Understanding Environmental Exposures and Their Potential Effects on Health
In this episode, Haylie Pomroy is joined by Dr. Gordon Crozier, osteopathic physician and Medical Director at Excellent Living Medical Center, to explore how environmental exposures may affect brain health, the immune system, and chronic illness.
Dr. Crozier shares how his own unexplained illness and the lack of compassion he met along the way led him to study neurotoxicity, and why standard lab ranges can miss what is happening beneath the surface.
Together, they discuss heavy metals, plasticizers, and pesticides, how toxins may drive immune reactions and allergies, why long COVID symptoms can keep returning, how peptide therapy is being researched, and simple lifestyle steps like movement, box breathing, sweating, and clean water that support the body's detox pathways.
Hear why compassion and curiosity may be the most overlooked tools in medicine, and how understanding your exposures can change the questions you bring to your next appointment, here on Fast Metabolism Matters.
If your body feels like it's running on empty, overburdened, or just not responding the way it used to, Haylie's latest book, Toxic Overload, tells you exactly what to do. Download your free digital copy today and start understanding what your body is trying to tell you.
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Dr. Gordon Crozier is widely recognized as a leading physician in integrative and genetic-based medical treatments and services. He is the Medical Director of Excellent Living Medical Center, where he also practices medicine, and sees patients at his private practice in Orlando, Florida, as well as remotely. A board-certified physician in the State of Florida, Dr. Crozier graduated from Des Moines University College of Osteopathic Medicine and Surgery in 1994 with a Doctorate of Osteopathy. After completing his internship and residency in Obstetrics and Gynecology at Michigan State University Garden City Hospital Campus, he practiced in neurology, neurosurgery, hormone replacement, and women’s health. He also travels around the world giving lectures on natural treatments, genetics-based medicine, and integrative medicine, and appears on national television and radio.
Website: https://crozierclinic.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DrCrozier/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drcrozier
Haylie Pomroy, Founder and CEO of The Haylie Pomroy Group, is a leading health strategist specializing in metabolism, weight loss, and integrative wellness. With over 25 years of experience, she has worked with top medical institutions and high-profile clients, developing targeted programs and supplements rooted in the "Food is Medicine" philosophy. Inspired by her own autoimmune journey, she combines expertise in nutrition, biochemistry, and patient advocacy to help others reclaim their health. She is a New York Times bestselling author of The Fast Metabolism Diet.
Learn more about Haylie Pomroy's approach to wellness through her website: https://hayliepomroy.com
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Edited Transcript
Haylie Pomroy: I have an incredibly special guest, very near and dear to my heart. I try to say I’ve read every single thing you’ve written, but this is Dr. Gordon Crozier, you guys, today. He’s an osteopathic doctor. Prior to becoming a DO, he was a PA in neurosurgery and in neurology. He’s won tons of awards. Something that was really cool that stood out to me was the most compassionate doctor recognition. If that’s not what we need right now, then I don’t know what is. He also recently received additional awards and praise in neurologic research from, and you’ll have to correct me, Dr. Crozier, there are so many titles here, from the Department of?
Dr. Gordon Crozier: It was from Neurological Research, the Department of Neurological Research. It’s part of Nova Southeastern, actually.
Haylie Pomroy: That’s wonderful and exciting. So, Dr. Crozier, thank you so much for being here today. Our community is going to be healthier just from getting to spend some time with you. I can’t thank you enough.
Dr. Gordon Crozier: Well, thank you. It’s great to be here.
Haylie Pomroy: So, I mentioned it a little bit, but I just wanted to talk for a second. I wanted to lead with compassionate care and personal care. Was that something that was indoctrinated or ingrained in you while you were in medical school?
Dr. Gordon Crozier: No. You know what? It is so sad that our medical system, they do not train their physicians, their physician assistants, their nurse practitioners how to be compassionate and forthright with somebody’s diagnosis. And so, it upsets me that we were that way. In fact, I was told, this is when I was a resident, they said, you are getting too close to your patients. You need to stop that. You need to have a space between you and your patient. So, it’s a sad world.
Haylie Pomroy: Is that so that you don’t get hurt? Because I think the best person to help you make decisions is a person that you feel like you can have intimate conversations with. And these are people that are sharing space and time with you during the most vulnerable aspects of their life. Why do you think that’s so ingrained? Because I’ve heard that from a lot of docs, that they really draw the line: don’t think of your patient almost as a person.
Dr. Gordon Crozier: Exactly. And I think that is so that that person doesn’t get so overwhelmed when something bad happens to that patient. But at the same time, I think we need to be overwhelmed, because if you have a patient that something bad happens to, you need to have that empathy for them. You need to have that caring aspect for them. And as a previous OB-GYN, we had a lot of, and doing high-risk OB, we had a lot of bad outcomes. And you had to be there for that person. But I was reprimanded constantly not to do that, not to be that; it shouldn’t be that way. And so I really realized when I became the patient that that is not the case. And that’s not the way it should be.
Haylie Pomroy: I had a really good friend that did a lot of palliative care and even worked in the hospice space. And she said, I’ve not lost a lot of patients, but I’ve sure lost a lot of loved ones. And it just really, really shook me, that, that helping that transition in the compassionate aspect.
In one of your early books, you wrote a lot about why you made the shift between being a doctor that looks at maybe a patient encounter like a scientific experience and making it a personal experience. Can you share with our community, like, why did that change? How did it change for you?
Dr. Gordon Crozier: Well, it changed during my own personal experience. I used to teach at the university, and I was teaching a lot of residents laparoscopic techniques and all this stuff. But I started getting sick. I got sick to the point where I was passing out during surgery. Well, you can’t be a surgeon and be passing out during surgery. I was put on medical disability during that time. Because I was at the university, I was privy to all the top doctors. They even sent me to other universities so that I could get a diagnosis. Nobody could figure out what was going on with me, number one, but nobody had compassion. Nobody had compassion. And everybody kept saying, “Are you sure you’re not making this up? Are you sure you’re not faking passing out? Are you sure this is real, that this is really happening?” It got to the point where I said, no, this is a real thing. I have six children. I’ve got to provide for six children. I cannot afford to be on medical disability.
Haylie Pomroy: Nobody gets rich on medical disability.
Dr. Gordon Crozier: No, you don’t. And so I just realized that you needed care, you needed empathy, and you needed somebody to look a little bit farther than just these basic labs. Even in traditional medicine, we have access to a lot of different labs, a lot, but nobody ever looks at them. Somebody could have done some tests on me, and they would have realized, oh, he’s a toxic mess. He’s got a toxic soup going on. But nobody ever did some of those basic labs to figure out that I was having really bad issues, and that was my cause.
Haylie Pomroy: And so in your case, like, I always say my goal, because I went through something very, very similar. And I remember I was on anti-rejection drugs. I was on 60 to 90 milligrams, 80 milligrams of prednisone every day.
I was on Mepron. And I remember somebody, one of the docs, was talking to me, and it was like, we’ll just start IV chemo, and we’ll do a splenectomy, and maybe we’ll see, maybe that’ll help your right kidney. And I was furious.
I was like, don’t you care? I was in my 20s. This is not okay and not acceptable.
You said something about just, just labs. I think for a long time, we thought there just had to be these crazy, massive labs to figure things out in an alternative space. But there are some basic labs that docs... I had to beg the other day to run a CRP on someone. Beg. Arm twist, and kind of get a little grumpy too. But I always tell people, when you get back from your doc, and they said, labs are fine, and you’re good, but you feel like H-E-double-hockey-sticks, those are just the labs. That’s just the little teeny piece of chemistry that they looked at.
Dr. Gordon Crozier: It’s just a little piece of it. And nobody really looks any deeper than that. And as you know, being in the integrative realm, what they call normal in the lab world... all labs are put on a bell curve. That’s what CLIA demands: that they have to have a bell curve. You have to encompass so many sick people in those labs. Well, according to science, what does science say about where those lab values really should be? And that’s my key thing. And we teach it a lot: these are the numbers you should be looking for in somebody. Like WBCs of five or less than five, it’s in the normal range.
Oh, you’re fine. But are they really fine?
Haylie Pomroy: Because they’re telling you they’re not. First and foremost, believe them. That’s why we say we believe you. Bottom line, whatever you’re going to tell me, I’m going to believe you 100%. And I’m going to back you 110%.
