In this episode of The Dr. Hedberg Show, I interview Dr. Terry Wahls in a discussion about how to heal Multiple Sclerosis. We had an excellent discussion about how she overcame Multiple Sclerosis, her research into MS, The Wahls Protocol Diet, the causes of MS, how the gut and the microbiome influences autoimmune disease, the Paleo diet compared to the Wahls Protocol and much more.
If you have MS or know someone who does, please share this episode and transcript of the interview below. It may be the turning point for you or a loved one by following The Wahls Protocol.
Dr. Hedberg: Well, welcome everyone to the Dr. Hedberg Show. This is Dr. Hedberg, and I'm very excited today to have Dr. Terry Wahls on the show. So, Dr. Wahls is a Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of Iowa. She's the author of the book, "The Wahls Protocol: How I Beat Progressive MS Using Paleo Principles and Functional Medicine," and also the cookbook, "The Wahls Protocol Cooking for Life: The Revolutionary Modern Paleo Plan to Treat All Chronic Autoimmune Conditions." You can learn more about her work from her website. It's terrywahls.com. That's terrywahls.com. And she hosts "The Wahls Protocol Seminar" every August where anyone can learn how to implement the protocol with ease and success. And she's on social media. You can find her on Facebook, Terry Wahls, M.D., Instagram, Dr. Terry Wahls, and on Twitter, @TerryWahls. And you can learn more about her MS clinical trials by reaching out to her team via this email, it's msdietstudy@healthcare.uiowa.edu, and I will paste that link and e-mail on drhedberg.com in case you wanna contact her that way. So, Dr. Wahls, welcome to the show.
Dr. Wahls: Hey. Thank you so much for having me.
Dr. Hedberg: Great. So, just for the people out there who don't really know your story, can you tell us a little bit about what you went through and your MS story?
Dr. Wahls: Sure. So, I'm an academic internal medicine doc, very conventionally trained and conventionally practicing, being very skeptical of diets, supplements, complementary and alternative medicine. But God has a way of teaching us, so in 2000, I was diagnosed with relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis on the basis of a history of dim vision 13 years earlier, and a new problem with my left leg. I had lesions in my spinal cord. So, I knew I wanted to see the best people in the country, take the newest drugs, and so I went to the Cleveland Clinic and saw their best people, took the newest drugs, and steadily declined. I'd had one relapse in the next year involving my right hand. And I continued to gradually decline.
By 2003, I had declined enough that I now needed a tilt-recline wheelchair. I took Mitoxantrone. I adopted, yeah, actually the year earlier, the paleo diet after being a vegetarian for 20 years, but as I had already mentioned, I did continue to decline and was in the wheelchair, took Mitoxantrone, continued to decline, then took Tysabri, continued to decline, then was placed on CellCept. And at that point, in 2004, it's quite clear to me that I'm likely to become bedridden, quite possibly demented, and quite possibly suffer from intractable pain related to poorly controlled trigeminal neuralgia.
And so, I start reading the basic science again, and I began experimenting using a variety of supplements targeting my mitochondria. And what I discovered is that my fatigue is somewhat less, the speed of my decline is slowed, and I'm really immensely grateful because now my docs have told me I have secondary progressive MS, that there's no more spontaneous recoveries, and so I'm grateful just to slow my decline.
Now, the summer of '07, I'm so weak I cannot sit up anymore. I have a zero gravity chair, where my knees are higher than my nose. A staff, resident clinic's there. I work in the Institutional Review Board reviewing research protocols that way. And I have another chair at home. And it's getting more and more difficult to function. My chief of staff tells me that he's re-assigned me to the traumatic brain injury clinic come January, and I realized what he's really doing is putting me in a circumstance where I'll have to finally take medical retirement because that's a job that I won't be able to do.
So, you know, things looked very bleak in the summer of 2007. But that summer, I discovered electrical stimulation of muscles, and I get my physical therapist to add that to my exercise program. And I discovered the Institute for Functional Medicine. And I take their course on nerve protection, which by the way is pretty tough in the midst of my brain fog. But I get through that. I have a longer list of supplements.
