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, board certified doctor of non-force chiropractic and practitioner
of functional medicine.
Functional medicine means using standard diagnostic tests to identify not something that's so
bad that you need medical care, a prescription or a surgical procedure, or referral to a
specialist, but just when normal function has gone by the wayside, when your organs
and tissues, when your liver, your kidneys, your thyroid, your immune system, your cardiovascular
system, when these systems and organs are no longer functioning like they should, like
they did when you were in your teens and your twenties and everything was working really
well.
So we're looking for a way to test for this as well as diagnose conditions like diabetes
and liver disease and etc.
So basically prevention.
We're looking for ways to identify things earlier so that you can use better food, exercise
and supplements to correct them instead of becoming dependent on standard Western medical
care in the pharmaceutical industry for the rest of your life.
So if you're interested in that, send me your questions.
I love answering questions.
Binkley at binkleyhealingcenter.com.
Text me at 805-218-3939.
The ringer on my phone is always off.
I already get so many spam phone calls that I can never answer the phone.
But I'll be happy to talk to you on the phone as well.
If you want to reach me on the phone, please just send me a text or an email and say, please
call me and I'll call you back.
So we've been talking about hormones for the past several episodes.
Still remind everyone that's interested that all the past episodes of the show are available
to listen to anytime you want on my website, binkleyhealingcenter.com.
My last name, healing like healthandhealing.com, binkleyhealingcenter.com.
They're also available as podcasts on Apple podcasts, Spotify and on YouTube.
So this episode we're going to talk about cortisol.
Cortisol is one of the main hormones that is produced by the adrenal glands, anybody
who has significant stress in their lives, if anybody's ever heard of adrenal fatigue.
When you have excess stress, it first causes your adrenals to produce too much cortisol
and that can have damaging effects.
And then eventually you wear out.
You cause fatigue of the adrenals.
The adrenals lose their ability to produce sufficient amounts of cortisol.
So that's what we're looking for.
The cortisol is always highest in the morning.
There's a normal curve throughout the day.
So cortisol is literally what helps wake you up in the morning.
When you wake up, when you open your eyes and you're kind of groggy and you hit the
alarm or you hit snooze or whatever, whenever you finally actually get up, that is in large
part the result of your adrenal glands pumping out cortisol.
It wakes you up in the morning.
So for that reason, most doctors, when they want to check your cortisol levels, they'll
send you to get a blood test for one blood test at nine o'clock in the morning, one blood
sample of cortisol.
Well, you know, that is the most important time of day if you're only going to test it
once to see if you're making adequate amounts to wake you up in the morning.
But that's not a very good way of really evaluating your adrenal gland function.
That's why it's so important.
More than any more than any of the other hormones, cortisol really needs to be done with a salivary
hormone test.
I've been talking about the difference between testing hormones in saliva and blood on all
these past few episodes.
There are some things that you have to test with the blood test, like hormone issues related
to pregnancy and menstruation.
But for aging issues, for stress, like we're going to be talking about today, and for menopausal
women, it's important to test a saliva test for the hormones, which measures your average
of the hormones throughout the day and not just a snapshot in time for a hormone that's
going up and down, up and down, up and down every 10 minutes all day long.
So the normal cortisol curve is highest in the morning, and then it drops down around
midday to about half the level that it is when you first wake up.
And then it goes, continues going down to a very low level in the evening and then remains
very low at night.
That's the normal curve.
So that is the curve, but you want it to be within a normal range as well.
So if you were to look at a graph and you would see this line starting out high in the
morning, dropping it down about half in the midday and then continuing down to very low
at night, there's also a range above and below that perfect line within which you want your
cortisol levels to be.
And when it is, then you feel good and everything works well.
And if it's above or below that range, then that's when we have problems.
So that's what we're looking for on the test.
You do a, you spit in four tubes a half hour after waking up in the morning, lunchtime,
dinnertime and bedtime.
So that's how we get those four points to plot that curve.
So deficiency of cortisol causes fatigue can also cause low blood pressure.
So most people hear about high blood pressure all the time.
It's much more common for people, especially as you get older to have high blood pressure
than it is to have low blood pressure.
But people who have, you know, someone who has low blood pressure, especially someone
that's older, but really anyone with low blood pressure that no doctor has ever been able
to explain it to them.
Deficient cortisol, deficient adrenal function is very often the cause of that.
And most doctors never test for this, never test for it effectively, never do a saliva
test to measure it throughout the day.
So I've had some, some really amazing cases with people with low blood pressure by testing
and restoring their adrenal function.
So stress causes overproduction of cortisol, which results in many health issues.
And when it persists for a long time, your adrenal glands basically just lose the ability
to make enough.
There are receptors in almost every tissue in your body that affect nearly every organ
system.
