#164: Dr. Baxter Montgomery - A Modern Day David vs. Goliath: Slaying the Cardiovascular Disease Giant
Today, we share a modern-day story of David and Goliath with Dr. Baxter Montgomery.
In 1997, Dr. Montgomery opened Montgomery Heart and Wellness in Houston, Texas right in the shadows of the powerful and world-renowned campus of the Texas Medical Center, the world’s largest medical center.
As a board-certified cardiologist and cardiac electrophysiologist, Dr. Montgomery has treated thousands of patients with severe cardiovascular diseases, but he started to notice something.
Even though he employed state-of-the-art procedures, interventions, ablations, and medications, his patients continued to grow weaker and sicker.
Montgomery, instead, started researching nutrition’s role in disease reversal and found that - you guessed it- PLANTS were the common denominator in determining wellness.
Today at Montgomery Heart and Wellness, Dr. Montgomery helps patients achieve optimal health and wellness through various nutrition programs. His goal? To get his patients to think beyond the script, improve their health, and reverse these chronic lifestyle diseases.
He truly is a modern-day David fighting a giant Goliath medical system, but much like David, he’s ready, willing, and able to slay the dragon of lifestyle disease.
Episode Timestamps
6:00 Why he was inspired to take a different approach to medicine
12:45 His own personal journey back to health that inspired his nutrition protocols
16:45 Just do this for seven days!
22:50 The results are astounding
24:30 Changing the Health Care Paradigm - “Heart and Souls of a Champion” upcoming program
29:50 Is his facility and in-patient center?
31:20 What’s an LVAT?
32:40 What is Lipoprotein a?
35:00 Are his colleagues on board, or still resistant?
39:00 Dr. Montgomery’s 3 pillars of optimal health
41:50 How can the human body heal itself so quickly?
45:35 Moderation is like running through quicksand.
47:40 How do his patients respond to his protocols and advice?
49:00 Why does he prescribe raw foods only for his patients?
57:00 All about the upcoming four-day Open House and Red Carpet Gala
1:02:00 How he is living his God-given passion
1:05:00 Bonus - Dr. Montgomery’s take on A-Fib and PVCs
About Baxter Montgomery, MD:
Dr. Baxter D. Montgomery is a Board Certified Cardiologist with years of experience in the latest medical practices and nutritional health. He is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Cardiology at the University of Texas in Houston, a Fellow of the American College of Cardiology (FACC) and the founder and medical director of the Montgomery Heart and Wellness Health Center (formerly The Houston Cardiac Association).Having seen many patients suffer the consequences of chronic heart disease, Dr. Montgomery founded the Montgomery Heart & Wellness Center in 1997 with the mission to reverse and prevent life-threatening illnesses. Located in Houston, Texas, The Montgomery Heart & Wellness (MHW) Center is a state-of-the-art health center complete with all the technology and resources to provide comprehensive medical and wellness care. Combining his medical practice with a food-driven lifestyle intervention, Dr. Montgomery introduces patients to a novel food prescription plan that helps reverse chronic conditions such as heart disease, hypertension, obesity and diabetes without medications or surgeries. He has refined this process over the years with profound positive results in severely ill patients. Dr. Montgomery and the MHW health and wellness team cares for patients at both the MHW Health Center and the world-renowned Texas Medical Center.
Episode Resources
Montgomery Heart and Wellness Website
Learn More About Montgomery Heart Open House and Gala - October 19th-22nd, 2022
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Rip Esselstyn:
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Baxter Montgomery, MD:
I had a patient suffered cardiac arrest right in my lobby a number of years ago. We resuscitated the patient, we shocked him. By the time the ambulance got there, paramedics got there, he was awake and talking, had an IV in et cetera. I put him in my hospital. One of my colleagues did his coronary angiogram. He didn't have any significant blockages. We implanted defibrillator. But while he was in the hospital, he was on a raw detox diet. That should be adjunct to the therapy. So yes, the technology is needed in many people's cases, but the problem is that we are ignoring the foundation of health. The foundation of health is optimal nutrition.
Rip Esselstyn:
I'm Rip Esselstyn and welcome to the Planstrong Podcast. The mission at Planstrong is to further the advancement of all things within the plant-based movement. We advocate for the scientifically proven benefits of plant-based living and envision a world that universally understands, promotes and prescribes plants as a solution to empowering your health, enhancing your performance, restoring the environment, and becoming better guardians to the animals we share this planet with. We welcome you wherever you are on your Plantstrong journey. And I hope that you enjoy the show.
Today I'm going to share with you the story of David and Goliath. Okay, not that story exactly, but a modern day version with today's guest, Dr. Baxter Montgomery. In 1997, Dr. Montgomery opened Montgomery Heart and Wellness in Houston, Texas, right in the shadows of the powerful and world renowned buildings of the Texas Medical Center. He's a board certified cardiologist and cardiac electrophysiologist. And throughout the years, he has treated thousands of patients with severe cardiovascular diseases. And here's the thing, even though he employed state-of-the-art procedures, interventions, ablations and medications, his patients continued to grow weaker and sicker.
He started researching nutrition's role in disease reversal and found that, yes, you guessed it. Plants were the common denominator in determining wellness. Today at Montgomery Heart and Wellness, Dr. Montgomery helps patients achieve optimal health and wellness through various nutrition programs. And his goal to get his patients to think beyond the script in order to improve their health and reverse these chronic lifestyle diseases. I was fortunate enough to grab an hour of his time in between seeing patients to talk about his career, his groundbreaking nutritional methods, and his exciting upcoming events, including an open house at his facility, and a new docu-series entitled Heart and Soul of a Champion. So if you hear a little background noise, it's just a busy man at work who took some time to speak with us about the good news about plants. Oh, and you'll want to stick around to the very end because after we finish the official recording, I was able to ask him a couple more questions and you don't want to miss his answers. Dr. Baxter Montgomery, thank you so much for coming on the Plantstrong Podcast. Appreciate it.
Baxter Montgomery, MD:
Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure. I look forward to it.
Rip Esselstyn:
I do too. I do too. So Baxter, I think the last time that you and I crossed paths, if I'm not mistaken, was about 11 years ago. And we were at, in Marshall, Texas, we were there in an event that Ed and Amanda Smith were putting on called Get Healthy Marshall. For people that don't know, it's a little town in East.
Baxter Montgomery, MD:
East Texas.
Rip Esselstyn:
In East Texas.
Baxter Montgomery, MD:
That's right, that's right.
Rip Esselstyn:
And I can remember there was a tote bag that one of the participants had because everybody got some tote bags and it said, Only kale can save us now.
Baxter Montgomery, MD:
That's good. That's a great memory. I don't remember that, but that's a great line.
