, surgeries.
• 6:43
  And it became very clear to me in that process that I wanted to become a midwife.
• 6:49
  Because I could see the midwives in the hospital
• 6:51
  and how they practiced practice differently than a gynecologist.
• 6:55
  And I had the thought, I want to become a midwife.
• 6:58
  And so that's how I ended up deciding, okay,
• 7:01
  I'm going to become a naturopathic doctor in midwife.
• 7:03
  And I luckily found best to your university
• 7:05
  that offered both of those programs at the same time,
• 7:08
  which is I wouldn't necessarily recommend doing all of that at the same time.
• 7:12
  Because by the time I finished five years later,
• 7:15
  I was completely exhausted and it took me time to recover from that.
• 7:19
  Because when you're training as a midwife, you're often up all night.
• 7:23
  I was training as a home-burst midwife.
• 7:25
  So I was at home-burst all around the Seattle area.
• 7:28
  And it was beautiful and amazing, but also exhausting.
• 7:32
  And then after I graduated and I completed my degrees and my residency,
• 7:37
  I also did a residency at Baster University.
• 7:40
  By then, I had gotten married in my now ex-husband,
• 7:44
  got a job in New York in publishing.
• 7:48
  And so I wasn't planning to move to New York.
• 7:51
  But at that time, it was like, okay, I finished all of my training.
• 7:56
  And at that time, he got a job here and we moved to New York.
• 7:59
  So I've been in the New York, Connecticut area ever since then.
• 8:04
  Wow, okay, so before continuing on your journey,
• 8:09
  what are like the three kind of things that you learned from the pharmacy industry?
• 8:14
  Since this is something we all face, right?
• 8:16
  We're all immeshed in the pharmaceutical industry, whether we want to be or not.
• 8:22
  So what are three things that you learned that are not really known about in public?
• 8:28
  One is that you have to be so careful with pharmaceuticals.
• 8:32
  If anything, even if you're taking an Advil,
• 8:36
  I would look at the other ingredients in the product.
• 8:41
  We're getting better at looking at other ingredients when we go to the grocery store,
• 8:44
  right? You and I talked about that on the How Human Teal podcast.
• 8:47
  So you got to look at the back of the package and see what else is in there.
• 8:51
  I really recommend you do that also with anything you take from a pharmacy.
• 8:56
  They make it tiny font.
• 8:58
  And sometimes you actually have to pull it up on their website and get out a magnifying glass
• 9:02
  to look at the font. But you need to look at what are the other ingredients in your medications
• 9:08
  because they're often filled with colors, fillers, waxes.
• 9:14
  Sometimes there's gluten in there.
• 9:16
  And other things that you otherwise wouldn't want to put into your body are other ingredients
• 9:21
  in medications. And I find that a lot of times when I react to a medication or
• 9:27
  patient's reaction medications, it's because of the other ingredients in there.
• 9:32
  I really recommend people pay more attention to what's in there.
• 9:36
  Still, there's a lot of people who are kind of following the standard medical system as if
• 9:41
  that's the only option for their health care, right? Where it's like, oh, whatever the standard
• 9:46
  medical system says is what I'm going to do. And kind of we have our blinders on. And that's what they
• 9:51
  want us to do, you know, since the Flexner report when they really made it seem as if
• 9:59
  conventional, traditional standard medicine and standard protocols and whatever's covered by
• 10:05
  insurance is the only way or the right way. In reality, it's not the only way. We have so much
• 10:13
  else available to us for our health. So what happens is when you're in that mindset of this is my
• 10:19
  only approach. And I'm going to go to the doctor and I'm going to get this pill or this prescription
• 10:24
  or this procedure that they offer in the standard medical system that we just have to understand that
• 10:31
  it's a it's also a business, right? Insurance is a business and these pharmaceutical companies
• 10:37
  are in business and they are in business to sell more of these. Now, I'm stopping myself to say
• 10:44
  medications. My father, it was a pharmacist, he ran a drug store. These are drugs. These are legal
• 10:54
  drugs that are made by pharmaceutical companies in the pharmaceutical industry and they have
• 11:01
  some approved uses, but they most all have also some side effects, potential side effects and
• 11:09
  many of them have a risk of dependency and withdrawal symptoms. And so I think it's really
• 11:17
  important for people to understand that because sometimes we just are so much wanting to get out
• 11:22
  of pain, right? Whether it's physical pain, emotional pain, right? We're either having neck pain,
• 11:29
  back pain, menstrual pain, or we're having emotional pain like anxiety and depression. We're so
• 11:35
  much wanting to get out of pain that we're we're going to go to the doctor and say, give me whatever
• 11:40
  I can take to get out of pain. And what we have to do is stop just enough to say, wait a minute,
• 11:46
  am I really willing to put this substance into my body when it may have some side effects that
• 11:53
  affects other parts of my body and it may cause my body to become dependent on it. And then when
• 11:59
  I want to stop taking it, there's withdrawal symptoms that can make me feel worse. And so I just
• 12:05
  really encourage people to think this all through before you just think that you only have this one
• 12:12
  option in your house care and to help you with pain. It's a good point, you know, that we have been
• 12:16
  conditioned and taught to look at pharmaceuticals as medicine. But I think you're really welcoming
• 12:23
  us to question what is medicine. So how would you define what medicine is?
