Dr. Oz's Webcast Transcript

Filiz: Sure.

Dr. Oz: I love Skype. You see on her—on the back of her knuckles she has some red spots there and sort of rashy like? That's an autoimmune ailment. So the skin which normally reproduces itself—thank you very much.

Oprah: Thank you.

Dr. Oz: The skin normally reproduces itself every two months or so. In psoriasis, every two weeks you shed your skin. And so your body's continually feeling like there's a need to heal itself, and so it's continually shedding this stuff, so you end up with these raw surfaces that are dried and patchy in appearance. You can ask the rest in English.

Filiz: Yeah, right. So after giving it thought, there is this—there's this lake called Balikli Gol, and if you translate it, it's fish lake. And it's said that the fish nibble on your dry skin and it kind of exfoliates it and it says it treats the condition. So how effective do you think it is?

Dr. Oz: You know, this is a topic that I was pursuing last year. There are actually some places in this country—

Oprah: Yes.

Dr. Oz: There you have the fish. And they actually eat away the dead skin on top of the psoriasis. And there are places in Washington and Texas, and we were actually going to do a show on this, but the health commissions of the states intervened. They said, you know, these fish go from person to person eating off the little scales, so they could spread disease. Plus, you can't really clean the water because you'd have to kill the fish. But that lake in Turkey actually— because I called them and talked to them. They actually have these fish. They thrive in the water there, so the fish will come, they'll eat away the dead skin so it debrides the skin, cleans it up. And when UV radiation sees the skin, it actually helps heal this area. So it's very effective for psoriasis. You have to go make trips there once in a while. But I actually love this idea.

Oprah: How would you know—this is the thing. How do you—how do the fish know to go to just the little scaly parts? How do you know they won't start eating on your knee or something?

Dr. Oz: They'll take the low-lying fruit. That's a good question. They're very small fish. They're the size of one of my small fingers here, and they swim around and they'll only take the stuff that's easy to pull off, which is the skin that's already dead and falling off.

Oprah: Wow.

Dr. Oz: And it's actually quite effective. Now, by the way, there are other ways of taking care of psoriasis besides traveling to this Balikli Gol. These are called doctor fish, by the way, because they're an interesting kind of carp that eat away the skin. But transcendental meditation, interestingly, this is one of the first places that we show that that kind of mindful meditation actually is helpful in changing an immune system response. That's a big deal because what it means to us is that you can actually control your immune system with your brain.

Oprah: Right. There have been all these studies done with monks where they've been able to—

Dr. Oz: Yeah, monks do it great. And there's some wonderful researchers in this area that I think have really shed a lot of light on the power of the mind-body connection. And when we look at people asking questions around the world in other countries like Filiz in Turkey, this is the globalization of medicine. Think about it. We have this webcast—

Oprah: Look, this is our community. This is now our community. We can talk to her sitting in her—

Dr. Oz: This is a sign of how much I love you.

Oprah: What? I've got some lemon on there?

Dr. Oz: Yes. It looks good.

Oprah: I was just squeezing the lemon into my tea. Is this agave? This is agave, right? Yeah.

Dr. Oz: So if you look at what medicine has done historically, it's remained very provincial, right? I practice very differently in New York than they even practice on the West Coast. So within the countries we have big issues. Think about across the world what an opportunity we have. So if this woman asks a question in Turkey, and I try to give an answer in Chicago, and someone in China can take that and spread it to somebody else, now we're globalizing medicine. And these kinds of insights, transcendental meditation, not you know, you think would be tried in a Western-based culture like ours. These doctor fish that can pull off scaling skin, all of these cool ideas of new foods we sometimes bring to the show, it's all an opportunity to share what the world has to offer in the healing arts.

Oprah: Wow. Filiz, thank you.

Filiz: Thank you so much.

Dr. Oz: (Speaking in Turkish.)

Oprah: Yeah. And the same here. Yeah. Same here.

Filiz: Okay. Bye, Bye.