Episode 175 | Apr 9, 2026

Healing from Chronic Stress, With Dr. Scott Sherr

What happens when chronic stress and low energy begin feeding each other in a loop that feels impossible to escape? This week on Health Coach Talk, Dr. Sandi welcomes Dr. Scott Sherr, a board-certified internal medicine physician and expert in health optimization medicine and hyperbaric oxygen therapy, for a fascinating conversation about the connections between the nervous system, mitochondrial health, and healing. Together, they explore why so many people feel “wired but tired” and what may be happening beneath the surface when clients are doing all the right things but still not feeling better.

“If you’re working with somebody that seems to be very stressed and very over-activated, I might start asking them to do small things like humming or breathwork, but I’m not going to try too hard to get them to downregulate until I support their mitochondria first.”

Dr. Scott Sherr

At the center of the episode is Dr. Scott’s concept of the “sympathetic spiral of doom,” a cycle in which chronic fight-or-flight activation and mitochondrial dysfunction reinforce one another. He shares how this pattern can show up as fatigue, anxiety, poor sleep, brain fog, and trouble recovering from stress or exercise, and he explains why timing and sequencing matter when introducing supportive therapies. Their conversation also offers a closer look at methylene blue, the GABA system, and hyperbaric oxygen therapy, including the possibilities these approaches may offer as well as the importance of caution, personalization, and a strong foundation.

For health coaches, this episode offers an especially helpful framework for understanding clients who seem stuck despite their best efforts. Dr. Scott’s perspective reinforces the importance of looking beyond symptoms alone and considering how stress physiology, resilience, and cellular health may all be shaping a client’s experience. It also highlights the meaningful role coaches can play in helping clients build supportive daily practices, understand their patterns more clearly, and move toward healing in a way that feels steady and sustainable. Check out the episode below.

Watch The Episode

Listen Now

Transcript

Dr. Sandi: Have you ever wondered about the benefits of things like methylene blue? How about hyperbaric oxygen? What is it good for? What are some ways that we need to be cautious? What’s the role of health coaches in some of these cutting-edge new therapies, new delivery mechanisms? And what is the role of the GABA system? In this conversation with my guest today, we get into all these areas. We also talk about the sympathetic spiral of doom. What is that and what can we do about it?

So, let me tell you about my guest today, Dr. Scott Sherr. He is a board-certified internal medicine physician, and he’s certified to practice Health Optimization Medicine and hyperbaric oxygen therapy. He’s the chief medical and health education officer of Troscriptions. This is a line of physician-formulated, pharmaceutical-grade, and precision-dosed buccal troches. We talk about what that is, containing novel ingredients like methylene blue. He’s also the VP of Health Optimization Medicine and Practice, which is the nonprofit arm of Troscriptions. He is, in addition, the chief medical officer of OneBase Health. This is a company that builds software and hardware to power integrative technologies. So, without further ado, here is my conversation with Dr. Scott. Dr. Scott Sherr, welcome to the podcast.

Dr. Scott: Thank you for having me, Sandi. It’s good to be here.

Dr. Sandi: It is so great to talk to you. And we have so many things to cover. But something that you describe, I really want to get into because I think this is really important for our audience, particularly for health coaches, and that is the sympathetic spiral of doom. Can you describe what that is and what can we do about it?

Dr. Scott: Yeah, so I’ve been a clinician. I appreciate you asking, Sandi. It sounds ominous, and I get that. But as a health coach, if you’re working with clients, you need to be able to recognize this pattern. It’s not a diagnosis. It’s not like you’re trying to peg somebody as this. It’s more if you can recognize this pattern, then you know how to break it. And that’s really what it comes down to.

I’ve been a clinician now for over 20 years. And what it comes down to is I realized a long time ago that there are certain people in my office, my telemedicine office now, that I couldn’t help. They would come in and they wanted diet changes, supplement changes. They wanted you to fix their gut, but they’d been through four or five other doctors. They weren’t getting any better. No matter what they try, they couldn’t get any better. And this is a very common scenario. And it might not be the severe cases that many of you are thinking about. It could be just the mild ones. Everything you try, like maybe it works for a little while, but it doesn’t really work fully, right? They never seem to be able to turn that corner.

