Dr. Maggie Yu 10:30
Yeah, I had hair loss. I had severe pain over my body, like fibromyalgia. I had severe — I started to develop severe brain fog. ADD-like symptoms. I felt irritable. I couldn’t sleep, and like random joint pain, like shoulder, wrist, heel, jaw, to the point where it was literally torture every single day without a cause. All my labs were normal, my X rays were normal, right? And then I hit early menopause at 36 no periods, literally at the top of my game, supposedly, as a family medicine physician, I was medical director of one of the largest clinics here, important here in the Portland area, working for a great medical group. I was ambitious. I was young, I loved my job. I was training other family physicians, and then I became sick as I’ve ever been. And I had no answers. Got to the point where I lost my job. I lost my job, I lost my marriage, you know. And I nearly lost my life. So the results was, I had to hit rock bottom.
Jeremy Weisz 11:47
I was just gonna ask the labs are coming back normal. What are the doctors? I mean, obviously you’re having all these symptoms, yeah. What were people telling you at the time?
Dr. Maggie Yu 11:59
Maggie, you don’t need to test your hormones, Maggie, if you’re not menstruating, then they’re normal, post-menopausal, and if you’re menstruating, then your hormones are normal. So you don’t need to test it. And then, when I literally had to beg my gynecologist, who was a friend and colleague of mine, to say, please, please, please, test my hormones. He came back, and my FSH, which is one of the hormones that shows you’re in menopause, was like in the 80s, which means I was full-blown menopause at 36 and the answer to that, and he didn’t check the other hormones, the answer to that was, you’re just getting older. Like, we don’t know why it’s happening, but you’re just getting older. It’s kind of like, deal with it. And this is a colleague, even of mine, right? You think maybe I get a little bit of referential treatment as a doctor, and I got the same shit everyone else got that I doled out.
Jeremy Weisz 12:53
And so, talk about that for a second. Then you went on a journey. What did you discover? And we’re looking at, here’s obviously more information. If someone you know has these issues, right, and everyone we know is going to experience something like this as they age, but you’re saying it doesn’t have to be normal, so you don’t have to live with it.
Dr. Maggie Yu 13:16
Everyone doesn’t experience what many people experience. There are many people that go through hormonal changes rather gracefully. And that doesn’t have to be menopause. It could be postpartum. It could be monthly cycles. It could be puberty. I mean, hormones affect every age, man, woman or child. And the problem with it is that people don’t realize how many things where the hormones are a trigger for other chronic diseases. And it’s interesting, it’s the rate of hormone change in certain individuals. I call it hormonally vulnerable times in women more often than in men. But then there are certain individuals with the underlying genetics or environmental factors that causes them to have a rate of hormone change that’s bigger, okay, and that is a triggering event for things like autoimmune disease, right? I didn’t realize two years later that at the birth of each of my children, when I delivered the baby, but I also delivered a placenta.
So when I deliver the placenta, there’s a dramatic hormone downturn the moment you deliver the placenta. And then I wonder why? Every time I delivered a child, I lost hair, I got all these symptoms, craziness, right? And it turned out it wasn’t years later, and I never had testing while I was postpartum, years later, I discovered I had an autoimmune disease against my thyroid, Hashimotos, and it was also, quote, unquote, borderline positive. So they’re like, oh, it’s not real. It’s not really positive. You’re kidding me, right? So there were hidden connections between thyroid autoimmune disease. And here is a secret that nobody else there is talking about because they don’t have the experience to say it. If anybody out there has low thyroid, okay or high thyroid, okay, well, let’s just use low thyroid as an example. There are now studies that show that, depending on the study, anywhere from 60 to 80% of low thyroid is autoimmune related. So it’s not just a thyroid problem. Your immune system is jacked up trying to kill your thyroid, which is a hormone making organ.
Now, if your immune system is making a mistake that your thyroid cells, which is hormone-making organ, is a germ and it needs to be killed, what do you think it’s doing to your ovary, hormone-making cells to your adrenal, hormone-making cells to your brain, hormone making cells or your pancreas, which makes insulin, these cells all look very similar. So what do you guys think is the likelihood that those other cells are also under autoimmune attack? Right 100% so there’s a hidden Holy Grail here, which is that don’t miss the link of autoimmune disease in people with thyroid disorders, but don’t miss the link of autoimmune disease in someone who already has an autoimmune disease. What hell is happening with the rest of the hormones that are also likely under attack? So there’s connections with hormones with clues to Windows to so many other systems in the body that are happening.
