Episode 286 Why You’re Always Tired: Measuring Your Mitochondria with Dr. Frank Shallenberger, MD, HMD

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[01:23] DEB: Every cell in your body runs on the same fuel: oxygen. So what happens when your cells stop using it? Well. Well, they get tired, they get sick, you age faster. And here’s the part that should make you really angry. We’ve had a way to measure this since the 1970s. And almost no one in mainstream medicine has ever offered it to you. Today I’m sitting down with a man who holds the actual patent on measuring mitochondrial function in a clinic. He is known as the godfather of ozone for a reason. He’s been using 130-year-old therapy to help patients regenerate joints, recover from chronic infections, and reclaim their energy, decades before anyone else was willing to say it out loud. This is Dr. Frank Shallenberger. Stick around, this one gets into the biochemistry of why you’re tired and what to do about it.

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[03:09] DEB: Welcome back to Let’s Talk Wellness Now, the show where we uncover the root causes of chronic illness, explore cutting edge regenerative medicine and empower you with the tools to heal. I’m Dr. Deb, and today we’re diving into mitochondrial function, oxygen utilization,, and the decades-long story of ozone therapy in America with one of the pioneers who built this field from the ground up. If you’ve ever been told your labs are normal but you still don’t feel like yourself. If you’re dealing with fatigue, chronic pain, degenerative joints, or you’ve just always sensed there’s a piece of conventional medicine it isn’t measuring. This episode is for you. So grab your cup of tea, coffee, or whatever helps you unwind. Settle in and let’s get started on the journey for deeper healing.

[04:07] DEB (Book promo): I know that story because it was my story too. I spent three years being told I had MS. Three years of fear. Three years of doubt. Three years of sitting across from doctors who had given up looking. Turns out, wasn’t MS. It was something completely different, something treatable, something we could actually address but nobody was asking the right questions. That experience is what gave birth to Seen at Last, my book written for every woman who has ever walked out of the doctor’s office feeling more invisible than when she walked in.

[04:45] DEB: My guest today is Dr. Frank Shallenberger. He’s been practicing alternative and integrative medicine since 1978. Yep. I said that right. 1978. And he’s a founder and past president of the American Academy of Ozone Therapy. Dr. Shallenberger holds the only patent on using respiratory gas analysis to measure mitochondrial function, a method he calls bioenergy testing. He’s written two books on the subject. The Type 2 Diabetes Breakthrough and Bursting with Energy, and he’s authored numerous peer reviewed papers on ozone therapy and oxygen utilization. He’s also the developer of ProloZone, an injection technique used to help regenerate damaged joints, herniated discs, and degenerative soft tissue and he is the editor of the Second Opinion alternative medicine newsletter. Dr. Shallenberger, welcome to the show.

[05:51] FRANK: Yeah, I was a surgical resident, an absolute neophyte to medicine. And I just happened to kind of get lucky in the sense that I found out that I happened to be in the San Francisco area at the time. And Linus Pauling was having a study group with about like 10 other people, all of whom were like, very famous people in San Francisco and I just found my way into it and I started listening to all these guys talking about things like vitamins and imbalances, and he called it orthomolecular medicine, but you know, talking about all the imbalances. And his theory was those imbalances would cause all the problems. And so therefore the way to fix the problems is not with drugs to help with the symptoms, but to actually go in and look for the imbalances and repair the imbalances. And typically the imbalances are all natural things. He was focusing mostly on vitamin C and other vitamins, but it could be anything. It could be amino acids, could be sleep, it could be lifestyle habits, whatever. And I just got lucky and it started awakening up here saying, “You know what? All they taught me in medical school was really good stuff like biochemistry and physiology and so on and so on.” But they never ever ever told me anything like this before.

[07:11] DEB: Isn’t that something I think all of us who kind of stumbled into integrative or alternative medicine, whatever we want to call it these days, we all kind of feel the same way, right? Like we’ve learned all this biochem and we were like, Oh, thank God it’s over. We don’t have to think about it anymore. And then you get into the integrative space and you’re like, Oh my gosh, that biochem meant so much. And now we know like the underlying cause of what’s causing the cells to not be healthy, to that make us sick. But we didn’t learn any of that part in medicine at all. We just learned the basics of it. And here’s how to fix people.

[07:45] FRANK: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so that’s how, that’s how I got into it. I remember I just so much remember 1978, I read a book called Sugar Blues. And this book basically had the radical concept of maybe people ought not to be eating all that much sugar. And oh, by the way, taking B vitamins might be a good idea. So I said, okay, you know, I don’t think anybody died from sugar deficiency or died from taking too many B vitamins. So I’m going to go ahead and give them those. And then about like 20, 25% of my patients started getting better. And then it started clicking.

[08:18] DEB: And did you just kind of gradually start doing more and more things as you learned then? When did you stop doing surgery? Because if you were a surgical resident, that’s a big thing.

