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.
I identify conditions other doctors miss by doing tests they don't often do.
Last week we talked about osteoporosis.
I began the show by answering a question from listener Grace in Ventura who wanted to know,
wanted me to talk about the difference between osteoporosis and osteoarthritis and the best
ways to treat those things without becoming dependent on drugs.
And I ended up spending the whole show talking about osteoporosis because it's such a large
topic plus I was also really excited about and still am and will still be giving more
information from this spectacular symposium I attended which was held in San Francisco
last weekend, the Laboratory Endocrine and Neuro Transmitter Symposium.
I've taken it for five years now.
I'll probably continue taking it every year because the speakers they have there are world
renowned speakers, lecturers, professors at universities, authors, just amazing materials.
So people often wonder, oh, how do you find the best doctor?
Did he go to Harvard?
Does he have privileges at the Mayo Clinic?
I always tell people the best way to tell if you've got a doctor that's going to give
you the best treatment available is ask them what seminars they took last year.
We're all required, all doctors are required to maintain our licenses, to take continuing
education seminars, to maintain our knowledge, to keep abreast of all of the latest research
which is just constantly getting better and better every year and that's really exciting.
So I did promise I would talk about the difference.
Craig Grace's question was about the difference between osteoporosis and osteoarthritis.
So osteoporosis is a disease of bones, a loss of bone density.
We spent the whole last show talking about that.
Osteoarthritis is not related to osteoporosis at all even though they sound similar.
Osteoarthritis is a disease of joints mainly.
Osteo means bone, arthro means joint, itis means inflammation.
The reason osteo, the root word for bone, is in what is basically a joint condition
is because when your joints break down over time from minor injuries and stress but mostly
from neglect, this is the major reason that osteoarthritis occurs anywhere in your body,
it can occur from trauma, but most of it, almost everyone gets arthritis as they get
older, that's why they call it the disease of aging is because it does tend to be very
common in most people.
It is not inevitable.
There are lots of people who are in their 80s and 90s and have no significant amounts
of osteoarthritis, but more importantly, when you take x-rays on people in their 50s, 60s,
70s or 80s, no one gets osteoarthritis or any other kind of arthritis uniformly in every
joint in their body as they get older.
So it is not caused by aging, it is mostly caused, it is associated with aging because
most people get more of it as they get older, but it is caused by neglect.
In other words, there are lots of people who don't get it when they get older and the difference
is mostly stretching, stretching the muscles that tend to overload the joint tissue in
your body.
So the main cause of arthritis, especially in your neck and your back and your low back
and your hips and your knees and your ankles and your shoulders, your elbows and your wrists,
is lack of maintaining flexibility.
Over time, our bodies just get stuck in certain positions.
We spend all day long sitting in chairs instead of getting up and moving around, but just
getting up and moving around, walking for example, which is excellent for cardiovascular
and mental health, just walking will not do much of anything to maintain flexibility in
your joints.
It is a little better than sitting in a chair all day, but only a little.
What you really need to do to prevent and reverse arthritis is identify the joints that
are, well you can feel pain in your joints.
To identify the muscles around those joints that have been tight for years.
When people come to me, they're surprised, oh, my hips just started hurting three weeks
ago.
I don't know what happened.
Well, did anything happen?
No.
Did you fall off a ladder?
No.
Did you have a car accident?
No.
There's no particular injury.
Everything shows up at some point.
People are always surprised, oh, but last week I felt fine and today I have pain.
What happened?
Well, you, your hips, wherever that painful spot is, was an accident waiting to be happened
most of the time.
If it's an arthritic condition, if it's a degenerative joint condition, you have patterns
of tension that build up in your muscles over time, over long periods of time, not weeks,
decades.
Most of the time when I come in and do a physical exam, when someone comes in and I do a physical
exam on someone, it's very easy to tell on palpation just by pushing on bones and joints
and palpating the muscles, feeling for tension in the muscles.
It becomes very clear that in certain spots in most people's bodies, especially the base
of the neck, the low back, sometimes the middle back, sometimes the upper neck, various parts
of the body, it's very clear that that tension has been there for 20, 30 years.
It takes a long time for joints, certain joints in the spine in particular, to become that
tight.
And so people go to traditional chiropractors and get an adjustment and it feels better
immediately.
And that's great.
That's so much better than doing nothing.