• 12:29
  For me, one of my best medicines is dancing. It's very clear to me that from my body, I need to be
• 12:38
  dancing on a regular basis in order for my body to feel good and to heal. And so medicine can come
• 12:46
  in many forms. It's not necessarily something that we swallow as a pill. It could be a tea. It
• 12:51
  can be our food as we were talking about. Our food can be our medicine. It can be being in nature.
• 12:58
  It could be being with our pets. It could be in community. Yeah, I really like what you're
• 13:03
  introducing here is that, you know, medicine is not just this kind of parallel or this very
• 13:11
  one-to-one thinking. It's very expansive and it's very specific to the person and to potentially
• 13:19
  the ailment, but that it's not a one-to-one relationship that even the ailment that you think,
• 13:24
  and this is what I hear you saying, is that even when you think, oh, I should be taking this red pill,
• 13:28
  actually the medicine could be at movement. It could be just getting out of your house,
• 13:33
  that we have to expand our definition of what healing looks like.
• 13:38
  Absolutely. Thank you for offering that way of looking at it and to say that it is unique to
• 13:44
  each of us. We're having this human experience, right? We're in these human bodies,
• 13:50
  and yet we're more than that. We're this energetic even people would argue spiritual beings
• 13:56
  existing in a human body, and we don't come with an instruction manual. We land in these
• 14:02
  human bodies without an instruction manual. It's not like a camera that comes with an instruction
• 14:08
  manual. We have to figure it out as we go, and even though we're all human, we know we have our
• 14:13
  genetic uniqueness. We also know that everything that we've been exposed to in our lifetime,
• 14:19
  what I refer to as stresses, right? It's really from our environment, whether that's from
• 14:25
  emotional exposures to toxins, to just daily stresses, those impact our genetic expression,
• 14:34
  and that determines how our bodies might respond and what medicines our bodies need.
• 14:42
  And so yes, we need to be really thinking more broadly about what is a medicine for each of us,
• 14:49
  and that it doesn't have to just be in a pill, in a bottle, at the pharmacy.
• 14:55
  Well, and I love that this is coming from the daughter of a pharmacist. That's so beautiful.
• 15:01
  So now you spend a lot of your career helping women clear HPV, prevent cervical cancer,
• 15:07
  and you end just in general transforming health naturally. You mentioned even migraines,
• 15:14
  you support people with chronic migraines, stress levels. So let's dive into a few of those.
• 15:19
  Like, for example, HPV, can you talk a bit about that? Like, what is it? And how should people
• 15:25
  be aware? Like, what are they looking for to know that that's what's going on?
• 15:30
  I want to emphasize two things from what I was sharing with my training. Two things is while
• 15:35
  doing all that training in nature, bathing medicine and midwifery, while I was learning how to
• 15:40
  support women in labor, one of my big research topics, in fact, my thesis was on how stress affects
• 15:49
  women in labor. And it was how understanding how stress impacts women in labor that then had me
• 15:55
  look at how to stress impact all of us, men and women and children, whether we're in labor or not.
• 16:02
  So that was part of that learning. And at the same time, I was helping a lot of women with
• 16:08
  abnormal pap smears because that's one thing that midwives do is pap smears. Also, you should be
• 16:13
  only think of going to the gynecologist, but you can also go to a midwife or a naturopathic doctor
• 16:17
  to get a pap smear. And so I started doing a lot of work helping women when they get an abnormal
• 16:23
  pap smear report. And so through that process, a lot of my colleagues would refer more and more
• 16:29
  women to me because they knew that I was helping in that area. And so I started seeing thousands
• 16:34
  of women over the years with abnormal pap smears and high-risk HPV virus. And I started to see this
• 16:41
  parallel where as I was helping women to prevent cervical cancer, because that's really what we're
• 16:46
  doing with at pap smears, we're looking for early signs of cervical cancer or cervical cancer.
