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.
The Top 5 Reasons Why Your Estrogen Levels are High – Men & Women!
Let’s talk about the top 5 reasons why your estrogen levels are high. We’re going to break them down today.
WHAT ARE ESTROGENS?
First, let’s look at the 3 major kinds of estrogens: E1 or estrone, E2 or estradiol, and E3 or estriol. In a woman’s regular cycle, it’s usually estradiol we’re talking about. When you start shifting to more menopausal and the ovary stops working, you start getting more estriol. The adrenals help in kick in a lot of DHEA and you make more estriol. Estradiol is more of the growth factor type of estrogen and estriol is a weaker estrogen.
WHERE CAN WE FIND ESTROGENS?
- PLASTICS. You’ll get it when the plastic is warm like in a microwave or out of a plastic water bottle especially if it’s in the car and the sun is hitting it or it’s outside. That’s why you want a good stainless steel or glass water bottle if you’re going to go outside or leaving it in the sun. The microwave heat and the radiation is going to cause a big release of plastic chemicals there, the xenoestrogens. One of the big ones are the phthalates but also BPA. There are other types of BPAs that are new which are supposedly safe but there are still estrogen-like compounds there as well. These plastics can affect women and men as well. Men are actually going to be more affected by them because men aren’t used to having estrogen in their environment and getting a whole bunch is going to be a problem.
- PESTICIDES. These tend to have an estrogenic quality to them and if you’re eating foods that are not organic, you’re definitely going to be getting organochlorines and various pesticides in your environment.
- PHYTOESTROGENS. These are found in soy. For example, I had a vegan-vegetarian patient. We ran a Dutch sex hormone panel on her and her estradiol was through the roof and really high. Phytoestrogens can be a big one, so soy may be a problem. With vegan-vegetarian, there’s a lot of phony protein consumption like fake meat kind of stuff such as the Beyond burger where there are a lot of soy and estrogen-like compounds in there. There are also hormones in meat. You have to make sure you get antibiotic-free, hormone-free, and ideally organic and pasture-fed or if you’re on the Whole Foods scale, step 4 or step 5 is ideal. Step 2 is at least pretty good. Organic means no pesticides, no hormones, and also the food they’re eating has no pesticides or hormones, too.
- HIGH LEVELS OF INSULIN. Too much carbs drive high levels of insulin because insulin responds to a high level of blood sugar. The blood sugars in your bloodstream go up and your pancreas comes in. The beta cells make a bunch of insulin to bring it down and bring it into the cellar and converted to fat. So, high levels of insulin upregulate an enzyme in men called aromatase that converts testosterone, the male hormones, to estrogen which becomes a problem. Now, in women, a similar thing happens but it’s the exact opposite or the big switch. Their estrogen is converted to testosterone. So, women can actually get more androgen-like issues which results in weight gain, acne, hair growth, and sometimes you can see some libido enhancements on that. So, that’s the difference between men and women.
- POOR GUT HEALTH. In the gut, we make healthy good bacteria in our gut that help us absorb a lot of nutrients. A good healthy gut function helps us break down protein for good HDL levels and good enzyme levels. We need these to break down protein into amino acids which are really important for helping us to detoxify. So, detoxification helps us to excrete estrogens that we’re getting exposed to in our environments such as the pesticides, plastic, or something that you don’t even know you’re getting exposed to. Good healthy detoxification will help your body eliminate that, so that’s a good backup plan.Also, if we have a lot of dysbiosis, SIBO and bacterial overgrowth, we can make a lot of what’s called beta-glucuronidase. This is an enzyme that’s made by bad bacteria and it makes it harder to detoxify estrogen. The beta-glucuronidase takes conjugated estrogens and binds it to a protein that helps us excrete it out the body. It takes that protein and it pulls it apart. It takes the handcuffs off that protein, so that allows that estrogen that’s been deconjugated to go back into the body in the general circulation. So, if we have gut issues, that could be a major concern.
HOW DO WE ADDRESS THE PROBLEM?
We need things like cysteine, glycine, glutamine, sulfur amino acids, and things that help us methylate like B12, B6, and folate. So, these nutrients we have to get them in our diet via a good diet. We need to be able to break down and absorb those nutrients, so we need good digestion to get those things in there.
So, in general, we’ve got to make sure we have a good gut bacteria balance. Even fungal overgrowth can cause problems and H. pylori that can lower stomach acid and make it harder to break down nutrition on one side and then it can create this bacterial overgrowth enzyme that makes it hard to detoxify estrogen. These are really important components. If you have any issues with estrogen, you’ve got to look there.
Now, we may want to do things to help detoxify like make lifestyle changes, food changes, pesticide changes, make the changes in regards to plastics, and make in in regards to your diet, your glycemic load, and your gut. That’s a good first step to get to the bottom. There are also different things we may do to help upregulate detoxification to help get that estrogen. It may be activated charcoal or various soluble fibers. It could be things like bentonite clay. We could use things like DIM or Calcium D-Glucarate or glutathione, sulfur amino acids, and vitamin C. They’re all helpful in different situations. We would recommend them based on what’s happening but at least make the diet and lifestyle changes out of the gates.
Top 5 Warning Signs of Hormonal Imbalance
Let’s talk about hormones. I’m going to dive into a couple of clinical pearls that I see in my practice from working with hundreds of female patients and male patients which have a major effect on modulating and supporting hormonal balance.
These are my top 5 hormonal balancing strategies:
- One of the first things in regards to hormones that’s very important, and this may be common sense but I try to give a lot of knowledge guided by experience, is nutritional building blocks for your hormones. Healthy cholesterol from animal products are very essential. Fat soluble vitamins like A, D, K are very important. Lots of good protein are also very important. We have steroid-based hormones that are going to be more cholesterol-based and we have peptide-based hormones that will also be protein-based. So, a lot of these protein, fat-soluble vitamins, and cholesterol especially healthy animal cholesterol are very helpful for hormonal building blocks. If you have a vegan-vegetarian diet or if it’s very nutritionally poor or there’s a lot of processed food, that may set you up with a deficit out of the gates for just hormonal issues. Remember: Make sure the food is nutritionally dense, anti-inflammatory, and low in toxins. That’s vital.
- Now, if you’re having a lot of good nutrition in there, the next thing is we have to make sure we’re able to digest it and break it down. So, if we have a lot of chronic acid reflux, poor digestion, constipation, or bloating, we know we’re not quite breaking down our food and our nutritional building blocks. That could tell us that we may have hormonal issues because we’re not breaking that down. Therefore, those nutrients can’t get into our body or get in our bloodstream and be taken throughout the body to be used as building blocks. So, if we have a bottleneck in the nutritional side, that could be a big factor.
