[00:00:00] Hi, Steve Adams here from Tiger Medical Institute, and I want to welcome you to the Future of Personalized Medicine Summit. I'm thrilled to be hosting this incredible event where top experts in health and wellness share their insights into optimizing your performance, your longevity, and really the whole idea of proactive health care.

[00:00:34] Okay? For joining me. Before we get started, let me talk about our guest here today, Dr. Daniel Kessler. He's actually a Tiger Medical Physician and we're excited to bring him on today. Let me give you a little bit of his background. I'm freewheeling this. But he he's actually from Germany.

[00:00:50] His parents owned a clinic for many years. They're doing functional medicine, root cause medicine. So he comes from a great background of that. He did his undergrad at Emory University, did a stint at the CDC. I recall working in toxins in the whole field of toxins and their impact on health.

[00:01:10] Went on to medical school at Nova Southeastern in the Miami Fort Lauderdale area. Did a stint, a fairly lengthy stint at the Mayo Clinic where he got significant training there as a DO. Dr. Kessler is also a certified practitioner at the Institute of Functional Medicine.

[00:01:27] So he's a very good root cause doctor. And then he also did a training program in Switzerland, learning the Swiss biologic method at a name of a clinic I can't say, so I'll let Dr. Kessler bring that up. Dr. Kessler, it's great to have you on today. Hey Steve, thank you so much for having me. Yeah, that clinic is a very famous clinic in Switzerland called Paracelsus Clinic.

[00:01:50] Paracelsus. Yes. I didn't want to destroy that by no worries on the fly. Yeah. Talk a little bit first about your journey to becoming a doctor. Cause I think it's really important. Everybody hears people's origin story about why they do what they do. Yeah, thank you. So basically, my dad was a doctor for more than 40 years, and he and my mom, they worked together in a clinic with over 25 nurses in northern Germany.

[00:02:18] And my dad was internal medicine trained. He was top of the class, but very quickly discovered himself that, traditional medicine, while it is great, didn't always have answers. So they built this clinic where people came from all over the world to a very little town in Northern Germany. And there it was where they helped people to find out why people didn't feel well.

[00:02:41] And there I learned one of the most important things, Steve is listening, to the patient. So my dad was very good in interviewing, asking the right questions. but also giving the patient an opportunity to speak. Whereas nowadays patients are lucky if they can speak for a minute in traditional doctor's visits.

[00:03:02] And it was really that experience, combined with my own healthcare scare when I was in my Oh, maybe eight, nine years old. I was very sick from my stomach and unfortunately almost didn't make it. It was very scary. And then it was with the help of functional medicine that they discovered why I was sick.

[00:03:24] I had a lot of. fungal problems, fungal overgrowth in my intestine. I suffer a lot from irritable bowel syndrome as a kid, and it took quite some time for people to actually believe me that my symptoms were not in my head, that they were real. And this combination then put me on the path to decide that I really wanted to be a doctor who listens and helps people to figure out what's really going on.

[00:03:52] Why don't you first frame our conversation, talk about what the strengths and what traditional medicine does well. When I say that, what I'm talking about is you go to your primary care doctor and may get referred to an internal medicine doctor or to a specialist, ultimately to a hospital. And compare and contrast that to what the functional medicine, root cause, preventative, proactive, whatever term you want to use, medicine, what that does well.

[00:04:22] Sure. I think what you're, what the listeners really have to understand that first of all, we are very well trained doctors and physicians. And what this means is that we need to really make sure that we don't miss anything bad. So the good thing is with our physicians at Tiger, and of course, I'm one of the physicians, when we meet a client, then we review, first of all, the symptoms that somebody has.

[00:04:47] Let's imagine somebody is tired or they don't have optimal energy, for example. And then the first thing is, for example, I say, how long have you been tired? And some people say forever and then we say what have you looked at with your other doctors? Show me some old blood work. So then we review what has been done.

[00:05:08] But the issue is that oftentimes everything is done correctly, but the labs that have been doing that they did does not show what's really going on. What functional medicine does well, if you ask the right questions, then you can determine, for example, if somebody has mental fatigue or physical fatigue, or if somebody has, for example, gut issues, and then the nice thing is that testing can be ordered that can be conveniently completed at people's homes, and then this will give me additional leverage to find out what's really causing their symptoms.