So cortisol affects your nervous system, your immune system, your heart, your cardio, entire
cardiovascular system, your lungs, your respiratory system, your reproductive system, and your
musculoskeletal system, your muscles, tendons, ligaments, and bones.
It's not a primary cause of osteoporosis, but appropriate amounts can help keep your
bones strong.
It can also help balance blood sugar, control weight, keep your immune system healthy.
It can affect sleep and mood, can help with anxiety and depression.
It affects protein synthesis and influences your testosterone and estrogen ratio and your
DHEA and insulin ratio.
So that sounds a little technical, but we've been talking about these on previous episodes.
All of your hormones influence one another and your, most of the hormones produced by
your endocrine system are controlled by your pituitary gland and adequate core normal cortisol
levels affect that balance, your ability of your pituitary to control all of your endocrine
glands and keep them in balance.
And it also affects your thyroid, especially the thyroid, the adrenal glands and the thyroid
work hand in hand.
So what causes too much cortisol?
Well, stress.
Stress is the most common cause of elevated cortisol, but some of the things can increase
it.
Depression, contraceptives, infections, especially chronic infections that people have that they
don't know about.
This is identified by a low white blood cell count on a blood test, poor sleep, inflammation,
hypoglycemia, low blood sugar, pain.
Just having pain is a form of stress, but sometimes people don't make that connection.
They're surprised to find out that the cortisol is going up just because they have some pain
that they've never been able to figure out how to resolve.
So a lot of times they'll help people with that by releasing tension from their muscles
and joints.
And also, like with so many things, exposure to toxins.
Chemical and heavy metal toxins are ubiquitous in the environment.
We're all exposed to them.
They are a form of stress on nearly every system in your body and can cause your cortisol
levels to go up.
So obviously, your cortisol levels, if they remain too high, your adrenals eventually
wear out.
Cortisol level goes down.
But in addition to just normal stress causing low cortisol over time, nutrient deficiencies
can impair your adrenal glands ability to make adequate cortisol.
Dysbiosis, which just means dys means like dysfunction, bio, bacteria, things that are
alive.
Dysbiosis means there's too many bad bacteria and not enough good bacteria in your gut.
Chronic inflammation, chronic pain, toxin exposure, over-exercising, hypoglycemia, poor
sleep, depression, severe allergies.
So basically, so many of the things that cause too much cortisol cause too low cortisol as
well because after you had high cortisol for too long, you end up with low cortisol caused
by the same things.
So excess cortisol also can result in compromised immune function, confusion, shaking between
meals, impaired memory, low energy, night sweats, binge eating, increased blood pressure,
high cholesterol, high triglycerides, high blood sugar, increased risk of osteoporosis,
increased insulin resistance, and risk of diabetes.
So anybody who's diabetic or pre-diabetic really should get their cortisol levels tested
because interactions between cortisol and DHEA and most of your hormones can strongly
interact with the things that are causing and the things that you need to do to prevent
or reverse diabetes.
Excess cortisol can also increase infections through its effect on the immune system.
It can cause thin skin, fatigue, irritability, sugar cravings, muscle weakness, weight gain,
sleep disturbances, and impaired thyroid function.
So especially, this is one of the main ways cortisol and thyroid function.
Your adrenals and your thyroid work hand in hand.
Excess cortisol from too much production from the adrenal glands can impair the conversion
of T4, thyroxin.
Anybody who's got low thyroid and is taking thyroid medication like levothyroxine or
synthroid, that is thyroxin is T4.
But T4 doesn't do anything in your body.
The active form, it must be converted from T4 to T3 and then some of that T3 must be
unbound into free T3.
Free T3 is the only active thyroid hormone that does anything in your body.
And excess cortisol can impair that conversion of T4 into T3 and then into free T3.
And excess cortisol can also cause increased risk of leaky gut syndrome.
So abnormal levels of cortisol are associated with menopause, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia,
depression, impotence, anorexia nervosa, diabetes, memory loss, irritable bowel syndrome, exacerbation
of autoimmune conditions like multiple sclerosis, panic disorders, PMS, premenstrual syndrome,
sleep disorders we've talked about, osteoporosis, heart disease, rheumatoid arthritis, even
breast cancer and Alzheimer's.
So it's really important to get these tested.
If you know someone who's stressed and has never been tested, never had their cortisol
levels tested, please encourage them to do so.
Just doing the cortisol levels, people ask how much it costs.
I mentioned on the previous episode, the comprehensive saliva hormone panel with all three estrogens,
testosterone, DHEA and progesterone plus all four cortisol tests to get that curve throughout
the day is $220 for all of those.
But we can also, sometimes if somebody is just stressed and doesn't have any signs or
symptoms of sex hormone challenges or symptoms, we'll just test the cortisol levels.
