The Upside of Bipolar: Conversations on the Road to Wellness
Living with bipolar disorder sucks! Each week Michelle Reittinger and her guests explore tools and resources that help you learn how to live well with your bipolar. If you are tired of suffering and want to live a healthy, balanced, productive life with your bipolar, this podcast was designed with you in mind.
The Upside of Bipolar: Conversations on the Road to Wellness
EP 72: Micronutrients, Medication Tapers, And Real Recovery with David Stephan, VP of Truehope
In this engaging third conversation with David Stephan, we unpack why symptom spikes during micronutrient use often signal overmedication, not relapse, and how to time reductions for smoother tapers. We share stories, protocols, and tools that make withdrawal safer while building real, durable stability.
• intake essentials and complete disclosure of meds and supplements
• medication potentiation explained and how to spot it
• custom reductions for SSRIs, benzos, stimulants, antipsychotics
• tracking patterns and using plateaus to time cuts
• med releases from stress or intense exercise and safe responses
• why to avoid liver cleanses and how whey protein isolate and aminos help
• gut health, candida protocol, and absorption basics
• four pillars: vitamins, minerals, amino acids, omega-3s
• using RXList to understand med release symptoms
• consistency tools: organizers, alarms, spacing doses
• faster vs safer taper styles and realistic timelines
• trust, patience, and compliance as success drivers
• resources, independent research, and support coaching
Link:
Truehope Canada | Media & Publications
Bio:
Over the past 22 years, David Stephan has worked extensively with Truehope, an organization on a mission to help individuals overcome mental illness through the use of groundbreaking micronutrient solutions. During this time, he has been involved in leading edge discoveries that have not only provided significant transformation in thousands of lives but have also been scientifically validated in dozens of independent studies from universities around the world. As such, David feels it a privilege and duty to share the knowledge that not only changed his life, but has also allowed for well over 100,000 others to transform their lives as well.
For more resources, visit www.theupsideofbipolar.com. If you're ready to dive deeper, grab my book, The Upside of Bipolar: 7 Steps to Heal Your Disorder. If you're ready to heal your symptoms, join my monthly membership, The Upsiders' Tribe, to transform chaos into hope.
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Consistency is key. A hundred percent. In relation to the overall success, consistency is one of the main ingredients that cannot be removed from the process. Otherwise, failure is what most people can come to expect. And so, yes, uh absolutely consistency on the medications while you're withdrawing from them. Otherwise, unless you're you like, you know, going down rocky roads, it gets a little more bumpy. But you know, the more consistency, consistent you are with it, the smoother the transition will be off of the medication. But then also obviously the consistency on the Empire Plus, because as you're coming off that medication, what's replacing it? What's generating the support within the brain, making you function? And so the Empire Plus is absolutely crucial.
SPEAKER_01:Welcome to the Upside of Bipolar, where we uncover the true sources of bipolar symptoms and share proven tools for recovery. I'm your host, Michelle Reitinger, number one international best-selling author of the Upside of Bipolar Seven Steps to Heal Your Disorder. In this podcast, I bring you solo insights from my journey and guest interviews with leading researchers and experts. Join us to transform chaos into hope and reclaim your life. Let's heal together. As such, David feels it a privilege and a duty to share the knowledge that not only changed his life, but has also allowed for well over 100,000 others to transform their lives as well. David, I can't wait for this episode. I'm like so excited to talk to you today. Thank you so much.
SPEAKER_00:Well, thank you again for having me on. And I think I need to rewrite my bio because it sounds like how I speak, and not everybody speaks that way. So it's a bit of a tongue twister sometimes.
SPEAKER_01:Well, it's it's great. And I am I if anybody is listening to this as a standalone episode and you haven't heard the previous two episodes, please go back and listen to them. The reason we broke this up into three episodes, and they're actually quite long episodes, we probably could have broken it up even more. But the first episode that I interviewed you on, well, this is in this most recent three. I interviewed you a couple of years ago for the first time, but in this most recent three, we started with the story of True Hope and how this micronutrient was disc, you know, the micronutrient treatment was discovered, you know, how the company came about, you know, some of the challenges you faced. And then in the second episode, we talked about why micronutrients are so effective and helping people resolve the underlying sources of their symptoms that lead to a bipolar diagnosis, and not just bipolar, but ADHD, OCD, even schizophrenia, that micronutrients are so effective. And we talked about why they were so effective. And so today we are going to talk about what that symptoms actually mean. When somebody starts to take micronutrients, a lot of times because we have created uh uh categories, we have created diagnoses, disorders out of clusters of symptoms, we have pathologized these symptoms to make pe and people then believe that they are experiencing a disease or an underlying etiology when they experience these symptoms. And so the problem that that creates is that when somebody starts to take the micronutrients and their brain starts to heal and they still are experiencing symptoms, they freak out and think they're for bipolar people who are struggling with bipolar, they think, oh no, my bipolar is coming back, or oh no, this isn't working. And that's probably most often not true. In my experience, and you have you know way more experience than I do, because you've been doing this for over 20 years, but but in my experience, what I actually see is that people don't understand the symptoms they're experiencing and what they actually what's actually happening. And so today I want to talk about the different types of symptoms you will experience if you start taking micronutrients, what they actually mean, and how that actually often is a sign that the micronutrients are working. So we're gonna, this is gonna be a real I'm super excited about this conversation because I I see this objection often. People will say, I, you know, I tried micronutrients and they didn't work for me. And I always want to say, let's talk about that, because micronutrients aren't a medicine. It's just something naturally occurring that our brain needs, and you're just giving your brain what it needs to function in a healthy way. It's not like it's not like a pill or a medicine, a medication. It's just something your brain naturally needs, and you're just making sure that your brain's getting enough of it. You know, often most people are not getting enough, right?
SPEAKER_00:Exactly. I mean, when we put it in the classification of essential nutrients, meaning that it's actually essential to the very functions that keep you alive, it's important to to put it in that that um that category. Because when somebody says, Oh, I tried micronutrients and then they didn't work, well, what didn't work about them, right? What what what what was actually taking place or why didn't they work? Because micronutrients always work if they get to to where they need to go. Plain and simple, right? Like there's no they don't work, they work. It's just what's going on either in your gut health or what was conflicting, where you, you know, and and that's why we go through limiting factors with our support protocols where we will, in essence, if if they're not working or something pops up randomly, we start to to go through like a kind of like a detective and and finally figure out that's what's going on. And that matches the symptoms. Here we go, right? And then we're able to then address it, correct it, and get it working again. Because micronutrients always work if they are where they need to be.
SPEAKER_01:Right. And and so let's start. I think the first thing we need to talk about actually is how psychotropic drugs actually work in the brain, like what what these different categories of drugs are actually doing, and why if you're taking them still and you start taking an adequate level of micronutrition, why you could actually start experiencing symptoms? Like what's actually happening in the brain? So let's start first with there's a lot here, so I don't want to like ask you these multifaceted questions that are complicated. Let's start with the drug categories. So let's I don't want to get into too much detail about these, but let's just kind of talk about general drug categories and what's actually happening with those drugs.
