Pioneers in Health Care - Interview with Dr. Shallenberger

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Pioneers in Health Care - Interview with Dr. Shallenberger
YouTube video by Dr. Frank Shallenberger (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKkaj49mUJA). Transcript is the auto-caption track — verbatim ASR, not a certified transcript.

[Music] hello I'm Dr Len Saputo welcome to Pioneers in healthcare I'm the founder of the Health Medicine forum and I've been in practice in the diao valley for about the last 30 years this show is about pioneers in healthcare people who have done something special to bring the profession forward in their own special way and sometimes at Great personal risk to their own safety today we have a very special guest Dr Frank shenberger Frank it's great to have you it's good to be here L thanks for joining thanks for having me few few little things about Frank first of all he graduated from the University of Maryland Medical School and he's board certified in Family Practice he's one of only 16 physicians in the state of Nevada to have boards is a physician a homeopath and in complimentary and alternative medicine he's a member of the American college for the advancement of medicine the American prevention Medical Association the American Association of uh anti-aging medicine he's a founding member of the bio oxidative Medical Foundation and a board member of the orthomolecular orth orthomolecular Health Medicine Society he was a clinical instructor of family medicine at UC Davis here in Sacramento and he was aort appointed by the the governor of Nevada to be a state board of homeopathic medical examiner he's a specialist in anti-aging medicine and board certified the American Board of anti-aging medicine he's published scientific papers and he's lectured extensively in the US and abroad has produced research that's interesting and he's a former member of the Mount Diablo hospital system where he was on the Family Practice committee and emergency medicine committee so Frank you have a very distinguished record that I think is a lot different from what you see in most Physicians you know most doctors are content to go through their medical training they do an internship in a residency they go into clinical practice and then they do what they were taught and they occasionally read some some literature you're a Pioneer have become very controversial because of the stands that you've taken and you've done that from the start and I'm almost embarrassed to say it took me 25 years to figure out that the system had problems before before I really got into this area that you're involved with and now we're colleagues in what was it that tipped you off that medicine wasn't quite on the mark and more had to be done well um yeah you know I I I thought about this course and then I write about it in my first book uh bursting with energy but uh uh the way the way it worked for me L is I from the from the earliest days when I was in medical school I was really interested in trauma it seemed seemed to me that uh that's a real straight appealed to me it's straightforward I can see real medicine there yeah I can see what happens you're broke I put you together it's it's the kind of thing that appeals to my left brain Mechanical Mind well it makes sense too you want somebody like that yeah so uh I did trauma medicine and I did it for six seven years and uh for a very a bunch of different reasons I decided not to do that just to get into regular medicine so that's the background I came from and I'll explain why that's why that's significant a sec here but then I I just got into regular medicine I hung a shingle out became a family practice doctor and uh and and you know I was doing it for about 6 months and and it just really occurred to me that you know my patients really weren't getting well at least they weren't getting well from anything I did yeah they either got well on their own and I just sort of sat around and gave them some pain relief or some sort of symptomatic relief until they got well on their own or they never got well and I continued to give him medications for blood pressure or arthritis or whatever it was I was giving him medications and that only took you six or seven years to figure out no that took me six months to figure out you six seven years in trauma it took me 25 years to figure out that and I was getting depressed because all my patients were on drugs and most of them four five or six or sometimes eight or 10 and and they just weren't getting better and it would be like regular business and I lost interest in it and that's why I shifted but go on with your story well I think I think think the trauma set me up for that because trauma is real straightforward you know if they come into the emergency room with a a knife wound you don't just give them some coating pills and send them home right you know you want to you you pull the knife out see if it lated anything fix it up by the time they actually leave the hospital you've addressed the causes of the issue and fixed it it's an over it's a done deal there's no more of it left you basically cured that patient of that problem that's the way trauma is either that or they die right so uh I you know in my naivity at the time I thought that's the way medicine was practiced patient come in to see you with they had arthritis so they had hypertension you found out why they had it you eliminated the cause they went home everything was happy yeah so that's why you know within four to 6 months I I realized that's just not doing that right so I asked all my buddies at the Family Practice committee there I said you know what's up I I've just been doing this a short time I'm sure I'm doing something wrong so you know you were right about that they said did you know we're all doing something wrong they said no no actually you're doing it the right way I said but nobody's getting any better