And this is often because they’re stuck in this loop of sympathetic activation and mitochondrial dysfunction. And that’s what the sympathetic spiral is really trying to describe is that you have this overactivation of the nervous system, stuck in fight or flight. Many of your patients and clients don’t even realize that’s the case because they’ve been this way for such a long time. And in the same breath, they also have mitochondrial dysfunction. The mitochondria aren’t working well to make energy. Either they can’t make the energy effectively, or they can’t neutralize the stress of making energy. And what happens is the mitochondria flip into something called this cell danger response where they can’t make energy effectively. And so they flip around and actually, instead of making more, they make less.

And then as a result of that, the sympathetic nervous system tries to compensate and you get activated more. And so you have this sympathetic activation, mitochondrial dysfunction loop, and it can start anywhere, which is really interesting actually. So, you can start with just the sympathetic activation on its own, or it can start with mitochondrial dysfunction on its own. And then either of them can lead into the other. I think about this more as a top-down or bottom-up kind of approach, where, at the top-down, you have external things that are causing stress. Let’s talk about all the things that are causing stress in everybody’s life, right? Work, family, poor sleep, stressful relationship, a stressful job, right? And then even trauma as a child or deaths in the family. And it can be pretty significant. That’s all the external stuff that’s causing that stressful activation.

Then you have the mitochondria itself that can get directly hit with medications that we take on a regular basis that cause toxicity, toxins in our environment, infections, insulin resistance, and that sympathetic activation itself actually causes mitochondrial stress. And so you have it directly hitting the mitochondria, directly hitting your sympathetic nervous system. And then you’re stuck in this loop.

What does that mean? That means your patients are wired but tired. They can’t recover anymore. What used to be an easy day with steady energy is now all over the place. Their mood is all over the place. They’re not sleeping well. They’re waking up in the middle of the night and can’t go back to bed. They feel like when they exercise, they’re sore for days rather than maybe a day or two afterwards. And so they have fatigue that doesn’t seem to get better no matter what they try. So, this is the loop. And many of your patients and clients are in here, and they don’t have any idea that they are. And that’s why it’s so important to recognize the pattern and start addressing it.

Dr. Sandi: That was such a great explanation. And I think fortunately there is something. There are not just one, but there are so many things that we can do. And I had found with all my work as a health psychologist and the training that I had in cognitive behavior therapy, positive psychology, that it’s really the… It’s endless, the number of external potential stressors. I remember once working with a woman. She could not sleep. She was frazzled. She was anxious. She had panic attacks, actually, because she couldn’t decide what draperies… She was redecorating and she would literally be up all night worrying.

Dr. Scott: First-world problems.

Dr. Sandi: Yeah, what should I choose? Should I choose this? Should I choose that? And the example I always gave was two people can be waiting in line at Disney World to go on a thrill ride. And one person is, “This is so wonderful and I can’t wait and I’m so happy.” And the other person is shaking with fear. And so it is really the interpretation of that event. Somebody could be dealing with some pretty serious issues, and they’re floating above it. But I love where you emphasize that there are certain things, certain hacks that you can use like humming and gargling as well.

Dr. Scott: This is the sympathetic versus parasympathetic balance, right? So, what’s interesting about this, Sandi, and I really appreciate the kind of work that you’ve done, is that when it comes down to having people recognize that they’re in this sympathetic activation, it’s important for us as clinicians to be able to demonstrate that for them and give them ways to see this. If I ask somebody that’s really stressed to calm down, that’s not going to go well. If you tell your partner, “You know what, all you need to do is just calm down,” that’s not going to go well for you.

