Fix the Brain, Change the Mind: Root-Cause Psychiatry with Dr. Robert Hedaya

Mark Hyman, MD

Full Transcript

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Dr. Robert Hedaya
A woman comes to me and she's having panic attacks. She has b twelve deficiency. I give her injection. With the first injection, her panic is gone. And I'm like, oh my god.

What else am I missing?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Today's guest is doctor Robert Hidea, a true pioneer in functional psychiatry and has been doing this work for more than forty six years, helping people with some the most complex and treatment resistant cases. And now psychiatrists are looking at the brain, doing imaging, doing something called QEEG, which is like a brainwave test that maps out things that we never saw before and that we're not making sense of. Talk about some of your more recent work around the whole adoption of this technology of improving neuropsychiatric treatment with QEEGs. What is it and why do we use it?

Dr. Robert Hedaya
We can follow and detect the information flow patterns in the brain. So we can see this and study a person's brain and then correlate with the symptoms.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So when you're seeing these patterns, it tells you like which area of brain is working, which not working, what you target Mhmm. How it correlates with symptoms. And so you can see almost like diagnostically in a way that you can never see before.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
Yeah. Oh, it's mind boggling.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Are you the only one doing this?

Dr. Robert Hedaya
To my knowledge, yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So what do you think the most common things that are causing these problems of sort of anxiety, depression, cognitive decline?

Dr. Robert Hedaya
I hate that question. If you said to me, what are four things that you could tell a person to do to help themselves? I would say diet. Be careful what comes into your mind. You need to really communicate with God or the universe or whatever you think this greater thing is.

Some kind of exercise, whatever is appropriate for you, is really critical. And I would say relationships are essential.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Bob, Doctor. Hidea, welcome to the podcast.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
Thanks for having me, Mark. It's great, great,

Dr. Mark Hyman
great to be here. Holy cow. I don't know where to start. We we were the o g functional medicine neophytes learning functional medicine together at the first training session, applying functional medicine clinical practice in Gig Harbor Washington in, what was it, 1998?

Dr. Robert Hedaya
'98.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yep. And we were one of the first cohorts to go through the program. There were more teachers than there were students in the class. And we became best friends there, and it's been almost thirty years that we've been doing this functional medicine stuff. And I wanna say

Dr. Robert Hedaya
thank you to you for what you've done for functional medicine. You know, I'm I'm the scientist, the clinician working, in the trenches, you know, learning and expanding and doing all this. And you're out there

Dr. Mark Hyman
spreading I'm just a big mouth.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
Yeah. And you're doing a great job, man. You're doing a great job. You're spreading it to the world, and it's fabulous. This is really needed.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I wanna be the mind virus that didn't fix everything. Yeah. It's amazing. When we know think back back then, we were just sort of joking before the podcast that, you know, people were laughing at us for what we're doing. And we're making fun of us for talking about things like leaky gut and mitochondria and the microbiome.

And we didn't even call it that then, we called it the And now it's sort of mainstream. Mhmm. And just last week, I got a call from the chief medical officer of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, or CMMI, which is the innovation hub within Medicare that looks at new solutions to chronic disease and problems. And she called me to tell me they were launching a $100,000,000 effort with 30 different sites, $3,000,000 or so each, to study functional medicine and lifestyle medicine in the treatment and prevention of chronic disease. In my lifetime, I never thought that would happen.

Right. And in the website of Medicare, it says the word functional medicine. I'm like, wow. And we've come a long way. And, you know, you are a psychiatrist, also an everything ist at this point.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
As you say, accidental psychiatrist, I'm accidental internist. Internist.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. So like, you can't look at the body without looking at the brain. You can't look at the brain without looking at the body. And you can't look at the mind without looking at the brain, which is sadly what most psychiatry does. And we're in this extraordinary moment in revolution.

I mean, you're 73, I'm 66, we're kind of of old now, but

Dr. Robert Hedaya
But getting younger.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Getting younger. And we've seen we've seen the trajectory of science emerging over the last decades. And now there's there's people we've had on the podcast like Savani Seti and Chris Palmer talking about metabolic psychiatry, and realms of psychedelic psychiatry we've talked about with Rick Doblin and others. And you actually do ketamine assisted therapy, which is in that realm. You've really gotten the front row seat to what's happening in the field of mental health, but from the lens of functional medicine.

And your book way back when, which I think was even before

Dr. Robert Hedaya
you It was before functional medicine. It was called Understanding Biological I didn't know it, but I had discovered functional medicine Yeah. In 1987. That's right. And maybe even even before, because of my internship, there was a woman who had low potassium, and I decided to give her bananas instead of of k lite.

Know? Yeah. They did they were not happy with me.

Dr. Mark Hyman
No. That's right. Food is medicine. And you basically have seen you've seen the development of this field and how so much of our ideas and concepts around mental health are just

Dr. Robert Hedaya
wrong. Mhmm.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And that in order to treat people, you need to think about treating the whole system. And that there are ways to fix the brain that change your mind. Mhmm. And that's not something that is really done in psychiatry. In you need therapy or psychiatric drugs, they suppress symptoms, but they don't really deal with the root cause.

And Right. You know, as functional medicine doctors, we are root cause specialists. That's what we do. We like dig and dig and dig until we find the thing that's or the things that are off, and then we try to correct them. And we also then try to do things with modalities that we're gonna talk about, which help map out where the dysfunction or imbalances are, and then how to correct them by supporting the body's own endogenous healing system, the built in repair system that we have, which is available.

Like we just don't know how to activate it. Right. What's really tragic is that there's so many people suffering with mental health issues, and they're not able to access the care, they don't know that this is even an option for them, they don't understand that that there's a way out of their suffering that has nothing to do with talking to a therapist, or not that that's bad, but I've certainly used them. Or taking psychiatric drugs, which generally don't work or cause a lot of side effects, or have a lot of sort of symptom suppression that don't don't really do the trick. Mhmm.

Maybe you kind of walk us through sort of the the original insights that you had around how how to think differently. Because as as you mentioned before, I wrote a book called The Ultramind Solution in 2009, which was a good decade more than when we we first met, and where I basically was seeing all these people and treating their bodies and their mental symptoms, ADD, or the dementia, or their depression, or anxiety, or whatever was going on, or bipolar, or schizophrenia. I'm like, what's going on here? Mhmm.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
And I realized, oh, the body is connected to the The neck. It's called as the neck.

Dr. Mark Hyman
The neck.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
I think we missed that lecture. Right? That's right. Well, they didn't give that lecture, actually.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It's true. And we we don't really think about, you know, in psychiatry what happens below the neck. But that's where all the action is typically, and it's systemic. So can you kind of walk us through the kind of origin story of how you begin to understand this? What when based on the original cases you had were, and what you've learned over the last thirty years.

Give us sort of a bird's eye view of the the life and mind

Dr. Robert Hedaya
of Abhin Daya. Okay. So quick thing that happened in medical school is I took six months off of medical school to study medicine on my own. And, you know, I had the two years under my belt, and I took six months off. And I said, you know, I'm memorizing stuff.

Let me let me let me get this let me get this. Right? So I took six months off, and I was studying about ten ten hours a day. I had a whole thing that I laid out, and I stuck to it. And I was, you know, very diligent and Amazing.

