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.
I'm Dr. Todd Binkley, board certified non-force doctor of chiropractic and practitioner of
functional medicine.
I identify conditions other doctors miss because I do tests that most other doctors don't do,
usually because your insurance doesn't want to pay for it because it's not quote unquote
medically necessary.
I'm really excited.
I've got some exciting things to share with you today.
I spent the entirety of last weekend in a three-day online conference, the Integrative
Medicine for Mental Health Conference.
This was three days of presentations from some amazing, renowned speakers and authors
from around the country and a couple from the UK.
There were over 400 participating physicians and practitioners from around the world talking
about some pretty amazing things.
For example, psychiatrist Mary Beth Ackerley, summa cum laude, graduate of Harvard University,
who went on to study at the National Institutes of Middle Health and finished her residency
at John Hopkins, certified in psychiatry and neurology.
She was the past president and co-founder of the International Society for Environmentally
Acquired Illness.
Dr. Ackerman, this very distinguished psychiatrist known around the country in the profession,
declared antidepressant medications like Prozac, Zoloft, Baxil, Lexapro, and Celexa, the top
selling drugs in 18 to 44 year olds and top selling mental health drugs in history, 337
million prescriptions per year.
Don't work for most people long term.
They dramatically increase suicide risk and make depression and anxiety worse.
People just become dependent on these things for the rest of their lives.
She also demonstrated conclusively with robust data how exercise, a low carb diet, and fish
oil works better for most people.
So this is one of the top psychiatrists in the country and educators for other psychiatrists
who speaks around the country, who's published over a hundred papers in peer reviewed journals.
She says that SSRIs, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, these are these very common drugs
for depression, Prozac, Zoloft, Baxil, Lexapro, Celexa, top selling drugs and mental health
in history, 337 million prescriptions are written for these drugs every year.
That's more than there are adults in the United States of America.
She declared that they don't work for most people.
They alter symptoms temporarily, but they also dramatically increase risk of suicide
and eventually make depression and anxiety worse.
They're very difficult to wean yourself off of.
And she showed data on how exercise, a low carb diet, and fish oil works better for most
people.
Dr. Akina Stein, board certified psychiatrist, certified practitioner of the Institute for
functional medicine and a distinguished fellow of the American Psychiatrics Association,
former professor of psychiatry at the medical school at Brown University.
She began her talk with a description of functional versus conventional medicine.
Conventional medicine means diagnose an acute disease, spend about an hour interviewing
someone, diagnose them with depression and give them a prescription.
And the challenge is that trying to switch to do anything other than that, anything to
what they're trained to do, it's very difficult.
Most doctors don't have time.
It takes longer to do a proper functional medicine workup.
And most doctors believe that their patients don't want or can't make changes in their
lifestyle and their diet.
And many doctors believe that they can't trust their patients history or even that they're
lying.
This is top psychiatrist saying this to her other professionals and people are nodding
their heads.
So adopting a different model of thinking about the root cause of chronic disease and
treating function, treating places where normal function has gone amiss instead of disease,
treating identifying earlier causes of all the stress on your organs and systems like
I'm always talking about doing this for a psychiatrist to switch to doing this requires
different training that most of them just don't have.
And most general practitioners and most conventional doctors in general just don't have the training
to do functional medicine.
They're not trained in it.
So she also described the most commonly medically overlooked causes of depression, anxiety.
So the most commonly overlooked causes of depression and anxiety, according to this
very distinguished board certified psychiatrist are low cholesterol.
And she presented data on how low cholesterol is linked to suicide attempts, low omega three
fatty acids, low vitamin D, undiagnosed thyroid conditions and other autoimmune conditions
and hypoglycemia, low blood sugar.
So these are, and she presented robust data to back all of this up studies in peer review
journals showing that risk of suicide, people who attempt suicide have much higher incidence
of low cholesterol and low omega three fatty acids, mental disorders in general across
the board, depression, anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder.
All of the main conditions that psychiatrists treat are strongly associated with low levels
of vitamin D, low levels of omega three fatty acids, undiagnosed thyroid conditions and
other autoimmune conditions and low blood sugar.
And these are all things that you can successfully resolve with better food, exercise and supplements.
One of the most exciting presentations of the entire weekend was offered by Kat Toups,
a functional medicine psychiatrist treating cognitive impairment and dementia.