Dr. Sandi: That’s only going to…

Dr. Scott: Exactly, that’s going to have the opposite effect. So, you need to do this in a way that’s supportive. And I think the missing piece here, Sandi, and somebody that I actually did a podcast with a couple of months ago really solidified this for me, is that she talked to me, she said, “Scott, I had Lyme infection. I was dealing with chronic mold and my nervous system was just shot. And my doctor decided to give me something to calm me down and it made me crash.” Why? Because if you are under such sympathetic activation and you already have mitochondrial stress, if you start to put the brakes on, you start putting the brake pedal on but you don’t have enough support on the cellular system to be able to tolerate taking off that stress, you are not going to feel good. And this is what I see a lot happen is that, as clinicians, we start trying to take that gas pedal off, put that brake on, without giving them enough cellular support at the same time. And this is important because if we just take the brakes and we put them on and you don’t have that cellular support, you could crash. And I’ve seen this.

And so it’s very important for us to think about, okay, what’s the right sequencing here? And if you’re working with somebody that seems to be very stressed and very over-activated, I might start asking them to do small things like this, like maybe do some singing, maybe do some humming, maybe try some breath work, but I’m not going to really try too hard to get them to downregulate until I get more mitochondrial support specifically. And so my first hack, as it were, is to help people first recognize that this is happening. And then as it is happening, then I’m like, okay, now we need to support the mitochondria of your cells. That’s the first step. And what’s interesting, though, and this is important, if I just work on mitochondrial support but I forget about that sympathetic activation, it’s like pissing in the ocean. Nothing’s going to work.

And many clinicians that are listening will resonate with this, like, “I gave them everything they were supposed to get. I saw their supplement requirements. I did their labs. Why didn’t they get better?” Well, dang, it’s that sympathetic activation. But I still very much recommend that you start there, at least initially. And that’s what that mitochondrial support is. And there are a lot of different ways to do this. I found a very fast way to do this is to use this very interesting compound called methylene blue.

Dr. Sandi: Yes, I was going to ask you about it. Yeah.

Dr. Scott: And so methylene blue has been on…

Dr. Sandi: I wore a blue shirt for the methylene blue conversation.

Dr. Scott: Yes, very good. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, very nice. And you match with your painting in the back there, too. It’s nice. But the methylene blue that I use is a very low dose. It’s around 4 to maybe 12 milligrams, like a small amount, because what methylene blue can do is it comes into your mitochondria and works like an electric-powered vehicle. And what I mean by that is that there’s no waste. And typically when our mitochondria make energy, we make adenosine triphosphate, which is our energy currency. We also make carbon dioxide, water, and we make reactive oxygen species, which are our waste products. These are important and we need them, but we also need antioxidants in the body to be able to neutralize the stress of making energy. So, we’re like gasoline-powered cars. And this is why over time our cells start breaking down because they rust from this stress.

And what methylene blue does, which is interesting, is it comes in as what’s called a redox cycler. It has the capacity to help compensate for energy capacity issues or energy-making issues. And it also can come in and work directly as an antioxidant. And so almost immediately when you get the dose, it’s not something that takes days. It doesn’t take weeks. It takes days. Like once you get to the right dose after a few days, you should start feeling a little bit more energy, a little more focus, a little bit less anxiety. I’ve seen this. And because the cells are starting to get enough support where they can start making that shift out of that cell danger response. Now that’s not the only thing I do. Like we’re trying to change their diet, trying to get them on good minerals, get better sunlight, lots of different things. But what I found that’s easy for people to put in their mouth, which is what a lot of people need to start off with before making big habit changes, is something small that can make a big difference.

And so once I get that mitochondrial support road going, once that motor is going a little bit better and people feel a little bit better, that’s when it’s time to start putting those brake pedals back on. And that’s when I started leveraging the GABA system. But before I get there, I’ll make sure you don’t have any questions. There are lots of things we could talk about with methylene blue, of course.

Dr. Sandi: Yeah. So, I have heard that methylene blue might be something that is useful for something like mold exposure, mycotoxins. Any thoughts on that? And who should not take methylene blue? And what are some of the things to be really cautious out there in terms of, don’t just go on Amazon and order some methylene blue?

