Reversing ADHD Without Stimulants with Dr. Todd Born

[00:00:00] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Welcome to the doctor Kumar Discovery podcast. My name is doctor Ravi Kumar. And on today's episode, I'm sitting down with doctor Todd Born, a naturopathic doctor and certified nutritional specialist who spent the last sixteen years treating one of the most common and most over medicated and most misunderstood conditions in modern pediatrics, ADHD. Now, when most of us hear ADHD, our minds go to one place, The hyperactive kid in the back of the classroom. The one bouncing off the walls. The one who can't sit still through dinner. The one who eventually gets handed a prescription for Ritalin or Adderall, and either turns into a zombie, or finally calms down enough to make it through a whole school day. And yet, the standard of care for kids under six, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics themselves, is not medication. It's behavioral support, parental support, nutrition, sleep and environment. Medication is supposed to be the last resort, not the first. And that is not what's happening in this country. Doctor. Born has built his practice around the question of, what else can we do? And his answer is a multi layered protocol that starts with diet, includes targeted supplementation, and leans heavily on something that we go deep on in this episode, homeopathy. Now, there's real debate on the efficacy of homeopathic remedies. Some well designed clinical trials show it performs no better than placebo. Other well designed trials show it performs equivalent to standard medications, but without any of the side effects. And both can be true at the same time. What most people miss in this debate is that placebo itself is incredibly powerful. There's a whole entire field of research dedicated to trying to replicate placebo on demand, because the effect is real and very efficacious. So my take is, and you'll hear me say this in the conversation, is that if something is low risk and works some or most of the time, why be skeptical to the point of dismissal? We should be curious, and we should be rigorous. But we should not be so dogmatic in our rejection of the unexplainable, that we deny our patients something that might actually work. So, by the end of this episode, you're gonna understand what ADHD actually is, and how it's diagnosed today, why the standard stimulant medications don't improve academic outcomes long term, the role of artificial food dyes in additives in attention and behavior, how constitutional homeopathy stacks up against methylphenidate in a head to head, double blinded controlled trial, and doctor Bourne's actual protocol for getting these kids off these medications. He's reporting a hundred percent success rate in his pediatric patients, which is extraordinary in itself. So one more thing before we dive in is a quick disclaimer. Both doctor Born and I are healthcare practitioners, but we're not your doctors. This show is for informational purposes only. Everything you learned from my conversation with doctor Born is meant to empower you. So take this knowledge, ask better questions, and work with your own doctor to build a more informed, healthier life. That's what I want for you. And just to be clear, the show is also separate from my role as assistant professor at UNC. Alright. Let's get into it. My name is doctor Ravi Kumar. I'm a neurosurgeon in search of the causes of human illness and the solutions that help us heal and thrive. I want you to join me on a journey of discovery as I turn over every stone in search of the roots of disease and the mysteries of our resilience. The human body is a mysterious and miraculous machine with an amazing ability to self heal. Let us question everything and discover our true potentials. Welcome to the doctor Kumar discovery. Okay. Doctor Bourne, thanks so much for coming on the show. I'm really excited to have you here today because we're talking about ADHD, And this is a problem that so many Americans are experiencing, not only parents, but their children. And this is something that you have a very unique experience with. So I was hoping you could start off by telling us what ADHD is, how it's diagnosed, and how common it actually is.

[00:04:31] Dr. Todd Born: Sure. Thanks for inviting me. I appreciate it. We've had a lot of good conversations with you, uh, you know, offline. So, I'm not a pediatrician by any means, but I do see a lot of ADHD and other conduct disorders and whatnot. Um, so the DSM-five criteria changed from the DSM-four. There is no more ADD, ADHD now. It's ADHD, either predominantly inattentive type, right, you can't pay attention. Predominantly hyperactive, you can't sit still, you're kind of bouncing off the walls. The mixed type, which is what most people end up having and that's what I end up seeing a lot in practice is kind of the mixed type of it. And it's really a diagnosis of exclusion but in the DSM V, which tells you basically the outline of all the criteria that the person needs to meet and it does need to be diagnosed before the age of 13 and then you can have adult onset ADHD. It also has to appear the symptoms and how it manifests, whatever's happening and occurring in the individual, has to be seen in two separate environments. And this is a kind of a quandary that sometimes parents will bring their child to me is that they exhibit a bunch of these symptoms at home, but they're fine at school or vice versa. So, then it's difficult because they're like, well, I don't really meet this criteria or that criteria and now I can't. Nowadays, right, you can get these IEPs with schools, these individualized educational protocols which can modify but unless you carry the official diagnosis, the school can't do much really about it.
[00:05:59] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Yeah. Okay. So, how many kids out there actually have ADHD? Is it pretty common? Can you put a number on it?
[00:06:07] Dr. Todd Born: There are some good statistics and right, when we look at these epidemiological statistics, right, these are people who are actually getting formally diagnosed. They go into centralized database. So there's certainly a few million people out there. There's probably five to 10 times more of that that people who aren't getting diagnosed or what will sometimes happen is I've actually had parents come to me. They will specifically request that I do not use that ICD 10 diagnosis And then, I honor their wishes and I was like, it's just a label. It's a number. And because it can go into insurance databases and you could see all these other, you know, things that can happen. So, there's certainly millions of people that have it and I would say that as you and I were talking earlier, our environment or the epigenetics of everything is certain playing into this and statistics bear this out that the average attention span, right, in the industrialized world just since social media has taken off has has gone down a few seconds. So the average person, but not even a child, the average adult Which is not very long, right, before we're looking onto something, looking into something. So, we kind of are fostering this universe and feeding into the inability to pay attention and causing anxiety and restlessness, especially in The United States, right? It's a very go go go society. We don't, you know, take a whole lot of time for relaxation and, you know, everybody's on their phone and bombarded by social media. So, yeah, highly high prevalence and I see it more and more and that's why I think there's more and more medications coming out to help address the disease, the condition.
[00:07:44] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Right. So, when we think about ADHD, especially in children, we think about this, like you mentioned, this inability to concentrate and this hyperactivity just bouncing off the walls, right? But you had mentioned that there's some other characteristics or maybe comorbidities that go along with it. And I guess I'm wondering, does sometimes does ADHD get missed and, you know, parents just think, hey, my kid's depressed or my kid's super oppositional and defiant, when it's actually maybe sourced or or rooted in the ADHD?
[00:08:17] Dr. Todd Born: Yep. That that that's a good point to bring up because then I think that's missed by clinicians most of the time or neglected because they may only be exhibiting, you know, bouncing off the walls. So, I mean, in at least thirty percent of cases and these aren't me pulling up random statistics studies show this that there is at least one comorbidity in individual in an adolescent or a child who has ADHD. And it is sometimes difficult when a child can't explain, you know, anxiety or depression. So you have to try to tease that out and, you know, behavioralists and child psychiatric psychiatrists and, you know, psychologists are really good at this, draw this. But for the most part, it's just quick to go see your pediatrician. My kid doesn't sit still. They're gonna get ready to get kicked out of school or they're really mouthy. You need to do something. So what are you gonna do typically even though the standard of care from the American Academy of Pediatrics is no medications unless an absolute resort under the age of six? Then it's just here's, you know, let's try this medication where a lot of times that medication makes the other things worse. So say you have ADHD and you're put on a stimulant but you also have anxiety, that's just gonna make the individual more anxious, right, because you just gave a bunch of pharmaceutical speed. So, yeah, now they're sitting still but their anxiety's worse and maybe now it's like more like that inner coil or they're more aggressive now because they have the eye conduct disorder or something. So a lot of times, it does overlap and it's almost always not even addressed. They don't send them to the behavior list or the therapist. It's just, so let's do this med and now, oh, it's rearing its ugly head. Now we might need to give them, say, an SSRI or an anxiolytic. And now you've got an eight year old on polypharmacy. Now, I'm not anti medication. There's a time and place for everything, but in my experience, you rarely need any medications and individuals have, you know, ADHD and some of these comorbidities. They're they're not necessary.
[00:10:09] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Yeah. I read a statistic, uh, the other day. It was like two thirds of kids between four and five who have this inattention or hyperactivity are prescribed, you know, methylphenidate or some other Right. ADHD medication. And that scared me, honestly, because the young mind is it's it's developing. It's making its connections, the connections that will be solidified in for the rest of their life, you know? I mean, once you become an adult, things don't change like they do when you're a kid. And so, the fact that so many children are having these medications circulating through their blood that affect their brains in ways that we don't really understand was kind of frightening to me. And I'm wondering, like, what do these medications do to these kids? And Mhmm. I know they can be helpful because I've hear parents say they're helpful. But is it sustainable? And is it having long term effects on their brain development?
[00:11:04] Dr. Todd Born: Sure. Those are good points you bring up, because again, back to the American Academy of Pediatrics. The position statement is, you should be doing lifestyle modifications, home behavioral modifications, parental behavioral modifications, like everything should be utilized before going to a medication. And sadly, what is our society the way I kind of look at it? Yeah, when you have a three or four year old, they should be pretty high energy, right? They're a child. They should be out there running around and playing. We are not, as humans, we are not designed, particularly at that age when creativity is explosive and that really neuroplastic brain, right? You know, the frontal lobe hasn't really fully developed. They don't have higher cognitive thought. It's more instinctual thought and they're supposed to run around. They're supposed to play. They're supposed to explore. Yeah. But yet, we're mandated and you look at other countries that are say ahead of us like Western Europe and The UK and Japan. No. They're more Montessori and Waldorf style. Learn, explore, play, lifestyle skills not just sit and be spoken to for eight hours. Humans are not well designed. Especially now we have an eight second attention span, right? We're not equipped and designed and not evolved to be just sat and spoken to all day and that's a sad thing. And certainly these medications, one, I don't think they're warranted in most cases, right, for someone who's a three, four, and five year old. One, all these other interventions can happen and there's a lot of side effects to them which is why in the people end up seeing me a lot in, in, in children. Their parents bring them to me because right, you can get agitation, you can get insomnia, anorexia, they're appetite suppressants, so then now your child's falling off the growth charts, behavioral issues. Um, most parents are like, my child's a total zombie and even the child themselves are like, I don't like how I feel on these medications. Yeah. Um, but the school mandated it or maybe the parents were just at their wits end, right? Because this child's just a bit of a tyrant and, you know, not sleeping and destroying the place. But, um, I'm a big fan of behaviorists and I honestly don't think that they're used, an occupational therapist, I don't think they're used enough in these cases because they can really help modify behavior and train that brain on how to control some of these emotions.
[00:13:13] Dr. Ravi Kumar: No. I mean, I I was put on Ritalin when I was a kid, you know. I mean, I was bouncing off the walls like like normal kids do. Maybe I was bouncing off the walls more than the other ones. But the teacher basically went to my mom, and I think I was in kindergarten or first grade, and said, if you don't put them on medication, we're not gonna teach them. And so they put me on Ritalin, and I became a zombie, you know? And my mom hated it, and she took me off, and she and she, you know, she's a Bulldog parent, so she went to the school and said, you know, don't ever tell me something like that again. My kid's not gonna be on medication. And I came out fine, right? My cognitive potential was realized, but even though maybe I struggle in school early on, but, yeah, I agree with you. There's this huge mismatch between what we were built to be and do and and what we're expected to in this modern world. No person at any age, especially not a kid, should be sitting and being lectured to for eight hours a day with, you know, a couple twenty minute recesses. That's just it's unnatural. And I can see how that would drive this, you know, a certain contingent of the child population to just not fit into the square shape that society is trying to push them into.
[00:14:23] Dr. Todd Born: Mhmm. And
[00:14:23] Dr. Ravi Kumar: so, honestly, I I feel like medicating kids to be something that they're not can be a mistake. Unlike you, I'm not anti medication at all. In in certain situations, it probably makes sense. But tell me what medications are being prescribed, how they work, and what kind of academic results or life results will parents see if they put them on these standard medications that are prescribed? Doctor.
