Episode 1 – Welcome To The Rezilir Way

Transcript

Craig Tanio: A lot of people who come to Integrative and Functional Medicine come in because they are sick, and this was the way out for them.

Jacob Gordon: Hey guys, welcome to The Rezilir Way with Jacob Gordon. I’m your host Jacob and I’m so excited to have you here today. I have my own website, mybiohack.com, which is essentially a database in Wikipedia for biohacking and epigenetics with over about 20,000 relevant and recent studies. In this first episode, we will be discussing what Rezilir is about. I’m here with the team specifically Craig Tanio and Tammy Motola, the two founders of Rezilir Health, and I have them here so we can talk about what Rezilir Health is. And without further ado, let’s get started. I’ve got Craig and Tammy on the show here today. I want to know you two a little bit more personally and what got you into helping others here.

Tammy Motola: I’ll let Craig go first.

Jacob Gordon: Why did you start Rezilir?

Craig Tanio: Why did we start Rezilir? We saw a real patient need. We saw that there are a number of people who are not getting the care from conventional medicine that they need. And we wanted Rezilir to be an example of 21st-century medicine, where we are bringing the proper scientific insight, patient care, and humanity for patients. In particular, it turned out that there are three or four different categories of patients that we are primarily seeing, but almost all of them are patients with complex chronic conditions that aren’t getting better through conventional medicine. They include patients with Neurodegenerative conditions such as Early Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s or Multiple Sclerosis. Autoimmune conditions, such as Ulcerative Colitis and Multiple Sclerosis, Toxin or Environmentally Acquired conditions such as Mold and Chronic Inflammatory Response Syndrome. And then finally, Chronic Infections and their sequela. One of the things that’s been really in the headlines lately around that has been the sequela that can happen from COVID.

Jacob Gordon: You touched a lot of topics here that I want to bring back around. I also want to hear Tammy’s aspect on this.

Tammy Motola: I think we knew very early that we wanted to do something in this space, knowing that there were many people suffering and not getting answers, being chronically ill for years and seeing numerous doctors with no answers and their health is deteriorating. We knew that we wanted to be in
this space. I think, for me on the operational side of this, I knew that I wanted to create a place where people could be hopeful and could look forward to coming because they knew that we were an outcome-driven practice. And our number one goals are getting you better and having you believe in the power of healing and the power of medicine again, because we’ve said it many times, even though we are an Integrative Functional Medicine Based Practice, we’re very grounded in the conventional medicine world. And we think it’s important that everyone knows that it takes all types of medicines to heal, and we’re not opposed to that, so we don’t ever say that we’re the best and we’re the greatest.

Jacob Gordon: You two are both trained in conventional medicine originally. That’s correct?

Tammy Motola: Yeah. Right. That’s correct. I think for us, we want to be known as the practice of choice, and the practice of choice because, we believe in outcomes, and we believe that there’s always something that can always be done. We have hope, and we want our patients to have hope as well.

Jacob Gordon: That’s great. Craig, I know you have a little bit of history on dealing with these problems as well that a lot of your patients deal with. Do you mind sharing a little bit about your story?

Craig Tanio: Great question, Jacob. We actually got into this space and founded Rezilir Health about four and a half years ago. We were about a year into things and I had learned a lot about Chronic Inflammatory Response Syndrome, and then Irma came along. Hurricane Irma forced us all to leave the local South Florida area for about a week or two. When we came back, our condominium was water damaged, and basically had water from the condominium above, come down and get all the walls wet. Over the next couple of months, I started to get symptoms and it became pretty clear.

Jacob Gordon: What do you mean by symptoms, what were you having?

Craig Tanio: Symptoms of fatigue, headaches, some blurry vision and sometimes a little bit of brain fog in the morning. Some problems with sleeping, problems generalized irritability and it became pretty clear.

Jacob Gordon: Were you relatively healthy before this?