Jeremy Weisz 16:17
There’s a video here. Dr. Maggie says, Ending Hormonal Hell.
Dr. Maggie Yu 16:23
Yeah, because women, I mean women and men going through hormonal hell know what I mean when I say hell, right? So that speaks to a lot of people, because what I went through was hormone nothing showed a hormonal health and to the point is so bad I thought I was better off dead, I mean, I really did. Mean, I mean, Jeremy, I wasn’t kidding when I said, between the hormones and the autoimmune disease and the chronic pain as a result of those signs, I mean, I was damn near suicidal. So it is like torturous to go through this kind of thing. And I’m going to talk about a mindset thing here. What do you think that does to your own personal sense of certainty and confidence about yourself? I lost myself. So this isn’t a minor hormonal hell kind of oh, menopausal woman thing. I think this whole idea around hormonal balance and spiritual and emotional and energetic mindfulness, balance is all tied together.
Jeremy Weisz 17:27
At what point. Thanks for sharing that. It’s like just a debilitating journey. If anyone’s had any type of pain, small or big, it’s just it restricts and the more pain and issues, it just restricts who people are and their lifestyle and their mood, right? I mean, as you know, I had practice, and I had patients come in, and I just told everyone in the office, like, if someone’s mad or angry, whatever, just don’t take it personally. They could just be in pain, and they’re just taking it out on us. So just be aware of that. It’s not personal. Talk about, what point do you decide, okay, because you were trained traditionally, right? And you’re working in regular clinics, you’re like, listen, I need to do something different. And you started Transform. What was that point where you decide I’m gonna start Transform, which is a totally different model of practicing what you learned in all the school you went to.
Dr. Maggie Yu 18:30
For me, how did I transfer from a functional, I had to start my own practice, and it was a functional medicine clinic that integrated both medical providers, medical doctors and providers with naturopathic physicians. So that was the biggest functional medicine clinic in Portland, Oregon, and I ran that for eight years. What made me switch to doing what I do right now, working online, educationally with clients and provider certification is, to me, really blowing through a glass ceiling of some limiting beliefs around this is the way it has to be, and this is the best and only way. I think that’s a big problem with how we train physicians, but it’s also with entrepreneurship. I think a lot of times we look at, well, every doctor who is going to do work or make it is going to be direct one-to-one patient care. And we got to try to work with insurances. We got to deal with billings, embezzlement, whatever it is.
This is the way it is and it has to be. But the thing was, the way it is and it has to be was killing me medically and honestly financially, was really challenging trying to do out-of-the-box type medicine in systems and in insurance, with dealing with insurance companies and adjusters that don’t know what the hell they’re talking about what you’re doing, right? I think it’s great to be a maverick, right, but it’s also extremely courageous and dangerous. So trying to work within that system, doing something outside box, didn’t work, and it brought me to my lowest point. I got to the point where patients weren’t happy because this had to be covered by insurance, or that didn’t have to be covered by insurance.
The other aspect of this was, one-on-one, medicine in a clinic doesn’t lend itself to education. And for me, I was like, if you actually teach someone the why and the how they can get results for life, like, how are we building skills and drills in the delivery of medicine? Like, I’m a teacher, and I mean it, but we’re not doing that in the way that we deliver care, in factory medicine whatsoever, and in a compensation model that also didn’t reinforce that. So I literally had to make a jump and say, you know what, I love to teach, and I love to learn. I am going to teach this to people. I’m going to have a format. You cannot do that in a clinic. So we’re going to go online. And it was literally a test to be like, can I engage some patients and clients in conversations that says you have this really hard problem, and you’re going to acquire a lot of education and hands-on together with me in a different type of relationship, you know, like it’s a mentor-mentee, student, teacher relationship, so you learn how to how to do this. And not surprising at the time to me, not surprising now, many people said hell yes.