[08:28] FRANK: I did that for a couple of years. And so back in the late, late seventies, you know, I made the transition. I said, you know what, this is a whole lot more interesting than doing this other stuff. Not talking to people and just cutting on them. One thing about surgeons is surgeons, their mentality is straightforward. It’s pretty obvious. You got a swollen appendix? I’m going to take the appendix out. We don’t have to get into a big intellectual discussion about this. Whereas with the internist, not so much, it’s always this or that. We don’t always know what we’re doing in internal medicine, but I got that surgeon mentality. I’m just looking for what’s obvious.

[09:09] DEB: Right. That’s why they call it all practicing medicine, right? Because that’s what we’re all doing. So you’ve said that the body is a self healing mechanism and it’s really our lifestyle and our toxic load that breaks down, which then causes all these problems. Do you think you started learning that when you studied with Linus Pauling or when would you say that you started really noticing that as a big part of people’s illnesses.

[09:34] FRANK: Yeah, way back then those guys were on it. I mean, they were focusing to a large extent on you know, certain vitamins, niacin, I remember, was one of them. There were also, you know, Linus was an interesting guy. He came in one time in one of the groups and he said, “I want to discuss urine therapy.” Yeah, okay. If anybody else said that, probably we’d throw him out of the group. You know, Linus was — so he was open-minded. He thought about lots of things and yeah, for sure they were focused on diet back then and lifestyle choices and all that kind of thing.

[10:09] DEB: Awesome. So you are the godfather of ozone therapy, right? That is what you are known for. And ozone therapy has been around a lot longer than people think, over 130 years. But still today, you know, most Americans have never heard of it. They’ve never done it. What do you think — the reason is that it hasn’t taken off to the mainstream like it has in different parts of Europe.

[10:33] FRANK: In the early 80s, a very famous German physician by the name of Horst Kief made this statement, “If ozone therapy were patentable, it’d be at every hospital in the world.” There’s your answer in a nutshell. It doesn’t make money and it’s cheap and it’s easy to do and there’s no side effects. So obviously you don’t want it in a profit-making system.

[10:55] DEB: That is so true. Can you explain to us a little bit so the listeners understand exactly what is ozone therapy and what does it do?

[11:03] FRANK: Yeah, so listeners, ozone is pure oxygen. It’s got nothing to do with pollution. It’s true up in the pollution, there is some ozone up there, okay? But the ozone’s not the problem. Ozone is just pure oxygen. The oxygen that we’re breathing right now, consists of two oxygen atoms coming together. The reason they come together is because each oxygen atom individually does not have enough electrons to keep that molecule balanced. So they come together and they share electrons. That’s a very stable molecule. I think of it as a man-woman marriage. And they’re coming together and they’re sharing the household or whatever it is, and things are better that way. So these two oxygen atoms are, and that’s what we’re breathing. O2. O2 is a fairly stable molecule. It’s not 100% stable, of course, but it’s a fairly stable molecule because it’s so well balanced. O3 is three oxygen atoms sharing the amount of electrons that makes two oxygen atoms stable. This threesome is not stable. It’s an unstable oxygen molecule. What that means is that when you put that into a system, a biological system, it instantaneously grabs an electron. It’s going to move an electron. All life is about electron movement. As soon as your electrons stop moving around, you stop moving around all about the movement of electrons. Everything that goes in on our cells, goes in on our mitochondria, goes in the nucleus, all that stuff, everything, 100%, is initiated by the movement of electrons. And ozone initiates that. So we can take that and we can put that, it’s a gas, by the way. We can take that and we can inject that gas into a joint and it’ll start moving electrons in the joint. We can inject it into a bladder. We can inject it into the intestines, we can inject it into the bloodstream. And it’s going to move electrons wherever we put it. It’s going to start moving these electrons. And that electron movement is the issue because the reason ultimately that we get sick, I mean the very bottom line reason that we get sick is because our electron movement starts slowing down. So when a person is feeling really good, when you’re a 35 year old triathlete, those electrons are moving fast. They’re moving fast and they’re moving purposefully. But you start hitting 55, 60, 70, start smoking, start not getting enough sleep, blah, blah, blah. The electron movements start slowing down and then everything else slows down. And then we counter that with ozone. So in a nutshell, that’s basically what it’s about. It’s about oxygen therapy.

[13:52] DEB: So ozone can be used as a treatment for an illness, but it also could be used as a preventative as we’re aging so that that electron transport doesn’t slow down and then we don’t have as much disease that should occur, correct?

[14:07] FRANK: Absolutely. Mostly. You know, it depends on people and what they want to do, of course. I get an ozone treatment periodically just because I’m in the office and I can do that. But the reality is that exercise is the same thing. Exercise does the same thing. So if you’re a healthy person and there’s nothing really wrong with you and you want to do what you’re talking about, like prevent it exercise. You technically don’t need ozone therapy. Just go out and exercise. Now, if you’re sick though, it’s hard for me to tell a sick person, I want you to go do all this exercise to ramp yourself up. So I’m going to get you a jumpstart with things like ozone therapy.