I love that you’re that way. And I notice also, so you’ve continued to not only treat your patients from a compassionate and integrative perspective, but you’re very much on the forefront of teaching young practitioners and physicians that know that if they want to get their patients well, they’ve got to continue their education, correct?
Dr. Gordon Crozier: Correct. We cannot stop. There was an article put out.
This is kind of an older article, but there was an article put out that after a physician finishes residency, on average, they only read five research articles the rest of their lifetime. And I’m like, that is sad. I try to read five a day. And I feel like I’m still falling behind. And sometimes I don’t get all five in because I’m so booked with patients or developing a new lecture, but sometimes developing a new lecture helps you learn too.
Haylie Pomroy: It does. Preparing for podcasts helps you learn. I was just reading through your stuff, and I’m like, oh, my gosh, I felt like I was drinking from a fire hydrant. And at the same time, I was just so excited about all of, all that you provide, which is, which is amazing. It’s interesting that you bring up the piece about only reading five articles, and it depends on which article you believe, but somewhere between 50% and 70% of research articles are also not repeatable.
If they’re not, if they’re not spending time with their patient and really listening to their patient and understanding the dynamics that their patients are in the disease state with... The disease is not a standalone. They are in this whole ecosystem that is supporting the disease. And if the doctor’s not addressing that, how in the world are we going to get anybody better?
I want to ask you a question, because our community oftentimes shares with me that they went in and their doc wouldn’t run labs, or their doc had the experience that you had, which is they just said, “Are you sure this is you? Or maybe you need rest? Or it’s stressful.” Exercise more, eat less, exercise more, eat less. And kind of suck it up, buttercup. How did you have the internal fortitude to keep pressing on? And what do you tell, like, my massive community that’s being faced with that from their own doctor?
Dr. Gordon Crozier: I just started looking at research articles. And I said, there’s something going on, there’s something deeper. I know this is not, it’s not a game. I’ve got to get better. I don’t have a choice. I have to get better.
I have got a family depending on me. And I started really looking at a lot of research coming out of Europe on toxicity. And they were at the forefront for a long time. And I started my PhD in neurotoxicology through Edinburgh University. Haven’t had a chance to finish it. And I’m like, oh, my gosh, I only have a little bit left. I’ve got to get there.
Haylie Pomroy: But do it with me; I’m back in school.
Dr. Gordon Crozier: Yeah. But I love what they do with a lot of their research and what they do with a lot of their articles. And they really were at the forefront of what toxins are doing in our body, to our cells, to our mitochondria, to our cellular matrix. It is so important. And why are we aging? Why is our age decreasing in the United States? We’re all about senolytics. We’re all about anti-aging. But yet, our age is declining.
Haylie Pomroy: For the first time in history.
Dr. Gordon Crozier: What is happening?
Haylie Pomroy: And the quality of our age, too.
Dr. Gordon Crozier: I mean, I love some of my family members, but they, they don’t listen to me. I was the baby boy; who’s going to listen to him?
Haylie Pomroy: I’m the baby girl. I hear you. One thing that you just said...
I went to Slovenia. I was in Ljubljana at the International Congress on Autoimmunity. It was phenomenal this year. And I was with a couple of my colleagues from the Institute for Neuro-Immune Medicine (INIM). And we had people from the World Health Organization, but we had immunologists from Germany and Italy and Spain and Israel and globally, all over. And they were talking about neurotoxicity and adjuvants in the vaccines. Like, just so absolutely, of course, these are immunologists, of course, this is happening. Of course, we’re poisoning the body. Of course, of course, of course. And we were kind of looking left and looking right at each other. Now, I lived it. I was poisoned, and I had to detox, and I was in the throes of a massive autoimmune disorder. I mean, nobody’s going to tell me that it’s not the case. Just like you. It’s my truth. It’s my reality. And I’ve walked it, and I’ve lived it, and I’ve breathed it. But to have all these immunologists standing up there and people from the World Health Organization talking about ASIA syndrome, where they’ve now classified the adjuvants as part of ASIA syndrome, which is a catalyst for autoimmunity. I was going, like, are we supposed to talk about this? Is it okay that we’re talking about this? You have to be globally minded. Because your body doesn’t understand, your cells don’t understand borders. That’s what I always say.
Dr. Gordon Crozier: You are so correct.
Haylie Pomroy: Because I have you, and this is, I would say, my time to learn, I want to ask you about toxins in general. Can you explain, we’re hearing a lot about neurotoxicity. Just give me kind of a third-grader version; help me unpack what that means in the body.
Dr. Gordon Crozier: Neurotoxicity: your brain controls your entire body. It is so important that our brain work correctly. But a lot of neurotoxicity, and you really have to go back to some other research that actually wasn’t done in the United States... But the first thing that we started realizing is that heavy metals were part of the reason for Parkinson’s. Well, who even looks at heavy metals?
When I have Parkinson’s patients walk in my doors, their traditional doctors never even looked at heavy metals for them. They didn’t look at any of that. And so heavy metals are a big thing for me to look for. And the proper thing to look at is not just heavy metals, but environmental toxins. What are the phthalates? What are the plasticizers, the pesticides, the herbicides, all those things?
When we eat food, we only have one little cell layer of thickness. And then on the other side is a blood supply and nerves. Those nerves have direct contact with the brain. So when you eat, you can absorb all these toxins through our food supply, because our food supply, we know that the American food supply is more contaminated than even some third-world countries’. We have a contaminated food supply that is actually increasing our neuroinflammation. These toxins that we drink or we eat or we breathe, because we breathe a lot in.
Haylie Pomroy: Or put on our body.
Dr. Gordon Crozier: Or we put on our body. I mean, I look at this because I do those, and I look at how many lotions have so many different parabens in them. And sometimes I’ll say some of these parabens are natural, and so if they’re in something organic, I put half a gram of organic lotion. And so the fewer, the better. I try to put essential oils on my body. I might be a little oily, but they absorb quickly into our body. And so I try not to put a lot of lotions on. I try to use more natural, as many natural things as possible, because it’s an environment that has a lot of toxins.
Haylie Pomroy: We’re being poisoned every day.
Dr. Gordon Crozier: We are being poisoned. And even our, I mean, like, we’re on electronics all day long. I’m on my cell phone constantly. My wife says, what article are you reading on your cell phone? Sorry. But my cell phone is my lifeline to all these research articles because I’m always looking something up.
But we have, even our electrical, it changes the whole platitude of what you’re going to observe in the electrons and the cells. The cells, and what happens with those cells, matters; what we take into those cells matters. And that is going to change our inflammatory response in your brain.
Haylie Pomroy: I always say, if scientists ever, and I’ve had conversations, I’ve been a massive advocate for people going through unfortunate things in their health. And when I have scientists approach me saying that we don’t exchange, or it doesn’t alter electricity or doesn’t alter our energy, I say, what the heck is happening with gravity then? How are you not floating off the face of the earth? You know what I mean? There’s, hey, done any chemistry lately?
It’s just one of those things where we, I think sometimes, when we find ourselves dealing with individuals that are vested in moving a patient along, we start to even discount basic science. I mean, we start to even discount basic science.
Dr. Gordon Crozier: Exactly.
Haylie Pomroy: How can toxicity play a role? And that was one thing that was fascinating, and actually, as I was reading when I was in Slovenia, knowing that I was going to get to interview you, I was excited to ask you this.
How do toxins disrupt the immune system?
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Dr. Gordon Crozier: Well, toxins, you’re going to develop an immune response to all toxins. Look at how people today have so many more allergens, so many more allergies. Why do we have all these allergies in today’s world? It’s because of the immune response dictated by toxins and the toxins in our world today. And I know I have a lot of people who come in and have an allergy. I had one guy, I had to write a letter to the state that you could not spray these pesticides and herbicides within 200 yards of his house, because he had developed an immune response. That immune response actually caused him to have a plethora of food allergies as well. We don’t understand the cross... This is still evolving. And I love it because it still is evolving, but we don’t totally understand the cross-reactivity when you react to certain chemicals, how that cross-reacts to other natural things where the chemistry is kind of close, but you’ll cross-react with that, and you develop an immune response.
