Dr. Kara Fitzgerald | New Frontiers in Functional Medicine, Longevity, Epigenetics

After suffering through a lengthy Lyme infection himself (with classic presentation), which initially responded to antibiotics but didn’t resolve the infection, Dr. Darin Ingels went on a years-long quest to recover, returning to naturopathic principles and discovering essential less-used protocols. The results are in his book: The Lyme Solution: A 5-Part Plan to Fish the Inflammatory Autoimmune R...

Wow! What a great conversation with Dr. Valter Longo, director of USC’s Longevity Institute. It’s always exciting to talk to someone in the trenches of bench and clinical research, especially a rock-star like Valter Longo! You can hear my nerves as we begin ☺, yet there’s much to learn about Dr. Longo’s journey from a Blue Zone upbringing in Italy to music major to biochemisty major to leading exp...

Yes, hemp & marijuana are major providers of cannabinoids, and in the FxMed space, we are extremely excited about this potent family of bioactive molecules. In particular, we are looking at CBD for indications ranging from pain to mood, inflammation, memory and more. Turns out the endocannabinoid system (ECS) extends body-wide, and similarly, phytocannabinoid sources extend far beyond hemp and mar...

In my conversation with Mark Hyman on his new NYT best seller, Food: What the Heck Should I Eat?, we discuss the myriad challenges consumers face in figuring out the correct diet, but also, what WE as clinicians caring for patients – what do we prescribe? What do the data show? Are grains really verboten? Is dairy completely off-the-plate? What about meat? And fats/cholesterol and the APOE4 patien...

I am thrilled and honored to podcast with Dr. Randy Jirtle. The field of epigenetics has exploded in the last decade, initiated almost exclusively by the groundbreaking research of Randy and his colleague Robert Waterland. Their 2003 study on the effects of nutrition on epigenetic gene regulation in agouti mice is the most cited paper in the history of science, and his trailblazing discoveries hav...

A lot of scientific discoveries are borne out of serendipitous moments where a brilliant idea and unmet need collide. Such is the case with one of my all-time favorite “workhorse” botanical combination products, Biocidin. Listen to Dr. Rachel Fresco, founder and president of Bio-Botanical Research, talk about the story of Biocidin, the decades of interesting and on-going in-vivo and in-vitro resea...

Why would Precision Analytical, the laboratory famous for the ground-breaking DUTCH test (Dried Urine Test for Comprehensive Hormones) and Cortisol Awakening Response test, decide to offer a handful of key organic acids on their panel (incidentally, at no extra charge)? The answers will wow you in this terrific podcast with Dr. Carrie Jones, Medical Director at PA. Turns out, looking at compounds...

Join me for an interesting, clinician-friendly conversation on the gut/thyroid axis with Dr. Mike Ruscio. Dr. Ruscio challenges both conventional understanding (where the gut/thyroid relationship isn’t recognized outside the research setting) and in the functional medicine world, where he argues we are often over-treating and over-testing thyroid function. What is the thyroid adrenal relationship?...

When Chris Kresser, M.S., L.Ac, was in his early twenties, he traveled the world surfing and learning to meditate. Along the way, he fell ill — and when he returned to the States he discovered that the conventional medical paradigm had little to offer when it came to treating complex, chronic illness. So he embarked on his own healing journey, studying acupuncture and Chinese medicine and learning...

Small-intestinal bacterial overgrowth, or SIBO, is notoriously hard to treat. Patients often experience persistent bloating—and even when they find relief, symptoms can return months later, seemingly out of the blue. After struggling to help patients feel better using the tools of conventional gastroenterology, Dr. Ken Brown began to research compounds that could effectively treat SIBO-related blo...

JJ Virgin was a well-known fitness and nutrition expert and author of several books when her son was hit by a car and severely injured. The doctors told her to prepare for the worst; they didn’t expect him to make it through the night. But, Grant lived. And JJ’s insistence on making sure he had access to both conventional and functional medical care is the reason why. She became an expert on the e...

Elemental Diets have a long therapeutic use history for myriad GI issues. EDs allow the gut to take a break from the hard work of digestion, offering the GI tract a chance for renewal and repair. They have been shown to help with a variety of conditions, including SIBO, IBS, non-specific intestinal inflammation, and autoimmunity, including IBD (among others). In this podcast, the director of clini...

