What is Functional Medicine? – with Dr. Brad Watts

00:03
Kevin
Alright guys, welcome back to the N of One podcast. Today you just have Jamie and myself, so Jamie and Kevin and we have here Dr. Brad Watts, he’s our guest today. He is a distinguished doctor of chiropractic and director of clinical applications and biogenetics. He has over a decade of hands on experience in functional medicine, clinical nutrition and beyond. Thirteen years of guiding other practitioners how to do functional medicine. He’s consulted on more than 20,000 functional medicine cases, shaping practices for all different types of businesses. So he’s a graduate of Northwestern College, Northwestern Health Sciences University and he’s become a highly sought after speaker and we’re super excited to have him over here to speak to us about functional medicine and give our audience a better look at what functional medicine is. There’s a lot of questions that surround that, wouldn’t you say Jamie?

00:53
Jamie
Absolutely. Thank you Dr. Watts, I really appreciate you coming. In my personal opinion, I mean as a surgeon and allopathic medicine medical doctor, I personally believe that functional medicine is the way medicine should be practiced. You know, one of the things that I have been frustrated with and many physicians are over the last 10 to 20 years is that we’re pushed into disease management, opposed to cure solutions to problems. And so I’m so excited about what you have to tell us Dr. Watts, because I think functional medicine, I think in many ways I think it will be the future of primary care. I think that’s just the way that we need to start thinking about healthcare and patient experience as opposed to just managing diseases until the end of life. And the only people who really benefit from that are pharmaceutical companies.

01:48
Kevin
Well, with that being said, tell us what you started in functional medicine, Dr. Watts, how you became involved with biogenetics specifically.

01:57
Brad Watts
Well, first of all, thank you for having me, I appreciate it and happy to connect here. So I, I’m a chiropractor by training and that was, oh my goodness, 15 years ago now is when were graduating from all that kind of stuff and I never had a neck and back clinic. I was always with an eye on. Yeah, but why is that happening? That was my thought process all the time. Why did that happen? What about this? What about that? What about that guy? We can’t help him. What’s going on there? And so I asked questions a lot and got involved in functional medicine right after graduation. And I know it sounds crazy but you’re like a third year student or a fourth year student and going I don’t know if I can do this till I’m 70.

02:46
Kevin
Right, right.

02:46
Brad Watts
And you start looking at the pain and suffering people have, and I’m like, all right, there’s gotta be other options out there. And certainly there are. I just didn’t know it at the time. And so start looking at functional medicine. And there are some huge names in the industry that were slogging away through the 70s, 80s, 90s, long before people in my generation ever got interested in it. And they’re really the ones that laid a foundation for how we look at patients from a functional perspective, which we could talk about that in a couple of minutes here if you want. But they’re the ones that laid the foundation and they’re the ones that really took the battle scars going through it to be able to have what we have today and right now, functional medicine, I’ve never seen it bigger. It’s kind of crazy.

03:35
Brad Watts
Even 15 years ago when I started, I thought this is. There’s a lot of people doing this, right? And it’s got to be 10x of what it was even 15 years ago right now. So it’s pretty cool, right?

03:46
Kevin
You think that’s part and parcel to all of us being locked away for so long during COVID Well, I think certainly helped.

03:53
Jamie
I think that, you know, actually, you know, American medicine right now is complete in the deer, mainly because, you know, physicians don’t really have much power really to make decisions. And so I think the public, they’re tired of this. They’re tired of having a fistful of medications that they have to take every day to manage all of these problems that have been diagnosed that they don’t really, they didn’t know that they had. You know, they don’t feel any different with the medications that they’re given. And so I think the public, I think the reason why it’s become so popular these days and will become more popular is the public seeks it out. They will seek absolutely the.

04:34
Brad Watts
So the market dynamics of it, whatever is in demand is. I mean, typically there’s like a five or a ten year window where people start asking for something and then, you know, five years later, it’s pretty common. And then 10 years later, you’re looking at, everybody’s participating, okay? And then there’s a new demand because people always like new solutions to garbage problems. Okay? Now, one of the things I like to say about medicine, you know, functional medicine, is based off of the same medical literature that allopathic medicine is participating in. Okay? It’s the same literature. It’s just a different Perspective and different applications. And you know, most of the time I’ll say something like, you know, patient will go, well, how come my doctor didn’t, you know, do this? How come my doctor doesn’t talk about it this way?

05:23
Brad Watts
Well, science only knows what it’s paid to know.

05:25
Jamie
That’s right.

05:26
Brad Watts
That’s like a huge thing. Scientists only knows what it’s paid to know. And unfortunately, it’s not really the doctor’s problem. The doctor it tip. You could talk about this more, Dr. McDowell, where the doctor’s got a 12 inch stack of paper on their desk that they need to be responsible for. Just pages and pages of journal articles and whatever. And then you also have, you know, the average physician in the United States today, like a family physician dealing with 2,000 patients or 2,500 patients, like it’s not a lot of time to sit and learn new applications. But it is a very good model to apply what the research is demanding you do as a standard of care. And functional medicine is a little bit different in that because there is no standard of care. Right.