Rip Esselstyn:
It is. And much the way it is in Houston, maybe not so much in Austin, in Marshall, Texas, barbecue and chicken fried rice are a way of life. And unfortunately just as are heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and all these chronic western diseases, and the five term mayor of Austin, sorry, of Marshall, Ed Smith in 2008, he was literally up against the wall of prostate cancer, went on a very robust whole food plant-based diet and was able to basically shrink down his prostate tumor and started proselytizing and for a number of years, held the Get Healthy Marshall event in Marshall. And anyway, that is where you and I first met. And I think you were speaking on heart disease and everything that you were doing at your incredible clinic, the Montgomery Heart and Wellness Center in Houston.
So I would love to, I've had other cardiologists on the show. I've had Columbus Batiste, I've had Kim Williams, I'm sure these are friends of yours, not cardiologists, but Dean Ornish and my father, Brian Asbill. And I love gleaning something different from each and every one of you cardiologists that have kind of taken this, I'll say, high road where really you're seeking prevention as opposed to just the myriad amounts of pills and procedures that are so prominent in that profession. So I'd love to know about, or A, Baxter your upbringing and why in the world did you decide that you wanted to become a physician?
Baxter Montgomery, MD:
Well, this is one hour show, so that's quite a bit to chew on. But the upbringing part is pretty interesting, it reminds me of a question that John McDougall asked me years ago is what your background contributed to what you were doing. And I recall when I was very young, probably seven years old, we were building a house and long story short, I was a little kid. We were living in an apartment and my dad said, "Let's go and see the lot where we're going to build a new house." And so I just heard new house, we drove out there and we got out of the car and I just saw this lot with weeds and I got out of the car and said, "Well, where's the new house?" And so as a young kid, I saw a lot with weeds develop into a house.
My parents had built it cash, we were own general contractors. So the point of making is that, that building of a house was made a big impression on me. Fast forward to where I'm now in my private practice, reflecting back on that, we did things very unconventionally. Building that house was not the conventional way of doing it. People would take out a 30 year mortgage, et cetera. We didn't do it the conventional way. And that has impacted the way I do things now, unconventionally. And I was trained in the traditional way of medicine, medical school, internship, residency in internal medicine, general cardiology, cardiac electrophysiology. And I started my practice. But in the back of my mind, my mindset was always looking to do things unconventionally. Not just for the sake of doing things conventionally, but always looking outside the box when the things in the box were not working.
And so when I started seeing patients, and the difference when seeing patients in the private practice compared to seeing patients when I'm in training is that you get a longitudinal perspective of your patients. What I mean by that is when I start seeing Mrs. Jane Smith or Mr. James, John Smith and I see them on day one and then year one, year two, year three, I get a perspective in terms of what the health is. And one thing I recognize with my patients is that despite the advancing technology of procedures and devices that I learned to implant in patients or prescribe for patients, the patients continue to get sicker. And so that's when I started to look elsewhere outside of the box. And that led me to plant-based diet as well as other unconventional things that we use in our practice.
Rip Esselstyn:
So I love that story about your parents and what they did to build their house and they paid cash and they were the general contractors. Where did you grow up? What city?
Baxter Montgomery, MD:
Houston, born and raised right here. I'm like one of these oak trees. Deeply rooted.
Rip Esselstyn:
I love it. But why the love of medicine? What steers you in that direction?
Baxter Montgomery, MD:
In ninth grade, I was in class and one of my classmates said, Hey, I want to be a doctor because they make $90,000. And I thought to myself, Hey, I'd like to make $90,000. I guess I'll be a doctor too. So I never thought again about it. So that was step one in medical school. And again, I mean undergrad medical school, I decided that I wanted to be a cardiologist. That was based on some research that I was doing between my first and second year medical school. So that then led to me going into cardiology, of course, had to train internal medicine before that.
And during my internal medicine training, I decided I wanted to sub-specialize in cardiac electrophysiology. And again, once I set my mind on it, I never looked back. And so that was my path. It wasn't anything early on that was so profound. I enjoyed sciences, I enjoyed interacting with people. And I guess those two things were a natural marriage for medicine. But it wasn't like I said, Oh, I want to cure cancer or anything. It was just that hey, this seems to be a nice thing to do. It's fascinating and it involves science and people. So I went in that direction. So I think it was more or less a God driven directive and it's truly my passion today.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. And when did you open up your own private practice?
Baxter Montgomery, MD:
Immediately out of training, I never worked for anyone. And that was the other part about that building of the house. It taught me that I can build things myself. I didn't have to go to anyone else to get a job, et cetera. So really the only job I had was when I was a kid working part-time jobs or I worked in college, I worked in medical school, so I had those jobs during training. But when I completed my training, I opened up my practice on day one and never looked back. And so it was early on, it was a conventional practice. I was busy as a cardiac electrophysiologist. And the electrophysiologist, we are actually the consultant, the cardiologist, they send patients to us. We have a rhythm problems. And so I was maybe probably the first, one of the first nine electrophysiologist in Houston in private practice.
It was a very new feel at the time. And so I was very busy. I had hospital privileges probably somewhere between 11 to 15 hospitals scattered throughout Houston. And Houston has a very large footprint for anyone in your audience, hasn't been here. You can drive 50 miles from one part of the city and still being the city limits. And so it was quite a busy practice. I was taking emergency room call, I would be up any hour of the day seeing patients doing coronary angiograms, doing device implants, ablations. And so that went on for the better part of two decades. However, in the back of my mind, I always wanted to do something in the area of wellness. I didn't know exactly what that meant. So as time progressed, as I said, I noticed my patient's health getting worse. I had some episodes, issues with some family members that I work with that shine the light, shown the light on this whole health issue.
But then my health started to decline, my cholesterol went up, my blood pressure went up in the like. And so I started looking outside of the medical literature. I started reading the lay press and you know, read a lot of things about this snake oil potion, et cetera. But the common denominator was a healthy diet and the common denominator was a healthy diet was plant-based foods. And that was one thing that I noticed and out of some strange, for some strange reason, I happened to take this raw vegan chef course. I took a weekend crash course to become a certified raw vegan chef. And in that crash course I was introduced to plant-based nutrition. We learned how to make wonderful raw dishes. And I was also introduced to a gentleman named John Rose in Houston. And he was well known for doing detoxes, juice feast detoxes. And so I signed up for his program and did a 33 day raw juice detox. And my life turned around in an amazing way. I felt 18 years old, and I was somewhere around, I don't know, 39, 40 at the time.
And that introduced me to this world of plant-based nutrition. I not only continued that lifestyle, but I started applying it to patients. And the patients I-
Rip Esselstyn:
What year is this? What year is this Baxter?
Baxter Montgomery, MD:
Oh gosh, this was about, I was maybe 39 or 40. So 36 and 2000. So 2004, something like that. 2000, yeah, 2000, I'm 48 now, so whatever, I'm not going to do the math right now. But around 2004.
Rip Esselstyn:
So this is before The China Study and my father's book and some others, I mean there was a couple maybe McDougall's books were out there. But you probably hadn't read those or even?
Baxter Montgomery, MD:
No, I hadn't heard of any of those guys. In fact, I didn't hear about them until around 2008.
Rip Esselstyn:
Wow.