[00:05:47] That makes a lot of sense. In your talk, you wanted to talk about three brain health secrets. One, the vascular system. Two, identify what's going on. And three, why investing in your own health is key. Let's start with that first question. The vascular system, introducing the glycocalyx and the microcirculation.

[00:06:06] Why don't you talk about what that is? Because most, a lot of doctors don't even know what this is. They know what microvascular is, but maybe they don't know the glycocalyx per se. And what's the Relevance of it to our audience? Yeah, I think first of all, that's a lot of words that a lot of people may not be familiar with.

[00:06:24] I think first of all, why are we doing it? So my father ended up having Parkinson's later in life, which was totally unexpected. And my mother. Has a very benign brain tumor. It's not a bad tumor. She has a benign tumor and my mom. She's not going to be 80. She's showing some early signs of cognitive decline.

[00:06:47] She doesn't have Alzheimer's but her cognition could be a bit better and so As the only child, I say what can I do to improve my own brain function, my own health. And when we think about circulation, we have our arteries that transport blood to all of our organs from our heart. And then we have our veins.

[00:07:11] We then return the blood back to the heart. And then we have arteries and veins all over our body. And if the listener is maybe imagines a garden hose where you water your flowers, then the garden hose has an internal lining. And this is called in the body called the glycocalyx. It's like a connective tissue that connects things.

[00:07:35] And what's interesting is that there's so much research. that used to not exist, but now it's getting more and more recognition how important the circulation is. So if the brain, for example, is not fed with proper nutrients, or if the brain is fed with toxins and you mentioned how I used to work at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, then toxins are ubiquitous.

[00:08:04] A simple toxin is sugar. So a lot of people know, may not know, that Alzheimer's is actually now called type 3 diabetes. So sugar can be a toxin. But The cool thing is when somebody has, for example, lapses of their memory, or maybe clinically they have a hard time focusing on their work, then the question is Why is this?

[00:08:33] And the glycocalyx we now have tools that we use at Tiger Medical where we can now test people non invasively to see if the glycocalyx is strong, healthy, or was it compromised by something? And then, of course, we have to figure out what that something That makes sense. I think I'll just share my own story a little bit here.

[00:08:57] I've been under your care and Dr. McNamee's now for five years and I went through all the traditional scans on my heart because we have a lot of micro vascular disease in our family. And so I had no blockage in a clearly scan at a zero calcium score. My, my blood lab work looks pretty good for somebody my age.

[00:09:19] And yet I had a very low score it was there's two scores. One, if you're above a 2. 1, it's not good. And I was a 2. 6. Now I'm down to 2. 3. And the other one was if you're below two, you're not good. And I was both of those. And what it showed was, is that you could think you're doing okay, but unless you understand the health of your glycocalyx, you don't really know the full picture.

[00:09:42] And now the good news is I'm pursuing some strategies to repair. And reverse the microcapillary blockage and some things like that. And you can test for this and find out years in advance before you have a problem. Yeah, I think for the listeners, when we think about the arteries in our body, we have big arteries and we have small arteries.

[00:10:04] And if you go, for example, to a cardiologist, and they do a stress test, or maybe they do a catheterization where they look at the big arteries. But the glycocalyx is a wonderful tool. There's a machine called GlycoCheck, where we actually check. But we checked the small arteries. And what's really interesting is that research has shown that years ahead of time, it is really the damage to the small arteries that can predispose somebody later to have big artery problems.

[00:10:36] And then you mentioned Other tests, like clearly so clearly is an AI software program that we also utilize, with our patients at Tiger, but we take cat scans like a calcium score, and then we feed that into this AI software program. And then from the convenient of a patient's home, we can then share a video and say, Hey, look let's look at your arteries.

[00:11:01] could there be an issue? And one thing that the listeners need to know is that 50 percent, five zero percent of people with heart disease have normal cholesterol levels, and more than 50 percent of people have heart disease. And they don't know it. They have no symptoms. And that's the scary part.

[00:11:23] When I used to work at Mayo, I also used to work in the emergency room for a couple of months. And many times people would come and their first discovery of having heart disease was Having a heart attack, so that's why I think when we look at the future of personalized medicine prevention is really the key, but we have to focus on and Daniel.

[00:11:45] What isn't there? Isn't a big number of people who die in their first heart attack? I heard as high as 70%. Yeah, I think that ultimately when we think about a heart attack, then we think about compromised blood flow to certain areas of the heart. And a lot of listeners may be familiar with the term Widowmaker.

