Dr. Matt Cook:
My feeling on this is interesting, is that everything that works for pre-COVID and everything that works for treating acute COVID, works for the long haulers.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Exactly right.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Welcome to The Doctor’s Farmacy, I’m Dr. Mark Hyman and that’s Farmacy with an F. F-A-R-M-A-C-Y, a place for conversations that matter and today’s conversation that matters and it should matter to a lot of people because it’s about how to deal with problems that no one else can fix in your health. Dilemmas, we call them.
Dr. Matt Cook:
Dilemmas.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
And my guest today is none other than Dr. Matt Cook, who is an extraordinary human and physician, who’s my doctor and I’m very picky, who’s helped me with many of my chronic issues with my back which we’re going to talk about in a little bit. Matt is an extraordinary doctor, he went to University of Washington med school, UCSF residency, he’s trained in anesthesiology, he’s board certified, he’s also trained in functional medicine but he’s kind of a one of a kind dude who practices an integration of many different modalities and approaches that’s designed to regenerate and create human health through science that is emerging, that is not really applied really that many places and Matt has really synthesized an enormous amount of information from all sorts of disciplines, Eastern, Western, traditional medicine, functional medicine, regenerative medicine, and has put together an approach that I think is one of the most groundbreaking approaches to health that I’ve ever seen, including what I do in functional medicine. So I’m sort of in awe of this guy and I’m so happy to have him on the podcast today. So welcome, Matt.
Dr. Matt Cook:
Hey, I’m so delighted to be here.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Okay, so you’re a traditionally trained doctor-
Dr. Matt Cook:
Yeah.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
You went to medical school, you trained in anesthesia, you worked a lot with pain stuff, but what got you into this field of regenerative and functional medicine? We’re going to define regenerative in a minute but what led you to change from your traditional training into what you’re doing now?
Dr. Matt Cook:
Yes it’s like the question of my life and I think everybody in the whole world that’s in traditional medicine is kind of thinking about trying to do it and they’re asking how you can do it and I remember when I was in medical school, somebody said you’re going to work your way into a box somewhere and a lot of times you’ll end up pigeonholed in that box and you got to find the truth at some point in your career and if you can, you want to follow that truth and just figure out what it is because the truth of medicine is going to change over time so then basically, from the beginning of my practice I was searching for the truth and relatively early on, I started to get insights, like insights into traditional Chinese medicine, insights into yoga and Ayurveda.
Dr. Matt Cook:
We had a very similar sort of journey and circuitous path through those things and then the whole time I was doing like ultrasound guided nerve blocks while I was working as an anesthesiologist, and then kind of the lights went off in my head six or seven years ago when I started to realize oh, you can start to put them together and I got kind of famous for doing injections but I had been doing functional medicine the whole time and I was kind of wondering which one was going to pop and which one I would end up being kind of known as doing and then I kind of came to this realization, which we were talking about sort of in the clinic earlier, that a lot of people that have straight up musculoskeletal things have an immune or a more complex-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Systemic issue.
Dr. Matt Cook:
Systemic issue and vice versa. So then I started really putting that together and so I kind of feel like we get a little bit better every day.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
That’s so true.
Dr. Matt Cook:
It’s amazing.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
So what is regenerative medicine? I mean we talk about functional medicine which is a systems approach to addressing chronic illness. It looks at the body as an integrated dynamic system and that health is really about creating balance in these systems. It’s not really about treating disease, per se. You have now kind of combined that with an approach called regenerative medicine which I see as really more or less the same thing but more dealing with some of our structural, biomechanical issues and pain. So talk about what is regenerative medicine?
Dr. Matt Cook:
Okay so that’s a good one, I’ve never thought of defining it like that but I would define it exactly how you said. It’s a systems approach to musculoskeletal medicine and so then we’re looking either from outside all the way in or from inside all the way out, so we’re looking at from the level of the bone marrow to the joint capsule, the meniscus, the fascia that affects how kinetic force moves through the body, nerves, ligaments and tendons, and sort of looking to see are there any problems at any of those levels? Is there a systemic problem? Then trying to figure out strategically what our targets are in terms of where problems are and then having a thoughtful approach to addressing any one of those problems with a product that has a potential to hopefully heal those tissues, whether that be a tendon or a nerve or a joint.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah, so I want to talk about some of these products because in traditional medicine, we use drugs, right? We even inject drugs, we inject anesthetics or nerve blocks, we inject steroids but there are all sorts of healing factors in the body. The body has its own healing system which is why if you cut your skin, it’ll heal, right? But we don’t tend to think of how do we activate those systems, in our training. We never learned that in medical school.
Dr. Matt Cook:
Right, no.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
And a lot of what you do is using various substances that are natural substances, things that are found in the body but in concentrated ways to help restore function and to help regenerate tissue, to help rebuild and restore. You’re not just removing a part or cutting something out or moving a disc, you’re actually helping the body’s own innate system activate.
