Watch the full interview below or listen to the full episode on your iPhone HERE.
Stu: This week I’m excited to welcome Caspar Szulc. Casper is the co-founder of Innovative Medicine, a company leading the way with a unique cutting edge and highly effective approach to medicine and health.
In this episode, we discuss the fundamental problems with conventional medicine, and explore how a personalised integrative approach can help push the boundaries of what’s possible in healthcare today.
Audio Version
Questions we ask in this episode:
- What are the fundamental problems with conventional medicine? – 02:36
- How would you treat low energy and brain fog? 19:02
- What can we do to optimise our brain health? 27:10
Get More of Dr. Glenn Livingston
If you enjoyed this, then we think you’ll enjoy this interview:
- Dr. Tom O’Bryan – The Autoimmune Fix
- Chris Kresser: The ABC of Functional Medicine
- Dr Stephen Cabral – Change Your Body. Change Your Life
Full Transcript
Stu
00:03 This is Stu from 180 Nutrition and welcome to another episode of the health sessions. It’s here that we connect with the world’s best experts in health, wellness and human performance, in an attempt to cut through the confusion around what it actually takes to achieve a long lasting health. Now I’m sure that’s something that we all strive to have. I certainly do. Before we get into the show today, you might not know that we make products too. That’s right. We’re into whole food nutrition and have a range of super foods and natural supplements to help support your day. If you are curious, want to find out more, just jump over to our website. That is 180 nutrition.com.au and take a look. Okay, back to the show.
This week I’m excited to welcome Caspar Szulc. Casper is the co-founder of Innovative Medicine, a company leading the way with a unique cutting edge and highly effective approach to medicine and health. In this episode, we discuss the fundamental problems with conventional medicine, and explore how a personalize interpretive approach can help push the boundaries of what’s possible in healthcare today. Over to Caspar.
Hey guys, this is Stu from 180 Nutrition and I’m delighted to welcome Caspar Szulc to the podcast today. Caspar, how are you?
Caspar
01:19 I’m doing well Stu. Thanks for having me.
Stu
01:21 No, I really appreciate it. And I’ve got a whole heap of questions that I’m very keen and eager to get stuck into, but before we do, for all of our listeners that may not be familiar with you or your work, I’d just love it if you could tell us a little bit about yourself please?
Caspar
01:37 Sure thing. So I am the co-founder of Innovative Medicine. We’re an organization that has been really transforming medicine and how we look at healing for the last 15 years or so. We have a clinical center in New York that sees patients from around the world, and we really are one of the few places that is truly advocating for a personalize and integrative form of medicine that gets at the root causes, and really restores health on all sides, mind, body, spirit. So it’s East meets West, meets everything in between.
And we’re really trying to help patients at that field, they don’t have too many options out there to go about it. And in a unique way that gets to those underlying dysfunctions, addresses them with a truly comprehensive approach and gets them back on track for prolonged health. How we should live in our natural state is healthy. And that’s what we’re aiming to do.
Stu
02:36 Fantastic. And I challenge our listeners to jump over to your website and have a look at some of the therapies as well that you have on offer, because I went through that, it wasn’t what I was expecting and we’ll get into that a little bit later on as well. But there were huge amounts of modalities in there that were very unique and I would imagine lend themselves to lots of science, lots of history. I mean there’s a whole heap of stuff going on there, and I know through speaking to lots of people like yourself that they can be so powerful too. And are radically different then to conventional medicine. And I guess first up, I’m keen to hear your description or perhaps your thoughts on the fundamental problems then with conventional medicine right now.
Caspar
03:27 Sure thing. And the first thing I want to say is I’m not one of those that likes to go around bashing conventional medicine. I think it’s fabulous. Has its place. My father was started as a conventionally trained doctor, surgeon, anesthesiologist and it absolutely has its place, but there are some fundamental problems I would say or things that are limiting it. And those limitations really start at the basis of treatment being the diagnosis alone. So when you go about this, that the diagnosis is this holy grail and my take on it working with so many doctors in so many different fields is a little blunt that you have to throw the diagnosis completely out, because we are not a word that describes our symptoms. We are much more than that. And it’s much, much more important to know why you have a problem than what it is. So that your symptoms fall in line with groupings that may fit into one diagnosis, does not mean that the treatment for that diagnosis will work for you at all. And I think that’s a big limitation because so many people would go misdiagnosed or undiagnosed and just get passed around because you can’t do anything from them. Whereas, if you took a different approach that the diagnosis, it’s just again, a term that describes symptoms and you fall into that just as your name may be Stu doesn’t mean that all students are the same. We want to go about that also in a completely different way that we’re addressing the why not the what. So it really starts I think at that fundamental problem of the basis. I think number two is that the options are somewhat limited. I know when my father was really going through and starting his career in the medical fields and working his way up in the hospital, he had this great frustration that he was helping people in some way they saw some improvement but they’d be back worse after a while or with something completely different.
And he felt incredibly frustrated because he only had certain tools. He had prescription drugs, he had some surgeries, some other procedures he could do. But none of those were enough for these patients. And the vast majority of them became chronically ill. And so he found that his frustration led him to go search the world and find that there are so many other option than just what’s in conventional medicine. And that’s really a sliver of the medical spectrum that’s there. So it’s almost as if we’re looking under microscope, under a microscope, under a microscope, going deeper into the rabbit hole. Rather than taking a step back and saying, wait, what else is out there that can help my patient? Let’s put the patient first and put Egos aside and say, oh, alternative medicine doesn’t work. Psychology doesn’t work. There’s no spirituality involved in this. And let’s try and see all of that.
