Dr. Deb Muth 0:03
What are the answers to your child's chronic allergies, ADHD, or autism?
weren't just in another prescription, but in restoring balance to their body chemistry. Today's guest has spent nearly two decades uncovering those answers through integrative and biomedical medicine. That's a mouthful, isn't it?
Helping children heal when nothing else seemed to work.
This is the conversation about science, compassion, and changing the future of pediatric care.
Welcome back to Let's Talk Wellness Now.
The show where we uncover the root causes of chronic illness, explore regenerative breakthroughs, and empower you with the practical tools to heal. I'm your host, Dr. Deb, your medical detective, and today's episode is one every patient should hear.
My guest is Dr. Anu Usman Singh, Medical Director of True Health Medical Center in Naperville, Illinois, and the owner of Pure Compounding Pharmacy.
And for over 17 years, she has been pioneering evidence-based integrative interventions for children with ADD, autism, allergies, and complex gastrointestinal and metabolic disorders.
She's not only a practicing physician, she's a researcher who's investigated copper-zinc imbalances.
metallonine dysfunction, biofilm-related infections, vitamin D in pregnancy, and hyperbaric oxygen therapy.
Dr. Usman serves on the executive board of TACA, and is a faculty member at MAPS, training other practitioners in pediatric integrative care. So get ready for a conversation that will open your mind and heart to the possibilities of when medicine truly becomes holistic.
If you guys can insert the ad in here, that'd be great.
Well, welcome back. I'm so excited to have Dr. Usman with me today. I have known her for, oh my gosh, 15, 17 years, something like that. We're aging ourselves.
Anju 02:32
Oh, yeah, when we were in our 20s, right?
Dr. Deb Muth 02:35
Yes, exactly. So, welcome back, and I am so excited for you to be here, because you have literally helped thousands of families over the years.
But I'd love for you to share a little bit about your journey, kind of who you are, what drew you into exploring integrative and biomedical approaches for helping children and families.
Anju 02:58
I think my journey is similar to a lot of you out there, the audience. I mean, we're looking to help our families, and our kids, and ourselves, and I was doing my residency at Cook County Hospital, downtown Chicago, in the 80s.
And I thought, oh my goodness, if I could take care of the sickest patients, then I can take care of anybody. So I came from Indiana, and I went to Cook County, and my children, my eldest daughter, started having, severe allergies and asthma, really, really at a young age.
And I went to, like, my residence, and I went to my attendings, and I said, this baby is wheezing. And they told me, babies don't have asthma.
And I said, she has all the symptoms of asthma. She has asthma.
And I remember with, in her crib, I would just nebulize her, you know, and I was like, what is going on?
And I figured out that she had a lot of food allergies, and I was nursing her, eating the foods that she was allergic to, and back then, in the 80s, you know, we didn't have the internet, we didn't have Whole Foods, and I just…
being a doctor, and I didn't even know what to do, and I felt so hopeless. And I thought, gosh, you know, I'm a doctor, I have these, like, skills, I have… people I can talk to, and I still feel so… it's so difficult. And then this… my particular daughter, the oldest one, her name is Priya, and she developed severe, asthma, and I couldn't figure it out. She was in junior high. Every time she would walk into the lunchroom, she would have a severe asthma attack.
And I'll be like, what's going on? What's going on? I kept her home over the weekend, she was better. I sent her back to school, she was bad again.
And we figured it out that it was other people eating peanuts.
Dr. Deb Muth 04:54
Severe peanut allergy.
Anju 04:56
And I went to the school, and I said, she…
can you, like, put her somewhere else? Can… they said, oh, no, that's not fair to other kids and their food. And this was in the 90s.
Dr. Deb Muth 05:10
Yeah.
Anju 05:10
And so, I just…
You know, my heart goes out to families who are struggling to find answers for their kids, and my daughter Priya, the one I told you about, she ended up passing away from a peanut allergy.
And so, I've just…
Dr. Deb Muth 05:26
Yeah.
Anju 05:27
My heart goes out to parents and my own kids and their illnesses.
And so I just started working with families, with kids, and
It just kind of grew from there.
