The Only Cause of Disease with Thomas Levy, MD, JD

Riordan Clinic [00:00:00]:
Hello and welcome to the Real Health Podcast. Today’s episode might sound a little bit different because I want to tell you about our Cancer Care Reimagined Speaker Series. When we began planning our 25th International Conference on Human Functioning, Dr. Ron Hunninghake sat down and created his dream team of speakers. Now, we reached out to all of them and we were so delighted that they all said yes. These speakers are leaders in integrative oncology, functional medicine, and research who are truly shaping the future of cancer care. Each week leading up to the conference will feature one of these extraordinary experts right here on the Real Health Podcast. They will be sharing insights, innovation, and inspiration to help you reimagine what’s possible in cancer care. Now, this series and the upcoming Conference and Gala would not be possible without the generous support of our presenting partner, Empower. Did you know that Empower is the most advanced compounding and 503B outsourcing facility in the nation? They are licensed to serve in all 50 states, and they are deeply committed to improving access to safe and affordable and personalized medication for the patients, providers, and caregivers who rely on them. Their belief is simple but powerful. Behind every order is a person in need. And with that knowledge, they approach everything they do with compassion, innovation, and a drive for excellence. We are so grateful for their partnership and their support of this important conversation around Reimagining Cancer Care. Now, if you’re looking for tickets, they are on sale now and you can go to our website at cancercarereimagined.org you can also find tickets for our 50th anniversary gala at cancercarereimagined.org/gala. Now, these links will be posted in the show notes below. We hope that you will join us here in Wichita this November for both unforgettable events.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:01:43]:
So welcome, everyone. We’re here for another exciting episode of the Riordan Clinic Real Health Podcast. And I do mean today is going to be exciting because we have one of our favorite guests on today, Dr. Thomas Levy. Dr. Tom, welcome.

Thomas Levy, MD, JD [00:02:04]:
Hola. Happy to be here.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:02:06]:
Hey, it’s really always great. And the conversations we have are amazing. And today I think we’re going to even outdo that. We’re going to be talking about the only cause of disease. Whoa, that’s. That’s a kind of a big title there, sir.

Thomas Levy, MD, JD [00:02:30]:
Where did.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:02:30]:
Where does that come from?

Thomas Levy, MD, JD [00:02:32]:
Well, it’s a small title, actually, but it’s got a lot of impact.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:02:35]:
Yeah.

Thomas Levy, MD, JD [00:02:37]:
And it’s designed exactly that way, not only to catch attention. Okay. But to catch Attention. Because it’s true. That’s. That’s always good, is when you can really catch somebody’s attention. Attention by saying something that on the face of it might look outlandish. But when you break it down, you find out it’s absolutely true. And that’s the case here. The case very simple is the only cause of disease is excess oxidation of biomolecules inside the cell. That’s it. And so then that begs the question, if that’s the only cause of disease, well, then what is the source of the excess oxidation? And that’s got a simple answer too. The simple answer there is toxins. All toxins, 100% are pro oxidant and oxidized biomolecules. In fact, if you have something you’re calling a toxin that doesn’t oxidize biomolecules, it’s not a toxic. Ah. Because that’s what defines its characteristic. And why is this the case? Quite simply, then, when a biomolecule is oxidized, meaning it’s lost some electrons and the toxin has taken electrons away from it, it becomes inactivated, it can no longer perform whatever its normal metabolic function is. Lipid fat, protein, enzyme, etc. And when you have a large number of these biomolecules in different locations, in different concentrations, in different types, in the oxidized state, you have a greater and greater and greater dysfunction of the cell. And that’s the disease. That is the disease. The disease is the state of oxidation. And it’s a seemingly small but I think important thing. Keep in mind, because in the literature we see the term oxidative stress a lot. And it’s a good valid concept, oxidative stress, meaning you’ve got a lot of oxidation. But where they sort of go wrong in the literature is they talk about oxidative stress causing disease. That’s not really the case. The oxidative stress is the disease. It’s not like a large amount of oxidized biomolecules causes some other state of pathology to occur. No, it’s the pathology completely and solely unto itself. And so that’s it in a nutshell. And that’s kind of like. I like to say that defining disease is simple. Resolving it is much less simple. But the simplicity is disease is only excess oxidation. And that excess oxidation is only caused by an excess toxin presence.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:05:30]:
Let’s take an example. I know, I’m with you. Just for the sake of the audience here, let’s say cardiovascular disease. Okay, now let’s run through that in terms of how does this definition fit with cardiovascular disease?

