Podcast 553: The Missing Link to Better Health? How Troscriptions May Support Mitochondrial Function & Nervous System Regulation

DR. SCHERR: It's your mitochondria. So, if your mitochondria are not working, whatever that cell was supposed to do, it ain't doing it as well as it can. But Boomer is our CEO, and myself, we're all involved in being, we call them “patient zero.”  We're the people that get to try everything first when Dr. Ted makes it. And we get to decide whether are we going to make these at scale or are they going to be things that we use internally.

MARTIN: And today I have the honor and pleasure to introduce to you Dr. Scherr, who's the medical officer at Troscriptions. Scott is responsible for the education and for the product development too. Here we go. Dr. Scott Scherr, welcome.

DR. SCHERR: Thank you Martin. Yes. So, from product development there's also Dr Theodore Achacoso who's our chief science officer. But Boomer is our CEO and myself, we're all involved in being, we call them patient zero. We're the people that get to try everything first when Dr. Ted makes it, and we get to decide whether we're going to make these as at scale or are they going to be things that we use internally? Those kinds of things.

MARTIN: Yeah. Yeah. That reminds me of my own story, me being my own guinea pig in my own learning. If it works for me or if I survive it, I should say, others will also.

DR. SCHERR: Yeah. I mean, we're, so Dr. Ted and I are both in clinical practice. So, we've been in practice, this is my 20th year in clinical practice now. And Dr. Chad's been in practice for 42 years actually. We were just talking about this before, earlier today. And so, we have a lot of years of combined clinical practice, both from the conventional side, but also understanding the alternative or the integrative. And that's what I've been in since I was a kid. My dad's a chiropractor for 45 plus years in New York. So, I grew up very out of the box. And so, we're always trying to bridge the worlds and marry them and bring the best of everything as we can. So.

MARTIN: Yeah, it's kind of interesting. My dad, a veterinarian, told me, "Don't become a veterinarian."

DR. SCHERR: My dad said the same thing about me becoming a chiropractor. He's like, "Don't become a chiropractor." Like, become a medical doctor and then figure it out. So, that's what I did.

MARTIN: Yeah. And here we are.

DR. SCHERR: Yeah.

MARTIN: Well, so Troscriptions, I think the main unique feature is the Troche, right?

DR. SCHERR: The troche. Yeah. We call it but Troche, Troche, there's lots of different ways to say it. Yeah.

MARTIN: Okay. Sorry about pronouncing it.

DR. SCHERR: No problem. You're not the only one. I mean, it’s T R O C H E. And so, as a result of that, it can be spelled or at least said in a lot of different ways or even spelled. People like you say Troch-ee, they're like, "How do you spell that?" deal. So, yeah, it's a very unique delivery, Martin. It’s been around for a long time. We learn about it in the, it's called the compounding pharmacy world. So, these pharmacies outside the main pharmacy system like Walgreens or CVS, there's also these independent pharmacies that can make every single dose of everything, single ingredient that you could imagine and also use things in combination. So they were using troches for things like ketamine or hormones, and we knew the delivery was very good.  A troche, for those that are listening, we have something called a buccal troche. It's b u c a l troche, and it goes between your upper cheek and gum. It's like a small lozenge.

But what's nice about it, it's square and it's scored. And so you can take a quarter, a half, or full. And so a troche is nice because as a result of its formulation. You can take a little bit, or you take more. You can figure out your dosing. 

MARTIN: Yeah. 

DR SCHERR: And dissolving in the mouth is very fast-acting. The ingredients are more bioavailable. So these are good reasons. You can also swallow a couple of the ones that we have too very easily because Methylene Blue, which is one of our products and compounds that we use, is highly bioavailable. So that's also available to swallow too.

MARTIN: Yeah. Yeah. It reminds me of chewing tobacco in a way, right?