- Stress, whether it’s emotional or chemical stress. If we’re eating foods that are inflammatory or we’re nutritionally deficient and we have a lot of emotional stress, what tends to happen is our hormones kind of go on two sides. We have an anabolic side which are the growth hormones — testosterone, estrogen, and progesterone — that kind of help deal with growing. Then we have anti-inflammatory hormones which would be cortisol and are catabolic. I always put progesterone in that category because progesterone can be used to make more cortisol. So, we have our anti-inflammatory and then our anabolic. In some, they kind of cross over. Insulin, growth hormones, and testosterone are anabolic. The more inflamed we get, we could have high amounts of testosterone because of PCOS and because of inflammation. So, some of these hormones kind of interact and cross over. With men for instance, the more inflamed men get and the more stressed they get, that can actually cause an upregulation of aromatase and could increase their estrogen. So, see how these things kind of cross react. Your hormones are going to be either pro-building or anti-inflammatory to reduce stress. So, for chronically and stressed out state, cortisol is going to rip up your protein and kind of decrease your muscle mass. As a woman, you’ll see your progesterone level start to drop and that will start putting you into an estrogen-dominant state because if we normally got 20 to 25 times estrogen than progesterone, that ratio starts to drop. Even if you still have more progesterone than estrogen, that ratios is going to throw you off and that can create breast tenderness, cramping, mood issues, excessive bleeding/menorrhagia, infertility, a lot of mood issues, back pain, and fluid retention. All those are possible situations.
- Xenoestrogens from the environment and foreign estrogens. They can come from plastic components, pesticides, herbicides or rodenticides, mold toxins, and heavy metals. They are going to disrupt our hormones. The easiest thing is eat organic, avoid plastics, and avoid a lot of the chemicals in the water because a lot of times you can get pesticide runoff or hormone runoff in the water. So, clean water and clean food, and then make sure it’s organic avoid the plastics as well. That’s a big, big thing. Plastics are probably okay if they are in a refrigerator or in a cold environment but ideally if you’re heating stuff up or it’s going to get exposed to light, you want some kind of a Pyrex or a glass container. It’s much better and really important.
- Last but not the least would be just making sure our detoxification pathways are running well. So, if we have good hormonal balance but we can’t detoxify it, then a lot of times we can reabsorb it. So, if we don’t have good sulfur, good glutathione precursors, good B vitamins, good methylation, N-acetylation and glucuronidation, we may have a hard time eliminating. Hence, we are re-absorbing a lot of our hormones. So, being able to break down your proteins, break down your amino acid and your B vitamins is going to help with your body’s ability to eliminate a lot of these toxins.
Summary:
Blood sugar, digestion, stress, xenoestrogens, and toxicity are really big. Those are the big 5 across the board. Try to apply at least one of these things.
Methods To Encourage Good Bowel Movement
You see women on Instagram. They’re all done up with their hair and makeup, and they’re marketing #ad #detox #tea. They have these ridiculous products that they’re remarketing and they’re not talking about poop. The best way to detox is getting poop out. I’m not going to buy detox tea. I’ll get a bit of dandelion or some milk thistle blended in and that’s part of it but unfortunately, detox is co-opted by the marketing industry. Most people don’t even focus on that. They’ll poop once a week but then they take a detox tea and they think they’re doing it correctly.
My whole take on detoxification out of the gates is very simple.
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- Get enough good clean water in your system.
- Make sure you’re digesting your amino acids and all your nutrients well.
Remember: Sulfur-based amino acids run the majority of your detoxification pathways, along with B vitamins. We need good B vitamins, good antioxidants, and good sulfur amino acids. For breaking down those nutrients well, there’s not a bottleneck with ACL levels or enzyme levels. We’re getting enough to clean water. - Not overly stressing our sympathetic nervous system.
Remember: The more we overly stress the adrenals, the sympathetic nervous system decreases that migrating motor complex which are the wavelike contractions that move stool through your intestinal tract, just like you roll up the toothpaste roll at night to get that toothpaste moving through to get your toothpaste out to brush your teeth. Your intestines are the same things.
If you can do those top three things right, you’re on the right track. There may be extra things where we need extra sulfur or extra antioxidants or compounds or binders to help with mold or heavy metal. That’s true and that would be addressed down the road but a lot of detoxification happens hepatobiliary, liver, gallbladder, back into the intestines, and then out the intestinal tract. So, we need to have really good motility and really good absorption of nutrients, and a lot of good clean water to help fuel.
Supplement Suggestion:Use one for liver support that has some gallbladder nutrients built into it. That can be really helpful because with sluggish bowels because a lot of times there’s also sluggish bile production. So, just helping thin the bile whether it’s using supplemental ox bile or methionine, taurine, B powder, whatever else we can do to increase bile flow. That’s going to be helping.
Detox and Diet
This is a low-hanging fruit that your average American is still really, really blowing it on which is just the fact that they’re not doing enough good meats, good fats, and good veggies. Your average American might wake up and do a piece of toast and maybe in 2020 or 2021, it’s an avocado toast but still that’s not the optimal thing for good poop.
Inflammation in the diet can easily mess up the intestinal tract and can easily create inflammation in the gut. That could either move the body more to diarrhea or more to constipation. If we start moving more to constipation, that’s not good. Of course, these foods can stress out the intestinal tract and then when we start creating inflammation in the intestinal tract, then we already have indigestion meaning we don’t have adequate enzymes and acids. So, we’re burping a lot after our meals, food sits longer in our tummy, and a lot of gases are produced because the foods are not being broken down properly. That’s a problem.
We’ve got to really make sure we’re masticating and chewing our food very, very, very well. We’ve got to make sure to increase the surface area for enzymes and acids to work. We also have to make sure not overly hydrating with our meals. So, hydrate 10 minutes or more before meal, and then if you’re consuming a little bit of liquid with a meal, just do it to help with swallowing pills. Don’t do it for hydration purposes. Because water has a pH of 7 and your intestinal tract has a pH of 1.5 to 2. So, if you start adding a whole bunch of pH 7 to up to a pH of 2, you’re going to move that pH more in the alkaline direction away from the acid direction. We need good acidity to help activate her enzymes in our acid levels. That’s very important.
If you have any issues with detoxification, please reach out to a functional medicine doctor.
Remember:
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- Chew your food up well.
- Make sure you’re not overly hydrating with the food. Do all your hydration 2 minutes before.
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The Top 5 Causes of Chronic Headaches
Today we are going to be talking about the top underlying reasons why you may be having a chronic headache. I had a patient come in today who had headaches for 25 years, monthly and chronically, and we were able to get to the root cause and there are many different root causes for every person. Let me lay out the common ones that I find to be a major vector of my patients.
So we have headaches and head pain or migraines where you kind of have that aura and sound sensitivity. There are a couple of different major reasons why headaches may happen.
1. Food Allergens
Most common food allergy is gluten and dairy. There are some studies on gluten affecting blood flow up to the brain. We have these garden hoses on the side of our neck called our carotid arteries. When we have inflammation especially caused by gluten that can decrease blood flow and blood profusion to the frontal cortex, and when you have less blood, you’re going to have decreased performance of the brain. You can see that manifesting in a headache. People don’t know but headaches are actually an issue with vasodilation in the brain. Caffeine can help as caffeine actually causes constriction and brain’s typical headache signal is caused by vasodilation.
2. Food Additives.
These could be things like MSG, aspartame, Splenda or various artificial colors and dyes.
3. Blood Sugar Fluctuation.
We want to have healthy proteins and healthy fats with every meal. If we skip meals or we eat foods that are too high in carbohydrates and refined “crapohydrates” and sugar, and not enough fats and proteins, our blood sugar can go up and then drop. This is called reactive hypoglycemia. We react by putting a whole bunch of sugar in our bloodstream because all of these carbohydrate sources break down into sugar — processed sugar, grains, flours and acellular carbohydrates. These type of flours and refined processed carbs get converted to glucose in our bloodstream. When glucose goes up, our pancreas goes, “Holy smokes! We got a lot of glucose there. We got to pull it into the cell.” It spits out a whole bunch of insulin and pulls that glucose right down, and we have his blood sugar going up with a lot of insulin driving that blood sugar back down. When that blood sugar goes back down, this is where we have cravings. This is where we have addictions, mood issues, energy issues, jitteriness, and cognitive issues. Our body makes adrenaline and cortisol to bring that blood sugar back up. Most people literally live on this high insulin where they are making fat, storing fat and engaging in lipogenesis which makes us tired. Then blood sugar crashes which makes people jittery, anxious, and moody. Most people live on this reactive hypoglycemia rollercoaster and that can drive headaches.
