Today’s episode is going to be really helpful especially for any moms who have children struggling with a variety of chronic health problems. Dr. Jaban Moore is a national board-certified chiropractic physician and an acupuncturist as well. He practices functional medicine looking specifically for the root causes of illness and treating them through natural protocols.
Dr. Jaban knows better than anyone that reversing chronic disease takes time, persistence, and a lot of detective work. He uses a wide range of tools to find out what’s really contributing to chronic health conditions and healing the cause, not just the symptoms.
Dr. Jaban Moore on Chronic Disease, Leaky Gut, & Thyroid Issues
Problems like Lyme disease and chronic infections are on the rise and can be tough to beat. It’s important to look at health issues from every angle and get to the root causes. Dr. Jaban’s postdoctoral training includes true cellular healing, chiropractic plus kinesiology, applied kinesiology, clinical kinesiology, acupuncture, bioresonance therapy, Sacro Occipital Technique, nutrition rehabilitation, functional medicine, blood laboratory analysis, and live cell microscopy. And if that’s not enough, he also trained with several Lyme-specific and parasitology experts.
I have a feeling I could talk to Dr. Jaban all day!
In This Episode You’ll Learn
- common reasons why low-level chronic disease is on the rise
- root causes of food allergies in children
- how toxins in our everyday environments undermine our health
- the difference between functional medicine and conventional approaches
- the connection between parasites and food allergies
- why Lyme tends to run in families
- live cell microscopy: how a visual analysis of your blood can reveal leaky gut, Lyme disease, candida, and more
- is fasting for everyone? (and how to do it right)
- how to be your own health advocate
- and more!
Resources We Mention
- Dr. Jaban Moore
- Facebook group: True Healing Strategies
- Book: Why Do I Still Have Thyroid Symptoms When My Lab Tests Are Normal? by Dr. Datis Kharrazian
- Dr. Alan Christianson
- Turmeric
- Apex Energetics Repairvite
- True Cellular Detox
- EWG Report, Pollution in Minority Newborns
- 510: Maggie Berghoff on Practical Tips for Reducing Inflammation
- 715: How to Know if You Have Inflammation and Lower Your Toxic Burden With Maggie Berghoff
- 262: Dr. Andrew Weil on Integrative Medicine, Reducing Inflammation & Most Important Factors for Health
- 102: How to Stay Safe During Tick Season & Avoid Chronic Lyme Disease with Dr. Jay Davidson
- 134: Five Benefits of Fasting, Autophagy, Diet Variation & Cellular Healing with Dr. Daniel Pompa
- 43: How to Get a Correct Thyroid Diagnosis
- 118: An At-Home Approach to Balancing Thyroid Hormones with McCall McPherson
- 155: Thriving With Food Allergies or Intolerance and Crushing Life With the Paleo Chef
- How to Prevent Tick Bites (+ Safe Tick Removal)
- Can Your Food Affect Mental Health?
- Intermittent Fasting: Can Skipping Meals Make You Healthier?
- How to Do a Ketogenic Diet (& Is It Safe for Women?)
Have you ever tried any of these therapies? What would you ask Dr. Jaban? And please, take two minutes to leave a review on iTunes. I value knowing what you think and this helps other moms find the podcast as well.
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Child: Welcome to my Mommy’s podcast.
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Katie: Hello, and welcome to the “Healthy Moms Podcast.” I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com, and today’s episode is going to be really helpful for moms, and especially any moms who have children who are struggling with a variety of different problems. And I am here with Dr. Jaban Moore who is a national board-certified chiropractic physician. He’s also passed the National Board for acupuncture. He practices functional medicine looking specifically for the root causes of illness and treating through natural protocols. His bio is super impressive. His postdoctoral training includes true cellular healing, chiropractic plus kinesiology, applied kinesiology, clinical kinesiology, acupuncture, bioresonance therapy, Sacro Occipital Technique, nutrition rehabilitation, functional medicine, blood laboratory analysis and live cell microscopy. Wow, that was a tongue tie. He’s also trained with several Lyme-specific and parasitology experts and we’re gonna go deep on that today. Dr. Moore, welcome and thanks for being here.
Dr. Moore: Well, thanks for having me on.
Katie: Yeah, so we chatted briefly just before we started recording, and just hearing a little bit about your practice and specifically, the children you’re dealing with, I am so glad you’re here to spread the word on this, but I think I’d be remiss if we didn’t start with your own story, and I think your mom’s story as well, because we’ve chatted about this a little bit in person and I think it’s a really powerful story. So can you start there with how you got into this in the first place?
Dr. Moore: Well, when I was actually very young my mom got sick. She was in an auto accident and a long story short, is in the ER they asked her if she had diabetes and she said “No.” They ran the test three different times and finally came back and said, “Yes, you do.” By this point, she was on 20 medications. She was so sick, she could barely get out of bed. She’d gained a hundred pounds. She had ulcers in her stomach, her thyroid wasn’t working. She was having high blood pressure, high cholesterol, anxiety, depression, the list just goes forever along with the symptoms that came from not getting to her root cause to what doctor she had. So, at one point, my mom told me, “You need to go ahead and learn how to do the checkbook. Your dad’s dyslexic, he can’t do it, so I think I’m gonna die.” Like she just told me that she was done, basically, and I was 10 years old.
