Welcome to the doctor's pharmacy. That's FAR MACY. It's Dr. Mark Heimann. This is a place for conversations that matter.

And today we're going to talk about some things that really matter with Dr. Jeffrey Bland, who's not only an extraordinary scientist and innovator and entrepreneur, but a really close friend and my mentor, who literally set me on the path to functional medicine.

I want to just welcome you, Dr. Bland, to the doctor's pharmacy.

Oh, well, just a second. Before we go any farther, Mark, I'd like to just take a moment.

That first of all, thank you very much. That was a very gracious introduction. But actually the most important thing for me, the most important thing.

And I want to emphasize that between you and me, was your recognition of you being mentored by me. There is nothing that is more gracious, nor for me,

I'm very impactful than you to say that, because as a leader of our field and a person who I have such great respect for in your clinical wisdom and the people around the world, we're literally millions of people that you've helped with your work and your teachings.

It's obviously to be given some attribution as part of your learning curve is a very high level of flattery. So thank you very, very much.

And that is, yeah, without you, I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing. I had this incredible unfortunate experience over 20 years ago of being very sick. And I didn't know why.

And I had this mystery chronic illness, chronic fatigue. My gut wasn't working. My brain wasn't working. My immune system was going crazy with rashes and sores all over.

I was in complete breakdown and had no idea what to do. And a colleague of mine at Canyon Ranch at the time, Kathy Swift, dragged me to your lecture, I was 1997, over 20 years ago. And I listened to you. And I was like, the paradigm was so different.

And I thought, wow, this guy's a genius or he's crazy. And I need to figure out which one because if he's right, then everything I learned about medicine is challenged. And I, I voted to myself, my patients to do this. And I started to try on these concepts and just to apply them in the practice with the patients I saw. And I saw amazing things that I would never have believed. I saw someone with an autoimmune disease. It's been six and she's nine years old. She was 30.

She was on disability. And within like a few weeks, she was completely recovered. I'm like, wow, this is amazing. Just by changing her diet and a few simple things that we did. And so I began to try this on myself. And it was really through that learning process that I began to realize that there was something here and that it was the best kept secret in medicine and science. And that there weren't really many people thinking about it. And I actually thought, oh, this is a great big field. Everybody's doing this. This is so awesome. And I looked around and there was like a couple of guys who were doing this.

Like Dr. Baker and Dr. Gallen. And I would like literally go sit at their feet and I listened to every talk you gave. And I literally followed you around and just soaked it in like a sponge. And through that process, I really began to understand not just my patients, but through my own biology, how functional medicine works. And what was really fascinating to me was that your ability. And this is I think really unique to you is you have this incredible, syncretic mind. You can synthesize enormous amounts of data across the world.

You can synthesize the data across all sorts of disciplines. And you read across disciplines, which most people don't. The neurologist read the neurology literature. The cardiologist read the cardiology literature. But you're reading everything. And you're seeing patterns in the data that no one else has seen. And decades and decades before anybody's talking about these ideas, you're bringing them to us. And then we're trying them. And they're working. Things like insulin resistance or talking about inflammation or leaky gut, which we used to be laughed at for talking about dysbiosis.

And here in major medical conferences, a gastroenterology, which was again, a quack term. You talked about omega-3 fast. You talked about heavy metals and environmental toxins about mitochondria. These are all now these emerging concepts. Bill Gates just gave $50 million to the Dementia Discovery Fund to fund inflammation research and mitochondria research in dementia, which noted what we're talking about. So how do you, how do you kind of do this? How do you kind of create this in your mind, these connections? And how did you come up with these discoveries?

Well, thank you. That was very, very gracious. And, you know, I'm part of this remarkable community of which you're a central member of which is this functional medicine community of really motivated techno prisoners, self learners, which is a perfect environment for me, obviously, because of the way that I think about things.

But if I was to go back to the origin of how I got here, you know, each person has their central features that they've been motivated by or been instructed by or they've wanted to model after. And I've been very, very fortunate to just be lucky to be in places to meet the right kind of people that stimulated me. So I could even go back to, you know, high school with, I just had fortunately had two great science teachers that saw something in me.

They got me summer jobs, you know, that I was able to work with other people in the in the medical and nutrition industry in summer jobs. And then later when I was an undergraduate, I happened to have an undergraduate thesis advisor who went to Nobel Prize in chemistry.

Oh, that Dr. Rowan, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on the free on effect on the ozone layer. And so it was very caught me into the whole environmental area through chemistry.

And then I of course went on from there to meet Dr. Pauling took chemistry courses from him. And then later as a assistant professor invited him to a lecture at our university. And we became then colleagues and friends, which then got me a sabbatical couple of years with him, where my office was right next to his. And so I had a chance to not just know him as a scientist, but knowing he and his wife have a hell in his people that were extraordinarily important in my learning about the broader way of thinking about the way of things.

The way we apply information because infom you know the actual facts that we learn can be looked up. It's the context by how we learn them and how we connect them to other things. And that's really what I learned from the Paulings, they were great examples. I mean what I learned was this concept of structure and function that could apply at every level.

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