So many people said, hell yes. In fact, that my first month delivering this type of model online, we had, I think, 12 to 15 clients. And pretty much within six months of doing that, I recognized something, which was most people were like, “you’re crazy.” Like, think about this pre-pandemic. 10 years ago, you have a medical doctor in a clinic, successful functional medicine clinic, who says, “I’m going to go do something online and teach people how to do this from anywhere around the world.” They’re like, “you’re crazy.” But the thing was, people got better faster. The results were bigger, and their self-confidence and certainty went through the roof in this process, which is something that’s never been a promise for conventional medicine. So I was like, there’s something here. And then they told all their friends, and within six months, it was so popular, and people referred so many people into this program, I shut down my physical clinic.
Maya Angelou says, “when you know better, you do better.” I knew better. I saw better, I experienced better, and hundreds of other people did as well. And I was like, I’m done with clinical medicine, because I’m going to take the skills, the best of that, and apply it to an online model, working in small groups with people in an educational way. And man, it was the lightning in a bottle.
Jeremy Weisz 18:55
Yeah, and in that situation, you can also help more people, and doesn’t have to be restricted to a geographic area.
Dr. Maggie Yu 23:08
Well, I also tell people, like, we talked to somebody yesterday, Maduri, and they were saying, well, when do we get the one on one to do this and all that stuff. And I said, let me ask you a question if I’m in this room and then there’s somebody over there that’s asking me some questions and all this stuff. I’m going to run the corner, I’m going to be whispering with them, and then I’m going to come back and going around with like, I’m going to ask you, like, do we not understand that 90% of what we learn is not from what the questions we ask? Okay, 90% of what we learn is from listening to the questions and answers that we didn’t ask that other people are asking, right?
So, like, it’s a concept around group learning and mentorship and teaching from one to many that people don’t realize is that, like, I can sit here and everybody is a perfect case study, or an example of some concept that without you having experience that you would have never had the opportunity in your life to witness, and now you just saw it, and you’re like, I’m never going to feel to forget it, because that person’s story is that person’s data is that person’s pattern. And you just had an opportunity of a lifetime.
Jeremy Weisz 24:31
Talk about the testing for a second, because I know you’ve talked before on, even from the hormone standpoint, there are certain tests that you recommend that aren’t ordered, because if you do, if a practitioner does order them, they’ll get flagged by insurance that they’re ordering too many. So talk about how the testing works alongside the program as well.
Dr. Maggie Yu 24:55
Oh, this is kind of sad, because it’s a good example. But I am an expert in long haul, in pots and dysautonomia, and my patients who have recovered from Long Haul are going to their long haul clinics around the country and sharing like their outcomes. And I’ve had like the head physician, the medical directors of these clinic and programs, and some of the names you would know reach out to me and say, what is it about, why do you get such out of the crazy results with this client, Heidi, that we’ve never seen anywhere else? What’s so special? What’s so different? One of the things I bring up first is I say actually hormones, but here’s where the limitation is, because when I started to go into how long haul, for example, has a major impact on multiple hormonal systems.
First of all, they don’t know this because they don’t test hormones. They’re not having any training on hormones, right? But then it gets into the practicality of it, and it’s like, well, how do you order these hormones? Right? Because in your regular, conventional medical doctor world, the only access they have to is blood test for hormones. Blood test is not the best way to test your hormones. Okay? So just given an example, saliva hormone testing way better. Urine hormone testing could be better in some instances. So there are many other ways right. And the problem is, if your insurance won’t cover the saliva hormone testing, right, then you don’t get it. And that was one of the things. Is like, well, insurance isn’t going to order the hormone testing. I go, well, okay, even if you overcome that barrier, okay, it’s a couple hundred bucks. Your patients who are sick enough would be willing to pay for that, right? So, and true, but they don’t even think of that. They’re like, well, if the insurance is going to cover I’m not going to order it right? And for me, it’s like, these people are dying. Like, these people can’t drive, can’t work. I mean, like, so, like, what’s a $300 and under test for hormones is right? So for me, like, the limitation of doctors and patients and thinking I can only get tests that my insurance will cover, your life depends on this.