Baxter Montgomery, MD:
And in fact, it was 2008 and 2009 we had a conference here and I invited your father, I invited Esse, I invited Neil Barnard, I invited Dick Gregory and couple of cardiology friends to speak at a con. We had been doing conference since 2006, but our conferences were to primary care medical professionals and they were well done conference that we would hold. But in 2009 we decided to do conferences for the general public. But anyway, back when I did the juice feast and started changing my life over and then started applying to patients, what I noticed that applying this natural food diet to patients had an amazing impact on their lives. These patients, the patients I see are, they range from being in the ICU to barely out of the hospital.
The heart toed at 10%. They've had bypass, they've had stents, they have devices. And so these were the patients I was managing. So I remember in particular one lady who had an injection fraction of 10%, the heart normally should beat about 55 or 60%, hers beating at 10%. She had had four vessel bypass, three stents since the bypass. She was a diabetic, she had arthritis in a wheelchair on oxygen. When her husband will into my office, she was on 21 medications. And so-
Rip Esselstyn:
It's not pretty.
Baxter Montgomery, MD:
No, it was not pretty. And she wasn't looking too good. So I looked at the medication list and I thought to myself, Well my goodness, am I going to add medication number 22, 23, 24. And so I asked them one question, I said, "Do you have a juicer?" And they said yes. I said, "Great, here's what we're going to do."
And I started writing out these juicing recipes and said, "So don't eat for the next 10 days, do this raw juice detox." And I would call her and check on her and we adjust medication over the phone. But she came back in 10 days walking, talking, no oxygen, feeling great. This is just 10 days. And I applied this approach, raw plant based diet, salads, fresh things I was writing them on recipes, everything from scratch just, and I would type them up and built a little booklet. It was one patient at a time, seven days at a time, go seven days, come back and see me. Another seven days, come back and see, because I knew it was a very aggressive regiment. I couldn't give it to him. Say come back in a month or three months.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah.
Baxter Montgomery, MD:
I'd say just do this for seven days. I didn't talk about the rest of their lives.
Rip Esselstyn:
And you'd say do this for seven days. And how much time would you spend with them?
Baxter Montgomery, MD:
Well it varied but usually quite a bit of time because I would go in and talk to them and I have a team approach. I've always had a team approach and even more so now. And so my mid-levels go and do the vitals and I would go and talk to them and I would come out of the room while they're getting their testing done are we go in and type in some recipes and I'll go back in and talk to them some more. So when patients come to our office and they spend a little time with us, it's a lot of testing that they do and like. So I tend to spend a fair amount of time. In private practice, it's tricky because of reimbursement, you don't have that much time. But we manipulate things here to where the time the patient is spending in a clinic is, my time may be interrupted, but I may go and talk to them for a few minutes up front.
I may have a mid-level or MA go and talk to them about something else. And we have handouts now, but at that time it was very difficult because it was just me. I didn't have a trained staff but I spent the amount of time that was necessary. But the fact that they knew that one, they were feeling ill, two, I was giving them a potential solution and three, we were going to see them back in seven days. So I didn't have to work too hard to convince them because it was just going to be seven days at least in their minds. And that's part of the trick. So they come back in seven days and they had a rough time, but if they noticed they're feeling better, they're on fewer medications, then they say, well when can I eat? So no, give me another seven days. And I would do that successfully maybe three times in a row.
And what would happen in that period of time, there was not only a clinical improvement in the patient, a physiological biochemical improvement in the patient, but there was a psychological improvement in the patient because even though I had them on a very, very stringent regimen, extreme by some people's definition, it was extremely effective. And so the patient on one hand struggled with the fact that hey, I'm only eating lettuce and grass and water if you will, but I'm feeling amazing. So I was chipping away at their inability to make lifestyle changes because they had a huge impact with an aggressive change. So then when we come up with a moderation program, I say moderation meaning that is a hundred percent plant based, but then now you can steam your broccoli and they're begging to having some bean soup. You see what I'm saying?
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah.
Baxter Montgomery, MD:
So the aggressive approach helped make a hundred percent plant, plant-based approach seemed very easy for them. And then we developed bootcamp classes and our patients started wanting to buy the food from us so we did have to open up a restaurant in our building. Now we have a restaurant and grocery store and we're getting into growing foods. It's gotten into, as John McDougall says, it's the food. And that's been the core part of our intervention. Now we do other things like solid therapy. We starting a program called Heart and Soul of Champ that I'll share with you later, which puts all of it together. And we bring in exercise and the like. But the food, it starts with the nutrition and the body has to cleanse and heal first and foremost. And this is something that we learned over two decades ago.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah, well that's fascinating to me that you were doing this back in the mid 2000s and getting such fantastic results and you seem like a guy that you like looking at and reading the data and the research and the medical literature. And at that point in time was there was much out there? Did you look, scour the literature or not?
Baxter Montgomery, MD:
There wasn't a lot in scientific, a lot of scientific data. When I started, again, I was reading lay books and so they didn't have control, prospective control studies, they were just talking mostly anecdotal and also theoretical. However, my personal experience was the first, so I guess I had a data point of one. So that really started things out. But it was so dramatic. And then when I started applying to patients, and see the thing is that, so to answer your question, no there's no data. However, the empirical evidence I had was patient after patient after patient, after patient, after patient. It was a hundred percent and it wasn't a hundred percent mild change. It was a hundred percent drastic changes.
Now I work in the world's largest medical center. I've been working the world's largest medical center for 25 years. We have three heart transplant centers in walking distance. There's few places in the world that has the technology equal to or greater than what we have here. So I've seen the best that medicine has to offer, the greatest that medicine has to offer from the traditional standpoint. And my center is just four miles south of that. I refer to them as Goliath and we're David.
And so for me to have the impact on these patients' lives who had gone through everything that the world's largest medical center had to offer was very impressionable for me. Not only that, over the years I've had a number of patients who were too sick to get bypass surgery, too sick to get interventional cardiology procedures, I've had and those patients we've been able to turn around in the hospital with detox, some patient for hospice with heart failure. We turn around with detox. I had a patient on life support, intubated on the ventilator with a chronic lung disease and heart disease with a kidneys failing. And her family refused dialysis. We put her on a detox, she walked out of the hospital. So the impact factor of this intervention is very strong.
When we published our data, gosh five, six years ago, we had a group of about 31 patients with hypertension, hyperlipidemia. And we applied the intervention with this patient group and we have amazing results in a very short period of time. So for example, the hemoglobin A1C was reduced by 3.4% in this population. Now this is not a population of diabetics, this is a population of people with, the selection criteria was hypertension, obesity and hyperlipidemia. So the average hemoglobin A1C was 5.9, so that's just barely in the pre-diabetic range. But we had a 3.4% reduction in just four weeks. And that's a huge impact with statistically significant impact. And similarly, we would first show a reduction in lipoprotein level A, which is an atherogenic molecule and just four week 16% reduction, just four weeks statin drugs done effect that. So the impact of this intervention is quite strong.