Haylie Pomroy: And I appreciate that you said something, and I wrote it down, which is that you are going to develop an immune response to toxins. One good thing that came out of this COVID pandemic, in my opinion, was that the average population started to learn even that we have an immune system and that the immune system is adaptive. And it responds to or is triggered by something. And we had individuals that were talking about cytokines and cytokine storm. And I just love when science starts to not hoard information and data, and it disseminates it freely to the average population. And I’m going to just wrap that into this one little pet peeve of mine. You talked about reading research articles and that people need to research. Well, I don’t know if a lot of people know this, but the majority of research articles are not publicly accessible to the average human. You either need to be part of an educational establishment, a university, a board, or you need to pay out the nose to read these articles. And if you’re sick and you’re reading a lot of articles, it’s thousands and thousands of dollars just to get the data of research that already exists. And that’s making decisions on your doctor’s ability to give health and on drugs’ ability to be manufactured. Sorry, I just had to go on that little tangent because what you said was profound.
Dr. Gordon Crozier: Correct. And that is probably part of the issue, because even the average physician can’t get to a lot of those good research articles. And I love the other research articles, and my other... I’ll tell you my little pet peeve.
Haylie Pomroy: I love it.
Dr. Gordon Crozier: Because, were you taught statistics? A lot of doctors, they’re taught statistics, but it’s gone out the window.
They don’t know how to look at an article to say, “Hey, this is statistically significant,” or “No, this is not statistically significant.” And we have to look, because there are a lot of published articles that a lot of people are reading, and they’re bringing these to me. And I said, look at this article. Number one, it’s from 2008. And I believe we can look at some of those old articles.
I think some of those are a framework and a bouncing board for us to jump to the next articles. But that article’s not even statistically significant. There’s been no more research on that. And they did try to do something, but they couldn’t reproduce the same results.
Haylie Pomroy: Not reproducible. And the fact that, what did they say?
80%. Like, we publish success. We don’t publish the 12 to 40 failures that came before that one time we had a positive outcome. And we find that a lot in drug research too. A lot of times a drug will get purchased, and they’ve had no success with the drug, but one successful study, and it’s going towards market. We’ve got to, again, have compassion and have that personalized care aspect.
I want to ask about long COVID. Are you seeing... we are seeing... I don’t know what we’re going to do. We were primed because our docs were in the ME/CFS space, where we have Epstein-Barr virus, sometimes CMV, HHV-6. We were primed to look at cases where the immune system responded, and we had dysregulation in the immune system after. But are you getting flooded? I mean, I don’t know what we’re going to do.
Dr. Gordon Crozier: I’m flooded with it. And some of them are very treatable. I’ll say that a lot of them are very treatable, but some of them are not so treatable. And why is that? Is it because of the spike protein? It’s more than that protein, that specific protein. That’s part of that thing. That spike protein and some of the other proteins involved have now developed an immune response. That immune response is getting triggered. Just like I said before, they get triggered by other similar molecular structures that are similar to that same protein. And these people are reacting over and over and over again. And that’s what I’ve been seeing in a lot of my long haulers and the long COVID. And I was glad that they did put that diagnosis out there for long COVID, because it is a legitimate problem that we’re seeing. And part of the other problem that we’re seeing is, now, I just had it the other day. They’ve been having some issues, and they went to another physician, and they were encouraged to get a, and I’m not an anti-vax person, not a pro-vax, I’m not anti-vax. I think you make your own decisions. That’s me.
Haylie Pomroy: Okay. Me too.
Dr. Gordon Crozier: But this person was encouraged, and this is one person I wouldn’t encourage to go get vaccinated, but they were encouraged by their other physician to go get a pneumococcal vaccine. Well, now they’re calling me. In fact, they had to come in. We had a little bit of an emergency visit with them because they’re in a downhill spiral.
Haylie Pomroy: Kind of a full flare.
Dr. Gordon Crozier: A full, full flare all over again. And how are you going to reverse that? What are you going to do? Well, we have things that we can do, because I’m thankful that we do have peptides that we can use.
Haylie Pomroy: That’s what I was just going to ask you. We talked about... two things I just wanted to kind of land the plane on, because they were going to stick in my brain. One is that you said treatable. We don’t seem to find, with our long COVID, like, time is not in their favor. It’s not like ride it out, just get more rest. It’s non-restorative sleep, just like we see in ME/CFS.
But something is off. And there are a lot of theories, but something needs to help first remove... And what I find is they’re also magnets for toxins. Like their toxicity level, if you just track them, their toxicity level gets higher and higher and higher and higher because they’re simply eating, breathing, drinking, and sleeping. And so some mechanism of their ability to detoxify seems to be compromised, because they suddenly become the hostess with the mostest. Just bring it on. I go get gas in my car and I toxify. Their ability to eliminate toxins... I think your approach of healing the pathways of detoxification, promoting detoxification, removing the insult, and then healing the insulted is so critical. On that line, and you teased me with it, but three years from now, what is exciting in medicine? Because you’re at the forefront. What is exciting?
Dr. Gordon Crozier: What’s exciting is we’re going to find new molecules. We have peptides, and we have a lot of peptides, and we’re discovering more peptides all the time. These peptides actually have signaling peptides. They are going to be, some people will call them pre-propeptides. Pre-propeptides, it’s out there. And these pre-propeptides actually are going to signal the other peptides to be able to do the job that they need to do in the person. Some of these people, especially my long haulers, have genetic mishaps. They all have genes, like with their SODs and with their glutathione genes and certain detox pathways, that are absolutely glitched. Well, how do you deal with them? Well, you can deal with them through certain peptides that are going to begin to open up some of those pathways for their detoxification, for their mitochondrial health, because you and I know that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. That’s how those people are going to keep living. If they don’t have the mitochondria, they’re not going to live.
Haylie Pomroy: That’s why the fatigue and the brain fogginess. I just want to say, I have your book. I went through it again, one of your books. In the beginning, you do a really good job, for me, of helping me understand what peptides are. They’re really hot right now. A lot of people, they’re starting to be well-researched, which is making me very happy. But just for myself, one more time, and to bring it back to our community, what is peptide therapy?
Dr. Gordon Crozier: Peptides are actually, a lot of them are natural in our body. And we create some of these peptides. Peptides can be created in your body. After the age of 21, which a lot of people don’t realize, a lot of these peptides go down the tube. We don’t create them like we used to.
Haylie Pomroy: Are they proteins? Are they hormones?
Dr. Gordon Crozier: They are proteins. They’re short-chain amino acids. The longer-chain amino acids are proteins. These are shorter-chain amino acids. Technically, most of them are up to 26 amino acids in a chain. And there are approximately anywhere between 7,000 and 9,000 different peptides. We’ve discovered a few more lately. But these peptides are being discovered, and they actually can control certain biological functions. Some actually control the expression of your genes and genetic expression.
These short little amino acids, they have disulfide bonds that connect these little short-chain amino acids. They can cleave off in different ways inside your body to actually, inside your body, create other peptides that might be more beneficial to what you need.
Haylie Pomroy: I want to ask you your top three favorite peptides. I figure out of 7,000 to 8,000, there’s one that I read a lot about, or I started to read a lot about, and maybe we’ll start here: it’s MOTS-c, because we were really looking at it from an inflammatory perspective, but now it’s been banned by the FDA. Help me wrap my head around that.
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Dr. Gordon Crozier: MOTS-c, you’re right, you probably hit it; that was my favorite back at the time when we could use it very freely. MOTS-c was one of the only ones that was indicated to be used via IV. I do a lot of IVs. Why? Because I need to get these people reversed rather quickly. But MOTS-c is a mitochondrial peptide. And the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.
MOTS-c not only helped to detoxify the mitochondria; it would help the mitochondria in the production of energy. And it also would help with insulin resistance, like the GLPs. But you didn’t have the bad side effects that the GLPs give you, because GLPs are peptides. But the MOTS-c didn’t have the bad side effects. You didn’t get the gastroparesis, you didn’t get the constipation, you didn’t get the nausea, you didn’t get the vomiting.
Haylie Pomroy: Hair falling out.