I think the last and final piece that I would say is a fundamental problem of conventional medicine is the measure of success. I think too many times you have this success is basically managing the disease and masking symptoms. And if you measure that as success, sure. Anyone that takes a drug and starts to feel better taking that drug is successful. You applaud it and say, okay. But are we truly get or are we sweeping things under the rug here? Are we kind of just painting over the leak in the wall, as I say, or are we addressing why the leak is there in the first place? And I think that that’s a big one because if you’re going to say it’s successful to continue living your whole life simply managing a disease and slowly deteriorating, but adding in different drugs and and doing different surgeries.
I think that’s a poor measure for success, and I do think we need to change that measure of success to self healing again, doing what the body was initially intended to do. You don’t cut yourself and then have to take drugs, apply things, go into surgery. It heals itself. It’s amazing. We don’t even think about it, and it’s happening without us even knowing we are healing all the time. But over time as we do things that kind of, I’d say drops in the wrong bucket, and we do things that don’t allow our bodies to function optimally. We sooner or later become diseased and then it’s basically conventional medicine is we’ll take care of that. We’ll go in and we’ll fix it by managing it for the rest of your life and also masking those symptoms. I think that truly needs to change for us to address some of those problems that conventional medicine has right now.
Stu:
07:59 Fantastic. And it’s a very exciting time as well because we now have lots of emerging tech that allows us to track our own performance and medical professionals as well can dial into things like, mitochondria, gut health, and really start to think about different ways that we can manage this without medication, which is really exciting once you actually know where your kryptonite areas lay, you can start to avoid them and then I guess track personally and see how you feel. So in terms of personalized integrative medicine, how would you describe that to the lay person and what would you typically do with a new client, a new patient that comes through the door, to I guess get a baseline as to where they are on their health journey right now?
Caspar
08:53 Sure. Yeah, I’d be happy to answer that because I think a lot of people have this misinterpretation or just a true non understanding of what integrative medicine is in the first place. So I think first and foremost, integrative medicine is about integrating all modalities. It’s about a comprehensive approach, right? It’s about bringing everyone to the table, as I say, and putting the patient on the altar in the middle. So it is conventional approaches. It is psychological and psycho emotional approaches. It is more natural approaches, biological medicine, you could say alternative functional medicine has a seat at the table. It’s also spiritual and consciousness are pieces of that as well that most people, most I would say conventionally trained orthodox doctors would say, well, that’s more religion based, but has nothing to do with religion, it has more to do a consciousness, purpose, passion, all those things.
So when you look at this medical spectrum, it’s pretty vast. And if you’re a true integrative doctor, you should really be covering that spectrum, from I would say surgical procedures going one end of conventional where you’re actually cutting open and cutting things out, to truly spiritual and consciousness techniques that are there and everything in the middle that kind of finds itself there. The personalized element is really interesting too because we’re all so unique. We really do think that every single protocol should not be a trial and error, generalized protocol. But it should be as unique as your fingerprint to you. And it should be highly specific and no one else should have it. We say it’s your personalized and tailored roadmap back to health.
That means if you had twins come in and sit down and had the same diagnosis, same even lab results let’s say, you might have two completely different treatment programs, just because those twins are indoubtedly never going to be living exactly the same lives with exactly the same influences every day that got them into a disease state even if they share so much genetic coding. So to answer how it would look when you come into a center like ours, first off, you’d have much more time on the initial evaluation. So we’re talking about an hour or so where you’d sit down with a doctor, the medical team works as a team. It’s not where, I know a lot of doctor’s offices are, each doctor is independent. So if you go see one doctor, they may come up with something different than the next doctor. And that’s really dependent on an educated guess. Maybe they went to a seminar last weekend and found something interesting that they want to apply to you.
Stu
11:37 Sure, yeah.
Caspar
11:38 It’s educated and it’s not a bad thing, but it’s still a guess and you don’t know if it’s going to work. We’re more working on a bioenergetic basis. We’re looking at the lab results, we’re talking to you. We’re getting to build that trust with you, understanding who are as a person, not to diagnosis. And then we’re going to look at it through a drop of blood basically, an evaluation that’s very, I would say advanced in a way, but also simplistic in getting to the core of why those things are there, not a huge amount of parameters. We’re looking at deficiencies, pathogens, stressors, including emotional stress, which of course don’t usually come out in certain ways. Even things like electromagnetic stress. Is that a factor here?
And then we’re also getting to what is your personalized program of treatment, almost like a decision tree across all of these different parameters, meaning conventional, biological or natural therapies, IV therapies, procedures that are there. Technology as you mentioned that may be helpful. Even biofeedback machines, there’s such vast numbers there. But going down that and really going down this decision tree to something that is again, your roadmap to health. And that will be presented to you within a day or so. So it’s not like four weeks of waiting for your lab results, and the lab results are again interpreted they’re downstream almost affects. And I think we’ll start you on this and go to this. No, it’s not like that with a personalized integrative medicine approach. It’s really kind of taking out the guesswork and using all the tools that are available within medicine to try and get you back and self healing again and restored to complete health.
Stu
13:18 Wow, yeah. So exciting, and so transformative as well. And I was intrigued when we’re talking about personal stresses as well, because I guess you’re only getting half of the picture when a patient comes in to you wanting help, because it’s going to be pretty tricky for you to determine if they’re living in an environment subject to toxic mold. Perhaps they sit on their iPhone until midnight, and they’re drinking tap water that’s tainted with chlorine and who else knows what, all of the above. How is it that you’re able to tap into that kind of stuff if you do? Because I would imagine that could have a huge impact in health.