• 16:52
  If it's there already, I started seeing this parallel with this impact of stress. What I started
• 16:58
  seeing is the more I help women recover from stress, the better they were able to prevent cervical
• 17:04
  cancer. So back to your question about HPV. So with HPV, we talk about it as if it's a single virus.
• 17:10
  Actually, there's over 150 different types of HPV virus. Of those 150 different types,
• 17:18
  some of them are low risk. And when we say low risk, it means they're not associated with cancer
• 17:24
  HPV virus or human papaloma virus is associated with warts, like even if you think of warts on
• 17:30
  your hands or feet or general warts, those are the low risk types of HPV. And then there's the
• 17:37
  high risk types of HPV that we know of at this point in time. There's 13 types of high risk HPV
• 17:44
  out of the 150. And these 13 high risk types are associated with cancer risk, including 99 percent
• 17:52
  of cervical cancer is caused by high risk HPV. But it's also associated with vaginal cancer,
• 18:00
  vulvar cancer, as well as anal cancer, and oral cancer. And it's also associated with cancer
• 18:07
  in men. It can be anal, penile, or oral cancer. In fact, 70 percent of head and neck cancer is
• 18:15
  caused by high risk HPV virus. So this is something that a lot of times we're not thinking about it,
• 18:23
  but it's in the background because when it comes down to it, the way we get exposed to high risk
• 18:29
  HPV virus is by sexual activity through genital contact is how we get exposed. And while a lot of
• 18:36
  people think that this is not a common issue, it's actually more common than you would think 80 percent
• 18:43
  of us are exposed to high risk HPV virus by age 50. So if 80 percent of us men and women
• 18:52
  are getting exposed and the rates of HPV related cancer are increasing. So this is actually something
• 18:59
  that many people are dealing with, but there's still very much a stigma around it. So people are
• 19:06
  embarrassed to talk about it. How does it show up? Like, obviously, if you're getting a pap smear,
• 19:11
  you can discover, but how does the person who the male or female, how do they know if they have it?
• 19:17
  Well, this is a thing. The high risk HPV doesn't cause wards and it doesn't cause any symptoms.
• 19:22
  So men, because they're not being screened, there's no equivalent to a pap smear for men. So men
• 19:28
  only find out usually that they have HPV when they get cancer. It's really scary. Women oftentimes
• 19:36
  are being going in for a pap smear. So they're hopefully finding out a little sooner.
• 19:42
  You know what I would say at this point, James? I would recommend that men and women do at least
• 19:49
  an HPV, high risk HPV test on a regular basis, depending on your, you know, if you've had any
• 19:56
  risk in your past, but I would say every year to every three to five years, we should all be doing
• 20:02
  a high risk HPV test because if you know that it's positive, you can start taking action to help
• 20:09
  your body clear it because the human body can clear the virus. It's just that we're not aware that
• 20:15
  we have it. Men, especially, but a lot of times women, if they're not going in to get tested,
• 20:20
  they don't know they have it either because there's no symptoms. So there's no obvious symptoms. So
• 20:25
  let's assume, let's just assume we all have it. And let's assume we have to just be mindful,
• 20:32
  okay, if you have it, we got to start fixing it. So how would someone go about fixing it?
• 20:37
  Well, this has exactly brings us back to what I saw in terms of the parallel with stress
• 20:43
  because what I see is that as humans, when we're exposed to stress, which we all have stress,
• 20:49
  right, we all have relationship stress, financial stress, we have parenting stress or taking care
• 20:56
  of our parents, caregiving stress, right, like there's constantly going to be stress. And when we're
• 21:00
  exposed to stress, it affects our stress hormones, our cortisol and adrenaline levels. We have a
• 21:06
  built-in stress response system as humans. And when we're under stress, it is going to
• 21:13
  affect that stress response system. And as it does, it disrupts our cortisol and adrenaline levels.
• 21:19
  And when that happens, it lowers our immune function. When we're under stress, we're less able
• 21:26
  to protect ourselves from high-risk HIV. And so what I would say is to me, if we all just come
• 21:34
  back to this concept of, how can I help myself recover from stress each day in small ways?
• 21:42
  The more we can help our bodies recover from stress and re-optimize our stress response system,
• 21:48
  the more we're going to fend off infections like high-risk HIV and other infections as well.
• 21:54
  How can ancestral or primal living reduce stress in modern world that's wired for burnout?
