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Prepare to have your health questions answered here on Safe, Effective, Natural Solutions
with Dr. Todd Binkley, owner of Binkley Healing Center in downtown Ventura. Now, here's Dr. Todd.
Good afternoon and welcome. I am Dr. Todd Binkley, board certified non-force doctor of chiropractic
and practitioner of functional medicine. If you're wondering what is functional medicine,
you wouldn't be the first person to ask. Functional medicine means using standard
diagnostic tests to identify earlier signs of stress on your various organs and tissues
early enough that you can give your body a chance to heal itself before you become dependent on
medication. Have you been to a doctor and been told there's nothing wrong with you and you still
don't feel right? If you don't feel right, there probably is something wrong with you. You just
haven't found out what yet. Whatever is preventing you from feeling as fabulous as you should can
often be identified with proper testing and there is a safe, effective, natural solution
for almost any health challenge. I've been getting a lot of questions coming in and one of the most
common questions I get and one of the most common conditions people come to see me for is fatigue.
So I'd like to talk a little bit about that today. There are some myths that need to be dispelled
that people are misinformed about. So myth number one, if I eat right, exercise, drink plenty of
coffee, my energy should be great and if that's not happening, I guess I'll just have to get used to
it. In reality, lots of people eat fresh organic vegetables, eat farm-raised chicken and wild caught
fish, go to the gym five days a week, drink good filtered water and still feel exhausted.
Myth number two, I had my blood work done recently and all the tests came back normal and my doctor
checked everything. No doctor ever checks everything. There are 300 common tests. Most doctors
only check 15 or 20 on a typical visit and most doctors never check to see if any part of your
of your body is functioning normally. They only check to see if you need medical care, a prescription,
an injection, more tests, a referral to a specialist. Myth number three, it's totally normal to not have
all the energy I used to have. Everyone slows down as they get older. In reality, most fatigue,
tiredness, lack of energy is caused by a dozen little things that are undetectable by standard
medical practice. They are identified if you look for loss of normal function in your liver, your
kidneys, your cardiovascular system, your digestive system, your immune system, etc. So for example,
I had a patient come in, well let's call her Yolanda, not her real name. She's a 47 year old
hairdresser. She's complaining of gas, bloating, nausea, poor concentration. It's a long list.
Headaches, dizziness, depression, anxiety, frequent colds and stuffy nose, cold hands and feet, and she
has 50% less energy than she had five years ago. After I asked her a few questions, she revealed
that she rarely exercises. She drinks five to six glasses of water a day. She constantly craves
starch and sugar, uses a lot of artificial sweeteners. She has dry thinning hair and hair loss,
dry skin. She's noticing bruises that seem to come out of nowhere. She also has neck and back pain,
severe cramps, and heavy menstrual flow. So I did some blood work on her and the blood work showed
that she had some stress on her kidneys, some stress on her liver, several nutrient deficiencies.
She was low on calcium and chloride and magnesium and protein. Her thyroid was low. She had iron
deficiency anemia and a few other things that are a little complicated to explain on this show.
But the good news is four months later her kidneys were doing better. Her mineral deficiencies were
still there, still needed some work. Her total protein was was better. Her cholesterol was better.
Her liver was a little bit better. Her cholesterol was completely normal now. We're near normal now
and her iron deficiency anemia was gone. But when I was explaining this to her,
she actually stopped me. She said, you know what, I don't thank you. I don't really care what my
blood tests look like. I want to tell you that I have no more gas, bloating, or nausea. I have no
headaches, no dizziness. My concentration is better. My depression and anxiety are much better. I have
no colds or stuffy nose. My hands and feet are less cold or cold less often and her energy is not only
not like it was, it's not reduced compared to it. It's actually better. Her energy is now better
than it was five years ago. She also was exercising three to five days a week and drinking two quarts
of water a day. She was really surprised when I told her that five or six glasses of water
was not enough for her body weight and lifestyle. She's eating much less starch and sugar. This is
huge. She's not using any artificial sweeteners which jangle her nerves. Most importantly to her,
at least the thing that seemed to get her the most excited, was that her hair wasn't falling out
anymore and it was thicker, less brittle. Her skin's back to normal, no bruising, neck and back pain
are 70% better. Her menstrual cramps are 50% less and her flow has returned to normal. So here's a
question. Who do you know who struggles to do things that used to be easy or who's always sick
and takes forever to get well? Do you know anybody that suddenly feels 10 years older
than they used to be? That never feels like going out anymore? Who's gained weight eating the same
food? Do you know anybody who's never wake who never wakes feeling fully rested or is anxious
or depressed for no reason? Anyone who's addicted? Someone who's addicted to caffeine, sugar and
stimulants? Someone who used to love to go on long walks, hiking or dancing? It doesn't have to be
this way. I am Dr. Todd Binkley sharing with you safe effective natural solutions to almost any
health challenge. If you're ready to take the next step and find out what's possible for your
situation, email me at drbinkley at binkleyhealingcenter.com. That's D-R-B-S-N-Boy I-N-K-L-E-Y
at binkleyhealingcenter.com. Another common question I get is, Dr. B, you're always talking
about functional medicine, making lifestyle choices, eating better food, exercise, supplements,
trying to prevent and reverse disease without needing medication all the time. Why doesn't
every doctor do this? Well, probably the most common reason is most patients wait till they
need medical care, crisis care, some kind of pharmaceutical intervention before they go to a
doctor. Most people wait till they're that bad off and that's why the practice of medicine is
so heavily based on treating things with drugs because most people need them.
