Getting To The Root Cause of Your Disc Herniations with Dr. Jeff Fisher | Podcast #381
In this video, Dr. Justin and Dr. Jeff Fisher discuss various types of disc issues, including bulging and herniations, and how they can be treated using chiropractic exercises and programs, as well as soft tissue and deep tissue therapy.
They also talked about using devices such as traction devices and decompression machines and the potential benefits of diet and supplements, including collagen.
Dr. Justin and Dr. Jeff Fisher also mention stem cell therapy and stem cell injections, hydrostatic pressure, and spinal canal herniations. They also cover signs and symptoms of when surgery may be necessary and natural anti-inflammatory options. Key takeaways from the video include the importance of exercise and therapy in managing disc issues and the potential benefits of supplements and alternative treatments.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
00:30 – Introduction to Dr. Jeff Fisher
06:25 – Chiropractic Exercises/Program
15:00 – Decompression and Traction Devices
19:17 – Diet and Supplements
23:00 – Stem Cell Therapy/Stem Cell Injection
26:00 – Spinal Canal Herniations
28:10 – Signs and Symptoms on Getting Surgery
30:20 – Natural Anti-Inflammatory
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s Justin Marchegiani. Welcome back to the show. I have doctor Jeff Fisher here on today’s podcast. I found doctor Jeff because I see lots of patients all over the world functional medicine wise and a lot have chronic pain and a lot of that pain can be disc degeneration, disc bulging, disc herniation and Doctor Fisher has some excellent advice and excellent products to kind of interventions to help work get to the root cause of some of these motion. So, we’re gonna have a topic. We’re gonna have a conversation on this topic and really dive in and look at all the different options. Doctor Jeff, welcome to the show. How are you doing today?
Dr. Jeff Fisher: Great. Thanks for having me.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Appreciate it. Excellent. And we’ll put links down below to some of the things we’re talking about Doctor Jeff’s website, his practice and to get some traction support as well. So how did you come into this space obviously your chiropractor, we talk pre show that you’ve been doing this for over 30 years, but how did you get specifically into the distraction space? Did you see a gap in conventional chiropractic and you were trying to fill that need, how did that happen?
Dr. Jeff Fisher: So it’s kind of a sad story for me, but a great story for my patients. I was a horribly slow football player. I was a slow moving target on the football field back in my day. So I’ve had a couple of disc herniations in my neck. I’m not even sure you can see my scar here. I’ve had an anterior discectomy with fusion. So I’ve got the little titanium plate and the four screws. It’s C5 and C6. And I also had a disc removal with a said procedure. Uh, where they went. They went in with a probe, stuck it in, went all the way out the back of my disk, and they sucked out material at C5, C6 and C7 is where I have my fusion. So I was in an incredible agony and I have the large decompression tables in my office, but obviously I couldn’t bring those home with me at night, when I couldn’t sleep, I could barely eat. I was in an incredible amount of pain, so I just started experimenting with myself and rigging up different apparatuses on a railing on our stairs up upstairs and I had this aha moment like the mother or father of invention is a necessity. I started to create my own home traction unit and Ijust said, wow, you know, I really got something here. As a matter of fact, I was in so much pain, I couldn’t sleep. And one night when I had built this prototype, I slept. I was out cold. My wife came up and she looked at me. She was like, Oh my God, he’s snoring. So just laid a blanket over me and left me there for about three or four hours. I woke up. I woke up and I was like, Jesus, I actually slept. I got you know, I got something here. So then I brought that into my practice and I started to experiment with my patients. And over the years I developed different prototypes that just became more and more successful, easier and easier for me to use and my patience to use. And finally we evolved into my Fisher traction and I have, you know, primarily we had a cervical unit, but then my wife had a large disc herniation for low back, there’s like contagious in our family, these disc herniations. And so I built one for my wife and she got incredible results. We actually had before, during and after MRI’s on her lumbar spine and we could see the reduction of her lumbar, discrimination from 7 millimeters to 5 millimeters to three millimeters in a relatively short period of time. So at that point I thought, wow, you know what, there’s so much, you know, clinical value and therapeutic value to this that you know I got to do something with it. So. I gotta do something with it. You know, we ended up. Building and creating my official traction as it is today.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: OK, very cool. So we’re kind of talking more today about disc bulging herniation.Um, the disk is essentially popping out. It’s either hitting Chipley, that intervertebral foramen where those nerves are going out. And so conventional chiropractic where we’re adjusting, we’re moving the bones, making sure we have movement in the spine, we’re addressing subluxations. Why isn’t that not enough sometimes to address these disc issues?
Dr. Jeff Fisher: Well, you know the disks are complex in some ways, but they’re actually very simple. And others, you know, are discs, the center of our discs, the nucleus. Functions on its hydrostatic pressure and because the gravity always pushing down, there’s that creation of the pressure pushing out and with our adjustments, you know obviously we’re working on enhancing the motion at the facet joint level and we are affecting the disk, but when you reverse that pull of gravity on the spine and you elongate it and you stretch it out, then you can create a negative intradiscal pressure. That actually sucks the disc back in and you can suck the herniation of the bulge back in through the annular fibers, which, you know, we can’t, we can’t quite do with an adjustment by itself. But you know, traction and adjustments, you know, especially in my practice, we do both. We don’t do just one or the other, we do both. And you can get incredible success when you combine both of those treatments together. Um.It’s a super fortunate situation for a lot of people with disc issues that you know when you combine chiropractic and traction together you can just get amazing results.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right. So with the chiropractic we’re getting good movements, good alignment within that spine. Everything’s moving better, better alignment, especially if we have upper cervical issues. You’re probably applying some level of exercise, right? And I imagine really working on extension muscles, postural muscles, probably just that upper cross or lower cross syndrome issue with the tight hip flexors or the deep cervical flexors. What kind of postural awareness or exercises do you kind of build into your program when you’re addressing disk issues?
Dr. Jeff Fisher: So how do I allude to this in my practice because I’m a corrective care chiropractic so I’m looking at restoring normal curves. So if you I I tell my patients this if you think of me.I’m like an orthodontist putting braces on your teeth. So my job is to try and get your spine straight or restore the normal curves in your neck. So I’m like putting braces on your teeth. I’ve got, you know, physical therapy and traction, which is like brushing and flossing. And we use Pilates, which is like a retainer. So we’re helping to strengthen those core muscles. Stabilizing, you know, the muscles that support and control the spine so that they’re not 100% reliant solely upon adjustments or entire lives and doing both. They’re working on the outer part, while I work on the inner part.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: If there was just one exercise like lower back disc or cervical disc, is there one thing that you could think of, one kind of movement pattern that will be essential and kind of your program?
Dr. Jeff Fisher: Well, I would say, you know, extension exercises are hugely important like with you, which you touched on is Uppercross syndrome. Yeah, now in the tech world, it’s called tech neck. Yeah, people on the computers or on their smartphones, so we have that tendency to lose the normal curve. Not matter of fact, they, you know.When you’re a chiropractor, you always have different examples, you know. I’m not sure. Can you see this? So, you know, we have tech neck. You know, this is the tendency of the spine to move forward, which is the opposite of what God intended our neck to be, which is back more in extension or that represents more of a natural curve.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: There should be a C curve. That C should be there.
Dr. Jeff Fisher: Absolutely. Absolutely. So when you work on these extensor muscles to strengthen and condition them to make sure that they’re constantly trying to pull the neck back into its more normal curve. They’re essential. And this, you know, this obviously is, you know, the head up here. Here’s the occiput and here’s the cervical spine but this also applies the lumbar spine too Lumbar spine too, you know, they’re they’re very similar curves in the lumbar sliding it’s anywhere between 20 and 40 degrees is the natural lordosis that we’re supposed to have. And in the cervical spine, this natural lordosis, this is supposed to be more towards about 30 degrees. So anything that you can do to help strengthen the condition and enhance those curves going backwards is super, super important.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s good. So what kind of an exercise would you recommend out of the game? Like a pro Cobra or like something like a walling where you’re tucking that chin in? Any specific, one exercise you can think of that kind of sticks out?
Dr. Jeff Fisher: So we call them supermans. Have you ever heard of that?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah you come on a Swiss ball sometimes or like yoga mat kind of
Dr. Jeff Fisher: yeah or just yeah you lay, you lay flat on the ground and you and you’re just trying to you know extend your body back contracting those muscles in the head and neck and and also a lumbar spine.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Got it. So you’re putting yourself in that really good extension with your back, an extension with your neck and where does soft tissue come into this? Do you ever do like active release technique or graston or any soft tissue to kind of get some of these muscles that may not be, they may be inhibited and you’re trying to facilitate them working again.
Dr. Jeff Fisher: Yeah, So what we do, my practice is we do a lot of neuromuscular reeducation and there there’s some incredible techniques that we use for our deep tissue therapist where they’re working on relaxing the trigger points, relaxing the muscles and typically what we do in my office is I have all my patients get that deep tissue neuromuscular reeducation work done first before I adjust them.So it’s like, it’s like marinating them before I go in and I, you know, give him a good strong adjustment to restore that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, that’s very good. That’s excellent. Alright, so I want to just put up some visuals here just for some of the listeners. I think it may be helpful. If you’re listening to this on podcast, we’ll put the YouTube links below so you guys can see. This video was good. This was the one that I think you showed what an actual disc herniation looks like. I’m going to just play it here for the listeners and. Just a visual here.So we have the nerve right here and then here’s the disk and essentially overtime that disk is shortening and then we have a little bulge irritating. That nerve right there. So just kind of bringing it down here, this is a really good picture. Can you explain what’s happening here when you’re doing traction and what’s how that’s working?
Dr. Jeff Fisher: So what’s happening is. I’ve got a couple of my units here. I’m going to use this one because you might be able to see it a little bit better, but what my invention would I actually created is is a new form of traction and the actual engine or the mechanism of pole is these little discs here with these latex bungees in the middle and over our studies we calculated the amount of strength, the tensile elastic pull strength of the bungees where you see and pulling them apart, and this is our cervical unit. And the cervical unit can apply a maximum of 50 pounds of pull force, which supposedly that’s about the maximum of human neck can handle, although we’ve we’ve experimented on patients with with even a larger magnitude of pole force and they’ve been able to handle like big guys can handle a lot more but that pulling, you know, like this, it’s pulling in the opposite direction of what gravity does and the great thing about these latex bungees is that they have very similar characteristics to our muscles in that like when you’re on a big table and your neck is getting stretch, your body might fight with it and there’s not any sensory to relax the traction so your muscles can relax these bungees. What they’ll do is just naturally they’ll relax if your muscles pull and as your muscles relax. It pulls more uh, which is very good. They actually act like kind of in a symbiotic relationship. This is our standard low back unit and this guy. I uh, OK. I’m pulling as hard as I can as far as I can, that thing’s got like about 100 pounds of pull force.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s very cool. Well, when I saw these devices a couple things because I’ve been recommending various devices. Usually the lower cost ones tend to be more gravity based, whether it’s like a kneeling inversion or inversion boots. Obviously those tend to have problems where it just can be a pain in the butt to get into those. And if you’re really hot with your disk being inflamed can be a little difficult. And so, and then my concern with a lot of them was when I saw your device, there was an aha moment because what I really was needing from my patients was this ability to decompress and then relax. Decompress and relax. Think of that as you get a rag, you fill up with water, you ring it out and then you have the absorption to clean up the mess and then you bring to a water again and then you rinse it out again. That’s how your disk works. It’s like a sponge. Now the problem is, I’ll just, for the listeners, overtime the discs tend to shorten a little bit, cartilage tends to get weaker and essentially you’re disc gets hydrated with imbibition that’s essentially the pumping of that that disk and that movement of putting the pressure on letting it pull. Right. Expand the disk, create the negative pressure, suck it in and then relax. That for me created that Aha Mama. That’s the inhibition that the disk needed to kind of rehydrate and heal. Can you comment a little more on that?
Dr. Jeff Fisher: Yeah, that’s really the critical component to decompression. Decompression by itself is the desired outcome and one of my proprietary components, Umm, I’m not sure if that’s in reverse there, but says crap, so release strap is engaged by the user to go through these periodic resting phases and if you think of the center of the disk, like the substances in baby diapers where the the proteoglycans, they can absorb, you know like 500 times their weight in water. But that lasting phase is critically important because once you draw the water it socks in. It needs to get absorbed in the matrix of those proteoglycans. And that resting phase allows that. So you’re literally, you’re rehydrating the discs, you’re giving the discs life.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Totally. That makes sense. And I didn’t. I haven’t seen a lot of other devices on the market that provide that pumping action. Unless you’re going into that, you know, unless you, you know they have the ones over the top with the weights or the blood pressure cup, but then it involves, it’s kind of a pain in the butt to kind of off on and off on. Are there any other competitors even close that has that release action?
Dr. Jeff Fisher: Well, they can’t because yeah, I have the United States utility patent, so I invented a new form of traction. So it’s kind of funny. Matter of fact, we run on Amazon and we’ve taken down about 40 competitors that tried to steal my idea so that no one else can actually design or make a traction unit like mine, because I invented a new form of traction. It’s mine, it’s my baby.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So it’s cost effective too. So that’s great. And this is kind of what’s happening at the lumbar here, right? This is pulling this apart.This is essentially pulling the hips down. You’re anchored up here, so it’s creating that disk space versus having to do traction or having to move your body and then you can release it here. Do you have a good image on the website for the cervical spine?
Dr. Jeff Fisher: I do, I do if you well actually, you know what so you know you’re funny story. We just sold out right there. There it is right there. If you click on that, you will probably see it. But we literally just sold out of our cervical units. Yeah, it’s a positive problem.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s a good problem. That’s a quality problem. Yeah. Yeah. OK, that’s cool. Alright. Anything else? And with the cervical spine, obviously similar situation. Right. We’re just, we’re just grabbing, you know the, everything from the neck up versus you grabbing it from the hips down. Where’s that image that I just had? Let’s see, here where go. I’ll try to pull back up here had it was a good image of what was happening there.
Dr. Jeff Fisher: While you’re looking for it. Another really important part about how my traction unit is different from most others is that there’s studies have been shown that if your spine is in extension in its more natural curve during traction you get better results, so that’s another reason why mine is supine. So when you lay down, your neck still maintains that natural curve. What they did was they designed it at an appropriate length so it maintains that 30 degree angle of pull force which enables you to reach over a larger number of disk spaces in the spine. If it’s too flat then you’re only affecting the upper cervicals, and if it’s too far forward where your neck is an extension one that causes damage to the discs the two, then you’re only reaching the lower vertebrae, but when you allow it to be in a 30 degree angle you can reach over almost the entire cervical spine all at once.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So this angle right here.
Dr. Jeff Fisher: Exactly, exactly.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And then typically this is anchored over gonna be like a door jam. Typically,
Dr. Jeff Fisher: Yeah, yeah, you do both. The upper, yeah. Hook it on a doorknob and just you lay down. It’s really super easy to use.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s cool. That’s excellent, very good. So outside of that, what else would you want to highlight with your programs like this is going to be a part of the program? What else do you see like nutritionally, diet wise, helping them move the needle, whether it’s reducing inflammation, kind of a Whole Foods kind of paleo template, certain food allergens, what kind of supplements as well would you want to add in to kind of help reconstitute that disk tissue?
Dr. Jeff Fisher: Well, you know one of the most simple is water. Water, water, water, water and and and and so many of us, you know like I drink, I drink my coffee. You know like everybody else does but I myself I’m kind of like a test tube or a test.Things out on myself first before I implement my practice. But I’ve been consciously drinking more water over the last year and honestly, I’ve virtually only drink water. I drink my coffee and I just drink water.That’s it, and I can tell myself that.You know, that’s helped in the inflammatory effects. I still run, I still work out, and my knee problems are gone. My feet, my ankles.Uh, you know, along with I take glucosamine with chondroitin MSM. Umm. And uh, you know, nutrition is a huge, huge, you know, part of our health. And, you know, unfortunately, we don’t always get that in our diets. So if you’re not taking any vitamins, you should take at least a multivitamin to start. But there’s so many, as you know, like in functional medicine, there is such an incredible depth of nutrition that can be evaluated properly and you can add it into your life. And honest to God, nutrition can totally change your life. It really, really can.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, so if you’re hydrating good clean filtered water, mineral water, you’re not, you’re not obviously doing a lot of the high fructose corn syrup junkets inflaming your body. What about for like tissue? Like what about collagen peptides or conjoin or any any building block stuff like what’s your experience with that?
Dr. Jeff Fisher: So you know that that’s a great question because we actually just started looking into that because, you know, as the disks themselves. Here’s my little. my little baby here. The outer fibers of our discs are made of type 1 collagen, and just a little bit deeper, they’re type 2 collagen. So you know, my wife is much smarter than I am. So she takes all these incredible supplements, but she’s been taking collagen. And she notices a difference in her skin, everything and and and I you know honestly I that’s not my area of expertise per se. You know more about that than I do but but I think you know collagen is able to maintain its same, you know, compounds even if it as it gets digested and you have extra collagen in your body then it can replace maybe old collagen I mean.That’s like a no brainer to me. Yeah, I think, yeah, you can pump that in you, you pump in the good and you pump out the old and your body stays healthier, stays younger.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I mean your your body tends to know where to lay down these these amino acids and proteins just by lifting weights your body creates the inflammation in the bicep by doing curls and you’re going to reconstitute protein there. So I imagine that same kind of response in that dish tissues and the trigger some of that building block and if you’re eating junky food or not digesting and absorbing a lot of nutrients, then that collagen will be helpful. Anything else that you would like, let’s say someone’s really hot, really inflamed, would you ever add in something like prolotherapy or PRP platelet rich plasma or stem cell injections. What’s your experience using an injectable in that area to kind of work alongside it?
Dr. Jeff Fisher: So you know, that’s actually a great question. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with this, what’s happened with stem cell therapy most recently. You know the FDA has stopped us from being able to use that, but we used to do stem cell injections in my office and they were.Oh really? Oh yeah, yeah, incredibly successful. But now they’ve put a limitation on it because most stem cell injections i’s a mixture. And once you start, once you start mixing things, you’re creating new drugs. So of course, FDA shut that down.So, we’ve had to discontinue that in our office, but it was incredibly successful. So there’s something there. There’s definitely something there.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I always tell patients too, even if you were to do an injectable, whether it’s PRP or stem cell or prolotherapy. It’s still not the root cause and maybe accelerating the healing of that tissue, but you still have to fix the underlying mechanism of why that got beaten down. And you still want to bring that disc back in so that annular fibrosis, that outer ring, can heal. Because of that pulposus is still pushing through that ring. It’s just not going to heal. It’s like ripping a scab off all the time, right?
Dr. Jeff Fisher: Exactly, exactly. And you know, again, that gets back to the rehydration. You know that disk lives on the hydrostatic pressure, so the greater the hydrostatic pressure inside the disc is so incredibly important and I’m not sure if you’re aware of this is something I just learned because I do all my continuing education courses every year. I always I’m always looking for disc related material and I came across this.Just most recently that we have these nerves that go into the disc. They surround the disk and they go into the disk OK and I can’t remember what the name of the nerves are, but the hydrostatic pressure prevents those nerves from getting deeper into the disc. And now they’re talking about discogenic pain. So the deeper those nerves are able to penetrate in, they’ll collide with an acid that the nucleus has and it causes pain. So as a disk dehydrates and loses its water those nerves can grow further in and then you have more pain. So maintaining that health of that nucleus by increasing that hydrostatic pressure by decompressing prevents those nerves from getting in, which prevents pain. So it’s hugely, hugely important.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So essentially you have that herniation, that video we showed where that disk kind of comes out, hits that IVF intervertebral foramen, those spinal nerves coming out. It’s not just that it could not even be hitting that, just there’s little nerves around the actual disc, just a little bit of pressure on that could be sending a signal, a pain signal, essentially.
Dr. Jeff Fisher: 100 percent, 100%. Yeah, yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Now what about disc herniations into the spinal canal? I think most disc herniations are going to be more IVF just based on the anterior to posterior nature of that where the spinal canal is more interior. How often do you see spinal, spinal canal herniations and would this type of traction still help that?
Dr. Jeff Fisher: They would and you know this one of the reasons why because we have a, you know, all the way in the very back of our of our spine, we have the posterior longitudinal ligament, which is like like a thick piece of leather that goes all the way down our spine and that prevents that that direct posterior disc herniation. But I do a fair amount of injury cases, car accidents. Where, when? When? Instability. Where the bones were able to move forward and backward beyond their normal range of motion. Yeah, that can cause a little bit of elasticity or loosening of that posterior longitudinal ligament were it actually allows a posterior disc herniation to go backwards towards the spinal canal and it doesn’t happen that often, but it just depends on the magnitude of injury and force. But when there’s instability is going forward and backwards, which you can see on flexion extension films, then you have to look for that also, which you know an MRI of course could show you that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: But you find, you still are able to recover patients like that?
Dr. Jeff Fisher: Yeah, we are, you know there’s such an incredible power to traction and it’s so simple. But the key is really the frequency and the consistency of use and like what we stress what we found is that.If you can use it for 21 consecutive days, 21 days. Use it before you go to bed or when you wake up in the morning, whatever is most convenient for you. But you know if after 21 days, you know, most of our patients are a lot better. If you’re not, then you better go check in with an orthopedist because you might be a surgical candidate.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. And at what point do you need surgery? What are the signs or symptoms of what percent of people do you think you’re able to save from getting surgery? Do you think 90, 95% and you can avoid and what symptoms you have to look for when you’re like OK yeah you really need surgery and then maybe work on this later?
Dr. Jeff Fisher: So like for me, I’m a perfect example.I had an enormous discrimination in my neck and I was starting to get atrophy of my left tricep and part of my pack. So if you’re getting atrophy of muscles, you need to consult with the surgeon because that can be a permanent issue. But again if you have numbness and tingling, if you’re if your reflexes or sensation are affected when you go in to see you know any healthcare provider may evaluate you. And if those things are progressive, they’re getting worse or they just will not go away with any type of conservative treatment.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Even interaction as well.
Dr. Jeff Fisher: Even traction. I mean, I wish we could help everybody, we can’t, but you know our success rates are over 80% and most studies show that about 80% of people that that take on traction, they get better. But there is, you know, I don’t know the exact percentage of people that are just, you know, always going to be surgical candidates or not, but you know, in my office I have a great relationship with the orthopedist who actually did my surgery. So he’s incredibly conservative. He knows all about. Chiropractic traction, everything. If I get a really difficult case where my patients just are not progressing, I’ll send them over to Nitin N. Bhatia and he’ll look at them and many times he goes, you know what, go back to Fisher. Keep doing it. Let’s give it another month. Let’s give it another month after that
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That see how much you can retract that this back in and if you’re seeing improvement and imagine some people they probably still feel a little bit better on the traction if they have a disk issue. So if you see a little bit of improvement and you can inch away at that like 21 days you said, then you could probably get some momentum. I would assume.
Dr. Jeff Fisher: Exactly and that’s the key. It’s getting that therapeutic momentum of treatment over and over and over on a consistent basis. And you can draw it back.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Any other natural anti inflammatories you would add in? Imagine just getting to the root cause, you’re going to be avoiding lots of these dangerous opiate medications that conventional medicines finally getting keen on and their addictive nature not really fixing anything, they’re just blocking perception of pain but any other natural anti inflammatories, you wanna add in or you see to be successful with their patients with disc issues?
Dr. Jeff Fisher: You know, I don’t know. Because, you know, I’m like a mechanic. You know, I’m, I’m restoring the motion and position of the spine and I tend to refer out. You know, there’s a big functional medicine facility that’s close to us. And uh, let those experts do what they do. I mean, you might, you know better than I do is, I mean what do you use, is there any?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I mean I think out of the gate, you know higher dose fish oil can be excellent. I think different herbs like frankincense or Boswellia or even some topical CBD can be great. I even find systemic enzymes taken away from food. Systemic enzymes that have like seropeptidase, they, they kind of get into the bloodstream and they start breaking up scar tissue, they break up inflammatory cytokines and interleukins and they can help provide more pliability to that tissue. So those are just a couple of things out of the gates I think can be helpful.
Dr. Jeff Fisher: Awesome. Well, you know what we need to collaborate then.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, that’s great. That’s great. And then can you work with patients that have gone the conventional medicine wrote. Let’s say they went in and they got a cortisone injection. OK, the pain is better. Doc, can you still work with those patients while that cortisone takes six months to wear off.
Dr. Jeff Fisher: Absolutely. We do that all the time.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And how do you find their limitations? Because now they don’t have pain telling them, oh, don’t do this. How do you get them to be on top of their limitations when they really can’t perceive pain?
Dr. Jeff Fisher: Well, you know, I X-ray everybody, Umm, I do. And unless somebody has films that are, you know, less than six months old, I X-ray, everybody. So I look at them from a structural standpoint where if I’m looking and seeing that they have subluxations, they have a lot of curve or scoliosis or whatever it is. I stay focused on that and I get them to focus on that because even if the pain is not there, their spine is not at their optimum level. So we’re always concentrating on the restoration of normal curves. So it helps the patient to get more focused on, hey, if you want to prevent this from coming back, you want to stay healthy, we have to get that curve back to normal.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Very good. Excellent, doc. Well, any other last clinical pearls you wanna leave us with your 30 plus years of practice?