• 22:01
  To me, the best way is what I refer to as self-care. Now, the thing is a lot of times we kind of blow
• 22:07
  off self-care like it's pampering or we never have time for it. What I've done is I use care as an
• 22:14
  acronym, and I'll talk you through what the acronym is, when we can implement self-care,
• 22:21
  which is really self-stress recovery on a daily basis, which is absolutely ancestral. When we look
• 22:28
  back in time, and if we look at areas of the world, for example, the blue zones where people have
• 22:35
  are living the longest and healthiest, what have they been doing over time that's helping them live
• 22:41
  longer and have less illness? Well, they're doing what I refer to as self-care. So the acronym
• 22:49
  for care is C for clean eating. So it starts with our food and what foods we're choosing to put
• 22:55
  into our body and which foods we're choosing not to have, right? So it's this C for clean eating.
• 23:00
  It's A for adequate sleep, which I know you love that concept as well. As humans, we have to eat,
• 23:07
  we have to sleep. And so we need to be prioritizing our sleep. And sleep is when our immune system
• 23:15
  is functioning and repairing and helping us recover from what we're going through. The R in care
• 23:21
  stands for recovery activities. And we can go more into this. The recovery activities is some of
• 23:27
  those things we talked about before, the things that we can choose that are medicine for us to help
• 23:33
  our stress response system recover in the moment each and every day. And then E in care stands
• 23:40
  for exercise. So exercise is whatever movement is best for you and your body at this point in time,
• 23:48
  but we need to be moving and exercising. But it's also important to not overdo any of this,
• 23:54
  James, right? There's such a thing as over exercising and then we're triggering another stress
• 23:59
  response, right? It's tempting as humans. We're like, Oh, I can do more. I can do better. And we can
• 24:06
  even overdo something that's good for us. But in the meantime, care is how I think about things
• 24:14
  we can do. And I absolutely teach this to women who I'm helping to prevent cervical cancer and
• 24:19
  other HPV related cancer. And I teach this to all my patients. If we can implement this acronym of
• 24:25
  care on a regular basis, I would argue help us to stay well and prevent really all different health
• 24:34
  issues, including cancer. So let's take this a little bit more granular. So if you had like three
• 24:39
  minutes with someone who's dealing with a hormone issue or a sleep trouble or anxiety, what daily
• 24:45
  habit would you tell them to start today? I just recorded a video for patients yesterday of
• 24:52
  something that I recommend and I'm happy to share it with all of you here. I would say I start with
• 24:59
  what I call a daily check-in. And you would do this daily check-in like when you wake up in the
• 25:04
  morning, maybe even the middle of the day and the end of the day. And the daily check-in could take
• 25:09
  one minute literally or five minutes if you have five minutes. And it's simply an opportunity to
• 25:15
  even close your eyes and start noticing your breath. Get reconnected into your body by noticing
• 25:22
  your breath. You noticing your inhale, noticing your exhale. Now you're teaching your nervous system
• 25:28
  instead of being distracted by our to-do lists and a million things that people are pulling us
• 25:33
  in different directions. You're saying no, I'm not doing that right now. I'm doing this. I'm doing
• 25:37
  me. I'm doing breath. And you just focus it on your breath and then you can put your hand on your
• 25:42
  heart, which also helps release oxytocin, which is our anti-stress hormone. So by doing deep breaths,
• 25:49
  you're signaling the anti-stress system. By putting your hand on your heart, you're signaling the
• 25:54
  anti-stress hormone and you're starting to just be with your body and yourself and you bring to
• 26:00
  your mind something you feel grateful for. By doing that, now you're even shifting an energetic
• 26:06
  level to higher energetic state of gratitude. You do this and you say to your body,
• 26:13
  body, is there anything you need to tell me? Is just your body have a message of tension?
• 26:19
  Is there an emotion that's coming up? Is there something that your body needs you to know in that
• 26:24
  moment? So you're checking in to say, hey, body, what do I need to know right now so that I can
• 26:29
  take action on that? And then you bring yourself back to this reality and you can then be in a
• 26:37
  much more balanced state. You've activated your anti-stress nervous system and now it's much easier
• 26:43
  to navigate our day-to-day routine. I love that. I love that you're even bringing up energy. It's
• 26:48
  something that I think is not talked about enough within the health field. I think we sometimes
• 26:54
  look for very practical and very tangible solutions, but I find in my 20 years of experience that
• 27:02
  it's actually the intangible that are more powerful. It's the things we can't quantify that we
• 27:07
  can't really understand fully but that we just have to almost have faith with. And I have to say,
• 27:14
  I think this almost carries us into plant medicine because there's an interesting debate going on,
• 27:21
  and maybe it's not on a national level, but just within some circles I'm in, which is plant
• 27:26
  medicine is more and more being looked at as a means of therapy. The argument is with some therapist
• 27:34
  saying, well, that you can't just only do plant medicine, that there has to be integration and
• 27:40
  the integration is using traditional therapy modalities. But I've been experiencing some plant
• 27:49
  medicine ceremonies and I've had now four total but three recently. The best way I can describe
• 27:57
  them is they have been astounding, like in the changes that have happened to me, but just
• 28:04
  truly almost mind-blowing, profound, truly profound. So can you dive into talking about what drew
• 28:13
  you towards plant medicine and what have you seen? What kind of healings are you seeing from it?
