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 am Dr. Todd Binkley, board certified doctor of non-force chiropractic and practitioner
of functional medicine.
Functional medicine means using standard diagnostic tests to identify earlier signs of stress
on your heart, your liver, your kidneys, your immune system, your digestive system.
Don't be surprised if you've never heard of functional medicine before.
Most doctors practice conventional medicine.
And conventional medicine is essential when you're in a crisis, if you're bleeding, if
you have an infection, if you need to go to the hospital.
But if you've got an issue that you've been struggling with for years and your doctor
hasn't been able to figure out a solution that's working for you, or if you just don't
like the idea of being dependent for the rest of your life on pharmaceutical medications
that mask your symptoms and often don't really ever address the true cause of what's ailing
you, then stay tuned.
We're going to talk about some exciting things today.
I've got some more information to present from the Integrative Medicine for Mental Health
Conference that I attended a couple of weekends ago.
I'm also going to be presenting a case of a woman who experienced one of the most traumatic
things any woman can experience.
She was a victim of assault and was still suffering, had been suffering for many years,
debilitating pain that no one could help her with.
She worked for a prominent local medical clinic and had every procedure known in medicine
to attempt to help her with this condition to no avail.
For those of you who are just tuning in for the first time, this is the sixth episode
in this new series, which just began last month.
And I am working on getting a podcast set up so that anyone can listen to these programs
again on demand anytime you like.
So I'll keep you posted when I've got that up.
Another one of the fantastic presenters who spoke at the Integrative Medicine for Mental
Health Conference I attended a couple of weekends ago was Jill Carnahan, medical director and
founder of Flatiron Functional Medicine in Colorado.
She's a breast cancer survivor, survived Crohn's disease and toxic mold illness, and she brings
a very unique perspective to healing and talks about her own journey.
She just released a book called Unexpected, Finding Resilience Through Functional Medicine,
Resilience and Faith, it just came out this year.
And she had a fantastic presentation, mostly focusing on the gut-brain connection.
So we've all heard that our guts and our brains are connected and some people wonder, you
know, how is that a tenuous link?
Is it, you know, what's the evidence?
There's a tremendous amount of evidence on how profoundly linked our guts and our brains
are and more research is coming out to document some profound effects, which she presented.
So the gut-brain access is linked to mood disorders.
Imbalances in the microbiome, the bacteria in your intestines can affect the production
of mood-regulating compounds like serotonin, epinephrine, norepinephrine, dopamine, all
of the neurotransmitters that affect psychiatric disorders.
And this disruptions in, you know, whether or not you do not have enough healthy bacteria
in your gut, it dramatically reduces the ability to respond to stress.
And at the same time, chronic stress dramatically reduces the diversity of beneficial bacteria
in the gut, so it goes back and forth.
Also disruptions in this healthy bacteria population in your gut increases intestinal
permeability, or what you may have heard called leaky gut.
So people with a lower diversity, with fewer different kinds of healthy levels of good
bacteria have higher levels of body fat and inflammation than those with more diverse
populations of good bacteria in their guts.
Consumption of high-fiber foods like fruit and vegetables leads to an increase in this
desired diversity and also improves clinical outcomes with obesity.
This is some of the research that she presented during her talk.
I've talked about previously and will continue to be talking about inflammation and how it
wreaks havoc throughout your body.
So Dr. Carnahan also presented some amazing research documenting how dietary polyphenols,
these are antioxidants in fruits and vegetables, but are also naturally occurring in coffee
and cocoa for fans of dark chocolate.
These things are extensively metabolized by good bacteria in your gut into compounds that
reduce inflammation throughout your body and reduced diversity in sufficient amounts of
good bacteria of varying types in the gut microbiome was also shown to increase the
risk of allergies in infants.
So this has in part to do with the intestinal permeability or leaky gut that occurs from
disruptions in the normal population of good bacteria in your gut.
If you lack sufficient good bacteria in your gut, it causes this leaky gut condition also
called intestinal permeability.
