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, non-force doctor of chiropractic and practitioner of functional medicine.
What is functional medicine? Well, functional medicine basically means identifying areas where normal function throughout your organs and tissues, your heart, liver, digestive system, immune system, pancreas, kidneys, etc.
Where that normal function has become disrupted and then using standard tests to figure out what areas need attention so that you can use better food, exercise, and supplements to restore that normal function.
This as opposed to the practice of medicine practiced by most conventional medical doctors, which is based on treating disease, identifying and treating disease that you already have now that's bad enough to require pharmaceuticals, surgery, other diagnostic tests to identify things that are in a crisis.
And, you know, most people are familiar with this. Most people wait until they need medical care before they go to any doctor.
There are a few thousand doctors around the country that practice functional medicine, but we still make up a tiny fraction of all the doctors in the country.
So, unfortunately, you're unlikely to find a practitioner of functional medicine unless you do some due diligence, or you could just call me.
But it's interesting. It may be interesting to know that when I go to functional medicine conferences around the country, because that's, you know, that's the most important thing.
It doesn't really matter where you went to school. What matters is what seminars you took last year, the year before, in the past five years.
What are you doing? What is your doctor doing to keep abreast of all the latest research, not just into the latest drugs that come out by big pharma every year?
That information is relatively easy to find. They spend billions of dollars advertising it directly to you and even more money advertising it directly to doctors.
But it requires to keep abreast of any new developments and research. It requires going to seminars every year.
So the best place to learn the best information to provide the best service to you is in hotel rooms at medical conferences around the country every year, which is what I do.
At conferences like the Clinical Applications of Scientific Innovation with world renowned lecturers that gathered in Nashville and Phoenix over the past couple of years online during COVID.
Next month, the Lens and Neuroendocrinology Symposium will be in San Francisco. This will be the fifth year in a row I've taken that because every year it's filled with fantastic new information that I incorporate to provide the best treatment options for you.
I'll be presenting a couple of great case studies about a 54 year old woman who had done a standard probably familiar to most people diet plan that involved doing a kind of a shake and some special foods every month.
And she lost a lot of weight and was really, really sick as a result. She looked great, sort of. I mean, she lost a lot of weight. That was her goal.
But she wasn't healthy. And when we did proper testing, we identified a bunch of problems. We're going to talk about that a little bit later, as well as another case where a hairdresser from Mexico was exposed to a lot of toxic chemicals, both in her work environment and in her home environment.
And that caused a lot of problems for her. So we're going to describe how we were able to get her feeling a whole lot better.
So the difference between functional medicine and conventional medicine as practiced by most doctors is functional medicine requires ordering more tests, usually in the beginning.
Most doctors are looking to solve an immediate crisis, which is relatively easy to diagnose much of the time because you know you have obvious signs and symptoms of a condition when you come in during a crisis.
When you want to identify a way to help your body heal itself, that's actually a little more difficult to diagnose the best way to do that.
And so for that reason, on about 80 percent of my patients when they come in for the first time, I order a 55 point blood panel that includes a bunch of tests that most doctors don't routinely order, like hemoglobin A1C.
They order that if they already know you're diabetic, but if you're just coming in without any symptoms of that, they don't. Uric acid, which is the standard test for gout.
But again, it's also an indicator of inflammation throughout your body and predictor of other conditions. It's really important. Magnesium levels are important, not commonly ordered.
Alkaline phosphatase, creatine kinase, LDH. I know these words don't mean anything to you. I'm just pointing out that these are tests that are widely available that medical doctors use all the time if they suspect that you have an advanced condition.
But they're also really useful to know whether or not you have incipient signs, early signs of a condition in the making that could be prevented or reversed with better food, exercise and supplements.
Serum iron and ferritin. Ferritin, I order on every patient and I see abnormal levels all the time. So it's really important. Ferritin is where is the measure of your body's iron storage capacity.
Iron is stored throughout your body. That's why men who are not bleeding and women who stop bleeding don't need to supplement iron. They don't need to get iron. You get enough, you get a little bit of iron in your diet regularly from food and you lose a little bit through cell turnover.
But your body is very, very efficient at conserving iron. So your ferritin levels should, the storage form of iron and different tissues throughout your body, mainly the liver, should stay consistent.
And if they start to go up, that could mean that you have, well it does mean that you have iron overload, the most common cause of which is hereditary hemochromatosis.