[00:14:49] Dr. Todd Born: Yeah. I mean, the first line medications, right, are going to be the stimulant medications. Methylthenidate, things like Ritalin and Adderall are kind of the classic. And then there's some other class of drugs that the mechanism is not even fully elucidated. We don't really know why or they. The researchers don't necessarily know why like SSRIs, SNRIs. We may understand why those work with some combative disorders, contact, oppositional defiance, anxiety, but how are they helping people focus? It's not well clear. Some kids, they'll actually be put on benzodiazepines along with the stimulant medications because one can calm them down and help them focus but then, you know, their anxiety gets worse. So now they're kind of getting these GABA agonists, you know, GABAergic, uh, medications. But if you actually look at the studies and these are well conducted studies that yes, attention increases but learning actually does not increase and they have no better test scores than if they were not on the medications over time. So, in medicine everything's a risk benefit ratio. It's like, and and does it improve outcomes? Well, the risk is moderate. Benefits could be high that the person is able to sit and focus but what about outcomes? There is no improvement in any outcomes when you put these individuals on these medications. Test scores don't improve, grades don't improve but yet the laundry list of side effects is pretty high. So again, in my experience and I don't blame my conventionally trained brethren because my colleagues, most of my friends are MDs and DOs and some are functional medicine, some are conventional, They don't have any options. You know, even my family practice doc with my four kids and then my doctor. He, in himself, he's like, I get parents to me all the time come with ADHD. He's like, All I know are meds and I send them to behavioralist and occupational therapy. He's like, what do you have? Um, what would you guys do as a naturopath? And I've talked to him about everything. I've sent him a link to when I've given presentations at medical conferences. He's like, that is I wish I had that offer. But at least I can refer them for people who don't want. He's like, otherwise, yeah, it's just straight up meds. It's just that's all we do. Yeah. Just quick with a script pad. And he's he doesn't like it, but he's like, that's my only training.
[00:17:02] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Right. So, if it doesn't improve academic performance in kids, then essentially all these medications are doing is basically placing a cognitive leash on the kids so the teachers can control them during the day. And the parents can hopefully control them at home if they're having problems. And I wouldn't say that's something people shouldn't do, but that's, I think, the the way that you should think about it. You're not making your kid cognitively better. You're just putting a medicated cage around them, essentially. What about adults? Are these medications safer or better in adults? And should adults with ADHD be less worried about them?
[00:17:42] Dr. Todd Born: That's a good segue because if you look at these kids, right, and then you give them the medications, part of the problems with the medications is high addiction potential and high tolerance. So you're really and it's it's essentially a band aid, right? They wear off, you take more. And that's the problem is that you take the short acting in the morning or you take the long acting in the morning and then by the afternoon now you gotta take another dose and now you're getting insomnia because you got too much stimulants in your body. You're not really retraining while that brain is neuroplastic. You're not training your body and your brain to better control those behaviors. What we tend to see into adulthood is that most of the comorbidities still exist, anxiety, depression, but now what we see more in the studies bear this out is, um, because it's a high addiction and impulsivity, right? That's part of the criteria is you're highly impulsive and you tend to have high addiction potential. So it becomes a world of self medication is that you have higher abuse of alcohol and illicit drugs to try to say have that same kind of dopamine effect. And part of that, I think, and I'm sure studies probably look at this and we could find those, is that is that not enough of that, you know, therapy from a behavioral standpoint, occupational therapy, counseling was done early on. So you were just basically, okay, I was all medicated through childhood. Now I'm an adult and I gotta keep a job down. So I just went from this stimulant, now I'm on, you know, I went on Ritalin, then I was on Adderall, and now I'm on Shotera and I also take, you know, I'm on benzo and then I I get a lot of palpitations so I'm on a beta blocker and you're 21 years old and you got four meds on board. So yeah, you know, it's certainly and because when you get older, right, you really, your brain is as neuroplastic as adolescents and you, those synapses, well I see adults with ADHD and they're like, I wanna be off all these meds and I say, well let's try, right. I'm always hopeful, but at the very least we can usually get you down to one in a very low dose because your brain has already made those connections now in life and it's hard to undo those. It works just as well but kids are so much more vital than adults. They respond quicker and say more curative. But I still have plenty of adults either go on off all their meds and they're like, this is great. And I just take these supplements or whatever instead. Diet's a big portion. Or they're like, This is awesome. I just take five milligrams of, like, extended release methylphenidate. I can work my whole day. It wears off. I go home. I don't feel all amped up or anxious and I can sleep now. My appetite's not suppressed. I'm eating better. So, for all of us, I think that's a win, you know, in my book. Yeah.
[00:20:15] Dr. Ravi Kumar: And everyone wants to hear about your protocols that are getting these amazing results. But before we get to that, I want to ask you one more thing, and that's about what is possibly causing this? Is it just that we are built a certain way and we're living in a different environment? Or are there factors that are new in our environment that might be pushing us down this path of inattention and hyperactivity?
[00:20:40] Dr. Todd Born: Right. As with anything, I think it's very multifactorial, right? And you'll say, people say, Well, we don't know the cause of ADHD. Well, we don't, there is no one single cause. We do know there's a whole slew of factors, right? Genetics, genetic propensity is very strong. It's one of the most highly inheritable conditions. So when someone comes to me and they ring their child and I usually try to, you know, play around a little bit and be, you know, take light but also be serious and say, Okay, who has ADHD? Who's fault is it? And the mom will almost invariably, because it has a high male preponderance, but they'll always say, oh, my husband, their father. He can't sit still. He's bouncing off the walls. He does see that. You know, so it is. And even in studies where they took homozygous twins, there's like a ninety eight percent probability that they both have ADHD. So, genetics is certainly one and that's what we see a lot in medicine, right? Genetics loads the gun, environment pulls the trigger. So certainly our environment's a big piece. The way we live in our society is another big piece. I mean, I have 30% of my practice is international and obviously it's a small window size, but I don't ever have people coming to me because that's what their complaints are is ADHD And their school days are shorter. I have friends that now, you know, they live in Germany because it's a better quality of life for the most part. Their kids go to school for less time in a day and yet they have way better test scores. You know, I mean, look at, we're, America is falling way behind. You look at our national science and math and reading, but yet, we're in school, like, all the time. So environment's a big thing. Genetics is a big thing. It's societal. That, yeah, you gotta sit. It's also, I think, the way we we educate our our children, our youth, right? To sit and be lectured to eight hours a day is a very efficient means of disseminating information. It's a very inefficient means of learning anything, right? Yeah. Um, that's why even homeschooling's more popular now, the Waldorf and Montessori systems where it's much more hands on skills learning. I mean, you even as a neurosurgeon, you know this well, right? How much are you gonna learn from a textbook? You have to be in there, in the lab, doing the real deal because that's how humans learn. We learn by doing. We don't learn by just sitting and being spoken to all day. Yeah.
[00:22:50] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Yeah. That's the truth. Yeah. Mhmm. So, uh, what about you had mentioned iron levels in children earlier and I thought that was very interesting because most parents never think, oh, what's my child's iron status? But this is something that you've seen a pattern with and it's been reported in the literature. Tell me about that.
[00:23:09] Dr. Todd Born: But so, yeah. Part of the multifactorial thing is I have hardly ever, it's rare, that I've seen someone with ADHD, Conduct Disorder, Oppositional Bying Disorder, you know, any of these kind of over autism spectrum that doesn't have some nutritional deficiency, usually more than one, and there's a couple causes of this and that's probably why the literature bears it out, right, is that you also talk to a lot of these individuals, their diet is the SAD diet, right, the SAD American diet. They're very limited. They're not eating a lot of fruits and vegetables. So it makes sense, right, that they're essentially malnourished. So when we look at the dietary aspect of it and particularly with aggression and low IQ, iron is one of them. And so, most physicians aren't gonna think of, you know, things like zinc and vitamin C and magnesium and iron to assess that nutritional status because all those are important, right? You need zinc and vitamin C to make neurotransmitters particularly dopamine, right? The field with one, um, as well as serotonin. So that's why studies for individuals who are put on SSRIs and if you give them vitamin C and zinc, they have improved outcomes because you need those co factors to make serotonin, protein, blood sugar. As adults, think about how you feel, you know, some people can marathon, right? They could sit and fast forever and they're fine. Most people are not like that, right? We feel hypoglycemic brain fog, fatigue, irritability, can't think, can't concentrate. Well imagine that in a child. Children don't know what's going on. They have larger swings because they haven't lived long enough to be able to manage these things. So like I'm really appreciative of my children's school which is a public school here in Gig Harbor, but it's very Montessori esque, very hands on. Lots of drinking water, lots of snack time. I mean, even in fifth grade, you're eating snacks, you know. If they see a kid start to wig out and get all agitated, they'll literally be like, I think you should go and eat a snack. Um, and they have healthy snacks in the classroom that are donated by the parents and then their own lunch. So yeah, a lot of people, most conventional clinicians will think of thyroid, right, congenital hypothyroidism because we know that leads to low IQ and low birth weight. Very few clinicians consider all these other nutritional components that are at play like artificial, you know, flavorings, preservatives, sweeteners, which is not a conspiracy theory. There's good studies to show it.
[00:25:33] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Yeah. No. That, I mean, that's one thing I've noticed with my kids is this, whenever they ate candy that had artificial colors, and it it seemed to me like it was more associated with Red Forty. Mhmm. I mean, that that's my observation. They would just wig out. And then, you know, we did an first we took all candy away from them. And they that's just sad, you know, to not let your kids have sugar when the other kids have sugar. And I'm I'm not we we don't have a lot of sugar in our house, but we wanted to let them have those little simple joys, so we bought these candies that did not have artificial colors in them. You know, they were just sugar and gelatin and whatever. They put all natural ingredients, and they wouldn't become hyperactive. I mean, literally, they could eat a whole boatload of candy, and they'd be still just normal kids. But as soon as you put, like, you know, put something that's completely artificial, synthesized in a chemistry laboratory from petroleum byproducts in these kids' bodies, they're lipophilic. They go into the brain. And you see effects. And I know there's parents out there listening right now and saying, Yeah, I've seen that too. And the scientific literature bears it out, and specifically with ADHD. And has that been your experience?
[00:26:52] Dr. Todd Born: Yeah, definitely. So, I mean, I've had, I can't tell many, uh, debates, if you will, I've had with conventional physicians over the years, family practice and pediatricians, are like diet has nothing to do with an individual's ADHD. I was like first of all, that makes no sense from just a common sense standpoint, right? Yeah. Right. Garbage in, garbage out. Good stuff in, good out. Second is that also the research literature substantiates what you and I are talking about. One of my favorite studies is where they gave a bunch of people basically from like the ages of eight through 14 and these were individuals who were diagnosed with um, ADHD and then individuals with no diagnosis of ADHD. And they either gave them this like artificially colored drink, it was probably like Mountain Dew or something, and or a similar drink that looked exactly the same, tastes the same, but was naturally dyed. You know, like an Afro color. It was a blinded trial so the individuals didn't know what they were consuming. And then they had a bunch of specialists in ADHD monitor them over time, over like a twenty four hour period and they had to take some subjective scores, nothing objective, except for what the individual, the specialists, objectifying. And it not only did the ADHD, what was expected, they got all their symptoms worsened. But then even the individuals who did not carry the ADHD diagnosis nor any symptoms started exhibiting ADHD symptoms. You know, aggression and everything, inattention. And they were giving them tests and they did worse versus baseline. So that's a great one just to show you that it's not just individuals who may be more susceptible, albeit their symptoms worsened because also, but their baseline was you know, lower as far as how they reacted. But even individuals couldn't pay attention. So, this whole nonsense that, Oh, well, artificial dyes, colorings, sweeteners, additives don't play a negative role in anything is hogwash because the studies are pretty solid and that's why many of these ingredients, they're banned in most industrialized countries, but The United States still allows them in the food supply and like you said, you know, and I get parents that will be like, oh, my child, they're eating such a restrictive diet because it's the first thing I say on the treatment plan after the visit is no artificial flavorings, colorings, preservatives, dyes, you know, and they're like, well, I said, I'm not saying you can't you know, because diet's hard to change. I'm not saying you can't give them the ice cream or the cookie or, you know, the lollipop. Just get one that doesn't have any artificial. I'll give them links to the natural candy store. I mean, there's so many options now. Uh, that's the first thing that goes on the treatment plan too. And if they don't believe me, I'm like, you want me to send you like six or eight studies? Do you really want to read it? That's cool. I'll do that.