But here's another reason. This is an article that just came out in Medscape in the medical
literature a few days ago. Here's the title, How Primary Care Practitioners Are Panelized
For Positive Outcomes From Lifestyle Change. How primary care practitioners are penalized
for positive outcomes from lifestyle change. This is written by Dr. Padmaya Patel, MD,
president-elect of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine. And he says,
clinical practice guidelines for many chronic diseases recommend lifestyle intervention,
basically better food, exercise, stress reduction, etc. as the first and optimal treatment.
A growing body of evidence supports lifestyle and behavior interventions to treat and when used
intensively even reverse common chronic conditions such as cardiovascular disease,
obesity, and type 2 diabetes while also providing effective prevention for those conditions.
However, no current quality measures consider lifestyle interventions, in fact some even
unintentionally penalized physicians for successfully treating and reversing disease
while rewarding conditions for meaning process measures, usually adherence to medication.
So this means doctors are rewarded for, especially in a nursing home setting,
for patients who consistently take their medication. If they consistently take their medication,
then that's considered a positive, a gold star for that institution, and the physicians themselves
are often rewarded for that. So rewarding medication adherence for the treatment of disease
when a lifestyle change for something like hypertension could work better incentivizes
physicians to skip the conversation about lifestyle changes and go straight to the
prescription of medication. Meanwhile, the clinician who takes the extra time to guide
a patient towards lifestyle interventions that could treat their current disease and prevent
future diseases without side effects is penalized. Isn't that crazy? He goes on,
existing comprehensive lifestyle programs that patients are eligible for, for example,
the diabetes prevention program, are often so poorly reimbursed that clinicians and health
systems decline to offer them. So despite the fact that lifestyle behaviors are top
contributors to health and conversely contribute to up to 80% of chronic diseases, few of the
measures that tell whether or not an institution or physician is doing a good job, are not
the same as the other ones. So, specific quality measures penalize lifestyle medicine approaches
include pharmacotherapy, drugs for type 2 diabetes, high cholesterol, osteoporosis,
and gout, as well as rheumatoid arthritis. So quality measures are the best for the patient.
For type 2 diabetes, high cholesterol, osteoporosis, and gout, as well as rheumatoid arthritis. So quality measures,
whether or not somebody is being measured as to whether they're doing a good job for their
patients, a physician is penalized for lifestyle medicine approaches for type 2 diabetes, high
cholesterol, osteoporosis, gout, and rheumatoid arthritis. Statin drugs for high cholesterol are a
perfect example. Here's a lifestyle medicine primary care physician who had a patient covered
by Medicare Advantage who was diagnosed with high cholesterol. Patient had a total cholesterol of 226
and triglyceride level of 132. Instead of prescribing a statin drug like Zocor, Lipitor,
it's orbit statin, etc. the physician prescribed lifestyle behavior modifications. Within three
weeks the patient's total cholesterol improved to 171. It dropped 50 points and triglycerides
similarly dropped over 50 points down to 75, which is a great success and the patient was delighted.
However, the CMS five-star rating system assigned the primary care physician a grade of C
rather than an A, which puts the physician's five-star rating at risk. Why? Because the system bases
its score largely on medication compliance. So despite achieving the optimal outcome at a lower cost
than with medication, he was penalized. So Medicare risk adjustment incentivizes physicians to manage
rather than reverse disease. A physician utilizing diet alone to achieve remission in a patient with
type 2 diabetes is penalized financially because when the risk is adjusted diabetes is no longer
listed on that patient's list of conditions. So Medicare pays the physician less money.