06:16
Brad Watts
Which is sometimes frustrating, especially when you’re like in my position where you get to talk to a lot of different doctors and you go, hey, why’d you do that?

06:26
Jamie
Doctors might be afraid of that. You know, there’s no standard of care. Guess what? It gives you exposure. We get sued.

06:33
Brad Watts
Exactly.

06:33
Jamie
A lot. So.

06:35
Kevin
A lot.

06:36
Jamie
One of the things in defense of allopathic and western medicine is you have to sort of think that, you know, 90% of physicians do not work for themselves. They work for hospital or healthcare system or insurance based system or, you know, academic medical center. There are very few private practitioners anymore. And so when you work for another company, guess what, you’re gonna have to be efficient. You’re gonna have to follow protocols, you’re gonna have to be profitable for that company. That’s the entire motive here. And at the end of the day, that’s why I would say that most of us, you know, we, in fact, it’s even taught in medical schools these days. You know, this disease management model that we’ve had for the last 20 to 30 years, because guess what? It makes the most profit for healthcare companies.

07:28
Brad Watts
Absolutely.

07:28
Jamie
It just doesn’t work. That’s the problem.

07:32
Brad Watts
Well, and so the thing is I don’t think it’s wrong.

07:35
Kevin
Right.

07:36
Brad Watts
I don’t think it’s wrong because you look at a patient population, not every single one of those people is gonna raise their hand and be like, yeah, I’ll do whatever I need to do to get rid of the problem.

07:45
Jamie
Right, right.

07:47
Kevin
Like that’s a system problem where people are, let’s take a pill. Let’s. Let’s do the easy thing before we try to do the hard thing.

07:56
Jamie
I always tell folks, you know, you know, in the last century, when you would go to see your family physician, we all had family physicians. I lived back then, too. And you had a problem, that doctor might write you a prescription, or they might just as well say, all right, you need to do this in your life. You know, you need to take this tip or do something like this. Which is basically what functional medicine has taken over in many ways. Give them practical life advice to deal with their own problems. That’s sort of the idea behind medicine. It’s now shifted.

08:27
Brad Watts
That’s right.

08:28
Jamie
Now, we manage numbers. We manage your cholesterol level, your blood sugar level, your A1C, your blood pressure. All these numbers have to be managed. And that’s really all we know how to do.

08:39
Brad Watts
And it’s generally pretty effective. Like if you look at lifespan, right. And you see lifespan improving or declining in certain conditions. Okay, well, define.

08:51
Jamie
Define improving. If you’re talking about longevity.

08:54
Brad Watts
Yeah, that’s what I was going to say.

08:55
Jamie
If you’re talking about longevity, that’s one thing. There’s lots of people living into their 80s, but guess what? They’re all institutionalized and they’re all. That’s a gain to their doctor. Has to full, you know, fill their prescriptions. We’re talking about quality of life, not just longevity, but quality.

09:11
Brad Watts
Exactly. That’s what I was going to expound upon, because at some point you look at chronic diseases like diabetes, let’s say, for instance, right now, type 2 diabetes, specifically. If we look at the standard of care. This is a study from Kaiser Permanente, right. Their own internal study. There’s a less than 4% chance of reversing the condition with their initial standard of care procedures. Less than 4%. Like, those are not very good odds. And then you start looking at the number of people in the United States that are dealing with it knowingly, or they don’t even. They haven’t been diagnosed yet. It’s insane. Like, they’re looking at 10% of the population being type 2 diabetic, and you look at metabolic syndrome and all the other stuff associated with it, and you start getting up above 30% of the population, and they have no idea.

10:00
Brad Watts
And modern medicine has a 4% chance of reversing the sugar component of it like they’re not great odds is what I’m saying.

10:08
Jamie
That’s right.

10:10
Brad Watts
So the problem is that medicine doesn’t change until the people that they’re selling to change what they want. So there are cycles. So I grew up in the 80s and so if you look at, you know, growing up in the 80s, the types of drugs that your parents or grandparents might have been on, those types of drugs are still in use today. Right. But not by themselves because the problems continue to expand over time. And so those are like frontline therapy. And then you got the secondary and the tertiary and it just continues to pile up. Right. Like, because we’re talking about diabetes, if you look at high blood sugar in the medication application in order to try to like suppress it. Okay, what’s happened? It’s like holding a beach ball underwater. Yeah, right.

11:00
Brad Watts
But the beach ball continues to inflate because chronic disease gets worse with time, not better. That’s why it’s chronic. And in reality, if it takes two, four, six different drugs in order to try to force that beach ball underwater, what happens when you get to the end of the treatment plan, when you’re on insulin already, like straight fat storing hormone, what do you do at that point?

11:20
Jamie
Well, and most people don’t understand that type 2 diabetes, not type 1 diabetes. Type 2 diabetes is a lifestyle derived disease. It’s a, it’s acquired. You know, again, in the solution to type 2 diabetes is lifestyle. And at the end of the day we don’t have time to explain the disease process of type 2 diabetes. It’s over consumption of carbohydrates. It’s very simple. And there’s a very defined metabolic pathway that we’ve known for years that overconsumption of sugar causes metabolic syndrome and all of these other problems. All we have time to do is, oh, your A1C is up this month. Well, we’re going to have to add on another, you know, hypoglycemic. We’re going to have to add on metformin or GLP or whatever. That’s not, that’s disease management. That’s not cure of disease. And so that’s kind of, I would.

