"Tired But Wired? The Hidden Loop Destroying Your Energy”

Mark Hyman, MD

Full Transcript

Automatically generated. Please forgive any typos or errors in the following transcript. It was generated by a third party and has not been subsequently reviewed by our team.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I eat perfectly. I exercise six times a week. I try to get to bed on time and sleep. I'm feeling depleted. And I think people are in this state, and they don't have a name for it.

But you call it the sympathetic spiral

Dr. Scott Scherer
of doom. And it's a loop. You have sympathetic activation, which is your fight or flight, your nervous system being activated. You have mitochondrial dysfunction. The challenge is anytime you try to down regulate your nervous system, it actually might make you feel like you're crashing.

People feel like they crash when they go down and try to do their breath work, try to do their meditation. Oftentimes, they feel terrible when they try to do it, if they can even do it in the first place. You've only been able to function because you've been at that high of a state.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You can't meditate your way out of this, like, physiological stress to your cells and mitochondria is what you're saying. So what do we do? If someone's stuck, what's the first step to getting out of this loop?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Today on the podcast, I'm joined by doctor Scott Scherer. He is a board certified physician and a pioneer in health optimization medicine. As an expert in mitochondrial function and the chief medical officer of Transcriptions, he's helping people break the sympathetic stress loop to rapidly restore energy, focus and resilience.

Dr. Mark Hyman
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Dr. Scott Scherer
Well, thanks for having me, Mark. Last time it was online. Today,

Dr. Mark Hyman
it's

Dr. Scott Scherer
in

Dr. Mark Hyman
person. It was online. We talked about hyperbaric oxygen. And today, we're gonna talk about a really important topic, which, honestly affects so many people, including me. And, you know, I never heard it quite described like this, but you call it the sympathetic spiral of doom.

Yes. Exactly. Needs to be

Dr. Scott Scherer
a sneak out direction.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And, you know, at first, was like, god, that's kinda hyperbolic, whatever. And then I started reading about it. Yeah. I'm like, oh, this is what it is. It's it's basically the way in which your system breaks down from too much stress from your life and your psychology, but also too much stress from the environment.

Yes. Call it top down, bottom up. So the environment would be toxins and infections and all the stuff that we're exposed to.

Dr. Scott Scherer
Right.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And it and it creates a breakdown in our ability to regulate our nervous system. And and then it influences our mitochondrial function, which kinda makes it worse. So the body's this big web networker. Everything's connected. Right.

And so you're kinda untangling the web to telling this story in kind of a new way. It's an old story. We all we all know that stress is bad for us. Right? Right.

But like, this is a very different frame of it, and I and I love it, and I think it's gonna help a lot of people because you have to be systematic about it. Right. And a lot of us are feeling burned out. Like, we're doing everything. I eat perfectly.

I exercise six times a week. I try to get to bed on time and sleep. And it's just know, but sometimes I just I'm I'm feeling depleted. Right. And I think a lot of people out there are probably feeling that.

And I think people are in this state, and they don't have a name for it, And they just feel like crap, and they don't know what's going on. They're exhausted. They're wired. They're anxious. They're burned out.

And today, really wanna, like, have people who are listening to understand, you know, what what is going on with their their energy? What is going on with stress? What what are the psychological and the physiological cause of stress? And how do we start kind of navigating this

Dr. Scott Scherer
Mhmm.

Dr. Mark Hyman
From a therapeutic perspective? Because, like, we all want out of this. I as soon as, yeah, I'm in this empathetic spiral of doom, and I don't want the hell out of this thing. So what is it? Explain it to us, unpack it for us.

Dr. Scott Scherer
Well thanks again for having me Mark. And what I like to just describe here is it's not a diagnosis for people, this is more of a pattern, as you mentioned. It's an age old pattern, but I realized recently that it was really a significant discovery for me to understand that it's a spiral and it's a loop. You have sympathetic activation, which is your fight or flight, your nervous system being activated. You have mitochondrial dysfunction.

Mitochondrial dysfunction, mitochondria as all your listeners know is a part of their cells that make energy. The combination of sympathetic activation and mitochondrial dysfunction is a loop. And what happens here is that this loop can either start with mitochondrial dysfunction directly, that's what I call bottom up, or it can start with sympathetic activation from outside stressors, say it's your job, your relationship, you have a snoring partner that is snoring and you can't get to sleep at night, outside stressors or even like worse things like trauma or things that happen when you were younger that have maintained you in this place where you can't stay safe. Either way, whether it starts with mitochondrial dysfunction directly or it starts with sympathetic activation externally, or for most people, it's both. Yeah.

And then it's something that just makes you fall off a cliff. It could be

Dr. Mark Hyman
Let pause you for a second. Yeah. Just define sympathetic activation. Yeah. Because people are like, what what is that?

And define, like, a little bit better mitochondria. Sure. Because these are these are central to your thesis of your sympathetics. Let's get our terms right because Yeah. I think if you're like, what?

Dr. Scott Scherer
Otherwise, there'll be just be talking doctors like

Dr. Mark Hyman
I'm sympathetic. You know? I'm sympathetic. No. No.

No. It's not that. Good point. So, So,

Dr. Scott Scherer
I put them sympathetic

Dr. Mark Hyman
to those

Dr. Scott Scherer
that are in sympathetic. The sympathetic nervous system, so sympathetic is your fight or flight part of your nervous system. So, it's running away from the proverbial saber tooth tiger, as we somehow always refer to it. I know, right. I don't know why.

But you're getting chased by something. Yeah. But unfortunately, we're getting chased all the time in modern society, whether it's with our phones that are actively in our faces all the time, and doom scrolling at 03:00 in the morning, going, why is this the way it is? Or it's outside things like your job or your relationship, but we don't reward people resting and relaxing. So the sympathetic nervous system is part of your autonomic nervous system.

You have your sympathetic branch, is your activation fight or flight, and you have your parasympathetic, which is your rest, digest, detoxify, heal. But modern society doesn't reward that side, It rewards the hustle. I mean, in medical school, my friends and I had shirts that said sleep is for quitters. Not surprising. I grew up in New York.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Surgeons don't have lunch, that was ours.

Dr. Scott Scherer
Yeah, there you go, same kind of thing. You hustle, right? You go and you grind, right? That's what we reward, and then unfortunately, that's how society has created this stress externally for us that we have to perform, we have to have more meetings, we have to do more, do more, do more all the time. And so instead of just running away from the saber tooth tiger and then hanging out the rest of the day because hopefully we lived, maybe we probably didn't, in some cases we did, right?

Then you would have the time to relax because your nervous system would be activated and then it'd be shut off. But that's not how modern society works anymore, as you know. We're constantly stressed, constantly on pressure, constantly on meetings and that's that sympathetic activation and most of us kind of think we thrive in that environment, and we can for a little while, but the problem is that when you're sympathetic all the time, you're releasing hormones like cortisol, your neurotransmitters like norepinephrine and epinephrine Adrenaline. And adrenaline, yes, noradrenaline and adrenaline that are stimulating the whole system to work harder because if you're in that sympathetic nervous system activation all the time, I call it sympathetic overdrive, you're just shoving all those neurotransmitters and hormones out all the time and that causes deterioration in immune system function, in hormone function and in your mitochondria itself. So to define mitochondria, which we can do now, the mitochondria are part of the cell that helps make energy, right?

When I was in high school, my daughter is in ninth grade, she learned she's got the basic cell, she just learned, she's like, dad, check out the basic cell. It's got a nucleus, it's got cytoplasm, it's got Golgi bodies, and it's got this one little cool organelle called the mitochondria. I'm like, this is what I learned when I was probably that age too. You learn that the cell has one mitochondria, but that is far from the Some cells in our body have thousands of mitochondria per cell, and some cells, actually there's one human cell that has zero, and that's the red blood cell.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah, the red blood cell.

Dr. Scott Scherer
Right. But most mitochondria per cell are in our reproductive organs. Eggs, oocytes, sperm are the number one.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You gotta swim, they have legal energy to swim.

Dr. Scott Scherer
Yeah, and the eggs have more though. Women have to create and make the baby, and so they have more. But then just behind that is your brain, your heart, your liver, your musculoskeletal tissue. So detox everybody is hugely hygienically intensive. Yeah,

Dr. Mark Hyman
liver is.

Dr. Scott Scherer
People don't realize that, it's like if you're gonna be able to detox, you have to have a huge amount of mitochondrial energy. And so we have thousands of mitochondria in our brain for example, as I mentioned. The problem is and the statistics are crazy, it's like ninety four percent of US adults have some element of metabolic dysfunction, right? And if you have metabolic dysfunction, you also have mitochondrial dysfunction, which means you can't make energy effectively. Our cells are like gasoline powered cars, right?

