[INTRODUCTION]

Hal Elrod: Hello, friends. Welcome to the Achieve Your Goals podcast. I’m your host, Hal Elrod, and if you care about your health, whether it’s preventing future challenges with disease or it is maybe something that you’re currently undergoing, maybe it’s a chronic illness or maybe it’s an acute illness, something that you want to heal, you are in for a treat today because we’re talking to my functional medicine doctor, Dr. Philip Oubre, MD. He is a board-certified physician and functional medicine expert who helps patients uncover the root causes of their health struggles rather than just treating symptoms. And that’s what we’re diving into a lot today, which are root causes.

Most traditional conventional medicine just prescribes medications to treat the symptoms. “Oh, you’re having headaches, take this Imitrex prescription. You’re having some sort of challenge, take this medication or this prescription,” whereas functional medicine looks at what are the lifestyle choices that you’re making. What are the environmental toxins that you might suffer from, whether that’s mold or, in my case, it was heavy metals and removing heavy metals from my body and brain that allowed my cognitive function to flourish. And Dr. Oubre is a specialist in reversing chronic illness through personalized nutrition, lifestyle interventions, and advanced testing.

And he is known for his educational approach, which is what he’s bringing today because it’s not just about hiring him as your doctor, like you can do that at the end of the episode. He works with people all over the world, in person in Austin, but then virtually. But it’s about learning practical solutions and paradigms so you can reclaim your health and take total responsibility for healing yourself and for thriving and extending your life as long as you want it to be. Again, I don’t get a kickback. I don’t know if I said that already. I don’t get any kind of kickback for Dr. Oubre. I’m just a big fan. I believe that if something is benefiting me or someone is benefiting me, it is my responsibility to share that someone or something with you, with our listeners, with my audience, with our community.

So, it is my great pleasure to introduce you to the one and only Dr. Philip Oubre.

[INTERVIEW]

Hal Elrod: I don’t know if I should call you Philip or Dr. Oubre.

Dr. Philip Oubre: Whichever you prefer. Doesn’t matter to me. I’m not that formal.

Hal Elrod: I don’t know. I think about two minutes ago was the first time I called you Philip. I’ve just known you as Dr. Oubre.

Dr. Philip Oubre: Does it feel weird? I know some people. As you know, it reminds me of Dr. Hall when I was in residency. He was walking down the hall, that’s not his name, but we’re walking down the hall, and some lady goes, “Oh, hey Jeff,” and she goes, “Oh, I’m so sorry, Dr. Hall.” And he responded so perfectly. He said, “I am Jeff everywhere in the world, except this place right here. I take no insult to it. It’s just a name.”

Hal Elrod: Isn’t that funny? It is. It’s some weird societal conditioning where we’re like, “Oh, I meant Mr. You know.” Yeah. It’s funny. And then you hear that, like, “No. Mr. Elrod’s my dad’s name. Call me Hal.”

Dr. Philip Oubre: I feel old.

Hal Elrod: Yeah, exactly. I want to start right off the bat. I want to answer a question that I actually couldn’t have answered off the top of my head, and I was actually watching some of your videos, and I go, “Oh, this is a layup for him,” because it’s what you do all day. But you are a functional medicine doctor. Is that accurate?

Dr. Philip Oubre: Correct.

Hal Elrod: What is the difference between functional medicine and conventional or traditional, whatever you would call it?

Dr. Philip Oubre: We typically say conventional medicine and functional medicine. So, the basic answer is conventional medicine is your standard medical doctor that went through medical school, got their residency training, and started practicing insurance-based type stuff. When we say functional medicine, that really means that the doctor, if whoever’s promoting that, there’s no real regulation of the term, so anyone can use it. But what the term is supposed to mean is someone that’s really trying to investigate the root causes of why you’re sick. Now, conventional medicine uses the root cause word all the time, but they just say that to give out a medication. They’re actually not in preventive medicine. They’re an early detection medicine.

Whereas functional medicine is not only literally preventing future disease, we’re also about reversing disease. And conventional medicine doesn’t believe most of the things we do are truly reversible, but we’ve proven it. So, that’s the easiest way, is that a functional medicine doctor says, “You’ve acquired something along the way. We’re going to help you unacquire it, not just take this medication so you don’t feel it, but literally unacquire the ‘disease’ that you’ve accepted to become part of your life.

Hal Elrod: I like you said, root causes, right? That’s really the essence of it is it’s like what are the root causes of this thing? And if we can address the root causes at the root, then you can eliminate the thing. I’ll give you an example. I watched a movie, oh gosh, it was a documentary, and I think it was called Reversing Diabetes in 30 Days. I think that’s what it’s called. Don’t quote. Could be wrong on the title, but definitely the topic. They took 20-something type 2 diabetics that were on insulin every single day. And that were told by conventional medicine doctors that they had to be, there was no other option, the only way to treat their diabetes was to treat the symptoms with insulin every single day.

Dr. Philip Oubre: For the rest of their life.

Hal Elrod: For the rest of their life. They took all, you know, it was 20 something, 26 I think. They took them to this retreat center where they had no access to the real world. They couldn’t go to McDonald’s, or they couldn’t go eat, and they control their diet.

Dr. Philip Oubre: Ice cream in the freezer.

Hal Elrod: And they gave them a raw vegan diet.

Dr. Philip Oubre: That’s hard.