12:12
Brad Watts
Even take it a step further and say that symptoms management, because high blood sugar is a symptom of an underlying problem.

12:19
Jamie
Absolutely right.

12:21
Brad Watts
The same way that high body weight is a symptom oftentimes a very similar problem. So.

12:27
Jamie
Well, the one thing that people can do, if you want to lead, you know, a healthy life with minimal Chronic disease. The first thing is have a normal weight. Have a normal weight. I mean, again, it makes. Yet we have this epidemic of obesity that I’ve been trying to deal with my entire career. It’s getting worse. It’s getting worse because we’re managing this disease. And as you said, with time and age, guess what? The obesity gets worse. You don’t grow out of obesity.

12:58
Kevin
So we’re talking about managing symptoms. What things, Dr. Watts, can people expect that functional medicine may help address when they go into their practice? I realize that every patient is different, and we certainly look for what they’re doing, but, you know, kind of set, you know, that average patient out to our audience so that they can kind of understand. Because after you get done, I’ll kind of tell them my story, because you’ve helped me, and you probably haven’t heard the end of my story. So.

13:30
Brad Watts
One of the things that I like to. To tell patients, they’ll oftentimes. Can you help me, doctor? Can you help me? And my response is always this. I have no idea.

13:39
Kevin
Right?

13:39
Brad Watts
But we have to look. What happens is people get a diagnosis from two numbers, three numbers on a piece of paper, but that diagnosis becomes the end point of the discussion rather than the beginning, like, for exploration. So what I want to know is if your A1C is high and your body weight, if you’re 5, 8, and 255 pounds, why. Right. You’ve been diagnosed with obesity and diabetes, but that doesn’t tell us anything about why. I want to look at things from a root and fruit perspective, right? So, like, nobody ever blames a plant, right. For the problem. You always look at the root structure, what’s in the soil, what am I feeding it, right? Not, why are these stupid flowers not growing.

14:22
Jamie
Right?

14:23
Brad Watts
Okay. And with a patient, I want to know, what are the drivers? So everybody’s got DNA, right? So everything is genetic today, right? Well, it is genetic. You have a body. But why is. Why are your genes expressing these patterns that are allowing you to generate these chronic conditions? That’s the question. Okay, like genetics. Genetics are kind of like a piano. Every piano’s got Mozart in it. But not every piano plays Mozart, right?

14:51
Kevin
True.

14:51
Jamie
Yeah.

14:52
Brad Watts
Not if I’m the one sitting at the keyboard. I’ll just play chopsticks for you. Okay, but the point is that expression requires input, right? So genetic expression requires input. Well, that’s down to your daily choices. That’s down to the environment you live in, the media you consume, and who you live with. Like, are you allowing these things to push the best parts of you into fruition, like your genetic expression, or are these things driving problems? So if we look at, like, a root and fruit perspective, think of a tree, okay? And you got the fruit in the top of the tree. Well, if diabetes and obesity and hypothyroidism or autoimmune disease, etcetera, is growing in the top of the tree, you want to figure out what are all of those things? What do they have in common? Right. Not.

15:40
Brad Watts
You know, medicine exists to be able to medicate each of those specific fruits. And there’ll be a drug for every single one of those categories.

15:47
Jamie
Yes.

15:47
Brad Watts
Okay. And that’s okay until your quality of life starts to tank and you’re like, is this it? Is this all there is? Is this as good as life is gonna get for me?

15:58
Kevin
Well, I look at it from where, you know, the average guy. So Jamie and I are both in our 50s, and you take a guy like us that has high cholesterol, high blood pressure, you know, multiple symptoms. You take us to a general practitioner, we start taking statins.

16:14
Brad Watts
Oh, day one.

16:15
Kevin
Day one. Day one. And they want you to take that statin. Then you’re gonna deal with the side effect of lowering your cholesterol, because most people don’t realize that your cholesterol is a much needed part of your brain activity, your sexual function. So they’re ending up with a patient that now has a foggy brain and they have erectile dysfunction. So naturally, this dude’s depressed, but there’s always a pill, another pill, and you’re having to deal with the side effect of another pill and another pill when, if you can, just get your body to function in a better homeostasis and.

16:52
Jamie
Balance cascade of pharmacologic disease management.

16:55
Kevin
So for the audience out there, I want you to hear my story because Dr. Watts helped me take a look at my labs because I was a guy. I’m describing myself. I had high cholesterol. I was on statins for years. And so my cholesterol, gosh, ran 260 or something. My blood pressure was through the roof. I was on blood pressure medicine. I started trying to get off of it, but by taking all of our advice that our practice has about insulin resistance, and it started working. But to take it a step farther, when I went through the plan with Dr. Watts and biogenetics, my cholesterol came down 90 points, my blood pressure came down 20 points. I am non medicated on any level at this point.