Does this make sense to you? For the change that needs to happen to be successful, it's vital,
this is the end of the article, for this change, the change that we want to be successful, it's
vital that lifestyle behavior interventions, optimal nutrition, physical activity, restorative
sleep, social connections, stress management, avoidance of harmful substances, this needs to
become the foundation of how we measure quality outcomes in health care. So isn't that sad?
Somebody's trying to do a better job for someone's health when it's proven to work better
and they lose money and lose their ratings for the institution that they work for. Pretty sad
state of affairs. Let's talk about another great case, give you an idea of what's possible
with taking better care of yourself. And even when things have become really bad, what you can do
with high doses of nutrients in special cases. So I had a 75 year old man patient that was coming
to me regularly for a few years, he had a lot of arthritis in his neck and his in his hips and he
was coming every month routinely just to help me just for have me help him keep his neck and hips
loosened up. And he had gone on vacation with his family. And I was only supposed to be gone for a
couple of weeks and a couple of months gone by I hadn't seen him. And finally, I think about three,
three or four months later, yeah, four months later, he comes in, he says, Oh, yeah, I was,
when I was visiting my family, I had a heart attack and ended up having to have open heart surgery,
double bypass surgery. And actually, I didn't see him for five months. And when he finally came in,
he looked like a ghost. He was weak, pale, couldn't drive anymore. Previously, he was fit. He
always wore shorts. Southern California, he's always wearing shorts. His legs were as strong as a man
much many decades younger than him. He always looked fit. He walked the exercise regularly.
He was he was in great shape. He comes in, he's pale, weak, slumped over, can't drive anymore.
He's got shortness of breath. He's kind of huffing and puffing a little bit. His ankles are swollen up
bigger than his calves. And I asked him what his BNP level was. And his daughter was with him and
his wife and they immediately knew what what test I was referring to. BNP B is in boy and is in Nancy
P is in Paul stands for B type natrietic peptide, B type natrietic peptide. So this is a test
cardiologists use to diagnose heart failure, congestive heart failure, especially.
So when you start, it's a common cause of death, congestive, natural, quote unquote, natural cause
of death, congestive heart failure, you get older, you start to get shortness of breath, fluid backs
up into your ankles and into your lungs eventually. And at some point, your heart just gives out.
But long before it gives out completely, it just becomes weaker. So the definition of heart failure
doesn't mean that your heart is stopped. It just means that it is failing to keep up with demand.
It's failing to pump strongly enough to keep all of your blood circulating. And so therefore,
fluid starts to back up into your ankles and eventually your lungs. So he looks terrible.
He's had open heart surgery, but it's been five months now. And I asked him what his BNP test
and it was was and it was 382, nearly four times the medical upper limit of normal.
And he'd been to his cardiologist recently. And his cardiologist told him that this was just this
was just normal. He's a 75 years old. He's had open heart surgery. Basically, this is as good as it
gets. You know, enjoy the time you have left. So I put them on a high dose of coenzyme Q10.
Coenzyme Q10 is an essential enzyme for heart repair for muscle repair throughout your body.
It's also essential for energy and the mitochondria for making energy and the
energy making part of every cell in your body. But it's especially important for heart
muscle. And our bodies make coenzyme Q10, but production peaks at around age 25.
And then after that it tapers off. So if you have heart failure or struggling heart condition,
almost any type of heart condition will benefit from supplementing with coenzyme Q10. I put them
on a very high dose of coenzyme Q10, 1200 milligrams plus several other nutrients.
In two months, his ankle swelling was reduced by half. He was standing up straight again,
his color had come back. He was driving again on his own. And he couldn't believe it. His wife
and his daughter were very happy. I reduced his dose of coenzyme Q10 down to 900 milligrams. These
are high doses and it's expensive to get that much coenzyme Q10, but it basically saved his life.
