YouSaid · the spoken record

Chris Palmer

lines on the record: 83
first: 2022-11-10
most recent: 2022-11-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Who's experiencing pain because their pain nerve is hyper excitable? It's firing when it really shouldn't be firing or it's not stopping when it should stop. And so metabolically compromised cells are prone to this hyper-excitability. And the challenge with ketones for some people is that you rush in this ultra clean kind of high octane fuel And the cell becomes hyper excitable. And the way that translates in terms of brain function is for somebody who's got a hyper-excitable or a metabolically compromised anxiety pathway or anxiety system, they could have a panic attack or feel more anxious early on. But for other people, it can result in psychosis. It can result in OCD symptoms. It can result in all sorts of things. Agitation, the extreme case of hyper excitability in the brain is actually a seizure.”
2022-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #633: Chris Palmer, MD, of Harvard Medical School — Optimizing Brain Energy for Mental Health, The Incredible Potential of Metabolic Psychiatry, Extraordinary Case Studies, and Harnessing Mitochondria for Anxiety, Depression, OCD, PTSD, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the consequences of metabolic dysfunction of a cell, you know, one of the big themes, there are several consequences. I kind of break them into five buckets depending on where and when. There are two primary ones for an adult, say, who is just developing nuance set symptoms. And the shocking thing is that they're polar opposites. So the cell can either become underactive, which means it's failing to work because it doesn't have enough energy and that kind of makes sense, common sense, really easy to understand. But the other consequence of metabolic dysfunction is actually that cell can become what's called hyper excitable. It can actually become overactive. And some easy examples of overactive or hyper-excitable cells are a muscle spasm or a heart arrhythmia or somebody with chronic pain.”
2022-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #633: Chris Palmer, MD, of Harvard Medical School — Optimizing Brain Energy for Mental Health, The Incredible Potential of Metabolic Psychiatry, Extraordinary Case Studies, and Harnessing Mitochondria for Anxiety, Depression, OCD, PTSD, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People with these genetic defects, you time and again see mitochondrial or metabolic impairment or dysfunction. And what I think the ketogenic diet is doing is imagine a cell that's only running on, it's a six-cylinder engine and it's only running on three cylinders. And you give it ketones and ketones are like rocket fuel for this engine. And all of a sudden, all six cylinders come online and that cell is firing. And for most people, that's a good thing. And it gives people energy and everything else. If that metabolically compromised cell actually is in great disrepair, if it is like really miserably kind of maintained and in great disrepair, giving it all this rocket fuel all at once can actually be really dangerous and can result in a whole host of other symptoms.”
2022-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #633: Chris Palmer, MD, of Harvard Medical School — Optimizing Brain Energy for Mental Health, The Incredible Potential of Metabolic Psychiatry, Extraordinary Case Studies, and Harnessing Mitochondria for Anxiety, Depression, OCD, PTSD, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tend to have regions of the brain, so it's not the entire body. Metabolism is cell-specific and tissue specific. So you can have one cell that's actually ready to die because it's metabolically failing. You can have another brand new healthy cell that's actually thriving in the same human body. So it's important to keep that in mind, but what all of this research says is that some brain regions and some people are metabolically compromised. Their brain tissue is not getting enough energy. And it also has higher levels of reactive oxygen species, which can produce inflammation and all sorts of problems. But we know this, and again, tons of evidence and different lines of evidence all pointing in the same direction, even genetic studies. Like when you look at, well, what is this gene doing and what's happening in the brains of”
2022-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #633: Chris Palmer, MD, of Harvard Medical School — Optimizing Brain Energy for Mental Health, The Incredible Potential of Metabolic Psychiatry, Extraordinary Case Studies, and Harnessing Mitochondria for Anxiety, Depression, OCD, PTSD, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What it means at the end of the day, so we may get to this mitochondria are actually much, much more than just powerhouses, but powerhouse function is a critically important function. And we have evidence from numerous data sources from blood work, from lumbar punctures, from autopsy studies, to all of the neuroimaging studies that we're doing, functional MRI, PET scans, spec scans, all of these studies, all of them converge on mitochondria and functions of mitochondria. And what all of these studies suggest is that people with mental disorders across the board”
2022-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #633: Chris Palmer, MD, of Harvard Medical School — Optimizing Brain Energy for Mental Health, The Incredible Potential of Metabolic Psychiatry, Extraordinary Case Studies, and Harnessing Mitochondria for Anxiety, Depression, OCD, PTSD, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's going to be debate. I actually firmly believe, based on this larger theory and kind of connecting all of the dots, I actually firmly believe that it really does come down to mitochondria. And some people call it mitochondrial dysfunction. There's another group of researchers that like to call it suboptimal mitochondrial function.”