Dr. Gordon Crozier: Hair falling out, all the horrible things that can happen from the GLPs. But MOTS-c would actually help to control some of the sugar levels. I had some pre-diabetics that we actually reversed because of MOTS-c. It was wonderful when we could use it. It actually helped a lot of my people be able to get up out of the chair to actually walk a little bit. All I’m asking is, let’s do one more step each day. Let’s do one more step to increase that. And MOTS-c really helped them. There’s a new one that I don’t know if you’ve heard of yet. It’s called SLU-PP-332. I want you to start to look that one up, because that peptide is really interesting because it also helps to reverse insulin resistance. It does not look like it has any bad side effects, but it also helps with muscle mass and increasing muscle mass. So muscle plasticity and muscle mass actually help with neuroplasticity. Muscle plasticity and neuroplasticity go hand in hand. We’re one body. What we do in one part is going to affect another part of our body, including the destruction of it. You’ve got to do the right thing for each organ system.
Haylie Pomroy: How does a person entertain the conversation of peptides with their physician? Are physicians being taught about peptides right now? I mean, we’re trying.
Dr. Gordon Crozier: Very few of them are being taught about peptides. As you know, I teach in a peptide course. We generally have about 150 people in each seminar, and a lot of them are new doctors coming to hear and wanting to learn something about peptides. Why? Because there are some peptides that have actually been put into pharmaceutical practice. They’re now pharmaceuticals.
Haylie Pomroy: Can you give me some examples of those? GLP?
Dr. Gordon Crozier: Ozempic. Wegovy. Those are some very common ones. Dihexa was going to be one, but it got banned, and the pharmaceutical industry is not going to go any further with the medication that they were developing with it. But those are some of them.
Haylie Pomroy: Why can you still get MOTS-c in other countries, though?
Dr. Gordon Crozier: Well, they have different rules and regulations. And there are a lot of other countries that are very open to peptides and to peptide therapy, because they really care about people’s health and them getting well. But here, we have an industry that is driven... there’s money behind it.
Haylie Pomroy: There’s no money in a healthy patient. Whereas in other countries, I don’t have an opinion on whether it should be government-funded or not. But I will say you see the difference in the motivation depending on who’s paying the bill. In other countries, when the government’s paying the bill, they are more motivated to keep you healthy.
Dr. Gordon Crozier: Exactly. They want to keep you healthy. And a lot of these countries really do want to keep you healthy. Right now, where do we get a lot of our raw material for peptides? It’s imported from Germany, a lot of it. Austria, Germany. We have some from China. There are different countries that are really pro. I’m going over to speak on peptides in Taiwan at the end of September. And they’re really blowing up. They really want peptides. They want so many. They want to know everything about peptides. And they understand them far above what we are understanding, because we haven’t been given the principles. And I think it should be in every family practice physician’s CMEs, that they learn about, begin to learn about, peptides. We’ve got to start teaching doctors what’s on the plate and what’s current for their patients.
Haylie Pomroy: And the medical industry does this really insidious thing where they keep the nomenclature away from the general population. I would bet you that 99% of the doctors that prescribed a GLP-1, that prescribed Mounjaro or semaglutide, had no idea they were prescribing a peptide.
Dr. Gordon Crozier: No. They didn’t even know. And in fact, I have a friend.
He says, oh, I’ve been prescribing Ozempic. And I said, oh, that’s a nice peptide. He says, that’s not a peptide. It’s a drug.
Haylie Pomroy: Let me ask you, in your practice, because you’re also doing so much teaching, what is the most common use that people, not that it’s maybe the most profound intervention, but the most common use that people are using peptides for? Muscle development, immune modulation. We’re seeing it in our long COVID patients sometimes. What are you seeing as the most common use for peptides globally?
Dr. Gordon Crozier: Globally, I think it’s for immune modulation because of the immune issues. I like Thymulin and Thymosin alpha-1. Those are my two key things that I use a lot. Thymosin alpha-1 sometimes is hard to get. That was outlawed, but you can still use it in cases where you really think that you need to use it. We can still use it, but you’d better document it. Because I don’t know when they’re coming into my practice, I’m documenting, document, document. And you want to make sure that you are using it under the grounds of what you can use it for.
Haylie Pomroy: Understood. And it’s compassionate use with kind of orphan diseases and stuff like that, which my autoimmune disorder falls into that category. Fortunately, I didn’t need to go that route, but I had researched it for sure.
Dr. Gordon Crozier: I love that because it does cross over the blood-brain barrier, and you do get wonderful results. The other major area that I see people using peptides for is for senescent cells, for people that have, like, precancerous things, who want to make sure that they’re killing off their senescent cells so that they don’t develop a cancer. And that one’s called FOXO4. I think it’s in that book. We have an updated book coming out, by the way.
Haylie Pomroy: The science is moving so fast in this space.
Dr. Gordon Crozier: It is moving so fast, and it’s hard to keep up sometimes because I’m keeping up with that. Plus, I’m trying to keep up with other aspects that I deal with on a daily basis.
Haylie Pomroy: So, Dr. Crozier, if people wanted to be your patient, do you have an open practice still? Is it a closed practice?
Dr. Gordon Crozier: Yes. Yes. We still have an open practice. We’re still taking new patients. It takes a little bit to get in right now, but that comes and goes, and sometimes somebody cancels, and we can move somebody else in.
Haylie Pomroy: That’s great. Well, I would love it if you’re open to it. There are a lot of topics that come through our community. Actually, some of the education, the ideas and tools that I go back and help people with, are from either attending your seminars or reading your literature or reading your books, or you’re constantly providing more data and more information.
As a takeaway, we’ve got people out here that are listening that are maybe frustrated in their care, at that pivotal point where you found yourself, where I found myself. Are there some words of encouragement and also a call to action, like step one, step two, step three? First of all, how do I not just throw my arms up and go, I can’t get good care? I’ve been doing this 30 years. It is worse than it has ever, ever been. So, I always tell people, I get it. It’s bad. Next, how do we stay inspired that being sick is not their destiny? And what can they do?
Dr. Gordon Crozier: So, number one is change your lifestyle. And by lifestyle, I mean, number one, begin to just do a little bit of exercise. I don’t care if it’s only walking 10 feet. Just begin to move a little bit. Movement moves toxins. So, you’ve got to move them. And then how do you get rid of toxins naturally without medications? Because I do use EDTA, DMSA. I use MycoBind. I use Welchol. I use a lot of different things to get rid of toxins. But how do you do it if you don’t have access to those things? Well, you’re going to breathe them out. So, you need to breathe. You need to do box breathing. I love box breathing because not only does it calm you down, but it actually does help you get rid of some toxins. You need to sweat it out. So, sweat it out. So, get hot. Sweat it. You’ve got to sweat it out.
And a lot of times, your metabolism is slower. So, you need to increase your metabolism. And I see your book back there, Fast Metabolism Diet. That is key. The key is increasing your metabolism, because these toxins slow down your metabolism. And we can’t have a slow metabolism because it’s going to disrupt things. So, those, and drinking lots of clean water. You have to drink clean water. Don’t forget about replacing; if you’re drinking too much water, you’ve got to replace your electrolytes, because electrolytes actually help with pulling some of these toxins and actually help with the interpretation of some of your genetic expressions. That’s key right there.
Haylie Pomroy: I love that. Okay. We are all going to focus on that. And I thank you for mentioning the book. I firmly believe in healing the metabolism. And I firmly believe everything that you said about exercise, moving the body, sweating it out, focusing on detoxification, healing the pathways of detoxification. I always try to tell people, like, we don’t get exposed to a toxin and then excrete that exact toxin. We actually have to metabolize it in order to excrete it. And when we’re stuck and we can’t metabolize it, the best place for it to be stored is in our adipocytes, our brain, our thyroid, and our bones. I mean, there’s some other neuro uptake. But I love what you said. And I just want to thank you so much for being on here. It’s a huge honor to me personally. And I always love to bring some of my mentors and favorite docs into our community, because there’s such a deficiency, a true crisis-level deficiency, in compassionate physicians. And so thank you for being compassionate. Thank you for being brilliant. And thank you also for having the perseverance to fight through your own personal struggle so that you can help us get there faster, too. Thanks for being here.
Dr. Gordon Crozier: Thank you. Thank you. It was great to be here. Absolutely.
In this episode, Haylie Pomroy is joined by Dr. Gordon Crozier, osteopathic physician and Medical Director at Excellent Living Medical Center, to explore how environmental exposures may affect brain health, the immune system, and chronic illness.
Dr. Crozier shares how his own unexplained illness and the lack of compassion he met along the way led him to study neurotoxicity, and why standard lab ranges can miss what is happening beneath the surface.