So when you like, spend a couple $100 to get the best test. So number one, the best kind of testing isn’t always covered by your insurance, or even available to the doctors that you’re seeing, even if they are the world expert in your condition, quote, unquote, they’re the world expert on what is medically covered for that condition in the constraints of that, which is a really narrow scope. I want you guys to know, because I approach Covid, there’s like so many pieces. It’s like a star. It’s literally like a David star approach, and that’s why we get these results. So I think that there’s a lot of limitations. And even just testing right? They don’t know what’s available. Number two, there’s no training and incentive for physicians to learn how to understand these test results out of the box, right? That are really the best tests. And this goes into, I think, Jeremy, you were talking about how, as physicians, working all, 99% of physicians are employed by medical groups or insurance companies or hospitals. We are evaluated from a performance level, from a KPI level, Key Performance Indicator level of how much is it per cost per client that we’re seeing per month, like we literally get a report card. I know, because I was a medical director for several years, right? I was responsible for taking these reports and going through it with our young physicians and saying, hey, hey, Dr. Grace, your average cost of radiological studies was $333 per patient.
And Dr. Jane over there, is at $230 a month. What’s wrong? I mean, think about that. So imagine, let’s say you’re a good-hearted physician, and you’re interested in hormones, and you’re like, oh my god, Covid, I’m gonna go ahead and order some hormones. Okay, that handle cost 600 bucks. Now, your average cost per month, per patients. Now you order just once a day, your average cost of labs for patients, just one $230 a month to $473 a month. You’re going to get a talk in two, right? So then what we don’t realize is physicians are literally, like, literally, we’re assemblers in a manufacturing plant. We’re being counted how many patients we see, how much each things cost or doesn’t cost, how much, how many of them are damaged, and this and that, like we are nothing but factory workers, I would say waitresses, literally working in the conventional medical system. So you can already see that we can’t even perform, even with the best of intentions in your best interests, because of the way that we’re being evaluated on cost containment.
Jeremy Weisz 25:20
Pretty crazy. Talk about the evolution of your programs, which, because I know you have the transform I know you have different master classes like the horn. On the food mapping the thyroid, which one came first? What was the kind of evolution of you creating these programs?
Dr. Maggie Yu 30:07
The evolution is, I’m super ambitious, and I wanted to tackle big problems with big solutions. So when I started the main program, it was an autoimmune program. It was transformed autoimmune disease naturally. That was the promise, and that was the program, because that was the hardest, biggest ass problem that I could tackle. At the time, I was like, let’s pick the hardest, because I know this works for that, and I having autoimmune disease myself collected a lot of autoimmune patients, 12,000 patients in the clinic, right? So we had the biggest autoimmune population in a clinic that we served. So it was a natural thing for me to build a program to address those different root causes around autoimmune disease. What I found, though later on, was, Oh, my God, this worked for people with long haul.
This worked for people with mast cell for pots for, you know, Parkinson’s for, you know, every single like major chronic disease, you can put a giant question mark on Hot diggity. Damn it works. And so we expanded the program to say, you know, this is the transformed program for chronic disease. So that was the evolution of that. And we started work with tons of autism spectrum families and all that, just like we did in the clinic. And then what happened was, when you have a big program and you have a big promise, there’s a lot of people that will say, I’m not sick enough for that, or, oh my god, I really want the hormone piece Dr. Maggie, like, I think it’s just hormones I’m going through menopause. Help me? Because, I mean, in the real clinic, that’s what happened.
A lot of people came to us to deal with male hormone issues, female hormone issues, and they’re like, I just want a piece of that pie. So the next so I decided, well, why not just offer a standalone hormone program? And we did. We took the hormone piece of this main program and we put it into a separate hormone program, and we started to work with individuals on hormones cue success. And so I remember the first group that went through, like, six years ago, and now we’re continuously enrolling working with people with hormones. And what we found, though, interestingly, when we started working with people in the hormone program, people started, remember, I connected thyroid and autoimmune disease and hormones, people started to make connections. And I have to teach well, if you got this hormone pattern that I see that they don’t see this is related to autoimmune disease, whether you know it or not, then they realize, oh my gosh, there’s other pieces that I’m missing or and when I go through hormone Jeremy, people don’t realize that digestion has a lot to do with the breakdown of your hormones.
