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 chiropractor and practitioner of functional medicine.
Functional medicine means using diagnostic tests to identify places where normal health,
normal function, the normal function of your kidney, your liver, your immune system, and
other parts of your body is no longer working the way it should be.
Instead of just waiting until you need medical care to treat disease that you already have,
perhaps even in an advanced state before you know it.
And one of the most common things that people come to me for is fatigue, unexplained exhaustion,
lack of energy for no apparent reason, and there is always a way to improve your energy.
Patients always show up on tests.
It's never one thing.
In my experience, I'm going to talk about a really great case of a woman who was just
having really debilitating fatigue, had been to several other doctors, no one could help
her and we've got her feeling a whole lot better.
But before I do that, I'm going to go over some of the latest updates in the medical
literature.
This one's really exciting.
The headline is cholesterol denialism.
Is it pseudoscience or appropriate medical care?
So there's this controversy that's been going on where someone wrote into a major medical
journal saying that it's ridiculous people who say that everyone shouldn't be on statin
drugs.
Statin drugs are the most common cholesterol lowering drugs like Lipitor, Atorvastatin,
Zocor, Simvastatin, and many in the medical profession, if you go by how they practice,
just basically think almost everyone should be taking these drugs to, in theory, prevent
heart disease.
And there's a vocal, increasingly a growing and vocal minority in the medical profession
and especially natural health community that suggests that no, not everybody needs to be
on statins.
Even people that are at risk of heart disease, there are better alternatives and it doesn't
make sense to put everyone on statin.
So of course, somebody wrote an article saying this is ridiculous.
Everyone should be on statin drugs.
That's an abbreviation of the first article.
So this latest article is written by two doctors who happen to have a different opinion.
So John Abramson, MD, retired family physician who is an expert in pharmaceutical litigation,
and Dr. Robert Kaplan, PhD, who's a researcher and an expert in clinical research standards.
And they begin by agreeing with the cardiologist that wrote the original article that for some
people at high risk who had heart attacks or strokes before that statins are beneficial.
There is some research to support that, but they go on to point out that people who are
not at high risk for heart disease, who take statin drugs, the benefit is modest at best.
And they cite data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey that shows
that nearly two thirds of people who are using statins are not at high risk.
And they cite the 2022 systematic review and meta analysis.
This is when a bunch of studies are aggregated to see if there's a trend that was done by
the US Preventative Services Task Force that included 12 studies on statin therapy for
primary prevention of cardiovascular disease.
None demonstrated a statistically significant reduction in cardiovascular mortality.
Point out how these findings are consistent with several other investigations, including
the internationally respected nonprofit Cochrane Libraries publication in 2011 of a systematic
review.
That concluded, quote, only limited evidence showed that primary prevention with statins
may be cost effective and improve patient quality of life.
And caution should be taken in prescribing statins for primary prevention among people
at low cardiovascular risk.
So even among cardiologists and mainstream medical professionals, there is a lot of disagreement
on who and how many people and how early and how often and how much statin drugs people
should take to attempt to reduce their risk of cardiovascular disease.
So why is that?
Well, in 1994, a cholesterol treatment trial collaboration was established with the goal
of aggregating the data across all these major trials to add more information about subgroups
like women and the elderly and increase the potential relevancy, clinical relevancy of
the data by pooling, which is similar to the pooled trials that I was talking about just
a minute ago.
But even on a grander scale, well, here's the rub.
They agreed to pool all this data, but the investigators in the studies, all but one
of which were funded by pharmaceutical makers, provided confidential individual level trial
data.
But there was a catch.
Before receiving the data, this group agreed that it would be held in strict confidence
and would not be used in any publication, quote, without the permission of the responsible
trialists.
In practical terms, that means that nobody outside this group would be given the opportunity
to verify and replicate the results.
So in the age of open science, peer reviewers, guideline writers, and independent analysts
have been denied access to the data that might resolve these differences of opinion.
We close with this, the preferences of those who choose to reject statin therapy must be
respected.
Doctors who engage in high quality informed shared decision making are delivering optimal
patient care.
Those are the words of Dr. John Abramson, MD and Master of Science, practiced as a family
doctor for 22 years and served on the faculty of Harvard Medical School for 25 years.
And as an unpaid consultant to the Department of Justice and the FBI, he's written two books
about the commercial takeover of knowledge doctors must rely on, the most recent of which
is Sickening, How Big Pharma Broke American Medicine and How We Can Repair It.
And the other author of the data I've been talking about today is Robert Kaplan, PhD,
who's a senior scholar at Stanford University's Clinical Excellence Research Center and a
former associate director of the National Institutes of Health.