[00:12:08] And we have different arteries in our heart and the, it's called the left descending artery. It's one of the longest, arteries, coronary arteries. And if that one is compromised, then a lot of times. People can have sudden death, sudden cardiac death. So that's why I'm really excited to talk about that there are some studies when they looked at glycocalyx testing, they can predict up to six, seven years ahead of time if someone could have an event or not and how that can be prevented.

[00:12:41] And it gives you if you were to be, it's the canary in the coal mine, if you will. Yeah. Yeah, also like to use a basketball term. It gives you more shot clock. Yeah, time before. Yeah. So let's switch a little bit and talk about personalized medicine through home testing. How are you able to use that Daniel to help your patients at Tiger Medical get better?

[00:13:03] Yeah, I think that first of all, we look at blood work. So blood work gets reviewed. If people have seen their regular physician, then we have a portal where patients can upload, for example, existing blood work. We also can give orders where people can go locally to a lab. And Daniel, can I ask you real quick, how is that different than what a traditional annual physical panel would be?

[00:13:26] Yeah, I think it's more comprehensive because the third aspect of what we talked about is personalized investing in your own health. And unfortunately, insurance companies, as they don't like to pay for things. But if you ask the right questions and then you order testing that is clinically justified in the mind of the doctor for the patient, then oftentimes you can discover what can be contributing to somebody's symptoms.

[00:13:59] For example a quick example for that would be thyroid testing. So some people may say I think my thyroid is wrong or my thyroid is off. And then the traditional testing is normal, but then when we actually order a comprehensive thyroid panel that we can see, what your thyroid hormones are low, or maybe you have an autoimmune component, for example.

[00:14:23] But what really shines in the functional medicine world with home based testing is that we also utilize breath testing, urine testing, stool testing. We also do a lot with wearable devices that, we can teach our clients about, and then they, we tell them, how to use them. And this gives us so much data.

[00:14:47] That gives us then a personalized comprehensive picture. And then what's nice is that when you then combine the symptoms, that somebody says, you know what, I'm tired, but my blood work is normal, but with this additional data, we then have a personalized plan, which we can then say Steve, next month you do this, after that you do that, and then you lay it out and patients are very clear on what they have to do.

[00:15:15] And so in addition to blood, what are some other things that you like to do to build your case, if you will? Because I know there are some other things you want to look at, different systems. Yeah. Yeah. First of all, as a physician I'm also almost licensed in all 50 states, which is amazing. We have clients, from all over the country.

[00:15:34] Sometimes people may also need imaging. Of certain areas of the body, so I'm allowed to order that. But I think a combination of blood fluid testing so blood, urine, stool, saliva breath testing, and then we have various Wearables where we also look at, for example, our autonomic nervous system.

[00:15:57] How is it working? The wearable industry is exploding and a lot of people know that data is critical. And then. Nutrition, of course. I'm one of the very few physicians who has training in nutrition where we then individualize the nutrition aspect for each patient, which is also very huge.

[00:16:18] With all those different fluids and things you're testing, you're looking at things like toxins, the burden that toxins carry. Yeah. And can you unpack briefly just the impact of toxins and the other is the impact of a microbiome that's dysregulated. Yeah, I think that the word toxin sometimes can scare people if they hear that, and we deal with toxins and toxicants man made versus toxins or toxicants that are not man made and because of my history of working at the CDC, my job was actually to look at people's blood from, we've had people from all over the world, and we, Identify that a lot of people are burdened by environmental toxins.

[00:17:02] One of the things, for example, it also plays a role is infectious toxins or mold certain viruses, certain bacteria. And then if we look at how long somebody may have been exposed to that, then ultimately your immune system adapts and 80 percent of the immune system is actually in our small intestine.

[00:17:25] Wow. And so 80, so 8 0 and that is why oftentimes when we start working with people, we say, we have to start with your gut, we have to identify how are you imbalanced. Why are you imbalanced and what can we do about it? And the majority of time, as we fix people's immune system in the gut, their health significantly improves.

[00:17:51] Yeah from a toxic standpoint, is that, does that have a contributing factor to things like causing metabolic syndrome because of oxidation or cancer even? Can you impact those a little bit? Yeah, I think that when we think about what keeps us healthy, then we have a word called metabolism.

[00:18:12] Metabolism just means all the chemical reactions in our body. And when something bad is going on in the body, whatever that may be, then the body wants to adapt and adapt. keep us healthy. But if we look at toxins, then there is a medical term called endocrine disruptors. So the word endocrine So endo means within, krine means crisis.