SPEAKER_00:Fantastic. And I'll just write off the bat here, I'll say I'm nowhere near as much of an expert in relation to how the drugs work in the brain. Whereas if you were listened to the previous podcast, you'd hear that I understand a fair bit about how nutrients are working in the brain. I tend to focus more on the solutions than the problems, if you will. And unfortunately, in this sense, the drugs are oftentimes the problem. So I'll just put kind of put that out as a caveat that don't expect the same out of me, uh the same level of intellect in relation to exactly what the drugs are doing in the brain compared to what the micronutrients are doing in the brain. So uh general classes of medications that we work with. The first thing is as an overall umbrella, we're talking about psychiatric medications. Those are the medications that we've had to, over the last almost three decades, develop support protocols to help people come off of them safely and effectively, because the vast majority of the people coming to us were on a psychiatric medication or a number of psychiatric medications. So it's a pretty broad sweeping umbrella. In essence, that's just mood altering or brain altering medications, is really what that is, that are working on the central nervous system, that type of thing that are having that type of impact. Whereas, you know, you have your heart medications, that type of thing that we haven't had to deal with as much, right? Because, well, it hasn't been something that's been conflicting. Although we do see people sometimes will reduce down or completely off of other medications like that, just by simply taking the proper nutrition, but it has never been of the concern that the psychiatric medications have been. We have our anti-anxiety medications, uh, we have our antidepressants, we have just general mood stabilizers, anti-seizure medications or anti-convulsants, your stimulants, which may not be as well known in relation to that classification of medications, but that's your Adderall, concerta, dexidrin, eritalin, that type of thing, you know, anything for ADHD. And then antipsychotics, which is obviously what you're going to find with people that are uh in psychosis or schizophrenia, they're gonna be on them. Um, and then the the one that oftentimes people won't classify in the psychiatric medications, but it's working along the same levels is your sleep aids as well. And those can actually be really quite nasty to try to come off of. And once again, you know, it's working on a similar level because you have some of these medications working to affect serotonin levels, but melatonin comes from serotonin. And so when you're taking a sleep aid, you're working on almost the same level. It's just that it's you know, trying to focus in on more on the melatonin aspect. And so the addictive nature of the of a sleep aid is actually quite high compared to, let's say, even just a general mood stabilizer or a simplistic antidepressant, if you will. And then uh in that whole mix, you also have your benzodiazepines, which are about as bad as they come, really, is what we what we found. And it's not just us that have found that I want to kind of digress for a brief moment here. We ended up getting our hands on this little booklet that was issued by Health Canada back in like 1976, if I recall properly. Small booklet, but a booklet nonetheless, specifically on the use of benzodiazepines when they were first being introduced to the marketplace. And it was a booklet that was being given out to doctors, an educational booklet. And within that booklet, there was a very strict instruction specifying that these medications were not to be taken for a duration beyond two weeks. The reason why is because of how addictive they were, and and it was easily identified how addictive they were. Yet we see that that booklet disappeared out of circulation. We see that that warning would no longer be communicated or adhered to, and people have been on benzos for years, and now you try to get them off, and it is it it's an uphill battle. It's a lot of work, it's well worth it, but it's a lot of work in relation to people that have been on these medications for an extended period of time.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and one of the things that I want to I'm gonna say here is uh Professor Joanna Moncrief, I've interviewed twice on my podcast and has done tremendous work in helping people actually understand what what these drugs do, how they work in the brain, and and how to safely taper off of them. She talks about how all of those names for drug categories are actually marketing names. They are not they are not accurate as far as what is actually happening. They are used as a marketing tool to deceive people, really, into believing that this is going to, it's anti-anxiety, so it's going to stop my anxiety, or it's antidepressant, so it's going to stop my depression, or antipsychotic, it's going to stop my psychosis. And she said that there is no scientific validate valid, scientifically valid reason for those names. They are simply marketing tools. So that people, when they take them, they get this idea that they are that, you know, that this drugs are doing something that they really are not, that there is more scientific validity to the drug than than they have based on even the testing. Right. And so, and one of the things I am going to mention this here too. The more I learned about medications and how they worked, the more I've been able to go back into my story and look at the symptoms that I was experiencing and start recognizing like my very first major anxiety attack that put me in the hospital for eight hours thinking I was having a heart attack, and the doctors even thought I was having a heart attack because I'll my blood pressure was elevated, my heart rate was elevated. There were like all these external indicators, and they did all of the testing, a full workup, and nothing was wrong with my body. And then they just then they decided it was just an anxiety attack. Looking back, that happened at the same time that I was switching medications. The same thing happened when I would go off of medications prior to getting pregnant. You know, I you have to go off of medications, and I had to take, you know, remove my birth control. And I would get severely, severely depressed right before, right as I was getting pregnant. Both times I got pregnant when I was during medication, it was recognized then not looking back now, it was I was in withdrawal, but nobody recognized that. Nobody acknowledged that, right? And then postpartum, I had a severe postpartum hyperthyroid condition that was correlated with the me starting up my drugs again. Like I was still taking antidepressants all the way through the pregnancy, but I would start taking the quote unquote mood stabilizers. And as my hormones shifted, and as I started taking these medications and they started changing my chemistry, my body went into hyperthyroidism. Like I my high my I felt I told my husband both times, I said, I feel like I'm in high school again. I can't I'm eating and eating and eating and I'm losing weight. And I was passing out and everything's like looking back, most of the problems that I was having were not related to quote unquote bipolar disorder. They were related to the drug action and the withdrawal and the you know switching medications and coming off of medications, but nobody acknowledged what was actually happening. And so all of it was lumped into this, dumped into this bucket, which is so we created this very convenient bucket to dump to you know to blame all of these symptoms on, which is bipolar disorder. So anytime you experience any symptoms at all, it is blamed on your quote-unquote disorder. And the problem that that creates for people as they want to heal is that anytime they experience the symptoms, there's a psychological dependence on these medications because you are afraid of the symptoms. And anytime you experience symptoms, you think, oh no, my bipolar is coming back. When that's not reality, it's not true. So I want to talk first about I want to talk, I kind of I think the best thing would be to go through the process somebody goes through when they come when they start with true hope. So when somebody comes to true hope, they do an intake, initial it take with you guys. And something that I've learned, and I've I've made sure that I coach people through whenever they start this process, is you need to tell True Hope everything that you're on, everything, any micronutrients included, because we don't understand, you know, the lay person does not understand how these things interact with each other. We don't understand like what the withdrawal is going to look like, we don't understand any of that. So we need to make sure we give a very clear picture to True Hope of everything that we're taking. And sometimes I think that it's helpful, you know, if you especially if you have we had one person one time that had recently titrated down and were experiencing a lot of intense symptoms, which once we talked to True Hope about it, he said, Well, you're actually in withdrawal. So before we increase your true, you know, your supplements, we're gonna do some aminos to help get rid of these withdrawal symptoms, help mitigate these, not get rid of, but help mitigate the withdrawal symptoms. So let's talk about that first. So what happens when somebody comes to you and they they do the this workup with you? Do they start titrating down right away, or what's the first thing that's gonna happen with them?
SPEAKER_00:Uh it all depends on the medications that um they're working with. And and I'm not on the support floor anymore. Uh once was back in 2007, 2008, um, overseeing some of the operations there more on the the intake side of things versus the actual support. Uh, but it it was always you know independent or um sorry, individual dependent on how the program was going to roll out. So sometimes what would happen, um, well, I'll shall say it's right off the bat, they would never engage in reducing somebody off their medications right off the bat. So what would what would happen is typically speaking, is that the individual would get onto the micronutrients, they get onto the MPR plus, they'd start to ramp up to a dose that's going to start really supporting them, supporting their mental health. And then, depending on the the individual and what the medication was, you know, generally within about a week's time, they would be engaging in their first reduction. And so let's let's just give an example here. Let's say that it's just SSRI, and this applies to most SSRIs, but not all. Some of them are uh generally approached with an eighth reduction model, where we will do reductions at one eighth of the medication per time. But generally speaking, it's a quarter reduction. And so a quarter reduction would occur after about a week or within that week, and then we would wait and we would see what's going on and wait for what is referred to within our head office as medication potentiation, where we start to see that the medication is starting to become overpowering, where they're into a state of over-medication. And then the next withdrawal would take place or the next reduction would take place from the medication, and then it just persists from there until we can get them off the medication. Now, those are pretty general, you know, general set of rules. Sometimes if somebody's on medication longer, it could be the same medication as the next person over, but they're getting an eighth reduction because they're much more sensitive. Their dependency on it has increased over the years. And so there's a custom tailoring that takes place in relation to all of this. We use general guidelines, but those general guidelines are there just to provide exactly what that is, general guidelines, not the specifics for that particular individual. And so there's variance that that will occur from one person to the next, depending on the various circumstances that led up to them giving us a call and getting onto the micronutrients. And so that's what it would normally look like. They come in, we do the intake, we get all the information that we can get, and so that we know what we're working with in relation to limiting factors, things that are going to contradict the supplements that they're gonna have to eliminate or reduce, even things like alcohol consumption, all that type of stuff, because that's counteractive to the the effects of the Empire Plus. And then then we'll begin the process of getting them onto the Empire Plus, they receive it in the mail, and then we start to work with them from there. Uh obviously, if they're in Canada, they may have already purchased it from a health food store, so they have it on hand, and they may already begin taking it, and then you know, we're gonna wait for that um that time to be able to begin the process of withdrawing them off the medication in the most safe and efficacious way that we know how, which we've developed some pretty good expertise over the over the years and over the about a hundred thousand people that we've worked with over the last three decades uh surrounding medication reduction.
SPEAKER_01:Well, and one of the things I want to anecdotally, um, when I started, so I prior to finding True Hope, I had found one other micronutrient or supplement, I shouldn't say micronutrient, but another supplement from an MLM that somebody had recommended. And I started taking it, and it was helping a little bit because I was getting over-medicated. I didn't know what overmedication was, I didn't understand what was happening, but there was something happening. And it has, it was helping with some symptoms. And so I was taking that prior to starting with True Hope, and I didn't mention it to True Hope when I started. In fact, I didn't talk to them about it for about two years because it never occurred to me that something natural was something that I needed to talk to them about. You know, I just like, this is just another supplement, I'm not gonna worry about that. And I told them about all the medications and I followed all the protocols. And a couple of years in, so just so anybody in the audience knows, if you're working with true hope, they will call you periodically. If you don't call them and you don't talk to them, they will call you on a periodic basis just to check in with you and see how you're doing. They'll want to update their files and make sure they know everything that you're on and and you know how you've been doing. And they called for one of these. And I, like I said, I've been on it for a couple of years. And as they were going through updating their file, they asked the question, is there anything else that you're taking? They didn't ask medications, they said anything else that you're taking. And I said, Well, I'm taking this other thing. And they said, Oh, well, what is that? So we went through the ingredient list because they weren't familiar with the actual product yet. And when they there was something in the ingredient list that they said, you should not be taking that because that actually interferes with the absorption of the Empower Plus. And I was surprised. I was like, really? You know, and so I talked to them, I was kind of curious. I talked to him about it for a little bit, stopped taking it, and within a month, like some of the things that I was still struggling with were gone. And I was just, I was always, I'm always amazed at how I shouldn't be. But I'm still like really in awe and grateful for the expertise that True Hope's customer support has because over the years, there have been times when I thought I knew better and I would try something and always paid a price for it. And so I got to a point where I'm like, never go against True Hope's advice. Like, if True Hope tells you to you tells you to do something, you do it because they understand what they're talking about. They've been doing this for so long. They know, they understand how to make sure that your brain is getting what it needs to function in a healthy way and how to safely remove the medications. And and so let's talk about over medication a little bit because I don't think people really understand what this is. I you know, if somebody starts taking the true hope supplements and they do not decrease their medications, they will start experiencing symptoms. And it's different for everybody, it's different based on the medications, it's based different based on the individual. But can you talk about you you used a different term? Um you you said over medication, but there was something medication something that you said.
SPEAKER_00:Medication potentiation is yeah, and I'm not sure how long they've been using that term for, but that's the term that they use in-house now.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. So what's my I'm gonna I'm gonna ask you if this is accurate because this is what I think is happening. So what I what I understand happening is that as your brain begins to heal, the medication becomes too much for your healing brain. Is that is that an accurate way to say that?