Dr. Matt Cook:
Right.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
And it’s so brilliant and it’s so common sense and it has no side effects, right? It has the potential to really bring people back from real challenges and I just want to take a minute to tell my story and then I want you to sort of talk about what you found and what you did from your perspective and explain how you approached these problems because you know, I had back surgery when I was 32 from a ruptured disc. It created a chronic problem for me, I had weakness in my leg and ended up doing pretty well, rehabbed for many, many, many years and then over the last 10 years its starting to degenerate my back and I can feel it aching a little bit and causing different issues and I’ve tried a lot of different therapies, I tried injections with steroids, I’ve tried radiofrequency ablation where they cut the nerves, I’ve tried even stem cell injections, I tried acupuncture, massage, I mean everything helps a little for a little while but nothing really took it away.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
I came to see you about eight months ago, before COVID and I was sort of at the end of my rope and I was willing to try anything and I flew out to see you and you did a whole series of extraordinary treatments that had never been done, things I hadn’t really heard about, they used various things like growth factors and they used various kinds of placental tissues and used various kinds of things that the body has to actually help regenerate and heal so talk about how you approach these chronic problems that are pain issues, back issues, neck issues, joint issues that are really plaguing so many Americans but they’re suffering from them and we see these narcotic addictions and we see these pain clinics that do help people, but somehow they’re not really getting to the root of the problem.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
So talk about, like for example with me, what did you find, what did you do, how did you see it differently? It was like going to like a magician and it was like a magic trick and I remember laying there, getting on in pain and getting up completely out of pain and there were no drugs and there was no anesthetics. I don’t even know how that could happen, right?
Dr. Matt Cook:
No, it’s kind of crazy. So force is moving through the body and so if force moves through the body as a wave, but then energy moves through the body and force moves through the body in the same kind of channels like where meridians and stuff like that are, but when it moves through the body I like to think of part of the force moving through the bones and then part of moving through the ligaments and tendons and the fascia. So it’s kind of… my analogy is it’s kind of like the Golden Gate Bridge, part of the force is going through those pylons right down into the ocean but part of the force is going through the suspension cables so we’re part suspension and we’re part bone to bone to bone.
Dr. Matt Cook:
So then what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to do a look and I’m doing both a physical exam and a movement exam and a neurological exam and then an X-ray exam with MRI and stuff like that but then most importantly I use ultrasound and I look at all of those structures-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
You’re literally looking with an ultrasound machine at my muscles and tendons and ligaments and nerves and bone and it’s just incredible.
Dr. Matt Cook:
And trying to diagnose what’s going on. So this is kind of a crazy thing, but in the back the spine is made up of a disc and a vertebrae in the front and then two little facet joints in the back so force is moving through there and think of half of the force moving through the front of the spine and then half the force moving through the back of the spine. It’s real common for people to get arthritis in the facet joints-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Which I have, terribly.
Dr. Matt Cook:
Which you had, so then my people, I can talk about this… the anesthesia pain people of the world, our philosophical approach has always been to go, uh oh, somebody’s got pain, if they’ve got pain in that facet joint, let’s see if we couldn’t stick a needle in and numb that joint up and make it not hurt. So turns out and sure enough, there’s a nerve called the medial branch and if you stick in a needle and numb that up, next thing you know the pain goes away. So then let’s say you do that and you go, God this poor guy’s facet joint is causing pain, then the anesthesia world what we say is let’s try to turn the inflammation off in that joint and so then they probably went in and put some steroids in there but then the other thing they will do if that starts to fail is they’ll say let’s just kill that nerve. If they kill that nerve-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Like when I had radiofrequency ablation.
Dr. Matt Cook:
That’s the radiofrequency ablation. So they stick a needle in-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
They zap it.
Dr. Matt Cook:
And then they turn the temperature way up hot and get it super hot and the nerve kind of dies. Turns out, it doesn’t totally die but it kind of dies for a year. So then all of a sudden the pain goes away but now for the next year you’re walking around and that nerve that is controlling how force goes through the back part-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
The muscles and everything.
Dr. Matt Cook:
Is not working because it’s off, so then that can’t do its job and it leads there to be a little anterior sliding that pinches the nerves coming out but then the other thing that happens is, there’s no electrical supply which means there’s no electrical supply to the deep spinal muscles that we call the paraspinal muscles that are kind of like the cables on the Golden Gate Bridge that need to hold everything together. So what people get, the way that you know if they did a good job on radiofrequency ablation is that you end up getting something called fat atrophy of your spine muscles.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
That’s what I got.
Dr. Matt Cook:
That’s what you got.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
That’s what I got, so they did a good job but they made my muscles week and what did you use in my back?
Dr. Matt Cook:
So then I did a couple things. One thing I did was I did an epidural with a growth factor epidural that is-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
So basically human compounds that are designed to repair and heal, that are antiinflammatory that helps repair tissues.
Dr. Matt Cook:
Yeah [inaudible 00:12:32] and placental compound, it was like an exosome product but they tend to be very antiinflammatory but the primary thing that I used for you is something called placental matrix and so basically it’s a lot of growth factors that come from the placenta and it’s placental tissue but it’s got a lot of collagen and it’s extremely antiinflammatory and so I treated your facet joints, I treated your muscles, I treated the fascia where all of the nerves are in the deep kind of spine and I treated the transverse process where basically the iliolumbar ligaments are that help stabilize your whole spine.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
That’s a lot of Greek for people, but essentially it’s all the ligaments and muscles that go up your back.
Dr. Matt Cook:
All the ligaments and muscles that stabilize everything.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah.
Dr. Matt Cook:
Yeah and then one that happens-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Or is it Latin? Maybe it was Latin.