So, from that point on, I went from being this terrible kid in school to basically never getting in trouble again, and it set me on my path to become the doctor I am today, to try and help people find these root causes so no one else has to go through what she’s gone through. She’s now had to have her thyroid removed from thyroid cancer, which we believe may have been a autoimmune thyroid before, but I, unfortunately, was not in practice when that happened, I didn’t know. And then when I got into college, I actually was diagnosed with Lyme disease, which is how I got into the chronic infection side of what I do. And when I was in college, I just started hurting all over. And I didn’t know why. And then it led to hormone dysfunction and fatigue, and I went and searched for months to looking for an answer and could not find an answer to save my life. I was starting to get discouraged, I was starting to feel a little bit depressed.
And finally, I ran into a doctor at a functional medicine conference that I was at for chiropractic, and he said, “Well, maybe you have Lyme.” And I went back to his practice and he did some different questionnaires and some different other testing because Lyme is mostly a clinical diagnosis, the blood tests just aren’t very good for it. And he started me on a protocol, and within about four weeks, my life changed. I felt so much better, my hormones were coming back. And just to give a little history on me, I was a all-American college athlete, and by the time that I got to his office, it hurt just to go to the gym to do light squats. So, I’m so thankful Dr. Lindsey was able to help me out.
Katie: Wow. And I think unfortunately, this is something, at least from the emails I’m getting, that we’re seeing more and more of. I think people understand pretty well the idea of acute infections, and even the normal medical system handles those pretty well. They respond really well to trauma and acute problems, but I feel like the chronic infection and chronic disease model is still one that a lot of medical professionals are struggling with, especially in the conventional medical world. And I know that you see every day people with these types of really severe chronic infections and chronic diseases, so why do you think we’re seeing such a rise in these to begin with right now?
Dr. Moore: Well, what a question. It’s so multi-faceted. Just to start, let’s say, it is Lyme that we’re talking about. One, they’re finding that Lyme can be carried by multiple different insects and those insects don’t carry one infection, they carry numerous infections. So when they bite you, they can inject into you 6 or 12 different possible infections. So that’s one thing you’ve got to look into. The other thing is, we are constantly living in a toxic environment from the fact that a lot of our foods still carry pesticides on them, even when we eat them, or some of the things as simple as toothpaste. If you look at the side of the toothpaste label, a lot of times it says, “Call poison control if swallowed,” well, how many of us don’t swallow any of that at all in our lifetime? Look at the paint that’s been on the walls for, well, my parents’ generation, the lead-paint generation.
So we’re just swimming in this toxic environment. Even so many of my patients come in and like, “No, no, I do a really good job,” like the really smart patients that I have. I mean, I have some amazing moms that come in that are looking out every possible way they can for their kids. I go, “Do you drink coffee?” “Yeah.” “Do you go to Starbucks?” “Yeah.” “Do you drink out of the plastic top of that cup?” “Yeah.” And you can start hearing them starting to figure this out because they know not to drink out of plastic. But when you superheat the top of these plastic cups, you’re getting some of that plastic into your body, which can be a hormone dysregulating substance, and that starts to cause this cascade that leads to sickness in your body.
So, whether it’s the toxins in our environment, the infections in our world because those infections, those bacteria, which is what Lyme is, we’ve been using antibiotics on them for 50 years now. So we’re killing off all the bacteria that our antibiotics work on, and these bacteria are getting stronger and stronger and stronger, which is why we keep seeing the rise of antibacterial resistant bacteria. And then the other side of it is if you ever listen to Doctor Clean Heart, he’s trying to get the word out huge. EMF is another giant piece of the puzzle, which is from all of our electronics. And they’re finding in some studies that that can cause our immune systems to be subdued a little bit. So it’s so multi-faceted.
Katie: I think that’s such a great point because I have to think, at the end of the day, like our bodies are designed to be able to handle things like infections for the most part in a perfect world. Like, we have a great immune system, it’s amazing our bodies are incredible, but when you’ve got all these, not just one, but all these factors constantly bombarding the body that does do things like suppress the immune system and suppress our body’s natural ability to recover, and I feel like that’s the beauty of functional medicine, at least from my understanding, is that you guys are looking at the root cause and then supporting the body and recovery versus just trying to treat the actual infection in isolation. Am I kind of understanding the model correctly?
Dr. Moore: Yes, so we’re not just doing the, you know, I’ll say it again….. We’re looking at it, like you said, at the root cause, so what started this journey off for you? Was it the lead that you got from your mom? Or was it the tick bite, because wherever that started it, you’ve got to go and remove that source. And then from there, sometimes the body is broken down, so many of my patients walk in with a laundry list of diagnoses. And I kind of just smile and then I go, “You’re in the right place. This is what I see every day,” because a lot of times they’re just at their wit’s end, not going somewhere, not being understood. And I go, “Although you may have started with Lyme, now you have Lyme plus autoimmune thyroid, plus genetic snips where your MFTHR, which is a gene that can show you don’t absorb B Vitamins very well.” And the list just goes on and on and on. So I’ve got to support each one of those processes in the body to build this person up so they become strong enough to actually make it through a treatment, and not just get sicker and sicker and sicker like they have before in some of the other treatments they’ve gone through.
Katie: That makes sense. Okay. So I’d love to get in the weeds a little bit on this because I know that there are a lot of moms listening obviously and a lot of…like these moms have children who are struggling with a lot of the things that you see every day. So one of the big ones I get a lot of emails about is food allergies, and we all know from the statistics that these are on the rise and it’s very terrifying, I know, for moms who have to struggle through this with their children. So, I’d love any info that you could share based on, like, the root causes of that, and also anything that you are able to do clinically that seems to be helpful.
Dr. Moore: Absolutely. So first of all, let me tell all the moms out there, there is hope. And I’m gonna kind of go through a little example here. I had a girl come into my office, she was eight years old, and she looked very healthy, but her parents had gotten her to a point where she was only eating between five and eight foods without having major blood and stool type reactions. So she was to a point, with all these food allergies, where her digestive tract was so weakened that she would be bleeding if she got off of these five-day foods. It took me about six months to a year and I know now that she’s down to where the only food she can’t eat often is gluten. Everything else that she eats is okay now.