But bottom line is your intestines are, your entire digestive tract is actually outside
of your body.
Nothing, people say, oh, you are what you eat.
Well, actually, you are what your body digests, absorbs, and then passes through the wall
of your intestine into your bloodstream.
It's not part of you until it's in your blood.
And the walls of your intestines are a single cell thick.
Your skin is about a dozen layers thick, and you can see how easy it is to penetrate those
layers if you cut yourself.
So the intestine, the walls of the intestines have to be very thin so that they can absorb
nutrients, the nutrients that your life depends on.
But they also have to keep out bad things, toxins, bad bacteria, viruses, and parasites,
and even just things in your food that don't belong in your bloodstream.
So when your gut is leaky, when this single cell layer, this single cell, the single layer
of cells that lines your intestines is the biggest interaction between your body and
the external environment.
It's much bigger.
You'd think your skin is the largest interface between the inside of your body and the outside
world.
But the lining of your intestines, if it were laid out flat, is the size of a tennis court.
So it's a huge surface area that interacts with things from your environment, things
you, your food, things you ingest so that it can absorb nutrients from them.
But it also has to be a barrier against anything that gets to getting in your bloodstream that
doesn't belong there, including things from your food that don't belong there.
Undigested proteins can enter your bloodstream.
And when one of the most common of those, food irritants, are among the most common
causes of a leaky gut, gluten is one of the most famous ones and one of the most common
ones.
And so this single layer of cells in the lining of your intestines has little openings that
allow your immune system to sense whether or not something is passing through your gut
that shouldn't enter the bloodstream.
And then it sends out little killer cells to digest and absorb these things and eliminate
them.
But when that happens over and over again, food irritants like gluten, there are several
others cause these little openings, which are called tight junctions.
They're tight normally gaps between one cell and the next group of cells.
These tight junctions become not tight junctions.
They become leaky junctions.
This is what happens when you have leaky gut.
So things that don't belong in your bloodstream from your digestive tract enter and your immune
system rightly sees these things as foreign and attacks them.
This is what underlies the cause of many, if not most autoimmune conditions.
Your immune system doesn't just randomly wake up one day and decide to attack healthy tissue
in your body.
When you have Hashimoto's thyroiditis or lupus or multiple sclerosis, your immune system
is recognizing foreign debris that has entered your bloodstream and your tissues migrated
to various parts of your body that do not belong there and then attacks them and healthy
tissue gets caught in the crossfire.
So gluten is one of the most common causes of leaky gut, but other things include exposure
to toxins, infections, overuse of common over the counter pain medications like Advil and
aspirin, chronic alcoholism, persistent diarrhea, long standing stress of all stripes and low
stomach acid, multiple nutrient deficiencies.
The result is an increase in circulating toxins and lipopolysaccharides has recently been
identified as the cause of inflammation in your brain and your nervous system, which
can lead to constipation, depression, anxiety, cognitive decline, memory loss, and a whole
host of other conditions.
Dr. Callahan presented some recent research done in Italy that demonstrates that a common
gut pathogen, a common bad bug in your gut called Clostridium difficile.
This is a really bad bug that causes a lot of infections in hospitals.
These Italian researchers showed that people treated for varying degrees of infection with
this organism Clostridium difficile, surprisingly had all kinds of relief from seemingly unrelated
conditions such as autism spectrum disorders, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's and multiple
sclerosis.
I'm Dr. Todd Binkley presenting to you safe, effective natural solutions to almost any
health challenge.
I'd love the opportunity to help you with something that you're struggling with.
If you have questions for me, I love questions, email me at drbinkley at binkleyhealingcenter.com.
The focus of today's program is the gut brain connection.
And in addition to various effects that microbes in your gut, good and bad bacteria, not enough
good too many bad bacteria can have on your brain and nervous system, there is also a
direct link between your brain and your nervous system called the vagus nerve, V-A-G-U-S.
The vagus nerve is a two way communication freeway that hardwires your brain to your
intestines and it plays a role in controlling inflammation throughout the body.