Rip Esselstyn:
So there's a lot I want to unpack about what you just said here.
Baxter Montgomery, MD:
Okay.
Rip Esselstyn:
For starters, I love your analogy with you're David and you know got Goliath just a couple miles down the road and in reading through your website and looking at your goals for, I should say your goals and kind of mission as the Montgomery Heart and Wellness Center, one of them is contributing to a needed paradigm shift in US healthcare.
Baxter Montgomery, MD:
Yes.
Rip Esselstyn:
And you are absolutely doing that. So huge kudos to you for that.
Baxter Montgomery, MD:
Thank you.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah.
Baxter Montgomery, MD:
Yeah, it's something that we have to, so it leads to a current project we're doing and if that's essentially the links I imagine will be in the notes. But we currently have a program, it's Heart and Souls of a Champion. And for years we did these bootcamp classes and your dad used to tease me about bootcamps. He said, "Why you calling it bootcamp class?" It's a military bootcamp. But it was along the lines of bootcamp because it's sort like two days football bootcamp is an intense training period for a finite period of time to accelerate in the case of bootcamp and two day football to accelerate your physical fitness. In this case we're doing an intense nutritional training for a finite period of time to accelerate your nutritional fitness. And so we would put people as I used to say, grass and water for four weeks, raw fruits and vegetables.
And we arbitrated chose four weeks. It came out of my initial clinical experience. But anyway, in 2009, sometime thereabouts, we did a bootcamp and I had some retired NFL players come and one of the vice reps was a retired NFL players, huge guy. And he saw the things we were doing and he was telling me about how these NFL players after retirement or suffering chronic illnesses. And I said, "Well, let's go and bring some detox them." And so I went to a local chapter meeting, we talked about it, we got some of the guys came and we actually filmed it and we had a professional film crew et cetera. For a lot of reasons we didn't get the project finished, the platforms then were not available then, were not available then as they are now. But I always thought back about that and said, "Look, I want to do this project again."
So fast forward to now, I was speaking at the Veg Fest in Fairfax, Virginia and I was introduced to Darrell Green and some other guys and I shared with him my desire to do this and he was really eager to do this. He had the interest in sort of revitalizing his fitness level. And so we put together Heart and Soul of a Champion. I'd already started working with some professional athletes already. So we had a group that come through. Now this program is more than just a detox. So we've put in time restricted eating, the raw diet, plus we have our restaurant now. So we provide all the food, we do infrared sauna therapy and other types of therapies that improves cardiovascular fitness. And then we added exercise. So we started with this group and I brought in a film crew, director from Hollywood.
So we put forth Heart and Soul of a Champion. Heart and Soul of a Champion is both our elite intervention program now, but it's also an art form. So we've started the makings of a docu-series and the purpose is to take this intervention and put it on different platforms so people see it over and over. So the first season's going to be with athletes. Subsequent season will be the next, season two will be chronic illness in women. We're going to have people of all walks of life because everyone is a champion in their own right, and they need to revitalize the championship. So this is a approach and the goal is to take this approach to health and put it before the everyday citizen and normalize it. When people think about eating a hundred percent plant-based diet, it seems extreme or weird when they think about exercising rigorously.
So people go and walk them out, but exercise with rigor. We'll get 85 year old ladies. I get people with who's had strokes on walkers. We get them out of the walker, get them out of the wheelchair, I'll get an MA on one side, we'll have them do lunges right here in the office. One of the patient is 85, she a cancers survivor, diabetes. She was doing lunges. Now she can barely hold herself up and we helped balanced her, but she did about five or six lunges. On the follow-up appointment, she was laughing. She said, "Look, I've been doing these at home against the wall." And said, "I've been sleeping much better."
And so what hard and soul of champ is going to do is we're going to, people in every walk of life, they come in wheelchairs, they going to wheelchair to the walk, or walk to the cane, cane to the level ground. We're going to walk them up the hills and roll them down the hills. But the point is that we're going to take patient of every walk of life and give them the opportunity to get to the next level, whatever that next level is.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah.
Baxter Montgomery, MD:
And one thing we've seen with what we've done so far is that the psychological impact on these patients is just amazing. And it's the old saying, you're creating an animal. We want to create animals out of these patients. We want them to be rigorous toward their health and confident that they can get up and move and nourish their bodies property and move their bodies properly. So Heart and Soul of a Champion is going to take this process and normalize it because when you see someone else on the screen doing it, then you're going to know that I can do it too.
Rip Esselstyn:
So tell me your facility there, is it a facility where you have beds where people spend the night or is it just day only or how does that work?
Baxter Montgomery, MD:
Right now it's this day only. So we have patients flying from all over the country and we have extended stay facilities that we have some relationships with. So we arrange for them to stay in extended stay places for say six weeks. We get patients out of New York, East coast, West coast and everywhere else and they'll come in, spend some time. There are a lot of different stories. There was one patient who was in a hospital in North Carolina, some small, well not too small at the time in North Carolina, but he's on the heart transplant list and the docs was telling him he needs an LVAD. And so he looked us up online and he got in touch with my integrated care coordinator and he ordered food from our restaurant. Because we ship throughout the 48 contiguous states. And so we were shipping to the hospital and then he got out of the hospital and we shipped it to his house. And so people find us by whatever means.
There was another story, guy who was in a Harlem hospital and he looked us up and his surgeon was about to go on vacation, and said, "Well, I'll be on vacation for two weeks. When I get back I'm going to put an LVAD in you." So he's in the hospital bed looking at his YouTube on the phone and look at the work we doing. And he checked himself out of the hospital and came down to Houston.
Rip Esselstyn:
For people that don't know, including myself, What's an LVAD?
Baxter Montgomery, MD:
I'm sorry. LVAD is acronym for left ventricular assist device. So what happens is when the essential part of cardiac function, you have four chambers. You have the two upper chambers, the left and right, the two lower chambers, the left and right. The left lower chamber, the left ventricle as we call it, supplies circulation to the body. So all of the ventricles are important, but that's the one that gets most attention because when that one fails, then total body circulation fails and you get a lot of trouble. So what happens that when you have heart failure, we're usually referring to the left ventricle. And so when the left ventricle fails, then it needs assistance by whatever it means. And so one surgical approach short of transplant, because people are not always ready for transplant, for the lack of donors most of the time. So they've come up with a mechanical device. Now the full mechanical heart has not panned out technologically, but you can mechanically assist the left ventricle, the left lower chamber. So that's called the left vent assist device or the LVAD.
Rip Esselstyn:
Got it. Got it. Good. You also mentioned a little bit earlier, in addition to bringing down those A1C levels in those 30 something patients, you also were bringing down the lipoprotein A. Will you explain to our audience what exactly is lipoprotein A and how important is it for us to know our lipoprotein A marker?