DR. SCHERR: Well, yeah. You have a lot of vascularity in your mouth, that's for sure. And what troches do is, the part between your upper cheek and gum. What they're going to do up there is going to dissolve into the buccal mucosa, which is highly vascular. So, if you ever gotten punched in the face, you also know how vascular your mouth is. I got punched in the face once, but it was in my jaw. Thankfully, I didn't pass out, but it wasn't that bloody, but I've seen other people get punched in the face. It sounds like I've been in a lot of fights. No, I haven't been in a lot. I promise. But I went to medical school in Baltimore, and so I just happened to get punched in the face once going to a bar. It was great. 

MARTIN: How bout that.

DR SCHERR: Funny enough, I was studying the jaw at the same time during anatomy class. So there you go. Synchronicity.

MARTIN: What an inspiration!

DR. SCHERR: Indeed.

MARTIN: And so there it is. You have the ability to dose it, right? So there's a quarter, and so you can take a quarter, half, 3/4 or whole. 

DR. SCHERR: Yep.

MARTIN: So you have a lot of control over how heavy you want to go with these products, which is great. It's almost as easy as doing an eyedropper in your mouth.

DR. SCHERR: Well, I think the difference is that with an eyedropper, you don't know exactly how much you're getting. You kind of know, they tell you, but the thing about a lot of things in an eyedropper is it's very variable. And liquids in general tend to be more variable if they're not homogenized and things like that. So the troche is nice because you know exactly from a precision perspective, that one quarter of that troche is going to be one quarter of the dose on the label. And every single time, no matter now or if it's in 10 packs from now, it's going to be the same, where liquids, it's a little bit more variable.

MARTIN: Right. And it’s not as runny, and you don't dribble it all over your chin.

DR. SCHERR: And it depends on the product. So, we have a couple of products as I mentioned, with this compound called Methylene Blue, and that product that Methylene Blue is quite blue and shockingly so if it gets on your face or if it gets on clothing. On the clothing, it's not going to come out, on a countertop you need to have antidote very quickly to get it to not be blue, and that's actually buffered vitamin C. People can look up something called the blue bottle experiment if they're interested. But in essence, liquids are messy. That's the short story.

MARTIN: I should have brought a bottle for demonstration.

DR. SCHERR: It's kind of cool to see, right? Because what Methylene Blue and Vitamin C, when you add Vitamin C to Methylene Blue, it turns from blue to colorless. So if you have buffer Vitamin C around the house,

MARTIN: Does the oxygen transport or electron transport remain, or does it get buffered away?

DR. SCHERR: That's a good question. So with Methylene Blue, it continues to cycle. It's going to go the buffering capacity continues to cycle back and forth. So the redox state continues to change whether vitamin C is around or not. But does it change the redox capacity for vitamin C? That's probably more the case, where I think you probably bind up the antioxidant capacity of vitamin C, making it less effective. So I usually recommend not taking vitamin C at the same time as Methylene Blue. Not because it's going to change the effectiveness of Methylene Blue, but it's likely going to change the effectiveness of Vitamin C.

MARTIN: Yeah, I think it's a good time for us to try and explain the mystery of Methylene Blue. How can it be both a redox activator, so, it can activate electron donors and electron taker?

DR. SCHERR: Acceptor. Yeah.

MARTIN: Yeah.

DR. SCHERR: Yeah. So, it either donates or accepts electrons. And so, it's just because the way the molecule has been created, where it has this sort of universal capacity to do both which very few compounds have that capacity. Most either will donate electrons or give you more energy, or other compounds will give you antioxidant capacity, so they bind up electrons like vitamin C, for example. But there's only one other compound that I know that's in nature that does this, well, there's others, actually, but the one that we will use as a supplement would be molecular hydrogen. Molecular hydrogen has the capacity to do both. You look at some of the things like estrogen for example, can do both, actually. Some of the herbs, some things like ashwagandha, can kind of do both sometimes, but in general mostly it's just the molecular hydrogen and methylene that are doing it.

MARTIN: Right, and that's quite mysterious because in the combustion chamber, the mitochondria, you need to be able to move energy in the form of electrons, right?

DR. SCHERR: Yes.

MARTIN: The mystery is that if you are lacking this ability to create ATP, creating energy out of food, you're going to be unable to think, move, act.

DR. SCHERR: Everything.

