Episode 272 – Why Some Chronic Illnesses Never Heal, Until You Treat the Root Cause

Dr. Deb Muth 0:05What if your immune system isn't broken, it's just confused? What if chronic Lyme, the autoimmune condition, the food sensitivities, the exhaustion that never lifts what if those aren't separate problems but one problem? A misfiring immune system that nobody taught how to stand down. Today's guest has spent over 15 years doing exactly that, retraining the immune system from the inside out with a therapy so precise, so safe, and so effective that it has changed the lives of thousands of people who'd been written off by conventional medicine. Stay with me. This one changes everything.Welcome back to Let's Talk Wellness Now, the show where we pull back the curtain on chronic illness, challenge outdated medical thinking, and hand you the real tools to heal from the inside out. I'm Dr. Deb, integrative and functional medicine practitioner, medical detective, and your straight-talking guide through the world of root cause medicine. Today, we're going to dive deep into the immune system, specifically something called low-dose immunotherapy or LDI, and also into some hormones, chronic fatigue, and what it actually looks like to treat the cause instead of suppressing the symptoms. If you or someone you love has been told there's nothing more we can do, this episode was made for you. Grab your cup of coffee, Settle in and let's get to work. Now, before we bring in today's guest, a quick word from our sponsor, and then we are diving straight in. I promise. Did you know sweating can literally heal your cells? Infrared saunas don't just relax you, they detox your body, balance hormones, and boost mitochondrial energy. I'm obsessed with my HealthTech Sauna, and right now you can save $500 with my code at healthtechhealth.com/dr-muth-req-25.I want to start you with a story because this is one I've heard hundreds of times in my own practice, and I'm guessing you've either lived it or know someone who has. She's 42. She's been sick for years. Fatigue that doesn't lift with sleep, joint pain that migrates, brain fog so thick she can't finish a sentence, and a gut that seems to react to everything she eats. She's been to her GP, rheumatologist, gastroenterologist, maybe even an immunologist, and every single lab comes back within quote unquote normal limits. She's handed a prescription for something to manage the symptoms and sent home. Maybe she's been told it's anxiety. Maybe she's been told it's aging, or maybe and this one always breaks my heart she's told it's all in her head. That woman is not imagining it. She is not anxious and she's not aging poorly. Her immune system has lost its ability to tolerate things it's supposed to tolerate, and no one has offered her the therapy that could actually fix that. And what we're talking about today with my guest has been practicing integrative medicine for over 15 years. Ty Vincent holds a medical degree from the University of Washington. He completed his family medicine residency in Anchorage, Alaska, and since has built one of the most impressive clinical repertoires I've seen anywhere in this field: acupuncture, Chinese medicine, environmental medicine, bioidentical hormones, hyperbaric medicine, chelation, regenerative peptide therapy, psychedelic-assisted therapy, and nutritional medicine.He lives and practices on the Big Island of Hawaii. He is married has 9 children. Oh my gosh, 9! And he has personally navigated type 1 diabetes, which, as you'll hear, is not separate from his mission. It actually is his mission. And most importantly, he is a world authority on low-dose immunotherapy, a therapy he pioneered in 2008 and since has trained over 200 providers globally and changed the course of chronic illness care as we know it. I have had the pleasure of learning from Dr. Ty Vincent. I have had pleasure of taking his low-dose immunotherapy course when he first started back in like 2008 or 2009. I remember doing it back then and learning more about it in 2011. And this is going to be a great conversation for us. So one quick ask that I have for you guys, if this sounds like something that you want to learn more about and you've listened to some of our shows, please share like, subscribe. It means a lot. It helps us grow our channel. It helps us continue to provide for you different topics, different speakers, and really give you what it is that you're looking for.So without further ado, I'd like to introduce you to Dr. Ty Vincent. All right, so Dr. Ty Vincent, this is gonna be a great conversation. We were just chatting before we went live of my training with you guys way back in like 2015, and I'm excited to hear all the new things that you've got going on. But introduce yourself to the audience. Tell us a little bit about you, how you got involved in this, uh, where you're at, all that good stuff.Tyvincent 