Hal Elrod: Yeah. Raw vegan. However, within 30 days…

Dr. Philip Oubre: That’s a lot of chewing. You just burn all your calories via chewing.

Hal Elrod: But 100% of them did not need insulin anymore.

Dr. Philip Oubre: Agreed.

Hal Elrod: Except for the one that left. One of them said, “I can’t take it anymore.”

Dr. Philip Oubre: Oh, well, that makes sense.

Hal Elrod: “I need some McDonald’s,” something along those lines that was literally what they said. They’re like, “I need McDonald’s.”

Dr. Philip Oubre: Yeah. That’s scary, though. So many people don’t believe it’s reversible. And that’s some of the easiest things we do, reversing diabetes. The only diabetics we have in our practice are type 1 diabetics, and they’ve lost their pancreas for the rest of their life, so they’ll never make insulin again unless we invent stem cells or something. So, they’re the only diabetics we have. Otherwise, everyone else is reversed.

Hal Elrod: It’s in reverse. Okay. So, let me real quick start with where I discovered you, right? Mike Dillard, who is one of your patients and a good longtime friend of mine.

Dr. Philip Oubre: Love Mike.

Hal Elrod: Mike and I are always trading like, “Oh, here’s what we’re doing to address the physical ailments that we struggle with.” And he and I have both suffered from cognitive challenges for a long time. His was from mold. Mine might have been from mold, but it was more so, I believe, from chemotherapy. They call it chemo brain.

Dr. Philip Oubre: So often multifactorial, right?

Hal Elrod: Yeah. And I saw Mike at a function at our kids’ school, and then he said, “Hal, hey, I discovered something that has fixed or repaired my cognitive function and proved it more than anything else. And it’s removing heavy metals.” And so, he said it was the most significant, like his brain, every treatment of removing heavy metals, it was getting better and better and better. And so, that’s how he referred me to you. And I went through the same protocol of getting heavy metals removed and noticed also very quickly significant improvements in my cognitive function. Talk about your perspective. I know, obviously, you just explained the difference in functional and conventional.

Talk more, elaborate more on your perspective of things like removing heavy metals, things like addressing mold, like what are some of the things that you see that are the root causes? Give me examples of root causes, and then how you all address them.

Dr. Philip Oubre: It’s pretty simple. We’ve got to narrow down to six basic root causes that cause all disease across all of humanity, chronic diseases. So, I always like to tell people, “If you get your leg bitten off by a shark, like, come on, that’s not root cause. That’s the shark. It’s gone, right? It’s never coming back.” But the six basic root causes are, number one, is gut issues. Number two is biological toxins. Think things that grow in you and on you that are trying to survive, but kind of kill you while they’re surviving. Number three is mold toxins, which they can live and grow inside you, but really they live and grow in walls, and you breathe their toxins.

Four is environmental chemicals. Think plastics and fertilizers, and all that crap. And then fifth is heavy metals. And six is a lot of what you do, Hal, which is the emotional toxins we call them. Just how your mind has shaped the different insults, and how you can overcome those things. So, basically, in our world, every brain fog, fatigue, autoimmune condition, whatever it is, is one of those six root causes. And every now and then, we have patients that are just an obvious like Mike had an obvious mold exposure and was a different human being before and after mold exposure.

But then, after he was healing from the mold, he still had metals. And so, interestingly, a patient like Mike that would come to see me, to use him as an example, his brain fog, we would say, well, it’s mold. And then we would treat the mold, but if it’s not gone, it’s clearly something else. Let’s keep looking. Oh, it’s metals. Let’s get the metals out. And, bam, now your brain fog comes back online, and now we look back and say, “Okay, his brain fog or cognitive issues were from metals, but not everyone.” So, I’ve got a lot of mercury I’m still working to detoxify for myself. And, luckily, I’ve never lost my brain function. My wife might think my memory’s not as great as she would like it to be.

But, yeah, basic answer is there’s something that’s causing it. Unless you were born with that brain fog, in which case there might be something just genetically wrong or you’re born the way, but if you acquired something, if you had the ability in your twenties to do something that now you don’t, you need to be investigating what are those causes and removing them.

Hal Elrod: Totally makes sense. I even think about, was it Aristotle or Hippocrates that said, “Let food be thy medicine.”

Dr. Philip Oubre: Exactly. Yeah. I think that was Hippocrates, but don’t quote me. Where’s AI?

Hal Elrod: Did you start as a functional medicine doctor? Or did you start conventional and make the switch?

Dr. Philip Oubre: Yeah. So, sadly enough, this has been kind of a God-given blessing to me because I went through conventional medical school. I grew up on Pop-Tarts and pizza, like the rest of us, and I even did a presentation in residency on how fish oil was useless. And now I give every patient fish oil that shows up for being alive. So, yeah, the calling kind of found me. I didn’t find it. Moving to Austin, I was working for a doctor that was doing some really advanced lab testing. So, as I started doing the advanced lab testing, I started seeing numbers that I’d never seen before, and just started doing the research, and I was like, “Well, this is all neat. How come I was never taught this?”

So, I kept learning, learning, learning with an open mind, eventually realized like, “What the heck? I have been lied to. There are so many things that we can do so much more. We can reverse things.” And once you see something reversed that you were told is irreversible, then it really makes you wonder like, “What else is reversible? If that was reversible, what else?” And that’s what’s led me to where I’m at. And we keep finding things like alopecia. We just had our first severe alopecia. I mean, this guy had huge like crop circles in his head, and he really wanted me to tell him that I had someone else that had reversed their alopecia.