We make ATP as you know, we make also carbon dioxide, we make water, and we also make what are called reactive oxygen species.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Free radicals,

Dr. Scott Scherer
yes, exactly. And so we need those, but if we have too many or if we're stimulated for such a long time or a period of time, like you're sympathetically overdriven, you're stimulating the mitochondria to make so much energy or trying to. And what happens over time is that the mitochondria can't keep up, they can't keep up with energy production, they can't keep it up with the detoxification required because you don't have enough antioxidants around and then the mitochondria become under significant amounts of stress. And so you're in this place now where you have sympathetic overdrive, mitochondrial dysfunction in the majority of people, and it's a spectrum now, but all of these people, everybody, so many of us are on this sympathetic spiral as a result of that.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And what's really interesting is the connection between the stress response, which we all can relate to Yeah. And our mitochondrial function, which is which is basically something that, you know, most of us don't think about. And by the way, most doctors don't know much about, that we learned basically in biochemistry in the first semester of medical school, how to, you know, food and oxygen go through our little Krebs cycle

Dr. Scott Scherer
mitochondria. Yeah. You memorize all the intermediates.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And we memorize it for five minutes before the test, and we forget about it. But mitochondria are essential to almost every single disease that we see in chronic illness, whether it's dementia Yep. Or cancer, or heart disease, or obesity, or diabetes, or all the all the neurodegenerative diseases. It's just quite it's quite profoundly important. And and you're right.

Like, if you if you are in this stress response and then you're also exposed to all the stresses of being in the modern world with microplastics and pesticides and heavy metals and latent viruses, infections, long COVID, tick infections, mold exposure

Dr. Scott Scherer
Insulin resistance.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Insulin, like the whole thing. Yeah. Then of course, our our ultra sort of processed diet that I was getting to that. Yeah. Yeah.

You know, our highly sugary processed diet. So, you know, we all are stressing our stress response because you you're by the way, eating crap makes your body stressed even if you don't psychologically feel stressed. Right. And also, it stresses your mitochondria. Then you get all these insults.

You talk about this sort of metabolic stress. Yeah. What what are the main symptoms people are in this sympathetic spy? How would people listen, you know, I have this

Dr. Scott Scherer
So when it comes down to when the mitochondria are so stressed, they shift over from being able to make energy effectively. Instead of making energy like with oxygen, they actually shift over into something called the glycolytic state, which is making less energy because they're trying to protect themselves from all the stress that they're on. And when that happens, there's an overcompensation of the sympathetic nervous system, the sympathetic overdrive gets even higher because you physically feel worse. And these are the symptoms you're talking about. We're talking about feeling tired but wired, feeling like you can't recover anymore from anything that was pretty small before, something small, now it takes you two or three days, you go to the gym, you don't feel like you really could recover for two or three days, or you go on an airplane, you don't recover for much longer.

Or you have a bad night of sleep and you feel terrible the next day. Or your mood is all over the place, it used to be pretty stable throughout the day, barring going through perimenopause or something like that, it used to be stable, and now it's all over the place. You also can find that just overall your energy level is just kind of up and down throughout the day, like you're relying on things like caffeine and stimulants to try to give you enough energy, give you enough brain function. And the challenge oftentimes, and I have patients like this, it's like, doc, I just need to feel better, I need more stimulation, I need more energy. And oftentimes it's not about giving them more energy, it's actually about calming down the whole system, this whole loop, this spiral, and then allowing them to get back to making energy more effectively.

And so there's a spectrum here, Mark, and you and I know this, we have people that are super complex and they've been sick for a long time and have very significant mitochondrial issues and then you have people that are on the other side of the spectrum where they just don't feel very good anymore, like they're just not waking up feeling like they have energy, their energy is waning throughout the day, their recovery is not as good and like, oftentimes with those people, that it's something often happens where they feel like they just fall off a cliff. Yeah. It's like that extra little stress that just did it, and then all of a sudden the things go down.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. They they kinda manage along, and then do is they crash.

Dr. Scott Scherer
Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
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And it's common. A lot of people haven't

Dr. Scott Scherer
had this. Super common.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It just and and if you look at it as spectrum, you know, some most of us are somewhere in that spectrum. Yeah. Yeah. So so this you talk about this feedback loop between the nervous system and the mitochondria, because I think it's it's a it's a little bit hard conceptually for people to understand.

Well, how did that work? Yeah. Your nervous system, yeah, your sympathetic, parasympathetic, and your stress response, your relaxation response, but how does that relate to your mitochondria and your energy system, and what is that connection and feedback loop?

Dr. Scott Scherer
One of the main hormones that's being vilified right now is cortisol. Cortisol is your stress steroid hormone, as you know. When you're under fight or flight, when you're in sympathetic overdrive all the time, you're pumping out cortisol all the time. We're supposed to have cortisol rise when we wake up in the morning, it helps us wake up from being asleep and then it's supposed to slowly go down throughout the day. The challenge is that most people do not have that pattern anymore and what cortisol does is it stimulates the production of, it's a steroid hormone, it also stimulates and initiates the norepinephrine, norepinephrine, noradrenaline and adrenaline in the system too.

And what happens when you have a lot of cortisol around and a lot of those neurotransmitters is that you are just telling your mitochondria that you're under stress, you need energy now. And as a result of that, it is going to your mitochondria and saying, Mitochondria, you need to make more energy now because you're under a lot of stress, this cortisol is high and as a result of that, you're getting the mitochondria that are like, we can't keep up. There's too much energy requirements that you're giving us. And so that's why it flips over into this something called the cell danger response, which I know you know about, which is when the cell says, we have to protect ourselves, and the mitochondria says, we're sensing too much stress, we can't actually keep up, and so what it does is it tries to protect itself, but when that happens, you start making less energy. And when you start making less energy, you start feeling like you're not able to compensate, you're not actually able to show up.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You're tired. You're tired. This is

Dr. Scott Scherer
the tired but wired kind of feeling.

Dr. Mark Hyman
The ability of the mitochondria to kind of register this danger is interesting, and you you talk about this this new concept, this cell danger response. But if actually you look in the medical literature Tons research. There. There's a lot of scientific papers about this. It's not just some woo woo thing.

It sounds kinda a lot crazy, but if you actually look at it and I think most physicians don't understand what it is. No. So so, you know, is what I'm just hearing, as you say, is when you have chronic stress, either from a top down or bottom up, from, you know, your brain or from Yeah. You know, the toxin crap and shit we're all exposed to, it stresses your mitochondria, then it flips into this cycle, this cell danger response. Yeah.

Is that the same thing as the sympathetic spiral of doom?

Dr. Scott Scherer
That's part of it, right? Because when you're in that sympathetic spiral, you're almost always flipping over into that cell danger response.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And so to unpack, what is the cell danger response?

Dr. Scott Scherer
The cell danger response is a natural response that the cells do when they're under stress. There's multiple stages of the CDR, and there's a very

Dr. Mark Hyman
CDR cell dangerous.

Dr. Scott Scherer
Cell dangerous response, yes, I'm sorry. And as a result of having this pattern, we have a way of either going anabolic or catabolic, which means that we can either build up or break down in the system. And what the CDR does when the cell danger response is active, we get into more of a catabolic state, we start breaking down parts of our body to try to protect it, where in the anabolic state is really when we're building up and getting That's when you're in a safe space, right? When you're in safe spaces, you're parasympathetic, I call it the parasympathetic edge really, and we can talk about that, but the idea is when you're in the parasympathetic mode, you're resting, digesting, you can turn off the cell danger response. But you can't turn it off if you're always in stress mode.

And the cell danger response is basically protecting you from stress, it's protecting you so that you can survive, it's a survival mode. It's also activated in the short term when you have acute stress, when you have acute infection, you have acute additional stress outside, external stress, but it's supposed to turn itself off. But it can't turn itself off if it doesn't have that anabolic parasympathetic activation, and that's the challenge. And in addition to that, what happens over time is that you deplete a lot of the intermediates, lot of the vitamins, minerals, nutrients and cofactors that are responsible for shifting you out of the cell danger response.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So just the very fact of trying to manage the danger, you're using a lot of nutrients.

Dr. Scott Scherer
Tons of it.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And you deplete your nutrients and then you end up in this vicious cycle where you need the nutrients to fix the problem but you don't have the nutrients and it depletes them.

Dr. Scott Scherer
And you're still in the stress mode and you're still right. The major question is, well how do you approach it? How do you work on optimizing somebody's capacity and increasing their reserve, getting them out of the sympathetic, but also supporting their capacity to flip out of that cell danger response and support mitochondrial function.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, that's an important question. I wanna get into the practical aspects of how do people end this sympathetic spyldom room, and how do they stop the cell danger response. Before we get to that Yeah. I wanna kinda unpack a little bit about your top down, bottom up idea here. Yeah.

Because it's important. Because, you know, you can enter into this sympathetic spiral doom from your psychological state For sure. Trauma, or from your biological state, from things you're exposed to in the environment you may have control over, or your diet, which you do have control over.