Dr. Scott: Yeah, there’s lots of things to unpack. When it comes down to dosing, what methylene blue can do at these lower doses, that 4 to about 25 milligram dose, really support mitochondrial function in a very comprehensive way, as I just described. Energy and detox. I tell my patients all the time, “You get energy, you get detox,” right? So, good story. I had a lady that first couple years after starting our company, she started taking methylene blue after about two years of mold issues. She had mold in her house, mold in her body. She got rid of the mold in the house, got rid of the mold in her body, but still felt terrible. Well, why? Because she still had significant mitochondrial stress. After two weeks of being on low doses of methylene blue, she was back to work as a physical therapist after being out of work for two years.

And I kept seeing this kind of pattern where methylene blue was coming in with patients with long-standing symptoms, long-standing Lyme, long-standing mold, etc. Like the infection really wasn’t the issue anymore in these patients because they’d done all that, done it all three times and more, but not seen that they’re really getting their energy back. And that’s when these low doses of methylene blue could be so, so powerful. And I’ve seen it in all walks of chronic infection, chronic autoimmunity, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, all of these where it’s just a missing piece.

The other piece to mention here, though, as well, is that higher doses of methylene blue, around a milligram per kilogram to about 2 milligrams per kilogram, so about 50 to 150 milligrams of methylene blue depending on the person and the dose, is fantastic as an anti-infective directly. In fact, that’s how methylene blue was first developed. In 1897, the first drug registered with the FDA—1897, not 1997, 1897—for malaria. And these doses are fantastically antimicrobial. And what’s also amazing about it is it doesn’t work like a nuclear bomb, like the rest of these antibiotics that we take. It doesn’t kill off all the other bugs that you have in your system. So, it’s not that you’re taking something for an infection and you lose all your gut microbes as a result of that. You maintain most of that.

Now, if you took methylene blue for long amounts of time at very high doses, you would shrink the numbers of commensals and things in the gut. But in general, short amounts of methylene blue over 5 to 7 or 14 days don’t have a major effect. So, you have these lower doses, which are fantastic for mitochondrial support, and you have the higher doses, which are great for more support as an anti-infective in general. And as a result, you get this sort of combination effect depending on the dosing, which is great.

You talked about quality too, which is really big. And so the problem with methylene blue is that oftentimes it can be contaminated with heavy metals. It can be contaminated with lead, mercury, arsenic, and cadmium. And so you don’t want that, right? You don’t want to have those in your diet, in any kind of supplements that you’re taking. And certainly the liquids are the bigger culprit of these typically. So, if you’re looking at liquids, they tend to be a higher culprit than if you get it in like a tablet or what we make at Troscriptions, which are these buccal troches. The buccal troche is a dissolvable lozenge that goes between your upper cheek and gum and dissolves over about 15 to 30 minutes. But it can also be swallowed. And the nice thing about that is that methylene blue is also quite blue. And so as a result of it being quite blue, if you dissolve it in the mouth, your mouth is going to turn quite blue.

So, you mentioned something about Amazon, Sandi, which I should also just point out. I don’t think anybody should be buying supplements on Amazon in general. The problem is that if it’s coming from an Amazon warehouse specifically, you don’t really know exactly what you’re getting. And there have been millions of dollars worth of counterfeit stuff on Amazon over the years. So, if you’re going to buy it on Amazon, I always recommend getting it from the actual company that you trust, as a third-party and not Prime shipping. I’m sorry, everybody loves Prime shipping. I’m guilty of this too. We all love Prime. But in the end, sourcing is super important because methylene blue can be contaminated along the way. And you don’t want to give somebody that’s trying to heal lead, mercury, cadmium, and arsenic, and you don’t want to give them a less potent amount than you think you are.

Liquids are always less potent than what it says on the label. One of my biggest pet peeves is somebody comes up to me, “Hey, doc, I’ve been taking methylene blue. I’ve been taking 10 drops twice daily and I feel terrible.” I’m like, “How much have you been taking?” They’re like, “10 drops twice daily.” I’m like, “How much is that?” And they never know. Even if it says on the label, which I don’t believe, they’ll never know. Quality is super, super important.

