Exploring Anti-aging & Integrative Medicine: Hormones, Thyroid Health, Brain Injuries, and More with Dr. Bill Clearfield

Lisa: Well, hi everyone, and welcome into Pushing the Limits. Today I have a superstar for you. I have Dr Bill Clearfield all the way from Reno, Nevada. Welcome to the show, Dr Bill. Fabulous to have you.

Dr Bill Clearfield: Thank you for having me.

Lisa: You have been such a major, just amazing teacher to me, and you don't even know me, because that's the power of YouTube. I came across your YouTube channel, which everybody has to go and follow, and I'll put the link down in the show notes. But Dr Bill, you're a physician over in Reno. Give us a little bit of background about who you are and what you do mainly, and then we're going to dive into things like hormones and thyroids and methylene blue and all of this good stuff today.

Dr Bill Clearfield: Well, I am a successfully departed medical doctor from a regular medical doctor, insurance-based practice, but I saw the light.

Lisa: Saw the light, yeah.

Dr Bill Clearfield: Actually, I always saw the light. It was early. In fact, I just wrote an article on 50 years as an anti-aging physician. Even when I was back in medical school, I actually spent a month — we had to do a month of clinical stuff at the Pritikin clinic in Santa Monica. That was in 1977, believe it or not.

Lisa: Wow.

Dr Bill Clearfield: And it was like the first inklings of low-fat diets, which turned out to be not such a great thing. But it was strictly for heart disease. The treatment for heart disease then was, if you had a heart attack, stay in bed for six weeks.

Lisa: Oh, brilliant.

Dr Bill Clearfield: Yeah, that's what it was. They didn't really have medications. They had like nitroglycerin, and that was about it. And I think beta blockers were right about then, but that was about it. And they gave you the diabetic diet, which was about 70% carbohydrates even then, and they weren't allowed to get out of bed.

Dr Bill Clearfield: One of the biochemistry teachers at the medical school where I went to in Iowa — he was 43, had a heart attack, and they wouldn't... we were visiting him, he was a great guy, everybody liked him, and they wouldn't let him get out of bed, and we're watching him get worse and worse and worse. You've got to move, you can't sit in bed and creak. He was dead within two years.

Lisa: Oh.

Dr Bill Clearfield: And then I saw, I think it was a news show or something, about this guy — who wasn't a doctor, by the way, so he was not to be believed — that he had done research, and he had had a heart attack when he was young, and he said, "I'm not staying in bed." He was an engineer, and he did some research, and some of the research was a little bit faulty, but he found out that high-fat diets, saturated fat diets, were an issue. Okay, we've learned a lot since then, not so much that. But they rented — I think they rented, or they bought — a hotel on the beach in Santa Monica, and they put these guys, it was all guys, there weren't any women then, on a 10% fat diet, low-fat, 10% fat diet, and they made them walk every day, which was like unheard of. And some of them couldn't go 100 feet, somebody had to go get them. But by the end of the month, the guys who had gotten there — when I first got there, I mean, they were going two, three, four miles at a time without stopping, and their chest pain went away. And it was pretty remarkable. And I think in the next year he was on 60 Minutes, that was a TV show, and then the low-fat diets became a thing, and then it turned out to be a whole mixed bag, that became the only thing, forgetting that the rest of the body needs cholesterol for things like your brain. 60% of your brain is made from cholesterol, and when you limit it, you're sort of limiting things.

Lisa: And brain volume.

Dr Bill Clearfield: Brain volume, yeah. And then these drugs came out, and they work, they lower your cholesterol, but there's a price to be paid for them. So that was way back in the 70s.

Dr Bill Clearfield: In the late 80s — so now I'm in practice — in the late 80s we did basically a protein-sparing modified fast, which was basically an intermittent fast. Okay, we used some protein shakes with it. That was like in the late 80s. And so we did that, and I don't know if you're allowed to... there was a commercial product in the US that had a catchy title: a shake for breakfast, a shake for lunch and a sensible dinner. That was their tagline. That's basically what we did, and the people did lose weight.

Dr Bill Clearfield: And we were actually at cardiac rehab. So rehabilitation, now exercise for heart patients, became a thing in the 80s, and I actually got a certificate as a certified cardiac rehab specialist.

Lisa: Wow.

Dr Bill Clearfield: At the University of Akron, I think it was 1986. So that became — we tied that at the hospital with our protein-sparing modified fast, and we did that. Then I went to acupuncture school at UCLA, and I'm in Northeast Pennsylvania, which is coal country. And it was a little difficult, because they're meat and potatoes folks. They were coal — that's where coal was discovered to be able to be used for heat, and that's a whole story in itself. The mines there closed in 1959 because one of the coal companies dug too close to the river, and the river broke through, and it flooded all the mines within two weeks. When I got there in 1980, they were still waiting for the mines to reopen, and I don't think they have yet.

Dr Bill Clearfield: So I actually started one of the first acupuncture clinics in a rehab hospital. It was the John Heinz Rehabilitation Center. So if you had surgery, hip surgery, knee surgery, that's where you went after the hospital, and then we did acupuncture on these folks, and we got them out of there three to five days sooner than those that didn't. So we really proved ourselves. And that was 1994, so I had dark hair then.

Lisa: Yeah, I can remember 1994, I can remember the 80s, I can remember the Pritikin, so yeah, I'm pretty old too.

Dr Bill Clearfield: Then I was on my own until '95, and then I actually joined up with a big group, because running a medical business and whatnot was huge. And so I was in a big group and they were insurance-based, and that was it. I didn't really like that all that much, but I kind of put up with it.

Dr Bill Clearfield: And then it was a bad winter, it was 2003, and I went to Disney World just to get out of the cold. Northeast Pennsylvania is — I don't know what New Zealand's like, I don't know if you would know what the weather's like in Chicago in the winter. Take Chicago and put it at three to four thousand feet, so it's terribly cold and higher up, so a lot of snow and a lot of ice. So by March, I'm out of my mind if I can't get out of there. I got a card — the internet was just getting started then — a skills workshop, so I didn't even care what it was, it was at Disney World. So I go to Disney World and I looked up that there's an Aerosmith exhibit there, so that was the big attraction. And then I did go to the skills workshop, and I learned two skills.

Dr Bill Clearfield: One was testosterone pellet implants, which — who used that? We were just told testosterone is prostate cancer, don't ever use it. We were taught that, and they were wrong. And then there was this new stuff that had come out that I actually had known about — you shoot it in people's faces and it gets rid of wrinkles. It had only been out about six months.

Lisa: Yeah, it was Botox.

Dr Bill Clearfield: Botox, yeah. But nobody — we didn't know what it was. I actually did know what it was, because I had an aunt who had... it was one of those things that was made for blepharospasm, eye twitch. That's what it was made for. She had that her whole life, and, you know, we kids can be mean — we used to call her Twitch, that was her nickname. And she went and had it done, and she only had it on one eye, and she came back and I went to visit her like a week later, and the right side of her face was all smoothed out. She was 85 years old.

Lisa: Wow.

Dr Bill Clearfield: And the twitch was gone. It was amazing. I said, "Where did all your wrinkles go?" And she goes, "What are you talking about?" I says, "This side of your face is smooth, the forehead, and this side's not, right?" And she goes, "I don't know, they shot the stuff in me and it stopped the twitch." And it lasted three months and then it started again. So I kind of knew what it was, because that's what it was made for. That was like 1991, actually, it would have been out, but they didn't start using it for cosmetic until 2003.

Dr Bill Clearfield: And I went home and I have a good friend who was a plastic surgeon, and I said, "Do you know anything about this stuff?" And he didn't know what it was. So I was the first one in Wilkes-Barre, PA, to do Botox. And we used big needles and we got a lot of bleeding and a lot of bruising, and we were also able to charge twice as much as we do now, and it cost twice as much, but that's another story.

Dr Bill Clearfield: So that kind of started me on that path. And then one day I went to visit my parents — my parents lived in Philadelphia, it was about 150 miles away. We used to, on the weekends every once in a while, meet about halfway. And there was a hotel with a dinner theatre, and I got there early, it was on the weekend, and I was just kind of wandering around, and there's these people with a laser machine. So I wandered in, I told him I was a doctor, and it was a kid, he was 25 years old. I said, "You don't need to be a plastic surgeon to do this?"

