Day: May 27, 2023

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• Autism needs to be approached as a system; systems biology looks at everything in biology as a web where everything is connected. When you tug at one part of the web, the rest of the web changes

• Dr. Martha Herbert believes autism develops in response to environmental factors that irritate and excite the brain, such as toxic exposures, allergens and electromagnetic fields

• Autism can be predicted by looking at the level of brain irritability in the child. Mercury, EMF, glyphosate, vaccine adjuvants and processed foods are all contributing factors

• The neural network disturbance found in the brain of autistic children has been shown to be proportional to the amount of mitochondrial dysfunction they have; in other words, autism is an outgrowth of mitochondrial stress and dysfunction

• De novo (new) gene mutations can result when sperm is exposed to wireless radiation. Men desiring healthy children should avoid carrying their cellphone in their pants pocket

This interview was recorded in November 2018 at the annual Academy for Comprehensive and Integrative Medicine (ACIM) convention in Orlando, Florida, but this is the first time it was ever run on the site. At the time there was concern that the topic was too controversial, but now that five years has passed and COVID changed the controversial landscape we thought it would be good to release the video on this important topic.

I had the opportunity to interview two experts on autism and dirty electricity, Peter Sullivan and Dr. Martha Herbert, who cowrote “The Autism Revolution: Whole-Body Strategies for Making Life All It Can Be.”

Here, we discuss some of the toxic factors that contribute to the development of autism, especially the role of electromagnetic frequencies (EMFs) and dirty electricity.

Sullivan has struggled with electromagnetic hypersensitivity, and still does to some degree, which was his primary motivation for learning more about it. He’s become a fount of knowledge as a result. As a software engineer in Silicon Valley in the 1990s, he was passionate about personal technology.

“I studied in Stanford. I did all kinds of human-computer interactions. I worked at multiple companies: as a troubleshooter in Silicon Valley, an engineer and a software designer at the very end. I worked at Netflix and some other companies people would know of,” he says.

In the early 2000s, problems began to take root. Fatigue and food allergies cropped up, and his children were struggling with developmental delays. He eventually realized he had toxic levels of mercury in his system.

“I eventually just took time off from work, in about 2005. I just said it’s ridiculous, with all these things going on, to have two people in the family working. I was focusing on my kids’ health and my health and really had some time and energy to really go deep and find out what was really out there.

I had a great doctor, Dr. Raj Patel … an integrative medical doctor who would talk about Candida overgrowth, mercury and all that stuff. He got us on track. Eventually, the kids slowly got better, but even after detoxing, I did not. I kept getting worse.

I got down to 131 pounds. I became electrically sensitive. My brain kept telling me, ‘All the stuff is safe and well-tested. I love technology.’ But my body was reacting like there was something really wrong. I was catching myself just throwing a cellphone away — feeling cellphones and then transformers when I plugged them in.”

He eventually learned about dirty electricity, and once he started addressing his exposure, he regained 10 pounds in a couple of months, along with his health. Today, he’s passionate about sharing information about the dangers of EMFs and dirty electricity, and how to address electromagnetic hypersensitivity.

“We’re just trying to share the information, make the field credible, because it’s very credible, and make sure people don’t have to suffer,” he says.

He even created an EMF-free tent that he brings with him to different seminars and conferences that people can sit in, as many of these events are held in places where you’re exposed to very high amounts of EMF. He’s also funded some of Herbert’s research.

I first met Herbert at a Cure Autism Now event (now Autism Speaks) in 2009. Herbert’s two children struggled with symptoms of autism when they were young. Today, they’re both grown and have fully recovered. Her initial focus was on mercury toxicity, looking at ways of doing noninvasive screening for toxic metals.

A lifelong environmentalist, Herbert went to medical school after getting a Ph.D. in history of consciousness at the University of California Santa Cruz. She studied pediatric neurology, and fell into working with autism after inheriting magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans from the first MRI study performed on autistic children in 1989.