Dr. Matt Cook:
Maybe it was Latin but basically imagine now those ligaments, those cables on the Golden Gate Bridge of your back kind of regain structural integrity and then force was able to flow through there.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
So basically provides all these reparative factors, placental compounds, growth factors, and even ozone that are designed to repair and stimulate healing and it was amazing to me that really for the first time in almost a decade, was mostly pain free for a long, long time and I’ve recently come back because I had a disc problem and had back surgery and had a complication that you’re helping me with but it’s really the same thing, I just notice so much improvement so quickly and from things that usually traditional medicine doesn’t do really great with.
Dr. Matt Cook:
Right.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
You know we were talking a little bit earlier and you treat people who come from all over the world with challenging problems, I used to joke because I worked at a health resort called Canyon Ranch that I was a resort doctor, I’m the doctor of last resort in functional medicine and someone said, “You’re a dilemma doctor, you have a dilemma clinic and you take care of all the people with dilemmas,” and I think that’s what we do. We take care of all the problems that no one else can figure out or fix after everybody’s tried everything else and it’s unfortunate that medicine is like that but hopefully the things that we’re doing will start to disseminate and spread and I know you’re teaching a lot and training people and we train people through the Institute for Functional Medicine and we’re really an incredible effort to make this more mainstream like what we’re doing at Cleveland Clinic but what also is really important people understand is that if you have a musculoskeletal problem or any problem, you can’t just treat that problem.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
We were talking about earlier, if you have a joint problem, you’ve got to treat the whole system and I don’t know if you remember in surgery when we did surgical rotations we had some pretty snarky surgeons and they had a pretty nasty term they would refer to certain patients as when they were doing operations when the tissue was so bad because you would sew the tissue and the thread would basically kind of pull through, it wouldn’t hold and we called it PPP, right? Remember what that is? Piss Poor Protoplasm. Piss Poor Protoplasm.
Dr. Matt Cook:
Oh yeah. Yeah. That was the term everybody used.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
And it was a term, like why do you have piss poor protoplasm? Which means your tissues are just crappy so it’s not like you just like look maybe unhealthy on the outside, but on the inside you’re unhealthy and your tissues are inflamed, the structural materials aren’t good, your nutritional levels are low, so you’re basically, the materials which you are made from are suboptimal, right? If you’re eating crap you’re going to be made from crap. You are what you eat and if you’re eating junk food your body is going to be kind of junky. So what we talked about earlier was this idea that’s so central to what you do, is you don’t just treat the back or the joint, you get people healthy overall through diet, lifestyle, other interventions, supplements, using functional medicine.
Dr. Matt Cook:
And you know, I’ve never told you this, but I’m kind of emotional thinking about it because you’re one of my inspirations-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Oh I am?
Dr. Matt Cook:
No this is hilarious because I was an anesthesiologist, like I was the kid that nobody knew and so I was going to functional medicine meetings and I was going to IFM meetings-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Oh so-
Dr. Matt Cook:
That’s how I know Patrick and all these people so I saw you there and then I was dreaming of being you but then what happened is I would go back to the surgery center and then I would get people who were those difficult type of cases and because I was the medical director, what would happen is I’d have them come back and I’d sit from 4:00 to 7:00 at night going through these cases and that’s kind of how I first started doing it.
Dr. Matt Cook:
I started realizing, because the surgeons are not really thinking like internal medicine people and so that’s when it sort of hit me, it’s like oh this is a really big problem and a lot of people need this and if you can start to apply systems- based-thinking then people are going to do way better and it’s just kind of trying to talk people into slowing down a little bit and taking a broader assessment and then a lot of times if you start to fix that and that’s what I learned with, for example, think about a knee. Some people, they just have a joint problem or some people they may just have bone on bone and it may be nothing else but a lot of people that have knee pain have a component of nerve pain and when I started doing a lot of orthopedic medicine, a lot of sports medicine, I started realizing oh there’s some people that it’s much more complex. It’s not just this and I loved what you said because this is my favorite thing, a lot of times you start to do functional medicine and then all of the sudden that inflammation goes away and so then all of a sudden, sometimes the knee pain goes away before I get a chance to treat it.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Of course, right, right.
Dr. Matt Cook:
Yeah.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah I think that’s so key to understand for people is that if you have arthritis or you have other joint issues, it may be a systemic problem it may not just be a a biomechanical issue so for me, I think I’ve got a lot of biomechanical issues but there probably maybe is some underlying systemic inflammation I don’t know. I mean I’ve had Lyme disease but I do have a pretty crumbly structure of my back because of the back surgery but I think for a lot of people, if you haven’t addressed your diet, if you haven’t addressed sleep, if you haven’t addressed your gut health, if you haven’t made sure your nutritional levels are optimized, your hormones are balanced, your detoxification system is working, if you haven’t optimized your mitochondria which is what we do in functional medicine, then it’s much harder to get better and it’s much faster to heal if you optimize these different things, whatever the problem you’re suffering from.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
So in your clinic, which is an incredible clinic, BioReset Medical, I mean I’m just in awe of what you’ve done there. You have an incredible team of people, you take care of people of all sorts of complex problems, your staff is amazing, and you really have created a model where you’re doing both. So you’re doing all of the procedures and the interventions and the injections and the treatments for people but you’re also taking care of their underlying biology with a whole team of providers that is helping to actually accelerate your results. You said the other day, you have people get better three times faster if they take care of their overall health while they’re trying to take care of their mechanical problems.