[14:43] DEB: Love ozone therapy. We do it in our office too. And like you, I have the opportunity to be able to do that. So if I start to feel run down or I’m traveling too much or I’m starting to feel like I’m coming down with something. I hop on that ozone machine and it is amazing how good you feel so quickly. And even my staff will say to me, you haven’t had an ozone in a while. Your blood looks thick. It’s not looking good. You’re not doing something you’re supposed to. And I’m like, you’re not supposed to know that. You’re not supposed to tell me that. But it’s amazing that they’ve noticed the difference in the blood and how it comes out and how it looks for us as we don’t do the things that we’re supposed to do and we become more toxic.

[15:23] FRANK: Yeah. You know, if it weren’t for logistics and expense and such like that really you could make a case in this toxic soup that we live in. You could definitely make a case for every single human being getting an ozone treatment on a pretty regular basis, whether they feel good or not.

[15:39] DEB: Yeah, just as a preventative.

[15:40] FRANK: Yeah, yeah. Just do something preventatively.

[15:43] DEB: Is there anybody that you can think of that shouldn’t be doing ozone or would be contraindicated in doing ozone therapy?

[15:51] FRANK: Well, you know, there’s this one enzyme called G6PD and we teach that in the courses and such, but everybody’s supposed to make this enzyme but if you don’t make enough of that enzyme, ozone can be toxic. You can’t tolerate that electron movement so well. You have to have that enzyme to direct and temper the electron movement. And if you don’t have that enzyme, or if you don’t have much of that enzyme, the practitioner’s got to be very careful in the dose they give. And sometimes, it would be fairly rare, but sometimes you just flat out don’t give it at all because of that. Otherwise, there’s no contraindication. You could do it once a week. You can do it twice a day. It doesn’t sort of matter. A lot of practitioners use it in gigantic doses. I’m not a big gigantic dose type guy, and they get away with gigantic doses.

[16:48] DEB: Yeah, that’s what we call high dose also, right?

[16:51] FRANK: Yeah. You know, it can be real purposeful and I don’t know of any contraindication to doing it at all as long as you have that G6PD enzyme.

[17:02] DEB: That’s awesome. Now you’ve been the developer of something called ProloZone. What’s the difference between a standard prolotherapy and ProloZone?

[17:12] FRANK: Yeah, besides sounding the same, they’re totally different. The mechanism of action is completely different. Excuse me. Proliferative therapy, or what they call prolotherapy involves inflammation. So you’re going to take a substance that’s very inflammatory and you’re going to inject it normally around the joint, but you can also go into a joint. It’s going to create the inflammation in there. And then the body responds to that inflammation by coming in with anti-inflammatory sorts of reactivities. Those, those, that response is what creates a healing effect in the area. Now, so that’s the mechanism of an action and inflammation, creating a body’s response to that inflammation and that response to inflammation is what creates the healing. Ozone is different. It doesn’t cause an inflammation. It is simply moving electrons. And, and as it’s moving an electric, as it’s moving electrons, that stimulates the body’s healing mechanism in a different way. There’s no inflammation involved. And so that’s kind of good because with prolotherapy, and I used to do this. Prolotherapy. I mean, you go ahead and inject somebody’s knee with Prolotherapy. It could hurt for a good seven, 10 days. It could be really painful because that inflammation hurts. But with ProloZone, no pain. You can end up with the same sort of effect, but no pain.

[18:32] DEB: And it’s much better if we don’t have pain, right? That’s so painful like that.

[18:36] FRANK: Yeah. You know what the other thing is though. And I don’t know if you thought of this. I’d been using ozone for over 20 years before I thought of this. And that is that. Wait a second, proliferative therapy uses liquids. Ozone is not a liquid, it’s a gas. So how is that different? It’s different because when you put a gas in an area, the heat of the body expands the gas and it starts spreading all over the place. So with prolotherapy, you’ve got to be pretty pinpoint where you’re putting that stuff. But with with ProloZone, it’s sort of like you know, target practicing with a shotgun, you got to be really bad to miss.

[19:15] DEB: So you get a lot more benefit even if you’re not a master injector right out of the game.

[19:21] FRANK: Yes, that too. And also it dissects along the fascial planes. As you probably know, you can put it in over here and the patients say, I feel it over here. It went over there. [Don’t do that.] So I think that’s a huge part of why ProloZone is like the best regenerative therapy I’ve done or I’ve ever worked with because of that one simple fact, I think there’s a big difference.

[19:44] DEB: Well, and that makes a big difference for the person too, because where they’re feeling the pain doesn’t necessarily always mean where the damage is. And so for injecting in the painful area, but that injury is actually lateral to it or up or down or wherever it is you’re not going to get the benefit out of it. You’re creating more inflammation. So that makes perfect sense. Why ProloZone would work so much better than prolotherapy for people.