[00:29:32] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Yeah, I'm totally with you on that. And I honestly, from a common sense standpoint, I don't understand why any regulator ever thought, yeah, take that petroleum distillate, take that chemical that's never been existed in nature before, and put it in food. Make it make it part of the food supply. It just doesn't make sense. In fact, if they if they just put little labels on candy and said, hey, this has a petroleum based, chemically synthesized chemical in it, just want to let you know.
[00:30:04] Dr. Todd Born: Just, you know,
[00:30:05] Dr. Ravi Kumar: if they put that on every candy label, no one would eat it. Right? But it it's like an undisclosed risk that we have. And you see all these kids out there, they're drinking, you know, red Gatorade and Twizzlers or, you know, Skittles or whatever. And the kids who don't have that feel like they're missing out on their childhood cause they don't have that, you know? Yeah.
[00:30:25] Dr. Todd Born: Oh, yeah. But, I
[00:30:26] Dr. Ravi Kumar: mean, you're right. There's there's good alternatives now. When we were kids, there weren't. Now there is. And there's stuff that tastes good, and kids can get their little sugar fix that, you know, that's not gonna harm them, especially if they're metabolically healthy. And and I I think you're right. Every parent would do themselves a favor by taking chemicals, artificial laboratory synthesized chemicals, out of their kids' bodies. Food supply.
[00:30:51] Dr. Todd Born: Yeah. Right, right. Yeah, I go to blows with my 11 year old son all the time because he hates it that, you know, if we give him chocolate or like a cookie in his lunch or what have you, he's always yelling at my wife and I. He's like, you guys just give me the generics. You give me the knockoffs. That's an M and M knockoff. I said, Timmy, they're not knockoffs. They just don't have any of the artificial, they taste better. And he's like, no they don't. And I think part of his psyche is like, yeah, maybe his classmates got a bag of M and M's, like especially around Halloween, right? And he's got the no dye, they're called raindrops, right? They don't have an M on there. It's all flavored with natural color or natural flavorings, natural colors. Doesn't have any synthetics, anything. And he just gives us a hard time that we're just giving him generic knockoffs. And then I said, fine, you don't have to eat it at all. But yeah, he'll be like, eat it anyway. You know, he's 11.
[00:31:42] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Yeah, no, I had the same conversation with my kids. Hey, guys. I need a quick favor. If you're getting value from this show, would you please take thirty seconds to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts? I know it seems like nothing, but it genuinely changes how many people the algorithm puts the show in front of. And if an episode hits home for you, send it to someone who you think needs to hear it. I'm doing this to cut through the noise and bring you clear, honest information on health topics that actually matter to all of us. So, please help me get the show to more people who need it. Cheers. Okay. So, tell us about omega three fatty acids, because this is something that, you know, most parents don't think about either. In fact, I don't think I ever took any omega three supplement, and we didn't eat a lot of seafood growing up. Right. I came out okay, but what role does that have in child's neurodevelopment and maybe what role does it play in ADHD?
[00:32:35] Dr. Todd Born: Right. Even most conventional physicians that are, that's like the one thing that they will recommend. The problem is, is that they're not recommending high enough doses and I see this all the time with patients. They're coming in, I'm like, What have you tried? What's worked? What's not worked? And they're like, Oh, I give them this fish oil and then, you know, my pediatrician recommend it. It's a perfectly quality brand but it's like two hundred milligrams. They're not noticing any difference. So, the mechanism isn't fully understood. One of the theories is that you have some neuroinflammation and these PUFAs, the polyunsaturated fatty acids, they are anti inflammatory but there and what we noticed in there was one study where they took individuals who had ADHD versus the control group which was the same age cohort who did not have any and they measured in blood serum PUFA levels, different omegas, essential fatty acid levels. And what they saw, and they had a couple 100 people and this has been replicated by even different authors, the baseline values in individuals that have ADHD, whether it's probably diets or what have you, could be an absorption issue, could be an intercalation cell issues, probably all of it, they have much lower levels than their cohorts. So, one reason why these work so well is you gotta get them back up to where people who don't have symptoms and you gotta give them enough. So, what we see a lot of times in the natural medicine world is that things are either poor quality and or they're just under dosed. So, what I'll do is give a child say a really, really potent, high quality, you know, molecularly distilled omega three fatty acid that's high DHA and we're talking, you know, not to me scary doses but someone else might be like, oh my gosh, you just gave them two thousand milligrams in a six year old. I was like yeah, but you gotta give them those loading doses, get them back up, get their cells saturated and make those cells more fluid and the brain health etcetera since our brain is mostly fat. And then you can start tapering down and even anecdotally, right, seeing thousands of patients with ADHD over time, the parents will come back and be like, Yeah, it is totally different. My child is calmer, they're less agitated, they're not throwing the controller after they die in their game and Roblox or what have you. And then I'm like, Okay, so so now we're good. I don't like to poke kids unless I have to. I'm like, I don't need to do a blood draw because we can make inferences and it's very safe. I just say watch for easy bruising and bleeding. And then you titrate up slowly, otherwise you get some gastric stress and the, um, the erythropoietic system will kick in and start making more red blood cells anyway, platelets. But, yeah, you just kind of titrate up and then you can go down dose by weight and also by the more worse their symptoms are, the higher amount. But they seem to be working mostly on just this anti inflammatory pathway with certain, you know, um, cytokines and chemokines, as well as the fact they're making the cells more fluid, so things go in and out easier.
[00:35:25] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Yeah. No, I think that's something that both adults and children get missed on their clinical exams because no one thinks about omega three fatty acids. And I know you said a lot of doctors will prescribe them. I've never had a doctor prescribe me or my children an omega three fatty acid. In fact, no one's even ever mentioned it. But, you know, I've I've done a lot of research on this, and I know how important it is. I mean, omega threes, for the audience, they're essential fatty acids. They're polyunsaturated fatty acids that are essential. Omega six fatty acids are also essential. And omega sixes are the pro inflammatory polyunsaturated fats, and omega threes are the anti inflammatory. And you need both. You need to push and pull. You need to push on inflammation when you need it and pull it back when you don't need it with omega threes. And the brain is heavily invested in these polyunsaturated fatty acids. And if you have too much omega six fatty acid in your diet, which almost everybody does because it's vegetable oil, seed oils, those are almost 70% poly, uh, omega six polyunsaturated fatty acids, and you're not getting seafood or taking a supplement, you're overloaded on omega-six and deficient on omega-3s. And that sets up this cascade of potential neurological inflammation, whole body inflammation. And so, I agree with you on that. Omega-three fatty acids, they're essential to growing brains. And it does not surprise me at all that kids with ADHD have lower baseline omega three fatty acids.
[00:37:01] Dr. Todd Born: Right. I mean, how many Americans don't tend to eat a lot of seafood, sea vegetables. Then, you know, what we've done to our world, right, is that I mean, I live in the Pacific Northwest, right? I mean, there's a few things they take very seriously here, one of which is seafood. But even the University of Washington did a bunch of studies of deep sea fish in the Puget Sound as well as the Pacific Ocean and they are showing unacceptable, even above EPA limits of human hormones and they postulate that that's because so many women are taking oral contraceptives and so it's coming out in their urine, right? Where does urine go? Right. And so, and then people are like, what about the mercury? And I said, I get it. But there's so many other health benefits. So just, you know, don't go high up the food chain and eat swordfish every day. Go lower on, you know, go a little bit lower. Yeah. But yeah, use a high quality molecularly distilled fish oil. Now with the world of gummies, lots of kids and companies make the gummies but you get into that same aspect is that you can only fit so much into a gummy. It's mostly pectin and sugar and what have you and gelatin. Right. Or veggie gelatin. So, if you look at the gummies and I always say, Bring in your bottle or show it to me, you know, because my practice is now all telehealth and has been for quite a few years, that they'll show it to me and then I'll say, See, there's only, you can eat four of those and you're only getting like three hundred milligrams. So, I need your child to eat 20 of those a day. And they're like, oh. It's like, yeah, exactly. So, to get what we need into them. So that's where we go to the liquids and you can hide them pretty easily in Concord grape juice and pomegranate juice. Um, I wouldn't put them in smoothies, right? Because then you got this whole thing. The children, the difficult thing is getting stuff into them because they got taste versions. They can't swallow pills yet. But there there's so many ways to do it and I have not had I've had to get creative, but haven't had many issues with getting stuff into people.
[00:38:47] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Okay. Yeah. No. I I I give my kids a capsule because of those issues you mentioned with eating seafood, having high levels of, you know, contaminants. Because every all our pollutants flow out to the ocean. Our oceans are a sink for pollutants, you know, and mercury as well. But if you get a fish oil supplement, make sure it's molecularly distill, like Doctor. Borne just mentioned. And also, the other thing I look for is IFO certification, which is international fish oil standards. It makes sure that the oil is not oxidized, uh, or rancid, which it can happen with fish oils because they're polyunsaturated. So if you follow those two and then get the right dosing, which, you know, you're recommending dosing that's actually been done in clinical trials in kids, then I think it's totally safe, and it's it's a more evolutionary match than just eating the standard American diet with no omega three fatty acids.
[00:39:39] Dr. Todd Born: Yeah. All processed foods, fast food. Yep. You know, there's a reason that we have a healthcare crisis, right? And a lot of it is just it is poor dietary choices.
[00:39:49] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Yeah. Okay, so let's talk about how you are treating kids and adults with ADHD. What, they come to you, they're either on medications or they've been recommended to go on them. What are you gonna do with them?