• 28:20
  I was researching stress. I have been researching stress for years, right? Ever since I research
• 28:25
  stress in women in labor. And I actually had just at that time started writing the book that you
• 28:32
  see over my shoulder, the master stress reset your health book. So I was in the midst of writing
• 28:36
  about how can humans recover from stress? And I, by the way, I don't go with this concept of
• 28:44
  managing stress. To me, managing stress is like just treading water. We don't want to just be treading
• 28:50
  water. We want to be surfing the waves, right? We want to be able to be living our best life,
• 28:56
  feeling our best, living our passion, spending time with people we love, and improving our health.
• 29:02
  So that's not just treading water. So I was in a mode of I want to go beyond just
• 29:09
  managing stress. I want to help people to master their stress. And at the same time, it just so happened
• 29:14
  that in my life, I was going through a very stressful time. I was dealing with a different health
• 29:18
  issue, arthritis. It turned out to be, but at the time we didn't know what that diagnosis was.
• 29:24
  So I was in the midst of this diagnostic process, and it was in the middle of the pandemic.
• 29:29
  So it was like this whole sort of sequence of events that happened that I was like,
• 29:36
  when a friend of mine, you know, said to me, hey, I found a shaman in Peru that I trust.
• 29:44
  She and I had already been talking about ayahuasca for years and thinking as herbalists,
• 29:51
  because ayahuasca is a plant medicine. It's an herb. As herbalists, we were like, we would like
• 29:56
  to know more about this herb from the Amazon. And so we were looking for an opportunity.
• 30:01
  And it just so happened that she found the shaman at that time. And I said, I'm in. And I just
• 30:07
  again went off the diving board into the deep end and said, I'm going. And I just booked a ticket
• 30:13
  to Peru during the pandemic, because I knew I wanted to research for the book. And I needed it
• 30:19
  from my own healing. And so those were the reasons why I was willing to do it. Because a lot of people
• 30:24
  would be like, how did you just dive in like that to go straight to Peru, straight to two
• 30:29
  two weeks of a dietta with ayahuasca? And the first day, the first ceremony that I took ayahuasca,
• 30:36
  I came out of that ceremony. And I said, this is the medicine I've been looking for.
• 30:44
  I have to agree. I did ayahuasca once. I was only able to do one of two days. It was a two day
• 30:50
  ceremony. And I was only able to do one. And I understood what people meant. Like, it's not a drug.
• 30:58
  It's a medicine. It talked to me. I saw very clear images. I was told things that were beyond my
• 31:07
  current knowledge. I mean, I, it was profound. I can't stop using that word about it. And then the
• 31:14
  experiences I've had more recently, we're not ayahuasca. They were other, I mean, so plant medicine
• 31:20
  just so anyone who is unfamiliar with that, you know, you're going to hear terms like ayahuasca,
• 31:26
  you're going to hear a psilocybin. It can also be other things like five MEO, right? Which is also
• 31:33
  known as Bufo. It could be what's known previously as ecstasy, but it's MDMA. There's so many others.
• 31:40
  I'm not mentioning all of them, but there's a lot of these things that I know when I was younger,
• 31:45
  I saw as I saw as a drug. I saw these as things like LSD even like I saw this as a drug. And now I'm
• 31:51
  experienced them these medicines in ways that are very therapeutic and very deep. So I'm in a
• 32:01
  training program right now. I'm in a I'm just completing a certification program in psychedelic
• 32:07
  assisted therapy. It's a training program through IPI, which is an integrative psychiatry institute.
• 32:14
  So this is a mental health institute in the United States that's offering a whole program to
• 32:21
  therapists and I'm in the first cohort of medical providers that are not therapists that are
• 32:27
  completing this psychedelic assisted therapy program. And so we're seeing more and more providers
• 32:34
  even from the standard medical system, like I'm in a class with ER doctors and gynecologists and
• 32:43
  all different practitioners pediatricians. And we're in this training program together to say,
• 32:48
  hey, we can see that these medicines can help people. And as healthcare providers, we see the
• 32:56
  limitations of how we can help our patients. These doctors that I'm in class with are saying, hey,
• 33:03
  I've been trying to help my patients. And I'm seeing that there's only so much I can do with what's
• 33:09
  available in the standard medicine in the pharmaceutical industry. And so they were wanting to bring
• 33:16
  these medicines to become more available. As you said, I also grew up during the more of on drugs.
