Episode 212
Cory Rice, D.O.:Why 70% of Your Immune System Lives in Your Gut and What That Means for Autoimmunity
Cory Rice, D.O.:
Why 70% of Your Immune System Lives in Your Gut and What That Means for Autoimmunity
Dr. Cory Rice joins me to debunk common autoimmune myths including the false belief that these conditions are rare, that there's one root cause, and that they can't be reversed. He shares why 70% of your immune system lives in your gut, why women are disproportionately affected, and the critical importance of comprehensive testing and gut healing in his functional medicine approach.
First Aired on: Oct 6, 2025
Episode 212
Cory Rice, D.O.:Why 70% of Your Immune System Lives in Your Gut and What That Means for Autoimmunity
Cory Rice, D.O.:
Why 70% of Your Immune System Lives in Your Gut and What That Means for Autoimmunity
Dr. Cory Rice joins me to debunk common autoimmune myths including the false belief that these conditions are rare, that there's one root cause, and that they can't be reversed. He shares why 70% of your immune system lives in your gut, why women are disproportionately affected, and the critical importance of comprehensive testing and gut healing in his functional medicine approach.
First Aired on: Oct 6, 2025
Table of Contents:
Table of Contents:
In this episode:
In this episode:
Introduction
Dr. Cory Rice is an internal medicine physician who now practices functional medicine and serves as Chief Clinical Advisor for Biote. He started his career in forensic science, working with cold cases and putting together puzzles from bones, and now brings that same detective-like approach to living patients. In this episode he joins me to bust some of the most persistent autoimmune myths that keep people stuck and suffering.
Episode Highlights
The Myth of the Single Root Cause
Dr. Rice explains why searching for one root cause is misguided and how functional medicine takes a multi-factorial approach to autoimmune conditions.
- Autoimmune diseases develop from a perfect storm of factors: genetics, hormones, toxins, stress, and gut dysfunction
- Pattern recognition and comprehensive data collection are key to understanding individual cases
- Only 8% of health trajectory is determined by genetics, while 92% is controlled by lifestyle choices
- Early detection and intervention are crucial before reaching the tipping point
Why 70% of Your Immune System Lives in Your Gut
The central role of gut health in immune function and autoimmune development cannot be overstated.
- 70-80% of the immune system is located within the intestinal wall lining
- Leaky gut (intestinal permeability) allows toxins to translocate and trigger immune responses
- Dysbiosis creates an inflammatory environment that promotes autoimmune reactions
- Gut healing must come before other interventions will be effective
- Comprehensive stool analysis is now mandatory for all new patients in Dr. Rice's practice
Why Women Are Disproportionately Affected
Dr. Rice shares his theory on why 80% of autoimmune patients are women, based on clinical observation and biological realities.
- Women are designed for incredible resilience but face unique challenges with childbearing
- Pregnancy literally requires giving your life force to the growing baby, depleting maternal resources
- Hormonal fluctuations throughout life (pregnancy, menopause) affect immune regulation
- Women are more self-aware and seek help earlier when something feels wrong
- The toxic burden from environment and stress compounds hormonal challenges
Hormones as Immune Modulators
Understanding the connection between hormone decline and autoimmune development is crucial for prevention and treatment.
- Estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone directly modulate immune function
- Hormone decline begins in the early twenties and accelerates in late thirties/early forties
- Bioidentical (iso-molecular) hormone replacement can be beneficial at any age with proper evaluation
- Even young women with cycle issues may benefit from hormone optimization without replacement therapy
Autoimmunity Isn't Rare Anymore
The statistics on autoimmune prevalence reveal these conditions are far more common than most people realize.
- 5-10% of the population has an autoimmune condition - that's 1 in 10 people
- In functional medicine practices, at least a third of patients have some autoimmune component
- Many people have early signs (psoriasis, eczema, severe allergies) before formal diagnosis
- Standard medicine doesn't screen appropriately for early autoimmune markers
Conventional vs. Functional Approaches
Dr. Rice contrasts the conventional immune suppression model with functional medicine's immune restoration approach.
- Conventional treatment suppresses the immune system to reduce inflammation and symptoms
- Functional medicine aims to heal the immune system and address root causes
- Both approaches can be used together when needed
- The goal is to give people hope and improve quality of life, not just manage disease
The Importance of Patient Participation
Healing requires active commitment from patients, not passive receipt of treatment.
- Patients must bring their A-game commitment for the therapeutic relationship to work
- Behavioral changes and lifestyle modifications are non-negotiable for success
- The therapeutic bond between provider and patient is crucial for healing
- Hope is often the biggest deficiency in people with chronic illness
Data-Driven but Person-Centered Care
Dr. Rice emphasizes the balance between comprehensive testing and treating the individual, not just lab values.
- "We treat people, not paper" - labs are just snapshots in time
- Comprehensive testing reveals patterns that guide personalized treatment
- Longitudinal data tracking shows progress over time
- Clinical observation and patient input are as important as lab results
Notable Quotes from this Episode
Women are literally giving your life to that baby that's growing inside of you. And if you have more of them, you're giving more of your life.
Dr. Cory Rice
The one deficiency I feel like is so pervasive in this human race. The deficiency is not any organic or biologic. It is hope.
Dr. Cory Rice
Eight percent of our health trajectory is determined by mother and father. Ninety-two percent is literally determined by you.
Dr. Cory Rice
It's not the food's fault when the gut is off. It doesn't matter what you eat, these people are gonna be sick. When you fix the gut, heal the gut, seal the gut, then it becomes the food's fault.
Dr. Cory Rice
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Other Resources:
Connect with Cory Rice, D.O.
Connect with Cory Rice, D.O.
Watch this interview:
Watch this interview:
Episode Transcript
Cory Rice: If you don't have that gut checked, then you're gonna just keep going on and on and on and on and on and on, and do the same thing. And like Einstein said, do the same thing over and on. You're gonna get the same results.
Julie Howton: Welcome back to the Inspired Living with Autoimmunity podcast. I'm your host, Julie Houghton, and today we're joined by Dr. Corey Rice, the Chief Clinical Advisor and Medical Advisory Board member at. The owner of Modern Medicine Clinic where he provides patients with personalized, progressive, comprehensive medical care.
Dr. Rice's background is internal medicine, but he now practices functional medicine and lifestyle medicine. His clinical expertise lies in most areas of chronic disease and ultimately the treatment and reversal of some of the more commonly encountered conditions in clinical practice today, I. In this episode, we are debunking the most common myths surrounding autoimmunity.
Corey, welcome to the podcast.
Cory Rice: Thank you, Julie. Thanks for having me.
Julie Howton: I am so excited for you to share your expertise and just have been looking forward to debunking autoimmune myths together. Um, but first I would love for the listeners that aren't familiar with you yet, I would love to know, I know you started out like forensic science, right?
So how do you get from forensic science to practicing what I consider just good medicine treatment, but what wellness medicine, um, true prevention?
Cory Rice: Yeah. So thanks for the opportunity to give you that background.
Interestingly, I wouldn't have thought back when I was in forensic science that I certainly would've ended up treating live humans.
So back in. Gosh, the late nineties, uh, 2000, I was the first graduate from, uh, Baylor University, uh, with a degree in forensic science.
So I went into healthcare and honestly, same idea. I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do, so I went into internal medicine, uh, did that for a little bit, did inpatient critical care. And so, at the time, I took a leap of faith years ago, and I, I, I just. Started to learn different modalities of healthcare that I was not exposed to in formal grad graduate medical education.
And so that led me to a world of, uh, functional medicine. And, and I'm sure you and your audience are quite familiar with that. Um, for those that aren't functional medicine, really, it's just taking, taking a a, a phenotype, a, a body that potentially is, is dysfunctional or, or not operating appropriately and literally putting the pieces back together in a root cause way, um, oftentimes without pharmacologic need, just so they can have their life back.
And so long story. But that's really where I started and that's kind of where I am now and what I do.
Julie Howton: Amazing. As you were talking, I was thinking about a text I got from somebody I worked with a year ago who's a nurse.
Um, and it was photos from some things phy, you know, mountain climbing, things she did this summer that she, you know, couldn't have done had she not gotten her life back. And, and it's like, yes, this is why we do it.
Cory Rice: Yeah.
Julie Howton: So I wanna start with, because you mentioned root causes and functional medicine, and I'm talking about puzzle pieces. You know, let's talk about that myth of finding your singular root cause.
Cory Rice: Sure. And I appreciate that. And maybe offline sometime, I'd love to hear your personal story because everybody's got one.
Oh, yeah. And I think, yeah. I become a better physician when I listen to people's. Personal stories because nobody has the same story. Right. Nobody has the same data, nobody has the same set of patterns that got them to where they're in front of me now. Yeah. Um, but I think there's a reason we're talking, but regardless.
Sure. To this, you know, and, and on the root cause side, you know, basically speaking, if, if someone comes in and they've got a diagnosis from a doctor or a set of doctors that they don't understand, they don't like, they aren't accepting for whatever reason, denial, or they just truly don't believe it, um, I'm the kind of guy that's like, I'm so, Hmm.
I would say confident in how we treat patients, that you can take everything we do and go to 10 different docs. I stand by the opinion we have because you have to be confident in what you do and with, with this type of medicine. People just need hope. I mean, this may be a lot of your listeners listen, listening to Sure.
You Go down this path and I and I will tell, be the first to tell you. I do not think doctors by any means the conventional medical machine. These are not not bad people
No. At all.
These are great people.
Julie Howton: I say it all the time. I'm, you know, I'm married to a physician. There you go. Nobody goes into medicine to, to do anything but help people.
Cory Rice: A hundred percent. Yeah. And, and the machine that we were fed into is one that was really not of our constructing. Right. It's just where we find ourselves and we won't get off on those tangents, but that's an entirely different, it's
Julie Howton: a, it's another episode of how, how do we, the system. Yeah. It's
Cory Rice: absolutely another episode.
So, you know, the idea of root cause is if you come in and you tell me, let's just use exam if you have Hashimoto's or whatever, who doesn't? Yeah, no, that's a great, that's another great point. 'cause in my world, basically everybody does. Yeah. But if you have that, you know, it's not that you just woke up one day.
This antibody's attacking a gland and Right. That's just how it is. There's a reason that happened. And the milieu of reasons can be anything from, um, you know, neurotransmitter related, hormone related. It can be complete living in a world that is just unfortunately toxic, polluted, the soil's been adulterated.
Everything is just different from our grandparents and, and, uh, yeah, sometimes parents and how, what they played in and what they ate from that, you're just set up with potentially a, a perfect storm to acquire something and have a body that goes awry and the name of autoimmune disease or Hashimoto's.
You combine onto that a genetic. Something pre dispositionally relieved for that. Then it's just this perfect storm. So to me, whatever the fill in the blank diagnosis is from MS to whatever. Mm-hmm. You, you have, you've been given this label, that's fine. You can choose to go the conventional route and that's your choice.
I don't judge choices if you want to go that route, awesome. I'm always here for you if you want to have an opinion or another one, or an additional one or whatever, and or you choose a, a path in which you can potentially. Reroute the body and the trajectory of your health in a way that is not going down the path of where these diseases go to.
And so that's through the root cause. And to develop and decide what the root cause is. I, my opinion is you have to do a lot of data. Yes. I mean, data drives everything instead of just empirically guessing. Right. Um, I'm probably a very good guesser because I've seen so much pathology and so much pattern.
I mean, really what I feel like I do, and what a lot of functional people do is we're just pattern recognition specialists. We're just, but you're
Julie Howton: a good listener. You said it already. You know a, I think it's the most healing thing for a patient to sit down and be heard by a physician. You start that healing process from that first contact.
Cory Rice: You could not be more true. And that's our providers at our, at our office. And I mean, it's, it's, it's imperative that that first encounter, you make a connection that is almost a life bond. Yeah. And you do that by listening and you basically, you, you let them tell, I mean, as much history as they want. Um, this is the cadence in which we do things is you start with me, you start with my functional health coach and we are getting a, a.
History. We wanna know your past. Yeah. But the moment you leave my practice and you come back for that data reveal party, which is that second visit. Mm-hmm. The past is last and our whole focus Yeah. Is on the future. But we have to collect the past so, you know, we care. Um, and you know that it's important to us because that is massively important.
'cause that really closes the gap between a therapeutic bond and an adversarial bond between patient and physician. Yeah. They know you care. And I mean it, when I said it a minute ago, the one deficiency I feel like is so pervasive in this human race. The deficiency is not, um, any organic or biologic. It is hope.
Yeah. I mean, the hopelessness that exists in this country, when someone is given. A myriad of these autoimmune diagnoses. I just, I hear it all the time and it's, it's heartbreaking that they don't understand there's a better life out there if, if you have access to someone that can help you potentially acquire that life.
So, um,
Julie Howton: I, I really, speaking of hope, I really hope that, you know, even for the people that are, are in that allopathic western system and maybe referred out to a rheumatologist, I look forward to the day when they are not told that there is no hope. I was told there was no hope by my physician that, you know, they would try to keep me comfortable, right.
For and slow the, there was no like, let's turn this around. You know, you're young, let's kick it now. No. Um, and so I think that that's why I have these conversations because, but, but I really, the ultimate goal, 'cause I'm a dream.