I think it's about $80 or $90 to just do the four cortisol tests.
So send me an email if you have questions about that.
So abnormal levels are associated with all of these things.
Treatment of adrenal dysfunction and abnormal cortisol levels includes fixing many of the
basic nutrient deficiencies that impair your adrenal glands ability to make adequate cortisol
like deficiencies of vitamin C and B vitamins, minerals like calcium and magnesium and zinc
and selenium, copper and manganese.
This is one of the main reasons I recommend that everyone take a good, and good is always
four capsules a day, sometimes three if you're under 120 pounds, but a good multivitamin
and mineral supplement mainly for the minerals.
Most people do not get enough minerals, especially calcium, magnesium, zinc and selenium.
These are very commonly deficient minerals.
Manganese is also a fairly common deficiency.
But actually before I get into the ways of treating it, the most important thing to do
if you have abnormal cortisol levels is to reduce your stress.
So we always start there.
Identify the stresses that you're having now.
And there's often lots of ways it's different with everyone.
It's kind of hard to really discuss that here.
Everyone's familiar with stress.
There's lots of different ways to reduce various forms of stress in your life.
How I can help is a lot of times stress is either caused by or exacerbated by pain and
stiffness in your muscles and joints.
I'm a non-force chiropractor.
I can always help anybody with any physical pain anywhere in their body because most pain
in your body, physical pain is caused by patterns of tension in your muscles that create inflammation,
irritate your joints, inflame your joints, make it likely for you to injure your joints
like herniated disc or cause arthritis in your hips or your shoulders or your knees,
tendons, liss, muscles, tendons like plantar fasciitis, carpal tunnel syndrome, pressure
on nerves from tension and inflammation in your tendons and joints.
So all kinds of pain can be stressors that affect your cortisol levels.
And those things can often be addressed with treatment on the table.
So once together we've done everything we can to reduce your stress levels or the effects
of the stress you have because sometimes you can't reduce your stress.
But here's an interesting thing.
I heard it said, it has been said that one person's stress is another person's form of
stimulation, right?
So something that could be exciting to some person could drive somebody else crazy and
actually affect their health.
But anyway, there's always ways to reduce stress.
Some are easy, some are not so easy, but we always want to start there.
But then obviously it is very common when I test people's adrenals where we need to
actually do some treatment directly for the adrenal glands.
And one of the simplest ways to do this is take adrenal glandulars.
So there are supplements that are made from ground up adrenal glands from healthy young
mammals that have all the nutrients our adrenal glands need to make healthy adrenal gland
cells and healthy adrenal gland hormones.
So they're called adrenal glandulars.
There's lots of different companies that make them standard process.
Doctors research are some of the ones that I use.
And that's the fastest way.
So if somebody's severely deficient in adrenal function, I'll put them on adrenal glandulars
and you usually feel an effect from that in two or three weeks.
And you usually don't need to do that long term, sometimes three or four months, sometimes
up to six months, usually not much longer than that, or maybe a very, very low dose.
If you're under a lot of stress, again, it goes hand in hand with how much stress you
have.
But usually you can get adrenal function back up into the normal range with glandulars and
sometimes adaptogenic herbs.
I usually do both actually.
After about three to four, sometimes up to six months.
And then long term, adaptogenic herbs help just deal with the daily stress of life.
So what does that mean?
Adaptogenic herbs.
These are herbs that don't necessarily stimulate anything that's deficient or suppress anything
that's in excess, but modulates.
So they help your adrenal glands, in this case, work normally, produce the normal amount.
So a lot of these things have been around for years.
You definitely don't want to go to some store and buy some cheap Chinese herbs from some
company you've never heard of.
These things can be dangerous and often are laced with medications.
But there are many excellent top shelf companies, like the ones I mention all the time on this
show, Designs for Health, Orthomolecular Products, Doctors Research, Gaia Pro is one of the ones
that I use for adaptogenic herbs for adrenal support.
Things like rhodiola and ginseng, ashwagandha, licorice, and several others can help restore
and maintain your normal function, help your adrenal glands continue to make and work normally
again on their own, and then continue to make normal amounts, even when you still have normal
stress, whatever normal stress is for you.
I'm Dr. Todd Binkley.
You're listening to Safe, Effective, Natural Solutions to Almost Any Health Challenge.
We've been talking about hormones for the last several episodes.
We were talking about cortisol levels and adrenal function today.
Stress causes adrenal dysfunction.
Initially, it causes overproduction, and then eventually, after long term stress, causes
a suppression of adrenal gland function.
We see this all the time.
If you know someone who has a lot of stress and they've never been tested for adrenal
function, it's a very good idea to encourage them to do that.
The best way to do that is with a saliva test, where you spit in four tubes, so we get that
curve of normal function throughout the day.