Dr. Scott Scherer
Right.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So can you kind of walk us through the top down, bottom up explanation? Yeah. And where the where where are the contributors to the sympathetic spy of doom and cell danger response? So I think if we understand what those are, we can start to think about how we might approach them.

Dr. Scott Scherer
The top down part, let's talk about that first. The top down part is how are we stressed? What is causing our sympathetic activation? And the amount of things that can be doing this is unlimited in this part. We can talk about it from social media to politics to what's going around in the world right now with wars and things like that.

Things

Dr. Mark Hyman
that I'm don't bit stressed in the world right now.

Dr. Scott Scherer
I mean a little, I mean a little. It's not going away.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And

Dr. Scott Scherer
we are wired as humans to do two things, survive and reproduce. That's it. That's what we are wired to do because that's what the species requires. And so as a result of that, what do our news media, what does our social media do? It wires you, it's wired or it's created to fit into those two patterns, survival and reproduction, mostly survival.

So fear, right? Fear is the biggest one. And so there's tons of things that are coming outside of us all the time that are trying to instill fear in us. It could be everything from the things I mentioned, it could be within your own home, right? If it's a relationship that isn't great, if it's a job that's too hard, if you're not getting enough sleep, that's a huge one, because if you're not getting enough sleep, you're not going be able regulate your nervous system either.

That's what I call the top down aspects, and I could fill in maybe-

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's all the psychological stuff. Oh, psychologically. You've had

Dr. Scott Scherer
patients like this too, that they were abused as a child, and they never feel safe in their own body. There's no way they can ever heal, there's no way they can ever really fully truly be their best self, because they're always in this locked in sympathetic

Dr. Mark Hyman
But there are ways for people to come out

Dr. Scott Scherer
of that. 100%, yeah, we'll talk about that, and then that's exactly what this is all about. It's about understanding the pattern and then seeing how to break.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So that's the top down.

Dr. Scott Scherer
That's the top down.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And the bottom up is

Dr. Scott Scherer
The bottom up is really, you did a great job earlier when we were talking about direct mitochondrial stress. You know, things like infections and

Dr. Mark Hyman
They're very sensitive. Mitochondria are very sensitive. They are. Everything affects them.

Dr. Scott Scherer
They do, they do. I mean they're a sensitive organelle. There's a lot of them, there's quadrillions of them in our bodies, huge amounts of them.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's a big number. I can't count that I.

Dr. Scott Scherer
I can't either, but it's a quad. I think after that, I can't remember, it's quint after that I think. After trillions, it's quadrillions, everybody that's listening. And so it's a lot of mitochondria. And so we need a huge amount of energy.

In fact, we need to make about 150 pounds of it every single day of ATP to maintain our energy capacity. And as I mentioned, 94% of us can't do this on a regular basis. And that's because of the things you mentioned. You talked about insulin resistance and toxins in our environment, medications that we take on a regular basis that actually have a dysfunctional impetus or actually make our mitochondria do worse. Things like metformin, things like birth control pills even, because they deplete nutrients that help with mitochondrial function.

Not to say people should get off their off their medications, but, you know, but even proton pump inhibitors, which are

Dr. Mark Hyman
acid blockers are a big one. That's thoroughly in cause of of use of drugs, which is acid blockers from people eating a crappy diet.

Dr. Scott Scherer
Yeah. Statins too. Statins And also have significant

Dr. Mark Hyman
that's the number one class of drugs. Yeah. So the number one and three class of drugs is causing mitochondria damage.

Dr. Scott Scherer
The statins, and they have effect on both complex one and complex two, which are the two first proteins in the mitochondria that help you make energy. And pesticides do it, infections do it, we talked about it. And then of course this sympathetic activation, which can be overarching to everything, but on its own can cause mitochondrial stress. And I think that the way I kind of picture this and I talk about it with my patients is that you and I were talking, it's not just one thing, it's often a combination, and you're going, you're

Dr. Mark Hyman
riding The combo package.

Dr. Scott Scherer
Yeah, of course, it's the bundle. And you're riding along, you're doing okay, until you hit around, for most people, though it's getting worse now, like around your mid thirties, late thirties, like early forties, and then things start going a little pear shaped, as they say in Ireland, one of my favorite expressions, and they're like, Yeah, a little pear shaped. And things start to go, like, Why am I not recovering as well? Why do I need more sleep or why don't I feel as rested when I wake up in the morning or why does when my son comes in when he gets home at school at 04:00 and he says like, Hi dad, I go, What do you want? I start like, What's going on there?

And so you start noticing these things, but as you said Mark, it's happening at earlier in earlier ages because of just the amount of toxic exposure that people have on a regular basis, which is crazy.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah, is a lot, it's a lot. And you know, the truth is we have a lot of mitochondria, but they're fragile. Yeah. And they're very sensitive to any insult. Even like disturbances in your microbiome For sure.

And the bacteria in your gut can cause harm. Yeah. You know, the microbiome mitochondrial connection, people don't even think about.

Dr. Scott Scherer
Yeah. The inter kingdom crosstalk stuff is Yeah. So

Dr. Mark Hyman
Very impressive. Yeah. And you know, you mentioned quickly metformin. I think I wanna just quickly double click This on is a drug that's widely being used for diabetes. I've used it for years in my practice, and it can be a good drug for diabetes.

But it but it does have a weird side effect, which is inhibits mitochondrial complex one, and this is a

Dr. Scott Scherer
Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Like one of the first steps in producing energy from food and oxygen. And and one of the studies that most concerned me was they did a randomized controlled trial where they did progressive resistance training, meaning muscle strength training, in in two groups. One taking metformin and one not taking metformin. Yeah. And the one taking metformin didn't have any muscle gains, and it inhibited muscle growth.

Yep. And that concerns me. So it's being used a lot for longevity and aging. I I feel strongly that it's not something people should use for that. I think in certain cases, in certain patients, it can be an adjunctive therapy, and Yeah.

Is a transition to get off of drugs because you can reverse all of it with lifestyle. But like, yeah, I just I I think it's important. So so you've got you've got all this top down, bottom up stuff. It even gets even more interesting than that because a lot of new research, and we've had Chris Palmer on and others talking about the mitochondrial role in mental health.

Dr. Scott Scherer
Oh, yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So it's not just that you lose energy and you're tired from the stress, your your mitochondria play a big role in dysregulating your mood Right. And your brain function. So talk about that.

Dr. Scott Scherer
Yeah, it's a big piece of it, and I'm glad that you had Chris on. I think his work is so great looking at metabolic dysfunction and the reversal using the ketogenic diet, for example. And that's a big symptom of what we just described here that

Dr. Mark Hyman
By way, when we talk about metabolic dysfunction, it's kind of confusing term. Metabolic dysfunction in this context means how we turn food and oxygen into energy in the mitochondria. That's our metabolism.

Dr. Scott Scherer
Yes. And then I would just add to that that how we are able to address the stress of making energy as well, in the sense that when we make energy, we make ATP, we're also making waste products as I mentioned, and that's the other part of metabolic health is that you're able to make energy effectively and you're able to neutralize the stress of making energy. But I love your definition because people get so confused by it, I appreciate you mentioning it. So when it comes down to brain health and mental health disorders, depression, bipolar, even schizophrenia and some of the major ones, you see amazing capacity to work on mitochondrial function and see these things get so much better. I mean people throw around and don't like the word cure, but in some cases people are coming off of medications, like entirely, and I've seen this

Dr. Mark Hyman
Like curing schizophrenia with

Dr. Scott Scherer
It's diet, keto amazing, and I have a colleague that's on this with bipolar disorder, right? So I feel like where it comes down to is that this is a mitochondrial dysfunction, at least a significant component of it. There might be neurochemical things for sure, but you and I both know, I learned in medical school that depression was a serotonin deficiency.

Dr. Mark Hyman
We know How did that work out?

Dr. Scott Scherer
Not so

Dr. Mark Hyman
Wait, depression isn't a Prozac deficiency?

Dr. Scott Scherer
It's a Prozac deficiency, right? And so everybody, we need to put Prozac in the water. That was like, not LSD anymore, but the Prozac. Know

Dr. Mark Hyman
now No, LSD would be better.

Dr. Scott Scherer
A 100%, yeah. That would been an interesting experiment in New York City back in the day. We know that depression is not a serotonin deficiency, and we know that people that have depression have no lower levels of serotonin than people that don't have depression. So I think that's an interesting thing that we all learned that's completely wrong, and that's what I learned in medical school. As we now know that mitochondrial dysfunction is so much more of the actual game here.

Now understanding why people have the mitochondrial dysfunction is absolutely essential, we talked about the top down, the bottom up and how you have to address the causes for sure. But in the essence of this conversation, what I would say to those that are listening is that we can help people right now by working on mitochondrial function and sympathetic activation, while long term trying to figure out what those inputs are that are causing it too. But seeing mitochondrial function improve, and all of a sudden depression, anxiety, insomnia Yeah. Get better, it's been transformative to people that I work with.