So we went from five foods you can eat, to one food that you can’t have often, so there’s hope. Now, how I’ve done that is, first of all, we went in and just started to support the digestive tract. I use a few products with a few different herbs in them just to help bring back health to the digestive tract. I had to keep her on that very strict diet for a while because I needed to keep her from flaring up, so we could get some healing going. From there, I went in and supported the liver making sure that phase 1, phase 2 of the liver pathway for detoxification was set up. I had to make sure she was going to the bathroom, number two, every day. And then we went in with some anti-microbial products that I used and started the process of reshaping the gut and what kind of microbes are in there. So we all are very familiar with probiotics, but that’s just one of the kinds of microbe, which is bacteria, and then we’ve got to have the right balance of those bacteria.
We also have to clean up yeast and parasites. Parasites are humongous and getting food allergens back or food allergies to go away so you can get foods back into your diet. And then from there, there’s a lot of viruses, too. So my latest and most strong food allergy myself with almonds and I actually had to take care of a virus to get my almond allergy to go away because it’s really hard to eat healthy when you can’t have almonds because they put almonds in everything in the health food stores.
Katie: Yeah, no kidding, that’s a tough one. And definitely, it seems like tree nut allergies are very much on the rise right now, so that’s really fascinating. So you’re seeing, definitely, a correlation between parasites or chronic infections and food allergies, but to the point that you can actually resolve them?
Dr. Moore: Yeah, I have seen that with that one kid there, but I’ve seen it with numerous other people that I treat, adult and children alike. I’ve seen people come in with food allergens that they’ve had for years. And not that it’s an immediate result, but over a year, we’ve been able to resolve so many of them. My office manager even, who I think you met and we talked a little bit about how she, when we first met, only ate junk food. Now I’ve got her to start eating a little healthier, but she always wants to go get cheese dip, which we both know is not the best food for you. But it used to make her really sick. And now when we go out and splurge just on that random occasion, she’s okay, totally fine, no reaction.
Katie: That’s really fascinating. Is there a crossover there? Because another one I get a lot of emails about is behavioral issues in kids, whether it’s ADD or ADHD or just behavioral problems in general. And I think my audience has pretty well-researched, so a lot of them understand that there’s some connection to the gut. But I’m curious how you’re addressing that and like what kind of cases you’ve seen with children.
Dr. Moore: Yes, so that little girl I talked about when we first started getting her well, and I said she can now eat gluten, not all the time, but every once in a while. If she eats too much gluten, no longer does she have the bloody stool, she has these little freak outs where there she is actually behaving very badly and very emotional. So that’s her response now to gluten. Now I’m not saying that if she ate it every day it wouldn’t go back to a more negative response, but that’s hers. So, so many of the kids that I work with, when you’re eating food allergens and they’re getting into your digestive tract, they create an immune response. That immune response leaves the collateral damage of damaging your digestive tract lining and damaging many of the different gut flora that you need. And that’s where you produce a lot of the dopamine and the serotonin which are neurotransmitters, so they’re what run your brain.
So if you’re damaging your ability to make those, then your kid is not going to be acting very well for a while, so you need to really key in on what triggers the kids to react a certain way. And even outside of food allergies, there’s other things that can trigger kids. And I know your followers are probably very, very into this, but some of the parents that I see we have conversations all the time about, when did we forget that sugar causes kids to act badly, they could be hyper, right? So I recommend all the time, no carbs before lunch.
Katie: That’s a good rule probably for all of us, the “no carbs before lunch.”
Dr. Moore: I’ve got teachers and daycare providers that I’ve told that to and they switched their foods for their daycare or for their classroom, and all of a sudden, their kids all started acting better, I’m like, “That’s a simple one, that’s easy. That’s not the only parasite, the chronic infection.” That’s just, you know, tell them these parents, “Well, my mom told me, I’m not giving you sugar, you’ll act bad.”
Katie: Yeah. And there’s some interesting research there, too. My doctor, Dr. Alan Christianson in Arizona, he’s done research on like the adrenals and cortisol rhythms, and a similar thing, like if you eat healthy carbs at night versus in the morning, that actually supports your natural cortisol rhythm as well and helps for sleep which I know a lot of parents will be really grateful for their kids to sleep a little better, so two reasons to try that one. What about from the mom side, because it seems like these things don’t necessarily happen in isolation, and like can infections be passed from mother to child, or can these things be transmitted through families?
Dr. Moore: Yeah, they absolutely can. I actually never envisioned myself having a practice with a lot of kids. It just wasn’t the direction that my practice started. And then I started getting moms in and I was helping work with them for their Lyme, and then once they started feeling better, they would bring their kids in. So I started seeing this pattern of, “Okay, mom has Lyme, now daughter has Lyme. When mom has Lyme, now son has Lyme.” And I’ve had so many patients go through that, that I started getting into the research, “Okay. Is this possible?” And it has been found in high correlation that if mom has an infection, it’s possible for the children to have infections. Not to mention, some of the places we pick up parasites are outdoors, swimming in lakes, walking around barefoot, playing in the dirt. So if the mom is out there and doing those things, a lot of times the kids are too, so could it be environmental? Possibly. Could it be transferred even in utero? Very possible.