Dr. Sandi: I’m fascinated by buccal troches, which is something that until a few years ago, and I got some samples from you, I had no idea. Can you explain the mechanism of action with that?

Dr. Scott: Yeah, sure. The buccal troche is a dissolvable lozenge that was developed a long time ago, actually, for compounding pharmacies. And the nice thing about them is that they’re small, they’re like less than the size of a penny, and they’re scored and you can take either a quarter or a half or a full depending on your dose. So, you can find the right dose for you. It can be very difficult with a capsule or a tablet if you’re too sensitive to the actual capsule or tablet to take a smaller dose, right? So, you can always cut the troche up into quarters, even an eighth, if you really need to.

And what’s nice about buccal absorption is that buccal is fast. It goes directly into the bloodstream through your cheek. And so it bypasses metabolism in the liver as well. So, it’s faster acting and the ingredients are more bioavailable, which means that they’re more potent when they get into the system. Methylene blue is actually the exception to this rule. Methylene blue, because it’s actually a very highly bioavailable compound, if you swallow it, you get the same effect as if you dissolved it in the mouth, but in the mouth it’s going to be faster. So, some of my patients and some people that I know will only use it in the mouth because it’s going to be faster, even though the same bioavailability is there.

So, we use the buccal troche because they’re faster acting, the ingredients are more bioavailable except for methylene blue, and you can titrate them. The titration is really important with methylene blue. I often recommending start off with a quarter of our Just Blue for our consumers, which is 4 milligrams, and increasing the dose every 3 to 5 days until you start feeling better. Usually the range that I find it’s going to range for everybody somewhere between 8 and 16 milligrams is a good mitochondrial support dose. We have a higher-strength methylene blue at 50 milligrams per troche, and that’s for practitioners only. And that one’s good for more significant mitochondrial support or as an anti-infective, as I mentioned as well.

Dr. Sandi: Gotcha. Who should not take methylene blue?

Dr. Scott: So, if you’re pregnant or breastfeeding, you shouldn’t take methylene blue. If you’re on antihypertensive medication, those medications are showing you that you have high blood pressure, of course, and methylene blue sometimes can increase blood pressure as well. So, you have to be aware of that. Usually it’s not significant, but if you have a hard blood pressure to control at baseline, it might be more difficult to control more so with methylene blue on board. So, you have to go slowly with the dose, work with the provider, and just make sure your blood pressure is not going too high.

The other thing is if you have kidney dysfunction, because methylene blue—fun fact—if you take methylene blue, it’s going to concentrate in your urine and you’re going to urinate blue. If you’ve had B vitamins in the morning, it’s going to be a neon green. So, just be aware of these things. And as a result of being excreted in the kidneys, you have to have normal kidneys to be able to excrete it. So, if you’re on dialysis, you can’t take methylene blue. If you have chronic kidney disease, you have to follow closely just to make sure that your kidneys are staying stable. Methylene blue is not going to make the kidney function worse, but if the kidneys do get worse over time, it may build up over a longer period of time.

So, that’s one of the places where I recommend people check their urine. And when it turns from going from blue to no longer being blue, that’s typically a good sign that the methylene blue is out of your system. But not everybody so it’s a little bit different. And everybody’s urine will turn blue at different times depending on the person, depending on how fasted you are, depending on travel and stress. And so a lot of this is very individualized. But CKD, or chronic kidney disease, is one. The other one that I would like to just discuss is detox kinds of symptoms, right? So, when you’re starting something that’s revving up metabolism, methylene blue is… there’s always a risk that you get detox symptoms that can start developing. Headaches, irritability, GI distress. These are typically pretty mild as long as you start off at a lower dose of methylene blue and increase it over time rather than starting off at the full troche or a higher dose of methylene blue right away, because that can sometimes be too stressful on the system too quickly. Certainly higher doses of methylene blue over the 50 to 100 milligram dose, those are going to cause more stress for sure. And so if I have to have a patient on those higher doses, I’m giving them more antioxidant support at the same time, just to help support them along the way because the deal is that once you get that support in place, once you get that mitochondrial support in place, Sandi, then that’s when I started looking at that sympathetic activation piece and seeing, how can we downregulate the nervous system? What can we do right now and what can we do long-term? Right now, that’s where I focus on the GABA system typically, because GABA is our primary driver of those brakes of the brain that many of us have lost.