And I actually came to actually understand the body and basic physiological principles. Wasn't just memorizing. Fast forward, I go in I'm gonna be a surgeon. I have a great mentor who teaches me how to do hypnosis in ten minutes. I'm, like, blown away by the results.

I switched to child psychiatry. I got to Georgetown. Then I go to NIH where they were doing cutting edge research. And and then I go into practice, and I'm in practice doing basically psychopharmacology. Mhmm.

And I'm doing cognitive behavioral therapy, which is, at the time, cutting edge therapy, which I learned from really one of the top doctors in the country. So a woman comes to me, her name is we'll call her Joanne, and she's 50 years old. And she's having panic attacks. I'm like, well, this is a piece of cake. I mean, I'm just you know, I'll I'll do some cognitive behavioral therapy.

Well, that didn't work. And so I'll do some, know, vivipramine or Xanax came out. At that time they were telling us to use eight milligrams of Xanax.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Eight milligrams. Jeez. It's like a horse's dose.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
Xanax. My working hypothesis was she's 50 years old. She has an unhappy marriage. Her only child is going off to college. She's having separation anxiety because she wants to leave her husband.

And and panic is basically separation anxiety where you think you're gonna die, and then this deep parts of the brain, you trigger the adrenaline in the brain, the locus coeruleus. It gets activated, and you're like, I'm gonna die. And you have panic. Your brain says, mortal threat. So a year into treatment, I'm dancing Saturday night at a bar mitzvah, and my pager goes off.

I look, go find a phone booth back in the day. Right? Okay. Call. Hey, Joanne, what's what's going on?

I'm having a panic attack. Okay. Talked to her, and then I'm like, what is going on here? This is a year. She should be better.

So Monday morning, I go into the office early to look at her chart. I had one lab at a CBC, a complete blood count.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Psychiatrist and blood tests? God, that was heresy back then.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
I had one. Turned out to be crucial. The size of her red blood cells, the MCV, the mean That's really high. It was one not really high. It was one zero one, the range of 80 to a 100.

I ignored it because two two reasons. One, I was taught to treat train wrecks.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Right?

Dr. Robert Hedaya
A little out of the range. Don't bother. Yeah. Because I was trained in the hospital. Yeah.

They treat train wrecks. Right? Yeah. And the second thing is I didn't know what it meant. Right.

So I didn't so that was it. So I went to the National Library of Medicine. I looked it up, and it says, oh, it could be a b twelve deficiency. Do a Schilling's test. No longer available, but at the time, I I never had done it, but I did it.

Yeah. And she has b twelve deficiency. I give her injection. With the first injection, her panic is gone. Gone.

And I'm like, oh my god. What else am I missing? Because people are in the system. They're just in the system. They go around this, you know you know, revolving door in the This doctor, that doctor, you know, this medicine, that meda.

That's when I was like, I must be missing a lot of stuff. Yeah. You know? And then I there were series of things where my mother-in-law was

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. When the doctor says it's all in your head, it means either you're crazy or the doctor's missing something. Mhmm. And I would say nine times out of 10 or more, it's the doctor's missing something.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
That is very true. It's very you know, in one sense, this is very simplistic, but you have the software, which is, you know, how you think about things critical, obviously. But then you have the hardware. How's how's the brain functioning? Does it have the nutrients?

Does Is the inflammation low? Are the circuitry, is it working properly, etcetera? Well, you gotta have good hardware to deal with the software. Right? If the hardware is broken, you know, then you know, then you're not really gonna get too far.

You're be in therapy for a hundred years. You're not gonna get

Dr. Mark Hyman
So I always say it's a lot easier to get enlightened if you're not mercury poisoned or b twelve deficient, your thyroid's working, and your gut microbiome is healthy. It's a lot easier to Yeah.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
If it's working, like how are you gonna run the race if you know, you got rocks on your back? Know? Yeah. You can't you can't do it.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's an amazing story. I mean, I I I you know, that's just one example. It's not that everybody with panic attacks has a b twelve deficiency. That's the problem in medicine. We're like, oh, you have panic attacks.

Oh, that causes b twelve. No. That's that the symptoms in psychiatry are all based on categorizing people according to a specific category and a disease, but it doesn't tell you anything about the cause.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
Right. The DSM is good for insurance companies.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Right? They call that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Psychiatry, which kind of is organized based on Categories. Prescriptions.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
Descriptions, but it doesn't tell you about etiology or cause at No.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I went know, remember Thomas Insol was the National Institute of Mental Health? And I had dinner with him once. I said, so Thomas, what do you think of the DSM-five? And he goes, well, I think it has a 100% accuracy, but 0% validity. I mean, it's really good at categorizing people according to symptoms, not telling anything about what to do.

And I think this example of the panic attack is so key because there are many reasons for panic attacks, such as one. And it's and when you start looking at the biology, you you kinda have to do a deep dive to see what's going on. I mean, I had a I was remember writing my book, Ultramind Solution. I was talking on the phone with some guy. Was fixing my stereo or something in the office, And he heard me chatting.

He was like, oh, yeah. Yeah. I I was so depressed. And then I took the b complex, and I was cured. And I'm like, well, yeah.

If you have if you have folate deficiency or b six or b twelve, those affect your neurotransmitters. And it works. But it's not mean, everybody with depression has that. Right? So you kinda had that insight.

You saw this Yeah.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
And then and then I had to I I really now don't get me wrong. Allopathic medicine is great for certain things, as we know. I don't wanna throw that out.

Dr. Mark Hyman
No. Of course.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
It's a

Dr. Mark Hyman
care of medicine.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
But, you know, I saw really horrible care of my mother-in-law, my father at the major hospitals in the in New York City. And they misdiagnosed my mother-in-law. She had she had mixed edema, and they wouldn't treat it because the reference range they didn't look at her clinically.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Thyroid, low thyroid.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
Low thyroid. And and the reference range said, no. She's not she's not abnormal. That was the same test we use now, but the reference range was up to 10.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You got 10. Right?

Dr. Robert Hedaya
And she was 11, they didn't wanna bother treating

Dr. Mark Hyman
Right. Like me. Should be a three and a half.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
Or two and a half even. And if you have a psychiatric problem, maybe even lower, and if you have certain genetics, even lower. Yeah. So it depends on that. So anyway, whatever.

You're forced to learn because there's nobody out there to help your patients. I I would send people to endocrinologists, but I'd get back nothing. So I had to actually learn myself what to do.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So you're the accidental internist, I'm the accidental psychiatrist. It all comes around the same stuff. Yeah. Because the body's one big and interconnected things travel together. Now there's this whole field of metabolic psychiatry we've talked about on the podcast, which uses, like, ketogenic diets and nutrition more aggressively.

What do you think about those?

Dr. Robert Hedaya
I think it's great. It depends on the patient. You gotta see what each person needs. It really does have to be personalized. And one thing let's say this.

Understand this. The people should understand this. There's a book called Mad in America, and it traces the history of psychiatry in America over two hundred fifty years. And what you see is that there are fads in psychiatry, and probably in medicine as well. And so you see that, you know, maybe a 100 two hundred years ago, you know, we thought that the problems were demons in our heads.

Right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so we okay.

Exorcism for everybody. And then actually they started putting people in giant centrifuges and spinning them around. And and they said, oh, hey. Hey. It works.