Dr. Matt Cook:
And you know, we were talking about this, this is my personal COVID blessing that I think from a certain perspective, all the rules changed and from a certain perspective, I’ve kind of said to myself well I’m out, I’m treating people, I’m getting exposed and so I just completely took… like I’m doing everything that you say to do now and I feel better than I honestly ever felt in my life and I noticed I’m talking to people, like I was talking to this friend of mine, a new patient who I really love and he was like, “Oh well I stopped at In-N-Out Burger on the way in,” and so then I said, “Guess what? You’re never eating at In-N-Out Burger the rest of your life.” I go, “This is COVID, this is a new game,” and he goes, “Okay, that’s awesome.” He goes, “I like that, I’ll do it.” And then he did and then he lost like 20 pounds and he looks totally fantastic.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Amazing.
Dr. Matt Cook:
And then all of these things went away and so then I’ve actually been like leaning into this because I feel like now I have a little moment to say, do what Mark says.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah.
Dr. Matt Cook:
Follow this thing and I feel like it’s totally working.
Speaker 3:
Hi everyone, hope you’re enjoying the episode. Before we continue, we have a quick message from Dr. Mark Hyman about his new company Farmacy and their first product, the 10 Day Reset.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Hey it’s Dr. Hyman. Do you have FLC? What’s FLC? It’s when you feel like crap, it’s a problem that so many people suffer from and often have no idea that it’s not normal or that you can fix it. I mean you know the feeling, it’s when you’re super sluggish, your digestion is off, you can’t think clearly, or you have brain fog, or you just feel run down. Can you relate? I know most people can but the real question is what the heck do we do about it?
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Well I hate to break the news but there’s no magic bullet. FLC isn’t caused by one single thing so there’s not one single solution. However, there is a systems-based approach. A way to tackle the multiple root factors that contribute to FLC and I call that system the 10 Day Reset. The 10 Day Reset combines food, key lifestyle habits, and targeted supplements to address FLC straight on. It’s a protocol that I’ve used with thousands of my community members to help them get their health back on track. It’s not a magic bullet, it’s not a quick fix, it’s a system that works. If you want to learn more and get your health back on track, click on the button below or visit getfarmacy.com, that’s get, Farmcy with an F, F-A-R-M-A-C-Y, dot com.
Speaker 3:
Now back to this week’s episode.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Let’s talk about COVID because it’s not only you’re treating all these biomechanical issues and other people’s chronic problems like Lyme and mold and so forth, but you’re also really working very much in the trenches with patients with COVID and you’re treating them when they have COVID, you’re treating them afterwards and you’re seeing pretty extraordinary results. I remember very early on we talked and you spent a lot of time looking at the science and the research of what could potentially help, obviously no trials on anything for COVID, right? So we have to sort of go on what works for viruses, what works for the immune function, what works to optimize peoples’ health, what likely would work and you came up with a whole approach which was really robust which is actually very similar to what I came to independent of you about what to do to these people and you’ve been doing it.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
So first, let’s talk about why it’s more important than ever to be healthy and focus on your health rather than just eating Doritos and having Dunkin Donuts every day because you’re depressed and you want to binge eat and why that’s so bad in COVID and two, why it’s more important than ever to actually focus on optimizing your health in the face of COVID and not just sort of going to all that and then we’ll get into some of the details of what you’re doing.
Dr. Matt Cook:
So that’s a totally fantastic question and it’s the question of our lives and what functional medicine is a systems approach to approaching inflammation and lowering it which is why, in a way, we were kind of designed for being ready to help people not just with the initial segment of COVID but with the longterm aspect of it. What happens is that COVID can come into the body and bind onto cells and when it does that, it creates inflammation and potentiates inflammation that may or may not already be there.
Dr. Matt Cook:
It can do that in your airway, it can do it in your brain, it can do it in your lungs, it can do it in your heart, it can do it in your kidneys and it can do it in your gut and from a systems perspective, everywhere in the body we’re trying to do things to address all of those areas and optimize them and COVID can lead to inflammation and sometimes it can lead to run away inflammation and my experience taking care of people is, when the run away inflammation happens, I think it’s kind of like what you say, their system was already pre-wired to just go into inflammation so they’re at higher risk for it but people who have systems problems, people that have sleep apnea, people that have obesity, people that have heart and lung problems, they just don’t have that much capacity to accept that much stress on their body.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah, right.
Dr. Matt Cook:
So then they just go down way quicker.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Like a sitting duck, right?
Dr. Matt Cook:
Yeah.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
And I think we see in this country that the people who are dying are the people who are overweight, not even obese, two and a half times more likely to get sick or die. If you’re obese you’re 12 times more likely to get sick or die, if you have heart disease or diabetes or you’re older or have high blood pressure, again you’re more likely to get hospitalized and die and all these conditions are disease of inflammation. They’re driven by our lifestyle, they’re driven by diet, they’re driven by chronic stress and nutritional factors and toxins and all these things that we deal with so when you’ve been approaching these COVID patients, both in prevention as well as treating them and you’re one of the very few doctors who’s using these approaches to treat COVID patients and you’re seeing pretty remarkable results. Can you share a little bit about what that is that you do and how you think about approaching these patients and what you’re seeing in these patients’ results?