I said, “Look, we’ve reversed a lot of autoimmunity.” Here’s my first alopecia patient. He struggled with believing that we could do it, and I can officially say it’s been I think six or nine months in our practice, and he’s got peach fuzz all in his alopecia. So, it’s coming back. It’s coming back, baby. So, now we have our first.

Hal Elrod: I mean, the human body, if you just zoom out and you go, “Oh, the human body’s designed to repair itself from, “I got a cut. Oh, it repairs.” But it’s like anything outside of a cut, it’s like we’ve been told, “Well, no, no, no, the body doesn’t repair that. You have to take a medicine or a treatment, something that we can patent and profit from.” One of the things that was eye-opening for me when I was diagnosed with cancer and I went and saw my oncologist, and I know how important nutrition is in diet or in healing, in health, in building our immune system, et cetera. And so, I wanted to kind of, it was just kind of a test, if you will, to assess like, “All right. I want to see where this guy stands.” So, I said, “What part does nutrition play in my healing cancer?” He said, “It doesn’t matter as long as you do the chemotherapy and take the pharmaceutical drugs.

Dr. Philip Oubre: Isn’t that unbelievable?

Hal Elrod: Right? And I was like, “Oh, I can’t trust you. I can’t trust you, and not that you’re a bad person.”

Dr. Philip Oubre: And I know your cancer was 10 years ago or so, right, Hal? But it’s not like nutrition knowledge was devoid 10 years ago.

Hal Elrod: No, not at all.

Dr. Philip Oubre: Come on, man.

Hal Elrod: And so, I want to ask you your take on that. Can you break down from your perspective how nutrition plays a role in a chronic illness? Why so many people are misinformed about it? Why so many doctors are misinformed about it?

Dr. Philip Oubre: Oh, boy. That’s multi-layered. And the first answer is that nutrition is simply the thing that would save America. So, as you proudly know, the healthcare industry is slated to bankrupt the country, and we’re either going to have to start rationing healthcare or close the government. So, I’m assuming rationing healthcare is coming if we don’t change something. And as fancy as the stuff we do, I mean, we do vitamin infusions and peptides and all kinds of crazy cool stuff, but literally 80%, 90% of the work that patients do is primarily nutrition. If you change your nutrition, so many things get better. Just educating the American population on why they should eat the way you should eat, not a, “Don’t eat this.”

It should be a, “Eat this because this feeds your body. Don’t eat that because it’s ruining your body.” Garbage in is garbage out. One of the shocking parts of the human body, we’re incredibly made, you can put extreme things in our body, and we can still operate. Take eating disorder patients that eat 500 calories a day. They still survive. Take raw vegans, right? Still survive. Take the other extreme, carnivore. They still survive. I always think of that back, maybe I’m dating myself, but that Back to the Future movie, when Doc shows up and he is shoving like banana peels and crap in his car. He is just putting whatever he can, and the car still runs.

That’s our human body. You can put whatever crap you want, and we run. We survive. But notice I’m using the word ‘survive’ not thrive. Something will go wrong the more trash you put in. It’s like showing up to the gas station and putting diesel in your car. Like, I don’t know. Let’s see what happens today. It ain’t going to work.

Hal Elrod: Yeah. Go ahead.

Dr. Philip Oubre: I guess to answer another part of that, when we could get lost in the controversy, but basically big pharma has bought medical schools and we’re…

Hal Elrod: I’m so glad you said that. Can you say that again for the people in the back?

Dr. Philip Oubre: It is, unfortunately. And I don’t like to say that doctors are bought. Doctors don’t make any money off of pharmaceutical companies anymore. It looks like we do because we prescribe medications. But the people making money are, or, well, we won’t say congressmen out loud, but we’ll say all the people in Big Pharma’s pocket. Doctors are paid by insurance companies, not Big Pharma anymore. We used to get trips and stuff, but yeah, Big Pharma has bought medical school, basically. So, we’re indoctrinated in. When a plumber shows up to do the plumber’s job, he’s going to show up with what he was trained to do. If you ask him to fix your cabinetry, he doesn’t know how to do that.

So, we’re trained to use medication. So, when you show up in the room, we’re going to use medication. I can literally tell you God’s honest truth, Hal, I’m not a fish story person, we had one hour of nutrition, one hour of nutrition in my entire medical…

Hal Elrod: I heard that publicly. Yeah.

Dr. Philip Oubre: I still remember it. And I remember like, “Is this lady actually going to test us on this stuff? This is so pointless. Why are we learning this?”

Hal Elrod: It was literally one hour in your entire medical training.

Dr. Philip Oubre: One physical hour. Now, it was, as in medical school, one hour of lectures, commonly like six hours of studying, but it’s still one physical hour was dedicated to nutrition, and everything else was pharmacology and pathology. We still learn a lot, but all of my nutrition knowledge, all of my nutrition knowledge was absolutely learned after medical school, after residency. I still remember, Hal, the book that changed my life was Mark Hyman’s, Eat Fat, Get Thin. And the basic premise is you’ve been lied to. Start eating fat to get thinner. And I still remember reaching into my fridge and reaching for the butter and thinking, “Mark Hyman said this is good. He’s smarter than me. He has research proven that this is good.”

I remember like unlearning something is the hardest thing to do. You can learn something, but unlearning is harder than learning. We have been lied to, and I have case study among case study proving conventional medicine wrong, but it’s not changing. They’re not. We are.