Katie: That’s fascinating. I’ve even seen some information about the potential that like Lyme, for instance, can even be sexually transmitted, like between husband and wife. I don’t know if that’s true across the board, but there seems to be maybe some initial research there because it is an infection, but definitely, it makes sense as far as mom to child and that it could be, like, at least the exposure could be there for all members of the family. So when someone comes in to you and they have one of these potential problems, like you said, it’s very rarely, like a single thing. So where do you start? Is there a kind of a process you normally go through with people to start figuring out what those causes are?
Dr. Moore: Yeah. So when you walk into my office, we go through several different types of testing. One, I got to have you fill out what I call a Metabolic Assessment and that’s assessment to see if parasites are possibly there, so a few hundred questions. And it’s asking you anything from how you deal with eating food as far as blood sugar and energy, to how you sleep and sweat, and your cravings, so that I can get a really good idea of how all the systems in your body work based on your opinion because blood work isn’t always accurate. Blood work only tells us when you are about 75%, 80% sick, that’s when your tests go outside those medical ranges. And a lot of times, kids especially, don’t fall outside those medical ranges. So those assessments are very helpful. And I know a lot of parents have a difficult time filling them up for their kids, so I just say, “Do the best you can.” And I’m going to ask your kids a lot of questions and we’re just going to move forward. And I’ve even got patients that are nonverbal autistic, and we are able to get enough information to move forward on that.
Another thing I do is I do live cell microscopy, so I will look at a drop of blood on a TV screen in front of the parent, right in my office, and we’ll kind of look through there and see if everything looks right or not. Sometimes things look great. I just had a kid come in the other day after I had seen his mom as a new patient, and his blood was all stuck together, couldn’t move at all. I did a couple of different samples because I thought, “No way, this kid’s too young for the blood to look like that,” because that’s typically in a very, very sick patient. But once I was able to really question the mom and son, the son was 12, so he could answer questions just fine, I was able to find out that his digestive tract doesn’t work.
He’s been hypothyroid before, he’s been hyperthyroid before, he’s had high cholesterol and low cholesterol, he has all kinds of digestive issues. I’m like, “Okay, well, maybe that blood start to make more sense to me.” And then we run actual lab work so that I can get some medical standards on things, so that we can track it through the lab. And then from there, I do some different Eastern medicine testing, checking through different acupuncture type tests, whether it’s pulse, tongue, or even muscle testing to figure out all the different information I can get. Because so many parents have already been through the Western medicine, you know, tests, so they’re coming to me looking for, “Is there something else that can help my child?” So, I take every possible route I can, put it all together, and then we come up with a plan.
Katie: Gotcha. And that’s fascinating that you do the live blood analysis because that’s something I had never encountered in the U.S. before. But when I went to Switzerland to interview a clinic there, they have a natural medicine and I think even natural cancer treatment clinic, that’s one of the things that they do, and it’s fascinating the amount of information you can get from the live blood like that. So can you explain what it means when the blood gets like sticky like that? I think the way they explained it to me is like the blood cells can stack like money rolls kind of almost, but what does that mean for like from the patient’s side and how do you fix that?
Dr. Moore: Yeah. So what you’re describing is called Rouleaux. Rouleaux is where the blood cells are sticky, and it’s sticky because there is a substance called monosodium urate that gets into the blood. It’s from the lack of digestion of protein. So that tells me that maybe you have a leaky gut, or that your digestion just isn’t working very well. The kid that I was talking about was a step further where it’s not even just stacking like that, it was just a glob, where it just looked like it was clotted, which if you do it properly you can cause a clot, which is why I did it three or four times because I was like, “Wait a minute, I didn’t expect that to happen.” But other things that you’re seeing in there is, you can see red blood cells that go through toxic organs and they misshapen due to that and they’re called acanthrocite if I’m pronouncing it properly. Sometimes even I looking through this and doing training here things pronounc differently, but we can see that. We can see if they’re iron deficient. You can see bacteria. So many of my Lyme patients come in, they’re like, “I’ve never seen anything. I just know I have Lyme.” The tests aren’t positive. And then we simply just put the blood on the screen, you see bacteria everywhere. I’m like, “Oh, well, maybe you do have it. I can’t make a diagnosis off of that, but it definitely gives us a direction to go. It gives me some information to start doing other testing from.”
Well, let’s see, what else? We can find fungus. So often, parents know a lot about Candida yeast, I’m sure you’ve heard of Candida yeast a hundred times. And we can see that. And just giving a visual to someone of what they’ve been dealing with can be so powerful and so enlightening so that they see something and then they know they’re going after something, because when you’re a parent and you just know something’s off, just having something to say, “Okay, yes, I know that’s what we’re doing, I know that’s what we’re going after,” is worth everything sometimes. Would you agree?
Katie: Yeah, absolutely.
Dr. Moore: I do look for some nutritional deficiencies like B vitamin deficiency. You can see hormonal imbalances. So it’s just very, very, very useful at giving me a great screening and tool to know where to go next.
Katie: Got it. And I will make sure…before we go on, I wanna mention, I will make sure that we link to your practice in the show notes for anyone who is close enough to go visit you, but probably I’m guessing there’s also a lot of people who geographically won’t be able to get to you, so I’m curious if there’s any kind of universal things that are helpful across the board that people could start with. So if they think they have one of these problems, are there certain nutritional, for instance, things that you do with almost everybody, or certain lifestyle factors that you change with almost everybody that everyone…like all of us could start with.