Dr. Sandi: That makes so much sense. So, I want to touch on hyperbaric oxygen. There are so many areas that you have your hand in, that you are interested in, and they all have such value in terms of either the GABA system or mitochondrial support. But hyperbaric oxygen, we’re hearing so much about this at the conferences. I think there’s 20 companies that were doing different types and styles of hyperbaric oxygen chambers. So, what is your interest and what do you see in the industry? What excites you, or perhaps what should we be cautious about?

Dr. Scott: Sure. I’ve been involved in hyperbaric medicine now for a long time, over a decade, and I’ve certainly seen things change a lot over those years. Where hyperbaric therapy really comes in is that it’s a fantastic synergizer and accelerator of healing. It decreases inflammation, you get stem cell release, you get immune system activation, you get decrease in swelling, you get angiogenesis, new blood vessels, and you get better lymphatic flow. All in the context, though, that your system is able to truly leverage it. And over the years, what I really have had a lot of respect for is understanding how to sequence hyperbaric therapy. And it goes back to that same beginning where I’ve had people with injuries that should have gotten better in the chamber but they don’t. And I asked myself, why didn’t they get better? And it’s oftentimes because their body was stuck in that fight or flight mode and they couldn’t get out. And if you’re in that fight or flight mode, there’s nothing that you can do to heal until you come out of that. When you get into that parasympathetic state, that’s when you can rest, digest, detoxify, and heal.

And so I was disinvited from speaking at a hyperbaric conference once because the title of my lecture was going to be, “Please Do Not Put Them in the Chamber.” And that didn’t go over well to people that are running hyperbaric clinics. But I think it’s great. So, if you have an acute injury, hyperbaric therapy is fantastic because you can very quickly get more oxygen into the system, preventing tissue death, decreasing inflammation, decreasing swelling, immune system activation, everything that I mentioned. But if you have a long-term issue, if you’re looking for longevity, if you have a chronic cognitive impairment, you have a chronic infection, you have somebody, a kid with autism spectrum disorder, you have many things that are more chronic. My mainstay here is to focus on foundational biomarkers first, optimize there, and then three or six months later, then really decide whether hyperbaric therapy is necessary and appropriate, because once you’ve optimized that foundation, then you do see fantastic benefit.

And I think the bridge here, Sandi, is that energy metabolism is the name of the game when it comes to hyperbaric oxygen therapy, because you’re flooding the body with a huge amount more oxygen, combining inspired oxygen at higher levels with increased atmospheric pressure that’s driving more oxygen into circulation. So, what is oxygen supposed to do? It’s supposed to go to your mitochondria, the part of your cell, and help you make all of that energy because it’s the final electron acceptor at Complex IV (cytochrome c oxidase) for those who like biochemistry. Without oxygen, you can’t make energy so you don’t live for very long. If you flood the body with oxygen, what happens then? You’re making a lot of energy, sure, but you’re also making a lot more reactive oxygen species, a lot more waste products of energy metabolism, or directly making them because you already have enough oxygen to make energy. So, what are you going to do with all the extra oxygen?

And so then you have this huge oxidative load that becomes part of the situation. What happens with that oxidative load? That’s what actually makes the stem cells release and the immune system get better and optimizes your epigenetics over the long term to get more blood vessels and decrease inflammation. But you have a huge oxidative load, so you need to have a neutralization effect of antioxidants in the body. And if you don’t have enough antioxidant capacity, you’re not going to feel good. And if you didn’t have enough capacity to make energy in the first place, you’re not going to feel good either.