[20:08] FRANK: Yeah. I don’t, I don’t do prolotherapy anymore. I don’t know anybody that does prolotherapy that has tried ProloZone that’s going back to prolotherapy. It’s just, yeah, there’s no point.

[20:18] DEB: I had prolotherapy in my neck and oh my gosh, I tell you that was the worst thing I’ve ever done.

[20:25] FRANK: Pretty bad.

[20:31] DEB: I made the mistake of doing it the day before I went on vacation. I was all screwed up for the whole time. Yeah. Yeah. I only did it once and I would never do it again. I was like, no. And I even used nitrous with it and it still was bad. And I was just like, I will never do this again. It was worse than the pain I was having. It wasn’t worth it for me at all. So if any of you listeners out there have had proliferative therapy and you don’t want to do that again, this is different. Yes. Do ProloZone. Do that instead. That would be much better. And you can do a ProloZone in pretty much any area, right? Degenerative joints, herniated discs, those kinds of things. Is there any place you can do it?

[21:09] FRANK: I have put it every place. Put it in bladders, joints, fingers, ears. I haven’t stuck it in an eyeball. I haven’t put it in the brain, but I’ve injected the epidurals with it. You know, I’ll put it right in the [CSF/epidural space].

[21:24] DEB: So you pretty much put it every place.

[21:27] FRANK: Pretty safe. Pretty safe. That’s just oxygen. It’s pure oxygen. There’s nothing in there besides the oxygen.

[21:34] DEB: Yeah. So that makes it very easy and very safe to use. Yeah. So you’ve also been, you’ve created something called bioenergy testing for mitochondrial function, right? And you hold the only patent on using this respiratory gas analysis. Tell us a little bit about that. How does it measure mitochondrial? What does it do?

[21:53] FRANK: A long time ago, like three decades ago, I’m trying to get it through my skull. You know, I figured out at that point, all disease is caused by poor mitochondrial function, for the listeners the mitochondria, the part of the cell where the oxygen goes in to start moving the electrons. That’s where the action is, so to speak. And we’ve known for decades: all disease, including the very process of aging itself, has to do with the decrease in the function of mitochondria to process oxygen. So I’m going through my head and I know that scientifically, not much gets done in medicine, if anything in an area where there’s no measurement. And the example would be blood pressure. If we didn’t have a blood pressure cuff or a way to monitor blood pressure, one, we wouldn’t know if there’s a problem or not. Two, if we assume there was a problem and treated for high blood pressure, we wouldn’t have a way to know if our treatment was working. So the point is if you don’t measure something in medicine, whether it’s blood sugar, blood pressure, or mitochondrial function, you have no idea what’s going on. So we’re talking about the single most important thing in health, and nobody’s measuring it. So I start to think, okay. How do we measure mitochondrial function? Now the Germans had done some work where they had — it involved an arterial stick and a venous stick simultaneously looking for the difference in the O2s. And it was very complicated and who wants to get their arteries stuck anyway as a routine test. And so I thought, well, I don’t know about that. Well. One day it just came to me. Now wait a second. What goes on here in the mitochondria when oxygen is involved? What goes on is the oxygen only goes one place. You know, all that oxygen I’m breathing in? It’s not like it goes to 20 different places. It only goes to my mitochondria. So if I’m breathing in that much oxygen, I must have that much mitochondria. If I’m breathing in that much oxygen, I have that much mitochondria. So the amount of oxygen that my body’s consuming, and that amounts to how much oxygen is coming in, subtracted by the oxygen coming out, that’s the amount that actually disappeared into my body. That directly correlates with how many mitochondria I have when the oxygen goes into the mitochondria and gets processed into that electron movement we talked about. The waste product is carbon dioxide. So the more effectively the oxygen is moving electrons, the less carbon dioxide produced, the more ineffectively oxygen is working. In other words, the mitochondria aren’t working so well. You get more CO2 produced. So I know two things. The amount of oxygen I’m consuming, that tells me how many mitochondria I have. The amount of carbon dioxide produced to the amount of oxygen that I’m consuming tells me how well they’re working. So it’s simple. I just put a mask on a person, kind of like a scuba mask. And they’re in their breathing. We do them with them sitting quietly in a chair so we want to see what their mitochondrial function at rest is. And then I put them on a bicycle and they’re on there for maybe 15, 20 minutes. And, you know, we progressively work them harder and harder and we can see their oxygen consumption go up, up, up, up, up, up, up. Well, at some point, obviously it always levels off. At that point they stop the exercise, but we take that number. What’s your maximum oxygen consumption? And then we say, is it good or not so good? So we go to a database and the database been out there for about 70 years, by the way. They did this stuff way back in the 30s. Back then the instrument was like a whole room. These days, these instruments look like a shoe box. It’s like a little computer. It’s crazy how crazy it is. But the database goes all the way back. Anyhow, we go back to that database and we can say, you know what? You’re a 50 year old person. Your mitochondria are consuming the amount of oxygen that’s typical for an 80 year old person. This is not good. You’ve got a problem. And then the patient can say, but I feel fine. I say, yeah, you’re on the road to destruction, but you haven’t got to destruction yet but you’re on the road. So it gives us a way to measure mitochondrial function. And so if somebody, one of my patients come in and we measure this on every single person I see, basically. And if it’s poor tell the patient, okay, you’re lucky, your mitochondria are lousy, and you got to find out about it early enough to make a difference. Because normally people only find out about this when they come down with cancer or heart disease or some kind of problem. So you’re lucky. So we’re going to go ahead and we’re going to do something and we could talk about what that amounts to, but we could, ozone would be one obviously, but we’re going to do, we’re going to do something to make your mitochondria better. And then we remeasure and make sure that what we’re having you do is actually working. So it’s a really remarkable system that I can tell you there are two things that really formed the basis of why we get sick. And such that if a patient does not have problem with these two things, they don’t get sick. I don’t know what they die of, but they don’t die of some illness. They don’t waste away. One of them is this, the mitochondrial function that we’re talking about. The other is endothelial function or circulation. Now they’re related obviously because the way the mitochondria gets the oxygen is through the circulation. So they’re a unit right in there. I can tell my patients. Look, by the way, we also measure nitric oxide and flow-mediated endothelial function as well. So between those two measurements, if those measurements are good, if your mitochondria are working well, and you have good endothelial function. Guess what, folks? You don’t get sick. Go about your business. Don’t worry about anything. You’re going to be 92 years old on no medications, and doctors are going to be scratching their heads and saying, “Wait, you’re not in any medicine and you’re in your 90s? What kind of crazy thing is this?” But that’s very possible if you do those two things. And by the way, folks, ozone therapy is good for both of them.