Dr. Moore: So, you know, one of the most common things I do in my office because I’m dealing with a lot of people with a lot of digestive issues. I just…if it’s bad enough, we start with what’s called an Autoimmune Protocol. And that’s a protocol where you eat very, very, very cleanly for about a month to see if maybe foods are what are causing your reaction. I don’t like to stick to that protocol for very long because, not only is it very rigorous, it also, in the long term, can restrict the amount of food you get, which decreases the amount of gut flora you have. So that’s just a start point. And then with that, I like to use a product from Apex called RepairVite, but what’s in that product is a few different things like marshmallow extract, Spanish moss. There’s some things like glutamine, which is the biggest amount of protein amino acid in there, there’s some ginger and a few amino acids which just help get the digestive tract healing a little bit. And I like to use a little bit turmeric with that to bring down inflammation in the gut, because a lot of times, just bringing down inflammation in the digestive tract can be so helpful, especially with kids’ behavior.
I mean, my first experience with a kid was I got a dad well, and then he’s like, “Can I bring my kid in?” And all I said was…well, his kid had autism. He said, “Can you help with autism?” I said, “I don’t know.” I said, “I don’t treat autism, but I treat kids, and I just want to remove inflammation and see what we can get from there.” So when his kid came in, and we were able to run some blood tests, find out that he had a little inflammation going on, and then we just started going after the things that would cause inflammation, like I said, autoimmune protocol is step one, we found out what his food allergies were and removed those from his diet. So, for him, it was dairy and gluten were the two huge ones which were very common. And then we added in the RepairVite product so that we could start healing the digestive tract.
And within a month, his teachers were sending notes home, “I don’t know what you’ve done with your kid, but keep it up. He’s acting so much better. He’s paying attention better.” Within three months of doing that, he had started actually being able to play on the iPad and being able to realize that his dad was in another room playing on an iPad, so he would take and run and give the iPad to his dad and run out of the room, which before he never understood how to do that. And then we started really working forward on the probiotics because I don’t start with probiotics, I wait till we get the digestive tract healing a little bit, so add those in a little bit later. And once we got going with the proper gut flora, then he started lying. And me in my early years of practice, not knowing a lot about lying, autistic kids don’t lie. So they don’t have the…that’s just not part of what they have learned how to do. So he started lying to his dad realizing if he could lie to him, he might be able to get what he wants, and his dad, at first, he was a little frustrated then realized, “He’s lying.” Which meant he is developing a little bit.
So then we just kept moving forward working on getting rid of inflammatory factors to the point where the next phase was is we started doing a little bit of a light metal detox. So, the metal detoxing can be…it can be very, very good, but you need to do it very safely. So finding programs like True Cellular Detox or finding a doctor that can guide you through the metal detox is very important. But, I guess, the take homes were remove the food allergies, add in the gut healing, support the liver because that will help us in detox, so getting good methylated B vitamins is a huge piece of supporting the liver. I think that’s a good place to start. Anything else that you’re looking for there?
Katie: That was awesome. And I think the key to what you just said, that I love, I think it like makes all the puzzle pieces come together, which is the inflammation idea. Because I’ve said this for years that, like, I’ve never bought the idea, strictly to get controversial for a minute, that vaccines cause autism as a one-to-one direct correlation like that, but I do think that there’s an inflammation connection there with any of these chronic diseases that you’re talking about. And I’ve heard several people say this, and this is how I’ve always thought of it, kind of like the bathtub model, where you can put almost anything in a bathtub, you can put like sand or rocks or water or whatever, but no matter what you put in once it reaches the top, it’s gonna overflow.
And that’s kind of how I think of inflammation in today’s world in that we have all these inputs and maybe my inputs were like too many antibiotics as a child, or heavy metals, or whatever it may be, but when those all add up and reach the top and it overflows, I’m gonna have a problem and it might manifest for me, like Hashimoto’s, or for someone else it might be that they are more susceptible to Lyme. But I feel like that model and keeping inflammation as the idea of what we’re going after makes so much more sense, and it then lets us address all these different things without having to try to like play whack-a-mole with just symptoms and conditions and treating things like a one-to-one approach. Like, would you agree with that or do you have a different way of looking at the whole inflammation idea?
Dr. Moore: No, I completely, 100% agree with that. I have two different ways that explain what you just did with the bathtub. One way is the bucket. I say, “Here’s your body as a bucket. Let’s start filling it up.” So I put up just a little bucket on the board, and I start with, there was a study done by Environmental Workers Group, and they found that in the umbilical cord there was over 200 different chemicals, most of which are causative of cancer going from mother to baby. So day 1 of life you already have toxicity in your body that isn’t supposed to be there. And then, again, on the controversial side, you have vaccinations, and I don’t believe the vaccinations alone cause autism, but I believe they could be a part of the bucket, so they have heavy metals in there. So then you’re getting injected with heavy metals on the first week of your life and a lot in the first couple of years. So that’s two pieces to fill up your bucket with.
So then, you go in and add, we get sicknesses as children and we all do. And we put random things in our mouths, and from there we’re eating food that we know has pesticides on it, and you just keep adding to the bucket. And then in life we go through stressful situations. I mean, I went through a professional school. That was stressful. My mom was sick, that was stressful. What if you lost somebody very close to you, that’s stressful, and that’s just more to put in your bucket. So anything that goes in the bucket is a stressor. And then you just keep adding to it. Well, eventually, your bucket gets to the top if you don’t do anything to start emptying it out.
So if you’re not detoxing regularly, if you’re not making sure that emotionally, you’re healthy, if you are not making sure that you get rid of the chronic infections, and your bucket just keeps filling and eventually, when it overflows, I write on my board next to it whatever conditions they’re having, so is that condition now Hashimoto’s? So many of my Lyme patients have Hashimoto’s, which is the reason why I got into thyroid. I spent a few years going to thyroid conference after thyroid conference after thyroid conference because I had patients coming in with Hashimoto’s antibodies, over 7,000. They reacted to everything in the world they came in contact with, and then their thyroid would just tank no matter what medications they were being given. And once we were able to treat Lyme, their Hashimoto’s 7,000 antibodies dropped to 2,000, and then we had to keep going from there with the co-infections and the heavy metals, and now we’re down into the low hundreds.
