My Story - The Founding Patient - Lori Gerber D.O.

 

-- Speaker 1 00:00:01 Welcome my outside the box thinkers to the Anti-Aging Unraveled podcast, where I am your host, Dr. Lori Gerber. In this podcast we'll explore the fascinating world of personalized anti-aging medicine that considers the whole person inside and out and how all systems are interconnected to each other. In today's world of modern medicine, we often find ourselves like just another number in a system that prioritizes quick fixes over sustainable and more natural solutions. Well, let's get ready for a paradigm shift. In health and beauty, we look far beyond treating symptoms and aim to get to the root cause of our health and cosmetic issues. This podcast is your go-to source for all things natural outside the box and innovative in integrative medicine and cosmetic dermatology. So sit back, relax, and get ready to dive deep into the world of functional medicine and aesthetics. With me, Dr. Lori Gerber, let's take a trip down the Real Skin Revolution Pathway together.

Speaker 1 00:01:05 Hello listeners. It's Dr. Lori coming at you again with my Anti-Aging Unraveled Podcast. And today I'm really happy to kinda do a little bit of a different format. I'm going to do a story about myself and we're gonna talk about my, how I got here, the journey to wellness or health, if you will, and how it really, uh, correlates with my method of integrative medicine and figuring out what's going on with all of my patients, which is called the Real three Method by Dr. Lori Grover. And I'm really happy to launch this method to how to teach this method and really to put some very specific, what I call pyramids or triangles into integrative health so that it makes sense even for the patient that's trying to figure out what's wrong with them or understand it. So I'm not gonna use any notes today guys.

Speaker 1 00:02:00 I'm just gonna talk at you or hopefully make this slightly interesting. And I wanted to start by, you know, saying that I come from some genes in my life. You know, my mom and dad don't have the greatest genetics. And I do think, you know, we are a product of not only our genetics but our environment. And you know, my mom and dad actually passed, um, in the last year in change. And really my dad, a lot of his were chronic conditions, but my mom was really an autoimmune kind of, um, inflammatory girl for a long time. And I think this went unnoticed for a lot of years because really, you know, we treated things differently when my mom was younger and we didn't really address these issues with autoimmunity. So I wanna start off kind of, as a kid, I always thought I wanted to be a vet.

Speaker 1 00:02:51 And you know, I realized that in college that uh, veterinary medicine for me was very sad all the time and I didn't feel like I, I could save enough animals. So, and I started off in college as an art major, but as a kid I actually remember going to the bus stop every morning with heartburn and I thought, wow, you know, this is normal to have heartburn after drinking orange juice or after having a bowl of cereal. My mom even tried squeezing me fresh squeezed orange juice in the morning. She would make me like literally cream chippy from scratch on a, you know, school morning, which is craziness to me thinking about my son and what if I would do that? But that being said, I thought it was normal. Fast forward to adult life and being in residency, I actually never had any medical issues until I went actually during college I went to live in Costa Rica for a year and I wanted to learn Spanish fluently.

Speaker 1 00:03:51 So I decided that I was gonna take off and do six weeks in school with my winter session at Delaware and called my parents at the end of the six weeks and said I wanted to stay. If my son did that to me, I'd probably kill him. But that <laugh> again, my parents said, if you get all of your credits pre-approved and you don't lose any time and enroll in college there, that you could stay, that I could stay. So that's what happened. So I stayed there and during that extra time there, I spent a lot of time on the Pacific side of Costa Rica at the beaches. And what I realized is eating mangoes off the trees, I started getting a kind of lip sensitivity with bumps and they were sore and almost like sores in the corner of my mouth. And at first I thought it was only from the sun hitting the mango juice and kind of like a burn.