Caspar
14:03 Yeah, absolutely. Because inside every patient, there’s this innate intelligence, everything’s being recorded basically within the patient, right? And it’s the same thing as so many people now are on looking at DNA and genetics and kind of decoding that to understand, of course, that is your imprint. That’s where you have proclivities to disease and other things like that. And it’s incredibly important to who you are, it basically is the information of who you are and everything. But then there are all the external factors that have come against you as you went on. But that’s also recorded, that’s basically information in there. The body has that innate information. Those of us are very in tune with our bodies. And I think if you went back several civilizations ago, we would have been more in tune with these things and understood them as they came up for us very easily.
But that’s what we’re trying to tap into is basically like having a conversation with this innate intelligence, because the patient themselves they’re coming from a brains ploy place in their mind and saying, I think this is wrong with me, here are my symptoms. But you’re right, they’re unsure. Is this mold, is it this is, is it a million different factors? Is it something, an argument that happened when I was five years old with my-
Stu
15:17 Yeah.
Caspar
15:17 … that just stuck around and I just never addressed, and has been slowly kind of taking its toll on me and coming out in a biochemical reaction right now. So when you go into this deep state, not this sort of top level information that’s easy to pull, that’s almost chemical reactions. You go a little bit deeper into almost a quantum state reaction or information you’re trying to pull out of the patient, then you’re getting these sort of much deeper answers in a sense, that the patient themselves doesn’t recognize. But now we can identify, interpret them through different systems, through advanced technology, and it’s just advancing every year more and more. And you’re able to pull out this information more readily and really get at the core of why you’re sick.
Stu
16:07 Yeah, very, very exciting. And at least in the circles that we operate in, most commonly people are struggling with their weight loss, low energy, things like that. What are your most commonly prescribed therapies? Because I know you have so many in there so far reaching.
Caspar
16:28 It’s a hard one to answer because again, I’m sitting here saying we should personalize everything and then it’s like, oh, these are the best ones. But I think there is a way, I always say there are patterns and there are particles. The particles are going to be the specific ones to you that no one’s going to be able to tell you just looking at you quickly. Those are the ones that are a little bit unseen and that’s going to be what personalizes your treatment. But the patterns are usually there. So you’re seeing a lot of different ozone therapies I would say, poor oxygenation and that allows the immune system to not functioning properly and allows pathogens to survive. It also changes the pH sometimes. So you’re seeing more IV therapies with natural pieces. Detoxification therapies are very big, whatever they may be, there’s so many different ones out there.
You’re also seeing energetic therapies, not just acupuncture or acupressure, but more advanced ones that use even laser systems. And to balance Chakras, because again, I think in this day and age, we don’t realize how many influences are ripping through our body at every second. The electromagnetic fields of all these things around us are literally, are information that our body doesn’t know what to do. And it’s ripping through us whether it’s Wifi, whether it’s 5G now or 4G was, going into it now. And even the amount of the radiation coming off of these machines it’s just growing and our bodies have never been like that for thousands and thousands years. So you have to be able to look. So you look at some of the problems that are the big ones and then you have an arsenal to kind of combat that with, and you want to do it in the gentlest form of course, you want to do it with something that’s safe, that doesn’t have side effects first and foremost.But you also want to correct it in the most efficient manner.
So whether that’s going to be something like a hammer, which is more the IV therapies or anything like that, or a specialized drill that is going to be more maybe the energetic pieces or biofeedback pieces. A lot of emotional issues. So we use emotional techniques, neuro emotional technique, even EFT and tapping comes into play sometimes with patients that have unresolved issues, and that’s something they could do at home. So those I would say are the most commonly prescribed ones. And it goes beyond just supplementation. We do have over 100 different therapies from all over the world, spanning many different modalities and that’s the beauty of it. When you have
19:00 A big tool kit, you could do a lot with that.
Stu
19:02 Yes, and a huge tool kit as well, absolutely. If I walked through your doors tomorrow, and complaining of low energy and brain fog, where would you start?
Caspar
19:20 First off, I’d tell you that you’re like 90% of that patients that flock in the door, and 90% of patients that walk around the streets, I have to say, you know? Low energy and brain fog are kind of a modern day dilemma. It’s a crisis going on right now, and it’s across the board.
I would start by, first and foremost, passing you off to our medical team, because I’m not a doctor.
Stu
19:42 Okay.
Caspar
19:42 But knowing what I know, and working with the medical team so closely, you got to get to the whys. There’s so many different whys involved, but of course, you want to look at the dietary things. You want to look at adrenals, you want to look at the brain function in general, and you want to look at, what is deficient? What is causing this, in a sense?
In many ways, it could be key metabolites that are used in mitochondrial function, and energy production, such as NAD, Coenzyme Q10, other ones like that. And you’re going to want to address it in a very personalized manner.
I don’t think … if it’s not a true, I would say, diseased state, and you’re just dealing with it an acute stage, then there are definitely some supplements you could take, I think, in more of the oral route … and lifestyle adjustments and dietary adjustments you could take, that would absolutely improve, I think, energy, and especially brain fog, looking at a more plant-based, even going into some intermittent fasting, to allow more, I think, absorption, and give your body a little bit to really take in things. That’s where you’d start.
If it were to turn into a chronic one, I think that requires a little bit more in-depth, personalized and comprehensive approach.
Stu
20:59 Right, okay, and in terms of baseline tests, perhaps that you think the majority of people would benefit from having … and it may be things like, “Well, let’s get your hormones, let’s get a decent set of bloods,” maybe even gut permeability, things like that. What would you prescribe as the best set of baselines?