Dr. Mark Hyman
No, it's huge. I think I think just people should stay tuned at the end of this podcast. We're gonna get to Yeah. Fix this, but I have a few more

Dr. Scott Scherer
No, I keep I keep foreshadowing.

Dr. Mark Hyman
No. No. It's good. It's good. It's good.

We're gonna get there. One one of the ways, know, as as people are listening, imagine they're thinking as well, you know, okay. I know how to activate my parasympathetic system. I can meditate. I can do breath work.

I can do yoga. I can maybe exercise to improve my mitochondria. But Mhmm. You know, co plunges, saunas, whatever. But you said something which is interesting.

You said you can't parasympathetic your way out of cell danger. What does that mean?

Dr. Scott Scherer
So this is the thing, right?

Dr. Mark Hyman
You can't meditate your way out of this physiological stress to your cells and mitochondria is what you're saying, right?

Dr. Scott Scherer
Yeah, you can't. I mean, because you're in this sympathetic locked in kind of mode, and the challenge is anytime you try to down regulate your nervous system, it actually might make you feel like you're crashing. Because when you try to get yourself out of sympathetic and get into parasympathetic, but you've been in sympathetic for a long period of time, so you're in that fight or flight, your mitochondria, as we've been talking about, have been under a lot of stress for a while, and we've depleted vitamins, minerals, nutrients, we're in that cell danger response location of your cell spectrum of capacity to make energy. And then you're trying to bring down the nervous system, but what can happen when you do that is that you've only been able to function because you've been at that high of a state. And when you bring down the nervous system without enough support, on the mitochondrial side especially, immune system will really be helpful too, you'll see that you have this crash.

People feel like they crashed when they go down and try to do their breath work, try to do their meditation. Oftentimes they feel terrible when they try to do it, if they can even do it in the first place. Because the other challenge of this too, Mark, is that people don't even know what it feels like to be back in parasympathetic mode. They don't even remember what it felt like to calm down

Dr. Mark Hyman
their nervous

Dr. Scott Scherer
And so it can be very difficult to do breath work or tell somebody to meditate or the last thing you want to do is to tell them to calm down, of course, right? That doesn't work. If anybody's married or has a partner, they know rule number one of being married is that you don't tell your partner to calm down, right? Doesn't work. I was talking to my son who's eight, and he's like, Dad, he has three sisters, three older sisters and my wife, and he's like, Dad, what are the things you never tell a girl?

I'm like, Number one, do not tell them to calm down.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Good advice.

Dr. Scott Scherer
Yeah, yeah. That's the thing, If you're in this locked in state where you're in this metabolic dysfunction related to being in this cell danger response, not being able to make enough energy, you can't just breathe your way out of it.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And so you've got to really deal with those root causes. Like, you know, say if you're mercury poisoned, you're betrothed fish, and your thighs aren't working, it's hard to get enlightened. Know, you gotta deal with those biological things.

Dr. Scott Scherer
Yes.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And then the often the psychological things or the or the physiological stress gets better.

Dr. Scott Scherer
But it takes time.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And and you know, it's interesting. I I I I was really sort of fascinated when you came up with this because I I've noticed this for years in my practice. I was like, gosh, when people have a physical stress, meaning a toxin, an allergen infection, and it's poor diet, whatever, it actually causes a a like a a trouble with the whole system. Like, it's not just it's not just causing, like, a mental stress causing stress. It's it's physiological stress.

It creates the same fight or flight, the same sympathetic activation, the same even if you even if you're kinda cool and everything's fine, you can still feel stressed because of having mercury in your system. 100%. For example. Yeah. And I think that's something people don't realize.

So it's not just psychological, it can be biological causes of psychological stress.

Dr. Scott Scherer
100%. And that's what I tell my patients all the time. It doesn't have to start with that sympathetic activation. Yeah. But it begins somewhere, and then at some point they both have to be addressed, right?

Which is you can't just address the mercury exposure if you don't address also the sympathetic activation that was caused by the mercury exposure. Even if it wasn't a top down issue before, maybe you had some mild things that were stressful but not too bad, that all of a sudden you're mercury toxic, that's a different story. So when you work on mercury toxicity, you also have to work on the sympathetic activation too. If you don't do them both, you're still gonna be left in a place where you're still sympathetically activated. And you know how it is, you've worked with patients like this, you know that if somebody's so fight or flight dominant, there's no healing that you can do with these patients.

Dr. Mark Hyman
No, it's true.

Dr. Scott Scherer
It's impossible and it's really difficult. It's like the one time I agree with our conventional colleagues that if you're giving them supplements, it's like giving them expensive urine. If you're not addressing the sympathetic activation, along with the root cause if it was mitochondrial first, right? So that's why it's so nuanced here, but it's so important to kind of piece this out as you are and discuss it.

Dr. Mark Hyman
But then even like in the mitochondria stress from toxins or whatever, it it it actually makes the body stay in fight or flight. Yeah. So how to explain that connection between the mitochondrial stress from things that are just insults that you didn't have to do it, like that are not mental insults, causing you to be in this mental state of fight or flight.

Dr. Scott Scherer
Right, so the idea is that when you have a lot of mitochondrial stress, you're not making enough energy, okay? And when you're not making enough energy, the system goes, Oh no, I need more energy. And what it does is tries to compensate by increasing your sympathetic nervous system, increasing your capacity to find out psychologically how you can help the situation. So it's almost like it's a bottom up where you have these sensations and activation of inflammatory pathways and etcetera in the body related to mitochondrial dysfunction that overtly psychologically this manifest in you trying to figure out why this is happening, or trying to give you more energy to maintain the capacity that you need to make any energy at all. And so you get in this loop where it doesn't have to be any of that over sympathetic activation from outside sources, all of a sudden it's just the mitochondria itself that are not making enough energy, and then causing the system to compensate for that.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Okay. So let me see if I can get this straight. We've got this thing that you've described, which is something that I think most of us who practice this way for years have already seen. We never called it this, but the sympathetic spy of doom, which can come from the top down, bottom up. Right.

It's a lot of mitochondrial dysfunction, stress, a lot of inability to produce energy in our cells, which runs everything.

Dr. Scott Scherer
Right.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And we end up in this cell danger response, so we've got like sympathetic spiral doom, cell danger response. So people listening, oh, yeah, that's me. Right? I'm listening, yeah, that's kinda me. So, like, what do we do?

Like, what if someone's stuck, how do what's the first step to getting out of this this loop? The first step The spiral of doom.

Dr. Scott Scherer
The spiral is to escape the spiral, that's what you want to do over the long term. But initially, you want to figure out ways to help somebody now, to help break the spiral, and get them additional support so they actually can maintain and benefit from long term support. So the idea is that you're a functional medicine expert, you've founded the field basically with Jeff and others. You know that working with people and optimizing their health, vitamins, minerals, nutrients, optimizing their gut, their neurotransmitters, that can take a long time to do, right? And if you're in this spiral, it's very difficult to do as well because again, you're clamped down, you're sympathetically activated.

So the goal of breaking the spiral is to support the mitochondria now as much as possible, and at the same time slowly start down regulating the sympathetic activation, slowly down regulating the nervous system so it can calm down. But you have to do it in that order. You have to start off with supporting mitochondrial first, mitochondrial function first.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So it's not meditate first, and then fix your mitochondria first, then meditate.

Dr. Scott Scherer
Because what can happen is if you go too soon on the parasympathetic side, trying to calm down the nervous system, without having mitochondrial support, that's when you get into trouble too, because you physically and mentally can't compensate because you don't have enough energy capacity. And so your energy capacity is still low, you've down regulated your nervous system and now the sympathetic activation, the fight or flight is down, you're trying to calm down the nervous system but you don't have energy that you can make, you don't have enough energy. And so as a result of that, you crash and I've seen this in my practice all the time where if you start working on the nervous system too soon, people crash. And so the key is to work on mitochondrial function now and give immediate support so that when you start down regulating and calming down, that this nervous system has enough capacity, the whole system has enough capacity because the mitochondria is supported.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Okay, so let's talk about that. How do we fix mitochondria? Because it certainly wasn't something that we all learned in medical school. It's it's something that's one of the central features of functional medicine, which is understanding how to diagnose and treat mitochondrial dysfunction. Right.

It's a little bit tricky because, you know, the best way to look at mitochondria is to do a muscle biopsy, but that's not fun. Yeah. No. But there are other other tests. How do you how do you think about approaching mitochondrial dysfunction?

Because, yes, it's gotta be focusing on the causes. Like, if you're eating something that's bad or if you're you got exposures to toxins, but let's assume you're working on those, because you have to, what else can you do to revive these little poor baby little mitochondria that don't feel so good?

Dr. Scott Scherer
Well, I think you're kind of alluding to the idea of testing to see how mitochondria are working. And there are new tests out there that are working on giving you a direct sense of what's happening in the mitochondria, and there are a number of them that are on the market already. Some of them might be more ready for prime time than others.