Speaker 1 00:04:44 And then what I real --

-- ized is that this is a more of a sensitivity. Even when I was eating it in the house that I was living in, if it touched my lips at any point, it would create these kind of hard uncomfortable bumps. So that was my first quote unquote food sensitivity was mangoes. Again, fast forwarding to med school, I went to PE o, which is Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine and got through P omm and actually wasn't a big coffee drinker back then. I actually really drank very little, if any coffee, it would just be for flavor. And then I went into residency at back then what was called Frankfurt, or Frankfurt Bucks in Frankfurt Torresdale. And now then it was rn, now it's Jefferson. And what I realized is I still had heartburn. So I would take, you know, Nexium almost every day.

Speaker 1 00:05:38 And I started drinking more coffee of course 'cause I'm in residency and internship and I'm tired and I feel like, you know, if I'm gonna go down and do something in the cafeteria, I'm gonna go get myself a cup of coffee or the break room. What happened shortly thereafter is I started gaining weight, I started getting some hair thinning and I was exhausted. So I just like any good, you know, intern or resident would do. I got my blood drawn and what I saw was my T SS H was super high, so my thyroid number was really high and I had antibodies to my thyroid. So back then I was actually lucky that we actually checked antibodies to my thyroid and I realized that I had what was called Hashimoto's thyroid disease and my T S H was pretty lousy. I can't remember exactly what it was, but I wanna say it was like a 17, it should be around a one to a two on average.

Speaker 1 00:06:31 But I never had a T three and a T four drawn. I just knew that I had a high T S H and I had antibodies to my thyroid. So in my brain I'm like, great, I'm following in my autoimmune mom's footsteps, right? My mom had rheumatoid arthritis, she had two hip replacements at relatively young ages. I wanna say it was like 40 and 50 or something like that. They're about 10 years apart. She had keratoconus, which is a cornea disease, an autoimmune cornea disease of her eyes had two cornea transplants, not to mention like I said, the ra, which was always sero negative, so it just ate away at her bones and joints over time. So I did not wanna fall in those footsteps, which is really why I started looking shortly thereafter for answers to how I could start to address this problem.

Speaker 1 00:07:25 Of course, the first thing I did, like any traditionally trained doctor and or patient for that matter, is I went on Synthroid and I have a really good podcast you guys on thyroid medication and when it came out and pulling out iodine from food and all this good stuff, but Synthroid was the number one prescribed drug and the nation prior to basically statins. And there's a reason for that. It's a prohormone, it's a very basic, what we call T four. So your body actually has to take that and convert it into active thyroid hormone. If you make antibodies, if you're nutrient deficient, if you just don't have a good pathway, vitamin D, vitamin A, vitamin K, two, iodine, selenium, they're all needed to make thyroid hormone. And truthfully guys, most of us are deficient in some, if not all of these. So not only can we not convert to active thyroid hormone, but we take this drug, this T four that makes our T S H look better on labs.

Speaker 1 00:08:29 And our primary docs are all very happy that our t s H is normal, but we never feel better. And that's kind of where I started out. I, I took T four for a while, Synthroid, I never felt better, I never lost weight, I never had my energy back. And that's when I realized I was a second year a family practice resident, that this probably isn't my answer. And that's actually when I started looking for alternatives and other ways to treat autoimmune disease and inflammation because around the same time I started realizing that I was getting seasonal allergies, they were mild, but the seasonal allergies definitely started to make me think like, why all of a sudden do our bodies change like this? And we get these, these inflammatory or histamine responses, right? So again, traditionally trained, I went to the allergist or the E N T and they basically told me to take Claritin or Zyrtec when I needed to or antihistamine.

Speaker 1 00:09:31 And that was all I really needed. Or we could allergy test me. Well t --

-- hat really wasn't enough for me. So as I'm trying to figure out what I wanna do with my life and be a resident and have these 30 hour shifts and or being on night float, what I started to look into is something called the A four M, which is an anti-aging, um, training module or training modules. And I went to a conference actually after I graduated, so I'm a little ahead of myself, but it did change my life. It actually changed everything that I thought about traditional medicine. But before that, since I'm not following any scripts, I got pregnant my last year of residency and that basically threw my body for a loop. I went into this spiral of autoimmunity and inflammation and food sensitivity. First thing that happened is I had, I was eating a lot of apples and peanut butter pregnant and I started getting a sensitivity on my throat, my lips, when I would eat the apples.