[28:11] DEB: It is. It’s great for both of them. So is this similar to — I know people that are listening might recognize this type of testing, they offer it in some of the gyms where they do the VO2 max, they put somebody on a bike and they wear this big thing and they work out. Is this a similar test to what they offer like that or slightly different?

[28:34] FRANK: It’s slightly different, but it’s the mechanism is the same. Those guys are measuring oxygen consumption. And most of them, but not all, are measuring carbon dioxide production. So we’re getting the same measurements. The difference is what are we doing with the measurements. So what we do is, and my patent is basically built around this, we take the measurements and run them through algorithms. And it gives me a whole printout of very interesting things — one of course is mitochondrial function, but I get a lot of interesting things through those algorithms. And then we don’t take people to VO2 max. Now that’s a misnomer. VO2 max is the amount of energy produced with and without oxygen. It’s a summation of with and without oxygen. We don’t care about without oxygen. So you don’t want to go to VO2 max. You just go up to the point where you start to enter into the production of energy without oxygen. We call that anaerobic threshold. So that’s one of the differences too. We don’t use VO2max, we use anaerobic threshold. All the data that’s published is on anaerobic threshold. The only data on VO2 max has to do with athletes the guys that win the race or the guys that have the best without oxygen energy production. But for just healthy people, we don’t need to know that, so we don’t do that. So that’s one difference. And the other difference is the algorithms. And then the final difference is that I don’t really want you, if you’re a 70 year old woman, I don’t want you to have the mitochondria of a 70 year old woman. I want you to have the mitochondria of a 40 year old woman. Everything we do is defaulted back to comparison to a 40 year old database.

[30:19] DEB: Oh, that’s awesome.

[30:20] FRANK: I don’t care if you’re 41 years old or you’re 81 years old, you are going to get compared to a 40 year old database. And the really cool thing is I’ve got patients in their mid 80s that are equal to a 40 year old database.

[30:34] DEB: Wow.

[30:34] FRANK: It can happen. It can happen.

[30:36] DEB: Yeah. Yeah. Like there’s investment in it, right? Like you have to be willing to invest your time and energy and money into having that type of mitochondria. It’s not going to come by eating at McDonald’s and eating sugar and all of that. There’s an investment in our health to be able to do that. So people listening, you know, realize that you’re going to have to make a commitment if you truly want to have the body of a 40 year old when you’re 80. It is possible. It just means you need to do some work to get there.