And so the whole framework that I think about here is using the science of metabolomics, which is a big part of my clinical practice, the science of small molecules that are involved in real-time cellular operation, cellular machinery. And that’s looking at small molecules of your citric acid cycle, small molecules of your oxidative stress panels, your small molecules. These are the things that you, I’m sure, teach as well, and how to interpret these kinds of labs. And that’s why this stuff is so important. Because when you can look at all that, you can start optimizing their diet, their lifestyle, their behavior, their supplementation, and get them in a place where hyperbaric therapy is going to work much better.

Not to forget that the stress response is huge. And that’s where that GABAergic neurotransmitter system really comes into play, where you want to get those brakes to start going back on. Because if you’re GABA-deficient, you have more anxiety, you have more stress, you have more insomnia, you have more depression. And so ramping up the GABA system is essential. And you do this long-term by optimizing the gut and inflammation and the blood-brain barrier, because you certainly don’t want to just take GABA supplements. GABA itself is too big of a molecule to get into the brain. If you do take GABA… I’m not sure if you’ve seen this in practice, but I have, Sandi. If you have your patients take GABA supplements and they work, it’s usually because they have a leaky brain and also corresponding to a leaky gut. So, it’s diagnostic. But over time I’ve seen in my practice patients that I work with, if they’re taking GABA and it works for them, once we seal their gut up, the GABA supplements stop working and you can use other things to enhance the GABA system that are very comprehensive. But certainly, hopefully at that point, the brain is not leaky as much.

Dr. Sandi: I think so many people are just applying the shot-in-the-dark approach. They’ll be scrolling social media, they’ll see a sponsored ad for some supplement or something, and they’ll say, “Oh, that sounds good.” And they’ll see the benefits and scroll down and say, “Okay, I’ll try that.” And then they add that to their supplement stack and pretty soon they’ve got a hundred supplements. And I know I’m guilty of that. I’ll say, “Oh, this sounds good, I’ll add that,” and not realizing potential interaction effects or some of the issues that may arise. And so I think it just points to working with a good functional medicine doctor. And one of the benefits of working with a health coach is they can provide this education and help people reassess, okay, like, why am I taking this and why did I choose to add this to my supplement regimen? And I’m often ignoring those basics like sun and good sleep and relationships, community, meaning and purpose, and good diet and movement throughout the day. But tell us about your clinical practice. Now let’s say patients come to you. Where do you start and what’s your usual process?

Dr. Scott: Yeah, the framework I use is called Health Optimization Medicine and Practice or HOMeHOPe for short. It was developed by Dr. Ted Achacoso. He’s the founder and the pioneer. And he developed this practice in 2017 as a nonprofit that I became a part of. It’s a nonprofit organization that’s training practitioners on how to optimize health rather than focus on disease. And the framework shift was really important for me. I’m the son of a chiropractor that was very out of the box and still is practicing in New York. And I was always looking for a way to create a foundation to the work that I did. And hyperbaric medicine was really the main thing that I did after leaving my residency in internal medicine and having a clinical practice. I started with hyperbaric therapy, but I was missing this base. And that base for me became Health Optimization Medicine.

The framework shift was really important, which was instead of just looking to treat early signs or even root causes of disease, how can we create the first standard of care for health? Instead of looking at how long people can live, how can we focus on optimizing their health instead? And using normalization values that weren’t normal for your age, but in fact were optimal for human optimization, human functioning. And that’s typically a range between 21 and 30 years of age. And so that’s hormones, that’s nutrients, that’s gut, that’s everything, right? We don’t want to be normal for our age. We want to be optimal, which is going to be in that 21 to 30 years of age range. With those that are listening, if you’re not in there, you remember how it felt to not have to think about it. You didn’t think about it because you just woke up the next day and you were fine, right? Almost no matter what you did to yourself. As you get older, that’s no longer the case. You have to really be working at it on a regular basis.