and they said well that's we all deal with that I'm sorry you know that's just you're going to have to get used to that and uh and that's so that's when I I started to say you know there's got to be some answer I know darn welder didn't teach me everything I need to know in medical school that much I've always known right uh and so I thought you know maybe this is one of those areas so that's that's what got me rolling and so where did it take you what kind of path did this take you on I know it's a long journey that's a huge question but maybe you do I'll tell you I'll tell you an interesting story so at that time I found out about um the um what was then known as the orthomolecular medical society okay right with Dr kanyan and let's define orth Dr juliia Julian Whitaker and lonus Pauling was in at that time and such orthomolecular medicine refers to you know Ortho means to correct and molecular means molecules so it's to correct the balance of the molecules in the body basically natural assuming all disease conditions start from an imbalance molecular imbalance in the system what do you need to do to correct that balance and then you can cure the disease that's and and of course that theory is absolutely correct I think it Bears out if you work it that way 40 Years of medicine I agree that it's that way well it's lonus pauling's idea yeah so um but so so that particular Medical Society was one of the few at the time that were dealing in in areas that we can call alternative medicine so isn't that odd that that basic premise that really does the healing is called alternative medicine when it's actually what's been done for tens of thousands of years by Mother Nature fortunately we have all the equipment to heal we the body does the healing the doctor standing by assisting it at best hopefully not interfering with it hopefully all right so go on with your story so so I went to this meeting and now I'm the neoy I don't know what's going on I'm just a medical doctor The Graduate Medical School knows about suturing up people and giving medicine all these Giants so I'm in this room with you know lius Paul and the rest of them which are basic you know they are giants in this field and uh and I look up and into the audience and who do I see but the chief of our medical staff oh no that's a surprise I see the chief of the medical staff and I go up to him and said John what are you doing here well that must have been John to that was John yeah of course he's one of us what are you doing here the better question is what's he doing there you know anyway and he says look uh you know I thought I I I came to learn some more but do me a favor and I said what he says don't tell anybody I'm here sounds like and and so uh but that's that that kind of exemplifies the time this was about 1978 1979 and that was that was the time uh when you know you didn't even want anybody to know that you were thinking about giving somebody a vitamin or thinking about making a lifestyle change yeah because you would have thought would have called you a quack would have said you know you're doing something wrong well your medical board worse off got you yeah because they were at that time really intolerant of anything that's out of the main stream they're pretty intolerant now they've expanded get they've expanded what they now accept to be true yeah you know but there's all all the stuff on the edge yeah that's still they're still intolerant ofal yeah well fortunately some legislation has passed which allows a little bit of flexibility and the way it reads is as as long long as you inform your patient of what the standard practices are and you don't try to dissuade them from that and you present the other story and they decide to do it it's fine so long as there's no harm if there's harm you're still up for all kinds of problems but that's where the law is now the question is is how much leeway will we have and that hasn't been tested in court yet so you don't really know your Point's right yeah okay so so that's that's how I got into this and and uh I started off with nutrition at first and I found out hey it works I had people with chronic headaches that if I was using the conventional medicine model that had just seen me forever and ever for some kind of medication that literally got cured right became cured I saw patients with arthritis that literally became cured I treated a woman once with rheumatoid arthritis that was literally cured on a diet elimination program and I'm talking cured I'm using the CW here I'm not talking just was better and had some symptomatic Improvement the disease went away and there was no evidence of the disease anymore in these people either laboratory evidence or physical evidence of disease and so you only have to do about a few of those cases your you realize uhoh uhoh now I've got to go back and relearn everything and that's what I've been doing all my life it's what I'm still doing well and it's been quite a few years and you don't know it all I mean there's so much more to do and yet you've expanded your horizons in a whole bunch of different fields it's not just like you're doing nutrition although without nutrition what can you do I mean the terrain of the body the way the body responds its defense mechanisms its way of protecting itself is a huge factor and if you don't give the raw materials the body needs to be able to manufacture its products to take care of itself how could you expect it to function particularly if you've got a genetic defect or if you've got a toxic exposure that's interfering with that and that's where this whole idea of nutrition pollution stress in the orthomol model that you and I know so well has come into practice now you've taken this uh your studies in some different directions and you're really geared to do maybe more things than anybody I know in a whole range of areas you're doing oxidative medicine for example tell us what that is well