Craig Tanio: Oh, absolutely, I’d never had a Chronic condition. I think, pretty ironic that a lot of people who come to Integrative and Functional Medicine come in because they were sick, and this was the way out for them. We came into this because we really felt that patients had a need, and I didn’t have that condition before I joined the practice. I think that being trained on how to recognize Mold and Chronic Inflammatory Response Syndrome, it became clear to me that I was likely suffering from getting mold exposure. And I went out and saw a practitioner who was certified in this and quite experienced, and she was able to get me better.

Jacob Gordon: Let me backtrack a little bit for a second with Chronic Inflammatory Response Syndrome, which is also called CIRS. It comes from mold toxicity, like Craig had, just so the listeners know what we’re talking about.

Craig Tanio: Yeah. It was first described by Richie Shoemaker in Maryland, but it is a situation in which somebody is exposed to a Biotoxin and that Biotoxin can be mold. It can be another number of other chemicals and substances that reside in water-damaged buildings. It can be an infection like lyme, and what ends up happening is that the body gets caught in an inflammatory loop, in which even if you are no longer exposed to the initiating toxin you still have inflammation, and that inflammation can be throughout the body but particularly in the brain, and when it’s in the brain, it ends up causing hormone issues, they can end up causing problems with your Autonomic Nervous System. It can cause problems neurologically, and oftentimes, when that person visits other physicians, they’re presented with multiple symptoms, and in multiple different body symptom systems. Most of the time, people are told that it’s in their head. It’s not that it’s not something that is real, and oftentimes, just given an antidepressant. In my case, we identified that the house had been water damaged, and even though there wasn’t a high amount of mold, there was still several issues that needed to be addressed. We ultimately needed to move out of the condo for me to ultimately get
better.

Tammy Motola: I’d also like to add that sometimes people will also refer to this as environmental borne illness.

Jacob Gordon: I’ve heard of it as that as well. Now, that experience, Craig, did that change how Rezilir grew like what you were originally planning versus what it’s now?

Craig Tanio: Oh, absolutely. I think the whole experience of Irma made us realize how big of an issue mold was in South Florida. My personal estimate is if you look at the quality of the housing stock in South Florida, and you think about the number of tropical storms that come year over year, there’s probably a good 30% or more of houses in the South Florida area that has some degree of mold accumulation that could be harmful to human health. What we have seen time and time again in our patient population is that there will be a patient who comes in with a high amount of symptoms. We’ll work on getting them better with one of the foundational elements being to fix their environment, and then their spouse or their children will suddenly tell us, oh, a lot of these chronic symptoms I’ve had in the background, but they haven’t been too big, have gone down significantly. What I think is happening in Florida and in many other states is that the environment is a big root cause of a lot of chronic symptoms that the conventional medical establishment attributes to aging or just something that is unexplained allergies. You asked the question, Jacob, what did this do for Rezilir? I think one of the things that it did, it made us crystal clear that we needed to solve the environment problem. If we weren’t going to help our patients. There’s been a big strategic emphasis to try to build out capabilities. And the first thing that we did is, we realized that we wanted to have an Indoor Environmental Professional be part of the practice. If I’m seeing a patient in my office, and I’m relying on them to get an accurate assessment of the house, and then take all the right steps to move out and to do something that’s called small particle remediation, and then make sure that the house is okay to move back in. Those are critical to getting better. And we saw in South Florida that there really wasn’t that type of capability. We looked at the market and said, who is somebody who’s quite an expert in doing this. And there was a gentleman in Chicago, Larry Schwartz, who has been doing this for 20 to 30 years. And we had a staff member Justin Seay, work closely with Larry for over a year in an apprenticeship role to really build our indoor environmental professional capability. And now that’s awesome. I think we may either be the only practice or if not the only practice, one of a handful that actually have the IEP capability be part of the overall company. We have the Indoor Environmental Professional set in a separate company called Rezilir Home, so that service can be available for the public and for other practitioners as well. Tammy and I are quite enthusiastic about the potential and the upcoming years to develop environmentally and human healthy housing, because we think that’s ultimately the best answer for our patients with CIRS.