Dr. Matt Cook:
Yeah, so the first thing that I’m doing is taking that systems approach and trying to understand everything. Understand all the rules of the game and what’s happening and kind of use that as the framework for my strategy. Then the second thing is, is I either have people who are remote and not around here or people who are here. For the remote people, then what I’m doing is I’m coaching them about things that they can take from a supplement perspective and I think there’s a lot that you can do from a supplement perspective that almost everybody at this point knows about. So there’s things like vitamin C, Glutathione, Quercetin, and there’s all of these-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Vitamin D, I mean there’s a study that it reduced ICU admissions by 95% if your vitamin D levels were adequate and 80% of Americans don’t have adequate vitamin D levels.
Dr. Matt Cook:
Exactly.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
That’s pennies a day and easy to do and there’s no side effects.
Dr. Matt Cook:
And vitamin D, you got to give them a pretty high dose. What dose are you giving people?
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Really, I focus on the lab value right. So it should be between 45 to 65 or 70 ideally and to get that you usually need about 3000-5000 units a day per person and if they’re very sick they were giving them 30,000 units a day.
Dr. Matt Cook:
Exactly and so then you can give somebody 30,000 to 50,000 units a day if they’re real sick while they just got it while you’re trying to support them and then relatively quickly, after three or four days I’m going to come down to 5,000 or 10,000 units a day and I think vitamin D is super important, so we’re giving people supplements that they can take by mouth so that you can swallow, the other thing that I’m doing that’s real important and I’m convinced that this is at least somewhat helpful is is that we’re doing a lot of nebulizing protocols with people.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah, talk about what is nebulizing?
Dr. Matt Cook:
So people have probably heard of asthma and a lot of patients that have asthma have a little machine, it’s a little box, and it blows air through some plastic disposable tubing and you can put a medication in there and it blows air so fast that it atomizes it and turns it into a mist so for people that have like asthma, then if you put albuterol or other medications in there, it mists it and by turning that thing into a mist, you can breathe it all the way in and it spreads everywhere in the lungs.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
That’s a good thing.
Dr. Matt Cook:
That’s a very good thing.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
And what are you using to help people breathe?
Dr. Matt Cook:
So what I’ve been using is I’ve been using a lot of Glutathione and Glutathione is like one of the best antioxidants in the body and it helps at lowering that inflammation all over in the lungs and so I’ve had a lot of people tell me I was going to go to the hospital but then I did the nebulizing treatment that you gave me and I got through that night and I had to do that two nights and I nebulized two or three times over the night but then I didn’t have to go to the hospital and then I was fine.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah, amazing. Yeah there have been studies where they’ve actually done even injecting Glutathione and seeing very impressive results.
Dr. Matt Cook:
Right.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
So there’s a lot of treatments that you’re not getting air play, you’re hearing about hydroxychloroquine and Remdesivir and Dexamethasone and all these new drugs and those are marginally effective and they have significant side effects and they often cost a ton, where the things we’re talking about are relatively inexpensive.
Dr. Matt Cook:
Yeah-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
And very effective and have no side effects.
Dr. Matt Cook:
Right, right. So then also colloidal sulfur is a great thing to nebulize and then we also have a protocol where I’ll use hypertonic sea minerals and that will increase the pH of the mucosa and seems to be helpful both for a lot of the upper respiratory symptoms but also the pulmonary symptoms and so then if we go back to kind of the theme of our conversation of the systems approach, then I’m actually pro, like I have a patient in the hospital and so they’re giving him Remdesivir but then I’d really like to be in a situation because this person was really benefiting from the nebulizing and so we’d like to really have them nebulizing also, the only problem with that nebulizing is all of these particles are spreading around and so we try not to have people do that when they’re exposed to anyone else so we do our nebulizing strategies but we have people do it in their home, in a room that nobody else is going in, or outside.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Right, yeah. Powerful. So you’re also using other treatments when people come in who are sick. You’re using intravenous treatments, right?
Dr. Matt Cook:
Yeah.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
And you’re using ozone and other kinds of things like that.
Dr. Matt Cook:
Yeah so I’m using ozone and we’re putting that together as part of a clinical trial similar to what you’re doing so that we can gather results.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah we have now, a group of us have put forth an investigational new drug application we’re calling IND to the FDA, Food and Drug Administration, to get approval for doing a study and they’re doing a lot of this in Europe and they’re seeing incredible results in Europe and I encourage people to look online and actually find some of the data, we’ll put it in the show notes but there’s a lot of published case series, there’s a number of randomized trials going on in Europe and then there’s a lot of potential for how this can work to help to address the immune system, address inflammation, address some of the coagulation issues, the clotting issues that people have so there’s a lot of benefits and I’m really curious to hear what your experience with this is. I mean this isn’t proven yet, it needs to be proven-
Dr. Matt Cook:
Yeah it needs to be proven.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
But people are trying different things and you’re seeing things happen.
Dr. Matt Cook:
If someone that I cared about had COVID, that would be I think the most important thing to do but I treated one kid, a friend of mine’s kid, who came in, couldn’t smell, couldn’t walk up the stairs to my office. At the end of the treatment, he could smell totally fine. I asked him if he could smell, he said yes, I said, “Can you smell?” He said, “Do you have a lemon in your office,” I go, “Probably.” And I did and he was like, “Yeah I smell perfect.”
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Wow.
Dr. Matt Cook:
Then he basically was fine ever sine then and so that goes to show you, you have a young healthy kid that’s really bad and they get better pretty quickly whereas these complex things-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
If they’re already pre-inflamed and older and have struggles.