SPEAKER_00:Or yeah, so so let me put it this way. So if you're taking an SSRI, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, which is preventing the reuptake of serotonin so that you have serotonin available, if you're taking that and then you take M Power Plus, which is enhancing the natural production of serotonin, well now you're reasonably you're gonna have too much serotonin, right? And you're not gonna feel very good. You're gonna go into serotonin syndrome. So, yes, that's exactly what what's going on there is the reason why these medications work for certain individuals is because there's something going on in the brain that needs to be addressed. And so, you know, and and this is just using the hypothetical that the medication is actually working for them, because many people will get on medications and they don't work, and then they have to jump from one to the next to the next, and then eventually that one seemed to work. And so let's say that hypothetically they're on a medication that has been working for them, and now they get on the Empire Plus. Well, their brain chemistry is normalizing. They're producing, and when I say brain chemistry, I'm talking about the production of neurotransmitters, which in essence are chemicals, if you want to call them that, but that's what they are, is you know, amino acid-based molecules that uh that are doing a job. They're they're sending and receiving messages, they're communicating, they're really communication enhancers, is what they are, telling the body to do certain things or the brain to do certain things. And so keeping everything working in order within the body. And so now the medication is being overdone. So it'd be, in essence, like giving somebody who never had a mental health condition a psychiatric medication. Well, what's it gonna do? It's gonna dysregulate things. It's gonna throw you out of balance, can throw you out of whack, if you will. You're not gonna feel well. And you're actually gonna end up with mental health symptoms, even though you didn't have mental health symptoms to start off with. So that's taking in, if you want to call it, a normal person, a person who doesn't have a diagnosable mental health condition, and throw them onto a psychiatric medication, a therapeutic dose, you can anticipate mental health issues to arise. So that's what it's doing. And what's interesting about that is that in the research, they call it the bell-shaped curve. And so you have people that are participants in the research. They're being studied, they're on the Empire Plus. Now, most of these people that were that were being researched were coming already on medications. And so what the researchers found is that generally by about that day five mark, is that they had a reduction in symptoms. So symptoms are going down. Hey, that's great. This is looking, you know, there's some statistical reduction in symptoms, anyways. And and it's looking great. But then it tapers off. And then symptoms start to go up again. And we're talking about mental health symptoms in general here. And the initial response from the doctors involved in the researchers saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, symptoms are returning. We need to increase the medication. When in reality, it was the exact opposite. We need to decrease the medication now. So then that and that was the hardest thing to educate a lot of these doctors on because it was so counterintuitive. Symptoms increasing, medication needs to increase. No, symptoms are increasing because they're over medicated and they're now exhibiting these mental health symptoms. So reduce the medication. Now we go like this, and now we're plateauing. That's when you should do the withdrawal right there. If we can identify that there's a flatlining in the symptom evaluation charts, that the symptoms aren't decreasing anymore, because we anticipate that if you persist, it's gonna go up and maybe it starts to go up. Now you reduce the medication. Oh, tapers down and down it goes again, right? And then you can follow that literally. You can just follow this downward step throughout the withdrawal process, where if you don't withdraw fast enough, you're gonna start to go up and then you withdraw and then you're gonna go down again, right? But it's hopefully if you're doing it at the appropriate rate, it's persistently going down rather than coming back up. But that's exactly what you would anticipate to see if the medications were not withdrawn at an appropriate rate, you would see an increase in symptoms that are synonymous with mental health conditions. And as such, that's where it becomes so counterintuitive, where doctors will look at it and say, symptoms increasing, medication needs to increase when in fact it's the exact opposite. The medications were causing the issue.
SPEAKER_01:Right. And so if somebody goes into over-medication, they call True Hope, and True Hope will advise them, based on the medications that they're taking, how much to reduce each medication by. If somebody's taking multiple medications, there might be a different amount that each one needs to be reduced by based based on their drug action, based on what withdrawal looks like from that medication. And then when they reduce the medications, they will go into a mitigated withdrawal, but it is a withdrawal. They are going to go into a withdrawal from that medication being reduced, right?
SPEAKER_00:Well, it depends. Because if if we're waiting for the medication potentiation to occur, where we're starting to see that the medication is starting to generate those effects, the reduction oftentimes won't create the withdrawal effect or near as much withdrawal effect. Whereas if you preempt it and you're you're going down, your symptoms are going down, and we haven't even gotten to the plateau yet, and we withdraw at that point, it could be too early. You might get lucky and withdraw just at the right point in time, and you just keep this kind of smooth-flowing decrease in symptoms as time goes on. But if you withdraw too quickly, likelihood that you're going to have withdrawal effects are going to increase quite a bit. And so that's why True Hope takes more of that kind of they try to take the safe approach where we want to wait till we see the medication starting to potentiate, starting to create some symptoms, and then withdraw at that point in time so as to avoid withdrawal effects as much as possible.
SPEAKER_01:Right. And it's really important. One of the things that I do in my program is I teach people to start mapping out what that looks like for themselves so that they can see it. It's really hard when somebody, especially if somebody's been living with this for any kind of extended period of time, you know, in the program, we don't talk about bipolar disorder, we talk about bipolar symptoms. We check, we we really actively try to work with the language that is going to help change the way that we view these things. And we talk about how symptoms are information. You're a detective in your life. We're going to figure out what the information is that's coming, you know, that we're receiving from that symptom. And so when they go through this process, you know, I try to make sure that they understand it. I do not advise them. I want to make sure everybody understands that. The only what I'm doing in the coaching program with this pro. Of the process of healing is teaching them how to use true hope effectively, how to make sure you're giving them accurate information, that you're calling when them when you need to. And, you know, that's our mantra is when in doubt, call true hope. Like if there's any doubt at all, call true hope right away, ask them, and they will tell you, you know, just stay the course. This is just normal, or you know, increase aminos, or, you know, it's hide for a reduction. But we always, you know, that's the that's kind of our mantra in the program is it, you know, when in doubt, call true hope. But it's understanding what these symptoms are actually telling them so that there's not uh there's a tendency sometimes I've seen in people to revert back to the idea that this is your bipolar coming back. You know, there's some fear and anxiety surrounding this. Like what if this isn't gonna work? And what if this, you know, what what if this, you know, I have my bipolar symptoms come back? You know, it's very scary for some people because they don't want to end up back in the hospital. They don't want to end up, you know, with the symptoms that cause them to do really bad things, right? And so, so it's really helpful, I think, for people to understand what's actually happening to them. This is not your bipolar coming back, this is your brain healing and your medication potentiation or over-medication is happening. And so now it's time to, this is exciting. Like this is good news. We're gonna reduce a little bit now, and then you're gonna level out for a little bit. And I want to talk a little bit, I'm gonna just talk here just briefly about what kind of that those those symptoms can look like, because I don't want people to be afraid that this is gonna like throw them into mania, you know, or you know, that it's gonna be a scary experience. What I have seen, and maybe you I don't know if you can talk about this, but for for me personally, I will share. I started to get depressed when I would get over medicated. And I also had a really weird thing where I so I would have depression and and and fatigue were two main ones for me. But I also would had this weird thing where I could taste the medication in my mouth. And I don't, I've never heard anybody else talk about it, but that was something really weird for me. It tasted like I had sucked on a pill, is what it tasted like to me. And it was, I thankfully, once I that once that happened a couple of times, I was able to say, I'm over medicated now, and so I would call true hope. But the first two times it happened, I'm like, what is wrong with me? I don't understand what's happening. And the first time it happened, I called my doctor, and my doctor didn't know what to tell me. And thankfully he was on board. That is not very common, but my doctor had had looked at True Hope's research. And at that point, I had been treated by him for over eight years, and he was as desperate to find something to help me as I was. And so I was so grateful to that doctor for his willingness to be open. And he looked at True Hope's research, felt like it was good research, and he said, This looks like a viable option. But when it came to going through the withdrawal process, he did not know how to help me. And so he, the first time I called him, he said, I don't know what to tell you. You need to call true hope. And from that point on, I just called true hope each time because he didn't he didn't know how to safely withdraw me from the medication.
SPEAKER_00:Well, no, they're not learning that in in in university. They're they're learning how to put people on medications, they're learning how to switch medications. But when you're working with psychiatric medications, the concept is that these are incurable conditions that will need to be treated for a lifetime. So the whole concept of withdrawing isn't on the table. Hence why they're not being educated on it. They're just medication isn't working anymore. All right, we're gonna do a switch. We're gonna switch over to this type of medication and see if it works. And then that's the general model that's being applied. So unfortunately, that's the sad reality that we see where you have very well-meaning doctors out there that are not educated in a way that they can best help their patients, especially when somebody's withdrawing off of one of these medications that the model was they were never supposed to get off it in the first place. And so, yeah, it's it's but it's been a real beautiful uh, you know, a benefit or a blessing for us to be able to interface with many open-minded doctors and to train them on the protocols over the years. Um, and many of them have used them to, you know, with great success with their own uh private practices and whatnot.
SPEAKER_01:And and uh I I guess I got a little sidetracked there, but I want to talk about some of the other symptoms I've seen. So um there's some people will get really agitated, so like really, you know, kind of agitated and like get angry really easily. Um, I have seen uh let's see, what are some of the other ones? Fatigue is one that I see regularly, fatigue and depression. Um, and then the agitation is another one. Um, so what are some other things? Because I I the one thing that I have seen with when it comes to mania, because that seems to be one of the things that people are most afraid of. I have never seen anybody in my experience where they ramped into mania like all of a sudden. And so it's it is the one person that I saw get manic, she had missed a bunch of doses of medication and micronutrients, and it took time for her to become manic for like weeks. So there were there were kind of warnings along the way, and and I didn't know at the time that she was missing doses. So it once looking back, you know, she ended up in the hospital. She, you know, had to stabilize for a few months before she could try again. And she learned her lesson. I was so grateful because I that she didn't give up because she's almost done with her taper now and doing really well. Like every time I see her, I'm like, you look so good, you know. But but like can we talk about a little bit more? I don't know if you know any other, like any other kind of over medication type symptoms, if there's anything other than that that you've seen.