The studies show it works. So the hospitals got together, they made these centrifuges that had like they could spend 12 people at a time. That's great. Funny thing at the carnival. Yeah.

Exactly. And so bigger and bigger and bigger. And then after about thirty years, the science they start to say, you know, the study's not holding up. This is questionable whether it works. And then out comes a new model, insulin coma.

You know? Right? And and then we had the psychopharmacology revolution in the fifties. Right? And I don't wanna say meds are bad because I wouldn't wanna practice without them, but it's so overused.

Yeah. There's always fads. There were fads. So the metabolic medicine, to to get to your question, if you don't mind. So I think for sure we're onto something here in functional medicine.

There's no question about that. No question at all. But you have to also recognize we have a chronic disease epidemic in the Western world for sure. It's spreading. And we're gonna actually succeed because we're identifying now through functional medicine the root causes, and it's gonna permeate the system.

It will. It'll take ten more years, twenty more years, thirty more It's gonna permeate. Diseases change over time. If you remember in training, thyroid problem oh, thyroid problem on the fifth floor. Everybody runs up to see what it is.

Let's feel the goiter. It's so rare. Now? What is it? One in five women have Hashimoto's thyroiditis, you know, and the disease changes.

So as we as we treat the chronic illness epidemic, we may have other things to deal with. So things do morph over time.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And we have long COVID.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
Right. Now we have now we have long COVID. Who would have thought that was coming?

Dr. Mark Hyman
So so you basically kinda mapped out this field of biological psychiatry even before, you know, you kinda found functional medicine. But you've evolved the model over the years. And you treat people with dealing with their diet, with their gut, with nutritional status, with detoxification, with

Dr. Robert Hedaya
hormones, infections.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. All the all tick infections, whatever whatever it is you have to deal with. But what what I think is really interesting about your work is that you've evolved into using certain modalities, which typically have not been used in psychiatry. You know, I always say this on the podcast, but like the joke is the neurologists pay no attention to the mind and psychiatrists pay no attention to the brain. But now psychiatrists are looking at the brain, doing imaging, doing something called QEEG, like an electroencephalogram, which is like a brain wave test that maps out things that we never saw before and that we're not making sense of, and using modalities that people aren't typically using.

So I love to talk about some of your more recent work around the whole adoption of this technology of improving neuropsychiatric treatment with QEEGs. What is it, a quantitative EEG? How does it work? What does it do? Why do we use it?

How does it connect to imaging? Like what kind of imaging do we do? And what kind

Dr. Robert Hedaya
of things are you seeing? Essentially the quantitative EEG is we we put a cap on a patient patient's head, we measure the electrical output at nineteen points, and it goes into the computer. It's really AI driven. This is standardized against a age and sex match control through the NIH database. And what we do is we get all this information over the course of fifteen or twenty minutes with eyes open, eyes closed, And then the computer takes that

Dr. Mark Hyman
So you're just you're just in there, like, quietly laying down and

Dr. Robert Hedaya
they Yeah. Your eyes are closed. It's painless, noninvasive. You do it we do it at home all over the country, actually. We send the equipment to people's homes, it takes about an hour.

And what we get back from that is a basically, a wiring map of the brain. We can actually see all the networks in the brain. We can see the surface areas of the brain and how they're functioning. Wow. We can follow and detect the information flow patterns in the brain.

So for example, dissociation, you'll see the information flow from the frontal lobe on the right side to the parietal lobe on the right side of the brain. These are two different parts of the brain that is not flowing. There's a dissociation. Right? And so we can see this and study a person's brain and then correlate with the symptoms.

And then we also do imaging like the neuro quant MRI, which tells us the size of different areas, small areas in the brain. And we correlate all that data with the patient with their symptoms, and we say, okay. Here's what's going on. This network is out of whack, or this this is is working too hard, or, like, your worry network is just like it's not resting, you know? Or you have trouble with the salience network, so you can't decide what's important.

You get overwhelmed. You can't process things properly.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So so when you see these patterns, it tells you like which area of brain's working, which not working, what you target, how it correlates with symptoms. And so you can see almost like diagnostically in a way you can never see before.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
Yeah. Oh, it's mind boggling. I could see if someone has a metabolic problem.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And you can tell which areas of the brain are not working or not working. So what do you kinda see, and what are what are the kinds of patterns? So someone's like having depression, or they're having bipolar, or they're having whatever.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
So in depression, for example, you'll see that the frontal lobes are not talking to each other. The information not flowing from left to right and right to left. Right? So that's something we can treat actually, you know, with a light to the brain, specifically targeted to those areas. Or for example, a guy I had who had schizophrenia.

And I didn't know till he was paranoid. Okay? I didn't know till I did his QEG. I could see this track that went from the front of the brain to the back of the brain, the visual part of the brain. And this helps you this tract helps you assess the valence of a person's face.

And I said, oh, this is strange. Right? So I I treated it with a laser. We could target it exactly. And after two or three treatments, he says, you know, I'm reading much faster and I didn't realize that whenever I look at someone, their face was getting distorted.

And and they looked like they were looking at me with disgust. And and it it actually he says it he said this. I remember him telling me this. Actually doesn't make physical sense that their face would look that way given how their body is. In other words, he could now see that his the distortion, and that was gone.

Wow. That was the basis of his paranoia.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's amazing.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
Amazing. It's it's astounding.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You you see the patterns in the brain waves that correlate with different areas of the brain that are dysfunctional, that are not online for various reasons. So what are the reasons that people's brain is not firing? So I think of like, almost like an arrhythmia for the heart, right? So your heart rate is not normal, your brain waves are not normal. What's causing that?

Well, there's

Dr. Robert Hedaya
many causes, obviously. So it could be head injury. You know, it could've had a head trauma you don't even remember, or maybe you had one when you were a kid. And that part of the brain where you had the trauma got segregated. In other words, it couldn't wire when you were adolescent and a young adult, Brain rewires, and it couldn't really rewire with the whole brain.

So you had to reroute all the information highways in a different way, and now you don't have certain skills. And you don't even know because you're just so used to it. You know what mean? Could be that. It could be toxins.

It could be certain infections have a a tendency to go to different parts of the brain. Mycoplasma goes to certain it goes to the basal ganglia, for example. I've seen it. And then you treat the mycoplasma, you actually see the QEG change over time. It's slow.

If you have an infection that affects your brain function, it won't really normalize for three months. It's gradual, but it, you know, it will normalize, but won't takes a while. Different infections go to different places. It's strange, but that's what they do. We know PANDAS, you know, strep infection with some kids, you know, goes into the yeah.

OCD and the basal ganglia and the nucleus, etcetera. So, you know, we're we're seeing deep into the brain in a way that we could never see. And and, you know, there's so much information in these scans. I can say, oh, this net or you have, you know, you have six networks that are at a balance, let's say. But which one of these is bothering you the most?

That's where we're gonna start. Yeah. Right? And that that will help reduce your stress, enable you to function better, you know. And oh, now I can start to cope with my life.

I can organize things now. You know, that kind of thing.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So you're basically seeing the the abnormalities, but then you have to trace back what the causes are.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
Yes. We're always doing the root cause medicine.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Is it a gut thing?