17:36
Kevin
And those things are real to Me, that’s the reason I get so excited and am excited to have you on the show today. But it’s amazing to me. It’s like the good news out there. When you have the good news, you want to stand in the pulpit and yell it to everybody. It’s like, oh, my God. You’ve been wasting your time, you’ve been wasting your money. And mind you, functional medicine is not cheap. But functional medicine can work if you have the same commitment level that I did to it. And making sure that’s the cool part.

18:02
Brad Watts
What you’re talking about, right? Because instead of suppressing the production of cholesterol in the liver or the absorption of it through your food or what other mechanisms you can drum up there, what you’re doing is you’re getting rid of the reason that was driving the cholesterol production in the first place, okay? That’s the key. Like, if there’s a rock in your shoe, don’t give me an Advil, right? Like some doctor figure out, is there a rock in your shoe? But nobody’s asking that question. So when it comes to these chronic conditions, especially things that drive obesity, one of the exciting parts of functional medicine I’m really excited for the next 10 years of this research is going to be this term called obesogen. Okay? Obesogen. Obesogens are chemicals that drive. Right. Obesogens are chemicals that drive your body to start accumulating fat.

18:57
Brad Watts
And those obesogens, they’re used as farming chemicals. They’re used as heavy. They’re heavy metals in the soil. Sometimes they’re plastics, which there’s been tons of money about that. Yeah, absolutely.

19:11
Jamie
Processed foods that you buy from the grocery store that are really cheap, that is frozen, right? I mean, these are all processed carbohydrates. These are all obesogens. So.

19:20
Brad Watts
So those. Those processed carbohydrates, I look at them as people call them empty calories, and I’m like, they’re not empty.

19:27
Kevin
Right.

19:28
Brad Watts
They’re smuggling trash into your body.

19:30
Jamie
High fructose corn syrup is awful. I always tell folks that, you know, yeah, good old plain. You know, cane sugar is so much better than high fructose corn syrup. They’re both sugars, they’re both sweet. One’s cheaper than the other. You can make it as in production, but guess what? Your liver has one enzyme that can break down fructose. It’s got a bajillion enzymes that can break down sucrose. And so that’s going to glut up the system in high fructose corn, sirup is not just empty calories, it’s bad calories.

20:02
Brad Watts
That’s right.

20:03
Kevin
When you take a look at the way.

20:04
Brad Watts
So when you.

20:06
Kevin
No, go ahead. No, please, go ahead.

20:08
Brad Watts
Yeah, go. I was gonna say when you take a, a position on how am I going to help this person. Right. If you’re going to do functional medicine now, you’re obligated to show them what’s actually causing the problem instead of just offering them solutions to suppress the symptomatic experience that they’re dealing with. Absolutely right. And that’s really functional medicine in a nutshell. What’s the root cause and is there anything I can do about it? Right. If yes, implement. And then over time obviously is a factor, but over time you would expect to see a reversal of whatever the issue is that you’re dealing with, you know, to whatever extent is possible. And you know, things that I thought were not possible 15 years ago. I mean, there are great FM doctors all around the United States right now that are absolutely destroying chronic disease.

21:00
Brad Watts
Things that I thought there’s no way. And it’s happening because they have committed to that root cause structure, that root cause assessment, and it’s pretty awesome.

21:11
Kevin
What are some of those disease states that you’re hearing that are being able to be solved or I should say improved, because you can’t ever say quite solved.

21:19
Brad Watts
Yeah, yeah. So you can’t say solved. Okay. Because if you generated it once and you go back to your lifestyle that was generating it’s probably coming back. Okay. And so anyway, so when you look at metabolic conditions, those are big hitters right now, especially with the adult population in the United States. Autoimmune diseases. Right. Just because you have an autoimmune disease doesn’t mean it needs to wreck your world.

21:45
Jamie
What turns on the immune system to cause the autoimmune problem? That’s what you’re trying to get at.

21:52
Brad Watts
Exactly. That’s what you want to find out. So I call them drivers and I want to know what’s the driver? Because if we’re treating somebody and you’re not handling the driver, it’s not going to get better. Right. Ever.

22:06
Kevin
So we talked about nutrition and lifestyle modification. There’s another component really being supplementation that helps out in the process. So if you can kind of explain the balance between all three, which one of them are actually the major driver. I realized that all three of them are have to work in tandem. But I’m saying all this because there’s kind of this notion in social media that I can watch this video and learn how to do the elimination diet. Right? And I’m going to figure out the thing that’s making me sick. It’s corn. It’s. Whatever it is. And now I’m going to be fixed forever. And if you can kind of explain that process or mentality about how it would all work when you talk to a patient like that.

22:44
Brad Watts
So, so there’s a, a new diet every day that’s out there, right? And oftentimes people say, hey, what’s the autoimmune diet? Or what’s the diabetes diet? And I always have to tell them, just stop for a second. We don’t want the autoimmune diet, we want the Jamie diet.

22:59
Jamie
Right.