Baxter Montgomery, MD:
So lipoprotein A, it's a molecule that's very similar to LDL cholesterol molecule, but it's an atherogenic [inaudible 00:35:32]. So essentially it potentiates plaque formation. So think of it as an LDL like molecule that potentiates thrombosis or clotting. And so if it's elevated, people can have an elevated lipoprotein A and normal cholesterol, total cholesterol and still be at risk for heart attacks or stroke. It's probably in part influenced by underlying inflammatory mechanisms as well as perhaps other mechanisms that we don't understand. But we do know that lowering the lipoprotein level A is helpful.
Having said that, a lot of, there are many bowel markers that we know that are signs of underlying biochemical and physiological imbalance, hell, there other biomarkers we've even yet to discover. And what I like to emphasize with people is to look at the totality of your health as opposed to focus on one or two biomarkers. We know that LDL cholesterol being high is not good. Total cholesterol being high is not good. But these biomarkers are not only signs or risk factors for heart disease, but in The China Study, Colin Campbell found that elevated cholesterol associated with increased cancer. I mean elevate. So when I see elevated cholesterol, I think of a metabolic imbalance, I think of hepatic metabolic imbalance. And so I look at it from, in its totality, not just from the standpoint, well you got too much cholesterol in your blood.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah, yeah. Now, so you're a member of the fellow of the American College of Cardiologists.
Baxter Montgomery, MD:
Yes.
Rip Esselstyn:
I'm really, I'm dying to know. So in 2022, with so much information now showing what a kind of whole food, plant-based lifestyle can do to help mitigate heart disease, do you find that your colleagues are getting on board with this? Or are they resistant?
Baxter Montgomery, MD:
I don't know if I'm allowed to say on this platform. But anyway, here's the thing.
Rip Esselstyn:
I think you can say whatever you want on this platform. Yes.
Baxter Montgomery, MD:
Here's the thing. My colleagues, whom I respect greatly and many of my colleagues whom I work with locally, they're wonderful people. I have a lot of patients. I still work at a hospital here in the medical center. I have patients there. I have patients get procedures, they have things to have done. So everyone's not able to make the kind of changes that they need to make to turn things around. So patients need hospitalizations and the like. But my colleagues, I don't think are equipped enough to be able to make those changes. I think that's probably the best way to say it. And by that I mean the following, medical school training is not just a training, that's one level you have education is up here and that's you're taught to think or you're taught to debate and look at data and analyze and come up with a conclusion based on empiric data et cetera. Then there's a training where you are given skills, et cetera.
But then there's a lower level in training, which is indoctrination. And unfortunately what we call medical training is more of an indoctrination than an education or even a training. And when one has been indoctrinated, unfortunately, there's an impediment toward, you're looking outside of what the indoctrination has led you, the direction indoctrination led to. So unfortunately, too many of my colleagues and I equipped despite how high the level they are in academia, and I don't say it as a criticism, I have all due respect, they're very bright people in many regards. And there's a lot of benefit to medical technology because a lot of people need it because of the status of our health condition and lifestyle condition. But unfortunately, they only apply that and not apply the lifestyle. So for example, let's takes someone who is very ill, who has a very weak heart. They're in the hospital and need, maybe they need valve surgery or maybe they need bypass, or maybe they have a left vein and the heart is week and there's some benefit, or maybe they're having a heart attack, let's use that.
So they're going in a heart attack, or cardiac arrest. Well, they will go and resuscitate the patient, do the medical procedures, et cetera, and put him on the standard American diet. I had a patient suffered cardiac arrest right in my lobby a number of years ago. We resuscitated the patient, we shocked him. By the time the ambulance got there, the paramedics got there, he was awake and talking, had an IV in et cetera. I put him in my hospital. One of my colleagues did his coronary angiogram. He didn't have any significant blockages. We implanted defibrillator. But while he was in the hospital, he was on a raw detox diet. That should be adjunct to the therapy. So yes, the technology is needed in many people's cases, but the problem is that we are ignoring the foundation of health.
The foundation of health is optimal nutrition. So I have a saying, first and foremost, optimal nutrition. And you can probably modify that statement to optimal lifestyle because exercise and proper sleep goes in there, but let's say optimal nutrition. Next is nutraceuticals as needed. Last is pharmaceuticals as a last resort. So optimal lifestyle, nutraceuticals as needed, and pharmaceuticals and medical therapies as a last resort. That should be our attitude, but unfortunately we have that upside down.
Rip Esselstyn:
When you say nutraceuticals, what exactly does that mean?
Baxter Montgomery, MD:
That would be vitamins, minerals. I mean, lots of people need a B12. You might need, in some cases vitamin C. I use coenzyme Q10 for some of my heart failure patients. So these are isolated nutraceuticals, magnesium, for instance. So these are isolated nutrients and they're not foods, but they're isolated nutrients that have been shown to have some benefit as an adjunct for people who have advanced health issues.
Rip Esselstyn:
Are you friends or do you know Eric Adams at all?
Baxter Montgomery, MD:
Yes, Eric Adams. I'm quoted in his book and we're going to invite him to our gala in October. We hope to have him and Rip Esselstyn sitting in our gala. We're going to send you an invitation for the same. We're just now getting, we just launched our site and we're just now sending out invitation, but I text him and his assistant and she's going to get it before him. But yeah, we had lunch together, gosh, back in 2019 and pretty impressive life story he has and-
Rip Esselstyn:
Oh, very much.
Baxter Montgomery, MD:
Yeah, and he knows my aunt, who's a retired New York state senator, and so they had worked together up there for years. But yeah, a very, very, very nice man, down to earth man.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Well, you brought up how the first, people after they have heart surgery, they should go on the detox or some sort of more of a whole food, plant-based diet instead of burgers and fries. And I think he's initiated something in New York state where the hospital's there, the default diet that you get in bed is a heart healthy, whole food plant-based diet, I believe.
Baxter Montgomery, MD:
Wow, I love that. I love here, I need to check on the details that. I would love to have you come and talk to us about that. That's great.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Yeah. And there's also at Montefiore Hospital with, I don't know if you know Dr. Robert Ostfeld?
Baxter Montgomery, MD:
Rob Ostfeld, I know Ostfeld. Yep.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah, and he's-
Baxter Montgomery, MD:
He's been doing good work up there in Montefiore.
Rip Esselstyn:
Very similar work there. Wonderful stuff. Absolutely. Yeah.
Baxter Montgomery, MD:
Yeah.
Rip Esselstyn:
So I mean, you mentioned that you're seeing people coming back in seven days with these staggering results. Explain to our, the listener, how can the human body get that healthy in that shorter period of time? That almost seems impossible.
Baxter Montgomery, MD:
The human body, I think it's Psalms 137, "Whereas you're fearful and wonderfully made... " Somewhere there abouts. The human body is an amazing design. The miracle isn't that the body gets better in seven days on a raw plant-based diet. That's not the miracle. The miracle is that the body can tolerate all the atrocious foods and terrible lifestyle and terrible things we do to it for not only seven days, but decades. That's the miracle. The miracle is that all these people are walking and talking, and you talk to them. So I eat trash all the time. I drink too much and I smoke. And you're 30, 40, 50 years old. That's the miracle. I see people walking in the office and they're talking, they're sick, but they're still talking and breathing, I say, "Wow, that's the miracle." Seven days of raw plant based diet and getting better. That's nothing. I mean, just think of somebody's choking you and they got the armed, you got a noose around you and somebody's choking, you blue in the face, and that's for decades.