Dr. Robert Hedaya
Is it toxin? Always doing the root cause. Yep. Right.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So you kinda can see the the pattern in the brain, which gives you a more targeted therapy. So you do the root cause analysis and the treatments. Right. But you also then do other modalities that are kind of ancillary, like neurofeedback, hyperbaric oxygen, laser Laser. Therapy, which is something you've kinda innovated.

I'd love you to kinda talk about this hammock moment. I was like, what is this sad about? And like, how how how did you kinda kinda get all these pieces to come together?

Dr. Robert Hedaya
It was from God or the universe, or whatever you wanna call it. So I was actually forced to take a vacation because we had paid for this place in somewhere in the Midwest. And they wouldn't give us our money back, so I was like, alright. We gotta go. So we took a week off.

And very sparse, very sparse. It's like nothing to do. Right? So just hanging out there, and my daughter was with us. And we went into a sweat lodge, and that was unbelievable.

That was great. And then the next day, I'm in a hammock for six hours. Like And I'm actually at the time retired, because I had retired in 2014. Oh, you had? Yeah.

I missed medicine a lot, but I was retired. And I'm in the hammock for six hours, and I'm reading a book. Deutsch, I think, He how to heal the brain, or I think that's the name of the book. Anyway, so I'm reading about Russia. In Russia, they're using lasers for the brain.

They snake it into the body up into the brain. And they The intergrim? Yeah. Like, through the arteries. Through the through the veins.

Not the arteries, but the veins. Right? Into the brain. And then they're talking about how it works. And I'm like, oh my god.

This could really help the brain. This is amazing because it's giving ATP. It's doing a lot of different things we could talk about, but I was blown away. Then I'm like, well, I don't know. How would I even know where to point this thing anyway?

And the next chapter is QEGs. And I'm like, oh my god. This is how I would know. And so I studied QEGs and lasers. Laser, I should define, is just focused light.

It can be very low potency or high potency, but it's very target, very focused. Yeah. So we could control the wavelength, how the frequency of the pulses, and you know, a lot of parameters about it.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
So I I oh, I could learn QEG, and then I could probably know looking at symptoms where I need to apply the light to heal the brain. Yeah. And so I studied for three years, and I started to do it in 2017.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So you weren't doing QEGs, you just read about them, and then you started

Dr. Robert Hedaya
learning And about I hired a mentor, and I studied for three years.

Dr. Mark Hyman
What do they use for now in medicine?

Dr. Robert Hedaya
There's a difference between EEG, electroencephalogram, that neurologists do all the time.

Dr. Mark Hyman
The seizures and things like that.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
Yeah. To see if you have a seizure or something like that. And and then there's a quantitative EEG, is AI. It takes all this data that you could never analyze yourself. Like, all those squiggly lines that you see?

Correct. 19 lines of this, you can't you can't put that all together. So the AI actually puts it together and gives you visual patterns and network analysis and analysis of the the the electrical patterns in different surface areas, the whole brain, really. And and that's the quantitative it's quantity EEG, and it's all AI driven. Wow.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And you were telling me that you can basically just send out a helmet that It's not a helmet. It's not

Dr. Robert Hedaya
a helmet.

Dr. Mark Hyman
A Or some kind of like

Dr. Robert Hedaya
It's a box. It's a computer and various things.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You just hook it up to your own brain?

Dr. Robert Hedaya
You would don't hook it up to your brain. You put the cap on. No. Put the cap on. Lot of people think they hook it

Dr. Mark Hyman
up to their brain. You just you just put the cap on.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
On with gel, and and we have the tech who shows up on the screen. Yeah. And tells you what to do and make sure the connections are good. And then you just you just basically look at the screen for about fifteen, twenty minutes, depending how much time we want. And then you close your eyes fifteen, twenty minutes, take it off, wash your hair, pack it up, send it back to us.

That's amazing.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. So really anybody can get this. Anybody can get this. And then you get the report, and then you identify the patterns, and then you design a program. But you also have to do the sort of

Dr. Robert Hedaya
We do a that's part of what we do, but then I want to I gotta get clinical data, right, know what's bothering you. And then I want a neuro quant MRI so I can correlate it. There's a strong Explain that.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Because you're talking about waves laying to the brain, and then you're talking about structural changes to a quantitative analysis of a brain MRI.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
So the neuro quant is telling us about the structure of the brain. Right? Is it big? Is it small? Is it inflamed?

The right is atrophied. It has a trunk. And then the the q EEG, the quantitative EEG that we do that we put that cap on you Yeah. That tells us our function. We have structure, and we have function.

Yeah. And then we correlate them and look at your symptoms. And then we can say, okay. This is where we need to focus.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Are you the only one doing this?

Dr. Robert Hedaya
To my knowledge, yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
No one else using laser in

Dr. Robert Hedaya
There there are people there's a lot of they call it photobiomodulation. Yeah. Right? So there are people making these helmets now. Right?

Dr. Mark Hyman
The red light therapy, independent Yeah.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
There's ten sixty four, eight ten, or whatever, and the helmets that they put on for neurodegenerative disease and that kind of thing. But the thing is I think that that is not specific. Like, we're very targeted. We're very specific, and we're very personalized. That's kind of a non specific.

So and and I don't know. I think it's it's definitely debatable whether that penetrates the brain. It's highly unlikely that it penetrates because the Laser? No. The laser penetrates.

About 2.6% of the light gets through. That we know. Some people say 4.2%, about 2.6, let's say. But the LEDs, which are basically these lights that are very weak, you're not gonna get much going into the brain. But you may still get some general benefits because, you know, you have all the blood flow and the mitochondria and the cells and everything.

You know.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So this is really key. You just said a big word, mitochondria. And I think, you know, there's a lot of work in this field around mitochondrial health and the brain. Whether it's Alzheimer's or Parkinson's or autism. Susan Goe has been on the podcast.

He's done tremendous work in understanding mitochondrial dysfunction, autism as a way of both understanding the disease and also treating it. Chris Palmer at Harvard has wrote a book called Brain Energy about the brain energy system and how that's so dysfunctional as a driver. And it's basically an energy deficit in the brain that leads to mental illness. And by restoring healthy brain energy through ketogenic diets and metabolic health, you can correct a lot of psychiatric problems. So you kinda come at this the same way.

And and one of the treatments that you use, the laser, actually works by increasing mitochondrial function and ATP.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
Right. That's one of the main things that it does. So when you basically put the laser pointed to a certain area, the photons, light particles or waves or whatever they are, go into the brain and they actually go to the the mitochondria are like little batteries. Right? And we have hundreds or thousands in every cell.

And they have, you know, four points where they function, and the electrons like floating down there like a wire. Right? And the mitochondria do so many things, but one of the things they do is produce energy. Without that ATP molecule, we're dead. Right?

So the photon from the light actually knocks off nitric oxide molecule, and then the ATP flows through. It's more complicated than that, but the ATP now instantly flows through. Now you have more energy. Now the brain says, oh, now I have energy. I can do some repair work.

Fix the potholes, you know, do do the work that needs to be done. Then you have the nitric oxide bringing more blood flow, and then you have changes, Mark, that are amazing, like misfolded proteins. You know, the proteins in the brain that don't fold right, and they cause problems. And they're like they're like viruses, they spread. Right?