Dr. Jeff Fisher: Uh, well, I’d say, you know, I tell my patients this all the time. Motion is life and life is motion. So if you are constantly working towards the restoration of normal motion, your maximum motion, you’re gonna live a better life, a healthier life. You’re going to be able to experience all the things that you want to do.vacations grandchildren whatever it might be so motion is so key so whatever you can do to help increase your ranges and your functionality and your body. You got to do it, you got to invest the time and effort.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Excellent. We’ll put links down below guys to access some of Doctor Fisher’s patented technology fishertraction.com. We’ll put links below in the comments and also Doc sees patients in person over an Irvine CA fisherchiropractic inc.com. I’ll put both links if you’re in the California area and you want to get support. He’s there for you as well. Anything else though, you want to leave the listeners with any other coordinations or social media stuff you want to highlight?
Dr. Jeff Fisher: Well, you know.We actually were coming out with our new boxed units of my Fisher traction. Um, we’ve got a deal going on right now. You’ve probably heard of Meyer DC they’re one of the largest durable medical devices. So we’ve got a big deal going on with them. So, we’re trying to reach out more to practitioners.Uh, like yourself, where patients need it, you’re going to be able to purchase it and have it in your clinics readily, readily available so patients can try it right away. We’re going to do some training videos on how you guys can implement it in practices and help your patients with it. So you know we’re we go to fishertraction.com. We’re always trying to update things and I have my YouTube channel where I’ve got I don’t even know over 100 videos on Chiropractic on traction on, you know virtually anything for health. So uh, it’s kind of an exciting journey.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s very good. We’ll put links below. We talked about a promo code, maybe Dr. J will work. We’ll put it in the description below. We can get that set up after. All right, doc? Well, thanks so much. Amazing chatting with you. Appreciate the information and we’ll talk again soon. You take care.
Dr. Jeff Fisher: Alright, brother. Take care. Thanks.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Thank you.
References:
https://www.fishertraction.com/
Recommended Product:
Discount code for 10%: Drj10
Audio Podcast:
Post Viral Immune Support To Improve Energy | Podcast #363
What you eat after a viral infection, when symptoms of fatigue persist, can have a marked impact on your speed of recovery. Dr. J and Evan discuss that specific foods need to be avoided or included in your diet to improve your immune system. So what are the truth and the evidence about diet and post-viral immune support?
The good news is that most people will benefit from some considerations when recovering from illness or infection. Having post-viral fatigue means that you will not have your usual energy to think, shop, prepare or eat as before. Be very practical and kind to yourself. Dr. J and Evan added that diet modification is vital in your recovery.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
0:00 – Introduction
1:57 – The role of acid-pH level in the digestive system
5:01 – The link of depression and anxiety to bloating
10:02 – The benefits of probiotics and effects of stress to digestive health
18:17 – Functional medicine strategies and testing to find the root cause of bloating
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And we are live. It’s Dr. J in the house with Evan Brand. Evan, how you doing man? How are your holidays? How’s everything going brother?
Evan Brand: Everything’s going pretty good. I’m trying to start 2022 off with a bang. I suspect it’s gonna be a better year than 2021. People are becoming smarter. They’re becoming more educated. They’re becoming more resourceful. People are waking up. There’s a lot of, we’re in the great awakening and so I think, this is an important time to be alive and an important time if you’re a parent, if you’re a husband, a wife, if you’ve got kids, if you’re a teacher. It’s important time to keep your eyes open and keep your ears to the ground because stuff changes quickly and you got to be like a little speedboot. You got to be able to take turns quick, you don’t want to be the titanic right now, you don’t wanna be slow in taking big turns, you gotta be nimble in these times and so what I’m alluding to is just you got to be able to navigate the world of health which is quickly evolving and that’s true. What we’re trying to talk about today is post viral fatigue and really that’s just the title but this really could apply to bacterial infections and parasites and mold exposure but we just wanted to try to zoom in a little bit specifically on post viral fatigue and things like Epstein Barr virus, many people are familiar with and there’s a lot of people that report their chronic fatigue, picking up after something like EBV, we’ve seen it a lot with the virus going around now which would probably get flagged and censored so we won’t say it but you know what it is and there’s a lot of post, uh, viral fatigue going on from that and so you and I have dealt with some of that, you’re still going through the thick of it right now but I think you’re coming through pretty well, you’re still working and obviously you’re on your feet right now literally standing so that’s exciting and yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: For the listeners, I had COVID last week, actually symptoms started on Wednesday. Really two hard days of symptoms, I was able to work the whole time though, I mean I think that the symptoms for my COVID that were, um, tough was I would say achiness and then like sensitivity to cold like it was like 45 degrees out and it felt like it was minus 10. So, I would say sensitivity to cold and then also getting really hot at some points, getting out where I would sweat through my shirt. So hot and cold, achiness/ headaches and then like easily out of breath but I mean for me I mean, it was still fine where I could work and still do the things I had to do. So it wasn’t that bad, I mean, I had a flu in 2013 where I was literally laid up for over two days and I couldn’t do anything so I know laid up feels like it wasn’t even close to the flu of 2013 for me, that was really hard. So, definitely, um, not as bad, I actually was my own worst enemy because on Friday I was feeling like really good like 80-90% better and did like 2-3 hours of housework like cleaning my house like doing all this different stuff because it was a beautiful day and I’m like all right let me get on top of some work, work 3 hours probably walk like 15,000 steps and that next day there was a major relapse in how I felt. It was probably like I went backwards 30-40%. Here I was at 80% probably going backwards to 50. I was like whoa what happened and so then I just kind of got in the straight and narrow and just said okay I gotta really make sure I kind of make sure I kind of keep it easy until I get back to 100% because, you know, um, it just you didn’t realize how much, uh, things could go backwards so fast so you really gotta wait till you get a 100% on things and so overall I mean the only thing lingering for me right now is a slight bit of um out of breathiness and, uh, this little lingering deep tickle cough like right now you can feel it like someone’s tickling the back of your throat with your finger and you want to cough to scratch it, kind of like that and so that’s where I’m at now. That’s like kind of makes it feel like I scratch it right there, right. So, I’m doing some ginger tea, I’m doing with the Manuka honey that soothes it like that helps with the irritation. It’s not knocking the cough down. Doing some, Elderberry, um, doing some thieves, uh, natural cough drops with essential oils, um, also doing some nebulizer so I’m doing some glutathione nebulization so those are couple of things I’m doing and then obviously sinus flushes, the amount of mucus that is coming out of me is out of control so sinus flushes are really, really important because if you do not flush your sinuses, the amount of stuff that stays inside of you, oh my God. So, flushing my sinuses out 3-4 times a day, you know, really good saline reverse osmosis with a little bit of silver in there to kind of keep things flushed out is helping a lot. So, that’s kind of where I’m at but honestly feeling pretty good, um, the whole family got it purposefully, my wife had it and I’m like come over here honey gave her a big kiss and then I kissed all my kids, I’m like we’re done. We’re gonna get this thing all together, be done with it all that way we’re not, you know, I get it next month and then I’m isolating for two weeks and then my kids get no we’re gonna get it all at the same time and surprisingly my kids’ symptoms were 80% less than the adults, super, super minor. I couldn’t believe how minor it was for the kids, so very interesting. So, that was kind of my experience with, uh, with the big C, uh, so to speak. And also, the big correlation I was listening to someone talk about this, the, a lot of the post C symptoms that we see after, right, people that have dysglycemia, and blood sugar issues tend to be a big driving factor of a lot of these post viral symptoms afterwards. Talking about post-viral fatigue, one of the big things is make sure you manage your glycemia, meaning you’re having good protein, you’re having good fats, you’re not eating a bunch of refined sugar, grains, those kinds of things. Make sure you put good metaphorical logs on the fire, good proteins, good fats to really work on blood sugar stability.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Yeah. We’ll I’m glad that you’re coming through it. Regarding the shortness of breath, I would kind of put that in the same category as the post viral fatigue because that shortness of breath can create fatigue and the best thing that’s helped me and has helped many clients is doing the color oxygen. So, ChlorOxygen, you can get that on amazon, it’s readily available. And it’s just a, it’s a liquid chlorophyll extract. So, when you do that within probably 5-10 minutes, you can feel a difference, so it’s like C-h-l-o-r-Oxygen, ChlorOxygen. I would probably do 10-20 drops up to 3 times per day. That thing is absolutely incredible. You can go as high as one tablespoon in 20 ounces of water and just sip on that throughout the day. I had one guy in New York, major, major issues with shortness of breath in the acute and the long term and that ChlorOxygen literally just turned his situation around. So, I’d get some of that stuff.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So, it’s C-h-l-o-r Oxygen?
Evan Brand: Yeah, ChlorOxygen. Yeah, and it comes in a little bottle tincture and it’s incredible. Also, something I’ve used personally, I’ve used with several clients too is Ailanthus. Ailanthus is three of heaven which is an invasive tree. I see a lot of it in Kentucky but you can buy Ailanthus tincture and that one is also really, really good.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Interesting. Is this the one, right here, Is the ChlorOxygen?
Evan Brand: Yeah. That’s the one. Yep.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay. Cool.
Evan Brand: Get you some of that but should help because that’s the problem is, you know, the shortness of breath was pretty bad for me and I felt better, you know, I got infected a long time ago. It was like August 2020 and then six months later that’s when I started to have some shortness of breath which I was like, holy crap and so luckily, I was able to knock it out, uh, with Demectin and uh, yeah, Demectin really helped me and then the nebulizer and the ChlorOxygen, I would say that combination was an absolute game changer, luckily, I haven’t had any issues since then. But what we are seeing is that the mitochondria have a role in this and some of this post-viral fatigue we’re seeing is due to mitochondrial damage so I’ve been fortunate enough to see a few dozen people now. And in terms of organic acids testing after the virus, and we are seeing that the mitochondria definitely showed dysfunction. You and I talked about this many times on other podcast about the mitochondria. We can measure the dysfunction and so what we’re doing is we’re coming in with mitochondrial support nutrients so CoQ10, we’re coming in with carnitine, ribose, a lot of these amino acids and B vitamins like riboflavin which can help fuel the krebs cycle and then also we can use things like PQQ to help get the mitochondrial biogenesis going, meaning we’re literally making new mitochondria so we can measure this on paper. So, if you guys are suffering, you know, one of us can reach out or you reach out to us rather and then we can get the urine looked at because we can measure this. You don’t have to guess where is this fatigue coming from. If it’s a mitochondrial induced problem, we can measure that. Now, you have permission to have multiple things wrong with you so there could be a dopamine problem, there could be a mitochondrial problem, there could be toxin problem. So, rarely is there one issue causing this fatigue but the goal is for us to try to get as many puzzle pieces laid out in front of us and then make an appropriate protocol.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. I’d say, the worst thing about COVID for me right now, coffee tastes bitter like it tastes bitter, almost a little bit sour, does not taste like coffee. I’ve almost been like I’m not even gonna drink it right now until this thing gets better because it does not taste that good but for me I’m just alright, I got, you know, 20 grams of collagen in there, I got some good fats, I kind of look at it as like a meal replacement for me. So, that’s probably the worst thing the whole time. For me, it kind of felt like a cold. I’d say a mild, mild to middle of the road cold. The only thing that really surprised me was that, that back swing where I was like 80% better and then went backwards that was the hardest thing.
Evan Brand: And, it could have been you overdoing it for sure, I mean,
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: oh, you totally did.
Evan Brand: Yeah. I mean I did have a little bit of that too where I kind of felt like I was better, overdid it and then I heard it again, so.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. 100%. So, excuse me, anything else you wanted to highlight on that so far? I would say post-viral stuff, the things that I’m doing right now and I recommend people do, in general, are gonna be Adaptogens and I like medicinal mushrooms. So, Shiitake, Maitake, Reishi. Reishi is great. I love it because it does deactivate viruses. It does build up and support the natural killer immune cells so I do like that, uh, any type of ginseng, Ashwagandha, these are things that help support energy production, support the adrenals, help buffer the HPA excess. So, any of these types of things are gonna be, uh, helpful too.
Evan Brand: You need to get on some Lion’s Mane too for your taste because what I’m finding is that the nerves are damaged and that’s affecting the sinus. So, the sense of smell, sense of taste, some of that is related to nerve damage. So, I would probably hit Lion’s Mane, maybe like two caps twice a day. That’s been helpful to restore the sense of smell and taste in some people.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s probably not damaged. It’s probably just more inflammation, right?
Evan Brand: Well, the long-term stuff, I’m talking to people just long-term. I’m talking to people that you know 6-8 months later say, I still can’t taste or smell. Bringing in Lion’s Mane, like 2 caps twice a day. It takes a few months but you know it does increase nerve growth factor and so I think that’s the mechanism.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s interesting. Yeah. I do have some Lion’s Mane. I’ll definitely add that in. I mean, I think medicinal mushrooms are gonna be really good to, um, be on top of, uh, just supporting your immune system and like helping with, um, the body regenerate and heal better.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Gabe was asking a question in the live chat on YouTube. How did you guys catch it? I don’t know, I mean I work from home. You know, I’ve got a home office, uh, Justin has a home office as well, you know, I do go out, uh.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Personally, it’s the new variant. The new variant has an R-naught of seven, which is that’s equal to, uh, measles so the delta variant had an R-naught of 2 or 3 so that means for every one person that gets it, it can be passed to 2-3 on average, right. The new omicron variant, it’s seven, so you can literally pass it to seven people so I think my wife was in a yoga class with three people and they were like spread out across that broom like they were like way you know spaced apart, you know, for just all the safety reasons and it was still able to get it so my whole take on omicron, it’s very, um, I think the symptoms are milder than delta for sure. That’s what everything’s been reported but, um, it’s way more contagious. Everyone’s gonna get it at this point, you just gotta have your plan and, um, be ready ahead of time, right? People don’t have a plan and then when they get it then they get stuck and they feel like they have to go to the hospital and you don’t have as many options there so try to have a, um, outpatient plan ready to rock and roll but yeah, you’re gonna get it because the, um, our knot on this thing, right, is that seven which is at a level close to measles so it’s right there. So, if you haven’t got it yet, you will. Anything else you wanna highlight on the immune side, on the post-viral stuff obviously I’m a big fan of ginger, I think ginger is nice because it’s anti-inflammatory, anti-viral, uh, helps with lymphatic. So, if your kind of like have a lot of like stagnant lymph in the chest area or in the neck I really keeps the lymph moving all that’s very helpful.
Evan Brand: Yeah. There was, uh, one person that commented if you’ve had delta you should have some memory T cells that will help if you get infected. Yes supposedly. Supposedly, um.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. You definitely should have memory T cells as well as memory B cells, right? So, even if you were to get sick again, um, you’re gonna be able to recruit antibodies way faster, right? Normally when you get sick if you’re first time getting exposed to an infection it takes about a week or so to really get those antibodies ramped up and so even if you were to get sick twice, you’re gonna be able to make those antibodies inside of, you know, 24 hours or so. So, you’re gonna be able to bring those antibodies to the table a lot faster and so that’s, um, that’s pretty cool. That’s pretty helpful.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Other strategies, uh, post-viral fatigue hyperbaric oxygen has been helpful. I’ve seen several clients that luckily have lived in a city where they’ve had access to do hyperbaric oxygen. Essentially, what it is, is it’s replicating being under water under water about 10 to 12 feet so that pressure is helping to get oxygen deeper inside of you. So, some of these tissues may have been starved of oxygen. This sort of mild hypoxia or hypoxemia, you know, you can basically reverse that by getting the hyperbaric oxygen. There are some people that can do there’s oxygen cans, little portable oxygen shots, if you will but it’s nothing compared to an oxygen concentrator with the hyperbaric oxygen so that’s good ongoing, I mean, I’ve had clients with Lyme that have done hyperbaric we know that’s incredible for traumatic brain injuries and concussions and that sort of thing. So, even if this is just a long-term fatigue problem, not related to viral issues at all, you know, hyperbaric is another good tool, you’re looking at probably around 100 a session but, you know, what, what’s your health? What is your health worth? So.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly. One thing I did was very helpful was use my infrared sauna the last couple of days. That was helpful, just getting a really good sweat in felt very good, you know, raising that body temperature up can be very helpful just at um at your body knocking down viruses. That’s part of the reason why you get, um, chill while you get the nutshells but, uh, why you get a fever right. It’s part of the reason your immune system is actually knocking down some of that bacteria and or viruses by doing it that way so using an infrared sauna can be helpful too.
Evan Brand: So, look at your mitochondria, get your organic acids test done, we can measure that and look at mitochondrial function come in with specific support whether it’s B vitamins, adaptogenic herbs like Rhodiola, you mentioned, Siberian ginseng or Eleuthero. There’s medicinal mushrooms like cordyceps which there is some benefits. There are some papers on cordyceps and athletes and improving blood flow. There may be some level of oxygenation that happens with cordyceps too. So, cordyceps, reishi mushroom, I think the Lion’s mane for the brain and for the nerves would be beneficial, the ChlorOxygen for any of the shortness of breath along with the fatigue, rest, I mean just getting good quality sleep, making sure you got to do whatever you can to get good quality sleep. So, all the same sleep hygiene habits we’ve talked about for a decade together apply in regards to candling down at night if you need some passion flower. Even melatonin, there’s some really cool studies on melatonin. We know, it’s a very powerful antioxidant and we are seeing higher doses of melatonin be beneficial. So, in general, somewhere around 5 milligrams but there are some papers going wat up 30 – 40 – 50 milligrams and beyond. I don’t know a ton about the high dose so I’ll just tell you that the regular dose standard dosing is better than nothing.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It was that melatonin?
Evan Brand: Melatonin. Yes.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Usually, it’s like the higher dose is like 10 milligrams and that’s gonna help with the oxygenation and then 30 – 500 milligrams for the arginine that’s to really increase the oxygenation.
Evan Brand: Yeah. The arginine for like nitric oxide production. Beet powder, you know, beet powder would be good too. So, anything you could do to create some vasodilation is gonna be smart.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Very cool. Anything else you wanna add, Evan?
Evan Brand: I think that’s it. If you need help, reach out, get tested, hopefully you get back on the full mend here so, keep, keep rolling. You’re doing a great job and hope everybody is doing well and we’ll be in touch next week. If you need help clinically, please reach out. You can reach out to Dr. J at justinhealth.com or me, Evan Brand, at evanbrand.com. We’re happy to help you guys. Keep your head up. keep moving forward.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I think the big thing out of the gates is to make sure you have time to sleep, rest. Don’t overdo it. Just know your body still needs more time even when you, when you’ve gotten through the whole thing to recover. Don’t overdo it. That’s really important. Keep the foundational nutrients dialed in so that would be like zinc, vitamin C, vitamin D, you know, you can keep those things in there. You may not have to use them at such a high level that you did with the infection but keep some of those nutrients. Don’t go from something to nothing. Keep something in there the whole time, find a medicinal mushroom that you like, find an adaptogen that you like. Maybe keep a little bit of ginger tea going. Something that has some antiviral support and um, you know, try to get a little bit of movement but if it’s making you feel winded then just try to do just enough where you can feel like you’re doing something but not where it’s overly taxing you. I think it’s really important to kind of meet that right in the middle.
Evan Brand: Last thing, two last things, a low histamine diet is generally pretty helpful because there are a lot of issues with mast cell activation being triggered from this. So, a lower histamine diet, fresh meat, and no leftovers is very important. And then, histamine support. I’ve got a product called histamine support but essentially it’s quercetin plus some other nutrients so anything, you can do to stabilize your mast cells that’s gonna be helpful because muscle activation can cause fatigue, meaning, after the viral issue was over, the immune system can sort of have PTSD for lack of a better terminology and the immune system will go into this crazy state where it will shut you down so that fatigue trying to rebuild that energy back up is re-regulating the immune system so like the quercetin, other mast cell stabilizers are very helpful.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Love it. Love it. Love it. Makes total sense and again not everyone’s gonna have that issue but you know, it’s kind of good to know if you fit into that camp. Those are a couple of strategies out of the gates. Anything else, Evan?
Evan Brand: No, that’s it. Take it easy. If people need help, reach out justinhealth.com and evanbrand.com will be available.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. We’re here to help you guys. I’ll probably be back later on today here. So, keep a lookout, comments down below. Let us know your thoughts on the topic, we appreciate a review. We appreciate shares to friends and family. Really helps us get the word out. You guys have a phenomenal day. We’ll talk soon.
Evan Brand: Take it easy. Bye-bye
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Bye you all.
References:
Recommended Products:
NeilMed Sinus Rinse Complete Kit
Genova Organix® Comprehensive Profile
Genova Organix® Dysbiosis Profile
Audio Podcast:
https://justinhealth.libsyn.com/post-viral-immune-support-to-improve-energy-podcast-363
What are the Natural Anti-Inflammatory Agents for Pain Relief
In general, we have our COX pathways. Now, Arachidonic acid can feed those pathways. A lot of excess, junky, refined Omega-6 from animal products can definitely feed those pathways. That sets the table like gas in the kitchen where a little spark can take it off.
Where to find anti-inflammatory agents:
- Natural herbs like ginger can help with COX-1.
- Fish oil is excellent for COX-2 at high doses. If you do high doses of fish oil, you can increase what’s called lipid peroxidation because fish oil is a polyunsaturated fatty acid. It’s more unstable. It’s got more double bonds in it. Omega-3 means three double bonds. The more double bonds that are they are, the more unstable the fatty acid is to heat things like that and the more, let’s say it can be oxidized. So, having extra vitamin C or extra vitamin D on board when you’re taking extra fish oil just to make sure you don’t have oxidation is great, and we already talked about things like systemic enzymes.
- There is also curcumin but liposomal curcumin is better due to the absorption or something with black pepper in it helps with absorption, too.
- Frankincense or Boswellia.
- White willow bark which is kind of how aspirin is naturally made though aspirin works more on COX-1. So, aspirin can be your other natural source and you can do white willow bark which is the natural form of aspirin.
- There are things like Tylenol but Tylenol works more on the central nervous system perception. So, it decreases the nervous systems’ perception of pain. Note: We have to be careful of Tylenol as it can actually chronically reduce glutathione. So, if you’re taking Tylenol longer-term, you definitely want to take it with NAC and/or some glutathione, just to be on the safe side.
- At the extreme example, we have opiates which block pain receptors in the brain, the opiate perception of the brain. It’s not the best thing because you’re just decreasing perception of pain. Obviously, the opiates are way more addictive.
- We can block some of these natural pain perceptions with CBD oil. So, CBD is another great way to reduce the perception of pain.
In general, we want you to try to do more of the herbals and more of the natural stuff out of the gates because that really, really, really can help reduce inflammation.
If you have osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, sports injury, or you’re just trying to heal maybe postoperation, these things may be something to implement and then obviously work in all the other root causes, too. You are not just what you eat. You are what you digest from what you eat.
So, if you’re doing all these good nutrients, but you’ve got some type of malabsorption issue in the gut, you’ve got ridges on your fingernails, you’ve got thinning hair or falling out here, you may need to look deeper at the gut and try to find some of these more root cause issues that led you to that amount of inflammation or slow recovery in the first place.
Collagen Diet: Collagen-Rich Foods for Healthy Joints, and Skin
We know collagen is going to help with the joints because we know half of your bones are protein. We need good building blocks for our cartilaginous tissue and ligamentous tissue. Frankly, most people get most of their protein from muscle meats. That’s a problem because they’re not getting the knuckles, the bones, and the cartilage, as we would from old-fashioned soups. So, if you’re doing a lot of soups and bone broth soups, that’s great. If not, we really want to add extra collagen.
I do 20 g of collagen in my coffee every morning. I think it’s amazing. I do my true collagen with some MCT oil and grass-fed butter. I love it. I think it’s excellent for skin, hair, nails, and just for overall prevention of bone loss and cartilage loss. We know the wear and tear that most people experience in their joints throughout the year, especially if they do a lot of long-distance cardio. You really need more building blocks to help prevent and mitigate the wear and tear, so you don’t have knee and joint replacements later in life. Collagen can really help decrease some of that wear and tear.
How do you take collagen?
I like adding collagen in my coffee in the morning because it has a nice little kind of creamer-like effect. It gives that little bit of frothiness which is wonderful. I also do it before bed. Sometimes I’ll do a little bit of collagen (glycine), magnesium, and vitamin C because vitamin C is a really important building block for making collagen. I find magnesium has some very good calming effects as well where there are plugs in the GABA or it’s just a natural beta-blocker as well. It can calm the heart and bring the heart rate down a little bit. I think magnesium does work on some of those GABA pathways as well and, of course, magnesium helps with blood sugar. You’ll get deeper sleep and better REM sleep when you have good magnesium. So, I love combining collagen and magnesium at night.
Where can you get collagen from?
