Welcome to Back from the Abyss.

This is a place for stories of hope and healing, recovery, and redemption.

I'm Dr. Craig Hecock. I went back the other day and listened to Episode 1, Strawberries, which,

if you haven't listened to that, you should all go back and hear it. But what was so crazy

was listening to how I announced the show. Here's what I did.

I did something like this.

Welcome to Back from the Abyss.

I sounded sort of like scared, drugged, somber, sort of haunted.

So I'm actually proud that I'm speaking at a more normal cadence here in season five,

and I'm less nervous. And I'm actually really excited for today. I'm going to introduce our guest

in just a minute, but our guest today is an expert, an amazing physician, and a super dear friend.

But we'll get to that in just a sec. First, I want to start with a listener letter that I got.

Love all the letters that you guys send

emails. This is from Jesse in the Netherlands. I've been seeing a lot of people jump on the

medical keto diet bandwagon recently, especially after Chris Palmer published his book, Brain Energy.

On the one hand, I'm intrigued with his case studies of people with

severe schizophrenia and bipolar one who become practically symptom-free. But I'm also skeptical

with the idea of metabolic dysfunction of the brain as brain cells being presented as the cause

and medical keto as the solution to all serious mental illness. In my opinion, silver bullets

rarely exist, and the diet itself seems unsustainable for the environment, and hard to follow

for multiple other reasons. But then again, it seems to have a really good track record for epilepsy.

What if they're on to something? What implications would that have? So what are your thoughts about

...