SPEAKER_00:You've largely summed it up. Um, one of the ways that we put it as well, and this would go along with the fatigue and and the agitation, is kind of just being groggy. And and that seems to be the direction generally that over medication goes. And if anybody has any questions about it as they're going through the process, oftentimes we'll just simply recommend that they go to rxlist.com, look up their medication, go to the side effects tab, scroll down, and sure enough, basically without fail, they can identify right, there's the symptoms that I'm having, these side effects that are listed on the medication. Because when you have the medication potentiation or the over medication taking place, the ability to have those side effects manifest, even though they weren't having them before, is increased at that point in time. And so rxlist.com has been a fantastic tool for many people over the years to receive some clarity for what they're currently going through and to understand it's not the bipolar. Oh, it's not where my initial initial diagnosis was. It's the side effect of the medication. And it's listed right there in black and white. And so that's been a fantastic tool to help enlighten people to realize what they're working with. That it's no, it's not you, it's the medication that you have, and you just need to reduce the medication.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And it's gonna go away. Yeah, and then consistency is critical. Since I mentioned that already, I I want to talk about that here because you know, and one of the things that I do in my program that I'll I'll mention is we set up like this tools that are gonna help people to stay consistent. So when I was doing it, when I first started doing you know, this process, I I missed med, I missed med doses all the time. Like I just was not, I didn't, I wasn't missing them every single day, but I would forget sometimes, you know, and I wasn't using a pill organizer with my medications or anything like that. So there were a lot of times where I'm like, did I take my medication today? I can't remember. And I'm sure that contributed to the erratic symptoms that I experienced when I was on medication. But when I was going through this draw process, True Hope's customer support was very adamant that I needed to make sure that I didn't miss doses. And I was trying to figure out like, how do I make sure I remembered that I take my doses? And I kind of went through a trial and error period. But what I landed on was how important it was for me to have pill organizers, because then I wouldn't be questioning whether I took my dose for the day. You also have to take like the medications and the micronutrients have to be taken a certain amount of time apart. There's a lot of different details that have to be remembered in order to be consistent with taking these. So we use like, I have people use alarms. I have them use a little chart for themselves that they, you know, make their plan for the week so they can see when they need to take them, if they're going to be gone. We have them make sure they if they put a reminder alarm to remind them to take their medications and micronutrients with them because you cannot miss doses. Like it's it's very important to make sure you're not missing doses of the medications, you're not missing doses of the micronutrients. You have to be super consistent with this process.
SPEAKER_00:Consistency is key. 100%. In relation to the overall success, consistency is one of the main ingredients that cannot be removed from the process. Otherwise, failure is what most people can come to expect. And so, yes, uh, absolutely consistency on the medications while you're withdrawing from them. Otherwise, unless you're you like going down rocky roads, it gets a little more bumpy. But you know, the more consistency, consistent you are with it, the smoother the transition will be off of the medication. But then also obviously the consistency on the empire plus, because as you're coming off that medication, what's replacing it? What's generating the support within the brain, making you function? And so the Empire Plus is absolutely crucial alongside whatever else they may have recommended. Maybe if somebody was suffering with generalized anxiety or something like that, they'd be taking the inocital on a regular basis as well. And you know, coming off the medications, they should be taking the free amino that's what it's called here in Canada, amino power plus in the US to help come off of those medications while eliminating withdrawal effects. But being consistent on whatever the recommendations are is going to much better ensure that you will have a very high level of success in coming off the medications safely and effectively and obtaining the mental health that uh you likely never even had in your life. But uh, if you did at one point in time have stability in life, you're gonna regain that and you can expect to go beyond even that, beyond what you were accustomed to, even in a state of wellness before.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and I I mentioned this in a previous episode, but I was going through this process for like five or six months, and then one day I woke up and it felt like it was the first time I was awake in over a decade. And I I called my husband. Like I called my husband, I was so excited, I'm like, oh my gosh, I feel like I'm awake. And he was nervous at first because he thought I was manic because I was so animated and excited. And so he's like, uh, maybe you need to call your doctor. You know, he was very nervous, and rightly so. The man had been through a lot with me, right? But I kept trying to explain to him, I'm like, I'm not manic. I said, I I haven't felt this way in years. Like my brain feels awake. Is this what normal people feel like? I just kept saying it's like, is this what normal people feel like? And I didn't, I think, especially when you're kind of in that that drug state for extended periods of time, you forget what it feels like to feel normal. Like you don't remember what it feels like for your brain to function in a healthy way, if it ever did. And it was such a it was it was such a and such a blessing because I did not know my brain could feel like that. And that was just a beginning. Like I was like, my brain is healed. It was like just the very, very beginning taste of what it was gonna actually feel like later on. But but that's one of the huge things, and I love I love watching people go through this process. Whenever somebody like quits before they get there, it makes me so sad because I'm like, oh, you don't understand how much better you can feel on this. It will change your life literally. It literally saved my life. I will forever be grateful to your dad and for all the people that made this this supplement possible because it literally saved my life. Quite literally. That is not hyperbole, that I'm not being you know, hyperbolic in that statement. I'm being very literal that it literally saved my life.
SPEAKER_00:You know, we we've gotten that so many times. Uh you know, and for your your audience here, it's it's important to understand that that you know, oftentimes what we're working with is literally life and death situations. But let's even just hone in a little bit more, uh, you know, just into relate, you know, relationships and all that. I had the opportunity years ago, I used to be over the video department. I actually started the video department where we were categorizing all of the news articles that were being produced on us, the documentaries that were coming out, that type of thing. And I was digitizing them and then I would disseminate them, all that type of stuff. And um we we developed this program where we started traveling around and we were doing video testimonials. Um and it was it was it was a it was a lot of fun. And the reason why is one, we were meeting all these different individuals, but hearing these fantastic stories. And the the one opportunity that I had in early 2007 was to interview a couple, uh, a husband and wife, and the the husband had just been suffering with bipolar for a lot of years, and it caused strain in their marriage, it caused strain in his relationship with his three sons. Um, he wasn't as present as a of a father as he should have been, and he destroyed their their finances significantly when he went into a complete manic state and he purchased everything he ever wanted to purchase, and all of a sudden they're over$100,000 in debt, and and also not a lot of debt today, but back in 2000, in the early 2000s, that you know, as a little more, and you know, he's buying whatever vehicle he ever wanted, and that just all sorts of stuff. And um as well-meaning as he was, and you know, good-hearted as he was, he he just wasn't in control of himself and it was causing these issues. And so I interviewed them, and this is years after he got on the Empire Plus, and you know, he's talking about the fact that he has a relationship finally with his boys that he never had, and his boys are in their late teens, early twenties now, but he's finally able to have the relationship. He missed that whole window of time with them, right? But he's but he but he's making up for it. And his wife, I interview her, and she's just bawling. And she's saying, I finally have the husband back that I had initially married. And you know, when you look at it, and we're you know you're say there's there's lives being saved in this situation. I don't think it was life and death, but in this situation, it was a marriage and a family that was being saved. And we hear this all the time. We hear this feedback, and it's what keeps me fueled up, right? Like no amount of money in the world would would ever replace the fact that I can go to go to bed at night knowing I made a difference in the world. Because I've had other opportunities in my life to go make money in a much more easy fashion than what we're doing here and and more money. But when I put into the balances, I said, Am I willing to leave off with this? When I'm hearing this beautiful feedback, am I willing to do that for some money? Like, am I gonna be a feel as rewarded? And the simple answer was no. The simple answer was no, as long as I have food on my table, it doesn't matter, right? As long as my family's provided for, it doesn't matter. Because the real reward in this is knowing that there are a lot of people being blessed in a significant way, in the same way that I've been blessed, my family's been blessed, that you've been blessed. And it's it's just a beautiful thing. And so thank you for sharing the fact that, you know, as you put it so boldly, that this saved your life. And that's not uncommon.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Well, and and I didn't know that I was healing when I was healing. Like I didn't really understand that. I didn't understand that it was possible to heal because I had been so thoroughly indoctrinated in this idea that bipolar was a lifelong and curable condition. I would have it for the rest of my life. And I was grateful for true hope because I thought, man, this is really helping me, you know, live better. Like I was, I was starting to have, you know, be able to control myself. I was, you know, especially like when I I think I mentioned in one of the previous episodes, again, this is the one of the things that I, you know, reinforce all the time. Symptoms are information. And don't just live with the symptoms, figure out what the symptoms are trying to tell you. So, you know, I had I had the experience after I'd been on in power for a couple of years where I'd had an outburst with one of my son, with my son. I was still continuing to get agitated. I was still struggling with anger. And I just happened to have one of those experiences with my son when True Hope called to check on me that day. Feels like divine intervention to me, honestly, because it had never occurred to me to talk to True Hope about this symptom because I didn't view symptoms that way at the time. I just thought I didn't have any self-control and I felt like a bad person, like a bad mom. And I was talking to her and I was kind of frustrated, and she said, like, you know, how's your day going? I'm like, not so great, you know. And I just kind of I don't know what made me say the things that I said to her, but I happened to mention this, like, I just don't have any control over my anger. And she asked me questions. This woman started asking me questions about it, and in a after a couple of minutes, she said, Sweetie, you need salmon oil. And I remember like that phrase will stick in my head forever. She's like, Sweetie, you need salmon oil. And I'm like, what are you talking about? She said, You need salmon oil. And I started taking a very high dose of salmon oil and it resolved the problem. Like all of a sudden, I was able to, I was able to um control myself. You know, I had been practicing mindfulness meditation. I've been doing all these other things to try and control this anger, but there was an essential nutrient that my brain was not getting that it needed in order to produce whatever was, you know, in my brain to help me control myself and be able to not flip out. And now, like I used to be a really angry driver. I would like scream at people, you know, stuff. I I am totally chill when I drive now, you know. So so it's it's really important for people to understand that we've got to stop pathologizing these symptoms and lumping them into these groups and and recognize like this this is your brain asking for help. What are the symptoms trying to say and start listening to the symptoms and give your brain and your body what it needs to function in a healthy way?