Jacob Gordon: I’m super excited about that. I know we’ve talked multiple times and met a lot of people about doing that, and that’s going to be the next step in where Rezilir should go.

Tammy Motola: I think one of the things that’s really important and bringing in IEP was that, when you have patients that are very sick, and you know that you’re doing everything that you can from a medical perspective, but the needle is not moving and they’re not getting sick, then you really have to take a step back and look at the environment. And that’s what was happening. It was something that was frequent, and it was something that was often, and patients would say, “no, I don’t think I have mold”, or, “well, now we had a remediator come in.” I want to be clear on that. We do not remediate. We are Mold Assessors, we come in, we investigate, we look, because it’s a very fine line. If you are a Mold Assessor/Remediator, for us, it was not something we wanted to do. We wanted to be on the other side where we could actually collaborate with the doctor, so that we could work together and get to the root cause of why this person was not getting better, or they were having continuous setbacks. For us IEP represented the missing link between the doctor, the patient and the environment. It brought all those pieces together for us. I would have to say that it’s been quite successful and getting people better, and when we take a step back and examine their actual environment where they spend most of their time, so it’s been a good thing.

Jacob Gordon: That’s great that you guys have that.

Tammy Motola: Yeah, I think so too.

Jacob Gordon: I haven’t heard of other practices that are doing that. And I understand why you’re not choosing to do the remediation side. There’s too much politics on that side.

Tammy Motola: It’s, too much.

Jacob Gordon: If your patients know that they have mold and they may be suffering from it, that is a major plus.

Craig Tanio: It’s not just mold in the buildings, one patient that I can remember in particular, where he had multiple assessments of his house and office, and they had come back negative for mold. And we said, hey, let’s just go back one more time and take a thorough look. The IEP assessment showed that there was a very high particle count in the air. And the patient ended up moving out for a trial for a week. After a week, he said, he felt better than he had felt in years. It was pretty clear that the environment was causing an issue. It wasn’t necessarily classic mold. There was something in the air that needed to be addressed. And this whole issue of I’m starting to frame it more as indoor air pollution. Because people understand extrinsically that pollution is bad for you. If you’re in Beijing or Shanghai, most people can’t even walk outside without some kind of facial protection. And we’ve done so much in my lifetime, I grew up in Los Angeles. When I go back, the amount of smog that is in the San Fernando Valley has decreased by 90%. So as a society, we’ve done a lot to address outdoor air pollution, which the WHO has estimated is a top 10 driver of chronic disease. But the indoor side, we’ve made a number of decisions that were pretty innocuous in terms of trying to lower the cost of housing. But I think over time has created an environment that’s not healthy for inhabitants. If you look at the typical American, probably 70% of the day, if not more, is being spent breathing air that’s indoor. And so if the air quality is not ideal, that is absolutely going be a contributor to chronic disease.

Jacob Gordon: I feel like if people could see their indoor air quality the same way that you see smog, or anything else, they would consider it differently.

Tammy Motola: Yeah. And I guess my point to Craig is, and what would you say, though, even if you’re not, in that percentage of people that are super sensitive, over time, you will start to have symptoms over a period of time, even though you don’t fall into that category.

Jacob Gordon: If you’re not hypersensitive, and you’re in general health, that’s something that will degrade your health over time.

Craig Tanio: Yeah. I think that when this issue was first written about, it was thought that there was a couple of genes that were the primary contributor of being sensitive to indoor air pollution. What I view is that people are really on a spectrum clinically and that some people are much better at detoxifying and getting it out of their system. But it’s been impressive to me how we can have patients who are very good with their diet, very good with sleep, very good with exercise. But if the air quality indoor is not where it needs to be, their whole health can suffer as a result.

Jacob Gordon: That makes sense. You’re primarily breathing the whole day. If you’re not breathing healthy air you can get sick from it.