Dr. Matt Cook:
But on the ozone front, high dose ozone therapy I think is the greatest thing. Ozone dialysis is even better and I think definitely works better but there are a lot of techniques like [inaudible 00:32:26] hemotherapy where you can-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
There are simpler techniques than the ozone and those are the ones they’re using in Europe with an incredible effect.
Dr. Matt Cook:
Yeah and I teach that and if people want to come to my office, I have doctors almost every day in the office and I teach that technique and I think that that is a game changing technique. On the ozone front, you can do ozone water which I think you can drink ozone water-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Doesn’t that ruin your microbiome?
Dr. Matt Cook:
I don’t think ozone water really affects the microbiome too much because it’s all getting absorbed in your small intestine where you’re not supposed to have any bacteria anyways but the rectal ozone I think can affect it. If I had COVID, I would do rectal ozone just because I would be-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
And that’s something anybody can do at home.
Dr. Matt Cook:
Definitely, if they have an ozone generator but then the other thing that I think is… if ozone was number one, the problem with ozone is you got to have a doctor that knows how to do it and they need to be taught and we just haven’t been able to scale that but there’s another field in medicine that is probably near and dear to my heart for about a hundred different reasons because it’s amazing for pain management and I use that a lot with injections, is peptide therapy.
Dr. Matt Cook:
We have little tiny peptides that are floating around in our body-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Peptides.
Dr. Matt Cook:
Our body makes proteins that do stuff and if a protein is a big protein, it’s called a protein. If a protein is a little baby protein, it’s called a peptide.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
It’s amino acid strung together but not as many as an actual protein.
Dr. Matt Cook:
Not too many. So then the most famous peptide is insulin. Insulin is a peptide so 30 million people inject themselves with peptides every day in North America but it turns out that there’s a couple peptides that come from your thymus gland and they help your white blood cells kill bacteria-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
And your thymus gland is basically the gland that is your immune organ.
Dr. Matt Cook:
Yeah.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Right.
Dr. Matt Cook:
Yeah.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
In your body.
Dr. Matt Cook:
So then these peptides, and I’m working with a whole bunch of different ones but they help your white blood cells fight bacteria, they help your white blood cells fight viruses, make antibodies, they help your gamma delta T cells kill viruses-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Those are your white blood cells.
Dr. Matt Cook:
These are white blood cells. So there’s a host of things that the peptides do to regular and kind of harmonize how your immune system works and what I’ve seen is-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
These aren’t drugs that just have one function, they’re multifunctional substances that help to regulate the body’s own healing systems. This is a really central point I want to make because this is how functional medicine works, it’s what regenerative medicine is, it’s what you’re talking about is not these single drug with a single action, a single outcome for a single disease, it’s understanding the body is this complex, dynamic, adaptive system and in order to actually optimize our health, we need to provide these compounds whether it’s a nutrient like vitamin D that has hundreds and hundreds of different actions or whether it’s peptides or it’s exosomes or whether it’s placental matrix that are these kind of intelligent substances that know what to do in the body, that the body is already familiar with, that it can use to actually repair and heal in ways that traditional medicine can’t and it’s such a brilliant approach, Matt, that you’ve created. So keep going about the peptides, I just wanted to sort of frame it a little bit.
Dr. Matt Cook:
Yeah so that’s super important, regulation is everything. Regulation is everything and so what we’re doing with the peptides, stem cells do the same thing. They regulate your immune system and we have stem cells in our body that are regulating the immune system and so if we put peptides in, it’ll help our stem cells regulate. If we put stem cells in, it will help the peptides that are in our body, regulate. So then we’re creating sort of a harmonious symphony of our biology and trying to hack and kind of tweak that and so I always tell people, I think of myself, if I was going to give myself a compliment, I would say that I’m a McKinsey consultant for the human body.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
I love that. A systems analyst.
Dr. Matt Cook:
Yeah, kind of trying-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Love that.
Dr. Matt Cook:
Trying to think of-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Now for those that don’t know what McKinsey is, it’s probably one of the top consulting firms and business analytic firms and looks at systems and governments and businesses, it’s a very impressive way that they put together a story of what’s actually happening for any group, organization, or government or business.
Dr. Matt Cook:
I went through their application process to work for them.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Oh you did?
Dr. Matt Cook:
But I had to make a decision because they said you’re going to lose your clinical skills if you do this and I couldn’t walk away from medicine because I loved it so much but maybe that might have been one of the most important things that I ever did because it opened my eyes to… I was talking to these senior level guys and they were super wise and thoughtful, kind of like a lot of the people that we know, who can think like you think. Like you just sit down, you walk around in the clinic and immediately see what’s wrong and how to fix it. I was like oh my God. I would actually hire you to be my consultant.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
No I was pretty impressed. So one of the things I want to talk about in addition to the things you’re treating COVID with is this phenomena that we’re seeing which is increasingly disturbing to me as a physician is this post-COVID syndrome. So when you look now, you’ve got six million Americans, seven million Americans, we’re going to have how many Americans have had COVID, probably two, three, four, five maybe 10 times that so maybe it’s 50 million? 30 million? And this phenomena of people getting COVID and then not fully recovering. It’s not like you get the flu, you’re sick for two weeks and you bounce back and you’re fine. This is a long term thing and today I just read an article in the New England Journal of Medicine that terrified me which was of elite athletes who got COVID-
Dr. Matt Cook:
Yeah I saw that.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Who have persistent inflammation in their heart muscle afterwards that reduces their longevity and increases their risk of all sorts of problems, decreases their performance, I mean you’re talking not some old person with diabetes, you’re talking about an elite, professional athlete. So this post-COVID thing is a real problem and there is currently really not that much science being done on it. There’s some descriptive stuff being done, there’s not much thinking as I can tell except for people like you and I about actually how do we approach this, how do we start to think about helping these patients. If you have COVID, should be on a protocol afterwards so you don’t get the post-COVID syndrome. If you do have post-COVID and you don’t get better and you’re sick for months and months even after you’re quote, “not infectious,” what’s that about? So what is this post-COVID syndrome, what are the symptoms, and what can we do about it?