2022-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #633: Chris Palmer, MD, of Harvard Medical School — Optimizing Brain Energy for Mental Health, The Incredible Potential of Metabolic Psychiatry, Extraordinary Case Studies, and Harnessing Mitochondria for Anxiety, Depression, OCD, PTSD, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's not been, I will share my personal story too, because I've been in and out of ketosis for many years. And I find the exact same thing. And quite honestly, sometimes the inability to sleep or sleep in adequate amount of time is the rate-limiting factor for me. And I'm like, I can't go with this little sleep for this long. This is not going to turn out well for me if I stay on this trajectory. I know enough. There are lots of people with lots of different opinions and we know at least like 40 different mechanisms of action of the ketogenic diet. Like I said, neurotransmitters, all sorts of things. So how exactly is it resulting in this improved mood?”
2022-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #633: Chris Palmer, MD, of Harvard Medical School — Optimizing Brain Energy for Mental Health, The Incredible Potential of Metabolic Psychiatry, Extraordinary Case Studies, and Harnessing Mitochondria for Anxiety, Depression, OCD, PTSD, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“While in a ketogenic state, my assumption is just going with a common sense evolutionary perspective, which is the body thinks it's actually starving. It's drought. There's a drought or famine or something. Something is going on. Food supply is scarce. That's why you have high ketones. And so the high ketones are actually activating brain regions to get you number one, more energy, more confidence, and more time. You don't need to be sleeping right now. You've got to find food.”
2022-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #633: Chris Palmer, MD, of Harvard Medical School — Optimizing Brain Energy for Mental Health, The Incredible Potential of Metabolic Psychiatry, Extraordinary Case Studies, and Harnessing Mitochondria for Anxiety, Depression, OCD, PTSD, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I've seen this a lot, not just with ketogenic diet, but with anything that induces a kind of ketosis and a fasting state or a fasting mimicking state. So I've seen this in patients who fast for five, seven days or whatever. And there are actually some studies in Muslim patients during Ramadan, especially patients who have bipolar disorder during Ramadan. They start fasting, they're much, much more likely to have sleep problems and they are much, much more likely to have subsequent mood episodes primarily hypomanic and manic, but also depressive for some people. So I think that we've got enough evidence and I certainly have enough anecdotal evidence to say decreased sleep is a thing. It's a real thing. It's observed. We've got some studies to document it. Why would the body need less sleep? Or why would the body get less sleep?”
2022-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #633: Chris Palmer, MD, of Harvard Medical School — Optimizing Brain Energy for Mental Health, The Incredible Potential of Metabolic Psychiatry, Extraordinary Case Studies, and Harnessing Mitochondria for Anxiety, Depression, OCD, PTSD, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like an epilepsy patients, for instance, have found that the ketogenic diet actually dramatically improves sleep overall. But a lot of those patients are sleeping too much and often because they're on medications that are extraordinarily sedating. And so those studies come to the conclusion ketogenic diet improves sleep. It normalizes it. People wake up feeling more refreshed. It's a great thing. This issue of hypomania and mania is very poorly understood. I'm one of the only people on the planet who seems to recognize it as hypomania and mania. So we've got a lot of work to do in terms of understanding it. I'll give you an evolutionary speculation about what I think is happening, widely speculative. We don't have the research for this.”
2022-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #633: Chris Palmer, MD, of Harvard Medical School — Optimizing Brain Energy for Mental Health, The Incredible Potential of Metabolic Psychiatry, Extraordinary Case Studies, and Harnessing Mitochondria for Anxiety, Depression, OCD, PTSD, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have gotten hypomanic while they, especially while they're keto adapting, to the point that they're actually only getting two hours of sleep a night and they can't sleep more than that. And sometimes they recognize this may not be optimal for me and other times they just think, well, you know, I've got a lot of time now to be productive and get all sorts of shit done. So, I mean, one guy actually was going for 20 mile runs starting at like 3 a.m. in the morning. And he complained that he couldn't maintain a normal weight and he wondered why. And I'm like, dude, you're like sleeping two hours a night and you're running 20 miles every day. What did you expect?”