• 33:23
  And so these drugs were categorized in schedule one, you know, several decades ago. And that's why
• 33:31
  they are not been available in the United States. And in terms of illegally ways to get these
• 33:37
  medicines. But that is starting to shift. And now, for example, Oregon and Colorado have approved
• 33:46
  certification for use of psilocybin. psilocybin is from mushrooms as a psychedelic substance from
• 33:52
  mushrooms. And MDMA is having so much research being done. They're hoping to fast track that to
• 33:59
  and the idea here, James, is not to just make it available for everybody, free for all recreational
• 34:06
  use. This is very much medicinal use. And as you mentioned, it's to be using the substance along
• 34:15
  with support to integrate what we receive from these medicines. So it's not that a person's just
• 34:21
  going to use a medicine on their own and be all on their own with what they with their insights.
• 34:27
  What the research is on all of these substances, when we research it, it's done in a very intentional
• 34:33
  way with where you're working with a therapist or a provider before. So you're prepared during your
• 34:40
  session after to help you understand what what you experienced and how to integrate it into your
• 34:46
  life going forward. And what they're most of the research is on stress related conditions. PTSD,
• 34:54
  which is post-traumatic stress disorder, this is where these substances are being used effectively.
• 35:00
  It's also being used to help with anxiety and what is currently being referred to as treatment
• 35:06
  resistant depression. When they say treatment resistant depression, they mean that the pharmaceutical
• 35:12
  drugs are not helping the person. Of course, we can't expect these pharmaceutical chemicals that are
• 35:19
  just helping to deal with the receptors to solve a person's depression. We need to help the
• 35:26
  person in a holistic way. I really believe that that's where these medicines are different,
• 35:33
  is that they are helping us in a more holistic way to actually help our bodies heal and recover
• 35:40
  from stress instead of just making us dependent on a chemical substance for the rest of our lives.
• 35:47
  I think that is such an important distinction. It kind of brings us full circle back to the pharmacy,
• 35:52
  earlier, the pharmacy discussion, which is when you are mentioning pharmaceuticals that A,
• 35:57
  you're dependent on, but also B that have a lot of side effects. Are you aware of many side effects
• 36:03
  with some of these plant medicines? The one side effect that I'm aware of is that you can get dehydrated
• 36:08
  a bit, which just means you got to increase your electrolytes or your intake of fluids while you're
• 36:14
  doing it or right afterwards. There are some more and more health practitioners that are helping people
• 36:20
  that are on doing these medicinal journeys to prepare for them, even with vitamins and minerals.
• 36:25
  So are you seeing any kind of side effects that people need to be aware of? Should they go down
• 36:31
  this path? Well, and this is the thing is sometimes in the midst of taking a substance, there
• 36:37
  may be symptoms, but I don't tend to think of them as same as side effects from a medication. It's
• 36:43
  more like, depending on the substance, sometimes there's some nausea, right? Even with
• 36:48
  like psilocybin, for example, some people feel a little nausea. Same thing with ketamine is a
• 36:54
  considered dissociative anesthetic and it is legal in the United States at this point in time
• 37:00
  and it is used in a therapeutic way, but even ketamine for some people can cause some nausea
• 37:07
  during the time. But the key factor is that none of them cause symptoms that are ongoing.
• 37:14
  There's a very rare, very rare, I think, less than 1% of the time that someone might have
• 37:21
  ongoing symptoms after taking one of these substances. Also, they're not addictive. Now,
• 37:28
  I say that in that, like, say, for example, ayahuasca, psilocybin, these are not considered to be
• 37:35
  addictive substances and the treatment is not something you have to take every day. So it's very
• 37:41
  different than what we usually think of as when you go to the pharmacy and you get a pharmaceutical
• 37:46
  and you have to take this pill every day and then a lot of times you have to take it at the same
• 37:50
  time every day and if you don't, you're going to have withdrawal symptoms. It's very different
• 37:54
  than that. These medicines are used in a therapeutic window. Usually, it's depending on the case. It
• 38:00
  might be you might use, you know, you might have one or two or in the case of MDMA, sometimes they're
• 38:07
  giving one dose per month over six months. You know, so there's specific protocols that are used
• 38:13
  but as the person recovers from their symptoms, then they're no longer needing this substance
• 38:19
  anymore. So it's a very different treatment protocol versus a daily pill and the likelihood of
• 38:28
  any kind of side effects or dependency is very low. There is a slight, I want to say,
• 38:35
  dependency possibility with ketamine. This is why it's so important to work with a provider
• 38:42
  who can help you to make sure you're using it based on the protocol. What's going to be effective?