You can get collagen from food via bone broth. Chicken skin is super rich in glycine, roughly 3.3 g for 3-1/2 oz. If you make chicken soup, throw the whole chicken in there. Get a rotisserie chicken from Whole Foods and or get the fattier cuts of the chicken at least with the bone and the skin, so that way you get the best of both worlds if you’re going to do it from a whole food source. Regarding seafood, wild salmon is going to be the best source of glycine.
Role of Functional Medicine in Mental Health | Podcast #326
As an adult, maybe you’re struggling with some of these symptoms yourself, things like anxiety, perhaps depression or mood issues, those types of things. Or many of you have kids with these types of mental health symptoms and problems. Functional Medicine is a form of integrative medicine that focuses on addressing the root causes of a person’s symptoms rather than merely treating the symptoms themselves and, in this case, manage stress. Here are Dr. J and Evan Brand sharing their insights about different approaches for stress reduction.
Dr. J suggested to pay attention to nutrients first and some natural herbs such as ashwagandha, rhodiola, holy basil, etc. Watch the whole video to know interesting details about functional medicine in mental health.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
1:22 Foundation of Functional Medicine Needs
8:27 Emotional Stress
14:50 How to deal with Stress
19:08 Alcohol as Stress Reliever
30:43 Importance of Exercise
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And we are live. It’s Dr. J here in the house with Evan. Evan, how are we doing today man?
Evan Brand: Doing well, the sky is blue, the weather is amazing. I looked at your forecast for this week too, it’s going to be like 75 and sunny all day, every day. So that’s going to be amazing. We’re inside though, maybe we need to do like outside recordings, maybe need to go like, sit out back in a hammock and record with me. So we don’t miss this weather because then it’s going to be cold. And we’re going to be complaining. But no, but long story short, we were talking pre show about just how everything this year has been kind of crazy. And a lot of people are expressing issues with their mental health, their physical health, their emotional health, it’s affecting our clients, it’s affecting potential clients, people that are reaching out to us that have had businesses closed down or potential job losses and a lot of economic issues that have caused a lot of, you know, mental emotional problems for people. So the idea today was, well, let’s try to cover kind of a, a broad stroke, if you will, of how we could use functional medicine to improve mental health. So let’s dive in.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Love it. So off the bat, like we kind of go back to like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, right? That’s kind of like the first thing. So I always tell patients off the bat, there’s kind of a foundation of functional medicine needs, that’s going to be clean water, sleep, and then clean food. And now we can kind of get in the middle of it in the weeds with the food and kind of getting your macros dialed in and getting all that kind of dialed in. But clean water, clean food and good sleep. And so I always tell patients, the more stressed you are, the more you need to be rested, fed and watered. And the more those things are kind of stable, and that’s like your foundation, the better adaptable you will be at the dealing with stress, adapting to stress. So the health, health and stress adaptation are intimately connected. So the more stressed you are, if you start going towards alcohol, and processed food, and staying up too late and watching too much news, it’s going to get that fear cycle going, you’re not going to have enough rest to recharge your parasympathetic nervous system, you’ll be too much sympathetic dominant, you’ll be leaning on your adrenals leaning more on cortisol leaning more on adrenaline, and it’s going to be harder for you to digest. You’ll be just kind of on the edge every time with your emotions, the smallest thing will set you off, and you won’t have a good solid foundation.
Evan Brand: Yeah, I I think people should really just get rid of the social media apps on their phone. I mean, that was something that I did. I just noticed that if I have the social media apps off my phone, and I have to go to a web browser to check them. It’s much much more inconvenient to do it. So I must I’m much less likely to do it. And also, for me, you have the option of being up speaking to that you hear his little notification sound. Oh, social media-
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: – has turned it off right now. Airplane mode, maybe.
Evan Brand: It’ll, it will, it’s it’s it, you know, there’s been like trials done on how long it takes you to get focused again. And so what I’ve tried to do is to limit my distractions, I think the world now has become a world full of distractions, mainly because people are trying to solve all the world’s problems on their own meaning, you know, I care about the trees getting cut down in the Amazon. So I’m going to go read about this, and then I care about this, I’m going to go read about that. And then you’re so scatterbrained that you kind of lost your own productivity. So I’m not saying that you need to just, you know, put your head in a hole and turn the world’s problems off in your head like they don’t exist. No, I think it’s just a fine line. And I think most people have lost the line of productivity, because they’re so focused on the issues. And a lot of the day to day decisions you make aren’t going to change the world that much like there’s nothing I could do necessarily right this very second, besides maybe donating some money to some organization to stop cutting trees in the Amazon like it sucks. I don’t like to see, you know, you got all this illegal deforestation going on. But there’s only so much you can do. So you got to find a way to to find a healthy way to absorb the media. And most media is negative. So social media, media news. And a lot of it’s not serving you. That’s the only point I have to make.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I do think number one, social media is a big one, you kind of have to like, use it, don’t let it use you. Right. So turn off the notifications. Don’t let it kind of be there something that you always go to write, I think deleting it from your phone, or at least maybe on the weekends or periodically, deleting it can be helpful because you’re not going to access it as much on the web browser. I think also people forget that most people use social media as their highlight reel. So they only post great things about their life. People feel bad about it. So I’m very aware about that. And I don’t overly post the highlight reel of my life on there because those things are between me and my family and I don’t need to share it with the whole world every now and then. I’ll get people A glimpse, but it doesn’t need to be there all the time. A lot of people overdo that. And people forget that they’re seeing someone else’s highlight reel and they make it makes their life feel a little bit less than or more inferior. And you got to remember that right? You can’t forget it. That gives you kind of a good perspective and a grounding and and it really just comes back to appreciation. Right, the more you’re grounded in appreciation for what you have that that really shifts that that stress and that sympathetic kind of response of just inadequacy and, and, and, and feeling like your life’s not enough.
Evan Brand: Yeah. And there’s people with it, we know that are incredibly successful in business and wealth and all of that. And these people will go publicly bring up their anxiety and depression. So when you look at someone’s life, and you see all they have it so good, I’m so jealous of this or that car, this house or whatever, a lot of people listening may just shut it down immediately. And they say, Oh, no, I don’t care. I’m not comparing myself. But it’s kind of a subconscious thing. You’re not even really aware that it’s happening. Just look up type in, like Instagram depression, there’s some studies done that it was the most depressing social media. So I don’t want to make it the whole anti social media podcast, but you, you hit on gratitude. And I think that’s really the key. So what I tried to do was like a walking gratitude. It’s very, very helpful. So I’ll just, I’ll take the kids outside, and they’ll just walk, whether it’s in the backyard, whether it’s down the driveway, whether it’s in the you know, by the garage, I’ll just find a place to just walk, walk, walk. And I’m just focusing on the motions of the body just shaking up and down, dude. And I’m just thinking, Man, I’m grateful. I’m so grateful. Look at this beautiful day, look at the sun, look at the blue clouds, or the white clouds with the blue sky. Look at the the contrast, look at the green on the trees. Oh, we’ve got a little bit of yellow coming in on these maples over here. This is gorgeous, Oh, look at that red tree over there. And it’ll really take you out of the fear, it’ll take you out of the worry those repetitive, repetitive thoughts, you know, there’s, and this is not talking to one or two people here on my intake form, which thousands of people have submitted, you and I use a couple different form creation tools. I’ve looked at how many submissions we have. And it’s literally like 95% of people out of these thousands have reported? Yes, they beat themselves up with negative self talk. That’s a question on the intake form. Do you beat yourself up with negative self talk? 95%? Say yes. Now is that because you and I have a population who has symptoms and they want to get better? Or is that indicative of the general population to I would say the general population would be the same?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I always kind of I heard someone say this a couple of years ago, they said, Imagine, you know all the inner thoughts about yourself, kind of write that down. Okay. And imagine if someone else said those things to you? Would you be friends with that person? Probably not. Right? So it’s, it’s amazing how hard people are regarding the inner dialogue. And I always just kind of inner dialogue comes through your brain, ask yourself, would you be friends with that person? If someone else said that to you? Probably not. So I always just try to say to people, you know, make sure you would be friends with the person that would be saying, the inner thoughts that you’re actually thinking.
Evan Brand: Yeah, that’s a good call, that’s a really good call, well, you can be your best friend or you can be your worst enemy. And I think it’s easy to become your worst enemy. Because I don’t know you, you’re the one who has to look in the mirror. Right? So you’re always going to be the one to blame yourself. But.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep. And if that happens, what do you do? Right? I mean, I think if you have that inner dialogue that kind of shifts overtly negative to yourself, what do you do in NLP world, you go and you visualize the stop sign, right? You don’t beat yourself up over it, you visualize the stop sign, and then you then you shift into appreciation. Or some folks will have the elastic band on the wrist and they’ll pull it tight, right to create that negative neuro Association, whether it’s a physical, elastic snap, or whether it’s a stop sign coming in, that’s that’s visually cueing you to stop, however you want to do it, and then just kind of refocus your energy in a non shameful way to, to the things that you have that are great, right? Because that stuff needs to be you need to it’s like weeds grow automatically negative thoughts grow automatically. It takes no effort to be a cynic. In today’s world takes no effort. It really takes a lot of effort to be an appreciator and to focus on the things that you have. So just kind of use some of those cues to stop the negative thought and then shift over into the positive thought. Now I always find too, if you’re some people, it just kind of feels good to be negative a little bit where you’re kind of venting over something. And if you feel that way, just do it while tapping on some meridian points, some of the EFT meridian points because I find at least if you’re going to be negative, this at least decreases that sympathetic tone. And then what happens is as that that nervous system kind of calms down a little bit, it’s easier to shift back into that positive perspective. So you can do some of the EFT points chin under the nose. under the eye doubletap, I find it’s more efficient for me.
Evan Brand: And as you’re doing this, and as you’re doing this, you’re you’re kind of talking about the negative thoughts, it could be, oh, I just thought about irritable, yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Just just talk about whatever it is, I always like to go into it, assigning it a number. So out of 10, 10 being the worst intensity, where, yeah, you had a five or six or seven. And I try to go into it, taking whatever that number is, I want to cut it in half. So if I’m at a seven, I’m going to cut it down to three, or four, if I’m at a six, I want to cut it down to a three, if I’m at a 10 and want to cut it down below five, I just try to go into it, and have that conversation with myself about whatever that thing is that pissed me off, whatever it is that hey, that difficult patient that that really stressful bill, whatever it is, right. And I just kind of go into it, kind of do a little audit of where you’re at, and then try to get that down until it’s at least half below where it’s at, that kind of puts you back in the driver’s seat. And then it gives you the ability to shift to being positive, because you can’t be positive, it’s harder to be positive when you have that emotional staying at a higher level on that on that object subjective scale I gave you. So if you can cut it in half, that gives you the ability now to downshift from negative into positive to enable just want to make that shift. while they’re at a high level of negative it’s too difficult. That’s Oh, man, doing the EFT can be helpful because one, it gives you permission to be negative, but two, you’re giving your your nervous system, a little bit of a bump to be able to neutralize it.
Evan Brand: That is the the best point you’ve made about the emotional stress piece because this is like taking somebody who’s in the middle of a full blown panic attack and saying, Just chill out.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Just chill out, like just relax, like, be be positive, no, can’t do that. Can’t do that. So this is where like the EMDR. And then you can kind of scatter your eyes around while you do it too. Right. So you can go look at like a clock face and go to 1936. Or you can tap while you’re pretending like you’re looking at different clock numbers with your eyes. And because when you move your eyes that uses different cranial nerves, which uses different parts of the brain, and that kind of the whole goal is you’re kind of scattering that signal. Number one, you’re interrupting the pattern. Number two, it’s kind of like if you’re talking about something you ever had it where someone interrupted you and you’re like, What the hell are they talking about? Right? ever have that? That’s kind of what you’re doing a little bit to your brain and in some of the negative thinking you’re trying to scatter that pattern and make it a little bit harder for your brain to go back to and then you’re like, what, what was I mad about? Oh, yeah, that. And then it makes it easier than shift into positive.
Evan Brand: I just tried to go outside to like, for some reason. Well, duh, I mean, humans were meant to be outside. We’re not meant to be in boxes all day. But you know, if you have a thought that is intrusive, you can just go out, and I’ll take a pair of binoculars, and I’ll just go outside and I’ll just watch the birds. Or I’ll go fill up the bird feeder, put it like a sewage feeder. So it’s like a big chunky like fatty CD type feed. I like to go put that out, watch the woodpeckers come in. And if I’m looking at them, and I’m not thinking about anything, yeah, that’s a that’s a great point. So let’s tie the functional medicine piece into what you said because I think what you said is a really good place to pivot which is you can’t take someone because someone listening who’s just so stressed out right now they’re going to they’re going to listen to you talk about tapping or if they’re watching the video on YouTube. So you tap into right What is this guy doing? He’s friggin tapping his forehead. I’m so pissed. I don’t care what what is this gonna do? That person’s a 10. He can’t he can’t even comprehend getting down to a five right now. So So on the maybe you would call it the herbalist functional medicine side, maybe we come in and give that guy or gal a shot of passionflower. Or maybe we give them a couple hundred milligrams of some pharma gabbeh or maybe a little bit of mother wort or maybe some ashwagandha maybe some Holy basil. Maybe we come in with some B vitamins because you and I know based on looking at thousands and thousands of people on organic acids testing that if you’re really really stressed, you’re going to burn out your bees as in Bravo, your B vitamins are going to be toast we know that. Based on looking at these labs, your neurotransmitters are going to be affected. So you may have low dopamine, you may have low serotonin, which is causing more anxiety, but then the low dopamine is causing a lack of energy and lack of drive. So let’s dive into some of these more functional pieces now.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, so we talked about the mindset stuff. We talked about tools to kind of decrease that sympathetic output and it’s just tapping on meridian points, right acupressure acupuncture points, kind of how energy and nervous energy Nervous System energy flows to the body. It’s just helping that energy flow better whether you call it ci or whether you call it action potential or, or nervous system, nerve flow, whatever you want to say, right? blood flow. It’s all connected, right? It’s all connected, right? So off the bat, we were talking about functional stuff. So when you’re stressed What are important things? Well, blood sugar stability is really important because most people get on a rollercoaster of blood sugar. When they get stressed meaning they’re going they’re overly gravitating towards alcohol, or overly gravitating towards refined sugar, their blood sugar goes up and then crashes down. And then it creates more nervous system stimulation via adrenaline and epinephrine being stimulated. And cortisol being stimulated to bring your blood sugar back up. So I find just keep it really simple, really easy with your meals, you may be more nauseous when you’re overly stressed because stress hormone does cause you to feel nauseous. So this is where you may want to do a soup or a simple smoothie, something really easy where there’s not a lot of digestion, but you’re still getting some proteins and fat in there. Whether it’s some collagen and some coconut milk or just sipping on some bone broth, right, something like that is going to have some good fat protein and it won’t be hard to digest. So if you feel nauseous just still no you should probably be eating but just try to make it something very easy on your tummy. And then think what are some of the nutrients your nervous systems in need when you’re more stressed, so low hanging fruit, B vitamins B complex is going to be very essential. Magnesium is going to be excellent gabbeh l-theanine these are good things that are going to help you relax and wind down having kind of mentioned valerian root or passionflower which are all connected to gabbeh and that kind of inhibitory neurotransmitter that helps you just relax a little bit kind of kind of puts the clutch in gear disengages the the gearbox so you can kind of downshift so to speak.
Evan Brand: Did you ever do Kava when you were down in Austin?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, so I mean, I’ve done I’ve done Kava still.
Evan Brand: Did you go to the bars though? There’s like a cot. There’s like a cup.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, no, I’ve never I’ve never done it at a bar, but I’ve done it. Um, someone brought it over my house. They got it from Fiji. Before I did, it was relaxing. I like Kava that does a lot of gabbeh too, right?
Evan Brand: Yeah, does I felt weird my throat. I felt like well, am I having a reaction to this? Like it numbs your throat so much. It was a bizarre feeling. Yeah, I’m not recommending it. I’m not recommending it as a as a tool. But it could be it could be a good tool. I just thought I’d bring it up. Because when you mentioned like, Valerian I thought, Man, I remember that one time I drink Kava. I was. It was a weird, almost like an out of body relaxation. And I didn’t feel very grounded. It was kind of like whoa, I’m floating in the room. Kind of kind of interesting.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I mean, like I always go to nutrients first. And then I go to my favorite adaptogenic herbs second, so ashwagandha is one of my favorites. Right? ashwagandha rhodiola. Excellent. Excellent x, Holy basil those are kind of like my favorite kind of very relaxed, defying, relaxing tonifying kind of herbs, if you will.
Evan Brand: I like it too relaxefying, Do you get any sort of change in your outlook with holy basil? Because for me, that’s the one that’s most significant. Like I feel like I could take on the world when I get like a, I don’t know five 600 milligram a holy basil. It’s kind of like I am ready for the challenge. It’s a weird because it’s I’m calm. But I’m also energized at the same time. Do you get anything like that?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It hasn’t been on my stack for a while. So right now my big stacks on my desk is going to be ashwagandha I do have some some gabbeh chewables and gabbeh sublingual. I mean, I think if you just took people’s works and took, you know, in their, in their place of work, whatever. And you took away all the candy and you just put like magnesium, and you put gabbeh like Lawson jers. Right. Think about how much of a stress reduction had been people’s works. Right. So much better. Maybe some B vitamins.
Evan Brand: Yeah, I mean, if you and I had brick and mortar places what I would do instead of a little you know how old school like front desk, you’ve got a little glass of like lifesavers and peppermints. And a bunch of garbage. I’d have like pre packaged chewable pharma gabbeh sitting there.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep. chewable pharma gabbeh, sublingual magnesium, maybe some l-theanine shots, right? keep it really simple. I remember in doctor at school before. For finals, we would like make drinks of like ginseng and holy basil. And we like create these like shot glasses all lined up with herbs where we take it. It was fine. I mean, those are some fun times. But um, yeah, so we just got to think a little bit differently and how you deal with stress, just a different mindset change.
Evan Brand: Yeah, I want to go back to what you said how people get into the alcohol and to the sugar and all of that and the carbohydrates and the blood sugar rollercoaster. I think people don’t understand why that happens. So I just want to give people a brief education of why that’s happening from a, you know, neurotransmitter perspective, that way you feel a little more confident that you can change this and you’re not just a victim to the food. So when we look at urine and you measure these neurotransmitter metabolites, we can see that after a period of stress, especially if somebody has been working with us for several years, we can see that Oh, they went through a divorce. Look what happened to their endorphins, for example, the endorphins got burned out. And with the help of Julia Ross, she has an amazing amino acid therapy chart in her books. You can see that the symptoms of low endorphins start to pop up. So these are the people that cry at the drop of the hat. These are the people that hard on the sleeve real emotionally sensitive. If they crave dark chocolate, they’re going for food to comfort themselves or reward themselves. Those are low endorphin signs, we’ll match up those symptoms to the neurotransmitter report on the oat. And then we’ll come in with a therapeutic nutrient like dl phenylalanine, to rebuild the endorphins. And then within four to six weeks, you can have it the 60% difference in symptoms were these people that were running to the cookie because they were stressed or running to the alcohol at night to relax, they no longer need that now, they may still do it. But they literally don’t have the physiological need to do that. Some people say, I just can’t relax until I have that glass of wine. Once you rebuild the brain chemistry, they literally don’t need it anymore.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I mean, if you’re having a stressful day, I mean alcohol Don’t get me wrong is that is a wonderful downer. I mean, it really does help relax people. Now obviously, if you’re going to engage in alcohol, keep it to like a drier champagne, a drier white wine, keep it to a clean alcohol and try to do it after you’ve eaten. So you’re not creating a blood sugar swing, because alcohol can actually lower your blood sugar. And then that creates more cravings and more cravings for junky food, right? So if you’re going to have a glass of alcohol, right, don’t want don’t get drunk. But if you’re going to have a glass, make sure it’s a healthy version, then just try to have some good protein before you have it like so if you go out, for instance, have some oysters, maybe a little bit of seafood, maybe a shrimp cocktail and have a glass of champagne or two or a cabo or Prosecco or something clean, clean, clean alcohol. There’s nothing wrong with that, you know, especially if it’s only if it’s not an everyday kind of thing. I think it’s totally fine. And you know, make sure you’re utilizing some of the nutrients we talked about. So you’re supporting the neurotransmitters as well.
Evan Brand: Yeah, check out our podcast, we did a whole one on the whole biohacking alcohol thing.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, that’s how-
Evan Brand: So, Sunshine, sunshine is huge. I mean, granted, when you’re in certain parts of the country, you really lose the sun, you really lose it because you get clouds. And, you know, if you’re really high northern latitude, it’s really tough to get sun, I’ve got a lot of clients in Canada, and they just get major, major seasonal depression. And so for those people, like a light therapy box can be helpful. I already know for me personally, it’s affected me like when it gets dark at five 6pm. I mean, I just mentally, I just don’t like it. And so the light therapy box can be very good. A lot of times, you’re going to see those at around 10,000. Lux, that’s a pretty bright, pretty bright light. Of course, nothing is going to beat the sunshine. But if it’s like you’re in Alaska, you literally or, you know, hours of sun per day, whereas before it was 12 hours, and now you’re three hours of sunlight. That’s really tough mentally, so sun can be helpful. I wish tanning beds weren’t so controversial. because years ago, I had a friend who worked at a gym who had a level, I think they called it a level three or level four tanning bed, which was not something that closed on you. It wasn’t like magnetic field balanced. Like I measured it, there was no EMF coming from it. But it was almost like the stage lights, almost like a like a theatrical performance, like a red light up at the top. And you could get a tan, I mean, literally in a couple of sessions. But I did it for mental health. And we know that sunlight in general can really help act as almost like morphine, it can really help modulate these opiate receptors in the brain. I remember coming out of a six or seven minute session, and I was just high on life. I felt so good after that. And I thought, wow, I wish this didn’t have to be so controversial. Because if someone could get access to something like this, if we knew that it wasn’t going to increase risk of skin cancers and such, man, what could it do for all the depressed people out there that have Seasonal Affective issues in the winter?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I think it just comes down to when you’re dealing with sun, it’s just don’t burn, you know, just just don’t get a burn and you’ll be fine. And that’s different for every single person. And so of course, you know, natural sunlight is going to be ideal. I think it’s gonna be excellent. So that’s a good first step for sure. We talked about some of the B vitamins and things and it gets really essential. I think also, you know, just from a financial standpoint, I think it’s really, really good. People talk about it, just having that six month emergency fund, right, try to have, you know, six months of being able to take care of your family, whether it’s food, living mortgage, just try to really make sure at least three to six months if people had that during COVID. I think there’d be way way, way less financial stress for people. I know, it’s a tough thing to do. But I think it’s something to strive for in regards to financial health is just really look for that six months, three to six month emergency fund. I think you’re smart.
Evan Brand: Yeah. And try to get rid of things that you don’t truly need. I mean, I had several people who say oh, you know this or that about budget, but they’ve got the hundred and $40 a month cable bill and they’ve got the the you know, the subscription to this or that that adds up to hundreds and hundreds of dollars a month. So I think with the reducing subscriptions where you can the emergency fund is smarter than from the food security perspective. Two, I remember months ago, you and I were talking about this it was there was talk about some of these meat processing plants and stuff shutting down and I had literally some of my clients freaking out thinking that they were going to run out of meat and not be able to feed their family. I mean, they were probably just watching too much news about the subject. But that’s why I always recommend everyone have a good chest freezer, you can get him for $100 and go on local harvest or eat wild, or just Google local farms around you, we have a farm that I pay him a little bit extra, but they’ll deliver to the house. And we’ll have literally an entire chest freezer full of amazing grass fed meat at anywhere from six to $10 a pound depending on the cut. And we don’t have to worry about going to Whole Foods where we’re going to get shamed if we don’t want to wear a mask, and then we’re buying their overpriced stuff sitting in the fridge. I’ve got my local farm, you know, bringing pastured meats at a fraction of the cost to my door, throw in the chest freezer, I sleep great at night knowing that if something were to happen to the food supply, my children and my wife and I will be well fed. And then of course well what if the electrical grid? Well, I don’t know. That’s that’s, that’s pretty slim chance. I know, people in California worried about that earlier this year, because of the fires, people were thinking, well, what if I have the chest freezer full of meat? And then the electrical grid goes off? Because California turns off my power generator? You know, hopefully, it’s not a long term thing. But you just got a problem solution problem solution, you can’t just get paralyzed by the problems.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, absolutely. You know, I always talk about it, you got to close the loop, right? You know, you have a problem. When you don’t close the loop. And you think about the solution, and you keep these loops, I call them keeping these loops open. That’s where stress happens when you close the loop. That’s where you feel a lot better, because it’s our problem solution. Problem solution, you’re constantly opening and closing loops all day long. That’s kind of how you want to think about it. So you have maximal you know, stress reduction. So we talked about physiology, right? That’s the foundation because remember, that’s like the this is the vehicle This is a suit, the biochemical suit we have to walk through every day and not everyone’s suit is the same and how we can deal with stress. So if you’re looking coming into this, you know, 20 minutes late, you’re like, Well, what do I focus on, focus on the physiological biochemical suit, because that gives you the ability to adapt. And then from there, you can try to grab one or two things that work best for you. mindsets, really important, dealing with some of these stress can be helpful. Talking about some of the supplements can be helpful. Making sure you’re in a good kind of financial situation can be helpful as well. You know, those are all good kind of strategies out of the gates. Anything else you want to talk about functional medicine wise. So we talked about some of the organic acid testing and looking at neurotransmitters that can be helpful, because I find people that are, you know, let’s say long term stressed out people, we’re going to see a lot of neurotransmitter patterns that are pretty depleted regarding amino acids and dopamine and adrenaline and serotonin. And that may be a longer thing you have to work on replacing with amino acids. So that may not be just a supplement you want to dunk on, they may take a while to work on depleting that, especially, you know, the faster it happens when you work on all the sleep stuff and the diet stuff that gets better, but that the bucket that may need some effort to work on depleting.
