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, doctor of non-force chiropractic and practitioner of functional
medicine.
Most of the time on this show I talk about functional medicine, how to diagnose and treat
conditions with better food, exercise, and supplements instead of becoming dependent
for the rest of your life on pharmaceuticals.
But I am also a non-force chiropractor.
So today I'm going to talk about neuropathies.
Neuropathy simply means disease of a nerve or a problem with a nerve.
So damage to nerves can be caused by diabetes.
That's one of the most common causes that at least that people are familiar with.
All but also liver disease, nutrient deficiencies, which a lot of people are unaware of, and
pressure on nerves.
This is also relatively familiar.
People have heard of sciatica, plantar fasciitis, carpal tunnel syndrome.
These are all conditions where pressure on nerves causes the damage, hence a neuropathy.
And I've seen thousands of people with conditions like this over the past 30 years.
So let's break this down.
Diabetes damages nerves because hyperglycemia, excess blood sugar floating around in your
bloodstream constantly for far too long damages nerves.
And the most common place a diabetic neuropathy shows up is in the feet.
You've seen it in the movies.
People who just, it's horrific.
People just can't even bend over to touch their toes anymore, let alone cut their toenails
or take care of their feet, especially if they're really impoverished.
End up with so much loss of nerve control to their feet that they can't even feel when
they're damaging their feet from something as simple as stubbing their toe or worse.
And then they get an injury that creates a traumatic inflammatory response that causes
ultimately necrosis, death of cells.
And they end up getting amputations of their toes or even part half or the whole of their
foot, which is just horrific.
So one of the things that's most important to understand about any kind of neuropathy,
any kind of damage or pressure or problem with a nerve is they're very difficult to
specifically identify.
So if you have pain, burning, tingling, numbness, sense of ants crawling, sensations like this
that are difficult to describe, and especially if it's difficult to pinpoint exactly where
that sensation is.
You know it's there.
You can feel it.
But is it exactly in your big toe?
Is it exactly in your heel, your calf, the back of your leg, the front of your leg?
And it's really hard to identify exactly where the pain, burning, numbness, tingling is,
then that is always a problem with a nerve.
That is actually one of the ways we diagnose a nerve condition versus a vascular condition
or an infection or a trauma or some other kind of condition.
If it's really difficult to identify exactly where the symptoms occur, and if they move
around a lot, it's almost always some kind of either pressure on or damage to a nerve.
So the damage to nerves with a diabetic occurs because of the damaging effects of excess
blood sugar.
And whenever someone starts to feel that effect, they should immediately see some doctor to
do something about that.
Even if you need to take drugs for a while, you don't want to destroy your nerves.
It used to be thought that once you destroy your nerves, they cannot be repaired.
We know now that they can, but it is still very difficult.
The reason we thought for so long that it was impossible to repair damaged nerves is
because repairing them takes months to years, not days, and it's certainly nothing that
can be accomplished by taking any kind of medication or even doing physical therapy.
Nerves heal very slowly.
They're one of the most slowly healing tissues in your body, right up there with joint tissue,
because the circulation to them is very poor.
Our bodies naturally flood our brains with nutrients and oxygen and the liver and the
kidneys and the hearts and the spleen and all the major organs because they're the ones
that mostly need robust circulation to keep us alive.
It's rare, relatively rare, for generations and in our current experience to damage a
nerve that could pose an existential crisis that could threaten our lives.
So physiologically, it is less important for the heart, for our bodies to supply nutrients
to nerves and joints.
As a consequence, anytime you damage a nerve or even just begin to stress it by reducing
the nutrients needed to heal and repair that damaged nerve tissue or nutrient deficient
tissue, it's going to take a long time, weeks to months, to reverse that damage usually.
So it's always important if you have any symptoms like pain not caused by some known trauma,
accident, injury, numbness, tingling, burning, in your hands or your feet are the most common
spots but any place in your body, seek attention from some qualified doctor that can help you
with this as soon as possible.
Unfortunately, when most people do this, they go to a neurologist, got a nerve pain, got
to go to a neurologist or they go to their GP and the GP refers them to a neurologist
and unfortunately the neurologist's standard testing to identify a problem with a nerve
are really, really crude testing and nerve conduction velocity tests to see if the wires
are damaged, EMG, electromyography to see if the connections between the wires and the
muscles are damaged and of course these tests have their purpose or they wouldn't be done
but a lot of people end up in an office of a neurologist doing these tests and they,
I've seen so many people, but I'm a little bit biased.
