The UltraMind Solution (11 page)

Clayton and his mother were diligent and determined to make changes. At his two-month follow-up visit, Clayton had discontinued all medications, including Ritalin, antihistamines (Zyrtec and Tagamet), bronchodilators, steroid inhaler, Tylenol (acetaminophen), and Advil (ibuprofen).

His mood and behavior returned to that of a typical twelve-year-old. His attention improved, his disruptiveness at home and in school disappeared, and his irritability and anxiety vanished completely.

Clayton found himself free from all his chronic symptoms for the first time in his life. His hives, asthma, chronic runny nose, anal itching, stomachaches, nausea, diarrhea, headaches, muscle cramps, and sensitivity to loud noises all completely resolved. He was also able to finally fall asleep and stay asleep throughout the night. Clayton also began to succeed in school both socially and academically as he never had before.

Clayton did not have a neurological or psychiatric “disease.” He had a “broken brain” caused by nutritional imbalances; toxicity; and altered immune, neurotransmitter, and digestive function. Treating those root causes and correcting the imbalances led to the resolution of
all
his symptoms.

Some of these findings and resolutions are subjective; therefore, for those skeptics, one irrefutable objective finding underscores the effectiveness of
this approach and “proves” the powerful effect the body has on the mind and brain.

Clayton’s dysgraphia, or abnormal handwriting, completely resolved within two months of treatment (see Figures 1 and 2 below and on page 31). Here is his homework before the UltraMind Solution and two months later.

Before Treatment

Figure 1: Clayton’s handwriting before treatment

After Treatment

Figure 2: Clayton’s handwriting after treatment

Clayton’s mother also sent me an e-mail reporting on her meeting with his school. The change was remarkable.

We had a 504 meeting at Clayton’s school this morning (where the teachers, school counselor, parents, and principal all get together to review “the plan” for kids with special educational needs—in Clayton’s case prompted by the ADHD diagnosis). This was the first time in his entire schooling history that everything seems to be going well. The input from his teachers was that he is “a different kid” than they saw in the first half of the year and that they’re amazed by the difference. The school nurse hasn’t seen him since March (and he used to be in her office several times a week). The school psychologist said his social skills are very good, age appropriate, and that she sees no problems at all. She also noted that Clayton seems very proud of himself and his new health and that he’s taking good ownership of all the changes in his diet. He even seems to be shrugging it off when the other kids at school tell him he’s an “alien” because he doesn’t drink soda.

This was just such a fantastic meeting and I wanted to pass along the good news and say thank you!

This story is not an isolated anecdote, but a story repeated over and over in medical practices based on Functional Medicine, which is where the principles of UltraWellness and UltraMind originate.

This case (and so many others like it) suggests that priority be given to research that teases out the subtleties of how to apply this approach to our epidemic of brain and psychiatric disorders. Instead we continue to research more “traditional” models for treating these problems.

I am no longer the “accidental” psychiatrist. I know as I treat the body the brain will heal. And that’s no accident.

And I want to tell you what I have learned and show you how to take advantage of this science now. I want to give you the tools you need to apply this Functional Medicine approach to your own life so you don’t have to wait twenty years for medical practices and the scientific community to catch up with what we already know today.

The question that remains is how to treat these underlying causes, so you can rebalance your health and empower your brain.

What was I able to help Clayton achieve by identifying and treating the underlying factors that were driving his illness, and how did I do it? How can you use this same approach to help you overcome the “broken brain” that is so debilitating you?

A new road map has emerged for how the human body works and how to treat illnesses—whether they are mental or physical. This road map is not based on the traditional ways of naming and diagnosing disease (or the ICD-9 disease classification system that you will learn more about in chapter 3) but on the underlying, core, interlocking, physiological systems that, in fact, underlie all disease.
¹⁸

No one element can explain Clayton’s constellation of symptoms, but his particular puzzle tells a unique story when taken as a whole. And while there may be similar patterns in other children with ADHD, his pattern is unique to him. Another child with ADHD might have different imbalances and require different diagnostic tests and therapies.

My medical school training gave me the ability to diagnose thousands of different separate diseases. Diseases that I suggest don’t really exist in the way we think they do. We give names to disease like depression or ADHD, but that just helps us group people together who have the same symptoms for the purposes of giving them all the same drug therapy. But what if I were to tell you that new scientific discoveries tell us that there is no such thing as depression?

What we see as the symptoms of depression are reflections of a few common interconnected imbalances in the body that have nothing to do with the medical specialties as we know them. Depression is not a psychiatric illness, but a systemic disease. To treat it we need to address the whole system—the ecosystem of your body.

That means we need to understand how the
whole
body operates as a system, not just how different pieces of the body operate independently from one another. We need to treat people, not body parts; we want to treat the causes of disease, not symptoms.

I was trained according to the dogma of separate medical specialties—for heart problems you see the cardiologist, for stomach problems you see the gastroenterologist, for joint pain you see the rheumatologist, for skin problems, the dermatologist. You just don’t ask the skin doctor about your joint pain. If you do ask, he or she will cut you off and tell you to see the joint doctor.

The road map I was given in medical school to navigate through the territory of illness was the
wrong
map. It taught us to diagnose disease and then assign standardized treatments no matter who was suffering. This is the wrong approach. It’s a map that sends us in the wrong direction.

Not only are your joint pains, skin rash, irritable bowel, and depression all connected, but the
only
way to find your way out of this mess of chronic disease (which affects 162 million people) is by using a new map—one that allows us to see how everything is connected.

This is what the rich new method called Functional Medicine offers. Functional Medicine (
www.functionalmedicine.org
) applies the science of systems biology in a practical setting. It
is
the revolutionary new system I have been talking about. It’s a fundamental change in our thinking, a whole different paradigm, like the world-is-round-not-flat shift. It changes our approach to the very way we think about illness and the human body.

With it, we can truly treat and cure disease.

Unlike conventional medicine, Functional Medicine personalizes treatment based on a patient’s unique needs. We are all different. We have a different genetic makeup. As a result our bodies react to our environment in different ways. Understanding this allows us to develop unique methods to treat
people
, not diseases.

At the heart of this paradigm shift are the seven keys of UltraWellness, the same keys that make up the UltraMind Solution.

All medicine can be simplied into a few basic principles and concepts or natural laws that explain all disease and suffering. These concepts are the seven keys or core systems of the body.

In Part II I will explore how each of these keys affects your mood, behavior, attention, memory, and overall brain function, and supply quizzes that will help you identify which of these keys is out of balance for you so you can optimize and heal your brain.

This will give you a personalized road map for your journey back to
health and wellness. It will help you heal from your broken brain and from a host of other symptoms you may be suffering with.

I would like to give you an introduction to the keys now, as they are critical for understanding how the whole program works. As you read this, keep in mind that these keys are not really separate but interconnect and interact in a dynamic, fluid web.