• 38:47
  What's going to help you heal so that you can then go on with your life and not be needing a
• 38:55
  substance all the time? I'm so excited to talk about this and I know that we should, you know,
• 39:01
  dedicate an entire episode or multiple episodes just to this topic because I think it's one
• 39:07
  that if anyone takes anything away from this conversation, it's that I just hope that it opens
• 39:13
  your mind to other modalities of healing. Many of these plant medicines that we're talking about,
• 39:19
  they are plant-derived. They're really more ancestral and natural than what you find on the
• 39:26
  market in the pharmaceutical industry. And then used back in time. But we know as that these
• 39:32
  substances have been being used, psilocybin in magic mushrooms, ayahuasca, these are substances
• 39:39
  were used thousands of years ago. So if we're looking at what was helping our ancestors deal with
• 39:46
  their stress, this was part of it. They were using and they found, we found psychedelic substances
• 39:52
  in all different continents. So humans have been using psychedelic substances and there's a lot,
• 39:58
  I'd love to talk more about it James. There's so much information and theories of how psychedelic
• 40:04
  substances have even helped humans through time to get to where we are now. So I absolutely
• 40:12
  consider these plant medicines to be very ancestral and it brings us back to our roots. It brings us
• 40:19
  back to our self-care as I talk about. You know, I consider the plant medicines to be a recovery
• 40:27
  substance, a help us recover from stress and trauma just like breathwork, just like meditation and yoga
• 40:35
  and time and nature. Psychedelic substances have that same ability to help us heal. They
• 40:41
  heal the vagus nerve. They help us process and release emotional stress and trauma. This is way
• 40:48
  different than what we're seeing in this standard medical approach and it's very needed. So many
• 40:55
  people are dealing with these health issues. Pain, right? We know there's epidemic of
• 41:01
  pain medicine use and millions of people on psychotropic medications when only 30% of them are
• 41:08
  being helped by those medications. So there's a huge need for humans to be helped in emotional and
• 41:14
  physical pain as well as prevention of health issues like cancer and heart disease and dementia.
• 41:21
  And so I'm simply a person who's on the lookout seeking medicines that can actually help
• 41:31
  humans heal and not just have human stock being dependent on a substance every day that's not
• 41:38
  actually helping them heal. Well, once again, I think it's really powerful that this is coming from
• 41:44
  someone who grew up around the pharmacies and pharmaceutical industry. That you're seeing
• 41:52
  that was not the answer that there's something else. And then the fact that you're taking these
• 41:56
  classes with other health practitioners, doctors, people that are also acknowledging, hey,
• 42:01
  our system is not working. And I also love that, well, these things are, as we just said, they're
• 42:08
  ancestral. So we're actually looking towards the past to find solutions for the present. And that's
• 42:14
  exactly what this podcast is about. So I'm so appreciative that we talked about this today.
• 42:19
  Thank you so much. Before I let you go, though, I do have a question. If every woman
• 42:26
  had access to one lab test in their 30s or 40s to prevent burnout and hormone chaos later,
• 42:34
  what would it be and why? My dream, James, you're asking, you're asking me my dream test.
• 42:41
  My dream is I wish we could all have access to testing cortisol levels because, again, cortisol is
• 42:50
  our main stress hormone. And we can measure cortisol in a blood test, but it's usually not done.
• 42:57
  You would have to ask your provider, please measure my cortisol. But even then, they're only going
• 43:02
  to measure your cortisol at the time you have your blood drawn, which is stressful time. So
• 43:08
  we need to know our cortisol levels because what's happening is oftentimes people guess that they
• 43:15
  have high cortisol, but I'm telling you in at least 50% of the time they're wrong because
• 43:21
  not everybody has high cortisol. Some of us have low cortisol and some of us have low cortisol
• 43:26
  sometime a day and high cortisol at different times a day. We need to be measuring cortisol
• 43:32
  morning, midday, evening, bedtime to find out where your cortisol is because here's the thing is
• 43:38
  the treatment is different. So you are my theory. And this is what I share in the master's
• 43:43
  stress reset your health book if you want to learn more. My theory is that we need to be even
• 43:48
  modifying our self-care and our stress recovery based on our cortisol levels. If we have high cortisol,
• 43:55
  we need to be doing a different types of self-care, different types of recovery,
• 44:01
  different herbs, different nutrients, then someone who has low cortisol. And the only way to know
• 44:07
  right now, we can do a urinary saliva test, which is when I offer patients through my practice,
• 44:11
  we'll do a urinary saliva test at different times a day to measure your cortisol. Talk about
• 44:16
  profound. It makes profound difference in people's health to first of all know what their cortisol is
• 44:22
  up to at different times a day and then to know how to take steps to get their cortisol back to
• 44:27
  optimal because if our stress hormone is higher low, it's sending out a stress signal throughout our
• 44:34
  whole body and throwing everything off track. And if our cortisol is optimal, everything's going
• 44:40
  to be on track and signaling on track. So it's to me so essential and what I wish would exist.
