In this episode of Functional Medicine Research, I interview Dr. Bruce Hoffman, who’s a board certified physician and he has a fellowship in Anti-Aging as well as a Master’s degree in Clinical Nutrition. He is also a certified functional medicine practitioner. Speaking with Dr. Hoffman was extremely educational, we spoke about mast cell activation syndrome and how exactly the condition is diagnosed. Dr. Hoffman covers how he first got interested in the disease and the progress that he’s made working with several other doctors working to understand the implications of mast cell activation syndrome. Dr. Hoffman explains how some conditions overlap and indicate mast cell activation syndrome; such as fatigue, brain fog, and even GERD.  You should come away from this interview with a much better understanding of mast cell activation syndrome, how it’s diagnosed and what lab tests are beneficial in assisting in this diagnosis.

Below is a transcript of the interview on Mast Cell Activation Syndrome:

Dr. Hedberg: Well, welcome everyone to "Functional Medicine Research." I'm Dr. Hedberg. And I'm really looking forward to today's conversation with Dr. Bruce Hoffman. He's a board certified physician, and he has a Fellowship in Anti-Aging, as well as a Master's Degree in Clinical Nutrition. He's a certified functional medicine practitioner. And one of the really interesting things about him is that, in addition to his clinical training, he studied with many of the leading mind-body and spiritual healers of our time. So people like Deepak Chopra, Paul Lowe, Osho, Ramesh Balsekar, and one of my favorites, Jon Kabat-Zinn.

So, Dr. Hoffman, you shared the stage with Dr. Deepak Chopra, Dr. John Demartini. And he continues to spread his inspiring vision of healing and wellness with audiences and patients around the world. So Dr. Hoffman, welcome to the show.

Dr. Hoffman: Thanks very much, Nikolas. I'm glad to be here. Thank you.

Dr. Hedberg: Great. So I'm really looking forward to this discussion on mast cell activation syndrome. It's something I haven't seen a lot of in my practice. I have heard a number of lectures on this and read quite a bit about it. And it seems to be an area of your expertise. So why don't we jump right in and just talk about what mast cell activation is, and how is this condition diagnosed?

Dr. Hoffman: Sure. I first got interested in mast cell activation syndrome when I started to work with a cancer patient advocate by the name of Dr. Mark Renneker out of San Francisco. And he alerted me to the connection between cancer and mast cell activation syndrome, particularly in gynecological cancers. And then put me in touch with Dr. Lawrence Afrin, who leads one of the major sort of advocacy groups for mast cell activation syndrome as opposed to systemic mastocytosis, which I'll explain in a bit.

And so I've been for the last three to four years working with Dr. Lawrence Afrin's group and learning to understand the implications of mast cell activation syndrome in most of the patients that we see. Which are chronic multisystem, multisymptom patients who, as you know, have been everywhere and remain frustrated with the one disease, one drug paradigm that we learned at medical school. So, what I learned over time was how to separate between two specific conditions, one called systemic mastocytosis and the other called mast cell activation syndrome.

But before I begin with that, I'd like to say that mast cells are part of a...they're produced in our bone marrow,