So that patient’s was Hashimoto’s, but it could be lupus, it could be food allergies, it could be ulcerative colitis or Crohn’s. It doesn’t matter what comes out of it, it’s that we know something’s going to be triggered, and that the way that we can get that something under control is by removing the source or the sources out of the bucket. So, my job, for most of my patients, is just figure out what’s in the bucket, and guide them to removing it from the bucket, and then all of a sudden you see massive changes in their health.
Katie: That’s super fascinating, and I think that’s a really helpful analogy, as well, because, like I said, it avoids that tendency to try to pinpoint like a single thing and just attack that. Like, I know when there’s so much great information now, for instance, about genetics and about things like the MTHFR mutations. But when that first started coming out, I felt like even within the natural health community, there was such a tendency of people wanting to be like, “Okay, I have this, I’m just gonna treat it with like extra methylfolate or extra this.” And now, we’re finding it’s not even that much of a direct correlation, certainly, that’s something important to know, but those are all that impacts other genes and other expressions. And like anything, like you’re saying, you have to treat the body as a whole and look at all these different factors, but at the end of the day, you’re supporting the body’s natural process because even though I’ve been through my share of health struggles, I do believe at the end of the day that our bodies are designed and meant to move toward health.
And it’s just, we, now in today’s world we have a lot of factors that are getting in the way and keeping that from being as easy as perhaps it once was. But I think also, it’s really hopeful people like you who are able to bring people out of these really tough conditions and chronic illnesses.
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Katie: And if you don’t mind sharing, I know when we first met at a conference, you had some absolutely incredible stories of people recovering and you’ve shared several of them. But if you have any other, like favorite stories, I’d love to hear a few more because I think that at the end of the day too, hope is so powerful in getting better. And for someone like me who had Hashimoto’s for years before finding answers, or certainly for parents whose children have food allergies or really severe behavioral problems, they can see sometimes like there’s no light at the end of that tunnel. So, if you have any more, I’d love to hear a couple more of your success stories.
Dr. Moore: Absolutely. I think one of our…ones that you and I talked about was a set of identical twins that came to me because the mother had Lyme and they both were autistic. At the age of three, she has some video of them just sitting and spinning on the floor. They would bang their heads against the wall. They did not know each other existed. And they’ve now been seeing me for almost three years and again, when they walked in, the mom asked me, “Do you treat autism?” I said, “No.” And to this day when patients walk in and they say, “Do you treat autism?” I don’t really say “yes” to them. I say, “I treat the person, I treat their body.” And now, at the age of eight, I still treat these boys. And they, if you were to walk up and talk to them, are basically maybe ADHD at worst, as far as the diagnosis you could give them. They come into my room, they read my books. And some of the books on my shelves I would not expect an eight-year-old to be able to read. They kind of point at some of the words and their dad will help them through some of those words because they’re medical books.
But they’re able to go to an understand-normal-class level schooling. They listen, they talk, they know each other exist, they have emotional responses, they exhibit full conversation. So yeah, I mean, that’s an incredible success because you were talking about two identical twin boys that were autistic and now are well. When their social worker came to double-check because the state sends someone around every so often, the social worker had said to the parents, “If I didn’t remember them, I would never believe they were autistic.” So that’s one of my favorite stories and I actually told that mom that we will be talking, and that you and I had talked about even doing a little bring the parents and have them talk with you and she was, “I’d love that.” So if you’re ever interested in that, I’ve talked to a few very intelligent mothers that have done some amazing work with their kids.
Katie: Yeah, absolutely. Because I truly believe these moms… Like you’ve mentioned it at the beginning, with these moms who their child is struggling with the problem, these moms are incredible researchers and I’m sure even by the time they get to you, so many of them are so well-versed in everything from Candida to like the gut-brain access, to the gaps diet. Like, these, women research and they are amazing resources, and they are totally on the front lines doing whatever they have to do for their kids. And I have so much respect, so I would love to chat with some of your patients as well. What about from the moms’ perspective? Like, do you have any like amazing standout stories from that side?
Dr. Moore: I have stories everything from very, very simple things, to very incredibly complex things, so I’ll give you a simple one. I just had a mom come in that was overweight and tired and she tried everything you could imagine from 500 calorie diets to exercising 2 hours every single day to even going on some different medications. And I ran her lab work and they came back just fine. Her thyroid was perfectly healthy. She didn’t come back with chronic inflammation. She came back with a little bit of an elevated homocysteine, which means we need to give her a little bit of methylated B vitamin. It was all great. And her questionnaire wasn’t too far off, but she could not lose weight and she had no energy. So I stepped on the a little bit of the food allergies and a little bit of the Eastern medicine testing, and I found that she had a parasite in her digestive tract that I wanted to treat and I needed to work with her on becoming a fat burner instead of a sugar burner.
And without decreasing her calories, in the last three months, she’s lost 35 pounds. And before, I remember, she was doing 500-calorie diets. So just by simply removing the source of what was causing her hormones not to be able to function, creating inflammation in her body, she’s been able to lose all that weight, and her energy is so high that her husband is telling her to slow down and having trouble keeping up with her, and she’s like, “Well, you better go in and see him. Go see Dr. Moore because you got to keep up with me now.” And it’s just hilarious because the smile on her face every time she comes in is incredible.