Dr. Mark Hyman
What do you think is the

Dr. Scott Scherer
Well, mean, there's a couple out there, I mean the ones that I use are more the indirect measures, like you do like organic acid testing for example, looking at the intermediates that are associated with making energy, and also oxidative stress markers, inflammatory markers, those are really good indicators really of mitochondrial function. There's things like MeeScreen and MitoSwab and others that are that out I think are interesting. I think they're new. In the end, what I see here is it's really nice to have the data, for sure, because then you can get a sense of how people do over time. But so much of this, as you know Mark, is subjective.

People really do know how they feel. Even guys who are not as good as women as we know about telling you how they feel, well how did you feel five years ago? Tell me about your energy now versus five years ago. Like, oh yeah, I had a lot of energy, had no issues and now I get brain fog, I get that dip during the day and I feel terrible. People can typically give you a sense.

So subjectively is such a big part of this and that's hard but it's so important because it's how you feel on some level. But what it comes down to is that when you're looking at optimizing mitochondrial function, it is giving the mitochondria what it needs to make energy effectively and to address the stress of making energy. Vitamins, minerals, nutrients, antioxidants, getting rid of heavy metals, this is your work, this is my work. The challenge with all that though is that it takes time. It doesn't happen overnight and so I've kind of fallen in love with a compound called methylene blue that you know of, that is a very novel compound in some respects, but it's been around for a long time, but it's one of the most effective ways at supporting mitochondrial function right now.

And the reason is that it works on the energy production cycle of things, it helps with energy production, and it also works directly like an antioxidant. So our cells are like gasoline powered cars. Methylene blue at low doses, as long as it's a clean source, four milligrams to twenty five milligrams or so works both as an energy enhancer and as a detoxifier, so more like an electric powered vehicle rather than a gasoline powered one. And so it's become one of these big levers that I can pull with patients to be a bridge, to be that bridge. I like a picture, I often will put up a picture of the Brooklyn Bridge, I love the Brooklyn Bridge, I grew up in New York.

And it's this bridge where you can help people right now while they're on that path. So if you're starting at letter A through H or something in the alphabet on your path to optimizing your health, that first beginning can be really hard. Really hard because you don't have energy to go take a walk around the block. You don't have enough energy to make your own food. You don't have enough energy to maybe get out of a relationship that's toxic, right?

But once you start giving people enough energy, supporting that capacity without causing stress on the system, that's when they can make huge gains across the alphabet in my analogy here, getting them to L, M, O or whatever. And then they're able to start really making changes that they really wanna make. And so I see methylene blue as a fantastic bridge for so many people on this path to their own health optimization journey.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And the mechanism of action is really interesting, right? It kind of acts as an electron carrier Yeah. Which is electrons are really what goes through this little mitochondrial assembly line to make energy to make ATP. Mhmm. And it kind of bypasses some of the complexes like two and three that are kind of in the way.

So if there's mitochondrial dysfunction, it kind of like leapfrogs over a little bit.

Dr. Scott Scherer
Right? Yep. It bypasses And you

Dr. Mark Hyman
get more ATP, and you get less oxidative stress. In my practice, you know, one of the doctors was sharing with me how they were doing intravenous methylene blue and how they had a Parkinson's patient, and they immediately improved their symptoms. And I don't know if it was a long lasting effect, but it was an incredible thing because we know that Parkinson's is fundamentally a mitochondrial disease in the heart of the brain that has to do with motor function. Right. And so can you kinda explain how that might all be possible?

Dr. Scott Scherer
Yeah. So in the end neurocognitive disease, metabolic as we've been talking about, everything has these parts of the cell called the mitochondria that help make energy, your immune system, everything. And so if your mitochondria aren't working well, you have significant incapacity in the areas that have the most mitochondria that are affected. And so in Parkinson's, it's in the substantia nigra in the brain for example. So one cool thing about methylene blue I should mention is that it is highly bioavailable, which means that orally absorption, oral absorption of methylene blue is almost as good as IV.

The only difference with IV is how fast it gets in the body but most people don't need IV, most people can use oral and get the same mitochondrial benefits. And so what you were describing on what's called the electron transport chain in the mitochondria, so the mitochondria has these proteins that are all kind of lined up and electrons that we get from our food, mostly carbohydrates and fat, they get donated to this chain using something called NAD and FAD which people know NAD these days, right? That's a hot topic I know. So you get these carriers, electron carriers, NAD and FAD that bring electrons into the mitochondria. So what happens is if you have those first couple proteins not working very well, complex one or complex two, the whole rest of the system breaks down.

You don't have capacity to make energy. And most of the mitochondrial toxins out there are affecting complex one and complex two. We talked about statins, we talked about metformin, infections, pesticides, more are affecting those first two complexes, excuse me. So And if those first couple complexes aren't working, the rest of the system breaks down. So what methylene blue can do is it can come in, it can bypass the complexes that aren't working very well and donate electrons directly up the chain.

So all of a sudden, you're able to start making energy in these cells.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It's almost like a bypass road. If there's a broken road, it goes around it.

Dr. Scott Scherer
Yes. And it also can recycle things like NAD and FAD, so those can maintain their capacity to take electrons from your food, even if those particular complexes aren't working as well as they needed to. So it's this amazing capacity to bypass and compensate for almost any capacity or incapacity of the electron transport chain to work. And that even to the much as so as it's actually the antidote for cyanide poisoning. So cyanide is actually a

Dr. Mark Hyman
kills you by stopping your mitochondria from working.

Dr. Scott Scherer
Complex four. So the fourth complex in the mitochondria, complex four, is destroyed by cyanide. And what methylene blue can do is it does these ninja moves of going across membranes and being an electron acceptor so you can maintain electron flow through those protein complexes even if you're poisoned by cyanide. And so that's just demonstrating power of this particular

Dr. Mark Hyman
It's actually how I learned about it was in the emergency room. As an emergency room doctor, if someone comes with cyanide poisoning, this is the drug that you give to cure people.

Dr. Scott Scherer
Right. It's not common, but it's there. There's another one called methemoglobinemia, which is more common, and that's also why it's used in emergency rooms all over

Dr. Mark Hyman
the That's carbon monoxide poisoning.

Dr. Scott Scherer
Carbon monoxide poisoning, and also the huffing glue or stuff. If you have too much of that, that gives you the incapacity to carry oxygen on your red blood cells. And methylene blue changes the iron state to make sure that you can.

Dr. Mark Hyman
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That's piquelife.com/hymen. And the and it also it also acts as a an MAO inhibitor, which is MAO is like a monoamine oxidase. It's really regulates neurotransmitter function, but you get higher serotonin, dopamine, or epinephrine, it can have mood, neurocognitive effects, right?

Dr. Scott Scherer
So it's dose dependent, so lower doses of methylene blue will increase norepinephrine and serotonin. Higher doses will also increase dopamine once you get it to about one hundred milligrams or so. The key, as I mentioned, is that it's dose dependent, meaning that a little bit will do a little bit of that, and more of it will do more. So, there are people that have talked about how methylene blue just helps people feel better because it increases serotonin, but that's not the case at We're talking about small amounts compared to the huge effect on mitochondrial function.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Patient listening that might know how to take it, like what are the doses like, how do you do it, I see a lot of people sucking on these lozenges, it makes their tongue all blue.

Dr. Scott Scherer
They can just swallow

Dr. Mark Hyman
it, it's okay. Can swallow it. They can swallow it, right.

Dr. Scott Scherer
Yeah, because as I mentioned, it's almost 100% bioavailable, which means if you ingest it, whether you dissolve it the mouth as a trochee, or if you swallow it, you can get the same mitochondrial benefits. The key here Mark, and I think this is important for your audience to know, that methylene blue is not a natural compound. It doesn't come from the earth, it's a synthetic ingredient. As a result of that, it can be sometimes contaminated with heavy metals, things like lead, mercury, cadmium, and arsenic. In the manufacturing?

In the manufacturing process. And so, to take the synthetic thing just for a minute, because I know some people don't like the idea of taking anything synthetic, the way I like to talk about this is that not everything natural is good for us. Okay, you can forage

Dr. Mark Hyman
Arsenic is

Dr. Scott Scherer
yeah, mushrooms will kill you, right? Mushrooms, like I was in medical school, I saw two people die of liver failure because of foraging for the wrong mushrooms, And for of course the dose makes the poison, right? So you can have low doses of natural products that can be okay, but high doses of nicotine for example can kill somebody, right? And so on the other side of things, synthetic argument. Not everything synthetic is bad for us is what it comes down to.