MARTIN: Heal, build, everything, right?

DR. SCHERR: Everything. And this is where I think it's such an important point, Martin, is that what runs all of your cells to make energy? It's your mitochondria. So, if your mitochondria are not working, whatever that cell was supposed to do, it ain't doing it as well as it can. And as a result of that, you are going to feel, maybe mild at first. It may be a little bit less just a little bit more moody, or my recovery at the gym is a little bit worse, or I just feel like I just don't have as much energy as I used to have. And then all of a sudden it's like I don't have any energy. I'm crashing on everything. And this is where mitochondrial function is the fulcrum. It's the point of the cell that will allow the cell to do what it's supposed to do.

MARTIN: Yeah.

DR. SCHERR: Or not.

MARTIN: Right. 

DR. SCHERR: That's how it goes. 

MARTIN: This is quite dramatic. Right. When immunity fails, you start getting really sick. Or when memory fails, you really start not being able to recall or process or whatever.

DR. SCHERR: Yeah. Yeah. So, I'm not saying that the mitochondria are the only part of the organelle or only part of the cell that matters, but I'm saying if other things are dysfunctional and the mitochondria is still doing okay, you're still going to be okay. But if the mitochondria are dysfunctional, everything else is going to go down too. There's nothing, because everything runs on energy, and we have to make the equivalent of about 150 pounds of ATP every single day to maintain our energy demand. So, we have huge amounts of energy demands especially in our brain, our heart, our liver, our musculoskeletal tissue, our kidneys, organ-based stuff, but even musculoskeletal tissue has a ton in reserve in case we have to run away from the saber-tooth tiger. And so it's one of those things where we have to be more focused on the mitochondria. We have to give the mitochondria more love and understanding and support, and then everything else gets easier. Even if you're always stressed all the time and always anxious, sometimes it's not just about the stress and anxiety. It's actually about working on what's happening in the mitochondria and supporting them. And then the stress and anxiety will often get better because there's not as much stress in the system, because there's enough energy around to support the capacity to make enough of those cells to do what they need to do.

MARTIN: Yeah. Here we are able to put a little troche in the mouth and all of a sudden within minutes the deficit starts going away. Right.

DR. SCHERR: The beautiful thing about Methylene Blue when it comes to that mitochondrial capacity is that it can compensate for almost any blockage or dysfunction, whether it's on the energy production side or the detoxification side, because making energy is not free. We make ATP, we also make water, carbon dioxide, and we make what are called reactive oxygen species or these free radicals. And so free radicals are okay in small amounts, but if there's too many free radicals the system can kind of break down. And so Methylene Blue comes in almost like an electric powered vehicle. It comes in with no exhaust, right? It comes in and builds up the capacity on both sides no matter what is dysfunctional and why. Do you want to know why? Absolutely. Because you really want to understand what you can do over the long term. What inputs are causing mitochondrial dysfunction? Is it insulin resistance? Is it a toxic exposure? Is it a medication? Is it an infection? Right. Or is it on the other side of things? Is it antioxidant deficiency? Is it significant inflammation in the system that's mucking up the whole inflammatory pathway? So, you don't have enough antioxidant capacity. So, you want to look at all that stuff,

But Methylene Blue comes in and just lifts everything up. All of a sudden it's like you're sort of level 10. Now you're at level 30 because you have Methylene Blue. And yeah, you're not at 100 yet, but you went from 10 to 30. That's pretty good. And you're going to see much more improvements and it's easier to do a lot of the other things.

MARTIN: Yeah. Rescue me now, because if I need to think and can't, all of a sudden being able to think again, that's a major win.

DR. SCHERR: Yeah. Even just a little bit. Even not, you went from 0 to 100, even if you get a little bit more back. What I find here, Martin, is that once you give somebody that bridge, then everything else becomes easier. They're able to start doing the harder work of changing diet, getting on the right supplementation, optimizing their lifestyle, like having a difficult conversation with a partner who's keeping them up all night because they're snoring, they just snore every night, right? So, these kinds of things are difficult to do if you don't have enough energy, right? Enough capacity. And so what I tell my patients all the time is, look, let's give you some additional capacity. Let me get Methylene Blue on board, now. It's not the only thing you're going to need, but it's going to make everything easier. Then we can look at what your stress levels are. Let me get you let's work on anxiety. Let's work on stress. Let's work on your sleep. All these things are important. And our company has products for all those things. And I use them all.