My experience and opinion is biased because I see the people who've already done that
and the test results are always negative or almost always negative and the other thing
to always keep in mind is when you do any test, if the result is positive, what is the
treatment going to be?
Well, if the result of a nerve conduction velocity test or an EMG, an electromyography
test is positive, usually the recommendation is some kind of surgery so if you know you
don't want surgery then you're probably, what's the point in doing an NCV or an EMG when you
could come to someone like myself or almost any chiropractor really.
I'm a non-force chiropractor and I'm going to talk about the difference between what
I do and traditional chiropractors.
A lot of people are afraid of getting their neck cracked or their back cracked but seriously
if your insurance covers, if you have a situation like this and your insurance covers traditional
chiropractic or if you're on Medicare, I'm sorry I don't take any insurance.
If you find yourself in a situation where you have one of these conditions that no one
else is helping you with, go see a chiropractor that takes Medicare.
You can email me, I have an excellent colleague, Dr. David Packard, an anacapic chiropractor
who takes Medicare and he does traditional chiropractic, he does a fine job of it and
helps a lot of people.
I'm Dr. Todd Binkley, you're listening to Safe Effective Natural Solutions to Almost
Any Health Challenge.
Today we're talking about neuropathies, pressure on or damage to nerves from metabolic conditions
like diabetes and liver disease and most importantly nutrient deficiencies which we're going to
talk a lot about.
Vitamin B12, magnesium and calcium are the three most common nutrient deficiencies that
can cause neuropathies especially in the legs and feet.
Vitamin B6 is also really important for maintaining nerve health and repairing damage from nerve
injuries and pressure on nerves.
But before I get into that, I want to talk about, I was talking a lot on the last episode
or two about supplements that are really good for dementia, maintaining brain and cardiovascular
health.
And oftentimes I also like to remind people of things they should avoid.
So supplement of the week to avoid, red yeast rice extract.
If you've never heard of this, red yeast rice extract is a supplement that is manufactured
for cholesterol.
A lot of people take this and thinking that it's a natural way to control their cholesterol.
Well, it does come from a plant but it's not good.
You take a red yeast rice supplement, what you're really taking is a statin made by mold
that grows on rice.
So the idea that you're going to use this as an alternative to taking a statin drug
is specious.
You're actually taking just a milder form of a statin that is made by this organism
that grows on red yeast rice.
If you need another reason to not take red yeast rice products for cholesterol is Kobayashi
Pharmacy, pharma in Japan has recalled cholesterol lowering supplements with red yeast rice over
a possibility link to kidney disease.
Five deaths reported, a hundred hospitalizations, the product's been recalled.
You really shouldn't be taking red yeast rice to control your cholesterol.
There are much better products like Bergamot BPF from Ortho Molecular Products.
Also niacin and a few other things.
Everyone's different.
It's best to get testing to find out what will work best for you.
Back to neuropathies.
Neuro means nerve, pathy means disease, so any condition that damages a nerve is a neuropathy.
But the neuropathy most people are familiar with is from diabetes.
High blood sugar damages nerves throughout your body, everywhere in your body, but the
ones most distant from your body are the ones that get hit first or the ones that have the
poorest circulation get hit first.
So most diabetics with high blood sugar get damaged to the nerves in their feet or their
eyes, because the nerves to the eyes are distant from the heart and very small blood vessels
supply nutrients to these nerves.
So with diabetes, it's both a neurological damage to nerves and damage to blood vessels.
Liver disease can also, because of the nutrient deficiencies, damage nerves.
So people with hepatitis, people with alcoholism, people with liver disease from diabetes, people
with fatty liver disease from other causes, anything that damages B vitamins in particular
are stored in your liver and processed in your liver.
So if you have any kind of disease process that is going to cause significant damage
to your liver, you're going to have deficiencies of B vitamins that can result in neuropathies.
Because of the insufficient amounts of, especially B12, sometimes folate and B6, vitamin B6,
your nerves are dependent on sufficient levels ongoingly of these B vitamins to heal and
repair themselves.
So the good news is these things can be identified on tests and you can replace those.
B vitamins are inexpensive.