2022-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #633: Chris Palmer, MD, of Harvard Medical School — Optimizing Brain Energy for Mental Health, The Incredible Potential of Metabolic Psychiatry, Extraordinary Case Studies, and Harnessing Mitochondria for Anxiety, Depression, OCD, PTSD, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think we have all the answers because this is a relatively new field in terms of looking at the effects of the ketogenic diet on mental states and certainly in terms of looking at it in terms of people with exclusive or primary mental disorders. Researchers have looked at it for other things. So the first thing I'll say is you're actually everything you described is spot on with what I see clinically in dozens of patients and what I hear from patients around the world. And it's one of the challenges. I want to point this out. You're highlighting the decreased need for sleep is one of the biggest risks of using this intervention in people who have had a history of psychosis. And the reason is because for you it sounds like it has not been a major problem. I've definitely seen people”
2022-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #633: Chris Palmer, MD, of Harvard Medical School — Optimizing Brain Energy for Mental Health, The Incredible Potential of Metabolic Psychiatry, Extraordinary Case Studies, and Harnessing Mitochondria for Anxiety, Depression, OCD, PTSD, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How that can have an impact on the brain, but it's more than the brain. I mean, you know, the brain is part of the human body and the human body impacts the brain. And so I'm actually more interested in the big picture. If you climb the mountain and look down or if you see the entire forest from the trees, you see the big picture. We're really talking about a new way to understand human health. And that includes mental health, but it also easily segues into physical health. So my only qualm with metabolic psychiatry is that it's focused on psychiatry. And I am a psychiatrist. I'm passionate about helping people with mental disorders make no mistake. I'm not looking to start a weight loss clinic for just any Joe or Jane who want to lose weight. That's not really my passion. But yeah, I am going to be helping people lose weight and improve their physical abilities and prevent cancer.”
2022-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #633: Chris Palmer, MD, of Harvard Medical School — Optimizing Brain Energy for Mental Health, The Incredible Potential of Metabolic Psychiatry, Extraordinary Case Studies, and Harnessing Mitochondria for Anxiety, Depression, OCD, PTSD, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think Metabolic Psychiatry is definitely an emerging field. There are lots of researchers, neuroscientists, clinicians, philanthropists backing this right now, the bazooki brain research fund, funded by David and Jan Bazooki, founder of Roblox. They are really backing this with passion. I think at the end of the day, the brain energy theory is bigger than just psychiatry. The brain energy theory is about metabolism, ultimately mitochondria, and how it affects human health.”
2022-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #633: Chris Palmer, MD, of Harvard Medical School — Optimizing Brain Energy for Mental Health, The Incredible Potential of Metabolic Psychiatry, Extraordinary Case Studies, and Harnessing Mitochondria for Anxiety, Depression, OCD, PTSD, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Changes, calcium channel regulation changes gene expression actually the gut microbiome is involved inflammation it's doing all sorts of things and armed with all of that information I my career took off it like I started doing you know more research collaborating with researchers around the world and everything else”
2022-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #633: Chris Palmer, MD, of Harvard Medical School — Optimizing Brain Energy for Mental Health, The Incredible Potential of Metabolic Psychiatry, Extraordinary Case Studies, and Harnessing Mitochondria for Anxiety, Depression, OCD, PTSD, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It totally, it actually snuck in the side door and smacked me in the face. I was like, what the hell is going on here? Like, this is impossible. You know, for people who know the keto diet is like a fad weight loss diet or whatever, it is a 100 year old evidence-based treatment for epilepsy. And that was a really important clue to me because we use epilepsy treatments in psychiatry all the time. Medications like depicute, tegratol, lamyctal, topamax, valium, clonopin, xanax, all of those are anti-seizure treatments. And we use them in tens, if not hundreds of millions of people worldwide all the time. And so I quickly recognize, well, wait, if this diet actually stops seizures and we use anti-seizure treatments all the time, maybe that's the reason it's working. And wow, this is shocking because it's like really working. And then I learned about the decades of neuroscience research that we have, documenting what exactly the ketogenic diet is doing to the brain, changes neurotransmitters.”
2022-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #633: Chris Palmer, MD, of Harvard Medical School — Optimizing Brain Energy for Mental Health, The Incredible Potential of Metabolic Psychiatry, Extraordinary Case Studies, and Harnessing Mitochondria for Anxiety, Depression, OCD, PTSD, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Illness in similar ways to Doris. I start this diet within two weeks. He's losing weight and I start to notice this antidepressant effect in him. I'm like, well, that's interesting. Within six to eight weeks, he too spontaneously started. It didn't happen right away for him. Took six to eight weeks, but he spontaneously reports hallucinations, delusions are going away. That man went on to lose 160 pounds. It kept it off to this day. and has had a new life, has had the ability to do things he had not been able to do. So to kind of get back to your question, those were the serendipitous things that just happened in my life that I didn't set out on a path to prove the ketogenic diet is a thoughtful intervention.”
