There is a version of chronic illness care that never quite works, and most people who have been through it can describe it exactly. A diagnosis, then a protocol. A protocol, then a supplement. A supplement, then another one. Progress that arrives and then leaves. In the first episode of The Healing Terrain, CellCore co-founders Dr. Todd Watts and Dr. Jay Davidson explained why that pattern repeats, and what changes when the order of operations changes.
One of them describes the problem with an image that has stuck. If a person is sick, something inside them is on fire. Conventional care puts a screen in front of the fire so no one has to look at it. The symptoms are hidden and the fire keeps burning. Functional and root cause approaches do something different but land in the same place, adding nutrients to a structure that is still burning down.
"That's like adding more drywall or adding more two by fours," he said. "Foundational medicine [says], let's put out the fire."
What starts the fire varies. Mold, parasites, Lyme, unresolved trauma, toxins damaging the mitochondria. What does not vary, in their experience, is that the fire has to go out before anything built on top of it will hold.
The Same Core Problem, Patient After Patient
The concept came out of a clinic rather than a strategy session, and out of a frustration with where the industry was pointing its attention.
Across hundreds of patients, Dr. Davidson kept encountering the same underlying picture. Mitochondrial dysfunction triggered by toxicity. A suppressed immune system. Rising parasite and microbial imbalance. Drainage pathways clogging up. Meanwhile the conferences he attended talked about customization, dialing in a plan for each individual person.
The issue was not that customization is wrong. It was that it comes too early. Dr. Davidson described the core dysfunction as static, so much noise in the body that nothing individualized can be heard through it.
"If we just remove some of the major dominoes right away, which seemed to be almost similar in every single person, now all of a sudden that noise [quiets down], and then we can customize to that person," he said. That sequence is the whole idea. Foundational medicine first. Functional medicine after, to refine what is left.
Dr. Drew Kidder, who hosted the conversation with Dr. Emily Hernandez, put it back in the language of the house. You cannot build one without a foundation. The personalization still comes. It just cannot come first.
The Order Came From What Went Wrong
The order came out of what was happening in the clinic. Early on, CellCore had only a few products, mostly anti-parasitics, and they were helping a lot of people. A subset had Herx reactions.
Dr. Watts remembers where the answer came from. "Jay's the drainage master. He [says], we need more drainage." Once drainage was addressed and the Roadmap to Health was mapped out, he said that really helped. Energy and drainage moved to the front, and everything downstream got easier. Enzymatic reactions begin. Organ systems start working better. Only then does it make sense to go after what is causing the problem.
Both of Them Were the Patient First
Neither founder came to this from theory.
Dr. Watts was diagnosed with Lyme and Babesia during chiropractic school. He ran the protocols and improved, then crashed, then improved again, still exhausted. A doctor suggested he look at parasites. That was the piece he had been missing. His immune system balanced, the crashing stopped, the Lyme symptoms resolved. And something was still wrong. He still could not tolerate exercise. That was how he found toxins, and eventually binders, which he describes as the change that ended a decade of not being able to train. Dr. Davidson's turning point was not his own body. In 2012 his daughter was born and his wife nearly died. She was reactive to everything they tried.
"That's where [I said], I've got to open the drainage pathways, got to move things," he said. "It was just that obsession, figuring that out."
That obsession set the design principle behind the entire protocol order. Build it for the most sensitive, most severely ill person you can imagine, and it will hold for everyone else, including people who are simply trying to optimize.
Why a Binder You Can Take With Food Changed Everything
Dr. Davidson describes compliance as one of the restrictions every practitioner runs into. You can tell someone what to do, but whether they can do it is a separate question. Traditional binders, activated charcoal and clays, have to be taken on an empty stomach. That means waiting two hours after eating, taking the binder, then waiting another hour before eating again. Three hours out of someone's day, every day.
The humic and fulvic blends behind BioActive Carbon® removed that constraint, and Dr. Davidson argues the timing is actually better with food, not merely tolerable. If a meal comes from a restaurant kitchen with unknown oils and unknown sourcing, a binder taken alongside it can support binding to what came with the food.* The older binders would have pulled nutrients out along with everything else.
Then came a second discovery. "We realized that these bioactive carbon molecules can actually be used as shuttles to help deliver the nutrients, the vitamins, the minerals into the tissues,"* Dr. Davidson said. That gave the same product two jobs, binding what should leave and delivering what should stay.*
Carbon That Never Burned
Both are the product of plant matter that decayed and concentrated over thousands of years, deep enough underground to sit outside the reach of modern contamination. Fulvic exists within humic. Humic is the larger, darker structure. The distinction Dr. Watts draws is between spent and unspent carbon. Burn a piece of wood and the ash left behind is spent. Its energy is gone. Activated charcoal is that. Humic and fulvic never burned.
That matters most with the compounds that are hardest to move. Radioactive elements such as uranium, thorium, and radium carry significant energy of their own, and removing them requires something that carries energy too. A spent carbon does not carry that energy. Humic and fulvic do.
Chemically, they work by donating or accepting electrons, protons, and oxygen molecules, and by enveloping a compound so the body recognizes what to do with it. They are also amphiphilic, able to interact with both water-loving and fat-loving environments and pass through a membrane. Dr. Davidson puts it more simply. Ashwagandha and rhodiola get called adaptogens. "Really the fulvic and humic molecules are the ultimate adaptogen."*
Not all sources are equivalent. Mineral balance, pH, and effectiveness vary from one mine to the next, the same way herbs vary by where they were grown.
Nothing Moves Until the Bottom Moves
Dr. Watts can name the patient who taught him this. Early in practice he gave a woman products for Candida and she came back a month later with boils across her body. He asked a question he had not thought to ask before. How often are you having a bowel movement? Every seven to ten days.
"I would never give somebody an antimicrobial if I knew they weren't going to the bathroom," he said. "So I didn't ask the question. That became really important for me."
Dr. Davidson separates two words that often get used as if they mean the same thing. Drainage is the movement of things through the body. Detoxification is grabbing hold of a chemical and pulling it out. One is flow. The other is extraction. Extraction without flow has nowhere to put what it loosens.
The funnel runs bottom to top. The colon is the base, and he recommends one to two bowel movements a day for generally healthy people, two to three for anyone working through a health challenge.* Above that sits the liver and bile duct system. Above that, lymph. Then organs and tissues. Then the cellular level.
That order flips how the phrase usually gets used. Healing at the cellular level requires draining at the cellular level, which requires the organs and tissues to drain, which requires the lymph to drain, which requires the liver and bile ducts to drain, which requires the colon to be moving. A backup anywhere backs up everything above it.
The liver and bile duct system is where Dr. Davidson sees the most trouble in chronic cases. When bile flow stagnates, the literature describes something like leaky gut occurring in the bile ducts. The liver completes phase one and phase two detoxification and hands the result to the bile for disposal, and if that route is blocked, those cells open and what should have been eliminated enters the bloodstream instead. He points to research connecting that pattern to itching, rashes, and damage to endothelial cells in the kidneys and lungs.
Which is the practical rule underneath all of it. "Once you realize that drainage is a key to minimize symptomatology, you have a lot happier people around you."
Listen to the Full Episode
Foundational Medicine: A New Model for Chronic Illness is available on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube. *These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.