And all of a sudden somebody cuts the rope out and you start breathing, say, Whoa, what the miracle. So no, that's not the miracle. The miracles, you've been choke for 30 years and you're still walking. People are literally physiological and biochemically choking themselves with the bad food they're eating, the lack of fresh air, lack of sunshine, lack of exercise, poor sleep, all that's a manifestation of what they're putting in their bodies. But to answer your question more directly is the following.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah.
Baxter Montgomery, MD:
Biochemically, when we're putting in these bad nutrients in our system, these abnormal molecules we refer to as free radicals, creates an imbalance of free radicals to antioxidant. So you have what's called oxidative stress. It's oxidative stress, to give you an analogy if you bite into an apple and sit it on the counter, you see it turn brown and oxidizes, the apple is exposed to oxidative stress. And so you see it deteriorating, wither away after several days.
The human body does a similar thing at the biochemical level. This happens at the cellular level. The other component that's interrelated with oxidative stress is increased inflammation. Again, these bad foods, the dead animal flesh to carcass you're putting in your system, you develop increased inflammation, intercellularly, between inside the cells, between the cells inside the tissue, and the body is slowly deteriorating. You do two things, when you go on a plant-based diet, particularly raw plant-based diet, there are two things that happen. There are more than two things, but the two fundamental things. One, you are removing the insult. When you stop eating bad food, and that's the first, and I tell people, the first step to optimum nutrition has to do with what you don't eat as opposed to what you do eat. So the absolute total removal of the bad food is the first and foremost step to optimum nutrition.
So when you're removing that, so that's a big impact. And the next thing is you are replacing it with optimum nutrition. Foods that bring energy, that bring life, they alkalinize the blood. They essentially put out the fire. These foods are loaded with antioxidants that stabilizes these free radicals. So you're reducing oxidative stress, you're reducing, eliminating inflammation, and the body's coming back to life. And this happens in a matter of minutes, hours, days to weeks.
Rip Esselstyn:
It is, it is such an absolute beautiful thing. So I think it's fair to say then you're not a fan of moderation.
Baxter Montgomery, MD:
That's correct. Your dad said it right, moderation kills. But it not only kills, but it tortures. So let's say for instance, if I were an evil person and you come to me and you say, "Look, Dr. Montgomery, I eat fried chicken three times a day, seven days a week, I love fried chicken and my cholesterol's up, my blood pressures up and I need to do something with my lifestyle." I'll say, "Okay, wonderful. I'll tell you what I'll do. Just get off the fried chicken for six days a week and one day of the week on Sunday, you have all the fried chicken you want." "Okay, great." Six days a week, you, you're suffering. You want fried chicken, you can't have it. You're getting better, blood pressure's getting better. On day seven, great, I'm having the fried chicken. Well, the fried chicken on day seven is going to destroy all the benefits of the first days one through six. That's number one. It destroy most, if not all, that's one.
Rip Esselstyn:
Wow.
Baxter Montgomery, MD:
Two, it's got to reinforce your addiction to fried chicken. And so after that day seven, day one comes back around, you can't have fried chicken. You're suffering day one through six until day seven comes again. So I'm basically only feeding into that addiction, making life worse than what it was. At least when you were eating fried chicken every day you were feeding the addiction, at least you were getting some pseudo satisfaction. Now I'm torturing you while at the same time impeding your improvement. So moderation is sort of having you running in quicksand, you're running, but you're going nowhere.
When you go all the way, yes, it's difficult at first. Maybe the first day, the first week, the first month, but while you're going through that struggle, you're making progress. That's number one. Number two, you're getting rid of your addiction to whatever these bad foods are because, I tell my patient, Look, your issue is not heart disease or high blood pressure or diabetes or stroke. Your issues is your addiction to bad food. I need to cure your addiction to bad food. Once I cure your addiction to bad food, then the diabetes, the high blood pressure, those things just naturally go away.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah, that's a great explanation for it too. And how do the vast majority of your patients respond when you deliver that message to them?
Baxter Montgomery, MD:
They're very receptive to it. And what we've learned over the years is that when the person has their mind made up, then they're ready to go. And so our role is to help them get to a point of renewing the mind. I saw a patient the other day, unfortunately has an autoimmune disease, and she had some issues and I've been seeing over the years, and she's gotten to a point she can't walk anymore. And I've been coaching her. But yeah, I saw the other day, she said, "Look, and I'm not at a point where I'm ready to go all the way. Yeah, I want to take baby steps." And it was very sad because she is going all the way, just all the way in the wrong direction. See, the thing is that what people don't understand is that you will make a lifestyle change, it's going to be on your terms or on the disease states terms, but you're going to make a lifestyle change. And if you're in your mind not able to make those changes toward improving your health, then you're left to make those changes to deterioration of your health.
Rip Esselstyn:
Lot of wisdom there. A lot of years you dealing with different patients. Tell me this, you've said several times this detox system that you have, juicing, raw foods. I am personally a huge fan of a combination of raw and cooked. So are you not a fan of cooked?
Baxter Montgomery, MD:
So it's not about being not a fan of cooked or not. I mean, cooked foods have, they're delicious. What we found is that, and again, the patients I see are really, I mean when you have somebody who's on hospice and her heart is very weak, she's on this medication drip that's keeping her together, and when you turn it off, she's going to die and you got seven days to get it turned around. You've got to hit it with the best. And so these are the people I see are the best. We know when one says cooked that there's a broad spectrum of cooked and we know that deep frying and that type of thing is not ideal cooking. So then if you go from the extreme cook part to steaming. Okay, steaming is okay, but then you say, Okay, when you say steaming for how long? Eight hours. That's not okay. Okay, how about seven hours? That's not okay. How about one hour? Probably too long still. Five minutes, two minutes.
So there's a spectrum even within cook that you say, Well, we got to draw the line somewhere. So number one, when people are allowed to cook it, I don't know whether they're drawing the line. And there's a lot of psychology here. So someone I say, Okay, you get a whole food plant-based diet, et cetera, steam, boil. Okay, great. At a restaurant, they say, Okay, give me the vegan option. Well, the restaurant may put oil in, they may not think about that. So that's more of a political thing, so that's, that part of it. But there is scientific evidence showing that even cooked foods, and cooked and mild ways can trigger inflammation. That's one. Two, we haven't formally studied it, but in our clinical experience, when I have, especially my patient with heart failure, advanced heart failure, my patient with advanced systemic inflammatory conditions, I will start them out on a 30 day raw diet. They'll get better. And when I put them on a cook plant based diet, they start to regress. And we've seen that before.