4. Gut Infections.
Patients with a lot of gut inflammation, gut permeability, and infections whether it’s H. pylori, SIBO (small intestinal, bacterial overgrowth) or fungal overgrowth have gut stressors can create inflammation in the gut. When we have inflammation in the gut, we have gut permeability. So our tight junctions in our intestines start to open up and undigested bacteria, lipopolysaccharides, food particles can slip through and create an immune response. You can see histamine along with that immune response and histamine can create headache issues.
5. Hormonal Issue.
A woman’s cycle is about 28 days and in the middle is ovulation. Some women have it during ovulation and most have it right at the end just before they menstruate. This is called premenstrual syndrome that is right before menstruation. A lot of women may also have it during menstruation, too. What happens is progesterone can drop out early and that drop in progesterone can actually cause headache manifestations and also the aberrations in estrogen can also cause headaches as well. We may also see it with excessive bleeding too. So if you’re bleeding a lot or too much, what may happen is you may lose iron and that low iron may cause oxygenation issues. That low level of oxygen may also cause some headache issues as well. Because if you can’t carry oxygen, that is going to be a stressed-out situation for your mitochondria and your metabolism. For menopausal women who have chronically low hormones and they’re not in an optimal place, that can create issues. Progesterone and estrogen can be very anti-inflammatory. So if there is inflammation in the brain, progesterone is a powerful anti-inflammatory and that can really help a lot of inflammation in the brain.
Summer Time Parasite Infections & Lyme | Podcast #296
This episode talks about parasite infections that people get during summertime, like ticks, lyme, and other types of infections. Dr. Justin and Evan Brand give a talk on how we deal with these infections, the root cause of it, myths, useful herbs and products in keeping the infections away, and a lot more! More information given below. 
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
0:40 Summer Infections with Ticks
7:50 Dealing with Ticks, Other Pathogens
15:52 Different Infections
22:08 Herbs for the Infections
29:29 Pregnancy Related Infections
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And we are live. It’s Dr. Justin Marchegiani here in the house today we’re going to be chatting about summertime infections. Evan, how are we doing today man?
Evan Brand: Doing really well, hoping that we can save some people from trouble. You know, the CDC says every year that 300,000 new cases of Lyme happen every year, and that’s the official number. So I suspect the real numbers probably close to like 500,000, or maybe even more. And then of course, parasites are big, too. I suggested parasites and he said, Hey, well, we can’t forget to talk about ticks because people are out and about during the summertime, potentially picking them up. And it’s a huge deal. So let’s dive in.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely. So kind of one strategy that I kind of put forward. And we chatted about last week for summertime infections with ticks, especially if you’re in your yard and you kind of want to know what’s going on in your yard. My wife got a tick last week. And what we did is we sent the tick to the lab and the reason why is because we wanted to make If there was an infection, we knew exactly what the infection was. So we had a tested for briella, which is borrelia. burgdorferi is the major bacteria in the ticks, we tested for like a babesia bartonella. Thankfully, the tick wasn’t caught wasn’t carrying any of these co infections. And I imagine you’d probably find ticks in your area that are carrying, let’s say, babesia, you’ll probably see a pattern of that in the locality of your yard or in your area. So I think it’s nice to know what kind of infections you may be dealing with. That way you can be on top of it and you can kind of have maybe the tinctures or the herbal formulas that you need to address some of those infections ahead of time. And that way, you’re not having to play this guesswork because you know how it is with Lyme. Hey, okay, is it just Lyme where this is a [inaudible] kind of bacterial infection or is it something else like a co infection, it’s kind of nice to know that way you can really hone in your treatment and if your tick comes back positive, you can kind of do it even preemptively or ahead of time, which is nice. And so we use it tickreport.com And we’ll put the link down below, but that’s helpful and we would just pay the hundred dollars and have the expanded panel and get all of the infections pulled up, which is great. And then you can kind of, you know, create a profile for your home where you know, okay, we in our backyard, we have a lot of bartonella. So we’re going to be really, really careful. And then one thing you can do on top of that we kind of talked about it ahead of time is you can use a product called wondercide, which is a seed oil product, natural no crap and there’s a couple other ones you can make. With different essential oils, you can do cedar, you can do olive leaf, you can do peppermint, but a lot of these oils are going to irritate and aggravate the ticks. So you can kind of create a barrier where you kind of push them outside of your yard using the wondercide or using the cedar oil and you can spray that over any forest area or higher grasses or any area where there’s bugs or insects or mosquitoes and it really helps kind of keeping the insects down a little bit and creating this little inflammatory buffer for them in your yard.
Evan Brand: Yeah, this stuff potent we got the premade solution at our old house where you can get up to the water hose and you spray it that way, man, I tell you that stuff. My God, you talk about potent. I didn’t even like and I’m like, Am I a tick because I don’t even like this thing I’m going to get away. But after a few days It does. It does get pretty, you know, pretty benign in terms of smell. And where we were hiking and biking and doing everything was such a huge area that for us it wouldn’t have been sustainable to do cedar oil on the whole thing, but at least in just the immediate backyard. That’s what we did. And supposedly it helps with mosquitoes. I don’t know, I can’t say I’m not sure but definitely does.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep, it does. I mean, you can make your own. Some essential oil lines like doterra they have their terror shield which is really good. You can make it a lot of times with a spearmint or a time or clove or Rosemary or citronella. So there’s different citrus oils or peppermint oils that you can combine and you can make your own kind of natural bug spray and then you can just put it in a good 16 ounce bottle and you Kind of spray, you know around the perimeter of your property and or any big bushes Where are high grass where bugs can hide. And I find just doing that kind of every couple of weeks just take a five minute walk around the property with the spray bottle, and that can really kind of help keep a lot of that down.