And so necessarily the conversation became, hey, there is a major digestion problem here, here’s some work that needs to be done around that. And then they’re like, but I have all these food issues. Why do I react to this? Why do I react to that? So the second program that came after that was our food mapping program. The most requested standalone program was the food mapping where people said, I want my food trauma done, and I want it done and I want it done one and done in the shortest period of time possible, right? And the answer is not just, here’s the test, like some of the mail-order tests you’re thinking about. The answer was, I got to teach you a master’s level course in digestion, because 50% of your food trauma is not even food allergy related, is digestion-related, dang it. And so as a result of that, I took the food map, I created the food mapping system where we educate individuals around all the aspects of digestion, how to figure that out, how to troubleshoot it, how to fix it. And then we do testing, and that’s data-driven, of course, isn’t covered by your insurance.
That is the exact test that you need that’s accurate. And then we provide the Rosetta Stone of how to understand those results, because some people have false positives and negatives. And we go, this is exactly what you should be doing and not doing based on these results with the Rosetta Stone that we’re teaching you how to do this. And then here’s everything you need to fix this problem. We launched this program January of this year. This has been eight months, and we’ve had about 400 individuals go through that program already. So this is by far right now our most popular and viral program is the food mapping program, because everybody can identify that food matters, and many people have food trauma, and we have to eat so rather than being traumatized multiple times every single day, food can become medicine, healing, nourishing and loving. So that’s what we do in this program. That was the evolution from hormones.
We added this. And then about a couple months ago, we added our thyroid standalone program. Because some people thought, wow, I really need you. And thyroid, a lot of people start thinking about prescriptions. You know, a lot of people. One of the obstacles is, you know, not only do I not know how to deal. The autoimmune disease and the thyroid my doctor doesn’t even know, doesn’t even think it’s autoimmune, and I can’t convince my doctor to prescribe. There’s certain angles in this where it’s like it requires some skills on your part to teach you how to find doctors who would collaborate, find doctors who you can have conversations with, and then sometimes you just need a damn prescription. So in this particular program, we take care of all of that, including a prescription if necessary, because a lot of times people just need help figuring out, how do I calm the thyroid, how do I get on the right dose of medication?
And it’s much easier than to ask the doctor, say, can you just refill this prescription? That’s worked for me. So that’s the promise of this. And we just started this in March of this year, and we just had the most amazing meeting yesterday with a group on their thyroid. And Vivian in there said to me, oh, my God. I had no idea that learning about my health and working with doctors can be this much fun. And I was like, hot diggity, damn it is so Jeremy, that’s how the thyroid program came about.
Jeremy Weisz 36:02
Thanks for sharing the journey. I want to talk about the food mapping for a second, and what are some of the common symptoms people are experiencing. I mean, is it something I don’t know if people are experiencing, oh, I have this allergy to dairy, or whatever it is, or is it you don’t even know, or broader symptoms that they’re experiencing.
Dr. Maggie Yu 36:23
The thing is, is that most people just think through trauma, and immediately they think about things like heartburn, bloating, pain, food sitting in their stomach, small intestine not moving, diarrhea, constipation, right? Some people even have blood and stool hemorrhoids. Like, there’s a lot of different types of gut-related symptoms, but to me, that’s like, the top of the iceberg, other food trauma, food related symptoms that people don’t realize is more downstream. So there are people now really big on the scene. People hear the word mast cell activation syndrome, histamine intolerance, where they’re just finding that the overall allergy exposure, any minute exposure they’re reacting to. So it may not even be just be food, or they don’t even know it’s food, but they have asthma, they have eczema, they have hives, and it’s just coming, and it seems to be random all over the place, and they think it’s environmental, or they think it’s totally random, and gosh darn it, 80% of problem is their digestion of their food.
So there’s a lot of hidden type things. And then people with autoimmune issues, they just know, wow, when I eat certain foods, I hurt. But then my theologist says that nothing’s wrong and food is not related. And so they know that food matters in some of their pain or autoimmune disorders, but they’re being poo-pooed, and they just don’t even know how food matters, but they know it’s connected. So there’s a wide variety of food-related trauma that aren’t just related with the gut, and I haven’t gone into like brain ADD symptoms kids in the autism spectrum, food is a major lever in those symptoms and in their neurological development.