Hal Elrod: Yeah. Why? Is it because…? This is my theory is that you’re a pharmaceutical company and, to your point, they have bought the medical school, so they’re choosing the education, and they’re choosing education that benefits their bottom line. It’s very smart as a business, right?

Dr. Philip Oubre: Brilliant. Brilliant.

Hal Elrod: Yeah. And so, I guess my theory, and I want to know if you would agree with this or see it differently, is that health is not taught because it’s not profitable, right? If you go to a patient, you say, “Oh, you’re suffering with these symptoms. You need to lower your inflammation by cutting these things out of your diet.” Well, the doc, you don’t make money by saying, “Cut this out of your diet,” or by saying, “Go to the grocery store and now buy these things.” But if you say, “Hey, take this prescription,” I’m curious, is that why? Is it that obvious?

Dr. Philip Oubre: I choose to believe I’m very disappointed in my profession, but I choose to believe it’s less sinister. And I choose to believe it’s doctors that really believe they know the truth, and they really believe that nutrition doesn’t matter, and they don’t see it. And what I often encourage my patients to do when they start seeing me and they reverse their autoimmune condition or whatnot, they don’t need their rheumatologist anymore. They don’t need their surgeon. They don’t need their GI doc. And I encourage them, “You should go back and you should tell them what you did and why it worked.” I realize you have to pay a copay, and there’s no point to seeing them, but if you never see them again, they’ll never hear this story.

And so, if you go back and they mock you or laugh at you, I’m really sorry, but know that you tried. You tried to teach that doctor that there is another way. And so, unfortunately, I don’t think doctors are sinister in this. But they are guilty. They are guilty by choosing to be close-minded. You have to have an open mind. And one of my pet peeves is when a doctor tells one of my patients or someone that goes in and is interested in functional medicine, and their response is, “There’s no research to prove that.” Hal, there’s so much research to prove what we do now. So, there’s a difference because you don’t know the research does not mean it’s not researched.

You, my friend, are the unresearched doctor. The research is there, maybe not to prove everything we do, but also, they don’t have everything researched either. So, that’s one of my pet peeves in medicine where I feel like doctors are to blame. They may not be sinister and evil in doing the medications, but they are guilty by choosing to stick their head in the mud and refuse to learn.

Hal Elrod: Yeah. I wouldn’t disagree. I want to ask you a question on a similar track, and it’s prescription drug commercials on TV. I was just telling somebody about this yesterday. I forgot how it came up, but my kids, my daughter’s 16, my son’s 13, and thankfully, we have educated them to pay attention to the last 30 seconds of the prescription drug commercials, where it’s like, “Hey, this will help you feel less gloomy, but it can cause suicidal ideation, hives,” on and on.

Dr. Philip Oubre: Hospitalization.

Hal Elrod: And like they came 10 times worse than the thing that it benefits. And I will never forget, when I was in the hospital getting chemotherapy, literally, I had a big needle in my arm, I’m getting five days of chemotherapy, and I just happened to glance at the bag hanging off the IV tower. And on the back of the bag, it had a skull like in crossbones or whatever it was, the warning. And again, keep in mind, I have acute lymphoblastic leukemia. That’s the cancer I am treating, and this chemotherapy says, “Warning. Can cause leukemia.”

Dr. Philip Oubre: Like, wait a minute.

Hal Elrod: So, I go, “Wait a minute.” And again, it’s hard to not be a little bit suspect of a sinister intention, which is like, “Well, wait a minute.” If you are using a so-called medicine drug, poison, whatever you want to call it, that causes the thing that you’re treating and if you actually, you know, they always say follow the money, and if you make money, if I get another cancer and I have personal friends, I have relatives that they get cancer, they go get chemo, and then they’re good for, and then another cancer comes, and then they get chemo and then another cancer comes, right?

Dr. Philip Oubre: Now, that’s one of the only places where doctors do make money on the pharmaceuticals, but they’re not making money on the pharmaceuticals. They’re making money administering it. And so, that’s where oncologists specifically, but most doctors writing pills, you’re getting it from the pharmacy. They’re not making any money. But if it were, “Hey, come in and get this IV,” then the doctor’s making money off of the administration of the drug.

Hal Elrod: Interesting. So, it’s kind of finding a loophole to where they can profit off of it. Yeah. Interesting.

Dr. Philip Oubre: Exactly.

Hal Elrod: Oh, man. I mean, I can get fired up about this stuff.

Dr. Philip Oubre: Right? I can too. I can too.

Hal Elrod: My doctor, when that happened where he said, “Diet doesn’t matter,” and I’m like, this is the first time I’m meeting him, and then I went into the cafeteria at the hospital. This is an MD Anderson Cancer Center. And I’m in the hospital, and I’m watching people that are hooked to their IV tower. They’re getting chemo, dragging their IV tower around, and they’re loading their plate up with pizza and cake and pie and ice cream, and drinking soda. And I just felt angry.

Dr. Philip Oubre: Pure fructose.

Hal Elrod: They were just told that they could eat anything they wanted as long as they did chemo. And now they’re feeding their cancer with refined sugar. Like, this is criminal.

Hal Elrod: Which is proven.

Dr. Philip Oubre: Sugar is proven to advance cancer. It’s proven. It’s not even a question anymore. Just proven. And (a) the biochemistry makes perfect sense; (b), it’s proven. You’ve got two great reasons to do something and act like it doesn’t matter. They act like it doesn’t matter. It is unreal.