MARTIN: Let's talk about that because I think, well, to inject, here at Life Enthusiast, we always lead with metabolic typing and with understanding how your genetics interact with your ability to convert food into energy. And if you screw that up, you are always running at a deficit right at this autonomic system level. Right at the mitochondria level. So when we are able to correct that, people arrive here with problems as in, “I'm crashing.” This is the leg up. But then now let's start fixing the specific issues, right? For example, well, let me talk about the sleep side of it. 

DR. SCHERR: Yeah. So, I mean, I think the way to think about it is a couple different ways. The first way is that when the mitochondrial is stressed, they are going to put out stress signals to try to get you to make more energy. And that's usually pushing your sympathetic nervous system, which is your fight-or-flight nervous system. And when that gets pushed, that puts even more stress on your mitochondria trying to make more energy, but they're not making it well because they're dysfunctional. And the whole loop gets tighter. And I call this a sympathetic spiral.

MARTIN: You're almost circling the drain here with what you're describing because all of a sudden stress makes you more stressed, which generates stress that makes you even more sympathetic.

DR. SCHERR: Right. What do you have to do here? You have to think about the mitochondria. That's for sure. But you also have to be thinking about what can calm down the nervous system as fast as possible and as safely as possible. And the neurotransmitter that runs all of the brakes of the brain calming down the brain is the GABA neurotransmitter system. So GABA is your primary inhibitory or calming down neurotransmitter. It's sort of the unsung hero. You heard about norepinephrine or noradrenaline and adrenaline. You hear about dopamine and serotonin. But GABA is always in balance with another neurotransmitter called glutamate. Glutamate's primary excitatory. GABA is primary inhibitory. Those two neurotransmitters run about 80% of your nervous neurotransmitter system. So, it's a huge amount, the other ones are happening but not as much at all compared to glutamate and GABA. Now, interestingly enough, glutamate is excitatory, GABA is inhibitory, and glutamate gets converted into GABA in the brain. And so, you have to convert from excitatory to inhibitory. And so many of our patients, so many of my patients at least, and so many people are GABA deficient because of so much chronic stress or chronic inflammation or mitochondrial dysfunction. And the list goes on and on. And so, what you want to do is really support that GABA system as quickly as possible. But the problem is you can't use GABA supplements. GABA is too big of a molecule to get into the brain. If GABA works,

MARTIN: It has to cross the blood brain barrier.

DR. SCHERR: Right. If GABA works for you, it means that your blood-brain barrier is allowing things in that should not be getting in. Now, is it a problem that GABA got in?

MARTIN: Actually, let's just really stress this. Let me just really make clear that this is underscored.

DR. SCHERR: Yeah. The problem is not that GABA can get in. Okay. The problem is everything else that can get into the blood-brain barrier. If GABA is also getting into the brain, it means reactivations of lyme, mold, EBV, viral infections. I've seen a ton of this, especially with severe infections because if you have a leaky brain, it often correlates to having a leaky gut. And so, you fix the gut, GABA supplements stop working. And I've seen this in practice where I've had patients come to see me, GABA supplements are working great. I feel great, doc. I'm nice and relaxed. I'm like, well, let's see how you feel after we seal up your gut. And they stop working. Right? So.

MARTIN: And the stress comes back, right?