Evan Brand: Yeah, the only other functional medicine piece we’re going to be looking into for these like super stress, people’s looking into the gut, we’re going to be looking at gut inflammation. We’re going to be looking at parasites, bacterial overgrowth, all the stuff we normally talk about Candida, because there could be some more functional reasons why someone is going into the cookies, for example, or the alcohol, maybe on a neurotransmitter test, they look okay, but in regards to their gut, maybe they have all these bacterial pathogens are parasitic pathogens that are kind of like begging for some sort of quick burning glucose, right? So we may come in. And I noticed personally just using some Mimosa, I was doing some experiments with not not the orange juice cocktail thing, but actual most of the seed most a tree seed in capsule form. That’s very beneficial for calming down my gut. And I noticed mentally I was calm, just by calming down my gut. So don’t forget about the gut brain access, there is a connection there. And so if you’re having digestive problems now, whether that’s due to stress, or whether it’s due to infections, if you’re having diarrhea or constipation, or stomach cramping or food intolerances, you got to try to address those because it does signal and alert Danger, danger to the brain, meaning if you’re going and eating this allergenic food, irritating the gut that can then irritate your brain and cause issues. So I’ve had some people that have gotten anxious after certain foods, and we know that histamine is a neurotransmitter as well. So if you’re having histamine reactions, even just something like a low histamine diet may be useful to help calm the brain down because of some of the reactions there with histamine. So people think it’s just histamine allergies. No, but it can also affect your brain chemistry. And so you got to focus on that maybe herbal anti histamines or something we would use or some enzymes to help to reduce some of the effectiveness of the histamine on the brain. So I think that’s probably my last piece.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, and those are all valid points. For sure. You know, you talked about histamine, you talked about inflammation, and inflamed brains not going to focus and not going to do as well. So again, inflammation, whether it’s food allergens or deeper gut issues is a big one. Also medical palsy women, you know, lower hormone issues can affect the brain. So try to make sure your hormones are at least at a good stable place because that’s going to help with brain inflammation that’s gonna help with cognitive stuff as well. So everyone’s coming at this from a different place from from a different foundational weakness. So just try to figure out where you’re at and take at least one or two steps, you know, Ford on that. Also exercise can be helpful. So just try to find a couple of movements, simple movements that you can do 510 minutes, that’s going to help really decrease a bunch of stress. So whether it’s a push movement, a pull movement, a set or squat, a bender, a pole, whatever that movement pattern is just try to engage in some of these simple movements, it’s going to really help your mood, it’s going to take a lot of that mental energy and allow you to kind of put it out into that physical movement pattern.
Evan Brand: Oh, 100% Yeah, exercise is key. I should have mentioned it earlier. I mean, I feel amazing after I just do some dumbbells or roll machine or hike in the woods, hike in the field, you know, whatever I could do to move. I mean, that’s in its free, right, it’s free, so and you don’t need any permission to do that. So obviously, if you’re going into a gym and you’re doing the whole mass thing in a gym, maybe that’s not as fun so get outside go somewhere where you know, you have your own space and you don’t have people you know, breathing down your neck, so to speak. But I think with the gut piece, the neurotransmitter piece, the aminos here’s kind of the the summary of today and what’s been going on in the world. A lot of people are just like, hey, things are crazy, I give up. But this is actually the time where you really want to dial things in even more. This is a time where you want to focus even more to keep your body keep your mind keep your your sleep patterns healthy. This is not a time where screw it I’m going to go off the rails and just drink a case of beer. It This isn’t the time to do that a lot of people they’re so stressed they have no other coping mechanism. But I would argue everything you and I’ve been talking and doing and preaching and clinically doing for people. This is kind of like the showdown This is like okay, what did all that work we put in actually do did we were we the last man standing, meaning everyone else got burned out and ended up on you know, anti anxiety medication. And we stayed calm and cool through the whole thing. I think this is the time where you can see all the hard work paying off.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% I think you’re totally kind of dialed in. Also, one thing I’ve been doing a little bit is a little more meditation and just keep it really simple with breathing. Just focus on breath, you can do kind of a biofeedback device like the Muse that I’ve talked about, we’ll put a link down below for that. That’s one thing I’m experimenting more with. It just kind of gives you that little bit of a thumbs up from a biofeedback standpoint that you’re you’re you’re putting your brain in a pretty good place when you’re meditating. I think it gives people confidence. They’re doing it right. The problem I find with meditation, people are like, Am I doing this right? And there’s just insecurity and what the heck they’re doing. And then that prevents them from being compliant with it. So I think having a extra kind of pat on the back yet you’re doing the right You’re doing good with a some kind of a device that helps whether it’s whether it’s HRV, or the Muse or M wave type of technology, these kind of things I think are helpful to give you the confidence that you’re doing something right.
Evan Brand: Yeah, yeah, the floatation tank is awesome. So doing doing a float would be good. deep tissue massage would be great. calming essential oils would be great Epsom salt baths would be great is anything you can do to downshift. We talked about the shifting phenomenon quite a bit, but-
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: There’s a lot, there’s a lot of options for sure.
Evan Brand: Okay, cool. Well, let’s wrap this thing up. So if people need help, we’re here for you. We always have been and we intend to be kind of on the front lines, helping people with all this stuff. So if you need to reach out to Dr. J. JustinHealth.com is the website. If you need to reach out to me, EvanBrand.com is the website and we’re here for you. So don’t give up. Don’t give in. You got to keep pushing forward every day, you still got to put your pants on, you still got to do the thing, whether it’s take care of your kids take care of your wife, your husband take care of career, you still got to move forward. So I know it’s easy to get kind of stuck and like you mentioned I like the idea of the open loops closing the loops. I didn’t get stuck in these open loops, but you got to close the doors. Try to simplify try to you know, minimize decision making focus on the big things and you’re going to be just fine.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I love it. Excellent and Well, great podcast today EvanBrand.com to reach out to Evan, JustinHealth.com to reach out to me we’re available worldwide. If you want to dive in, look deeper at your physiology, biochemistry, neurotransmitters, gut whatever the root issue is. We’re here to help you guys have a phenomenal day. Click down below for all the important links, guys. Take care. Bye.
Evan Brand: Take care now. Bye bye.
References:
Audio Podcast:
https://justinhealth.libsyn.com/role-of-functional-medicine-in-mental-health-podcast-326
Recommended products:
JIH – Comprehensive Bio-Screen Blood Test
The Allergy and Hormone Connection – Natural Allergy Solutions – Part 2 | Podcast #314
Hormones have profound and significant effects on your physical, mental, and emotional health. In this video, Dr. J and Evan continue their discussion on how these chemical messengers have a significant role in regulating your mood, appetite, and weight, among other things.
Typically, your endocrine glands produce the precise amount of each hormone needed for various processes in your body. However, hormonal imbalances have become increasingly familiar with today’s fast-paced modern lifestyle. Besides, hormones decline with age, and some people feel a sharper or dramatic decline than others.
The bottom line is, your hormones are involved in every aspect of your health. You need them in precise amounts for your body to function fully. Hormonal imbalances may increase the risk of obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and other health problems. Although aging and other factors are afar your control, there are many ways you can take to assist your hormones function well. Consuming healthy foods, meditating, exercising regularly, and engaging in other healthy behaviors can go a long way toward improving your hormonal health.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
1:21 Hormone Connections, Menopausal
8:24 Nutritional Deficiencies, Food Diets
15:58 Proper Lab Testings, Reading Hormone Profiles
22:07 Men and Female Hormones in Allergic Disease
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And we are live. It’s Dr. J in the house with Evan Brand really excited today we’re going to be talking about the allergy hormone connection. We did. We had a nice chat last week on natural solutions, functional medicine solutions for allergies. So I’m actually very excited to go over the hormone connections, we won’t be going into as much on the supplements or, or things that we do on that side of the fence. We’ll put a link down below so you can see that first podcast. This is going to be building off of that podcast. So if you’re coming in late to the game, you want to take a look at that first podcast, we’re going to be really dive diving in and connecting the hormone piece to it. Because there’s a lot of people that have estrogen dominance, menopause, hormonal issues, imbalances in their adrenal function, and part of that could be driving their allergy issue and you really got to look at everything holistically. And we’re going to be connecting the dots for you guys today. It’s always context, context, context. Evan, how are we doing today, man?
Evan Brand: Doing good, always good to see on a Monday, it’s like the best part of my week is to start off with a bang. So I actually got a lot of good feedback last week on that podcast, too, you know, you and I kind of joke about how it’s a thankless job because we’ll put out an episode get 1000s and 1000s of downloads and not hear much but actually had a lot of people messaged me and said that that allergy when we did was one of the best of the year. So appreciate your feedback. And we’re excited to take it a step further.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Love it, absolutely love it. So out of the gates here, I mean, there’s kind of maybe three categories of patients that I see really benefit from a lot of this out of the gates. So first are going to be our menopausal females, and menopausal is the one study that we’ll talk about here today that showed menopausal and perimenopausal women having two times the likelihood of having allergy issues. Part of that has to do with the drop in progesterone and the imbalance and progesterone estrogen that can skew the immune system. The other one would be a cycling female who has significant estrogen dominance, massive imbalances in progesterone and estrogen, that’s another kind of category. And then the last would be someone it could be male or female that has significant imbalances and cortisol, right? We know, when you’re having allergic reactions, you’re developing and producing all these inflammatory cytokines, right, interleukin cytokines, and these are pro inflammatory. And our adrenal glands make a natural anti inflammatory hormone called cortisol. And cortisol naturally will have combat and balance out some of the pro inflammatory cytokines. So if we have significant imbalances, and cortisol, cortisol is too high, and and we’re too catabolic, or it’s too low, and we’re not able to combat the inflammation that can really be I think, the starting mechanism of this whole allergy cascade.
Evan Brand: Yeah. And you and I were talking before we hit record about, well, why is it such a problem now, because you look at like tribal societies and such, and you don’t really see any discussion or any big issue with menopause. And we were talking about the difference in the lifestyle, of course, you don’t have the stress as much as we do in the, in the tribal societies, as you do in modern society. You’ve got more family support group, you’ve got parents and grandparents and the whole tribe helping to pinch hit in some of the family roles. And so really, the the, we’ve lost our tribe, and that baseline stress is really just so strong on people that when there’s the transition to menopause, the adrenals have already been weak for 40 years of parenting with just you and your spouse, that, you know, it’s the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, I agree. I think you also have a lot more environmental toxins, you have increased nutritional deficiencies, you have a lot more pesticides in the environment, all those different things. Now imagine if you’re like, you know, living out in the forest or something in some kind of a hotter teepee, or some kind of a structure, there’s quite a lot of environmental molds, just things decaying around you. So there’s probably a lot of that by a lot of rain getting in there. So it’s amazing, probably a lot more natural mold exposure, maybe being out there but you know, a lot less stress on the other side of the fence as well. So I think we know stress plays a major role on your adrenals because cortisol is a natural stress hormone. It’s anti inflammatory. It’s a gluco corticosteroid, which means it pertains to stress and inflammation. It’s also a very powerful Energizer hormone. And cortisol can pull from progesterone. So we know progesterone does have anti inflammatory effects. So for chronically producing cortisol, that can really start to skew this estrogen progesterone balance. Because as cortisol is being stimulated due to chronic stress and inflammation, progesterone can be pulled downstream to make it because progesterone is a building block of cortisol. And if progesterone is being pulled downstream, what can happen to that natural ratio of estrogen progesterone, it can skew now. Typically speaking, progesterone is always going to be higher than estrogen in general, usually it’s about a 23 to 25 times ratio of progesterone, estrogen, but at that ratio starts to drop. So we start talking about estrogen going up, and progesterone dropping. We’re talking about that more in relative terms. not absolute, we’re talking about the ratio dropping, not the absolute numbers going in opposite directions just to make sure that’s clear for everyone.
Evan Brand: Yeah, let’s also tie in the gut piece. I mean, a lot of people responded to me and said, Wow, I didn’t have a clue that bacterial overgrowth in my gut could create the allergies. But in the same vein, the gut issues could actually create the hormone issues. So let’s talk about that for a minute. When you are looking at stool test, and we’re going to look at beta glucuronidation, being high due to a bacterial overgrowth. Now we have the recirculation of hormones happening as well. So there may be this point where we come in with some of the herbal anti histamines that we talked about. But now we also may need to come in with some of the glucuronidation pathway support like your calcium D glue, great, maybe the sulfur based amino acids glutathionre broccoli seed extract, like broccoli sprouts, we like to use those. So that’s another mechanism. I think that once again, the allergist, they’re going to miss they’re not going to give you a calcium D glucrate, but they might need 200%.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep. 100%. I’m going to read a study here. I’ll get the exact article here for you down the road. But here is the quote, study in Northern Europe included over 2300 women and track their respiratory health from 2000 to 2012. They found the odds of getting asthma quote, we’re more than twice as high for women going through menopause or transition, or after menopause compared to non menopausal women. So there’s something that’s happening at around Peri and or menopausal timeframe. So let’s say early to mid 40s, to early to mid 50s. Right. There’s that timeframe that’s happening, I think the big thing that’s probably happening is you’re having a drop in progesterone. And then we’re starting to happen as you’re having FSH and LH starting to increase. And I think you’re also starting to rely more on the adrenal glands to fill in the gap. And if cortisol is out of balance or imbalance, there is not enough DAGA you’re gonna find a real deficit and some of these hormones and you’re not going to have the same inflammatory backup generator support, if you will, from the adrenal gland. And that’s a big mechanism that’s active here. And that’s why you’re going to see more Peri and menopausal women affected and again, a lot of women are chronically stressed and they kind of fall into that perimenopausal category younger and younger. I’m seeing a lot more perimenopausal symptoms and women in their 30s and early 40s. Now, which is really interesting. I mean, perimenopause is that timeframe before menopause. Usually menopause is when you have one year 12 months without a period. But you can start to see perimenopausal symptoms start to happen younger and younger and younger, I think because of chronic stress. And that could be hot flash issues. Of course, that could be just a lot of the PMS issues. Usually you start to see cycle, missing cycles, hot flash issues, you can also see a lot of mood changes, vaginal changes, sleep issues, weight issues, you can see mood, irregularity, loss of libido. And now again, a lot of those also connect with PMS too. So it’s kind of hard to connect the two but usually you start to see missing cycles and starting to see some of those hot temperature issues starting to occur. And then of course, a lot of vaginal dryness or a lot of mucous membrane dryness issues as well.
Evan Brand: Yeah, that was my next question for you is why are you seeing this in younger women? I mean, because this is kind of a new phenomenon, right? I mean, in the last 10 years, you’re seeing this thing is ramping up significantly. So you think it’s just the stress in the 30s to early 40. Women that maybe previously wasn’t as intense.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, chronic stress, chronic inflammation. I think a lot of women I mean, this is this is in general, this is people in general, just a lot of nutritional deficiencies due to chronic poor diets. A lot of women if they, you know, 20 plus years ago, they were in that low fat era, and they weren’t getting good healthy fat and good healthy cholesterol, I mean, that’s going to put a lot of stress on your hormones, because you need these building blocks. To make these hormones right hormones made from cholesterol, your body makes a lot of cholesterol, but could never make enough. And you need a lot of important fat soluble vitamins in cholesterol from good healthy animal products that to ideally make it optimally right. It’s hard to do that on a vegan vegetarian diet, because you’re just missing a lot of those fat soluble vitamins, and long chain omega three fatty acids that you get from high quality fish and such. So that’s I think a big thing as well. And also fats play a really important anti inflammatory role, right? We know good healthy fats, like fish and coconut, or have good anti inflammatory benefits. And we know a lot of the Omega six in plant based diets can be more inflammatory. And a lot of the good healthy omega threes on the plant based side that come from flax or chia, right, these are going to be like alpha linoleic acid, these are going to be omega threes, they have to get converted downstream and they go through different enzymes like Delta five desaturase, that makes that conversion. And if you have insulin resistance, or inflamed, it’s going to be harder to maximally convert that some people say maybe only 20% converted. So there’s a lot of conversion issues downstream. We see the same problem with vitamin A. So if you’re a plant based and you’re relying on a lot of beta carotene, for instance, and carrots plant based products, you may not get a good conversion cuz that’s the UK converted. So if you’re getting vitamin A from grass fed liver or beef, or let’s say called liver oil, right or egg yolks as a maximum conversion there because you’re getting active vitamin A in there versus having to rely on a conversion, and the more inflamed you are and the more stressed you are, it’s hard to convert an activate a lot of these nutrients.
Evan Brand: Yeah, well, you know, you gotta you made a good point, too, you got a lot more women doing things they shouldn’t be doing like going on strict vegan diets, doing plant based burgers, getting off of real Whole Foods. So I think I’m trying to just answer my own question in my head here. Like, why is this being ramped up in younger women. And I think there’s a combination of factors like always, but man, it, you got Bill Gates and other people pushing so hard, just get off meat, meats, bad meats, bad, there’s still so much on brainwashing that we have to do in the population. So I really hope folks listening into the podcast, we really hope that you all are eating good quality fats, especially women, we really don’t want you to be afraid of those.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, and kind of my pitch on meat versus plant based products. It’s pretty simple. So number one, plants bio accumulate nutrition. So the benefit that you get from animals is they buy or accumulate plants. So for instance, about one meats, one pound of grass fed meat, it takes about eight pounds of plant matter to make that grass fed meat. And so animals face make sure I say correctly, animals bio accumulate plant based matters. So you get a lot more bio accumulated nutrition. So for instance, 16 cups of kale gets you the amount of protein that’s in six ounces of grass fed beef, right, there’s a bio accumulation of amino acids and fat soluble vitamins, and even things like zinc. And then when you go and look at the bioavailability, of course, plants have a lot more anti nutrients than animal products do. So you have a lot more anti nutrients binding up oxalates phytates mineral blockers, protein blockers that make it harder to break down a lot of the nutrients in plants. And then the my sentience kind of emotional argument is, it’s all about taking, it’s all about having the most the largest amount of nutrition per death, okay, it’s really important, you have nutrients per death, if I have one cow kill for my family, that’s gonna feed my family the whole year, right? If you look at a lot of the factory farming involved in, like, let’s say raising high quality plants, and again, this may not be the broccoli or kale in your backyard, right? But if you look at on a wide scale kind of monoculture kind of scale, there’s all kinds of rabbits and snakes, and badgers and all kinds of things that get caught up in the combines when they harvest a lot of these plants. Okay, so there’s a lot of deaths happening. And so then you got to say, well, is that badgers death equal to this cow’s death, right, then you got to look at and kind of weigh well, whose life’s worth more. And then the third argument a little bit deeper is, well, are you taking the life when you’re killing a plant, and I think my personal belief is, it takes life to sustain life. So everything that you kill, whether it’s plant or animal has to have some level of life force to it. And then you’re just playing this game of well, whose life matters more obviously, I can emotionally connect with the cow because it’s got a mommy and a daddy. And it’s cute and cuddly. Maybe not with the kale, right? But all life, it takes life just to stay in life. So there has to be some level of life in that plant, for it to sustain you. Same thing with the animals. And so keep that there. And of course, when we talk about animals, we’re talking about non factory farming, we’re talking about organic, we’re talking about super high quality raising no hormones, no antibiotics, you know, one bad day for that animal. And that’s it. Right. So I just wanted to differentiate that for people that are kind of listening in on the fence with that.
Evan Brand: Yeah, well said, well said I liked the way you you put it. Alright, so this study and paper that you had, it also mentioned vitamin D. Now, just in case, we didn’t mention it last time, I just want to make sure we mentioned it now that there is definitely a link between more severe asthma symptoms and low vitamin D. So that’s a very, very easy low hanging fruit that should be addressed. If you’re working on some sort of a histamine allergy protocol. You’ve already hit upon increasing omega threes, your nuts, your seeds, your Coldwater fish, you’re doing your low histamine diet, if necessary, you’re treating the gut infections, but then boom, if you miss vitamin D, that’s easy.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 110%. And again, the other component, I would say is glutathione. We need that through digesting good proteins, right? So if we’re chronically stressed, let’s connect the dots here. So if you’re chronically stressed, you’re pouring out cortisol, your adrenals are in this fight or flight kind of sympathetic dominant state. You’re over secreted cortisol, and again, that can also look in a chronic state like low cortisol, right? Your cortisol doesn’t get low unless at some point it was chronically overstimulated. So some people think or feel like oh, my God, like my cortisol must be so my adrenal must be so overstimulated right now because I feel so off but it’s possible that they could be in this state of total dysregulation, and they’re on The lower side. So either way, chronic cortisol stress is going to affect your nervous system because the sympathetic nervous system is what’s engaged when you have a lot of adrenal stress. And the sympathetic nervous system affects digestion, right? It’s the parasympathetic that has the rest, the digest the energize, repair. So if we don’t have enough parasympathetics going, it’s gonna be harder to digest and break down our foods, absorb our nutrients. And this can really one start to create indigestion that can create more cebo and dysbiosis and bad bacterial imbalances. And those bad bacterial imbalances can negatively impact our immune system. And an immune system that’s not correctly primed. It’s overly sensitive and going after allergens that are not like a threat to us, that’s going to create allergy issues. So you see how this hormone adrenal Nervous System digestion, gut, immune connection kind of evolves, right? You can really connect it to a lot of different things because they really dovetail so importantly.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Now, the good news is, once you get the proper labs, it’s less overwhelming, because when you’re saying that back to me, I’m like, Oh, crap, how would somebody even know where to start with it? But once you get the data, it’s really easy for us to go and look at the piece of paper and go, Okay, look, here’s the gut analysis. Here’s the hormone analysis. And then on the gut analysis, we get a clue into the, into the hormones to right, because we’ll see that beta glucuronidation marker, if that’s high, we know Oh, crap. There’s recirculation going on. So this hormone profile now we have answers even deeper, we have a root cause of the root cause. Why is the hormone profile working like this? Well, because of the gut profile, and then you piece in the oats, your piece in the chemical profiles, the mold profiles, you look at where does somebody live environmentally, how much outdoor exposure Do they have, then we look at the diet piece, it makes it much much more digestible. So I just want people listening, you may be able to pull out little pieces of the puzzle like oh, I’m going to boost vitamin D, I’m going to do quercetin to stabilize it. But really, you got to get the data. So that’s what we always want to lean upon. for a couple reasons. One, it helps us to shorten the treatment duration, because then you’re not guessing and checking by just giving herbal anti histamines and sending people on their way. But number two, it’s a good compliance piece, because we can show people look, we have the reason of why you’re feeling like crap. Stick through this protocol, it works so much better. You know, there were times where clinically, I would talk to someone, and we would say, Well, you know, it sounds like this, it sounds like that maybe budget was a concern. It’s in a couple of cases. But we would just give somebody a guess and check protocol. But then we always had to go back to testing later. So really upfront, if you have this going on, get some data, so you know what you’re up against, you’re going to, you know, definitely shorten your timeline, and you’re going to shorten and decrease your cost. Like, if you were like me, I’d go buy this supplement, I’d buy that I’d buy that you have the supplement graveyard, you’re spending much, much more money doing that, as opposed to getting a dialed in protocol made for you.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 110%. Yeah, if you can see what’s going on is going to help you be a lot more compliant, for sure. And then one other connection here is we know that women who are overweight, they have twice the likelihood of having allergies as well. And again, I think this goes with men as well, when you’re overweight, fat is a major reservoir of interleukins, and cytokines and inflammation. So you can make a lot of inflammation via your fat cells. So the more inflamed you are, right? The whole thing with allergies and asthma and all these different things is the immune reaction that you’re having is an increase in cytokines and interleukins that are pro inflammatory, right. And so when you’re, you have exposure to endogenous allergens in the environment. That’s kind of what’s creating an anti inflammatory response. And then your body is then oversee accreting more inflammatory compounds, they kind of add to the mix, right? So your body’s overdoing it. And you have natural anti inflammatory compounds via cortisol and progesterone in your body. And if you don’t have enough reserves there to kind of let’s say, cover that up or neutralize it. It can really create more and more problems. That’s that’s a big one. I mean, here’s the summary. estrogens role in allergic disease remains complex, as allergenic as allergic disease continues to increase in the prevalence and effect women is fortunately gaining a fuller understanding of its effects. Basically, it’s talking about xeno estrogens and hormonal imbalances driving more allergy issue. It does it because it modulates the immune system, T cells, immune cells, B cells, it’s affecting all of the immune system, because we’re throwing a lot more histamine, leukotrienes and other immune compounds that are just putting our body into a more inflammatory state, if you will.