And then as far as the chronic cases, man, I have so many to talk about because that’s kind of where I started, but I’ve got a couple favorites. And I’m actually doing a thyroid presentation in Kansas City this Thursday and I just put this patient’s lab work, so I’m very familiar with it into my presentation. And I’ll talk about her. She came in and she was in her mid-40s, a couple kids at home, and she worked. So she was busy. She brought in a list of everything that had happened to her her entire life. I’m talking about from birth all the way till the last doctor she saw a few weeks before me, and it was everything from fatigue, to anxiety, depression. She had some pain throughout her body. She was anemic. She could never get her blood up, she had blood work for the past decade, she’d been through functional medicine MDs, and naturopaths, and chiropractor. She had tried everything from different autoimmune diets, to GAPS diets, to FODMAP diets. She had tried all the methylation work out there from different practitioners.
I mean, she had been everywhere. And she came into my office very much doubting that I’d be able to help her, especially when she walked in and she saw that I was in my 20s, and I’m now in my 30s, I was just starting. But I talked to her, we ran some blood work and we did the same kind of stuff when I talked to us. We had to remove the food allergens so that we get inflammation down. We supported her digestive tract. And then I immediately jumped into working with a gut microbe that I thought would be at the top of her list, because we had already had positive blood tests for Epstein-Barr and a couple of other bacterial infections that she brought in with her. And I said, “Great. Those are there. We can’t get rid of those until we get rid of this.” The next time she walked in three months later, she was so frustrated with me because she’s like, “I don’t feel better.” I said, “Hold on,” and we just ordered a lab work and we looked at the lab work. Her anemia was gone. Her red blood cell count was finally up to normal ranges. Her white blood cell count was up to normal ranges, and her thyroid had started functioning a little bit, but she was on thyroid medication, but it wasn’t converting well into the actual functional thyroid and usable thyroid hormone. It was just staying as the T4, which is inactive in the body.
So she gave me another three months, basically. So every time that she came in and we were working together, she was always kind of questioning the next step that I was going to make, which so many moms do. It’s like the thing that I’m doing on all these new patient visits in the next three months is building trust. Because they’ve been through so many other doctors and they’ve heard so many other things and there’s such amazing researchers, I have to build this trust, so they’re questioning me constantly and trying to see if I know what I’m doing. So by six months, she started feeling some better. And we went back and looked at the labs again and she was getting a little bit better. Well, I’ll tell you right now, we’ve been going a year and a half, we’ve even introduced things in such as neurofeedback, all of her lab work is almost completely normal now. And when she came in it was all low or high, it was so all over the map. She’s completely off her thyroid medication and her labs are still normal, and they’re actually better than they were before as far as when she was under medication.
We’ve gone through a lot of metal detox and infection detox. And she walks in and sits down to talk to my office manager and she goes, “You know this past weekend, I sat down, and I didn’t worry about anything. My anxiety was gone. I haven’t had that in a decade.” And she’s like, “I had enough energy that I was able to do laundry for the first time with no anxiety, no worries.” And then the next thing she said to me when she was in my room was, “What do I do with all this knowledge now that I’m better?” And we still have work to do. She said, “What do I do with all my knowledge, like all these moms that you’re working with and listening and that are researching constantly,” she goes, “What do I do?” I go, “Well, you could help others.” And she just said, “How do I do that?” I go, “Well, there’s all these kinds of nutrition certifications out there,” and then she goes, “Are you hiring?” And I kind of looked at her like, “What?” And she’s like, “I want to give this knowledge to other people. I want to help. I’ve been through this.” She’s like, “I can relate and they can see that there’s hope.” So, we’ve actually talked now about her getting this nutrition certification and helping me with patients in the future. But, I mean, watching a woman to where she was barely able to leave her house or get out of bed, and now after a lifetime of that, getting your life back, that’s one of the most incredible stories that I know of.
Katie: That’s amazing. I think such a testament to what happens when you can support the body correctly. I’d love to actually get your take on two more things before we start to wrap up because I get a lot of questions about them and they’re very trendy right now, and they are the keto diet, which is everywhere right now and also fasting which can be done a ton of different ways. I’m curious if you use either of those in your practice. I know that you said you don’t restrict calories with your patients, but I’m curious if you think either of those have a place in clinical work.
Dr. Moore: Well, one, it’s not that I’d never restrict calories, it’s just with a lot of patients, you don’t have to once you get their body working better. Then when we move on to the keto diet, every diet that I use and I’ve mentioned throughout, you know, the ones that are basically all free of that terrible substance, sugar, tend to work. So whether it’s keto or fasting or Mediterranean or so on, they’ll work and they’re all great, and it’s diet variation that is the most powerful tool that I use. So I do ketos from time to time, and then I’ll do fasting at other times. I actually have a group right now called True Healing Strategies that is a Facebook group where I’m kind of coaching people through doing different types of strategies. And we just did a fasting challenge about two weeks ago now where a lot of them got on and they started working on learning how to do fasting because fasting is incredibly effective for allowing the body to take a break from food to heal itself.
By taking a break from food and fasting for three to four days, there’s been so many studies to show increasing growth hormone which is gonna help you heal, a reset in the immune system to allow some of those autoimmune food allergies to take a relax or relax in four days and maybe even shut off. It increases stem cell growth in your body and they’ve seen some studies to show that the body will actually use those stem cells to help regrow damaged tissue. And then in those longer fasts, it can help your body to become a fat burner, so many of my patients they simply don’t burn fat, which is why they get headaches when they don’t eat for every four or six hours.