And it actually reduces that and reverses alpha synuclein Oh, wow. It's a dementia protein. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And tau protein, you know, all these things, beta amyloid, And so there's the acute effects of the light, the laser, which we're directing to specific places. And then there's effects that occur over time.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Basically you do like the QEG, the brain imaging, the functional medicine assessment and workup for causes. Right. And you design a comprehensive plan, and then you use various modalities. Laser therapy is one of the key ones that's kind of new and novel. Right.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
There's a lot of research on this, by the way.

Dr. Mark Hyman
A lot of research on laser in the brain? Yep. Or just in general?

Dr. Robert Hedaya
Laser in tissues, laser in body, laser in

Dr. Mark Hyman
the brain. I haven't seen anything about it used like I've seen the transcranial magnetic stimulation Yeah,

Dr. Robert Hedaya
that's different.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Which is also used for depression and mental issues. But this is really different than that.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
I personally think it's better because the TMS, the transcranial magnetic stimulation, is basically like a shock. You know, it's a magnet that's shifting everything in one direction, then it shifts back to the other direction. So it's a little bit of a shock, the cells. And the outcomes, although now they're modifying a little bit, but the outcomes, they don't they're not durable, really. After six months, there's a high relapse rate.

You know? And it's a lot of money expense and time and it's The laser, don't see the relapse rate? It depends on the person. So now if you're treating a young person well, as an example, this woman, the first patient I ever treated with the laser, she had facial blindness. And I didn't I didn't even know she had I didn't even know what I didn't even know it existed.

Okay? And I'm treating her because she has a little early dementia and, you know, some memory problems, and she has a little bit of a temporal lobe seizure. And anyway, I treat her with the laser based on the QEG and where where I'm gonna treat her because she's having trouble finding words. And she tells me after the first visit, like, five minutes. After the first visit, she says, oh my god.

I can remember the I still hear her voice. I can remember the face of the person I worked with this morning. Now she had built up a whole structure but she was going to people's homes to do environmental consults. So she'd take pictures of their faces in the house, everything. Everything was documented because she couldn't count on her memory for faith.

She'd come to the door and see someone. Shoot, like, I never saw you before in my life. No. And then, with the laser, five minutes later, she's, oh my god. I remember the face of the woman I treated

Dr. Mark Hyman
this That's pretty amazing.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
The woman and her husband, and he had this mole on his face. And we're like, wait. Wait. Wait. This what are you talking about?

This doesn't make any sense. Yeah. I couldn't figure it out. But what I figured out eventually is that the brain has a lot of cells that are kind of alive. They have a heartbeat, but they're not doing their job.

I say that they're in a liminal state. They're kind of on the border between alive And and if you give them the energy, they wake up. And so her cells woke up. She was cured. That was it.

That's amazing. So I published it. It was the first ever cured acquired prosopagnosia facial blindness.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And how long do you have to apply the laser to this head?

Dr. Robert Hedaya
It's a matter of how much energy you wanna deliver to the so we kind of measure the area we're treating, the square how many centimeters squared. We calculate how much energy we want to deliver. And then I decide on the other parameters, know, pulse frequency, etcetera. There's a lot of different parameters. And and then we start slow.

We always get certain imaging before to make sure there's no reason not to do it. You have to make sure they don't have an aneurysm or that there's no tumor or there's no you know what I mean? And then we apply it. And and in some people, it actually really boom. They're on the road.

They're done.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Wait. Is it five minutes? Is it an hour? Is

Dr. Robert Hedaya
it No. Kind It's maybe it depends. It could be ten minutes to twenty to twenty five minutes.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, it's short treatment. Oh, short. And you're just needing one treatment, or

Dr. Robert Hedaya
do you need For most things you're gonna need multiple treatments. Like how many? So for example, for the visual thing, the guy needed three. I just did it on a guy who's 80 with Parkinson's, I did the visual thing. And he needed three and that was cured.

It was cured. Not the Parkinson's, he was treating the Parkinson's, but this was a different visual trick that was causing trouble. But if you have someone with a chronic condition, then for example, one guy with Parkinson's we were doing twice a week, and now we're down to twice a month.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And you combine that with other stuff like hyperbaric oxygen therapy and Neurofeedback.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
Neurofeedback, speech therapy. In other words, you wanna it's like going to the gym. No.

Dr. Mark Hyman
The brain gym.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
You're going to the brain gym. Before you go to the gym, if you wanna work out your biceps, you have to eat the food, and then you gotta work them out.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Right? This is a real revolution. Are there any other colleagues doing this?

Dr. Robert Hedaya
No. No. That's why I wanna that's why I wanna do these educational concerts. I wanna train people who need this.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I have people coming from all over. So people listening and are curious about this, they can ask their doctor to work with you?

Dr. Robert Hedaya
Yeah. The you can go to my website. It's wholepsychiatry.com. And we have an educational consult model that we've been doing for about a year. And basically, you go to your doctor and you say because people feel weird asking their doctor, you know.

So they go to the doctor and say, you know, you've helped me a lot, but we're kinda stuck here where I'm on too many meds or have these side effects, or I wanna see if I can get to the root causes of my problem. And there's this guy, doctor Hideo, who's doing this method. He has his website, and he does these educational consults. So your doctor stays in charge. And I I you come and visit me and physically in person, and we'll spend probably four or five hours together.

And I'll do physical and go over all the records, and we'll have the QEG, and we'll have the the imaging for the structure. Have all that when you come. And then I process all that. I say, okay. Here's what I think is going on, The root causes, here's what's going on in your brain.

I'll show you, and I'll show the doctor. I'll share the screen. And then I'll say, okay, this this is the workup. I wanna confirm my hypotheses about your immune system or, you know, this or the other thing. Right?

So you'll do these tests. And when we get all these tests back, I'll sit down for about typically four to six hours, go through all the data, which probably I won't have to do in the future when your company is in my office. I go with all the data, and I'll come out with a plan, which I will make a sequential plan for the patient, put it on paper, present it to the patient, they come back to my office for the presentation. The doctor's on Zoom, and then they the doctor will consult with me as, you know, needed going forward. And the point of this is to help a lot of people around the country, and to train the doctors in this kind of methodology.

That's my goal. That's my goal. I wanna train people. This can't stay with me. And just to be clear, it's all based on clinical the basic science, it's all there.

The lot you just go do a AI search on on photobiomodulation of the brain. You'll see there's hundreds, if not thousands.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It kinda speaks to an interesting thing, is that there's a lot of advances in medicine and science, but they kinda languish outside of medicine because doctors don't adopt them. Right. And it can take decades.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
Decades. Decades. Decades. Semmel wise.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I was gonna mention that.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
Right? Right. If people don't know, this guy, he he actually learned in the late eighteen hundreds, I think, that handwashing prevented puerperal fever. Well, a lot of women were dying after Well, all the midwives were

Dr. Mark Hyman
washing their

Dr. Robert Hedaya
hands. The doctors The were doctors weren't. Right? But the doctors didn't wanna learn.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And they were like, when he said, you know, maybe we should wash our hands, guys. They were like, oh, you're a heretic. How could you imply that doctors would cause their patients to become sick, and you're banished from medicine? And he died in disgrace.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
You know what he did? He sent out a letter to a 100 hospitals about handwashing. And they were incensed with him. Yeah. And they didn't start washing their hands for Fifty years.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Fifty years. It's tragic. And one of our presidents died because the doctor didn't wash his hands. Really? Mc McKinley was shot in the stomach.