So in spite of all that, most medical doctors are going to tell most of their patients that
they should be taking statin drugs and there's lots of reasons for that.
Not all of them good.
The main point for you is there's other, there's better ways to prevent your, to reduce your
cholesterol but even more importantly, reduce your risk of heart disease because those two
aren't the same thing.
I've listened to my other podcasts about heart disease, cholesterol doesn't cause heart disease,
inflammation causes heart disease, cholesterol is part of the process of dealing with the
inflammation in your blood vessels that leads to the formation of plaques that cause heart
attacks and strokes and there's other ways to prevent that even without lowering your
cholesterol.
So email me if you have questions about that with a single product called Bergamot BPF,
my orthomolecular products.
I've routinely seen people lower their total and their bad LDL cholesterol by 25, 30 points,
have had a few patients that have reduced it by 40 or 50 points, one even up to 70 points
by taking that product and eating some decent diet and getting a little bit of exercise.
So it's important number one to know that there are real alternatives to preventing
heart disease, for preventing heart disease and lowering your cholesterol but also statins
cause real harms.
The way statin drugs work is by putting a chemical clamp on your liver and in the process
that same HMOQ reductase enzyme pathway that's blocked in the liver stops the, produces the
production of coenzyme Q10 which is coenzyme Q10 is the most important enzyme for healing
and repairing heart muscle and muscle throughout your body.
That's why the main side effect, one of the main side effects if not the main side effect
of statin cholesterol lowering drugs is muscle aches and pains.
Well you can do a blood test to see if it's also suppressing the production of adequate
amounts of coenzyme Q10.
CoQ10 is the main enzyme you need to heal and repair heart muscle.
So all these doctors are giving people the cholesterol lowering statin drugs to prevent
heart disease and at the same time impairing the production of the natural enzyme your
body makes to keep your heart healthy and strong, coQ10.
So you can test that with a blood test that directly measures coQ10 in your blood or more
importantly a test called BNP.
Backed about this test a lot of my previous shows before BNP, Bob, Nancy, Paul, it stands
for B type natriuretic peptide.
This measures stress on your heart and if you have high stress on your heart, if that
number on that test goes up the solution to it is to simply supplement with higher doses
of coenzyme Q10 which is a direct way to reduce your risk of heart disease and document that
it's happening.
I'm Dr. Todd Binkley and you're listening to Safe Effective Natural Solutions to Almost
Any Health Challenge.
I promised I'm going to talk about an excellent case of a woman who came to me with fatigue
today but before I get into the specifics I just you know I ask you ask yourself or
people that you know do you have you noticed people that are having fatigue feel tired
all the time for no apparent reason and then maybe they've been to the doctor already and
have been told the tests are normal.
Well is that is that really true all are your tests normal do as your doctor even done all
the tests necessary to identify the potential causes of fatigue.
Well short answer to that is no because there's almost never a single cause of lack of energy
or fatigue.
It's almost always caused by a half a dozen or more sometimes a dozen or more little things
that are contributing to it.
So why shouldn't you have all the energy you used to have.
Well a lot of people think you know I eat right exercise I drink plenty of coffee my
energy should be great.
I guess I'll just have to get used to it.
Well in reality lots of people eat really good food fresh veggies farm raised chicken
wild caught fish go to the gym drink good water and still feel exhausted.
So a lot of people also think you know it's totally normal to not have all the energy
I used to have everyone slows down as they get older.
Well that's not true either.
Most in reality most fatigue is caused by as I just mentioned several little things
that can be measured on testing.
So as an example one of the most recent patients who came to me is having unexplained fatigue.
She's doing everything right.
She's eating pretty well.
She looks great.
She's exercising.
She's happy.
She's got a job she loves.
She's busy but she likes being busy.
And for just the last couple of years her energy is half of what it used to be and there's
no apparent reason for it none that she can find anyway.
And she has been she had been to another doctor who told her that you know all of her tests
were normal.
Well when I tested her number one I do a lot more tests than most doctors do and I identified
a whole bunch of things that were contributing to her fatigue.
She had borderline anemia from insufficient vitamin B12 and folic acid.
Now I didn't even determine this by measuring or testing directly for these vitamins.
All often patients will come in and some of their doctors will have tested folate and
B12 levels in the blood.
But that's not actually the best way to do it.
It's much better to look at a complete blood count because when your body is deficient
and folate and B12 your red blood cells get bigger.