SPEAKER_00:Exactly. I I know we've digressed from the the medication aspect here, but did we talk about the four pillars of nutrition in your own?
SPEAKER_01:You mentioned it before, but will you repeat it in this one? Because I think that's a good thing to talk about here.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, you because you brought up the salmon oil, and and we don't we don't sell salmon oil. And the reason being is that there's great salmon oils out there. We're not we're not about just supplying any you know a Me Too product and really commercializing what we're doing here. Um we just recommend that people go get a good omega-3 fatty acid. And oftentimes that salmon oil, if you want uh a more immediate effect because it's pre-converted, the salmon went and did the job for you. It converted you know different forms of omega-3 fatty acid into a form, actually, well, they probably got it from the krill, but down the road at some point in time it started off as a vegetable source, omega-3 fatty acid as ALA, and then it gets converted in in our bodies, right, in fishes' bodies in the krill, whatever, into different forms of omega-3 fatty acid. So you have the DHA and the EPA already read readily available to go straight to work, and the DHA is really that's a docahexanoic acid, but that's really for cognition. It's it's it helps the brain, helps with mental health conditions, helps with ADHD, it's it's it's great, especially when it's not on its own. When you when you combine it with the other pillars of nutrition to make sure that there's synergy, that there's conversions taking place that need to take place. And so when we take a look at the four pillars of nutrition that really give us a strong support base, just like a four-legged chair, that's vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and then omega fatty acids, and I still can't hold that one up on its own any stretch. So um you have those four classes of nutrients, and they work synergistically together. Not one of them will do its full job without the others being present. And so that that you know, it goes down the whole neurotransmitter pathways, it goes to the whole conversion in the human body of flax oil or hemp or chia, you know, the omega-3 fatty acid being found in there, converting over to the DHA, DPA, and EPA necessary for your body to be healthy, your brain to thrive. And so, you know, you really highlight that, okay, the M power plus got you to a certain place and was serving you quite well. But without that omega fatty acid, with you being deficient in the omega-3 fatty acids, you were never able to get fully to where you needed to be. And so once you introduce that, life changing.
SPEAKER_01:Yes. Yeah, and and uh one of the other things that I want to talk about. So when I got onto this, I'm using anecdote just to kind of take us along the path, but we moved, I've moved a ton, like not across town like other states. We've lived in six states since my husband and I got married. And within the state we're living now, we've lived in four different places already. So hopefully we're not moving anymore. I'm sick of moving. But every time I would move, the first time I moved after I switched over to Empower, I started getting like I kind of got hypomatic during the moving phase, and then I got depressed afterwards, and it was a pretty significant depression. And and it made me nervous because again, the psychological dependence, this idea that I had this disease, you know, this disorder that I would have forever. And I started worrying because I had been through this with medication, I started worrying that maybe the medic that the micronutrients weren't working anymore. Because I'd been through that with medication where I would be okay for a little bit and then all of a sudden it wasn't working anymore. And I called True Hope in a panic one day. And I said, I I'm I'm depressed and I, you know, the micronutrients aren't working. And they asked me some questions. One of the things I love about this is that True Hope does not just shoot from, you know, they don't shoot from the hip. You guys don't just, you know, spout off stuff. They always ask questions. There's always follow-up questions to get a clear picture of what's going on. And they talked to me for the first time about a med release. I had never heard about medication, you know, what a medication release was. And and I said, but I've been off the medications. I can't remember how many months at that point. I want to say eight or nine months at that point. But they said your body stores this medication for up to 10 years in your soft tissues. And when you go through intense stress, it can push that medication back into your system. And so then you end up with medication that your body doesn't need anymore. And it's, I don't want to say toxic, but it's what it felt like to me. Like it was pretty bad depression. This was not like it was it felt wrong. I don't know how to describe it. Because there's there's a natural state of depression. There are times when we have bad things happen in our lives, and that is a natural state. This did not feel like a natural state of depression. And and so that was the first time that I learned about a med release. And true hope gave me the protocol for what to do to help mitigate those that in my body, and I took care of that, and then we went through another move and I went through med release again, and the third time it happened, I was like, I don't want to do this anymore. And I talked to I talked to True Hope and I said, I'm gonna do a cleanse. I just want to get this out of my body, and they said, Do not do that, that is unsafe. We don't have any idea how much of this medication is in your system. It could be very dangerous for you. This was one of those times when I learned the hard way, and so I went to a a store and got a liver cleanse and started a health food store and started taking it. And I was so depressed. If I didn't know better, I would have ended up in the hospital. Like I was in bed, couldn't get out of bed, I was severely, severely depressed, and called True Hope crying and said, I didn't listen to you, I don't know what to do now. Like, and they said, first of all, stop taking the liver cleanse. So I stopped taking that, and then I was like drinking tons of whey protein isolate and taking tons of the aminos. And after about a week, it was out of my system and I was feeling better, and I was like, never again, never ever, ever again. So, can you talk about what that is? What did I go? What was I going through? It's very frustrating for some people when they learn this because they're like, well, it feels hopeless, but it's not actually hopeless. I think that it's helpful to understand this because forewarned is forearmed, right? So let's talk about what was happening to me each time that happened.
SPEAKER_00:Well, it depends on the medication that that you were pushing into your bloodstream and and the effect that it was having in your neurochemistry. Um, but I I I want to add to that real quickly here because patience is a virtue, especially when it comes to the medication reduction process. And then even just after the medication is out, like you're you're communicating there. Um when we say that it can store up to or up to 10 years in your system, that's that's actually just a hypothetical. I've worked personally with people that have been off medications for longer than 10 years. And I don't want to communicate a lack of hope here that, oh boy, I'm gonna be dealing with this for the rest of my life. No, when we're on nutrition, we detox faster than when we're not on nutrition. So I've I've literally worked with people that have been off medications for longer, thinking of one particular situation at hand here where this individual wasn't on our supplements. They had used our supplements over a decade before to get off the medication and then drop the supplements, dropped the medication, and just coasted through life and did better than they were when they're on the medication, but they were unstable. And they ended up getting onto the M Power Plus again uh through associating with me, and this is over a decade later, and they started pushing meds again. This is over a decade, they hadn't touched medications, and so um they they can store for who knows how long, right? Depending on the circumstances that you're generating. Now, like I said, when you're on the nutrition, you will detoxify on a regular basis. It becomes a normal everyday process, which is good, but it can come with its quirks as well, you know, as you're pushing stuff out, but it's better out than in. Now, I want to communicate the s the severity of the liver cleanse and consider yourself blessed.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:There's another individual I know personally, and they got well after a lifetime of being very unwell, they got well, were very successful in in relation to going and even telling their story. So this wasn't just a you know, oh you know, marginally better. No, they were it actually became their career that they were going and communicating to others their story when true. We used to be associated with an MLM years ago. And this individual, uh, her and her husband, they went to a uh naturopathic doctor who recommended do this liver cleanse. They did it, and it pushed so much meds that this individual forgot who they were. They they they didn't even know who they were for like five days and never fully came out of it. It caused brain damage to the point that they never fully came out of it and developed even um an accent. Literally, like they the speech was different, markedly different than it was before. And and then it was kind of rocky road after that, up and down, up and down, never going back to where they had once been. And it's because they literally overdosed on medication that was stored in their system and they pushed it out too fast. So we are very, very strong advocates that you do not touch the liver.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Not not in a profound way, especially when you have Empire Plus. If you don't have Empire Plus in you, can you push the liver a little more? Probably. But it's because your brain chemistry or your brain can handle it more when it's not nutrient, but it'd be like me just going taking a handful of antipsychotics or something like that, and what's gonna happen, right? I think I could die from it, right? I'm gonna my propensity to have negative impacts from it is higher than somebody who may qualify for a diagnosis of psychosis. Right?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:So that that that's so important there in relation to following those those rules, right? That have been established for a very good purpose. So consider yourself blessed. But yeah, so as to what you are working with, basically what's happening is you have normalized brain chemistry, you've just pushed a ton of medication out into your system, and you are going to go into an intense state of over-medication. And once again, RX list is your best friend uh when it comes to that to identifying. Look at that. I'm experiencing two-thirds out of the total totality of the side effects listed on the on these two pages, right?
SPEAKER_01:Right.
SPEAKER_00:And I just feel like a complete mess.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and it's I there were things that true hope, because I I was getting aggravated with this, what was happening. And so I was asking, okay, well, what causes these this these med releases? So I want to I want to go back make sure that I'm saying this right. So my understanding is the the medication gets stored in the soft tissues of your body, and something about stress, stressors on the body, pushes that medication out of the soft tissues into the bloodstream. And my one of the other things that I've discovered was causing this was I love to do triathlons, and I I'm a super competitive person. And so I was doing super intense training. Like I don't know how to do things part way, so it wasn't like, let's do a triathlon and we'll just kind of dabble in it. I was like went and bought books on it, and I was creating this really intense training schedule and stuff. And while I was doing the training, I started experiencing symptoms and called True Hope and found out like you cannot do this intense training right now because it is pushing medication back into your system. Like that intense training is stress on the on the body that is pushing those medications back out into your body.
SPEAKER_00:Yep.
SPEAKER_01:Is that accurate?