Caspar
21:26 You know, I think you hit on the most common ones nowadays, and those are the ones that a lot of practitioners are looking to. I think they’re very good in providing information. I think, then, deciphering that information and sometimes, having too much of that information, is the problem with those tests.
Stu
21:44 Yeah.
Caspar
21:45 I think that there’s a lot of interpretation to be had, and again, you’re looking downstream effects. It’s much better to understand the body upstream. So, if you’re going to use an analogy, if you pick up on a chemical contaminant in a river downstream, sure, you could bring in the compounds that help suction that in that chemical. But what is causing it is really the question.
Stu
22:08 Yeah, sure, yeah.
Caspar
22:09 Too many people just say, “Oh, you have a deficiency, and it’s just take this,” right? Vitamin D deficiency, take Vitamin D. There isn’t a, one, why is that Vitamin D deficient?
Stu
22:17 Yeah.
Caspar
22:18 In all honesty, if you’re eating a well-balanced meal, and this and that, and you’re living a healthy life, there shouldn’t be any deficiencies in you. I would have to say, if I’m going to give some other test that people could look into, to get better insight of those upstream ones, I would look at more of tests that are a little bit on the cutting edge of heart rate variability testing.
Those are, there are some interesting ones that are really kind of executing, looking into chronobiology, looking into adrenals on a different basis. And I think they’re giving you a good measure. I know most of the patients like seeing those things.
It’s a printout, it’s a nice screen, it has so many different things that you could get from this heart rate variability test, and it can give you a little bit more, a rounded picture, a little bit more upstream.
It’s not all the way upstream, like some of the tests we’ve done, that are very unique and really require a doctor to do them, and an artist, I would say, to perform them. But they do take you a little further upstream and answer those questions. So, in some ways, they could really complement those basic lab tests that you mentioned at the beginning, and that are there, and give you this information downstream. But they allow you to get a little bit more piece, more pieces of the puzzle, I should say.
Stu
23:33 Yeah, okay. I’d love to hear a little bit more, then, about heart rate variability. Because I know that, I mean, I wear an Oura ring, and track all of that kind of stuff. Many of our listeners may not have heard of that, they’ve heard about resting heart rate, and respiration, things like that, that are a lot of the activity trackers that are allowed, will provide us. So, for our listeners that have never heard and want to explore more, what is heart rate variability, and why is it so important in health?
Caspar
24:08 Well, HRV, or Heart Rate Variability, basically, it is looking at the sequence from, looking almost at the sequence of up and down of the heart rate, seeing it out of the pieces, right?
Stu
24:20 Yeah.
Caspar
24:21 There’s actually, the more invariability there is, the better. You’re not supposed to have a heart rate and at a beat that goes incredibly in unison.
Stu
24:31 Yes.
Caspar
24:32 It’s a measure of things, and by measuring that, and also measuring electrical impulses that come off it. So it’s not literally that you’re wearing something to your heart. You’re usually wearing some electrodes on the finger, like an Oura ring or something.
It’s actually sending impulses in, measuring those variabilities to the millisecond, seeing that, and also sending signals to other areas of the body, while measuring that, too.
So it’s almost a biofeedback meets Heart Rate Variability, of that variability, and measuring those heartbeats, and looking at basically interpreting, then, what stressors, what pieces are there, what information you’re getting out of that, as you send the feedback in, receive it back, and look at everything, all these different parameters, like we said, from chronobiology, hormonal levels, even your biological age of things.
So it looks at those things and compares it, based on the metrics. And it really is, I think, a better determinant, because it’s going a little bit deeper. It’s utilizing something incredibly important, such as the heart rate, or heartbeat, and the variability to it, and being able to give you information based off of that, that is pretty scientific, and quite measurable, and allows you to have more information from it.
Stu
25:47 Got it, and in terms of improving our Heart Rate Variability, would that lend itself more to the psychological and mindset-oriented therapies that you offer? Or would it be more therapeutic supplementation, all that side?
Caspar
26:05 I think it depends drastically on the person and what you’re looking at there. I think it gives you a very good picture, again, of where the patient is and what type of a treatment program would come off of that. We use it as an adjunct, basically evaluation system, on top of everything, and use it with our psychologist as the one that basically performs it.
So it does give some, I would say, psychological feedback as well, which is incredibly important, because the emotional side of everything’s important. But it still requires interpretation by a skilled person who’s going to look at it, and be able to look at and say whether or not you require supplementation, based off another.
There’s still an art form and skill to that in itself, and you have practitioners that only use HRV to basically base this off of. As I said, technology’s improving so much, what you could do with this now, and how to interpret, and the more data they have, the better they could get as well, with understanding the variability, and what it means as they’re testing throughout the body.
Stu
27:10 Yeah. Exciting times. I’m keen to talk about brain health, and I think we’re certainly in a very interesting era in our time, in that our free time is slipping away, to social media and distractions, and often times that dials into things like poor sleep, as well, because we just can’t shut off the monkey minds. And many of us don’t rest and reset at all.
I know that that rest and reset phase is so important for brain health, and all of the restorative processes that happen when we sleep, perhaps, as well. What can we do to safeguard ourselves, perhaps right now?
Because commonly, we might be practicing, we might be doing the wrong thing right now. Which is fine, if we’re in our twenties and thirties. But I really want to think about the mantra, prevention is the cure, so I don’t go downhill when I’m in my fifties and in my sixties. What do you do, in terms of safeguarding, then, for brain health?
Caspar
28:21 You do mention it is a very interesting time right now, because it’s such an information age.
We have so much, vast amounts of information that are being thrown at us, and different forms of it coming through, social media through, just technology as a whole, through advertising, through everything we basically see throughout the day. And our brains are on overdrive most of the time.