Evan Brand: Make sense i mean that once again, we’re back to external exposure, meaning potentially environmental but when we say environmental, that’s not just nature, it’s not like that anymore. It’s contaminated. You’ve got so estrogen.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly estrogens may polarize T cells and cause more th to immune response that’s kind of more of our antibody immune response. So you may get a lot more of that. Estrogen promotes the class switching of B cells. To immunoglobulin e, IGE is going to be a product that those are eosinophils so it’s going to promote more in a more allergenic side of your immune system via eosinophils. And then of course, estrogen promotes the degranulation of mast cell base fill so base fills are in your blood their immune cells just like you eosinophils are when they start to go into your tissues, they can start they become mast cells, essentially a mast cells produce histamine and we know histamine increases all these leukotrienes and, and cytokines, which are part of this whole allergenic immune reaction. So you can see how all these things kind of, um, you know, roll downstream and create more problems. So when people are listening to this, and you’re like, what the heck is he saying, just focus on this just go upstream. Anytime you get overwhelmed, always go upstream. Okay. Everything kind of gets more granular and nuanced as you go downstream. So hormonal imbalances, imbalances and progesterone, estrogen, especially when you start to have more estrogen dominance, that creates more of a pro allergic response. When cortisol starts to go out of balance, typically, either overly high acutely or chronically low. In a more chronic situation, that’s going to create more allergies, the more your sympathetic nervous system is in fight or flight due to chronic hormonal stress that can create more allergies as well. It affects your ability to digest, rest, repair, and absorb nutrients, and it sets up your digestive tract for inadequate enzyme and acid levels. And it also throws off your gut microbiome start to have more dysbiosis and that can throw off your immune system. Why? Because 80% of our immune system is in our intestines are Gault which is our gastric associated lymphoid tissue, that’s our stomach and our mouth, our mucosal associated lymphoid tissue that’s in our small intestine. hope that makes sense.
Evan Brand: It does. So, if you’re still drinking out of single use plastic water bottles, you got to quit doing that, because you were you were reading through it kind of fast. But basically what I pulled out you were saying that these, you know, estrogens, those have been linked to stimulating or irritating the mast cells. Was that right?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, let me just read this summary here. This is a big one. So female hormones appear to play a significant role in allergic diseases, with estrogens effect being the most well studied estrogen influences, immune cells, favoring that th two immune response, and it causes our B cells or B cells are basically our body’s ability to make antibodies, right? We have five antibodies, right? neutrophils, lymphocytes, eosinophils, monocytes, basophils? How do I remember it? Never let monkeys eat bananas. Okay. That’s how we learn about that in doctoral school. And so we start to have a lot of these B cells, which you know, they can be anything of these five, they start to go more towards eosinophils. And again, he for allergy, that’s how we remember that he for allergy now with the exception is parasites can also increase the ascenta fills there for parasite infections can increase your chance of allergies to see all these things connect over. So the potential role for astron and nasm is supported by epidemiological evidence and increase the asthma prevalence and severity in adult women. And by associating estrogen with changes in airway mechanics and inflammation. However, the mechanism by which it may act is quite complex, we know that exogenous compounds of estrogen activity may influence allergic diseases, how well if we’re getting exposure to potentially birth control pills, or plastics, or pesticides, in the water, hormones and the meat all of these things may potentially throw us more into an estrogen dominant state. Now this study is not saying it, I believe it’s it’s really going to be that hormone ratio. So it’s more that estrogen dominance, unnecessarily high amounts of Astrid that definitely is part of it. But I think also that that ratio, or that Oh, right here, and it says with the effects dependent on the concentration of hormones, and the concomitant presence, or absence of factors such as progesterone, so it is kind of alluding to that the absence of progesterone can also throw that immune system into a more allergenic response, which is what I’m highlighting earlier, it’s more estrogen dominance than it is just estrogen by itself
Evan Brand: Makes sense. Okay. And now I’ve got a couple papers here is talking about estrogen is very stimulatory to the mast cells to release histamine. And then the excess estrogen also is going to down regulate the DA o enzyme that clears his domain Oh, bingo, they’re inactive. And at the same time, histamine stimulates the ovaries to make more estrogen. So the net result can be a vicious cycle of estrogen to histamine to estrogen to histamine, whereas progesterone comes in and stabilizes the mast cells and actually up regulates do production, and therefore can reduce histamine. So many symptoms of estrogen dominance are actually symptoms of histamine or mast cell activation. And then we know like mast cells, and histamine play a role in endometriosis and also pmdd. So that’s, that’s pretty cool. And this is an epidemic problem. You and I kind of talk about it. Like it’s this nuanced thing, but no, this is going on in hundreds of millions of women around the world and probably more so in women than men. But this issue can definitely happen in men also.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, so I don’t want men to kind of feel left out here. There’s a lot of men that have a lot of estrogen imbalance issues as well due to the environment, poor detoxification, gynecomastia excess of just being overweight, there’s some of those same mechanisms that are happening here, member fats can produce estrogens as well. So I don’t want our guy friends to be left out in this here. So just know there’s still a lot of the same mechanisms that are at play. Of course, we’re not going to be you know, hitting the hormones the same way. But we’re going to be looking at the adrenals are same way we’re going to be cutting out environmental hormones, we’re going to be looking at the toxification and your body’s ability to clear these excess of hormones. Of course, if we’re seeing women that come in with birth control pills, we’re going to try to hit that via a different mechanism. without throwing off the hormones, there’s a lot of ways we can hit this. I’m really happy that we’re talking about this because this is something that I see endemic in a lot of my female patients and male too. So I’m glad that we’re on top of this. And we’re not going to be going over too much on the supplement side cut for this because we talked about it last time. So please click down below and look for that previous podcast. But the big thing I would say with my female patients and or hormone patients listening is we’re going to look at potentially using endogenous progesterone, depending on the levels, we’re going to use herbs to help modulate estrogen and progesterone. So some of those herbs could be chaste tree, or maka or dawn quai. There’s a lot of other herbs that we use to modulate that we may use things like ashwagandha rhodiola, ginseng things to help modulate cortisol, of course, we’re going to be fixing a lot of the diet and lifestyle strategies, whether it’s blood sugar, inflammatory foods, sleep, of course, all of the healthy diet and lifestyle, things are foundational. So I’m not going to go into all of that, because that’s all with a podcast within itself. But just kind of keep that in mind. Those are all going to be part of the foundational principles that we utilize. And also I use other palliative things like natural anti histamine, the granulators, which looked at that previous podcast. And then also we talked about sinus flush protocols, and high quality air filtration, which are going to be important components. But you know, see that previous podcast for more instruction on that.
Evan Brand: Yeah, well said last thing here, just a note, it was talking about the whole progesterone, estrogen mast cell connection. And why progesterone, of course, is going to stabilize mast cells and upregulate DAO, and it made just a note here. This is why most women feel better early in the luteal phase when progesterone is higher. So if there is like a cyclical pattern to your issues, pay attention to your cycle. That’s probably a good clue there that it is progesterone deficiency.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, part of the reason it wouldn’t feel bad those last couple of days or a week before is because that’s where we have the biggest drop in progesterone. So it’s this big drop that happens. And usually it happens a little too early. And that’s what kind of gets this whole cascade of PMS or pmdd happening, right. And it’s usually just that fall out and progesterone too soon and too hard. Usually around a 21 to 24 it can just fall out harder versus gradually coming down around day 27 or so.
Evan Brand: And you’re saying we can help blunt the drop with some of the strategies, the herbs and nutrients, getting rid of the excess estrogens in relationship all of it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep. And don’t get me wrong. utilizing some of these natural anti histamines that we talked about in podcast one is helpful. But we just have to always draw a line is this the root cause and so I always want to make sure patients know this is not the root cause, but it’s buying us time. And it’s helping us deal with the histamine while we work on all the other diet and lifestyle and hormonal things. And then over time, you become less reliant on those things. And it’s better than taking medications that cause you to be drowsy and brain foggy throughout the day, or even things that add more steroids in your body to which could be more destructive.
Evan Brand: Absolutely. Well, if you need to reach out and get help, please do. If you need to reach Dr. J, you can at his website, JustinHealth.com. And he does console’s worldwide via phone, FaceTime, Skype, whoever you need to reach him. He’s there. If you need to reach out to me my website, EvanBrand.com we have all the information in regards to scheduling. It’s a piece of cake and you can book a intro call to discuss your symptoms, your goals, see if you’re a good fit for care, we’d love to help you out, get you off the roller coaster get you off the merry go round, unless you like that kind of thing. But these medical merry go rounds are not something fun. So we want to try to get you off of that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Totally. I have three patients this last week. Two women, one man, one man who had a significant 80% reduction in lifelong allergies, doing a lot of these strategies. So I mean, these things aren’t esoteric, like there’s a lot of thought leaders out there that just talk about things, but they aren’t in the clinical trenches with their sleeves rolled up dealing with people working on this and actually getting results. So you know, I have quote, I have, you know, strong experience in this Evan does too, and we’re seeing it so when you guys are hearing the things we’re talking about this isn’t theoretical. This transcends what you’re reading the study. This is real. So I don’t We say that just to give you guys a lot of motivation and hope that if you’re listening, just start applying it. And then if you’re feeling confused or overwhelmed, we’re here for you. There’ll be a link down below where you can click to reach out to us and we’re here to help y’all. And if this information resonates, please find a family member or a friend that you can share it with because we really appreciate that.
Evan Brand: Awesome, we’ll take good care. We’ll be in touch next week.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Have a good chat with you have a good one, y’all. Bye now.
Evan Brand: See ya. Bye.
References:
https://www.evanbrand.com/
Recommended products:
Allerclear Histamine Support
Nasaline Sinus Flush Bottle
Xlear packets
Xlear rescue spray
Navage Nasal Irrigation
NeilMed Sinus Rinse Complete Kit
Xlear Sinus Rinse Kit
Austin Air Healthmate Plus
Air Doctor Air Purifier
Whole House Water Filter
Water Filtration Devices
Clearly Filtered
Audio Podcast:
Fatigue, Tiredness, and Lethargy: Link to Gut Infection | Podcast #311
Tiredness is not a symptom that defines any one particular disease. Rather, tiredness can be a symptom of many different diseases and conditions. Causes of tiredness range from lack of sleep and over exercise to medical and surgical treatments. The lack of energy (lethargy) associated with tiredness can sometimes cause difficulty with normal daily activities, leading to attentiveness and concentration problems.
Dr. J suggested considering to support protein breakdown by extra amino acids and enzymes. Dr. Evan also added that if you have issues, always reach your conventional Dr. or functional Dr., be tested, find the root cause and guide to fix possible infections that cause you to feel tired before you reach a crisis level.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
1:10 Mechanisms to Gut Infection
4:05 Where Gut Stressors Come From
12:12 Infections that causes Fatigue
17:41 Probiotics and Beneficial Bacteria
22:32 Supplements to Gut Infection
24:18 Immune Issues
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And we are live. It’s Dr. J here in the house with Evan brand. Today we’re going to be chatting about your gut infections may be making you tired. Many people don’t think about how their gut maybe having an impact on your energy, your mood, your emotions, but it’s totally true. Most people think, oh, if I have a gut issue, I’m just gonna have bloating or diarrhea or constipation or acid reflux. Oh contraire. We’re gonna dive into that today, Evan, how are we doing today, man?
Evan Brand: Doing really well. How about should I just go straight into my story, then? I mean, I suffered with this thing firsthand, as you know.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep. Let’s do it.
Evan Brand: So when I was down in Austin, I was losing weight. And I didn’t know why I was losing weight. And turns out and I was exhausted. That was that was the main thing. I mean, I was drained, like, it was really tough for me to get through the day. I mean, I was to the point where, at some point, it’s kind of embarrassing. I mean, I was like, okay, am I do I have enough energy to cook a meal at night, you know, for dinner, like, the workday just drained me. And so fortunately, after I got the gut infections resolved, I mean, the story is not much longer than that my energy came back online. So I mean, we can say clinically, and personally, that this is a big, big smoking gun for anybody who’s been dealing with chronic fatigue.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, totally 100%. Now, let’s talk about some of the mechanisms why like, you could have constipation, you could have diarrhea, you could have all these digestive issues, that’s fine. And it makes sense why some of these issues may be causing problems. Because if you’re going to digest a lot of the nutrients that energize you, right, B vitamins, your amino acids, your essential fatty acids to burn them in the mitochondria for fuel, all of these things require optimal absorption, right? So if we don’t have adequate enzyme, or acid level or biliary level to break down fats, proteins, and carbohydrates, we’re going to have a problem with those nutrients getting into our bloodstream and making their way to ourselves and our mitochondria to be burned for fuel. So that’s one big mechanism. And the other big mechanism out of the gates, and we’ll kind of expound deeper into each one is the fact that your immune system sucks up lots and lots of resources. So think back to when you maybe got the flu or had some kind of illness. Were you energized? Are you tired? Most people were very tired. Now, why is that? It’s because your immune system allocates lots and lots of resources when it’s stressed. And it will make you tired, because it’ll pull some of those energy resources to put it towards fighting an infection. All right. So if your immune system is caught chronically in that state of trying to fight something, whether it’s a gut infection, cebo, or parasite, or just gut permeability issues that are upregulated, due to bad foods, and food allergens, you’re going to be really over stimulating and over allocating resources to deal with whatever’s happening with the immune system, aka the gut. Don’t forget 80% of your immune system is located in the gut, people forget that so important. So if you’re over stressing your immune system, you’re gonna have problems.
Evan Brand: Yeah. And so for me, I was taking some immune support, but it was all just kind of a bandaid, right? Because I wasn’t focused on the underlying infection. So this time of the year, we’re, we’re talking in the fall here coming up on winter, you have a lot of people that will say, Well, you know, I really just want to strengthen my immune system. So they’ll go and do maybe some extra vitamin C, maybe some medicinal mushrooms, or maybe some other herbs, astragalus, things like that. But it doesn’t matter if you do all those if you don’t address the infection. So if someone’s like, tired and they feel weak, they feel depleted. They feel like they’re possibly immunocompromised. Sure, you could do some of the tools, like we talked about those herbs, but really, you got to test first of all, figure out what kind of infections you have. And then step two, is you come in and make a protocol to fix those infections. And not to mention, you know, like h pylori is super contagious. So, I mean, you and I’ve seen hundreds and hundreds of cases where, you know, husband and wife have reinfected each other. And so we’re not doing this to try to make more money. We’re doing this to help the family when we say, Hey, what about your husband? What about your wife when we try to get them on board? It’s because we know about this potential, you know, cross contamination.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. So we kind of look at the gut, and we’re like, Alright, where are the gut stressors coming from? So the first stressor we look at are food allergens, because if your immune system is kind of responding negatively to food, that could be a big a big issue, right? And what happens is, when food allergens kind of come in, whether it’s gluten or dairy, or just you know, processed grains, or sugars, or even things like nuts, or seeds, or just more allergenic foods, soy those kind of things. Your immune system is upregulated dealing with those foods, and that’s going to suck away resources. And also, these foods if you have an allergen to them, if your body’s hyper allergenic, meaning your immune system is over responsive. There may be some gut permeability. And gut permeability is like these little tight junctions in the epithelium in the small intestines. They’re like this. So imagine you’re putting your hands together like you’re saying a prayer now, start pulling your fingers apart a little bit, you see the little gaps that happen that’s happening at a microscopic level with the tight junction cells in the small intestine. So the more you’re stressing your gut lining, these tight junctions open up, like I mentioned, the fingers come further apart. And then food particular we call it antigens, right? These foods aren’t supposed to be in the bloodstream at the size they’re in. Now you start having these antigens go into the bloodstream at a larger level, and now the immune system’s going to start going after it with full force. And that’s gonna start sucking up a lot more of your resources. So the first thing when we’re working with patients worldwide, we’re trying to cut down the food allergenicity we’re trying to decrease the immune response by helping the foods not become so bad or stressful on the immune system. So some people coming in on a standard American diet, a paleo template, maybe enough. Some people that are really have an autoimmune issue or Irritable Bowel Disease, we have to go to a paleo template where we’re cutting out extra allergenic foods, some we have to even go to a carnivore or some kind of an STD low lower fodmap diet because the bacteria is overgrown, and it’s reacting to even fodmap foods like broccoli and onions and garlic like healthy foods, were reacting to it. And so it this whole thing becomes a little bit more nuanced with food, the more unhealthy you become, or the longer your conditions progress. So as a practitioner, right, we’re trying to meet people where they’re at some people come in at a really easy phase, they’re just diets crap. And we can just make a simple change with the Paleo some we have to get a lot more nuanced.
Evan Brand: So let me ask you, you brought up garlic. I had a woman last week, actually. And she was complaining that garlic was a big issue for her. So we’ve already cleared out gut infections, and we’ve done a great job. We’ve retested we’ve confirmed that we got rid of all the gut infections, we are doing some leaky gut support, but she says every time I eat garlic, I get really bloated. What would you What would you do? What would you say to that garlic person?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well, it could be a SIBO thing. So I’d want to test other fodmap foods. So if there’s some kind of a gut issue or like a bloat or a motility issue, or a diary or a constipation issue, we’re going to be cutting out fodmaps fermentable carbohydrates, fructose, oligo, disaccharide, mono and polyols. And we’re going to do that and then we’ll eventually do a reintroduction. And when we reintroduce foods, we’re going to start with moderate fodmaps first and then go to higher fodmaps. Last, so those foods are higher fodmap. So the question will be How did she do adding in the moderate ones? First, I want to know how she did incrementally adding things in.
Evan Brand: So like apples, she does fine, which was interesting, because to me, I’ve had a lot more people have issues with apples than I have with garlic. So I thought Hmm, you know, is it really a bacterial overgrowth thing? The stool test didn’t really show much in the in the bacterial category. So it’s kind of like, well-
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: when people like that, I just want to see is it a one off? Is it just garlic? Or is it other foods like onions and broccoli and avocado, which is a moderate or sweet potato, which is a matar, I want to test more of the moderate fodmaps? Maybe add in some fermented foods like a kombucha or a sauerkraut? Did it happen with those two, if it’s just a one off, then it could be some die off, it could just be she’s having an issue with that food. So if it’s a one off, I don’t really worry about one offs, I look for patterns, like patterns or like part of being a good functional medicine doctor, it’s pattern recognition, you’re looking for patterns, like some patient that can be Well, last week I had this happen or that like, we got to look at bigger picture, we got to have enough data points. So we can look at patterns. Anything can happen one off due to stress or a poor night’s sleep, or you got exposure to some bad foods. And now your guts a little bit rocky for a few days. So we got to look at longer trends and really have a lot of good pattern recognition. Part of what we do, we’re kind of CSI detectives, and we got to look for things repeating itself, because anything can happen one off, we don’t want to change what we’re doing, or the programs that people are on, off of just a one off issue.
Evan Brand: And that’s what it was, it was a one off and it was kind of, you know, frustrating for me because I’m thinking well, crap, you know, everything else, she’s tolerating good and any other problematic foods, I’d kind of put in that same category that we thought would be a problem. They’re not a problem. So I’m sitting here thinking, Okay, well, what kind of explanation Can I give her? Because she wants some kind of good functional medicine answer for me, right? And so that’s what I told her. I’m like, well, this sounds like just Oh, to be honest, kind of like a food sensitivity, particularly to the garlic. You know, I don’t looking at the testing. I told her I didn’t really see anything that was compelling to indicate any other sort of issue and all the other foods were tolerated. So I kind of just gave it like a political answer. It was like, wow, hmm. You know.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, well, we’ll come it’s possible there could be just a, her immune response is just a little bit more sensitive to if we don’t see extra data points correlating to it, then I just tell patients, hey, let’s just we’ll come back. We’ll work on probiotics. We’ll work on good re inoculation of good healthy bacteria while adding some prebiotic fibers every month. We can try testing it again. But as long as there’s no yeah, as long as there’s no, let’s just say, family of other foods that are interacting like this, then we’re not going to really worry about it too much. But you can always retest, make sure that gut’s doing good, but it’s possible you have one off allergen issue that’s possible. But every month, we can always retest it and see.
Evan Brand: Yeah, good point, I did end up throwing in a high dose, multi strain probiotic. So we’re with a high amount of bifido. So we’re gonna see what happens.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, and this person could tolerate fermentable carbohydrates, like sauerkraut and, and maybe a little bit of kombucha it’s probably not a fodmap issue, because those things are very, very high in fodmaps. It could be she’s killing some stuff off. It could just be she sensitive to garlic. It’s possible. Yeah. And so I mean, I just tell patients, hey, you know, that’s an artifact, we just kind of make a note on it. When we follow it down the road later on. If things kind of connect back to it down the road. That’s nice. But if not, things that are one offs. You don’t want to you don’t want to one off to derail your whole investigation.
Evan Brand: Yes. Yes. That’s a great point. You know, it’s like you’re, you’re you’re like, you know, investigating a crime scene, and you have his weird piece of evidence. That does not make sense.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Right. Okay. Well, we’ll make a note on that. And we’ll come back to it if there’s any patterns that they point back to it down the road.
Evan Brand: Yep. Yep. Great. So so small tangent, but really helpful. I think it’s, it’s helpful for people to see how do you have to think when you’re approaching these issues, it’s not always black and white, you know, we try to refer back to clinical experience, we kind of sprinkle in some of the data sprinkled in some previous case studies that we’ve done with people. So it’s really fun. But back to the fatigue piece.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So I just wanted to highlight one component, because while you’re on it, is when we are talking about these things, because we’re clinicians, and we see thousands of patients, we’re operating more off of clinical concepts than like rote memorization of like, a fax. And so when people listen to our podcasts, we really want them to understand the overarching concepts of health. If you understand a concept, you don’t really have to memorize it, if you’re trying to memorize random facts and randomness, and that becomes a little bit convoluted and a little bit stressful. So just try to get the overarching concepts that we’re talking about here. Once you get the concept, you never have to worry about memorizing, and it’s just there.
Evan Brand: Yeah, yeah, good. So I just wanted to go back to the to the fatigue piece, because for certain people, there may be multiple layers of infections that are causing your fatigue. So for me it was H. pylori, and then once I got rid of the H pylori, then it was the parasites that were still causing me to be tired. And once I got rid of that, then I did have some Candida that I had to address. So what I want people to know is that if you double down or triple down on something, you know, the guy tells you it’s parasites, or the girl tells you it’s this, and you pursue that, and you’re not better, it’s possible that you’ve, you’ve missed something. And so I just want people to wrap their head around you, like you say, you have permission to have multiple things wrong at the same time. So you could have a bacterial issue, a parasite issue, a Candida problem, all at the same time. And so you got to make sure you get all the data if you just run a stool test. Candida rarely shows up on the stool test, you and I’ve talked about this many times. So the urine test will often fill in the blank. So if you had one test done, or your doctor ran this or that, and you feel like you’re missing something you probably are so keep, keep digging.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You also there’s one study here just looking at h pylori and mitochondrial function, I’ll put it up on my screen. But this is important, right? And the reason why it’s important, I’m going to just I’m going to do a share here. So if you guys are listening to the podcast on YouTube, you’ll be able to watch the video. If you’re on iTunes, you know, you have to just click the YouTube link, and you’ll be able to see what we’re talking about. If not, I’ll try to describe it pretty well. But you can see my screen you see my screen.
Evan Brand: Yep. h pylori affects the mitochondrial function.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So this is important right here. So mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cells. This is really important and the powerhouse of your cell generates ATP for energy. Now, if you look here at the bottom they talked about, they wanted to investigate whether there’s an increased mutational load and mitochondrial genome and what they found was there believe that the there’s a downregulation in the mitochondrial DNA repair pathway? What does that mean? It means how your mitochondria are repaired and regenerated. It’s going to be down regulated, so you’re not going to be able to repair your your mitochondria as fast. It’s believed to be involved in mitochondrial base excision repair. Our results suggest that these genes A p one and y b one, just know that their DNA is that are involved in mitochondrial DNA repair. They’re they’re demonstrated to be involved and they’re demonstrated to be down regulated when there’s an H pylori infection. So it just means that your body’s ability to generate ATP which has decreased respiration coupled aptr. So you’re not able to generate as much ATP and repair your mitochondria as well when you have an H pylori infection. And this is something that we think is there with a lot of gut infections. It affects your mitochondria. Your ability to repair it, which then affects your ATP synthesis.