[31:06] FRANK: I’ll tell you a story and I want to tell you the story because it’s so recent for me now and it’s personal. I’m 80. I just hit 80 years old. So I’m an 80 year old dude now. Now in the old days, I used to race bikes. So back in my thirties and early forties, I’d race bikes on pretty darn good condition and so forth. And I mean, we used to go out and you know, ride 60, 80 miles, group of us, you know, and think nothing of it. No big deal, go home, have a beer and call it a day. So I thought, you know, I’m 80 years old, the Huntsman World Senior Games is held every year in St. George. And they do all kinds of stuff, but it’s all for seniors. And it’s not competitive. So I thought, you know what, I’m going to go out and I’m going to compete in the bicycle competition. So, okay. So it turns out there’s a number of factors to it, but one of them is a 25 mile road race, 25 miles. That’s like nothing compared to the old days. So, so I’m now 80 years old though. I’m not like the old days. Okay. But my test looks pretty good, really good. I mean, it looks as good as the average 40 year old, but these, these guys that race aren’t average. But anyway, so I said, I’m going to go out and I’m going to ride for, I’m going to prepare for this. Guess what? I go like seven miles and I’m out of gas. I’m like, what? I just, I struggled home. You got to go out seven miles, which means, oh yeah, unless you call your wife, you’ve got to come back seven miles. [So that’s what really helps.] And I got home after 14 miles and just laid on the lawn and just like I was about half dead. I completely ran out of gas. And what got me off on this tangent is number one, you know, I’m nowhere near what I used to be. Okay. And I’m cool with that. But the point is. So I started on a training program. So I got my bioenergy number was about like 110, which means 10% better than a 40 year old. And now it’s up to 160. Okay, guess what? I feel like a young man. Yeah. I did not expect that. It’s funny. It’s a personal experience for me, but I didn’t realize, you know, I know I had to get in shape for this bike race but I didn’t know that I have all these extra benefits. Like I’m sleeping better, my back doesn’t hurt, this and that. All this stuff is like really good. And my brain’s more [cognitive] the whole thing. It’s just extra bonuses, but it kind of goes to your points about, yeah folks, you gotta work at this. For me, it’s kind of fun because of the results. If I didn’t get the results, no. I would not want to go out and ride a bike intensely for two hours. But getting the results, okay, I can do that. And yeah, I can turn down the Twinkie. It’s not that big a deal. I can live without that Twinkie because of the results. Because of the results. And then I can look forward to, you know, unless something terrible happens to me, I can look forward to, I don’t know, 10, 20 more years of good functional living.

[34:06] DEB: Right. And I think a lot of us are, we’re fine with living in our 80s and 90s. And there are some people that are striving for 100. I have a patient that’s striving for 150, go for it. But you want to have that quality of life. That’s what everybody’s afraid of. Like we don’t want to be 80, sucking through a straw, living in a nursing home where we don’t know anybody and we’re just miserable living in this existence because that’s not a quality of life. So if we want to live to be that age, we have to put forth a little bit of effort to do that.

[34:38] FRANK: Yeah. There’s a famous Stanford doctor who interestingly enough died at the age of 92, but he, he put the aging thing really, really out there in the late sixties, early seventies when nobody was thinking this way. He wrote a whole bunch of books. One of them was called, [Why Do We Die Too Long and Live Too Short? — title unconfirmed] It was just to your point. Yeah. Yeah. You know, look, why do you want to get to be 75 and then for the rest of your life be all sluggish and on eight different medications when you don’t have to be that way? You don’t actually have to be that way. The medical system tells you, oh yeah, that’s normal. No, it’s not normal.

[35:21] DEB: Yeah. I think that’s the hardest part is, you know, from 40 on the medical system start saying, well, you’re getting older. Well, you have to accept this. Well, this is normal and you really don’t have to accept it. You just have to be open to looking at health and life in a different fashion. You know, mitochondria is so important. And I think I’m glad to see that we’re talking more about it than we ever have before, but mitochondria can fix a lot of different things. Why do you think we’re seeing more mitochondrial disease in such a younger age population? I mean, so many young people in their 30s and 40s and now even early 50s, they’re, you know, type 2 diabetes. They have cancer fibromyalgia. I mean, they just, the list of what they have going on, it goes on and on and on and on. And I don’t remember this 25 years ago when I started. I don’t remember seeing this kind of list of problems in this population of people. What’s your opinion on that?

[36:18] FRANK: Yeah. So, okay. So you asked the question, well, what screws up mitochondria? Okay, now we know aging has an effect with that and everybody knows that. Right. But leaving aging, just the very aging thing aside, what could screw up your mitochondria? Clearly heavy metals. Heavy metals are known to screw up everything, the endothelium, the mitochondria, the whole package and a lot of heavy metals out there. You go get a flu vaccine, you’re getting some mercury injected in you. The dentist puts silver amalgams in you, you get mercury injected in you. You get glyphosate, you get all kinds of environmental toxins, so that’s certainly part of the problem. I think you could probably, listeners could probably name a lot of things that people do these days that aren’t so good, they don’t get enough sleep. They don’t exercise. They sit in front of a computer all day long and you know, they’re stressed out. They take medicines and drugs all the time. It’s crazy all the drugs people take. It could be over-the-counter drugs, it could be prescription drugs. They don’t think anything about it. Hey, I just read an article about the kids in Baltimore — kids lower than eighth grade — like half of them are on drugs. They’re getting vaccinated. They’re on drugs. They’re living in an environmental soup of heavy metals. Good grief. It’s amazing it doesn’t get worse than it really is.