Dr Bill Clearfield: He was like a year out of college, and he was hired by the laser company and he was doing hair removal. I said, "Well, this is pretty neat." And so we started doing laser hair removal, and then that got kind of like ironing, not one of my favourites. And then fillers came out, so we started doing that.

Dr Bill Clearfield: And I'd always done a little bit with acupuncture, so I actually learned about Chinese herbs and herbal remedies and whatnot. I used to use the raw herbs and get them and have the patients cook them. You have to put them in at different times, and they would come and there would be twigs and rocks in a bag, and sometimes there were bugs in there, and I thought, this might — I might have some liability with this. So by that time, I stopped doing that for a while, but by that time there were American companies compressing the Chinese herbs into pills. I'm sure it's not the same, but we started using those.

Dr Bill Clearfield: And then one day — now remember, I'm in northeast Pennsylvania, wintertime, right? So I think it was 2007, somewhere around there, again had to get out of the winter. I went to Las Vegas to a family practice conference, which was just about the worst thing. It was just dreadful. And those conferences, you need the credit, you need the education, so you went, you signed in and then went to play, basically. So I went and I sat, and I remember there was a lecture on — we were still handwriting prescriptions, tall letters so that they could read it. My handwriting isn't too terrific, I have doctor's handwriting to begin with. I got a D in handwriting in sixth grade.

Dr Bill Clearfield: So I just kind of wandered across the hall. There was another group, so I wandered in and the guy was teaching. I told him who I was, and he says, "Well, come sit down and listen." And his name was Neal Rouzier. I don't know if you know who he is — he's one of the sort of original gurus of bioidentical hormones.

Lisa: Oh wow.

Dr Bill Clearfield: And I just happened to wander in and listen to a lecture on that. I didn't know who they were, I didn't know what they were doing, and I'm sitting here listening to this and I'm saying, this makes sense.

Lisa: Yeah, it does. I mean, that's a good place to jump off, maybe into that actual stuff. That's a bit of a whirlwind tour through 40-odd years of anti-aging.

Dr Bill Clearfield: That was only about 20 — that was maybe 25. So 25 years of anti-aging medicine.

Lisa: But what that illustrates, though, is how much medicine got wrong at the beginning, and parts of it were right, and then it's changed and it's evolved. And there's no difference now, is there?

Dr Bill Clearfield: Well, in some quarters, yes. So if you've noticed, I sort of developed a theme now in the talks I give, in the lectures and the PowerPoints, and I always have it in parenthesis: nearly everything we learned about — fill in the blank — hormone optimisation, testosterone, oestrogen, progesterone, thyroid — was wrong in medical school. Nearly everything we learned about thyroid disease in medical school was wrong. Nearly everything we learned about hormone optimisation was wrong. Nearly everything we learned about almost everything was wrong, as it turns out. And I'm sure 30 years from now they're going to look back at what we're doing and say that was wrong.

Lisa: Exactly. That's how things grow.

Dr Bill Clearfield: And how we develop. We're doing things way differently now than when we started. I remember when I was in Dr Rouzier's classes way back when, the goals that we're looking for, the treatment goals and whatnot, are way different than they were. They're a lot lower, for the most part, for most of them. We didn't really have anything to go on. Basically all we had was — I call them the gym rats, the bodybuilders, the 18- to 22-year-old kids doing stacks, steroids and whatnot. We really didn't have anything else to go on.

Dr Bill Clearfield: So for instance, for a 50-year-old man who's got a very low testosterone, our treatment was, we try to get his total testosterone to 1,500. And then testosterone aromatises or breaks down into oestrogen, and with oestrogen you get man boobs and whatnot. And so then we would give them oestrogen blockers to get it to zero, which is not good. That turned out to be wrong either. But we quickly learned how to do things. And once we got kind of the basics down, then in the last 10 years or so we've branched out into many areas.

Dr Bill Clearfield: So we see a lot of traumatic brain injuries, we see a lot of head injuries. And if you think about it, it makes sense, because where are the hormones generated? Right in the centre of the brain, there's the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland. And you shake that brain up, you know what's going to happen — the hormone generators are going to get disrupted.

Lisa: Let's talk about this a little bit, because we need to get into the meat and potatoes of the stuff that we want to cover off today, and hormones is one of those major places that I wanted to. And I've done a lot of work in the brain rehabilitation space, and I love Dr Mark Gordon's work, who I think you know about as well.

Dr Bill Clearfield: He was one of my mentors. And I fight with him too now, because I don't agree with everything.

Lisa: But he sort of brought to awareness among you and others as well that hormones — often when you've had a brain injury, that pituitary gland and that hypothalamus has gone offline, for want of a better description, being damaged, isn't producing the hormones. So it's something that we need to check. So if someone presents with a brain injury, what are the sort of things that you do as a workup for them?

Dr Bill Clearfield: Well, as you know as well, we try to take a pretty good history and find out what happened and what's happened to them from the time of the brain injury to the time they show up. I always say that it's not a coincidence when they show up in front of me, there's a reason for it. It's time to do something different.

Dr Bill Clearfield: We see a lot of veterans, which after nine years of wrestling with the VA here in Reno, we're slowly making some progress. Because they would put these guys on five different antidepressants and three antipsychotics and then four other drugs to counteract the side effects from the first.

Dr Bill Clearfield: And this guy wandered in here. I have what I call shrink wrap on my windows, and I'm next to a big service gas station. Do they have 7-Elevens there? So we're right next to it. And this guy wandered in. He had no hair. I mean literally no hair, nowhere. He had no head hair, he had no chin hair and he had no hair on his arms, and he said he hadn't had any. He'd been in a rollover crash in Iraq, and he was on 13 medications a day, 34 doses, and he was basically living under a bridge.

Dr Bill Clearfield: And one day he was in a store, he said he had some money, he doesn't know what came over him, he just stole something. He stole a nothing, a $5 something, and he got caught, and he ended up going to jail for it. And he wandered in here. Things were slow, and I don't know, we kind of took to each other. So I started asking him. I said, "Do you get hot flushes?" Yeah. "Do you get night sweats?" Yes. "Dry skin, dry hair?" He showed me his fingernails, they were all basically — he didn't have any. No libido, very depressed, no muscle tone, and he had urinary dribbling, and his blood sugar was like 140 and it was sort of borderline diabetic.

Dr Bill Clearfield: And so I'm going through my paces here — I call it a hormone-centric view. I do this with every person that I see, every patient that I see: I ask them the hormone excess and deficiency questions. That's how I kind of look at it. And he checked them all off. And they said, "Oh no, I have severe depression, I have schizoid, whatever." And I said, that sounds like a testosterone deficiency to me.

Dr Bill Clearfield: And he had no memory, his memory was shot, he couldn't concentrate on anything. He couldn't start — you gave him something to do, it would take him three months to even get started. Then he never finished anything, and he couldn't do two things at once. And he was very obsessive-compulsive. They told him he had obsessive-compulsive disease. He couldn't leave home, couldn't leave where he was living without making sure his shoes were all lined up and his shirts had to be in colour order, that kind of thing. And he was paranoid. And I said, that's a growth hormone deficiency.

Lisa: Wow.

Dr Bill Clearfield: So I said to him — he was a veteran — so I gave him a lab slip and I said, let's see what we've got. And he came back a few days later and he says, "They laughed at me, they won't do this."

Lisa: What?

Dr Bill Clearfield: Yeah, they wouldn't do it. So I actually have a deal with a lab, we have a pretty good deal with a lab, so I paid for it myself and I sent him down there. And he had no thyroid function, he had no testosterone, he had no oestrogen, he had no growth hormone. I mean, barely a blip. He had basically nothing.

Lisa: Wow.

Dr Bill Clearfield: So I made my first mistake: I wanted to fix it all yesterday. Well, it turns out with hormones, especially if you've been depleted of them for a long time, that's not a good thing to do. So he got a psychotic reaction. And thank God he sort of stuck in there, stuck with me. So we had to start over from the beginning, and then we started doing it slowly and gradually, and we took one hormone at a time and sort of optimised that. And it took us like —

Dr Bill Clearfield: — two years to get him up to speed doing it that way. But it turns out he's got a beard down to here now, by the way.

Lisa: He's a little bit — I've seen him on your webinars.

Dr Bill Clearfield: Yeah, that's him, right? His birthday's tomorrow, thanks for reminding me. He's a character.

Lisa: Oh, he's a character all right.