Hal Elrod: Here’s the lesson I want to impart for people, right? Like, not just us complaining and being like, this is terrible and there’s really nothing we can change it. It’s that if you’re listening to this and whether you or so, or just anyone listening to this or anyone you know, you have to take 100% responsibility for your health, your healing, your recovery. When I went into the hospital…

Dr. Philip Oubre: Don’t trust your doctor.

Hal Elrod: And I did chemo, it was the doctors on my team. I am not delegating my health and my survival to this person in the lab coat. They are like, I’m 100% responsible. So, I was every day researching and learning about healing and looking at what are other people that have cured their cancer naturally, what did they do? One of my, I think, those underrated forms of, and I think you would agree with this kind of based on what you already said, Dr. Oubre, but is anecdotal evidence like, if a thousand people cured something by doing the thing and it was natural…

Dr. Philip Oubre: That’s not, I think, total anymore. Yeah.

Hal Elrod: Yeah. It’s like, yeah, that’s reality.

Dr. Philip Oubre: Especially the things that are harmless, right, eating broccoli, it gives you a better chance of survival. Well, hello, eat it. It’s not like it’s going to kill you. Going gluten-free, even if it’s not studied, that’s not going to kill you. The number one thing we try to teach our patients is part of our process, we have some lab testing and luckily, everything nowadays can be tested. Like if I think you have mold, I can prove with you, you have mold, all of that stuff.

But the number one thing is as you’re going through your treatment plan of whatever it may be, experiment and listen to your body. So, maybe your body loves carnivore, maybe your body loves paleo. It’s not all about like, well, this one person did this one thing. It’s like, okay, that one person did that one thing. Let me understand why they chose that. Let me put it in my body and see how my body reacts and if it doesn’t work well, then okay, try the next, try the next, but keep searching.

Just like you said, Hal, I mean, I don’t want to say don’t trust your doctor even though I did just– but don’t trust him with the full plan. You have to go out and seek, and nowadays with social media and AI, there’s so much information at your fingertips that just because your doctor said something doesn’t mean you have to take their word for it. And nowadays, there’s an AI called openevidence.com that I tell patients about all the time where it’s a research only-based AI, it’s only used as medical research.

And so, a patient will come to me, and this really pisses me off. This will toot my own horn on a little bit, but a patient will come to me with a drug on their chart and they’re telling me why they’re on the drug. And I roll my eyes and I say, “Okay, let’s look this up together.” And so, I have a TV in my office and I pull up Open Evidence and I give it the exact patient I have in front of me, my 80-year-old female on Eliquis, whatever it is, does she need this? And the AI will tell us a lot of times, because I know the answer, it will tell us that no, this patient is not indicated to be on this drug. And I’m like, your own doctor has lied to you. It’s one thing to be on a medication. It’s another to be on a medication that actually is research proven, but it goes back to the plumber with the wrong tools, can’t fix the job.

So, unfortunately, conventional medicine is just so 12-minute visits, next, next, next, next, that they’re not paying enough attention. And you said it perfectly, Hal, you have to be an advocate for yourself and you have to have a family member, especially if you’re own chemo and your brain’s a chemo brain, you can’t think for yourself. You have to have a health advocate because one of the top killers of people in America is actually medical mistakes. That’s scary. That’s not in the chart when you look for it, but it is real. The medical mistakes that are killing people, every patient that goes in the hospital usually comes back with at least one story of a mistake that they or a family member caught that was just a whoopsie. It was not evil. No one wanted to do that, but it was like, oh, sorry. I’m glad you caught that. Like, we’re going to go fix that now. Scary.

Hal Elrod: Well, I mean, even though…

Dr. Philip Oubre: Now, we’re really off topic.

Hal Elrod: Well, on that note, the survival rate for my cancer, if I got the treatment, is 30%. So, 70% of people that trust their doctor, their oncologist, and say, “I will take this treatment that you give me,” 70% of them die. And that’s why I’m like, okay, the only way that I’m going to get into the 100% of survivors is I’ve got to combine the best of Western medicine, traditional, conventional medicine, and every holistic practice known to man to detoxify my body from the chemo. I even asked my doctor to say, a lot of people die, 70% die from chemo toxicity and some other side effects from the chemo. And he said, yes. I said, “So how can I improve my odds? How can I detox my liver and the organs that the chemo poisons?” And he said, “Well, there’s a drug we can give you to do that.”

Dr. Philip Oubre: Oh, goodness.

Hal Elrod: There’s a pharmaceutical we can give you to do that. So, I took milk thistle, I did three coffee enemas a week, minimum. Like, I did all these natural things that have been proven to detoxify your organs.

Dr. Philip Oubre: Exactly. It’s simple and simple. If you have a trash problem in your house, you’re going to need to hire some cleaners or get cleaning yourself, right? So, no different. You’re introducing a lot of toxic chemicals into your body. You just have to add the nutrients that are the byproduct for that. So, it’s not rocket science, and that’s what’s really irritating. A doctor can learn that too. You learned it, Hal. Why can’t they learn it? And this is their profession. It’s one thing if they’re like, look, I don’t believe in this stuff. But look, the research says if you do this and this, it makes sense that biochemically, you could help detoxify.