Thomas Levy, MD, JD [00:05:46]:
Good. With a take on there.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:05:47]:
It’s your cardiologist. Yes, that’s.

Thomas Levy, MD, JD [00:05:50]:
Well, when you’re looking at all the different possibilities for new toxins, the first thing to keep in mind is that the primary source across the board in the world’s population for new toxins comes from infections. In other words, really and truly, the only way an infection hurts you is by how many toxins it produces and how much it produces. And when you’re able to resolve the infection, then the, then the new toxin sources stop and you start to get better. So infections are the primary source of toxins. Now, in the case of heart disease, then what is causing the heart disease? Well, the heart disease is being caused by a colonization of oral pathogens from an infected tooth or infected gums in the wall of the coronary artery. And what does an infection do? Well, I just said an infection has a lot of toxins. What do toxins do to vitamin C? They consume the vitamin C. Vitamin C is the antioxidant toxins of pro-oxidant. So the more toxins you bring in, the more you use up your supply of vitamin C and the blood vessel wall until you basically reach a point where you have, and we had an article on this, you recall where you have a focal scurvy of the coronary artery. Atherosclerosis is a focal scurvy. And the important thing here, then that then goes from there is, well, focal scurvy or loss of virtually all the vitamin C in a given area or spot of the body is what defines the state of inflammation. So if all your vitamin C is gone, that tissue is inflamed. If by some reason you’re able to inflame the tissue, then you check the vitamin C is gone, it’s and it’s the same thing. No vitamin C inflammation. Restore vitamin C, resolve inflammation. So then continuing then with the heart disease is these pathogens then colonize the heart artery, knock the level of vitamin C in the artery down to zero. The artery becomes inflamed. And then what happens when anything becomes inflamed? You get an acute immune response. That’s what triggers an immune response, is that the whole purpose of your immune system is to quell inflammation, really and truly. And as it turns out, the only way you quell inflammation is by restoring the vitamin C status. So the first cell to come to the site of inflammation is, guess what is the monocyte. Why is that significant? That’s significant because the monocyte has the highest level, 8,000% higher than other cells of vitamin C. Inside is literally a cell jam packed with vitamin C. It’s also got, incidentally, a very large amount of magnesium and a very large amount of hydrogen peroxide. So your monocyte, the first cell of the acute immune response, is delivering to that site of inflammation the three main things you need to resolve an infection and restore the vitamin C status to normal. And so that’s pretty much in a nutshell. And I would say, and I’ve talked with you about this before, talk about oversimplification, only it’s not oversimplification, is you look at an immunology textbook and I just get dizzy. I mean, there’s just so many different factors, different abbreviations. This causes this, this causes this. You can just. I get nothing out of it. But when you’re looking at the body, when you’re looking at health and illness, it is not an oversimplification to say that regardless of the complexity of the immune system, and it is complex, there’s a lot of interacting factors. The bottom line is the only purpose, the overriding purpose, or if you want to call it the main purpose of the immune system, is to provide vitamin C where it’s depleted, because the depletion of vitamin C causes the inflammation. And the inflammation is what the immune system is designed to quell. And until you quell inflammation, the immune system is of no consequences also. So that’s all in. In a nutshell, we still need to.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:10:27]:
Know things like, why do we keep having inflammation in the coronary arteries? I’ve talked about this before, how most people don’t realize that they have infection in their mouth or that they have pathologic features in their mouth that’s constantly feeding this down to the heart. And as long as that’s there, the body’s going to keep trying to fix it. But yet, somewhere, some, at some point in time, you got to turn off the spigot. You got.