And you remember McBurney? The McBurney's point from medical school with the appendix? Oh, The appendix point where you push on the stomach? It was named after the surgeon, McBurney, who got called to see McKinley after he got shot. And he stuck his finger in the wound.

Oh. And he got infection, and he died from the infection. It wasn't from the gunshot. You know, so That's how Theodore Roosevelt became president. And yeah, it does take a long time.

I mean, we've been doing this for thirty plus years. Functional medicine around for forty years. Right. Now only now we're seeing it in Medicare language on the after decades, right? It's sad because so many people are suffering.

And I think that the work you're doing to understand the biological mechanisms are really important. And there's a lot of ways into repairing the brain. And what the modalities you use are actually different than using a drug. Because drugs typically interrupt or suppress or block something in the body. These actually enhance the body's own repair systems like hyperbaric oxygen and neurofeedback and laser.

Can you talk about these as sort of therapeutic levers that you use in psychiatry? And a little bit more about each one, and how they work? Can you talk about the laser? But I think it's about energy, right? Release and improvement?

Dr. Robert Hedaya
Yep. So hyperbaric oxygen, in a general sense, could think of it as a general tonic for the body. Right? Because you know, you're treating actually the whole body. It's not it's not targeted necessarily to a part of the body.

Right? And in in hyperbaric oxygen, you're you're doing so many things. You're increasing delivery of nutrients. Right? You're increasing delivery of oxygen.

You're actually increasing nerve growth factors. Your stem cell growth, right, capillary perfusion. Right? So it's really helpful unless you happen to have Babesia as infection, then it's maybe not the best idea because they love oxygen. Babesia.

Babesia loves oxygen. Right? It lives in red blood cells, they love oxygen. So we don't do it if you have Babesia. But but we'll do it for lots of causes.

And we don't use it in everybody, but we'll use it for people with

Dr. Mark Hyman
And you have it in your office or you just send it We have it in

Dr. Robert Hedaya
our own we have a couple of chambers in our office.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And we People have to live there near you to do it.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
Some people move for a few months or a few weeks, six weeks to three months, or even six months to get the treatments. And and some people will buy a h bot and put it in hyperbaric oxygen chamber, put it in their house, for example. And then with the laser treatment, it has to be done in my office. But as I train people in this, which takes time to train them, then I'm hopeful that people will actually be able to do it with their patients in that city where they are. You know?

But right now, I'm the guy who's doing that.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, you're seeing results using this sort of extra combination of things in addition to functional medicine that you weren't seeing before?

Dr. Robert Hedaya
Am I seeing results in situate sit

Dr. Mark Hyman
In words, you've been doing functional medicine psychiatry for decades. Right? So with the advent of these new technologies that you're applying, or these old technologies applied in new ways Yeah. What are you seeing as as the improvement over what you

Dr. Robert Hedaya
were doing before? First of all, I can I can reach conditions that I can never reach? So for example, schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder. Yeah. What you know, depends on the resources the patient has, their willingness for treatment, for example.

A lot of times these are infection based. You know, you can actually normalize things. You can treat this particular area, the supramarginal gyrus with the light, you know, which is helpful. I'm seeing people with Parkinson's disease now, which I never bothered treating before. Now I can treat it with the neurofeedback, the hyperbaric, and with the targeted laser.

And you find that this is fascinating that Parkinson's, like everything else, is is a kind of a waste paper basket diagnosis. There's multiple types of Parkinson's. Have a guy who came to me with Parkinson's, and by looking at his QEG and then taking his history, his QEG was the tip-off. It turned out he fell off his bicycle twice in the same place, and you could see it on the QEG. So all I had to do was laser that, and he's been stable now for six, seven years without any laser, without anything.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And are you seeing the same thing working like psychiatric conditions like bipolar, other things like that?

Dr. Robert Hedaya
So with bipolar disorder, you have to be careful using the laser. They have to be stabilized before you do it. Because they can respond with too much activity, and you could actually precipitate a mania. Yeah. So you have to actually make sure they're on a stabilizer.

If it's bipolar one, the severe type, you have to have the medicine to stabilize them for sure. Bipolar two, you can stabilize most of the time with lifestyle and, you know, treat the infections and the hormones and all that. Sleep and, you know, all of those things. And then there are things like severe depression. Treatment resistant depression, I mean, which nothing touches.

And then I have a guy who's now 45 who depressed since he's 12 and started treating with laser. And he's been doing great for a couple years. Hadn't done that well for a long time now. The laser has to be recalibrated now, so he's not doing as well. But know, that's yeah.

No. There's amazing things that we can do. And neurological things, that's the other thing, you know, for Alzheimer's. So one of the nice things about this is, like, people will come to me and they're like not ready for the whole million tests and, you know, the four and a half hours and the whole thing. So I could just say, you know what?

I'm just gonna jump in with these noninvasive things. I'm gonna do my quantitative EEG. I'm gonna look at the volumes in the brain. I'm gonna take your history and you you know, see what's going on. Do some objective testing with a computer, see where your cognitive abilities are, etcetera.

And then I could just jump in and treat. You don't have to do anything. The neurofeedback, you watch a movie. You just watch a movie. That's all the Don't you have

Dr. Mark Hyman
to like actively engage No. With You can't control it. Your brain I've done neurofeedback before. I had to play a video game where I basically had to use my brain waves Right. And I had to calm myself when I can get a certain relaxed brainwave, then the video game would work.

Right.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
If I was

Dr. Mark Hyman
stressed, it wouldn't work.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
No. This is different. This is different. Your brain, you say, I wanna watch this video. Your brain tags it as a reward.

And now you're watching the video, and we control the settings. Right? So let's say the default mode network, we want it to function in this frequency. We wanna down regulate it or up regulate it. Right?

So so we set the bar. And we say, okay. When your brain default mode network goes here, you get to watch the movie. And when it doesn't, the movie gets gray or goes black or the sound goes down. Right?

So we start easy. You're getting reward, reward, reward. And then gradually make it a little harder, and a little harder. And it takes about six or seven sessions, and then brain says, okay, I know how to do this. You cannot control it.

This is all Automatic. Automatic. Your brain is like, I want the report.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I want the movie. It's gonna be a good movie. Wow. And and you also mentioned in some of your work about a case of a dental infection and schizophrenia.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
So this is very interesting. There's a woman I've been treating her since late nineties, actually. And she has severe dental problems, and she's just not gonna go for anything. So I put her on

Dr. Mark Hyman
Didn't go to dental dentist?

Dr. Robert Hedaya
She would not go. To the dentist. She has so much infection in her mouth. And as you know, the infection causes changes in the brain chemistry.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Of course.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
Right? Increases glutamate, excitotoxicity. So she was going in and out of the hospital periodically for decades. And I put her on two antibiotics to at least control this infection. You know?

And she hasn't been in the hospital. She's doing great. Better than she's done. And I've known her now for twenty six years, something like that. Doing great.

I understand the bar. If you look at the the genetic studies on psychiatric illness, they're called genome wide association studies, right, where they look at millions of people and look what genes show up in psychiatric disorders. You know this. It's like the immune system and it's the hormones. Those are the big drivers of psychiatric Yeah.