It's also important to know if your ferritin levels are low because that means you have anemia. And again, most doctors will only evaluate whether or not you have anemia by doing a CBC, a complete blood count, to check to see if you have adequate red blood cells and hemoglobin and hematocrit.
But if your ferritin is low, even when your CBC looks normal, that means your tank is running on empty. Your bone marrow is still doing the best it can to produce red blood cells and keep supplying oxygen to your cells.
But a slight deficiency or any challenge to that system is a functional anemia. It's going to reduce the function of your body's ability to supply oxygen to every cell, which is obviously going to increase your risk of degradation in that organ or tissue and increase your risk of any disease to that part of your body.
I also include, most doctors always do a liver panel with the two standard liver enzymes AST, ALT, again don't worry about these names. But there's a third one that's really important called GEGT, glammoglutamyl transferase.
The name doesn't matter, it's just another enzyme that most doctors unfortunately don't do. It's about an 11 or 12 dollar test. It is a measure of damage or cell increased cell turnover in the liver and the pancreas.
This is super important because number one, it can identify problems with the liver that otherwise go undiagnosed, but it's so important to know any kind of early signs of stress on the pancreas because people get pancreatitis, it affects people with diabetes, but also have you ever heard of anyone who got pancreatic cancer?
Yeah, pancreatic cancer usually has no symptoms until it's stage four and you've got three to six months to live. Well anybody who gets pancreatic cancer is going to have an elevated level of GGT months before they're in that state, give you a much earlier chance of treating it successfully.
I do a full thyroid panel on everyone. Most doctors don't do a full thyroid panel, most doctors just test one test, which isn't even a thyroid test. Most doctors just do TSH, which stands for thyroid stimulating hormone.
Thyroid stimulating hormone is made by the pituitary. It's literally not even a thyroid test. It's a test whether or not your pituitary thinks your thyroid is working well or not and it's an excellent test and it's very sensitive and useful and important to do and a good part of any medical screen.
But it doesn't tell you whether or not your thyroid is working, especially functional levels. It'll tell you if it's so low, if your thyroid is so low for example, that you need to be put on thyroid medication.
So the most common form of a problem with your thyroid is hypo, low thyroid. And there is obviously also the opposite problem, but it's just much less common.
But it's important for most people who have fatigue, especially women over 50, who have fatigue, who have hair loss, weight gain, dry skin, classic signs of hypothyroidism, it's important to test a few other thyroid tests like especially FreeT3.
FreeT3 is the most important thyroid hormone. It's the only one that actually does anything. And the assumption is generally made that if your other thyroid tests are normal, that your body is fully capable of taking the last step to convert it into the active form.
But you don't know that unless you test it. And I test it all the time and find that in fact, people are not converting the thyroid that their thyroid gland is making into the active form. And that has profound effects on how they feel.
And when you fix it, people feel a lot better. So some doctors don't even include a CBC, a complete blood count with differential and platelets, which means, you know, all of the different forms of your red blood cells to diagnose anemia plus all of your different white blood cells to tell whether or not you have an infection or an inability to produce certain reactions to an infection or whether or not you might have an environmental exposure that's causing your eosinophils to go up, etc.
And then I also check erythrocyte sedimentation rate, which is a measure of inflammation in your body. And literally what this means erythrocyte just means red blood cell sedimentation rate means literally they just take a tube of your blood and wait to set a timer and see how long it takes for the red blood cells to sink to the bottom.
So the longer it takes your red blood cells to sink to the bottom through the plasma is a measure of your blood viscosity, the thicker your blood, the longer that's going to take and that's going to raise your ESR, your erythrocyte sedimentation rate.
And that just means that you have inflammation. It's an indirect measure, but a very accurate measure of your body systemic levels of inflammatory cytokines, other things. That's what makes your blood thicker.
Inflammation is what makes your blood thicker. So that's an important test to do on everyone. And I do it in the standard panel that I do on 80% of my patients. I also include another marker of systemic inflammation, which means inflammation anywhere in your body called C reactive protein.
This test alone is a better indicator of your risk of a heart attack or a stroke happening anytime soon than your cholesterol levels that people are always worried about. But of course cholesterol levels are also included and we do address those when they're elevated.
And another really, really important test is vitamin D. Everyone should have their vitamin D levels checked. You have no idea if you're getting enough vitamin D unless you do the vitamin D test. More and more doctors are ordering this test, but they're still blindsided by these ridiculous ranges.
