April 22, 2024
The podcast this week is a must listen to for everyone as Dr. Stephen Porges is a luminary in the field of Psychology and trauma. His work has given us the Polyvagal theory and a key to understanding the root causes of trauma based behavior and disease suffering. This work is especially true for children in traumatic environments. Give it a listen and read his paper in Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience.
The Book that I never published. It is time for me to take another look at the mother child story in book form. In 2019, I embarked on a project of writing a book about maternal health and WHY it matters tremendously that we address the issues driving offspring dysregulation. The time since has ushered in an era of podcast guests that in some instances have solidified my beliefs on knowns while also shattering some beliefs leading to new ideas. Over the coming weeks, I am going to relook at this topic.
Part of this project is going to be taking a page out of the Derek Sivers' book writing style, brevity and meaning are paramount. I am naturally hyper verbose and my writing style follows this reality. Thus, I am going to fight my natural style and desires in an effort to make this book shorter, much shorter and still powerful in delivery.
Here goes!
WHY?
The story of normal maternal health and how we are disrupting it in modern America.
In 2018, I attended the Institute for Functional Medicine's Autoimmune Conference in Florida. The speaker list was a who's who in the cutting-edge world of autoimmune disease understanding. To say that I was inspired is a significant understatement. My personal favorite, Dr. Alessio Fasano, gave a rousing talk about the intestinal microbiome and immune function. During the talk, he discussed how the first 1000 days of life for a child are critical as it is the time to which the intestinal microbiome becomes fully established. If this occurs according to a natural plan, we can live with limited disease risk. If not, then the risks rise commensurately with changes to our inner garden of microbes.
After the conference, I took a barefooted walk on the beach and while passionately listening to the Rain Song by Led Zeppelin, I felt called to write. It has long been clear to me that prevention is the best route to health and longevity for all humans not the reductionistic medical symptom management espoused by modern American medicine.
Over the past 25 years, the scientific understanding of maternal and child health has blossomed to the point that what we truly need to do is to go back a full 1000 days before birth and make positive changes to have maximal impact on the outcome of mom and her babe. Over the next few pages of text, I am going to give you my thoughts on the beginnings of life and what I think resonates with our best health outcomes based on the science and philosophy of life.
In this book, I want to explore the time from before a mother chooses to conceive to the child's age of two and a half. This is actually much more than some 1000 days, however, as you will see many of the risks to a bad outcome come well before conception and also de facto live birth.
For all mothers,
Dr. M
“Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny”
C. S. Lewis
My Story
In 1992, I left lovely Poughkeepsie, New York and Vassar College and embarked on my journey of medical study at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. I was wide eyed and full of fear and excitement for the road ahead. What was I going to learn? Could I handle the rigor? I had no clue what lay ahead. The years passed, I survived and felt pretty confident that I understood medicine. I packed up my few belongings and went up the Charlottesville, Virginia to begin pediatric residency at the University of Virginia.
The game changed overnight. Now I was responsible for a human life in a way that I had never known. The pressure to know it all mounted and the reality of this impossibility set in poorly. Now I had fear. A lot of it. The nonchalantly calm attending physicians teaching us daily seemed so far ahead in knowledge and clinical acumen that there were many dark days of worry. But, as with everything, hard work and time changed that narrative, feared subsided and happiness took over. Hard work remains the best way to beat fear.
The wild card that I did not expect to hit me blindside during the intern year was the day I met my wife, Nicole Brindisi. She was everything that I had ever dreamt of in a woman. She was intelligent, thoughtful, challenging, funny and empathetic. We met in the hospital as she was a registered dietetic intern on the same floor as my pediatric patients. In short order, I was lost in her world and the future as I knew it turned directionally. My time to learn and live was now compromised, in a good way.
We spent much time together over my intern year and I realized that I knew nothing about nutrition. Like John Snow, "you know nothing Chris Magryta" was my reality. She would routinely challenge me on nutrition topics and I would fail miserably. How could this be? I was supposed to be smart! I went to great institutions of learning! I felt confident…..Not so much. The simple answer is that the nutrition education in medical school and residency during the 1990’s was deplorable. There was no emphasis on food and the body. There was a complete emphasis on the pharmaco-physiological symptom complex. Nicole was a thinker and she often dove deeply into topics that I went nowhere near. She was an avid follower of Dr. Andrew Weil and read his weekly newsletter ritually. For those who don’t know Dr. Weil’s story, he is the defacto ground zero for the Integrative Medicine movement which was built on the desire to find all methods of healing regardless of origin. Dr. Weil did not shun allopathic western medicine. He furthered the belief that any intervention that promotes healing is worth exploring and using as long as we obey the Hippocratic oath.
As the rude awakening to a knowledge base that was foreign to me continued, I began to break down the hallowed belief that I held that my medical education was perfect. Time passed and the blinders were officially off. In 2006, I enrolled in the Fellowship for Integrative Medicine with Dr. Weil at the University of Arizona. Over the next 2 years, I finally competently learned what happens to the human frame with the correct use of food, stress reduction and toxin avoidance. The game was changing for the better. The fascinating thing about learning is that the more that you know the less you feel like you know. Every time I learned a new methodology or science fact, I felt like I was peeling an onion, only to find more layers beneath.
One of my classmates in Arizona was the brilliant, Dr. Gerry Mullin. He worked in the gastroenterology department at John’s Hopkins and was the thought leader for all things GI. In one of our conversations he let me know of another course that was worth taking. The Institute for Functional Medicine’s modules on disease avoidance and intervention. This group of educators was taking the Integrative movement to a different level by focusing heavily on biochemistry, metabolomics and epigenomics. Suffice it to say that the compounding interest on this type of education was exponential.
I now had a bigger toolkit to draw from for which to treat children. Finally, I felt remotely close to the level of competency necessary to impart useful information to mothers and children.
Now we have a framework to change the outcomes of humans through lifestyle prevention and treatment. We now have real-time data and true mechanistic pathways that lead to a desired outcome if they are followed. This is the future of medicine. This is truth in healing. This is root cause healing instead of downstream symptom management and amelioration. This is as Dr. Jeffrey Bland says, the headwaters of disease etiology.
TBC,
Dr. M