Dr Bill Clearfield: Turns out he's extremely bright. He sort of woke up. He reconnected with his family — he had been estranged from his family for 20 years. He ended up — he's the coordinator for the suicide hotline at the Veterans Administration here now. He's got his own 501(c)(3) for veterans. And he bought his own house, he bought his own car, which wasn't even anything on the radar. He reconnected with his father, who also has a beard down to there.

Lisa: Wow. And what a story.

Dr Bill Clearfield: Yeah. So we turned him around. And then there's a thousand other guys and gals like that at the VA. Again, they didn't want anything to do with it. They all had to go see the endocrinologist, who was about 800 years old.

Lisa: Hadn't opened the book since 1964. No comment.

Dr Bill Clearfield: Yeah, yeah. So we didn't get very far. But I think he's gone now, there's a younger guy there, and so we're making a little bit of headway. They'll take our labs now, they will run on them. They're still not quite up to — they'll give them a shot of testosterone if their testosterone's less than 300, they'll give him one shot a month. Now considering it's half gone in 12 days, the shots, that's not the way to dose it.

Lisa: Yeah, but it's better than nothing. I mean, we face the same sort of problems here. And I have a lot of people coming into my clinic who've got brain injuries, and the first thing I do is a hormone workup, to try to work out what's going on, if that has been affected. It isn't always affected with brain injuries, but it is a lot of the time. And then a gut health, microbiome workup, to see what's going on in the gut, because that's very often also with brain injuries, isn't it?

Dr Bill Clearfield: Yeah. So we start with the hormones, and then we do the gut health. And lately we've been seeing — the more I learn, the more I'm seeing. So lately, one of my latest crusades is we've been looking for mould. Now Reno is a high desert, you wouldn't think there would be much mould here, but the last 32 patients that I've actually tested for mould, 30 of them have been positive.

Lisa: Wow.

Dr Bill Clearfield: And there isn't any — you know, there isn't any "you're complaining of this and that means you have mould". It's just very — there's a lot of symptoms.

Lisa: And for anything, yep.

Dr Bill Clearfield: So you've got to kind of piece it together.

Lisa: There is an online questionnaire that they do — I've forgotten the name of it now. The visual — VCS, it's called, VCS. Do you think that has any validity at all?

Dr Bill Clearfield: It's an okay screen. If it's positive, we're probably looking at mould. If it's negative, that doesn't mean it's not.

Lisa: Right, okay.

Dr Bill Clearfield: It's an okay screen. And there's two warring factions in the US on mould. There's a Dr Shoemaker on one side — he's the one who developed the VCS — and then there's Dr Andrew Campbell, who's on the other side, and they sort of lock heads. So Dr Shoemaker looks at it as a chronic inflammatory response and he does binders, and he'll do the urine test. Dr Campbell says there's no validity to the urine test, and there's no literature on the binders. So they sort of lock heads.

Lisa: Yeah.

Dr Bill Clearfield: I've had more success with Dr Campbell's approach, but if the patients aren't completely better within six to eight months, then I'll add in the other one, and that seems to work out pretty well.

Lisa: Wow, okay. So you do a hybrid.

Dr Bill Clearfield: So both of them are mad at me.

Lisa: Oh, you're going to make people mad. And it's great that we have people that are trying to work all these things out and they're not all going to agree. I mean, I interview doctors and scientists every week on my show and they don't all agree with each other. But I welcome all opinions, because then we learn, right, when we have robust debates about things and we can openly talk about it. Because what I do find is there are a lot of scientists, especially ones who are PhDs and things, that are right down one rabbit hole and sometimes lose the perspective of the whole person. And I find that ones who aren't in clinical practice are often, theoretically, this all works on paper, but is it actually working on the patient? And there's quite a disconnect sometimes as well. So they can be right when it comes to Petri dishes and stuff.

Dr Bill Clearfield: Yeah, that takes us back to the cardiologist and cholesterol again. They want the cholesterol to be zero, which is a disaster.

Lisa: Right, no matter what.

Dr Bill Clearfield: Doesn't matter what. I said, "What's that going to do to the rest of their body?" They said, "Well, we don't care, their heart will be good."

Lisa: Is okay. And then you've got people like Peter Attia and things that are going, "LDL's got to be as low as possible." And there's a reason for it to be there, and it's all homeostasis, it's all getting it in the right balance. And cholesterol — when I see a really low cholesterol... I mean, the studies are out now that we know that actually you want a lot of the good cholesterol, you want to watch the oxidised LDLs, you want to do the Lp(a) and ApoB, and to work out the density of all of these cholesterol molecules. It's not just the HDL.

Dr Bill Clearfield: The particle size, that's it.

Lisa: Yeah, the fluffiness and particles, and all of that. And then also the inflammatory state of the person, if they're inflamed and they've got a lot of macrophages doing their thing and causing, and you've got a lack of nutrients and things like vitamin C, which really help protect. All of these things are aspects of it, aren't they, that are missed in these big headlines: "cholesterol is bad". Like, I've got quite a high cholesterol level, but I've got a really good HDL, and the breakdown of my cholesterol is beautiful, so I'm not worried about the fact that it's high. The total cholesterol is high, not at all, because I'm taking the fish oils and the olive oils and the things that are actually keeping it.

Dr Bill Clearfield: Some of it's genetics. So I told you about my father. He did everything the opposite. His blood sugar was 240 from 1987 on. His cholesterol was 500. He never — his idea of exercise was hitting the clicker on the television.

Lisa: Right. And he lived to what, 95?

Dr Bill Clearfield: Well, he was 95 when the COVID shutdown came, and he laid down and he said, "The casinos will never open again, I have nothing to do, so that's it, I'm done." And he pulled a sheet over his head and that was it, he was done.

Lisa: Really? He'd still be —

Dr Bill Clearfield: Yeah, he'd have been 99 this year. He'd still be — I swear to God, he would still be here, he'd still be going by himself to the casino.

Lisa: At the casinos, I know he would have.

Dr Bill Clearfield: Right. He was just too stubborn. He wouldn't take insulin because he said it was made from pigs. He says, "I don't eat pigs." I said, "What did you have for breakfast, Dad?" "Bacon and eggs."

Lisa: What a character.

Dr Bill Clearfield: But yeah, every doctor wanted to give him insulin and he told them to, you know, "Get out, go away, get out of here."

Lisa: Oh, that's funny. And genetics play a huge role, for sure. There's some people who should have the butters and the good fats, and there are people who shouldn't, and that's all this nuance of this conversation. We need to personalise medicine, we need to find out what your genetics are, we need to see what your environment is, your history.

Dr Bill Clearfield: Genetic tests can do now — you can do genetic testing on someone to match their medications and herbs.

Lisa: Yeah, and as things unravel in the next few years, we'll be able to go right down into the nitty-gritty of whether this medication is right for you. We're not quite there yet for the general public.

Lisa: But just coming back to the hormones — I am a big fan, I'm personally on bioidentical hormone replacement. Can you comment on the Women's Health Initiative? It did a massive disservice to women.

Dr Bill Clearfield: Disastrous. And I still get that — I won't use the four-letter words that come to mind as soon as you mention that.

Lisa: Yeah, exactly.

Dr Bill Clearfield: So let's go back in history again a little bit before that. I don't know if you know this or not, but I was an OBGYN — I was a failed OBGYN resident, 1979 to 1981, for two years. That was enough for me. But we would do hysterectomies, because that's what gynaecologists did, and we would give our patients Premarin, which was the synthetic oestrogen, right? And we told them they didn't need progesterone because they didn't have a uterus, so they didn't need that anymore. I actually do a whole lecture now on progesterone after hysterectomy, and I have 32 documented, evidence-based reasons to use progesterone after hysterectomy, and the one reason not to is because they can't get pregnant. Well, they can't — you take the uterus out, you're not going to get pregnant.

Dr Bill Clearfield: And I remember saying — so we would have a post-op clinic for the babies on Tuesdays and Thursdays from two to four in the afternoon, and I remember saying to one of the senior residents, I said, "You know, these women come back, we did a hysterectomy two years ago, and they come back and half of them have breast cancer." And they said, "Yeah, well, that's just kind of the way life is." And so in 1980, we knew — at least I knew — that that was an issue, right? We didn't really put two and two together.

Dr Bill Clearfield: So the WHI study comes out. Now remember, Premarin was the most prescribed drug from, I think, 1970 right up into 2002, in the history of the world.