2022-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #633: Chris Palmer, MD, of Harvard Medical School — Optimizing Brain Energy for Mental Health, The Incredible Potential of Metabolic Psychiatry, Extraordinary Case Studies, and Harnessing Mitochondria for Anxiety, Depression, OCD, PTSD, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I became a different person, a person I had never been in my entire life even during good times. I had never felt that good. So I of course am, you know, recommending this to friends and family who want to lose weight or shed a few pounds and some of them are reporting equal results. So within a couple of years, I start using it in patients with treatment-resistant depression. And lo and behold, it worked for at least some of them. It didn't work for everyone, but it worked for some of them. I think the pivotal moment that really changed everything for me was actually in 2016 when I had a longstanding patient schizoaffective disorder, which is crossed between schizophrenia and bipolar. And he asked for my help to lose weight. He had tried 17 different medications. None of them worked. He was tormented by his illness.”
2022-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #633: Chris Palmer, MD, of Harvard Medical School — Optimizing Brain Energy for Mental Health, The Incredible Potential of Metabolic Psychiatry, Extraordinary Case Studies, and Harnessing Mitochondria for Anxiety, Depression, OCD, PTSD, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It went against everything I'd been taught, but I decided to give it a shot, really just kind of as my Hail Mary pass. And within three months, my metabolic syndrome was completely gone. Everything was better. But the thing that I noticed was I had dramatic improvement in mood, energy, sleep, confidence,”
2022-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #633: Chris Palmer, MD, of Harvard Medical School — Optimizing Brain Energy for Mental Health, The Incredible Potential of Metabolic Psychiatry, Extraordinary Case Studies, and Harnessing Mitochondria for Anxiety, Depression, OCD, PTSD, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Were awful. I had prediabetes. And year after year, my doctor kept telling me diet and exercise, I was doing a super low-fat diet. I was exercising regularly. It was not doing anything. All the numbers were just getting worse. And he finally kept pushing meds and was like, you're going to have to go on meds. And I'm like, damn, dude, I'm like in my 20s. You're putting me on meds already. And that means I'm going to have a heart attack by the time I turn 45. Like that is not okay. And I am not going to accept this as my final answer. And so I'd heard through the grapevine about low carb diets. At that point, it was the Atkins diet. And I had heard that it was helping some people reverse their diabetes or improve their cholesterol levels and other things.”
2022-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #633: Chris Palmer, MD, of Harvard Medical School — Optimizing Brain Energy for Mental Health, The Incredible Potential of Metabolic Psychiatry, Extraordinary Case Studies, and Harnessing Mitochondria for Anxiety, Depression, OCD, PTSD, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, my familiarity actually began with my own. You know, when I went to live with her, even before that happened, I had my own challenges with mental illness. And after I went through that hell with her and homelessness and everything else, it only spiraled down. And by the time that I was in my twenties, I actually had gotten to a good place. I was not clinically depressed anymore. I wasn't impaired. I was actually getting through medical school. I had finished medical school. Actually won an award for being one of the top students. And I was doing my psychiatry residency at Harvard. And so, you know, anybody looking from the outside would say, this guy's doing well enough. He clearly is not impaired by a mental disorder. But I had metabolic syndrome. So blood pressure was up, cholesterol, and lipid levels.”
2022-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #633: Chris Palmer, MD, of Harvard Medical School — Optimizing Brain Energy for Mental Health, The Incredible Potential of Metabolic Psychiatry, Extraordinary Case Studies, and Harnessing Mitochondria for Anxiety, Depression, OCD, PTSD, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Specific genes even do not confer risk. There is no one gene that confers risk for only one disorder like schizophrenia or bipolar or autism. One gene confers risk for numerous different disorders. So there might be one gene that confers risk for schizophrenia and bipolar and autism and epilepsy and other diagnoses. And so even if you look at a single root cause like something so concrete as a gene, they're not distinct entities. And the reality is that the National Institute of Health abandoned the DSM-5 diagnoses about a decade ago, recognizing these aren't valid constructs and were not really getting anywhere assuming they are.”