[37:43] DEB: Yeah. I can’t tell you. I don’t think I’ve seen a 20-year-old in a long time who hasn’t been on some kind of stimulant, Adderall, Ritalin, Vyvanse, antidepressants. Like everybody is coming in on an antidepressant that seems to be the answer that traditional medicine has for people. Let’s give you an antidepressant and we’ll give you Adderall or Ritalin, whatever it is these days. And it’s really hard and they can’t function without it, but nobody’s looking at their mitochondrial function at all.

[38:13] FRANK: Yeah. Yeah. And as you know, there’s all kinds of alternatives to these antidepressant medications, all kinds of alternatives to Adderall. Which brings me to another point, and listeners should hear about this. Our medicine system has some good sides to it some really good sides. One of the good sides is that it helps with symptoms. Because there’s going to be a point in time, folks. You’re starting to get sick now. Okay. You’re like 40 years old. Your mitochondria is starting to go bad but you feel good. But the whole time they’re going bad over the next 10, 15 years, you feel pretty good, but you’re not doing anything. You’re going like I say on the highway to destruction. What you want to do is stop that early on because there will be a point where you can’t go back. That’s the thing, that you can’t go back. Folks, you will reach a point where you can’t go back. And then you’ll say to yourself, “Hm, darn it, I wish I had not been smoking for so long,” or whatever your problem was. That’s a point you can’t go back. And we don’t want to get to that point, obviously. And that’s where the drugs come in handy. That’s the point I wanted to make, Deborah. That’s where the drugs come in handy. So I’ve got a patient now and their back so bad I can’t really fix it the way I want to fix it. Surgery’s not gonna fix it. Nobody’s gonna fix it. Okay. We got some medicine to help you with the symptoms. Now I’m not going to delude myself and thinking I’m fixing you with these symptoms, but that’s one of the handy things with medicines is that it can help you when you’re at that point that you can’t go back. But unless you’re at that point, let’s not use the drugs for the symptoms. Let’s actually fix the problem.

[39:53] DEB: Yeah. That happened to my husband recently. He had, when he was in his late forties, he had a carotid artery that got blocked. And he was 100% blocked and he knew it. And he [sat in medicine], but he said to me one day we were driving and he’s like. Hey, can you order an ultrasound for me of this neck thing? He’s like, I don’t feel well. And I looked at him and I’m like, what are you talking about? And he’s like, I think my carotid artery is blocked. And he’s not an internet guy. So he didn’t search this out. His intuition told him something was wrong. And I ordered the ultrasound thinking, ah, it’s going to be nothing. And the hospital calls and says, he’s 100% blocked. Like he needs to do something right this minute. And he’s kind of stubborn this way. He’s like, no, I got a hunting trip coming up with my boys. I’m going hunting. And he’s like, I’ll be back on Monday for the surgery. And he took the risk and he did it. And that was back in 2013. And he started getting blocked again. They put in a cow artery [bovine patch], and he’d been great since. Then he started getting blocked again. And one surgeon said, I think you should have this procedure called a TCAR done. The cardiologist said, why would you do that? That’s such a risky procedure. You could throw a clot on the table. And it was the cardiologist that the vascular surgeon sent us to. So we took a step back and went, okay. So we got another opinion, saw another cardiologist. He’s like, yeah, you could do it. It’s only 60% blocked. I think you’ll be okay. Another vascular surgeon says, I think you’re okay. Let’s just watch this. So we watched it for three months. Things were okay. No change. We go back three months after that. Now it’s been six months since they found it. He’s 100% blocked. So he went from having what looked like an hourglass carotid artery where just one spot was blocked. So now the internal and external carotid artery are completely blocked and they make no, they made no big deal out of it. They were like, well, it’s blocked. What are you going to do? We can’t do anything. And I said, what do you mean you can’t do anything? And he’s like, we can’t do anything. And he’s like, yeah, you could do a CT if you want, but nothing you could do. So of course I ordered the CT. Luckily his left side is compensating for the right side and he’s had no symptoms and that’s why he’s had no symptoms. But I [would love to try] going, okay, let’s try to be super aggressive here and see it just happen. Let’s see if we can open this up — some ozone, some Plavix, some nattokinase, lumbrokinase, things like that to see. I said, I don’t know if it’s going to work or not, but we could at least try. And, and, but that, you know, we, we were waiting and part of the reason we waited is they said to us, if we put this TCAR in, it’s only good for 10 years. And so he said, I’m 62. What am I going to do at 72 then? But nobody said, if you don’t do it now, the chances of you blocking like this is higher. And nobody once said that that potential could happen both externally and internally. Nobody looked at why that happened. They didn’t care in the cardiovascular world at all. And now it’s left him going, well, what the heck? Why did I go see the cardiologist? They weren’t going to do anything anyway. And so when we talk about conventional medicine, that is really the difference between what they do and what you and I do is we’re looking for the root cause and trying to fix the problem so those things don’t ever happen.

[42:54] FRANK: Exactly. It’s reactive medicine, right? Conventional medicine, they’re waiting until everything goes to heck. And then they decide to do something.