Lisa: In the history of the world. And if your viewers don't know, Premarin is synthetic oestrogen, it was made from the urine of mares.

Dr Bill Clearfield: Yeah, of horses. It has 10 different types of oestrogen molecules, only three of which were human. The other seven were not.

Dr Bill Clearfield: For females, it affects the female sex organs, so it's the breast, the uterus and the ovaries, for the most part. I mean, it does lots of other things too, but it should take all of 20 seconds to figure out why you would give somebody a highly inflammatory foreign substance that will affect your sex organs. And they're going to form — so what's cancer? Cancer is abnormal cells, abnormal growth of cells, is what it is. So how does the body protect itself from a foreign invader? It builds walls, it builds cells around the organs that are affected. Okay, can you put two and two together now? I mean, how it causes cancer?

Lisa: Yeah, I mean, that should have been obvious.

Dr Bill Clearfield: And that scared women off bioidentical hormone replacement — because that wasn't even a word back then, it was just hormone replacement — and now people are still scared. So Prometrium, which is natural progesterone, had come out in 1988... 1998, sorry, 1998. And progesterone is the balance for oestrogen. So the powers that be — and I have this in my earlier lectures, we're kind of beyond that now — said it didn't matter what type of hormone it was, if it was natural, which is chemically the same as what we make, or the synthetic, it didn't matter, it was all bad. Well, it turned out that it did matter, and it wasn't all bad. The natural oestrogens and progesterones actually have less incidence of cancers than if we gave you nothing at all.

Dr Bill Clearfield: So a French study came out five years later, 2007, it's the E3N, I think it's called. And it showed — and the numbers are a little bit deceiving also, there's statistics and then you can make them say whichever you want — so if they gave you no hormones at all, about 10 women out of 100,000 would develop a breast cancer. If we gave you Premarin, the synthetic oestrogen, on average it was about 20% higher. Okay, well, what's 20% of 10?

Lisa: Well, yeah, two more, two more people.

Dr Bill Clearfield: Two out of 100,000. Now, if you're one of the two, it's unfortunate.

Lisa: That's a synthetic.

Dr Bill Clearfield: Yeah, but if you look at it and you're saying, wait a minute, that's not that terrible, right? It is 20% more, but it's kind of misleading. If we gave you Premarin and Provera, so the oestrogen-progesterone combination, it was 40% more than if you had no hormones at all. But if we gave you the natural oestrogen and the natural progesterone, it was actually 10% less than if we gave you nothing at all, 50% less than if we gave you the synthetic combination, and 30% less than if we gave you just a synthetic oestrogen. So the natural oestrogens and natural progesterone will actually protect against breast cancer.

Lisa: And again, so it's 10% less, which is how many? One.

Dr Bill Clearfield: One, yeah.

Lisa: And this also doesn't take into account anything about that person's environment, their lifestyle, all of these factors, which also should be taken into consideration when you're looking at HRT, or how you process out. I love doing the DUTCH test, the dried urine test of complete hormones, and looking at the proportion that's going down the 2 versus the 4 versus the 16. And how's your methylation, and how's your organic acids stacking up, and how's your cortisol, and all of these parts of that equation that should be considered, not just, yeah, whack it in or don't whack it in. And didn't the Premarin make more oestrone, which is the more deleterious...

Dr Bill Clearfield: That's the bad guy, yeah, yeah.

Lisa: And this is why women naturally make more oestrone in our later 40s and 50s, don't we, just naturally anyway?

Dr Bill Clearfield: Yeah, so you have to push it down, try and push it back over to the other form. And they came up with, well, maybe the natural oestrogens are okay, but only for the first 10 years after menopause. Well, what are the three big killers of women?

Lisa: Heart disease.

Dr Bill Clearfield: Heart disease, yep, breast cancer, and cognitive decline, Alzheimer's.

Lisa: Yeah, which needs oestrogen. And what does oestrogen protect against? Heart disease, cancer, right?

Dr Bill Clearfield: Right, yeah, yeah.

Lisa: And also osteoporosis. That's a major one. Like osteoporosis — my mum is 82 and I have her on testosterone, oestrogen, progesterone.

Dr Bill Clearfield: Your mum? We're not supposed to give her any of that stuff.

Lisa: I know, but I have enlightened doctors that I work with.

Dr Bill Clearfield: I said, well, then what? Well, according to — I haven't looked at it lately — but the American College of Clinical Endocrinology, their first-line recommendation is Effexor, venlafaxine, which is an SSRI, which is probably one of the worst drugs. Any of my students that prescribe that, they fail.

Lisa: Yeah, that's highly addictive.

Dr Bill Clearfield: And you get called on a Saturday night: "I left my Effexor at home, I'm in Hawaii, I've been here 24 hours and I'm jumping out of my skin, can you call in some?" So it's dangerous, it's dangerous.

Lisa: I've got a client that I'm working with at the moment who's trying to titrate down, under the guidance of doctors as well, but we're working — and he's got a brain injury. For years, they've told him he's just depressed, he's just depressed. Well, we've done a full workup with him, and I've got a couple of colleagues that work on neurofeedback and all of that sort of stuff, and neuro-chiro, and he is miles better already. He's been doing hyperbaric oxygen therapy, but the hard thing is we're having to titrate him down off this terrible drug. It's going to take us a long time to get right down off it. And that's something like methylene blue — that brings that point up — like methylene blue could help with a lot of these things too.

Dr Bill Clearfield: Well, we really lucked out with methylene blue. So this was invented as a blue dye in Germany and in Austria in the 1870s. And the dye makers, the clothing makers noticed — those places weren't exactly clean, right — and they noticed that a lot of the bacteria, all the bugs, all the things that were kind of around then... You don't see that stuff in Western movies, you don't hear about that kind of stuff, but it was pretty prevalent. And the methylene blue killed the bacteria. If they spilled it on the floor, they wiped it up, and the floor was a little bit blue, but all of the schmutz that was on the floor was gone.

Lisa: Yep, yeah.

Dr Bill Clearfield: About 10 years later, in the late 1880s, scientists took the stuff and they sort of distilled it down and they made it into kind of a food grade, so that it wouldn't kill you. They used it as an antibiotic and they used it as an antiviral, and it has antifungal properties. And they used it up until about the 1920s. And then in the US, in 1912, there was something called the Flexner Report, and if it wasn't strict medicine or surgery, it was thrown out. And methylene blue got put into that category — homeopathic remedies were thrown out, chiropractic was out, herbs were thrown out, all of it was no good. And so methylene blue got put into that category.

Dr Bill Clearfield: Now fast forward a hundred years, and now we have these crazy viruses, and think about wherever the hell they came from. Well, bugs like to live, that's why they kept having these variants, right? We get rid of the COVID one and then all of a sudden you've got COVID two, and whether you think it's a conspiracy and half of it was a bunch of hooey is another story. But methylene blue was an antiviral that hadn't been used for a hundred years, and so the bugs weren't used to it, and it was actually quite effective.

Lisa: And they used it in small clinical trials in people in ICU, didn't they? And they had a huge success with methylene blue, and then it got shut down.

Dr Bill Clearfield: We use it in long COVID also now. So these people that have these lingering symptoms, and they had neurological damage and immune damage that's semi- or even permanent, we've had some very good success with that, along with other things. It's not just one thing. It was quite a breakthrough, it sort of gave us something that we could really depend on. The issue was getting it, and then you had to warn the patient that it'll turn their urine blue.

Lisa: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I've got blue urine.

Dr Bill Clearfield: It was a little bit frightening, and again, the VA didn't like that.

Lisa: It's crazy, like methylene blue — and I highly recommend that everyone go and watch Dr Clearfield's lecture on methylene blue. It is the best lecture on the internet for methylene blue, and see what it's good for. Like, this stuff is amazing.

Dr Bill Clearfield: Yeah, makes more energy, helps with mitochondrial dysfunction, helps with methaemoglobinaemia.

Lisa: It helps with UTIs, which is one of the major reasons that I've used it with my mum. And yeah, she's got a blue bum now, but that's okay. She hasn't had a UTI since we started using it.

Dr Bill Clearfield: Don't spill it on a white couch, by the way.

Lisa: No, no, she gets strict instructions not to tip it over, because it will dye everything.

Dr Bill Clearfield: If you have a white carpet also, that's probably going to be dyed blue.