Say it's totally fine for your blood level of vitamin D to be as low as 30 and that means you're fine. Well, it means that you're not at immediate risk of your bones collapsing, but it has nothing to do with evaluating whether or not your immune system is strong.
You want your vitamin D levels in your blood to be between 50 and 90 because that's what it takes to keep your immune system strong. It'll also go a lot further to preventing your risk of certain cancers, dying in a hospital from a cold or a flu or COVID, and having brittle bones from osteoporosis.
I'm Dr. Todd Binkley and you're listening to Safe, Effective, Natural Solutions to almost any health challenge. I'd love to have the opportunity to help you or someone you love feel better. Who do you know that just doesn't feel right? Who do you know that's been to their doctor and told they're fine? All their tests are normal.
Well, their tests aren't all normal. If the range, if the yardstick used is only this broad medical range used to determine whether or not you need drugs or surgery or another diagnostic test or referral to a specialist, today the focus of today's talk is functional medicine, which involves the use of a second yardstick, a narrower metric to see if there is stress on your organs and tissues before it becomes diagnosed.
It becomes diagnostic for some disease that requires conventional medical care. So this means in addition to doing more blood tests than a standard medical workup, sometimes it also means ordering some tests for your hormones.
And even there is a big difference between standard practice. Most doctors, most endocrinologists only check serum levels of your hormones and those are useful tests. They're important for especially evaluating pregnancy issues. But for post menopausal women, for men who are having difficulty with testosterone from anyone who just has fatigue and you want to evaluate your adrenal function, it's much more important to do salivary hormone testing for that.
And I do that through the best lab in the country that performs those kind of that kind of testing, which is called doctors data. So look up doctors data. If you're interested in more information about that. I also often do testing for heavy metal toxins, chemical toxins, mold toxins. These are things that can affect almost any disease condition and are very rarely checked by most doctors and can have profound effects on your health.
So let's talk about a great case study. I had a 54 year old patient who came in who lost 77 pounds on a really popular diet program of meal replacement shakes and vitamins. And, you know, she looked a lot better than she did when she was 77 pounds heavier. And she was, you know, she was, she was excited about that. And I'm not going to tell you which program it was, but it doesn't really matter. Most of them are very similar. They give you a meal replacement shake that has really, really poor vitamins.
And convince you that that's giving you all the nutrients you need. That's the most egregious part of these diet plans that give you a meal replacement shake that and say that this is giving you all the micronutrients you need, plus some a good source of protein and maybe some healthy fats and other a little bit of carbohydrates.
It's just that that's the part that's frustrating the most because it makes people sick when they don't when they don't eat when they don't include healthy food along with it. Well, a lot of these plans also include something like, you know, two healthy meals a day and just one protein shake to restrict your caloric intake.
And they do a very good job of, you know, recommending a delicious meal, perhaps oftentimes even providing those meals with some lean proteins and a little bit of healthy fat and mostly vegetables.
But then this is this was all something like that was also included in this 50 year old woman's program. But the problem was, when I ran blood, she looked great, but she felt terrible.
And she came into me and I ran my standard panel that I just described, and she had anemia, poor circulation, varicose veins. She had sores that were never healing. She had numbness and tingling in her legs and difficulty sleeping due to restless legs.
So she you know she's she didn't tell me she didn't know that she had anemia I could just tell from everything else that she was describing. I showed up when we did her blood tests that she had anemia, and she was convinced that she couldn't take iron I oh I can hear this all the time.
Not all the time, but not infrequently I hear someone say oh I can't take I know I'm anemic. My other doctor told me I'm anemic but I can't take iron. It either upsets my stomach or causes constipation or both.
Well I've got news for you if that's you, it's not true. Anyone can take iron. The problem is 99.99999% of the iron supplements on the market. And definitely the one any conventional doctor is going to give to you is ferrous sulfate.
Ferrous sulfate is difficult for your body to absorb and assimilate. It's not a plant like nutrient, your stomach doesn't like it your body doesn't recognize it and it causes upset stomach and constipation so don't take ferrous sulfate don't buy cheap iron supplements from any store.
The form of iron you need is called bisglycinate. The company that I use for iron supplements is Ortho Molecular Products. The product is called Reacted Iron and the ingredient is bisglycinate form of iron.
