The profound connection between mental health, chronic stress, and physical well-being. It highlights how unresolved stress can manifest as serious health conditions like IBS and ulcers, and emphasizes the importance of addressing the mind-body connection. From advanced diagnostics to holistic therapies, the discussion sheds light on innovative approaches that go beyond traditional medicine, offering practical solutions for lasting health improvements.

The emerging field of psychedelic therapy and its potential to reshape mental health care. With insights into its role in neuroplasticity and emotional healing, the episode underscores the transformative power of addressing deep-seated stressors. By integrating mental health into a comprehensive wellness approach, listeners gain a fresh perspective on living a healthier, more balanced life.

Highlights of the Podcast

00:03 – Introduction to Stress and Nervous System Impact

01:05 – Chronic Stress and Physical Health Issues

02:11 – Exploring Psychedelics for Therapy

04:32 – Barriers and Progress in Psychedelic Therapy

07:45 – Holistic Health Approaches

09:24 – Modern Medicine vs. Holistic Insights

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:00:03] They call the default neural state. And so now you come back to this like, I can think and all that crazy hard core anxiety’s gone. So it’s it’s really, really, really beneficial. It’s one of the things because we talk about it like, well, no one’s shooting at me. Divorces, car. Wrecks. Yeah. There’s so much.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:00:23] Covid. Like all that stress, people can go get washed off of them.

Host – Woman [00:00:27] Yeah. Well, not just even if it’s not happening to you directly. I mean, if you just take a moment to look around in the world and take stock of what’s happening, I think that alone could be enough to send you into that that alarm response in your nervous system.

Host – Man [00:00:40] The parasympathetic nervous.

Host – Woman [00:00:41] System.

Host – Man [00:00:41] Right? Yeah. And all of a sudden you do that enough times the chronic stress builds up and yeah, I can.

Host – Woman [00:00:46] Just because we get used to it like we I think because it becomes so constant and it’s just our normal day in, day out, like to experience this kind of life we get. You get used to being that way. And it’s not until you have a moment, like you said, to breathe and have all of that lifted that you’re finally like, my God, this is what we’re supposed to feel like.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:01:05] People don’t actually recognize the symptoms of long term stress. So celiac, IBS, ulcers, those are all from sympathetic escape. So when you get stressed out, fight flight, you’re stuck in the sympathetic shuts off parasympathetic, which is resting, digesting. I’m sorry. I forgot.

Host – Man [00:01:20] Yeah.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:01:21] And so what we’ve actually seen to do, like when I’m working on ulcerative colitis or celiac, we can get the problems, the symptoms to go away. But for for it to stabilize and hold, we’ve got to do mental work with them to bring down that sympathetic chain. So either psychedelics or we’ll do an LP work or we’ll do whatever to break that sympathetic hold so their guts will actually heal. And so it’s not that the mental piece of this is is the biggest part of health care and we are avoiding it like crazy. And it’s a lot there’s a lot of things we can do to make it better.

Host – Man [00:01:49] Yeah. Yeah. You know, when I first recently kind of dove into this rabbit hole to, I guess to say Huberman and actually here’s here’s the I think this is the last time I can’t remember the last time I brought up Huberman.

Host – Woman [00:02:03] Yeah, I know.

Host – Man [00:02:04] It’s been it’s been a while.

Host – Woman [00:02:05] Yeah. Usually it’s like we just have a clock running. For how long? It takes a dimension. He.

Speaker 4 [00:02:09] He mentioned him.

Host – Man [00:02:11] But. But essentially he’s done a whole series on a whole bunch of the of the psychedelics and it had some of the leading experts on psychedelics on his podcast talking about it. And it was really eye opening to me of just like, okay, this is, you know, more than anything, it’s like I just heard kind of I think and I think this is public perception is like, okay, well, if you want to go on a trip and see rainbows and, you know, see things melting, like that’s kind of the public perception. And he really opened my eyes to it of, no, there’s there’s a lot more behind this. And I guess the actual mechanisms, how it work, the dissociative effect of some of the medications, but primarily how it basically because it’s such a novel experience, it creates such a massive opportunity for neuroplasticity, for things to essentially get reshaped. And if you do that in the proper clinical setting, you know, where you’re not so much focusing on somebody’s face melting, you know, and you do it with like a blindfold or things along those lines, you have someone guiding you through it. It can be an incredibly therapeutic means to to get through things that you’ve been struggling, obviously in your experience, been struggling for years. So yeah, I mean, it’s definitely very exciting.