There's a lot of products that I have to recommend to people to do my job that are unfortunately
expensive, because you get what you pay for, the good products cost more, the cheap ones
often don't work.
But B vitamins, like vitamin C, are kind of an exception.
B vitamins are B vitamins, like B12, folate, B6, niacin, the whole other subject.
But B vitamins are inexpensive.
So there's really no reason anyone should not be able to have access and take these
things when they need them if they have any symptoms of neuropathy.
So diabetes, liver disease, nutrient deficiencies, pressure on the nerves also causes damage
to the nerves, which is a form of neuropathy.
So if you have burning, tingling, numbness in your feet, in the back of your leg, anywhere
from your hip down to the tips of your toes, then you've got pressure on your nerves, especially
if you have numbness, tingling, burning pain anywhere between your hips and your toes that's
really hard to identify.
Like you're trying to, oh, it feels like it's kind of here, but maybe it's there.
Maybe it's in the back of my thigh, the front of my thigh.
It's only in my big toe or it moves around constantly.
And as almost always damage to a nerve, because if it was a muscle, it's pretty easy to identify.
You can push on the muscle, you'll feel the pain in the muscle.
That's the problem.
It's in the muscle.
If you can't find exactly where the pain is or the other symptoms, a lot of times people
think, oh, it's loss of circulation and I can't feel my feet.
It's numb.
I must have my circulation is cut off.
If your circulation is cut off, your feet, your hands will turn white first and then
eventually blue from lack of oxygen.
And that's a totally different thing that people often confuse with damage to nerves.
So when you feel numbness, it's not from lack of circulation.
It's from pressure on a nerve.
And that pressure can be reversed.
If you cross your legs a lot, you can, people have felt this before you can, your foot will
go numb.
It's not because of loss of circulation to the foot when you have your legs crossed.
It's because of pressure on the nerves to your feet that can no longer confer, convey
sensations to your brain.
So you feel numbness.
So it's important to distinguish pressure or damage to nerves from pressure on circulation.
All the things we're talking about today, if these are your symptoms, numbness, tingling,
pain, these are symptoms of pressure on nerves, not loss of circulation.
So sciatica is one of the most famous types of pressure on a nerve.
The sciatic nerve is really, is not really a nerve, but a huge bundle of nerves.
It's like a telephone cable that forms where several branches of nerves come from the base
of your spine and then combine into this huge bundle in your buttock area that travels down
the back of your thigh.
And then everything below your knee is innervated by branches of this nerve.
So everything you feel or cannot feel from your knee down is either working or not working
based primarily on whether or not there is or isn't pressure on the sciatic nerve bundle.
So this sciatic nerve, everyone's heard of it, but what really is that?
Do you know where the sciatic nerve is even?
So at the base of your spine, all the nerves start out in your brain, travel down your
spinal cord to your tailbone area at the base of the spine, a half a dozen nerve branches
branch off of the spinal cord and then coalesce to form this sciatic nerve bundle.
Your body likes to conserve space.
So these nerve branches form this bundle that makes it easy to send the signals down the
leg to the feet.
Our legs are pretty long.
The nerves to your toes are the most distant nerves from your brain.
So the sciatic nerve is a way to, it's kind of like a freeway from your butt down to your
toes.
And one of the problems with this conservation of space in the physical parts of our body
is that this sciatic nerve passes through a notch in your pelvis called appropriately
enough the sciatic notch, but a muscle also passes through that notch called the piriformis.
This is one of the major hip rotators.
One of the muscles that if you're a ballet dancer or a soccer player, it's a muscle in
your hip that turns powerfully, turns your foot out when you want it to.
And the downside of that, the proximity of that muscle is that most people don't use
that muscle.
If you're not a ballet dancer, if you're not a soccer player, you hardly ever forcefully
turn your foot out.
You hardly ever really use the piriformis muscle and the piriformis muscle passes through
this notch in the pelvis right next to the sciatic nerve.
In fact, 15% of the human population, according to Gray's Anatomy, has a split piriformis
muscle.
They have actually two piriformis muscles that are split.
Instead of one, they have two muscle bellies.
And the sciatic nerve, instead of going right underneath that muscle, it passes between
the two separate bellies.
So if you have tightness in this muscle, and everyone has tightness in this muscle, it
can cause pressure on the sciatic nerve.