Cory Rice: Is
Julie Howton: that, that, that those conversations are taking place, you know, with primary care docs, with specialties with it, that someone does.
It's not, it's not the functional medicine perspective, it's just truth, like the body is designed to heal.
Cory Rice: No question. I would tell you one of the most rewarding experiences in my life. Is having rheumatologist as patients, um, endocrinologist.
Julie Howton: Mine unfortunately passed away about seven years ago, sadly, you know,
Cory Rice: and, and I, you know, and again, I I don't, I'm not making this about me in a braggadocious way.
I'm making this about me in a very realistic sense, so your audience understands what I see every single day. Yeah. And I'm very fortunate to tell you that there's a significant amount of my patients, and I mean, we're talking tens of thousands of people we treat that are prescribers, um, physicians at different times.
And the reason is, yeah. Um, I do a lot of teaching and I think what ends up happening is, is, is when a colleague sees another colleague who's, who's fairly well educated, but doesn't come across as like, holier than thou, or, I know more whatever. Sure. You know, I'm one of you and I, I just found my way to this, and if you, if you ever want to learn more, great, I'm here for you.
If not, not a problem. A lot of them just establish, but that's the greatest thing when I get one of these docs who is, I understand they're not gonna go back to their clinic and necessarily. Do this, but if they want this for their own health, that tells you something. Right. You know what I mean? Yeah. And those are just like awesome moments.
I never, I never disempower those people, I them to try and find a way in which they can help their patients and augment what they're already doing with some of the things they've learned through their own health. Right. That's kind of the way I
Julie Howton: Absolutely. Well, and th this will lead us to myth number two.
Well done. Um, and they're not in any order other than in my head. Um, th this idea, and even back when I was diagnosed in my early thirties, you know, it was, oh, you're so young and, and this is rare. Mm-hmm. Right? Growing up, I didn't know people with autoimmune conditions. Um, so there it goes. Your genetic theory right there.
Um, but so the most, at some point, most physicians are going to have. You know, either themselves a loved one, somebody they really care about struggling with one of these chronic illnesses. And, and so the more exposure to the truth that the body, you know, can actually do its thing and, and these are the things we look at, like you said, it doesn't mean they're gonna convert their practice to a functional medicine practice.
Right, right. But, um, I, I said we, we had a new patient come in recently whose, whose primary care said, you have autoimmune, you need to go find a functional medicine doc. And I said, I want the name of that primary care.
Cory Rice: Yeah,
Julie Howton: because that's a good doctor.
Cory Rice: A hundred percent.
Julie Howton: Yeah. You
Cory Rice: know, you're, the world has changed and, and, and, yes.
I, I actually am very, I'm pretty young, relatively speaking, but 10 years ago, what I'm telling you now would not be true, but today, just yesterday, yeah. Oh, yeah. I had two patients referred into the practice by a, a provider within 20 miles, who 10 years ago would never have done that. But what's happening is, is they're hearing about it.
They're seeing other people come back and they're like, that guy. And what they do over there is. Incredible. And now, and that, that, that kind of thing is new, then it's not gonna go away. Right? That's an impenetrable force field that won't go away. I mean, that's gonna continue to be a pattern. You mentioned something about rarity of these conditions.
Julie Howton: Yeah. So are they rare?
Cory Rice: I mean, rare is relative, I would say in my world, no. In most functional medicine world, no. But if you check it, you're gonna find it. And one of the biggest problems in healthcare is we don't, in my opinion, yeah, we don't screen people appropriately no matter what. If they're an NFL professional athlete or they're sick and they have six months to live, we aren't screening people and catching things early.
You and I both understand this, your husband does for sure. Early detection is the name of the game in this country. Yeah. We will lose the battle if we wait until something is found at the very end and then they think we're gonna hop in and be able to like put that genie back in the bottle. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
The body has a way of doing a tipping point where you spill over. It is gonna be very difficult to fix that completely. You have to early detect. So the standard of care is not to screen every human for autoimmunity. Right. The standard of my care is because I want to find Yeah, us too. Fix things early.
Yeah. And so when you say rare, I'll just, the, the stats are simple. Five to 10% they say of the world is autoimmune or the us So whatever that puts that at, if that's one in 10 people are autoimmune. You know, 80% of that population are female. So it's like an 80 20 kind of percent women to men. Um, in, in my life, in my clinic, I mean at least a third, if not a half of people that present have some autoimmune condition.
Now, the devil's in the details of what I just said. Does that mean they have positive blood markers to associate them having an autoimmune disease? Not necessarily. Right. Some of these people just have scalp psoriasis. Some people just have eczema. Some people just have like super bad allergies with high eosinophils and these other things where I'm like, you're so allergic.
And you're so, like, I make a living off seeing people that are allergic to life. Okay. Right. These people are sensitive to every thing, but yet they don't have on the paper or something. I look at mm-hmm. Definitive diagnosis and I'm like, yeah, but it's coming. Like it will come. Right. If we don't stop. Also,
Julie Howton: data's really important.
Labs. Deep dive labs are important, but I'm assuming you're treating people and not results on a paper.
Cory Rice: That's why my, uh, that's why my, I think my tagline on my website is we treat people not disease. Um, you know? Yeah. And what I say, what I say in the offices. I'm gonna go through a lot on paper here, but I treat people not paper.
Yeah. You just have to know what's on the paper. And I'm like, good. You know what? This paper is only as good as the next one we do. Yeah. Because right now I've got you at a snapshot in time. Right. And if I can do what I know, I, and the other thing that I say, and I'm, you know, I don't mean to get tangential here, but I think this is critical.
If you're a prescriber listening to this, if you are constantly bringing your A game to these patients constantly, you're just, you're, you know, you're, you're, you're, you know what you're doing. You're creating these, these pathways and, and all of these things that you know are gonna work, but they continually bring a C game to you or a D game.
Mm-hmm. And they're not ready and they don't have the behavioral change. Yeah. That I know al medicine health coaches can talk you through and they can't do the habitual changes and all. If you don't have that, you're gonna divorce. And so the first thing I tell patients in the room is, this isn't a, this isn't, this isn't, this is just a relationship 1 0 1.
If you bring to me your commitment, your a game, your trust, your faith, some of this faith's gonna be blind 'cause you don't even know me yet. But you're gonna do, if you do these things and I bring my A game, it's an infallible model. You cannot leave here feeling worse. You cannot. But if you bring a c commitment to an a, you know, facilitator Yeah.
It's not me. Like we are not gonna, it's not gonna work. So I'm just telling you, if you're not ready, totally fine. We're here when you are. But let's not waste each other's time. And maybe that's little too direct, but to me, life's too short. Yeah. And a lot suffering patients out there, you need to be, you need to be honest with them.
'cause if they're ready to feel better, which sounds crazy, people on your audience are like, why wouldn't someone be ready to feel better? Yeah. But if you are telling 'em to change this and change this, yeah. They're like, I'm not ready for this. You know?
Julie Howton: Absolutely. And I do think some of it is conditioning.
It used to be, you know, and, and obviously I still value the wisdom of, of a good physician. Um, but it used to, it used to be like the, the doctor's the expert on you. And, and, and even just, if you look at the, the Western, you know, diagnosis. Prescription. Right. There was no active participation expected.
Right. Right. From those of us who wanted to get better.
Cory Rice: Right. Right. And
Julie Howton: so I I do, I love that you brought that up because it, it, it is, we have it in our new patient paperwork that they have to sign. Like, if, if you're not here to participate in your health, we're not the place to turn.
Cory Rice: It's funny how your new patient paperwork evolves as the maturation of your business and your Right.
Your practice does. Because yeah, if you could look back and if I could look at back at my first new patient forms, I would laugh so hard because, and then you see it's, it's like a book you could write and then what it is now is like, it's going through like every scenario of what would happen and it's just like, oh my God.
So you're so funny. Yeah. We have something similar. Uh, yeah. But it, but it
Julie Howton: is, you know, if someone's looking for s like I, I believe that that not only does this model of medicine, which to me is just good medicine work, not only does it work, you know, but it, but it requires participation. There's no magic wand.
Cory Rice: Yeah.
Julie Howton: Um, and so, you know, I love that you highlight that, and you're right, most people that are, that are listening to this are already on that. You know, what can I do? I, I, I'm wanna take the steps. Um,
Cory Rice: sure.
Julie Howton: What you, you, when we're talking about how, you know, so I think we've debunked autoimmunity is no longer rare.
No. Um, but you brought up the, the ratio, you know, which actually is almost getting worse, I think. Um, why do you think it's women are so much more affected than men?
Cory Rice: Yeah. Thank you for the question. This is a Dr. Rice theory. This is not
Julie Howton: Yep.
Cory Rice: I, my placebo controlled, nor is this database driven literature matrix that I'm about to tell you.
This is based on lots of clinical observation, which I do believe is actually very important in healthcare. It's not just about Mable placebo.
Julie Howton: Yeah. Not, you can't, you can't do those studies on everything. Yeah.
Cory Rice: Here, here's, here's the truth about women, and this is, this is, um, you're
Julie Howton: amazing.
Cory Rice: Well, I was about to go there.
Women are incredibly resilient and amazing. Creations. And what I mean by that is they were designed to take on so much in their lives. I don't, I'm sure you know this, but I'll just say it as a man, the childbirth process and having children, not just the actual physical part, right. But a woman, after she has one baby, her autoimmune risk goes through the roof.
And Dr. Rice's opinion is these children, you are literally giving your life to that baby that's growing inside of you. Yeah. And if you have more of them, you're giving more of your life. And why do That's one. Sentinel event that I feel like starts to lead them down a path where they could potentially trigger something that happens on the autoimmune side.
Because women, unfortunately, with hormonal decline, mm-hmm. With childbearing years and being completely exposed to a very polluted environment that's full of not just polluted air and water and soil, but people. So when you're polluting yourself with all of this, how do you thrive? How do you, how are you optimized?
How can you do any resilient behaviors as a woman who's juggling. All the things that she juggles. Men are very linear, very simple. Yeah. Like there's not a complex thing here. So why I think women get this so much is they though they're built on resiliency because of childbearing. I don't know that they're built enough.
They haven't evolved yet enough to deal with their resilient behaviors they need to have within their body to fight off all of these challenges that affect their immune system. The amount of Hashimoto's, none of it Prior to pregnancy? Yeah, all of it. I mean, that's just like night. I see this over and over and over.
So one of the reasons is women. That's one. The other one is women. God bless them, tell you everything. Um, men tell you. I mean, they're like, you're not as
Julie Howton: simple as you think, but Yeah, I get it. Yeah. So
Cory Rice: I test all these women. Yeah. Because they want to know why they are this way or, and it takes a man 10 years to figure out they are this way.
Like women already know, needs to be told a bunch of times. Like, no, nope, something's wrong, something's not right, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. And so I'm like, okay, well let's test, you know, so maybe it's just a set of both the realities they face as a female, but then the fact that they are so self-aware that they may find someone like me or you and you're like, okay, let's test.
And sure enough, you find it. If you look for it, you're gonna find it. So, you know, that's my theory on this. Mm-hmm. But that's why I'm seeing it. I feel like so much. Um, but there are these men out there that come in. I just had last week. It was insane. I've seen his wife. For years. Horrible Hashimoto's, as well as another concomitant autoimmune disease.
They had the worst fertility challenges you can name. Sure. She finally was able to have a baby and it was done through, you know, healing her from the inside out, restoring her gut health and all the things. Right. And, and all of that took a while. But her antibodies came down, her thyroid function was good.
And she was able to conceive. He finally, she was like, can you just go and just get your labs checked? Just go, like, he had no ma no problems. He comes in, he's like, I'm just here. 'cause she told me to. Right. So he comes in, we get the data. I was like, oh my God. He had four autoimmune diseases and they were at very high burdens.
Like they were high levels of these things. Mm-hmm. And I finally, when he came in, I went down and I had his wife come too. And I was like, listen man. Your life's about to change. I mean, but you didn't even know, right? You told me you think you feel good. I don't think you even know what good is.
Julie Howton: Yeah. We're about to figure it out.
'cause how, how do you know if you know what I mean? Like how can you tell what somebody else's good is?
Cory Rice: When.
Julie Howton: Yeah. And exactly, and most, most people, and, and I'm not even talking about people with autoimmune challenges, most people don't know what optimize feels like,
Cory Rice: and they surround themselves with the tribe that they've chosen to surround themselves with.
And guess what? The tribe feels the same way you do. Right? So what guess what You all feel what? Normal.
Julie Howton: Yeah.
Cory Rice: Well, I mean, it just becomes the cyclical process to when 10 years later someone finally says, go see this person. Yeah. You get data done. So I don't know if that answer or helps you, but that, I mean, that is definitely a reality.
I see. Well,
Julie Howton: I would, yeah. And I, I, I think those of us that are in this world, we, we form opinions, you know? Um, and I, but you did, I do wanna follow the thread of one of the, and I, and I love because yes, you're a physician and you're very intelligent and compassionate. Um, but you're also, man, so I love that you included the, you know, to toxic people and, and the stressors of, I'll add to, I think all of that we could manage if we were ever taught from a young age as females, that it's not selfish to prioritize our, our health.
Right. Hundred percent. That the oxygen mask definitely does need to go on mom first.
Cory Rice: Yes. But
Julie Howton: we, we don't learn that until we crash.
Cory Rice: Yep.