And the other big piece of it was not looking at it from an organ perspective like you have a heart, you have a liver, you have a brain. Of course you have those, but at the deeper level, you have a cell that powers them all. And that basic cell powers all of your tissues. And the way to best look at that is in the science that I was mentioning earlier called metabolomics. Metabolomics is the study of these small molecules in real time. Your genes are important. Your genome is important, but it just gives you a window on what may happen. But you don’t really know, right? There’s all these other layers. There’s your genome, there’s your transcriptome, there’s your proteome, there’s your metabolome. These are all levels that are coming from your DNA. And of course you have your epigenome as well. Then you have your external environmental factors that are all pounding you as well with your food, your water, your microbes, all of these things, right? And metabolomics is the best way right now that we have, I think, to be able to really optimize and to really assess what’s happening.

So, in my clinical practice, I’m using this framework called Health Optimization Medicine to take people on a journey. It’s a path, right? The path does not end unless, you know, when we end, which is hopefully a long time from now. But knowing that path is challenging. It’s not something that tomorrow you’re going to feel better. If it took you 40 or 50 years, Dr. Ted likes to say this, if it took you 40 or 50 years to get to where you are, you can’t expect that tomorrow you’re going to feel better. So, you’re going to have roadblocks along the way, many of them.

And that’s where we developed a company called Troscriptions, which helps people right now along that path with methylene blue containing products, Just Blue or Blue Cannatine, for example, or things that leverage the GABA system, Tro Calm or Tro Zzz. Those really help right now with energy, with focus, with sleep, with stress, because those are some of the main roadblocks. And we also have something called Tro Mune for immune system function, which is significantly important, especially when you’re in that sympathetic spiral of doom and getting sick all the time too.

And so we developed all that. And I think what’s really interesting as I think about this, Sandi, is that health coaches are this as well, right? Health coaches are the people that are able to get people from point A to B, C, D, and G when they want to get where they want to be at XYZ already. But how are they going to get there, right? They need people, they need advocates. They need people that are going to be in their corner along the way and giving them the ways that they can do these simple things like change their diet and their lifestyle and work on their stress. That’s not easy. And that takes time, effort.

And what I love about Troscriptions is that we’re giving a molecular synergy to help people there, but it doesn’t take the place of having to do the hard work long term. And that’s what really requires… Health coaches are I think the prime people to do that right now the way the system is set up, and I see so much potential there always.

Dr. Sandi: That is music to my ears. Dr. Scott, where can people find you and where can they access Troscriptions?

Dr. Scott: Thank you for having me, Sandi. So, I would say if you’re looking for some of the products, we have Just Blue, Tro Calm, and Tro Zzz. The first two are methylene blue containing. Just Blue is pure methylene blue for energy. Blue Cannatine is focus plus energy. It’s fantastic. If you have brain fog, that’s the best one, especially for perimenopausal women. They tell me this all the time. And we have our Tro Calm for anxiousness and Tro Zzz for sleep. Check it out at troscriptions.com. You can also find us at Troscriptions on Instagram. We also have a not large but growing YouTube channel. We come out with a video every week. It’s really focused on education. That’s the big thing. And we also have a nonprofit organization called Health Optimization Medicine and Practice, or HOMeHOPe for short. You can check that out at homehope.org. If you are a health coach or a clinician and you’re interested in learning this, you can. You don’t have to be a licensed practitioner to be able to get a great framework and learn this. And so we have a seven-module certification. We also have the capacity to take any module that you’d like for certification. We also have continuing medical education credits available as well. So, you can check that at homehope.org.

My personal consulting, you can find it, it’s my name, drscottsherr.com. Don’t throw an extra C in there. You won’t go to the right place. And there you’ll find my work in hyperbaric medicine consulting, my Health Optimization Medicine practice that I do via telemedicine here in my little town outside of Boulder, Colorado, and then also links to Troscriptions. And I have another company called OneBase Health that’s involved in integrative technology, hyperbaric medicine, etc. That also might be interesting for some of your listeners.

Dr. Sandi: This has been fascinating. I want to thank you for being with us. It took a long time. Things kept coming up and we had to reschedule. Thank you for being so patient. And this has been jam-packed with information. So, wishing you luck in all of these companies. You are doing such cutting-edge work. And I hope you can continue the conversation.

Dr. Scott: It’s been a pleasure to be with you, Sandi. Thank you for having me.