“I was one of the first people — but not the only one — to identify white matter abnormalities in autism through brain imaging, not through gray tissue,” Herbert says. “That really violated the paradigm that behavior comes from the cortex. I was already kind of a whole-body person. I was seeing patients.

[Few of them] had these rare neurogenetic diseases that you’re trained for in pediatric neurology. But everybody was coming in with diarrhea and eczema, and they couldn’t sleep. It was almost like primary care in neuropsychiatry. That’s where I sort of edged my way into the whole-body approach.

I had an epiphany in 1999 … that all the stuff I was seeing in my patients really could connect with the environment … I started putting together and figuring out that this was really a systems [biology] approach to these conditions.”

Systems biology looks at everything in biology as a web, in which everything is connected to everything else. When you tug at one part of the web, the rest of the web changes. In conventional science, individual components and variables are studied in isolation. That’s how clinical research is designed.

“We’re looking for pure forms of disease. But mostly in these conditions that we’re talking about, it’s a mess,” Herbert says. “Everybody has a bunch of different [symptoms], some of which are more prominent than others. Early on in figuring out autism as a systems problem, I was looking at specific language problems or developmental language disorder.

But if you look at these people carefully, they have coordination issues … You see this subtle breakdown of the precision and fine-tuning of the brain … I finally … I found a great article about the networks in the brain that are messed up in psychiatric illnesses (not just autism but also schizophrenia, depression and so forth).

The hubs of these networks have very high-frequency gamma frequency … It turns out that this gamma frequency is driven by cells that are very high-energy demand mitochondrially centered cells …

We now have enough studies showing that the metabolic stuff going on in the brain match onto the networks going on in the brain. The proportion of network disturbance in some of these cases has been shown to be proportional to the amount of mitochondrial dysfunction.”

Herbert has created a brain research program at Harvard called TRANSCEND

(Treatment, Research and Neuroscience Evaluation of Neurodevelopmental Disorders). They use MRI, magnetoencephalography (MEG) and electroencephalogram (EEG). MEG measures the magnetic activity of the brain, whereas EEG measures the electrical activity.

“When you have electrical activity, the magnetic is at 90 degrees. They measure the same thing, but in somewhat different ways,” Herbert explains. Her hypothesis is that autism is not something you’re born with. It’s something you develop in response to environmental factors.

“In order to study that, I started studying babies from the time they were in their mother’s womb. We got biosamples from the mothers. We got biosamples at birth, and then — until the mothers stopped nursing — we get biosamples from them, plus EEG and autonomic … using wristbands … to see how things deteriorated in the kids who developed autism.

What we found was something that could be interpreted in a variety of ways. We’re working on publishing this. We have EEG dated of 2-week-old babies, predicting their outcome at 13 months.

Now, I just finished saying that I think that autism is something you developed. That would sound like something you’re born with, but you can’t say that they have autism. The way I think about it is if their brains are really excited and irritated. So, it matters very much what happens [in their early environment to make them] more predisposed.”

Using this early predictive ability, a small number of primary care pediatricians have started implementing whole-body approaches to the parents and children, showing that when whole-body lifestyle modification is implemented, such as avoidance of toxins and allergens, virtually none of these predisposed babies actually develop autism.

“My feeling is what we need is a public health intervention where people are taught how to keep healthy from preconception to pregnancy to infancy. If they get an EEG that says that their brain is irritable, you don’t want to do a drug … You want to do safe and healthy things, because [drugs and toxins are] the problem in the first place,” Herbert says.

There are many anecdotal stories from families with autistic children suggesting EMF causes problems, and Herbert and Sullivan are working on setting up an online database to capture this data.

“That when you reduce the Wi-Fi, the symptoms abate a lot. I know a kid who was stimming like crazy. He liked to stim by the dishwasher. Guess what, there was dirty electricity in this dishwasher. They fixed it and he stopped that, and a lot of his symptoms remitted,” Herbert says.