SPEAKER_00:Well, that that's absolutely accurate. And and and and the main antidote, though not a full antidote, but the main antidote to it is increased whey protein isolate on a regular basis. So some Some people will be like doing two, three, four scoops throughout the day. So they have a constant release of amino acids into the bloodstream so that when the medications are pushed out of the soft tissue, that there's something to bind up to them and to pull them out. So one, reducing the effects that the medications are having, and two, facilitating the ability for them to be able to actually flush out of your system rather than the body saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, put it back into storage. This is you know destructive stuff. When you knock them out of storage, you want them out. But it doesn't eliminate the overall effect. So it's still not advisable to just go and do that type of intense training unless you put it to the test and you know that you can do it, but that you want to work your way up to it, right? That you don't just start overnight and then you sound you sound similar to me, you sound similar to my dad, where it's like, hey, if I'm gonna do something, we're all in. Like all in. Like it's all or nothing. And it's a funner way to live life, I can tell you that. But sometimes uh the un an unintended uh effects are not desirable.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Yeah. So we've talked about we've talked about the sources of symptoms of over medication, withdrawal, med release. One other thing I think is important to talk about is gut health. So if you do not have, and there's a lot more, I think people are starting to understand better, you know, because there's more information, there's more research being done, and more it's being talked about more. How we have to have healthy guts in order for our body to absorb nutrients, nutrition, and nutrients into our body, right? And if your gut is not healthy, you can take nutrients all day long and your body is just not going to be able to absorb it in in adequate levels, right? And so I want to talk about that a little bit because I don't think people really understand that that piece.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I'll start by saying that the the gut is the gateway to health. That's health, not health. And so it's the gateway to health, and without a properly operating gut or or healthy intestine, intestinal tract, you are not going to thrive. And and it's multifaceted in this way. One, a lot of neurotransmitters are actually produced in the gut. So if you have gut dysbiosis, if you don't have a healthy gut flora, if you don't if you have an imbalance in bacteria and whatnot, or you have uh candida overgrowth that's taking place, you're likely not producing the neurotransmitters that you need to be in the gut that are then going to absorb into the bloodstream and go and and and work for you. So there's that aspect. The second aspect is going back to the candida overgrowth, candida albicans, parasites, that type of thing, which are more common than we're being told, and and part of the root of disease as well, in in many aspects, because they will actually rob you of nutrition as well. So you're not getting it out of your food as much as you should be, and you're not getting it out of your supplements as much as you should be when you have fungal overgrowth like Candida and or parasitic overgrowth, and oftentimes they go hand in hand as they both thrive within the same environment. So they kind of work synergistically together or symbiotically, if you will. And so if you have something like that in your gut, if if you do a candida self-test and you are you know off the charts type of thing, which a lot of people actually are, those are things that you want to address that you'll actually need to address before you can ever expect high health outcomes in relation to any protocols that you're doing. And so that's why we've actually developed the Candida protocol over the years. I started developing that, I believe, probably, I'm gonna guess, around 03, 04, somewhere around there is when we started to really develop the candida protocol because we recognized the need for it. Where if somebody came to us, let's say they weren't even on medications, so we don't even have that as a factor in all this. So it should be as simple as pop the top of the bottle, take the pills, you know, take the capsules, the 36 ingredients, you're gonna do well. Voila. Should be that simple. And if they weren't adequately responding, then it's like, okay, well, why aren't they responding? And you know, vast majority of the time came down to oh, candida overgrowth. The candida is actually consuming the nutrition. You're actually feeding the candida, you're making it more resilient, stronger, or or same with parasites. You're you're feeding them. They like good nutrition too, right? And so they're consuming at first and you're not getting it. And so when we would deal with that, then all of a sudden, they would just do better. They would do better all around, and they would their digestion would increase and their bowels would clear up. Things just got better all around. That now bang for their buck, they're getting more out of their supplementation, bang for their buck, they're getting more out of their food. And overall, they're just thriving. They they they've lit up, their their overall health is doing much better. And so those are the main aspects surrounding gut health is that you know, candy to overgrowth, parasites, either or, right? And having to address those and making sure that we're absorbing the nutrition, that we're getting the nutrition, and that you've got a good, healthy gut flora that's facilitating already the production of neurotransmitters before it even has an opportunity for the nutrition to get into the bloodstream.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and I've over the years, like I started taking because I had to go through the candida protocol a few times over the years. And one of the things that I discovered was actually causing a problem for me was when I would take antibiotics. I had no idea that taking an antibiotic was going to destroy my gut. And so I had a few times when I was frustrated going through the can, you know, that candida protocol because it takes like three months to, you know, get everything fixed. And it's a lot of, you know, a lot of like regimented like taking pill, you know, having the pill organizer again and you know doing all the things uh because it's you know taking the probiotics and taking the olive leaf extract or the things that are antifungal. It's a it's complicated for like three months. So it was really annoying to me. And after the third time, I was like, what is going on? Like, what am I doing wrong? And I called True Hope to like talk to them about it, and they helped me understand. Like, they asked me, I think that was again my question. Like they said, well, have you taken any antibiotics recently? And I'm like, Oh yeah, I had really bad bronchitis this this winter and I had a Z pack. They said, Okay, in the future, if you need to take an antibiotic, before you do that, call us, and we will help you mitigate the effects of that antibiotic so that you don't completely destroy your gut health. So after that, I've never had the problem again. Like anytime I don't take antibiotics very often, anyway, but there were a couple times after that that I did, and I've called True Hope right away. They gave me a protocol to make sure that I am mitigated the effects of that. So there's just like that's one of the reasons why I am so grateful for True Hope's customer support. So grateful because there are so many things that we don't understand, and unless you've gone to school, like not school, but like unless you've learned uh about all of these different details and stuff, I'm always amazed at how much the customer support understands and knows. You know, they'll say, Oh, well, this is this is why this is happening, or this is why this is happening. And and and I'm so grateful to the customer support. There was a time when True Hope's supplements were being sold through uh uh MLM, and I had family members that knew I was taking it, so they called me to, you know, they wanted to do a presentation for me or whatever. And I said, Nope, sorry, like I cannot lose True Hope's customer support. I am not switching to another source. Like, I need to stay with True Hope because I trust the customer support. I don't know what I'm doing. And even over the years, you know, I've I've been on this for 15 years. There are still times when I need to call and say, okay, something's funky, you know, something going on. Like my husband lost a job and it was a tremendously stressful time. And I called him, I'm like, I can feel myself getting depressed and like, okay, we need to increase your nutrient intake right now because you're under a lot of stress and you're burning through it faster. Like things like that. I wouldn't know intuitively. I have to call true hope and say, okay, what do I do right now? Something's something's not right.
SPEAKER_00:Yep. Yeah, exactly. The beautiful thing is that we've taken such a scientific approach from day one where tracking of symptoms is taking place, database was established, you know, and we literally have over a hundred thousand files on database. And they highlight and identify certain patterns. And when you see a pattern emerge enough times, you can say, this seems to be exactly what you anticipate given these particular circumstances. And so we were able to narrow things down, like even coffee consumption, how that's impacting one's mental health, and that, hey, somebody who's drinking five, six cups of coffee, absolutely not. If you want to get well, you gotta stop that. You gotta, because you're you're constantly consuming literally a stimulant, one that's in the same class, in essence, even though it's coming from a natural source, but it's it's alongside things like Adderall and Concerta and Dexygen and whatever, right? Like you're messing with your brain, right? And you're actually messator messing with your serotonin levels. Coffee, one of the reasons why people are addicted is because it enhances serotonin production, makes them feel really nice. And and so you know, we've been able to identify those things, and that's fantastic, so that then when you know a new staff member comes in, they're able to be trained on this, and that that knowledge is you know kind of hardwired into the computers literally with the database that we have all that information there, it's not so easy lost, and you know, you can actually anticipate that you're gonna get somebody on the phone that's gonna be able to assist you through the process in a very professional way, regardless of credentials. Why? Because we're we've pioneered this field of mental health and we're actually training doctors on it. The uneducated is training the highly educated. That's backwards, but it's appropriate given the circumstances because we developed these protocols, we've figured these things out through hard experience that others weren't having, that weren't going through that experience. So we've really pioneered in that field. But going back to the whole antibiotic thing, it's interesting because um, you know, I just want to touch on this real quick. I mean, there's a fantastic herbal antibiotic. There's so many fantastic herbal antibiotics that don't create the gut dysbiosis that pharmaceutical antibiotics create. And that gut dysbiosis, the destruction of the gut flora is where what generally results in increased depression and all sorts of other symptoms. And so the olive leaf extract, this is a Canadian label, Canadian bottle, but the olive leaf extract is a phenomenal antibiotic. It's what we use for the antifungal for knocking back candida, but it's antibacterial, antiviral, antifungal, antiparasitic, and it's a phenomenal antioxidant as well. So it's just an all-around fantastic herb, and it doesn't create the gut dysbiosis. It just seems to knock back the opportunistic pathogens that are um uh reaping havoc within us.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. There's so many good products that you're you guys have done so phenomenal research and and pioneered, like you said, you guys are pioneers in this field, and it's incredible. And one thing that I want to we're gonna come to a close here, but one thing I want to uh reiterate and maybe talk just a little bit about is the two keys to success with getting off of medications, getting onto micronutrients, and helping the underlying sources of these symptoms heal are patience and consistency. And and talking about the patience piece, one of the things that's interesting, there's a lot more information out there now on social media about people getting off of medications. And so they go through, you know, I've seen so many accounts with people are talking about their withdrawal process from medications, and it'll go on for years. Like they'll they'll it's you have to go super slow on their taper because the withdrawals are so awful and it'll take them years. And that sounds like a lot of people think like uh I don't want to do that. Like, why would I do that? And I always am so sad. Frequently I'll go on there and I'll say, Have you tried like adding in a micronutrient to that process? Because even though it sounds like a long time, true hope significantly cuts down on the withdrawal time. One of the things that is in the book, The Better Brain, they talk about how the average withdrawal time, based on, you know, depending on the medications you are you are on when you get on True Hope's product are six to twelve months, which is significantly lower than any, you know, what I'm seeing on social media where people are going through this draw withdrawal process for like three years, right? Because they have to don't go down so little so or so slow. And and the withdrawal symptoms are significantly mitigated because you're actually healing the brain. And the way that true hope approaches this is you know, waiting until there's an indication of that, you know, medication. I'm sorry, I keep forgetting the word, but potentiation. Potentiation. You know, we're waiting for that to start to happen, and then we would then we we go down. And what I have seen, I'll just mention this here too, is people will experience you know the over medication symptoms, and they will, you know, I always say call true hope right away. And if they if they recommend a reduction, usually 48 to 72 hours of of that, you know, I don't know if it's a medication potentiation lasting that long or if it's or if it's withdrawal, but it's about you know 48 to 72 hours is what I've seen on average. I don't know what other people are experiencing. So it doesn't last forever. You know, it's it and and when we create that um withdrawal pattern, that you know, titration pattern, they can see what's happening. So after as they've gone through a couple of cycles of of this reduction, they can start to see the pattern that they have and they say, okay, about every three to four weeks is when I start to get over medicated, and then I'll, you know, this will last for about 72 hours, and then I'll be okay for another, you know, three to four weeks. And when they start to see that, then it makes it easier for them so that they, when they start to go into over medication, they can look at their chart and like, oh, it's been about four weeks since I reduced. It might be time to do that again, and they can call true hope. But it's so important to be patient with this process, though. You don't want to go off too quickly. You don't want to, you know, I've I've seen that happen before, and it always makes me sad when somebody's like, I don't want to do this any longer. I just want to go off, and they'll just go off their medications and then they end up in like severe withdrawal. I saw somebody one time that went into protracted withdrawal, and so then they were dealing with these withdrawal symptoms much longer than than they would have if they had just been patient with the process.