But some people are frustrated by the fact that when they get a traditional adjustment
or a deep tissue massage or any kind of forceful treatment, oh, I have all this tension, force
it out of me, please.
And you do that and you get a hit of endorphins and you physically release some of that tension
and it feels amazing.
For how long?
A day?
A couple of days?
At most, maybe a week or two if you're really lucky.
The problem with forcing all that tension out of your body that you have allowed to
accumulate is your body doesn't learn anything from that.
If you want your body to, if you want to reverse the pattern of tension, that pattern of tension
in your muscles that's been built up over time, then you need to do something else.
And that is the reason that applying massive force with a really deep tissue forceful massage
or a standard traditional chiropractic adjustment often doesn't last.
Again, these are great things to do.
If you're not going to do anything else, please continue getting traditional chiropractic
or massage.
They're both wonderful things that will prevent you from becoming worse than you would otherwise.
But there's something that's even better and that is to identify the patterns of tension
in your muscles.
Patterns of tension in your muscles build up over time and persist for years, for decades
from poor posture, from crappy beds, from car seats that push your head forward to prevent
whiplash and never allow you to sit up straight.
From just sitting in a chair all day staring at a computer screen and allowing your shoulders
to come up around your ears and you know, just having bad pot.
Most people know when they have bad posture and they just figure there's nothing you can
do about it.
Well, there is something you can do about bad posture always.
And that is to get it assessed and learn how to do some very specific stretches to reverse
those patterns of tension that build up in your muscles.
So that's the key phrase.
I'll say it again.
Most people don't know this.
Patterns of tension in your muscles build up over years and decades and you'd think,
oh, well, if my muscles are tight, I'd feel that.
Sometimes you feel it, but most of the time you don't.
You don't feel it until one day the result of that pattern of tension on your joints
or the attachment of those muscles suddenly begins to hurt.
So you're walking around with a sub threshold accident waiting to happen for 10 years, 20
years, 30 years.
Finally it just goes above that threshold and now you feel the pain and you think, oh
my God, what just happened?
What just happened was the straw that broke the camel's back.
Obviously there were no camels involved and your back's not broken.
But it's a very confusing thing if you don't have an understanding of it, but I'm very
happy to explain it to you if you come into my office.
It's very common patterns of tension build up in your muscles all the time and they can
be identified.
So here's a thing that I get all the time.
Someone comes into me, oh, I have this horrible pain in my neck or my shoulder or my knee
or plantar fasciitis or sciatica.
I have something in my joints, in my musculoskeletal system and it just started last week and nothing
happened.
I didn't have an accident.
I didn't fall.
Nothing happened.
I do my physical exam and it's very clear immediately that there has been a pattern
of tension in the hip rotators.
For example, the hip rotators are muscles in the upper glute area that attach from your
pelvic bone near the base of your spine in the middle out to the side of your hip bone,
the bone that you can feel, the easiest bone to feel on your hip.
There are several muscles that cross your hip joint from the front, from the back.
Most of them are in the back or in sort of in the middle in between.
And these hip rotators constantly get tight when you sit a lot.
Raise your hand if you spend a lot of time sitting in front of a computer, sitting in
a car, sitting at home, reading, watching TV, whatever.
We all do it.
And, you know, it's fine but you need to do something to offset the effects of that
by identifying these places where tension has built up over time and you don't feel
it.
You don't feel that tension until it's been there for a long time, until it finally so
badly irritates those places where the tendons and those muscles attach to bone or where
because of the compression on the joint tissue gets so bad, then boom, you suddenly feel
a horrible pain even though maybe all you did was bend over to pick up something off
the floor.
In fact, the herniated disc in the low back is one of the most common joints that becomes
arthritic and an accident waiting to happen by something as simple as bending over to
pick up something off of the floor.
Most people over 40 have some significant patterns of tension built up that are causing
breakdown in the joint tissue, making it very easy to tear, basically making it an accident
waiting to happen.
So that's why these things seem to occur suddenly but with osteoarthritis, with any kind of
musculoskeletal injury, unless you had an obvious trauma, you fell off of a roof or
a ladder, you had a really bad car accident or you slipped and fell.
The trauma can cause these conditions but most of the time, even when you have a trauma,
when you have a slip and fall, when you have a car accident, when you have a fall of any
kind, what's the part that ends up getting injured?