Evan Brand: That is pretty crazy. I mean, especially if we’re talking about an athlete who wants to perform right you’ll have all these big celebrity personal trainers and stuff and they’ll just get people on different diet changes or no, you need to do this exercise or this exercise and they missed the boat. They don’t have a clue about H. pylori being the root cause of the of the fatigue or the exercise performance. So yeah, it’s just crazy.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And then also, there’s a lot of right here, right here one study, I’ve already looked at it before, if people are having gut issues, and they go to their conventional gastroenterologist, what are they typically prescribing? Well, a lot of times they’re prescribing antibiotics, right, and there’s a lot of data, bacterial Seidel, antibiotics induce mitochondrial dysfunction and oxidative damage. And so we know this is something that’s actually present, where there’s damage to the mitochondria with antibiotics.
Evan Brand: Well, and and, and to be clear, for H pylori, it’s not just one antibiotic, it’s three or even four, they have what they call quadruple therapy now, which just the name of it scares me, it’s literally four antibiotics at the same time. And you and I have both seen patients that have had triple or quadruple therapy done and guess what we retest them, and unfortunately, due to antibiotic resistant bacteria, the infections are still there. So now we have to come in, repair all the mitochondria that were damaged, plus use herbs, which are much, much safer, and in my experience, just as if not more effective, and then we actually get rid of the bugs.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, she’s a summary of your mitochondria dysfunction and oxygen damage induced by bacterial Seidel antibiotics, which is interesting, because bacteria, all antibiotics are bacterial Seidel, so interesting. They use that description. It’s mammalian cells. I’m not sure which mammals they use. But they talked about that it’s alleviated by antioxidants. Well, guess what, when we use a lot of the clearing herbs that we use, guess what they’re rich in, I mean, tons of antioxidants, polyphenols. And that’s the benefit, a lot of the herbs that we use, they have a lot of antioxidants in them to help buffer the oxidative stress. Because remember, oxidative stress is part of what happens with the antibiotics. And we have a similar effect with herbs. But the herbs have a lot of antioxidants, which is helpful. Any comments on that?
Evan Brand: Well, what you’re saying makes us look really good, because not only are we giving nutrients that can effectively get rid of the infections, but we’re also protecting the system or even replenishing antioxidants, because in general, and the oxidants are going to be reduced because of all the oxidative stress from the infection in the first place. So it’s literally like a win win, for us and for the person under the protocol.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep. And there’s lots of different studies here as well on probiotics and beneficial bacteria, correcting mitochondrial dysfunction with probiotics. There’s there’s definitely studies on this as well. And again, you know, these are things that we’ve seen in our practice, like when you see someone get better. So protection of hepatocyte mitochondrial function by blueberry juice probiotics. So there’s lots of studies on this, because when you see patients get better with certain beneficial bacteria, after you do an elimination, you’re like, why does that work? And so what happens is you see a clinical outcome, patient getting better when you do something. And then you’re like, Huh, what could the mechanism B and then you chase it down online? And you’re like, oh, maybe that’s it? You know, maybe it has to do with the fact that it’s helping the mitochondria and people’s feel better afterwards? Maybe that’s the mechanism. It’s possible, right?
Evan Brand: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: We have to comment on that.
Evan Brand: Well, it’s a lot of good things happening. And then you mentioned the probiotic piece. So that’s going to help even more. So after we get someone on a killing protocol, there’s going to be good benefits there, your energy is probably going to get better just based on doing that. And then when you go to the next phase, if we’re going to come into the gut healing phase, you’re going to get even better than so it’s it’s really fun for us to kind of paint the picture here of just how how is someone going up, up up up better, better, better? And you’ve just outlined how so pretty I talked about it right here.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: They talked about a collusion the studies show this is BP stands for blueberry juice and probiotic exhibit a synergistic effect preventing the development of a and that’s non alcoholic fatty liver disease by protecting mitochondrial function, suppressing the damage of mitochondrial ultrastructure by reducing mitochondrial swelling, right. So mitochondrial damage by antibiotics, as well as we could do the same thing when we search, let’s say pesticides, or heavy metals or mold toxins, so we know that gut plays a big role and one helping to absorb those nutrients. But number two, also helping to have beneficial bacteria that modulate these, this inflammation and mitochondrial damage as well.
Evan Brand: Yeah, yeah. Well said. Excellent.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well, it’s good that just a couple of studies. I mean, when we look at like we look at research a lot differently, so just kind of everyone there. We look at clinical outcomes in patients. And then we chase them back to what the literature says. The problem is a lot of people who are clinicians, they’ll look at the literature, and then they’ll try to then come up with a clinical like decision based on the literature. And that’s sometimes it’s really hard to do, because a lot of the PhDs and a lot of the research out there isn’t necessarily clinically driven, and maybe driven because someone has a PhD in this area. And they’re just they’re just studying that topic, because or maybe it’s an NIH funded study. Who knows, right? So we’re looking at things that are clinically driven, not research driven, because someone has decided to dedicate their life to this topic. And this is the study they’re choosing right?
Evan Brand: Now. It’s good that we can kind of pull out some studies to help backup what we’re saying. But it’s not like we go into PubMed to try to figure out exactly what we’re going to do the clinical stuff is really that’s where all the magic happens.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. And some may say we have a confirmation bias and how we look for these things. But we’re not looking for out of the blue we’re looking for, because we’ve seen clinical outcomes support something is happening in that direction. And then we use the data, the research to say what could be if positive things are happening in this direction? A to B, what could be the mechanism of why that is? And so we kind of chase it backwards. versus the other way around?
Evan Brand: Yeah, yeah. And it’s just it’s a blast. It is fun for you to pull that stuff up. Right? Because, you know, we get we get used to our our methods, we get used to our results. But when you get to see in the literature like that antibiotics, causing mitochondrial damage is like, Oh, yeah, I forgot. That’s why we do this. It’s Yeah, we’re Exactly. We don’t want people to get damaged.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And you get confident when you see things repeat itself. Clinically, you’re like, Okay, something’s happening here. Now what? So you’re going at it with a lot more confidence versus like, Hey, I think maybe, you know, I’ve heard this, it’s a hearsay kind of thing. No, you’ve seen it, you’ve seen it clinically? Well, here’s the confidence.
Evan Brand: Here’s the thing that’s always fun for me is when we’re on the topic of fatigue and gut infections. And so when you have a case where you do the follow up, and someone is reporting that they have significantly more energy, and you didn’t give them any energy supplements, you just fix their gut, you just gave them some liver, maybe some enzyme support, some gallbladder support, and then you killed the infections and all the sudden, boom, I’m 20% more energetic. I always smile and laugh simultaneously. Because it’s like, This is so fun. We have 20% more energy. And we did zero energy supplements. That’s just super cool.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, it’s powerful. Now, if people start feeling a little bit worse, then we got to be very careful. So when people start feeling worse, I’m like, all right, we got to spend more time building up the adrenals, we got to make sure the diets clean, because if someone’s got his or, like, if you’re putting lots of bad foods in and you’re inflaming the gut, then your immune system and also your adrenals may be making more resources to deal with the inflammation in your gut. So we have to decrease the inflammation in our gut and support the adrenals by calming it down. Now, the adrenals have more resources. And of course, we always like supporting the adrenals ahead of time. So then you have natural, your more of your natural anti inflammatories, because conventional medicine when there’s serious gut issues, they’re going to give prednisone cortisol, well, let’s just support your body’s ability to make that naturally. And then when we go into a gut clearing phase, then we have more of those resources on board. And then patients are sensitive. I’m titrating the herbs in there slowly so we’re not overwhelming the system by killing more, you know bacterial toxins, LPs endotoxins, mycotoxins, we’re not overwhelming the lymphatic system that a toxification immune system. So we’re going to kind of really titrate things in a little bit slower if you’re more sensitive. And we may even add things like binders and glutathione too.
Evan Brand: Yeah, yeah, the glutathione is good for me. I had to take a break from it for a little while. It was just too strong. It does mobilize toxins to so this is all case by case basis. But yeah, I love glutathione when it works. But when you take too much, that’s no good. There’s always a right dose.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, if you’re slow, if you’re like more sensitive, always start low, work your way up. And then if you’re sensitive, you can always start with just a gentle binder first, as long as you’re not getting constipated. That’s a good first step on increasing things.
Evan Brand: Yeah, that’s great. So let’s see here.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Um, the other component, I would say is people that have got issues tend to also have immune issues. We already talked about why 80% of your immune systems in the Galt, that’s the gastric associated lymphoid tissue that’s in the stomach. And then also the model that’s the mucosal associated lymphoid tissue, lymphoid meaning like lymphocytes, white blood cells, and that’s in the small intestine. And so if you have a lot of gut permeability issues, if your guts over responding well, what’s the most common autoimmune condition that affects people and mostly women, five times more women is autoimmune thyroid. And so if you have an autoimmune thyroid, that could also be affecting your energy because you know your thyroid gland is being attacked and your body is ability to generate thyroid hormone may be decreased. And it’s possible that your conventional doctors overlook that. And so knowing that there’s an autoimmune thyroid could be affecting your energy too. And if you have an attack, you could feel hyper where you’re like anxious, can’t sleep irritable, sweating, right? first and then you go into a hypo where you’re like tired, fatigued, depressed, right? So you could easily be going hyper and hypo swings based on autoimmune tax of the thyroid.
Evan Brand: Yeah, and once again, the hashimotos could be a side effect of something else. So even if you go to the endocrinologist, let’s say they were a more advanced endocrinologist, for example, hopefully they’re running thyroid antibodies TPO, TG maybe TSI. And they’re looking at that and maybe they’re treating your thyroid giving you desiccated glandulars, or nature thyroid, or just Synthroid or side ml. Even then you see how people can fall between the cracks and not get better. Because yeah, you’ve kind of cranked up the thyroid that was hypo due to autoimmunity. But you still never got to the gut infection that started at all.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: BINGO, BINGO, BINGO, BINGO 100%. That’s what we got to look at always the root cause. So anything else you wanted to talk about here on the gut and fatigue I did, we hit the thyroid, of course, I alluded to the adrenals earlier, because they play a huge role in regulating inflammation. And we know acute gut issues, they may be, they may be given a corticosteroid to calm down the gut inflammation, that’s possible too. So we want to support your body’s ability to do it naturally. I would also say supporting protein breakdown. So with maybe adding in free form amino acids, because protein can be very hard on the body to break down. So of course, dialing in enzymes and acids and maybe giving extra free form amino acids. So it’s taking stress off the digestive system to be able to access those amino acids as well.
Evan Brand: I think I think you’ve hit it all. I mean, I would just say, kind of where do you go next is you really have to get the data. I mean, we’ve talked about a lot, right. But if you don’t have the data, you don’t know what you’re up against. You don’t know what you’re doing. So, you know, I think the best advice I could give is if you’re dealing with these issues, test, don’t guess. And so, you know, feel free to reach out to Dr. J. Justin at JustinHealth.com. And he can run labs on you anywhere in the world and send them to your door and jump on a call and discuss it make a great protocol to help you to get better. Same thing for me my website, EvanBrand.com. And we’re available we love helping you all we’re grateful to be in this position. So you know, sure you know a lot of you listening or kind of do it yourselfers. That’s what led you to be smart and find a podcast anyway. Because you want to kind of educate yourself, but there’s a certain point where it’s okay to reach out. And I tried to fix myself for a long time. And you spend more money and you spend more time doing that. So you know, feel free to reach out and get a guide.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% and then you’re available at EvanBrand.com worldwide. We’re available worldwide and we’re clinicians, we have our sleeves rolled up and we’re in the trenches every day, dealing with patients. Also, if you’re listening to this don’t just kind of glom on to one thing. So we see lots of people they’re like, they come in like Oh, I know what’s h pylori or I know it’s Candida or I know it SIBO keep an open mind on what’s happening because you have the right to have more than one issue going on at the same time. And for instance, Evans original story was Evan had not could have it wrong if you had h pylori, Giardia and crypto. That’s correct. Yeah, yeah, h pylori, giardia crypto, those are some serious infections. Any one of those infections is serious and could could have created the symptoms Evan was having yet he had all three at the same time. So if Evan was like, Oh, it’s only H. pylori, you know, he may have missed the fact that grd and crypto were involved too. So go into with an open mind and you have the right to have more than one infection happening at same time. Sad but true. But either way there are solutions to work on it and fix it.
Evan Brand: I was tired. Man, I was tired. Now that was a that was a that was a level of exhaustion that just doesn’t even seem real. I mean, that’s how you know something’s wrong when you’re that tire. But you know, hopefully, with this education we’re providing people can reach out and work on this before it gets to that crisis level because it’s much easier to pull you out if you’re not that deep.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Now Evan can you go to your conventional medical doctor or a gastroenterologist and typically get these infections picked up on?
Evan Brand: No, definitely not the testing is just so outdated, you know, it’s not sensitive, like the DNA stuff we’re using. So that’s the downside is if you go to the gastro doc down the road, say, Hey, I think I’ve got Giardia, I heard these two guys on the internet talk about it. They’ll probably just laugh in your face and say, Well, you didn’t travel to any third world countries. So you don’t have it. But if you if you really want to Sally, I’ll test you on they’ll run the outdated test and then everything comes back negative and then we’ll say see, I told you it was all in your head, just, you know, take an acid blocker.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So yes, my opinion is very similar. So the more acute you are, especially with typical gastrointestinal symptoms, the greater chance they’ll pick you up, especially if you came back from like Mexico or some kind of a country like Bali where infections are probable, right? But now what do you do? If your infections aren’t really gut based symptoms, they’re the fatigue or the brain fog, well, then how does that get picked up, you’re typically never going to get picked up for that you’re more than likely to, to get a psych referral for an antidepressant, right, then to get a gut test, and Evan already alluded to some of the technology they have isn’t going to be as up to par. So we have a little bit you know, more access to the DNA technology a little bit more sensitive. And then also like H. pylori testing that they may run a breath test, right? Urea breath test and look for elevated levels of co2, it’s possible, but that may miss an infection. And if it’s more subclinical, you may need a more sensitive test to pick it up. So if you’re listening, and you’re like, Hey, I’m gonna go to my MD that may not be the solution, I may not get you the answers you want. And if you don’t have the typical gut symptoms, diarrhea, bloating, gas, a lot of stomach discomfort, and irritability, you may not even they may not even want to run a test, because those symptoms don’t match with what they think the problem could be.
Evan Brand: Yeah, yeah. And you know, it sounds like we’re like picking on him. Right? And we sort of are and that’s fine. I love picking on them, because they’re failing people. And it makes me sad. Because I was there I was sitting in the doctor’s office trying to get help. And I was told that I just needed an acid blocking medication. I told the doc, no, I feel better when I take it. enzymes that actually increased my stomach acid, I think you’re wrong. She said, That’s not possible. You’re gonna hurt yourself, you need to stop taking supplements stop all dietary supplement, the FDA, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And and that was it. And that’s when I signed off and said, No, I’m done.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, and I do recommend, and I think you’re in the same way, I do recommend patients that have chronic issues, or acute issues, at least go see your conventional medical doctor just to get checked off that there’s nothing glaring that’s going on. And that that way, if you work for someone like myself, for you, and then they’ve kind of already been looked at, and they’ve kind of already know, okay, conventional medicine is kind of done all they can do. And, you know, functional medicine is the next best option at that point.
Evan Brand: Yeah, I’m not saying we’re the all knowing at all, if you’re bleeding out of your butt, you need to go confirm you don’t have some type of a bleeding ulcer or colon cancer or you have some type of a polyp issue or diverticulitis and you need colon surgery. I mean, there are certain things that we can’t help with. But for these more functional, non pathological issues, we’re definitely going to be able to help.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And we can help with all those issues. Once they’re stable. If they’re unstable, though, conventional medicine does a really good job on stabilizing very sensitive issues. But once they’re stable, now what because for the most part, it’s going to be just symptom drug management for the rest of your life. Right? If you look at what they talked about, it’s, hey, we’re managing your gut issue versus let’s actually get to the root underlying issue. And sometimes management’s good when things are acute and flared. But now when they’re stable now what we want to go beyond just who wants to just manage their diarrhea for the rest of their life? That’s crazy, right?
Evan Brand: Oh, God. Well, that happens every day, doesn’t it? It’s happening today while we’re doing this call somebody is in the doctor’s office right now about to get an antispasmodic drug for their diarrhea.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, and that may be fine acutely, but then what’s next? So get your health issues under control from a you know, stable standpoint, and then work on the next step with a good functional medicine doctor. Well, everyone was excellent chatting with y’all anything you want to leave us with Evan?
Evan Brand: No, that’s it. We’re just ranting at this point. So if you need help, please reach out. JustinHealth.com, EvanBrand.com. Take great care yourself. We’ll be back. Have a good one, y’all.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Take care. Bye now.
Evan Brand: Bye.
References:
Audio Podcast:
https://justinhealth.libsyn.com/fatigue-tiredness-and-link-to-gut-infections-podcast-311
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Tom Brady’s Performance Secrets | Podcast #306
Since we witnessed a great win and performance of Tom Brady in the NFL, we have Dr. J and Evan talking about the basics of food template and physical training to be an excellent athlete and fit in general. The Tom Brady Template, or TB12 Method, is a whole-foods-based diet that protects against diseases, may aid weight loss, and boost your sports performance and recovery. Still, it is very restrictive, not based on sound science, and likely difficult to maintain long term.
It is important to note that everyone is unique, and well-known athletes are no exempted. It is still best to know what works for you. The bottom line is, if you want to perform excellently in your field (sports, fitness, etc.), it always encouraged to eat minimal processed, whole foods, etc. It is highly recommended to avoid inflammatory foods or acidic and hydration. It’s also good to have a fitness program that aims to achieve adequate energy levels, recovery, performance, and overall health.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
0:47 Vegan, NFL Diet, Tom Brady’s Diet
7:23 Grains, Gluten, Paleo
10:44 How We Can Do The Same Diet
15:03 Psychology Side Visualization’s Importance
16:29 EMF Mitigation Strategy, Bedroom Temp Control
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And we are live. It’s Dr. J here in the house with Evan brand. We’re coming off at amazing Super Bowl win just last night. I’m a big Tom Brady fan big Patriots fan growing up in the Boston area. So we have to kind of connect what’s happening with current events to health, right? We know Tom Brady oldest quarterback ever most successful, he’s the goat right greatest of all time. And there’s definitely some nutritional and health secrets and tips. I think we can parse from his experience, maybe we can apply to ourselves for optimal performance and function. What do you think Evan?
Evan Brand: Yeah, I think that he’s doing everything that we’re preaching all the time. So it’s great to be able to see that the proof is in the pudding. You’re not seeing any amazing performing vegan quarterbacks, maybe there’s some out there, but none that I know on mainstream television like this.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well, the problem with you know, you can look at Cam Newton was vegan a couple years back and he had a lot of big bone and foot injuries is part of the reason why is unless you’re doing tons of protein powders, it’s really hard to get a lot of the dense amino acids you need for rebuilding your muscles, your tendons, your ligaments, you’re also not getting a lot of that the collagen amino acids to turn over your cartilage and tendons and stuff. And then also really important fatty acids, you need fats to have cell healthy cell membranes, these fats are like a really important kind of building block for kind of buffering yourself helping yourself be more flexible, because fats are that outer cell membrane. And when you look at vegan vegetarian fats, a lot of them are going to be polyunsaturated fats, higher omega six, these fats tend to be a little bit more fragile, a little bit more heat sensitive, and a little bit more, let’s say oxidizable in the body, because there’s more omega bonds, right? So omega six fat means there’s four, six double bonds throughout that long chain fatty acid and double bonds, they’re not as resistant, they’re not as pliable, okay, they’re, they’re more fragile, and they can oxidize with heat and stress. And so the benefit of having animal fats is you have a lot more stability, because the fats are more saturated, you have a lot of fat soluble vitamins A D, and K in there. And then you don’t have the oxidizable nature. Anytime you oxidize a whole bunch of fats, you’re going to, you’re going to require a lot of antioxidants to help stabilize those cell membranes, because oxidation means those cells have lost electrons, and you need antioxidants that are willing to give up an electron to stabilize it. So good saturated fatty acids, again, fish oil, wonderful, right, but it’s an omega three, so it’s a little bit more heat sensitive. But if you’re doing some good omega threes with some saturated fats, and you’re keeping some good balance, omega threes are going to be wonderfully anti inflammatory. And they’re a plant based omega three, they just they don’t quite get converted to the active omega threes in DHA, EPA 80% go don’t get converted or kind of lost in that conversion be that delta five desaturase enzyme. So that’s the first thing on the fats.
Evan Brand: Let’s go through the list here. So they they’re calling it his NFL diet, which is kind of funny because like I said, this is the diet that you and I are pretty much prescribing for almost everyone. He’s saying here that of course, he’s got a private chef, of course, at that level of wealth, you’re gonna have private chef 80% of what he’s eating his vegetables. He’s getting the freshest vegetables. If they’re not organic, he doesn’t use it. And he will do some rice. He will do some quinoa and millet. He’s doing grass fed organic steak. He’s doing duck, he says every now and then he’ll do chicken. He’s doing wild salmon. He uses raw olive oil, but he doesn’t cook with it. He only cooks with coconut. And he uses Himalayan salt and never uses iodized salt and then no nightshades which you and I’ve done podcast on autoimmune protocol. And you’re going to pull out the Nightshade. So he’s saying here Nope, no tomatoes, peppers, mushroom, or eggplants. Tomatoes trickle in every now and then he said, but he said he’s very cautious about them. No coffee, no caffeine, no fungus, no dairy.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So a couple of things to highlight there. So number one, just want to highlight a few things is Tom’s using saturated fats to cope with why we’ve already talked about that there are a lot more heat stable, they’re not going to oxidize, they’re not going to break down. Also Coconut oil is very good for your cell membranes. And if you’re kind of switching into a fat burner status, right, you kick off a lot of ketones, a lot of fatty acid metabolites called ketones from coconut which is very high and a medium chain triglycerides, right, this is c6, c8, c10, c12, right capric caprylic, caproic and lauric acid, these are your medium chain triglycerides. So very important for fat burning. Also, Tom does about 20% meat. So that’s good quality, organic, high quality grass fed meat, right? So he’s probably consuming with his body six for 230 pounds. So he’s probably consuming about at least three to 4000 calories a day if he’s really active and working out. So you can imagine he’s probably consuming about I’m in a gas between 160 to 250 grams of protein a day probably around that depending if he’s lifting or how story is. And also he’s cutting down a lot of the nightshades now nightshades may be okay, a lot My patient may be listening and saying, Well, you know that J started me off on an autoimmune diet, I could add back in some Nightshade, some tomato, some potatoes. And that may be great for you. But when your joints are under a lot of stress, and a lot of inflammation from big linebackers tackling you every Sunday, your joints may be a little bit predisposed to inflammation and those nightshades and that alpha solonian content, maybe just enough to flare it up. So depending on how active you are nightshades may be something you want to keep down. inflammation in your joints is the problem.
Evan Brand: Yeah, yeah. And, you know, I think with the fruit thing, it’s interesting, too, he’s saying he’s not really doing fruits, occasionally. There’s something in a smoothie, maybe some berries or banana smoothie, but beyond that, he’s not really doing fruit. So, I mean, yeah, you would assume he probably is, you know, I wouldn’t say keto, because he does say he is doing some grains and rice and stuff. But I mean, in general, this is what you and I are doing everyday personally, every day clinically, he’s saying he does do nuts, or he’ll do a organic salad. And that could be roasted chicken with guacamole and mixed nuts. So what else here?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well, I also know Tom does a lot of protein and he’s his big protein his way. So he does whey protein. Whey Protein is an excellent protein because it’s very high in sulfur amino acids very high in cysteine. Very high in MSM or MSM mfine. So it’s high and a lot of the sulfur based amino acids, glutamine, glycine, cysteine taurine, so whey protein is really good to me, it’s 99% dairy free. So even though I think Tom doesn’t do dairy, they may do a little bit of butter in there. But it’s a good amino acid. Now, if you’re sensitive, you could always do pea protein or just collagen amino acids. If, if dairy, were the potential that even a tiny bit of dairy is a problem. Again, whey protein is 99% lactose and casein free. So most people that have dairy problems are with the lactose and the casein. So that’s one component. Tom also doesn’t do a lot of coffee. Now, I think coffee may be okay for Pete many people. I think Tom’s issue with coffee is the diuretic aspect. And the minerals. I know Tom talks about minerals a lot. Now, you could still do coffee, just keep it to once a day, you know, you know, do your one or two servings in the morning, take it with fat and amino acids. And just make sure you’re hydrating before and after. And you are supplementing extra electrolytes, your muscles and your cells need good levels of sodium and potassium. So that sodium potassium pump and that good cellular communication can happen. That’s very, very important.
Evan Brand: Yeah. So I mean, really, we should title this podcast, the Super Bowl diet or something or this how to win a Super Bowl diet. Now, in regards to the training, I don’t have any details on that. But I mean, I will say that in general, he’s he’s an athlete, obviously. So he’s probably going to benefit more. Some of the people may say, Well, what about the grains, you guys always talk like grains are a bad thing. I think in his case, he’s gonna need some more starch. I just feel like in general, if you were trying to perform at that level, and he were just like strict keto, like just meats and veggies, I don’t think he would perform as well.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So Tom does a lot more starches in the wintertime. And so his big starches are still going to be safe starches, grain free starches. So sweet potatoes are from what I understand are going to be a big source of a lot of the starch that he consumes in the winter and Tom when I have seen his grain free.