Evan Brand: Yeah, Stephen Buehner love Stephen did some really, really great books on Lyme and co infections in his book, he has a recipe. So if you all have that book, it’s the healing line book. He has a recipe in there for what he calls like a 99% effective tick repellent. You mix all these essential oils together and my lord It is very, very, very, very strong and potent. I don’t think I’ve had any takes on me but man, one spray on your legs and you’re going to be smelling like think Frankincense is in there but you’re going to be smelling all day so you have to shower off after that but either way, I’d rather smell like essential oils. Now one other thing to this another piece of advice if you are going in wooded areas I’ve had several clients who’ve been out camping so far this summer and they have came back with ticks on them or their dogs. It’s called a Picarton. It’s PIC like pick a carton. And Sawyer is a brand who makes the card and there’s other brands out there. But apparently I looked into the literature on this because it’s, I don’t like manmade chemicals. You know, you hear about deet and deets, bad news. But this Picarton is like a synthetic pepper extract. It has no smell to it at all, which is amazing because most of the conventional bug spray smell smell terrible. So I when I was looking at a piece of property, I actually got some of this Picarton lotion, and it’s like a 20%. And I put some of the lotion on and I was in I’m talking the thick of the thick where I would have typically had five, six ticks on me. I had I had zero and all I did is I put just a tiny dime sized amount on my ankles and then I put a little bit on the back of my neck and a little bit around my waist because I like to crawl into your pants and I hadn’t noticed So I haven’t I haven’t done enough you know, long term research on this, but so far Picarton just look up a card and it’s, it is synthetic. But in terms of toxicity, I can’t find anything about it. I think there were a couple rat studies where they were applying tons of it for years and years and nothing ever happened. So it seems benign, it seems safer than deep for sure. If the essential oils like they weren’t for me, they were too strong. I got a headache from the essential oil blends and the McCartan could be something else to look into it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s good. I mean, just the standard cedar oil is going to be excellent just having a lot of times the cedar oil acts as a bug spray. But what it does is I mean, if you if you see if you ever treat your dog with a cedar oil bath at all, you can see like a little fleas, you put some seed oil, they literally run from it, right? And so if you do that it kind of acts as a good repellent where they’re less likely to jump on you because you’re not quite as tasty right. So the cedar oil is great. Badger makes a really excellent insect or I should say mosquito repellent and it has a lot of cedar oil in it. So it would work for other bugs and even for ticks. And then one thing I recommend everyone get is get a tick removal kit that just you can get them from on Amazon for like 10 15 bucks. But if you ever get a tick, you’ll have the ability to pull it off without destroying the tick keeping it intact. And then you can also send it into the tick report place and get your report. So definitely spend that 10 to 15 bucks to get a tick remover kit. We’ll put the Amazon link down below the one that I’ve used. And I’ve used successfully the last couple of weeks that I’ve got a tick off my dog recently and I took off my wife and it worked great, keeps it intact. Easy because the worst thing is you don’t want to break that tick open and you don’t want to have half in and half out. So it’s a great way to get it out and intact and send it off to the lab.
Evan Brand: Yeah, there’s a bunch of myths like doing a match head to a tick don’t do that or try to twist it or crazy stuff. Don’t do that you just grab on and once you pinch these guys, you just hope And on them. And then eventually they released they let go. So I just kind of grabbed the tick hold with pressure. And then eventually, three, four seconds later it lets go and it just pops off. So I would have done the tick report, but I was pulling so many off at the time. It’s like, Okay, well, which tick, you know, which tick Am I going to blame here? So.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I mean, for you, it probably just be nice to get a profile just to say, okay, you know, let’s put in five or six ticks, see what comes back. Okay, we got some bartonella coming up in the backyard. So then we can, we can really have a lot of maybe we’re going to be on some bartonella support throughout the summer, just to be on top of that. But if you look at a lot of the tick removals when it comes with tweezers, which is kind of standard, but it’s like this little V, and so wherever the tick is, let’s say the ticks here, you start with the V, and then as the V comes in, it gets underneath the tick and it kind of pops it out as you go in. So once you’re all the way down on the V, you can pull it out, yeah, at least get its grasp off and then you can use the tweezers to then pull off the skin. So that little v thing really helps. It just allows you to scoop underneath the tick and have it release so then you can pull it off better.
Evan Brand: Yep, when fingers crossed, hopefully people don’t get them hopefully, whether it’s the Picarton or whether it’s the essential oil blend like Buner talks about in the book or the cedar in your yard, you know, hopefully, these are things you can do to prevent it. And if you live somewhere where you don’t have and will Well, good for you, you’re, you’re seriously lucky. But that’s, that’s the tick thing. Now let’s talk about some of these other these other pathogens, things that you’re probably going to get from water more than you are from things crawling on you things that I’ve personally dealt with, and you and I’ve dealt with clinically, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times, which is going to be Cryptosporidium, and giardia, which are two infections that really really start to pop up in summertime because people they’re playing in the water more and they can really, really wreck you. Now, here’s the annoying thing. I want your comments on this. This is the annoying thing is when you look up crypto or you look up Giardia and you get just the standard kind of CDC information. It always talks about how like immunizations compromise people with AIDS and HIV and data. Those are the people don’t get sick from it. But all right. I don’t have HIV AIDS, I don’t have cancer that I know of, and I got really sick from those pathogens. So what do you say to those articles where it kind of makes you it almost gives you a false sense of security because it’s like it’s only the elderly or this or that they can get symptomatic from these bugs.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. I mean, I think there’s a spectrum, right, I think the most pathogenic expression of the infection is going to express with people that have significant immunocompromised conditions, like you see people with AIDS, they die of Candida, right, because of the fact that not the Candida kills you but it’s the fact that when you’re immunocompromised significantly, it can definitely be something that puts the straw, you know, the last nail in the coffin, so to speak, right, the straw that breaks the camel’s back. So that’s for sure. Now, you could be in a place where, hey, maybe you’re just having a little bit of loose stool, maybe you’re getting some brain fog. Maybe you’re having a little bit tummy upset. And we know GRT actually comes from beavers in the water. So if you’re hiking and you consume water or potentially you’re in a lake water, it’s possible that you could get exposed to it. So, you know, I’m an avid water skier watersport guy. And so if you’re out in the water a bit, you really want to be on top of that, you know, make sure you don’t swell on it. If you if you do by accident, incidentally, which could happen with water sports, or just being in the water, right? Same goes up your nose, you want to have some good clearing herbs on hand that you can at least take preventatively maybe even before after, and then maybe some extra probiotics on top of that to prevent any infection from kind of gaining a foothold. That’s going to be helpful but with JRD I mean, you could have just loose you know, loose or watery diarrhea. You could have some cramps because of the minerals being thrown off because of the diarrhea. You could have nausea or poor appetite issues. You could have energy issues, you could have cognitive issues, brain fog issues, of course that can affect energy and mood as well. And then when you throw off the electrolytes, you know, your muscles may not work well, you may have some muscle fatigue as well. So all those things are possible, especially if you start getting diarrhea and you lose your electrolytes. So all those things are, you know, key. So if you have that we want to do some different stool testing to pick that up. So grd isn’t any one of the first anything else you want to say about that.
Evan Brand: Yeah, the symptoms, I’m just, I guess what I was kind of frustrated about is people will think, oh, that can’t be it because it says here, it’s only going to be elderly or this or that and then they’re like, No, that can’t be me. This article says here, it’s only the you know, severely immunocompromised people who can get sick, but in my case, I was what I thought I would say I was relatively healthy. And you know, I ended up losing a ton of weight from Giardia because it massively affected my appetite and digestion. So, this you know, the point of this whole podcast is if everything was decent to average, and now all of a sudden you got some weird things popping up in the summer. This is one of the most common infections people are going to pick up this time of the year.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Giardia is gonna be a big one we’ve talked about I think you heard it before in the past. Also the next one’s Cryptosporidium, that’s another waterborne parasite. Again, you’re gonna see a lot of the data saying, Hey, you got to be immunocompromised but I can tell you I’ve seen patients get it that are not immunocompromised. And what does immunocompromised mean? I mean are a lot of people at a health level where they could be a little bit you know, compromised, maybe not at the same level of someone with AIDS or someone who was malnourished at a third world country but I think people are getting these infections and I think it’s kind of written off at these infections only happen in like Third World type of countries where water supplies bad and nutrition’s is bad or someone with a has a severe immunocompromised condition but I’ve seen it happen and others I know you have to so we want people to definitely be aware of it. So Cryptosporidium is another water and either a food one so we’re thinking summer people are in the water, the lakes, the ponds, and these could be something that they catch or get exposed to. So an ounce of prevention is possible. worth a pound of cure, right? So we can be on top of these things where we take some nice clearing herbs ahead of time. In my line, I do the giac clear for ahead of time, which will have the berberine, the golden seal, it’ll have some olive leaf and some grapefruit seed extract some black walnut holes. And I’ll do a couple before couple after. And that’s usually enough to kind of keep things at bay. And maybe I’ll throw in some probiotics that night or that next day or to some extra dose to really make sure we have some good beneficial bacteria that can help crowd certain things out and flush some stuff out as well. Nice.
