Dr. Joe Tatta:
Welcome to today’s edition of the Healing Pain Summit. My name is Dr. Joe Tatta. I am a licensed physical therapist and certified clinical nutritionist. And today we’re going to be talking about how to create health in your life, how you can overcome chronic disease and the persistent pain that you may experience. My special guest today is Dr. Terry Wahls. She’s a clinical professor of medicine at the University of Iowa and the director of extended care and rehab services at the veteran affairs Iowa city healthcare system. She’s also a patient with secondary progressive multiple sclerosis, which confined her to a wheelchair for more than four years. Dr. Walls restored her health using diet and lifestyle using a diet and lifestyle program. She designed specifically for her brain. She’s the author of the Wahls Protocol, a radical new way to treat all chronic autoimmune conditions using paleo principles. And with that introduction, Dr. Wahls, thank you for joining us for the healing pain summit.

Dr. Terry Wahls:
Thank you for having me.

Dr. Joe Tatta:
So obviously multiple sclerosis is a chronic disease. It can be progressive in nature. Um, you’ve had pain with it. Talk to us about your story of kind of overcoming that.

Dr. Terry Wahls:
Sure. Um, so although I was diagnosed first in 2000 back in 1982, I’d started having episodes of lancinating electrical pain affecting either the left side of my face or the right side of my face. Uh, no clear diagnosis. I continued with that, uh, getting gradually worse. Uh, in AB seven add episode of blindness in my left eye when I was out roller skiing on a hot August day, clear no diagnosis in 2000, I had weakness of my left leg. Uh, then had another workup, uh, which showed lesions in my spinal cord at my neck and at a spinal tap, which showed abnormal proteins and a diagnosis of relapsing remitting MS was made. Now I knew that within 10 years of diagnosis, uh, one half will be unable to work due to severe fatigue and a third life problems walking, needing a cane, walker or wheelchair.

Dr. Terry Wahls:
So I sought out the best, uh, center I could find that was doing active research, which was the Cleveland clinic. Uh, saw their best people, took the newest drugs and still within three years my disease had transitioned to the progressive phase known as secondary progressive. I needed a reclined wheelchair. I took Novantrone and a form of chemotherapy. Then I took Tysabri and continued to steadily decline. And fortunately for me, that’s when, uh, it was apparent I was headed towards becoming bedridden, possibly demented. And so I began reading the basic science myself and would eventually create a diet lifestyle program that, uh, once I started would have a very dramatic dramatic impact. I mean, you really

Dr. Joe Tatta:
took the time to research all the conventional treatments, all the kind of allopathic methods that are out there. How is that? Yeah. I mean, you went into the evidence-based research, right?

Dr. Terry Wahls:
Yeah. You know, and I’m an academic doc, so of course, I thought, you know, academics were the way to go and treated my disease aggressively with the newest drugs was the way to go, which I did vigorously for seven years, uh, without much help. And during that time, my, my pain was getting worse and worse. Um, I was going to the pain clinic frequently. I was on very high dose Gabapentin. Um, and I was to the point where I was taking, I want to have a pain flair, visits to the pain clinic daily and uh, high dose [inaudible] Medrol. Um, and then three days of site Mederol wasn’t enough. I was taking five days of Saudia bedrock and, um, my fear, which I think was a real estate fear to have was that my pain would turn on and would not turn off.

Dr. Joe Tatta:
So in addition to struggling with the symptoms of the ms, you possibly also had kind of side effects from so many drugs at once kind of this polypharmacy.

Dr. Terry Wahls:
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

Dr. Joe Tatta:
So you developed your own lifestyle program, which is incredible. How has it affected how you practice today and how you interact with your patients?