We live in synthetic worlds, have lots of synthetic things all around us, right? My son, when he was four, he had a tracking cellulitis or a skin infection up his leg and I was looking at it, go up his leg in front of me, and so I took him to the hospital and I got him antibiotics, which are synthetic. And if you're taking insulin right now as a diabetic, if you have type one diabetes or type two, it's a synthetic ingredient, it's not from a pig anymore. And so there are reasons why we need synthetic things, and I think methylene blue falls into this category where it's a synthetic compound that can help so much, especially in the short term. And then I think over the long term, as you get more optimized, you don't need it as much.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And do you use it in conjunction with other mitochondrial support? So Yes. We talked about CoQ10, and creatine, and carnitine, and

Dr. Scott Scherer
Yes.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Hypoic acid, and acetylcysteine, and riboflavin, and, you know, magnesium, potassium, aspartate, all these wonderful Yes. Ribose that can be supportive. And I've used them in my practice to great benefit often, you know, together with, you know, thinking things like heart failure.

Dr. Scott Scherer
Of course.

Dr. Mark Hyman
But you have to use them in conjunction with methylene blue or not as much?

Dr. Scott Scherer
It works better when it's being used in more of a synergistic mutual way as you just described it. So methylene blue what it's gonna do is it's gonna increase metabolic rate because it's gonna increase the amount of energy you're making. So low doses are very supportive, don't cause a huge amount of stress, but it is much better to have it as a full ecosystem that you're creating in the mitochondria. So you're creating all the substrate, meaning you have the capacity from vitamins, minerals, nutrients, like all the things that you just mentioned to support mitochondrial function and to use the methylene blue, it's like a supercharge. Because the things you mentioned do a great job with mitochondrial function but it takes time for all of those to work.

Whereas you give some methylene blue in the system, within about three days, once you find the right dose, you will feel a difference. It's not something that happens thirty days or a month later which can happen with many of the things that you mentioned, which I love and I use in my clinical practice too. And they're so supportive and necessary but what methylene blue can do is in that short term give you the boost that you need, and so that you start feeling the difference much sooner.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So this is the most important tool for getting out of this sympathetic spell of doom?

Dr. Scott Scherer
I found it's the fastest tool to be able to do it from a mitochondrial perspective, right? Because you want to be able to support the mitochondria to help it relax. A good example of this

Dr. Mark Hyman
Is it okay to take it every day?

Dr. Scott Scherer
In the beginning, yeah, as long as you're keeping the dose low. My sense of this is that

Dr. Mark Hyman
What does the dose low

Dr. Scott Scherer
mean?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Usually The milligram amount.

Dr. Scott Scherer
So typically milligram dose that I find that's really great for the mitochondria is somewhere between eight to about twenty five milligrams a day. If you're keeping the dose less than thirty milligrams per day, you don't even have to take a day off and you can take it every day. If you're taking above seventy or eighty or one hundred milligrams of methylene blue, then you do need to take more days off. So the thing about it, methylene blue kind of has this sort of bimodal capacity. What I mean by that is low doses of it around what I just described as a range, fantastic mitochondrial function.

Sometimes a little bit higher than that but when you get to about a milligram per kilogram, is around fifty to seventy milligrams of methylene blue and above, what happens then is it becomes more of an anti infective actually. It's a fantastic antimicrobial at higher doses. It does that because it produces something in the body called hydrogen peroxide. And hydrogen peroxide can buy at the store.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It's actually what your white blood cells produce to kill infections.

Dr. Scott Scherer
Exactly, and so what methylene blue does is it creates more of a hydrogen peroxide capacity, and you kill bugs easier, and you also enhance your antioxidant systems if you have the capacity and that's the key. That's why if you have an acute infection, I use it all the time at high doses. But if you have a chronic infection, chronic Lyme, chronic mold, I use it at the higher doses, but I ramp them up, Yes, I don't start because if you give somebody a high dose of methylene blue right off the gate and they have chronic Lyme, they're not going to feel good if you give them fifty or one hundred milligrams right away. So slowly increasing their dose, mitochondrial support, and then higher doses can be fantastically effective for chronic Lyme, for chronic mold, for even people with spike protein, I've seen some interesting things as well. And also, as a result of that, even viral infections as well, I've seen some really interesting things.

But the majority of people are going to be using lower doses for mitochondrial function. That being said, some people have these chronic infections that are causing significant mitochondrial dysfunction. But I was tell a patient a story about a friend of mine, he's a colleague, he's like, Doc, I've had anxiety for my whole life. I started taking methylene blue and it's gone. You ask, well why is that the case, right?

Is that because we changed his neurochemical stuff? No, it's because we gave him significant mitochondrial support immediately, and then he's like, I've never felt this good. And as a result of having enough mitochondrial support, his system started being able to unclench itself. And because now you're making enough energy and now the system can start healing. Amazing.

And I found my Methyleneblu at these low doses to be fantastically effective, Mark. Initially I was very skeptical because I was like, This is a compound that doesn't come from the ground and my dad's a chiropractor for forty five years. In the beginning he was militantly against Western medicine, but over the years he now knows that it's important to use too. So I was blown away the first couple years when we started using it. We had this one lady with mild cognitive impairment, she started telling stories about her childhood that nobody in her family had ever heard of before.

Her brain came back online. I had another lady that had chronic mold, done all the remediation in her house, in her body, still felt terrible, started giving her some Methylene Blue, she was back to work in two weeks. It was crazy. And then I had another lady with chronic ankylosing spondylitis, like severe pain disorder in the back, inflammatory issues, nothing had ever worked. She started taking methylene blue and her pain just went away.

And I was like, this is back in 2020. So we were the first people to really pioneer this back then in 2020 at our company. And so we've seen gigantic amounts of anecdotal data. And then there's researchers that have been doing this and showing that these are models of Alzheimer's, models of Parkinson's, others looking at it in traumatic brain injury, looking at it in stroke. And so it's a fantastic compound that has gotten more popular over the last couple of years, which is great, but understanding what you're doing dosing wise and making sure you're getting good quality stuff is absolutely essential.

The stuff on Amazon is garbage mostly, most liquids out there are not as potent, even if it says it on the label, it's a huge deal. And so I'm very much a proponent of using it, but using the right company stuff, the right products, and the right dosing is

Dr. Mark Hyman
absolutely Just to be transparent, you have created a company called ProScriptions, which I use. But but it it it you provide methylene blue. Yeah. And and you have different forms of it, but you run through all third party testing and make sure it's the right dose and Right. That there's no contaminants.

So is is there is there like a is there a method that you've kind of developed that actually are you able to do that?

Dr. Scott Scherer
So at Transcriptions, which is our company, we decided to make this company, by the way, Mark, we actually evolved it out of a nonprofit organization. So we have a nonprofit called Health Optimization Medicine and Practice. You've met Doctor. Ted in the past, who's our founder, Doctor. Ted Articoso.

And the idea with the nonprofit was to create an ecosystem for practitioners for training and for learning how to optimize health rather than focus on disease, very much aligned with functional medicine. And out of that, we birthed the transcription company because we wanted to help people right now along that path. And Transcriptions was the first company to come out with a commercial product of methylene blue using it in 2020. I thought Ted was crazy at the time. I'm like, what are people going to They're to want their urine to be blue because your urine

Dr. Mark Hyman
will Well, turn by way, yeah, you make sure your urine green or blue or

Dr. Scott Scherer
you're Exactly. The concentrate's in the urine, so you've to watch out for and you have to You can stain

Dr. Mark Hyman
your clothes if you're

Dr. Scott Scherer
Yes, you gotta be very careful. And so, we came out with the first commercial product in 2020, and I was a little bit hesitant, to be honest, because I was like, I saw the research, it was very compelling. But then the other issue that I was very hesitant about is that it took us about a year and a half longer to launch the company to find a good source of methylene blue. Even when it said pharmaceutical grade, USP grade, it was contaminated with heavy metals, or it was not as potent as it said on the label. The challenge is, and you know this, you get a compound from another country, we get ours from Japan and Korea, even China, it doesn't matter where you're getting it from, you're going get what's called a certificate of analysis with your product, with the ingredient itself.

A certificate of analysis is technically supposed to be a third party assessment of that particular ingredient, but can you trust that that's coming from another country?

Dr. Mark Hyman
No, Is China policing itself?

Dr. Scott Scherer
I'm not even throwing China under the bus, any other country, right? And so what we do, which most companies don't do unfortunately, you know this in the supplement world even across the board, is that we test it again once it comes into The United States with another independent lab to make sure that it's safe, to make sure that it meets our specifications, and only then do we put it in our products, and then we test it again, final product to make sure it's the exact amount of milligram dosage. We've tested a lot of things on market, but in the end, I didn't get into this to sell methylene blue, I get into this because I saw this pattern. Didn't know, I didn't name it in some And

Dr. Mark Hyman
you can use it in conjunction with your other areas of expertise like hyperbaric oxygen and red light therapy, which can also help modify mitochondrial function, right?