23:00
Brad Watts
What do you need to do for your body based off of your labs in order to move in the right direction? Right. So customization is going to be key. Food definitely is important. And I would say food is one of the most common drivers because of what food smuggles into your body. Okay. So one of my areas of focus over the last couple of years has been in toxicology and understanding the toxins associated with specific disease processes. When you look at it through that lens, you don’t have to dink around very long to understand how to help people. When you’re like, oh, yeah, you’re loaded with diabetic and you have diabetes or you have all of these plastics in your body and you’re driving autoimmunity, that’s wrecking your thyroid or your brain or your skin or whatever’s going on.

23:48
Brad Watts
And so we want to be able to look at the food and also what that food is bringing into the body. Those are two key critical issues there. And then we look at supplementation. It’s kind of funny to say this, but I’m not a fan of supplementation first, ask questions later. Right? And it’s funny to say that considering I work with biogenetics and I’m in the nutrition field, et cetera, I’m a proponent of supplementation when appropriate. And how I say that is if a patient’s not going to do the work to get rid of the driver, I don’t want them using supplements. Right. I don’t want them compensating. Like if somebody’s drinking a six pack Miller Lite every night before they go to bed and they have a liver problem, I don’t want you to use liver products.

24:39
Kevin
Right.

24:39
Brad Watts
To support a healthy liver, I want you to get rid of the driver. And if we need to. Supplementation can certainly be an effective route moving forward. So you have to pair those two things together. If we don’t pair them together, then we’re just using nutrition in an allopathic model to suppress symptomatic experience. And even though there are some results there for people, they’re not long lasting and they’re not gonna be, they’re not gonna feel good in the long run. Right. Because ultimately I want people to be able to live their best life. I want them to be able to be old and have grandkids and see their grandkids, have kids, you know, that type of thing.

25:18
Brad Watts
And ultimately, if we have a model that doesn’t support healthy food and supplementation in tandem together, you know, it becomes extremely problematic because the results are unpredictable. And as a doctor, obviously the only thing that you like more than air itself is predictability in outcomes. Okay.

25:42
Jamie
That’s why I’m a surgeon. I have control over that.

25:46
Brad Watts
Exactly.

25:47
Kevin
Well, and Dr. Watts, I’ve been to a functional medicine person way before we started this business.

25:52
Jamie
Yeah.

25:52
Kevin
And even their idea there was a general practitioner that was doing functional medicine is to provide a steady stream of supplements that you’re paying out the wazoo for. I mean, God, I was paying $400 a month. It felt like, sure, it was stupid money. That’s cheap. Well, no, but this is in perpetuity. That’s the problem. Just get it. But if it’s $400 to make you live longer, I guess I won’t buy the new car for the next five years.

26:21
Kevin
But my point in saying is that my simple as simple version of how the process works and the way that you construct and work with biogenetics is that we are taking supplements along with lifestyle to reset your receptors so that your body knows how to appropriately react to the stimuli that is your food and your environment, in order to help you better process that environment to live a healthier life.

26:49
Brad Watts
Right.

26:49
Kevin
Fair statement.

26:50
Brad Watts
That’s right.

26:51
Kevin
Okay.

26:51
Brad Watts
Fair statement. Yep.

26:53
Kevin
Well, so. So for the common person, like if you have an insulin resistance problem now, we’re going to make it so that when your body, when you reach over and grab that cookie and you actually eat it, we’re not saying you can’t eat a cookie. We’re saying now your body will know how to react to that sugar and you probably won’t be as turned on and jazzed up about that cookie, let’s be honest, as you once were, but your body will know what to do with that sugar and not jump it Straight to the fat on your butt.

27:19
Jamie
I’ll tell you an indicting story. So several years ago, I had been on anti hypertensive. I’ve been on cartism for years, and I was diagnosed with essential hypertension and had been through the workup of that and had been taking cardism for years, and it did nothing for my blood pressure. It didn’t move a millimeter of mercury anytime. And of course, I went back to my primary care provider and you know, Jamie, you need to control your stress. Really? Okay, that’s going to help me. And so they’d go up on the blood pressure medication. And of course, I love my primary care provider. He’s a wonderful man, but this is not what he does.

28:01
Jamie
And so I decided to take upon myself, how am I going to get control of this high blood pressure because I’m going to have a heart attack when I these days. And so I was at the gym and I said, you know, the first thing you got to do is got to lose some weight and that will get the blood pressure down. This is something that we know, we’ve known for a long time. So I’m at the gym and I see one of my favorite cardiologists working at the gym, one of my best buds. And I came up to him and I said, man, I’ve been on this anti hypertensive for 10 years. It’s not gotten anywhere that we want to start adding a second one.

28:31
Jamie
We want to add a beta blocker, and it’s going to make me not be able to do as well in the gym. Do you have a suggestion for me as a cardiologist? One of the finest cardiologists I’ve ever met. He’s like, dude, I’m on three. I’m like, okay, all right, wait a second. We’ve gone way off the rails here. And to be honest with you, I lost about 50 pounds, started fasting, started taking care of myself, and the blood pressure went down crazy. I didn’t even need a functional medicine guy. But I think that’s what should happen. I mean, I took my own knowledge and said, look, I’m not taking this crap anymore. Got to get a hold of this. And that’s what functional medicine does, is it teaches patients how to manage their own problems.