[00:40:03] Dr. Todd Born: So, it doesn't matter whether they're on meds or trying to avoid the medications or they actually had to stop the meds because they had too many side effects. Those are kind of the three big camps of what I'll end up seeing whether they're a child or an adult. So I always go through like, okay, so what are your symptoms? What's going on? How's the behavior? You know, what's worked? What's not worked? And then, when I especially assessing what's not worked, it because a lot of times parents will or even adults, oh, I tried Astaxanthin or I tried this or I tried this, you know, tincture or this oneopathic. But again, it's just not either high quality or it's just not dosed in a high enough amount, right? I mean, natural agents don't, the disadvantages they don't work like drugs. They're not as potent necessarily. The advantage is that they don't have necessarily the side effect profile as medications and they tend to work multimodal, multi mechanistic. So, yeah, we go through everything and then I'm like, I'm definitely gonna do a quick dietary recall and it's pretty much unheard of someone's diet. And that doesn't have to be stellar but it needs to be reasonable, right? Oh yeah, my kid basically just eats a bunch of simple carbohydrates all day. Well, where's the protein? And where's the high quality protein besides McDonald's which is not high quality protein, right? We live in a society where we have a lot of caloric rich foods, but they're nutrient deplete. Right? I mean, there's no substantial, you know, um, health benefits to a lot of what we eat and people are going to and I understand. I have four kids. I have a private practice. I do a lot of consulting. I don't know what it's like to be busy. Even like my cut my some of my kids and they're soccer teammates, like they're always like, they're going to McDonald's after the game. My kid's like, why can't we go to McDonald's? Like, we don't eat McDonald's. I keep picking on McDonald's, but you know where I'm going with this. Doctor. Yeah. So, I'm usually like, okay, Diet's always the first. So in naturopathic medicine, which is one of the few differences as far as ideology with conventional training is that we have this thing called the, uh, therapeutic order. It's shaped like a pyramid where you're initiating the least invasive, least aggressive treatment interventions first, saving drugs and surgery as a last resort. So, it's not anti drugs and surgery, but you also meet the patient where they are, right? Someone comes in, they chop their arm off in a saw, that's not the time to start putting pulsuses on there. You need to go to the emergency room. So, with them it's like, what are you eating? You know, the first thing, you know, is assessing that. And diet is difficult to change in anybody, a child or an adult. So, I usually will add things in before I take away because that's a hard thing to do except for the one thing I will take away is everybody. The number one thing on the treatment plan is no artificial flavorings, colorings, preservatives or additives to any of your food. You know, you wanna eat the cookies and ice cream? Fine, we'll change that later. Right now, I need this because part of it is also, you usually only have one or two opportunities right before they just go doctor shopping and they bounce out and you are like, oh man, I wish. You know, after sixteen years of practice, I don't have, you know, nutrition much anymore. But it sucks because you're like, I knew I could've helped that person. So keeping things reasonable, so I'll end up doing that. They usually come in on a whole bunch of supplements. You know, friends, neighbors, friends, a meta ad, an influencer with no medical training or health training is, so they got all these things. They don't know what to give, what's working, what's not working. As long as they're quality brands, because they already spent the money, I'll actually give them appropriate dosing. And there's a big aspect to the gut microbiome which we know is is time for another podcast, but 70% of our neurotransmitters are produced in the gut. So, it makes sense that you're gonna address that. And in children, you know, things like dysbiosis aren't usually, you know, which is an inordinate amount of bad critters in the small and large intestine versus healthy ones. But Mhmm. That's fine. You could still, you know, give them health, good probiotics to modulate that these psychobiotics that have a gut brain axis connection, those kind of things. So, it's usually the way I structure my practice is the diet is the first and then giving them what's called the constitutional homeopathic medicine which are these little sugar pellets that are great because there's no side effects, there's no interactions, there's no contraindications. And then, depending on how old they are and what's going on in their diet, we do talk about blood tests, you know, and, um, I do usually typically recommend them and then making sure they go to, I usually say there's a children's hospital nearby because, you know, drawing a child is not like drawing an adult. The veins aren't in the same place and if you get a phlebotomist who doesn't know what they're doing with the pediatric blood draw, they'll never wanna get their blood drawn ever again and it's a nightmare. It's sad. The kid's crying. You gotta pin them down. It's a mess. So, blood tests of vitamin D and zinc, just some basics. And if their child's really young, you can't draw much blood anyway because you can't draw too many vials because of weight. Have them come back in a couple weeks and then we're like, okay, how did the diet stuff work? What did the homeopathic do and not do? The next step is literally basics. I end up putting them on a high quality multivitamin mineral that, um, not a gummy because again, you gotta just eat too many of them and and some of these better simulated forms of nutrients, um, aren't stable in gummies so they just oxidize and go bad. So, um, and I don't wanna give things like cyanocobalamin and I wanna give more of the active forms of nutrients because they work better and you could use them at lower dose. So, give a multi fish oil probiotic and then they come back usually in about a month after that so their third visit is, you know, six to ten weeks from the the first one. And then I'm like, alright, what's left? You know, what what things do we need to tweak? And usually, they're 90 to a 100 better, like they have no more symptoms. So then, that's when we start talking about long term, like, let's start working on getting some better diets, stabilizing blood sugar, where are some options. And because of just time, sheer fact of time and how the way I bill, that if they really need a lot of help, I have nutritionists that I that I refer them to that could actually, like, walk through meal planning and, you know, more appropriate things versus them shelling out the money per hour to have me start doing I'll do a lot of the basics and guide them. And then, they're doing so much better, we could start tapering the doses but there are times where say they're only 80% better. The homeopathic were great, these were great but they plateaued so I don't need to give them any more of what they're already on because they're already at therapeutic doses. So then, I might start having to bring in other things that are say, more of a of a band aid. They don't have a permanent fix like L theanine and GABA, these inhibitory neurotransmitters or, um, you know, it's scary, but losing low dose lithium. Okay. Not lithium chloride or carbonate that you would see in bipolar disorder at six hundred to eighteen hundred milligrams. We're talking lithium orotate which is better bioavailability and doesn't have any adverse effects on the thyroid like other lithium. And we're talking about like five hundred micrograms, right? Or up to like a milligram and that's nice because as that builds up in the bloodstream, it gets intercalated in cells because it is a mood stabilizer. So, they don't need it long term or they might just need it as kinda PRN as needed for symptoms. But I always tell people, you'll get tired of seeing me before I run out of options. But usually, they're fine, usually by the third or fourth visit. Even in adults, they don't have any more symptoms and the teachers have been thoroughly convinced that they're on meds, but they're not. And then if they are on meds, I can taper their meds. You know, you can't just abruptly stop any of these medications that they're on. I'm like, as a professional courtesy, I might go back to your original prescribing physician, you know, tell them how much better the child's doing and then or I can write a letter or call the doctor and have them start tapering because I don't want a doctor messing with my treatment plan. Why would I just start messing with someone else's? Plus, there's medical legal liability. And once in a great while, they kinda get into a little bit of a kerfuffle with the prescribing physician, like it's fine. That means that doctor's not for you because they're not looking out for you and your, say, your child's best interest. I've got a whole referral network of GPs. You want one? That they play nice and they play well? And Or, um, maybe in the interim that I start tapering until we get them to a new clinician.
[00:48:21] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Okay. Okay. So, let's unpack that. So, the first thing you start off with is nutrition. And the big one that you go for is getting out artificial colors, artificial flavors, and food preservatives. And then I assume you work on getting them towards more of a whole food nutrient dense, uh, diet after that.
[00:48:38] Dr. Todd Born: Yep. Exactly. I try to include some things. I'll make some suggestions like there's a there's a great thing I I don't know if my wife created or what, but basically get, know, I usually do vegan protein, chocolate protein. I'm like, does your kid like chocolate ice cream? Yeah. Okay. They like like Wendy's Frosties. So you just literally, you get a frozen banana, one or two bananas, you break them up, put them in a blender, put in some milk and we do talk about allergy elimination diets because, you know, gluten and dairy and whatnot but that's later if we need it. But there's so many almond milk for example. Put some almond milk in there, put a scoop of this vegan, uh, I like any protein but I like the vegan protein powders in this scenario because they're they're more palatable than say, uh, whey when they might be sensitive to whey or the beef proteins. And then you blend that up and there is a high protein, you know, snack and drink that I have yet to have a kid that will not drink these because it's basically you just tell them it's a chocolate milkshake and they don't know the difference. Yeah. And you can put all sorts of stuff in there.
[00:49:36] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Yeah. Yeah. No. I know we've done that too. I mean, chocolate and bananas blended up, you know, are are delicious. So you're working on nutrition. You're getting all the basically all the artificial additives out of their nutrition. You're checking labs. You you mentioned vitamin D and zinc. Are you checking other blood tests?
[00:49:53] Dr. Todd Born: Typically magnesium because, you know, magnesium's nature's anxiolytic. That's a natural anxiolytic. Also, it's a cofactor. What we know in studies that it's a cofactor for at least 300 biochemical processes in the body. Yeah. I just saw an article that there's more than 500. And every reaction in the central nervous system takes magnesium and B6 as a cofactor. So, I wanna start it's a type of modality called orthomolecular medicine. You're literally giving almost pharmacological doses of these nutrients to push those biochemical pathways in a certain direction. So I'll test magnesium, iron, and um, glad you brought that up. So it's not just a CBC. I've had plenty of doctors, even adults, right, they run a CBC and they're like, your hematocrit, your hemoglobin's normal. You don't have iron deficiency anemia. Well, there's stage one anemia, there's stage two anemia and the body's always gonna rob Peter to pay Paul. It will keep pulling from iron stores and to make hemoglobin and hematocrit normal, right? And RBC's normal. So if you really wanna know someone's iron status, right, you need to run serum iron, a ferritin, a transferrin, percent saturation, and a TIBC. These are iron panels with a ferritin. And you can see that they may not be completely iron deficient, but you can be iron insufficient when ferritin drops below, you know, say 25 or what have you. The drawback of saying children is that there's usually not good standardized reference ranges in a child than there's an adult. But you could still go by clinical symptoms, what's their diet, physical exam, right? Do they have pale sclera? Do they got pale gums? You know, those kind of things. So, looking at thyroid, iron, vitamin D, zinc, magnesium and magnesium is difficult because it's just cellular, but you can run a couple. Sometimes depending on the weight, I will run some B vitamins like B6, B12. As you know, humans in general, we're very empiric people. We like subjective data. So, if an objective data. So if you have these labs, they come back abnormal. The individual is much more likely to be adherent to the treatment interventions I'm implementing than if they've got nothing. Because they know
[00:52:00] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Because you have objective data to see if
[00:52:02] Dr. Todd Born: they can get them here. That's right. I'll be like, look, and it's pretty, I would say most often, iron is low. Thyroid, I pretty rarely I see thyroid off. That's, and it's not just a TSH, right? I'll run a TSH and a free T and a free T4 to actually look at the actual thyroid hormones. And sometimes those do need to be split up to two separate blood draws because they're just too small. But at the end of the first visit, I'll say, have your, has your child ever been drawn for blood? Depending on the answers whether I'm gonna have them do labs between the first and second visit. They're like, No. I'm like, Well, let's just do some basics. Have you come back? And if there's no improvements, because I'm still gonna do the diet stuff anyway, but those labs will inform me whether I need to bring on supplements like, you know, one of the leading causes of death in a child of the age of six is iron overdose, right? So, I'm gonna give someone a iron unless they really need it. Um, it could be dangerous. Yeah.
[00:52:57] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Okay, so you're working on the diet like we talked about. You're drawing blood on the first or the second visit, depending on your read of the patient, basically. And then you talked about homeopathy, which is something that many people might not know what it is. Some people, a lot of people have actually probably used it, but they still don't know what it is. Can you explain it to us? Because, you know, if we try to explain it from a physical and biological standpoint, it's hard to understand why this would be beneficial to human biology. But I'm hoping maybe you can wrap our minds around what homeopathy is and why you think it works in ADHD. Doctor.