We have many patients that go through radiation and chemo and stuff and they’re looking around at their counterparts and like, I’m not burned from my radiation. Some patients even still keep their hair, usually not glorious hair, but at least can keep their hair. They (a) still feel fine. They don’t look like death, basically. So, yes, and we’re just talking cancer right now. But that goes for so many things. If you have lupus and the statistic is that 70% of the time, you’re going to end up on an autoimmune drug, well, how do you not be in that group? What are the things you can do to minimize that? Even if you don’t believe lupus is reversible, what are the things you can do to minimize the flares or minimize the drugs, whatever it may be? Even if you can’t afford to see a functional medicine doctor or something, do the obvious stuff. You put trash in, you’re going to get trash out. Fix your nutrition, stop putting refined carbohydrates, and stop with the sodas and things and just vegetables, right? I’m not a vegan, I’m not a fan of veganism at all, or carnivore at all. Those are both extreme diets on opposite ends of the spectrum. We and my practice are much more balanced. And number one thing we ask everyone to do is gluten free. And then, of course, got to eliminate the sugars and balance your macros – proteins, fats, and carb.

Hal Elrod: Now, no sugar is an obvious one. Why no gluten, for anybody listening?

Dr. Philip Oubre: So, I’m not a fan of the no gluten for anyone. But if you’re in my office, if you’re sitting on that couch in my office in the background, chances are you’ve got inflammation. Yes, you do. So, if you’re in my office, generally speaking, you have inflammation, you have problems, and gluten is just such a common trigger for everyone, and there’s literally no health benefits to having it in your life. So, if something has no benefit, then just remove it. And so, some patients are able to add gluten back into their diet later after they’ve done the healing. But just why play with fire if you already have so much fire you don’t know what’s burning you.

So, we ask everyone to give up gluten because this is the number one food trigger, especially in America. We don’t need to go on a tangent. I’m sure most people know America has tainted their gluten, ruined their gluten, and so, it’s literally dynamite for most people. Now, gluten in Europe, that’s a whole different discussion, but gluten in America is just poison, unfortunately.

Hal Elrod: And why is gluten in Europe so different? That’s what I experienced when I went there because I don’t do much gluten here. And my wife was– she’s from Poland and she’s like, “Oh, no, you can eat all the bread. It’s totally different here.”

Dr. Philip Oubre: Yeah. So, there’s kind of three main things. Number one is in Europe, they’re using the more archaic version of gluten that is untainted and unadulterated. Number two is in America, it is GMO, genetically modified. They’ve actually multiplied the amount of gluten per grain, basically. So, eating the same wheat in America can have exponential or more amounts of gluten. And then number three, we raise it with such toxic chemicals that no one knows which of the three is the problem, and it’s more likely a combo of it all.

No different than if you ate strawberries every day of your life, just quantity, your immune system would get pissed off at it. Number two, if your strawberries were just covered in chemicals, your immune system would be pissed off at it. It’s no different than a vaccine. A vaccine, and I don’t want to get– we can get a vaccine debate if you want to, but…

Hal Elrod: Whoa, whoa, whoa, let’s not.

Dr. Philip Oubre: No, the basics of a vaccine are, we’re trying to immunize you. They are trying to immunize you against something that’s dead. Well, you don’t have an immune reaction to something that’s dead. So, what do they do? They give it chemicals and all kinds of things that they call adjuvants to intentionally piss off your immune system so that you become reactive to the dead thing they gave you. So, let me re-explain that. They gave you something dead that didn’t have an immune reaction, but they gave you a lot of other crap that was immune reactive so that you would react to that thing.

So, now, let’s take that to gluten. Gluten may not be that reactive, but we’ve strapped atom bombs to it so much that your immune system’s tired of seeing the gluten. And so, now, it’s an inflammatory trigger and it hasn’t forgotten about it. So, I’m not a big fan of saying, no gluten for all, but everyone needs to at least attempt gluten-free for two months before they decide they’re not gluten reactive.

Hal Elrod: Nice. Yeah. Yeah, when I went to, after chemo for whatever reason, I never thought it was gluten beforehand, but when I started eating gluten after my chemo, I would break out in rashes all over my face.

Dr. Philip Oubre: It’s so common, Hal. For people that eat, it sounds crazy to eat something daily and not have a reaction, and then eliminate it completely and then add it back in, have a profound reaction. And so, we’ve come up with all kinds of metaphors to explain that. But the truth is when the body is chronically inflamed to something, the reaction is actually kind of subdued. But when it releases, it is like pulling the rubber band back and then when it exposes, then it hurts again. So, if you react, it’s not just some functional medicine doctor trick that we play that, nah, ha, now we’ve sensitized you. It’s no, it was not good for you for the beginning. Your immune system just got worn out by it.

Hal Elrod: Totally makes sense. I got a couple more questions for you. For somebody listening right now and we may have already covered some of this with the diet, but if somebody was listening and they want to take the first step toward reclaiming their health, like they know that’s an area of improvement for them and they know they’re settling and they should make some changes, what advice, what practical advice would you give them today to get started?

Dr. Philip Oubre: Easy. Look up, and we don’t like the D word, the diet word, that’s a bad word. It’s a four-letter word. We like food plan, right? We all have to eat. It is not about what you don’t eat. So, the simplest advice is simply look up something like paleo or Whole30. Those are some of the two simplest food plans where tons of options of food, tons of options of food, but just a few things that, hey, you probably shouldn’t be eating those things. If you did that, I am serious that 80%, 90% of chronic disease would start falling away. Now, you also have to be smart about it, right? A paleo muffin is still called a muffin, folks.