Evan Brand: I don’t know maybe he changed it. This one article said that he was doing rice, millet beans and quinoa.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I’ve seen other articles. And again, that that may be that may be something that he does, but I’m pretty sure in during the season he is 100% grain free. I know he’s gluten free. And a couple articles talking about him getting more sweet potatoes and other safe starches. But again, it depends, right? A lot of those foods are pseudo grains, like the qinhuai is the beans if you have good digestion maybe right? So it depends kind of where you’re at on that. I’ve seen a lot of grain free but definitely gluten free, right? The problem with gluten free is you can consume rice and oat and still be gluten free. But they they’re still not grain free. So grain free I think is gonna be a big component. And then I think the other thing is I have seen in Tom’s locker room I have seen him with creating in his locker. So I do know creatine is a powerful thing as a fuel your muscle uses. So creatine and whey protein, and I think bcaas are something that he uses on a day in day out basis just for easy accessible fuel for his muscles out of the gates. hydrations a big component. Electrolytes are a big component, mostly a paleo paleo autoimmune kind of template, I think is a big one out of the gates there. And I know Tom’s trainer Alex career is a big kind of proponent of acid alkaline diet kind of stuff. I’m not a huge fan of that. But in general, if you’re consuming good quality meat and lots of vegetables, you’re pretty much gonna not be overly acidic anyway because of the alkalinity from the vegetables. And in regards to the pH that people forget right, meat may be acidic, but grains are actually 10 times more acidic than meat. So if someone is concerned about pH and their food, remember grains are going to be 10 times more acidic than me it’s a logarithmic scale. Meats like around a 5 ish. I think grains are in the four range. So each number is a 10 X, you know, interval from the previous number.
Evan Brand: Yeah. And people listening are like, Well, I’m not performing in any Super Bowls. So what do I do? I mean, honestly, you can benefit from the same thing. Like I said, we’re implementing this clinically, I do rice, I feel fine with it. I don’t have any issue. It’s not a staple. For me, it’s a treat. But you know, I think it depends on what’s going on with your gut with your blood sugar, with your sensitivity. I mean, it is possible you have some gluten cross reactivity. So you know, if you’re looking for advice I see in general, do what we’d mentioned. But you know, what the, with the grain piece, I don’t know, you really got to consult with us and look at your labs, because I think that’s how we could base it off.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% I mean, the big thing is, Hey, you know, you want to be active, you want to be able to play with your kids, you want to be able to do your hobbies, to your sports, be active well into your old age, and it’s all about yours, it’s about quality of yours, right? So it’s about being able to do your thing, right. And I say, the more you can participate in life and not notice the pain in your body, that’s the better the more you can be present with your kids and your family and your hobbies. The more you’re worried about your back and your elbow in your knee as you’re doing the activity, I think the less present you’re going to be and so I think one of the key things is just keep your body in a great place. So you can do all those things. Now, from a training standpoint, I know Tom Just so you know, I think what you said is perfect regarding like rice and such as long as you don’t have a serious activatable immune issue. You know, you could probably cheat on some of that stuff. As long as you don’t have a significant you know, symptoms afterwards. I think it’s probably okay as long as it isn’t that 80-20 80% of the time not 20% maybe Okay, I my birthday last weekend, we had some we had some crab fried rice and of course it was gluten free, but it just a little bit of it and I felt good afterwards. So you know, you always can mitigate that. From a training standpoint, though Tom really trains for playability. He doesn’t overly inflame his muscles with too much lifting because he wants to keep his muscles strong and active, and be able to contract turn on and off fast. But he also doesn’t want to overly inflame the muscle and cause it to become reflexively stiff. Think of it as like beef jerky, he wants a strong muscle, but not a muscle that’s going to be overly inflamed that won’t absorb for so it’s kind of like a soft, raw fillet steak versus beef jerky, right? Beef jerky is hard and stiff. And if you put a lot of force into it, it can kind of tear, right? Think of that soft tenderloin. It’s like a sponge, it can absorb force. So Tom’s kind of training modality is training for pliability training for force absorption. So not overly inflaming the muscles, so doing a lot of band work. And doing works that really not overly hypertrophy and cause the muscle to get more inflamed and bigger and stronger, but strong, but also smart, strong and not overly inflamed and hard and stiff. So the playability is important because he asked to absorb force. And he asked to put repetitive inflammation on it from throwing and doing certain movements. So he wants that force to be distributed throughout his muscles well and not rip that beef jerky every week, if you will.
Evan Brand: Yeah, and that’s probably a better approach for most people to have. I mean, you know, like you mentioned, maybe the people on the defensive side, the line, they’re gonna have a totally different strength training profile than him he wants to be lean, he wants to be flexible, nimble. So that’s what I want to be, I don’t want to be just just huge and strong like a rock, I want to be just nimble, I want to be flexible, but still have strength.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, some of the band works nice. I mean, you can get bands that provide a lot of force, like the x three bar band is one that I have, because you can provide hundreds of pounds of force and create a three to 400 pound deadlift to that band. It squats as well, push movements pull movement, so you can still create a lot of force. The thing I like about bands is just use some technical terms as most people, they hurt themselves in the eccentric motion of a lift. In other words, you’re going into a squat, right and you drop down at the bottom, maybe you go a little bit too fast, or you’re doing a deadlift at the bottom, you kind of bounce that bar up, or you’re doing some kind of a bench press and you’re really trying to push that thing back up and you come down too hard and, and stretch that muscle. The nice thing about a band, it’s more forgiving as you go into a eccentric motion as you elongate as you elongate the muscle, right? So in other words, you’re going deeper into a squat, or you’re letting the bar go deeper into your chest. The the elasticity in the band becomes less because the band’s becoming, it’s moving closer to its origin and insertion. So there’s less force, so where your muscles the most compromise. It’s putting the least amount of force on that muscle, so there’s less chance for you to injure it. And that’s helpful. So if you’re an athlete, that can be helpful. If you’re an everyday person, it just gives you that little bit more forgiveness so you don’t get hurt.
Evan Brand: Yeah, makes sense. Well, I think that’s all I really need to say about it. I mean, I think we could ramble on about how awesome it is that this is probably the one of the most successful athletes of all time and he’s doing what we’re telling people to do every day. I think it makes Look up. But beyond that, I don’t have anything else to add.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: One other thing I would say sentiment wise amino acids, creatine bcaas. On the mind, psychology side visualization is very important. Anytime you go into an event like the Super Bowl, if you can go into into that place 1000s of times ahead of time. In your head, it gives your nervous system the ability to feel like it’s not a foreign environment, the more you can put your body in your mind into a place 1000s of times or hundreds of times ahead of time, once you go in there that fight or flight response is less likely to happen when there’s less fight or flight, you can use your frontal cortex better, right? frontal cortex allows you to think read the play, do all the things you got to do go through your reads as a quarterback, the more your fight or flight is happening, the more you’re going to react out of fear. And that may not give you the best opportunity. So I’d say that’s the big, I would say sleep is a big component, you kind of already highlighted that, you know, probably 10 hours a night. There’s other modalities that Tom’s using, he’s using certain clothing types that are infrared in regards to it to generate infrared heat, which helps decrease inflammation help a blood flow. I’ve heard things in regards to late potential laser stuff, infrared lights, hyperbaric oxygen, these are all other potential modalities that may be used may or may not be accessible to the average person. But when you’re making 10s of millions of dollars off your body, they help with reducing inflammation. And then other things may involve stem cell stuff, things like that outside of the season. Who knows. I mean, Tom looks amazing.
Evan Brand: Oh, one last thing. Yeah, one last thing. I did see that he’s like strictly no tech in the in the bedroom. So he luckily he’s not bringing the cell phone into the bedroom. So maybe he does have some kind of emf mitigation strategy in place to that would be smart.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: There’s probably some EMF mitigation there, I think as well. And then also, I know Yeah, and that’s a big one. And he also is a big thing in regards to temperature control at bedtime. He really mitigates You know, he tries to dial in the optimal temp at bedtime for deeper sleep. I know that’s around 65 to 69 degrees Fahrenheit. On the bedtime side. Is there anything else I would say outside of that playability component, good training. Just think about all the right I think that’s really the big one. Oh, he has a big smoothie in the morning with some banana and some fruit and some whey protein. So I like I like smoothies in the morning. Because if your digestion isn’t great, or you have to get up and workout in a few hours, you don’t want a big solid food in your body, you want something easily accessible. So I think that’s great for anyone that’s being more active in the morning. I think we hit a lot of the major things. So if someone’s listening here, how do you become more like Tom Brady out of the gates, I think you kind of progress to a paleo template, see if nightshades are an issue for you or not right, tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants, peppers, look at adding in some bands to a little bit more of your workout to stimulate muscle growth. I think adding good sleep and hydration added minerals, you can always play around with amino acids to help enhance body. anabolic metabolism, healing and recovery. minerals, of course, I think is great. And mindsets always great, too. Anything else you want to add, Evan?
Evan Brand: Now there’s probably some other secret supplements we don’t know about. But yeah, I’d be interesting to know with adaptogens and all that. Or if he’s doing, you know, neurotransmitter support, maybe he if he’s doing bcaas, who knows maybe he’s doing some brain support too, right? Like some fossil title sarine or some acetyl l carnitine. A lot of that stuff in there too.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: There’s definitely some more stuff in there. I 100% agree. So hey, this gives everyone a good start kind of a little bit of an insight. I know Tom Brady is one of those guys either love him or hate him. But I mean, the fact that his longevity is there and his victories are hot, the highest ever, right? He’s the goat greatest of all time. So we got to at least be able to kind of put our emotions aside and learn from it and see if it’s a couple of things we can use to make our lives and our health better.
Evan Brand: Awesome, awesome. If people need help clinically to implement some of this stuff. Like I said, We do this every day with our clients. Tom Brady’s not our client, but you know, we would certainly be open to helping him run some labs on him. I’m sure where is he? Or is he? Maybe he might be happy to look at his mitochondria, see what’s going on there. Make sure he’s running on all cylinders. But if you need help, you can reach out to Dr. J at JustinHealth.com or me Evan at EvanBrand.com. And we look forward to talk with you all next week.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Have a good one y’all. Take care.
Evan Brand: Take care. Bye bye.
References:
Audio Podcast:
https://justinhealth.libsyn.com/tom-bradys-performance-secrets-podcast-306
Herbal Alternatives to NSAIDS
By Dr. Justin Marchegiani
It is said that inflammation is the root cause of all modern diseases. Anti-inflammatory pharmaceuticals, called NSAIDS (such as aspirin and ibuprofen), are a quick and convenient way to reduce pain, swelling, and other symptoms of inflammation.
However, as we will outline below, there is a dark side to taking these drugs. The good news is that there are also natural solutions–let’s dive in!
Inflammation
Inflammation is a normal body process that actually serves a beneficial role–in certain scenarios. For example, if you get injured and the area gets warm and swollen, that is the body’s process of healing itself. ‘healthy’ inflammation. This is the normal process of your immune system healing your body. Inflammation arises to prevent infections from spreading and help with recovery. However, when the immune system goes into overdrive and starts attacking healthy cells and tissues, we are met with a case of unhealthy inflammation.
Symptoms of Inflammation
- Headaches
- Fatigue
- Bloating and digestive distress
- Skin issues: acne, rashes, dry patches, etc.
- Puffiness
- Joint pain
Chronic Inflammation can lead to autoimmune disease, premature aging, irritable bowel syndrome, arthritis, and even cancer.
Causes of Inflammation
Chronic inflammation is a chronic modern problem. Some of the most common causes of chronic inflammation include:
- Chronic stress
- Lack of sleep
- Poor diet: The Standard American Diet is high in refined carbs and sugars. Sugar, alcohol, grains, and processed foods are a sure ticket to inflammation.
Dangers of NSAIDS
NSAIDs block certain processes in the body, without discrimination. Since all areas of the body are subject to the suppressive effects of NSAIDS, there are often unintended side effects. Certain processes which are vital for maintaining the lining of the stomach, kidneys, gut, and liver are affected by taking these drugs, which with long-term use can lead to stomach ulcers, liver toxicity, and leaky gut syndrome.
Other side effects of NSAIDS include:
- Increased risk for cardiovascular issues
- Heart Failure
- Liver failure
- Kidney failure
- Allergic reactions
- Miscarriage
- Increased blood pressure
Herbal Alternatives to NSAIDS
An anti-inflammatory diet and lifestyle is key for preventing the need for NSAIDs. Luckily there are some super herbs which can jump-start your way becoming inflammation-free.
Turmeric
Turmeric’s active component curcumin has been used for centuries as an anti-inflammatory agent in Ayurvedic and Chinese medicine. Because of its ability to inhibit inflammation, curcumin has been studied as a treatment for colitis, chronic neurodegenerative diseases, arthritis, and cancer. Turmeric can be used as a spice in your food, enjoyed as a tea, or you can even take pure curcumin as a supplement!
Other benefits of Turmeric include:
- Detoxification support
- Cardiovascular support
- Mood balancing
- Weight loss
- Better joint and muscle health
- Lowers inflammation
- Better skin
- Cognitive function boost
Ginger
Ginger provides a major boost to your immune system and has been used in Ayurvedic medicine for centuries for its healing properties. It’s ability to modulate the immune system makes ginger a powerful weapon against inflammation. Studies have shown that 2 grams of ginger daily can significantly reduce markers of inflammation. Ginger can be used in food, as a tea, or as a supplement.
Rosemary
This wonderful herb is a great source of antioxidants and anti-inflammatory compounds. You can use rosemary in your cooking, or use rosemary essential oil topically. I personally like to put a fresh sprig of rosemary in with my coffee grounds and brew my coffee with rosemary to get all the beneficial oils.
Frankincense
Frankincense has been used across Asia and Africa for centuries for its healing properties. Studies have shown positive results using Frankincense to lower inflammation in people with arthritis. Frankincense can be taken as a pill, but can also be used as a cream or resin and applied directly to the area of pain.
Takeaway
Now that you are aware of the potential adverse effects of NSAID use, I hope you feel empowered to use herbs as remedies. Remember: the best way to get relief from inflammation is to prevent it in the first place, which you can do via a healthy diet and lifestyle.
References:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26400429
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3011108/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21139128
What Are The Strategies to Treat Fibromyalgia and The Firbo Summit | Podcast #291
Hey, guys! Here’s Dr. Justine Marchegiani and Dr. Roger Murphree talking about things to be checked and pointed out in dealing with fibromyalgia.
Fibromyalgia is a disorder characterized by widespread musculoskeletal pain with fatigue, sleep, memory, and mood issues. Dr. Roger shared that the frustrating thing is there are still doctors who don’t believe that it exists, and those who do, don’t understand it.
Some issues reported by most patients with fibromyalgia include pain, lack of sleep, tired/fatigue, brain fog, restless leg syndrome, adrenal fatigue, and more.
Watch the entire podcast to learn more about this disorder and interesting approaches on how to fix it!
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
0:38 Diagnosing Fibromyalgia
10:13 Approaching the Issue
20:14 Unique Treatments
25:16 Infection Pattern with Patients
32:50 Compromised Immune System
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hey there, it’s Dr. Justin Marchegiani with Dr. Rodger Murphree here. We’re going to be chatting about fibromyalgia and the fibro summit coming your way. Dr. Roger, welcome to the podcast How we doing?
Dr. Rodger Murphree: Hey Dr. Justin, so glad to be here. Thanks for having me. This is gonna be fun.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I’m really excited to be part of your summit as well. That summit will be coming out, I think on September 28. So we’ll put some links down below so you guys can get subscribed to the summit. So let’s talk about fibromyalgia. It’s kind of one of these, you know, subjective diagnoses, right? A doctor kind of comes in and you and they do these like they look for different tender spots. How does that diagnosis work?
Dr. Rodger Murphree: Well, you know, the frustrating, frustrating thing about Fibromyalgia is there’s still doctors who don’t believe it exists. There’s, there’s still some out there, have that mindset and those that do don’t really understand it, they don’t really know how to treat it and then tell their patients to learn to live with it and the diagnosis is one of elimination. So there’s no really definitive Lead test after that will show you right. And it typically takes you know, three or four years and half a dozen to a dozen doctors before you finally get the diagnosis. And you’re right it typically is a you know, it’s a hands on type of examination but but after they’ve done all the the other workup to rule out, you know rheumatoid arthritis or any type of autoimmune disease or Ms. And then eventually you get the, you know, the diagnosis of fibromyalgia and you kind of stuck with that because it’s kind of a good thing and a bad thing. I mean, it’s good to finally get a diagnosis. But once you do get that diagnosis, it follows you forever. And a lot of times it didn’t serve you very well.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, totally. So you go online and you look you can you can get a an image of all the different kind of tender pain spots that they’ll they’ll kind of rub gently and they’re kind of looking for this central allodynia this pain that’s, that’s it’s, it’s not proportional to the amount of physical stimulus stimulus you’re putting in when you’re touching these different spots, whether it’s the shoulder, collarbone, neck arm, just kind of the different joint. So the doctors coming in, they’re going to be running maybe, AMA, HLAB 27, all of these kind of autoimmune markers. If none of them come back, then they’re going to that physical examination. And if there’s pain in those spots at all right, then then that’s kind of the diagnosis, but it’s not really helpful outside of the fact that you know, you got it, but we got this kind of path in the road, we have functional medicine, and we have all of these biologics and pain meds. So what happens next?
Dr. Rodger Murphree: Well, you know, the thing is, once you get the diagnosis, oftentimes, I think people have a sigh of relief, because they, they think, oh, at least you know, I’m not crazy because a lot of times, they’re made to feel they they’re lazy, crazy or just a hypochondriac. And nothing can be further from the truth. I mean, nobody would want to make this kind of stuff up that you can’t sleep. You know, he had this diffuse, sometimes disabling pain, no energistics, exhausted, irritable bowel, restless leg syndrome, low moods, anxiety. You know, nobody wants to Make that kind of stuff up but totally the diagnosis then unfortunately what happens is you get past from more you know another doctor you know, you get you get on this medical merry go round. And every doctor you come in contact with, if you mentioned any symptom, any condition, they’re going to try to sweep your fibromyalgia symptoms underneath the Fibromyalgia rug and tell you Oh, yeah, the, you know, the, the stomach pain that you have. That’s fibromyalgia. Oh, yeah, the, you know, the thrush the chip on your tongue. Oh my gosh, there it is the migraines and you know, all these all these are warning signs or symptoms and symptoms or just telling you, you know, telling us that there’s something under underlying this symptom that is, you know, where’s the we need to be looking for the causes, and not treating the symptoms, but unfortunately, once you get that diagnosis, really most doctors just happy to change and learn to live with it, they’re not going to keep looking for the underlying causes.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I tell my patients this all the time, like most of the time conventional medicine, I, they’re looking at the downstream symptoms, and typically a diagnosis is a bunch of symptoms that are in an organized fashion, right with a lot of the central allodynia pain, right? That’s your fibromyalgia, if it’s if it’s autoimmune type of pain, where there’s autoimmune markers, maybe that’s rheumatoid arthritis. So you’re just looking for these different symptoms and in these different pattern and once you have those symptoms, they give you an ICD 10 code and then from there, they can prescribe your drug. Now, Fibromyalgia tends to come together a lot of times with chronic fatigue so you get people that are sore, and also tired. Now, we know in functional medicine, that there may be other kind of root causes upstream like with the gut or with the hormones or the adrenals or the thyroid, what are like just the top three like root cause patterns that are upstream that you see are driving a lot of the fibro symptoms downstream.
Dr. Rodger Murphree: Well the main thing Justin is there at this allodynia, which is this low pain threshold, right? For them, their pain is magnified and you and I can go, you know, we can go get a massage, we can shake cans, we can, you know, hug our partners, we can do things that you know wouldn’t bother us at all but the fibromyalgia patient any that stimulation, which could send them over the top that so pain is magnified? Yes. But that pain is coming from it can be from wear and tear osteoarthritis or osteoporosis, bone loss, it can be from scar tissue. Past surgeries, it can be from nerve damage, it can be from elevated blood sugar issues, but they have central sensitivity pain syndrome, which means their nervous system is over ramped up, and pain is magnified. And the place to start with these individuals is you’ve got to raise the pain threshold and the best place to do That is making sure that they have plenty of serotonin. So brain hormones, you know you’re familiar with your serotonin level, the higher your pain threshold, and the higher your serotonin level, the less anxious you’re less depress your more mental clarity app. And less likely you have are to have IBS because you have more serotonin receptors in your intestinal tract than you do in your brain. So the place to start for these individuals is number one making sure that they have plenty of serotonin because anybody that has true true fibromyalgia, they’re going to be deficient in serotonin and that’s one of the main driving factors of the underlying symptoms that they have.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s interesting because serotonin we know comes from the amino acid tryptophan right? So I find common thread is going to be poor digestion, in a lot of these fibro patients. So poor digestion, maybe low stomach acid, low enzyme, maybe their diets poor, maybe They’re not eating enough protein, maybe they kind of were on a vegan vegetarian kick. Maybe there’s a gut infection that’s impeding digestion as well. How much do you see digestion? Being an impediment as well as maybe digestive infections too?
Dr. Rodger Murphree: Well, it’s certainly a big part of it, for sure. And in the Fibromyalgia community, what we see is that genetically some of them at our disadvantage, just the way God made them. Yeah. Convert trip to fan into five, proxy trip to fan they have a block and they’re kind of around kind of an enzyme pathway. Yeah. And because that conversion is not made, they’re at a disadvantage. So they’re, they’re low and seratonin. Certainly, you know, you
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: B6 playing a big role in that too?
Dr. Rodger Murphree: Yeah, so the cofactors as you bring up, you know, to make seratonin you need tryptophane, which turns into hydroxytryptophan, the B vitamins in particular B2 B3, and then any vitamin C and magnesium that’s what Yes, you know, No one has an antidepressant deficiency, you know, yeah. But you could have a five HTP deficiency or B vitamin deficiency and yes, you probably have a magnesium deficiency, if you have fibromyalgia, but the place to start for these individuals is making sure we get that serotonin level up. And when we do that, we see their pain threshold goes up. Absolutely.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I see that a lot. I run a lot of organic acid tests, and I’ll look at five hydroxy and dolo acetate, and usually that’s very high or very low. So there’s usually a burning or a total depletion issue there. And I’ve never seen a fibro patient with really good digestion. There’s always some bloating, some gas and cebo or a gut infection. I almost always see that. Now what’s your take on beta endorphin? Because beta endorphin is kind of our natural opiate, and it’s made from 19 amino acids. So I mean, obviously, we see this amino acid kind of trend there any feedback on beta endorphin?
Dr. Rodger Murphree: Yeah, one of the things that you don’t have a patient’s do they fill out in the new patient questionnaire, they’ll have a brain function questionnaire, little survey and it across the board, it shows that they’re low in serotonin, but then they may be deficient in dopamine and opioids and some of these other things that show that they have other amino acid deficiencies besides five HTP. Bingo. No, no. So it definitely shows up. That’s a pattern that we see that they’ve Yes, deficient in these amino acids for, you know, whether it’s genetics, or you know, poor diet, or there’s something that’s compromising their ability to be able to absorb these nutrients like SIBO, or leaky gut or some type of bacterial overgrowth.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah so my strategy, I’m curious to get your so my strategy is I try to figure out a way to get the sympathetic nervous system in check, because most of the time, the adrenals is that kind of gateway between, you know, the sympathetic nervous system. It’s kind of how that when you interpret stress, you’re making adrenaline, you’re making cortisol and when you have that level of stress, you’re going to be burning up a lot of those neurotransmitters. So I try to get the adrenals under control, and then I’ll I work on supporting more of those amino acids, more of those cofactors. I try to get tests so I can get specific. What is the root issue? And I’m just curious to know your take on that. How did what’s your kind of out of the gates approach?
Dr. Rodger Murphree: Well, there’s for me from doing this for 20 years, found there’s four key things that have to really be addressed. Because if you got 15 tax in your foot, and two or three tax, you’re not going to notice a difference. And that’s-
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: A great analogy. Excellent analogy.