So I gave her some good form of iron, a good multivitamin, some fish oil, some vitamin D, some B12 because she also had anemia from B12 deficiency, some calcium and some hydrochloric acid to better absorb protein that she was eating.
She was eating protein that she wasn't even absorbing because her stomach acid was so low. And a little bit later her calcium and protein levels were much improved. Her code blue, she had super super bad anemia, was completely back to normal.
And her iron storage was just dramatically just dramatically improved. Her iron storage went from 22 to 140. Well and she was also happy that as a result of this her body could heal itself better and her varicose veins were looked dramatically better, less bulging and you know better healed.
Sores, some other sores that she had on her skin were healed. Her restless legs were not gone but improved enough that she could sleep through the night and her energy was better than ever.
That was her main complaint when she first came in. She lost all this weight and she was expecting to feel as good as she looked and she felt terrible mainly because she had no energy.
Well she had no energy because she was anemic and severely deficient and a whole host of other nutrients which you can really only identify if you do proper testing.
Here's the way you want to think of getting adequate nutrition in your body. Your bloodstream is a river of life coursing throughout your body through every tissue and cell of your body.
And there are construction crews waiting on both banks of the river for the nutrients for the building materials that they need to execute the healing and repair processes that they've been tasked with that are sitting there waiting on hold.
A lot of aging is simply due to these crews waiting around trying to repair something but you never give them the materials they need to do their job.
And there's only the only way to test for that the only way to know whether or not that's happening whether your river of life is full of all the nutrients you need to heal and repair all your cells and tissues is to get more advanced testing that tests for functional levels of nutrients.
Do you have enough nutrition enough basic nutrients to keep the function of your organs and tissues working at their peak not just test to see if you have a disease that needs crisis care today.
So I promised to talk about another great case study I had a 37 year old hairstylist who was exposed to chemical irritants at the hair salon she worked at for many years.
And she also had previa exposure to house cleaning chemicals and a tremendous amount of air pollution.
Just from living in Mexico City near in an area of Mexico City which is there's a lot of those that are just full of toxic toxins from all the all the pollution in the air and that causes a constant strain on your body and even if you know you wouldn't even when you leave a place like that.
Those toxins often remain stored in fat cells throughout your body and never get completely eliminated unless you identify them and do come up with a particular treatment program to eliminate them and so she came in with eye pain low energy swollen glands difficulty swallowing bruising poor memory swollen
ankles dry mouth sugar cravings difficulty concentrating shoulder pain low back pain muscle spasms and dry thin hair so I did my standard blood workup that I've described earlier and guess what.
Four months later her blood tests were worse.
She had a lot of things that were happening there her body was still struggling with and it made her blood work look worse but I said how are you feeling and her eye pain her low energy her swollen glands difficulty swallowing bruising poor memory swollen ankles dry mouth sugar cravings difficulty concentrating shoulder pain low back pain muscle spasms and dry thin hair were all 50 to 80 percent better.
So we do the tests to know where to start but sometimes at least on the test things get a little bit worse before they get better.
The opposite can also happen. Your tests might be doing better but you still don't feel right which usually means we need to do some other tests but the point is you never really know until you do the testing.
I'm Dr. Todd Benkley we're about out of time. Remember the condition of your body is more important than any disease you've ever been diagnosed with try and do something this weekend to be healthier than you were last weekend call some friend you haven't spoken to in years call your mother your son your brother anyone that you've been avoiding speaking to if that's the case.
Go for a walk if you don't feel like going for a walk get a dog then you'll have to go for a walk. Most of the disease conditions that people suffer from are caused by stress identifiable nutrient deficiencies lousy diets lack of exercise and general neglect if you want to truly be healthy.
You have to take responsibility for your own health but you do not have to do it on your own. I'm here to help with 30 plus years of experience I'd be honored to help you restore robust health to your heart your kidneys your lungs your immune system your digestive system and your pancreas identify areas where your liver is silent silently struggling and could use a little help to help you basically restore true health and longevity.
Next month and for probably most of February I will be talking about heart disease the number one killer in America and giving you all kinds of excellent information hopefully you can use to prevent suffering that fate or at least reduce your risk of it I look forward to speaking with you right here next Friday at 4pm on KDAR 98.3 FM have an awesome 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 Dr. Binkley at Binkley Healing Center.
Take advantage of this opportunity to ask questions for yourself and for your loved ones because our health matters join him next Friday at 4pm for safe effective natural solutions right here on 98.3 the word KDAR.