Dr. Toups is board certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology and a distinguished
fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, the highest honor bestowed by the American
Psychiatric Association and a certified practitioner with the Institute of Functional Medicine.
She's been practicing for psychiatry for over 30 years and functional medicine psychiatry
for more than a decade.
She's been a featured speaker at national and international medical conferences on dementia
and functional medicine psychiatry, as well as a frequent guest at various summits.
She's been the principal investigator on over 100 clinical research trials.
Her specialty is reversing dementia.
And she recently collaborated with Dr. Dale Bredson on a promising prospective clinical
trial using functional medicine to reverse mild cognitive impairment.
This early dementia where 84% of the patients had improvement, including on their head scans.
So she's implementing a protocol, a robust protocol of better food, exercise and supplements.
It's not an easy thing.
It's not an easy program to adhere to, but 84% of the patients had improvement.
She's reversing Alzheimer's.
This is unheard of or until very recently, she's documenting it.
This paper was published in the prestigious Journal of Alzheimer's Disease in July of
22 and two additional papers that are even more exciting that she presented early the
data from at the conference.
Two more papers have been submitted for publication.
So it is possible to reverse dementia with lifestyle changes with better food, exercise
and evidence-based supplements were indicated.
There's data to show this is happening right now.
Interestingly, nearly every single presenter at the Integrative Medicine for Mental Health
Conference that I recently attended included some discussion about one topic that affects
all aspects of mental health disorders.
Can anybody guess what the one commonly overlooked, almost never tested for element that affects
all of us that contributes to and in some cases is the primary factor underlying almost
all mental health disorders?
Anybody?
Those of you that were listening to my program last week probably guessed it.
Toxins, mold toxins in particular, mold toxins, chemical toxins from pesticides and fertilizers
and heavy metals in our water and in our air.
The brain is the most sensitive organ to any kind of toxin, especially in children and
in the elderly.
But we're all sensitive to these things.
We're all inundated with exposure to mold toxins, chemical toxins from pesticides, fertilizers,
heavy metals in our water and our food because of the way most of our food is grown.
And most of us have no idea the effect of these things on our physical body, on our
physical symptoms, but also our minds.
These things are literally driving us crazy and robust data was presented documenting
the effects of this, especially mold toxins over and over and over again.
Several of the presenters were hitting on mold toxins and showing the direct way they
damage neurons in the brain and increase and drive cognitive impairment, depression, anxiety,
obsessive compulsive disorder, autism, virtually every mental disorder that was discussed in
the conference.
They had data to show some linked to especially mold toxins, but also heavy metals, lead,
mercury, arsenic was another big one.
So toxins, they're out there.
If you're suffering any symptoms like this, if you know someone who's suffering symptoms
of depression and anxiety especially, or wants to reduce their risk of dementia, please have
them contact me at email me at dr. binkley at binkley healing center.com.
I'm Dr. Todd Binkley discussing with you safe, effective natural solutions to almost any
health challenge.
There are many ways you can test for these various types of toxicities for mold toxins.
What we're measuring is not the presence of the mold itself, but basically the metabolic
waste of those molds.
So the mold itself isn't really what's harming you.
It's their we, the metabolic waste they produce.
That's what does the damage and that's what your body flushes out as best it can.
And when it can't, it gets shoved into fat cells for storage to remove it from circulation,
to stop it circulating around, irritating every other part of your body.
And there it remains for the rest of your life.
So you might have been exposed to mold for six months, 10 years ago, and you'll find
out once you do a specific type of test that you've still got huge amounts, huge body burden
of these toxins that are damaging your brain, that are causing perhaps depression and anxiety,
increasing your risk of dementia or autoimmune conditions.
So there's a special urine test that you can do that with for other toxins.
You can directly measure chemical toxins like glyphosate, Roundup, the chemical that is
most commonly used, pesticide, herbicide, anything that ends inside is designed to kill
something.
Monsanto wants us to believe that it's not going to kill you.
It's sprayed on Roundup ready crops.
So they don't kill the crops if you buy your seeds from them.
So they make money that way.
And then they make more money by selling all that toxin to spray on that food that then
ends up throughout the food chain.
It ends up in the groundwater.
It ends up in the livestock that are fed those Roundup glyphosate saturated crops.
It ends up in breast milk that mothers are feeding their children, which has been linked
to autism.
We're going to talk more about that later if we have time.
Dr. Shaw presented a very interesting data set that he's been collecting for many years
showing that glyphosate that ends up in exposing pregnant mothers and ends up in food that's
being fed infants is increasing their risk of autism.