Craig Tanio: Why it is important is that it is not just everything about breathing, but you usually think about lung diseases and that it’ll create allergies, but an important mechanism now has been inhaling through your nose, and we believe that a lot of the toxins will cause Chronic Inflammation. And if you look at the path of the nerve that governs your sense of smell, the olfactory nerve. It goes under the frontal lobes and then to the base of the brain, and that’s a lot of the area of the brain that we see swollen in these types of conditions. And actually, the loss of smell is an early prognostic indicator for Alzheimer’s that people oftentimes lose their smell five or 10 years before the symptoms.

Jacob Gordon: That makes sense, when they’re doing studies on rats and animal models, they will take out the olfactory bulb to mimic Alzheimer’s.

Craig Tanio: And then you’ll see in COVID now that loss of smell is becoming an indicator that people have the virus and so most assuredly if that pathophysiology is involved in the olfactory nerve, you’re going to have brain involvement in COVID. And so we think about the mechanisms as being the lung, but now we need to realize that the brain is involved as well, because of what’s happening with the olfactory nerve.

Tammy Motola: When patients come to see us, and you have family members that are clearly caregivers or there for support. And they tell us they are saying it’s all in my head, it’s this, I need to go for a psych eval, the truth of the matter is, it actually is in their head. It’s because it is inflammation.

Jacob Gordon: You’re saying it’s physically and not an emotion.

Tammy Motola: Physically. Yeah, it’s physically there.

Craig Tanio: This is where we’re bringing technology into there. We oftentimes to a NeuroQuant, which is what is called a Volumetric MRI. It is an MRI that is done a certain way and then given to a computer that has a database with literally thousands of controls, and the computer will look at the brain and divide into over 100 different sections on the left and the right-hand side, and then give a very particular information back. Is the patient’s brain larger or smaller compared to controls in that area. The computer can now do that in 15 minutes, what a radiologist would take 11 hours to do and of course, a radiologist isn’t going to do that for 11 hours. But now with this extra technology that in my mind takes a regular MRI would basically be maybe standard definition and the NeuroQuant is high definition 4k. We’re able to see early involvement of the brain either early inflammation, or as the diseases progress, there could be relative atrophy. We try to align this with symptoms as well. We’re always taking a multiple look at what’s going on. But the brain being involved is a critical aspect of CIRS

Jacob Gordon: Is a NeuroQuant something that any doctor can order, since it’s just a MRI?

Craig Tanio: Well, any doctor can order one. Absolutely. And the technology is definitely picking up. The radiology company needs to be facile in how to perform the NeuroQuants. But if you go to the Cortech website, there’s a list of facilities that offer them and in, let’s say, the South Florida area. There probably are a dozen different centers that you could get NeuroQuants within the South Florida area. And when we have patients who call us from out of state, we’re usually able to find a facility that offers a NeuroQuant relatively close to them.

Jacob Gordon: That’s great. Let me get back a little bit to Rezilir and its origin. I want to know why the name Rezilir. It’s such a funny-sounding made-up word.

Tammy Motola: It is a made-up word. It’s made up and It’s made up for a reason, but it was made up and it was born out of the word resilience.

Jacob Gordon: That’s awesome.

Craig Tanio: And we love the concept of resilience, because it made sense on multiple levels. What we are trying to do with the way that we’re practicing  precision medicine or multimodal medicine is, we’re trying to find the root causes of the issues. But ultimately, we’re trying to help people build up
resilience so that they are able to get better, but they have a reserve. And we also think that within a company, the entire staff and the people, have their own resilience as well. And we thought that was a perfect concept to describe what we were doing. And we wanted to figure out a name that could really be unique to us. One night with the help of least a couple glasses of wine, we were able to figure out the word.

Tammy Motola: True story.

Jacob Gordon: It came out as a slur?

Tammy Motola: Maybe. No comment, Rezilir was born, and we are resilient as a company and we have a fantastic team. I think the growth.