Dr. Rodger Murphree: You know, what they’re doing is they’re taking resveratrol, or, you know, they’re taking coq10 or tumeric and those things, those are great. But if you don’t pull out a bunch of tacks real quick, you’re never going to see a difference. So totally. It’s the analogy that we’re all born with a stress coping savings account. And in that stress coping savings account, we have certain chemicals that allows us to be able to deal with stress. So we have serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine, cortisol, DAGA, Panasonic acid, cortisol, these things Are there and anytime we get under stress, we’re using these chemicals to deal with stress. But those who have fibromyalgia, they haven’t bankrupted their stress coping savings account. So they have this deficit. And then when they, you know, get up to face the day, they’re already done, you know, they just don’t have those chemicals they need. So the first thing that’s gonna happen is we got to replenish that stress coping Satan’s count. And that is done by deep, restorative Delta wave sleep. So if they’re not getting a good night’s sleep on a consistent basis, they’re going to have many of the symptoms that we you know that we associate fiber Imagine if you’re not getting deep restorative sleep, your inflammatory chemicals are increased by 40%. They’re going to have more pain. If they’re not getting deeper short asleep, their pain threshold goes down so pains magnified. They’re going to obviously going to be tired gonna have fatigue, brain fog, which is a common symptom of these individuals. Eero bow, you have more as I mentioned, more serotonin receptors. In your test or trial, you’re doing your brain. restless leg syndrome starts to show up. Once they can get a consistent deep restorative sleep, then they’re going to see that many of those tacks we can start to pull those out. So the first place to start is deep restorative sleep, making sure they’re getting plenty of serotonin. And then the next place is, as you already mentioned, is the adrenal fatigue. But because they get a good night’s sleep, and they start to feel better, then even though they’re cautioned not to do that, do this, you know, in my book, they’ll go out and do things hadn’t been able to do in years, and then they’ll have a fibro flare and they’ll be back in bed because they don’t have the stamina, or resiliency to stress, physical stress, mental stress, real or imagined. And so if they don’t fix their stress coping glands, the adrenal guess, be vulnerable. The third thing is in your already mentioned up mentioned this astutely. You, you’ve got to fix any kind of gi issues. Yeah, amongst with digestion or problems or elimination, you know, problems absorbing in every fibromyalgia patient I’ve ever worked with last 20 years. There’s something there whether that’s SIBO leaky gut, yeast overgrowth, parasites are just reflux and malabsorption. They’re not absorbing, they’re huge. That’s that’s got to be fixed. The last thing, which really could easily be the first thing, it’s you’ve got to lay the foundation with high doses, but the right combination of vitamins, minerals, amino acid and central fatty acids, because if you don’t have these building blocks, you can’t make these hormones and chemicals that they need to write themselves. In. Now, most people have tried a multivitamin. They tried this, they tried that. But what they’ve taken is, is so inferior to what they need, they’re they’re looking And things like, a Centrum silver or one a day.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, yeah.
Dr. Rodger Murphree: Which is you know, based on the RTA the recommended disease allowance, right? Yeah, it’s just enough to get, you know, keep you from getting scurvy, or berry berry, it’s not gonna, you know, provide optimal nutrients that you need to be healthy is, you know, so So it’s this, this four pillars that I think are just crucial you got to get those. And then, you know really once you do that you’ve pulled out a lot of tax, you may be pulled out 10 or 12 tax. Now there’s three texts that are still left, and they’re still giving you trouble. But at least you’ve made this dramatic impact. And then you’ve got to go look for what are some of the underlying other underlying conditions that may be driving the symptoms like, you know, problem with their thyroid?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, it’s really interesting because not all the tax create the same amount of pain. So sometimes it’s the eight tax you pull that out, so Whoa, a really big improvement and sometimes you pull them out. And then the improvements delayed like it’s like, oh, I’m starting to see a five or 10% improvement one to two months later. So it’s interesting. Where the compliance factor like really getting the patient’s mindset on board is is crucial because it’s never going to be a meet every now and then that you get a miracle tax. Sometimes it’s too late. So you got to paint that big picture and compliance is big. And when you talk about some of the nutrients, you do have a really good multivitamin that you formulate or what what should people be looking in their multis at certain doses at certain the quality of the nutrients? What should they be looking for, Dr. Roger?
Dr. Rodger Murphree: Yeah, so years ago, when I start treating Fibromyalgia we had I had a medical clinic where we had five medical doctors work for me. And we did high doses of IV therapy. So we did Myers cocktails back then. Yeah. And we found by doing that, Justin that if we gave them these vitamins and minerals, that they slept better, they had less pain, he had more energy, they had better mental clarity. They just felt better. But it wasn’t practical for people every day couldn’t do it hooked up to an IV. Yes, years ago, I developed this thing called the CFS fibro pack, which has high doses of vitamins, minerals, amino acids and essential fatty acids in there and some other things like malic acid, magnesium, potassium sparks a to help drop the cellular energy, it but you can find something, you know, similar for you but, but that is the cornerstone of what my patients take. They take that, as well as some other supplements like a good digestive enzyme, an over the counter adrenal cortex, supplement and then the five HTP that makes up this thing called the jumpstart protocols, that people who read my book, they’re encouraged to try that on their own and get as far as they can before they reach out to me to set up a phone console.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Interesting. And you mentioned the serotonin which you mentioned lowers that pain threshold which is which is really important. But we know serotonin also is that precursor to melatonin. Which helps to sleep and you mentioned the Delta wave in the sleep. So it’s kind of like, everything’s kind of connected. It’s not just like, one web, it’s like you hit one web, it moves the whole spiderweb. So you Okay, you you increase the pain threshold, and then you help the sleep. And then the sleep helps the adrenals and the adrenals help the inflammation, and it just keeps on spiraling.
Dr. Rodger Murphree: Yeah, it’s all connected. You know, it’s a myriad connections there. Yeah, the five HTP increases your natural sleep hormone melatonin by 200%. So that was when I started doing the research on that. Well, it’s been two decades ago, and found that correlation, it was a no brainer to start putting my patients on that. And then thankfully, along with making the serotonin, it really encourages them to be able to wind down and be able to get a good night’s sleep. Now there’s some other things typically have to add to that sometimes adding some additional melatonin to the five HTP. But the five HTP has been extremely helpful for these folks.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And if you’re not getting I mean, if you’re not getting the optimal results regarding sleep, I mean, imagine you may keep the five there to help with the serotonin so the pain improves but Wendy added melatonin to the mix. When does that happen?
Dr. Rodger Murphree: Bite promote sleep protocol it’s they start off with 100 milligrams of five HTP 30 minutes for bed with a little bit of grape juice doesn’t take much, but the grape juice is going to cause the body to release insulin to help pull that serotonin pass the blood brain barrier. Yeah, going to the stomach just a little trick. And then if they don’t fall asleep within 30 minutes, then that in sleep through the night, the next night they go to 200 milligrams and then they need to they get a 300 milligrams, but they get up to 300 milligrams and they’re still not falling asleep or they’re not staying asleep. That’s when I would start adding the melatonin preferably sublingual melatonin somewhere, you know three milligrams or so and they and they can increase that up each night up to about 12 milligrams and, and then hopefully that does the trick. If it doesn’t. Then I would add things like gamma means butyric acid GABA. So I have a little sleep form that I put together that it’s combination of GABA and l theanine, ashwagandha and delirium, and passion, passion flower, that can be taken to really calms them down before bed. But it’s even more useful for those individuals who wake up at, you know, two, three o’clock in the morning can’t go back to sleep, they can take this product called Delta sleep, or something similar. And it allow them to fall back to sleep within, you know, 10 minutes or so, and it doesn’t make them feel hungover, dopey or sleepy The next day, like some of the prescription medications would.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Tat’s great. I think we’re just really dropping a lot of key clinical pearls here. So if you’re a patient and you’re have these kind of issues, try to glom on to one or two of these things. I think it’s really important especially if you’re in that Fibromyalgia camp, you really want to work with the practitioner because there’s a lot of as Dr. Roger gave the example of tax you got to pull out and these are a couple of one or two key tax, but there’s always a Plan B a Plan C a plan D, it always seems easy when everything works with Plan A the first time around, but I think Dr. Roger will probably agree a lot of times you have to dig deep into that tool basket with a lot of other plans too. Would you agree?
Dr. Rodger Murphree: Oh, absolutely. But I think you’ve got to lay the foundation for what, what trips people up with fibromyalgia and those trying to treat Fibromyalgia is they try to put the cart in front of the horse, you know, is you know, there’s such a unique individual. And a lot of times they may go to an integrative doctor or maybe a function doctor. And, and he or she will, okay, let’s put you on biomechanical hormone replacement therapy because that’s, you know, as a female, it’s, you know, that’s a lot of times what they do, but that may not work and usually does it you to me, these four steps that I just mentioned, that
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Do you mind if we repeat the steps one more time, what they are?
Dr. Rodger Murphree: Deeper store to sleep. You got to replenish your stress coping stages account. And the way you do that you you make deposits into your stress coping savings account by going into deep store to sleep. So you’ve got your peritonei level up. So five HTP and then the second one is you got to fix adrenal fatigue every everybody as far as adrenal fatigue, so I use adrenal cortex glandulars for my patients. And then number three was digestive issues. I put everybody on digestive enzyme and then if they need other treatments for cebo, leaky gut or things we’ll deal with that. And then the last one was a good high dose, multivitamin mineral formula with essential fatty acids Fishel, malic acid, extra magnesium, which is so important, but those four things provide the foundation really to build upon it really, you know what it does? It’s, if you kind of think of you know, if you got this complicated jigsaw puzzle. And you just throw all the pieces out on the table. And until you get the corner of the puzzle, right? You’re, you could just be looking forever to put the pieces together. But once you get the corner, now everything starts to come together, you can build that puzzle. So the first four things, make up one core in a corner, I’m sorry. And then the puzzle starts to come together. But you may have to, you know, find another piece of the puzzle that’s, that’s eluding you could be a problem in your thyroid. Could be a problem with yeast overgrowth could be a problem of food allergies. But if you don’t get that first corner, boy, you’re going to struggle, you’re really going to struggle.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Totally agree that makes a lot of sense. Now, when you’re working with patients, are you testing their adrenals? And it sounds like you’re finding a lot of low cortisol in your patients. Is that true?
Dr. Rodger Murphree: Yeah. So I think you know, we These individuals are very complicated ideally, although I do have programs where they can try to do it themselves to talk about that in the book. Ideally you want to test I mean, you’re not trained in functional medicine. You know, you don’t want to guess you really want to try to laser in find out where the key linchpins for helping these folks and you want to know what’s going on. So yeah, when I’m when I’m doing a four sample saliva test for their adrenals, I see it’s all over the place. So it’s low. In the morning, it’s bottomed out and sky high first thing, you know, because they’re not yet now drive that, that level up. But it’s about really balancing that out because it’s, you know, very well, a lot of times we’ll see that there. DAGA is it then of course, our levels, okay. But their DAGA is really high. And that’s a sign that the body’s trying to hang on. Yeah, but it was going to bottom out right. Or they’re gay is bottomed out and of course, all levels are bottomed out. So you had treat both of those, or you may find, like I do a lot of patients is that they have a low cortisol in the morning. And then as the day goes on, you know, it should, it should keep going lower. But for, for these individuals, their cortisol level actually spikes towards bedtime. So there’s like they’re catching their second window.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And they just rhythm almost.
Dr. Rodger Murphree: All day they’re exhausted. And then about nine o’clock they catch the second wind and like, Oh, well, I haven’t been able to do anything all day. Let me go clean up the kitchen or straighten up or you know, wherever it is, and then they miss the window of opportunity to get in bed on time and now they’re, you know, they really just continue to throw their sleep wake cycle into further Helter Skelter.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That makes sense. Do you test any of the total cortisol? Do you do any of the urinary cortisol as well to get a window into free as well as total?
Dr. Rodger Murphree: I don’t. I don’t do that and find it. I guess. Probably just from doing this for so long, I know that the majority, I would say when I say the majority, I mean 98% of them are gonna have a problem with their adrenals. And if I can just make sure what the pattern is, then I can on the right supplements that will you know, that will correct that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. What also do you see in regards to an infection pattern like pate with patients? I’m seeing h pylori blastocyst is hominis. Sometimes you see things like epstein barr, maybe even a Lyme issue, what kind of infections Do you see? And it sounds like you kind of have that priority. You hit those four pillars that you mentioned. Right? adrenals and, and the nutrients and the sleep and etc. And then you kind of do dive into infections later, is that part of when you’re addressing the gut stuff? Where do the infections come in? And what are the top maybe three or five infections that you see that play a role with fibromyalgia?
Dr. Rodger Murphree: Probably the most consistent one is yeast overgrowth. So I test everybody for yeast overgrowth, test, everybody for parasites. blastocyst is hominis definitely shows SIBO is definitely a thing that is for whatever reason, you know, I think you kind of run into these patterns where you you know you get one and you get two then you get you know dozens I’m at a time. Mold issues certainly starting to show up. But definitely infections are there. I’m really careful not to go after them. Initially, certainly not aggressively because we Fibromyalgia they, they they can’t handle the stress they bankrupted their stress coping chemicals, and they bankrupted their stress coping gland. So stress is magnified. I don’t want to get aggressive on treating yeast or SIBO or some of these things that show up until I get them going into deeper storage of sleep. Start working on their dreams and then yeah, absolutely. Then you have to look at you know, definitely h pylori shows up as well. You have to start dealing with those because that’s something that’s going to be leftover that’s going to create, if it’s, you know, if it’s if it’s leaky, God is you know, that’s going to create More information and more pains. Yes, with at some point.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I just really wanted to highlight that for the listeners because this is probably the biggest mistake I see with a lot of my patients and people that I connect with online is we just live in this generation that’s antibiotic driven. Oh, you have an infection, staph strep STD, here’s an antibiotic knock it out. And that can be stressful on the body. Number one, it wipes out the microbiome which affects the immune system, gut permeability, but it’s stressful going after an infection. And when you don’t have the reserves, your sleeps already amassed, you’re nutritionally deficient, you can’t digest that’s like a big stress ball on that bucket or another five tacks underneath that foot. So I’m really glad that you highlighted that.
Dr. Rodger Murphree: Yeah, you know, and I think that’s the thing is what you want to do with fibromyalgia you want to try to find and fix the underlying causes, because really, you know, Fibromyalgia is just a name. It’s all it is, is a name given to a group of symptoms that people have in common, and we call it fibromyalgia. And so if you can start to find and fix each underlying cause Eventually you’re going to get your life back and that may take you know, that may take different things but certainly the God is you know, that’s number four you have to you know, you have to fix that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Totally. And you mentioned a couple of different things and I know the protocols are going to be specific to each individual person and where they’re at. I get that so people that are listening, I want you to just talk about do you have like a couple of your favorite herbs on the gut side and also do you have a couple of your favorite herbs on the virus side and how much do viruses play a role in this whole thing?
Dr. Rodger Murphree: You know, as far as I don’t use a lot of herbals I do use some but I don’t use it. He is some may think think that that in the fiber match community. A lot of them have chemical sensitivities have issues. A careful what you what you do in the having said that I also really recommend everybody a food allergy test because food allergies, right masqueraders but for digestion, the first thing I do is put them on digestive enzymes or on the team You know, make sure that we we start from the beginning, you know, make sure they’re digesting their food.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s key. Yeah.
Dr. Rodger Murphree: If they have issues with with yeast overgrowth, or even SIBO then I’ll turn to things like bio seed, which has oregano, and berberine and some of these golden still herbals in their-
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Black walnut, ekinesia. Yep.
Dr. Rodger Murphree: But I don’t use a tremendous amount of herbals, just for the fact that I really find that using the right doses of vitamins and minerals, essential fatty acids and amino acids typically start to turn these individuals around, you know, but but definitely there is a place for for berberine and undecylenic acid and caprylic acid. I mean, there’s definitely those can be incredibly helpful for these folks.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: How about the virus stuff? Do you use any natural antiviral supports, and what viruses Do you see in And what are your like top three on the anti viral side?
Dr. Rodger Murphree: You know, it’s interesting that I don’t see a lot of viruses, which really surprises people when I say that I used to more so than I do now, let me let me explain why that is. You know, people think of fibromyalgia is being driven by a virus, and they can’t have viruses. But if you look at you know, Fibromyalgia is on one end of this clothesline, and chronic fatigue syndrome is on the other end of the clothesline and sometimes they get lumped together and you can have both, but if you look at true fibromyalgia and true chronic fatigue syndrome, with true fibromyalgia, their symptoms are number one pain, right, but they can’t sleep and they have no energy and, and then if you look at the true chronic fatigue syndrome, they can have trouble with their sleep and they do have achy flu like pain. And obviously the number one symptom is no energy, so fatigue, but the difference between the two is that those are Fibromyalgia don’t necessarily have anything wrong with your immune system. Those with chronic fatigue syndrome all have some type of immune dynamic, something that is, you know that is compromised that so that they’re always fighting off some type of infection. And absolutely in those individuals, you got to go after that, find out what that is and use things like lacto Fearon, or using thymus extract some of these things in Oilers system that can be incredibly, incredibly beta one, three glucan some of these things that I use for these individual, but you know, it’s odd because over the years, for whatever reason, I have attracted less chronic fatigue syndrome patients in the last probably 10 years, than I have fibro to me fibro, and I hate to be careful how I say this. Yeah, Ramalgyia is I won’t say it’s easy but for me it’s it’s there’s a system that seems to work chronic takes syndrome. Once you start working with that, if you’re not careful, you open up Pandora’s box and you find that not only is it viruses, but then you also have parasites and you have Lyme and many things that you mentioned, that tends to be more down on this end of the clothesline with property syndrome, than it does fibro.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And you’re differentiating that between the fact your fibro have the central allodynia that’s just the wound up nervous system the pain spots at the joints and throughout the body, but they don’t really have the energy problems or energy still pretty good is that the differentiating factor?
Dr. Rodger Murphree: Know the difference because we’ve thought about them and they have many of the same symptoms as those with chronic fatigue syndrome. Yeah, separates and you can be anywhere along the clothesline, you know, but what separates the two is that those with chronic fatigue syndrome always have a compromised immune system.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And your by your saying compromised immune system, so they the fibro patients still might have fatigue, but you’re just not seeing what a diagnosed autoimmune condition along with fibro or they get sick a lot. How are you defining compromised immune system?
Dr. Rodger Murphree: So for those who have fibromyalgia, they, they normally don’t have problems with random sore throats. They don’t have swollen lymph glands. If we test them, they don’t show antibodies to epstein barr virus, or cytomegalovirus kraftig syndrome, you’re going to see elevated epstein barr virus cytomegalovirus herpes viruses, they’re going to get random sore throats out of the blue. They’re going to have palpable lymph nodes, you know, they’re gonna be swollen glands. Oftentimes, they have issues with laryngitis, they just lose their voice for days at a time because they get so exhausted. With fibro, you can have some of that. But that’s not the norm in kraftig syndrome. That’s the norm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So I’m just trying to wrap my head around this because the diagnoses are kind of a little bit flaky. So if these fibro patients still have they’re still really tired, right? What’s the conventional different like, if you’re a conventional Medical Doctor, what makes you diagnose this person with chronic fatigue with the immune stuff, but these people over here without the immune stuff, they’re still tired. What what allows them to get that chronic fatigue diagnosis on the conventional side?
Dr. Rodger Murphree: I think typically it comes down to the doctor that they see. So that’s more familiar with complex syndrome, they’re probably going to get that diagnosis than they would fibro. If you said doctor this more for me with fibromyalgia, they’re going to get that diagnosis. And right now you got even though there’s not a lot, you probably got more doctors who are familiar at least with fibromyalgia, they don’t really know how to treat it. Then they have conflict syndrome that that illness, chronic fatigue syndrome is something that most doctors really don’t know anything about.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And there’s another name for for fibromyalgia over in Europe, right it’s the mycologia with it with the name Britain Europe.
Dr. Rodger Murphree: Yeah, what now for [inaudible] syndrome is myalgic encephalitis so with us.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, okay. And so it sounds like to me it’s not necessarily the diagnosis that matters it’s more the immune symptoms of antibodies to these different viruses and then that chronic immune reaction lymph nodes chronically sick is that is that kind of if we kind of really boil it down is that more specific you think?
Dr. Rodger Murphree: Yeah, but I think we got to be careful because I think there’s a misconception that Fibromyalgia is an autoimmune disease ever seen that in any in you know, we’ve been looking for the smoking gun, it’s not there. So I don’t believe Fibromyalgia autoimmune disease. We don’t know if chronic fatigue syndrome is it probably could have an autoimmune component to it. We haven’t found that yet either.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So a lot of thyroid autoimmune people that have fiber though?
Dr. Rodger Murphree: Now that I was gonna say is see a ton of autoimmune hashimotos thyroiditis. So with in the patients that I work with F5 about 70% of them have something wrong with their thyroid. Many of those have Hashimotos many, many of those with hashimotos have never been properly diagnosed. So they have the, you know, the festering symptoms they had for 5-10 years. No one’s ever checked their antibodies or thyroid antibodies. So that they never knew they had it. But yeah, definitely that, but you know, I don’t see. I don’t see lupus. I don’t see rheumatoid. I don’t see sjogrens I don’t, it’s there. It can be, you know, could be could be a companion to the Fibromyalgia but it’s not what’s driving the fibromyalgia.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, cuz I see did you see patients though with a lot of the hashimotos and the fibro and of course I do find that like gluten. Cutting gluten out really helps a lot of the the pain symptoms and I know gluten plays a big role of gut permeability. So even though the research may not show that I have a sneaking suspicion there has to be something underneath the hood, or we wouldn’t see a lot of these connections. When you address them, they improve prove a lot of those fibro symptoms.
Dr. Rodger Murphree: Yeah, you know, and you know, that’s one of the big conundrums for fibromyalgia. I think there’s just so many things that are wrong.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes, the hard part.
Dr. Rodger Murphree: Can write itself the way that you and I were trained in chiropractic school that innate intelligence. You know, we’re born with this incredibly inborn healing Dynamo system, that normally we don’t have to think about taking 12 breaths per minute or pumping blood to 60 miles of arteries and veins, we just write these things. But with fibromyalgia, those systems get get compromised the hypothalamus, the pituitary adrenal HPA axis, when it gets under too much stress, it can’t regulate these different systems. And now because of that, you see, so many symptoms start to show up, because so many systems are not working like they’re supposed to. And that’s incredibly challenging for the doctor that wants to try to try fibromyalgia, most most work because it’s too complicated. And it’s incredibly challenging for the patient. Because where do you start?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: No, I totally agree. And you’ve done a great job during the podcast just to kind of outline a couple of the really good pillars. Obviously we have the fibroid, the fibro summit coming up in the next two weeks on the 28th. So really excited. We’re gonna put the links down below as well. I see a book on the shelf back there. Is that your book? Would you mind put it on screen?
Dr. Rodger Murphree: Yeah. So this is my Treating and Beating Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome book. It’s in his fifth edition, the sixth now? I didn’t November so yeah, labor of love. You know, for the last 20 years, you know, it’s been my mission to help those with fibromyalgia, learn how to live healthier, happier, more productive lives because you know what they’re being told right now Justin is just learning to live with it. But you know, I want to learn to live with chronic pain, no energy, brain fog, insomnia, restless leg syndrome, irritable bowel mean. That’s it. That’s not living that’s existing. So, you know, the fibro summit is an opportunity for individuals with fibromyalgia, to get a breath of fresh air, sort of set off all the doom and gloom out there. They actually can learn from people like yourself, she did a fantastic interview, all about thyroid, we did a deep dive into this interview. So people like yourself are sharing incredible information, that if you have fibro or even if you just want to be healthier, there’s so much we share in the summit, about mold and parasites and adrenal fatigue and insomnia and leaky gut and gluten intolerance and food allergies, huge. If you’ve just can’t get a few little key things from these interviews. It may be the missing piece of the puzzle that you need to put it all together and get your life back.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I mean, that’s awesome. Now, if patients want to get a hold of you, they’re like, great, I’m going to get the book. I’m going to get the summit. I’m going to start applying some of this stuff, but I want to work with you. How did patients work with you?
Dr. Rodger Murphree: Yeah. So appreciate that. They can go to yourfibrodoctor.com and there’s free videos in there, blogs, free protocol and a tremendous amount of free information so I encourage you to check out, see if it resonates with you. If it does, you’re on the right track.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s great. We’ll put the links down below for the book, for the summit, for Dr. Roger’s website. Dr Roger, anything else you want to leave the listeners with? Do you have a youtube channel or a podcast? Anything else people can get more info about you?
Dr. Rodger Murphree: Yeah so we do have a youtube channel and you’ll see that on the website, a blog, both of those podcasts coming soon. And you’re going to be one of my first guests by the way. We’ll be coming soon and I just want to say thank you. I want to thank you for for everything that you do because the information you’re sharing is so needed and without people like yourself taking the time, making the time because I know you’re busy just like I am and you’re dedicated to getting the the message out there, that you you know that you don’t want to be just treating symptoms. You really want to be finding and fixing these underlying causes whether you have fibromyalgia or you have migraine headaches or type 2 diabetes and your podcast which I’ve been checking out here recently is just fantastic. So thanks for what you do.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Thank you so much Dr Roger. Really appreciate it. And people listen to so much information here especially if you’re coming at this with fibro or chronic fatigue, it’s hard to grab a lot of these things. So just rewind it, listen to it again, try to grab one thing that Dr Roger said. Try to get the book, get access to the information and make sure you get on that summit. Amazing great speakers there. Dr Roger thank you so much for being a part of today’s podcast.
Dr. Rodger Murphree: Thank you Justin so appreciate it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Thank you.