Together, they discuss heavy metals, plasticizers, and pesticides, how toxins may drive immune reactions and allergies, why long COVID symptoms can keep returning, how peptide therapy is being researched, and simple lifestyle steps like movement, box breathing, sweating, and clean water that support the body's detox pathways.
Hear why compassion and curiosity may be the most overlooked tools in medicine, and how understanding your exposures can change the questions you bring to your next appointment, here on Fast Metabolism Matters.
If your body feels like it's running on empty, overburdened, or just not responding the way it used to, Haylie's latest book, Toxic Overload, tells you exactly what to do. Download your free digital copy today and start understanding what your body is trying to tell you.
Free Download: Get Your Copy of Toxic Overload 👉 https://hayliepomroy.com/pages/toxic-overload?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=gordon_crozier
You don't have to figure this out alone. Inside Haylie's private membership community, you get personalized guidance and support, member discounts on supplements and shakes, and the ability to ask questions directly to podcast guests like Dr. Systrom. Join free for 30 days and take the next step on your health journey.
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Dr. Gordon Crozier is widely recognized as a leading physician in integrative and genetic-based medical treatments and services. He is the Medical Director of Excellent Living Medical Center, where he also practices medicine, and sees patients at his private practice in Orlando, Florida, as well as remotely. A board-certified physician in the State of Florida, Dr. Crozier graduated from Des Moines University College of Osteopathic Medicine and Surgery in 1994 with a Doctorate of Osteopathy. After completing his internship and residency in Obstetrics and Gynecology at Michigan State University Garden City Hospital Campus, he practiced in neurology, neurosurgery, hormone replacement, and women’s health. He also travels around the world giving lectures on natural treatments, genetics-based medicine, and integrative medicine, and appears on national television and radio.
Website: https://crozierclinic.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DrCrozier/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drcrozier
Haylie Pomroy, Founder and CEO of The Haylie Pomroy Group, is a leading health strategist specializing in metabolism, weight loss, and integrative wellness. With over 25 years of experience, she has worked with top medical institutions and high-profile clients, developing targeted programs and supplements rooted in the "Food is Medicine" philosophy. Inspired by her own autoimmune journey, she combines expertise in nutrition, biochemistry, and patient advocacy to help others reclaim their health. She is a New York Times bestselling author of The Fast Metabolism Diet.
Learn more about Haylie Pomroy's approach to wellness through her website: https://hayliepomroy.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hayliepomroy
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/hayliepomroy
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@hayliepomroy/videos
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Edited Transcript
Haylie Pomroy: I have an incredibly special guest, very near and dear to my heart. I try to say I’ve read every single thing you’ve written, but this is Dr. Gordon Crozier, you guys, today. He’s an osteopathic doctor. Prior to becoming a DO, he was a PA in neurosurgery and in neurology. He’s won tons of awards. Something that was really cool that stood out to me was the most compassionate doctor recognition. If that’s not what we need right now, then I don’t know what is. He also recently received additional awards and praise in neurologic research from, and you’ll have to correct me, Dr. Crozier, there are so many titles here, from the Department of?
Dr. Gordon Crozier: It was from Neurological Research, the Department of Neurological Research. It’s part of Nova Southeastern, actually.
Haylie Pomroy: That’s wonderful and exciting. So, Dr. Crozier, thank you so much for being here today. Our community is going to be healthier just from getting to spend some time with you. I can’t thank you enough.
Dr. Gordon Crozier: Well, thank you. It’s great to be here.
Haylie Pomroy: So, I mentioned it a little bit, but I just wanted to talk for a second. I wanted to lead with compassionate care and personal care. Was that something that was indoctrinated or ingrained in you while you were in medical school?
Dr. Gordon Crozier: No. You know what? It is so sad that our medical system, they do not train their physicians, their physician assistants, their nurse practitioners how to be compassionate and forthright with somebody’s diagnosis. And so, it upsets me that we were that way. In fact, I was told, this is when I was a resident, they said, you are getting too close to your patients. You need to stop that. You need to have a space between you and your patient. So, it’s a sad world.
Haylie Pomroy: Is that so that you don’t get hurt? Because I think the best person to help you make decisions is a person that you feel like you can have intimate conversations with. And these are people that are sharing space and time with you during the most vulnerable aspects of their life. Why do you think that’s so ingrained? Because I’ve heard that from a lot of docs, that they really draw the line: don’t think of your patient almost as a person.
Dr. Gordon Crozier: Exactly. And I think that is so that that person doesn’t get so overwhelmed when something bad happens to that patient. But at the same time, I think we need to be overwhelmed, because if you have a patient that something bad happens to, you need to have that empathy for them. You need to have that caring aspect for them. And as a previous OB-GYN, we had a lot of, and doing high-risk OB, we had a lot of bad outcomes. And you had to be there for that person. But I was reprimanded constantly not to do that, not to be that; it shouldn’t be that way. And so I really realized when I became the patient that that is not the case. And that’s not the way it should be.
Haylie Pomroy: I had a really good friend that did a lot of palliative care and even worked in the hospice space. And she said, I’ve not lost a lot of patients, but I’ve sure lost a lot of loved ones. And it just really, really shook me, that, that helping that transition in the compassionate aspect.
In one of your early books, you wrote a lot about why you made the shift between being a doctor that looks at maybe a patient encounter like a scientific experience and making it a personal experience. Can you share with our community, like, why did that change? How did it change for you?
Dr. Gordon Crozier: Well, it changed during my own personal experience. I used to teach at the university, and I was teaching a lot of residents laparoscopic techniques and all this stuff. But I started getting sick. I got sick to the point where I was passing out during surgery. Well, you can’t be a surgeon and be passing out during surgery. I was put on medical disability during that time. Because I was at the university, I was privy to all the top doctors. They even sent me to other universities so that I could get a diagnosis. Nobody could figure out what was going on with me, number one, but nobody had compassion. Nobody had compassion. And everybody kept saying, “Are you sure you’re not making this up? Are you sure you’re not faking passing out? Are you sure this is real, that this is really happening?” It got to the point where I said, no, this is a real thing. I have six children. I’ve got to provide for six children. I cannot afford to be on medical disability.
Haylie Pomroy: Nobody gets rich on medical disability.
Dr. Gordon Crozier: No, you don’t. And so I just realized that you needed care, you needed empathy, and you needed somebody to look a little bit farther than just these basic labs. Even in traditional medicine, we have access to a lot of different labs, a lot, but nobody ever looks at them. Somebody could have done some tests on me, and they would have realized, oh, he’s a toxic mess. He’s got a toxic soup going on. But nobody ever did some of those basic labs to figure out that I was having really bad issues, and that was my cause.
Haylie Pomroy: And so in your case, like, I always say my goal, because I went through something very, very similar. And I remember I was on anti-rejection drugs. I was on 60 to 90 milligrams, 80 milligrams of prednisone every day.
I was on Mepron. And I remember somebody, one of the docs, was talking to me, and it was like, we’ll just start IV chemo, and we’ll do a splenectomy, and maybe we’ll see, maybe that’ll help your right kidney. And I was furious.
I was like, don’t you care? I was in my 20s. This is not okay and not acceptable.
You said something about just, just labs. I think for a long time, we thought there just had to be these crazy, massive labs to figure things out in an alternative space. But there are some basic labs that docs... I had to beg the other day to run a CRP on someone. Beg. Arm twist, and kind of get a little grumpy too. But I always tell people, when you get back from your doc, and they said, labs are fine, and you’re good, but you feel like H-E-double-hockey-sticks, those are just the labs. That’s just the little teeny piece of chemistry that they looked at.
Dr. Gordon Crozier: It’s just a little piece of it. And nobody really looks any deeper than that. And as you know, being in the integrative realm, what they call normal in the lab world... all labs are put on a bell curve. That’s what CLIA demands: that they have to have a bell curve. You have to encompass so many sick people in those labs. Well, according to science, what does science say about where those lab values really should be? And that’s my key thing. And we teach it a lot: these are the numbers you should be looking for in somebody. Like WBCs of five or less than five, it’s in the normal range.
Oh, you’re fine. But are they really fine?
Haylie Pomroy: Because they’re telling you they’re not. First and foremost, believe them. That’s why we say we believe you. Bottom line, whatever you’re going to tell me, I’m going to believe you 100%. And I’m going to back you 110%.