Jeremy Weisz 38:05
Yeah, it’s really interesting, because I started a breakout at one point, like on my forehead and my cheeks and everything. And so I went to the dermatologist, and I started to list off, well, here’s some of the stuff I tried to cut out of my diet, and here’s what? And they’re like, here’s a prescription. See you later. And I was like, wait, I didn’t have a chance to, like, tell you, and I wasn’t a convert. It wasn’t a holistic conversation, yeah? And I’m like, it’s got to be something right that I’m doing, because it just came out of the blue.
Dr. Maggie Yu 38:39
Based on what you already told me, I already knows 10 pieces of information in my head, and these are the hidden patterns that I see, right? So immediately I already know there’s several steps in your digestion, I already know are broken. I can already tell, based on that symptom alone, the story you’re telling me, right? And number two, it has been going on for a long time, but it’s just shown up in other ways that I’d be like, I could probably pin where there’s been times in your life where you’re like, oh, there’s some digestion issue or some gut related symptoms, and you just had no idea that it was even related later on to I got this thing going on, or this rash or this hives.
So already I would be, already going down a completely, very different way, I’d be like, what’s going on with digestion? What’s going on with the food allergies associated with it? And then the third piece is, why now, and that’s going to tell me hormonal issue going on as a lever, a lever switch, the time of when these things happen. Give me so much insight in the fact that there’s a hormonal connection here. Some hormones are probably changing rapidly in you at that period of time. And why.
Jeremy Weisz 38:40
Talk about Dana for a second? Because she kind of fits into this category.
Dr. Maggie Yu 39:50
Dana, when I met her, was a 22-year-old in marketing for nonprofit, and she had literally symptoms all over the place she was weighing and i She has posted her pictures, and I’ve interviewed her multiple times. She was sounded really 96 pounds. She had cystic acne all over her face, rashes all the time, reacting to all food she doesn’t know what, because it was everything and seemingly random. And she was on all these different elimination diets because the Google, Dr. Google told her to do that, and some of the holistic doctors told her to do that. So 96 pounds, and told to go on an elimination diet, to eliminate probably 80% of the food that she was eating, right. And then, in the meantime, she was no longer able to drive. She was dizzy. She had vertigo, right? And so no diagnosis either for all of that, because she’s just cooking for Cocoa Puffs, right?
So recommended to antidepressant. Maybe this is ADD, who the like? What? What’s the brain fog? So when I met her at 22 like she as a vibrant young lady, was losing, not only, like all these physical symptoms, but she was losing her self-confidence and self-trust. Where was the Dana spunk, right? And not supported by her own family in their belief of her, their belief and trust of her, or their willingness to invest in her outcomes, right? So she took it upon herself to join our program, and Dana is also the same person we’re very early in the program within, because our main program is two months. Two months, that’s it like, this is a master’s degree, and within the first two weeks, she figured out with us that there was a digestive issue, no semi-acid, and she started supporting her digestion, right? And it’s really interesting, because that’s not even talking about food allergies, hormones or even other nutrient deficiencies later.
When I talk to Dana at week 10, I always ask people at week 10, I always say, hey, what was your biggest outcome so far, right? And she, like, lit up, like, Chris, like, like, light bulbs. She goes, oh my god, oh my gosh. And I went, what? And she’s, like, I forgot that I haven’t had pot symptoms, like, since week two. This is why she couldn’t drive. This is why she was dizzy. This is why she was almost, at the point of almost ready to use a cane or assistive walking device or going upstairs in her own home, right? So for me, like, even something as unsolvable, like that, where she had been struggling for years with it, and it turned into almost like a terminal problem by week 10, number one, first step was digestion, and that’s why it’s the first, the first medical chapter of my book is called digestion, the first domino. And that’s why, for me, like order matters, and for me, really critically important is we got to address, educate you and address digestion first, and it shows you her case really shows you why mastery of one thing is really important at a time, and number two is the order of operations matter. By the second week of the program, she all her pots, postural, orthostatic tachycardia syndrome symptoms were gone, not less gone.
And this is completely unheard of by all her cardiologists, all her dermatologists, all her endocrinologists. They’ve never seen this outcome before. And for me, I was like, yeah, we get this at least twice a week on two different clients. And that’s what she even forgot. She’s like, I forgot. I just I forgot, because this is what we see every single week.