Hal Elrod: Yes, that’s right.

Dr. Philip Oubre: It’s still a muffin. So, a paleo food plan, the idea, the Paleolithic era, do you think the cavemen were making muffins in their oven?

Hal Elrod: No.

Dr. Philip Oubre: It was no. You can eat junk food of all types, right? So, yeah, that’s the main thing is when you look down at your dinner plate, you should see real food that needs sunlight to grow.

Hal Elrod: There you go.

Dr. Philip Oubre: Or water or air or something, yeah. Twinkies, they don’t need air. One of my other– no one else seems to like this, but I always like saying it, like, if you can get your food wet and still eat it, it’s generally a good food. And what I mean by that is like, well, you could dip a steak in water, it’d still cook it. It’s still good, right? But if you dip that Oreo in water, not so good, right? Your crackers in water, like, eh, it’s starting to get like your bread in water, it’s kind of gross. You dip a boiled egg in water and still eat it, your broccoli in water and still eat it. So, that’s one of the ways I’m eating something healthy.

Hal Elrod: That’s interesting. Yeah, little back test.

Dr. Philip Oubre: Simple.

Hal Elrod: So, you mentioned, I almost called this out right when you said it because I know that anyone listening that’s vegan, would go, you said, I forgot how you said it, but basically, I don’t recommend the vegan diet. But then right after that, you said, I don’t recommend the carnivore diet, right? So, it wasn’t a, I’m against veganism. It’s like I’m against extremes and recommend balance. And I want to just mention something, for anyone listening, so I was vegan for 20-plus years.

Dr. Philip Oubre: That’s hard to do.

Hal Elrod: Roughly half my life, I was vegan. And what actually got me to consider not, and it was just because I was like, yeah, I don’t want to injure animals. I saw a video, and it was like, or a documentary about injuring animals. I’m like, yeah, if we don’t have to injure animals, why would we do that, right? So, that caught my attention and I went down that path. However, the reason I switched back is I discovered that vitamin B12, which is an absolutely crucial, and like, if you are vegan, I am not here to impose anything on you. I’m here to give you information and share and I see you nodding, so I want you to share this after.

You can look this up. You can look this up if you’re listening. I learned that vitamin B12, which is a crucial nutrient for a human to thrive, is virtually non-existent in a vegan diet. There are a couple random foods, like a nutritional yeast, like there’s a couple random things where you can get a small amount of B12, but sufficient amounts of B12 only come through animal products. And when I learned that, my whole world, like my whole paradigm shifted. I went, wait, how could the proper diet that I’ve been on for 20 years be veganism…

Dr. Philip Oubre: Completely agree, Hal.

Hal Elrod: If it’s missing this crucial nutrient? It can’t be the proper diet. It can’t be. And then if somebody says, well, you can supplement it with over-the-counter supplements, yeah, yeah, but if you have to do that, then it’s not natural.

Dr. Philip Oubre: Not a complete diet. Completely agree.

Hal Elrod: So, anything that you would add to that?

Dr. Philip Oubre: Yeah. So, vegan unfortunately is our least favorite nutritional plan. It is the only one we’re truly against because (a) the B12, you’re right, but like you said, and anyone that is a vegan and choose to continue being a vegan must be on a B12 supplement. We actually encourage all vegans to be on a B12 injection. We have some Indian populations with us that do vegan, but it’s hard. So, the two main things are B12. So, you got to be on a supplement, preferably the shot, just so you got it.

Number two is it’s really hard to get your protein. Most vegans are carbatarians and just being a carbatarian is hard to manage your weight and insulin, i.e., inflammation. And so, oddly enough, as weird as it sounds, I would rather someone be carnivore than vegan. But like you said, I really don’t like extremes in general. So, yeah is the answer, but getting your protein as a vegan is really hard, and your fat, like there’s only so many avocados you can eat to maintain your fat. Most plants are not high in fat or protein. So, if it’s not high in fat, it’s not high in protein, well, that means carbs. And all of the protein sources also come with carbs. So, that’s the hard part.

Hal Elrod: Yeah. Balanced diet, that’s where I have landed. And even for a long time, I would say I’m vegan by day, paleo by night because I would have a smoothie in the morning with some nuts and seeds for protein and some fats. I’d literally put in MCT oil. Then I’d have a salad with nuts and seeds and avocados for lunch, right? And then, for me, it was the energy. It’s like, oh, I feel like I have more energy when I don’t put on a big steak to have to digest in the middle of the day. And then at night…

Dr. Philip Oubre: It takes energy to break down food.

Hal Elrod: What’d you say?

Dr. Philip Oubre: It takes energy to break down food.

Hal Elrod: Yeah, exactly. That’s one of the most energy-draining processes that we go through. And so, for me, it was– and then for dinner, it’s a grass-fed beef or pasture-raised chicken or whatever. All right, I got one last big picture question for you, and it’s, how do you see the future of medicine evolving as more doctors and patients who are looking for root cause approaches instead of system management, but still, there’s an entire industry that is focused on profit and system management?

Dr. Philip Oubre: That is a great question, Hal. And of course, this is a predict the future, but where functional medicine has grown already is, it’s really a movement of the people. So, the people are learning on social media, the people are learning, the patients are learning about these things and going and asking their doctors, and when they’re not getting the answers they want, they then start looking for them. So, basically, every time a functional medicine opens up their shingles, it’s the hope that some patients come to see them. And so, the idea is it’s a supply and demand issue.