Speaker 1 00:10:39 So that was my second food sensitivity. Not realizing it at the time, I still didn't eat mangoes, but I'd also started getting a sensitivity to some nuts. So walnuts, yeah, primarily walnuts and almonds. And when I would eat them out of the canister with like the little bit of, she kind of still on them, it would bother my throat and my lips again. I wouldn't get the bumps, but I would just get kind of an itchy kind of full feeling in my throat. So fast forward to having my son Ethan, and basically getting done with pregnancy, my body kind of decided it wanted to be sensitive to every thin skin fruit. So I was eating a lot of cherries after I was pregnant, so cherries started to bother me. Peaches, pears, kiwis, basically anything that can cross react with pollen, if you actually look this up, it's actually a, a spring allergy kind of cross-react reactivation, but it killed me.

Speaker 1 00:11:43 Couldn't eat anything. All the fruits and stuff that I loved just became basically, you know, not an option for me. And that was not acceptable to me. I, I felt like there had to be something I could do to stop this course of action from progressing. So I avoided those foods for a long time. I went back to ear, nose and throat allergy and they said to me again, kind of this is what happens, you know, just become, you're becoming sensitive. And they wanted to put me on some more antihistamines during the day. So I graduated residency, still had the same situation and decided I was gonna look for answers and look for a wellness program that maybe I could someday put into my office setting. And that's when I found the A four M. And really guys when the A four M when I got to my first conference, I went to their general meeting and now I remember calling my boyfriend at the time and saying that this is medicine that I've never learned before.
Speaker 1 00:12:41 I can't believe that this isn't taught in med school because all the
science and physiology makes sense. The biochem it all, it all made sense and I was hooked. I was hooked on the gut immune connection primarily and the fact how important hormones were to the body in general. And, and that's when I actually signed up for the training. Right before I left the conference, I signed up for my first set of modules and the gut immune brain was life changing for me. So what I've realized, and that's where this real three method comes from, is one, had I not really sat there and did a timeline of my life and realized that heartburn as a kid after eating, eating kick cereal every morning and then fast forward to all these new food sensitivities after pregnancy and then Hashimoto's autoimmune, had I not put that timeline together with my mom's history of autoimmune disease as well, I might never have realized that there might be more to this than just, you know, hey this is it, you have allergies and that's all. Speaker 1 00:13:49 So again, looking back, so I've done a food sensitivity test years later. It turns out that I thought for as an older adult that I was just gluten allergic, but I am sensitive to baker's yeast coffee, which I've always known as I progressed with the coffee, it always gave me heartburn every day. So that was eliminated actually during covid for me, gluten was eliminated pretty early on. And then honestly, I don't even do gluten-free products that rise like gluten-free breads because I can't do the baker's yeast. So, and and bananas were on my list for a long time, but I had kicks cereal with bananas and milk and orange juice every mornin --

-- g as a kid for breakfast. And bananas always bothered me even as an adult. And I just thought, oh you have heartburn. Well no, it was a food sensitivity. I was actually making antibodies to bananas, antibodies to coffee antibodies, to thin skin fruits like the apples, pears, peaches and the baker's yeast as well as the gluten.

Speaker 1 00:14:52 So what do you do in those instances? And I think it's good to know this information, but what I've realized doing this for now for 10 years is that we sometimes need to calm the body down a little bit first and heal up that lining of the gut, which is where when we talk about the real three, we're putting all the pieces, the puzzle pieces together, we're retrieving information, we're gathering and then we're basically eliminating foods that we know are really inflammatory so that we can calm the system down. So we're eliminating gluten, we're eliminating a lot of dairy, sometimes nightshades, sometimes fermented foods depending on what we know that bothers their their stomach. If we don't know then we just pick the most common and we just say to this, basically saying to the system, here's a lot less allergens and a lot less inflammation and we work on healing and adding back in.