Essentially, Herbert believes autism can be predicted by looking at the level of brain irritability in the child. But what might contribute to this kind of irritability? Sullivan believes mercury, EMF and glyphosate are three major triggers, even more so than vaccines.

Herbert believes processed food is another major contributor. “Simply reducing allergens in the mother’s diet from preconception to pregnancy is a really big deal,” Herbert says. That said, it’s really the total load that matters, not any particular given factor.

“There are 10,000 different ways to injure mitochondria. It all piles up. All these little seemingly innocuous exposures add to the pile, so they all matter,” she says. Sullivan has created a video talk and booklet, “Simplifying Autism Improvement and Recovery,”

which includes a list of suspects for parents to consider.

One big one that few people consider is de novo mutations resulting from sperm being exposed to wireless radiation from cellphones and laptops. Men desiring healthy children would do well to avoid carrying their cellphone in their pants pocket while it’s on, as the cellphone radiation can mutate the genes in the sperm. If you’re going to keep it in your pocket, make sure it’s off or in airplane mode.

Herbert is currently enrolling patients for her Child Health Inventory for Resilience and Prevention (CHIRP) study, which will gather information about the associations between the total burden of environmental stressors and exposures and chronic disease in children. If you have a child between the ages of 1 and 15, you can apply

by filling out two prescreening questionnaires to determine your eligibility.

Herbert and Sullivan have worked with autistic children and have advised parents for a long time. What are some of the common mistakes they see people make? Sullivan replies:

“People assume it’s a problem with the child. They jump in and start treating the child. They assume it’s genetic or whatever, and they’re doing behavioral therapy. The things that I would do again for myself, if I could do it all again, is I would start with the environment. I would start with EMF, especially at night.

We turn off the baby monitor, the cordless phone base station, Wi-Fi, and even sometimes the circuit breaker for the bedroom … A wired baby monitor is safe … Plug everything into a power strip. Put the strip in the wall. When you go to bed, just pull out the power strip. In the morning, plug it back in. It’s not hard. Or, put it on a timer.

I would say it’s a state of overload not just for the kids, but for the entire family … There are [many] things you need to do [to clean up your environment]. The key is in the sequence. Do the easiest things that get you the most impact.

That’s why we’re starting with EMF. Because once you reduce that, you start sleeping better, and then you start to have more capacity. You want to build a spiral of capacity. You start an upward spiral …

Martin Pall’s paper

on the neuropsychiatric effects from microwaves and EMFs show it’s a big factor, as is sleep, because sleep and [lowering] inflammation are fundamental to good mental health.”

For more information about autism and wireless radiation, how EMFs affect sleep, and recommendations for EMF meters and tips for EMF safety, see Sullivan’s website, ClearLightVentures.com.

On Herbert’s site, HigherSynthesisHealth.com, you can find information about how to improve your overall health and lower your total body stress burden for a healthy pregnancy and baby.

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Disclaimer: The entire contents of this website are based upon the opinions of Dr. Mercola, unless otherwise noted. Individual articles are based upon the opinions of the respective author, who retains copyright as marked.

The information on this website is not intended to replace a one-on-one relationship with a qualified health care professional and is not intended as medical advice. It is intended as a sharing of knowledge and information from the research and experience of Dr. Mercola and his community. Dr. Mercola encourages you to make your own health care decisions based upon your research and in partnership with a qualified health care professional. The subscription fee being requested is for access to the articles and information posted on this site, and is not being paid for any individual medical advice.

If you are pregnant, nursing, taking medication, or have a medical condition, consult your health care professional before using products based on this content.

Download Interview Transcript | Download my FREE Podcast | Video Link

• The TB12 Method, named after NFL quarterback Tom Brady, focuses on pliability training — deep force muscle work that lengthens and softens muscles at the same time those muscles are rhythmically contracted and relaxed

• Pliability is different from flexibility. Flexibility can result from loose ligaments, whereas pliability relates to how your brain connects to your body. It involves a neurological component in which the muscle-brain connection is reeducated and rewired

• As you get into your 50s and 60s, you typically lose about 50% of your pliability. The TB12 pliability program can help reverse some of that loss, and allows you to sustain peak performance well into old age

• Workouts in the TB12 Method are primarily resistance band-based, since this allows you to activate both accelerating and decelerating muscle groups at the exact same time, which you cannot do with weights

• Many professional athletes are benefiting from the use of clothing, bedding and wraps with embedded bioceramic powder or far-infrared LEDs

Editor’s Note: This article is a reprint. It was originally published February 18, 2018.