Lisa: I would love to see methylene blue accepted in the mainstream. I mean, they use it in the hospitals for things like sepsis. In some countries they use it for the inducible nitric oxide problems.

Dr Bill Clearfield: Yeah, yeah, for carbon monoxide poisoning, for CO poisoning, things like that, emergencies.

Lisa: But they don't use it for all the other things that it could be great for. And it's just like, wow, this is easy, cheap, something that could be done. But anything that's easy and cheap seems to get quashed. And it was originally an anti-malaria drug too, and it's making a comeback for that as well, isn't it, because they're becoming resistant to the antibiotics.

Dr Bill Clearfield: So that's okay, we don't want to give out all our secrets. That's why they can't figure it out. The endocrinologists here in town, if you call them in the morning, they'll say, "Can you be here by three o'clock in the afternoon?" If you call me, I say, "Can..."

Dr Bill Clearfield: "...you be here in November?" So they can't figure that out.

Lisa: I love it. So that's methylene blue. Go and check it out, everyone. That lecture really dives into the weeds on methylene blue and is a very, very powerful lecture.

Lisa: One of the other great things that I love is another drug called low dose naltrexone, which also has a very interesting backstory. It was used for opioid use at high doses, so to try to get people off opiates. And then — I forgot the name of the doctor — but he started to titrate it down as he was getting his AIDS patients... I think his name was Bihari.

Dr Bill Clearfield: Yes, that's the one.

Lisa: And he was titrating it down, getting his patients off the opioids, and then he noticed that they started to have all these benefits at very low levels — three milligrams and four and a half milligrams, that sort of level — that they started to have all these anti-inflammatory benefits. The cytokines were downregulated, the immune system was better. Can you tell us a little bit about low dose naltrexone and why?

Dr Bill Clearfield: Right. So naltrexone is a medication, it's been around since the 60s. I think it was FDA approved in 1984 at 50 and 100 milligrams. It's an opioid blocker. If you take naltrexone, it's got about a 36-hour half life, so it'll last about a day and a half, one pill. If you take it continuously, every day, you can do drugs all day, you can drink all you want and you won't get high.

Lisa: You won't get high. It's a good way to get off it.

Dr Bill Clearfield: So why did Dr Bihari in New York City decide to do this? I don't know. In the mid 80s is when the AIDS crisis came about, and I was actually in Wilkes-Barre. Believe it or not, we had a fairly high population of AIDS patients and there was only one doctor in town that would see these folks.

Lisa: And you're talking to him. Wow, so amazing.

Dr Bill Clearfield: Everybody was afraid, and nobody knew what it was — all these crazy infections. And one day a guy's perfectly fine and six hours later he's in the ER with delirium, and he had a cytomegalovirus meningitis. We never saw stuff like this. And pneumocystis carinii, which are these sort of — I don't remember if it's a bacteria or a parasite — in the lungs. Where the hell was this stuff coming from?

Lisa: And their immune system was shot, was gone.

Dr Bill Clearfield: Yeah, and their endorphin levels were about a third of what they should have been.

Lisa: Wow.

Dr Bill Clearfield: So however it came about, when he watered down the naltrexone from 50 milligrams to five, so we took 10% of the full dose, it has very different properties. One set of properties is that it will work for about six to eight hours at a four and a half milligram dose, and then it wears off. While it's effective, it blocks the opioid receptors. Our body's reaction to it is to make endorphins. When the medication wears off, the opioid receptors are open, the endorphins rush in and fill the opioid receptors. So endorphins, or beta endorphin, is the most potent anti-inflammatory that we make naturally. I'm sure, you're an athlete, I'm sure you've had the runner's high, that kind of thing?

Lisa: Yeah, totally.

Dr Bill Clearfield: Same thing. You don't get the high, but it's the same effect. So that's how it works, basically.

Lisa: And also a great anti-depressive thing. So would this help with anti-depressive?

Dr Bill Clearfield: Yeah, I mean, there's indications as long as both of your arms and both of your legs. There's whole societies dedicated to this now, and there's very specific dosing instructions. We use it a lot for autoimmune thyroid disease. It's very, very potent for that, but you have to use it in lower doses than even the highest dose of low dose naltrexone. The thyroid is very sensitive to this, and patients, especially if they're on thyroid medication, will frequently become overdosed. So we have to watch their thyroid levels, and we frequently reduce their medication. Sometimes we can get them off of it also.

Lisa: Wow.

Dr Bill Clearfield: The other ones that are extremely sensitive to it are MS patients, multiple sclerosis. So the highest dose we'll use for low dose naltrexone for most general things is 4.5 milligrams, but for the thyroid and for multiple sclerosis, never more than three.

Lisa: Never more than three. And we start low and we kind of build it over a couple of weeks.

Dr Bill Clearfield: Yeah, you don't want to start out there. There's a few side effects that are pretty minor. It's pretty clean. One of them is — we usually dose it at bedtime, with the idea that it lasts about six to eight hours, the opioid receptors are blocked and then it wears off, so that by the time you wake up in the morning, now you're good to go. About 10% of the patients end up with some sort of insomnia where it keeps them awake. The good news is it happens in the first day or two, so we usually tell the patients, if you're off on the weekend, take it on a Friday or Saturday night, if you're not working the next day. If it keeps you up, then there's a whole treatment dose schedule, two hours earlier, two hours earlier. That's okay, but after a while I kind of got tired of it, I just told them, if it keeps you awake, just take it in the morning.

Lisa: Take it in the morning, yeah. And it might make you sleepy. And vivid dreams is the other one that I get from it, because I'm on it.

Dr Bill Clearfield: Yeah, that's about 20% of the patients. And some of them tell me they're riding dragons and all sorts of crazy things.

Lisa: Yeah, I was hanging out with the Rock last night, doing crazy stuff. It's cool.

Dr Bill Clearfield: It can cause a little bit of nausea. That usually is gone in a few days to a week, and we can usually cover that. I've been using this stuff for about 25 years. I can think of about three or four patients off the top of my head that stopped, couldn't take it, because it made them too sick to their stomach.

Lisa: So powerful. And things for anti-cancer, like cancer prevention, as a longevity molecule, for immune system regulation, for down regulation of a lot of the inflammatory cytokines. I don't have off the top of my head which ones, but I think IL-6 and interleukin 17 and 18, 19 and 23.

Dr Bill Clearfield: It's just about all of them. I have a really nice slide in my presentation that has them all.

Lisa: Wow. And that's another lecture that you guys must go and listen to if you want to really do a deep dive into low dose naltrexone, and if you're dealing with anything from multiple sclerosis to cancer prevention or cancer itself.

Dr Bill Clearfield: Pretty much any inflammatory issue at all, even from neck pain, back pain, to Hashimoto's thyroiditis, to lupus, to Sjögren's disease, to Crohn's disease, any type of autoimmune issue. If you're on opioids, you're really not supposed to use it, but we can use micro doses to try and wean you off of them. That's pretty much really the only reason not to use it, if you're on oxycontin.

Lisa: Which are bad anyway, and try and get off those if you can. And what about for long COVID? Would that be a good thing, with this sort of upregulated...

Dr Bill Clearfield: That's part of our protocol, along with methylene blue. And then we use some other anti-inflammatories. We like quercetin and nettle as a combination. And then we use ivermectin.

Lisa: Ivermectin. Let's talk about ivermectin, because it was ridiculed and it's still — you go to ChatGPT, I did it today just for fun to have a look at what it says about ivermectin now, and it's still going, "It's not standard of care, it's not this, it's not that." And ivermectin has saved so many lives, and it's a horse...

Dr Bill Clearfield: So again, ivermectin is a very potent anti-inflammatory, and almost all of the cytokines that are covered with low dose naltrexone, ivermectin does that also. So yes, it was developed as an anti-parasite drug, but again, it does so much more.

Lisa: Yeah. And this is what interests me. One of my teachers, Dr Elizabeth Yurth — she's a fabulous cellular health expert and longevity orthopedic surgeon and goodness knows what else she's done, she's amazing — she tells us that we need to learn the pathways, that we need to understand the pathways that are involved in different diseases, and then look at the drugs that are available. There's 32,000 drugs that are FDA approved, and start to work out what pathways are affected by these drugs, because there's a lot of off-label use that you can do and they've already gone through their safety and all of these sorts of things. Do you find that's a good approach as well?