[00:53:37] Dr. Todd Born: Right. So, yeah, the first visit's always diet homeopathic. And then second visit, especially if I have labs, it's a little more diet and then, yeah, multivitamin, fish oil, and usually a probiotic, especially what the labs will show and then iron if I need. The way homeopathy works is that it's an interesting modality because it's the most popular and utilized medical modality in the world. It's the most contentious medical modality in the world. And the reason that is just like you said, so you've seen these numbers after them, the six x and the six c and the 12 c and the 30 c. It's because once you get past a six c, which is the amount it's diluted, you're beyond what's called Avogadro's number. And if we all remember from our really boring chemistry and physics days of school, that that has to do with once something's beyond Avogadro's number, there's no physical molecules left of the original substance. It's too diluted for anything to be there. So that's why the daysayers come about, which I get it, right? That, well, homeopathy can't work because you're beyond Avogadro's. There's no physical substance left. That is true to the science that we know today. But if you look at quantum physics and quantum mechanics, those are nanoparticles. That that that's what it's looking at. Right? Things that shouldn't really be there. So I think once we get better and more advanced at quantum physics and mechanics, we'll understand homeopathy better because they're nanoparticles. They really are working. There's been studies out of Germany which is a big homeopathic country that that likes homeopathy, uses a lot. There was an interesting study that came out where these physicists looked at homeopathy and all these dilutions, 200 C, one M, 30 C, and they went to disprove homeopathy. They went to say, Look, there is nothing left. And they themselves had to publish this paper because their minds were blown that they're like, This is physically impossible. If there's no molecules left, they put them through whatever torture that these amazing theoretical physicists and applied physicists did and they showed that even past six c, there was still something left. There was an imprint on these like, kinda how like CERN, the Super Collider. They have ways of their instruments to detect them. So, they said, Look, we're not proving homeopathy. We're not saying homeopathy exists. We're saying that there is something beyond Avogadro's number and these nano particles and we're not sure why these are actually still showing that there's something. And so, that was pretty interesting. But, if you look at medicine, doesn't matter the medicine. People say all the time, well, naturopathic medicine, you don't know how your medicine works. And it's like, me not nagga, I prescribe medications all the time. And my response is, well, you don't know how your medicine fully works. People will, they'll go, huff and all. I'm like, tell me how aspirin fully works. Tell me how, you know, giving something like TESFIDERA to someone who has progressive multiple sclerosis and its mechanism of action is that up regulates Nrf2, which, you know, has the cascade effect of, um, increasing antioxidants. How does that work in MS? By being anti inflammatory? We don't know how most medications work. So, don't give me that. And then they'll say, well it's the placebo effect. And never underestimate the placebo effect, right? Because that's a powerful system of medicine. There are studies, there are surgical studies where we show, you know, OA studies where they've done debridement on people who have OA and they've done fake sham knee surgeries, real knee surgeries and those that got the sham knee surgery actually had better outcomes than though had the real knee surgery. So surgeons are like, what are we doing? But I digress. So homeopathy is that the theory is that it's passed to succeed. At least before succeed, it's working on some kind of oral tolerance, right? You're putting it in your mouth, there's a physical substance left, it's inducing the immune system via oral tolerance. Well, how is it working past that? It's considered an energetic medicine that we don't fully know. I think again, it's working on nano particles. It contains nano particles working on cell signaling pathways and even many drugs are going into the nano particle world versus, okay, instead of just blasting you, let's actually get inside of a cell and start turning on DNA and G transcription. I think homeopathy's working the same way. And then for the naysayers that say, well it's just placebo, I'm like okay. So, say I have a two month old and they are covered in eczema. They have severe atopic disease, right? And I give them these sugar pellets. And three weeks later, they have no, they have no eczema. That two month old had no idea what I gave them. How did their eczema go away? It wasn't spontaneous remission of their eczema. You know, oh, well maybe the mom, you know, because the mom was breastfeeding decided, nope, mom didn't change anything or diet. I literally had no confounders. I just gave them those pelt. And I've done this many times. So, you know, there's ways to kinda push all these things aside but it is very contentious and I get it. So, in the way homeopathics tend to work, when there's different kinds of homeopathy, there's acute homeopathy where you bang your arm and you go to the store and you grab something called arnica, right, which is classic for bruising. Speaking of arnica, I had a cousin, uh, I have a cousin who is an ER physician in Colorado. He's since retired but he said that there was the studies on arnica in the ER, in the trauma center, were so robust that it was showing equivalency to certain pain meds and also speeding healing, that the only homeopathic that actually was approved in the formulary in the ER at that hospital in Boulder was arnica. But no other homeopathics were.
[00:59:02] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Only arnica.
[00:59:02] Dr. Todd Born: He's like, yeah. He was like, so we're sitting there literally giving patients arnica in the ER. But nothing else. I was like, well, I'm gonna go to someone.
[00:59:10] Dr. Ravi Kumar: If you can find something, uh, you know, an alternative to opioids, then do it.
[00:59:14] Dr. Todd Born: There's acute homeopathy, sorry, then there's the, um, the shotgun homeopathy. These are homeopathics that are in all the stores. They got like 40 in there and I see this a lot with patients. Uh, I bought this, uh, this and they'll bring the box in or show it to me and they're like, it didn't really work. Or some people say, it helped a little. And the reason that homeopathics may or may work is that everybody's individual. So, maybe one of those 40 homeopathics was that was what that person need needed and that's why it worked. But most of the time those don't work versus the studies you and I have been talking about where homeopathy has been shown efficacious. That's constitutional homeopathy where you match the physical, mental, and emotional parameters of an individual to a particular homeopathic medicine. And there's about 5,000 homeopathic medicines in the world. In clinical reality, there's a 100 that are quite common and then there's another 50 that are really, really common and then like 35 of those are called polycrests, which is what most everybody are. So you just have to match that person and their personality and their traits and their symptoms to one of those medicines and then you give them the medicine and they dissolve it. And what's nice is that it's quite curative that it will fix their ADHD. It does wear off eventually and then symptoms come back so you just re dose it. And I think it's just mostly optimizing someone's genetic potential, but it's the number one tool in my armamentarium for pretty much any health condition. Um, I'm using medications and supplements and herbs and stuff, but homeopathy gets the quickest results I've seen and the most long term effects. And then sometimes you miss on the remedy, the parents come back and they're like, my child is no different. That's fine. That means I missed and I got the wrong remedy, so I'll give you a different homeopathic medicine, because I have usually a differential of three that they'll most likely be.
[01:01:04] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Yeah. So, what does the data specifically say? You know, have they done clinical trials on this showing how homeopathy works on ADHD? I mean, have they specifically studied this?
[01:01:16] Dr. Todd Born: Yeah. It's been studied quite a bit and there are a number of studies that show no improvement compared to placebo. And those are poorly controlled studies and they're also poorly performed studies. So, the way constitutional homeopathy works, and I put it in quotes because that's a particular type of homeopathy, which is a type of classical homeopathy. Homeopathy has been around for over two hundred years and was invented by a medical doctor. This whole like treat like, like cures like kind of deal where you give a low amount of something. So, say someone has ADHD and they got 50 subjects that have ADHD and they all have kind of similar symptoms or a lot and then a bunch of disparate symptoms and everybody gets the same homeopathic or they get placebo and then, you know, they greater outcome, right, clinical effect than placebo. And those, that's true Because that is not how homeopathy works in clinical reality. So, the studies, and it's not just ADHD, it's a lot, a number of other conditions, um, you know, arthritic conditions, autoimmune diseases, you know, mood disorders. I mean, it runs the gamut of health conditions. Is that when you actually do these trials like they're supposed to be done and like how it's done in real world where they get, whether it's a homeopath or a doctor who's, who's deaf and you know, and and well skilled and trained in homeopathy. They might get the same 50 subjects and they will get, and all of those are getting 25 get SIBO, 25, they they might be getting 10 or 15 different remedies because it's personalized medicine. So while one person might need phosphorus, another person needs metorhinum, another person needs carcinosin, another person needs, you know, Nat Mary, you could see where this is going. Then all of a sudden, and the person who's giving the medicine because they're double blind and randomized and placebo controlled, nobody knows what the individual subjects got. The person who prescribed the medicine doesn't know whether they got the real remedy or they got the placebo. And then when you actually go back through those trials and there was a trial, a head to head trial in eight and nine year olds where they put them against, I love these trials where they go against gold standards. So they either gave them, it was a, you know, three arm trial. They either gave them methylphenidate, a constitutional homeopathic remedy or placebo. And nobody knew what anybody was getting right except because they didn't unblind the trial. And they showed at the end of this trial that, and it was statistically significant, that the individuals who got the constitutional remedy did just as well as those on methylphenidate with no dropouts because the methylphenidate group did have dropouts due to side effects. And it was superior to the placebo and it was equivalent in subjective and objective parameters as the actual medication. And even the authors of the study were like, we recommend, you know, starting a trial treatment with this. And even in the crossover study, right? Then they, same one, they then then switched to two and then people who had methylphenidate got the homeopathic and it still worked. So, to me, that's pretty good efficacy and statistical significance in a trial.
[01:04:20] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Yeah, I've read that study. I mean, because that was a very strong, well designed trial. And, yeah, I was totally shocked. I mean, you know, there was actually a pilot study up before that trial that showed that seventy five percent of kids who took these homeopathic remedies had complete resolution of their ADHD. So, you know, and they don't know how it works.
[01:04:41] Dr. Todd Born: Right? So
[01:04:42] Dr. Ravi Kumar: and that's what drives the medical community away from it. Because it's just you know, when I was in residency, I did, was doing research in a lab, and I was growing glioblastoma cells in a Petri dish, in a cell culture dish. And glioblastoma is a very aggressive brain tumor. And then I was dosing them with tiny, tiny amounts of curcumin, which is the active component in turmeric. I mean, amounts that were so small that it would be the same concentration that you would get from eating, like, a bowl of curry, essentially, with turmeric in it. And these glioblastoma cells would just die when I would put the curcumin in these concentrations in there. And the dish next to it that didn't have the curcumin, this just had a placebo, would proliferate and just grow like crazy.
[01:05:28] Dr. Todd Born: And
[01:05:29] Dr. Ravi Kumar: so I took this to my my, uh, professor at the time. I was like, hey, look what I found. And he's like, well, how does it work? And I said, well, I don't know. I can try to look into that, but it does work. And he's like, uh, it doesn't matter. If you don't know how it works, doesn't really matter if it works. That's science, you know? But still, it's a dogmatic way of thinking that medicine has, where if you don't know why it's happening, it doesn't matter that it is happening. And I think homeopathy is a great example of that. It works. And maybe people are gonna say it's just an excellent placebo delivery. And I know they've done studies over that specifically. But even if that was the case, it still works, right? Exactly.
[01:06:10] Dr. Todd Born: It was mass delivered.
[01:06:11] Dr. Ravi Kumar: And placebo is better than most drugs that we have, you know? So, if you can efficiently deliver placebo, great. I know all the homeopathy doctors out there are listening to this and hating me right now for saying that. But, uh, if it works, why not?
[01:06:26] Dr. Todd Born: Doctor. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, I'll get burned at the stake for all, you know, a lot of the stuff I say. And I don't repertorize. And I I, you know, I don't do it like the traditional two hour intake. And people and when I speak at medical conferences, doctors are like, well, how are you incorporating all of it into the visit? And I was like, children are usually only forty five minutes. Right? Um, but adults are sixty to seventy five minutes, depending on 90 if they're really, really complicated for a first visit. By the time I've gone through, you know, the history of presenting illness and I've gone through the normal usual mumbo jumbo, I only need to talk to them for five or ten minutes specifically on homeopathy, asking specific open ended questions and closed ended questions because I've got a good differential of the remedies in my head already. I don't need a whole separate two hour. Plus, um, it's a lot of noise with a lot of the homeopathic type of questions that to me are irrelevant. They're too narrow for me to basically match the essence of the person to the essence of the remedy. But you're right. I mean, that's also human nature, right? We are constant in science in general. We have to know how something works. And that's cool. I'm a scientist. I like to know how things work. But sometimes, we just don't know. And like you said, you're sitting here watching, you know, glioblastoma cells basically go through apoptosis and die because you're giving them curcumin. And we know, well, there are certain ways of manipulating curcumin now in humans that you can get it to cross the blood brain barrier, but you need it in boldest doses, but you could still do it. And, you know, we don't know. There are some theoretical ways, but yeah, people just don't like to use things. Or I ask docs all the time, I'm like, well, you know, how did this work? And people are like, I don't know. You know, it's like, who cares if it worked? Especially, there's like potentially no side effects.
[01:08:04] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Yeah. So, are there any side effects to homeopathy?