[00:18:36] So there's a crisis from within our body that gets disrupted by these toxins. And take estrogen, for example. So nowadays people have all these cancers. And when we do testing on people who want to, first of all, prevent cancer, then we can identify For example, what kind of estrogen like compounds are within the body that are mimicking estrogen, like plastics or or like chemicals from like perfumes or others.

[00:19:12] And then when we identify them, then I can share with a patient, look, why don't you reduce the exposure of what you're doing? Could you use more natural products? Could you use some nutrition support? Could you use some supplements to help, get rid of them? So there's a lot of really different tools that we use.

[00:19:35] So talk about we have six, seven minutes left. Talk about can you think of a client that has a unique story that, came to you with a lot of complex issues? Tired probably representative of a lot of people who are middle aged would watch something like this Yeah, maybe unpack how you were able to help that person because it because by doing that you'll unpack what our process is Yeah, sure.

[00:19:59] Sure. Everybody loves a story and this is always memorable. So I think if we put this in the context of brain health and circulation. That's how I'm going to frame it. So this patient is a very successful person and he is about 58 years old and he was diagnosed with a lot of mental health issues, including the depression, anxiety even bipolar is on medicines for that, but was unable to perform his job.

[00:20:32] Was unable to focus. Didn't have any headaches, but just had this cognition problem and focus problem. And then, of course, the first thing I did was to make sure to ask how long has this been going on for. And it was about a year or so. And the first thing I did was I said, listen, we need to image your brain to make sure.

[00:20:56] Not to sound dramatic, make sure there's nothing bad going on because sometimes personality changes and those things can happen with tumors. So there was no tumor. And then I asked him about toxin exposure. And I had a questionnaire and based on the questionnaire, we found out that mold was the issue for this patient.

[00:21:18] At the time he was living in an older house for a couple of years. I tested him, I sent him a home test for mold and sure enough, most of the markers were positive. And what's interesting is that when he showed me his blood That his thyroid levels were off and he said, I probably have to go see a thyroid specialist.

[00:21:40] And I said let me see. And within about four months by treating the mold. His focus is now 100%. His depression, anxiety is gone. His bipolar is gone. He's in fact no longer on medicine. And his thyroid levels have completely normalized. I also did a lot of nutritional work with him to help support his detox pathways, for the mold.

[00:22:09] And then I said listen, you gotta check your house. Your car, your work for mold and it was his car under his car seat. I know it sounds disgusting, but that's where the mold was. So every day he drives four hours in his car and is exposed to these micro toxins. So now he has good reason to buy a new car, which, but Oh, he says he feels like he's 15 years old.

[00:22:35] And he can, and then of course. I looked a little bit more into other hormones, but the idea is why did this happen? What was the root cause in this case? And for him, it was the mold toxins. And not looking for another medication and another specialist. No, but but I did have to treat him medically.

[00:22:55] So I did give him medicine. For the mold, and I did give him some nutritional supplement support on top of his diet and optimize his sleep, all these like basic things, but yeah, but in combination, your listeners have to our listeners have to understand it's really a combination. It's never just one thing.

[00:23:16] That's not how the body works. Last question. What is the value to you as a clinician and unlocking a puzzle like this with genetic testing. So genetic testing. I think some people say that genetics everything can be blamed on genes, but we know that the genes are not our destiny. It's really the environment, that acts on our genes.

[00:23:42] But, working with a client, discovering why something is happening and working on prevention. There's nothing better as a physician to give somebody a peace of mind and years of quality life. And that's just very rewarding. This is always what my dad wanted to do also is really focus on prevention and helping people live their best life.

[00:24:05] So I really, I'm really grateful that I can continue the legacy of my parents. Yeah. Daniel, thank you for being on the summit for the incredible work you do with our people. Because I'm interviewing you, I'm gonna go ahead and tell people if you want to know more about how you could work with Dr. Daniel or Dr. McNamee, our other doctor in Seattle. Dr. Daniel is in the Jacksonville area. What we do is 100 percent virtual. You never have to go there. Although we are offering a couple of tests now that give people the incentive to go there that we include. Just go to tigermi.com, tigermi.com. And you can book a call and talk to a professional. We also have an optimal health test you could do to be a first step, find out what's going on inside before you make a bigger decision. So thank you, Daniel. Have a great day.

Thank you so much. Have a nice evening.