Dr Bill Clearfield: We've done that. Again, we use the cytokines, which are the inflammatory proteins. We try to determine which inflammatory proteins are involved with, name it, okay? And then we'll look at whatever substances we have that have activity against those. And a lot of times, first of all, you have to use good quality stuff, especially in the over-the-counter markets, the supplements. Really know what you're getting. And you have to use enough of it for a long enough period of time.

Dr Bill Clearfield: So let's go back to ivermectin. There was so much hullabaloo about it, so somebody — I don't remember who it was now — decided they were going to study it and write a paper. So our protocol was, I forget what the dose was, it looks like somebody like you would be about 12 milligrams a day...

Lisa: Yeah, exactly what we've got.

Dr Bill Clearfield: ...for five days, right?

Lisa: Perfect.

Dr Bill Clearfield: So they did a study on, I think it was 600 women. They did three milligrams a day for three days, and then said it didn't work.

Lisa: Oh yeah, brilliant. And that was deliberately designed that way, no doubt.

Dr Bill Clearfield: Yeah. It'd be like saying, you have a strep throat, we're going to give you — you need four penicillin a day — we're going to give you one a day, and if it doesn't work, well then it's no good.

Lisa: This is the thing that really pisses me off with clinical research — they use science to manipulate it, because the general public doesn't know the nuance of that conversation that we just had there. We know that the dosing is 12 milligrams; the general public doesn't. All they see is the headline: "Ivermectin doesn't work." And that's wrong, and that's deliberately done by the big pharma companies, I believe. Hopefully I don't get banned for saying that, which would really just prove the point if it does. But they do these things to manipulate, and they fight science with science. They did it with the tobacco industry in the 50s and 60s and 70s, where one side would be arguing the science that smoking is good for you — and the doctors used to say that, by the way.

Dr Bill Clearfield: And then the other side... I have an old — I have it framed in my office — it's an old magazine advertisement that says "2,649 doctors say Camels are it." It says it's toasted, it soothes your throat as it goes down.

Lisa: Oh, exactly. And that should be a humbling reminder that we don't get everything right, and that there are lobby groups that are there to push the tobacco industry, in that case, to refute the science of the ones who were saying it was bad. And now we know. And we can laugh at that and look back and go, "Oh well, they were just dumb." No, we're doing the same things now.

Dr Bill Clearfield: We do the same thing. I got dragged into the hydroxychloroquine thing before the ivermectin. One of my hats was, I was the executive director of the American Osteopathic Society of Rheumatic Diseases. Rheumatic diseases used a lot of hydroxychloroquine for 45 years before someone decided that — again, it's an anti-inflammatory and it's got a lot of anticytokine activity — that it might be useful against COVID. And so the governor of Nevada one day just declared that he banned it from being prescribed for COVID.

Lisa: Wow. What? And it was banned here too.

Dr Bill Clearfield: Yeah. First of all, the guy — I don't know, did you ever see Seinfeld? Remember Seinfeld?

Lisa: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dr Bill Clearfield: Remember his father, Morty? That's who the governor of Nevada at the time reminded me of. Whatever Morty Seinfeld determined, right? So us in the Nevada Osteopathic Medical Association, we ended up suing him, and they just let it run out after four months. And the only ones who made out on that at all were the lawyers. But at least they didn't keep renewing it.

Lisa: And with all of this — when do politicians start mixing into the medical? Not to mention the V-word, because it's a complete disaster if you think about it.

Dr Bill Clearfield: What other entity have you ever run across where they say, "No, you can't do anything, just go home until you're sick enough to then come back so you can die"? No prevention, nothing. My mother kept things to herself. She had some eye problems, she went to an eye doctor for, and he sent her for a chest x-ray for some reason. She never smoked in her life, but she spent a lot of time in casinos. She had stage four lung cancer in both lungs. So they sent her to an oncologist, and he tells her she's got four weeks to live. So she calls me — I was living in Wilkes-Barre then, they were in Philadelphia, about 150 miles away at the time, so I wasn't right there — and she says, "I feel fine. They're telling me I'm sick, I'm going to die in a month." She says, "I told that doctor, I'm going to live longer than you just to spite you." And she did, actually.

Lisa: And I've got similar stories. Mum was told so many times that she's got weeks to live and she's dying, whatever, and she's outlived some of those doctors as well.

Dr Bill Clearfield: At the time, I'd just begun my anti-aging studies, and so I ran across — his name was Mark Rosenberg, he was an integrative oncologist in Miami. So we consulted with him, he gave me a whole long list of things to do for her. We did about a third of them, because she wasn't going to do all of it. And every once in a while I'd get a call or a letter or a note from the oncologist: "She's still here, I can't explain it." A year later, two and a half years later — she was supposed to be dead in four weeks. And he got hit by a car, so she did outlive him.

Lisa: I don't know, that's not nice, but... and this is the thing, it's not always that that doctor knows everything on the planet. And certainly now — the medical knowledge, I had a statistic recently, is doubling every 72 days. And so there's no person on the planet that's across everything.

Lisa: On that point, I did want to dive briefly into — we probably need to do a complete other session on this one — but thyroid. Thyroid is an area that I've been learning a lot from you on. Things like Hashimoto's and how you do a thyroid workup has been a real eye-opener for me, and all the nuance of the conversation. Because you go to the normal doctor, they'll do a TSH and they go, "Yeah, no, you're fine, your TSH is normal." What's wrong with that picture?

Dr Bill Clearfield: Well, again, someone came up with sort of a semi-artificial test and said, "This is it, this is the gold standard, and don't do anything else." The endocrinologists — and they were unanimous about it. You can put 10 doctors in a room, they're not unanimous about anything, but this they were unanimous about. They decided that this one test called TSH, thyroid stimulating hormone, which is the pituitary secretion for the thyroid molecule — that would be the gold standard, and that's it, you don't do anything else. Well, that didn't quite work out.

Lisa: But they still do that.

Dr Bill Clearfield: Well, they still do. I mean, I do it as part of what we do.

Lisa: One of many.

Dr Bill Clearfield: There is some utility to it. So TSH, thyroid stimulating hormone, is generated in the pituitary, which is stimulated from the hypothalamus, from thyroid releasing hormone, and there's like a negative feedback. So if you have enough thyroid circulating in your system, it will tell the hypothalamus to shut your thyroid down, and it will slow that down until there's not enough, and then it'll tell your brain to ramp it up. So the number that you get is an inverse. If you have a high number, that means you're running low; if you have a low number, you're running high. And I can't tell you — at least once a week somebody will come in here and says, "I got my lab test and it said it was running high, so I stopped taking it."

Lisa: Yeah, wrong way around.

Dr Bill Clearfield: Wrong way around. And I try to explain, but a lot of people don't listen. So up until about 50 or 60 years ago, maybe 70, most thyroid issues were hereditary. It was from Mum, Dad, Grandma, Grandpa, usually on your mother's side. It was very rarely from any type of outside influences. In the last 50 or 60 or 70 years — I think the last count I saw was over 100,000 chemicals have been invented and dumped into the world, and our bodies just can't handle it. It's just not handleable.

Dr Bill Clearfield: Now, where I live, I don't know if it's maybe that I know more than I did 15, 20 years ago and I'm sort of acutely aware of it, but it seems that a third of the patients who come in to see me, new ones, don't know they have some sort of autoimmune thyroid issue.

Lisa: Yeah.

Dr Bill Clearfield: And I don't know — there was a lot of mining that went on around here, there still is. We're downwind from where the nuclear tests were done in the 50s and 60s. Remember, they were just setting off bombs all over. For a long while they would do it in the air, and then, "Oh no, that's wrecking the air, we'll just do it underground." And we're sort of downwind from that. So I don't know, but it seems to me — and maybe it's just what I do — but there seems to be an awful lot of autoimmune issues, especially thyroid issues. And once you start with one, it's a continuum. They all come from the same place, we just give them different names. If you have dry eyes, we call it Sjögren's syndrome. If you have the thyroid issue, it's Hashimoto's thyroiditis. If it's in your lungs and internal organs, it's lupus. If it's in the intestines, it's Crohn's disease.

Lisa: Yeah, we like to label things.