Dr. Terry Wahls:
Well, you know, so, uh, at my worst I could not sit up in a regular chair anymore. Um, I was having, uh, frequent episodes of severe pain that were very difficult to control. Um, and I was having brain fog. Uh, and so I went from there in a span of 12 months to be able to do a 20-mile bike ride with my family. Um, and of course, uh, and I’m no longer needed doing anything for my pain. My pain is gone as long as I’m fine, my diet lifestyle program. So this really changes how I understand the disease and how I understand health. And I started talking to my patients about diet, lifestyle, toxin exposure, uh, how much they were sleeping, their exercise level and addressing that. Yeah. And so my physician partners thought I was behaving strangely and complained to the chief of staff who called me and said, Hey, Terry, what do you do when people are complaining?

Dr. Terry Wahls:
Um, and so I brought all my papers down, uh, went over everything with them. And, uh, my chief of staff became a huge champion, uh, and as I was getting these very exciting results in my clinical practice, um, and then I was invited to be part of the traumatic brain injury clinic and again, got some very nice results there. Uh, then a couple of years later, the chief of medicine said, you know, I’d like to pull you out of primary care. Uh, and instead, let’s have you create a clinic where this is all you do is your lifestyle medicine. So we call it the therapeutic lifestyle clinic. Uh, and, uh, we’ve finally had it running now for a year and a half. Uh, I keep having to reimagine how I do my clinic because we have such demand. So I went from individual appointments to small group appointments to large group appointments. Now I just run classes. Uh, and in fact, I’m meeting with administrators, uh, to the hospital to reimagine what we’re doing once again. And what are the additional staff that I need to expand this program? Uh, because, uh, you know, the growth is just rising, uh, very, very briskly. Uh, we have, uh, even though I am now teaching large classes, we still have a waiting list. People can’t, can’t get it fast enough. Um, so very exciting stuff. Plus my research is going, you know, uh, very, very well, uh, in addition

Dr. Joe Tatta:
and congratulations on your program growing. I love the idea of group classes because I think it’s a really effective way to obviously hit more people, but then they also get the kind of interaction and support from each other.

Dr. Terry Wahls:
Absolutely. Uh, I’m, I’m quite convinced now from my experience that people are much more effective at changing and sustaining their behavior changes when they have a support group that they’re interacting with, talking to each other, uh, sharing successes, searing, uh, problems, uh, plus, you know, they can be far more Frank in each other’s critique and suggestions. Then, uh, we physicians, uh, can be because we have to have a certain level of a stilted responses where a peer can say, you know, get off your fat ass and start moving young. They actually enjoy that kind of a Frank conversation. Uh, and uh, teasing, give and take that you and I could never engage in that that was disrespectful from us.

Dr. Joe Tatta:
Yeah. I think support is kind of oftentimes the missing key to recovery. But talking about recovery, um, the walls protocol is an excellent book. I encourage everyone to get out there and read it, but what are the kind of key principles in there that our listeners and viewers on their stomach can really apply to their life?

Dr. Terry Wahls:
So I, um, a lot of, uh, paleo folks are all about the meat and taking away gluten. Uh, perhaps I’m all about adding in the food that you need to feed your brain. So it’s nine cups of vegetables, three cups of leafy greens, three cups of sulfur, rich vegetables, cabbage, family, onion, family, three cups of deeply colored things like carrots, beets, berries, a sufficient meat but not accessed meat. So six to 12 ounces. I’m a big fan of Oregon meat, big fan of seaweed and I still say, uh, get rid of the sugar. Get rid of the white far and get rid of gluten if are going to have gluten-free products. One serving a day. So that’s like one-half cup of Brown rice, one small piece of bread, one tiny muffin, not a big plate of gluten-free pasta.

Dr. Joe Tatta:
So you’re a big proponent of kind of bringing people’s carbohydrate level down to a certain extent.

Dr. Terry Wahls:
Well what I do is I swap out all the flour-based products for nine cups of vegetables and people often like there’s no way I can eat nine cups of vegetables. And that’s because I’m thinking about all that yummy bread and pasta and cereal. I’m not giving that up cause I’m addicted. So there’s no way I could get in nine cups of vegetables. But if I take away all the grain and flour products, now if you’re a guy like you are nine cups of vegetables, actually pretty easy to achieve if you’re a lady. Uh, four cups is probably realistic. If you’re a tall woman, I’m six foot tall, you know, I can still do nine cups on a problem.

