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 identifying earlier signs of stress on all of your organs and tissues
so that you can fix them with natural solutions like good food, gentle exercise, and supplements
where necessary as identified on proper testing.
So, most disease conditions are caused by stress and lousy food, lack of exercise, and general neglect.
And you can identify how you're doing and someone you love is doing by getting proper testing.
And I'd be truly honored to help you restore true health and longevity.
I'd be delighted to help you identify all of the areas where your heart or your kidneys or your lungs,
your immune system, your digestive system, your pancreas, your liver, any part of your body
is silently struggling and could use a little help.
So, that's what happens. You know, these things, they don't, if they had glaring symptoms,
if there was a flashing red light or a siren, you'd do something about it immediately.
But if you just feel a little off and you think, you know, I'm getting older,
it feels like I'm getting older, it's probably fine.
Or you've already been to your doctor and they've tested everything.
No doctor ever tests everything.
But you've had some tests and been told that you're fine.
If you don't feel right, something's wrong.
This is, there's no other way to say it. If you don't feel fine, you are not fine.
And just because 10 doctors told you they couldn't find what,
they don't tell you they couldn't find what's wrong with you.
They say there's nothing wrong with you.
If you go to any doctor who said, you don't feel good,
and you walk out of there after the whole process and you still don't feel good,
and they say there's nothing wrong with you, that doctor's an idiot.
Or they're lying or they're just misinformed. I'll be generous.
They're just misinformed. They don't know what's wrong with you.
That's what they should say.
If you go to any doctor and you walk away without a solution that's working for you,
and they say there's nothing wrong with you, that's not good.
They should say, I don't know what's wrong with you.
I say that to patients sometimes. I don't know what's wrong with you.
I don't know what's wrong with every single patient.
Well, I can usually figure out what's wrong with most patients that come to my office.
But sometimes, once a year, maybe.
I refer people out when I usually refer people out because I know what's wrong with them
and I know they need to go to a gastroenterologist because they've got a raging inflammatory condition in their gut.
Or I identify a cancer on their blood test. They've got leukemia.
They need to go to a hematologist.
But the point is, far too many doctors, especially in Western mainstream medicine,
tell millions of patients every day that there's nothing wrong with them
when there is something wrong with them or they wouldn't be there.
And they refer them to a psychologist or they say they're a hypochondriac.
And, you know, hypochondriacs exist in people with mental health issues
that mimic other symptoms, exist also.
But far too many people are dismissed when they have a real problem
that that doctor couldn't figure out.
So anytime some doctor tells you or someone you love there's nothing wrong with you and you don't feel right,
walk away or run and find a doctor who can figure out what's wrong with you.
And I'd love to be that doctor for you.
And, you know, just kind of a context to consider, something I always like to remind all of us
is that the condition of your body is far more important than any disease you've been diagnosed with.
So I'm taking the time and covering the cost of this program every week to teach you how you can improve your health.
I'd like the opportunity to help you do that.
But I also love it if you just get some information you can use to take better care of your health on your own.
I figure, you know, what goes around comes around.
I believe if you do good things in the world, it will come back to you.
And so I really appreciate you listening to my show.
I hope you share it with other people and that everyone that listens to it gets some benefit from it.
On that note, all the past episodes of this show are available on Apple Podcasts.
If you have an iPhone or an iPad and like to use the podcast app,
just punch in Safe, Effective, Natural Solutions or my name, Todd Binkley, and it will come up.
They're also available on Spotify and YouTube.
On YouTube, you have to put in the whole thing.
You have to put in both the title of the show, Safe, Effective, Natural Solutions and my name, Todd Binkley, for it to come up.
And they're a little bit out of order. But if you like YouTube, they're on there as well.
And most easily to find, they're on my website, binkleyhealingcenter.com.
All of the past episodes are on my homepage.
You just punch in binkleyhealingcenter.com and scroll down and they'll come up.
So last week I was talking about anemia from heavy menstrual flow.
And this is just really important for people to understand.