Red blood cells live for about three months and if you're not if your bone marrow isn't
getting sufficient folate and B12 to make adequate numbers of new red blood cells according
to demand whatever demand you're putting on it then the old red blood cells that are you
know working their way through their lifespan get bigger to take up the slack.
So that is a classic sign of deficiency of folate and B12.
And then the other of course the other most common cause of anemia which was part of the
case in this patient as well.
Any any menstruating woman who's not supplementing iron especially if their flow is heavy is
going to be functionally iron deficient even if they go to the doctor and they tell them
that they're not anemic.
Well if they're if they're losing blood and they're not replacing it they're going to
be functionally anemic and it will show up when you look at the healthy ranges the functional
ranges the ranges on standard blood tests that not the broad ranges that are used to
determine whether or not you need a medical procedure or a drug or some kind of medical
follow up or specialist that day.
But the functional ranges the measure for normal human physiology normal function any
menstruating woman who's not supplementing iron to replace the iron she's losing in that
blood is going to be functionally anemic.
And a lot of women know this.
This is the other thing I hear so many times have heard so many times over the past 30
plus years in practice.
Oh I know that I need to take more iron but I can't it makes me constipated or it gives
me nausea or stomach upset.
Well that the reason that's true is because ninety nine point nine percent of folate and
B12 I'm sorry of iron supplements.
Ninety nine point nine percent of iron supplements on the market are iron or ferrous sulfate
iron sulfate which really no one should take because it's just very difficult to absorb
that and it and it causes nausea and cramping and other issues.
But no but that's you know that is not the only option.
Iron bis the bis glycinate B I S G L Y C I N A T E bis glycinate the bis glycinate form
of iron.
I've been giving to women for dozens of years and I haven't had a single one who had any
problems taking it.
No constipation no stomach upset no nausea.
So any woman can take iron supplements if they need it if they take the right kind.
The product I use is usually that's not the only one available but the one that that I
always have in my office is also made by orthomolecular products it's called reacted iron.
In addition to these two forms of mild anemia this woman also had borderline low thyroid
the thing I see all the time as well as a lower than normal white blood cell count.
White blood cells are essential for fighting off and healing infections and a lot of times
you have a chronic infection in your gut and your sinuses or in your gums that you don't
even know about.
Well you usually know about it if it's in your sinuses or your gums but lots of people
have too many bad bugs and not enough good bugs in their gut and do not know it because
it may not cause any symptoms at all except fatigue.
So this can show up the lower white cell count will show up on the test on the blood test
panel that I do on everyone and specific types of the red blood cell white blood cells may
also be lowered and that shows that your immune system is being challenged.
Well not surprisingly I also test vitamin D levels on every single patient and most
people who end up having that lowered white cell count also have low levels of vitamin
D. Your immune system is dependent upon adequate levels of vitamin D. The standard dose for
most adults for functional range to keep your immune system strong is 5000 units of vitamin
D a day.
If you're a white woman who weighs less than 120 pounds then 4000 might be enough but even
children that weigh over 50 or 60 pounds I often recommend they take 5000 units of vitamin
D a day to keep not just your bones but your heart your brain and especially your immune
system strong and functioning at its peak.
So we identified you know four, iron and folate and B12 deficiency, iron deficiency, vitamin
D deficiency, borderline low thyroid, anachronic infection of some kind we don't even know
what the infection is but just giving this woman some nutrients to build up her immune
system restore her vitamin D levels to where they where they should be between 50 and 90
on the test and healthy levels of vitamin D on the standard test should be between 50
and 90 whereas most doctors will tell you you're fine if it's above 30.
So we gave her some supplements to deal with these deficiencies made sure that she was
well she was actually you know not doing as much exercise as she used to do because of
the fatigue hello it's not easy to exercise when you don't have any energy.
So after four months of taking some supplements she started actually through I forget what
she said it was halfway through or three quarters of the way through maybe a month two or three
she started exercising a lot more because she had the energy to do it and that just
and you know it makes everything work better.
So she's happy feeling good now has all the energy to do the things that she wants to
do and she said you know I feel like a new person.
I said at the top of the show that fatigue is one of the most common things people come
to me for and I've just I've helped hundreds and hundreds of people identify what's causing
their fatigue so that they can correct it and have healthy levels of energy without
resorting to stimulants or other things that don't really give you energy they just you
know they give you a false sense of energy without actually improving it without improving
your own body's ability to make its own energy normal which is the way you want to do it.
So if you know someone who has fatigue please have them give me shoot me an email.
You can even check out another website in addition to my regular website Binkley Healing
Center dot com.
I set up a separate website just for fatigue with information about fatigue called fatigue
free living dot com.