[43:04] DEB: Yeah, exactly. That’s crazy. This has been such a great conversation. I would love to hear one more thing from you is that what’s the belief you’ve held early in your career about healing that you’ve, you’ve seen come to fruition or something that you believed when you were younger, that’s really changed how you practice or how you see medicine today.

[43:27] FRANK: Okay. I’m not sure how to answer that question exactly, but let’s see what I can do. So, so — gosh, so many things. Sometimes people say, “Well, what have you learned that’s so great?” And I’m thinking, “Okay.” You got two hours? So much, right? You know, maybe this is the answer. I don’t know if it is, but maybe this is the answer. We screw ourselves up. If I get sick tomorrow, I did it. And really, realize that, folks, realize that. If you get sick tomorrow, you did it. It wasn’t your next-door neighbor. It wasn’t that somehow illness is floating above you and it decided to drop on you all of a sudden. No, you did it. And as Adelle Davis, this is a great quote. I use this quote all the time. Adelle Davis was a nutritional pioneer in the ’50s. I don’t know if you ever heard of her, but she died in the early ’60s. But she said, every day of your life, you’re doing one of two things. You’re either producing disease or you’re producing health. That’s the statement. That means what I’m going to do today. What I’m doing today, folks, what you’re gonna do today, what are you gonna be doing? Is it gonna be doing something that produces disease? You’re gonna be sitting around drinking beer and eating Twinkies and watching TV? Or you’re going to be out on your bike with Shallenberger riding 25 miles and taking a vitamin or something. But what are you going to do today? And if you get that through your head, if you’ll accept that and get it through your head, put up posters around the house or something. What am I doing today? Am I building disease? Okay, today I think I’ll do a building disease day. So you could probably have a building disease day, you know, periodically, that’d be fine. But to do it every day, don’t do that, you know. You don’t, again, like, you don’t want to get to the point we just talked about. You don’t want to — the only thing that’s left is drugs and now you’ve got side effects and then you’ve got to take another drug for the side effects and you’re off and running and everybody’s met people like that and it’s a bad thing because they didn’t know that our conventional medical guys, they’re not going to tell you about stuff like that, like they did with your hubby. They’re not going to tell you about stuff like that. They’re going to just say, “Oh, okay, just let’s wait.” And it gets really bad.

[45:41] DEB: Yeah, exactly. So we can’t do anything and then we’re just going to say, well, that’s okay. Yeah. I love that though, because that does give you empowerment, right? It’s like the same quote. Every day you’re either living or you’re dying. What are you choosing to do? And I love though the quote that you have, it empowers you. Like it gives you the power to make the choice every single day. And just because you make a mistake at noon, doesn’t mean you can’t make it better at 12:30, right? So you have that little piece of chocolate or you have that one little thing. Okay. Then you just don’t do it the whole rest of the day. Make the choice to make a difference every moment of every day to live better than you did the time before. And that empowers you. And if you have the power to fix things, you have the power to live the life the way you want. And that’s huge.

[46:26] FRANK: The sooner you start, the better. Starting your 30s, starting your 40s. Don’t wait until your 80s to decide, okay, look, I made it this far. Maybe I’ll start cleaning up my act. You know, that’s good if you’re going to do that. Okay. I’m not putting that down, but, but early when you feel great, start doing it while you’re feeling great. That’s the whole idea. Don’t wait until you feel crappy and then decide to do it.

[46:53] DEB: So good. Dr. Shallenberger, this was amazing. I have had such a pleasure of talking to you. You’re wonderful. How can people find you and work with your team, work with your clinic if they are resonating with what you’re talking about?

[47:08] FRANK: Thank you for that, Deb. Number one, go to YouTube — I’ve got a zillion YouTubes on there. So you can plug in Shallenberger YouTube. Shallenberger, prostate cancer, whatever. Then go to Amazon and buy my book Bursting with Energy which really gets into pretty much most of the stuff we’re talking about. If people who are like 40 years old and healthy people and they read that book and live by that book, I could darn near guarantee they’re never going to get sick. So read the book Bursting with Energy and then the website. It tells you about all the stuff we do if you’re already sick. We’ve got lots of good answers for you. We can do the mitochondrial testing. We can do the endothelial testing. We can do all these sorts of things that, you know, probably most clinics in your area aren’t capable of doing. And so you can learn about that at the website, which is antiagingmedicine.com. So it’s real easy to remember: antiagingmedicine.com.

[48:03] DEB: I love that. Thank you so much. We will have those in the show notes and we’ll have links to all of your sites so that people can find it easy, especially for those of you who are listening while you’re driving. Thank you so much for being with me. It’s been a pleasure.

[48:16] FRANK: Okay, Deb. Thanks. Thanks for all the good work you do.

[48:19] DEB: Thank you. You too.

The post Episode 286 Why You’re Always Tired: Measuring Your Mitochondria with Dr. Frank Shallenberger, MD, HMD first appeared on Let's Talk Wellness Now.