Stu
28:43 Yeah.
Caspar
28:43 And being incredibly depleted. The top doctors I speak with say that this is a crisis of brain energy going on right now. This is across the board, every single patient is dealing with it in some way, shape or form. It is a symptom of most diseases, also, and a cause for a lot of them, and it’s incredibly hard to tell someone, “Listen. The best thing you could do is go into a cave, turn everything off, live in nature,” right?
Sleep eight hours, be very in tune with the chronobiology. Go to sleep when it’s dark out, wake up when it’s light, but we can’t live there. We’re not going to live in a cave. I understand that. We’re in this age now, and we have to do things about it.
Number one is just, awareness is always the biggest one. I think so many people are aware of things like diet, and working out, and you go on Instagram social media, and 90% of the experts out there are all either in fitness, or taking pictures of their breakfast, of some kind of a special soup or food they’re doing.
And there’s nothing wrong with that, but at the same time, they’re missing this huge element of what truly makes us human is our brain.
Stu
29:54 Yeah.
Caspar
29:54 Is that capacity for feelings, for emotions, for coming up with these amazing solutions, and we ask so much of our brain but do so little to repay it. And we do ask for those incredible long days, and for it to be focused and on at all times.
That’s not really realistic, in some ways, and I do think we have to shift our focus to helping the brain, to, like you said, regeneration is incredibly important. Sleep is incredibly important.
You can’t wear that as a badge of honor, where you sleep only three or four hours, and then hustle throughout the day. That’s burnout, that’s complete depletion of the brain. That’s something, you have to prioritize your health to be productive in the long term, and accomplish that. So that’s number one.
We have to be mindful of how much time we’re spending on things that are sucking, basically, energy out of our brain, like social media, like our phones, like, all the digital stuff. Our brains are really meant to take in more forms of natural elements, and not digital. It changes everything once you have sinusoidal kind of waves that you have to interpret, that are more of these digital waves. And it does impact.
I think it’s a huge problem with children, that are there on their phones basically, and you see parents that, as soon as the child acts up, give them iPad, and let them be.
Stu
31:17 Yeah.
Caspar
31:17 And they just shift off, and it almost like, turns into a state of zombie-like-
Stu
31:20 It does, yeah.
Caspar
31:22 That’s unfortunate. Because that, the brain, is suddenly being impacted in a very negative and deleterious way, that we need to address a little bit more and focus that. I think there are great supplements out there. I think there are great techniques out there.
I think even children should be taught to mediate, should be taught the breathing techniques, to basically balance the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system. Right now, our sympathetic nervous system is always on, almost, and the parasympathetic is never there. And that’s going to throw everything off. You’re going to have a hard time sleeping, you’re going to have a hard time producing melatonin tonight. You’re going to need sleep aids and things like that. Of course, there are supplement, there are things. We’re really intrigued at what we’re seeing at our center, and what other centers are seeing on, “All right, what’s the root cause, again, of this brain energy crisis? And what are the key coenzymes that we’re looking at, that more and more research is looking at, that researches all the enzyme of anti-aging, and of life as this NAD, nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide.
We saw it in IV infusions, where you had people, recovering drug addicts, that were, their brains were incredibly impacted by opiates. And basically, when you give them this coenzyme, its ability to impact the brain, refresh the brain, go in there, and basically provide it with energy, at the same time, help with withdrawals, was incredible. It really is something, I think, more and more people need to look at.
I think it’s starting to get that recognition, but that’s something we saw, and really, kind of, we saw as an ability to say, “All right, that seems to be part of the equation.” It’s not everything.
Stu
33:09 Yeah.
Caspar
33:09 There is no one molecule that that cures everything, but in terms of brain energy, brain functioning, this is pretty central. It’s as essential as oxygen is, to every single cell in the mitochondria I’m producing, but especially in the brain, which takes up 20% of our energy on any given day, if not more so, as we continue to utilize more technology, and ask more of it.
Stu
33:30 Fantastic, and I have heard so much and read so much about NAD, and listened to a very interesting podcast, I think, with you and Dave Asprey as well, who is a self-professed biohacker, and will do, go above and beyond to change his biology. So I’m intrigued, then, to hear about [Natovin 00:33:51], which our listeners can find if they jump onto your website as well, and we’ll put the links in the show notes later.
But that seems to be very exciting, so I wondered if you could just tell us a little bit about why you developed it, and what the primary function is, as well.
Caspar
34:07 It’s a really, yeah, it’s a really interesting story, because it really goes back to probably 10 years or so, where my father and I were sitting at a table and basically discussing, if we could choose one thing, if we could do one supplement out there, I wonder what it’d be. What would have the biggest impact?
Stu
34:22 Yeah.
Caspar
34:22 And we wanted to look at that lowest hanging fruit, to help as many people, and that was 10 years ago. We didn’t know what it was at the time. We were looking at different things.
There was cell immune function, detoxification, it needs to do this, it needs to do … When we started using NAD outside of simply, I would say, a drug addiction, and started using it on patients with neurological disease, Parkinsonism, ALS.
When we started it on patients with Lyme disease and brain fog, we were seeing some really really great results. Then things started to move in this motion, well, almost every single patient has some sort of a brain symptom, related to a neurological system.
Again, the brain is just so incredibly important. It is our CPU, it governs our body, it tells us what to do, and so many of the symptoms and dysfunctions we see are really starting with the brain.
From there, my father kind of jumped into the lab like a crazy scientist, and start to say, “How could we take this NAD compound that’s having such great impact in an intravenous format, and transition that into an oral format, into a supplement that’s safe, that’s gentle, that can use this NAD, be absorbed and really impact the brain as much.