Thomas Levy, MD, JD [00:10:59]:
That’s right. I was just getting ready to say that. My good mentor, Dr. Huggins, told me a long time ago, said, tom, you can’t dry off while you’re still in the shower. And that’s exactly what’s happening here, is you want to bring in a lot of antioxidants and the immune system and heal that inflammation, but you’re not going to heal the inflammation until you stop the new toxins that are continuing to cause the inflammation. In other words, turn off the shower and then dry off. So. So that’s exactly the case. And, and I might add, for anybody who’s wondering about this connection between the heart and the mouth is in 2006, a study was done by a Dr. Ott where he looked at patients who already were known to have coronary artery disease. You know, blockages, atherosclerosis, and some of them larger than others. And so he did a study where he did angiograms on all 38. And he used a special device inside the catheter called an atherectomy catheter, which literally roto rooters and scrapes out plaque to open up the blood vessels. Well, he didn’t just scrape the plaque out. He also analyzed the plaque over pathogens and microbes, and he found over 50 different bacteria, viruses, fungi, and protozoa inside there. And to be sure he had some control specimens. It’s not normal to have any of that in your, in your heart artery. So that. And they were also bacteria and pathogens that were typical for pathogenic oral flora. And here’s the kicker. He found that in a mere 38 out of 38 patients.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:12:42]:
Wow.

Thomas Levy, MD, JD [00:12:42]:
So even if it’s not 100%, it’s in the high 90s as to, I mean, theoretically, if you cause a focal infection anywhere in the body, whether it initiated from the mouth or not, you’re going to get a consumption of vitamin C and an increase in inflammation. But just from a practical point of view, the way our bodies are constructed and the way our mouths deteriorate over time, it turns out our mouth is doing the job most of the time. This also carries on to the breast. The, the contamination from the infected teeth goes into the blood, and that eventually makes its way to the first high pressure artery that it encounters, the coronary artery. And the other one is the lymphatic drainage. And the lymphatic drainage goes down into the breast. And almost as reliably, you get breast cancer as quickly as you get coronary artery disease from these infected people.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:13:46]:
It’s interesting that the first real medical revolution centered around the discovery of germs. Really, it’s almost like cardiology has gotten sidetracked in terms of just thinking of heart disease as a mechanical problem. If we just put a stent in there, there, we fixed it, we’ve mechanically opened the, the artery, we. But we have not gotten to the root cause double entendre.

Thomas Levy, MD, JD [00:14:15]:
You know, it’s even funnier when you put it that way, because in the cardiology literature, that, in the cardiology literature, mainstream cardiology literature, they say inflammation causes coronary Artery disease, the cause of all coronary artery diseases, inflammation. Guess what? That’s true. I just said that. But for some reason they don’t know how, or they don’t want to pull another layer off the onion and ask, why are we having an epidemic of inflammation? Why are coronary arteries, for no reason at all becoming inflamed and beginning the atherosclerosis process? And of course, that’s what we just said. So, no, they know inflammation is taking place, but they’re extremely uncurious, not curious at all as to why inflammation should suddenly be such an epidemic, such a pandemic in the population as it is in the coronary arteries.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:15:19]:
So you can take this thesis and start looking at all the various chronic diseases which are such, such a problem in our modern world. And you can, if you, if you think it back to the true root cause, it’s going to come down to this basic fundamental cause, is how, how many of the chronic diseases that we are dealing with, you know, like metabolic syndrome, cancer, how many of those diseases have people actually sat down and tried to apply this thesis in your, in your opinion?