[01:08:08] Dr. Todd Born: Doctor. Not generally. There's not, I wouldn't, I guess it's a quasi or a pseudo side effect is that what I tell my patients is that there's only really two things that can happen. One, it does nothing. I just missed on the remedy completely. The analogy I always give is imagine that you're, you know, or a metaphor, I was like imagine you're a dartboard and the bull's eye is what's called the synonym which means the remedy that treats everything that's going on with you. If I get that, everything's better. But the farther I get out from the bull's eye, the less things that improve. So, you might come back and be like, A, B, and C got better but there's other things. That means I was too outside the remedy or I need to redose it. But, generally, either it does nothing or you get what's called, in homeopathic theory, they call it a healing crisis which I think is too negative, too pejorative, right? So, I just, I call it a healing reaction where things get worse before they get better, but it doesn't last more than a few days. So, say you have like a highly agitated, very aggressive ADHD child who also has, you know, a number of health issues like they're biters, they're hitters, they've been kicked out of schools, they punch their parents, everybody walks around eggshells around them. I do warn them that that may get worse before it gets better, but it doesn't typically last more than a week and it shouldn't. And if it does, they need to reach out to me because either the rep and most often what happens is the remedy was too strong. So you just give them a lower you make it wear off and then you give them a lower potency. So, over years of practice, I usually give a lower strength over a period like every day. So that mitigates the probability of the child now because then obviously parents are not happy with me when they're like, thanks. My kid broke the TV, they busted their Xbox and they got in a fight at school. You suck. You're fired. I'm not gonna see you anymore. You know, I'm like, I warned, like I don't care you warned me. So what's the reason
[01:10:00] Dr. Ravi Kumar: behind that? Why is it that a remedy would cause them to get worse before getting better?
[01:10:06] Dr. Todd Born: I think it's similar like how some medications, right, make people worse before it gets better. That's just like, uh, particularly SSRIs, SNRIs, is that it's like this the theory again, it's all theory. There's no it's not law. It's almost even probably that we don't have a hypothesis is that the way homeopathics are working is a constant level of balance. So, if you have that super aggressive person, it's trying to bring you down here. If you've got that like super mellow person who's like tired and brain fog to fatigue all day, it should bring you up here. So it has like this teeter totter. And over the years, I've had a lot of patients describe it, older people, like adults who can explain things better. They'll describe it like as a roller coaster. Up and it goes like this where the ups and downs, the pits and valleys are, um, um, larger part for like a week and then there was this new baseline where like everything was great but they'll say, Yeah, that first week was not fun. I'm like, Sorry. It doesn't happen every time. It only happens sometimes. And I've tried to gauge the type of person and I'll ask them, are you sensitive? Are you sensitive to medications? Are you kinda sensitive to supplements? And they'd say, yeah, I don't go with those higher potencies. So, one theory is, um, because it's working on a person's like vitality because it's an energetic medicine is that say you have a super high vitalistic person and you perturb the system, that system then inside them pushes back equally hard. So, just the same reason, like say you have a very depleted, like say you have a cancer patient who's very ill. You know, what we learn in homeopathic classes in med school, the theory is that you do not wanna give them a really strong dose because they don't have the vitality to keep up with it and you could actually do more harm than good, right? You know, as we always learn in medical school, do first do no harm. So you give them the lower strength, but homeopathy, uh, just is not well understood outside that six c. I think it'll until quantum physics and is better understood. It it's always gonna be the devil child, you know, and, and people will shy away from it. But, I could tell you that it is the number one tool I've seen, like people with autoimmune diseases that stop their flare or mitigative flare. The child who's the asthmatic, their asthma goes away, their seizures get better, the ADHD gets better. But it's not the end all be all, right? You still have to do all these other pieces because it has its limitations.
[01:12:26] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Yeah. It's
[01:12:27] Dr. Todd Born: not the magic pixie dust.
[01:12:29] Dr. Ravi Kumar: So do you have to, once you start a, say you take a homeopathic remedy, you get benefits say with ADHD or one of these other problems you're talking about, do you have to stay on it for the rest of your life?
[01:12:40] Dr. Todd Born: Doctor. No, that's a good question. So, these homeopaths will just be cringing when I say this but many people believe traditionalist that you're a homeopathic remedy basically. That's your your samilam. That's your true remedy for life and I don't that doesn't make any sense. You can't tell me that you're the same person as a 10 year old as you are as a 30 year old. You're a totally different person. Yes, you've got some of those traits and similarities, but you're a totally different person. You're in a different phase of your life. You're in a different state of your life. So how could you possibly be the same homeopathic? So, and then in homeopathic theory, do you have these, um, pathological remedies? These are like the aggressive, the biters, the hitters, you know, because since we're talking about ADHD and conduct disorder and those things, they're gonna be a much more aggressive, deeper state remedy that they will eventually move out of. And I can't tell how many parents I've had like literally crying in my office with joy because they're like, I got my kid back. My kid was six years old and they were huggy, lovey, social. Now they're 12 and it's more than just pre teen angst and puberty, right? I mean, they're going to boarding school because I can't take them anymore and they've been kicked out of all schools and they're, they won't do their homework, they're failing. And there's, and then we kinda, you also gotta look what's going on at home and there's other aspects. But you know, serum is going with this. So, then you give them that homeopathic, all that goes away and then they either, those symptoms come back, you redose it, or what most likely happens is that they only usually need the remedy one or two times, maybe three, and all of that goes away and they move into a healthier remedy. They don't need that deep, dark, pathological remedy anymore. And they might stay that remedy for years until they kinda go through puberty or they get in their twenties and now they might be a different homeopathic medicine. But no, they don't I've had people that and usually the remedies, every time you give it and they get healthier and healthier, there's less things for the homeopathic to fix. Plus, with me, I'm doing so many things that they may not they don't usually need it right away. They might go three months or four months. I've had some patients who have mood disorders or even ADHD where it's like a year later, they might be seeing me for something else. I'm like, Well, how's this and this? They're like, That's not a problem. Do you need the homeopath again? They're like, No. That's unusual to last that long, but it does happen where I got people that are like, No, my depression dude, I feel great. It's like, Wow, by now you should normally need it again, but you don't. And it's the antithesis of what we understand with all medicine. Less is more, right? We understand like loading doses and high doses and tapering and prednisone tapers and homeopathy doesn't work that way. It's the less is more. So, you actually, that's why the whole time when it's past six C, these two hundred C, one M, when it's really diluted, those should last a very long time. So, you don't want to take them very often and that's counterintuitive to how we think as a, probably a human and Americans. We're like, More is better. No, not in the world of homeopathy. And that's hard to get around that psyche. Even myself, I'm like, do you feed the remedy? And like, nah, feel good. Okay.
[01:15:52] Dr. Ravi Kumar: No, it's counterintuitive, you know? But, so, let me let me clarify something. So, are you changing their prescription as they as their symptoms change then?
[01:16:01] Dr. Todd Born: Yep. Yeah. You're starting them
[01:16:03] Dr. Ravi Kumar: on one remedy and then you're changing the prescription to a different remedy if they need it?
[01:16:08] Dr. Todd Born: Yep. Exactly. Because they won't need it anymore. Especially if I got the remedy. I'll give you a great example. There's plenty of times where I've got a hyperactive, aggressive child who is highly precocious and I mean, you think you're talking an adult but they're very mouthy, they're very lippy and they're very irritating even into a clinician. But you gotta keep your composure, right? And there's a classic remedy for them called the iritromalbom. It's made from a plant. And so, these are kids who are extremely haughty. They are well aware of their intelligence. Right? And you gotta be careful of what you say and do because they will call you out on it and be like, well, ten minutes ago you just said this. And you're like, oh my God, this kid's 10. So
[01:16:52] Dr. Ravi Kumar: So That's like all four of my children, so.
[01:16:54] Dr. Todd Born: Well, they do have a neurosurgeon as a father, so I'm sure they're quite intelligent and mouthy. Yeah, my kids, the three of the four got got a mouth on them, even our daughter. Our youngest is like more regular, but So, you give them the homeopathic and the parents will come back and be like, this is crazy. And the classic thing that most parents will say is this, we all feel like we're walking on eggshells around our child because anything will set them up. These are major behavioral issue children that make it difficult to be around them, make the child have difficulty maintaining friendships. Right. They're just, they're challenging people. And that's sad, right, because you want them to be a child, even an adult. It's mostly given to children, but you can still, you will find adults and they kind of present a little bit differently. But, you give them a remedy, they do a lot better, and then say a couple months goes by and the parents will usually reach out and be like, we're having some issues at school and, you know, this has come back. You give it to them again. And then, six months goes by, a year, they're totally fine and or they have new symptoms that come about or new issues. But all those original ones and then you give them a different homeopathic remedy because they don't need that one anymore. It won't work.
[01:18:01] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Yeah. So, I was assuming that this is regular dosing, like a regular dose medication. Are you talking about one time doses or are you saying you give them a course and they stop and then you try a different course?
[01:18:13] Dr. Todd Born: It depends on the person. So, like usually what I'll do in children, usually what I'll do is I'll give them a medium strength, a two hundred C, or a higher potency strength, which is called the 1F. And that will usually last at least a month. So, I it's all individual. It's all individual. One time dose.
[01:18:31] Dr. Ravi Kumar: And then it lasts them for a month?
[01:18:33] Dr. Todd Born: It usually lasts, the first time it usually lasts about a month. Wow. Okay. And then the symptoms, they won't all come back at once and they won't come back full throttle. The parents will say, I'm starting to see some issues again. So then, uh, I will give it to them again and this time it usually lasts much longer. Sometimes what happens, like I have a patient that I'm thinking of that this was, uh, it was referred to be in like a lot of cases that a very violent child, very aggressive. Um, he he was a very different type of remedy but a lot of, you know, these are the individuals that you get worried about that honestly, um, become school shooters. Very aggressive. Very violent. Punching the mom in the face. And this kid was 14 years old. Punching the mom in the stomach. His dad was six foot eight. He's getting into fights with his dad. You know, you don't wanna fight a six foot eight man, but he was a big kid too. His dad's six eight. His siblings never leave the bedroom. They're scared of him, right? So this, you can see where this goes. So gave him a remedy called trombone which is a very dark and violent remedy. Worked really, really well, but it only lasted like two weeks and that's you'll see this a lot. So, something is making the remedy wear off too quickly and in homeopathy, less is more. If you keep giving those high potencies too frequently, that can make the remedy stop working because the body and its inherent wisdom is like, I've seen this before. Kinda like how we build tolerance to medications. It's like this isn't gonna work and now we're in a little bit of a trouble because one of the other homeopathics may not work. So that's when I will switch to either a daily or a couple times a week homeopathic, but at a much weaker strength where it's meant to be taken every day like a 6C or a 12C. And that way, it's almost like taking their medication every day where the parents will even say, If I don't give them that 6C, three pellets or whatever, and I miss a couple days, I notice that these behavioral issues come back. And they usually don't need those long term either because it's just slowly nudging the system to kind of fix itself. Plus, I'm intervening on a whole bunch of other things. I'm not just like, Here's your homeopathics. See me in six months. I'm like, We gotta look at this. We gotta look at this. Fix this. I like to go for the cure whenever possible for any health concern. And those will be dailies or twice a week or three times a week. Learning disabilities also, I forgot to mention, that's really common in ADHD that gets overlooked is a lot of dyslexia, sensory integration disorder, apraxia, agraphism, right, where they write. And so, naturopathic medicine along with behavioral therapy and occupational therapy, right, is really well equipped at making that brain, when it's so neuroplastic, work better And I've done it plenty of times where all of a sudden their test scores shoot to the roof and they drop their IEPs and they're out of special education. Um, because it's been supercharged by, you know, all of these wonderful ingredients that most people don't have training or pooh pooh it, so to speak.
[01:21:24] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Yeah. So, you're saying that these kids with ADHD who are presenting with potential learning disorders actually have cognitive abilities that no one realizes that are being basically prevented from coming out and and being utilized because of the ADHD. And as soon as you control that, they go back to basically normal and maybe even excellent academic ability.