It's the part that's been an accident waiting to happen.
It's the weakest link.
No one gets osteoarthritis, the most common arthritis of aging, uniformly in every joint
in their body as they get older.
When you shoot x-rays on people, I've seen thousands of them, no one has arthritis uniformly
in every joint in their body.
They only have it in some joints.
Well, which ones?
The ones that aren't moving, the ones that haven't been flexible for years because the
muscles around those joints have become short and tight.
And you'd think if muscles around the joints at the base of your neck or the base of your
low back or anywhere in your body have become short and tight, you'd think you'd feel that
immediately.
You don't.
There's no flashing light.
You don't notice really anything at all.
The one thing you can notice is loss of flexibility.
So people do notice as they get older that they can't turn their head when they're backing
their car out as far as they used to be able to or it's difficult to bend over and touch
your toes.
They notice lack of range of motion, but they still think they feel fine.
I'm just getting a little bit older.
Getting a little bit older does not necessarily have to involve losing range of motion in
your joints.
So if you get a good head to toe examination of all the muscles in your body that impact
all those joints, you'll often find that there are simple ways you can reduce that tension,
restore flexibility, restore normal tension in those muscles, take the pressure off of
those joints.
The arthritis is caused.
The meniscus in your knee wears out because your quadriceps are constantly overloading,
compressing that cushion between the upper and lower bones, between your thigh and your
lower leg, and oftentimes, as often, because hip rotators in your thigh are constantly
twisting your leg just a little bit so that every time you take a step, your knee tissue,
your knee joint, instead of just bending forward and back like a hinge, which is all it wants
to do, it's being forced to twist a little bit because your hip rotators are short, pulling
your knee towards the outside, trying to turn your foot out.
If you're a ballerina or a soccer player, you use these muscles all the time.
If you're someone who doesn't do either of those things, you probably never use your
hip rotators very much.
And interestingly, dancers, ballerinas in particular, overuse the external hip rotators
and never the opposite ones.
And they often end up with knee injuries as well from the same problem.
So the only way to know if that's you is to get a proper examination and identify the
patterns of tension in your muscles.
And these are things that most doctors never check.
So if you find them, there are always ways to implement a stretching program, sometimes
requiring a helper, sometimes requiring me to do some work with you on the table to remove
that tension.
And oftentimes I invite someone to bring in a helper to show you how you can do some of
these very specific stretches at home that will go gradually, if you do them consistently,
reduce and reverse that tension, restore normal length.
You're physically making these muscles longer.
That's what relieves the pressure on the joints.
I'm Dr. Todd Benkley.
You're listening to Safe, Effective Natural Solutions to Almost Any Health Problem.
Today, we're talking about osteoarthritis.
And the most important thing is to reduce the tension on the joints that causes the
damage in the first place.
But there are nutrients that you can take to help your body heal arthritis as well.
Among the most common ones that people hear about are things like glucosamine sulfate,
MSM, chondroitin sulfate.
These are our precursor nutrients for building new joint tissue.
And they wouldn't be around if they didn't work for anyone.
They work for a lot of people, but usually only for maybe three or four months.
And then they kind of taper off in their effects.
I find that the most important thing for nutrient-wise is to give your body other nutrients that
help build joint tissue, which are actually joint tissue from other animals in form that
are difficult to describe.
But they're made by companies like Doctors Research and Standard Process.
And most importantly, systemic enzymes.
So the main thing that needs to happen to heal and repair joint tissue, similar to osteoporosis,
is you need to break down the old joint tissue before you replace it with new tissue.
And our body makes proteolytic enzymes.
Proteolytic just means breaking down protein.
Our body makes enzymes that break down old proteins so that they can be effectively replaced
with new proteins, with new tissue made from protein.
But the production of those enzymes decays over time, usually starting in your 30s, which
is why arthritis often begins in your 40s.
Even when you don't know about it, if you look at hundreds and hundreds of x-rays, you
first see when you study radiology, you can often tell how old someone is by the amount
of arthritis they have starting to form in the joints, especially in their spine.
So the nutrients that I've found to be most effective over time to help reverse arthritis
and act as an indirect anti-inflammatory, which even relieves the pain because it's
reducing the inflammation, in the joints are systemic enzymes, things like seropeptase
and natokinase.