Four months later, his ankle swelling was gone. His fatigue was gone. He looked and felt better
than he felt before the surgery. And his BNP test was down to 132, 132, just barely out of the
medical range. A lot of physicians who are used to treating patients who aren't aware of the benefits
of coenzyme Q10, especially high doses on somebody with a situation like this,
think it's impossible to get the BNP test down below 200 in somebody in their 70s or their 80s
or older. So we got it down to 132. A couple of years after that, or I think about a year after
that, if my recollection is correct, we even got it below 100. We got it down to 87. And he went on
and lived another seven or eight years driving on his own, walking, doing all the things, you know,
doing all the things that he enjoys doing. And then, you know, eventually his heart gave out when
he was in his 80s. So that would never have happened without coenzyme Q10. And it did happen
with no medications. He was taking some medications for his blood pressure, but he wasn't taking any
statin drugs for his cholesterol. I think the only medication he was taking was one medication for
his blood pressure. So some people would call that a miracle, because it doesn't often happen. And
a lot of people don't understand how it can happen. But I've seen many, many patients respond very
well to high doses of coenzyme Q10 for almost any heart condition. It works for people on atrial
fibrillation. It works for people with cardiomyopathy, which is a thickening of the muscle of the heart.
It works for people that, well, have almost any heart condition. So BNP is the test to run if you
want to find out how much stress there is on your heart right now. BNP is a feedback mechanism
between your heart and your kidneys. So a peptide is a fragment, a building block of a protein.
The proteins that your muscle, your heart muscle is made of, you know, your heart muscle is made of
is made out of include one of these peptides. So as basically as your heart muscle is normally
turning over, as some old cells are dying off and new ones are replacing them, some of that cell
turnover results in BNP ending up in your bloodstream. There's a normal level of it in your
bloodstream all the time. The medical upper limit of normal is 100. The healthy range is 40 or less.
But there's always some there telling your kidneys that this is the amount of stretch and strain on
your heart muscle. And if it's elevated, then it tells your kidneys to dump more water to take the
pressure off of the heart. So that's why there's always some there. But if it's above 100, and a
lot of people have no idea, I test this on anybody who has signs or symptoms of being at risk for
heart disease. And I've had people that are just high stress personalities or had a family history
of heart disease, but have no symptoms of heart disease at all people in their 30s, 40s, 50s.
I recommend we run this test and I've seen people with no symptoms of heart disease have a BNP of
300, 400, 600, no symptoms. Put them on high dose of CoQ10 for a few months, get them back to normal.
That's called preventing heart disease. Did you know that most doctors are employees? Most doctors
are employed by a medical group, a hospital, a nursing home. They're told what they can and cannot
do based on standards of care, meaning you get the same treatment everyone else does, and insurance
reimbursement. They're governed by a board of directors who are mostly interested in maximizing
profits for their institution and cutting costs at the expense of your health. I'm not employed by
anyone other than myself, full stop. I work for you. My only interest is helping you, teaching you
how you can take responsibility for improving your health. Nothing you'll ever hear from me on this
show is a cure for any disease. That's not the purpose of this show and it's not what I do.
I've never cured a single disease in my entire 33 years in practice. That's not my job. Your body
does that. Your body heals or fails to heal any disease you get. That's worth repeating. Your body
heals or fails to heal any disease you get. Diabetes is not caused by a lack of metformin.
High blood pressure is not caused by a deficiency of lisinopril. Chronic headaches are not
caused by inadequate Advil. Heart disease is not caused by insufficient statin drugs like
etorvastatin or semvastatin, liposor or zocor. Most of these disease conditions are caused by
stress, identifiable nutrient deficiencies, lousy diets, lack of exercise, and general neglect.
If you want to be truly healthy, you have to take responsibility for your own health,
but you don't have to do it on your own. I'm here to help. I'd be honored to help you identify
all the areas where your heart, liver, kidneys, lungs, immune system, digestive system are
silently struggling and could use a little help. Remember, the condition of your body is far more
important than any disease condition you've been diagnosed with. Do something today to be a little
healthier than you were yesterday. Go for a walk. Eat more fresh vegetables. Call your mother or
that friend you haven't spoken to in years. I'm Dr. Todd Binkley sharing with you safe, effective,
natural solutions to almost any health challenge. I look forward to the privilege of speaking with
you again right here next Friday at 4 p.m. Have a blessed weekend. You've been listening to safe,
effective, natural solutions with Dr. Todd Binkley. If you have a health question you want discussed
on the show, email your health questions to drbinkley at binkleyhealingcenter.com. Take
advantage of this opportunity to ask questions for yourself and for your loved ones because our
health matters. Join him next Friday at 4 p.m. for safe, effective, natural solutions right here
on 98.3 The Word KDAR.