Speaker 4 [00:03:26] It’s even more interesting that you didn’t you didn’t know you were struggling. I mean, you said, I haven’t. No. Have a beautiful life, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then and then all of a sudden this big change. And so that that’s even more eye opening than. Yeah. Someone who has the issues, right.

Host – Woman [00:03:40] Yeah, I, I even had a friend who did who need it. Yeah. Yeah. I have a friend who did a session who was talking with me about it after the fact and realized this years long issue that he had with a family member that could they just never, ever could get along and like, had this memory and recollection of like where it pinpointed in child as something that happened in a like the family dynamic that created this animosity and separation and was able to heal that relationship through that awareness. I mean, that’s crazy when you really think about it. Years of therapy. And this friend is very smart, very self-aware, very smart, growth minded person and couldn’t get through that thing. So I just think that the the implications, you know, across the right wide range and also being non habit forming, like you said, as opposed to, you know, cannabis versus opioids. I mean that’s that’s a that’s a whole other topic number.

Host – Man [00:04:32] And the number of treatments that you actually need, Like oftentimes it’s either 1 or 2 treatments and then it lasts for such a long period of time. So, you know, it’s yeah, it’s a amazing therapy option. That’s, I’m super excited that is getting explored more and that we’re going to kind of break into that and that it’s becoming more commonly accepted. Obviously we’re not there yet. It’s still what I believe. It’s still legal in most states to to do this. But I think that watching I can’t remember if Washington.

Host – Woman [00:05:03] Is Washington now, ketamine is legal.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:05:07] It’s got ketamine.

Host – Woman [00:05:08] As ever, say, okay, I need.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:05:09] Every state.

Host – Woman [00:05:10] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Host – Man [00:05:10] And I know Oregon is very open. We’re located here in Washington, so. And, you know, are our neighbors down south. Ah. What is it? Portland’s whole thing is keep it weird.

Host – Woman [00:05:23] So, yeah, you know.

Host – Man [00:05:24] They. They definitely. They definitely live up to that. So. But yeah, it’s, well.

Host – Woman [00:05:29] Not to get too political, but I know there’s been, you know a lot of, you know when, when Oregon did change the law in drug law there was a huge lashing out of it like they don’t care and heroin addicts on the street or whatever. But I think it’s important to remember that when reform is needed, sometimes there’s a lot of things that have to be undone first while you rebuild the way things should look. And so that pendulum swings really far. So, you know, to consider I’m not saying it’s all well and good and whatever for the access to all the drugs, but just keep in mind there are certain class for illegal substances that actually have really incredible implications for mental health that we have to kind of start unwinding all of that in order for those things to be available to the people that need them. And then we can start reforming and restructuring a lot of these laws around what’s what’s actually dangerous compared to what’s not. Just a just as I.

Host – Man [00:06:19] Thought, which I’m guessing is probably what your charity is targeted towards. I’m guessing it’s targeted towards a whole bunch of different us.

Host – Woman [00:06:24] More probably it’s.

Host – Man [00:06:25] Targeted towards the legislative side of things as well.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:06:29] A little bit. But my whole thing is if we if I can get you ketamine and I can get you fixed, we can watch you through and I’ll be working so you can go after it sometimes afterwards. Like I had one of the guys call me after like his fourth or fifth session and he was like, All my anger is gone. And I was like, Great. And he is like, No, no, no. He’s like, That’s what I used to drive me to get things done. I was like, All right, hold up your get. Don’t freak out. And I was like, Love is a much more powerful emotion. Potatoes. And I was like, Let’s walk through this. What do you love about your job? And he told me, you know, like, what do you hate about it? He told me he was like, Delegate that out. Hires me to do that. And you do all the things you love. I talked to a couple months later. He was like, I’m making more money than I love every day. I was like, Here you go. That’s what it is. So there’s a lot of things that are in it. So, Wilson, these guys out here get him Ketamine therapy. Some of these guys, like, who really need that. Like they fail ketamine or something else. And we need to step up to ibogaine or something like that. We’ll sit him down to Mexico. We’ll help him get that stuff worked out. And so that’s really what we’re doing. You know, the legislation thing. That’ll change as soon as we figure out how to. How to get the right money in the right places. Yeah. To make the people make the decisions. That’s how that’s how decisions are made. Apparently it doesn’t have to do with health and wellness. So since you’re going to people who do pay off and the pharmaceutical group pay to play wi fi. Yeah. So until then, we’ll just make sure everything gets fixed.