that that would be my weakness my weakness is that the I get too interested in everything I should specialize I should specialize in arthritis of the left hand or something you know but to make my life medicine's not like that I can't I'm like a kid in the candy shop don't you have to know a whole lot of things to be able to have a balance in what you do and have a whole bunch of different approaches it's the way I'm wir yeah what I do so what's oxidative medicine what does that mean I like to break down uh things in terms of four what I call the four quadrants of Health okay so one would be exercise learning how to exercise one would be learning how to eat and one would be learning what things to take and by that I would mean like vitamin pills supplements hormones whatever medications would body and the last thing would be learning how to deal with stress but I call those the four quadrants of health and if you can get those balanced to your genetics that's the secret that's what makes you heal and that's what keeps you well how would you get sick if those were balanced you probably you'd have to try hard you'd have to really work hard okay so oxidative medicine really comes Under The Heading of exercise what exercise does is it stimulates the body to use oxygen um and you know all that oxygen that you take in it only does one thing and that's to it produces energy period that's all it does and uh so how well you make that happen is pretty much critical to how well your body is going to be able to heal and take care of itself all right so and oxidative medicine comes under that it's ways to make your body handle oxygen better okay the the premier most common for form of oxidative medicine is aerobic exercise because it makes a lot of free radicals and it's what gets your body to adapt its own oxidative stress uh protection system and allow you to do more things safely right well you this there's there's there's this process you know this is kind of analogous to a car engine but there's this process where you take in the oxygen and you burn the fuel which could be carbohydrate or fat and from that you produce energy now you can do that efficiently or you can do that with a low level of efficiency okay uh you want to do it efficiently because if you do it efficiently what you get is a result is one more energy and two less internal pollution less free radical activity okay so you want want ni way to say do it efficiently if it were your car to do it efficiently You' take it into the mechanic you'd say you know tune all the little knobs up and get it all running well reset the car but in your body you don't do that you exercise it you exercise it and that's going to make it more efficient I mean think think about it you got a guy that's out of shape and one at some point down the line he's running a marathon he went from being inefficient to very efficient and and that he did that through Progressive exercise and conditioning of the body so oxidative medicine in its simplest most everyday form is aerobic exercise now when we use that term oxidative medicine we're not normally saying that but that's what we're thinking about because when we use the term we're talking about sick people so if I have a patient come in that's sick with say stage four cancer or he's sick with any kind of debilitating you know degenerative disease right I can't tell him to go run around the block I'm not going to put him on a training program but I can give him oxidative therapies I can give them oxidative medicine which is sort of like exercise in a bottle I can administer that to him and increase the efficiency with which he burns oxygen without him having to exercise at all now you designed a test that's specifically made to do that it's called a bioenergy test that's true tell us about what that test does because it really is an important way to differentiate who's sick and who's not sometimes and how sick are they yeah how bad is their oxidative metabolism so what is this test it it will measure how efficiently you use oxygen now from what I've just said you could say hey that's a pretty good test let me have that test good idea I want to know how efficiently I use oxygen because that makes pretty good sense it's like saying I want to know how efficiently my car uses Gas makes it's the same kind of sense this is the the four fundamental uh uh basic of what keeps us healthy is how well we do that so I developed a test that measures that and it's pretty simple test uh basically it looks at two things one is how much oxygen is disappearing into your body we use a mouthpiece for this so you can imagine uh like something like a snorkel but there's a mouthpiece and you're breathing all your breath through that mouthpiece pure oxygen and it's and it's going to measure how well you cons how all that oxygen how much oxygen goes into your body and how much carbon dioxide comes out of your body so why is that important well by knowing those two variables and then hooking that data up to a computer which runs it through some MH mathematical variance I can tell you how efficiently you're using oxygen because the ratio of carbon dioxide to oxygen under certain conditions of exercise will tell me your efficiency if I for example if I get you up to an efficent if I'm exercising somebody to say it's such and such a level say I'm working them at 120 watts of exercise okay okay if their ratio of CO2 to O2 the amount of CO2 produced to oxygen consumed is low they're more efficient okay the lower that ratio is at that level of exertion the more efficient their oxidative metabolism is all right we can measure that they need less fuel to do the same amount of work exactly they they're getting more bang for their Buck out of their oxygen all right so people who have cancer or Lyme disease or chronic fatigue or fibromyalgia or or a condition like that where energy production is marketly compromised this test will tell