Dr. Scott Scherer
100%, yeah, this is not just a zero sum game, it's not like one thing. What I find with methylene blue is just a fantastic supercharger, accelerator, bridge for our patients that are just stuck, and then all of a sudden we unstick them, they can become unstuck, guess, and then we can actually let them finally heal, finally maximize their potential, because you can't heal when your mitochondria are stuck and you can't I

Dr. Mark Hyman
agree, it's sticky one of issues in functional medicine, how do you unburden someone's mitochondria, how do you get them out of this cell danger response, this, what you call a sympathetic spiral of doom. So so let's kind of talk a little bit about what you call the parasympathetic edge. Yeah. What is that? Why is it important?

And it's you know, people talk about, you know, pushing hard and just going through and, you know, going through the barriers that you feel and kinda overcoming resistance, but you're saying maybe that's not the best way. So what is the parasympathetic edge?

Dr. Scott Scherer
So this is the opposite of the sympathetic spiral. This is the parasympathetic edge. But the deal, I have a friend of mine, he's the only Olympic skier and former wide receiver on the Philadelphia Eagles, his name is Jeremy, and he told me when he first started doing his competitions, he would listen to Metallica and hard metal. But by the time he was Olympic level, he was listening to Mozart and Beethoven. Why?

He didn't need his nervous system to be functioning at a sympathetic level, he needed to drop down just a little bit to find that edge so that he was right in there. And you talk about people that are high performers, they are not in sympathetic overload. They are just below that in a place where they can maintain their capacity. Navy SEALs are famous for this, right? They can find ways when they're actually in operations, they're not sympathetically dominant, they've done training so much, like Michael Phelps is a great example of this too, You have trained so much for every eventuality that nothing is going to make your nervous system go too high, because if it goes too high, we can't function that high, we don't do well.

And this is where the classic example is like you have that dream where you're supposed to give a speech and you can't remember your lines, because when your sympathetic nervous system's so high, on such high alert, you actually lose blood flow to the front of your brain, which is where you have what's called your executive function. Your capacity to maintain things, bring things from your long term memory, you go blank, you go blank, that's sympathetic activation. And so we wanna have people learn is that when we down regulate the nervous system, you're going to function better than you're even thinking that you're functioning at a higher capacity when you're at sympathetic dominance. Because when you teach people that you can bring people down and have them function at a better level, it is like night and day. I mean the main good example of this, another one, just to give another example is recovery.

We're now in 2026, people care about recovery. But five or ten years ago, if you were an athlete in the professional sports, nobody gave a crap about recovery, right? Until people were burning out, they were getting injured and things like that. But now if you focus on knowing you can strength train three times a week at most and it's better than strength training five times a week, why? It's the same deal.

Because are you going to exercise optimally? That is sympathetic, but as soon as you finish exercise, you need to drop yourself down into parasympathetic to actually gain muscle and actually build, because you build most of your muscle when you're out of

Dr. Mark Hyman
Right, the because cortisol actually causes you to lose muscle, right?

Dr. Scott Scherer
Yes, it's catabolic. But the GABA system, and that's the system that is involved in calming down the brain, GABA is your primary inhibitory neurotransmitter. That is your neurotransmitter that puts the brakes on your firing, calms down your nervous system, and it's enhanced when you have increased insulin, example. So after you eat, your GABA levels go up, example. But GABA is deficient in so many people because of the lives that we live with stress all over the place.

So GABA deficiency is actually more associated with depression, anxiety, insomnia than any serotonergic issues that you could ever imagine.

Dr. Mark Hyman
But you say that you're taking GABA because you can buy GABA supplements over the counter.

Dr. Scott Scherer
Right. So GABA as a supplement is not a good idea.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. But you're saying there's another compound that comes from the toxic mushroom, the Aemone muscaria mushroom, which is agaran.

Dr. Scott Scherer
Yeah, agaran, yeah. Agaran, Agaran, And so what it comes down to, to break it down just briefly, so GABA, again, your brakes of your brain. Most of us are running around GABA deficient because of the sympathetic activation, the spiral that we've been talking about. The challenge is that if you go to your regular doctor and you say, I have anxiety, I have stress, I have depression, they're probably gonna give you an SSRI. Maybe they'll give you a benzo, which they don't want to give you, but they might give you a short amount of it.

Now, when it comes to benzos and alcohol

Dr. Mark Hyman
Benz is like Valium or

Dr. Scott Scherer
Like Valium, Ativan. Ativan, Xanax. Right, so those medications and alcohol, they all bind to the GABA receptor, but they vastly deplete GABA in the process, giving you more GABA issues over time and more anxiety, more stress, and then you have more tolerance to those drugs, need to take more of them, etcetera. And so GABA supplements sounds like a good idea, but the problem with the GABA supplement is that GABA is too big of a molecule to get into the brain. If you take GABA and it works for you You have a leaky brain.

Leaky brain, meaning that your blood brain barrier is not doing what it's supposed to, keeping things out. And so what do you really have there? Oftentimes you have a leaky gut, as you know. So if you optimize the gut, I've had patients like this where GABA works for them beautifully, they feel nice and calm and relaxed, be it optimized their gut, seal it up, GABA supplements stop working. And when I first started talking about this a number of years ago, had a number of clinicians that came up to me and said, GABA supplements, if they work for my patients, it's diagnostic, they have a leaky brain.

And I was like, this is interesting. And I started learning more about it and seeing it in my own clinical practice, when you optimize the gut, which you and I do in practice all the time, the brain gets better. So GABA supplements don't work. If they do work, go see a practitioner.

Dr. Mark Hyman
But there's something else you can take, which is from the mushroom.

Dr. Scott Scherer
Yeah, but the mushroom has, so the Amanita mushroom has a very cool compound called agarin, or agarin, and it's a long acting molecule that works in the GABA receptor binding to where GABA would bind. The cool thing about the GABA receptor is that it's five subunit receptor, not getting too technical, but you have a place where GABA binds itself, and then you have separate sites called, separate sites or allosteric sites where other things can bind. Where agrin binds is directly where GABA would bind. So when you take it, you're not depleting GABA in the process. The thing is if you're binding something on a separate site to the GABA receptor, say it's Kava for example, or CBD, or CBG, or Magnolia Bark, or Valerian, these are all binding to separate sites, increasing the amount of GABA to bind.

But if you don't have enough GABA around, what's gonna happen is over time those aren't gonna work very well for you. They're gonna stop working.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Scott, so this is really fascinating stuff, and I think that getting a parasympathetic edge is key, getting the sympathetic spyldrum is key. How do how do you kind of support people to kind of maintain they'd sort of broken the cycle a little bit. Yeah. You you you and we're we're gonna refer you to resources. I know you've written a lot about this, and I'm gonna ask you sort of where people can find out more information.

But how do you maintain a more stable state rather than keep falling into the sympathetic spiral of doom?

Dr. Scott Scherer
Yeah, I think the first place is to know what it feels like to not be in that state, right? Because when you know that the system is now calmed down, you're going to feel better. You may not feel 100% better right away, because you still need a lot of long term support, you need support with your vitamins, your minerals, your nutrients, your diet, these things can take time, as you know, and be difficult, and then you fall off the wagon and come back up and things like that. But I think what it comes down to for me is that you need to have short term ways to intervene. Short term way for me is Methylene Blue is just a great capacity enhancer in the mitochondria.

Optimizing the GABA system can be great and Transcription does have some products there, have something called Trocom and Introzy that can be helpful. You don't have to go product, you can also learn how to meditate and do breath work and start taking more walks in nature, get better sunlight, these are all going to be helpful too. It doesn't matter where people are on their level of capacity to start doing something. Sometimes it's helpful, I've found, is to give them something, like something that down regulates the nervous system, something that's GABAergic, that works on the GABA system, to give them the experience of what it feels like to not be in that sympathetic state. And doing it in a very supportive way.

So their mitochondria supported typically is what I try to do first, as I mentioned, and then I'll give them the experience. You can still get some reactive anxiety when that happens because you're used to being at a certain level. So that's short term. So short term, giving people the experience of where there is. We talk about in meditation, there's no there there, but in parasympathetic edge, there absolutely is a there there.

So knowing what that feels like, and then you can try to modulate that in various things that you're doing in your day to day life. Very powerful. But that's the thing, your day to day life becomes your meditation, becomes your life. You have to find ways during your day to break down, not break down, but calm down, the system. Taking more breaks, getting outside in the sunlight.

And then that's more medium term. Long term is like, okay, why are you so sympathetically activated? We talked about this. Is it external stuff? Is it top down?

Do you need to get out of a bad marriage? Do you need to sleep in a different room to just get a sleep divorce from your partner? I think about fifty percent of US couples sleep in different beds, It's different not a small thing. They have a more PC word of it, like sleep union or something like that now instead of sleep divorce, it doesn't sound as bad. But if you need to sleep in a different room, you get better sleep, you should, but that can be hard, right?