Speaker 1 00:15:48 That's that a we're gonna add back in nutrients that you're depleted in. We're gonna add back in healing things to heal up that gut lining. If you don't heal up the lining, you are always gonna have a little bit of what we call a leaky gut or almost like if you think about cobblestones that have separated these large molecules of food that maybe are irritating us will go through the system artificially large and create immune responses. And that's what you don't want. We wanna close the cobblestone gaps, we wanna put those, those little gaps back together and that's what we do with some of the products that we use to heal up or add back into our life. Now you might need that for the rest of your life. People like to ask me that all the time. Do I need, you know, gut stuff forever?

Speaker 1 00:16:32 And I'm not saying that you necessarily need it every day forever. However we have, once we develop these sensitivities and this leakiness or this inflammation, there's no getting rid of it totally. So you can heal up the lining and then have a cheat. Let's just say you have a cheat weekend and you end up having pizza or something you aren't supposed to. It takes a long time, at least six weeks to get rid of the antibody that you've produced to the gluten. And if you do that repeatedly, you're gonna get new leaky gut. So I tell people even a couple times a week, maybe a couple times a month with some of these things that we're adding back in for healing purposes is enough to keep your leaky gut and like the, the downstream effects of that which is autoimmunity at bay. Once our immune system gets turned on by these foods, it's really important for us to control the foods to get this immune system shut down, especially for autoimmunity.
Speaker 1 00:17:32 So we see a lot of people with celiac that have autoimmune disease. We see a lot of people in general that are have other food sensitivities coming down with Hashimoto's or autoimmune thyroid. It's really, really common. We see positive AANAs with which are autoimmune indicators with no real diagnosis of the disease yet. But we know that an A n a, which is basically it's called anti neutrophilic antibodies, we know that's not normal. We know it's not normal to fight self. Okay? So I want you to understand we're not taking away these foods forever all the time necessarily. But we do need to know that the downstream effect of some of these foods to certain people specifically are extremely pro-inflammatory and will turn on the immune system in a way that just starts to fight self and can become very dangerous. Autoimmune disease over time can really lead to cancers, it can lead to, I call short circuits in the system.
Speaker 1 00:18:32 So whether it's just breaking down bone and degenerating joints or is it creating further gut problems or is it actually creating cells that don't wanna stop dividing because they can't function correctly, which essentially is a cancerous process. It also affects the way we break down our, our estrogens and our, and how we make our thyroid work efficiently through methylation. Um, if we can't digest our foods correctly and we can't absorb these green leafy vegetable --

-- compounds we have, we don't make methyl efficiently, which is carbon and hydrogen. We can't utilize extra estrogen as part of the pathway that we utilize estrogen with and then it becomes a higher risk of a cancer of carcinogenic material. Same thing with our B vitamins. We can't utilize them very well if we don't methylate, which can become toxic byproducts to the heart like homocysteine. We do started checking homocysteine more recently in the hospital settings and we know that it's a pretty significant cardiac risk factor.

Speaker 1 00:19:30 So I think we just need to understand that this isn't meant to withhold things from you or punish you. This is a way to get your body to behave in a way that'll be healthier down the line. And that's where those Ls come into play. For our real three, we are basically creating longevity and long lasting luminosity. So we're getting rid of, and I like to put a whole lot of Ls in here. We're getting rid of lines and wrinkles because what we're doing is we're making the body healthier and by making the body healthier, we're actually creating a system that doesn't degrade as quickly. And those antioxidants are gonna work really well and you're not gonna get as much damage to the skin. Which also guys just f y I makes your all of your treatments, your neurotox, your fillers, your lasers, creating collagens from exosomes, which are stem cell vesicles that help to create collagen.