I love that you’re that way. And I notice also, so you’ve continued to not only treat your patients from a compassionate and integrative perspective, but you’re very much on the forefront of teaching young practitioners and physicians that know that if they want to get their patients well, they’ve got to continue their education, correct?
Dr. Gordon Crozier: Correct. We cannot stop. There was an article put out.
This is kind of an older article, but there was an article put out that after a physician finishes residency, on average, they only read five research articles the rest of their lifetime. And I’m like, that is sad. I try to read five a day. And I feel like I’m still falling behind. And sometimes I don’t get all five in because I’m so booked with patients or developing a new lecture, but sometimes developing a new lecture helps you learn too.
Haylie Pomroy: It does. Preparing for podcasts helps you learn. I was just reading through your stuff, and I’m like, oh, my gosh, I felt like I was drinking from a fire hydrant. And at the same time, I was just so excited about all of, all that you provide, which is, which is amazing. It’s interesting that you bring up the piece about only reading five articles, and it depends on which article you believe, but somewhere between 50% and 70% of research articles are also not repeatable.
If they’re not, if they’re not spending time with their patient and really listening to their patient and understanding the dynamics that their patients are in the disease state with... The disease is not a standalone. They are in this whole ecosystem that is supporting the disease. And if the doctor’s not addressing that, how in the world are we going to get anybody better?
I want to ask you a question, because our community oftentimes shares with me that they went in and their doc wouldn’t run labs, or their doc had the experience that you had, which is they just said, “Are you sure this is you? Or maybe you need rest? Or it’s stressful.” Exercise more, eat less, exercise more, eat less. And kind of suck it up, buttercup. How did you have the internal fortitude to keep pressing on? And what do you tell, like, my massive community that’s being faced with that from their own doctor?
Dr. Gordon Crozier: I just started looking at research articles. And I said, there’s something going on, there’s something deeper. I know this is not, it’s not a game. I’ve got to get better. I don’t have a choice. I have to get better.
I have got a family depending on me. And I started really looking at a lot of research coming out of Europe on toxicity. And they were at the forefront for a long time. And I started my PhD in neurotoxicology through Edinburgh University. Haven’t had a chance to finish it. And I’m like, oh, my gosh, I only have a little bit left. I’ve got to get there.
Haylie Pomroy: But do it with me; I’m back in school.
Dr. Gordon Crozier: Yeah. But I love what they do with a lot of their research and what they do with a lot of their articles. And they really were at the forefront of what toxins are doing in our body, to our cells, to our mitochondria, to our cellular matrix. It is so important. And why are we aging? Why is our age decreasing in the United States? We’re all about senolytics. We’re all about anti-aging. But yet, our age is declining.
Haylie Pomroy: For the first time in history.
Dr. Gordon Crozier: What is happening?
Haylie Pomroy: And the quality of our age, too.
Dr. Gordon Crozier: I mean, I love some of my family members, but they, they don’t listen to me. I was the baby boy; who’s going to listen to him?
Haylie Pomroy: I’m the baby girl. I hear you. One thing that you just said...
I went to Slovenia. I was in Ljubljana at the International Congress on Autoimmunity. It was phenomenal this year. And I was with a couple of my colleagues from the Institute for Neuro-Immune Medicine (INIM). And we had people from the World Health Organization, but we had immunologists from Germany and Italy and Spain and Israel and globally, all over. And they were talking about neurotoxicity and adjuvants in the vaccines. Like, just so absolutely, of course, these are immunologists, of course, this is happening. Of course, we’re poisoning the body. Of course, of course, of course. And we were kind of looking left and looking right at each other. Now, I lived it. I was poisoned, and I had to detox, and I was in the throes of a massive autoimmune disorder. I mean, nobody’s going to tell me that it’s not the case. Just like you. It’s my truth. It’s my reality. And I’ve walked it, and I’ve lived it, and I’ve breathed it. But to have all these immunologists standing up there and people from the World Health Organization talking about ASIA syndrome, where they’ve now classified the adjuvants as part of ASIA syndrome, which is a catalyst for autoimmunity. I was going, like, are we supposed to talk about this? Is it okay that we’re talking about this? You have to be globally minded. Because your body doesn’t understand, your cells don’t understand borders. That’s what I always say.
Dr. Gordon Crozier: You are so correct.
Haylie Pomroy: Because I have you, and this is, I would say, my time to learn, I want to ask you about toxins in general. Can you explain, we’re hearing a lot about neurotoxicity. Just give me kind of a third-grader version; help me unpack what that means in the body.
Dr. Gordon Crozier: Neurotoxicity: your brain controls your entire body. It is so important that our brain work correctly. But a lot of neurotoxicity, and you really have to go back to some other research that actually wasn’t done in the United States... But the first thing that we started realizing is that heavy metals were part of the reason for Parkinson’s. Well, who even looks at heavy metals?
When I have Parkinson’s patients walk in my doors, their traditional doctors never even looked at heavy metals for them. They didn’t look at any of that. And so heavy metals are a big thing for me to look for. And the proper thing to look at is not just heavy metals, but environmental toxins. What are the phthalates? What are the plasticizers, the pesticides, the herbicides, all those things?
When we eat food, we only have one little cell layer of thickness. And then on the other side is a blood supply and nerves. Those nerves have direct contact with the brain. So when you eat, you can absorb all these toxins through our food supply, because our food supply, we know that the American food supply is more contaminated than even some third-world countries’. We have a contaminated food supply that is actually increasing our neuroinflammation. These toxins that we drink or we eat or we breathe, because we breathe a lot in.
Haylie Pomroy: Or put on our body.
Dr. Gordon Crozier: Or we put on our body. I mean, I look at this because I do those, and I look at how many lotions have so many different parabens in them. And sometimes I’ll say some of these parabens are natural, and so if they’re in something organic, I put half a gram of organic lotion. And so the fewer, the better. I try to put essential oils on my body. I might be a little oily, but they absorb quickly into our body. And so I try not to put a lot of lotions on. I try to use more natural, as many natural things as possible, because it’s an environment that has a lot of toxins.
Haylie Pomroy: We’re being poisoned every day.
Dr. Gordon Crozier: We are being poisoned. And even our, I mean, like, we’re on electronics all day long. I’m on my cell phone constantly. My wife says, what article are you reading on your cell phone? Sorry. But my cell phone is my lifeline to all these research articles because I’m always looking something up.
But we have, even our electrical, it changes the whole platitude of what you’re going to observe in the electrons and the cells. The cells, and what happens with those cells, matters; what we take into those cells matters. And that is going to change our inflammatory response in your brain.
Haylie Pomroy: I always say, if scientists ever, and I’ve had conversations, I’ve been a massive advocate for people going through unfortunate things in their health. And when I have scientists approach me saying that we don’t exchange, or it doesn’t alter electricity or doesn’t alter our energy, I say, what the heck is happening with gravity then? How are you not floating off the face of the earth? You know what I mean? There’s, hey, done any chemistry lately?
It’s just one of those things where we, I think sometimes, when we find ourselves dealing with individuals that are vested in moving a patient along, we start to even discount basic science. I mean, we start to even discount basic science.
Dr. Gordon Crozier: Exactly.
Haylie Pomroy: How can toxicity play a role? And that was one thing that was fascinating, and actually, as I was reading when I was in Slovenia, knowing that I was going to get to interview you, I was excited to ask you this.
How do toxins disrupt the immune system?
Hi, it’s Haylie Pomroy, your host. I’ve written six New York Times bestselling books on metabolic pathways. And my latest book, Toxic Overload, tells you exactly what to do when your body’s overburdened. If you go to hayliepomroy.com/book, for a limited time, you can download a digital copy of this book completely free. That’s hayliepomroy.com/book. Grab your free copy while supplies last. Now back to our show.
Dr. Gordon Crozier: Well, toxins, you’re going to develop an immune response to all toxins. Look at how people today have so many more allergens, so many more allergies. Why do we have all these allergies in today’s world? It’s because of the immune response dictated by toxins and the toxins in our world today. And I know I have a lot of people who come in and have an allergy. I had one guy, I had to write a letter to the state that you could not spray these pesticides and herbicides within 200 yards of his house, because he had developed an immune response. That immune response actually caused him to have a plethora of food allergies as well. We don’t understand the cross... This is still evolving. And I love it because it still is evolving, but we don’t totally understand the cross-reactivity when you react to certain chemicals, how that cross-reacts to other natural things where the chemistry is kind of close, but you’ll cross-react with that, and you develop an immune response.