Julie Howton: Typically, at least that, you know, that's most of the people I work with, and that was my, my experience as well. But I, I also think hor our hormones have, have to have something to do with it.
Um, as somebody who also works with, you know, dementia reversal and prevention, again, take Alzheimer's and women to men. So I, I really think, um, that, that. Hormone dysregulation, I'll say, and that, and I'll then let the expert say what he thinks that means. Yeah. Um, really plays a big part. And I, I believe that that's why childbirth, you know, tends we get these big fluctuations.
Our immune system is so brilliant. I mean, we get to tamp things down to grow another person. Yep. Right. And our body knows like, don't attack baby, don't attack baby.
Cory Rice: Mm-hmm.
Julie Howton: Um, but all of those beautiful changes can be that tipping point for, for some of us.
Cory Rice: No question. And that was very eloquently said, women face hormonal challenges, not just when they're 45.
Right. 55. Right. These things start hormones decline. Naturally in their early twenties and then precipitously, late thirties, early forties. Naturally, if you combine that with stress, you combine that with sleep deprivation, you combine that with childbearing, you combine that with poor diet, you combine that with alcohol, you then you're gonna have a compounded problem with hormones.
And so in the world that I function in hormone, uh, I guess hormone assessing and then potentially optimization mm-hmm. With therapy or not, is a critical piece to avoiding age related disease. And I don't mean to be redundant, but, but repetition's, the mother of learning. I guess if you check it early, you can start to fix things early, waiting until a woman is 65 years or older to initiate or even consider initiating hormones.
It makes no intellectual or educational sense or, or even just, you know, common sense because these things are declining quickly. And if you ask a woman, are you, do you have more brain fog? Do you have less energy? Are you and I, I mean, I'm just saying it, I'm not judging. I'm just saying, are you more doy?
Are you more fluffy? Are you losing your firmness? Are you not sleeping well? Have your desire. I tell my
Julie Howton: husband not to say dewy by the way.
Cory Rice: Have your, have you, uh, are you, are you losing interest in like everything that you know in your, in your life, right? Yeah. Your desires are down. These are things that are like very natural that you don't have to wait for.
And, and so to tie in the immune system side, estrogen, progesterone and testosterone are immune modulating compounds. They will do something to affect the immune system, whether that's at the inflammatory cascade side with like inflammation and, and IE joint pain or lubrication or whatever. All of that inflammatory milieu that happens in the hormone naive patient, meaning they've lost, you know, their hormones, or they don't have any, or let's say they don't have their uterus and they're just, they have no hormones at all and their ovaries were taken out as well.
These are big problems because that's where cog cognitive decline accelerates. That's where sarcopenia or losing muscle accelerates. That's where bone loss, all the things that you don't want. And to say that all of that isn't in some way tied to an immune system that decides to start attacking you would be disingenuous because it's an environment in which the body will turn against itself.
You've literally just put the. Put it on the T and you're about to hit the ball and it's, it's, I mean, it's going to happen. Yeah. So hormones are critically important to assess at any age. Just to see certain aspects of it doesn't mean you have to be on hormones, but you need to start checking a timeline of what's happening and then doing a wonderful history of what's happening and be able to ask the right questions, some of which are a little sensitive, some of which are a little private.
But that's okay. You need to know these things because honestly, who else are you gonna talk to these other, if you can't talk to your daughter, who else can you talk
Julie Howton: to? Yeah.
Cory Rice: So, well,
Julie Howton: and I love that you highlight that at any age, because a, again, as a woman and, and I have a daughter, and, um, I know I. Kind of the thinking when I was younger and you know, in teens, twenties, it was like, what?
I had friends that had horrible, horrible cycles. You know, I can now I know what was going on with them, but you know, we were just taught, that's part of being a woman. Um, and so a lot of these imbalances can, can be, can be lifelong, you know, oh, somebody will say, oh, my cycles are fine. And then you ask specific questions, right?
Well, do you have bad PMS breast tenderness, heavy cycle, you know, all the things, the cramps, the pain. They're like, yeah, that's normal. I've had it my whole life.
Cory Rice: A hundred percent.
Julie Howton: And those are the women that are gonna end up in your office, you know, so, and
Cory Rice: hopefully it's never
Julie Howton: too, too young.
Cory Rice: I think it's never too young and, and hormone.
Assessing and balancing doesn't necessarily mean going onto hormone, no replacement therapy. Oh, there's a a large subset of people that probably need that. However, the young population who's having, like you said, bad PMS, yeah. PC symptoms, endometriosis, they're having irregular cycles. A lot of this is from the way that their body's making their estrogen and the way it's metabolized down these pathways.
If you can just control for these metabolites, whether you do it through diet or. Whatever you decide you wanna do, you can control some of this so you can regulate her cycle. Yeah. So she doesn't feel so bloy and, and crampy and puffy and all these things. Yeah. There's things you can do during the menstruation or right up until the menstruation and then back off on them.
So, you know, to your point, hormone imbalance, I mean, hell, I just had an 18-year-old that has like crazy cycle stuff and the only option in the conventional world of birth control, birth control, birth control, birth control, you know, and I'm like, look, I'm like, I told the parents, I was like, I don't control birth per se, but I can help, I can help the, uh, right.
The, so, I mean, I can help, I can help the young
Julie Howton: lady, I can help her feel so
Cory Rice: bad. But you guys are gonna have to like talk about like that side of that contraception, right? That's
Julie Howton: not what we're here for. That's not right.
Cory Rice: But, um, so yeah, that's a really good point. So all ages you can have hormone.
Metabolism problems that may not affectionately mean you're on hormone replacement. Right.
Julie Howton: Yeah. And I, this is, I am not a physician, um, but my personal opinion, so I did have a hysterectomy with ectomy. There is not a seed, a TA supplement in the world that is going to protect me through the rest of my life, which I'm hoping will be long.
Um, so for, you know, I, I do think there is a time and a place where the only thing when your body's not making hormones, it, it needs you to, to get some
Cory Rice: bioidentical support. Thank, thank you so much for that. Because your audience may be similar to what I'm about to say. The, the amount of people I see that come in here, and I even have some colleagues that are very well thought of, colleagues that almost feel what I'm about to say is true.
To think that you can herbalized, supplement or feed a woman to. Reverse her osteoporosis, penia back to normal bone, avoid the decline of cognitive decline, the mild and cognitive impairment to dementia and protect her heart with herbs and with eating correctly and watching out for phytoestrogens. All that's important.
But, oh my God, good gravy. Giving her hr, giving her hormones, in my opinion, that are molecularly, you know, iso molecular to her body. Yes. But giving her something that's recognizable makes academic and common sense and also it improves her quality of life, demonstrably over what she can do by doing the herbs and the teas and things like that.
And I'm not against that. You can do that in Sure. Combination with, but it doesn't replace pure actual hormones. So thank you for saying that.
Julie Howton: I just, I am, and it is li it is literally life changing. I, James and I joke all the time because he gets to. Again, he went to medical school, so he should be the one.
He gets to prescribe hormones for people that are struggling and you know, within a week they feel amazing. And as, as the health coach, the change, you know, my, my work with them is slower, more difficult, takes more time together. It's magic. But I tell people all the time, like, if somebody stops me in an alley, they can have my wallet.
They cannot have my hormones, I will fight.
Cory Rice: Oh, that's good. That, that, that's good that, that I,
Julie Howton: it's, it's amazing. Well, I know we're supposed to be busting autoimmune mist, but I, I, I wanna bust this another myth, 'cause I hear this all the time, which is fascinating too. Do, do, is your perspective that if a woman hasn't been on hormones and she is way post-menopausal, is it ever too late to, to put a woman on hormone?
Cory Rice: So, you know, the formal societies on this would tell you to use caution and sometimes they would say to actually not do it. I would say the truth is, is, is more of the use caution. What I would say, it'd be rare for me not to consider putting a woman on hormones. Yeah. Because of my knowledge of them.
There is above a certain age, 65 ish, 62 ish, 63 ish. Above that age there is some scant literature that you are moving more, you have little, tiny bit more risk. Because the thought is if she has accumulated all this microscopic plaque and inflammation and like, you know, protein malformations in, in the brain, all these things that have happened, that by giving her HRT you might actually accelerate the process of that degeneration.
And I.
Julie Howton: I wanna know what kind of hormones they use in the study. I'm suspicious. And that's
Cory Rice: exactly right. Is is the devil is in the details. Yeah. What hormone, how is it delivered? What dose? A, a, a medicine is a poison unless you dose it, right? Correct. And so. The unfortunate reality is I keep using this term iso molecular, and your audience may understand the term bioidentical.
I'm not the biggest fan of that term because it's become more of a hype marketing kind of situation, right?
Julie Howton: Because take m just like
Cory Rice: this, right? Right. And you know, it comes with like, oh, is that real medicine? And oh, you know, all these things. Iso molecular is a very simple term. It is molecularly identical to what you've made as a woman since you started producing hormones.
And what I've made as a man since I started, and I'm
Julie Howton: not a horse. I love my horse, but I'm not one.
Cory Rice: And there's hormones out there that we get from other things, animal parts, animal urine, and blah, blah, blah. So if we can just level set and talk about just those types of hormones, those are the ones we're referring to.
The reality though is, is what the conventional world will tell you is that's all great, Dr. Rice, but there's not level one a evidence on iso molecular hormone replacement in a woman who's 63, 65 plus. Giving her health benefit. And it's back to my whole mantra before I get it. But if we wait for there to be the highest level of data, we're gonna die.
Yeah. If we wait seven years, I was gonna
Julie Howton: say, but what do you see clinically? Because I know what we'd see and no one's
Cory Rice: gonna fund that study, by the way. Yeah. So if, if your listeners waiting for that study, they'll never gonna get it because it won't be funded and it won't happen. So what we have to do is take whatever we do have, then we take a mountainous, you know, cataclysmically, high amount of clinical observation with patient input.
Period. Yeah. What is the patient like? What does the patient feel? The first thing we have to do in he healthcare is no harm. I think second thing, like immediately right behind no harm, improve these people's quality of life. Yes. Like that is not what was taught to us. Yeah. Ever. But I think it is just as, don't harm these people and improve their quality of life.
If you take that into consideration with your clinical observation and the the scant data that exists, you're gonna come up with an answer I believe that's gonna point you in a direction that the risk benefit Yeah. Is, is, is, is skewed in the way of, of benefits, uh, yeah. To these patients. And, and, and, and I think just waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting for FDA clearance or FDA, this, I mean, it's just, you know, that's a whole nother discussion too.
But you're just waiting for something that doesn't, it is, it's just not gonna happen. Yeah. So, um, you have to take what you have and make the best clinical decision you can by putting your patient first, no one else, and just listen to them. That's it. That. Yeah. And, and follow their blood work, follow their scans, follow their bone density, follow their, and just make sure that their cognition's not going down their bone density's good.
They're not having any, you know, you know, degenerative problems that you know of. And then just go, that's it.
Julie Howton: Yeah. Yeah. You know, it, it is, it's such a, thank you for that. So Well, but Sure,
Cory Rice: sure.
Julie Howton: Um, I had a client once and I was like, what is going on? She who, you know, would, I was first working with her and doing her, gathering her history and, and she had been on hormone replacement therapy until she retired, and when she retired they told her to stop.
She didn't need it anymore. I'm like,
Cory Rice: wait. Yeah. I see the well and, and maybe the type of hormone she was on. I,
Julie Howton: I, yeah. I just, but it was that whole
Cory Rice: conversation, the data beyond, you know, using that beyond a certain age maybe wasn't in, wasn't favorable. And, and in healthcare we do what we do. We, we extrapolate.
Yeah. We, we extrapolate. Conclusions from one population to another, and everyone does it, whether you're on the functional side, whether you're on the conventional side. Extrapolation is part of our reality because the, the reality is there's just not enough data. I mean, we need more data. And, and, but again, to my point, I'm not gonna wait until I'm dead to be able to know that there's a trial that proved that I knew that it could have.
I mean, that's just, that's just completely disingenuous.
Julie Howton: Yeah. Oh, well, I appreciate that. I, I feel like there is no, just like I, I don't think any one of us has one root cause.
Cory Rice: No.
Julie Howton: Um, there is no, you know, one health focus. Right. And so I don't, I don't think that all of autoimmunity is hormones.
Cory Rice: Mm-hmm.
Julie Howton: Nope.
Um, either, you know, but I, I do feel this is like a, just total non-medical, um, I, I think that hormones decline. Yes, it's a natural cycle. Um, but I, I think that what that signals to the body is you're done. Yeah. Like, we're gonna just start to break down now. And so why wouldn't we? We're living longer. Don't you wanna live?
Well, like it, it there just
Cory Rice: Right, right. Well, and, and hormones decline again, you, you have not only are hormones declining, but you have this continual accumulation of disruptors in the body that you're exposed to, whether you do it or you are just living in an ecosystem that's giving it to you. Right.
And your body is not machine-like to process metabolize and get rid and excrete these things. Yeah. And it leads to this entire inflammatory cascade that could be be like, oh my God, is that my hormones? I mean. No, I mean, your hormones are kind of happening too, but it's these other things, right? And then it goes down and hits your immune system, which, you know, 70 to 80% of it is within the lining of our intestinal wall.