And not because of the effects of it by itself.
I want to come back to that later.
There is another way, there's a simple way anyone can get some idea of your broad body
burden of toxins with a simple questionnaire.
So if you email me, I can send it to you or you can Google this, look it up.
It's Dr. Hyman.
A lot of people have heard of Dr. Hyman.
He's an excellent functional medicine practitioner that does a lot of educational programs on
eating better food especially.
And so it's Dr. Hyman's medical symptom toxicity questionnaire.
So if you Google Hyman medical symptom toxicity questionnaire you can answer the various symptoms
on that and score it and get a rough idea of how you compare to a normal population
that has not been exposed and tested for these various toxins.
Let's talk about a case who came to me whose primary complaint was depression.
She was a 22 year old female at the time with anxiety, depression, attention deficit disorder,
fatigue.
She was constantly craving starch and sugar and she's on three different medications for
anxiety and depression and amphetamines for attention deficit disorder.
Her blood test showed very low protein.
She had some significant stress on her kidneys and anemia from both iron deficiency and B
vitamin deficiencies.
And as I almost always see when I initially test people, very low vitamin D. So I also
did some heavy metal testing on her.
There's a couple of different ways you can test for heavy metals.
One of the simplest ways is with a hair test.
So your body, as I've mentioned previously, when you're exposed to these things they build
up in fat cells in your body.
And your body, one of the ways your body excretes them, mostly initially when you have an acute
exposure to lead, arsenic, cadmium, uranium, your body will flush these things out through
the kidneys and the colon.
But another way they flush them out is through sweat, directly through your skin, your sweat
glands excrete these things in very small amounts over long periods of time.
But it is a good way to detox that anyone can do to sit in a sauna or exercise and sweat.
And make sure you wipe that sweat off and wash it off as soon as possible so that it's
not immediately reabsorbed back into your skin if you're going to do that.
But we did a hair test which shows these hair tests are widely used for drug testing and
other things as well.
But it's a simple way to test not what's in your body, but it tests what your body is
excreting.
It tests what's coming out through your sweat glands and hair follicles as your hair grows
out.
So we cut the hair off right at the scalp, little pieces, you don't have to shave your
head, it's about a teaspoon full of little one inch cuttings of hair.
And we send it in, the lab analyzes it, Doctors Data is the premier lab in the country that
does this type of testing.
It's very reliable.
And her hair test came back with high uranium, high levels of aluminum, arsenic, cadmium,
lead and mercury, not off the charts high, but noteworthy, bad enough to definitely want
to do something about it.
So I put her on chlorella, a reasonable effective dose of chlorella powder which is a blue green
algae that you can take in capsule or powder form, you can make it in a shake.
And these things, you want to do this slowly.
So sometimes you hear about people doing a liver cleanse or just some kind of detox thing
that they've heard about somewhere without any testing and without any guidance.
And sometimes these things can be dangerous, they make you sick because your body has shoved
these things into storage to get them out of circulation for a reason.
So if you try to pull them out of storage, you can make yourself sick and people feel
experience that sometimes.
So it's a slow process to slowly, gently escort these things from storage and fat cells to
the bloodstream where they're then excreted, eliminated through the kidneys and the colons.
So I told her with a hair test, we're not measuring what's unlike a blood test or a
provoked urine test, we're not directly measuring your body burden of these things, we're measuring
what your body is trying its best as it can to flush out.
And so when we retest, and you've been taking chlorella, which is going to one of the most
powerful herbs to facilitate your body's ability to flush these things out, when we retest
these, what we expect to see is some of these things go up because now her body's flushing
more of these things out.
That's what we want to see.
And that's exactly what we saw.
So her initial uranium was 0.049 and six months later when we retested her, it was 0.4, it
got up tenfold.
So ten times as much uranium is coming out.
She still has some significant levels of aluminum coming out.
But the lead and the mercury were already getting better.
We're already coming down to safer levels, the arsenic was unchanged.
So I told her to continue that.
You know, meanwhile she's also been doing, I explained to her how to get much less, simple
ways to get much less grains, starch and sugar in her diet so that she would stop craving
those things.
I gave her some iron and some folate and B12 to address her B vitamin anemia and some vitamin
D. I always recommend everyone take fish oil and a good multivitamin.
We'll talk more about that later because there's lots of bad multivitamins, but she took a
very good multivitamin.
