TBD Fit

I met Dr. Abid Husain at a longevity summit in Austin, and after hearing him lecture, I wanted him on the show. Heart disease is still the leading cause of death worldwide, and he is one of the few cardiologists I know who treats the whole system around the heart.

Abid spent 15 years in conventional cardiology, mostly at the end of the line, in the hospital and the emergency room. He left that model to focus on prevention and on wha...

I first met Dr. Peter McCullough at a Lyme conference, and his talk there stayed with me. He is coming up on 40 years in medical practice as an internist and cardiologist, and he is also a trained epidemiologist. Before the pandemic, his research was in chronic disease. After it, he moved into acute SARS-CoV-2 infection and the complications he sees after infection and vaccination.

His central argument is that the spike protein is t...

I have had patients referred to me for mental health concerns who changed a great deal once we went to work on the gut, so a conversation about what the brain is actually built from was always going to hold my attention. Laurie Hammer works one level up from where I usually start. She focuses on the amino acids the brain uses to make its neurotransmitters, and what happens when the supply runs short.

Her process starts with a long i...

I have been saying for years that we treat the bark instead of the tail we are standing on. Diamond Fernandes has spent twenty seven years watching cardiology do a version of the same thing, and his correction is a single sentence: arteries are a muscle, not a pipe.

Viewing an artery as a filling channel means waiting until it is blocked. Viewing it as living tissue shifts the focus to what damages the lining. Plaque forms like a pi...

I open almost every episode by asking for the origin story, because pain drives purpose, and Andra McHugh's is one of the clearer examples I have heard. Her third baby was essentially born with eczema. Her two year old came down with it the way you come down with a cold, a small patch on the inside of a thigh that took over her whole body. The pediatrician's plan was two steroid creams caustic enough that Andra was told to glove up...

Every so often the simplest thing turns out to be the most powerful, and this conversation is a good example. Dr. Sachin Patel is the founder of the Living Proof Institute and a longtime leader in functional and lifestyle medicine, and he has spent the last few years going deep on something all of us are already doing, and almost none of us are doing on purpose: breathing. His premise is that the breath is the most overlooked syste...

An engineer is trained to ask one question over and over: what is the actual root cause? Nicole Bell asked it about her own husband, and the answer changed her life's work. Nicole Bell is an MIT and Duke trained engineer, the author of the memoir What Lurks in the Woods, and the CEO of Galaxy Diagnostics, and she came on TBD Fit to tell me a story I have not stopped thinking about. When her husband Russ began to decline, the diagno...

Lindsey Wells got into this the way a lot of good clinicians do, by meeting one patient. A teenager with autism came through her rotations in naturopathic school and brightened every room he walked into, and she decided that was the population she wanted. A decade later, most of her practice is children with autism, PANS and PANDAS, and tick-borne illness, and a lot of her attention sits on one specific mechanism: cerebral folate d...

I have spent the better part of a decade on this show talking about the microbiome, so it was a treat to give a full episode to the other bacterial system we carry around: the mitochondria. Sundeep Dugar has been in drug discovery for more than 35 years. Sixteen years ago a set of cardiology data out of UC San Diego sent him down a road nobody had mapped. Everyone agrees exercise is good for you. Everyone agrees exercise builds mit...

On this episode, I sit down with Dr. Pat McShane, who spent about 40 years in reproductive medicine and fertility before turning her attention to women's healthspan. We talk about why so much of conventional care was built on male standards, and why so many women reach midlife feeling dismissed. Dr. McShane walks through what she learned across four decades, from the early days of IVF to the factors that shape fertility today, incl...

In this episode, I sit down with Ashok Gupta, who got into this work the hard way. He was an undergraduate at Cambridge in the mid-nineties, burning the candle at both ends, when a virus knocked him down and never fully let go. He could not read a page. He had no energy. His doctor told him there was no treatment and he might have it for life. His response was to go find the answer himself, which in the pre-internet era meant a boo...

We spend decades trying to kill our microbes, then wonder why we can't heal. In this episode of TBD Fit, I sit down with Dr. Dushyant Viswanathan (Dr. DV), a triple board-certified integrative internist, to rethink chronic disease from the gut up. We get into why so many of us are walking around with a "sterilized" microbiome, the difference between prebiotic and antibiotic forces acting on the body, and how the gut talks to the br...

A cancer diagnosis can feel like the ground disappearing. Dr. Michael Karlfeldt's message is that the ground you build long before then, and the team you build after, both matter.

On this episode of TBD Fit, I sit down with Dr. Michael Karlfeldt for a prevention-first, whole-person conversation about cancer risk. We talk about the lifestyle foundations he believes shape resilience, the labs he watches to catch problems early, and ho...

In this episode I sat down with John Nieters, and it is one of my favorite kinds of conversations, where an ancient tradition and modern science turn out to be describing the same things in different languages. John has spent a lifetime in Traditional Chinese Medicine, and he walks through how much a trained practitioner can read from the tongue and pulse, and how those observations line up with what we now understand about the bod...

Welcome to the TBD Fit podcast on DrTalks. In this one I sat down with Dr. Bobby Dubois, and it is the conversation I wish everyone would have before they buy the next longevity gadget or supplement. Bobby's whole message is about the difference between something sounding true and something being true. His filter is clean: a cool mechanism, a good anecdote, and a credentialed expert telling you to do it is not evidence, evidence co...

On this episode of TBD Fit, I sit down with Dr. Liz Bartman, the Chief Medical Officer at EndoAxis, for a conversation about the part of hormone health most people never see. Her north star is simple: test, don't guess. Before she recommends anything, she wants the data, not a snapshot, but the whole story of how your body is making and clearing its hormones.

We break down the three ways to test, blood, saliva, and urine, and why ea...

We spend a lot of time on this show talking about the body, so I loved turning toward the mind for a while. Phil Sarpong brings a clinical psychologist’s view of how deeply the two are linked, starting with trauma. His smoke-detector picture stuck with me: the same alarm that keeps us safe can get oversensitive and start firing when there’s no real danger, which helps explain why two people can live through the same eve...

This is one of those conversations that reminds you how much of health is detective work. Valerie Orsoni has spent more than two decades treating her own body like a lab, tracking her numbers, changing one thing at a time, and paying close attention to what the data actually says. We get into how she measures inflammation and pace-of-aging at home, and how following the trail eventually led her to mold-related toxins and gut imbala...

When a patient tells me a peptide "didn't work," my first question is never about the peptide. It's about everything around it. In this episode of TBD Fit, I sat down with Dr. Gordon Crozier, DO, one of the most detailed clinicians I know, to talk through why cellular repair succeeds or fails long before the injection ever happens.

We get into his own recovery from mold, Lyme, and Crohn's, why he is so particular about where his glu...