Dr. Matt Cook:
This is the defining question of our lives that we’re going to face. This is like the defining thing that I think we will be facing for the next 10, 15, 20 years which is going to be the bulk of our clinical experience.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
I mean just before you go on, I just want to give you a quick statistics, SARS which was the other virus that was a coronavirus that killed people very quickly, the people who survived, 40% of them had chronic fatigue at three years.
Dr. Matt Cook:
Right and a lot of them have PTSD also.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
87% of people who were admitted to the hospital with COVID are sick a two months. Now, that’s kind of scary.
Dr. Matt Cook:
Right, yeah. Super scary. A friend of mine had a patient present to him who was like a super elite, famous, VIP athlete and presented with amenorrhea, lost their period and so it goes from there to catastrophic overwhelm with people with constant chest pain and constant neurological symptoms. People will have nerve pain, people will have all kinds of neurological symptoms in their head.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Fatigue, shortness of breath.
Dr. Matt Cook:
Fatigue… and fundamentally, it is going to turn from being this super aggressive viral storm picture into a picture that mirrors very similar to what Lyme disease is like. So what’s going to happen through the arc of as we watch this, it’s going to behave like a lot of these things. It hides out-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
And by the way, you’re talking about Lyme, you’re talking about people who not just get Lyme and get treated for three weeks, but Lyme persists and there are a lot of people who suffer from chronic Lyme which isn’t even well recognized in traditional medicine but it’s a real thing and you and I have taken care of these patients, we’ve seen their lab tests, we’ve seen them get better and we treat it and it’s very difficult to treat. It gets inside the cells, it’s persistent, and you’re saying COVID can do the same thing?
Dr. Matt Cook:
COVID is similar, it gets inside cells, it’s persistent, it hangs around. Now there’s a question and I’m not sure that I know the answer to this. I think that the virus persists in the body and that it’s going to persist and wax and wane and come in and out. It may not because there are some people who are continuing to test positive as long haulers. There are other people who are not testing positive, it may be the test is negative but its still in their brain but what happens is, they have pervasive systems dysfunction, particularly immune and neurologic and vascular and those are the three places that it goes and so then what we have to do is basically do functional medicine, do an amazing job of supporting them and getting them healthy, detoxing them, but then there’s some simple things that I think are going to be home runs over the longterm and I think the data will eventually bear this out and one is peptide therapy.
Dr. Matt Cook:
For post-COVID, I think I’d break it down into two categories. Whether people are remote or whether they’re in person. If they’re remote, I have everybody taking this peptide, thymosin alpha 1, and I’m having people if they’ve had COVID take this peptide for three to six months and I’m noticing people-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Every day?
Dr. Matt Cook:
Every day and so when they do that, people tell me, “God I feel a lot better,” and I’ve had a lot of people remote that had a lot of symptoms and then they start taking, it’s just a little insulin syringe, and then just inject like a tenth of a CC every day but when they inject this tiny amount of fluid it starts to regulate their immune system and I’m seeing it help basically almost all post-COVID symptoms and so-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Is kind of good for Lyme?
Dr. Matt Cook:
It turns out its also really good for Lyme, it’s also I put everybody that has CVO and leaky gut ang GI inflammation on it and so it’s kind of an all purpose, work reverse peptide that turns out to be great, either I think for prophylaxis to prevent from getting COVID and so anybody that if one person in the house gets COVID, I put everybody else in the house on this peptide. If you have it acutely it helps and there’s different dosing that we do depending on whether you have an acute or you don’t and then finally, for these long haulers, these people that have this COVID for a long time, we’re doing that and it’s been really, really helpful.
Dr. Matt Cook:
I like other peptides also. I like thymosin beta 4 which is also really good for regulating the immune system and I like BPC 157 but not for everybody. There’s some issues with that but-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
It’s a whole list of these peptides-
Dr. Matt Cook:
There’s a whole list.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Used for all kinds of different things and I think it’s really an interesting emerging field of medical therapy that’s still sort of on the fringe and I think where can people sort of learn more about peptides and where to find out how to use them?
Dr. Matt Cook:
So we’re doing some courses, I’m doing a online course where I’m teaching starting in a couple weeks, a weekly class where we talk about peptides every day. Peptides are great for immune stuff but they’re amazing for pain and so the other thing we’re starting in a couple weeks is I do these videos where I do yoga and stretching and then I literally teach people where to inject peptides for example, around their knee or their ankle or their hip, and it’s super helpful.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
That sounds great.
Dr. Matt Cook:
But then the amazing thing is that a doctor can write a prescription to a compounding pharmacy and then they will take this peptide and put it sterilely in a vial and mail it to you and then you can take it.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Do it yourself.