Evan Brand: Yeah, I don’t have personal test in front of me, but my daughter when she was two, she had parasites, we just noticed that she was having some loose stool. So this is a call out to the parents too. If you’ve got kids, you know, talk to your kids about their poops. You know if they start getting 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 years old, maybe they don’t want to talk about their poops. But this can be important because let’s say you’re just hanging out on the boat drinking a margarita or something but the kids are in the water. They’re more likely to just maybe on purpose or accidentally swallow some water and get infections and the parents may not know about Because the kids don’t talk about their poops, so, and I’ve worked on hundreds of kids, and you’ll see kids that have mood issues that are linked to these infections. So the parents may say, Oh, well, the kid, you know, he’s just crazy. He’s got anger, or he’s got irritability, or he’s got this or that. But there’s a huge link between mood issues and gut infections. And I tell you, when I had gut infections, my mood was crap. Because my if you think of the domino effect here, the infections are messing up your ability to digest, you don’t have enough amino acids, so you may lose weight or muscle mass, your neurotransmitters can get affected, you could have all sorts of issues downstream. So it’s not just like diarrhea, it can manifest in many other ways. So if your kids are crazy, all of a sudden, it could be an infection piece and their liver may not be able to keep up with the toxic load. So if you see dark circles under the eyes of your kids, you know, that may be something to investigate.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. 100% so we have different infections. On the parasite side, which could be Giardia. It could be Cryptosporidium, Our stool test of choice for addressing this will be the GI map. We’ll put a link down below if you guys want to reach out and order a GI map from Evan or I will put our links down below so you guys can access it. That’s wonderful. Okay. And then we talked about the ticks, right? So what I recommend if it’s if it’s happening or is a frequent exposure in your backyard, figure out what your tics may be carrying. That way you can kind of be on some different herbal support ahead of time. What are some of your favorite herbal support for the different types of CO infections, Evan?
Evan Brand: Well, I got to give credit where credit’s due so Steven Buner in his book one thing I forgot to mention, we may have mentioned it years ago on a podcast but and I can’t confirm whether or not this worked for me or my wife because I had so many tick bites that it was hard to say. Like, did I prevent the infection from that bite but that bite did get me when you have multiple it’s tough but Andrew graphis Well, we did is we did his recommendation of a green clay mixed with andrographis. You kind of make a paste out of it and you put the paste on the tick bite area and it’ll just basically solidify and it gets kind of crusty, but that on the tick bite area is supposed to help prevent infection I don’t know if it’s like a quote sucking mechanism or what to pull the infection out. But the andrographis clay mixture supposed to be very well preventing infection. Like I said, I’ve had too many bites to confirm whether or not that work but if I do get any more future by itself will be while I’ll be implementing. And then of course on just in summertime in general, I’m staying on astragalus about two to three grams a day just to keep my immune system on alert that in theory could help to where if you did get bit with a tick to have borrelia which is a bacteria that causes Lyme in theory, if the astragalus at the two to three gram daily dosages in your system, in theory, it could help to keep the immune system revved up enough to where Lyme would not be able to take place. And then going into the actual herbs and the Favorites there. It kind of depends on what you’re up against. And it depends on you know, whether it’s a kid it depends on the Constitution of The person I use a lot of beyond balance products, their professional company they’ve got several tinctures specifically designed for different types of babesia. They have several for bartonella. They have some for borrelia. I’ll work in some of those. But man, I’m a big fan of, of isolated herbs too. So like Japanese knotweed is so amazing and so broad spectrum and it is kind of an anti spy rokit-
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: or Japanese knotweed that’s basically resveratrol. So Japanese knotweed is an herb but very, very high in resveratrol, which has some immuno modulating benefits.
Evan Brand: Yeah, and you want you want if you’re going to get resveratrol, you want it from knotweed, you don’t want it from like grape seed or whatever else. There’s other forms of resveratrol, but you want the knotweed so that I love knotweed, I’ve got a huge bottle of it right here.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s great.
Evan Brand: And then my other my other favorite tincture here, this is CSA, this is crypto lepus Sita and our corneas good. And these are the CSA blend is good. I’ve tried to do some different isolated tinctures like Sita, which can be very helpful for bartonella bartonella can actually come from mosquitoes and from fleas so if your pets had fleas and the fleas jump off, you can actually get bartonella from those so people that think, Oh, I haven’t had a tick bite, you know, many people I’ve tested positive for bartonella that have never had a tick bite that they know of. So, in bartonella, can be a beast regarding, you know, chemical sensitivities and headache at the occipital portion on the back of the head, it can cause anxiety, it can cause depression, despair, it can do a lot of stuff to you. And so, the CSA blend is something that can address bartonella and it can address babesia but easier Believe it or not, I had I had deja vu all the time, like two three times a week, but I Oh my God, I’ve been here before this is weird, you know, massive deja vu. Apparently, deja vu is one of the symptoms of the vizia. So that’s how I knew to test it. And then I can confirm with DNA testing and show that that I did have a visa so the CSA is great for me because, you know, bartonella showed up for me and but Vizier showed up for me and krypto lepus sido. cornea, those three are sort of anti malarial herbs are kind of traditional anti malarial herbs. And Bz is kind of a cousin of malaria and the way it infects the red blood cells. So those are, those are two game changers for me, but does that mean that you need to go by those? No, not at all. You should definitely work with a practitioner because this stuff gets tricky. And depending on what’s going on with the immune system, there may be other priorities. So you know, Justin, I always talk about kind of painting the picture and getting all the puzzle pieces. So there may be parasites to go after first, there may be H. pylori, there may be bacterial overgrowth, there may be other things first, it’s not so, so simple and clear as I got bit by tick test positive for bartonella. I’m going to go take every herb that you can take for bartonella because that may not be the correct order of operations.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 110% 110%. So it’s nice to know what kind of infections are going on. So when you talked about the first line defense, you talked about putting a bentonite clay over the tick bite.
Evan Brand: Yeah. So you would mix it you’d mix clay and water graphis together. Okay.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So you get an andrographis tincture, you mix it with a little bit of bentonite clay and put that right over the tick bite.
Evan Brand: Yeah, turned into a paste, rub it on, let it dry, and then just leave it there for a few hours or however long it kind of makes your skin like, I don’t know, maybe a little itchy or just kind of stretches. It feels like it’s stretching it because it’s drying. So as long as you can handle it. Yeah, keep it on the take fight area.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So andrographis and then you do that maybe dry it with a with a hairdryer and maybe put a bandage over it to keep it from falling off. Maybe.