You, everyone knows probably has a woman in their life that they know or love who, you know, might have,
know that they have millions of women know they have iron deficiency anemia and think they can't take iron because it causes constipation
or some other kind of abdominal pain. And as I mentioned last week,
if you take the bisglycinate form of iron, B-I-S-G-L-Y-C-I-N-A-T-E, bisglycinate iron,
doesn't cause any of those side effects. I've been giving it to thousands of women for 30 plus years.
No one's ever had a problem with it.
But most people still don't know about it because 99% of the iron supplements on the market are ferrous sulfate.
Any medical doctor who identifies a full blown anemia will, if you don't need a blood transfusion or some other kind of medication,
they'll tell you to take an iron supplement and give you a prescription for crappy ferrous sulfate.
If you go to GNC or Trader Joe's or any Costco or any store and look for iron supplements,
it's virtually guaranteed that all of them are going to be ferrous sulfate. No one should take ferrous sulfate.
They should take bisglycinate iron. And it'll fix the anemia.
So just a little recap there. I mention that again because anemia is undiagnosed, especially anemia,
is one of the most common causes of fatigue. How do you really know?
Most people find out they have anemia when they have fatigue, when they have tiredness, when they have lack of energy.
Different people express the sensation in different ways.
But from a functional perspective, lack of energy, fatigue, tiredness, they're all basically functionally the same thing.
They have similar causes that overlap, let's put it that way.
And so today we're going to talk about fatigue. And the most important thing, fatigue is one of the most common things people come to me for.
I strongly suspect it's one of the most common symptoms people present with to any functional practitioner and a lot of mainstream medical doctors as well.
You know, I just don't feel right. I'm exhausted all the time and there's no reason for it.
Okay, I'm getting a little bit older, but I'm still eating right. I'm still exercising. I'm still doing all the right things.
And I'm exhausted. Why? Why?
Especially if it's, you know, suddenly appeared just out of nowhere last week or six months ago, or even if it's been going on for a couple of years.
If you haven't figured out why and no one else, no other doctor has been able to figure out why, there probably is a solution.
There probably is a reason, but it's never it's never a single reason. Fatigue is never caused by one thing.
I'm just going to say that I've never seen a case of significant fatigue that had one cause. It's never one thing.
It's always a number of things, often almost always half a dozen things, minor things contributing to it.
And that's why no one can ever find out truly what's causing their fatigue is because it's not one thing.
It's a half a dozen things or a dozen things or more.
And I see this so often that I even set up a separate website that you can go to called FatigueFreeLiving.com.
I set up that website just to talk about all of the things that can contribute to fatigue.
It starts with the dozen most commonly overlooked causes of fatigue.
And there's a really excellent case study that I present there of a woman who had a forty forty seven year old woman hairdresser with fatigue, which I'll come back to.
And if you go to the bottom, you can sign up and receive my report on these dozen most commonly overlooked causes of fatigue.
And as a little secret, when you get that report, it includes another dozen because I could easily come up with twenty four
commonly overlooked reasons that causes of fatigue that just people just never really figure out.
Most doctors don't test for most patients are unaware of. They are identifiable and they are correctable.
I'm Dr. Todd Binkley. You're listening to safe, effective, natural solutions to almost any health challenge.
We're talking about fatigue today, one of the most common things people come to see me for.
And so here we go. Here are the dozen most commonly overlooked causes of fatigue that I see and my practice.
Number one, we've already talked about iron deficiency anemia. Huge, huge and almost always overlooked when it is present.
Number two, pre diabetes. Have you had an A1C test? So lots of people know about the blood sugar test.
Most doctors, if you get any routine blood work, they will test your fasting glucose level when you get a blood test.
If you have to fast, you have to do a 12 hour fast. You're not you're not you have to fast for all of those tests.
The main ones you have to fast for to get an accurate reading are your glucose and your cholesterol.
There are a few others, but those are the two most important ones that if you don't do a 12 hour fast,
you won't get an accurate reading because your blood sugar and your cholesterol might still be high from the last meal that you had.
So you need to give your body 12 hours to get rid of the finished finished processing that meal so that you get a good baseline.
So pre diabetes. So getting your your blood sugar tested, just your fasting glucose level is an important test.
Your morning glucose level shows you what is your blood sugar still like after you've had 12 hours to, you know, process the last meal.
Is it totally back to normal or not? If it's elevated, if it's above 99, then you have pre diabetes.