Inflammation. Yep. Mhmm. So we're treating the neurotransmitters, right? But we're and I'm missing the boat.

Again, not that these meds are not useful.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You you got this woman to eventually treat her dental infections?

Dr. Robert Hedaya
No. She won't she won't go. But she's stable and making doing artwork, and and she's it's amazing.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So really severe psychiatric problems, whether it's schizophrenia, bipolar, you know, severe treatment resistant depression. Mhmm.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
Yeah. You can treat these things So many different things. Yes. We treat like 40 different conditions. I mean, you know, as you do.

You know, these things all travel together. Right?

Dr. Mark Hyman
So what do you think the most common things that are now today causing these problems of sort of anxiety, depression, cognitive decline? Like, what I hate that question. Well well, I mean, common things are

Dr. Robert Hedaya
common, right? So like know, there's so many

Dr. Mark Hyman
There's always the outlier case. But like what are the things that really are driving this? And I think

Dr. Robert Hedaya
There's food. Right? There's mental set, your mindset. Right? There's hormones.

There's infection. There's sleep. There's a social breakdown as a big factor. Right? Antisocial media, you know.

You know, it's really a big problem. So there there are problems at many levels now and now we have long COVID. So I would say if you said to me, like, look, what are four things that you could tell a person to do? Right? To help themselves.

Right? I would say diet. Right? So assimilation really. Be careful of what you eat.

Right? As you say, your fork is your best medicine. Right? Right. Right?

And also be careful what comes into your mind. What are you exposing yourself to? What are you listening to? What's on the social media? Who are your friends?

What movies are you watching? What songs? Right? It's all information, and it damages you. What you know, we're we're floating in a cesspool of bad information.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I don't really try not to pay too much attention to news, and I just opened a, you know, a newspaper app, and I was like, God. Rob Breiner's like stabbed by his son, and Jews killed in Sydney, and the people at Brown University. I'm like, what is going on? I just it's so depressing. I try not to pay attention.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
Yeah. Can't pay attention to it. It's not it's not good. I mean, so I think you have to work on this I strongly believe this. And I think your previous podcast guest talked about this.

You need to really communicate with God or the universe or whatever you think this greater thing is. And b, develop a relationship because the universe works with you. You work with it. It works with you. You ask for help, you get help.

Not always the way you want or when you think you should get it, but the universe has got you back. Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I I I think I have to be more specific because I was like, I really wanna slow down, some more time at home, but then I I didn't say how. I Yes. Got in a bike accident and busted up my feet.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
Be very careful. I'm like, wait,

Dr. Mark Hyman
I can't go anywhere, but it wasn't what I had in mind. Like, specific. I wanna be healthy at home.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
Right. Yeah. So that so that's very important. So it's assimilation. The food you take in, the information, the people, that's that's one thing.

Then because then you have exercise activity, and it doesn't have to be crazy exercise. I mean, you're a biker. I'm a biker. Right? But I've moderated, and I wish I had moderated earlier even though I love it.

But exercise, some kind of exercise, whatever is appropriate for you, is really critical. And and I would say we'll say relationships are essential. I I think community you know, they they say social media and the community and social media. It's not a community. People don't even know what a community means anymore.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I

Dr. Robert Hedaya
myself recently moved from Maryland. I was at Georgetown, Maryland. And I recently moved about almost four years ago to New Jersey. Oh. And I'm on the beach.

Right? And I have a whole community because I grew up with this community. I know people. People I'm walking down the street of the The

Dr. Mark Hyman
Jersey Shore.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
Jersey Shore. Yeah. Yeah. Bruce Springsteen. Right?

That's where he grew up. And people say, hey, doc. I don't even know who he is. Hey, doc. Can I give you a lift?

It's like and I stop, and I'm I'm doing something with my car. Another guy's there's the guy who looks homeless, he's near my car. Somebody else stops and says, hey, doc. This guy bother you? Said, no.

No. No. He's fine. He's fine. He hangs around for a while.

Or I go to synagogue, you know, and I have friends. I have people. I I didn't realize how lonely I was actually in Maryland. I was pretty, you know, I had friends, and I had my practice, my wife, my kids, and everything. But I didn't realize that I didn't have a community.

You know? And so the think people need to develop community.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It's important. It's definitely one of the best investments you can make. Yeah. I would say community is medicine. Yeah.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
It really is.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It is. Yeah.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
It really is.

Dr. Mark Hyman
But from a functional medicine perspective, there's a lot a lot of things that are really going on now that are driving mental health issues, like the microbiome changes, mitochondrial injury, toxins, you know, nutritional factors, deficiencies. I mean, just so widespread.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
The whole list.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. That's really why you know, I've been thinking a lot about the biomarkers of mental health. You know? And then in Functional Health, you know, the company I co founded, we do a lot of labs, and we can see a lot of things that relate to mental health that people typically don't pick up on, whether it's marginal thyroid dysfunction like you were talking about, or whether it's b twelve deficiency, or whether it's

Dr. Robert Hedaya
You know what's a big one? A big one is genetic glucocorticoid resistance. So steroid corticosteroids, which we make those are stress hormones. Right? So they're a set of genes, five genes, n r three c one, f k b p five, CRH receptor one and two, CRH binding protein.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Gonna be a test on that, guys. Yeah. You

Dr. Robert Hedaya
know, whatever. It's these genes that basically when you're when you make your stress hormones, when you're under stress, whatever's causing it, the stress hormone goes to the cell, and then it goes into the cell and knocks on the door of the nucleus, the center of the cell where your genes are hiding. Knocks on the hey, let me in. I got a message for the genes. Nobody answers the door.

Or it takes a lot of knocks. So you have the stress hormone. But it's like insulin resistance. You're not really reading the signal. So now you're more vulnerable to PTSD, to depression, you know, even suicide.

Because because you can't the cortisol doesn't hit the receptor properly? Yeah. Doesn't translate to the genes, to tell the genes that you're under stress, so you don't make enough proteins to help you cope with the stress.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That breaks down some of the pathways that

Dr. Robert Hedaya
Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Are hard to keep your body

Dr. Robert Hedaya
can't respond to the stress. How do you you know, now you have PTSD much more easily. Right?

Dr. Mark Hyman
One of the things you talked about was you had like a twenty three treatment resistant depression patients, and you had a hundred percent full recovery rate. Like, when you look at psychiatric meds, like if it's thirty percent remission, that's like I was talking, excuse my French, like a miracle.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
That's

Dr. Mark Hyman
right. And you're talking about a hundred percent, that almost seems like, you know, too good to be true. So tell us about that.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
With my second book, which was the antidepressant survival guide or program, which was really functional medicine. I had a four page spread in the Washington Post Health magazine, and we had thousands of phone calls. I mean, thousand. You couldn't put phone down without someone calling. So I couldn't really obviously treat everyone.

So we screen people with looking for people with treatment resistant depression. Yeah. And basically, people who had the resources, meaning the support, to do what I was gonna ask them to do, functional medicine. And I'm treating people. And I was doing a lot of psychopharm, you know.

I was hadn't dropped that too much. I was still doing a lot of psychopharm. So three years into this, after the book, I'm like, wait a second. Everyone's getting better. The diabetes is going away.

Osteoporosis is away. The MS lesion is going away. Right. Like, maybe I'm lying to myself. Maybe it's selective attention to the positive.