Haylie Pomroy: And I appreciate that you said something, and I wrote it down, which is that you are going to develop an immune response to toxins. One good thing that came out of this COVID pandemic, in my opinion, was that the average population started to learn even that we have an immune system and that the immune system is adaptive. And it responds to or is triggered by something. And we had individuals that were talking about cytokines and cytokine storm. And I just love when science starts to not hoard information and data, and it disseminates it freely to the average population. And I’m going to just wrap that into this one little pet peeve of mine. You talked about reading research articles and that people need to research. Well, I don’t know if a lot of people know this, but the majority of research articles are not publicly accessible to the average human. You either need to be part of an educational establishment, a university, a board, or you need to pay out the nose to read these articles. And if you’re sick and you’re reading a lot of articles, it’s thousands and thousands of dollars just to get the data of research that already exists. And that’s making decisions on your doctor’s ability to give health and on drugs’ ability to be manufactured. Sorry, I just had to go on that little tangent because what you said was profound.
Dr. Gordon Crozier: Correct. And that is probably part of the issue, because even the average physician can’t get to a lot of those good research articles. And I love the other research articles, and my other... I’ll tell you my little pet peeve.
Haylie Pomroy: I love it.
Dr. Gordon Crozier: Because, were you taught statistics? A lot of doctors, they’re taught statistics, but it’s gone out the window.
They don’t know how to look at an article to say, “Hey, this is statistically significant,” or “No, this is not statistically significant.” And we have to look, because there are a lot of published articles that a lot of people are reading, and they’re bringing these to me. And I said, look at this article. Number one, it’s from 2008. And I believe we can look at some of those old articles.
I think some of those are a framework and a bouncing board for us to jump to the next articles. But that article’s not even statistically significant. There’s been no more research on that. And they did try to do something, but they couldn’t reproduce the same results.
Haylie Pomroy: Not reproducible. And the fact that, what did they say?
80%. Like, we publish success. We don’t publish the 12 to 40 failures that came before that one time we had a positive outcome. And we find that a lot in drug research too. A lot of times a drug will get purchased, and they’ve had no success with the drug, but one successful study, and it’s going towards market. We’ve got to, again, have compassion and have that personalized care aspect.
I want to ask about long COVID. Are you seeing... we are seeing... I don’t know what we’re going to do. We were primed because our docs were in the ME/CFS space, where we have Epstein-Barr virus, sometimes CMV, HHV-6. We were primed to look at cases where the immune system responded, and we had dysregulation in the immune system after. But are you getting flooded? I mean, I don’t know what we’re going to do.
Dr. Gordon Crozier: I’m flooded with it. And some of them are very treatable. I’ll say that a lot of them are very treatable, but some of them are not so treatable. And why is that? Is it because of the spike protein? It’s more than that protein, that specific protein. That’s part of that thing. That spike protein and some of the other proteins involved have now developed an immune response. That immune response is getting triggered. Just like I said before, they get triggered by other similar molecular structures that are similar to that same protein. And these people are reacting over and over and over again. And that’s what I’ve been seeing in a lot of my long haulers and the long COVID. And I was glad that they did put that diagnosis out there for long COVID, because it is a legitimate problem that we’re seeing. And part of the other problem that we’re seeing is, now, I just had it the other day. They’ve been having some issues, and they went to another physician, and they were encouraged to get a, and I’m not an anti-vax person, not a pro-vax, I’m not anti-vax. I think you make your own decisions. That’s me.
Haylie Pomroy: Okay. Me too.
Dr. Gordon Crozier: But this person was encouraged, and this is one person I wouldn’t encourage to go get vaccinated, but they were encouraged by their other physician to go get a pneumococcal vaccine. Well, now they’re calling me. In fact, they had to come in. We had a little bit of an emergency visit with them because they’re in a downhill spiral.
Haylie Pomroy: Kind of a full flare.
Dr. Gordon Crozier: A full, full flare all over again. And how are you going to reverse that? What are you going to do? Well, we have things that we can do, because I’m thankful that we do have peptides that we can use.
Haylie Pomroy: That’s what I was just going to ask you. We talked about... two things I just wanted to kind of land the plane on, because they were going to stick in my brain. One is that you said treatable. We don’t seem to find, with our long COVID, like, time is not in their favor. It’s not like ride it out, just get more rest. It’s non-restorative sleep, just like we see in ME/CFS.
But something is off. And there are a lot of theories, but something needs to help first remove... And what I find is they’re also magnets for toxins. Like their toxicity level, if you just track them, their toxicity level gets higher and higher and higher and higher because they’re simply eating, breathing, drinking, and sleeping. And so some mechanism of their ability to detoxify seems to be compromised, because they suddenly become the hostess with the mostest. Just bring it on. I go get gas in my car and I toxify. Their ability to eliminate toxins... I think your approach of healing the pathways of detoxification, promoting detoxification, removing the insult, and then healing the insulted is so critical. On that line, and you teased me with it, but three years from now, what is exciting in medicine? Because you’re at the forefront. What is exciting?
Dr. Gordon Crozier: What’s exciting is we’re going to find new molecules. We have peptides, and we have a lot of peptides, and we’re discovering more peptides all the time. These peptides actually have signaling peptides. They are going to be, some people will call them pre-propeptides. Pre-propeptides, it’s out there. And these pre-propeptides actually are going to signal the other peptides to be able to do the job that they need to do in the person. Some of these people, especially my long haulers, have genetic mishaps. They all have genes, like with their SODs and with their glutathione genes and certain detox pathways, that are absolutely glitched. Well, how do you deal with them? Well, you can deal with them through certain peptides that are going to begin to open up some of those pathways for their detoxification, for their mitochondrial health, because you and I know that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. That’s how those people are going to keep living. If they don’t have the mitochondria, they’re not going to live.
Haylie Pomroy: That’s why the fatigue and the brain fogginess. I just want to say, I have your book. I went through it again, one of your books. In the beginning, you do a really good job, for me, of helping me understand what peptides are. They’re really hot right now. A lot of people, they’re starting to be well-researched, which is making me very happy. But just for myself, one more time, and to bring it back to our community, what is peptide therapy?
Dr. Gordon Crozier: Peptides are actually, a lot of them are natural in our body. And we create some of these peptides. Peptides can be created in your body. After the age of 21, which a lot of people don’t realize, a lot of these peptides go down the tube. We don’t create them like we used to.
Haylie Pomroy: Are they proteins? Are they hormones?
Dr. Gordon Crozier: They are proteins. They’re short-chain amino acids. The longer-chain amino acids are proteins. These are shorter-chain amino acids. Technically, most of them are up to 26 amino acids in a chain. And there are approximately anywhere between 7,000 and 9,000 different peptides. We’ve discovered a few more lately. But these peptides are being discovered, and they actually can control certain biological functions. Some actually control the expression of your genes and genetic expression.
These short little amino acids, they have disulfide bonds that connect these little short-chain amino acids. They can cleave off in different ways inside your body to actually, inside your body, create other peptides that might be more beneficial to what you need.
Haylie Pomroy: I want to ask you your top three favorite peptides. I figure out of 7,000 to 8,000, there’s one that I read a lot about, or I started to read a lot about, and maybe we’ll start here: it’s MOTS-c, because we were really looking at it from an inflammatory perspective, but now it’s been banned by the FDA. Help me wrap my head around that.
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Dr. Gordon Crozier: MOTS-c, you’re right, you probably hit it; that was my favorite back at the time when we could use it very freely. MOTS-c was one of the only ones that was indicated to be used via IV. I do a lot of IVs. Why? Because I need to get these people reversed rather quickly. But MOTS-c is a mitochondrial peptide. And the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.
MOTS-c not only helped to detoxify the mitochondria; it would help the mitochondria in the production of energy. And it also would help with insulin resistance, like the GLPs. But you didn’t have the bad side effects that the GLPs give you, because GLPs are peptides. But the MOTS-c didn’t have the bad side effects. You didn’t get the gastroparesis, you didn’t get the constipation, you didn’t get the nausea, you didn’t get the vomiting.
Haylie Pomroy: Hair falling out.