So trauma, you mentioned this as well, and this is where things become harder, right? This is where your experiences with psychedelics specifically are very Because interesting, looking at psychedelics like ketamine and MDMA and lipoagain like you did, right? These are huge, and I know you've spoken openly about this, which I really commend you on, because I'm very often sending my patients to go get ketamine with our friend Dave Rabin and others that are out there that are really good at creating a huge neuroplastic response to these medicines, and that's where the real healing is going to occur long term. We can give the people the experience of down regulating their nervous system now, we can give them modes of operation on a day to day basis, but if there's elephants that are hanging around in the room, those are still there, and we have to address those. And from the mitochondrial side, it's the same thing.

We have to address the mercury toxicity, we have to address the toxic exposures or the

Dr. Mark Hyman
Practice functional medicine basically.

Dr. Scott Scherer
Exactly, exactly.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's Work the system, yeah.

Dr. Scott Scherer
You have to be the system, and your system is fantastic for that, right? That's what you do, and that's what's beautiful. But that takes longer. It So takes

Dr. Mark Hyman
can people stay on methylene blue long term, or is it like a maintenance thing?

Dr. Scott Scherer
What I have people typically do is that find your right dose. My main way of doing that is start off at a low dose, somewhere about four or eight milligrams, which is a quarter or half one of our trochies, and then increase your dose every three to five days. See how you feel at one dose, take it in the morning,

Dr. Mark Hyman
typically So one whole trochie is sixteen.

Dr. Scott Scherer
Yeah, one whole trochie is sixteen, then one quarter is four milligrams. So take four milligrams in the morning, how you feel. Take it on an empty stomach, you don't have to dissolve in the mouth, okay? You can if you like, but your mouth is gonna be blue. That's okay too.

It works faster up here, but the same amount of methylene blue is gonna get in the body. See how you feel for about three days, take it in the morning. Don't feel much, go to eight milligrams. See how you feel, take an empty stomach in the morning. If you don't feel much, go to twelve then go to sixteen.

But somewhere between eight and sixteen for most people is when they're gonna start feeling, wow, I do have more energy. Wow, my brain's functioning a little bit better, don't have as much brain fog. I'm not getting that energy dip in the middle of the day. My inflammation is better, even my pain might be better. My mood seems to be more regulated.

You will know and that's what I find is that and then when you start increasing the dose more from there, you don't typically see as much return on your investment. Usually there's like a sweet spot for people and once you find that right dose, how long or how often should you take it depends on what you're taking it for. If you're taking it as a bridge, you're kind of early on in your process, you might need to take it every day and I have patients that are on it every day for a while. But over time, the goal is always to come on it less or use it less, using it when you need it. So for example, when you get more optimized, you're still gonna have mitochondrial stress.

And the question is when do you use it? So a good example is when you're traveling on an airplane. On an airplane, you're going from about 21% oxygen in the air that you're breathing at sea level to about 18% relatively on a plane. That's a huge hypoxic stress, low oxygen stress on an airplane because you're pressurized about 8,000 feet above sea level. The best jet lag hack that I've ever found, Mark, is to move to Colorado because I live at 5,500 feet, and so I go on an airplane, it's 8,000 feet, pressurization, then I come to Austin to visit you, I'm at sea level, I feel great because I've been at altitude for a while.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And I was just at 8,500 feet in Montana, and I felt it.

Dr. Scott Scherer
You need methylene blue for that, man. Because actually, what I have is anybody that's coming to visit me, I always get them methylene blue before they get on the plane. And then I was actually with our nonprofit, Doctor. Ted and Boomer, who's our CEO at Transcriptions and Home Hope, we were in Tibet. We were at Mount Everest Base Camp at 17,800 feet.

17,000. Was very, very high. Had intermittent oxygen, we had oxygen canisters, but we're using methylene blue. It was game changing. Really?

That wasn't the only thing we used. We used Diamox, and we used

Dr. Mark Hyman
I got pretty significant altitude sickness when I was in Bolivia. We drove right up to 16,000 feet. Was no acclimatization, and there was a hotel there, and my oxygen saturations were down in the seventies. I'm sure, yeah.

Dr. Scott Scherer
The tents were low too, we had them on oxygen. But we were using Diamox, which is a drug for altitude. We're using Viagra as well, which helps with nitric oxide and blood flow, and then we're using Methylene Blue. So as you get more optimized, Mark, you don't need it as much, and you don't need it as often. But I have everybody, all of my patients have a higher strength methylene blue in their medicine cabinet just in case, which is 50 in strength, so we have something called Tro Plus Blue, which is available to practitioners, so if you're a practitioner listening, we have a practitioner

Dr. Mark Hyman
And why would you use the fifty?

Dr. Scott Scherer
So the 50s are great for acute infection, acute stress overall. And so I use it for acute infection, acute stress. So if somebody has a concussion or has an acute injury, I give them higher doses. For a short period of time. Yeah, a short period of time.

And sometimes I combine it with antibiotics. So my mom for example was bitten by Lyme tick in New York, she's around 70. So, sorry mom, I gave her your age. But I gave her methylene blue, about two milligrams per kilogram, about one hundred and fifty milligrams for five days. And she also took doxy at the same time.

We wanted to give her doxy because she's in New York, Lyme ticks are everywhere, right? But we checked her Lyme titers four weeks later, they were negative. And so it's not like it's the only thing sometimes, but it's also being used as monotherapy for urinary tract infections as well at these higher doses. So I give higher doses intermittently, but it's the lower doses that I use and maintain. So for me, I'll use it about three times a week, four milligrams at a time, sometimes twice daily.

You can dose it in the morning, sometimes I'll dose it again really in the afternoon as well, because it doesn't typically keep you up. It's not like caffeine or a stimulant, it should just give you more energy, feel like you can just go, that's the idea. And then when you find that right dose, often you'll know it. If you're pretty well optimized, you can also use it for endurance. I have guys that use it because it increases aerobic capacity.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Oh, good. Okay.

Dr. Scott Scherer
So I have cyclists that use it. I have

Dr. Mark Hyman
a bike trip this summer. Yeah.

Dr. Scott Scherer
Yeah. Exactly. And I have ultramarathons that use it.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Me

Dr. Scott Scherer
either. I know you've used it as well and had Yeah. Some experience as

Dr. Mark Hyman
This has been such a great conversation. Where can people learn more about your work, about sympathetic spiral of doom, or self danger, all that stuff?

Dr. Scott Scherer
A couple of places, and thank you for having me, Mark. So my personal website is my name, it's my name, DrScottSher, drscottsherr.com. The company that makes some of the products we've been talking about today is called Troscriptions, it's the word trochee and prescriptions mashed up into tro descriptions. We are pharmaceutical grade, we're physicians that run the company w and we have precision dosing with all of our products, I really care about all of that, so

Dr. Mark Hyman
does Doctor. Ted. You can check it out at

Dr. Scott Scherer
proscriptions.com. We have Just Blue, which is our pure methylene blue, have something called Blue Canatine, which is a combination with methylene blue, nicotine, caffeine and CBD, is fantastic for focus, it's more for stimulation but great as a stimulant. Then we have Trocom and Trozee, which are more on that GABA side, turning that brain off, that GABAergic side, so Trocom and Trozi, then we have a whole practitioner-

Dr. Mark Hyman
Trozi is for sleep.

Dr. Scott Scherer
Trozi is about the most comprehensive sleep formula that I've seen on the planet, it's got eight different ingredients including the GABA system, so Trozi is fantastic. We also have a practitioner ecosystem, so if you're a practitioner, you can sign up for our practitioner account, you can either buy for your office or we have direct shipping, we have a huge portal and ecosystem that I've developed over the years with my team. So that's at transcriptions.com. And then the nonprofit is called Health Optimization Medicine and Practice, or HomeHope for short, it's homehope.org. And there you can find, if you're interested in training, we have CME certified courses, we have a whole ecosystem there that's very much aligned with functional medicine as well.

And then where else? I think on our website, on Transcription's website, there's a lot of information on the sympathetic spiral of doom. I've been talking a lot more about this and I will continue to be doing it as well. And again, this is not a diagnosis, it's a pattern that you and I have seen in clinical practice for years, Mark, but the key I think is the sequence here, is mitochondrial support first, then sympathetic down regulation, and in that order is the key, and then we break the spiral, we escape from it long term using the work that you do and that I do in clinical practice.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Amazing, well thank you. Thanks for doing it Scott, thanks for always helping me when I reach out to you on the My pleasure. Oxygen stuff.

Dr. Scott Scherer
Oh, yeah. And then that's finally, I have one other company called OneBase Health. Yeah. And that's a company that's involved in the hyperbaric space. I know you have a chamber now

Dr. Mark Hyman
and Yeah.

Dr. Scott Scherer
Yeah. Had some good experiences doing Well,

Dr. Mark Hyman
thanks, Scott. Thanks for what you do and just bringing the science to everybody and being dedicated to helping people live a healthier, life.

Dr. Scott Scherer
Right back at you, Mark. Thanks for having me.

Dr. Mark Hyman
If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social media channels at Doctor Mark Hyman. Please reach out, I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to The Doctor Hyman Show wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at Doctor Mark Hyman for video versions of this podcast and more.

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