Dr. Karen Carnahan presented research showing how certain beneficial bacteria can stimulate
the vagus nerve to dampen inflammatory responses.
It also helps grow and maintain new nerve cells in various regions of your brain and
emergence to emerging studies suggest that certain bacteria can increase nerve growth
factors that heal and repair your brain.
Even more exciting than this, one of the most amazing presenters of the entire conference
was Dr. Steven Porges, PhD, professor of psychiatry at University of North Carolina, professor
emeritus at the University of Illinois Chicago and the University of Maryland.
He is a founder of the Polyvagal Institute.
He's published over 400 peer reviewed scientific papers across several disciplines including
anesthesiology, biomedical engineering, critical care medicine, ergonomics, exercise, physiology,
gerontology, neurology, neuroscience, obstetrics, pediatrics, psychiatry, psychology, psychometric
abuse. His research has been cited in more than 50,000 peer reviewed publications.
In 1994, he proposed this phenomenal theory, the Polyvagal theory that basically completely
redefines our understanding of the vagus nerve, this massive branch of your nervous system
that can directly connects your brain to your gut.
So it was a roller coaster of a ride in anatomy and neurophysiology, but for your benefit,
he's also written a fantastic book called The Polyvagal Theory.
I recommend it highly, The Polyvagal Theory, and it explains in layman's terms what this
means and why it's important and how this hardwired massive nerve that connects your
brain to your gut affects almost every aspect of your life. It underlies, effects on it
can underlie, often underlie any psychiatric condition, anxiety, depression, even severe
psychiatric disorders like multiple personality disorders, schizophrenia, and just extremes
of emotion, rage. Our brains are designed and he's discovered and developed and been
documenting and progressively identifying further aspects of how basically our nervous
systems are hardwired to ensure that we feel safe. As we go throughout our day, one of
the most fundamental things to our bodies, instincts to preservation of life is feeling
safe, feeling that we can carry on doing whatever it is we're doing without any threat to our
lives or our safety. Most of us are familiar with the extreme examples of this post-traumatic
stress disorder in war zone experiences, returning soldiers, people who've been traumatized,
assaulted, witnessed a serious injury of another even. Some of the effects of this can be subconscious
and even something like sudden death of a close friend or relative or sibling or a parent
can have very similar effects. So we're not always aware of this lack of feeling safe
that's embedded in our nervous systems. And of course, the worst thing that can happen
is when this nervous system as it's being developed in an infant in the first few years
of life is traumatized in any way that causes this profound link between our brains and
our guts that governs this feeling of basic safety to be traumatized. It might be tempting
to think, well, that's really awful that people experience these things, but what can you
do about it? Is there anything that could be done? And there is. So his book, Our Polyvegal
World, I might have misspoken earlier, the title of his book that explains this in layman's
terms is called Our Polyvegal World, How Safety and Trauma Change Us by Stephen Porges, P-O-R-G-E-S.
So in this book, he explains several things that we can all do to reverse the effects
of previous traumas or even just perceived trauma. Your body reacts, can react to an
experience that isn't even occurring in the present time. You can smell something or hear
something or just have any number of sensory triggers that launch your body into a reaction
to something that happened many, many years ago when there is no current threat. So there
are ways to enable your brain to understand. There's even a form of treatment that I do
in my office called bio-energetics synchronization, where we can help your brain realize that
the seemingly traumatic experience your body is convinced is occurring right now or imminent
was in fact something that happened a long time ago and need not bother you anymore.