Jacob Gordon: Tell me a little bit more about the team. What kind of team do you have on staff?

Tammy Motola: We have a mixture of people and of course we’re always looking to expand and we’re in a growth spurt right now. We have our Nurse Practitioner that’s on-site and she works alongside Craig. We have our Registered Dieticians/Nutritionist because all of our patients have to see they must see the nutritionist when they come in because food is at the top of everything, food is medicine. We have a couple of MA’s, we have a Supplement Manager, we have Front Desk person that helps out whenever, we have our IEP team. We have two people that are running IEP, we have our Administrator. We have a great team.

Craig Tanio: We also have an Integrative Nurse Coach who helps patients with the entire change process and then we have a Herbalist and Chinese Medicine/Acupuncturist who is really able to provide patients with a deep insight and benefit into how natural products and herbs can work, as well as I think a
very complementary way of looking at healing that, I think is very supportive of the general process that we use to help patients.

Jacob Gordon: Yeah, that’s definitely an approach that more practices need to take into consideration. It sounds like a great team; I’d love to get all them on the show. Maybe one by one.

Tammy Motola: I’m sure they’d love to. They would love to do that because I think each of them bring something to the table and adds value. And for us, critical parts of our protocols and our programs are around the Nurse Coaching and the Nutritionist. They’re very necessary and moving the needle to
get better outcomes and sustainable outcomes.

Jacob Gordon: Yeah. Really, I’ve done a lot of modalities with you guys as well with the services that you offer. Hyperbaric, hydrogen you know, inhaling that. Sauna, Acupuncture, some IV Therapies. You guys have tons of modalities.

Tammy Motola: Yes, we do. Are you better?

Jacob Gordon: I’ll go in there for a week and then I’ll feel amazing at the end of it.

Tammy Motola: Great. That’s good. Okay, well, check that off.

Jacob Gordon: My Bio Hacking service there.

Tammy Motola: There you go. We’re always happy to see you.

Jacob Gordon: How do people find Rezilir? If someone’s suffering with a chronic illness or a multitude of symptoms? How would they find you; they do a Google search?

Tammy Motola: You can do a Google search but we’re also you can type in what your illnesses is and say Miami, like CIRS Miami or Schumacher Protocol, or The Terry Wahls Protocol. We’re listed under all that, we’re also very active on social media. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and then our website is totally rockin. It has a lot of information on about us, who we are, what we do, why we do it, a lot of information and you can also reach out and ask to schedule through our website and you can schedule through therezilirway@rezilirhealth.com.

Jacob Gordon: That’s great. If they mentioned The Rezilir Way do they get “in” quicker than others?

Tammy Motola: Craig is really busy, but we try to accommodate everyone on some level. If you can’t get in to see Craig right away, our Nurse Practitioner is certainly trained and she works with him and he oversees all the care and all protocols that are recommended here in this practice. I think that it’s funny even through COVID we still had a lot of calls and a lot of people, just because COVID happening doesn’t mean the other illnesses go away and so I think for us it was really important to focus on our virtual platform so we could continue to have an impact and help people, because there are many who are still struggling and is still suffering, but I think when you make the initial call here, our patient navigator Karen Brody, she’s phenomenal. She will be the one to get you set up, and talk you through any questions and if you have more and she feels she can’t answer, she always reaches out to me and I’m happy to do a call with a potential patient. Also, Craig is always happy to do these 15- minutes free consults to see if the patient, is a good fit or if he can help them. I’ll be honest, for the sake of transparency, not everyone is a good fit for our practice. And for us we do a lot of screening and we are interested in those that want to get better. And people who want to get better, will do what is recommended, and you may not always be able to afford it and we try to work around those pieces. Dr. Tanio is an expert in what he does, and the recommendations that he makes, are there for a reason. Some people are just not ready to commit yet. We are a commitment practice. And so, we’re committed to you, but we need for the patient to be committed as well. And so, we try to make that very clear, right out of the gate. But not everyone is a good fit. We are very intense, and like I said earlier, outcome-driven. It is something to consider when you’re trying to figure out whether or not you want to try The Rezilir Way. And when we say The Rezilir Way I’ll let Craig talk about The Rezilir Way a little bit, and how we came up with that kind of phrase.