29:13
Jamie
Not even manage, cure their own problems through lifestyle and supplementation and these other ways. It’s just, it’s such a better perspective and used to be the way that we did it in allopathic.

29:26
Brad Watts
Medicine so well, it’s because it was logic based, right?

29:29
Jamie
Yes. Not protocol based.

29:32
Brad Watts
That’s right. So with supplementation, there are going to be, you know, forever. If you just Google liver supplement, right, you’re going to get 27 pages of liver supplements. And what we want to be thinking about is applying the same logic to the process. So predictability is a big thing. Okay. Predictability in outcomes. And, you know, it’s one of the reasons why I like working with biogenetics and I’m so pleased to have been able to be part of what they’re doing. They give me a platform and able to, you know, to be able to help people create predictability and outcomes. And with supplementation, most of the time it’s the complete diametric, you know, opposite of what the pharmaceutical is trying to do. Right. So pharmaceuticals typically are gonna downregulate, block, inhibit, decrease function or attenuate some process in the body. Okay.

30:31
Brad Watts
And while those can be effective at curbing whatever the result is, over time they become less effective. Right. Over time. And supplementation plus the lifestyle intervention together will help get rid of that underlying inflammatory issues. So you’re talking about blood pressure. Okay, well, yes. High body weight is certainly going to create peripheral resistance. Okay. Getting rid of the body weight is going to help.

30:56
Jamie
It’s absolutely the case.

30:57
Brad Watts
The question is. Exactly. The question that everybody has is, well, how do I do that? And they answer their own question. They go, eat less, exercise more. And in reality, if it were just that simple, like, Jenny Craig wouldn’t have gone out of business five years ago. Right. So it’s this process of, yeah, eat less and exercise more. But how, right? How do you do that for your specific physiology? What nutrients can you use to help expedite that process so that you gain weight over 40 years? You don’t want to take 40 years to lose all the weight, right? So you hit your goal by the time you’re ready to, you know, check out. So nobody needs that. Just interesting, though.

31:40
Jamie
Well, I mean, I think one of the things that we’ve tried to focus on as much as supplementation is included in this is, look, you know, these pharmaceutical. These are chemicals that are made in a lab that your body is not used to seeing all of these pharmaceuticals.

31:55
Kevin
Right.

31:56
Jamie
And so I think one of the things that this perspective has come from is, you know, we use molecules that I like to say are made by God. Okay. You know, I think hormonal replacement needs to be, you know, commonplace everywhere. We haven’t done it for 20 years because of a Stupid study that was done in 2002. You know, hormones, we know their side effects, we know their outcomes. These are molecules that are made by God. They’ve been around since were humans. You know, supplements, vitamins, these are things that your body needs. And so instead of using a chemical that acts on a receptor that your body is not used to seeing, your body’s going to react to that chemical that’s acting on that receptor and it’s going to downregulate that receptor. And so you’re not going to get the effect of it.

32:43
Jamie
This is how you get the second line therapy and the third line therapy and money, more money to be made on pharmaceuticals. And so this is an alternative to that.

32:54
Brad Watts
Yeah, absolutely. The. I will say it this way, right, that there’s a time and a place for, you know, a pharmaceutical intervention. And there’s also a time and a place for making quality decisions every day, right. With what you put in your mouth, what you make your body do during the day, supplementation has the ability to shrink the time that it takes for you to come back from a lot of the issues that people have generated through chronic disease. And that’s all it is, right, Is it’s packaged food, like food products. It’s packaged herbs that have shown to have a specific mechanism of action in the medical literature, and then vitamins and minerals that your body uses as like cofactors, keys to the engine. Right.

33:43
Brad Watts
And ultimately, if you can pair those things together based off of the patterns that you’re presenting and make good decisions, you know, with your food during the day, you’re going to get some form of a result that you can be proud of. And, you know, that’s one of the things that I love so much about this, is the patient stories and just getting the emails that come in, hey, you helped this person do this. You guys were able to, you know, look at this situation, and they didn’t need to have their gut cut out, that type of thing. And it’s like, I like that people I’ve never met but good doctors out in the field that are participating with these patients, changing their lives. And it’s like, well, it puts control back into the patient.

34:25
Jamie
The patient feels like they have control over their own health.

34:28
Brad Watts
Yes. It’s predictable.

34:29
Jamie
Yes.

34:29
Brad Watts
Right. And it makes the doctor feel like a real doctor, like you thought it would feel like when you were going to school.

34:35
Jamie
Right, Right.

34:35
Kevin
Well, I’m saying I’m really big on statistics, and this is something I bring up to most of all our 95% of disease states are inflammatory in nature in some way.

34:44
Brad Watts
Yes.

34:45
Kevin
30 to 50% of the population that is obese is caused by chronic inflammation as the underlying cause. Not that they were fat first. That the chronic inflammation caused them to be fat. Which I think is a huge sigh of relief to our patients because they’re like, it isn’t just me.

