Why Mixing Old and New Medicine Might Change Everything

0:00 Introduction to Integrative Medicine

Dr. Yi Song: You're going against the normal trend. You are actually standing at a forefront now, not just taking traditional western medicine treatment, but then you're actually integrating a lot of other holistic approaches. That's what led me into sort of a regenerative angle, right? Chemo without the side effects. Welcome to Regeneration Effect Podcast, dedicated to merging ancient wisdom with modern technology to help people live healthier, longer lives with vitality.

We are so glad to have Dr. Elizabeth Eversull today to discuss her journey from physiatrist to having LionHeart Integrative Medical Clinic. Welcome.

Dr. Elizabeth Eversull: Thank you. Thanks so much. I'm glad to be here.

0:52 The Meaning of LionHeart

Dr. Yi Song: I'm so glad you are here because you have a unique journey. So, how did you come up with the LionHeart for your integrative clinic name?

Dr. Elizabeth Eversull: That's a great question. I actually had another name for my clinic and a few years ago we did a rebrand. It made me think long and hard about what we wanted to be and portray, and what is a good name that encompasses the patients and how we think. After a while, looking at patients in clinic who are really working hard and doing everything that we say, I realized these guys have the heart of a lion. From the other side of the coin, myself and the people that work for me never stop trying to figure out what else can we add, what else can we learn, and how can we suggest more. To me, that is lionhearted because we never give up. We never relax on it. We're always trying to help more.

2:15 Fear and Allopathic Medicine

Dr. Yi Song: Also, to me, it stands out as LionHeart represents courage and fearlessness. You are standing at a forefront without just taking the traditional pain treatment or traditional western medicine treatment like medications and surgeries. You're integrating holistic approaches that go against the normal trend.

Dr. Elizabeth Eversull: That seems like it would be so easy, right? I mean, that's what a lot of allopathic medicine is. It can work, but there's a whole lot of formulaic "if this, then that" pill. That doesn't require as much thought, innovation, or care.

Dr. Yi Song: Most mainstream allopathic doctors are still against a lot of other holistic approaches.

Dr. Elizabeth Eversull: It's true. I think most doctors come from a really good place, but they're not familiar with it. Things that are not familiar are by definition more scary or intimidating. Because they're not really affiliated with some of the treatments, they don't want to do anything wrong or suggest anything wrong. They're in this place of not being totally against it, but definitely not on board. I think it'll get better as things go by.

3:53 Navigating Specialist Pushback

Dr. Yi Song: A lot of times you come across patients who have already tried so many different treatments in western medicine and failed. But when you suggest a new treatment, they say they need to talk to their pulmonologist, cardiologist, or rheumatologist. Once they ask, those doctors say these are not proven.

Dr. Elizabeth Eversull: That's exactly right. I'm sure some people are threatened by the possibility of something being very powerful and actually helping the patient, and then where are they left? But again, it's the unfamiliarity that is really tough. The poor patient is scared, thinking, "This isn't working, but my doctor says this." I'm willing to talk to anyone. I tell them to get their doctor to call me and we'll work through it, but they rarely do.

Dr. Yi Song: Do you actually talk to their doctors?

Dr. Elizabeth Eversull: Sometimes. The younger oncologists are getting to be a little bit more open, which is pretty nice. Even regarding eating a really low carbohydrate diet. Everyone in our world knows that sugar feeds cancer; it's kind of obvious. Some of the older oncologists say diet has nothing to do with anything, but the younger ones coming up won't recommend it outright, but when I recommend it, they agree. It's a little bit more on the down low, sadly, but I'll take what I can get.

6:01 Diet and Cancer Genetics

Dr. Yi Song: Do you recommend your cancer patients be on a ketogenic diet?

Dr. Elizabeth Eversull: In general, I do some testing with specific labs that can tell me how important that is for a patient based on the genetic expressions of the cancer cells. If we don't have the ability to do that testing, I will generally recommend that. There's also juicing, like some other protocols that are not technically super low carbohydrate, but they're all about juicing and that works as well. I think both activate some of our starvation preservation genes. However, juicing is extraordinarily expensive and a full-time job. Most of them probably go with a higher fat, low carbohydrate, all organic diet.