That’s where it became a little bit tricky, because NAD is incredibly delicate compounds. For many years, it was thought to not be orally absorbed, and basically hydrolyzed in the intestines and stomach acid. And so, we had to find a way, both of very high quality NAD, that is orally available, that is together mixed in a formulation, that makes it more bioavailable, more concentrated, almost, in a sense, where you’re not talking about more milligrams, but you don’t need as many milligrams to deliver and impact the brain.
After years of testing, of looking at different things, we came up with this product, which is called Natovin, and it combines NAD, along NAD+ in its true form, not a precursor or anything like that, along with seven other ingredients that are all research-backed, well-known, such as Bacopa, [Cartsqua 00:36:30], Coenzyme 10, magnesium, [Glaicine 00:36:34], thiamine, and really, in the right ratios.
It was incredibly important, my father said, that the ratios have to be right. Nowadays I think so many marketers just say, “More is better, try and fit as much as you can into a capsule, and just sell it as, ‘Look how much we have of it.'” ‘
But even something as simple as the ration of NAD to Coenzyme Q10, two incredibly important enzymes in mitochondrial function, two that have been starting to research, has shown has worked on Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and then, and orally, has a great improvement in those with fatigue. And even that ratio had to be incredibly specific, where it was a little bit off.
So we had it at 200 to 33. When we were testing at 200 to 40, 220, it just wasn’t the same.
Stu
37:17 Right.
Caspar
37:17 So it really was this kind of, art form to finding all these ratios. You have eight ingredients, and it’s like a lock with eight numbers. It’s incredibly imagine up, so it unlocked something.
Stu
37:29 Yeah.
Caspar
37:29 But after all, after two-plus years of doing it, and then working with a great nutraceutical development team that at first said, “I don’t know if we could do the feasibility. It may not handle together. It may not work.” And we were able to pull it off, which was a, I think, a great feat.
From everything we’ve seen so far, using it first for a whole year, only in the clinical setting, only on the toughest cases, only on neurological cases that really weren’t seeing any improvement through conventional routes. We saw improvement, and we saw it across the board, at multiple
38:00 Multiple medical clinics and then we opened that up to the public after we knew it was proven in a way, anecdotally sure, but I think in the best way through the experience of tough cases and patients who literally showed us that they were getting better, remarked on it as well, as well as the doctors remarking on it. That’s where it came from. It really started all those years back and what’s that low-hanging fruit, what can have the most impact on people and what could we do to make it the highest quality, make it unique, formulate it in a very specific way that truly impacts as many people as possible. I think everyone could agree, the functioning of the brain to improve that in any way, shape or form can help anybody whether you’re an athlete looking to focus better, whether you’re working with your writer and trying to have writer’s block or whether your patient is suffering from brain fog symptoms and just short term memory loss and inability to concentrate.
Stu
38:58 Fantastic. Well, the testimonials are very, very encouraging on the website. The product looks fantastic. I think that everybody deserves the right to feel and look at their best as well. I think the people that are actively looking at a compound like that are already head and shoulders above most of the population who, perhaps, are unaware of all of the important things that you do need to do to try and get you on that journey. For our listeners, where could they go to find out more about that particular compound?
Caspar
39:30 Yeah. Nadovim is on the website all on its own, basically, on nadovim.com, N-A-D-O-V-I-M. You could go on there. You can look at [inaudible 00:39:40]. You can look at those results. You can look at doctors’ clinical experience with it. We really want to be transparent with it. We really do want the rest of the laurels, of the results. That’s what speaks the best for us. We know that in the medical community, results are everything. Our referrals mean the world to us and getting people healthy is the main objective. Again, unlike a lot of different products out there, this contains no stimulants. It’s incredibly safe. It’s being used with patients with incredible sensitivities that can’t take other supplements. It was created by an integrative and holistic practitioner that understands that there can’t be any side effects when dealing with this type of thing.
Yeah, they can look there and really get into. We have subscriptions. We ship around the world. Yeah, more and more people are really getting on this. I’m not claiming it’s any sort of miracle, it’s the only thing you need or anything like that. If anything I’m going to be realistic in, that it’s not going to solve all your problems.
Stu
40:36 Sure.
Caspar
40:37 It will give you, as most people have said, as Dave Asprey and other, it gives you those nuance improvements of levels of cognitive function. It gives you things you didn’t know. So many times, we hear other users say, “I don’t need that cup of coffee later in the day. I was almost relying on it because my energy levels started to drop.” It’s true, most of us are NAD deficient. Everything from stress to alcohol to prescription drugs, drains NAD at a quicken rate. Having that and restocking and replenishing the levels of NAD in your brain really do show you what it should where it would be working like or what the brain can do when it has the proper nutrients and metabolites to do what it does best and allow us to think, to create, to solve problems. It’s really a great product, I would say, as a first one for us.
Stu
41:29 I have the image of the movie, Limitless, with Bradley Cooper. I don’t know what are you saying there.
Caspar
41:35 We’ve been trying to get him as a spokesperson for a long time now. Yeah, he hasn’t answered. If Bradley is listening right now, please respond to the emails.
Stu
41:43 Yeah. Good stuff. You are in an amazing position and that you have access to some of the best tech, brains, supplements, therapies on the planet. How do you apply that to your own life? What does your personal supplement regime look like? What do you do everyday? As a precursor, I’m going to say, whatever you tell me is going to be unique to you. It shouldn’t, I’m guessing, be replicated by anybody out there.