Speaker 1 00:20:27 It all works better, it's more efficient, you have less degradation of the product, it just has a much higher effect. So what I see in my patients truthfully, just like myself, is I had to do this timeline of my own body and then the timeline of my family, the labs and put all those rs together and then eliminate the things that were creating problems in my body, which were gluten and like I said, baker's yeast, coffee, bananas, the thin skin fruits and heal up the inside, add the things I was deficient in. I do take a box of supplements, you know, I have my little pill case that we now will have available online for you guys when you order. It's so cute. But I have to say, you know, it's a necessary evil. I didn't used to wanna do that, but it does make my overall health better.
Speaker 1 00:21:19 I don't get sick as much as I used to. I used to get sick all the time. Every cold that would come around I'd pick up and it would be forever. My energy levels are better. I don't have heartburn every day. Very rarely do I have heartburn anymore. I have to be, you know, pretty bad about what I'm eating or drinking or if I have too much wine or acidic, you know, something else that's acidic. That's really it and I know how to calm that down and heal it. Digestive enzymes are great for helping to break down foods when we can't do it. So there's ways that you can even have these cheat meals if you have to have them and still not do as much damage to your body. And let's fast forward to adult life. I've been on birth control for quite some time and you know, and what I do, it's really not something that I wanted to continue. Speaker 1 00:22:06 So I trialed myself off of it last April and in August got covid and started having back pain and I was running with one of my friends and I had realized that, you know, I couldn't run anymore. It was my back was hurting too bad. It took me a really long time to figure out why all of a sudden I was having this back hip pain. And I think abruptly stopping the hormones, even though they weren't the right combination of hormones that I wanted to be on created a lot of inflammation in my system. And it also created what I would say laxity of my joints and the muscles that hold and tendons that hold my joint in place. And what that did was made me very hypermobile, very a lot of popping and clicking like constantly and not just the normal like oh my knee cracks, but I didn't have any stability with doing core work.
Speaker 1 00:23:01 I couldn't lean over my chair to inject my Botox and fillers. So what happened was is I went back on birth control and about three days after going back on the birth control, I realized that a lot of my hypermobility and about 50% of my pain improved with going back on the hormones. Now I'm not suggesting that we be on birth control, however, I am suggesting that hormones are great anti-inflammatories and they are very good for muscle and joint health, especially testosterone as well. So going ba --

-- ck on that and actually doing my mom's timeline who had her uterus out at 45 and realizing that maybe I created a fibroid, which turned out to be positive on my MRIs, that I could have been doing a little bit of a double whammy. I got covid, I got some joint inflammation si joint irritation from covid, which I'm almost positive had a enlarge uterus with a fibroid in that same area and then may have possibly created a, a labral tear in my right hip.

Speaker 1 00:24:10 So all these things are compounding right and it's hard to tell which one's causing the pain. So now we're doing the due diligence to figure out, okay, which is it to, is it the uterus? Is it truly my back isn't my right hip? But I never would've thought hormone unless I did my timeline and unless I knew you know, about my mom's history and thought really long and hard about where my pain was truly, which is in the kind of the SI low back area, right where my fibroid showed up on M R I. So things change as we get older, but the timeline for me and the retrieval of information and the focusing on how these triangles interact and making sure we replete what we're deficient in and actually eliminating what's not doing US service, which goes for everything in our life, right? But also foods and lack of sleep and emotional stressors. Speaker 1 00:25:08 These are all part of that. And eliminating with the toxic burden, any environmental exposures, work exposures, these all go into your health. The next thing I'm gonna be diving into for you guys is mitochondrial health and how well are the powerhouses of our cells working? They aren't working, nothing's working. You know, if we can't get rid of the, the mitochondrial, the dead cells, which is how we are thinking that long hauler covid works is we, it it actually stops our mitochondria from being able to eliminate bad cells basically then we are stuck with all these bad cells that are defective and can't produce functional energy and then we get this inflammatory autoimmune response and that's our next goal to tackle. But we really have to think long and hard about what we're putting into our body and how we're healing it before we can even feel better.
Speaker 1 00:26:02 It's a long process for most of us. So that's a really long way of me kind of talking about how the real three method works. We're taking these triangles of gut immune brain, thyroid, adrenal, pancreas, autoimmune inflammation, bug and hormones. And we're putting that all together and we're trying to figure out where the deficiencies are and what is the, the, the culprit or the starting source. And a lot of the times you have to eliminate the burden for your body to heal. And that's that it's our three as well, but it's our E of elimination and that's what we're focusing on this month. And that's what I want you guys to focus on for the rest of August before the fall is how are we going to eliminate the toxic burden, eliminate the things that are stressors, eliminate the foods that are culprits, and then starting to add back in and heal and take advantage of all the good integrative and functional medicine out there that does have great data.
Speaker 1 00:27:01 Mind you just not as much money put into it as as big pharma. But I encourage you guys to take advantage of this now before the F D A gets involved too much in our industry and it will happen and it is happening. There are peptides that are being pulled off the market now that I'm hoping aren't off forever, but they're, they're going into clinical trials and they're going into pharma because they work. So if you want more information on this, if you wanna learn the real three method, if you're a nurse, nurse practitioner or PA physician working in an office that wants to put this into their aesthetic practice or their even their family medicine office, please feel free to reach out to me. Um, you can email me at lori l o r i@mydoctorlori.com and that's all spelled out. Or you can go to our website and click the um, contact us page as well.
Speaker 1 00:27:55 If you're really just interested in getting some quick recommendations for how to eliminate like starting with a liver detox for example, which we have on our website, which is fabulous to help for clean out. If you wanna, if you think you have a bug that you need to be detoxed from or you wanna just try to eliminate the food groups that are are toxic to your system and add back in nutrients, --

-- you can always fill out our rapid RX form, which is under resources on our website, my dr laurie.com. I would love to get a bunch of those from you guys and just give you recommendations without even necessarily having to do a full lab panel. We can absolutely go that route. We try to go through your insurance for that so you shouldn't, you know, have to rack up a huge bill if you have insurance with a not a high deductible.

Speaker 1 00:28:43 If not, we can do some self-pay options. But I would love to find out what's going on with you, give you some, some guidance in that way so that you know, you don't have to necessarily wait till you're in your thirties or forties or fifties like I did my mom unfortunately, I think though it was too long before they really treated her autoimmune disease and I don't think it was treated effectively. So she unfortunately died too young of what I believe to be complications of autoimmune disease and covid. So when you look at inflammation and autoimmunity, the first thing you're gonna think about is gut. And you don't have to have symptoms that are gut for that to be the case. For example, it doesn't have to be heartburn, diarrhea, or reflux. It can be nasal congestion, post nasal drip headaches, joint pains, fatigue, brain fog, so many things, sore throats.
Speaker 1 00:29:38 So many things that can go into this that can all be gut related and you'd be surprised at how just fixing these tiny little, I wouldn't say tiny fixes 'cause sometimes it's not, it's a little hard to do and it takes commitment, but they're not necessarily expensive, right? These are things to do with what you eat and your gut and what you're putting into your body and what you're exposing it to. So I'd love to hear from you guys. Stay tuned for my next podcast. Um, they're gonna be really interesting, some really great information. I have a round table coming up with some patients that have done my programs. I hope to do a couple on mitochondria and mitochondrial health and I've been getting tons of requests for more peptide ones, so I would love to keep talking about peptides as well. But I love to have you guys, so don't forget to like the page and follow me.
Speaker 1 00:30:25 I will have a Patreon page launching soon. It actually should be this week. So join my Patreon if you want, you know, the to UpToDate information and basically membership only material. Feel free to follow me on Patreon and you could do a paid membership and you'll be first in the know for even deals, discounts, new peptides on the market. And anything that's new in the integrative functional medicine world for practitioners is also launched. And that's the real three method and you guys can also ask us about that on our website, my dr lori.com. All right guys, well I'm gonna be signing off. I hope you enjoyed listening to the story of me and where I came from and how I ended up here. And now my passion is, is basically passing that along to you guys. So stay tuned and be well.

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