5:29Okay. I, uh, it's a long story, but some of the highlights, I guess I was born in Alaska in the early '70s and grew up there kind of wandering around in the woods with my dogs with no one around all day long. It was amazing. You don't get kids don't get that experience anymore. So you kind of learn to be an independent thinker, I think, you know, because latchkey kid, parents weren't home till 6 and you're on your own from early.Dr. Deb Muth 5:49That was a great time, wasn't it? Yeah.Tyvincent 5:51I mean, I have, I have 9 children now and none of them grew up like me. And despite my effort, I mean, I'd have to basically like helicopter them out in the woods and drop them off for a few hours for them to understand what independent kids today are so dependent and parents are so helicopter that, uh, it's changed. Anyway, I, I grew up just really liking science and really loving science, a huge nerd. And, um, and, uh, when I went into college, when I wanted to be a marine biologist and I thought that that was my passion of the ocean wildlife and all that, and then halfway through college, personal Couple things made me change my mind. It was a girl, you know, the usual. And I decided to go to school in Anchorage instead of going I was, I was transferring to Hawaii and I was going to study marine biology. And then, uh, my girlfriend moved back to Alaska where we were from. And I decided to do that instead. And then they didn't have a marine science program.So I decided I'll just get a biology degree and go to medical school. I'm a smart guy. I can do that, but I had no awareness of medicine. I really didn't have any, you know, the passion some people have to be a healer and to go help people wasn't part of the calculus at all for me. I was kind of an Asperger's kid, so that really wasn't the way I thought, honestly. And then I went into medicine and I was really interested in the science, the biology, the biochemistry, all the stuff, the physiology. And before I started medical school, I was reading some Andrew Weil's books and I was, I decided to get a book on nutritional biochemistry because I naively thought that's what they were going to teach me, right? This is how you make people healthy. You figure out how it works and you give them the things that make their body work right. Yeah. And we all know that that's. Not been true for over 100 years now since the Flexner Report. And, you know, the rich people steered the government towards pharmaceuticals.Dr. Deb Muth 7:26Yeah.Tyvincent 7:26But that was my interest. And when I went through the first 2 years of medical school, I just really devoured all of the basic science stuff. And that was what I thought was the most important. And I honestly mastered all that. I scored in the top 1% in the country on all the exams and everything. And it was the top, in the top of my class at the University of Washington. And then you start doing clinical medical training and you discover that they don't use any of that knowledge anymore, really, unless it pertains directly to pharmaceuticals, and that pharmaceutical research is extremely narrow and reductionist, and they only want to try to prove one little effect, and it doesn't translate to real health. So as I got into clinical work and started residency, you know, by the third year of residency, I was like, they didn't really teach me how to help people with chronic illness. You know, I was, I went to family medicine residency, so I was delivering babies.I was assisting with surgeries. I was in the ER. I was doing colonoscopies. I actually did colonoscopies in practice after residency, which family Doctors almost never get to do, but I'm a small town in Alaska. So I managed my own ICU patients and did everything, literally circumcisions in the office. And you're dealing with like hospice and end of life care, just both ends, right? Pregnancy to death. And so I'd realized that if I really wanted to do the job well, which was my goal, I needed to learn other things. And in my, in my third year of residency, I actually did the extra, like, like additional training in medical acupuncture that was put on by the Helms Medical Institute then with Joseph Helms.And that was great. And I had to learn Chinese medical theory and I learned, I did the extra module on Chinese herbal medicine. And it was wonderful because I had to open my mind to a completely different way to evaluate people and illness. And I thought, okay, well then there's got to be more. And as I went, I just became this voracious consumer of broad medical knowledge, not conventional medicine. You notice how a lot of the conventional people call it traditional medicine?Dr. Deb Muth 9:07Yes.Tyvincent 9:07Which annoys the crap out of me because there's nothing traditional about something that's been around for 100 years. I mean, you need time, you need like an epoch to say something's traditional....