7:08 RGCC Testing and SOT Therapy

Dr. Yi Song: Talking about the tests you do, do you do the regulator cell cycle testing?

Dr. Elizabeth Eversull: I do. It's RGCC lab in Greece. I like that one because it gives me robust information and they have other technologies we can use as well.

Dr. Yi Song: Is that lab the one that uses the patient's own serum?

Dr. Elizabeth Eversull: There may be other companies that do that, but the most popular technology they use from a treatment standpoint is called SOT, which is Supportive Oligonucleotide Therapy. It's really a gene silencing therapy. They use the patient's own blood sample. If that patient has circulating tumor cells, they take those cells, do the genomics on them, and find out where on the DNA it is most active in promoting the cancer and causing the cell to be immortal or regenerate quickly. They'll make a little piece of a nucleotide that clips on that part of the genome to shut it down. It's a bespoke gene silencing—chemo without the side effects of chemo.

9:04 Integrated Oncology Care

Dr. Yi Song: So it's customized to each patient.

Dr. Elizabeth Eversull: Yes. What I also like is that you don't have to pick a lane. Some patients are going to do regular allopathic chemo and then they can do this as well. You just have to do the timing. That's when I really talk to the oncologist to let them know what we're doing and what the patient wants. It's cool because they don't have to just commit to one thing, fearing they picked the wrong road.

9:45 Cancer Screening and Early Detection

Dr. Yi Song: Do you test people when they are not even diagnosed with cancer as a screen?

Dr. Elizabeth Eversull: Yes, I do. Every now and then we will find some cells even though the patient has no complaint and no diagnosis. At that point, we have decisions to make in terms of workup and radiology. Often we do not find any mass that is apparent radiologically, which is not uncommon. I will typically recommend the Supportive Oligonucleotide Therapy, but also we can look at what the cell is doing. For example, if it really responds to heat, I can recommend an aggressive sauna because it activates heat shock proteins. We can recommend diet and direct physical testing of different supplements to see what the cell responds to. If we add quercetin to the cells in a petri dish and they die, that's directly cytotoxic information. We can wait six months, recheck the cells, and sometimes they are back down to zero.

13:58 The Prevalence of Circulating Cells

Dr. Yi Song: Do you have a certain percentage of people who don't have any detection of a solid tumor but just want to eliminate the possibility of growing cancer?

Dr. Elizabeth Eversull: Of the people that I test, probably 2% have those cells. I was sort of surprised. You run your urinalysis and CBC, and more people than I am comfortable with are having positive cells come back.

16:45 Limitations of Radiography

Dr. Elizabeth Eversull: When you see them on radiography, it has to be at least 5 millimeters, which is millions and millions of cells already. That's why doing the blood testing is a good look ahead.

17:15 Melatonin as an Antioxidant

Dr. Yi Song: When you have your cancer patients treating both with chemotherapy, radiation, and complementary treatment like a sauna or quercetin, do you also use antioxidants?

Dr. Elizabeth Eversull: You do, but you have to be careful if you're doing hyperbaric because that's an oxidative therapy. You don't necessarily want high levels of antioxidants going into your hyperbaric. But high-dose melatonin is one of the strongest antioxidants and is extremely anti-cancer. Sometimes patients will be on 30 to 50 milligrams of melatonin.

Dr. Yi Song: Would they take that at night before bed? You would think you'd never wake up.

Dr. Elizabeth Eversull: It can actually be activating for some patients. It doesn't necessarily make you more tired than five milligrams. Interestingly, some melatonin researchers will use hundreds of milligrams.

18:40 Peptides and Cancer Risks

Dr. Yi Song: Would you use the peptide to stimulate the pituitary gland instead of just taking melatonin?

Dr. Elizabeth Eversull: The pineal gland is where the melatonin is coming from, but those are just calcified these days. Regarding peptides like Sermorelin, I wouldn't do something like that in the face of a cancer situation because of the growth risk. It's a theoretical and practical worry. While I love Tesmorelin or Ipamorelin for perimenopause and menopause, I wouldn't use them in this case.

19:53 Dr. Eversull's Personal Health Journey

Dr. Yi Song: I remember you were talking about how you yourself had a mold allergy a long time ago.