Caspar
42:15 Yeah. I feel like I’m going to let people down with this because I truly believe simpler is better. I’ll get into it a little bit more.
Stu
42:15 Sure.
Caspar
42:23 I think that fundamentals and simplicity mean a lot. I think when you’re talking about supplement, in general, you should be taking supplements for certain things and where you are. Looking to supplement what is a balanced, basically, diet, nourishment should really come from what you eat. Deficiencies of vitamins, of minerals means that, number one, you’re not getting enough from your food. Meaning, the quality of the food or-
Stu
42:51 Caspar, just a little bit of a drop out there over the internet, but we were talking about your personal supplement regime and the things that you do that ( a) are personal to you and (b) probably shouldn’t be replicated by public as well, but very keen to know exactly how you dial into the health that you’re in today.
Caspar
43:10 Yeah. It’s a question I get a lot to do. The reality is, there’s nothing fancier or special about my supplement regime. I truly believe in simplicity. I truly believe that most of our nourishment should come from what we … if we’re eating high quality, if we’re eating the right foods, we shouldn’t be deficient unless there is something else like a pathogen or some extreme stressors in your life. It’s at those times that I believe you require certain supplements. Depending on even my levels of stress, I’ll take L-theanine and a GABA product. Again, what we look for, you said it before, I’m incredibly lucky because I work at a top medical center that has a dispensary and we test things from around the world. We understand what’s high quality.
Again, you pay for what you get. If you’re going in and looking for a multivitamin, you want to pay the least that your local grocery store. You’re probably not going to get a product that’s bio available that’s giving you a good quality stuff your body is going to use. Again, it’s not quantity, it’s quality, but some of the supplements I’m more regularly using, I’m using the Nadovim just because I’m in a situation where I’m going to have some depletion regardless of how well I take care of myself. I am usually using a high quality probiotic supplement just for gut health. That is your second brain. You have to take care of that as good as you eat. You won’t always know what you’re eating even when you think it’s organic and high quality. If you go to a restaurant, you may eat something that’s a little bit off and throw you off. I’m taking, sometimes, because I don’t like to drink all the time, an apple cider vinegar pill-
Stu
44:56 Right.
Caspar
44:56 … just to balance the pH and everything. There are a number of different ones depending on what’s going on. If I’m more stressed, sure, I’m going to up the vitamin C a little bit to boost the immune system. I may take things like Chaga tea that are more natural. I’m consistently looking at my body and trying to read it. How am I feeling today? What do I feel I may be missing? Or what do I feel, maybe, coming up? If I feel that cold is coming on or some congestion in there, I’m going to try and take wild oregano oil or just a few drops in the morning with something like that. I’m going to increase just the amount of lemon I’m drinking and squeezing in there while also supplementing on top of that. It’s not just that you’re taking something every single day. I don’t want my body to truly become dependent or just get rid of nutrition, anything like that. I wanted to work as optimally.
My father and a lot of different doctors say, it’s usually not what you put in your body, it’s what you take out of it.
Stu
45:59 Yeah. That’s good advice.
Caspar
46:01 A lot of people are taking those 60, 80 pills a day. I think, sometimes, that it’s better to just detox yourself and spend some time in a sauna and relax yourself and take those negative thoughts out of your head than actually trying to put everything in there and balanced, but of course, I believe in supplementation especially if you’re in somewhat of a depleted state to help you get back to your norm and then you could lay off that a little bit.
Stu
46:27 Yeah. No, that’s great advice. Do you wear any trackables at all to be able to determine, perhaps, where you are or is it more intuition and just the way you feel?
Caspar
46:41 I used to be really big into trackables. I moved away from it now. I thought too much information and too many things going on. I had the sleep tracking versus the dietary tracking versus how many steps versus the meditation tracking. It’s a lot of information, but I think you do lose a little bit of intuition. I think you can manage that. For myself, I found myself going one or the other. Again, it was a personal decision that I stop doing that and just went to the fundamentals. I don’t look at the scale. I look in the mirror and I ask myself how am I feeling. The scale could be incredibly deceptive, anyone that works out. When you start and you’re putting a lot of little muscle, it’s much heavier, oh my goodness. It’s going up. I thought I was going to lose weight. You get very negative on yourself. You start to beat yourself up. That’s not what the body wants and then you’re just going to produce all these negative hormones and [neurotize 00:47:34].
Yeah, I think it’s incredibly important to be in tune with yourself to use that but use it in the right way. What fits you. Again, that comes back to the personalized level. You have to understand yourself and appreciate who you are, and then you could utilize all this information the right way in a positive way.
Stu
47:52 Yeah. No, that’s great advice. Absolutely. We’re just coming up on time. I have a question that I ask every guest towards the end of the show. It’s based more around the knowledge that is unique to you given the amazing environment that you are in right now. If you could offer one, two, three top tips that you think could make the biggest impact on our health today, what do you think it might be?
Caspar
48:26 Sure. I’ll give you three and it’s just based off my experience working with thousands of patients and doctors. This is basically trying to take a step back and see what are those trends and everything. Number one, fundamentals over fads.
Stu
48:40 Right.
Caspar
48:41 Too many of us jump on the latest fad and really hone in on that and that’s all we care about without understanding the fundamentals. To me, it’s that person, the first week in the gym that goes to the very, very plyometric and isn’t using it right. Just stick to your squats and bench presses. Start there. Those are the best. Or just do push ups and pull up, right?
Stu
48:41 Yeah.