2022-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #633: Chris Palmer, MD, of Harvard Medical School — Optimizing Brain Energy for Mental Health, The Incredible Potential of Metabolic Psychiatry, Extraordinary Case Studies, and Harnessing Mitochondria for Anxiety, Depression, OCD, PTSD, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you can mix and match them however you'd like. This is really important because It implies that maybe our diagnostic labels number one are not valid constructs, and number two maybe our diagnostic labels are not as distinct as we think they are. You know, if I look at people with eating disorders and they're all more likely to have depression and OCD, but I look at people with schizophrenia and they're all more likely to have depression and OCD. And I look at people with personality disorders and they're more likely to have depression and OCD. The boundaries between these diagnostic labels really start to fall apart. And you kind of start to wonder what's going on. Much more importantly, when we look at the root causes, the root causes that we do know about for mental disorders, it turns out there is no single root cause for any singular psychiatric diagnosis. And this goes all the way down to the level of genetic.”
2022-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #633: Chris Palmer, MD, of Harvard Medical School — Optimizing Brain Energy for Mental Health, The Incredible Potential of Metabolic Psychiatry, Extraordinary Case Studies, and Harnessing Mitochondria for Anxiety, Depression, OCD, PTSD, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And no one knows what causes any of them. And the real answer is that when researchers have looked at all of the diagnostic categories, it turns out that there are two major problems with DSM. And the two major problems with DSM are heterogeneity and comorbidity. And what that means is, so heterogeneity means that if you see two people with OCD or with autism spectrum disorder, they can have extraordinarily different symptoms and look and function very differently from each other and it can seem like there's no way they have the same brain disorder or brain illness or whatever we want to call it. So that's heterogeneity. The comorbidity part is even more confusing because it turns out if you have one psychiatric disorder and you're getting mental health treatment, there is an overwhelming probability that you have more than one.”
2022-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #633: Chris Palmer, MD, of Harvard Medical School — Optimizing Brain Energy for Mental Health, The Incredible Potential of Metabolic Psychiatry, Extraordinary Case Studies, and Harnessing Mitochondria for Anxiety, Depression, OCD, PTSD, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ways that diagnostic labels are actually useful, and I'm not here to challenge any of that. I think understanding what symptoms people are having and understanding what treatments might be helpful to reduce those symptoms is actually really invaluable. And that's great. But the reality is that every diagnostic label in DSM is a syndrome. And what that means is that it's just a constellation of signs and symptoms that we put together.”
2022-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #633: Chris Palmer, MD, of Harvard Medical School — Optimizing Brain Energy for Mental Health, The Incredible Potential of Metabolic Psychiatry, Extraordinary Case Studies, and Harnessing Mitochondria for Anxiety, Depression, OCD, PTSD, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know DSM 5 is kind of the Bible of psychiatry, and it's what all mental health professionals have to use to make a diagnosis. If you want to treat patients and get reimbursed by insurance, you have to assign a diagnostic label if no label is assigned. You don't get paid. If pharmaceutical companies want to develop pills for psychiatric disorders, they have to abide by these labels and study pills for specific labels. And the assumption is that these labels are all discrete, separate illnesses, and they define a set of symptoms, but more importantly, they define a prognosis and a life trajectory sometimes. They also define treatments that can work and treatment approaches and how long people might need treatment. And in many of those”
2022-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #633: Chris Palmer, MD, of Harvard Medical School — Optimizing Brain Energy for Mental Health, The Incredible Potential of Metabolic Psychiatry, Extraordinary Case Studies, and Harnessing Mitochondria for Anxiety, Depression, OCD, PTSD, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She never got better Her life was decimated. Was able to take care of herself which was great, she worked various part time jobs and bought a small home and paid for it with her own money. And she inherited a chunk of money from My grandfather, like $100,000, but she was extraordinarily frugal, so that was enough for her to live on for pretty much the rest of her life. She had obesity and diabetes and eventually a massive heart attack and died of heart failure.”
2022-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #633: Chris Palmer, MD, of Harvard Medical School — Optimizing Brain Energy for Mental Health, The Incredible Potential of Metabolic Psychiatry, Extraordinary Case Studies, and Harnessing Mitochondria for Anxiety, Depression, OCD, PTSD, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was the second coming of Christ, and she was somehow involved. She would get paranoid and she became convinced that my father was actually the actual devil incarnate. And that led to them getting divorced. And the divorce courts were not kind to her at all. She lost everything. She lost all of her savings, she got none of it. She didn't get any partial ownership of the business she had worked her ass off to help start, and she lost custody of all eight kids. Was, I think, about 13 when that happened. I knew she was going to die. And so I went to live with her. And it was not a good scene. It was not good at all. We were actually homeless for a while. So my first day of high school was from a homeless shelter. I could go on and on. The fast forward of her story is that she lived the rest of her life with a psychotic disorder.”