Jeremy Weisz 41:48
I want to talk about Farook for a second family. I do want to share something really quickly, which is, if you go to 8outofthebox.com, which we’re looking at right now, you can get Dr. Maggie’s book. And shockingly, when I was looking at it today, it’s $1.
Dr. Maggie Yu 43:52
Yeah, because I want to get this out there.
Jeremy Weisz 43:55
And obviously there’s a bunch of bonuses with that that you can see here, from hormone course to other things, so you can check out.
Dr. Maggie Yu 44:07
I’ll even do you better. What I’m gonna say is this is that we’re gonna for the show notes, we’re gonna put in a different link for you guys, so that every listener of this can get my book for free.
Jeremy Weisz 44:23
I still think people should 99 cents. They have to have some buy-in, in my opinion. But that’s very generous of you. I think 8outofthebox.com and then you get all these bonuses with it, and just learn directly what I find Dr. Maggie with the books like people pour their 30 years plus of education into this format that I can consume at a fraction of the price, and it’s just huge value. So I’m always buying books as well.
Dr. Maggie Yu 44:59
Well, you know my favorite part of the book is this, is that I’m a too long don’t read person. TLDR, I like to say what it is that I need to do. So my promise to you is this, at each of these eight lessons, in the back of each chapter is action steps. If you don’t even read the book and you just go to the action steps the back of each of the chapters, you can get all the benefits already, right? So just what I said here about digestion, if that intrigues you, the first medical chapter is called digestion, the first domino, and the first chapter book is why it’s important to actually lead with curiosity. So if you’re not curious, right now, I don’t know what’s going to get you curious, and so I think leading with curiosity is one of the biggest lessons I learned as a physician, as someone with chronic health symptoms, and as a teacher, right? So I want curious students come at me, and so that’s why chapter number one is leading with curiosity.
Jeremy Weisz 45:59
Love it. Check it out. Farook and family.
Dr. Maggie Yu 46:03
Yeah, I love Farook story, because Farook came to me, and they live in Iowa, and so there was a lack of local physicians that really were dealing with some of the symptoms his family was dealing with, and that he has a young son who’s on the spectrum, and who is four years old and nonverbal or very poorly verbal, but the main complaint was just constipation, right? You think it’s not a big ask, right? And for me, when we talked to Farook, I actually spoke to him. I love parents who lead with curiosity, and he is, for me, the best leader for a family that you can get between him and his wife, Sarah, because they’re curious. They wanted to learn, and they knew that locally, they said functional medicine, doctors, naturopaths. And there was a joke, quote, unquote. And so one of the limiting beliefs a lot of people have is, I have to find a doctor around me. And besides, I have to have one cover by insurance. Another one was, I have to find someone around me.
And so he got out of the box. He did research, and found, you know, YouTube channel, found other providers in the area who referred him to me. And so his constipation. And so looking at constipation in the child, if that was the only promise, and I was like, you’re just low. Your bar is too low. Dude, I said that. I said, Yes, he’s constipated. He’s also a child with autism spectrum. And I know with all the patterns that we deal with is kids on the spectrum come from families with autoimmune issue, there’s a link genetically between one or multiple parents or their family line having autoimmune genetics and kids with autism spectrum. So it was really critical for him to understand that there’s autoimmune basis to this, that this was way more than constipation, and that I was going to solve bigger problems with him and with his family and with his child, we really, yes, digestion came first, right? However, there were definitely food sensitivities here. And the genetic basis for this was incredible, because we ended up working with the entire family. So it was such a good case study for everybody who is in the program to be able to look at, here is Dad’s result.
Here is son’s results. Here’s daughter’s result, here’s mom’s result, for us to actually teach him how, not only was our testing accurate, it was genetically accurate, like it told us information about genetics. And so we ended up helping the entire family. Yes, conservation was gone. I was the easy shit, right? But what ended up happening was, within the next two months, the verbal of this child went from very poorly to non-verbal, to within a matter of a couple months, being able to speak with two and three-word sentences, right? This is unheard of. We really have out there nothing for autism spectrum, like the kind of speech therapy, OT, some of this, yes, right, there’s some, but the same time, nothing actually has these kinds of results. And the reason is, we’re not dealing with the root cause of the problem. So when I look at Bear, their child and I think about that, there were connections there with his adrenal hormones. Like, who’s gonna look at a kid’s adrenal hormones, right?