Craig Tanio: The Rezilir Way one of the things that we had to figure out first, when putting together our practice principles, and just thinking how we wanted to take care of patients, is we asked ourselves, why does this situation exist? Why are there a set of patients who are not getting the care that they need? And I think that there are some blind spots in conventional medicine. I think that there are certainly some dominant paradigm scientific paradigms that need to be overturned. Certainly, the pharmaceutical industry has shaped practice to really be focused around a single modal treatment as opposed to multimodal treatment.

Jacob Gordon: So just like a drug or just like one IV or whatever?

Craig Tanio: Yeah, correct, I’ll take something in a very simple, like, hypertension, you’re taught that, in general, that most of hypertension needs to be treated by a drug. There might be a handful of reversible causes, but you’re not taught to look at the whole patient and to know if a patient has metabolic syndrome, is overweight, has high blood pressure, has some brain fog, and you’re able to get them on a healthy lifestyle and all of this goes away. I think that there’s been less of an emphasis on how to optimize health. And when it comes to Mold and Toxins, there certainly has been a liability issue, really shaping how the research is done. I saw a review of the last 200 articles that are around mold in the literature, and 70 to 80% of them reference neurologic symptoms as being a primary factor, but the last guidelines that were written around mold are almost 10 or 15 years old, and most of the people who authored the guidelines, were also accepting money from attorneys that were defending landlords and people as such, from mold suits. And so, once you get the whole liability issue in, especially with toxins start to really shape the science. The most important thing I think is time. it is that conventional medicine doesn’t cover or reimburse the time that’s necessary with patience. In many of the situations we face we will have people come in with 10 notebooks full of prior medical records, and they’ve been suffering for 10 or more years. And to put that all together takes time. Our standard intake might be three hours of my personal time, but when you consider the team, it might be almost the whole day involved in an assessment. And sometimes that’s needed. It’s certainly not needed for everybody. But sometimes that’s needed. And I think the maximum reimburse time for a typical insurance-based patient might be an hour as a new patient.

Jacob Gordon: So they’re barely looking at the patients.

Craig Tanio: Absolutely, and then especially in follow-ups. Follow-ups, maybe down to 10 minutes or five minutes. And it’s very much of production paradigm, so the word throughput is used a lot on the business side of medicine. And that’s not the business that we’re in. We’re not in the business of trying to increase throughput. We’re in the business of trying to heal and help patients. And for that reason, we decided to make this practice a cash practice to begin with, because we did not want the insurance company reimbursement philosophy to shape the way that we’re practicing.

Jacob Gordon: That makes total sense.

Craig Tanio: Yes. And it’s unfortunate that insurance has shaped everything that people think about health care. Because if you look at the cost of our service, let’s say for example, it might a number 20 to $30,000, over a year’s period of time to get somebody with CIRS completely better. And let’s say that’s over a 12-month period of time. If they had been sick for 10 years is that too expensive? Well, certainly if you look at the pharmaceutical industry, you see several specialty drugs that just for six months of treatment might cost $50,000 or $100,000. We encourage our patients to look at what we’re doing it’s just the equivalent of a specialty drug, but with the potential to really heal people by getting at the root cause.

Jacob Gordon: That makes a lot of sense. When you’re doing that, they can get back to their normal quality of life, their healthy quality of life, instead of spending 10 years sick.

Tammy Motola: It’s not a Band-Aid fix what we do, it’s getting to the root cause and solving those issues, so that you can have a healthy sustainable life.

Jacob Gordon: I love it.