Thomas Levy, MD, JD [00:15:57]:
Well, not that much. I mean, so, so I can’t, I can’t just say some people are curious. Many people are curious. Some of it is just lack of curiosity and not really wanting to analyze something. And the other is practicing medicine in a convenient fashion and, and not wanting to rock the boat and do what you do on a daily basis and make your money and go home. And they don’t want, they’re not interested in change. I mean, doctors are no different from any other profession. They don’t, they don’t want to be changing what they’re doing all the time. They want to just be able to plug in their protocols, not terribly stress out their brains and then, and then follow the protocol through. So, but the thing is, is the toxins. I, the other thing I, I think is important to mention because I said, all right, toxins are what causes the oxidative stress, is you have the chronic infections and another shoot off of that is the chronic infection known as persistent spike protein. We now have that layered on top of, I think millions of people now around the planet. And the spike protein attacks everything. So you can get potentially any syndrome, get what’s called the turbo cancer, where people are just really getting rapidly developing cancer these days. All the different autoimmune diseases, I mean, make no doubt about it, the only cause, only cause of an autoimmune disease is your immune system’s reaction to A modification of a normal part of your anatomy with an infectious agent. So the infectious agent causes some modification, and then the immune response, in trying to counteract that infection, forms an antibody against the physical material upon which the infection was superimposed. But once we get rid of these things going on in the mouth definitively, these, these antinuclear antibodies disappear. Saw that many, many times with Dr. Hal Huggins. And then the third prong, I have three prongs, three prongs on, on, on toxins. The third prong is heavy metals. We’ve all been enormously exposed to heavy metals, but we don’t usually get carried away about it if we’re feeling reasonably okay. We only get worried about it when we start getting really sick and other things aren’t responding. And then, oh, well, maybe we need to look for heavy metals to stress them out. Well, guess what? You’ve been accumulating heavy metals long before that cave problem. So if we’re going to really practice the concept of not only preventative medicine, but resolving something and keeping you healthy for the future, we have to be aware of these accumulations. Probably the most noteworthy study I know of in this regard was in 1999 in the Journal of the American Cardio, Journal of the American College of Cardiology, in which they looked at, I think, about 15 or 20 patients with a extremely enlarged heart, congestive cardiomyopathy. And they were basically being worked up for possible heart transplantation, which is the only thing that medicine really has to offer that these days. But they biopsied. In the biopsies they did of the heart, they looked at heavy metal concentration inside all of these congestive cardiomyopathy patients, 100 of them, they had on the order of 2000, 20, 2000 fold. That’s 2,200,000 percent more mercury than in a normal cell. They also had 1,100% more antimony, something people don’t seem to know about or. But that’s as toxic as arsenic, and that comes from plastic. So we have the plastic exposures and we have the mercury amalgam fillings. Most people in our generation have had several to many amalgam fillings sitting inside their mouth for decades. And that’s where most of the heavy metals go. I mean, make no doubt about it, you’ve got these mercury everywhere in your body, but you have it mostly in your heart. Why? Because the heart is a very high metabolic organ. It’s going, it’s going, it’s going. So it’s pushing toxins out Bringing them in nutrients in and out, a high metabolic organ, you know, verse. So it’s like the heart and the nervous system and the kidneys are always the organs that really get hard, hit hard when you’re talking about something that’s in the circulation and how quickly it gets taken up. And I might add then as one final point is this, this is why we’ve read how the spike protein seems to hit the heart so hard. We hear, we hear a lot about the chest pains, the arrhythmias, the heart failure, everything like that. Well, guess what? The spike proteins going everywhere throughout the body, but most of the time we’re talking about the heart.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:21:43]:
Why?

Thomas Levy, MD, JD [00:21:44]:
Because in everybody, not just those with heart failure, you’ve severely accumulated heavy metals and you’ve already pushed your heart close to the edge of the cliff in terms of how much more oxidative stress it needs to then be pushed into an arrhythmia or into a heart failure or into a heart attack that.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:22:10]:
Well, I think it’s literally mind bending. I think it’s. I hate to say this, it’s going to make your head get really big. It’s a genius. It’s really genius. I wish we could talk more about this, but I wanted to invite the listening audience who are. I know you’ve got lots of fans out there coming. This November 7th and 8th here in Wichita, Kansas, here at the Riordan Clinic, we are celebrating our 50th year of functioning, improving human functioning. And we are going to be having our 25th international conference, Cancer Care, the Rise of Integrative Oncology. So we’re going to be looking at this topic that you’ve been wonderfully explaining. We’re going to be looking at it in depth from a number of different perspectives and we’re so excited that Dr. Levy will be one of our speakers and his topic will be the Only cause of disease. Dr. Tom, I’m proud to be your friend and an associate. We’re really excited about this conference and we’re looking forward to what new insights you’re going to bring to us on that on that day. So thank you very much for being with us today.

Thomas Levy, MD, JD [00:23:32]:
Well, thank you very much, Ron. Genius comment, appreciated.

Riordan Clinic [00:23:36]:
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