In this interview, Alex Guerrero, cofounder of TB12 and personal body coach for Tom Brady — one of the best quarterbacks in NFL history — shares the natural and holistic program he developed with Brady, called the TB12 Method. Tom was told at one point that surgery for one of his injuries was unavoidable. This training method was said to have helped resolve his injury and return to the field, without surgery.

The pair launched “The TB12 Method” mobile app on iOS, and co-wrote a New York Times best-seller book about their philosophy, called “The TB12 Method: How to Achieve a Lifetime of Sustained Peak Performance.” A primary focus of the program is pliability training — deep force muscle work that lengthens and softens muscles at the same time those muscles are rhythmically contracted and relaxed.

“I’ve been practicing this for a little over 20 years now, and when I first started, it was with the idea of just doing some good deep tissue work and helping athletes recover from whatever their injuries were at the time,” Guerrero says.

“Some of [my] clients … would feel better and would go back out and do their training, and then they would hurt themselves again … It became a pattern, and at some point I thought, ‘I really need to see what this mechanism of injury really is. And why are they feeling better but not getting better?’

As I started to … watch them actually train, I realized that everything they were doing, all their biomechanical movements … were all learned behavior. The brain was developing more neural pathways as it related to the way they were wanting to move. So, I thought our treatment principles should be based on the same thing.

And if the brain can create neural pathways based on functional movement, then I should be able to do some functional movement during my treatments so that the brain can create more neural pathways for getting better as opposed to just feeling better.”

As he began working on muscle tissues through active ranges of motion, and having the client actively involved in the movement, they not only felt better but actually stopped reinjuring themselves. That’s when he realized that being pliable is different from being flexible.

Pliability actually correlates to how your brain connects to your body. In other words, it involves a neurological component in which the muscle-brain connection is being reeducated and rewired. According to Guerrero, pliability training is a good substitute for a regular warmup and/or cool down. He explains:

“In Tom’s case, we will do pliability treatments [on the] lower limbs, calves, hamstrings, quads, hips, hip flexors and his right arm pre-practice. We do that to stimulate the nervous system. We want to activate his nervous system and get it primed and ready to perform its function of running and moving in quick ways, to be able to go out and throw the football 200 times and not be sore in his elbow or shoulder.

We get the nervous system warmed up that way, rather than just doing some long tosses, or throwing or running. My belief is that, if you can actively stimulate the nervous system to do the function you’re asking it to perform at the time you need it to perform, it can do that.

You’re neural-primed and ready to go do those things. That’s our warmup. And then you practice, or do your exercise or whatever you want to do … and then we … reset … [W]e want the brain to understand [it] can go out and do two hours of physical activity and not be sore.”

To the outsider, the treatment looks much like a massage, but there are important differences. (There are some muscle groups you can work on yourself, but typically you will need a therapist to perform this treatment on you.) The main difference is your participation in the process. During regular massage, you’re basically just lying there, relaxing. To create sustainable pliability, however, you need to perform active movement to engage your brain.

Part of the inspiration behind this method goes back to traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), in which Guerrero has a master’s degree. TCM is a holistic medicine that takes into account the fact that the physical body, emotional body and spiritual body are interconnected and inseparable. While studying for his master’s, Guerrero also went to massage school to get certified in massage therapy. TB12 is a synthesis of those two schools of thought.

“Understanding biomechanics and learning how people move and function, and then creating that mind-body connection, is how I came up with [the TB12 Method] over the course of time,” he says. “When I first started … I would try a technique on [the client] and see how they felt. [They’d] go out and practice, come back, try it again, and see how they felt.