So let's turn now to this case I promised to present in the intro. A woman in her late
fifties came to me who was a rape victim and she had pain in her private area radiating
down the inside of her upper thigh and she worked for a medical, I'm sorry this is not
a fun case to hear but I promise you there's a happy outcome. She worked for a prominent
local medical clinic. She had every procedure done to attempt to relieve pain from her pelvic
area. She had a full hysterectomy. She had multiple epidural blocks. She had multiple
nerve blocks, cortisone injections, every oral medication pain reliever that might potentially
offer her some relief and nothing helped her. In fact when she called me she had heard from
a she was referred by another patient and she asked me a few questions and then said
she'd call back and then a few months went by before she finally did call back and come
in and when she came in I told her that I don't have a treatment for rape. You know
for the things that you're describing I have no direct way to cure that. What I can do
is offer some ways to help your brain realize that the trauma you experienced many years
ago is no longer occurring. Your body is reacting, her body was reacting as though this trauma
was still happening or about to happen again at a moment's notice and that was what was
causing her pain. So I did a form of treatment on her that's difficult to describe on the
radio but it involves using kinesiology, muscle testing to identify emotions that her brain
is associating right now with the memory of this traumatic event. The only parts of her
body I touched were her feet and her head. I used this very special form of testing to
identify a dominant emotion that her body was ready to work on, to release and after
the very first session she said to me something feels different. She couldn't really describe
it but the area that she had this intense pain in her groin inside of her thigh felt
different. She came back a few days later, continued to work on her after about two or
three weeks, three times a week doing this type of work helping her brain. I'm just giving
her brain information that it can use to realize consistent with this polyvagal theory that
I described earlier. I'm helping her nervous system realize that there's no current threat
now. Something horrible happened to her. The memory of that is never going to go away but
there is no current need for her body to react and continually be triggered by things that
remind her of that event anymore. After about three weeks of this she told me that her pain
was reduced by half. Nothing, hysterectomy, multiple medical procedures, injections and
medications had ever given her any relief at all. And after three weeks of this type
of work her pain was 50% gone. About three months later she was able to finally consummate
her marriage. She had remarried a year and a half ago. Her husband then quickly became
a patient. She was up dancing and painting. She was a painter and she had been a dancer
in her youth and she felt like an entirely new person. It looks like we have time for
another case. I know this is going to be difficult to understand on the radio and it's going
to sound incredible beyond belief but I had another patient who came in who was a healthy,
fit, young, happy, 23 year old woman, worked in a bank, married, happy life, happy job
but was having difficulty getting pregnant. She wanted a family and she had had two previous
miscarriages both that occurred in about the seventh or eighth week and now she was having
trouble getting pregnant again. I told her that there is this particular form of work
I can use on her, no guarantees but we can see what happens. A lot of times you are totally
unaware of things that are causing profound effects in your body. So I did a similar procedure
on her to identify a dominant emotion that her body was reacting to unnecessarily that
was interfering with her body functioning the way it's supposed to. I had her think
about some words and numbers that gave her brain access to places where she was reacting
to something that had happened in the past that was no longer dangerous, that it no longer
needed to react to. Soon enough she announces that she is pregnant again. She is very excited
and I'm seeing her less frequently now, once a week. She was traveling from about over
an hour away each time. I'm seeing her once a week and she is worried that finally she
has gotten pregnant again. After two miscarriages she was having difficulty getting pregnant
since she was delighted just to be getting pregnant again but of course still worried
that she was going to miscarry again. So around the seventh or eighth week she says, I'm sorry
I have to tell you something. I don't know how I didn't even think of this until then
but I just remembered this. My mother told me at some point that when she was pregnant
with me she was raped by her boyfriend. Wow. So again this sounds a little odd but here's
what happened. Her body had an energetic imprint from an experience in the womb. That's my
theory. I don't have any randomized controlled trials to prove it but what happened was we
continued to give her brain feedback that it could use to realize that this perceived
threat to her survival was no longer occurring. There was something that happened in the past.
She got through the seventh and eighth week. She did not have a miscarriage. Nine months
later she brought into my office a beautiful healthy young boy with tears in her eyes thanking
me for helping her body figure out that there was nothing wrong and that she was perfectly
healthy and she was very happy to have her healthy young son. I'm Dr. Todd Binkley. I
love an opportunity to help you with any health challenge you're struggling with. Email me
your questions. I look forward to speaking with you again right here next Friday at 4
p.m. 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.