It can cause pain, burning, numbness, tingling down the back of your leg, down the front
of your leg, in your calf, in your heels, in your foot, only in your big toe.
You can have only numbness or only burning or only pain in one toe of your foot.
And it can be coming almost exclusively from pressure on the sciatic bundle of nerves in
your hip that are constantly, potentially being pressurized by these muscles.
And the piriformis muscles, and there are several other hip rotator muscles, there are
over a dozen and a half muscles that cross your hip joint.
And six or eight that can impinge on this sciatic nerve in your hip that can cause or
contribute to pressure on the nerves that exit the base of your spine or traveling down
your leg.
And then, you know, most doctors just never even look for these things.
So a simple physical exam, a very simple physical exam.
In fact, I'll even tell you how to do it at home.
Lie on the floor.
Lie on the floor with your knees bent, have someone try to push on your knee gently and
see without raising your hip off of the floor, will your knee move to the opposite side or
not?
It should go about 45 degrees.
If it doesn't, then you have tight hip rotators of which the piriformis and to a slightly
lesser extent the gluteus medius and maximus, the small muscles in the gluteal area just
below the famous gluteus maximus, the major butt muscle.
And these are so common.
These muscles tighten up just from sitting.
People always ask me, how did these muscles get so tight?
Well, do you ever spend any time sitting in a chair in front of a computer, sitting in
a chair, looking at screens, sitting in a car, sitting, reading?
We sit all the time.
People in other parts of the world who get up and down off the floor all the time and
don't sit in chairs don't have these problems.
We do because we sit all the time.
And we don't need to stop that.
We just need to stretch more and identify pressure on nerves like I'm talking about
right now to release that pressure and then come up with a way to minimize it recurring
in the future.
I've had so many results over the years with amazing results with people who have various
types of neuropathy or pressure on nerves.
It's hard to begin to start.
But here's an example that just comes to mind off the top of my head.
I had a teenage girl who was really fit cheerleader and had just this tremendous pain in her left
hip and tingling and burning and numbness all the way down her legs.
She is a cheerleader.
She was super healthy.
She looked amazing and she had been to physical therapy for a year and no one could help figure
out why she couldn't get rid of this pain.
And it was because she had huge ridiculously tight piriformis and small glute muscles,
the gluteus medius and minimus.
This is these little gluteal muscles that are underneath the big famous gluteus maximus.
And it's hard to believe she had been to physical therapy for a year and they hadn't figured
that out.
But I see that over and over again.
The hip rotator muscles, the muscles in your hips that get tight just from sitting in chairs
all the time.
Doctors, physical therapists don't check these.
I hope that's different now.
I know that some do, but anyway, I've seen it so many times that they don't.
So if you're having or you know someone who's having a situation like that, have them give
me a call.
I know a teenage girl who had pain down her left leg, couldn't cheerlead anymore, couldn't
walk eventually.
She was, her mother brought her in and she was in really dire straits.
And the fun thing about treating people who are younger, if you come in earlier, it's
always easier to treat.
So I worked on her and this was a really bad case and it's always bad if one thing is tight
on one side of your body and not tight on the other.
It's much better if it's equally tight on both sides.
It's easier to relieve the problem if you have that situation.
But she had super tight on one side and I worked on her.
I worked on her on the table to do some physical things to help feedback, provide feedback
to her brain to figure out how it is not necessary.
Her brain needs to learn.
Who has a situation like this, a huge component is always lack of feedback to the brain.
The brain is in control of everything.
So if something's not working, then you should consider that maybe the brain is not getting
the information it needs to fix that.
Because if it does, it will do so.
Automatic, that's the way we're designed.
So I helped her brain by doing some physical exercises on the table, helped provide robust
feedback to the motor cortex, the part of her brain that controls the part of everyone's
brain that controls all muscles so that it could realize, oh my God, this muscle is sitting
here tight for no reason and it relaxed.
And she very quickly became pain free and went back to doing cheerleading and all the
other things any healthy young teenager would want to do.
And there are so many other examples I could cite from a man who fell off of a 50 foot
cliff, had to have major back surgery and excruciating pain that I helped him with from
releasing pressure from the nerves.
A woman who had liposuction with the neck nerve were running out of time.
So we'll talk about this next week.
Please tune in next Friday.
See you then.
Have a fantastic 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.