We haven't had time to formally study it, but we have a pretty strong clinical experience that shows that patients need to be on, depending on how systemic that illness is, et cetera, would benefit from a raw diet for a long time. An example, a patient I saw who was a gentleman had a history of aneurysm and dissection probably about six or seven years ago, was operated on then. Fast forward to recently, he presented to the hospital with chest pain, was found to have a heart attack and also had another dissection. Now dissection for the audience to know, it's where the inner lining of the blood vessel separates. And so instead of blood going through the natural lumen of the vessel, it can go through the walls and tear the wall apart of the vessel.
His wall was being torn apart from the aortic arch all the way down to the kidneys. So you had the dissection, they call it, I think it's a type A DeBakey. But anyway, and this normally would be operated on, however, it came in the setting of a heart attack. And so the surgeon cannot operate on it, because that's the most dangerous surgery to do in the most dangerous setting to do it in the setting of a heart attack. So they just observed him, stabilized him and discharged him. And they came right to our center. They had seen us online. And I put him on a raw diet 100% for about a year and a half, and we just now allowed him to eat a little bit of steam veggies, maybe a meal or two a week. And that was only after, his wife is cooking some of the most delicious gourmet raw. He's got stuff from us, et cetera.
But the point I'm making is simply this. There's situations where you want to make sure that the patient's getting the absolute best. I cannot afford to have them go and eat something that steam, have a little oil or whatever the case is. That's one, two, even if it's steamed without the oil. I've seen lots of patients with advanced disease on a whole food, plant-based diet. No oil, no salt, very regimented cooking their food. And it's only after we put them on raw that they turn around. We seen it over and over and over and over and over again.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Yeah. That's really fascinating. Now how do you eat?
Baxter Montgomery, MD:
I've been for the last two years, a hundred percent raw. I was mostly raw, much of my time. When I got on this regimen, let's say 18 years ago, I went vegan. Then I went from the spectrum of junk food vegan to raw, and every year I'd do a raw juice feast. And I felt different. I said, "Well, that's something different than the spectrum of this food." So I was about five years that nonsense. I started pushing more raw and I finally got to the point and said, "I'm meeting all raw." Our restaurant does a lot of gourmet raw stuff.
And just so that your audience will understand, if you're on a hundred percent raw diet, there are a lot of things that you can make that's very delicious. For instance, we have a delicious raw meatloaf, sprouted rice with a raw vegan gravy that will knock your socks off. We have a raw enchilada pie, we have raw [inaudible 00:57:19]. So there are a lot of things that you can do in the gourmet raw area that gives you the satisfaction and savoriness of whole foods that you normally would get from cooked. And so when I say raw, people think just salads and maybe wraps here or there, but there's a lot that you can do, some work and effort you have to put into it. But there's a lot that you can do.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah, well when your life's at stake here, it makes sense. What did you have for breakfast today?
Baxter Montgomery, MD:
Oh gosh. So I had two green drinks and I had some raw granola and some sprouted wild rice. And normally I'll have a salad by this time, but I was between patients and getting ready for this-
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Baxter Montgomery, MD:
... event. But yeah.
Rip Esselstyn:
So you have a chef on your team? Chef India. Is she still with you?
Baxter Montgomery, MD:
Well, so Chef India, we brought her in as a guest chef. She's not on our team full time, so we brought her in. She's in Belize, and so we contract with her. She came in and worked with us on our menu. So she'll bring in, come in, and so I worked with her. And Chef India is incredible. I mean, she's raw. A lot of these raw chefs, they use too many cashew nuts and too much oil and all that stuff. When she came in and said, "Okay, we want nothing with oil." We prefer seeds over nuts in our recipes. So a lot of our recipes are not with the cashews and things. We don't use peanuts. So our meatloaf has walnuts and pumpkin seeds and we'll use a lot of hemp seeds for other things. But yeah, we use seeds. So she's able to follow our strict criteria and she's done a great job.
We have a quiche salad with broccoli, kale, and there's a pumpkin seed sauce. We have enchilada pie as I mentioned. We have a number of wraps. We made a raw naan that we use. It's a pizza crust and we have a pizza that's off the chain. It's very, very good food. You're not too far from Houston, you need to come down and try our stuff. In fact, when you come to the event, when we send you an invitation, hopefully you'll find time. We'll show you the site and I think you're going to have a great time.
Rip Esselstyn:
Tell me. So tell me about this event that's coming up.
Baxter Montgomery, MD:
So the event, if your audience goes to events.montgomeryheart.com. It's a four day open house and red carpet Gala. Day one is going to be October 19th, and we will start with an open house. People will be able to tour our facility. We'll also be open for consultations. Now these aren't traditional health consultation where we come up with a diagnosis and treatment, but we'll talk to people about their health goals and their health journey and challenges and discuss ways that one of our programs can help them out. We have online coaching, we have an online community, we have meal plans, grocery plans, we ship, people can pick up, deliver, and we give guidance. So we help people in many different ways with many different support tools. So the consultation program will help you understand in what way we can probably help you.
On day two, on October 20th, I'll be leading a group on shopping rounds. We go to local health food shopping store and we'll talk about reading labels and making wise decisions in the supermarket. Even some of the healthiest supermarkets can be landmines. And then we'll go on the nature walk. The Houston Arboretum is a great place and we try to encourage our patients when I talk to them about exercise or emphasize exercising outdoors, getting outdoors, going on nature walks. And so we're going to have a nature walk. I'll be leading the pack with some of my assistants and going doing that. On day three is going to be the evening of the red carpet gala. It's going to be an evening time starting at five. It's going to be quite a long event. We'll have the keto speakers, be Dr. Pam Popper, Dr. Kim Williams. We're going to have David Carter the 300-Pound Vegan, and John Sally will be there speaking.
We'll have a panel. I'll go out on the limb and say, Rip Esselstyn is going to be there in the audience greeting people. But it's going to be a great event. And it will be the premier of our docu-series. We'll show the trailer and episode one of season one, and then we'll have a discussion of that. Also, Wednesday evening, on the 19th, we'll have a sneak preview of the docu-series, and then we'll have the premier, formal premier on that Friday. And then Saturday morning will be a brunch, a celebrity sendoff brunch will be again at our facility, and we'll be showcasing a lot of the food that we prepare in our kitchen. In fact, our gala is being held at the Rice University Faculty Club, and they have a rule that they have to prepare the food, and we have to meet with them because they prepare vegan food, but it has oil and whatever's in it.
So I met with them, my chef, my kitchen manager, and two of my chefs, my kitchen manager myself. We went met, we went through the details of how everything was prepared. We gave him some of our recipes, looked at their recipes, made. So we went to, and we met for over an hour, hour and maybe 20 minutes going over the intricate details of how everything was to be prepared, because we said, "Look, we have a strict criteria and this has to be met." And then they did a great job. They stepped to the plate, we toured their kitchen.