And before you know it, you're getting like Swiss cheese intestinal wall that can't actually absorb or anything. And you're getting translocation of things. And before you know it, you have this whole, you know, picture of like, you can have an imbalance of estrogen and testosterone and progesterone. You have an imbalance of bacteria that feeds the immune system and bacteria that's hurting the immune system.
And it's that the term isn't hormone imbalance, it's dysbiosis, but Right. The more of that you have, it's just this whole recipe for developing autoimmune disease. And, you know, God, we can talk an hour about that, but that just the gut, I, I know a big, a big piece of it, right?
Julie Howton: Yeah. And, and I feel, uh, really strongly, I mean, I rem it's again, like you were talking about.
If you think of your intake forms from the beginning, if I think of my coaching process from the beginning, um, or, and I remember when it, you know, all of this, the gut, the gut, the gut. And I would kind of roll my, I didn't really understand. Yeah. I would roll my eyes like, oh, here we go again. Yeah. Um, but I operate under the assumption if somebody's coming, first of all to me versus just the clinic.
'cause they could be coming for something else. Um, but if someone's coming to work with me, they have autoimmunity or they have what they think is autoimmunity and hasn't been diagnosed even better, then we don't have to get rid of a label. That's great. Yeah. Um, I operate under the assumption that, that they for sure have leaky gut unless they have already done a lot of work.
And I, yes. And we test and we do things too, but I, I think it's that rampant. Like I really do believe, especially by the time you've tipped into autoimmunity
Cory Rice: mm-hmm.
Julie Howton: We know that's part of the driving process.
Cory Rice: There's no question. Um, you just talked about the maturation of your forms. It's the same with the maturation of our, our, um, acceptance of gut health as being Right.
It was, I was resistant
Julie Howton: in the beginning, like, come on. In the
Cory Rice: beginning I'm like, oh, you can go out to someone else for that and then see a
Julie Howton: gut specialist.
Cory Rice: Exactly. It evolved into an option. Okay. We have gut testing if we, if you want to do it, I mean Sure. Kind of thing. It was kind of like, just like there.
Yeah. Um, as you walked by the window, it's like, well, I guess maybe I'll check my gut, I guess. Should I do that? I mean, if you want. Um, and now it's funny, in six years and I think 19, early 20, I basically mandated at our offices in the Dallas area, I mandated that there's not a human that can establish care with us if they won't do a microbiome assessment.
Yeah. And I learned this in COVID. I said, you know, everybody came to me to help their immune system. They were getting sick or they were losing grandpa, or they were all nervous. And I said, how can I possibly address this if I don't even know what you're doing? Right? I can tell you about food and what to eat and blah, blah, blah, but, but one of my mentors in this space, I'll give him the credit where credit's due.
He said one time he said, you know, you need to understand it's not the food's fault. When the gut is off and it's not sealed and it is just not producing or productive and it's not getting what it needs. It doesn't matter what you eat. These people are gonna be sick. It doesn't matter if they eat healthy or they eat crappy.
Yeah, they're going to be bad. Now when you fix the gut, heal the gut, seal the gut, and you sort of like, you know, kill what needs to be killed and, and whatever's overgrowth or undergrowth, you sort of correct those imbalances. You help feed the diversity and you do all of that, then it becomes the food's fault.
If their gut is working well and you start eating inflammatory foods, they'll have reactions. So that was really, really helpful to me. 'cause I realized, you know, it's not, yeah, I guess it's not really, if I don't go after the gut first, I all bets are off. You know what I mean? It's a service. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So that's, that's the evolution of us. Now. There's not a human and we're probably gotta be the number one in Texas. I mean, there's, I can't be any, I can't imagine there's anybody else. We do seven or eight a day. I mean, there's a lot. And I like a, I do a three day, uh, stool collection to, okay,
Julie Howton: I know
Cory Rice: which one you're using.
Then increase accuracy. Yeah. I like uhhuh. I like, I like the company, I like the customer service. I like the data. So reproducible, it's so reproducible. Patient response, you know. So, yeah.
Julie Howton: Um, which, and, and again, it takes a certain kind of patient. It's, there used to be such a resistance to I have to do what, I have to collect my poop.
I know, I know. And now, you know, I, I guess that is the, that that's the positive of the progression of the, the information getting out there. People know that they, they need to,
Cory Rice: yeah. And luckily they don't usually see us for that second visit till like three to four weeks after the specimen's been submitted.
So I always come in and I'm like. So, have you slept since? So how, how's your therapy been going? And they always, yeah. And it's always a good icebreaker for your, but um, it's just between them and their bathroom. That's all I tell them. Just between you. Right. Nobody sees it. Yeah. Yeah. So, but it's an important test.
Important.
Julie Howton: It is. Lots and lots of, of information. And I love that you highlighted because, you know, for so many self fixers mm-hmm. Um, you know, people wonder why the needle's not not moving. And I'm, I'm, you know, eating all the good things. And, and I, I've worked with so many people who have sensitivities to the healthiest foods you can name, because they're just pouring those healthy foods into a really leaky gut and creating it.
I mean, it, it just, you gotta, you gotta heal it. I know. It, it seems, uh. Uh, you know, a little like, uh, really more gut, but
Cory Rice: yeah. But it really is, it really is.
Julie Howton: It, it is.
Cory Rice: These people that are, they're listening right now. I know you are, that you're feel like you can't eat anything. Yeah. Nothing ever works.
You'd eat it, you get hives, you just, you, you throw, drain it like nothing. If you don't have that gut checked, then you're gonna just keep going on and on and on and on and on and on, and do the same thing. And like Einstein said, do the same thing over and on. You're gonna get the same results. I mean, it's just, it's just, you know what I mean?
So, yeah.
Julie Howton: It's so true. So do you have, are there any autoimmune myths that you wanna bust that we haven't touched on yet? That are, that are like, you know, urgent? Yeah.
Cory Rice: Yeah. So I think, you know, not, it's not rare is, is, is critical. I think the other big one here is, and, and I'm gonna come back to this a little, but so many of these autoimmune patients need.
More hope than just an infusion.
Julie Howton: Mm-hmm.
Cory Rice: Or a medicine that may or may not bring side effects. Those are, just so we know, the conventional approach to the autoimmune treatment, thank you. Yep. Is to suppress the treatment, is to suppress the immune system so that you don't react so inflammatory to whatever the disease is.
So rheumatoid arthritis and lupus, and Sjogren's and blah, blah, blah. You're on these, you're on these compounds to make your immune system suppressed so that it equally suppresses the inflammation. So maybe you don't have as much dry mouth or dry eyes, or joint pains or rashes or you know, whatever that is, right.
Or fatigue, whatever it is. But when you do that, you also expose yourself to not just side effects, but you expose yourselves to opportunistic infections from whatever virus, fungus, and yeast and bacteria, and you name it. So. Doing that is, is one approach. The other approach is to actually ramp up the immune system, heal it from the inside out.
Cool. The inflammation down through different means that you can do and create a sustainable way of gut health and immune system support so that you don't have to manifest these symptoms anymore. And you're hope, hopefully, whoever's listening to this needs to understand you can fix these problems.
Mm-hmm. Uh, it doesn't, and sometimes you can use both, honestly, there's conventional ways. Sure. And then other way, you know, and it doesn't have to be an either or in every proposition, but the hope and the myth that needs to be busted is that you cannot fix, you cannot cure, you cannot reverse, let's say an a NA.
You can't reverse Hashimoto's. You can't reverse, let's say, you know, someone who has multiple sclerosis. I've probably got 10 multiple sclerosis patients. It's gone. Yeah. Like now whether that was the right diagnosis is a different, for a different time. Yeah. But the neurologist who actually diagnosed them with that, do whatever they did before and say whatever that was, whether it's an MRI or lesions or scores or validated question, it's changed.
And that to me, I would not have believed what I just said 10 years ago. Right. That you can fix these conditions that the, that that people are living with. And the pro, the, the, the point is, is that you, in, in some cases you can, I don't know if across the board you can, you can fix every single one of them, but you can, you can give a meaningful quality of life to people that oftentimes Yes.
Don't have one, you know? Yeah,
Julie Howton: absolutely. And I mean, so, so, so much of the autoimmune experiences, life gets smaller and smaller and smaller. And so every bit of healing allows people. To expand life back out and, you know, be just, you know, whatever. Uh, uh ha Even just to have the energy, the energetic resources to, to be the better mother, the better wife, the better coach, physician business, whatever it is, um, yeah, it, it really does make an impact.
And then back to that ripple effect, right? Is why you love working with providers. Because it, it's, we, we, that's how this whole mess that we call, you know, not, not modern medicine, sorry. That's a good thing. And that's, that's why I named my business stuff. I know. I love
Cory Rice: it. I wanna redefine it.
Julie Howton: Yeah. Because it's just medicine.
It's just good medicine.
Cory Rice: Yeah. It, it really is. And, and yeah. And we've mentioned it, but the providers themselves, I do feel are good people. It's just, its just Absolutely. System has been. It turned upside down in a way that doesn't put the patient first. Well, how much? There's no other way to say it other than that.
Julie Howton: Yeah. And you're a, do, how much nutrition training did you get in medical school?
Cory Rice: So, none. None in medical school. Um, I actually went to an MD residency, uh, and, and, but I, I, we didn't get into personal like what hap but, but I had health struggles, uh, no question about it. Years ago, I wasn't who I was now, and I was highly medicated for different things and I was just following the conventional path and Right.
And I did some genetic testing on myself. I've never met actually my biological father. So once I did some. Genetic testing, realized I'm dealing with a lot from someone I hadn't met. I sort of restructured my entire life, diet, everything around sort of that, um, and, and sort of follow up a fairly simplistic pattern.
Um, and I became medication free within six months and haven't looked back. I haven't been on one since. Woo. And so, you know. Yeah. And it's been great. And I feel like that day or that six months, I changed the trajectory of my Alzheimer's Ms. Crohn's colitis, um, dementia. Cancer risk. I think everything changed.
Yeah. When I learned, and if that's the singular gift I could give to patients, is change the trajectory of where you're going. You will never know if you would've had cancer. You will never know if you would've had Parkinson's. You will never know. But that's a risk that I'm willing for you to take because Yeah.
You don't know. You know what I mean? And that's, we don't have the luxury of knowing if you would've developed this. So you do have to put faith in this. But, but I strongly feel my personal trajectory was changed that hopefully one of these days I don't get one of those things because of all of that I learned about myself.
Julie Howton: Yeah. And God forbid, you, do you have the resilience, like you've given your body that opportunity? A
Cory Rice: hundred percent. Yeah.
Julie Howton: Um, which I wanted, you said it earlier, but I, that, you know, wanna re-highlight, you know, genetics can predispose us, but that shouldn't be taken as a sentence or doom and gloom. It's an opportunity of like, it's like an arrow.
Like, oh, let's make sure we mitigate this risk.
Cory Rice: Yep. I'm, uh, the believer that 8% of our health trajectory is determined by mother and father. 92% is literally determined by you. Yeah. And what you do, how you breathe, how you drink, how you poop, how you sleep, how you exercise, how you eat, how you use hot therapy, how you use cold therapy.
How do you detox? Do you detox? Like these are things if you, how do you
Julie Howton: connect and relate?
Cory Rice: A hundred percent. If you do those things, that 8% is gonna be squashed into the ground and it won't even matter. Because like I tell patients, I was like, I don't know. We, I probably have cancer in my body right now, but luckily I think I have a machine Right.
That just turns it over and I never know. And, and I wanna create the same for you. This isn't dissimilar. So, you know that that's really, and and that's a big part. If you're a doctor that does this or a provider that does this, you gotta walk the walk, you talk. Right, right. Um, if you don't, I mean, come on, this is this.
That's crazy. So, yeah.
Julie Howton: Absolutely. Uh. So much good stuff. Amazing, amazing. This is the, don't even be
Cory Rice: longer than what you said.
Julie Howton: I know. I knew it was gonna be good. Now, outcome, the hardest part of the interview, not for me, but for you, what is one step that listeners can take starting today
Cory Rice: to improve their health?
One step today? Oh my gosh, there's so much you could do. Oh, so. Here is probably the best piece of advice I can find. I can tell 'em if they don't have a health advocate that they have found they need to find someone. Because if they're not a doctor or a prescriber or they don't have a prescriber or doctor who even remotely sounds like this or talks like this or has some way of testing like this, they must find them.
Because I think one of the biggest, there's a lot of problems, but one of the biggest ones is access to what I'm talking about. Right. People like, I mean, how do you broadcast this? How do you, um. How do you commercialize this? How do you market this? It's, it's, it's all word of mouth in my world. Right? And, and I will be the first to tell you it is absolutely not about Dr.
Rice. This is about all prescribers understanding the calling we have and, and the opportunity we have. So my biggest piece of advice is to try to find someone, however. I mean, listen, I, there's different places you can go to to try to find someone like me. Um, but you've gotta find someone who's your, who's your health, who's your health advocate.
Um, you know, there's a lot more there that I would wanna say about, you know, hydration and bowel movements and, um, you know, like a sauna and a sauna addict, and that's a whole nother world. But I don't survive today without that. So, um, you know, there's a lot of resilient behaviors I think that are super important.
Exercise the perfect prescription too, for anything. Um, so there's a lot I could talk about that. It's really hard for me to find one thing,
Julie Howton: but it's, I I said it is, it's a tough thing. Get your
Cory Rice: gut tested. Get your gut tested. That's what, oh,
Julie Howton: there we go.