Half hour after waking, noon, dinnertime, and bedtime is when we collect the samples,
and that gives us that nice normal curve of cortisol and whether or not it is within range.
Let's talk about a couple of cases.
I had a 57-year-old man who came to me who was having... He was in a lot of pain.
He was trying to put off getting his knees replaced.
He had horrible pain in his knees, and I got him doing some stretches that helped a lot,
but long before he came to see me, he had been taking medication for many, many, many
years.
He'd been taking Vicodin for years, and then in my opinion, his idiot physician that he
was seeing switched him to Oxycontin, which is just crazy.
Needs to resolve the source of the pain, not put him on opiates that cause overdoses all
over the country.
Anyone who listened to the news knows we're in an opioid crisis around the country, and
Oxycontin is one of the worst of the worst.
Anyway, he was getting off of that.
Actually, the doctor that switched him from Vicodin to Oxycontin died, and he had to get
a new doctor.
The doctor said, okay, you've got three months to get off of the Oxycontin.
I was helping him with that, firstly by doing some things to show him how to stretch the
muscles in his legs, get some pressure off of the knees, reduce some of the pain naturally,
from reduce the cause of the pain.
He was also gradually weaning himself off of the Oxycontin.
I tested his adrenals and had did some blood work on him, and he had a bunch of things
going on, and he needed some support for his cardiovascular system.
He was also pretty heavy.
We had to put him on some things to help reduce his cholesterol and inflammation in his vascular
system and lower his blood pressure.
He had some inflammation throughout the body.
I gave him some support for some anti-natural nutrients for inflammation, like turmeric
and some others.
Natokinase is a product that Designs for Health makes called Natocerozymes that has systemic
enzymes, analogues of natokinase and seropeptase, which reduce inflammation in the vasculature
and the blood vessels and in the bones and joints.
He had some other things on his blood work, low protein, the common things that I see,
and his cortisol levels were really, really low.
I gave him some support for that, several things at once.
He had a lot of things going on.
What stands out, and what he later told me about that he was so shocked and surprised
by and excited by, is he had taken off early in this process, I think maybe a little over
a month after he started weaning himself off of OxyContin.
He had driven to Vegas by himself and was going to be there for a weekend conference.
He got there and he realized he only had one pill.
He was still taking a low dose of OxyContin.
He couldn't get off of it completely.
He only had one pill and he forgot to bring the bottle of OxyContin with him.
He didn't get in his suitcase or whatever.
He found one in a pocket and that was all he had, which is very difficult.
You've probably seen in the movies when people try to stop cold turkey on these things.
It's just like trying to get off of heroin.
Severe, severe side effects if you just stop cold turkey.
He was really worried, but he had his supplements with him.
Even though he only had one OxyContin, he was able to get through this too.
He thought it was a miracle, actually.
That was the word he used.
He got through his two day conference because he was taking his supplements to reduce inflammation.
He was doing a couple of stretches when he had time.
He didn't actually do that much stretching, but he did some.
He was taking nutrients that reduced all these horrible effects that were contributing to
his pain and to his anxiety.
It didn't obviously resolve his symptoms, but he was able to get through the weekend,
do his conference and drive home by himself without having the severe side effects that
he expected while he was trying to get off.
The upshot of that is he was able to get off OxyContin completely much earlier.
His doctor was going to give him three months to do it.
I think he did it in about six weeks.
He was very excited to finally get off of that completely.
We still had some side effects of not taking that.
It was difficult to stay off of it, but the supplements were helping him manage it, basically
to keep it controllable.
Now we just have him on a low dose of these adaptogenic herbs that I was talking about
before, things like rhodiola and ginseng and some basic nutrients to keep all of his organs
and systems healthy and strong.
The multivitamin that I recommend for everybody, vitamin D, fish oil, an anti-inflammatory
nutrient, a good source of curcumin from turmeric.
It helps with the inflammation that he's always going to have because of the arthritis in
his joints.
We just got him to where he's feeling good all the time now with better food, a little
bit of exercise, and a few supplements.
He's very happy about that.
His problems aren't completely gone, but we started way late with him and he's much better
off than he would have been if he had continued doing the things that his medical doctor was
telling him to do.
This was a couple of years ago.
He still hasn't had his knees surgery.
He's been able to just maintain it tolerably with the things that we've been doing.
He's very happy about that.
If you know somebody that has symptoms like this, please, I'd love the chance and opportunity
to help them, especially if they've never had their cortisol level stumbles checked.
Anybody you know who has a lot of stress should get their adrenal gland function tested with
a saliva hormone test.
Thank you for listening.
I will see you right here on KDAR 98.3 FM next Friday at four o'clock.
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 four p.m. for Safe, Effective Natural Solutions right here on
98.3 The Word, KDAR.