Mark Newman is the founder Precision Analytical and the developer of the DUTCH test, one of the most accurate and patient-friendly measures of sex hormones on the market. The test eliminates the need for multiple types of testing by using dried urine to measure sex hormones, hormone metabolites, and free cortisol. Free cortisol is a key indicator of the health of the HPA axis — and having that mea...

Tumor cells have more insulin receptors than healthy cells, so they preferentially metabolize glucose. When you cut off the glucose supply to tumor cells, they struggle to make the fuel they need to proliferate. The ketogenic diet sharply limits the glucose that reaches tumor cells (while providing other anticancer benefits), and animal studies (and one small but seminal human study) have shown pr...

Dr. Terry Wahls was a practicing primary care physician when she was diagnosed with relapsing-remitting MS. Despite treatment at some of the finest medical institutions in the United States, her health progressively declined until she could no longer walk. When she discovered functional medicine, she made a rapid turnaround. Soon she wasn’t just walking again, she was doing 20-mile bike rides. Tod...

I went to school with Dr. Hilary Andrews. She graduated before me, but I recall her then—she had a reputation for brilliance (and was voted class valedictorian, incidentally). Hilary applied that brilliance to childhood health and nutrition, which inevitably included investigation around vaccine safety. Flash forward to current time, Hilary continues to research and lecture extensively on the topi...

Small Intestinal Microbial Overgrowth: A Conversation with Dr. Vincent Pedre, MD IFMCP All microbes, not just bacteria, can contribute to problems in the small intestines. Today more than ever, we see patients with hard-to- treat gut problems. Dr. Pedre brings his own gut healing journey and Functional Medicine background to the table to talk to us about treating patients with SIBO-or as he likes...

Dr. Carrie Jones and I went to medical school (National College of Natural Medicine) together. She was a brilliant, awesome friend then, and still is. What a privilege it’s been to watch her grow into the expert she is today. As you’ll see in her bio, Dr. Jones has been focused on women’s health and hormones her entire career which has spanned academia, clinical practice and now as the chief medic...

Dr. Corey Schuler is a man of many talents- an educator as well as a practitioner in integrative and functional medicine. In today’s podcast, Dr. Schuler will be wearing his nutritionist hat as we discuss individually designed elemental diets. Some of the applications we cover will be well-known to practitioners and patients alike. Others don’t have precedent in clinical practice but listen to thi...

As you probably know, stem cell therapy outside of the research setting is the Wild West. It’s offered everywhere, here and outside of the US (there’s a whole “stem cell tourism trade”). Radical claims are made routinely without much evidence or oversight. Pricing for therapy, and protocols used, vary widely, although anyone (even those participating in research trials) can expect to spend thousan...

In general, I am a fan of IgG food sensitivity testing. While we can in some cases manage just fine using a standard elimination and challenge protocol, IgG testing can benefit patients in a few ways, such as: providing motivating data, individualizing the foods needing to be removed and identify less-common antigenic foods. However, if you are using IgG food sensitivity testing in practice, you’v...

Functional hypochlorhydria is a condition we see so often, yet Prilosec is a top ten medication: what’s the disconnect? Probiotics: which ones, how much, combo or single strain? What does the research really show probiotics are actually doing? Is there any truth to probiotics colonizing the GI tract? And what about soil-based probiotics, any reason to be jumping on that bandwagon? What is the corr...

Have you been wondering what you should really do with the 23andme genetic data that you’ve gathered? Wondering if you should even take the test at all? Or wondering what the future of genetic/epigenetic medicine is? This podcast is for you. I am especially excited to bring you this conversation with epigenetic legend, Dr. Moshe Szyf. The study of epigenetics is continually breaking new ground in...

Thanks to Dr. Susan Blum, functional medicine has even more to offer for patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and osteoarthritis (OA). She shares new insights about RA’s underlying causes, details what goes missed in treatment plans, and gives practical tips for mining data from stool tests, utilizing functional blood markers, and combining herbs and probiotics to reverse processes that other p...

Fibromyalgia can be a particularly difficult condition to address conventionally, but Functional Medicine really has a lot to offer here. In this podcast, we mine the wealth of information that Dr. David Brady brings to the table on this important topic, including: · The signs and symptoms of fibromyalgia and how it is diagnosed (previously-defined tender points are no longer used!) – see also Dr....