Craig Tanio: And this notion of a cash practice that’s where we are today in 2020. But if an insurance company came to me tomorrow and said, Craig, we’re willing to take this set of patients who have an autoimmune condition that are on a high-cost specialty drug, and said, we’ll be happy to have you get them better over the next year, and we’ll give you a flat fee, we would be happy to have that conversation with insurance companies, anytime, because what that does is, it is aligned with the way we want to practice which is we want to create an outcome for the patient. And we want to do it in a predictable manner. And we don’t want the insurance company to get into the details of how much time is spent with the patient. Because that I think, has been one of the major root cause problems with the US healthcare system for not spending enough time with patients upfront and instead, they’re spending more of the money on technology and procedures.

Tammy Motola: I would just like to add, that time with patients is critical. And time with healing is critical. For example, if I have a patient that comes in and presents with symptoms that they’ve had for 10 plus years, this is not a one-trick pony, so to speak, you can’t expect to come to this practice and be seen once, and wake up the next day feeling like a rock star.

Jacob Gordon: You don’t even want those type of patients.

Tammy Motola: They need to be invested in their health, right out of the gate. And that’s what I look for in people who are pursuing scheduling, with our team. It’s very critical and it’s very important to understand that if you’ve been sick with a chronic illness or disease, even a couple of years all the way up to 10,15 years. It’s going to take time to get to the root cause and unravel all these things that we look at. Now with genomic testing and all the other pieces that we have, it certainly speeds things up a bit because we’re able to look at the genes that have been affected. But having said that, when you visit Rezilir you’re looking at a minimum of 90 days of intense therapy. That is, you must show up, you must be there, and you have to follow the protocols. We always try to say that right up front, you cannot expect to come here one or two times and leave feeling like you’re going to go run a marathon or something.

Jacob Gordon: It sounds like a full-on Health Rehab or a Health Recovery Center.

Tammy Motola: We’re looking to overhaul everything you have going on in your system and that take time, whether it’s through detox, whether it’s through whatever paths the doctor decides to take, it’s long term, and when you make changes to your health to improve to support outcomes. We’re going to change your diet, we’re going to change your behavior, if we’re going to get you better, these are changes that you must be willing to commit to, forever from now on. To come in and to do the work for six months, and then just decide, well, no, I’m going to eat that anyway. Or I’m going to do “X” or I’m going to go back to these other bad habits, you’re wasting your money. And so, what I want is for people to get their money’s worth, and to really follow the protocols that we put together. For the sake of, longevity, and healthy aging that’s important.

Jacob Gordon: Yeah, it’s paramount. Most people don’t even see their health as a long-term commitment. And diet will be seen as a diet instead of a new lifestyle, but your team seems to help people integrate it into their lives.

Tammy Motola: One of the things we’re working on for the future is, Jacob, as you well know, are healthy communities or healthy homes. But for us, it’s where home meets health, because this is where you spend a lot of your time. People think nothing about going out to buy a new car. They just don’t think anything about it. But when you tell someone, they’re looking at spending anywhere from 20 to 30,000, and could be higher a year on their health they hesitate. But the old saying “health is wealth.” It’s true, because if you’re not healthy, you’re not going to enjoy a lot of those wonderful things that you’ve worked for or that you’ve aspired to be part of. So for us, it’s really about in helping you find your core, your true center, heal and go on this journey with you, because nothing makes us happier than for our patients who come in assisted with walkers or wheelchairs and to see them, six to nine to 12 months later, walking around the clinic, for me that’s a success.

Jacob Gordon: Wow, that is so rewarding. Craig, you read so much, and so many articles, you have a fantastic blog that seems to be growing every day?