Maybe maybe I'm forgetting the failures. So I hired a statistician. And, you know, we're collecting data on everybody. And I said, you gotta go over the data and and tell me, you know, here are all the patients. I've got the log.

And he came back to me and says, no. You're not lying to yourself. Wow. Everyone the mean depression score at start Better. It was in the severe range, the low severe range.

They all were better by ten months. And you could see When

Dr. Mark Hyman
doing just those combination of things and functional medicine.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
Yeah. Just doing the functional medicine. By four months when they're implementing the program, three months, four months, they start to get better and they steadily improve. And their overall health, all the other things are getting better too.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Right. Well, that's the thing. You treat one thing, you treat everything. Right? Right.

That's the thing. It's like we have such a siloed form of medicine where each specialty focuses on their particular organ or their particular body part and their disease categories. But there's so much cross among all these diseases, like, they're all inflammatory, most of these chronic illnesses.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
Right. And mitochondrial.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It's we're really in a revolution in medicine, a revolution in psychiatry. You know, I can't believe you're still going at it this hard.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
I I you know, I can't stop. I love it. Yeah. It's amazing. There's no end to what we can learn.

Right?

Dr. Mark Hyman
No. And we were just like at the beginning. We were the OG kind of we thought we like I remember when I took that, was like, oh, this is such an established field. I'm like, we were kind of the the few guys who kinda started to poke our nose around. And we've been doing this for so long.

And the reason we keep doing it is because it works. Right. Like, you just see miracles. I always say every day I get to be witness to miracles. Right.

Things that I never thought were possible to cure or treat in medical school, and things that you know, people suffer from that they don't need to. And that we have answers for, they're just not getting them. And

Dr. Robert Hedaya
then there's prevention. Right? You know you have a problem in your family history, there's vulnerability. You know, correct your diet, exercise, your get rid of the toxic influences in your life, you know,

Dr. Mark Hyman
and prevent. I think about prevention is treatment. In other words, we we kinda define treatment and prevention sort of separately. Mhmm. But I think if you do the same things you would do for prevention, you're also gonna treat the problem.

Like if you eat healthy, you exercise, you sleep well, yeah, your diabetes is gonna go away. Right. Right. Your autoimmune disease is gonna go away if you do all the right things. If you do the things to get healthy, then automatically, I always say when create health disease, goes away as

Dr. Robert Hedaya
a side effect. And think of it this way also. If you have, say you're you're working with someone in functional medicine, and you know, you're correcting your diet, well, guess what? Your kids are gonna see. Yeah.

And you're gonna be helping generations. Right? Right? So it it is it's I think really we are it's it's revolutionary time. People are taking control of their health more now.

They see the system as as broken. It's not totally broken. There's a lot of good stuff going on, but it's it's very limited with this chronic disease model.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And and what are you seeing among your colleagues in psychiatry? Are they friendly to these ideas? Are they resistant? Are they like, you're a quack, forget out of my space. You know?

Dr. Robert Hedaya
I think, you know, I get this thing from the New Jersey board. Right? And they're new ideas in medicine. Let's talk about b vitamins. And I'm like, all right.

Well, that's a start, know? Like, I might Late to the this rate, we're looking at a hundred years. I'm like, want it you know?

Dr. Mark Hyman
You want it now.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
I want it now. And and the other thing is not everyone has the bandwidth, Mark. You have the bandwidth, I have the bandwidth. You have the curiosity. You know?

You wanna get to the truth of it. You get to the root of it, and you're just gonna follow the science. You're gonna follow what what the truth is. You're not wedded to a model. I'm not wedded to functional medicine.

If something else comes back out that's better, of course.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Great. Wedded to the truth.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
Yes. Exactly. But a lot of people are they're they're too algorithmic in their thing. They're too rigid. They're afraid they don't have the bandwidth.

They can't handle the anxiety of not knowing. Right? But we live in uncertainty. That's life. Mom, thank you for

Dr. Mark Hyman
all you've done for the last decades to advance this field. You were kind of the OG functional medicine psychiatrist when there wasn't any. And there's Abraham Hoffer who was we both got to know who was the sort of pioneer really of functional medicine.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
Well, you know, he told me with my second book, I'm very I was very honored. He told me he said I had lunch with him at a functional medicine conference

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yes, I think I might

Dr. Robert Hedaya
have been there. Yeah, think you were there. He said to me, he says, Bob, you wrote the book I wanted to write.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
He saw this.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, for those listening to kind of close-up, he was a psychiatrist in Canada back in the 50s, and was a kind of a colleague of Linus Pauling, and was sort of experimenting with schizophrenia by giving them high doses of certain vitamins and believing that there were certain pathways that were stuck that he could unlock. And that led to the development of sort of this field and in general, functional medicine. In fact, Linus Pauling went on to write in 1969 a key paper in Science Magazine called Orthomolecular Psychiatry, which was sort of in a sense the original paper describing how we use nutrition to optimize your biochemistry to change your brain and your mood and your cognitive function. It was sort of so far ahead of its time. That was like 1969.

But I remember Abram Hoffer. He was quite a guy. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm so glad I got to meet him.

And I actually got to meet Linus Pauling too back in day. He was he was yeah. He won the Nobel Prize for for folding of proteins, but also for for the peace prize for the nuclear test ban treaty in the sixties. Yeah. So he prevented the above ground testing of nuclear weapons.

And he was part of the whole movement that I was a part of, which was in medical school called the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. And I got to kind of hear him speak. It was it was pretty inspiring.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
Wow. Wow. What a journey,

Dr. Mark Hyman
Amazing. What a journey. Yeah. So thanks, Bob, for being on this journey with me. It's been great.

And anybody wants to know more about your work, find out more where can they find you?

Dr. Robert Hedaya
Oh, they can go to, like it's like Whole Foods, you know, only Whole Psychiatry. Okay. And and then we have there's a lot of information on there. Videos, there's all kinds of information. And then there's a contact form.

And if you want an educational consult, you know, look for a functional medicine doc in your area. And and, you know, contact us, and we'll help you find someone if you can't find somebody. We have a a network that we're building. And and then we'll meet typically, we'll meet on Zoom for fifteen, thirty minutes, make sure this is right for you, that's the right fit, and then I think I can be helpful. And then we go from there.

Well, I know.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I'm gonna get my QEEG. I wanna see what's going on in my brain. That's what's happening.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
You know, I do it I do it regularly and I don't know if it's because I do the laser on myself, by the way. And I don't know if it's that or twenty five years of mountain biking, but my doctor told me her brain looks like a 55 year old. Amazing. Which is thank God.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I can only help. I can only help both of Thanks for being here and thanks for coming all way, Austin.

Dr. Robert Hedaya
It was a pleasure seeing you, Marcus. It's been too long.

Speaker 3
If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social media channels at Doctor Mark Hyman. Please reach out, I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to The Doctor Hyman show wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at Doctor Mark Hyman for video versions of this podcast and more.

Thank you so much again for tuning in. We'll see you next time on The Doctor Hyman show. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center, my work at Cleveland Clinic, and Function Health where I am chief medical officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guests' opinions. Neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests.

This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided with the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, please seek out a qualified medical practitioner. And if you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, visit my clinic, the Ultra Wellness

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