Evan Brand: The bandage would be smart. Yeah, we didn’t do that. I was just losing crusties everywhere but yeah, the bandage would have been smart.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That makes sense because you’re kind of just you’re trying to use it as a magnet to kind of pull any toxins or junk out. So it doesn’t quite go as Right.
Evan Brand: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And I’ve heard I’ve heard people say they think it worked, you know, I mean, how do you how do you verify this? You know, it’s it’s hard to prove.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, it’s hard for sure. Now a couple things that I like. So we’re going to just go over a couple of herbs. You mentioned a couple you mentioned Siddha, acuta, crypto Lapis or cryptologist. However you want to pronounce that one. There’s a couple that are just really good, right? cat’s claws just a really good general herb. You talked about Japanese not word for knotweed for the resveratrol really, really good. Noni and neem also tend to be very, very good as well. Silver also tends to be very good for different in CO infections like babesia, we may want to do more silver with lime or borrelia burgdorferi, maybe more cat’s claw or Japanese knotweed for other types of infections like going down my list here. If we have other types of infection like ehrlichia, we may use more astragalus right. So different herbs are Different infections, different herbs but cat’s claws a good one to have in your medicine cabinet. neem is a good one to have in your medicine cabinet. And I would say cryptologist or Siddha, or resveratrol Japanese knotweed is excellent to have.
Evan Brand: Yeah. And also, I’ve tried one called Otoba Bark. I believe it’s an AFM a Toba bark. It’s like a Brazil, some type of a Brazil tree. There was a guy named Dr. Marty. I’m trying to get him on the podcast. Really cool. Really cool guy, really smart guy. He talked about that. I bought some tincture and I tried it, man, that stuff is potent. So I can only handle like a few drops of it twice a day, but the otoba was supposed to be very, very anti borrelia as well. So if you’re somebody who’s been battling, you know, chronic, whether it’s like a nor neuro what they called neuro Borealis, where you’re having a lot of the cognitive stuff associated with Lyme, the ottobock can be helpful and then you mix that with cat’s claw, so and then not worry too because it’s so anti inflammatory for the brain. So yeah, I definitely noticed more my head gets more clear. If I do not wait, so.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, you could probably even do some little more curcumin as well to help.
Evan Brand: I’ve tried curcumin, hard to say that’s one of those supplements. For me, it’s hard to tell whether it’s doing much, but I know it’s helpful.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, everyone may respond a little bit differently for sure. So yeah, but it’s good, you know, we kind of throw them out there. And again, we’re not we’re kind of giving you guys some good general ideas on things. Just make sure if you have any of these issues work with a practitioner, so they can kind of help guide you through the process because it can get a little bit overwhelming. And there’s a lot of things you could do, it may not be necessary, right? So treating some of these infections acutely, maybe a little bit different than working with us on a functional medicine program. Because we work with people based on chronic health issues. There’s a different program that we may go after, compared to someone dealing with an issue a little bit more acute. So when we’re kind of triage the patients a little bit differently. And then of course, you know, if you get to the point where there’s a active Lyme issue that’s totally acute and you’re symptomatic right away. It may be reasonable to Look at doing a doxycycline antibiotic for two weeks or so. But again, I tried to stay away from the antibiotics unless it’s absolute last case scenario. So if it does get significant, or it’s acute, you may want to look at a doxycycline. But off the bat, our bias tends to always be going towards the herbs, indoor using some of the natural expectorants the you know, adsorbents right, bentonite clay with the andrographis over the tick bite seems like a really good first line for anyone with the tissue.
Evan Brand: Yeah, and the problem with the antibiotics is most people they don’t know that their situations acute. You know it depending on what article you read. It’s such a low percentage of people that actually get the rash and all of that. So you could have these other kind of flu like symptoms that could be the early stages fatigue and whatever else and you’re not actually know that it’s live. So by the time it gets past that acute phase, you don’t even know and it kind of becomes chronic before you even know that you have it and if you go and do a DNA test for example, on the year You know, it may take few weeks or if you do blood, it may take a couple of weeks to get it done. So it’s so you’d have to really, really, really catch it early, I guess is all I’m saying?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well, with tick reports, you grab that tick and you send it off to the lab, you can get the results back in three days. So I wouldn’t be jumping on any antibiotics personally, unless you’re symptomatic. And you can test that ticking and it comes back positive with an infection.
Evan Brand: That’s the hard part too.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I’d be jumping on the herbs first. I think the herbs are very, very effective. I think it just depends on how how significant it is, how acute it is, you know how much those symptoms ramp up. That’s the problem. The problem with a lot of Lyme stuff is a lot of the side effects of the antibiotics can also mirror Lyme symptoms, joint pain, fatigue, malaise, I mean, go look at doxycycline side effects. You’ll see a lot of those side effects mirror some of the Lyme symptoms so it becomes this well, if die off or is it just the antibiotic creating side effects. What is it right it becomes a little bit tough to to fret that out.
Evan Brand: True, true. Yeah. And I interviewed that guy, I want to say his name was Steven, the guy tick report. Anyway, I asked him the question of ticks. And I said, Okay, well, they’re averages around 51% of ticks contain contain line. So they’ve tested hundreds and thousands, hundreds of thousands. And I believe it’s a 51% positive rate for borrelia. So if you, if you get bit by two ticks, you know, basically, you’re probably going to get it because there’s 51% of the ticks habit, unless you go to-
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: -maybe an area thing to maybe an area maybe like, hey, true in this area, it’s 90%, you know, 10%, but this area, it’s 90%. Right? And then it just kind of averages out across the country. So it could be that that’s why I like sending some of your tics in and then you know, we kind of talked about your situation, right? Like you used to be hiking a lot in the forest and now we’re like, Alright, let’s cut out maybe a wider path in your backyard. So you can you can be going through there and not have all these branches or high grass hitting your legs and stuff.
Evan Brand: Yeah, well, I was getting paid. And I was getting paid to you know, 2009 2010 I was getting paid to, to work in the woods. I love Did it was great, but man many times I brought home ticks, so no fun. No fun.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s not worth it now, though.
Evan Brand: No, it’s not at all.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Because I think some of your chemical sensitivities because of these chronic infections.
Evan Brand: Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Yeah. So I try to be on top of that, I think some of the wondercide is great. And, you know, if you have a lot of woods in your backyard, try to have a nice little path cut for yourself. So you can go in there enjoy nature and not be these ticks jump on you.