Over the course of some time, I was able to refine it. In sports and athletics, you don’t have a lot of time, especially in professional sports … so, I had to figure out how I could get an athlete’s body to change the way it thought about the injury mechanism in a quick amount of time.

Through practice, I was able to change the way the brain thought about how the injury occurred, or even the muscle memory pattern, and I was able to change those over the course of the two- or three-day treatment cycle. I could pretty much take any injury that an athlete had, that was soft tissue related, and get them better in two or three days.”

I’ve previously written about the benefits of photobiomodulation, where red or near-infrared light is used to activate mitochondrial recovery mechanisms. Many professional teams, including the U.S. Olympic track team are using it. Guerrero uses it as well, along with fabrics embedded with bioceramic powder that creates infrared in response to body heat.

“We’ve used far infrared for a long time, and we’re continuing to see how we can advance it so it becomes more user friendly,” he says. They’re already seeing good results with sleepwear embedded with bioceramics, which allows your body to be engulfed in far-infrared for multiple hours each night.

“It has worked out really well and we’ve done a lot of studies on them. There are certainly a lot of data points on those. Now we’ve gone from the pajamas to actual bed sheets that we have our athletes and our clients sleep in … You’re creating more ATP production and getting greater blood oxygen levels.”

As you get into your 50s and 60s, you typically lose about 50% of your pliability. This is also when many people end up developing disabilities and start losing their range of motion. Guerrero’s pliability program can reverse some of that. One of the reasons you lose so much of your pliability is because virtually all movement is learned behavior, and few of us have learned proper body mechanics during our lives. Hence, the older you get, the less muscle pump function you have.

“Let’s say you put in an average of 2 million steps a year. If you have a biomechanical asymmetry greater than 5 percent left to right, that load is going somewhere — your soft tissue should take that load, but if it can’t take that load over the course of time, your structure takes the load. That’s why we’re seeing knee replacements and a lot of hip replacements with people that age.

My feeling is that, if you’re able to maintain pliability, or even if you get into that 50- or 60-year-old range … as you increase their ability to have better muscle pump function through these pliability treatments, and get neural-primed and educate your body to support whatever your acts of daily living are, you’re able to function much more comfortably.

Our oldest client is 87; his best friend is 85. Their goal was to go ride the Tour de France circuit on their bikes. I thought that was a crazy goal, right? But they figured it would take them three months and they wanted to go do that. So, we put together a program for them, and they did it. They came back five months later, and not only did they do [the Tour de France], but they also decided to go on a [scuba] diving expedition …

[A]ging [then] becomes a number, and your only ability to not do something is based on the muscles’ ability to support whatever your acts of daily living are. I feel that pliability is the key to being able to accomplish that, [and] you can start to make physiologic change over the course of 14-day cycles. Over two weeks you can start to create new neural pathways for the way that you want to function and move …

I certainly think you can accomplish whatever your heart sets out to accomplish. That’s one of the reasons why we developed our TB12 Method app. People can download the app, see what it is they want to accomplish, click on that part of it, and then start their pliability program, their resistant band based program, their eating program — all those things [that will] help them sustain their peak performance.”

An interesting fact about Brady is that he nearly eliminated the use of weights several years ago. The idea behind that was that heavy lifting should not be done at the expense of pliability. Guerrero explains:

“Again, because everything is learned behavior … when you do a lot of heavy weights, and you do them slow and controlled, and then you go out on the field and you ask your body to move fast and furious, it’s counter [productive]. The body just doesn’t neural-prime that way. So, we do weights, we just don’t do a lot of really heavy weights.

A majority of our workouts are resistance band-based, primarily because [Tom] is getting older … [and] we can both do accelerating and decelerating muscle groups at the exact same time, which you really cannot do with weights … You can still get 500 pounds of pressure on a resistance band.