There were connections with his family history and autoimmunity. There were connections with food allergies, for sure. There were certain food sensitivities. And it’s not what you think like at times. You guys think, like, people think, oh, it’s gonna be these 6,000 things. Well, has it ever occurred to you guys? Leah, from Italy, she became a carnivorian because of all her GI issues, but in the end, guess what the one thing she had to move from her diet was, based on our testing, she had a big ass digestion problem, and she was allergic to beef. And in Bara’s case, same thing, like we make certain assumptions, oh, on the autism spectrum, when we Google it, it’s gonna be this, this, this and this. And we’re dealing with kids who have a lot of like, food aversions, right, preferences or texture issues. So parents really need accurate data. Parents need digestive help that the kids can tolerate. That’s age appropriate, right? And so it was really cool working with this family. So constipation is gone, increasing verbal like at this lightning speed, and the rest of the family is getting better and better. Boom, there you go.
Jeremy Weisz 50:40
Dr. Maggie, I have one last question. First of all, thanks for sharing your lessons, your journey, your knowledge. I want to encourage people to check out drmaggieyu.com they could also check out 8outofthebox.com. I bought it on Audible, but you can also get it on that site. Yeah, I well, I bought it so I didn’t realize it just came out. My last question is, resources, some of your favorite resources? It could be books, experts, whatever you deem as some of your favorites.
Dr. Maggie Yu 51:15
Yeah, Gabor Mate, I really, I would say one of my biggest whispers to me is Dr. Gabor Mate, really, thinking about how trauma plays a role patterns of thought and thinking really plays a role in disease. So for me, we didn’t get a chance to talk about it, but a huge part of our program is what I call from mindset to mind growth. So that whole neuroplasticity of the brain and the sick patterns that it gets in because of trauma responses is a really big deal. And so there’s a chapter in my book about mindsets and mind growth.
But Dr. Gabor Mate and his work really speaks to how, example, diseases that we now know are more and more autoimmune like ALS. There literally is an underlying thought pattern and behavioral pattern that your body gets into that actually is a cause of disease. And I saw that in my own mother with ALS. So really, I think a shout-out to him, and it carries a very big personal note for me.
Jeremy Weisz 52:21
Any other experts or resources?
Dr. Maggie Yu 52:26
I think about from an entrepreneur standpoint, and life coaching standpoint, and I love Mel Robbins. I really do. I listen to her podcast all the time. And just the other day, I listened to one where she says she has something called Let Them, and I love that where we have people who do things that irritate you or put obstacles in your way. And sometimes you just got to say, Let Them, right? For example, like, there are people who might say that functional medicine or holistic medicine is buffoonery, it’s levitation. And if that’s what they think, that’s okay, let them that’s not who I work with. That’s not who’s going to listen to the end of this podcast like you are right now. So I think that there’s a lot of good life advice that really applies to our health. I love Mel’s podcast.
She had Dr. Thema Bryant on her podcast also recently, and Dr. Thema has a new book, it’s called Homecoming, I believe, but Dr. Thema Bryant has some great life advice. And recently someone texted me a quote from Dr. Thema, and it was something about how what other people’s stories have about you is about them, like, go live your own life, right? People’s stories about you is about them. And that was really great. It’s helped me have a certain healthy sense of detachment, so that I’m able to teach without attachment. I’m not attached right now to you or your audience member having to believe me or having to do what I say. I’m not attached to the reader having a specific set of outcomes. I’m more like, here’s the opportunity, here’s the invitation. I’m here, and then just go ahead and spread the word out, and then the right people will be drawn to you, right? So between let them and what other people’s stories have about you is about them. That’s really great, because now I’m only responsible for me.
Jeremy Weisz 54:31
Love it. Dr. Maggie, I want to be the first one to thank you. Thank you for sharing. This has been fantastic. Everyone, check out drmaggieyu.com and we’ll see everyone next time. Dr. Maggie, thanks so much.
Dr. Maggie Yu 54:44
Thank you.