Dr Bill Clearfield: It all comes from the same thing, and it's that our normal cells are fooled — it gets misrepresented by things that look like it. And again, as genius doctors, like I mentioned about the low-fat diets — well, we go back earlier, after World War II, two events happened almost simultaneously. There was a scientific duo, one was named Wolff, one was named Chaikoff, and they did experiments with rats where they gave them radioactive iodine, which of course killed their thyroid. And they extrapolated that to food-grade iodine, and they decided that iodine was a poison. And that's where the iodophobia came from. They convinced whatever was the FDA at that time to take iodine out of the food supply. That was number one.

Lisa: Oh, well done.

Dr Bill Clearfield: Number two, just to add insult to injury, was that the big cities in the US decided they were going to fluorinate water, put fluoride in water.

Lisa: We've done that here. We're doing it now, because it protects — it does protect against dental caries, but unfortunately...

Dr Bill Clearfield: But iodine and fluoride are in the same chemical — if you ever look at a periodic table, the chemical table, they're in the same classification. They're very similar. And when our body comes into contact with fluoride, it recognises it as iodine, until it realises that it's not, and then it sends the cavalry out, which is our immune system, to go and kill it. Well, it kills everything.

Lisa: And if you leave it alone...

Dr Bill Clearfield: Right, if you leave it alone, it'll take about five years and your thyroid's gone. And anybody who's had...

Dr Bill Clearfield: ...a totally destroyed thyroid. It's a difficult and miserable thing to have to live with.

Lisa: Exactly. And we do it on a population-wide basis here. We stick it in the drinking water still.

Dr Bill Clearfield: If you're only looking at TSH... I have another video, actually, of a patient. She came in here — for 10 years she was schizophrenic, she was in and out of psychiatric hospitals, she was doing antisocial things, we'll just leave it at that. She was disrespecting her family, we'll just call it that. And she came in here for Botox, actually, because I do that stuff too.

Dr Bill Clearfield: So I'm just asking her some questions, because there's certain characteristics that you can see. The edges of the eyebrows, if you have low thyroid, will come out — she didn't have any there. Her fingernails were kind of cracked and broken, and she had some white spots on her fingernails, which are actually zinc deficiency, which you see in thyroid issues also. So I started asking her the thyroid questions: dry skin, dry hair, I can see her fingernails, do you have constipation issues — which was terrible, she said. She'd gained weight and she couldn't lose it. She was tired all day long and slept 12 hours a day and was still tired.

Dr Bill Clearfield: And she says, "I've had my..." I said, "Well, that sounds like a thyroid thing to me." "I've had my thyroid checked and it's always been normal." So she brought me the TSH. So the number 0.4 to 4.5 is considered normal, and she had three or four of them and they were 2.6, 2.8, 2.3 — perfectly fine.

Dr Bill Clearfield: So we ran everything. We ran the full panel. So T3, which is the part that's usable, and we ran the free T3, which is the part that is not bound to protein. So hormones, when they're produced, are bound to protein, and even though you could have a lot of hormone, if it's bound to protein it doesn't work.

Lisa: We need to know what the free part is.

Dr Bill Clearfield: Yeah, okay. And we ran a free T4, which is the storage unit, and the thyroid antibodies. The thyroid antibodies were unmeasurable. It was greater than 2,200 on one and greater than 3,000 on the other.

Lisa: Very sick.

Dr Bill Clearfield: So I said, "Well, I think this looks like your problem here," right? And TSH 2.46, you know.

Lisa: Wow.

Dr Bill Clearfield: So she slowly came around. We use plant sterols, which are the fat from plants. They actually act like Pac-Man in your system and kind of gobble up the antibodies. Depending on where you start, they either work quickly or not. And again, depending on which lab — there's two main lab arrays. One has a normal number of nine. Remember, I told you this lady was greater than 3,000. And the other one has greater than 34. So if we're on the nine scale and you're at 11, we jump on that right away, because if we leave it alone, we know what's going to happen.

Lisa: Wow.

Dr Bill Clearfield: Normally, somebody comes in and they don't know it, it's usually 200 to 400.

Lisa: Wow.

Dr Bill Clearfield: And my world record is 4,226 on the TPO, and that was a guy who's still with me. It's been eight years, nine years now. Last time we did it, it was 101. They go to the endocrinologist — "there's nothing, it doesn't matter, and there's nothing you can do about it." Well, that's not true, and it does matter.

Lisa: It definitely matters.

Dr Bill Clearfield: They're extremely sensitive to gluten, the protein made from fake wheat. So we emphasise it — I can't follow them around, but we emphasise it over and over again, a strict gluten-free diet. You have Judge Judy there where you are?

Lisa: Oh yes, yes, I've seen.

Dr Bill Clearfield: Right, it's a Judge Judy deal. It's a yes or a no. Not "I did it 80 per cent." No. Either you did it or you didn't. So that's a no, right? Gluten must be completely gone. And gluten is a molecular mimic — so this is where the autoimmune goes after dairy, gluten, and what's the other one? There's one other one that's common.

Lisa: Casein.

Dr Bill Clearfield: Yeah, the proteins. It's rye, wheat and triticale — triticale is a combination of rye and wheat. So we usually recommend white flour, white sugar, dairy, those are the bad guys, off the table if you've got Hashimoto's. We actually have a computer programme, we send patients recipes, menus, and they get it every day for a gluten-free diet, probably about 60 days in a row. They'll get different recipes, menus, shopping lists, food pantry lists. So we really emphasise that. And that's one of the good things about computers — it's an aid for us, so it does save us quite a bit of time.

Dr Bill Clearfield: So then we use the plant sterols. That's usually our next line of work. And a lot of these people, their thyroid function is normal. Normal thyroid free T3 — that's the part that does the work — is 2.0 to 4.4. We want it in the 3.2 to 4.4, 4.2, the upper half and upper third. That's where the patients will be feeling good.

Dr Bill Clearfield: And then again, when I do my thyroid lectures I always start with this. Okay, let's say we're at a — next week I'm going to be at the Nevada Osteopathic Medical Association. I call it the white-bread medical guys. They're strictly by the book, right? They don't want to hear any of this. So here's your thyroid lecture: if the TSH is greater than 10 — remember, the higher the number, that means you're low — give them Synthroid. If it's four and a half to 10 and they have symptoms, so the dry skin, right here, that I mentioned, then give them Synthroid. If it's under four and a half, they're crazy, send them to the psychologist. Okay? That's the approach. That's it, lecture's over, right?

Lisa: So wrong. That's nice to know, but there's nothing you can do about it.

Dr Bill Clearfield: Okay, so it's just not so. And do it over and over again. There's five or six big triggers for autoimmune thyroiditis. The reason we emphasise hypothyroid, low thyroid, is because it's 98 per cent of the time that's what it is. And usually by the time they get to us, if they've had a thyroid storm where they had wild, crazy palpitations, hospital, and psychiatric breaks — usually that'll last a couple of months if it's untreated, and then they have a crash, and then they become hypothyroid. So it goes from one to the other. By the time they get to us, that's usually what it is.

Lisa: And you had a good analogy — you said something like, the thyroid is your gas pedal.

Dr Bill Clearfield: Yeah, it is your gas pedal. So if it's foot to the floor, you're burning up through things. So one of the first questions I ask — patients will come, "I've had a thyroid problem for 30 years." I'll say, "Okay, what does a thyroid do?" And you'll get all sorts of answers. I said, "You get four words, and the first two are 'it's your...'" — and you already mentioned it, so it's your gas pedal. That's what it is. And then the light goes on. Okay, so this is our energy, this is our fuel, right? Too much, you're going to be speeding until you crash. Not enough, you're going to be dragging around, right? And that's what it is.

Dr Bill Clearfield: And then the TSH, our boogeyman — that's our detective. It detects how much is in your system. If you don't have enough, your brain's going to tell you to make more. If you have too much, your brain's going to tell you to make less. And so that number that you get is an inverse: the high number means you're low, the low number means you're high.

Dr Bill Clearfield: The part that does the work — and there's actually four thyroid molecules that are produced: one, two, three and four. The numbers are the number of iodines attached to a protein called tyrosine. So if you ever buy a thyroid supplement, it'll always have tyrosine in it. That's the protein that makes it. It actually makes one, two, three and four. Synthroid, or levothyroxine, the gold standard, is only T4. It also makes calcium, and there's a need for magnesium for it to function properly. So there are some synthetics — one of the best ones we can't get anymore — that actually has some calcium and magnesium in it. And so that's one of the side effects of Synthroid or levothyroxine: long-term use is osteoporosis. You lose calcium, you lose bone. Well, it's because you're not replacing it. That's why that happens, because that's what the thyroid makes, the thyroid makes that.