DR. SCHERR: Well, what can happen is that once you seal up the gut, often times you're taking away a source of their sympathetic activation, which was mitochondrial stress and cellular stress related to inflammation because of having a leaky gut. And so you find that there's lots of different reasons why you want to seal up the gut, obviously, but the GABA system can be modulated in other ways. It doesn't have to be modulated with GABA itself. So at Troscriptions, we have two products, well, three products really, that are focused on leveraging the GABA system, but doing it in a way that naturally supports the GABA receptor rather than really trying to hit it over the head. Hitting it over the head happens with alcohol, with benzodiazepines like Xanax and Valium, and things like that, and also your sleep drugs like Ambien and Lunesta. What those drugs do, alcohol included is they bind to a separate site on the GABA receptor where GABA would bind and they massively increase the amount of GABA that needs to bind and that completely changes the receptor ecosystem in a place where you get tolerance, withdrawal and dependence and so at Troscriptions we created things together.

MARTIN: But I would like to butt in with the following.

DR. SCHERR: Sure.

MARTIN: I have worked with so many people who are telling me who would like to get off of benzos or something related and find it to be exceedingly difficult because of the addiction of the dysregulation of the entire cellular system that you just described.

DR. SCHERR: Yeah, it's a big deal, and it's hard because what happens is you can't come off those drugs very quickly because if you do, especially the benzos of the world and alcohol, you can die. You can die from basically glutamate toxicity, which is, there's not enough GABA around because all the receptors have gone away because you've been on these drugs for such a long time. And as a result of that, you have to be very careful about coming off of them. And they also have a significant effect on the mitochondria as well, not just on the GABA receptor. But guess what that receptor was made from? There's a cell that holds that receptor, right? So, this is all kind of how it all goes together, right? But in the end, what you want to do as much as you can is support the GABA receptor by giving a source of GABA at the same time as modulating how much GABA binds to the receptor. So, we did that at Troscriptions. We have two products for sleep. We have one called Tro+Somna. We have another one called Tro Zzz. They both include two compounds that enhance the GABA system in different ways. We have one that binds to the separate site, one that binds to where GABA binds. And so, in Tro+Somna we have something called dihydrohonokiol-beta, which is from magnolia bark it binds to a separate site in the GABA receptor, and we have another one called agarin, which is from a mushroom called the Amanita muscaria mushroom. It's a red-capped, white-spotted mushroom, and this mushroom is poisonous if you eat it, so don't, but if you dry it, it has this compound called muscimol in it that's very good at being a long-acting compound on the GABA receptor, binding to where GABA binds, and so that combination is powerful. Then Tro+Somna also has apigenin in there too, which binds to a separate site that has optional melatonin, where Tro Zzz has honokiol from magnolia bark and then six other ingredients that are working on other sleep pathways as well. So because if you can regulate sleep, as you know, Martin, everything else is going to get easier, and so sleep is a big lever in clinical practice for sure.

MARTIN: Yeah. Yeah. Right there. Right. Like if you are not sleeping enough and there are the different phases of the sleep itself, you're going to create all kinds of deficits in the body, especially the repair deficit. And,

DR. SCHERR: Yeah, you can't regulate your nervous system. You can't regulate your immune system. Why is this? Because you're not cleaning up garbage, right? So you need to sleep well so you can clean up the garbage, including the garbage that gets made in your mitochondria, right? So, where do you make the most,

MARTIN: The lymphatic system. That one.

DR. SCHERR: Yes. Where do you make your most garbage on a regular basis? In your mitochondria, because that's where we make as much energy as we need to, right?

MARTIN: Yeah.

DR. SCHERR: No. Are there other places we make garbage? Yeah, we make garbage everywhere, right? We make garbage and that goes into our poop and we poop it out every day, too. So, it's just interesting. It all comes back down to being able to regulate your nervous system, but that's at least what we would say. But in the end, it's all about regulating your mitochondria, right? Because if you can regulate your mitochondria, everything else gets easier. Your nervous system is going to be more regulated, your sleep's going to be better, mood's going to be better, but you have to do things from multiple angles. You have to find out where you need to really help people. So, oftentimes for me, it's starting on mitochondrial support and then from there adding on something like our Z or our Somna for sleep if needed or even more commonly for me is our Tro+Calm. This particular product is great because you can take it anytime of day. It has an anxiolytic effect. So, it decreases anxiousness, but it also doesn't make you feel tired. And I think that's a very nice combination because in the middle of your day, you don't want to feel tired, you just want to feel less anxious, right? And so, it's a great product for that. So, I use that a lot even with people that don't think they're anxious. That's my favorite patient. They come to see me, their HRV is in the tank. They can't sleep. They go, "I'm not anxious. I don't have any anxiety. I don't have any stress. I feel fine. But my,

MARTIN: I’m not chewing my nails.