Dr. Gordon Crozier: Hair falling out, all the horrible things that can happen from the GLPs. But MOTS-c would actually help to control some of the sugar levels. I had some pre-diabetics that we actually reversed because of MOTS-c. It was wonderful when we could use it. It actually helped a lot of my people be able to get up out of the chair to actually walk a little bit. All I’m asking is, let’s do one more step each day. Let’s do one more step to increase that. And MOTS-c really helped them. There’s a new one that I don’t know if you’ve heard of yet. It’s called SLU-PP-332. I want you to start to look that one up, because that peptide is really interesting because it also helps to reverse insulin resistance. It does not look like it has any bad side effects, but it also helps with muscle mass and increasing muscle mass. So muscle plasticity and muscle mass actually help with neuroplasticity. Muscle plasticity and neuroplasticity go hand in hand. We’re one body. What we do in one part is going to affect another part of our body, including the destruction of it. You’ve got to do the right thing for each organ system.
Haylie Pomroy: How does a person entertain the conversation of peptides with their physician? Are physicians being taught about peptides right now? I mean, we’re trying.
Dr. Gordon Crozier: Very few of them are being taught about peptides. As you know, I teach in a peptide course. We generally have about 150 people in each seminar, and a lot of them are new doctors coming to hear and wanting to learn something about peptides. Why? Because there are some peptides that have actually been put into pharmaceutical practice. They’re now pharmaceuticals.
Haylie Pomroy: Can you give me some examples of those? GLP?
Dr. Gordon Crozier: Ozempic. Wegovy. Those are some very common ones. Dihexa was going to be one, but it got banned, and the pharmaceutical industry is not going to go any further with the medication that they were developing with it. But those are some of them.
Haylie Pomroy: Why can you still get MOTS-c in other countries, though?
Dr. Gordon Crozier: Well, they have different rules and regulations. And there are a lot of other countries that are very open to peptides and to peptide therapy, because they really care about people’s health and them getting well. But here, we have an industry that is driven... there’s money behind it.
Haylie Pomroy: There’s no money in a healthy patient. Whereas in other countries, I don’t have an opinion on whether it should be government-funded or not. But I will say you see the difference in the motivation depending on who’s paying the bill. In other countries, when the government’s paying the bill, they are more motivated to keep you healthy.
Dr. Gordon Crozier: Exactly. They want to keep you healthy. And a lot of these countries really do want to keep you healthy. Right now, where do we get a lot of our raw material for peptides? It’s imported from Germany, a lot of it. Austria, Germany. We have some from China. There are different countries that are really pro. I’m going over to speak on peptides in Taiwan at the end of September. And they’re really blowing up. They really want peptides. They want so many. They want to know everything about peptides. And they understand them far above what we are understanding, because we haven’t been given the principles. And I think it should be in every family practice physician’s CMEs, that they learn about, begin to learn about, peptides. We’ve got to start teaching doctors what’s on the plate and what’s current for their patients.
Haylie Pomroy: And the medical industry does this really insidious thing where they keep the nomenclature away from the general population. I would bet you that 99% of the doctors that prescribed a GLP-1, that prescribed Mounjaro or semaglutide, had no idea they were prescribing a peptide.
Dr. Gordon Crozier: No. They didn’t even know. And in fact, I have a friend.
He says, oh, I’ve been prescribing Ozempic. And I said, oh, that’s a nice peptide. He says, that’s not a peptide. It’s a drug.
Haylie Pomroy: Let me ask you, in your practice, because you’re also doing so much teaching, what is the most common use that people, not that it’s maybe the most profound intervention, but the most common use that people are using peptides for? Muscle development, immune modulation. We’re seeing it in our long COVID patients sometimes. What are you seeing as the most common use for peptides globally?
Dr. Gordon Crozier: Globally, I think it’s for immune modulation because of the immune issues. I like Thymulin and Thymosin alpha-1. Those are my two key things that I use a lot. Thymosin alpha-1 sometimes is hard to get. That was outlawed, but you can still use it in cases where you really think that you need to use it. We can still use it, but you’d better document it. Because I don’t know when they’re coming into my practice, I’m documenting, document, document. And you want to make sure that you are using it under the grounds of what you can use it for.
Haylie Pomroy: Understood. And it’s compassionate use with kind of orphan diseases and stuff like that, which my autoimmune disorder falls into that category. Fortunately, I didn’t need to go that route, but I had researched it for sure.
Dr. Gordon Crozier: I love that because it does cross over the blood-brain barrier, and you do get wonderful results. The other major area that I see people using peptides for is for senescent cells, for people that have, like, precancerous things, who want to make sure that they’re killing off their senescent cells so that they don’t develop a cancer. And that one’s called FOXO4. I think it’s in that book. We have an updated book coming out, by the way.
Haylie Pomroy: The science is moving so fast in this space.
Dr. Gordon Crozier: It is moving so fast, and it’s hard to keep up sometimes because I’m keeping up with that. Plus, I’m trying to keep up with other aspects that I deal with on a daily basis.
Haylie Pomroy: So, Dr. Crozier, if people wanted to be your patient, do you have an open practice still? Is it a closed practice?
Dr. Gordon Crozier: Yes. Yes. We still have an open practice. We’re still taking new patients. It takes a little bit to get in right now, but that comes and goes, and sometimes somebody cancels, and we can move somebody else in.
Haylie Pomroy: That’s great. Well, I would love it if you’re open to it. There are a lot of topics that come through our community. Actually, some of the education, the ideas and tools that I go back and help people with, are from either attending your seminars or reading your literature or reading your books, or you’re constantly providing more data and more information.
As a takeaway, we’ve got people out here that are listening that are maybe frustrated in their care, at that pivotal point where you found yourself, where I found myself. Are there some words of encouragement and also a call to action, like step one, step two, step three? First of all, how do I not just throw my arms up and go, I can’t get good care? I’ve been doing this 30 years. It is worse than it has ever, ever been. So, I always tell people, I get it. It’s bad. Next, how do we stay inspired that being sick is not their destiny? And what can they do?
Dr. Gordon Crozier: So, number one is change your lifestyle. And by lifestyle, I mean, number one, begin to just do a little bit of exercise. I don’t care if it’s only walking 10 feet. Just begin to move a little bit. Movement moves toxins. So, you’ve got to move them. And then how do you get rid of toxins naturally without medications? Because I do use EDTA, DMSA. I use MycoBind. I use Welchol. I use a lot of different things to get rid of toxins. But how do you do it if you don’t have access to those things? Well, you’re going to breathe them out. So, you need to breathe. You need to do box breathing. I love box breathing because not only does it calm you down, but it actually does help you get rid of some toxins. You need to sweat it out. So, sweat it out. So, get hot. Sweat it. You’ve got to sweat it out.
And a lot of times, your metabolism is slower. So, you need to increase your metabolism. And I see your book back there, Fast Metabolism Diet. That is key. The key is increasing your metabolism, because these toxins slow down your metabolism. And we can’t have a slow metabolism because it’s going to disrupt things. So, those, and drinking lots of clean water. You have to drink clean water. Don’t forget about replacing; if you’re drinking too much water, you’ve got to replace your electrolytes, because electrolytes actually help with pulling some of these toxins and actually help with the interpretation of some of your genetic expressions. That’s key right there.
Haylie Pomroy: I love that. Okay. We are all going to focus on that. And I thank you for mentioning the book. I firmly believe in healing the metabolism. And I firmly believe everything that you said about exercise, moving the body, sweating it out, focusing on detoxification, healing the pathways of detoxification. I always try to tell people, like, we don’t get exposed to a toxin and then excrete that exact toxin. We actually have to metabolize it in order to excrete it. And when we’re stuck and we can’t metabolize it, the best place for it to be stored is in our adipocytes, our brain, our thyroid, and our bones. I mean, there’s some other neuro uptake. But I love what you said. And I just want to thank you so much for being on here. It’s a huge honor to me personally. And I always love to bring some of my mentors and favorite docs into our community, because there’s such a deficiency, a true crisis-level deficiency, in compassionate physicians. And so thank you for being compassionate. Thank you for being brilliant. And thank you also for having the perseverance to fight through your own personal struggle so that you can help us get there faster, too. Thanks for being here.
Dr. Gordon Crozier: Thank you. Thank you. It was great to be here. Absolutely.