Lisa: Wow.

Dr Bill Clearfield: That's part of it. So we do the free T3, the free T4. There's also something called reverse T3, which is a T3 — three iodine molecules — but it's upside down. And that happens when there's some sort of inflammatory process going on, some sort of disruption. Ninety per cent of the time it's from cortisol dysfunction. It could be other things, but it's a cortisol dysfunction. And it's thyroid that's not usable, it's inert.

Lisa: Yeah.

Dr Bill Clearfield: Now, if your doctor orders a total T3 and you get a number that's normal, you don't know whether it's that reverse T3 or the usable part. We don't know. I mean, if the number's high, well then you can guess that it's high, but again, you still don't know which one it is. So you really need to cone down and get the reverse T3 and the free T3.

Lisa: So how can we get this reverse T3 to come down? Because I was seeing that pattern a lot.

Dr Bill Clearfield: Yeah, so for the most part, 90 per cent of the time the reverse T3 is actually a reflection of cortisol, or stress hormone, abnormality. So we go through that sort of chain. I used to — I don't do it as much anymore — I used to do that four-point cortisol test, you do that one, those graphs. Well, the reverse T3 is actually a pretty good check on that.

Lisa: And I learned that from you. I'd never heard that before, that that was related, and that's a pretty good check on that.

Dr Bill Clearfield: So we'll start, if that's high — normal on our lab is about eight to 25 is normal — but we'll start seeing cortisol abnormality symptoms when the reverse T3 is over 15, for the most part. And again, that's the reason we have the patients here. We're not just looking at numbers and saying, "Okay, you have to do this." I mean, that would be a lot easier, but...

Dr Bill Clearfield: That's not what you're supposed to do, right? So symptoms, especially when the reverse T3 is over 15, are things like: when you wake up in the morning you're tired; in the middle of the morning you need something to keep you going, a coffee or tea, or I don't know if you guys have Red Bull there, but you might have some stimulant, unfortunately; in the afternoon the patients need a nap, or they take naps; by dinner time they're exhausted; later at night they get a second wind and that's when they're most awake, eight, nine, ten o'clock, and then they have trouble sleeping. And there's usually sugar or salt cravings with it.

Dr Bill Clearfield: A couple of other symptoms — there's something called a Sergent's white line, if you've heard of this, where you have the patient lay down and I used to use the back of a percussion hammer, or you can even take a pen, and just run a line from the top of the pubic bone to the belly button. It should turn red and it should dissipate after a little while, but if it stays after two, three minutes, that's a positive. That's only positive about 25% of the time. The other thing is, if you shine a light in the patient's pupil, it should contract. If it doesn't, if it dilates, that's also a cortisol abnormality. So those are things to look for, and it's pretty accurate. We correlate it probably 90% of the time, and most of the other time it's if their blood sugars are abnormal, which is also an inflammatory issue anyway, and sometimes if they've had recent acute injuries. But for the most part it's a cortisol abnormality.

Dr Bill Clearfield: So that's how I separated it out symptom-wise. Thyroid patients, the fatigue is constant all day, and the cortisol one comes and goes. They wake up tired, they get a wind, then it comes back again, then they get another wind, and it comes and goes.

Lisa: So you'd be, every thyroid patient or someone you suspect of thyroid, you'd be also looking at the cortisol. Do you also look at the microbiome or anything?

Dr Bill Clearfield: That comes next, that's like the second, the third.

Lisa: Yep, yeah.

Dr Bill Clearfield: Unless it's obvious — they come in and they have all sorts of dysbiosis and they've had it for years — then we'll go for it. But if it's not obvious, again, those tests are expensive, insurances don't pay for it, and so we try not to spend their money unless we really have to. And a lot of times we can kind of pick out a lot of the things anyway. After you do this a while, as you know, you start to recognise patterns and they become fairly obvious. Sometimes you're fooled, but not often. I mean, I'm not going to be able to tell you which parasite or bacteria you have, that's often a microbiome test, but we can start probiotics, prebiotics, we can have them use fermented foods, we can do a lot of the things that you do. I'm certainly not going to give them antibiotics or antifungal agents unless we have that in hand. But a lot of the practical things, yes.

Dr Bill Clearfield: And so let's go back to thyroid again. Remember, cruciferous vegetables — broccoli, kales, cauliflower — which are good if you're postmenopausal, because they're...

Lisa: Yep, right.

Dr Bill Clearfield: But for thyroid it's the opposite. It actually slows the thyroid down. They have what are called goitrogens.

Lisa: But this is only at higher levels, isn't it? Because I've been taught that the cauliflower, the Brussels sprouts and broccoli and so on are only really problematic in really massive doses, and that they're okay at food-level doses. You don't agree?

Dr Bill Clearfield: I've come to the conclusion that they're usually okay if you cook them, so you shouldn't have them raw. I don't know who's having raw Brussels sprouts. Potatoes, sweet potatoes are on that list — I don't know who's going to have raw sweet potatoes. But again, I have patients who come in and say they have a spinach salad every day, and they have thyroid antibodies off the chart. Well, maybe if you could — and again, it's not going to cure anything, I don't think, but every little bit helps — so if we could slow it down to three or four days a week, that would probably be a help.

Lisa: So a little bit. Yeah, yeah. And working with... Now, Dr Bill, we've got so much more to talk about. I think we need a part two for this. I would love to do a deeper dive next time, if you have time for me, into the hormones. I want to look at growth hormone and all the sex hormones, testosterone, those things for men and for women, and maybe dive deeper into there. So I think we need to do a part two, if you're up for it. And where can people find you? So, YouTube — everybody go and subscribe to Dr Bill on YouTube, because...

Dr Bill Clearfield: YouTube, Clearfield Medical Group, right on YouTube. Our website is drclearfield.net.

Lisa: That's it, yeah, .net.

Dr Bill Clearfield: And aosrd.org, and you can find all of our integrative medicine seminars going back — we've been doing this since 2020. We're there every Tuesday. I've only missed one in almost, coming up on four years now.

Lisa: And I want to join that, I want to join that and be a part of it. Unfortunately it's in the middle of the bloody day in New Zealand when I've got clinic and things. But can we get the recordings if we can't...?

Dr Bill Clearfield: That's what I said — aosrd.org, webinar, they're all there. They're all there.

Lisa: Yeah, and I would love to share on there at some point, because there's so much. I think that's a great group. I love the people on there. I've learned lots already from it.

Dr Bill Clearfield: And we're really expanding. We have a whole group of Filipino doctors now that joined us.

Lisa: Wow.

Dr Bill Clearfield: So we're really happy, and actually one of them is going to be presenting this week, so this is the first time we're getting one of our new Filipino friends to present.

Lisa: Well, I'll try and make it.

Dr Bill Clearfield: Just to give you an idea, so this week, I don't know if you know that there was a new fatty acid that has been...

Lisa: Fatty15.

Dr Bill Clearfield: Yeah, that's the talk.

Lisa: Oh, I definitely have to listen to that, because Fatty15 — I've had that in Mum's protocol, and I've been trying to reach out to them and get it down here because I want to import it, but they don't respond to me, unfortunately. I had them on the show once as well. But yeah, there's some pretty powerful research coming out about Fatty15, so very excited about it.

Dr Bill Clearfield: So that's this week. And we've had a lot of the leading lights in integrative medicine and anti-aging medicine. Jim — I don't know if you know him.

Lisa: Yeah, yeah, I've had Jim on, yeah, yep.

Dr Bill Clearfield: How about Jacob Teitelbaum? He was the father of chronic fatigue syndrome. He wrote about chronic fatigue in 1975.

Lisa: Wow, I've heard of him but I haven't met him.

Dr Bill Clearfield: I mean, these people command $20,000 to give a talk for an hour and a half, and we have them on for...

Lisa: I know, I know. There are some amazing people. And check out Dr Elizabeth Harris, because she's my favourite doctor in the entire world. You should get her on if you can. I mean, she's a busy lady, but...

Dr Bill Clearfield: Get me, get me, we'll get it off.

Lisa: Yeah, she's good. She's good.

Dr Bill Clearfield: You love her, okay.

Lisa: Dr Bill, thank you so much for your time today. It's been an absolute pleasure.

Dr Bill Clearfield: Okay, thank you. I've had a great time.