• 44:46
  I would love to meet a lab that wants to create a way to measure cortisol through, for example,
• 44:53
  our watch or our ring or, you know, something that allows us to know our cortisol level
• 45:00
  each and every day throughout the day so we can take that information and modify our activities,
• 45:06
  our exercise, our meditation, our sleep. We need to modify our self-care based on our cortisol
• 45:12
  levels. And that's only truly going to happen when we can get a daily analysis of our cortisol.
• 45:19
  So for right now, our best ways to do that again is you can do a urine saliva test through a
• 45:24
  specialty lab like an a specialist like me in my office. We offer that also just so your listeners
• 45:30
  know I developed an online quiz called the stress type quiz. You can find through my website.
• 45:37
  This quiz allows you to get a sense of what your cortisol likely is if it's likely higher low
• 45:43
  based on an online quiz, but still my dream would be that we could all know our cortisol throughout
• 45:50
  the day every day so that we can make in the moment five tuning changes to optimize our health.
• 45:57
  I love that we'll put the link for this quiz in the show notes. And I would like to offer that
• 46:02
  I bet you that the solution is not going to be a ring or a watch. It's going to be a bidet like
• 46:08
  something that you put on your toilet and it's measuring your poop and your urine whenever you go
• 46:13
  to the bathroom. Oh yeah, then it can have a little digital readout. Something I you know, I mean
• 46:18
  that that just seems like there's going to be certain things you can get from you know heart and
• 46:22
  went not through rings and watches, but then you know you're always going to need to get other things
• 46:27
  from poop a pee. So we might as well have the measurement where you're actually going, right?
• 46:31
  I love that idea James. I love that idea. That'd be perfect. And then it could just tell you on
• 46:36
  your mirror when you wake up in the morning. Here's what here's how you need to modify your day
• 46:40
  based on your cortisol. Oh my gosh. Talk about synergy. That would be in a me. I'm sure that
• 46:46
  someone's working on that. I know that the toilet that analyzes you know your health is being
• 46:51
  worked on, but how cool would it be to then have it talk to one of those you know smart mirrors or
• 46:56
  something like that. Yeah. Wow. Well, that is a real congruence of taking modern tech and helping
• 47:03
  it with our health. Thank you so much for joining me, Dr. Donny. So how can people get involved? Do
• 47:09
  you take clients? If someone wants to work with you based on our conversation, what do they do?
• 47:15
  And I work with patients from around the world. You can come see me in New York, but you don't have
• 47:21
  to. I work with patients virtually from around the world. They can just find me at Dr. Donny.com. So
• 47:27
  D-O-C-T-O-R-D-O-N-I.com. I'm also on social media, so I'm happy to see you there as well.
• 47:34
  We'll put it in the show notes where they can find your books as well. Thank you for trusting your
• 47:38
  instincts. I think that it would have been very easy for you just to go down the straight
• 47:43
  narrow path that your father had. And I'm just so glad that you were aware enough in your early
• 47:48
  20s to say, you know what? I think I need to go a different way because you're helping thousands
• 47:52
  and thousands of people. So thank you so much for what you do. Thank you, James. I appreciate you
• 47:58
  too. Thanks to your listeners for being here. I feel very grateful. Thank you.
• 48:02
  When thank you all for either watching or listening, this has been the Everyday Ancestral Podcast.
• 48:07
  If you're enjoying it, share it. Please let other people know what we're about and make sure to
• 48:13
  subscribe or follow us. But most of all, check in on our next episode. Thank you again.
• 48:19
  Thank you so much for joining me on Everyday Ancestral. If you enjoyed this episode,
• 48:25
  hit subscribe so you don't miss the next one. You could find the show notes, links and resources
• 48:31
  mentioned at eatpluck.com. That's E-A-T-P-L-U-C-K dot com. And hey, if you know someone who'd get
• 48:42
  something out of this, share it with them too. Stay curious, live well, and keep it ancestral.