[01:21:50] Dr. Todd Born: Yeah. I mean, so I've seen kids and studies also bear us out is that, and I've worked with clinical psychologists all the time and scientists that do these assessments that the ADHD is the predominating symptom. They don't, it's like when people think dyslexia, it's like the classic dyslexia, right? It's the transposing the letters or the numbers or the words. It doesn't necessarily have to be like that. It can also be a processing disorder, right, where their brain isn't interpreting it correctly, even if their handwriting might be totally fine. Something like that. So the ADHD is the predominant thing. They're all they see, they being the teacher, the parents, is that my child is really hyper. My child, even when I'm talking to them, you can see them like kinda, you you know, they drift, they go out to lunch. So all these other things that are getting neglected and then now they can sit and focus and they're quiet because they're on stimulants, but yet the problem with their learning disabilities hasn't come to fully fruition or hasn't been assessed or hasn't been noticed because they might be mild to moderate versus, yeah, you know, I mean, you know, the agraphism is pretty obvious, right? When you look at someone's writing, you're like, that makes absolutely zero sense. But, maybe they write fine, but then their brain doesn't interpret it. I like clinical psychologists for neuropsych eval's all the time to get all this stuff elucidated. Plus, those say what kind of non drug, non pharmaceutical interventions should be utilized and insurance covers it because you know, wait, it was pre auth. But, yeah. You'll see all of these things be fixed because one thing if they bring a a 25 year old comes to me with these issues, I'm like, well, that's a little harder because your brain has made those connections. But six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 12 year old could totally be undone.
[01:23:31] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Yeah. Well, that's, that's pretty, like, fascinating and very hopeful, honestly, to hear something like that. Okay, so let's jump back to your protocol because we did a, took a big side quest on homeopathy. But just to review, you start off with nutrition. You you cut out all the artificial additives to to to food. And you also on the first visit, you start off with a homeopathic remedy. Then on the second visit, you reassess. You might change your homeopathic prescription, and you potentially check labs if you feel like things aren't progressing in the right direction. And you add supplements, which we talked about, omega three fatty acids, magnesium, vitamin d, a multivitamin, which I'd like to hear more about. And then you continue with, uh, different assessment and following that that patient and making sure they're headed in the direction that you want them to to go. Is that right? Does that sum it up or did I miss something? Doctor.
[01:24:29] Dr. Todd Born: No, that that's pretty much it. And if if I miss on the homeopathic medicine, the second time I see them, I will hold off on that and I'll just do the supplements because I know those are say, more predictable. Like, what if I miss a second time? The parents aren't gonna wanna wait around for me to keep trying different homeopathics. I'm not a homeopath. I'm just a naturopathic physician who uses a lot of homeopathy. Plus, I don't like to throw too many things in because then what if something went wrong? I won't know what did what. Yeah. You know, I occasionally, not that often, but I will get some patients that are like, we're not comfortable with homeopathy, just its premise. Okay. That's fine. I don't have to use homeopathy. I usually make my case for it but I wanna do with what you're comfortable with. I could still do all these other things and still get some good results and we'll go with that. So it's usually the first like three appointments, four appointments is a lot of diet as it takes a while to get their diet approved and get them on board of like adults, right? Is that diet's difficult, but once you get someone better and they see the results because I like, I'm definitely a results driven position. I like to work fast. They'll usually do whatever I recommend now. Even if it's difficult. And I said, look, you missed a day, you know, you forgot the supplements, you didn't get the fish oil and that's fine. It's not the end of the world. But don't kinda come crying to me when you're like, well, they're no better and I check back and they only gave them the supplement once. Well, that that's not gonna work, right? It doesn't work like that. You have to constantly get it into their system. Especially in the beginning, we need loading doses because they're so nutrient deplete. And then we do talk about, especially if they have gut issues, allergy elimination diets being the gold standard for food sensitivities and intolerances and there's a difference between those and food allergies, etcetera. So, it's a lot of tweaking and the way I do my appointments, no matter the really the patient for the most part, unless it's like the worried well or someone that's kind of they're an athlete and they want to just set their game up so they don't need me that much, is everything's front loaded in the beginning, the first like three months. So it's a lot of fine tuning, a lot of tweaking, a lot of not a lot of appointments, it's usually just three appointments, but a lot of like emails in between because unless for me no news is good news, right? If I don't hear from you everything's going great, it's all copacetic. Then the appointments start getting farther and farther apart because usually they're better and now these other treatments that are slower to take effect, for example, I need time for those to actually work to be able to assess whether they're doing something. And usually it's Right. I'm not a heavy handed supplement provider. So usually it's, you know, everybody baseline pyramid. The multi, the fish oil, probiotic, and depending what their labs show, do I, um, a magnesium or an iron or I like to combine as many things at once. So the the probi the multivitamin's gonna have everything I need, but the zinc and the vitamin C and the D and all the adequate stuff. So, that way it's just like, you know, scoop a day or something like that.
[01:27:19] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Yeah. Tell me about your multivitamin because this is something that, you know, most people who take a multivitamin, it's like a Flintstone or a, you know, Walmart brand, you know, generic. Is do those work or do they need something special?
[01:27:32] Dr. Todd Born: You know, it's like generally speaking, something's better than nothing, but there's a caveat to that. So, you know, I I am I'm a subject matter expert to the dietary supplement ministry. I consult and consult and advise a lot of companies and there's a reason that the dietary supplement industry gets a bad rap, right? But there's a misnomer that, Oh, the dietary supplement industry is unregulated, which isn't far is farthest from the truth. The dietary supplement industry is actually heavily regulated. It's poorly enforced. The FDA only has so many field agents because they have to do food, drugs, uh, manufacturing facilities, the compounding pharmacy industry, dietary supplement industry, the contract manufacturing facilities that make the dietary supplement industry. And so, there's all they can only police so much and unfortunately how it works is the opposite of the FDA, right? It is the opposite of the drugs. Pharmaceuticals have to prove safety first, then get it out in the marketplace. Where natural substances, as long as they're not banned, it's the other way around. You don't have to prove safety so much is that you just have to prove that it's not gonna kill someone and it's got what's called GRAS status, generally recognized as safe or what they call self affirmed which you can do. So, it's, and the FDA only steps in when something goes wrong and then people report it to MedWatch, whether it's a hospital or it's a person who consumed it. So, the policing, unfortunately, is weak and that is not good for, obviously, public health and safety. The other problem with the dietary supplement industry is that a lot of the reasons that they don't show good clinical outcomes in many trials is that they're poor quality. So poor bioavailability of nutrients, they're in too low of a dose, lots of supplements are either contaminated, fraudulent, or, you know, they fail to even meet label claim. And Amazon's a big culprit of this. Yeah. So, you'll be amazed when you actually take a person who say, has taken a Centra multivitamin and like, I take it because I'm supposed to take a multi, I never know say anything. And then you give them one of these high quality ones that cost $20 more, their mind is blown. They're like, Oh my God, I have so much more energy. I can think. I'm okay, focus. And it's because you're using things that the body utilizes much better than what you had before. And Flintstones, that yeah, I grew up on Flintstones chewables, right? I mean, those are great. Yeah. But they finally do make a version that doesn't have anything artificial. They do make a gummy and the the forms of the nutrients aren't the best, but you know what? For me, that's all the kid's gonna take, for example. I will recommend one of these lower quality, if you will, but at least they don't have any of the artificial in it. They don't have fructose corn syrup because it's some is better than none while I'm still trying to buy myself time to get more foods in them. Or, I have an autistic child who's got super tasty versions, right, and they're like eating four things. And so, I'm like, well, at least I can get this into them and then make sure it's actually doing it. But so, when you see these trials, like there was one that just came out a few months ago, that showed no overall decrease in mortality, morbidity, basically had zero. And the the mold, and I'm not knocking Centrum, but the study was done on Centrum And, there's a reason that you won't see those but you look at other trials you do show efficacy is because Centrum is a, it's not a poor quality company. If you just look at the back, it's like zinc oxide, cupric oxide, cyanocobalamin. These types of molecules, the body does not really absorb much at all. Right. Yeah.
[01:31:03] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Yeah. I know. It's exactly, and people don't realize it, that they're paying for stuff that they're just, they're just pooping out, you know? Yep. So, what, what brand or what do you have your own formulation? What what are you using personally and what are you giving to your patients?
[01:31:18] Dr. Todd Born: Right. So, in my practice, I use probably 25 to 30 brands. I'm very particular about the brands I use and the actual specific Uh, you know, I'm very particular because I want things to work. So there's there's some brands I literally may only use one or two products because I don't really care for the rest of the portfolio or I don't like the way the formulation is. I have formulated and launched probably more than a 100 products into the dietary supplement space via the direct to consumer channel, healthcare practitioner channel, the e commerce channel. I don't get royalties on any of these. Some companies, like startups, I do have full disclosure, I do have equity. Like I was given equity, and as far as shares to help do all the medical affairs and scientific affairs and claims and all the regulatory stuff and do the formulas. Uh, but I have no specific ties to any particular company. So, you know, in children, and you know the way this world works all now in mergers and acquisitions and private equity and venture capital taking everything over, you know, it's just that's the way it is, right? Nature's the beast. So I might be using something for a long time and it just it's crushing it. Somebody buys that company. They look at the portfolio and the P and Ls and they just wipe them out. So, just recently, I did have to switch this multi I loved for fifteen years because it was a powder. You only need like half a scoop and it had, you know, especially with B vitamins, it's kinda hard to mask because they're not very good, right? They smell the way they taste and vice versa. That you can mix it and it didn't really have any taste. So that company was acquired, they discontinued it, so this is like three months ago. I just had a patient tell me. I'm like dang it. So I had to replace it with a company called SFI and I have no affiliation with them and they have a great full spectrum. They have a couple multis but they have a powder that actually was originally developed by scientists for autistic children. I use it in all children. But it's nice because it's, you know, it's third party tested. It's a high quality company, professional line. I think that they call it, they don't call it Spectrazyme. I think it's called Spectrum Awakening. When you go to their website, they have two powders. One of them is one, it's, um, you can't miss it, right? Because they promote it for autism spectrum and all that. But that powder works really, really well because it's in its coensymated form. It's in the active form of all of its nutrients to the body. Even if it has these single nucleotide polymorphisms that everybody's concerned about, you don't have to worry about it because you're bypassing those steps and you're already taking it in its activated form. And children don't seem to mind it because it doesn't really have a taste. I avoid the wafers, the chewables, because it's chalky, most kids won't eat them. Gummies are fine, it's just you have to take so many of them to make a therapeutic, you know. But again, that's all the kid will take. SmartyPants is another line that will do that, that makes a reasonable gummy that doesn't have any artificial and they do have some of the vitamins in there as active forms.
[01:34:15] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Yeah.
[01:34:16] Dr. Todd Born: They have a nice one that, uh, is an omega three, a multivitamin all in one. So those ones, the probiotics same thing if they, those are easy, right? And the probiotics, I should say that most probiotics out in the marketplace are total garbage. They've been Yeah. Oh, they're good. They're either contaminated with pathogenic bacteria, they don't meet label claim, they're not shell stable, so and they have dairy in them and a lot of people don't do well with that like so I just look for a hypoallergenic dairy free probiotic and then sometimes I get into the strain specific if I'm treating something specific. But for the most part, like with little kiddos, I use, um, it's called NBI, their company. He's got one, it's called Happy Belly. So I will use that one and it's it's it's nice. It's got 13 strains, 50,000,000,000 and you just open the capsule, put it in applesauce, put it in whatever you want, a smoothie, a shake, if they can't swallow pills. And so you just gotta play around. I'll usually ask, Can your kids swallow pills yet? No. Will they do chewables or powders, liquids? And they'll say, Yeah. And they usually say, Yeah, my kid's eating Flintstones. And I'm like, Well, let's change that. Because I haven't seen those do as much, unless you give them a lot and that's okay. I'm like, fine. Eat eight of these for the next month and then we're gonna taper you down.
[01:35:29] Dr. Ravi Kumar: No. I mean, I think, you know, minerals that are basically conjugated to oxide or reacted with oxide, they don't absorb. So people should, when they're looking at their multivitamins, look for minerals and and vitamins that are conjugated to amino acids, like citrate, glycinate, things like that. Those those tend to be better absorbed and more bioavailable. Okay. So so let's talk let's let's wrap this up. You've given us your whole protocol. You've talked about the etiology and and the current state of ADHD in our country, in our world. What results are you getting? You know, what percentage of these kids who come in and get and you treat are finding some benefit?