35:04
Brad Watts
Right. It’s not a character problem.

35:06
Jamie
Well, metabolic syndrome and inflammation are the same thing. I mean, you know, we talk about autoimmune diseases. Autoimmune diseases are worse when you have metabolic syndrome and there is a connection between your body’s immune system getting revved up inappropriately and having metabolic syndrome. Well, we talk about insulin resistance, obesity, hypertension, hyperlipidemia, and so there’s a connection there. And so even with total body inflammation, what do you do about that? You know, in western medicine, we’re going to give you a. We’re going to give you a medrol dose pack. We’re going to give you high dose of steroids. And what’s that gonna do? Right. And make you feel better for a week or two. Make you a little crazy. You won’t sleep well, but it’s not gonna solve the problem.

35:45
Kevin
Yeah.

35:47
Brad Watts
So in. In this hard stop.

35:52
Jamie
Okay.

35:53
Brad Watts
Got it.

35:55
Kevin
Recording stopped. Everybody log back, we’re gonna sign off, and then we’re gonna.

35:59
Jamie
Yeah.

36:19
Brad Watts
All.

36:29
Jamie
Right. How much longer you want to go with this?

36:33
Kevin
Five, ten minutes max. Okay.

36:35
Jamie
It’s pretty good. Yeah, it’s real good. You think we’re getting the idea across?

36:38
Kevin
I think so. I’m going to try to steer it just a hair bit different.

36:42
Jamie
I’ll keep my mouth shut.

36:43
Kevin
No, it’s okay. You’re doing great. I think we’re doing great together. Okay.

36:46
Jamie
Yeah. You ready?

37:01
Kevin
Four, three, two. There we go.

37:05
Jamie
Now we got it.

37:06
Kevin
One. All right, Dr. Watts. So functional medicine is a different process, but how would a patient know? Let’s take a look at it from the patient’s angle. How do they know if it’s the right choice for them?

37:20
Brad Watts
Yeah. Well, first of all, how do you know your doctor’s participating in functional medicine is then going to measure the condition of your body with three numbers and the three numbers determining what drugs they need to give you? Right?

37:36
Kevin
Right.

37:36
Brad Watts
So doctor has to collect data. Right. Doctor has to collect data. And if they can’t collect data, then there’s no ability to make decisions based off that data as the data you have.

37:50
Kevin
What kind of data are you looking. So if you had. If you had a patient that had no problems with money. And they could spend it to get it, to get the result they’re looking for. What kind of ultimate data are you looking for?

38:04
Brad Watts
Certainly, I’d like to have a comprehensive blood chemistry. Okay. Comprehensive blood chemistry allows you to check all the major systems in the body, often many of the hormones and stuff that’s going on there. But it allows you to take a screen of the patient and. And understand where are the hotspots, what are the patterns showing that I should look deeper into. Sometimes you’ll look at a blood chemistry and you’ll start seeing things that make you think about a gut issue. Well, if you have a gut issue, in my opinion, you probably should have somebody look at your stool sample. How are you gonna know what’s going on with the tissue unless you look at what the tissue’s generating? Right. And so stool testing is a key feature in functional medicine.

38:51
Brad Watts
The one that I’m most excited about right now is tox panels, because the tox panels basically give you the entire script of where your health is headed if you don’t get rid of the driver. And I appreciate those as well. They do a great job. Certainly, there are a bunch of different hormone tests out there that help you assess not only your values, but what is your body using? Why is your body turning down testosterone production? Is it an injury or is it a protective mechanism? If it’s a protective mechanism, cholesterol lower. What is it exactly? If it’s a protective mechanism, what is it protecting you from, is the question. Right. And so you want to be able to assess this information, to put together a narrative. Right.

39:40
Brad Watts
Most people that have a chronic condition have never had a comprehensive diagnosis because they’ve never had comprehensive testing. If you haven’t had comprehensive testing, how’s the doctor supposed to know what to do moving forward? Right. One of the things I appreciate about you guys is you go through the comprehensive testing so that you can have comprehensive treatment plans for a patient. Like, that’s the key right there. What makes you different than any other doctor? You’re willing to look. That’s the difference. Right? You’re willing to look. And that comprehensive treatment that comes out of that is what’s netting you guys results, because you keep pushing in the right direction because the data informs you where to go. So. And that’s. That’s the big thing right there. So.

40:28
Kevin
Well, how do you measure. What are the points that you measure outcomes with for your patients? Is it purely how they feel? Is it how they respond back to therapy? How do you help them I guess manage their expectations of success.

40:44
Brad Watts
Yeah, that’s a really good question. It depends on goals. So I’ll never help a patient that doesn’t have goals. Okay. And if they don’t have goals, that’s what their primary care doctor is for. They’ll continue to give them the subscription prescription plan. And that’s like, that’s fine for you. That’s great. But when you’ve had enough of, you know, being sick and tired, what we want to be able to do is to figure out what our goals, they have to be measurable goals. Like, if somebody is like, hey, Dr. Jamie, I want to lose £180 by next Thursday. That’s not gonna happen. Okay? Like, that’s not a goal that I would agree to. So they have to be reality based. Okay. And they also have to be measurable.