So after taking some supplements for about six months, we retested her hair, getting
the expected results, still got a lot of work to do on flushing those heavy metals out.
But her protein levels are back to normal.
Her anemia is gone.
She has no more iron deficiency anemia or vitamin B deficiencies or vitamin D level
is back to normal now.
And she's off of all three of her medications.
She went back to her psychiatrist and that physician was very happy that she was doing
better.
She's still taking one of the medications for depression once in a while on a bad day,
maybe once or twice a week.
But she was taking amphetamines for attention deficit disorder and two medications for anxiety
depression every day for years.
And so she's off of the amphetamines and off of one of the other medications with her
psychiatrist's approval and just occasionally on a bad day, still having a little bit of
depression but so much better.
She was very excited and very happy with her results.
And of course, I tell you still people with a hair test, you usually have to test at least
three times you do an initial read to see what your body's flushing out now.
We do an intervention, chlorella.
There's several other things that chlorella is the one I use most commonly, but there
are several other ways to facilitate your body's ability to flush out the heavy metal.
So when we do a second test, these things go up because your body's flushing more out.
So then we need to do a third test, usually six months, a year apart, sometimes longer.
And then on that third test, we should see that the ones that had peaked are now going
down.
And that's exactly what we saw.
So that tenfold increased uranium is back down to nearly a safe level.
The cadmium and lead and mercury are almost undetectable.
And the arsenic was still a little bit elevated, still needed a little bit of work on that,
but also much improved.
And she was feeling fantastic.
Another common theme that kept coming up in all of the presentations in the conference
I went to last weekend for mental health disorders was inflammation.
Inflammation underlies all chronic disease.
And one of the presenters did a great slide and a metaphor for this, because what is inflammation
exactly?
Well, there's a technical way to explain it.
It's inflammatory cytokines like TNF-alpha and IL-6, and nobody knows what those things
are.
But another way to think about it, it's like flood water.
So if you have a flood, water enters your house, so all of a sudden all your floor is
completely covered with water.
The longer it's there, the more damage occurs.
And you don't just have damage to your flooring, but eventually it seeps up into your couches
and your chairs and your kitchen cabinets, your baseboards, and starts working its way
up the drywall.
And eventually it affects every part of your house.
Well, in the case of chronic inflammation, it affects every part of your body.
So acute inflammation, like if you have a flood and then get somebody over right away
to clean it out, maybe you just had a nice cleanup for your house.
When you have acute inflammation in response to some kind of disease, to heal a cut or
a bruise, if you smash your thumb with a hammer, or if you have an infection that your body
needs to heal, then inflammation is good.
That's part of the process that your body needs to use to fight off and eliminate something
or repair damaged tissue.
But when it's chronic and persists over weeks and months and years, then it's causing damage
and damage that you're often not aware of.
But in combination with the stress of everyday life, this is also chemically stressing and
damaging organs and tissues throughout your body.
And of course, we can test for these things too, with tests like ferritin level and erythrocyte
sedimentation rate, which measures the blood viscosity, the thickness of your blood, the
thicker your blood, the more of these inflammatory components are present.
So there's ways to test for inflammation and eliminate it.
And there's ways that anybody can reduce the effects of inflammation on your body simply
by eating better foods.
So eat, you know, pro-inflammatory foods are grain, starch, and sugar, junk food, burgers
and fries.
Probably the worst thing you can eat is a donut.
Probably the second worst thing you can eat are French fries because they've got starch
and sugar and grease all in one package.
Instead, eat more fresh, healthy vegetables, preferably organic vegetables.
And organic vegetables can be expensive.
Not everybody can make it to a farmer's market.
Another way to get fresh, healthy vegetables every day, one of the best ways, is to grow
your own.
I've done this at my office.
You can come by and check it out.
There's a fresh organic veggie garden right on Main Street with some herbs.
You can come by and pick some for yourself if you like.
There's basil, parsley, chives, rosemary, thyme, tarragon, oregano, mint, stevia, green
onions.
I like to demonstrate how you can grow your own food, an abundance of food, in a small
space with minimal water.
It looks like we're about out of time.
I'm Dr. Todd Binkley.
I'd love the opportunity to help you solve whatever is challenging your health.
If you have any questions, email me at drbinkley at binkleyhealingcenter.com.
Look forward to speaking with you right here again next week at 4 o'clock.
Have a great 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.