SPEAKER_00:Exactly. And you know, so you have the patience and you have the consistency, and a big part of it actually leading up to that is the trust. Um, and I know sometimes it's it's hard. It's you know, you're you're dealing with uh an organization outside of the mainstream. Uh you're not dealing with mainstream medical system that that naturally is, you know, that trust is instilled in us as we grow up, as we're taught in school and all this type of stuff. That that's you know the highest level of health care, especially in the Western world, right? Our our health care dominates all other healthcare is what we're taught in essence. Um but when we take a look at it, they're not able to do what they need to do in relation to mental health. Mental health outcomes have gotten worse progressively over the decades, which shows that they they have failed miserably. And so it's hard to put your trust in in something else or someone else. Um but in in relation to this, I mean, if you can move forward with a level of trust, then that patience and the consistency um is is enhanced significantly that um that compliance isn't an issue because compliance will uh you know compliance issues. I mean, we've we've worked with individuals for a couple years where you finally have to say, you know, maybe you want to go do something else because compliance has been an issue where they just they bombshell themselves, they hit rock bottom, and then you have to pick them back up, and then they're doing good again, they're starting to get there, and all of a sudden they do it again. And it's a self-sabotaging behavior, and they never get well because they keep on having, they keep on taking things into their own hands, and compliance is is a major issue. So compliance wouldn't be an issue if trust was there. And so there's that aspect as well is if you can learn to just trust, right? And I don't advocate blindly trusting in anybody, but trust. Go and research, go figure it out, go look at the science, go look at the studies, go look at you know, testimonials, go talk to people, establish that trust, um, and you'll find that your success rate is much higher. And then going to the um, oh, what was I gonna mention? I think it was in relation to the withdrawal, withdrawing off of medications. So there's different ways that it that it can be done, and and we've taken or the six to twelve months is that's what it was, was six to twelve months coming off of medications on average, based on uh what was mentioned in The Better Brain by Dr. Bonnie Kaplan and Dr. Julia Ruckledge. Well, I would say in the vast majority of circumstances, it's actually quite a bit less than that. Like quite a bit less than that. And if somebody were just working with me personally and they were just on a simple, like just an antidepressant, they weren't on a benzo or something like that, if they were working with myself and my wife, my wife used to do a lot more support than I I've dabbled in it just enough to understand it enough to be able to speak effectively to it. But if if they were working personally with us, we would generally be looking at doing reductions. We we fast track it and we would increase the dosage higher on the Empire Plus, which causes you to need to withdraw faster, right, off the medication. So there's different ways of doing it, and Truope's taking a more safe approach right now, oftentimes, in how they're doing it. Um but we're using some of the older protocols that used to be in place, and um, they can be equally as effective, but you can also you need maybe a little bit more attention given to the particular individuals as you're doing it, but you increase the dosage of the Empire Plus, which causes the over medication to happen faster, which means you need to withdraw faster. And oftentimes we can have somebody off of a standard antidepressant within about three weeks fully, and then and they do fine, right? But you just need to be more careful while you're going through it that way. There's variations to it, but yeah, so anywhere between generally three weeks to it depends on the individual if they're on a benzodiazepine or something like that. Sometimes it's a year-long withdrawal process, and that's when it's gets long and arduous, and it's really unfortunate, but it's still worth it because it's a much better quality of life that they obtained through the process than they previously had.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. So I will, as I mentioned before, I've been off of these medications for 15 years now, and I my life is totally different. Like I couldn't have ex I couldn't have imagined the life that I have now. And I I I want to go back just a little bit to to make sure that we have not scared anybody about the the med release thing. Med release is is just a reality that you are it is it is what it is, right? You've you've been on this medication, this is a reality, and I feel like understanding what could potentially happen and what the symptoms mean helps to mitigate all of that because I, you know, when I did go through, once I understood, you know, that what med release was, after I had my unfortunate experience with the liver cleanse, I never did it again. And when we moved again, I I already knew, like, okay, so I stopped training for triathlons. I would just do sometimes I would do road races, but I didn't do intense exercise. Like I would just kind of do, I I'm very consistent with you know walking. I don't run anymore, unfortunately. I'm getting too old. I don't want to my knees don't like it. But but I I know I do exercise consistently because that is good for my mental health, but I don't do super intense exercise anymore. I could probably try it now. I just don't have any desire to do it anymore, frankly. But once I once I understood what was happening, if I started to have a med release, I started to understand what that looked like for me. And I would call true hope and say, I'm in a med release, and then they would just I always called true hope. I didn't ever just do it myself because there were often like variables that I wasn't thinking about where True Hope had improved their protocols, they had improved their knowledge at that point, you know, because it had been a couple years. And so it was always helpful for me to call True Hope and say, okay, what do I do? I I think I'm having a med release. I would tell them the circumstances and the symptoms I was experiencing, and I would start drinking whey protein isolate four times a day. Increase my fiber too, because all that protein going into my body didn't make my digestive system super happy. But but it was, it just made it so I I could handle it, you know, and it was once in a while. It wasn't happening all the time. It wasn't on a regular basis. I was having an like once every couple years, I would I would go through this, right? And over time, it just got to the point where my body was healed. I didn't have medication in my system anymore, and everything is great. And in the past, if I missed doses of true hope, I noticed it. But I had something happen last year where I was gone away for at a retreat for a few days and left my pills sitting on my counter in my bathroom and freaked out when I got up there. I'm like, oh my gosh, I can't go with you know, three days without these my micronutrients, but I couldn't do anything about it. Like I panicked, I was like, I was too far away, I was like three hours away from home. I was too far to ask my husband to drive him to me. So I was just like crossing my fingers, I hope I survived the weekend, right? And I had this worry in the back of my head because I had not gone that long without them in years, and I was fine. I I was tired by the end of the week, or by the end of those three days, like I could tell, like I haven't taken my micronutrients, but I didn't become symptomatic. I wasn't like because my brain had healed and I was, you know, and I'm forever grateful I will never stop taking true hope supplements because they they give my brain what it needs to function in a healthy way. Like, why would it's kind of like stopping eating? Like now that I know my brain needs this and I can't get it through my diet, why would I stop taking that? And so it's not like I I had somebody say, Well, do you have to take those for the rest of your life? And I'm like, I get to take them for the rest of my life. Like, I am so grateful that I have them. Like, why I'm not gonna stop eating. You know, do you have to eat for the rest of your life? Yes, of course I have to eat for the rest of my life, right?
SPEAKER_00:So, anyway, yeah, what an inconvenience that we have to keep on, you know, drinking, right? Like, that's just so unfortunate that we have to drink. Do we have to do that for the rest of our life?
SPEAKER_01:I know.
SPEAKER_00:If you want to live, you do. Yeah. And if you want to live well.
SPEAKER_01:Well, and that's the thing that's so so incredible, is one other thing that I want to mention here, just so that we're kind of rounding out the talk about you know, symptoms, is there are other sources of symptoms that people can have that will lead to symptoms of bipolar. I and so somebody can have like severe trauma in their childhood that doesn't get resolved, causes dysregulation in the brain, you develop unhealthy coping mechanisms as a result that then continues to produce symptoms. You know, we can have again, we've talked about drug the symptoms that can come from drug use, and it can come from illicit drug use as well as as prescription drug use. Like you can get these symptoms, you know, that come from those sources. But getting true hope into my system, helping my brain heal from the effects of the medication, getting then the adequate levels of micronutrients so that my brain could function in a healthy way, actually cleared the way for me to resolve the other sources of symptoms. It made it possible for me to process emotions in a healthy way so that when I went to, when I figured out how to use therapy to heal, that I was actually able to heal. Like I was able to go in and handle going through EMDR to process severe trauma in my past. And I was able to, you know, work with the therapist and my brain was functioning in a healthy way so that I could actually resolve, you know, acknowledge, recognize, and resolve unhealthy coping mechanisms. And so it's really important to remember, again, symptoms are information, and we need to look at the symptoms for what they are. Our brain is communicating a need instead of just trying to shut it up. You know, I think I mentioned in one of the previous episodes, I heard this really fantastic thing from Josef Witt During, Dr. Joseph Witt During on on social media, where he said taking an antidepressant when you're depressed is like turning the fire alarm off. You know, it's it is there's a fire, it doesn't resolve the fire, it just shuts off the alarm.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. And then the same thing goes with pain meds and all that type of stuff. All you're doing is shutting off, in essence, the fire alarm, you're you're shutting off signaling in the body, and that signaling is necessary to get the body to do certain things. So I, you know, I I can attest to that example is I I shattered my arm a few years back in a car accident, flipped over from the wind, blew the trailer over, the truck went with it, and my arm blew through the window and drug in the ditch and literally completely snapped.
