Dr. Terry Wahls: When Hope Returns
Good Life Project
Jonathan Fields / Acast
4.5 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 24 April 2017
⏱️ 61 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The earliest signs of Terry Wahls' condition began to surface in med-school. An electric shock of unknown original seemed to randomly radiate across her face. But it would be many more years, deep into her practice as a physician, before additional symptoms would lead to a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis.
Within three years, she found herself largely confined to a tilt-recline wheelchair and was told that her condition had progressed quickly. Function, once lost, she learned, would never come back. Being a doctor, she accepted this and began treatment, the only goal to try to slow the progression. Medication seemed to be failing her. But, in the background, she began to research related conditions and started to focus on the then maverick offshoot known as functional medicine.
What happened over the next few years defied what the entire medical profession thought possible. Developing her own food-based protocol, she was able to not only stop the progression, but regain strength and function. And, along with that, came hope, energy and a sense of mission. In the intervening years, Wahls has now brought her ideas to the world through a viral TED talk, books, trainings, research and is now conducting clinical trials to bring her protocol to more people living with MS, as well as other neurodegenerative conditions.
In this powerful conversation, we explore her journey, the decline in health and ability and acceptance that reversal or recovery was not possible. We dive into the detailed steps and research that uncovered a radically different approach and the deeply emotional moment hope returned and she realized there was a different way. We also talk about how hard it is to bring radical eyes to a very established profession, the difference between hope and false hope and how her experience has shaped the lives of her family as well.
Terry's entire approach is detailed in her book, The Wahls Protocol and her new recipe book, The Wahls Protocol Cooking for Life.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | And I realized that, yeah, I don't know what my future is, but neither does the physicians |
| 0:07.3 | know what knows because the conventional understanding of progressive MS is wrong. |
| 0:12.6 | The conventional understanding is clearly wrong that the functional medicine point of view |
| 0:17.7 | is probably superior. |
| 0:20.2 | Imagine receiving a diagnosis that basically said you have a condition that will see you |
| 0:29.3 | progressively losing function in your body, in your muscles over a period of, we don't |
| 0:36.6 | know, weeks, months, years, and you will never get it back. |
| 0:41.2 | Well, this was the diagnosis that this week's guest, Dr. Terry Walls, got when she was |
| 0:46.5 | told that she had MS and a form of MS that was progressive. |
| 0:51.5 | She was told that as she lost function, this would never come back. |
| 0:55.2 | She started down the road of all of the traditional medical treatments because that was her training. |
| 1:00.3 | She was in fact a physician and a professor and a researcher. |
| 1:04.7 | But she started to get exposed to the world of functional medicine, which looks at nutrition |
| 1:09.8 | and how it affects our body, our brain, our muscles, and our nerves, and especially |
| 1:14.2 | what she began to research was the mitochondria, the, quote, power plants of the cell. |
| 1:19.1 | And through her own approach to supplementation and then natural foods, she began to see a return |
| 1:25.1 | of function that she was told was not possible. |
| 1:28.3 | She shared what she was doing and the entire protocol that she developed, which we now |
| 1:32.5 | know as the Walls Protocol, first in a TED talk that kind of exploded a number of years |
| 1:37.0 | back, then in a book entitled The Walls Protocol. |
| 1:40.8 | And more recently in a cookbook, which actually shares her recipes. |
| 1:45.0 | And I wanted to sit down with her and really talk about her journey, her awakening to a different |
... |
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