So systemic enzymes are enzymes that your body can use to break down fibrin, which is
the main protein of scar tissue, over time.
So natokinase, for example, was famously identified decades ago in Japan in a food called natto,
which is a fermented soy product, which is very uncommon to be eaten in the West because
it has the consistency and odor of nasal mucus.
It's really disgusting, but Japanese families start their children on it early as a porridge
and they get used to it and it doesn't bother them.
I have a cousin that lives in LA who has a Japanese wife, and so I tasted it once and
it wasn't quite as bad as I expected it to be, but I'm definitely not going to, I've
never eaten it since, it's pretty gross, it's stringy.
And not very many people, unless you're Japanese and have gotten used to it, are going to eat
the fermented soy product called natto.
But the great thing about natto is there is an enzyme in it, so named natokinase, which
has robust research.
It is one of the main reasons that the Japanese have much lower rates of cardiovascular disease
and they live so long, so well, because they consume this in their diets.
That's only one of the reasons, but it's an important one, so natokinase breaks down fibrin,
that is the scar tissue protein that forms arthritis in your joints.
So when you consume natokinase, it helps break down that fibrin.
Similar and also famously, natokinase also helps break down fibrin and hardening fibrin
forming, creating scars in your blood vessels.
So actually, natokinase is more famous for its effects on blood vessels than on joints,
but it works on both.
There's another very important natural enzyme, which is even more powerful for joints called
serrapeptase.
Serrapeptase is an enzyme made by silkworms.
So it's not inexpensive, it can be a little pricey because it's literally the enzyme that
a silkworm makes to digest its way out of a silk cocoon.
Silk is the strongest natural fiber in nature.
If you shoot a fiber of silk with a bullet, it will deflect.
If you shoot any other natural fiber, the bullet will tear right through it.
If you shoot a strand of silk, it will deflect.
It's really, really strong silk.
If you've ever tried to tear a necktie that's made out of silk, then you can get an impression
of how strong silk is.
So how does a squishy little worm get out of this cage of silk, the strongest natural
fiber?
Well, it makes this enzyme called serrapeptase.
So that's why it's a little pricey to get this product because it's literally extracted
from the intestines of silkworms.
And it's a natural product and it's totally safe because there's no side effects and the
only interactions that you have to be concerned about, any doctor has to be concerned about,
is these drugs will make blood thinners work better.
They will never thin your blood unless it's too thick.
But if you're on warfarin, a very common blood thinner, which is also in rat poison, Coumadin,
I don't want to scare people too much who are on warfarin, but sometimes people need
it.
My own mother had been taking it for a long time.
I finally got her switched to a better blood thinner called Eloquist after she had deep
vein thrombosis.
But that's a whole other story.
It is important to know that you shouldn't take natokinase or serrapeptase if you're
on warfarin unless you have a very progressive physician who will measure your INR, your
international normalized ratio, your prothrombin time.
They always measure.
When you're on warfarin, they always measure your blood thinning activity.
And you actually can take these enzymes even when you're taking that blood thinner, but
only if you measure it and adjust the dose accordingly.
So it is contrary indicated to take these things if you're on a blood thinner.
But if you're not on a blood thinner, then anyone can take natokinase and serrapeptase.
And they are the most effective things I've ever found for reversing osteoarthritis as
a supplement, in addition to, of course, doing stretching.
I'm Dr. Todd Binkley.
I've helped thousands of people reverse the effects of both osteoarthritis and osteoporosis
by identifying these patterns of tension in the muscles and giving you some specific stretches
and a few things that we need to do on the table.
Most of these conditions are caused by stress, identifiable nutrient deficiencies, lack of
exercise and general neglect.
So if you want to be truly healthy, you have to take responsibility for your own health.
But you don't have to do it alone.
I would be honored to have the opportunity to help you do these things, to identify the
things that you need to do to make your body work better the way it is designed to do.
Remember, the condition of your body is far more important than any disease you've ever
been diagnosed with.
And I'm taking the time and the cost of this program to teach you how you can improve your
health.
Do something this week to be a little bit healthier than you were yesterday or last
week.
Go for a walk, take a Tai Chi class, a stretching class, go for a swim if you have access to
a pool and send me your questions.
I'd love to be able to help you with anything you're struggling with.
I look forward to the privileges 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
Dr. Binkley at www.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.