Cory Rice: That's another one. Do a third party stool analysis.
I'm not talking about a guac or a Cologuard.
Julie Howton: Oh, no, no, you're right. Function. Thank you. A
Cory Rice: functional stool analysis. That would be my number one piece of advice. Have that done.
Julie Howton: All right. He is a believer. See the evolution, right? From like, oh gosh. Got, but yeah. Amazing. And for people that are listening on the go and they're not gonna check out the links in the show notes, where is the best place to find out more about you or your, your clinic, modern medicine?
Cory Rice: Yeah. So, uh, you know, our website, my modern medicine.com, um, is, is, is there, there's links. They're to things I've done. Um, I know I've gotten, there's assets out there, different webinars I've done, and I don't even look at these things. But I, I do a lot of material just 'cause I just, I absolutely love to talk and I love to disseminate information that I think is very usable.
Um, and so, I don't know, I fool the wool over people's eyes, but apparently they want me to do that too. So I have other things out there, like, um, just these organizations I'm a part of, um, you know, the, the hormone, um, company I teach for and, and honestly advise at a very high level, uh, is called Biot. And, and it's just made up of almost 10,000 prescribers.
And it's an extremely, um, blessed honor to be able to teach my colleagues because they forced me to learn at a very, very high level. So, so worry. You gotta be on your game. Exactly. So I'm through modern medicine and, and, and really through, through them as well. So that's probably the best way to access me if there was, if, if somebody needed to actually access me.
Julie Howton: Perfect. And, and there's lots of, lots of good stuff on, on the clinic website as well. And, um, I encourage people to check it out and, and understand, you know, there's a, a team there, right. So that's a team
Cory Rice: that's not just about me. Yeah. You, you're only as good as the team. You're only as good as your team.
But
Julie Howton: I can see why people want you to, to continue talking to us. So I so appreciate your wisdom, your perspective, your time, um, and, and most of all the, the hope that you share with listeners, um, because I, I totally agree with you that that is, to me, that's the first step in healing. Mm-hmm. So thank you.
Cory Rice: You're very welcome. And I meant what I said. I wanna hear your story sometime.
Julie Howton: I will share it. I talk too. So
Cory Rice: thank you so much, Julie.
Julie Howton: Thank you for everyone listening. Remember, you can get those show notes and transcripts by visiting Inspired Living Do Show. I hope you had a great time and enjoyed this episode as much as I did.
I'll see you next week.
Julie Howton: Welcome back to the Inspired Living with Autoimmunity podcast. I'm your host, Julie Houghton, and today we're joined by Dr. Corey Rice, the Chief Clinical Advisor and Medical Advisory Board member at. The owner of Modern Medicine Clinic where he provides patients with personalized, progressive, comprehensive medical care.
Dr. Rice's background is internal medicine, but he now practices functional medicine and lifestyle medicine. His clinical expertise lies in most areas of chronic disease and ultimately the treatment and reversal of some of the more commonly encountered conditions in clinical practice today, I. In this episode, we are debunking the most common myths surrounding autoimmunity.
Corey, welcome to the podcast.
Cory Rice: Thank you, Julie. Thanks for having me.
Julie Howton: I am so excited for you to share your expertise and just have been looking forward to debunking autoimmune myths together. Um, but first I would love for the listeners that aren't familiar with you yet, I would love to know, I know you started out like forensic science, right?
So how do you get from forensic science to practicing what I consider just good medicine treatment, but what wellness medicine, um, true prevention?
Cory Rice: Yeah. So thanks for the opportunity to give you that background.
Interestingly, I wouldn't have thought back when I was in forensic science that I certainly would've ended up treating live humans.
So back in. Gosh, the late nineties, uh, 2000, I was the first graduate from, uh, Baylor University, uh, with a degree in forensic science.
So I went into healthcare and honestly, same idea. I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do, so I went into internal medicine, uh, did that for a little bit, did inpatient critical care. And so, at the time, I took a leap of faith years ago, and I, I, I just. Started to learn different modalities of healthcare that I was not exposed to in formal grad graduate medical education.
And so that led me to a world of, uh, functional medicine. And, and I'm sure you and your audience are quite familiar with that. Um, for those that aren't functional medicine, really, it's just taking, taking a a, a phenotype, a, a body that potentially is, is dysfunctional or, or not operating appropriately and literally putting the pieces back together in a root cause way, um, oftentimes without pharmacologic need, just so they can have their life back.
And so long story. But that's really where I started and that's kind of where I am now and what I do.
Julie Howton: Amazing. As you were talking, I was thinking about a text I got from somebody I worked with a year ago who's a nurse.
Um, and it was photos from some things phy, you know, mountain climbing, things she did this summer that she, you know, couldn't have done had she not gotten her life back. And, and it's like, yes, this is why we do it.
Cory Rice: Yeah.
Julie Howton: So I wanna start with, because you mentioned root causes and functional medicine, and I'm talking about puzzle pieces. You know, let's talk about that myth of finding your singular root cause.
Cory Rice: Sure. And I appreciate that. And maybe offline sometime, I'd love to hear your personal story because everybody's got one.
Oh, yeah. And I think, yeah. I become a better physician when I listen to people's. Personal stories because nobody has the same story. Right. Nobody has the same data, nobody has the same set of patterns that got them to where they're in front of me now. Yeah. Um, but I think there's a reason we're talking, but regardless.
Sure. To this, you know, and, and on the root cause side, you know, basically speaking, if, if someone comes in and they've got a diagnosis from a doctor or a set of doctors that they don't understand, they don't like, they aren't accepting for whatever reason, denial, or they just truly don't believe it, um, I'm the kind of guy that's like, I'm so, Hmm.
I would say confident in how we treat patients, that you can take everything we do and go to 10 different docs. I stand by the opinion we have because you have to be confident in what you do and with, with this type of medicine. People just need hope. I mean, this may be a lot of your listeners listen, listening to Sure.
You Go down this path and I and I will tell, be the first to tell you. I do not think doctors by any means the conventional medical machine. These are not not bad people
No. At all.
These are great people.
Julie Howton: I say it all the time. I'm, you know, I'm married to a physician. There you go. Nobody goes into medicine to, to do anything but help people.
Cory Rice: A hundred percent. Yeah. And, and the machine that we were fed into is one that was really not of our constructing. Right. It's just where we find ourselves and we won't get off on those tangents, but that's an entirely different, it's
Julie Howton: a, it's another episode of how, how do we, the system. Yeah. It's
Cory Rice: absolutely another episode.
So, you know, the idea of root cause is if you come in and you tell me, let's just use exam if you have Hashimoto's or whatever, who doesn't? Yeah, no, that's a great, that's another great point. 'cause in my world, basically everybody does. Yeah. But if you have that, you know, it's not that you just woke up one day.
This antibody's attacking a gland and Right. That's just how it is. There's a reason that happened. And the milieu of reasons can be anything from, um, you know, neurotransmitter related, hormone related. It can be complete living in a world that is just unfortunately toxic, polluted, the soil's been adulterated.
Everything is just different from our grandparents and, and, uh, yeah, sometimes parents and how, what they played in and what they ate from that, you're just set up with potentially a, a perfect storm to acquire something and have a body that goes awry and the name of autoimmune disease or Hashimoto's.
You combine onto that a genetic. Something pre dispositionally relieved for that. Then it's just this perfect storm. So to me, whatever the fill in the blank diagnosis is from MS to whatever. Mm-hmm. You, you have, you've been given this label, that's fine. You can choose to go the conventional route and that's your choice.
I don't judge choices if you want to go that route, awesome. I'm always here for you if you want to have an opinion or another one, or an additional one or whatever, and or you choose a, a path in which you can potentially. Reroute the body and the trajectory of your health in a way that is not going down the path of where these diseases go to.
And so that's through the root cause. And to develop and decide what the root cause is. I, my opinion is you have to do a lot of data. Yes. I mean, data drives everything instead of just empirically guessing. Right. Um, I'm probably a very good guesser because I've seen so much pathology and so much pattern.
I mean, really what I feel like I do, and what a lot of functional people do is we're just pattern recognition specialists. We're just, but you're
Julie Howton: a good listener. You said it already. You know a, I think it's the most healing thing for a patient to sit down and be heard by a physician. You start that healing process from that first contact.
Cory Rice: You could not be more true. And that's our providers at our, at our office. And I mean, it's, it's, it's imperative that that first encounter, you make a connection that is almost a life bond. Yeah. And you do that by listening and you basically, you, you let them tell, I mean, as much history as they want. Um, this is the cadence in which we do things is you start with me, you start with my functional health coach and we are getting a, a.
History. We wanna know your past. Yeah. But the moment you leave my practice and you come back for that data reveal party, which is that second visit. Mm-hmm. The past is last and our whole focus Yeah. Is on the future. But we have to collect the past so, you know, we care. Um, and you know that it's important to us because that is massively important.
'cause that really closes the gap between a therapeutic bond and an adversarial bond between patient and physician. Yeah. They know you care. And I mean it, when I said it a minute ago, the one deficiency I feel like is so pervasive in this human race. The deficiency is not, um, any organic or biologic. It is hope.
Yeah. I mean, the hopelessness that exists in this country, when someone is given. A myriad of these autoimmune diagnoses. I just, I hear it all the time and it's, it's heartbreaking that they don't understand there's a better life out there if, if you have access to someone that can help you potentially acquire that life.
So, um,
Julie Howton: I, I really, speaking of hope, I really hope that, you know, even for the people that are, are in that allopathic western system and maybe referred out to a rheumatologist, I look forward to the day when they are not told that there is no hope. I was told there was no hope by my physician that, you know, they would try to keep me comfortable, right.
For and slow the, there was no like, let's turn this around. You know, you're young, let's kick it now. No. Um, and so I think that that's why I have these conversations because, but, but I really, the ultimate goal, 'cause I'm a dream.
Cory Rice: Is
Julie Howton: that, that, that those conversations are taking place, you know, with primary care docs, with specialties with it, that someone does.
It's not, it's not the functional medicine perspective, it's just truth, like the body is designed to heal.
Cory Rice: No question. I would tell you one of the most rewarding experiences in my life. Is having rheumatologist as patients, um, endocrinologist.
Julie Howton: Mine unfortunately passed away about seven years ago, sadly, you know,
Cory Rice: and, and I, you know, and again, I I don't, I'm not making this about me in a braggadocious way.
I'm making this about me in a very realistic sense, so your audience understands what I see every single day. Yeah. And I'm very fortunate to tell you that there's a significant amount of my patients, and I mean, we're talking tens of thousands of people we treat that are prescribers, um, physicians at different times.
And the reason is, yeah. Um, I do a lot of teaching and I think what ends up happening is, is, is when a colleague sees another colleague who's, who's fairly well educated, but doesn't come across as like, holier than thou, or, I know more whatever. Sure. You know, I'm one of you and I, I just found my way to this, and if you, if you ever want to learn more, great, I'm here for you.
If not, not a problem. A lot of them just establish, but that's the greatest thing when I get one of these docs who is, I understand they're not gonna go back to their clinic and necessarily. Do this, but if they want this for their own health, that tells you something. Right. You know what I mean? Yeah. And those are just like awesome moments.
I never, I never disempower those people, I them to try and find a way in which they can help their patients and augment what they're already doing with some of the things they've learned through their own health. Right. That's kind of the way I
Julie Howton: Absolutely. Well, and th this will lead us to myth number two.
Well done. Um, and they're not in any order other than in my head. Um, th this idea, and even back when I was diagnosed in my early thirties, you know, it was, oh, you're so young and, and this is rare. Mm-hmm. Right? Growing up, I didn't know people with autoimmune conditions. Um, so there it goes. Your genetic theory right there.
Um, but so the most, at some point, most physicians are going to have. You know, either themselves a loved one, somebody they really care about struggling with one of these chronic illnesses. And, and so the more exposure to the truth that the body, you know, can actually do its thing and, and these are the things we look at, like you said, it doesn't mean they're gonna convert their practice to a functional medicine practice.
Right, right. But, um, I, I said we, we had a new patient come in recently whose, whose primary care said, you have autoimmune, you need to go find a functional medicine doc. And I said, I want the name of that primary care.
Cory Rice: Yeah,
Julie Howton: because that's a good doctor.
Cory Rice: A hundred percent.
Julie Howton: Yeah. You
Cory Rice: know, you're, the world has changed and, and, and, yes.
I, I actually am very, I'm pretty young, relatively speaking, but 10 years ago, what I'm telling you now would not be true, but today, just yesterday, yeah. Oh, yeah. I had two patients referred into the practice by a, a provider within 20 miles, who 10 years ago would never have done that. But what's happening is, is they're hearing about it.
They're seeing other people come back and they're like, that guy. And what they do over there is. Incredible. And now, and that, that, that kind of thing is new, then it's not gonna go away. Right? That's an impenetrable force field that won't go away. I mean, that's gonna continue to be a pattern. You mentioned something about rarity of these conditions.
Julie Howton: Yeah. So are they rare?
Cory Rice: I mean, rare is relative, I would say in my world, no. In most functional medicine world, no. But if you check it, you're gonna find it. And one of the biggest problems in healthcare is we don't, in my opinion, yeah, we don't screen people appropriately no matter what. If they're an NFL professional athlete or they're sick and they have six months to live, we aren't screening people and catching things early.