So, for example, Tom doesn’t do bench presses, but when he has to test for bench press, he can still lift 225 pounds, 18 times. We don’t lose any power or strength by doing [resistance bands]. We’re just looking to keep our muscles long and lean so that they can be functional for what you’re asking them to do every day.”

Many of these workouts are included in the TB12 Method mobile app, so you can experiment with them yourself. Another interesting way to adopt the TB12 Method at home is through the use of vibrating rollers and vibrating spheres, which I’d never heard of before. These, too, are used to provide nervous system stimulation and greater blood circulation. Using a vibrating roller will also warm up and relax the muscle far faster than regular foam rolling will.

The vibrating sphere is basically a ball that does the same thing. You can find these items on TB12sports.com. Needless to say, hydration is important, but water alone may not do the trick. You also need to replenish lost electrolytes. Guerrero recommends drinking half of your total body weight in ounces of water each day.

Most athletes, and most people in general, are somewhat dehydrated, and to offset that, especially if you’re active, you need to add trace minerals. This will aid the regenerative process. Certain macrominerals, such as sodium, potassium and magnesium, are also important. TB12 Electrolytes, a product which can be found on the TB12 website, contains these along with 72 trace minerals. It’s flavorless and contains zero sugar. You simply mix it with water.

The TB12 Method is based upon 12 principles. These 12 principles encompass physical fitness, emotional stability and spiritual soundness. Guerrero believes it’s important to find a balance between all three.

“I think we do that through the type of workouts we do — through pliability treatments, through cognitive exercises, proper diet and nutrition, hydration, rest and recovery,” he says. “Those are all things we feel are very important to be able to tie in those three areas of our physical bodies … I think a lot of people look at us … as being different, maybe even controversial, but we certainly don’t see it that way.

We really feel like this is something that certainly can be mainstream, and I think over the course of the years that we’ve been doing this, we’re certainly seeing a lot more people take hold of it, understand it, apply it and really feel the benefits of it.

I would say that for people who want to sustain their peak performance, first define what that means to you. You need to then tailor your program so that it is specific to you and your needs, because all of us are different.

We’re different shapes, sizes, heights, weights. We move differently, we behave differently, we do things in a different way. So, a one-fits-all type of thing never really made a lot of sense to me …

Once you’re able to define what sustaining peak performance is, I believe that age is just a number. And again, our oldest client is 87, and they’re out riding bikes and diving with whales, enjoying the success of what they’ve accomplished through their life, and that’s what I think everybody can have.”

I too am confident you can retain full functionality well into old age, but you do have to work at it. I believe TB12 can be a really valuable aid in that quest. Another one of Guerrero’s clients is a 77-year-old woman who runs four marathons a year — and that’s how she defines her peak performance.

“I believe our method can help people redefine their lives so that they can go out and do the things they really enjoy doing,” he says. To learn more about this program, pick up a copy of “The TB12 Method: How to Achieve a Lifetime of Sustained Peak Performance.”

You can also download the TB12 Method app

(currently available for iOS only). Last but not least, for those of you who cannot visit Guerrero’s facility to get the treatment, there’s good news. A certification program is in the works, which will be launched in spring 2018.

If you’re an athletic trainer or health care provider interested in becoming a certified TB12 therapist, you can sign up for more information and updates on TB12sports.com. Eventually, the website will also contain a list of certified TB12 body coaches.

Subscribe to Mercola Newsletter

Disclaimer: The entire contents of this website are based upon the opinions of Dr. Mercola, unless otherwise noted. Individual articles are based upon the opinions of the respective author, who retains copyright as marked.

The information on this website is not intended to replace a one-on-one relationship with a qualified health care professional and is not intended as medical advice. It is intended as a sharing of knowledge and information from the research and experience of Dr. Mercola and his community. Dr. Mercola encourages you to make your own health care decisions based upon your research and in partnership with a qualified health care professional. The subscription fee being requested is for access to the articles and information posted on this site, and is not being paid for any individual medical advice.

If you are pregnant, nursing, taking medication, or have a medical condition, consult your health care professional before using products based on this content.