Dr. Deb Muth 05:40
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and I think being a mom who went through that yourself, and…
was seen but not heard, and turned away from the traditional medical community, you're forced to start finding answers on your own. And we always feel like we're on an island by ourselves in the medical world when we're doing that.
Anju 06:01
Yeah, I, it was really hard when I found out, you know, about…
Integrative medicine, and just different…
ideas and approaches to diet and supplements, I thought, how come I wasn't trained in any of this?
And…
Dr. Deb Muth 06:21
So angry when I learned some of the things that I learned in the beginning. I was like, same thing, like, how did they not teach us this? And then I think, you know, it's my fault, was I asleep, was I not paying attention, whatever. And then you just realize, like, there's this whole part of the human body.
That they just didn't teach us.
Anju 06:42
Yeah, so then I… I, probably like you, we had to learn it on our own. There weren't, like, classes or any way to learn this stuff
And I just reached out. There's a clinic that,
I don't know if you've heard of the Pfeiffer Treatment Center?
Dr. Deb Muth 07:00
No.
Anju 07:01
Do you know Carl Pfeiffer from the attendees.
He has a clinic called the Pfeiffer Treatment Center in New Jersey. It was called the Princeton Brain Bio Center.
Dr. Deb Muth 07:12
And in the 70s, they did orthomolecular medicine for patients with ADD.
Anju 07:18
And schizophrenia.
Dr. Deb Muth 07:20
Mmm…
Anju 07:21
and depression.
And they used to categorize them in 3 categories, and at the time, they called them histopenics, histidelics, and pyrolurics.
Dr. Deb Muth 07:31
Okay.
Anju 07:32
Histapenix were low histamine patients.
Delix were high histamine patients, and pyrolurics were their own kind of category. We added another category of copper-zinc imbalances, and then we would categorize that population into high histamine, low histamine, pyrolurics, and copper-zinc.
Now we talk about under-methylation, over-methylation. Sure. So, under-methylation is the, you know, the high histamine people, they can't clear the histamine. And the over-methylators are, you know, what we call about low histamine now.
And, and then pyrolurics and copper zinc. So…
I lost my train of thought, but in the 80s, when I was going through this, in the 90s, I reached out to the Pfeiffer Treatment Center.
He's like, can I calm and just hang out and, like, see what you guys do? Because I need some answers.
And I started working there and, started doing research on copper-zinc imbalances, and I did it in children with autism.
And that's how people started coming to me, and I kinda got, like. not famous, but I, you know, the word spread about, okay, we could talk about it, and Dr.
Walsh was the, you know, PhD there that did a lot of the research, so we worked together for 8 years.
Dr. Deb Muth 09:05
Isn't it crazy to think that we knew about histamine issues way back in the 70s? You know, I got the pleasure of being trained by, environmental medicine doctors. Dr. Wayne Konetsky and Glenn Toth taught me about environmental medicine, and what we called histamine issues that we call it today, mast cell, right? But when I was learning in the early 2000s, it was labeled as chemical sensitivity. And so it was just people that would react to everything, and we really didn't know why, and they didn't necessarily have this very specific allergic reaction, but we knew they were reacting, and we would try to treat them, to lower the histamine way back then. And it's taken all these years, 25 years, to get to a point where we understand mast cell activation now, and histamine issues.
And it's really sad to me that it's taking this long for us to identify things.
And we've all got our journey, and I loved back in those days, too, because as I learned, I would call people up and say, hey, I just got a patient from you, and they told me this great story, and I have other people, can I come see what you were doing? And back then, everybody was very open. They were like, yes, please, come, learn. Now everybody's like, oh, we can't teach you, we can't give you our secrets, but…
Or pay me $20,000 to come learn with me. But back then, I mean, everybody was just… we were all in the same boat. We were all just trying to learn from each other.
Anju 10:36
Oh, yeah, oh yeah, and any bit of knowledge you got, you're like…
Dr. Deb Muth 10:41
Yes.
Anju 10:41
God, you know, I learned this piece, and…
Dr. Deb Muth 10:43
Hmm?
Anju 10:44
We just kind of built from that. I keep thinking about b...