you how compromised it is and give you ideas of where you sit and what you can do to remedy that situation so you can make energy more efficiently it will give you a reliable number that you can use uh the best example I give to people when I'm trying to explain this concept to him is think of a blood pressure cuff mhm now if you didn't have a blood pressure cuff as a physician you'd have a heck of a time treating high blood pressure you sure would for one you'd have a heck of time diagnosing it right it's not easy to diagnose high blood you know this right you can't rely on symptoms person can feel great and have high blood pressure so so you have to have a method to one diagnose it but even more importantly if you diagnose using your blood pressure cuff that's you know a person has high blood pressure now you're going to give them a remedy for it you're going to have them do something take a medication say if you don't have a blood pressure C how you going to know if it's working exactly so it's just being a scientist yeah so this is scientific if I want to improve somebody's oxidative metabolism I better have a way of measuring it and then I'm going to measure it first and if it needs help I'll I'll give it some help but then I have to measure it a second time to make sure that the help I'm giving it is working for them because none of us are wired the same exactly if I got four people with low oxidative metabolism and I give them all the same therapy maybe 25 maybe a quarter of them maybe one of them will actually see an improvement with that the other three won't wow what a fantastic to sort it all out now you do a lot of other things you you would do what I would call uh real Integrative Medicine meaning you're looking for all kinds of strategies that can help your patients and you're not really terribly concerned about what those strategies are as long as they seem safe and have some possibility you'll study them and then maybe give it a try oh yeah sure what kinds of other things are you doing that that round out your practice um well uh you know I I we do a lot of lab tests you you know and um talk about the biochemistry of nutrition you know you know one of the most important things we do probably maybe even the most important thing I do in my practice is take a history I mean take a good history does thatan not a quicky little history what does it what does that mean okay for me it means I want to know the chronological order in which everything has occurred in their life what happened you know okay so if they tell me I I have complaint a headaches I want to know when did those headaches start you if they say they started 10 years ago I want to know can you remember when they started did you wake up with them or was it come over insidiously over 6 to 12 month period can you remember any details about it and so we kind of get that down then I say has the nature of the headache changed over the years but specifically I want to know what happened in your life life in the 6 to 12 months leading up to the onset of that symptom so why cuz that's going to help me have a pretty good idea of what throws them into imbalance you know if they told me it was a very stressful time in my life I can focus more in on that angle right if they told me uh you know that they moved into a different house uhuh then I'm going to start thinking maybe there's something in that house okay or if they got a different job or maybe there's an accident there's an accident they hurt themselves yeah exactly or may maybe how about this how about they started on a medication 6 to 12 months a lot of my patients are sick from the medications that we as Physicians give them right and and it's often overlooked I can't tell you how many times I've had a patient say I have such and such a symptom I've been into hospital after Hospital they've given me five or six drugs for this symptom and it turns out that that symptom was due to a drug that was started on them and nobody ever thought to ask them oh by the way what happened 6 months before you got the symptom oh I started that new drug but you don't think that have anything to do with it do you right yeah it's remarkable see I I would agree with you I think the a patient's story exactly is something that really needs to be listened to and it takes time A Lot takes a lot of time it'll take me an hour usually just to do that part and sometimes many hours because people come in different different uh with different situations and often what I'll do is ask them to write an autobiography of their physical emotional and spiritual life and email it to me and I look that over and hope they'll put it in or eight or 10 pages the information that comes from that sometimes makes it unnecessary to do all the complicated workups that we do that uh because they don't expose the psychospiritual basis for a lot of what's happened and I know you being the holistic physician that you are pay a lot of attention to that so when you answered that question about how do you what do you do with the patient that's important and said I take a history I listen to their story I really identify with that such a critical thing because you so many high-tech things it's easy to forget that in an a half hour show to try and go over all your high-tech stuff would be impossible because it's just too much but I'd like people to get some kind of idea of some of the other things that you do just with a a brief uh amount of attention to each one if there you know time being as it is to show the the kinds of things that uh make you really practice as a physician well okay so one of the things we look at is toxins mhm and we look at heavy metals so most of my people if there's any chance that that the reason for their problem could be due to lead or cadmium or Mercury toxicity they're going to get an evaluation for that okay so what do you do oh well I'll do hair analysis or I'll do blood analysis