Evan Brand: ep, and burn. And this is not like, oh, work with a practitioner. I mean, yeah, we would love for you to work with us. We’re honored and blessed for the opportunity to help so many people. But we’re not saying that to just sell ourselves. We’re saying that because I can tell you personally and clinically, this stuff does get tricky. And you can definitely poke the what’s the analogy you could like poke the beehive so to speak with these bugs. So for example, if you have borrelia and you have bartonella and you try to go after, let’s say borrelia first and not the CO infection, the CO infection may take you down Because the stress of killing can weaken you a little bit so you may kind of knock down one you know, play whack a mole, you may knock down one infection, and then the other infection can kind of take you down and more symptoms ramp up there. So you really want to be able to check in with somebody where you can know oh, this popped up. Okay, we may need to switch gears because if you’re stubborn, you’re just going to go go go and try to do all this yourself. And it may extend your timeline, and it can definitely extend your suffering.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% Yep, I totally agree. Anything else Evan, you want to highlight here today? I mean, I think we’re on the right track. couple of questions came in what’s your insight for pregnant women passing worms? Just depends. There’s some herbals to do it. I probably would stay away from the herbs if you’re pregnant. There’s some medications like me bandas or albendazole slash vermox. You don’t really take them that long. Usually you take them, you know, one to two times a day for two days and then you wait two weeks and take it again. I’m not sure about the safety profile of that if you’re pregnant. You have To talk to your prescribing doctor and then there are some natural things like diatomaceous earth foodgrade, that may be okay because it’s kind of more dehydrating the worms, exoskeleton, and it’s primarily going to stay in your intestinal tract. But if you’re pregnant, you know, all bets are off. So my general recommendation is try to treat these things ahead of time. If you are going to get pregnant, so you go into pregnancy with a good gut, if you have an acute issue, you know, you really want to talk to your conventional medical doctor, look up the safety profile of those simple worm meds, and then maybe some of the more gentle binders, but you’d have to do a little more research on that. And the question can we use herbs in the mouth gargling brushing for gums like amoebiasis or inflammation? You definitely can. There’s a product that I use called dental Sidon, you can use the liposomal formula. That’s great. You can also gargle with silver as well. You can even do a 3% hydrogen peroxide as well gargle with that but that those are some really good options. Thought Evan?
Evan Brand: Yeah, the the pregnancy question that one’s tough, because A lot of herbs are off the table during pregnancy. So I guess the question would be, you know, how far along is she. And then you could always wait until you have the baby. There are many, many more things on the table that are safe while nursing that are not safe during pregnancy, mainly because nobody’s going to do the study on them. So I’ve worked with many, many, many pregnant women, but the general recommendation is, hey, depending on how bad it is, like olive leaf has pretty good safety profile olive leaf has some general antimicrobial benefits. So may or may not be in firepower, but we probably just try to, you know, get that woman as comfortable as we can through pregnancy, get her to the nursing phase, and then that would open up the door for a lot more herbs.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Like even me bandsaws not really studied during pregnancy. So I would try not to do anything personally while pregnant unless it’s 100% necessary and it’s a cute and then on that note, I mean what I do with diet tomato, I probably stick to a D food grade over anything else. But that’s just me. I mean, it just comes down to have to weigh your options about how acute The issue is and Kind of where you’re at in the pregnancy because if you can wait always wait through.
Evan Brand: Yeah, the D is good. We use that for my daughter when she had pinworms, and they were super resistant to the parental that conventional drug we didn’t want to use it but the the herbs we tried didn’t work. So we brought up the D and it and it cleared it up. So I know like even in young kids, for example to maybe she has some concern about possibly that the baby having some kind of worm issue, you know, I would just get through the pregnancy and-
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You know, what should you do, though? You know, you know, do that be really good. You could do some pumpkin seeds, pumpkin seeds should be fine during pregnancy and that would also have a natural deworming effect. I would do pumpkin seeds that has a natural compound in there called Kurt cucur byton cucur byton and it paralyzes the worm and helps the body eliminated. So pumpkin seeds would probably be your safe one. If you needed a natural support to get rid of it because pumpkin seeds I don’t think are contraindicated to seed right? any food that’s contrary to you, so that would probably be your safest bet. If you Support now. Nice but again, this is not medical advice, just purely entertainment. So talk to your prescribing doctor ob and or functional doc.
Evan Brand: Yep, sounds like easy to implement and who knows, maybe it works. Maybe it’s not in the firepower But hey, can’t hurt. Don’t kid definitely can’t hurt.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Anything else you want to highlight today. So we went over like the common stuff that we see in the summertime we have all the ticks in the coinfections. We went over triage care with that topical, we talked about a couple of internal things. Before you go internal definitely reach out to a good functional medicine doc. We talked about the grd and the crypto. We talked about some preventative and how we go after that. And then the testing for that being the GM app, put the link down below. We talked about preventative stuff to make your yard safer to get rid of a lot of the past and the insects and the ticks and the fleas. We talked about how we can actually test some of the ticks to see what kind of infections your yard may carry and what kind of profile your yard has. That way you can kind of have a lot of this stuff on hand if your yards heavily Borriello or bartonella you can have those things on hand maybe even be preventively taking some of these things are in the summer. And you can take some extra precaution to get some of the natural essential oils down to kind of create a buffer zone to keep these bugs out of your yard.
Evan Brand: Yep, yep. No, it’s all great. I asked the guy when I talked with him, man, can you guys plot all this stuff on the map? I’d love to see an interactive map with all their 50,000 plus test test points and kind of click around and click on the states and see a map of where all the infections are. That’d be cool. But he said they hadn’t implemented it yet. That was several years ago. That’d be a cool feature, though. It would because then, you know, hey, if I’m in Austin, Texas, and you could see like a lot of borrelia right, there are a lot of bartonella right there then you can kind of use that data accordingly. That would be awesome. Well, if you need help clinically, we work with people around the world. So please don’t hesitate reach out. We’re here to help and we’re honored and grateful for the opportunity to do so. You can reach Dr. Justin at JustinHealth.com, me, Evan Brand at EvanBrand.com We’ll talk to y’all next week.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And if you guys enjoyed the content thumbs up really appreciate it put your comments down below let me know your experience with different summertime infections really like to understand that we’re available worldwide and also if you guys don’t mind if you’re really enjoying the content, head over to EvanBrand.com/iTunes or JustinHealth.com/iTunes and write us a review. We really appreciate kind of getting the word out. Our review really helps it gives us more credibility and well you know, we appreciate you guys learning and sharing it with your friends and family so everyone can be a little bit healthier. Anything else, Evan?
Evan Brand: No, that’s it. Have a great day.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Take care everyone. Bye y’all.
Evan Brand: Bye bye.
References:
Audio Podcast:
https://justinhealth.libsyn.com/podcast-summer-time-parasite-infections-lyme-podcast-296
Oils That Cause Gut Inflammation
There are various top-causes for gut inflammation but a big one is an oil. The oil you use to cook or bake into foods could be a major culprit to your very uncomfortable gut inflammation. Let’s look at the good and stable oils vs. the unhealthy oils.
If you look at the standard American diet, just even a hundred years ago, your grandparents or your great grandparents, they did not have access to these type of oils. They were cooking with traditional fats. They did a lot of lard and maybe some beef tallow.
If I asked my grandfather, “What did your grandmother cook you and what did she cook it with?” She was not using soybean oil. She was not using corn oils. She was not using rapeseed oil, which is canola. She was not using peanut oil. If they did something fried, it was going to be fried in possibly bacon fat, which came from the pig in the backyard of the farm or it was going to be cooked in some type of like a beef tallow, where the cows were on the back part of the farm.
When it comes down to fats, most plant fats are not going to be the best unless they are cold extracted or unless they are minimally processed to extract the fats. Partly because of the processes of extracting, it tends to damage the fats because the heat and the extraction process also makes the fats rancid and taste bad. There’s a lot of like deodorizing and filtration and different processes to make it more palatable that you would never be able to have at a natural state.
So the best plant fats are:
- Coconut oil because it’s a saturated fat and it’s more temperature-stable.
- Cold-press olive oil and good-quality avocado oil, which is primarily a monosaturated fat.
- Palm oil, which is more in a kind of saturated state.