But I said that to say this, again there's a very precise approach to this. So as a physician, as I said, I'm a cardiac electrophysiologist and we place catheters on electrical pathways that I cannot be off by a millimeter. I have to be very precise when I put that catheter, I have to map out that electrical pathway. It has to be with a millimeter of precision if I go in wrong direction, and you may need a pacemaker or have some other problem. So I have to apply that level of precision in my electrophysiology career. Guess what? I have to be very precise when I prescribe a food diet and a lifestyle. We have to be precise. What kind of exercise do you do? We have to be precise about lifestyle prescriptions as we are precise in medical and surgical prescriptions.
Rip Esselstyn:
Well, you know hat's incredible to me in spending the last hour with you, Baxter, is how your passion for everything you're doing is just gaining momentum. It's not like waning whatsoever. And why do you think that is? You're going as hard as you've ever gone. You're introducing all kinds of new modalities, you're doing galas, you're doing a docu-series. What's that all about?
Baxter Montgomery, MD:
It's interesting, and it's a great question. I like that question because it's, the long and short is this. I recall looking at a interview with Jeff Bezos and he said something quite interesting. He said, If you have a job, that's great. If you have a career that's even better. If you have a passion that's supreme, that's even much better. And the way he said, I'm paraphrasing, of course, but he says, Your passion finds you. And when he says, your passion finds you, it's almost a biblical aspect of that because there's a scripture in the Bible says, Delight in the Lord, and he'll give you the desires of your heart. And it's not the sinful desires that he'll give you, but he will impart desires in your heart that are godly desires. And he will, in essence, give you your passion.
And so it's the passion. So I see it as a God given passion that's driving me. It's a force that's greater than I am that is giving me what I need in terms of getting me to where I need to be. So it's a God given passion that I see that's empowering me. It's a force greater than me that's empowering me to do the things that I do. And that's the best explanation that I have.
Rip Esselstyn:
Well, I'm a fan. I'm a huge fan. And I listened to an interview that you did probably a couple years back, would Terry Mason, wonderful, wonderful human being. And at the end of the interview, he thanked you for being such a pioneering, not only physician, but also just human being. And I want to say the same thing. Thank you for all the incredible pioneering work that you're doing and continuing to do. And I'm a fan, huge fan, and I just can't appreciate you enough for coming on the Plantstrong Podcast and sharing your passion and what you've created in your life and your world and all the people you're helping. Thanks so much.
Baxter Montgomery, MD:
Well, no, thank you Rip. And thank you for the work you're doing. I mean, again, I consider you one of the pioneers, again, the work you're doing it's sort of putting this at another level, not only with your podcast, but all the things you've done in the past. So it's a joy to be a partner with you in this whole mission. I mean, this is a heavy lift that we're all trying to carry out. And so I really enjoy and have comfort in knowing that if guys like you there. So I really appreciate that as well.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah, yeah. All right. Hey, can I get a little Plantstrong?
Baxter Montgomery, MD:
There you go.
Rip Esselstyn:
All right. I could have talked to you for another four hours. Serious. I want to know about vitamin C and thermal imaging and your take on AFib. I find more people these days that are having AFib issues, and I'm like, What's going on with that?
Baxter Montgomery, MD:
Yeah, AFib is a systemic illness, and I, as electrophysiologist, I used to do AFib ablations. It's one of the more, well, it was one of the more challenging procedures to do. It's still a fairly complex procedure. You have to do a double transseptal, you have to poke two holes in the heart from the right side to the left, and then you have to map out the pulmonary veins. You isolate the pulmonary veins with electrical catheters. So you burn a ring around the pulmonary veins. Now, the old ways, they were doing it back when I was doing, they would just stop burning inside the pulmonary veins. And they used to call pulmonary stenosis, pulmonary vein stenosis. Then we started burning outside the pulmonary vein just right around the osmium of it. And so that would isolate, electrically isolate the pulmonary. So the theory is that there's some electrical signals that come from inside the pulmonary vein that goes into the atrium to irritate it, and that triggers a fit.
But that's not the only thing, because what happens is that you have the generation of the atrium. So what with inflammation and increased oxidative stress, you develop, it's sort of potholes in the street. So you drive it in the street, you see a large pothole, you try to detour around a pothole. Well, electrical signals do the same thing. So if it sees a piece of scar patch, it'll detour around the scar patch. But when you detour, where you go around it and electrical signal can, it goes around, but then it can circle. So you can go up this way, you go around, but then you can go around in a circle. Well, that's called reentry. And so if you go here, then here, then you go like here, and then that's a reentry, and it'll take over the electrical circuit. So just think you have a thousand of these little pothole scar patches, and you got signals going and just doing this. And that creates atrial fibrillation.
Now, there's a spectrum of atrial arrhythmia as you go, atrial tachycardia, multifocal atrial tachycardia et cetera. And so a lot of these people have atrial fib, don't have atrial fib that originate from the pulmonary veins. They have atrial fib due to electrical distortion in the atrial tissue itself. Well, how do you treat that? Well, I just said inflammation and scarring. So if you do things like reduce oxidative stress, reduce inflammation, you put the body in physiological balance, the autonomic nervous system balance. Scar patches are suppressed, et cetera. And you can probably quieten down these. And we have anecdotal evidence showing that atrial fibrillation is reduced with a raw detox diet.
Rip Esselstyn:
Wow. What about PVCs?
Baxter Montgomery, MD:
Similarly, PVCs. But again, oftentimes people have electrolyte abnormalities and magnesium deficiencies and things like that will contribute to PVCs. But again, you can have irritable [inaudible 01:10:52], you can have electrical abnormalities. Again, if someone has scarring in the heart due to heart attack, then that's what we call an electrical arrhythmogenic substrate. So you have a scar that disrupts the normal electrical signal. So that electrical signal has to make a distorted move around that scar, and that's a distortion. So one loop is a PVC, infinitely mini loops is VT. And so you have that situation where you have to stabilize that electrical pathway. So yeah, we implant devices to shock the heart, but we also have to nourish the body to erase some of the scarring, to suppress some of the scarring and stabilize electrical signal.
Rip Esselstyn:
Fascinating stuff. Really, really. Well hey, I don't want to be a hog with your time. I know you got patients out there, but hey, thanks for this. And I'm seriously, I know we'll be seeing each other soon. The Montgomery Heart and Wellness Open House Gala and Premier of Heart and Soul of a Champion takes place over four action packed days from October 19th to 22nd, 2022. To learn more about this event, visit events.montgomeryheart.com. And I was thrilled to know that Montgomery Heart offers tons of online classes and resources, plus they ship their delicious food and meals across the country. Of course, I'll be sure to put a link to this and all other resources in the show notes at planstrongpodcast.com. Thanks so much for listening, and as always, keep it Plantstrong. The Plantstrong Podcast team includes Carrie Barrett, Laurie Kortowich, Ami Mackey, Patrick Gavin, and Wade Clark. This season is dedicated to all of those courageous true-seekers who weren't afraid to look through the lens with clear vision and hold firm to a higher truth. Most notably, my parents, Dr. Caldwell B. Esselstyn Jr. and Anne Crile Esselstyn. Thanks for listening.