okay or I'll do what they call provocative urine analysis and uh then so that's one thing that we'll do the other thing that we can do is we can check vitamin and mineral levels we can we can do run tests to see how immune system is functioning I have a whole theory around how the immune system has to work so there are ways to test how well that immune system is staying in balance and self correcting itself exactly people with autoimmune diseases especially very critical stuff those are all important we look at hormones I think you know for anybody over the age of 35 or 40 hormones can definitely be in the picture so we need to start taking a look at them so we look at them evaluate them and I'm a big believer in clinical trials what does very big believer inic trials that means you learn about your patient by doing something to him and seeing how he reacts that's an outcome experiment that we do every time we put a pill in somebody's mouth or we give them any kind of therapy we do because everybody is different so it's always an experiment I like like I had a lady once that I won't forget cuz it was very dis very dramatic story you don't forget the dramatic stories but this is a young woman she's 27 years old uh her thyroid blood tests were totally normal okay the only thing she was complaining about this 27y old woman was chronic migraine headaches I by taking her history and by just sort of trying to figure things out even though her thyroid test were normal I thought you know maybe she needs some thyroid so I initiated a clinical trial basically I gave her thyroid test or normal no overt signs clinical signs of hypothyroid but it seemed to me that the whole story that was going on with maybe pointed in that direction so there's a possibility so that's a feel you have with experience so I gave her some thyroid her headaches went away and been gone I still talked to her this was 27 years ago her headaches were gone within one month and never returned wow now that's a clinical trial it tells me that her migraine headaches were caused by low thyroid hormones and so I do a lot of that kind of thing if I think that you know such and such a problem is going on I'm going to go ahead and give things maybe in a sequential fat pattern to see how the patient responds to it well when you think out of the box a little different than what you were taught in your internship and residency medical school and start questioning some of the things that we do in medicine a lot of red flags go up and when you're looking at thyroid tests in particular I mean the way that they put these tests together is they say that if you're two standard deviations from the mean that's just a statistical way of saying if you fall in a certain range you're probably with 9 5% correlation going to be okay but there's 5% that don't and those are the ones that slip through the cracks these are the patients that you and I see in our practice and these are the ones where you have to go outside the boundaries of what conventional medicine might dictate according to its strict rules and then by using your your Ingenuity there and applying your experience you come up with ideas like this and it also fits back with the test that bioenergy test that you designed which is clearly showing whether or not this is the case aside from what the laboratory tests show because the laboratory tests aren't perfect they they're never are there's no test that's perfect my test isn't perfect no of course not there's the blood pressure tests aren't perfect you know that right so there the studies are about how imperfect taking a blood pressure measurement is right so when you're talking about being a real doctor okay a real healer the story listening to the person using your experience being intuitive not just scientific because it's really one spectrum of intuition and science I think science and spirituality are in the same spectrum and they're just extremes of it that you can look at it if you want to and I know how spiritual you are too and I I'll bet I I can't I'll ask you this but isn't a lot of of what you do in medicine geared towards your intuition and your spiritual nature I'm TR myself okay uh well I was going to say before I get into that I wanted to say it's trend TRS I look for Trends on things okay uh so that if I'm look again let's come back to the blood pressure analogy since everybody's familiar with that I'm not so much interested in what the absolute value of that blood pressure is although I am but I'm more interested in what's the trend over time right and uh and I think that one of the things Physicians really can do really that helps a ton is to to be like real true honest to God family doctors and follow their people over time oh yes and take measurements over time and make flowcharts and graph and look at things like PSAs or whatever you want to look look at what the trend is over time and then look at what the trend how the trend is affected by your therapies and based upon that you can get a really good insight into what that individual person needs you well see you sound like a scientist and unfortunately we're out of time but you sound like a real scientist who looks at the data takes a special interest in your patient and then does something based on that information that requires some kind of logic so what we have here is a story of somebody Dr Frank shenberger who's a a whole physician he he treats Body Mind emotion and spirit is one thing not four and he uses his scientific training in ways that are out of the textbook doesn't necessarily use what's there he reads a textbook and then he looks at it and says this is interesting what if this is the case too and then he takes it to another level and which you wind up with is a whole different brand of medicine that makes you a Pioneer in healthcare thanks friend Frank thank you Frank so much for being part of this show thanks L enjoyed it very much [Music]