Dr. Joe Tatta:
So you’re adding a lot of things into the diet. I mean, you add things into your, your gut things start to change, I. E. your microbiome starts to change. Can you talk to us about some of those effects? Cause I think as a, as clinicians we get it, but as the lay person, you kind of think how, how can I really affect these hundred trillion cells in my body?

Dr. Terry Wahls:
So what, what is, um, what I learned in medical school that we’re going to, uh, map the genes and then we’d understand why we developed chronic disease. We mapped our genes, we realized that the genes don’t determine whether that we have chronic disease. It is how our environment interacts with our genes. And so by shifting what people eat, I shift what genes are on and what genes are off that changes how you run the chemistry of life. And furthermore, we have even more genes, uh, in our bacteria, viruses and yeast that we let live on and in us. And by shifting what I’m feeding them, I fertilize different populations and suppress different populations. And we’re, it’s a very exciting area, but we’re beginning to realize that I’m the sum of my parts. So I’m about 3.3% human and 99.7% other stuff in terms of my DNA and my genetic material. So if I fertilize the right other stuff, my chemistry works much more effectively.

Dr. Joe Tatta:
I love the word fertilize. I think most people know how to fertilize their lawn in their garden more than they know about their actual body.

Dr. Terry Wahls:
Absolutely. So I spend a lot of time now talking about how we have to fertilize our internal garden. And I spent a lot of time that we have to grow our garden internally and to afford what I’m telling people to do, I want them to have their backyard garden, their container garden, the garden on their shelves, the sprouts in their cupboard so they can afford eating all these vegetables.

Dr. Joe Tatta:
Exactly. So in addition to multiple sclerosis, what other condition diseases would your protocol be appropriate for?

Dr. Terry Wahls:
So in my therapeutic livestock, like we see people of course with diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure, uh, we see them with rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, scleroderma, uh, Sjogrens by senior gravis, depression, anxiety, bipolar, uh, uh, Parkinson’s, early cognitive decline that, you know, basically anyone with a neurological problem, a mental health problem, a medical problem. Uh, the reason we get nearly all of these chronic diseases, 70 to 95% of the reason is diet and lifestyle. So the most powerful thing we can always do is address the diet. Lifestyle shifts it to the most health promoting that we know and the symptoms will decline. And for many people, they’re able to reduce, eliminate drug after drug after drug, often able to get off all of their drugs. And people come to me on 20, sometimes 30 drugs. Uh, so we have to do it gradually to do it safely, has to do it carefully. Um, but we see stunning results.

Dr. Joe Tatta:
So the question I have for you, and I’ve asked a couple other people on the summit is why should nutrition be the first intervention for people who have chronic disease versus let’s say a drug or a test, let’s say.

Dr. Terry Wahls:
So drugs control symptoms, but they don’t get to the root cause of the illness. I tell my patients over and over again, you can go back to your primary care doc, keep taking the drugs, your disease will progress every time you come in. You will need a higher dose of drugs. And then additional drugs, if you fix your diet and get back to eating vegetables, get rid of the white flour, the sugar, the grain. You will be fixing how your cells run the chemistry of life. You’ll be fixing the root cause. The problem symptoms will abate. Uh, pain will reduce, energy, will improve, moods will improve. And frankly, uh, I’m seeing improvement at a, uh, occurring at a much faster rate when I use diet than I ever saw when I use just drugs.

Dr. Joe Tatta:
Fascinating. And people can have, people have influence over their own diet choices, so to speak. So they can influence their health directly.

Dr. Terry Wahls:
Yes, know, and I, I spent a lot of time talking about this is a family intervention. This is not an individual intervention. This is an intervention for the whole family. Um, and families that will do this together are very successful individuals that do it alone. Uh, we’re nearly always fail.

Dr. Joe Tatta:
So shifting from the microbiome, let’s talk about mitochondria for just a little bit because I bought a condo. Dysfunction is very closely related to fatigue and pain. So give us the connection of that there.