Now, I definitely do not start my patients with a four-day fast because that seems like climbing Mount Everest for most patients. We usually start with finding out how long they go on a typical day without eating and that may be 6, 8, 12 hours, and that does include overnight. And then we just slowly build them up to the point where they can get to an intermittent fast, which is 16 to 18 hours, and from there, a 24-hour fast. And that just starts getting their body re-sensitized to insulin and sensitized to actually learning how to break down fat. And that fat then, when it breaks down produces substances called ketones, which is what you’re looking for in a keto diet. Now, you can also produce ketones when you’re just eating a very, very high fat diet and a very low carb and protein diet because protein can actually trigger insulin response, especially protein powders which was very interesting for me to learn.
There were some studies done where taking protein powders can spike insulin even about half as high as eating straight table sugar. So I don’t even really recommend a lot of protein powders in my office because of that fact. So if you’re out there doing keto diet or out there doing…and fasting, protein powders, for me, at least they’re not acceptable during times of trying to be in ketosis. So these diets are very useful because when you’re in a fasting state creating ketones, there’s a process called autophagy. And I’m sure you’ve caught up on autophagy. There was a Nobel Prize won on here in the past few years, and it’s where your body will actually go and break down bad tissues, not your good tissues, not your good muscles, but your bad tissues, and use that nutrition to help you grow new stronger tissue and recover. But the great thing about this is you’re not fueling yourself to build this new tissue, you’re breaking down the stuff you want to be breaking down like bad muscle tissue, damaged tissue, and you’re re-growing new tissue. So it’s just like cleaning yourself out or recycling your bad tissue, which ends up leaving you in a much healthier state.
Katie: Yeah, it makes perfect sense, and I’ve experimented with fasting and I…like I will say, it’s hard the first couple times, those first few days, but then the ketones, because they’re so good for the brain, it’s amazing how productive I am and how great I feel actually, when I’m fasting. And I cannot believe that we’re already coming to the end of our time. I could talk to you all day, but I’d love to wrap up with a couple questions that I love to ask. And one is, what book has had the biggest influence on your life?
Dr. Moore: Oh, the biggest influence is probably Datis Kharrazian’s book, “Why Do I Still Have Thyroid Symptoms?” And the reason why is that was like the first functional medicine book I ever read, so I’d already gotten into looking for a root cause because that’s the philosophy of chiropractic. It’s just missed that a broader place is not the only reason for interference to be in the body. So, in Datis Kharrazian’s book, he shows so many reasons why your thyroid can be off, and it doesn’t necessarily relate just to your TSH being off, which is a blood test, or just one small thing. It’s looking at the body going, “Does the immune system have a role? Is there inflammation as a role? Is there infection as a role?” and it just really got me going. I’ve read that book three or four times. Now, I’ve been to his classes several times, so that has to be my favorite book because it just it was a start to my journey as far as in the world of being a doctor.
Katie: I love that. And I’d also love to know, what one piece of advice you’d like everyone to know, especially like maybe someone who they have a health problem, or their child has a health problem.
Dr. Moore: The greatest piece of advice I can give to anybody is what my mom’s done because she’ll leave a doctor if she doesn’t feel like that doctor is listening to her and giving her the right advice while I did searching for Lyme. You know, so many of the brilliant mothers that I have that come in is, be your own health advocate. Only you know yourself and only you know your child as well as you do. So if you know there’s something missing, ask the questions, ask the hard questions. And don’t be afraid to find another doctor. And that goes to my patients. If I’m not answering questions the way you want, not giving you the time you need, not giving you an appropriate amount of either time, energy, or answers, you’ve got to be your own health advocate because there is an answer out there for you. There is someone who’s going to be able to help you.
The only thing is that I’ve got to say in that state is have patience when you have someone that is working with you because some of these chronic, chronic, chronic things that you’ve been dealing with for a long time take a while to heal, and it’s not a road where the road goes straight up. So, sometimes the road goes up and down, just make sure to ask the questions because your practitioner should have the experience to be able to give you an answer. And if they give you an answer you don’t like, make sure that it’s an answer you can accept. There are times where I say, “I don’t know. Give me a chance to look it up or figure it out,” because I don’t have every answer out there, and I think some parents appreciate when I say, “I just simply don’t know.” But, be your own health advocate.
Katie: I agree with you 100% on that. And some of the most frustrating words I hear from people, especially pregnant moms, but anyone, are “My doctor won’t let me” or “My doctor says I can’t do blah, blah, blah,” and I totally agree with you. Like doctors are amazing medical professionals, but they’re also consultants and they don’t absolve us from the responsibility of our own health and from being our own advocate. So I love that that’s your message as well. And of course, the links will be in the show notes at wellnessmama.fm so people can find you, but can you also let us know where people can find you geographically, where you live, and also what your website is?
Dr. Moore: Yeah, I’m in Kansas City Missouri, and my website is drjabanmoore.com, and I’m also on Facebook and Instagram, also Dr. Jaban Moore. And my name is spelled J-A-B-A-N, because I know that’s one that most people have not heard.
Katie: Awesome. And again, those links will be in the show notes. For any of you who are driving, don’t feel like you have to try to type them while you’re driving. Be safe, but they will be in the show notes at wellnessmama.fm. Dr. Moore, thank you so much for your time in being here. Like I said, I could talk to you all day and I think you’re doing amazing work, and hopefully, anyone close to you geographically can find you and get some help as well, but thank you for being here.
Dr. Moore: Well, thank you for having me.
Katie: And thanks to all of you for listening and I hope to see you next time on the “Healthy Moms Podcast.”
If you’re enjoying these interviews, would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on iTunes for me? Doing this helps more people to find the podcast, which means even more moms and families could benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time, and thanks as always for listening.
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