2022-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #633: Chris Palmer, MD, of Harvard Medical School — Optimizing Brain Energy for Mental Health, The Incredible Potential of Metabolic Psychiatry, Extraordinary Case Studies, and Harnessing Mitochondria for Anxiety, Depression, OCD, PTSD, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When she was 42, some horrible stuff happened in her family of origin with her siblings and everyone all beyond her control she had nothing to do with any of it, but it put enormous stress and burden on her. She had what she called a nervous breakdown, that's what it started, and I think it started with what we would call depression. It quickly led to depression with suicidal ideation, and then shortly thereafter led to psychotic symptoms. She began to think that she was Mary Magdalene reincarnated. She thought the world was ending, she thought this priest that she had gone to for counseling was Jesus Christ reincarnated.”
2022-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #633: Chris Palmer, MD, of Harvard Medical School — Optimizing Brain Energy for Mental Health, The Incredible Potential of Metabolic Psychiatry, Extraordinary Case Studies, and Harnessing Mitochondria for Anxiety, Depression, OCD, PTSD, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I haven't really done this publicly yet. So my mom actually is a woman who had two lives. The first part of her life up until about age 42 was that she wanted a simple middle class Family life. She and my father wanted a big family. They were Catholic. They wanted four kids. They ended up with eight kids. You know, it's Catholic thing. And that's all she wanted. My father was a pharmacist. He started his own pharmacy. And he needed help. So she helped him. She and he both worked 12 hour days, six days a week to get that pharmacy started. She would always take the youngest kid with her to work. She was often breastfeeding one of them. But that was the life she wanted.”
2022-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #633: Chris Palmer, MD, of Harvard Medical School — Optimizing Brain Energy for Mental Health, The Incredible Potential of Metabolic Psychiatry, Extraordinary Case Studies, and Harnessing Mitochondria for Anxiety, Depression, OCD, PTSD, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She remained symptom free from symptoms of schizophrenia. She remained off psychiatric medications. She remained out of psychiatric hospitals. She never tried to kill herself again. And when I last spoke with her, she actually said she was happy to be alive. She attributed her recovery primarily to God that she really felt that it was a miracle from God, and she asked me to tell her story far and wide to anyone who would listen in the hopes that it might help even one other human being spare the suffering she endured for decades. Sadly Dors passed away this past January of COVID pneumonia.”
2022-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #633: Chris Palmer, MD, of Harvard Medical School — Optimizing Brain Energy for Mental Health, The Incredible Potential of Metabolic Psychiatry, Extraordinary Case Studies, and Harnessing Mitochondria for Anxiety, Depression, OCD, PTSD, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And at the age of 70, she was referred to a weight loss clinic at Duke University, where they were using the ketogenic diet as a weight loss method. She decided to give it a try for whatever reason, and within two weeks not only did she begin losing weight, but she spontaneously reported that her longstanding auditory hallucinations were going away. Within months, all of her symptoms of schizophrenia were in full and complete remission. Within six months, she was off all psychiatric medications and remained in full and complete remission. Doris went on to live for another fifteen years. She lost 150 pounds. So the weight loss thing was secured, but much more important.”
2022-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #633: Chris Palmer, MD, of Harvard Medical School — Optimizing Brain Energy for Mental Health, The Incredible Potential of Metabolic Psychiatry, Extraordinary Case Studies, and Harnessing Mitochondria for Anxiety, Depression, OCD, PTSD, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Gonna actually use her real name because she gave me permission to use her real name. In the book, I call her Mildred, but her real name is Doris. And Doris had a horrible childhood. She had a lot of PTSD, depression, other things. By the time she turned seventeen, she was diagnosed with schizophrenia. She had daily hallucinations and delusions. Over the ensuing decades Antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, antidepressants, and other medicines. None of them worked to stop her symptoms. She slowly but surely gained massive amounts of weight. And by the time she was 68, she was miserable, hated herself, hated her life. From the ages of 68 to 70, she tried to kill herself at least six times and was hospitalized for those suicide attempts.”
2022-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #633: Chris Palmer, MD, of Harvard Medical School — Optimizing Brain Energy for Mental Health, The Incredible Potential of Metabolic Psychiatry, Extraordinary Case Studies, and Harnessing Mitochondria for Anxiety, Depression, OCD, PTSD, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT