In 2012 my wife knew I would be dead by December.

How I got there

Within two years I lost my mother and my only brother. He fought multiple myeloma for nine and a half years and I was with him for every step of it, keeping a spreadsheet of his blood work and his medications from the beginning to his last moment. He chaired the criminal justice department at Temple University. He was my oldest friend.

While he was declining, my wife developed a meningioma that had been misdiagnosed for four years. By the time anyone found it she had lost the vision in her right eye. It sat at the optic chiasm and the pineal gland. Brain surgery was a total gamble: she might survive it, it might change nothing, the tumor might grow anyway. For four years she had been examined by the top retinologist in the area, and he consistently missed it.

Meanwhile our clinic went bankrupt in the 2008 collapse. Patients never knew what was happening behind the scenes and were completely surprised when we closed the doors.

Then my own body went. I was diagnosed with the worst ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease my regional hospital had ever seen. Steroids did nothing. HUMIRA did nothing. I was losing two thirds of my blood volume, bleeding out slowly, day after day.

That is the state I was in when I lay there catching flashes of myself giving the graduation speech for my medical school class, and laughed between breaths at the distance between that man and this one.

What actually turned it around

Four things, and none of them came from a prescription pad.

1. Refusing to treat expertise as above questioning. Think for yourself. Verify. Ask for clarification. The retinologist who missed my wife’s tumor for four years was, by every measure, the top man in the region.
2. Steering clear of over-promoters and strong egos. The people who know the most are usually the least publicly certain, and the most willing to be asked a hard question.
3. Fecal transplant and a ketogenic diet. The microbiome does change on a ketogenic diet. That was my wife’s insistence, not mine, and she was right.
4. Learning how to exercise effectively. HIIT and HIT, enough to build muscle and restore cardiovascular capacity.

My ketogenic work began in March 2014, out of sheer crisis. I had to re-examine everything I thought I knew and question my own assumptions. That is how I became an analysis junkie: come to think of it, maybe that part was never a change at all.

I have been off all medication for Crohn’s and UC since June 2015, with perfect colonoscopies since. My longest fast has been seven days. Precision PSMF is now part of my weekly routine.

Why this is the work I do

I have sixteen years of clinical experience treating patients through diet and lifestyle change, either directly or in support of other care: cancer, GI disorders, autoimmune disease, endocrine and gynecological conditions, diabetes, PCOS, infertility, environmental toxicity, and formal detoxification programs designed around a person’s actual toxic burden.

But the reason I do it this way is simpler than the credentials suggest. I nearly died holding a set of lab results that nobody was reading in relation to each other. I had to learn to read them myself, and then I had to learn what changed them.

That is what I now do for clients. Full panels, read as patterns rather than as a list of values against a reference range, with your own diet data alongside so the numbers can actually be explained rather than merely described.

The short term is paying it forward. I have sat with the leaders, researchers and physicians in this field and I still feel like I am beginning. The research is busting open. Your kitchen becomes the center of your new life, and I would rather show you how to read your own data than hand you a protocol.

Credentials

Naturopathic Doctor and Acupuncturist, certified in Chinese Herbal Medicine and Environmental Medicine. ND, LAc, Dipl. Oriental Medicine. Bastyr University, 1998.

• Graduation speaker for the 1998 graduating naturopathic class at Bastyr University, chosen by the class itself.
• First Bastyr graduation speaker to graduate with two degrees: a doctorate in Naturopathic Medicine and an MS in Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine.
• Member, International Medical Hydrology and Climatology Association.
• Co-managed the Gaia Herbal Symposium, 1992 to 2007, Black Mountain, North Carolina.
• Apprenticeship in wildcrafting medicinal herbs of Puget Sound, Washington, with Ryan Drum, 1995.