There are some nut-based and some seed-based oils, but then you start ramping up the Omega-6 and those may not be the best. There are some supplemental oils that are more GLA-based that I’ll give supplementally, like black currant seed oil but we’ll give it supplementally and that’s coming from great sources that are going to be in capsules that won’t be oxidized and such.
Bad fats are going to create a lot of oxidative stress and they are going to deplete a lot of your antioxidant reserves because if those fats are oxidized, your body is going to need a lot of vitamin C and vitamin E to help with the oxidative stress that those fats may cause your body.
Now what it you find a good fish with gluten-free breading so it’s not covered in wheat with some type of non-gluten containing flour, but then you’ve got canola oil. Do you think you’re still going to be net positive in terms of nutrition because you’ve still got the good fish, but yet you’ve got the inflammatory oils or would you say, just get you some grilled fish and then if you want to bread it, you bread it yourself?
There’s a product that we like of sweet potato fries that my wife will do for my son because it’s really easy, but they have a little bit of canola oil in there. So you have this kind of convenience factor where ideally if you could you always would want to put your own fat on there if you could and my easy saturated fat or my easy fat for cooking that’s plant-based would be avocado. I like avocado because it tastes a little bit more neutral. I do not like olive oil as much. Olive oil is better for dressings, but I’ll do avocado for cooking. If you have control over it, you always choose the better fat over the junky fat if you can.
So the interesting thing is like coconut oil and avocado they’ve become kind of trendy and I would say avocado is not going to be a traditional fat meaning, meaning like traditional people were probably not doing it because you’ve got to have some heavy-duty equipment to extract the oil, but coconut oil would be super traditional. I mean, this would be something that has historical use.
Your big fats that are going to be plant-based would probably be primarily coconut. But your biggest ones that I think are going to be used more long-term from generation to generation will be your tallows, your bacon fat, your duck fat, and those kinds of things because saturated fats don’t go bad. They stay good for a long time because the carbon is saturated with 4 hydrogen bonds between them, which makes the fat really, really, really temperature-stable.
Take note of oils are that bad for your gut because they cause inflammation and oxidative stress.
4 Herbs That Give You The Upper Hand Against Viral Infections
Let’s talk about four herbs with antiviral properties.
Click here for a consultation with a functional medicine doctor before taking herbal supplements!
Olive Leaf
As part of a Candida protocol, we’ll have a couple of herb combinations that will have olive leaf combined with monolaurin. Stack those two right on top of each other. Monolaurin is a lauric acid coconut extract. It has been shown to be very, very potent as an antiviral. With olive leaf, the main compound in it – oleuropein – and that actually prevents the virus from attaching to the cells. We kind of talk about mechanisms a lot and people ask why does that matter. It is because some herbs may prevent the replication of viruses. Things like olive actually prevent the virus from attaching to healthy cells. So if you have multiple herbs, you’ve got multiple mechanisms. You’re just making yourself even more resilient.
Astragalus
They help with either immune modulation, natural killer cell, antibody modulation which is the infantry that comes in afterwards, or it is going to help with viral replication. Typically, it’s going to modulate the inflammation from the immune response.
Usually it is hitting things in about three to four different ways, and most are going to fall into that category. That is kind of the mechanism how they are working.
Cat’s Claws
We use Cat’s Claw or Samento a lot with biofilms. They work really well. These are protective shields, bacteria and critters use. We also use it with a lot of Lyme and various co-infections, but Cat’s Claws is great at the immune system, helping with viruses, and really enhancing the body’s ability to deal with infections. Again, everything we are talking about is not necessarily to treat anything. A lot of the time it is just to support our own immune response to what’s happening, because our body is really the ultimate fighter in all of this. Everything we are doing is just trying to give our body’s immune system an edge to address the issue to begin with. The body has dealt and humankind has dealt with viruses since forever.
Echinacea
When we are doing a lot of these herbs, a lot of times we want to make sure the whole root is present. A lot of times with Echinacea, you will see a lot of flower present. I want the whole root. I find that it has a lot more of the immune-modulating alkaloids that really have the immune benefit. It is excellent in how it reduces virus levels. It inhibits the growth of bacteria. It inhibits the growth of viruses. It is also going to modulate with the inflammation caused by that immune response and caused by the cytokines and interleukins.
What can you do to try to gain the upper hand?
These things are just going to improve your resilience. It’s important to have the right mindset. A lot of people are selling like cures or solutions and that is not going to be the case, but it is really going to be our body to begin with. Even antibiotics, when an infection gets cleared, it is still not the antibiotic. It is the antibiotic lowering the level of the infection and then the immune system can kind of come in and play. It is like if we are using a lifting analogy, it really gives a very helpful spot when you’re kind of low in that bench press, it really gives you that little spot to kind of get it up through that sticky point.
How To Treat Toenail Fungus or Discoloration
Let’s go into like the most common things that you would see or hear of with complaints regarding nails. The biggest one is going to be toe fungus under the nail bed where it’s going to be a yellow or just a fungal-infected toenail.
Why Should We Address Gut Issues?
If it’s on the toenail, there’s definitely implications that it could be in the gut. The problem is you can address the gut a lot of times but that’s not going to be enough to address the toenails well. Just because the time you put herbs into the gut or whatever time it gets into the bloodstream, makes its way all the way down to your toe. Unless it’s a very minor fungal infection, most of the time you’re gonna need to hit it topically because your immune system and all these antifungals take a long time to get to the outer periphery of where this fungus is located. So in general, we should address the gut and then we should also address it topically on the nail. So we’ve got to hit it from both ends, inside and outside, to kind of put that fungus between a rock in a hard place.
How Fungus is Treated Conventionally
Let’s just say you go to your foot doctor or your podiatrist and you say, “Hey, I’ve got a fungal infection on my toe.” They’re going to end up giving you Lamisil or some other type of a prescription or over-the-counter antifungal. But to me, I think that’s a shortsighted approach because that toenail is not having that infection for no reason.
How Fungus is Treated Functionally
If it’s really bad, you definitely want to be addressing your diet because a lot of the fungus or yeast, which is primarily that yellow-discolored nail is going to be fungus in that area.
- You got to stop what’s feeding it. Look at the diet and stop feeding it all the refined carbohydrates.
- You want to address the gut issues to begin with. The Candida, which is a kind of yeast or fungus, whether it’s Microsporidia Rhodotorula. You want to address and knock down some of these yeasts. More than likely we’re going to topically hit it as well.
- Some of the Lamisil or the other medications that are antifungals are very hard on the liver. So if you’re going to go that way, definitely take some herbs like milk thistle and take some extra glutathione to help support and tonify the liver if you’re going to go that way.
Alternative Treatments for Toe Fungus
- Topically, we can use things like Melaleuca or tea tree and/or oil of oregano and topically rub it on the nail.
- We can also do a fungal soak as well. The fungal soaks work phenomenal. There’s a herbal concoction that you mix it with apple cider vinegar which works amazing. You can do that and then topically rub something on after you soak your feet for 5 or 10 minutes. Some people they’ll just do the topical nail as well. I like doing the whole foot. That way if there’s any fungus between the toes or in the heel or wherever in the skin, you kind of get all of it versus just some of it. So nail fungal soak with also topically hitting the nail as well.
Anything that we can do to reduce that process of AGEing — the advanced glycation enzyme process — is also going to be one of the critical steps to this. The less stress in your body, the better. Nail fungus is really unique because once you fix a lot of the root cause stuff, that may not go away. So you gotta really topically hit it as well.
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.