41:28
Brad Watts
So sometimes a patient will be on three or four diabetes medications, blood sugar, you know, blood cholesterol, blood pressure medications, all this stuff. And their goal is to create a scenario where their primary care doctor takes them off of those meds. Well, I like that goal. Right. So how are we going to be able to achieve that? I have to figure out why the doctor gave them all of those meds in the first place. Okay. What’s causing the high sugar, what’s causing the high pressure, what’s causing the high cholesterol. And then I want to address the underlying mechanisms that are driving those, because if we handle those and their numbers start to come down, the last person in the world that wants their patient over medicated is the prescribing physician. All right?

42:14
Brad Watts
So ultimately, they’re the ones that are taking them off of the medications. But the patient has to earn it. They have to be able to demonstrate. Here’s the data that says, here’s where I was when I saw you last January. Here’s where I am today. What’s our plan, doctor? And those doctors love taking those medications down because they’re like, wow, the patient diet, lose weight and exercise, just like I told them to. And, you know, and you got to let them have the win sometimes. So. That’s right.

42:43
Jamie
That’s right.

42:44
Kevin
Well, I guess looking forward, how functional medicine will work, what does the future look like in functional medicine? What things are getting you excited in the next five to 10 years that you think are going to be game changers for yourself and for the patients?

43:01
Brad Watts
Yeah, a couple of things I’m excited about. I think the next 10 years are going to be the golden years of functional medicine, because the demand is getting to the point where there are not enough providers. Right. And that’s my job. You know, that’s one of the things that I’ve set out to do is I want to make a thousand of me, people that I would trust, looking after my own parents. Okay. And you know, making sure that there are quality providers out there that are making decisions that it’s. That are informed on data. So that’s the first thing. The second thing I think that’s going to happen is you’re going to see people come up with new and different blends of herbs. There’s actually an explosion right now of research that’s taking place from a natural care perspective.

43:49
Brad Watts
That’s like the first time in history that anybody’s been able to say that. Right. Because it’s been pharmaceutically dominated for the last 50 years. But there is a lot of institutional based research that’s starting to come out that’s talking about blood pressure, whether it be about, you know, the properties of a beat, okay, that are helping people reverse their blood pressure issues, or whether it be talking about, you know, glutamine and gut problems. Like the research is actually happening now where, you know, 20 years ago people were just, you know, relying on less. How do I want to say this? Less hardcore data, more patient outcomes, as far as like, what decision should I make here? Right. I appreciate that the data is coming out is what I’m trying to say. So that’s the second thing.

44:40
Brad Watts
The third thing is this that as patients continue to call for different solutions, that’s going to put pressure on research organizations and then manufacturing companies and doctors to come up with a way to assimilate those solutions that make sense. Affordability. I think you’re going to see the costs of functional medicine declining as usage goes up. And I think that’s going to be an important piece because at some point when these products which are readily available across the marketplace right now off the Internet, it comes down to the doctor’s ability to apply the right product at the right time with the right food plan in place for the right person. And essentially you’re going to get the doctors that are doing well at that will rise to the top because results speak for themselves ultimately.

45:37
Brad Watts
So I think it’s going to be a good decade coming up here.

45:39
Kevin
That’s what I was about to say. It’s a results driven business. Regardless of the product you’re using. If you can’t trust your provider to be able to manage all those things. You can take all the supplements that you read online or do whatever, and if you don’t get results, well, that’s your own fault. You didn’t have any supervision to help you get there. So, Jamie, you have anything else to add?

46:00
Jamie
I mean, I think this is really exciting. You know, like I said, you know, Western medicine is at its nadir at this point, and so I am looking forward to a time in which we can start to look at things this way. Absolutely. And so I personally, my personal. You know, I guess I would say kick Sadic and Don Quixote. My windmill to tilt is I want to try to have functional outcomes for everyone with obesity. America is an obese nation, and it’s getting worse. We haven’t gotten anywhere, really, with surgery, drugs, even the GLP1s. And we have to look at this from a different perspective. It is a complex problem. It’s interrelated with everything that we’ve been talking about. And my goal is for the next 10 years is to find a way to cure obesity. So.

46:55
Kevin
Well, with that being said, I think we’ve reached kind of an end point here. But I would like to thank our sponsor, Maxgen Labs, who is we. As we discussed earlier, the genetic component of how your body reacts to its environment is important, and Maxgen gives us the ability to see what your propensities can be, and hopefully we can find ways to trigger the right ones and not trigger the bad ones. So with that being said, Dr. Watts, I would love to thank you for being here today. I think it was an amazing trip with you, and that journey is ongoing always. And we’ll probably try to have you back on to get into the weeds a little bit about some of these conditions and things that we can do.

47:32
Kevin
But we’re definitely happy to have you guys in Biogenetics and your thoughtfulness behind that company to inspire us to better practices and clinics.

47:44
Jamie
Thank you so much, Dr. Watts. I really appreciate this.

47:47
Brad Watts
Thank you for having me, you guys. I appreciate it. Anytime.