Host – Woman [00:07:45] I was going to say, well, you know, we talked about this in the opening in the intro about like holistic health, but like, can we spend a little bit of time talking about what that actually means? Me personally, I love it, but I think a lot of people could kind of equate like holistic to that. Like woo woo. Pie in the sky, herbs and sage and ham and all of that. So like, can you just take a moment to talk about what is it, what does it mean to, to be a holistic health guy?

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:08:14] So first of all, there is all that like, you know, we.

Host – Woman [00:08:16] We love.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:08:16] And welcome all the stuff. Yeah, well, holistic means we’re taking care of the entire person, the whole bunch. So like, I do lots and lots of like, for instance, when people come in, cholesterol levels have absolutely zero bearing on cardiovascular health. And so when I bring people in, the first thing I do is I’m like, Hey, well, you guys Ccta, which is a calcium C.T. of with Di, really shows any planking in the arteries. We do an echocardiogram. It’s a video of the heart actually beating. If you have a hole in your heart myocarditis, you know, if you’re not pushing enough blood out, if you have leaky valves, we can see it all. And so I’m like, don’t take a lab test and guess like go look like look for the plaque. Like we have the test to do it. Look for the parking lot to make sure your heart’s okay. And then I don’t care where your cholesterol levels stand outside of that. UCLA medical did a study in 2009 that of 136,000 people who were in the hospital for a heart attack and 75% of them had good, normal cholesterol levels. The problem with this is that if we’re looking at cholesterol levels, we’re going to miss 75% of people who have a heart attack. So if we don’t start looking for plaque, we don’t start looking at the heart. We’re going to have a lot of people who are going to have issues that we could have stopped, but we didn’t.

Host – Woman [00:09:24] Well, as you say, the 2009 UCLA study, it makes you remember we had Dr. David Bill Stroman, which is one of my favorite conversations to date, autoimmune guy doing like forefront of research. He was saying that, like most doctors in traditional medicine is 17 years behind the research. And that number blew my mind because I’m like, because that’s so type, you know, and just more reason why you have to be your own advocate within your health care. Because it’s not to say that, you know, doctors are quacks and we can’t trust them. It’s like their research is so, so fast. And I can only imagine what it must be like to be a medical professional professional trying to stay at the forefront of that. So but but also like, wow, that’s crazy. And those that’s information that we should really know because you still hear it preached about cholesterol.

Host – Man [00:10:09] Well, I think you bring up a really good point, Natalie, with the 17 year problem. Right. But I think that there’s there’s a lot that goes into that, right? It’s it’s like you can you can discover this thing and have their eureka. But then how do you actually do some of that, disseminate that information out to the public? Right.

Speaker 4 [00:10:24] Testing that has to be there.

Host – Man [00:10:25] There’s testing that has to happen. They have to make sure it’s like all these things that you have to deal with the bureaucracy of like getting things FDA approved. The other piece of it, too, is oftentimes, well, there’s money, but oftentimes that the the experts that find out these things and are the most knowledgeable on these things, the way that is presented is like this may have an effect. And, you know, the the the press doesn’t want to hear this may have in fact, they want to hear this is the next, you know, revolution for obesity. Yeah, exactly. It’s like they don’t want they want to hear me. They want to hear this is absolutely the real deal. And so it’s so hard because really what ends up happening and I think like one example of this, a really good example of this is honestly GLP ones and I’m sure that you would agree with us, GOP ones have been around for a very long time.

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Dr. Matt Chalmers

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