Dr. Terry Wahls:
So the mitochondria are basically the battery pack for the cell and uh, let the cell have the energy to run all the other chemical processes. And so when the mitochondria are not working well because of poor nutrition, uh, or excessive sugar, toxic load, um, that cell doesn’t work well. And when the cell begins to become toxic, uh, the pain, uh, levels will skyrocket. Uh, energy levels decline. So fatigue becomes worse. Cognition, mental clarity, uh, becomes worse, uh, because you don’t have the mental clarity to see the big picture. Now instead of realizing that the comment you made was perfectly innocent, you were just joking, I’m going to be pissed off and want to throttle you. But what should have been an innocent remarks? I’m far more irritable, so everything’s not working well. Your brain, your moods, um, your heart, your muscles, when your mitochondria are not working well.

Dr. Joe Tatta:
Excellent. So I’ve read your book. I’m talking to Dr. Terry Walsh. She’s the author of the walls protocol, a radical new way to treat all chronic immune conditions using paleo principles. I want to give you an opportunity to talk to people about why your book is appropriate for even those who don’t have any kind of health condition or problem right now.

Dr. Terry Wahls:
Well, I’d say two things. One is we all want to, uh, live, uh, enjoy how we are now. We want to continue to enjoy how we are when we’re 50, when we’re 70, when we’re 90. I would much rather know that I will know who I am when I’m 90. I can still play with my grandkids, my great canned goods. So I have to take care of myself now because if I, uh, engage in poor nutrition, uh, and I start starving myself, I’ll become much more likely to be, uh, have early cognitive decline when I’m 50, when I’m 60, when I’m 70. So instead of having a full vigorous life up until my late nineties, I’m going to be demented in my fifties, sixties, and seventies. Who wants that?

Dr. Joe Tatta:
Hopefully no one. Right. No one wants that. Hopefully now you and your book talk about electrical stimulation and physical therapy a little bit, which is great. Here are you coming from a primary care physician? Cause I think that’s been times orthopedic surgeons embrace that. Sometimes physiatrists embrace it, but I like that other members of the medical community are embracing. It’s, give me a little bit about your experience about working with therapists and maybe the role they play in your lifestyle intervention clinic.

Dr. Terry Wahls:
So, uh, I think uh, movement is critical. Uh, I talk a lot about the need to have a uh, exercise program that will, uh, include strengthening balance training. Um, aerobic conditioning is nowhere near as important as strengthening balance and stretching. And that I really would like to have people work with a physical therapist and, or occupational therapist to help them design an exercise program they could do at home. Uh, certainly they, they can go to a gym, work with a physical trainer, uh, or a, uh, classes, uh, that also works to, um, or they may have a physically demanding lifestyle, mountain biking, et cetera, but they probably could still use a big tune up to be sure that they’re getting their balance training. Uh, and they’re stretching usually no matter how active we are, we, we could do well with a tuneup, uh, with a physical therapist.

Dr. Joe Tatta:
Yeah. And I’ve been a BI big advocate of saying anyone over the age of 65, she’d have kind of a yearly physical exam to get check out their whole movement system from a physical therapist related to functional movements, so to speak. Um,

Dr. Terry Wahls:
my advice is anyone with any, any health challenge should have an annual physical therapy assessment, uh, and a retuning of their approach to movement. Uh, and I would say anyone over the age of 50, I think 65. Why, why wait for all that age-related decay to have set in that didn’t need to have.

Dr. Joe Tatta:
Exactly. So it’s been great having you on the healing pain summit. Can you tell everyone where they can find out more information about you and the types of products and services you offer?

Dr. Terry Wahls:
Sure. So please come to Terry Walls, T E R R Y Wahls w a H L s.com. Uh, you’ll find links there on our shop page for books, lectures, seminars, quick start programs to help people implement the program. And for those who want to have more support and coaching in the process, we have those products too.

Dr. Joe Tatta:
Excellent. Dr. Terry Wahls, thank you for joining me for the healing pain summit. Please check out the Wahls protocol as well as Terrywahls.com and we’ll see you in the next episode. Thank you very much.