Fatigue free living dot com is a great place to send people that you know who are having
fatigue and want to know how I might address it and you know understand better about why
there's so much confusion why so many people have it and don't know what's causing it and
there's a great example of a successful case there who had amazing results with what we
did for her and then there's even a place at the bottom where you can sign up to get
some more information a guide that I developed called the dozen most commonly overlooked
causes of fatigue.
Here's an interesting article in the medical literature the headline is the quote useless
appendix is more fascinating than we thought and then further down in the article the appendix
is called a safe house for bacteria.
Do you still have your appendix.
It's sometimes important it can be an emergency situation if your appendix ruptures and can
lead to bad bacteria causing a rapidly expanding infection so there's lots of good reasons
that people have had their appendix out but there's also a lot of people that have had
it just routinely taken out for no good reason at all.
That's what the subject of this article is for years people who are having surgery for
some other reason while they've got you opened up they would just take your appendix out
while it's at while while they're at it thinking it's a useless organ that has no function
and might save you know save you from having to have another surgery later so that's no
longer considered best practice but there's more data coming out that shows what but this
you know for years we're still hasn't been convincing argument for what the appendix
actually does.
Well so French researchers in a twenty twenty three study compiled data from a French zoo
that established that animals with appendixes are far less likely to suffer severe diarrhea
diarrhea far less likely to have diarrhea in animals than those that don't have an appendix.
So immunologist William Parker PhD a visiting scholar at the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill says quote these data are in support are as bad as good as we could hope
for in support of the idea that the appendix might protect mammals from gut problems and
experiment on humans would be unethical but observational studies offer clues.
So one such study showed that people with an intact appendix when compared to young
people who had their appendix removed the people that would have their appendix removed
had double the risk of developing a serious infection of salmonella that would require
hospitalization.
Those studies like this add weight to the theory that Parker and his colleagues developed
back in 2007 that the appendix acts as a safe house for beneficial gut bacteria.
We're hearing more about the importance of a healthy microbiome of having sufficient
amounts of good bacteria in your gut for a whole host of reasons.
So Parker Dr. Parker suggests that we think of the colon as a windpipe that may become
contaminated with a pathogen a bad bug such as salmonella.
Well diarrhea is going to follow so that the pipe gets repeatedly flushed wiping everything
clean but also including your friendly gut microbiome.
So luckily you've got this little offshoot of the pipe where the flow can't really get
in because it's too constricted.
That is the appendix.
The appendix is a little worm shaped blind pouch that sticks off of the lower end of
the small intestine right where it transitions to the large intestine.
There is evidence to show that the appendix is full of beneficial bacteria and it survives
this flushing out.
If you get diarrhea from getting eating some bad food you don't wipe out all of your good
bacteria after you've had diarrhea if you have an appendix because it stores up some
of the good bacteria and they can work their way back into the gut.
So that's why they're calling it the safe house for beneficial bacteria.
The appendix is also rich in special cells that act there are called M cells that act
as scouts detecting and capturing invasive bad bacteria and viruses and exposing them
to the body's defense teams such as T lymphocytes.
There are several studies that show people who've had their appendix removed have increased
risk of certain diseases.
A study done in Taiwan showed that people who had an appendectomy had a 40 percent higher
risk of developing irritable bowel syndrome.
There was another study that showed that within three years of having their appendix out patients
under 30 had double the risk of developing type 2 diabetes.
So don't panic if you've had your appendix out it may just be a good reason to come in
and get a functional medicine evaluation to identify whether or not you need some support.
Perhaps you need a good probiotic or some good prebiotics to feed the healthy bacteria
and grow more of your own.
The test sometimes a stool test is required.
Stool tests can directly measure whether or not you have adequate good bacteria and too
many bad bacteria whether they be or bad viruses parasites or a fungal infection.
I've had some cases of severe irritable bowel syndrome severe ulcerative colitis and Crohn's
disease people who've gone to other doctors on medications and just nothing has worked
for years and years and years and had to help them make dramatic recoveries by restoring
testing for and restoring the normal beneficial microbiome in the gut.
This is hugely important for those conditions but also for any condition that involves a
weak immune system almost any mood disorder depression anxiety attention deficit disorder
hyperactivity these things are all affected by your gut.
So gut health is super important.
It's one of the most important things to consider testing for if you're not feeling right.
I'd love the opportunity to help you or someone you love find out what's actually causing
their problems that other doctors haven't been able to figure out and get you feeling
better as soon as possible.
Thank you for listening.
I look forward to speaking with you right here next Friday at 4 p.m.
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
Dr. Binkley at Binkley Healing Center dot 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.