Dr. Matt Cook:
And then you can do it yourself.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
So what do you do for people who are here in the office that you see have post COVID and how are they doing with treatments?
Dr. Matt Cook:
So my feeling on this is interesting, is that everything that works for pre-COVID and everything that works for treating acute COVID works for the long haulers.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Exactly right.
Dr. Matt Cook:
Yeah so ozone probably number one, vitamin C, Glutathione-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Intravenous vitamin c with Glutathione.
Dr. Matt Cook:
Intravenous. Intravenous ozone. There’s a vitamin called NAD which seems to stimulate your mitochondria and it’s a ubiquitous molecule in the body, it’s basically a signal of your energy stores and so we use that and interestingly, one of the first thing that happens when you start treating people with NAD is their vascular health starts to improve.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Amazing.
Dr. Matt Cook:
And the reason is is that cells love NAD because it’s like money to a cell and so it represents potential energy and so then if you put a molecule in a vein, the first thing that’s going to happen is it’s going to try to diffuse out of that vein and then when it tries to diffuse out of the vein, it’s going to get absorbed by the cells that line your vein and artery and so then what happens is you improve the health of those cells so I have a lot of people that come with vascular problems and I start doing NAD and they get better. Well guess where COVID goes? To your blood vessels. That’s why people have so many problems with their heart or their kidney or their brain because it’s inflammation in the blood vessels and then it can leak out and then get into the nerves which is why we’re trying to put something in the blood vessel, whether that be ozone, whether that be vitamin C, whether that be Glutathione, whether it be NAD. I submitted an IND for exosomes-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
A research proposal.
Dr. Matt Cook:
Yeah, a research proposal and so we’re going back, we’re on our second-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Exosomes would be helpful-
Dr. Matt Cook:
Yeah, we’re going to do a randomized clinical trial with exosomes for COVID.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Amazing.
Dr. Matt Cook:
So I think we’re going to get approved in the next day or two, we’re like two or three rounds deep with FDA just going back and forth with the-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
That’s incredible. There’s a whole realm of medicine out there that it’s just emerging over the last few decades. It’s still on the margins that you and I are in, things like in clinic they’ve introduced functional medicine, they’re starting to do this more and more in different healthcare centers and hospitals around the country but you know, what’s unfortunate is people really have trouble accessing this but I think the work you’re doing and the stuff we’ve done at Cleveland Clinic and I’ve tried to do over the years, is really trying to break ground so this is more accessible for everyone.
Dr. Matt Cook:
Yeah.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Because ultimately, this has to be covered by insurance and it has to be accessible, the cost has to come down and it has to be something that people can get access to. Right now it’s hard but I think people should have hope that there’s a lot of stuff that they can do, that isn’t that expensive. Diet, lifestyle issues, sleep, exercise, the right supplements, and even some IV treatments may not be that expensive so I think there’s ways to get yourself healthy in this time that people really need to focus on and the challenge for us is that we just go about our lives, we’re busy and this and that, but now more than ever people need to think about their personal health, not just for themselves but for their family, their communities, their society, and really the world because we’re really facing this pandemic that’s not going away and we need to be smart about how do we protect ourselves and make us more resilient in the face of it and your work is just so fantastic, Matt.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
I mean your clinic, BioReset Medical, which is in northern California is really a beacon of hope for so many people, it is for me. I know I’m like thank God you were born because without you, I would still be in chronic pain all the time and I never thought I would be out of it and I’m just so grateful that you were able to help me and help so many people and I’ve sent so many patients to you who’ve done so well and continue to do well and it’s just such a great pioneering work that you’re doing and I’m so thankful for you that you’re doing this work, Matt.
Dr. Matt Cook:
Oh my God. It’s amazing. That’s the nicest thing anybody ever said. I want to cry but you know what, it’s interesting it’s like the greatest thing in the world to be a doctor. Just the greatest thing in the world and it’s interesting because people come in to the clinic and they talk, and sometimes we do a lot of PTSD and I got to tell you, there’s so many people with COVID-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Trauma.
Dr. Matt Cook:
And trauma and maybe they had a little bit of trauma and there’s so many people that had SARS that ended up with PTSD and numbers like in the 20 and 30% and I think that’s going to happen with COVID and so then for me it’s like this amazing journey of going through the day and just trying to like get through but I insanely love it and I actually have more hope than I ever did because like with the way that you described medicine, I feel like it’s a coherent and thoughtful way of taking care of people.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
It totally is. And it works! It works. It really works.
Dr. Matt Cook:
Yeah.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
So thank you for being on The Doctor’s Farmacy podcast, Matt. If people want to learn more about Matt and his work, you can go to bioresetmedical.com if you want to listen to his podcast, go to bioresetpodcast.com. He’s just a wealth of knowledge and insight, he’s my new guru, I’ve learned so much from Matt and I’ve been around the block and there are very few people out there doing the pioneering work and I just look up to you so much, Matt. So thank you for doing what you do, thank you for being on the podcast. If you loved this podcast, please share it with your friends and family on social media. Leave a comment, share your experiences about your struggles with COVID or with chronic pain and what you’ve learned and what you’ve done and discovered that might help other people and subscribe wherever you get your podcast and we’ll see you next time on The Doctor’s Farmacy.
Dr. Matt Cook:
Thank you so much.