SPEAKER_01:So fainful.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, it was it was it was amazing, really. Uh great experience when I look back at it, but um had a little bit of trauma associated because I thought my arm was actually decapitated because it wasn't where it I thought I was holding it because there was a 90-degree bend in my bicep with the arm dangling down and blood dripping. But, anyways, so trigger warning, by the way. So they get me into the ambulance and they immediately put a little pick line in me, right? I'm like, oh, what are you putting that there for? Well, so that we can put morphine into you. I said, You're not putting morphine into me, absolutely not. And they're like, oh, okay, right? Like that's standard protocol. No, not gonna happen. So, okay, whatever. So I get into the emergency room, can of the medicine here, Canadian socialized medicine. It took them four and a half hours before they were cleaning up my large open wounds and stuff like that on my arm. And they finally got a cast on the arm, a shiker tong cast to hold it in a position so that hopefully the bones would would fuse back together because it was completely severed. Unfortunately, it didn't come protruding through the muscle, though, otherwise it would have been surgery. So, anyways, the doctor comes and says, There's no badges of honor here for you know bravery. Like you can just take the medication. I said, I'm not like I'm not gonna take the medication. Yeah, it hurts. It should hurt, but I'm not that much in pain, which is probably due to the fact that I also have natural painkillers in me at all times, not shutting off receptors or shutting off signaling, but things like organic sulfur or methyl sulfenomethane and stuff like that, which is a natural painkiller, natural anti-inflammatory, good for joint health, good for your knees, so you can keep on running, that type of thing, right? And so I constantly have these, and it's a mineral. So I have these things in my bloodstream throughout the day, every day, and so I probably don't feel pain like most people do. And so what was interesting though, is he's like, tomorrow the pain's gonna be worse. And it wasn't, and there's something to that because it likely would have had I been on the pain meds, because I would have shut off the initial pain signaling that would have allowed the body to start dealing with it, and then the next day, all of a sudden, the pain that I didn't experience would probably be exponentiated. Whereas progressively, day after day, it just got better. Like the pain reduced on its own, the way that it probably should have, because I refused to take a pain med to suppress, to shut off the fire alarm, to prevent the body from ultimately acting and and responding the way that it should do in a normal, healthy environment. So the same thing with an antidepressant, absolutely. That when you start taking these medications, you are literally just you're either shutting things off. Well, generally, you're just shutting things off, like serotonin, uh selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, you're shutting off the ability for it to re-uptake the serotonin. Antipsychotics oftentimes are just dopamine blockers, they're just blocking it, suppressing it. So it's not healthy for the body to just shut those processes off. You want to embrace those processes and just make sure that they're put into a functional state by supplying all of the nutrition that you needed all along.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:This has been phenomenal. I I'm so glad that we did this series because it's I think that there are a lot of things that people don't really understand about micronutrition. They don't understand, again, because we have pathologized these symptoms and we have created a medical diagnosis out of it. There's a psychological dependence on medications. There's this idea that we have to take medications. People accept the idea that the best they can expect out of their life is learning how to suffer well with their disorder, right? And the reality is that people do not have to live with this for the rest of their lives. The reality is that it is possible to address the underlying sources of the symptoms, heal the brain, and help it function in a healthy way. And if you have, if you have other additional sources of symptoms, if there have been like, you know, if you have trauma in your past, this this micronutrients helps number one, resolve one of the underlying sources of your symptoms, because most people don't get a sufficient level of nutrition. And so that's why there has been such a dramatic increase in the number of people being diagnosed with these quote unquote disorders. But then it also makes it possible for you to actual actually process those, you know, the trauma to, you know, to get your brain functioning in a healthy way so that you can then do the work necessary to heal the other sources of your symptoms. And I am I am proof. I people question me all the time. I am gonna say this on here because people question me all the time. They're like, well, you don't know, you won't know until like three years down the road when you have your next episode. And I'm like, I actually do know. We have been through some of the most incredible stressors over the past five years in our family. We've lost a child, we've had to move, you know, we had to sell under distressing circumstances. We lost a job and went with a couple years without a job. Like, we have been through intense major stressors, and I have not had, I've not become symptomatic. Like I've had normal emotional responses to it, but it wasn't like distressing, ending up in the hospital, ending up dysfunctional. You know, I I can absolutely say without any hesitation, I know that I have healed. I am completely recovered. I would never be diagnosed with a mental health disorder anymore because I don't have those issues any longer. I have resolved all the underlying sources of the symptoms and I have healed. It is possible to completely recover, it is possible to heal.
SPEAKER_00:I I think, you know, it's something I can relate to, but uh just the loss of a child, that alone is about as much as you can be put to the test. And if you pass that test without ending up in that situation, that in itself speaks volumes. And uh sadly, my wife and I can can attest to that as well. Having lost a child, um, there's I don't think there's anything um worse that a parent can go through than than losing a child. So um that in itself, I think, is the answer right there. Are you well? Did you make it through that? Yeah. Yeah, if you make if you can make it through that without losing your mind, then I think you're Pretty stable. I think your mind is healed. I think your brain is working the way that it's supposed to.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. Yeah. Are there any last comments, any any final words that you want to offer to the audience? Sorry, that's putting you on the spot.
SPEAKER_00:No, no, no, no, no, no, that's okay. No, I think we covered off the medication thing pretty well enough that uh that hopefully it instills a level of confidence in people that when they phone the the Truop Support Center that they're they're willing to take the advice that's been established over the last solidly established over 25 years now. I mean it started almost 30 years ago, but it's been well documented now for well over 25 years. So, you know, I think we've we've done a good enough job there without getting into the nitty-gritty, because oftentimes the nitty-gritty isn't even applicable to many people. I mean, there's so many different pathways that they can that they end up going based on the the medications that they're on, the cocktail medications, right? How long they've been on them, what's going on in their life. I mean, the protocol is gonna be custom tailored for them. And so I think we did a fairly good job there in communicating that. You know, in relation to the overall true story, there is the the the Piffany film that was recently produced, and maybe we want to put that in the in the notes there. Um phenomenal, very emotionally compelling film. Um very well done. Independent film producers looked at it and said this story needs to be told. And he went out on a limb and he produced it, and um it's uh it's generating some fantastic feedback. And so perhaps that that making that film available would be a great thing. But aside from that, um I've got nothing else for for today that I'm aware of.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. Well, thank you so much. And I do want to tell the audience if you are not already a member of the Upsiders Tribe and you do want to go through the healing process and you want support going through this process, the Upsiders Tribe will offer that support. You know, we we have seven modules in that in that program. It's based on my book, The Upside of Bipolar, Seven Steps to Heal Your Disorder. And there's an entire chapter dedicated to the cross-titration process. I talk about my own experience with it. I talk about the true hope story, I talk about the lessons that I learned. And each, you know, there's there's talk about over medication and withdrawal and med releases. So that's a really fantastic resource. So I would encourage you, if you have not read that book yet, please go get a copy of the book. And if you or would like help walking through this healing process, please make sure you check out the you know, the Upsiders Tribe. And if you are ready to get started with True Hope, I will make sure that this is linked in the in the show notes, but please give them a call. Go to their website, they've got all kinds of resources on there for you to learn more about, like David talked about, like gaining trust in their what they have to offer. They have a tab there that goes through all of the studies that have been done on there. You can go through and see, and it's I love how that that it's broken down by categories. So if you have a you know somebody that you love or if you struggle with ADHD symptoms, there are studies on ADHD, there's studies on OCD, there's studies on bipolar. It's really phenomenal that that all of that research is there. And this is all independent research. True Hope did not commission any of this research. This is all research that has been done independent of them, because there are doctors and researchers that recognize the value of what they have and they were curious about application in certain areas. So they would take it and they would test it. And this is all the results of those studies. That was actually what convinced my doctor to give me the go-ahead to try it, was looking at the at the research that had been done on this product. And he said, Well, this looks like a viable option, you know, and I was, I will forever be grateful that he was open to that because I don't know if I would have trusted it if it hadn't been that way. Now I look back and I'm like, who cares what he said? You know, like I need to trust my own intuition, you know, and this this like literally saved my life. And then the other thing that's on there is there, True Hope has a lot of products out, you know, that are available now that, you know, in in addition to M Power Plus, you know, like you talked about the olive leaf extracts, you talked about the amino power. There are a lot of products in there, and you can go in there and learn about what the product does. And again, the best resource is True Hope's customer support. They are phenomenal. They really help you understand the process, they will walk you through that process, they will guide you. And if you decide to do this, listen to them, follow their instructions to the T, and you will be successful in getting off the medications and helping your brain heal and moving forward on the path to recovery.
SPEAKER_00:Awesome. What you're doing is amazing, Michelle. The resources that you're providing and and you know, just some accolades for your book. Very well written. So just awesome. Love it.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you. Thank you. I was not trolling for a compliment, but I appreciate it.
SPEAKER_00:Well, compliments due. Well, yeah, credit is due. We're uh I'm locking the words now.
SPEAKER_01:I know, we're tired.
SPEAKER_00:Two podcasts today. This is the second one, so yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. All right, thank you so much, David, and I am confident we'll have you on again in the future. But thank you for this last this last three episodes have been phenomenal. And again, if you have not listened to the previous two episodes, I encourage you to go back and listen to them. They are so informative. There's so much great information that will help you understand how to help heal your brain using micronutrition. All right. Thank you very much, David.
SPEAKER_00:Awesome. Thank you.
SPEAKER_01:All right, until next time, upsiders. Thanks for joining me on the Upside of Bipolar. Your journey to recovery matters, and I'm grateful you're here. For more resources, visit www.theupsideofbipolar.com. If you're ready to dive deeper, grab my book, The Upside of Bipolar: Seven Steps to Heal Your Disorder. If you're ready to heal your symptoms, join my monthly membership, The Upsiders Tribe, to transform chaos into hope. Until next time, Upsiders