You and I both understand this, your husband does for sure. Early detection is the name of the game in this country. Yeah. We will lose the battle if we wait until something is found at the very end and then they think we're gonna hop in and be able to like put that genie back in the bottle. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
The body has a way of doing a tipping point where you spill over. It is gonna be very difficult to fix that completely. You have to early detect. So the standard of care is not to screen every human for autoimmunity. Right. The standard of my care is because I want to find Yeah, us too. Fix things early.
Yeah. And so when you say rare, I'll just, the, the stats are simple. Five to 10% they say of the world is autoimmune or the us So whatever that puts that at, if that's one in 10 people are autoimmune. You know, 80% of that population are female. So it's like an 80 20 kind of percent women to men. Um, in, in my life, in my clinic, I mean at least a third, if not a half of people that present have some autoimmune condition.
Now, the devil's in the details of what I just said. Does that mean they have positive blood markers to associate them having an autoimmune disease? Not necessarily. Right. Some of these people just have scalp psoriasis. Some people just have eczema. Some people just have like super bad allergies with high eosinophils and these other things where I'm like, you're so allergic.
And you're so, like, I make a living off seeing people that are allergic to life. Okay. Right. These people are sensitive to every thing, but yet they don't have on the paper or something. I look at mm-hmm. Definitive diagnosis and I'm like, yeah, but it's coming. Like it will come. Right. If we don't stop. Also,
Julie Howton: data's really important.
Labs. Deep dive labs are important, but I'm assuming you're treating people and not results on a paper.
Cory Rice: That's why my, uh, that's why my, I think my tagline on my website is we treat people not disease. Um, you know? Yeah. And what I say, what I say in the offices. I'm gonna go through a lot on paper here, but I treat people not paper.
Yeah. You just have to know what's on the paper. And I'm like, good. You know what? This paper is only as good as the next one we do. Yeah. Because right now I've got you at a snapshot in time. Right. And if I can do what I know, I, and the other thing that I say, and I'm, you know, I don't mean to get tangential here, but I think this is critical.
If you're a prescriber listening to this, if you are constantly bringing your A game to these patients constantly, you're just, you're, you know, you're, you're, you're, you know what you're doing. You're creating these, these pathways and, and all of these things that you know are gonna work, but they continually bring a C game to you or a D game.
Mm-hmm. And they're not ready and they don't have the behavioral change. Yeah. That I know al medicine health coaches can talk you through and they can't do the habitual changes and all. If you don't have that, you're gonna divorce. And so the first thing I tell patients in the room is, this isn't a, this isn't, this isn't, this is just a relationship 1 0 1.
If you bring to me your commitment, your a game, your trust, your faith, some of this faith's gonna be blind 'cause you don't even know me yet. But you're gonna do, if you do these things and I bring my A game, it's an infallible model. You cannot leave here feeling worse. You cannot. But if you bring a c commitment to an a, you know, facilitator Yeah.
It's not me. Like we are not gonna, it's not gonna work. So I'm just telling you, if you're not ready, totally fine. We're here when you are. But let's not waste each other's time. And maybe that's little too direct, but to me, life's too short. Yeah. And a lot suffering patients out there, you need to be, you need to be honest with them.
'cause if they're ready to feel better, which sounds crazy, people on your audience are like, why wouldn't someone be ready to feel better? Yeah. But if you are telling 'em to change this and change this, yeah. They're like, I'm not ready for this. You know?
Julie Howton: Absolutely. And I do think some of it is conditioning.
It used to be, you know, and, and obviously I still value the wisdom of, of a good physician. Um, but it used to, it used to be like the, the doctor's the expert on you. And, and, and even just, if you look at the, the Western, you know, diagnosis. Prescription. Right. There was no active participation expected.
Right. Right. From those of us who wanted to get better.
Cory Rice: Right. Right. And
Julie Howton: so I I do, I love that you brought that up because it, it, it is, we have it in our new patient paperwork that they have to sign. Like, if, if you're not here to participate in your health, we're not the place to turn.
Cory Rice: It's funny how your new patient paperwork evolves as the maturation of your business and your Right.
Your practice does. Because yeah, if you could look back and if I could look at back at my first new patient forms, I would laugh so hard because, and then you see it's, it's like a book you could write and then what it is now is like, it's going through like every scenario of what would happen and it's just like, oh my God.
So you're so funny. Yeah. We have something similar. Uh, yeah. But it, but it
Julie Howton: is, you know, if someone's looking for s like I, I believe that that not only does this model of medicine, which to me is just good medicine work, not only does it work, you know, but it, but it requires participation. There's no magic wand.
Cory Rice: Yeah.
Julie Howton: Um, and so, you know, I love that you highlight that, and you're right, most people that are, that are listening to this are already on that. You know, what can I do? I, I, I'm wanna take the steps. Um,
Cory Rice: sure.
Julie Howton: What you, you, when we're talking about how, you know, so I think we've debunked autoimmunity is no longer rare.
No. Um, but you brought up the, the ratio, you know, which actually is almost getting worse, I think. Um, why do you think it's women are so much more affected than men?
Cory Rice: Yeah. Thank you for the question. This is a Dr. Rice theory. This is not
Julie Howton: Yep.
Cory Rice: I, my placebo controlled, nor is this database driven literature matrix that I'm about to tell you.
This is based on lots of clinical observation, which I do believe is actually very important in healthcare. It's not just about Mable placebo.
Julie Howton: Yeah. Not, you can't, you can't do those studies on everything. Yeah.
Cory Rice: Here, here's, here's the truth about women, and this is, this is, um, you're
Julie Howton: amazing.
Cory Rice: Well, I was about to go there.
Women are incredibly resilient and amazing. Creations. And what I mean by that is they were designed to take on so much in their lives. I don't, I'm sure you know this, but I'll just say it as a man, the childbirth process and having children, not just the actual physical part, right. But a woman, after she has one baby, her autoimmune risk goes through the roof.
And Dr. Rice's opinion is these children, you are literally giving your life to that baby that's growing inside of you. Yeah. And if you have more of them, you're giving more of your life. And why do That's one. Sentinel event that I feel like starts to lead them down a path where they could potentially trigger something that happens on the autoimmune side.
Because women, unfortunately, with hormonal decline, mm-hmm. With childbearing years and being completely exposed to a very polluted environment that's full of not just polluted air and water and soil, but people. So when you're polluting yourself with all of this, how do you thrive? How do you, how are you optimized?
How can you do any resilient behaviors as a woman who's juggling. All the things that she juggles. Men are very linear, very simple. Yeah. Like there's not a complex thing here. So why I think women get this so much is they though they're built on resiliency because of childbearing. I don't know that they're built enough.
They haven't evolved yet enough to deal with their resilient behaviors they need to have within their body to fight off all of these challenges that affect their immune system. The amount of Hashimoto's, none of it Prior to pregnancy? Yeah, all of it. I mean, that's just like night. I see this over and over and over.
So one of the reasons is women. That's one. The other one is women. God bless them, tell you everything. Um, men tell you. I mean, they're like, you're not as
Julie Howton: simple as you think, but Yeah, I get it. Yeah. So
Cory Rice: I test all these women. Yeah. Because they want to know why they are this way or, and it takes a man 10 years to figure out they are this way.
Like women already know, needs to be told a bunch of times. Like, no, nope, something's wrong, something's not right, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. And so I'm like, okay, well let's test, you know, so maybe it's just a set of both the realities they face as a female, but then the fact that they are so self-aware that they may find someone like me or you and you're like, okay, let's test.
And sure enough, you find it. If you look for it, you're gonna find it. So, you know, that's my theory on this. Mm-hmm. But that's why I'm seeing it. I feel like so much. Um, but there are these men out there that come in. I just had last week. It was insane. I've seen his wife. For years. Horrible Hashimoto's, as well as another concomitant autoimmune disease.
They had the worst fertility challenges you can name. Sure. She finally was able to have a baby and it was done through, you know, healing her from the inside out, restoring her gut health and all the things. Right. And, and all of that took a while. But her antibodies came down, her thyroid function was good.
And she was able to conceive. He finally, she was like, can you just go and just get your labs checked? Just go, like, he had no ma no problems. He comes in, he's like, I'm just here. 'cause she told me to. Right. So he comes in, we get the data. I was like, oh my God. He had four autoimmune diseases and they were at very high burdens.
Like they were high levels of these things. Mm-hmm. And I finally, when he came in, I went down and I had his wife come too. And I was like, listen man. Your life's about to change. I mean, but you didn't even know, right? You told me you think you feel good. I don't think you even know what good is.
Julie Howton: Yeah. We're about to figure it out.
'cause how, how do you know if you know what I mean? Like how can you tell what somebody else's good is?
Cory Rice: When.
Julie Howton: Yeah. And exactly, and most, most people, and, and I'm not even talking about people with autoimmune challenges, most people don't know what optimize feels like,
Cory Rice: and they surround themselves with the tribe that they've chosen to surround themselves with.
And guess what? The tribe feels the same way you do. Right? So what guess what You all feel what? Normal.
Julie Howton: Yeah.
Cory Rice: Well, I mean, it just becomes the cyclical process to when 10 years later someone finally says, go see this person. Yeah. You get data done. So I don't know if that answer or helps you, but that, I mean, that is definitely a reality.
I see. Well,
Julie Howton: I would, yeah. And I, I, I think those of us that are in this world, we, we form opinions, you know? Um, and I, but you did, I do wanna follow the thread of one of the, and I, and I love because yes, you're a physician and you're very intelligent and compassionate. Um, but you're also, man, so I love that you included the, you know, to toxic people and, and the stressors of, I'll add to, I think all of that we could manage if we were ever taught from a young age as females, that it's not selfish to prioritize our, our health.
Right. Hundred percent. That the oxygen mask definitely does need to go on mom first.
Cory Rice: Yes. But
Julie Howton: we, we don't learn that until we crash.
Cory Rice: Yep.
Julie Howton: Typically, at least that, you know, that's most of the people I work with, and that was my, my experience as well. But I, I also think hor our hormones have, have to have something to do with it.
Um, as somebody who also works with, you know, dementia reversal and prevention, again, take Alzheimer's and women to men. So I, I really think, um, that, that. Hormone dysregulation, I'll say, and that, and I'll then let the expert say what he thinks that means. Yeah. Um, really plays a big part. And I, I believe that that's why childbirth, you know, tends we get these big fluctuations.
Our immune system is so brilliant. I mean, we get to tamp things down to grow another person. Yep. Right. And our body knows like, don't attack baby, don't attack baby.
Cory Rice: Mm-hmm.
Julie Howton: Um, but all of those beautiful changes can be that tipping point for, for some of us.
Cory Rice: No question. And that was very eloquently said, women face hormonal challenges, not just when they're 45.
Right. 55. Right. These things start hormones decline. Naturally in their early twenties and then precipitously, late thirties, early forties. Naturally, if you combine that with stress, you combine that with sleep deprivation, you combine that with childbearing, you combine that with poor diet, you combine that with alcohol, you then you're gonna have a compounded problem with hormones.
And so in the world that I function in hormone, uh, I guess hormone assessing and then potentially optimization mm-hmm. With therapy or not, is a critical piece to avoiding age related disease. And I don't mean to be redundant, but, but repetition's, the mother of learning. I guess if you check it early, you can start to fix things early, waiting until a woman is 65 years or older to initiate or even consider initiating hormones.
It makes no intellectual or educational sense or, or even just, you know, common sense because these things are declining quickly. And if you ask a woman, are you, do you have more brain fog? Do you have less energy? Are you and I, I mean, I'm just saying it, I'm not judging. I'm just saying, are you more doy?
Are you more fluffy? Are you losing your firmness? Are you not sleeping well? Have your desire. I tell my
Julie Howton: husband not to say dewy by the way.
Cory Rice: Have your, have you, uh, are you, are you losing interest in like everything that you know in your, in your life, right? Yeah. Your desires are down. These are things that are like very natural that you don't have to wait for.
And, and so to tie in the immune system side, estrogen, progesterone and testosterone are immune modulating compounds. They will do something to affect the immune system, whether that's at the inflammatory cascade side with like inflammation and, and IE joint pain or lubrication or whatever. All of that inflammatory milieu that happens in the hormone naive patient, meaning they've lost, you know, their hormones, or they don't have any, or let's say they don't have their uterus and they're just, they have no hormones at all and their ovaries were taken out as well.
These are big problems because that's where cog cognitive decline accelerates. That's where sarcopenia or losing muscle accelerates. That's where bone loss, all the things that you don't want. And to say that all of that isn't in some way tied to an immune system that decides to start attacking you would be disingenuous because it's an environment in which the body will turn against itself.
You've literally just put the. Put it on the T and you're about to hit the ball and it's, it's, I mean, it's going to happen. Yeah. So hormones are critically important to assess at any age. Just to see certain aspects of it doesn't mean you have to be on hormones, but you need to start checking a timeline of what's happening and then doing a wonderful history of what's happening and be able to ask the right questions, some of which are a little sensitive, some of which are a little private.
But that's okay. You need to know these things because honestly, who else are you gonna talk to these other, if you can't talk to your daughter, who else can you talk
Julie Howton: to? Yeah.