DR. SCHERR: All the things. And then so what I often typically do is have them on some sort of round the clock at least initially, to get them like “oh wait this feels different. I don't remember what it felt like to have my mind go this slowly or more relaxed.” And then from there you can start building in parasympathetic muscle, or the parasympathetic edge as I call it, where you give people a feeling of what it actually feels like to be back in that parasympathetic rest-and-digest mode, because that's where you need to heal, detox; that's how you build muscle, people need to be more parasympathetic, and we have to teach them how to do that in modern society unfortunately.

MARTIN: Yeah. Let's mention the longevity issue, right? When you are running your car 24 hours a day, no repair, no shop time, you're going to wear that thing out fast. Likewise with the human body, if you don't shut down the autonomic nervous system into the repair mode, you will age at a pace that's way faster than what you would have otherwise if you were actually able to relax, never mind the sleep, even just during the daytime, not wearing yourself.

DR. SCHERR: And I find that people sleep better if they don't wear themselves out during the day. And I think that's what people don't realize. I have people that tell me they can't sleep and then I'm like, "Well, what did you do before bed?" Like, "Oh, I was looking at my phone this far from my face, one inch from my face, and then I decided to go to bed." I'm like, "Well, how do you think you'd ever sleep like that?" Right.

MARTIN: And what were you reading?

DR. SCHERR: Yeah. I mean, it's all the things. And so it's such an interesting world we live in. We have so much respect for the hustle culture, which is don't sleep, you'll do that when you're dead. But I think many of us are waking up to the idea that health really starts with optimizing the balance between your sympathetic and your parasympathetic nervous system.

MARTIN: Yeah, that is such a misunderstanding to declare that sleep is just waste of time.

DR. SCHERR: I think more people know that now, but not when you're in your 20s. I had shirts in medical school with my friends that said sleep is for quitters. Yeah.

MARTIN: Sure.

DR. SCHERR: In your 20s, for a lot of us like me, you can get away with it. But as you get older, you can't. And the best you can do is not have that mentality and start, always really respecting your sleep and your timing.

MARTIN: Right.

DR. SCHERR: But the cool thing about being a human is that sometimes you don't need to get as much sleep and you're going to be okay. But at the same time, humans are the only species that purposely sleep-deprive themselves. No other animal will do this except for humans. Not surprising.

MARTIN: Yeah. Well, we're the overachievers.

DR. SCHERR: Yeah. We got these big brains, you know.

MARTIN: Right. Okay. The combination. How would you actually time it? How would you actually dose it? I would like to do something practical. So, I have somebody who's already in the issues of, well, already using drugs. Let's just say that they use something like Ambien or whatever.

DR. SCHERR: Using pharmaceuticals? Yeah. Okay.

MARTIN: Yeah. Something. And so now they are realizing that okay, that leaves me zombified and tired in the morning. But what if I tried the other way? How will you titrate, or how will you scale it? How will you sequence this whole thing to make it work?

DR. SCHERR: Yeah, it's a little bit trickier when somebody's already on pharmaceuticals because you have to be very careful about doing it under medical supervision and cross-tapering kinds of things.

MARTIN: Yeah.

DR. SCHERR: I have seen clinicians be able to do that with some of our products, but it's one of those things where it's got to be very slow depending of course, on how long they've been on the product, especially if it's something where if they came off too fast, they could get withdrawal and hemodynamic instability. So, their blood pressure, heart rate could kind of go crazy. But it is possible. The key is to cross-taper, usually where you're bringing down the pharmaceutical by a certain percentage and then you're increasing the non-pharmaceutical by a certain percentage, and you're kind of just watching and seeing how they do over time.

MARTIN: Okay. So, how long do you think they should expect to take? Months? Weeks?