Craig Tanio: What we’re looking to do on the website is to make it a place that if people have a particular interest in complex chronic conditions, like neurodegenerative, Autoimmune, Toxic, Environmentally Acquired or Chronic infections that they can come to the website and get ongoing content and updates that are really based on what we are doing to keep current, and interesting insights that we’re having on a weekly basis. What we have done internally, is put together our own guidelines and protocols, which is a synthesis of what we see in the literature, particular clinical insights that we’re getting from some of the clinical networks that we belong to, and trying to curate this information and prioritize it by the quality of evidence and the impact that it would have on patients. And so there’s a lot of information out there and we’ve been keeping that more internally, and what we are in the process of doing and will try to accelerate these efforts in the upcoming months, is to get more available to the public through ongoing blogs and posts. Probably the first example of that we tried to do the last two or three months is just to keep an ongoing blog around COVID. Because there’s so much misinformation as you know, and as we talked about in the last blog, but we have a wealth of information around brain health and around Autoimmune conditions and Toxic conditions and we’d love to get that out.

Jacob Gordon: Yeah, it seems really extensive. It’s RezilirHealth.com/blog. I’m excited for more of what you’re going to post because you guys have so much to talk about, so many topics. I’d love to see maybe some patient data as well. Maybe anonymous patient data and the outcomes.

Craig Tanio: The outcomes are important, and I think that my background had been as training in Health Services Research. I think there is a real opportunity here in the functional and the integrative medicine side to start to collect more registry data. What is a registry? It is making sure that you fully capture a data set on your entire population of patients. For example, the country of Taiwan has registry data on all its citizens. And there was a very interesting paper that was published a few years ago about herpes infections. When patients who had herpes infections got treated with a high dose of Acyclovir, the incidence of Alzheimer’s decreased by 90% percent over the next 10 years. It was an insight that chronic infections may be one of the many root causes of Neurodegeneration. What we’re looking to do is to commit to the following: collect all of our patient’s outcomes, have it set in a registry, have patient approval for that registry, and ultimately, open the data collection and infrastructure to other practices who would like to participate with us. And then ideally, we could start to publish registry data around the entire book of patients. I think it’s important because at conferences sometimes people will present case studies, which are always interesting. But there’s a big jump between a case study and a randomized double-blind controlled trial. But the registry data can be a way of accelerating this. For example, with patients who have Mild Cognitive Impairment, if 20 practices all get their data and maybe each practice has 50 patients and now you have 1000 patients that you can report on with real-world data, it can answer some important questions such as, is this approach to try to reduce the decline of Mild Cognitive Impairment is it making a difference? and if it is making a difference, then that can obviously fund additional research. We set up what’s called The Rezilir Foundation which is a not for profit 501 (c) that will house the research and we’re quite committed in terms of principles of having that be available for The Rezilir practice, but also for other practices as well. Because we think that, one important principle of The Rezilir Way is, we don’t think that any of our treatment protocols should be proprietary. We’re wanting to be a good citizen of medicine and try to accelerate progress. And this whole area and functional integrative medicine really hasn’t gotten the funding that other parts of medicine has. And so, everybody has to do their share to try to move the field along based on scientific principles.

Jacob Gordon: That is so awesome and so needed in the community, and hopefully it can bring different policies and health care that kind of data.

Tammy Motola: Yeah, absolutely. Data is critical. And as we said before, we’re looking to practice 21st-century medicine. It’s unfortunate that I think the politics and the economics of medicine have created this situation where there’s “conventional medicine vs. functional and integrative medicine,” our perspective is there should be medicine. But if we’re in a situation where patients aren’t getting the medicine that they need, we have to innovate and make sure that we create a situation so that they can get the medicine they need.

Jacob Gordon: It’s fantastic. All right, guys. Is there anything else you want to add?

Craig Tanio: We really appreciate the conversation on a Sunday morning.

Tammy Motola: Thanks Jacob.

Jacob Gordon: Thanks, guys for listening to The Rezilir Way. If you want to find out more information about us, head over to RezilirHealth.com. Also, be sure to check out the new e-book by Dr. Craig Tanio on RezilrHealth.com it covers a variety of Neurocognitive disorders and ways to improve your cognitive health. And best yet, it’s free. I’ll see you guys in next week’s episode and for now, stay beautiful.