[01:36:11] Dr. Todd Born: I would say, you know, and ADHD, like most patients, they could run the spectrum, right? You could have mild ADHD. You could have severe ADHD. And, you know, anywhere in between. For me, it doesn't matter. Again, not to sound like narcissistic or pat myself on the back, but I would say my success rate with people who are under the age of say 18 or 20 is a hundred percent. They there's no symptoms whatsoever.
[01:36:33] Dr. Ravi Kumar: A hundred percent.
[01:36:34] Dr. Todd Born: Hundred percent. They might have What does that mean? So, your
[01:36:38] Dr. Ravi Kumar: kids like coming off their meds or they're not they don't have ADHD anymore? What does hundred percent mean?
[01:36:44] Dr. Todd Born: One hundred percent, you know, back to like one of those studies, right, where they had these individuals who just did the artificial flavorings and sweeteners. There are studies that when they did this with these kids, they actually no longer met the DSM. I keep saying DSM IV because these studies were four and DSM V. They actually no longer met the criteria. So I would say a 100% resolution. Does that mean they have no symptoms a 100% of the time? No. Nobody. You and I have a bad day. We might not get a good, good sleep. And and then you and I actually talked offline about this that you and I haven't talked about yet, but sleep is so critical to just think about if we don't get enough sleep as an adult. We're irritable. We're brain foggy. We can't think that well. We can't concentrate.
[01:37:22] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Ruins your whole day.
[01:37:23] Dr. Todd Born: Your whole day. Think about a child. Right? That's why if you're, you know, nowadays, especially because sleep hygiene is not great. Maybe when they're a baby, we're so hypervigilant with sleep hygiene, but that is critical for memory. That's critical for mood and behavior. So if your kids are getting those ten, eleven, twelve hours especially when they get into that deep sleep, there have been studies where when they actually got these kids to sleep, even if they're just giving them melatonin, they didn't meet the DSM five criteria or four criteria for ADHD anymore. So they may have some off days or maybe the parent, like, six months later is like everything has been great. We've had zero issues. They're totally excelling, but this is kinda coming back and this is kinda coming back. You know, okay, well, I haven't seen you in a while. Make an appointment. No, because you didn't need to see me so make an appointment and let's just triage real quick. Is it are these new symptoms? Are they the same symptoms? Is it full blown? Do I need to redose the homeopathic? Like, where do I just need to pick up? And that's usually what happens. I just redose the remedy. Maybe they fell off supplements. I'm like, okay. Amp back up on these and taper them down like the fish oil. There was one that I used to use, I used again forever and then Nestle acquired the company that was awesome. In half a teaspoon of this strawberry DHA fish oil, and anyway, you've probably tried these liquids. They taste like strawberry at first and then a little back end of the fish oil. But, all I needed was half a teaspoon. It was two thousand milligrams of omega-3s. And that's another thing that fish oil supplements are legally able to do but it's misleading is, and I see this a lot and I'm sure you have in your practice, is that it'll be like, Oh, I'm taking a thousand milligrams of fish oil. I said, You are taking a thousand milligrams of fish oil. Look at the back. How many total omega-3s? They're like, it's like a 135, right? That's why it's not working. So now you get these super concentrated ones. So, you know, I will get these ones like Barlanes, no affiliation. They make these omega swirls that you it's about a tablespoon, but kids love them. They pina colada and mango and these kids will eat this stuff up all day because it's a treat. You give them a tablespoon of that and send them off to school with a nice healthy breakfast, now you'll see a greater improvement. So, most people I would say, yeah, no meds, uh, children and adolescents. Adults, I get, I would say the same amount of success but they, it takes maybe a little longer. Like you get results and then they plateau and they get results. They're not as quick as children because of the reason we talked about. And then, they may just need like one medication and just a, like a small amount to get them through their work day, but they're not on the forty milligrams of Adderall anymore, the Shatara, and they're off the benzos and, yeah, their life is a lot better. And it's the same treatments, just maybe not the same like earth shattering 100%, but they'll maybe get 90% better. And they're like, this is great.
[01:40:15] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Doctor. Well, that's fantastic. I mean, the fact that you can have such a high success rate with kids who would otherwise be put on these stimulant drugs, I mean, that that that's extraordinary. And and it's all from these natural treatments that have really no side effects. So that's really cool. I mean, I I hope that if people hear that, it gives them some hope that there is alternatives because I know a lot of parents are out there. They're thinking, I gotta I gotta put my kid on the stimulant or they're gonna get kicked out of school or Yeah. Our family's falling apart because of their behavior. That there is an alternative out there. Yep. And for adults who are, you know, their life is just falling down because of the inability to pay attention to things or the inability to be productive, there are routes outside of the stimulant category, like what you're talking about, that could help them. And and just to be clear, you're often treating these adults who still stay on some dose of stimulant as well. Right? So you're not they're not all coming off their medications?
[01:41:18] Dr. Todd Born: No. Some of them I would say probably maybe I would say probably twenty five, thirty percent do stay on a medication. The adults that come see me, they half the time that's what they want. They're like, I have ADHD. The other half the time they have other issues like they're coming to me for insomnia, anxiety, depression, all those and then they're also like, by the way, I have ADHD. And they may not even bring it up the first time. I just, it's on their intake form. I see that's one of their medications they're on, you know, some amphetamine salt and I may ask them. But usually what will happen is say in those cases, yeah, the second or third visit, their anxiety is gone, their insomnia is better, their fatigue is better. They're like, Hey, you know, I would really love to get off some of these meds because I think that's what's causing some of my issues. Is this and how long have you been on this? Twenty years. I got a forty five year old right there. They're like, I've been on this for twenty years and I just I have to keep taking it but I don't like it. I don't like the way I feel. It does help me, you know, focus, but I may, I think I'm having some of these other issues. So, with those individuals, yeah, they, sometimes we get them off of them completely, but there's no one, you know, knock on wood, that doesn't at least go down on their meds or come off most of them and just stays on a low dose. I have a patient now, she's was at 20? Now she's at five. And she was seeing me actually for chronic fatigue and then a bunch of the other things came up and then the amphetamine salts came up and she just takes five in the morning. She's a psychotherapist and she's like, This is all I need and I don't have any other issues now. And then she's like, I think I can get off this too? I said, Maybe, but right now things are going well and it hasn't been that long and you already tapered the phi. Let's just, you know, see what happens in a few months. Plus, there's that psychology of it, right? You've been taking something every
[01:43:01] Dr. Ravi Kumar: day. Yeah, yeah.
[01:43:02] Dr. Todd Born: You're like, I didn't take the my amphetamine. Um, plus we're dealing with chronic fatigue and getting rid of that. So, just chronic fatigue syndrome. So, Michael, it's one bridge at a time.
[01:43:12] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Yeah. So, you're you're it sounds like you're seeing complex patients with lots of different problems.
[01:43:17] Dr. Todd Born: A lot of problems. Yeah. A lot of the health issues and, you know, that that's kinda the bread and butter why people get referred. I get a lot of the regular cases, which are fun, because then they're like no brainers versus I like the complicated cases. I like to help people. I like the puzzle. But, as you and I were talking earlier with some of your neurosurgic surgical cases, it's like seeing those all day every day. It's challenging. It's draining. And you're like, oh, can I just get someone who's like, just has Hashimoto's and just be done with it? You know, it's easy.
[01:43:44] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Doctor. You're like the only doctor out there who calls Hashimoto's easy, but
[01:43:48] Dr. Todd Born: Doctor. Yeah. Doctor.
[01:43:48] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Only the Doctor. That's maybe something we have to do another episode on, because that is another source of great suffering in this country and world, you know? So, just before we wrap up, kids who come in on medications, can a hundred percent of them get off I mean, in your experience, a hundred percent of them get off their medications? Yep. Yeah. That's amazing. That right there is totally extraordinary. So, where can people get ahold of you, Doctor. Bourne, if they want to learn more about what you're doing?
[01:44:18] Dr. Todd Born: Right. Um, you could Google my name. It'll come up. My website is bornintegrativemedicine.com and there's lots, there's a learning center there so there's more videos when Doctor. Kumar and I are done. Eventually that will go up on the site and, you know, that way there's information for people to know and, but yeah, you Google my name or go to bornintegrativemedicine.com. That's the easiest, best way to find me. And then, you know, you can email me through the contact form and that goes, that's just the way to do it, essentially.
[01:44:44] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Okay. And you can see patients remotely anywhere in the country or over the world?
[01:44:50] Dr. Todd Born: Yep. 70% of my practice is all over The U. S. And 30% is international. The international patients, um, you know, I think you and I talked on the phone about this and I thought the American healthcare system was pretty broken and kind of eye opening to see these patients around the world. Their healthcare systems are just as broken but in different ways. Um, so I have patients in Western Europe, Eastern Europe, The UK, Australia, New Zealand, a lot of the same problems just like one of our problems, right, is we have the pre health, pre authorization, everything. Plus everything is r crazy expensive. Some of these socialized medical systems are like, I can't even get in to see my GP for like six months or I need an ultrasound and, you know, it's a nine month wait. But the advantage of these places is cost because they can go to a private pay hospital and get like an ultra the cost is nothing versus like, you know, us trying to send someone because it's so insurance driven to pay cash pay. You're like, oh man, I can't afford that. No, well now we have to pre author that got rejected or denied. So it's there's so many ways these things are so broken, but it made me feel a little better about The United States healthcare system that we're not the only ones.
[01:46:00] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Yeah, we definitely have expediency here as far as healthcare goes. But, yeah, the cost of an MRI is, you know, $3,400,000. When I was living in India, an MRI was $25. $25. And you had a full MRI with a radiologist read. So, yeah, we got problems. Other people have problems. And I'm glad to see that they have, everyone has access to you. So, we'll put the link to your website in the show notes. And I am super appreciative of you coming on the show. This has been very eye opening for me. And I think your approach is super creative and super open minded. And I think that people need to keep in mind when they're thinking about stuff like this that, hey, if it works, go with it. Doesn't matter what the mechanism is. If it works and it's a low risk, take it.
[01:46:49] Dr. Todd Born: Right.
[01:46:50] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Exactly. Because I can tell you why my surgery works, you know, if I cut your spine or your or your head. But there's real risks there. And if there's an alternative, you know, to whatever problem you're having that has low risk and it works, why not? That's what I would want for me, and that's what I want for all my patients too.
[01:47:10] Dr. Todd Born: Right, yeah. I appreciate you having me on.
[01:47:12] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Yeah, it was great. Thanks a lot, man.
[01:47:15] Dr. Todd Born: Yep, thank you.
[01:47:16] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Alright, bye Doctor. Bourne.
[01:47:17] Dr. Todd Born: Bye, see you.

[01:47:18] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Okay, so I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Doctor. Todd Bourne. I thought it was a fantastic conversation, and here's what I want you to walk away with. There are real, evidence supported alternatives to stimulant medications for ADHD, especially in kids. And the standard of care from the American Academy of Pediatrics actually tells us to try alternatives first. So the first and easiest thing you can do is cut artificial dyes, colors, preservatives, and additives out of your kid's food altogether. Next, make sure your kid is getting ten to twelve hours of sleep. You need to protect their sleep hygiene like it's your job. And then, make sure you let your kids run, play, climb, and explore the way humans were designed to before we started sitting kids in chairs for eight hours a day. In addition to those high impact lifestyle changes, supplements like a quality multivitamin, omega three fatty acids, a clean probiotic, magnesium, and some basic labs can definitely help. And for parents and adults who want to explore constitutional homeopathy, which despite controversy is held up in head to head trials against methylphenidate, which is Ritalin, doctor Born sees patients all over the country and internationally. His website is bornintegrativemedicine.com. I'll put the link in the show notes. K, folks. That's the show. Cheers, and I'll see you next week.