DR. SCHERR: It depends on how long they've been on some of the pharmaceuticals, and it depends on how good their practitioner is, to be honest, about helping them off. But it could be a couple weeks, or it could be a couple of months, or even longer depending on,

MARTIN: I mean the patient here will decide for their own selves how they feel, right? 

DR. SCHERR: No. Yes. Kind of, right. I don't recommend tapering off a drug without medical supervision. I just don't do it.

MARTIN: Yeah. That's not advisable. I hear you.

DR. SCHERR: Yeah. But yes, it's how do you feel when you're tapering off the drug? Yeah, that's going to be on how of course, how you feel and then like are you ready to start tapering it down more? I've seen a number of people using our products over the years be able to taper themselves down or taper themselves with a practitioner's supervision down very safely, and I've seen it work wonders. It's just really got to be very personalized in the approach.

MARTIN: Right on. And so you would do the blue and?

DR. SCHERR: Well, it depends. Yeah, it depends. Almost always what I do here is get some Methylene Blue on board if I can because that's going to give more mitochondrial support. And then from there, what else is going on, and what else needs to be addressed? What's going to be the main focus, is it sleep, is it stress? And then from there, adding whichever product on makes the most sense, but doing it slowly. But the nice thing about Methylene Blue is that it can give energetic support while somebody's coming off some of these drugs that are affecting the mitochondria in detrimental ways.

MARTIN: Yeah. Okay. I don't know if it's just me, but the cases or the types of problems that people come with are so often hormonal dysregulation, especially thyroid dysregulation, probably driven by some gut problems that need to be fixed. So, it's fix the gut, detoxify the toxic burden, deal with the metabolic deficiencies, fix the thyroid. It's that sort of fixing the bicycle while you're riding it, right?

DR. SCHERR: Well, what I say here, Martin, is that there are short-term solutions and there are long-term solutions, okay? You want to get somebody some short-term solutions so that they can get to the long-term stuff. And starting them on the process of health optimization in the beginning is extremely important. And so, it's not just I want to get people Methylene Blue and Tro+Calm and call it a day. No, this is going to be a base for you so that we can start the vitamins you need, the minerals, get the lifestyle changes you require, optimize your thyroid, and things. And it becomes easier once the system is out of that autonomic dysregulation, when it's no longer in that sympathetic overdrive, because nothing's going to work if you're in sympathetic all the time. I don't care how many supplements you use, it's impossible. And so I've been burned this way as a clinician. I give somebody exactly what their metabolites say that they need, exactly what their gut tells them, and nothing changes. Why? Because I did not address that sympathetic activation that was driving everything. And so it's so important to think about it in this capacity where, if you can let the system calm itself down, get into that parasympathetic mode a little bit more, then all those vitamins, minerals, nutrients, that gut testing that you did and optimizing the gut, it's all going to work better now because now you have a foundation for it all to be on.

MARTIN: Yeah. And well, we have this accelerator in the food choices, right? Metabolic typing helps you stop making the sympathetic drive dominant.

DR. SCHERR: Awesome.

MARTIN: And you do that, you can further accelerate it with taking the calm with it.

DR. SCHERR: Absolutely. Yeah. And that's the nice thing about our products, they're not mutually exclusive to anything else that you'd be doing to support your health. Unless you're on another pharmaceutical drug that might interact with it, then you have to be more careful, but that's pretty rare. When it comes to methylene blue, the major interaction there is that it can increase people's blood pressure. So, if you're on blood pressure medications, you got to be more careful. If you're on SSRIs, Methylene Blue does increase serotonin. So, low doses are usually safe, but they should be done under medical supervision. High doses have to be careful overall, but typically okay as long as under medical supervision. 

MARTIN: Right.

But if you're on one of our either Tro+Calm, or TroZzz you have to be careful combining it with the pharmaceuticals that also work on the GABA system or alcohol as well. So, but in general, very safe.

MARTIN: Great. Not much more to be said, right?