Functional medicine is growing in demand and more and more physicians and practitioners and all that are getting disenfranchised from the medical system. So, right now, it’s a movement of the people. The problem is that insurance is not covering it, so most of us functional medicine-based doctors are cash based so not everyone can afford us, unfortunately. And so, the wealthiest, the people of means are the ones making this movement happen. And that’s why I’m so passionate about trying to get this information out to the public with courses that I have on my website and YouTube videos and all of that, just trying to help as many people as I can that maybe can’t afford it.

But where I do see the future of medicine going is basically it’s going to be like Europe in some way, form, or fashion. There’s going to be a healthcare shortage. And the government’s going to get involved. And then, unfortunately, it’s going to be government insurance or cash-based medicine. And the cash-based medicine is going to become increasingly functional medicine. A bigger problem we have right now is that we don’t have enough generic practitioners out there, meaning that we’ve specialized doctors so much that you don’t just go to a really good general practitioner. You go to a cardiologist and a neurologist, and none of them are– they only care about the organ in front of them. They don’t care that their medication is also harming the brain. And so, that was one of my claims to fame is I started with patients and started minimizing their specialists and saying, you don’t realize that your specialists have you on medications that are contradicting each other. So, let’s simplify your medicine list. And that was one of the early starts I got into functional medicine.

And so, this functional medicine movement is actually creating a vacuum. So, patients are demanding it and there’s not enough supplies, so doctors are becoming it. And it’s actually creating a vacuum where specialists, for the first time ever, are unspecializing.

Hal Elrod: Oh, wow.

Dr. Philip Oubre: In getting into– yeah, yeah, it’s interesting. When you see a functional medicine “cardiologist,” there’s no such thing as a functional medicine cardiologist because you can’t just treat the heart. You have to treat the gut, you have to treat the toxins, you have to treat the entire human being. So, it’s actually in a way unspecializing. Now, that functional medicine cardiologist obviously knows more about cardiology than I do as a family medicine, functional medicine doctor, but that is the ultimate solution, you pair in there with hopefully AI.

And one of the projects I’m looking to start is creating a functional medicine AI doctor, so to speak, so that maybe people that can’t afford the one-on-one time with me, if we can train this AI doctor to treat the 80%, 90% of patients that don’t need my time, they just need the nutritional advice, they need the supplements, they need the guidance, they need something to interpret the labs, kind of to semi put it together, we can save the American healthcare industry and not bankrupt our country. I think that was the answer you’re looking for.

Hal Elrod: I think so. I think you nailed it. Well, if somebody, so obviously, I’m a patient of yours here in Austin, Texas, so is Mike Dillard, so are my friends that I have referred.

Dr. Philip Oubre: Thank you, by the way.

Hal Elrod: Jon Vroman is a patient of yours, Justin and Jennifer Donald, right?

Dr. Philip Oubre: They are great people.

Hal Elrod: When I believe in something or someone, I tout it to other people. So, if somebody’s in the Austin, Texas area, obviously, looking you up, but what’s the best way for people to find you, whether they are in Austin, Texas, or they’re going to find you on YouTube to watch videos? What’s the best way to connect with you?

Dr. Philip Oubre: Yeah, so luckily, I have a very weird last name, so Oubre Medical, it’s pretty easy to find me. So, OubreMedical.com. Of course, Oubre Medical in YouTube.

Hal Elrod: And you got to spell it though because it’s not spelled the way it sounds. The R is silent.

Dr. Philip Oubre: Not at all. Yeah, it’s South Louisiana nonsense. So, it’s O-U-B-R-E Medical. And so, Oubre, O-U-B-R-E, Medical.com. And luckily, with Zoom and things nowadays, we have patients all over the country, all over the world. So, with the virtual meetings and things, we can– I would like to tell people that it’s like 95% as if you’re in the room with us because we can ship supplements and peptides. There’s of course some things we just can’t do if you’re not in person. But we can still do 95% of what we do.

Hal Elrod: And that makes sense, the majority, because you can have somebody go get their labs. Just like I go get my– I don’t get my labs at your office. I go get my labs…

Dr. Philip Oubre: Quest is everywhere.

Hal Elrod: Somewhere in town.

Dr. Philip Oubre: Exactly.

Hal Elrod: Interesting. And then you’re, okay, that makes so much sense. Yeah, so if y’all, to remember it, I always just think of OubreMedical.com. That’s how I remember it, O-U-B-R-E medical.com. Well, Dr. Oubre, it’s always a pleasure, man. This is the first time we’ve ever connected in this capacity, but I really, really enjoyed this.

Dr. Philip Oubre: And we love and appreciate everything you do, Hal. My wife just loves. She’s always like, oh, look what Hal posted today. Like, okay, show me. You’ve always got great stuff, man. Thanks for being a positive light on our life. You’re wonderful, man.

Hal Elrod: Thank you, brother. Thank you. Well, goal achievers, thank you for tuning in today. I encourage you to pursue functional medicine in your life, and not when you have to because something came up that you didn’t take a proactive approach to, but actually, I don’t have anything wrong with me necessarily right now, but I see Dr. Oubre to prevent things going wrong in the future. And so, check out Oubre Medical, if you will, O-U-B-R-E medical.com. And I love you so much. Thanks for tuning in, and I will talk to y’all next week.

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