And then in the fall of '07, I had this really, you know, radical idea that, you know, I should be redesigning my paleo diet based on the supplements that I was taking to maximize those particular nutrients. And if I redid my diet that way, I'd probably pick up more supplemental nutrients that we haven't even identified yet that are really going to be helpful for my brain. So, that's more research. It takes a few months to get that figured out. And I remembered December 26th, I'm really starting this new way of eating.
And so, the middle of January, I now go to the traumatic brain injury clinic. That first week, I'm just watching my colleagues, you know, run the clinic. Then the next week, so now I've had a month of my new eating plan, I've had a couple of months of the e-stim, and I discovered that actually I can do this task. I can, you know, drive my wheelchair to the clinic and stand up, examine folks, sit down, make their notes, and at the end of the week, I'm like, "Well, actually I could do that." And I was quite surprised. The end of three months, I'm beginning to walk around the hospital with a cane, and at six months, I'm walking around the hospital without a cane. At nine months...you know, and I would say I'm still just taking each day at a time. I don't really know what this means because I've fully accepted that progressive MS is progressive, that there's no recovery that's possible. And so, I'm not sure what this stuff means.
And then at nine months, I get on my bike, and it's the first time I've tried to do that in over six years, and I bike around the block. You know, my kids are crying, my wife is crying, I'm crying, and that's when it's very clear to me that the conventional understanding of progressive multiple sclerosis and probably relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis is incomplete. And then at 12 months, I do a 20-mile bike ride with my family. So, this really changes how I'm thinking about disease and health. It changes how I'm practicing in my primary care clinics with the residents and then in traumatic brain injury clinic. And so, I am focusing more and more on diet and lifestyle. And of course, this will ultimately change the focus of my research as well.
Dr. Hedberg: So, quite a story. Now, there had to have been a period where when you first got the diagnosis, were you...do you think that that was a traumatic experience for you getting that and experiencing it, and how did you deal with the trauma of finding out you had MS?
Dr. Wahls: Well, you know, before I entered medical school, I was an athlete. I did some long distance running, and I was a black belt in taekwondo. In fact, I competed nationally in full contact sparring, getting a bronze medal in the national competition for the Pan-American trials. So, I always valued physical activity and athletic activity even during medical school and with my kids. We're physically very, very active.
And so, when I was diagnosed, that was difficult. And part of me was relieved, like, "Okay. I'm not being a slug after all. This explains why my workouts have been getting suddenly more difficult." So, there's a part of me that was relieved that way. And then being sort of the, you know, very ambitious individual, once I was diagnosed, I did what many physicians do. I started reading the scientific literature, and that's when I saw that, you know, within 10 years of diagnosis, a third will need a wheelchair, walker or cane, and one half will be unable to work due to severe fatigue. And so, I was just getting more and more upset. My wife sat me down and said, "Terry, you got to stop reading the literature. And it's just getting you upset. We'll find the best people in the country. Let them take care of you." You know, and actually, that's part of how I, you know, started at the Cleveland Clinic and gave them all of my responsibility and let go of reading the literature.
But then, as I was getting steadily worse despite seeing the best people, despite taking the newest drugs...and I'm having to reimagine myself first as no longer an athlete, then I was no longer able to do the activities of daily life and contribute to, you know, the various family responsibilities and having to reimagine like, you know, how am I gonna teach my kids resilience, and fortitude, perseverance? I thought I was gonna be doing that by teaching them athletics and wilderness travel, but that was no longer possible. And so, those were very challenging times because I had to keep reimagining who I was and how I could contribute to family life, how I could contribute to my children's growth.
Dr. Hedberg: Right. And this was a huge transition obviously with your conventional medical training, learning about functional medicine and nutrition and you're doing that in your clinics now, have you...and you talked a little bit about this at IFM, can you tell everyone just kind of the pushback that you have from conventional medicine?
Dr. Wahls: Sure, sure. So, my colleagues are just thrilled to see me suddenly walking around again. And so, they're very excited. My chair of medicine is so impressed, and he is actually a rheumatologist. So, he gives me the job of getting a case report written, and I go like,