DR. SCHERR: Well, I think in the end, the goal for me, Martin, just to step out, is that I want to help. I want to help now, while the long-term work is being done, right? And the helping now is what Troscriptions is all about. And that's why we have products for energy, focus, sleep, stress, the immune system, because you need help with those things as fast as you can so that the harder work of long-term health optimization has fewer bottlenecks along the way because guess what? I just addressed all those bottlenecks, or I'm addressing a lot of them that would hamstring you or take you off course, whatever the analogy, you're trying to maintain a path that's very difficult if you have all these bottlenecks along the way. So.

MARTIN: Here you have actually landed on the biggest challenge of the modern industrialized society where that is the primary cause of our ill health. The stress inputs, not coping with the volume of stuff that's coming at us.

DR. SCHERR: It's a difficult place to be for all of us these days, but we all have more capacity if we have more energy. So that's why Methylene Blue can be great. That's why we all have more capacity when our nervous system isn't in sympathetic overdrive. So let's calm it down and then we can have a better decision-making regarding what is and what isn't something that we should be doing. Society is not created to keep us healthy. It's helping other companies make money off of you. That's what society is set up to do, we're a capitalist country in the United States and even Canada, even though less capitalist than us, but not by much. And it's one of those things where if you are not aware of what's happening to you, it's being done to you, not for you. So be aware of that. Right. So.

MARTIN: Yeah. Well, I'm not saying that I'm morally superior to the pharmaceutical companies. They are selling their stuff. We're promoting our stuff. At least I feel when I look at myself in the mirror, I'm thinking, well, I am actually helping people become independent. I'm actually helping people to gain control of their own lives rather than becoming dependent on some externalities.

DR. SCHERR: Right. And that's a really good point with our products, too, Martin. I don't want you to take them every day for the rest of your life. I want you to be able to take them and then wean them off and use them as needed once your health is more optimized. And then if you need them for stress, take them. If you need them for sleep, take them. But you don't hopefully, need them every day, every night, for the rest of your life. Unless you don't want to change what you do. If you don't want to change the path that you're on and you want to have something for more energy, yeah, Methylene Blue is going to help you, but it's not going to solve the problem. It's just going to support you. And so I have some patients like this who have mild cognitive impairment. They're in their 70s. They're not going to change their diet no matter what I tell them. And so, yeah, take some Methylene Blue. Go for it. It's going to be helpful, right? But the goal is to hopefully get people on them less so that they're not having to take them every single day.

MARTIN: Right. Indeed. The next big crisis that may come well, again, be involving the metabolic comorbidities. These products are that which will protect you from them, right?

DR. SCHERR: Yep. Sounds good. I agree.

MARTIN: Yeah. So there we are.

DR. SCHERR: Thank you, sir. Thank you for having me.

MARTIN: Yeah, it's a real pleasure. Dr. Scott Scherr, a man who's actually doing the clinical work. It's, I just tell how much wisdom is coming through those fast fire thoughts that you're putting out there, is that you have bumped your head into difficult problems that just wouldn't give. Right?

DR. SCHERR: It's, I speak fast, and I do apologize for that, but there's a lot that we've synthesized as clinicians seeing patients for as long as we have to understand what the levers are and what the challenges are, and I think that's what our company's all about. So I hope the product can be helpful. Only to mention as well that they're only available through practitioners. So you can't just go online and purchase them right now. But we have a great practitioner map that is from all over the country, mostly the US, though where we have practitioners that can help. And so check it out at troscriptions.com, and you can look at the app to find a practitioner. If you have any questions, you can always email us. We do have a great blog. We do a weekly YouTube video called “Don't Look Up”, which you can learn more about various topics. We do weekly on Fridays a little bit of a roundup for questions. So, lots of different ways to be in our ecosystem. And then we're also on Instagram, Troscriptions, my personal stuff. I'm at Dr. Scott Scherr, D-R-S-C-O-T-T-S-H-E-R. So, you can find some of my stuff there. And yeah, thanks. Thanks again for your time, Martin.

MARTIN: You bet. Thank you. You can find these products at life-enthusiast.com. And this has been the Life Enthusiast Health Shots Podcast. Thank you, Scott Scherr. This is Martin Pytela. Over and out. Thank you.