Cory Rice: So, well,
Julie Howton: and I love that you highlight that at any age, because a, again, as a woman and, and I have a daughter, and, um, I know I. Kind of the thinking when I was younger and you know, in teens, twenties, it was like, what?
I had friends that had horrible, horrible cycles. You know, I can now I know what was going on with them, but you know, we were just taught, that's part of being a woman. Um, and so a lot of these imbalances can, can be, can be lifelong, you know, oh, somebody will say, oh, my cycles are fine. And then you ask specific questions, right?
Well, do you have bad PMS breast tenderness, heavy cycle, you know, all the things, the cramps, the pain. They're like, yeah, that's normal. I've had it my whole life.
Cory Rice: A hundred percent.
Julie Howton: And those are the women that are gonna end up in your office, you know, so, and
Cory Rice: hopefully it's never
Julie Howton: too, too young.
Cory Rice: I think it's never too young and, and hormone.
Assessing and balancing doesn't necessarily mean going onto hormone, no replacement therapy. Oh, there's a a large subset of people that probably need that. However, the young population who's having, like you said, bad PMS, yeah. PC symptoms, endometriosis, they're having irregular cycles. A lot of this is from the way that their body's making their estrogen and the way it's metabolized down these pathways.
If you can just control for these metabolites, whether you do it through diet or. Whatever you decide you wanna do, you can control some of this so you can regulate her cycle. Yeah. So she doesn't feel so bloy and, and crampy and puffy and all these things. Yeah. There's things you can do during the menstruation or right up until the menstruation and then back off on them.
So, you know, to your point, hormone imbalance, I mean, hell, I just had an 18-year-old that has like crazy cycle stuff and the only option in the conventional world of birth control, birth control, birth control, birth control, you know, and I'm like, look, I'm like, I told the parents, I was like, I don't control birth per se, but I can help, I can help the, uh, right.
The, so, I mean, I can help, I can help the young
Julie Howton: lady, I can help her feel so
Cory Rice: bad. But you guys are gonna have to like talk about like that side of that contraception, right? That's
Julie Howton: not what we're here for. That's not right.
Cory Rice: But, um, so yeah, that's a really good point. So all ages you can have hormone.
Metabolism problems that may not affectionately mean you're on hormone replacement. Right.
Julie Howton: Yeah. And I, this is, I am not a physician, um, but my personal opinion, so I did have a hysterectomy with ectomy. There is not a seed, a TA supplement in the world that is going to protect me through the rest of my life, which I'm hoping will be long.
Um, so for, you know, I, I do think there is a time and a place where the only thing when your body's not making hormones, it, it needs you to, to get some
Cory Rice: bioidentical support. Thank, thank you so much for that. Because your audience may be similar to what I'm about to say. The, the amount of people I see that come in here, and I even have some colleagues that are very well thought of, colleagues that almost feel what I'm about to say is true.
To think that you can herbalized, supplement or feed a woman to. Reverse her osteoporosis, penia back to normal bone, avoid the decline of cognitive decline, the mild and cognitive impairment to dementia and protect her heart with herbs and with eating correctly and watching out for phytoestrogens. All that's important.
But, oh my God, good gravy. Giving her hr, giving her hormones, in my opinion, that are molecularly, you know, iso molecular to her body. Yes. But giving her something that's recognizable makes academic and common sense and also it improves her quality of life, demonstrably over what she can do by doing the herbs and the teas and things like that.
And I'm not against that. You can do that in Sure. Combination with, but it doesn't replace pure actual hormones. So thank you for saying that.
Julie Howton: I just, I am, and it is li it is literally life changing. I, James and I joke all the time because he gets to. Again, he went to medical school, so he should be the one.
He gets to prescribe hormones for people that are struggling and you know, within a week they feel amazing. And as, as the health coach, the change, you know, my, my work with them is slower, more difficult, takes more time together. It's magic. But I tell people all the time, like, if somebody stops me in an alley, they can have my wallet.
They cannot have my hormones, I will fight.
Cory Rice: Oh, that's good. That, that, that's good that, that I,
Julie Howton: it's, it's amazing. Well, I know we're supposed to be busting autoimmune mist, but I, I, I wanna bust this another myth, 'cause I hear this all the time, which is fascinating too. Do, do, is your perspective that if a woman hasn't been on hormones and she is way post-menopausal, is it ever too late to, to put a woman on hormone?
Cory Rice: So, you know, the formal societies on this would tell you to use caution and sometimes they would say to actually not do it. I would say the truth is, is, is more of the use caution. What I would say, it'd be rare for me not to consider putting a woman on hormones. Yeah. Because of my knowledge of them.
There is above a certain age, 65 ish, 62 ish, 63 ish. Above that age there is some scant literature that you are moving more, you have little, tiny bit more risk. Because the thought is if she has accumulated all this microscopic plaque and inflammation and like, you know, protein malformations in, in the brain, all these things that have happened, that by giving her HRT you might actually accelerate the process of that degeneration.
And I.
Julie Howton: I wanna know what kind of hormones they use in the study. I'm suspicious. And that's
Cory Rice: exactly right. Is is the devil is in the details. Yeah. What hormone, how is it delivered? What dose? A, a, a medicine is a poison unless you dose it, right? Correct. And so. The unfortunate reality is I keep using this term iso molecular, and your audience may understand the term bioidentical.
I'm not the biggest fan of that term because it's become more of a hype marketing kind of situation, right?
Julie Howton: Because take m just like
Cory Rice: this, right? Right. And you know, it comes with like, oh, is that real medicine? And oh, you know, all these things. Iso molecular is a very simple term. It is molecularly identical to what you've made as a woman since you started producing hormones.
And what I've made as a man since I started, and I'm
Julie Howton: not a horse. I love my horse, but I'm not one.
Cory Rice: And there's hormones out there that we get from other things, animal parts, animal urine, and blah, blah, blah. So if we can just level set and talk about just those types of hormones, those are the ones we're referring to.
The reality though is, is what the conventional world will tell you is that's all great, Dr. Rice, but there's not level one a evidence on iso molecular hormone replacement in a woman who's 63, 65 plus. Giving her health benefit. And it's back to my whole mantra before I get it. But if we wait for there to be the highest level of data, we're gonna die.
Yeah. If we wait seven years, I was gonna
Julie Howton: say, but what do you see clinically? Because I know what we'd see and no one's
Cory Rice: gonna fund that study, by the way. Yeah. So if, if your listeners waiting for that study, they'll never gonna get it because it won't be funded and it won't happen. So what we have to do is take whatever we do have, then we take a mountainous, you know, cataclysmically, high amount of clinical observation with patient input.
Period. Yeah. What is the patient like? What does the patient feel? The first thing we have to do in he healthcare is no harm. I think second thing, like immediately right behind no harm, improve these people's quality of life. Yes. Like that is not what was taught to us. Yeah. Ever. But I think it is just as, don't harm these people and improve their quality of life.
If you take that into consideration with your clinical observation and the the scant data that exists, you're gonna come up with an answer I believe that's gonna point you in a direction that the risk benefit Yeah. Is, is, is, is skewed in the way of, of benefits, uh, yeah. To these patients. And, and, and, and I think just waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting for FDA clearance or FDA, this, I mean, it's just, you know, that's a whole nother discussion too.
But you're just waiting for something that doesn't, it is, it's just not gonna happen. Yeah. So, um, you have to take what you have and make the best clinical decision you can by putting your patient first, no one else, and just listen to them. That's it. That. Yeah. And, and follow their blood work, follow their scans, follow their bone density, follow their, and just make sure that their cognition's not going down their bone density's good.
They're not having any, you know, you know, degenerative problems that you know of. And then just go, that's it.
Julie Howton: Yeah. Yeah. You know, it, it is, it's such a, thank you for that. So Well, but Sure,
Cory Rice: sure.
Julie Howton: Um, I had a client once and I was like, what is going on? She who, you know, would, I was first working with her and doing her, gathering her history and, and she had been on hormone replacement therapy until she retired, and when she retired they told her to stop.
She didn't need it anymore. I'm like,
Cory Rice: wait. Yeah. I see the well and, and maybe the type of hormone she was on. I,
Julie Howton: I, yeah. I just, but it was that whole
Cory Rice: conversation, the data beyond, you know, using that beyond a certain age maybe wasn't in, wasn't favorable. And, and in healthcare we do what we do. We, we extrapolate.
Yeah. We, we extrapolate. Conclusions from one population to another, and everyone does it, whether you're on the functional side, whether you're on the conventional side. Extrapolation is part of our reality because the, the reality is there's just not enough data. I mean, we need more data. And, and, but again, to my point, I'm not gonna wait until I'm dead to be able to know that there's a trial that proved that I knew that it could have.
I mean, that's just, that's just completely disingenuous.
Julie Howton: Yeah. Oh, well, I appreciate that. I, I feel like there is no, just like I, I don't think any one of us has one root cause.
Cory Rice: No.
Julie Howton: Um, there is no, you know, one health focus. Right. And so I don't, I don't think that all of autoimmunity is hormones.
Cory Rice: Mm-hmm.
Julie Howton: Nope.
Um, either, you know, but I, I do feel this is like a, just total non-medical, um, I, I think that hormones decline. Yes, it's a natural cycle. Um, but I, I think that what that signals to the body is you're done. Yeah. Like, we're gonna just start to break down now. And so why wouldn't we? We're living longer. Don't you wanna live?
Well, like it, it there just
Cory Rice: Right, right. Well, and, and hormones decline again, you, you have not only are hormones declining, but you have this continual accumulation of disruptors in the body that you're exposed to, whether you do it or you are just living in an ecosystem that's giving it to you. Right.
And your body is not machine-like to process metabolize and get rid and excrete these things. Yeah. And it leads to this entire inflammatory cascade that could be be like, oh my God, is that my hormones? I mean. No, I mean, your hormones are kind of happening too, but it's these other things, right? And then it goes down and hits your immune system, which, you know, 70 to 80% of it is within the lining of our intestinal wall.
And before you know it, you're getting like Swiss cheese intestinal wall that can't actually absorb or anything. And you're getting translocation of things. And before you know it, you have this whole, you know, picture of like, you can have an imbalance of estrogen and testosterone and progesterone. You have an imbalance of bacteria that feeds the immune system and bacteria that's hurting the immune system.
And it's that the term isn't hormone imbalance, it's dysbiosis, but Right. The more of that you have, it's just this whole recipe for developing autoimmune disease. And, you know, God, we can talk an hour about that, but that just the gut, I, I know a big, a big piece of it, right?
Julie Howton: Yeah. And, and I feel, uh, really strongly, I mean, I rem it's again, like you were talking about.
If you think of your intake forms from the beginning, if I think of my coaching process from the beginning, um, or, and I remember when it, you know, all of this, the gut, the gut, the gut. And I would kind of roll my, I didn't really understand. Yeah. I would roll my eyes like, oh, here we go again. Yeah. Um, but I operate under the assumption if somebody's coming, first of all to me versus just the clinic.
'cause they could be coming for something else. Um, but if someone's coming to work with me, they have autoimmunity or they have what they think is autoimmunity and hasn't been diagnosed even better, then we don't have to get rid of a label. That's great. Yeah. Um, I operate under the assumption that, that they for sure have leaky gut unless they have already done a lot of work.
And I, yes. And we test and we do things too, but I, I think it's that rampant. Like I really do believe, especially by the time you've tipped into autoimmunity
Cory Rice: mm-hmm.
Julie Howton: We know that's part of the driving process.
Cory Rice: There's no question. Um, you just talked about the maturation of your forms. It's the same with the maturation of our, our, um, acceptance of gut health as being Right.
It was, I was resistant
Julie Howton: in the beginning, like, come on. In the
Cory Rice: beginning I'm like, oh, you can go out to someone else for that and then see a
Julie Howton: gut specialist.
Cory Rice: Exactly. It evolved into an option. Okay. We have gut testing if we, if you want to do it, I mean Sure. Kind of thing. It was kind of like, just like there.
Yeah. Um, as you walked by the window, it's like, well, I guess maybe I'll check my gut, I guess. Should I do that? I mean, if you want. Um, and now it's funny, in six years and I think 19, early 20, I basically mandated at our offices in the Dallas area, I mandated that there's not a human that can establish care with us if they won't do a microbiome assessment.
Yeah. And I learned this in COVID. I said, you know, everybody came to me to help their immune system. They were getting sick or they were losing grandpa, or they were all nervous. And I said, how can I possibly address this if I don't even know what you're doing? Right? I can tell you about food and what to eat and blah, blah, blah, but, but one of my mentors in this space, I'll give him the credit where credit's due.
He said one time he said, you know, you need to understand it's not the food's fault. When the gut is off and it's not sealed and it is just not producing or productive and it's not getting what it needs. It doesn't matter what you eat. These people are gonna be sick. It doesn't matter if they eat healthy or they eat crappy.
Yeah, they're going to be bad. Now when you fix the gut, heal the gut, seal the gut, and you sort of like, you know, kill what needs to be killed and, and whatever's overgrowth or undergrowth, you sort of correct those imbalances. You help feed the diversity and you do all of that, then it becomes the food's fault.