Dr. Elizabeth Eversull: Oh my goodness, that and more. Growing up, the amount of toxicity was unbelievable. We lived in the middle of cotton and soybean fields where they were crop dusting. My father was a gunsmith and always had machine shops with every manner of chemical on the floor, and I'm walking around barefoot. Both parents smoked till I was about 12. We were always renovating, sanding lead paint. My grandmother was a stained glass artist, which meant lead solder on the ground. I inhaled the smoke from the solder. I started getting migraine headaches in high school and never really figured that out.

21:30 Decompensation in Medical School

Dr. Elizabeth Eversull: In med school, we bought a 1910 Victorian house to renovate. The amount of lead paint, mold, and asbestos was incredible. We would pull up carpet and you could almost eat the mold. We weren't wearing masks; that was for ninnies and babies where I'm from. Finally, with the stress of med school, I just decompensated. I went from how we are now to almost not being able to mentate. It was rough.

22:50 Overcoming Institutional Criticism

Dr. Elizabeth Eversull: One of my instructors pulled me aside and said, "There are some people that aren't meant for med school, they're just not smart enough, and we feel like you're one and you need to drop out." I was always the smartest kid in town with awesome scores. How did I go from here to "stupid" overnight? No one asked if I was sick or ate something bad. I had no backup plan, so I decided to do it by hell or high water. That was the turning point where I started to read, experiment, and change things, even Epsom salt baths.

24:58 Low-Tech Detoxification

Dr. Yi Song: What did you do to get your health back?

Dr. Elizabeth Eversull: It was super low tech: Epsom salts, milk thistle, charcoal. As I learned more, I would do more, like coffee enemas, colonics, and castor oil packs. Even taking binders as a toxic hit comes in can keep the levels from building up.

26:50 Transition to Pain Management

Dr. Elizabeth Eversull: My residency led me into pain management, which was the opposite of what I wanted. You're toxifying people with medications—opioids, sleeping pills, antidepressants, and steroids. You're just digging a hole deeper. It wasn't very long before I realized I couldn't live like that. That's what led me into a regenerative angle. I started with injections like PRP around 2008. People were in such tremendous pain and were asking for more steroids, but I knew that would shut their adrenals down. I started suggesting PRP and prolotherapy instead.

29:14 The Value of Prolotherapy

Dr. Elizabeth Eversull: Prolotherapy forces you to really learn anatomy because you're going from bony landmarks to find where to inject. I started doing prolotherapy and then PRP on top of that to try to get people to stabilize joints rather than having laxity that wears the joint down.

30:17 Evolution to Stem Cell Therapy

Dr. Yi Song: When did you get to know about stem cells?

Dr. Elizabeth Eversull: Probably 2012. I was frustrated with PRP. I love that it turned the tide, but it didn't heal what we wanted it to heal and it really hurts. That led us into stem cells. Evolutionarily, we've gotten better quality and more viable cells per batch, which I'm very happy about.

32:15 Autologous vs. Mesenchymal Stem Cells

Dr. Yi Song: Have you ever tried to use a patient's own stem cells for joint injections?

Dr. Elizabeth Eversull: I have. Some people don't want a product from anywhere else. The thing I explain to people is that your stem cells have been through everything you've been through. For me, they've been through toxicity and radiation from giving shots in the spine. When you get mesenchymal derived stem cells, they're newborn and fresh, so they haven't been through as much. There is benefit and risk to everything.

34:25 The Truth About Wharton's Jelly

Dr. Yi Song: I only use the cells I got from a lab in Colombia. Recently, I found a company in Florida that sells Wharton's jelly rather than extracted mesenchymal stem cells. They sell 70 milligrams for $150. If you calculate it, that tube only has about 28,000 mesenchymal stem cells, which is almost nothing. It's mostly just protein and growth factors.

Dr. Elizabeth Eversull: I have a microscope in my office and I've looked at different material. Sometimes you don't see cells, or you see cells that are not robust or are already shriveled. It doesn't necessarily tell me the outcome, but it's interesting.

36:34 Conclusion and Future Topics

Dr. Yi Song: We had a great conversation today from cancer to mold allergies and mesenchymal stem cells. We are going to have more detailed conversations in the future about other holistic treatments for neurological and autoimmune conditions.

Dr. Elizabeth Eversull: That would be great. I look forward to it. Thanks so much, I enjoyed it.