Caspar
49:02 I think the fundamentals are always, eat well, take care of yourself as far as sleep goes and restoration, regeneration, watch what you think in your stress levels. Those are some of the fundamentals, I think, that are just the beginning of that and your lifestyle. Watch what you do and everything. I think number two of that is quality over quantity. People think more is better. I think in health, that’s not true. I do believe that the higher quality things that you introduce in your life, the higher quality output you could expect. It’s not even in the amount of things. Calorie counting, I think, is out the window because it’s about quality. Quality is so much more important. You’re going to compare a Big Mac in a lot of broccoli have the same amount of calorie. You could even say GMO and non-GMO have the same amount of calories, but one is going to be more absorbable. One is going to work better with your gut health. One is going to be something that is of a higher quality.
I think we do have to go out there and seek quality and pay for quality too. We can’t take shortcuts when it comes to health. We can’t put that anywhere except at the top. Our greatest wealth is health and that requires a little bit more of a focus on what we put in it and that’s quality over quantity. Number three, and one of the biggest X-factor, we actually created a whole system around this called, Empowered Healing, which is where we went around and interviewed a lot of different patients and practitioners and say, “If there’s one X-factor in what got you healthy, what was it?” It wasn’t treatment. It wasn’t the doctor you went to see. It’s really interesting, it was purpose. Have purpose in your life. Have a purpose to be healthy.
Too many people, I think, that are unhealthy or falling into a disease state, go into these forums and start to become their disease. They start to associate that. They start to victimize a little bit. They start to lose purpose in life. They start to be bedridden. They start to not understand who they are in the world and what their purpose is. What we found is, when you have a purpose … it could be something as simple as, “I want to see my grandchildren more. I want to travel. I want to go to this place and experience this before I die.” It could be anything. “I want to go in a vacation for one person that was severely ill. I want to go on a survival vacation. Right now, I can’t do at my level of energy.” That, they literally put survival gear in the corner of the room and everyday, they looked at it and they stared and they said, “My purpose right now is that.” It gave them something to strive for.
Suddenly, they’re more compliant with their treatment. They are more responsible with how they acted. They really were in a higher state of trusting the process, being there and having this outcome that they really want to strive for, a gold to strive for. They got better. Whereas, others who did not have a purpose and had probably a better chance at actually getting better and healing did not.
Stu
52:00 That’s-
Caspar
52:00 I truly believe that’s one of the X-factors out there and something no one really talks about that’s, “Who would care about that in medical treatment,” right? Don’t worry about that, but no, that’s so important.
Stu
52:11 I’m so pleased that you’ve said that because we’ve had lots of very interesting conversations with people around that topic as well. I had one last year with Dan Buettner who wrote a book about Blue Zones, a National Geographic journalist, and visited the Blue Zones around the world and realized that those key areas around the world where people were typically living to 100 plus were the cultures that had the most purpose in life. I think when you take that purpose away, you’re left with this void where you’re just in this state of just doing and everyday you’re doing. Again, I think when your mindset isn’t right, then you can expect biological changes in your body as well. Again, I’ll link to your overall health and well-being. Yeah, amazing to hear that, but so key, I think. I guess it’s like anything.
When you’re looking forward to a holiday, you get really amped and excited and you feel good and knowing that you have a purpose in life and you’re working towards it. I completely agree. Fantastic advice. Thank you so much. Before we go, what’s next for you? What have you got in the pipeline?
Caspar
53:30 There’s a lot in the pipeline. This mission to transform how we heal in medicine, it’s pretty big. A lot to go on, but of course, I just want to be a resource and use our organization as a resource for people who are looking to empower themselves to make the right choices, looking to get healthy, looking to stay healthy. We want to expand, of course, for clinics, impact, hopefully open up new centers around the world as well while keeping the quality high and not losing any of that. We want to offer more information and really become a trusted source for people. Like you said, “What products do you use?” We want to put it out there. We want to use our ability to talk to doctors and patients and test these things and know what’s of the highest quality and share that with the world. We want people to really take advantage of these things.
We’re going to be working hard on putting more of that content out there, revamping and sharing these things almost like a consumer reports of the top medical things in this field and how to get there. Yeah, I just want to connect more and more with people and just give them that I hope, I think, is the big one. Especially when I speak to patients. They’re so frustrated. They have nowhere to turn to. They’re feeling like they have no options left. That’s a terrible feeling. Just to speak to them. Not to give them, again, the particles. That’s not my job and all of this. It’s to give them the patterns and let them see that there are these options out there. There’s so many great doctors, so many great people working tirelessly, but getting their eight hours of sleep and doing amazing things out there to really help people push the boundaries of what is possible in medicine, cure the incurable, and really help people stay healthy as long as possible.
Stu
55:16 Great. Fantastic. For all of our audience, listeners, whether they’re watching this reading transcription or listening to the podcast on their devices, where can they go to get more of you and your work?
Caspar
55:30 Yeah. First and foremost, the approach and everything, we talked about in here and is on innovativemedicine.com. That’s the company I started. They could go there and learn about the therapies, read some of the articles there and really gain an appreciation for what we do. On a personal level, I have a website. I’m always on social media. They could go to healing-entrepreneur.com. I’ll take them to my site where I love talking shop. I love connecting with people. If people have questions, if they have anything they’d like to share, please go there and share that with me through any of the social media platforms, email or anything and I’d be happy to get in touch with them and see what we could do.
Stu
56:08 Great. Fantastic. Well, we will put all of the links that we’ve spoken about today in the show notes, but Caspar, thank you so much.
Caspar
56:08 Thank you, Stu.
Stu
56:14 I thoroughly enjoyed this and a wealth of information. Again, hopefully, I’ll be speaking to you at some stage in the future. Thanks again.
Caspar
56:23 Thank you.
Stu
56:23 Good luck.