If their gut is working well and you start eating inflammatory foods, they'll have reactions. So that was really, really helpful to me. 'cause I realized, you know, it's not, yeah, I guess it's not really, if I don't go after the gut first, I all bets are off. You know what I mean? It's a service. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So that's, that's the evolution of us. Now. There's not a human and we're probably gotta be the number one in Texas. I mean, there's, I can't be any, I can't imagine there's anybody else. We do seven or eight a day. I mean, there's a lot. And I like a, I do a three day, uh, stool collection to, okay,
Julie Howton: I know
Cory Rice: which one you're using.
Then increase accuracy. Yeah. I like uhhuh. I like, I like the company, I like the customer service. I like the data. So reproducible, it's so reproducible. Patient response, you know. So, yeah.
Julie Howton: Um, which, and, and again, it takes a certain kind of patient. It's, there used to be such a resistance to I have to do what, I have to collect my poop.
I know, I know. And now, you know, I, I guess that is the, that that's the positive of the progression of the, the information getting out there. People know that they, they need to,
Cory Rice: yeah. And luckily they don't usually see us for that second visit till like three to four weeks after the specimen's been submitted.
So I always come in and I'm like. So, have you slept since? So how, how's your therapy been going? And they always, yeah. And it's always a good icebreaker for your, but um, it's just between them and their bathroom. That's all I tell them. Just between you. Right. Nobody sees it. Yeah. Yeah. So, but it's an important test.
Important.
Julie Howton: It is. Lots and lots of, of information. And I love that you highlighted because, you know, for so many self fixers mm-hmm. Um, you know, people wonder why the needle's not not moving. And I'm, I'm, you know, eating all the good things. And, and I, I've worked with so many people who have sensitivities to the healthiest foods you can name, because they're just pouring those healthy foods into a really leaky gut and creating it.
I mean, it, it just, you gotta, you gotta heal it. I know. It, it seems, uh. Uh, you know, a little like, uh, really more gut, but
Cory Rice: yeah. But it really is, it really is.
Julie Howton: It, it is.
Cory Rice: These people that are, they're listening right now. I know you are, that you're feel like you can't eat anything. Yeah. Nothing ever works.
You'd eat it, you get hives, you just, you, you throw, drain it like nothing. If you don't have that gut checked, then you're gonna just keep going on and on and on and on and on and on, and do the same thing. And like Einstein said, do the same thing over and on. You're gonna get the same results. I mean, it's just, it's just, you know what I mean?
So, yeah.
Julie Howton: It's so true. So do you have, are there any autoimmune myths that you wanna bust that we haven't touched on yet? That are, that are like, you know, urgent? Yeah.
Cory Rice: Yeah. So I think, you know, not, it's not rare is, is, is critical. I think the other big one here is, and, and I'm gonna come back to this a little, but so many of these autoimmune patients need.
More hope than just an infusion.
Julie Howton: Mm-hmm.
Cory Rice: Or a medicine that may or may not bring side effects. Those are, just so we know, the conventional approach to the autoimmune treatment, thank you. Yep. Is to suppress the treatment, is to suppress the immune system so that you don't react so inflammatory to whatever the disease is.
So rheumatoid arthritis and lupus, and Sjogren's and blah, blah, blah. You're on these, you're on these compounds to make your immune system suppressed so that it equally suppresses the inflammation. So maybe you don't have as much dry mouth or dry eyes, or joint pains or rashes or you know, whatever that is, right.
Or fatigue, whatever it is. But when you do that, you also expose yourself to not just side effects, but you expose yourselves to opportunistic infections from whatever virus, fungus, and yeast and bacteria, and you name it. So. Doing that is, is one approach. The other approach is to actually ramp up the immune system, heal it from the inside out.
Cool. The inflammation down through different means that you can do and create a sustainable way of gut health and immune system support so that you don't have to manifest these symptoms anymore. And you're hope, hopefully, whoever's listening to this needs to understand you can fix these problems.
Mm-hmm. Uh, it doesn't, and sometimes you can use both, honestly, there's conventional ways. Sure. And then other way, you know, and it doesn't have to be an either or in every proposition, but the hope and the myth that needs to be busted is that you cannot fix, you cannot cure, you cannot reverse, let's say an a NA.
You can't reverse Hashimoto's. You can't reverse, let's say, you know, someone who has multiple sclerosis. I've probably got 10 multiple sclerosis patients. It's gone. Yeah. Like now whether that was the right diagnosis is a different, for a different time. Yeah. But the neurologist who actually diagnosed them with that, do whatever they did before and say whatever that was, whether it's an MRI or lesions or scores or validated question, it's changed.
And that to me, I would not have believed what I just said 10 years ago. Right. That you can fix these conditions that the, that that people are living with. And the pro, the, the, the point is, is that you, in, in some cases you can, I don't know if across the board you can, you can fix every single one of them, but you can, you can give a meaningful quality of life to people that oftentimes Yes.
Don't have one, you know? Yeah,
Julie Howton: absolutely. And I mean, so, so, so much of the autoimmune experiences, life gets smaller and smaller and smaller. And so every bit of healing allows people. To expand life back out and, you know, be just, you know, whatever. Uh, uh ha Even just to have the energy, the energetic resources to, to be the better mother, the better wife, the better coach, physician business, whatever it is, um, yeah, it, it really does make an impact.
And then back to that ripple effect, right? Is why you love working with providers. Because it, it's, we, we, that's how this whole mess that we call, you know, not, not modern medicine, sorry. That's a good thing. And that's, that's why I named my business stuff. I know. I love
Cory Rice: it. I wanna redefine it.
Julie Howton: Yeah. Because it's just medicine.
It's just good medicine.
Cory Rice: Yeah. It, it really is. And, and yeah. And we've mentioned it, but the providers themselves, I do feel are good people. It's just, its just Absolutely. System has been. It turned upside down in a way that doesn't put the patient first. Well, how much? There's no other way to say it other than that.
Julie Howton: Yeah. And you're a, do, how much nutrition training did you get in medical school?
Cory Rice: So, none. None in medical school. Um, I actually went to an MD residency, uh, and, and, but I, I, we didn't get into personal like what hap but, but I had health struggles, uh, no question about it. Years ago, I wasn't who I was now, and I was highly medicated for different things and I was just following the conventional path and Right.
And I did some genetic testing on myself. I've never met actually my biological father. So once I did some. Genetic testing, realized I'm dealing with a lot from someone I hadn't met. I sort of restructured my entire life, diet, everything around sort of that, um, and, and sort of follow up a fairly simplistic pattern.
Um, and I became medication free within six months and haven't looked back. I haven't been on one since. Woo. And so, you know. Yeah. And it's been great. And I feel like that day or that six months, I changed the trajectory of my Alzheimer's Ms. Crohn's colitis, um, dementia. Cancer risk. I think everything changed.
Yeah. When I learned, and if that's the singular gift I could give to patients, is change the trajectory of where you're going. You will never know if you would've had cancer. You will never know if you would've had Parkinson's. You will never know. But that's a risk that I'm willing for you to take because Yeah.
You don't know. You know what I mean? And that's, we don't have the luxury of knowing if you would've developed this. So you do have to put faith in this. But, but I strongly feel my personal trajectory was changed that hopefully one of these days I don't get one of those things because of all of that I learned about myself.
Julie Howton: Yeah. And God forbid, you, do you have the resilience, like you've given your body that opportunity? A
Cory Rice: hundred percent. Yeah.
Julie Howton: Um, which I wanted, you said it earlier, but I, that, you know, wanna re-highlight, you know, genetics can predispose us, but that shouldn't be taken as a sentence or doom and gloom. It's an opportunity of like, it's like an arrow.
Like, oh, let's make sure we mitigate this risk.
Cory Rice: Yep. I'm, uh, the believer that 8% of our health trajectory is determined by mother and father. 92% is literally determined by you. Yeah. And what you do, how you breathe, how you drink, how you poop, how you sleep, how you exercise, how you eat, how you use hot therapy, how you use cold therapy.
How do you detox? Do you detox? Like these are things if you, how do you
Julie Howton: connect and relate?
Cory Rice: A hundred percent. If you do those things, that 8% is gonna be squashed into the ground and it won't even matter. Because like I tell patients, I was like, I don't know. We, I probably have cancer in my body right now, but luckily I think I have a machine Right.
That just turns it over and I never know. And, and I wanna create the same for you. This isn't dissimilar. So, you know that that's really, and and that's a big part. If you're a doctor that does this or a provider that does this, you gotta walk the walk, you talk. Right, right. Um, if you don't, I mean, come on, this is this.
That's crazy. So, yeah.
Julie Howton: Absolutely. Uh. So much good stuff. Amazing, amazing. This is the, don't even be
Cory Rice: longer than what you said.
Julie Howton: I know. I knew it was gonna be good. Now, outcome, the hardest part of the interview, not for me, but for you, what is one step that listeners can take starting today
Cory Rice: to improve their health?
One step today? Oh my gosh, there's so much you could do. Oh, so. Here is probably the best piece of advice I can find. I can tell 'em if they don't have a health advocate that they have found they need to find someone. Because if they're not a doctor or a prescriber or they don't have a prescriber or doctor who even remotely sounds like this or talks like this or has some way of testing like this, they must find them.
Because I think one of the biggest, there's a lot of problems, but one of the biggest ones is access to what I'm talking about. Right. People like, I mean, how do you broadcast this? How do you, um. How do you commercialize this? How do you market this? It's, it's, it's all word of mouth in my world. Right? And, and I will be the first to tell you it is absolutely not about Dr.
Rice. This is about all prescribers understanding the calling we have and, and the opportunity we have. So my biggest piece of advice is to try to find someone, however. I mean, listen, I, there's different places you can go to to try to find someone like me. Um, but you've gotta find someone who's your, who's your health, who's your health advocate.
Um, you know, there's a lot more there that I would wanna say about, you know, hydration and bowel movements and, um, you know, like a sauna and a sauna addict, and that's a whole nother world. But I don't survive today without that. So, um, you know, there's a lot of resilient behaviors I think that are super important.
Exercise the perfect prescription too, for anything. Um, so there's a lot I could talk about that. It's really hard for me to find one thing,
Julie Howton: but it's, I I said it is, it's a tough thing. Get your
Cory Rice: gut tested. Get your gut tested. That's what, oh,
Julie Howton: there we go.
Cory Rice: That's another one. Do a third party stool analysis.
I'm not talking about a guac or a Cologuard.
Julie Howton: Oh, no, no, you're right. Function. Thank you. A
Cory Rice: functional stool analysis. That would be my number one piece of advice. Have that done.
Julie Howton: All right. He is a believer. See the evolution, right? From like, oh gosh. Got, but yeah. Amazing. And for people that are listening on the go and they're not gonna check out the links in the show notes, where is the best place to find out more about you or your, your clinic, modern medicine?
Cory Rice: Yeah. So, uh, you know, our website, my modern medicine.com, um, is, is, is there, there's links. They're to things I've done. Um, I know I've gotten, there's assets out there, different webinars I've done, and I don't even look at these things. But I, I do a lot of material just 'cause I just, I absolutely love to talk and I love to disseminate information that I think is very usable.
Um, and so, I don't know, I fool the wool over people's eyes, but apparently they want me to do that too. So I have other things out there, like, um, just these organizations I'm a part of, um, you know, the, the hormone, um, company I teach for and, and honestly advise at a very high level, uh, is called Biot. And, and it's just made up of almost 10,000 prescribers.
And it's an extremely, um, blessed honor to be able to teach my colleagues because they forced me to learn at a very, very high level. So, so worry. You gotta be on your game. Exactly. So I'm through modern medicine and, and, and really through, through them as well. So that's probably the best way to access me if there was, if, if somebody needed to actually access me.
Julie Howton: Perfect. And, and there's lots of, lots of good stuff on, on the clinic website as well. And, um, I encourage people to check it out and, and understand, you know, there's a, a team there, right. So that's a team
Cory Rice: that's not just about me. Yeah. You, you're only as good as the team. You're only as good as your team.
But
Julie Howton: I can see why people want you to, to continue talking to us. So I so appreciate your wisdom, your perspective, your time, um, and, and most of all the, the hope that you share with listeners, um, because I, I totally agree with you that that is, to me, that's the first step in healing. Mm-hmm. So thank you.
Cory Rice: You're very welcome. And I meant what I said. I wanna hear your story sometime.
Julie Howton: I will share it. I talk too. So
Cory Rice: thank you so much, Julie.
Julie Howton: Thank you for everyone listening. Remember, you can get those show notes and transcripts by visiting Inspired Living Do Show. I hope you had a great time and enjoyed this episode as much as I did.
I'll see you next week.
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My Guest For This Episode
My Guest For This Episode
Connect with Cory Rice, D.O.
Cory Rice, D.O.
Dr. Cory Rice is the Chief Clinical Advisor for Biote, serves on the Medical Advisory Board at Biote, and is the owner of Modern Medicine, providing patients with personalized, progressive, comprehensive medical care. Dr. Rice’s background is Internal Medicine, but he now practices Functional Medicine and Lifestyle Medicine; his professional interests include nutrition based chronic disease management, thyroid management, longevity precision medicine, and bioidentical hormone replacement therapy for men and women. His clinical expertise lies in most areas of chronic disease and ultimately the treatment and reversal of some of the more commonly encountered conditions in clinical practice today. His main focus in his practice is on wellness and prevention, nutrition, therapeutic lifestyle change and appropriate hormone balancing for men and women.
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