If it's above 125, you have diabetes. The diagnosis of diabetes is two on two separate occasions of a blood sugar fasting blood glucose reading of 125 or more.
Alternatively, you can also diagnose it with the A1C test. A1C is short for hemoglobin A1C because blood sugar binds to your red blood cells.
The hemoglobin in the red blood cells bind sugar, your sugar and your blood stream sticks to hemoglobin and it accumulates over time.
And your red blood cells have a lifespan of about three months, three and a half months. And so during the course of any red blood cells lifespan,
sugar sticks to it in accordance direct proportion to how much blood sugar is floating around in your bloodstream all the time.
So this is a much better test. It's basically the standard for evaluating diabetes now.
If you have, so when you eat a meal and your blood sugar spikes and then it goes back down and then it spikes again after your next meal,
especially if you're eating sugar or refined carbohydrates and all this stuff that a lot of people eat for breakfast like pancakes with syrup and waffles and hash browns and, you know, grains, starch and sugar, wheat, flour, potatoes, corn,
anything with sugar or flour in it is going to spike your blood sugar. Most people know this. Most people have heard about low carb diets.
So anyway, those things will all raise your blood sugar and consequently elevate your hemoglobin A1C level, which so that A1C level tells you what your average glucose is for a three to three and a half month period.
Well, how does it do that? Well, your blood sugar is going up and down all the time, but whatever it is, whatever you've consumed, whatever effect that has,
whatever sugar is coursing through your bloodstream over that three month period will stick to your red blood cells in accordance with the level that's the result of whatever you've been eating.
So it's a very accurate measurement of your average blood sugar over a three month period. So anything above 5.6 on your A1C test is a diagnosis of pre diabetes and anything above and anything above 6.4 is full blown diabetes.
So pre diabetes used to be 6.0. It's been progressively reduced to 5.8 and now 5.6 and that's important.
Numerous studies show that damage to your blood vessels and your nerves starts to occur when your blood sugar is above 99.
But when your A1C, and so diabetes isn't diagnosed until it's 125, but it really should be lower than that.
And the A1C that is now the cutoff for diabetes 6.5, that's an average blood sugar of 140.
So that amount of blood sugar is wreaking havoc on your blood vessels and your nerves when it's averaging 140, which is an A1C of 6.5.
But the cutoff for pre diabetes 5.6, that's still a blood sugar of about 115, way above 99 obviously.
And so even if your A1C is 5.6, you know, there are other ways that your body can mitigate the effects of that. But just know that your average blood sugar when your A1C is 5.6 and you're still below pre diabetic,
depending on how much grain starch and sugar you're eating, you still could be doing some damage to your blood vessels and nerves.
That's easily preventable by just changing your diet.
Pre diabetes is a is number two on my list of a common cause, overlooked cause of fatigue.
Because if you have elevated blood sugar, it tends to cause a spike in your blood sugar and then a crash.
You don't just get the spike, you get the spike and then the crash.
Because your body, if you have you have if you have a spike of blood sugar, your pancreas pumps out insulin to try and shove that sugar into your cells and get it out of circulation so that it won't damage your blood vessels and your nerves.
And that lasts much longer. The insulin lasts much longer.
That insulin hit carries on in your bloodstream for a lot longer than that spike you got from that candy bar you just ate.
So you get a crash. Have you ever experienced this? You eat some sugar, you feel like there's no energy in sugar. Sugar does not give you energy. I'm going to come back to that.
But you don't get a sustained energy from eating sugar because mainly because sugar doesn't give you energy, but also because insulin response causes a crash that lasts much longer.
You know, 45 minutes, an hour, sometimes two or three hours, depending on what you ate.
So that's why pre diabetes and obviously full blown diabetes can cause fatigue.
So number three of the dozen most commonly overlooked causes of fatigue, low protein. I see this all the time. This is one of the most common things I see when I do my complete blood panel on people.
And this is a common test. Most doctors, if they order any blood tests, they're going to order a metabolic panel.
Even if it's a brief metabolic panel, it's going to include your serum protein level.
But again, the problem is they don't use the proper range. They'll say it's fine if it's above five point something up to, I don't know, eight point something.
You want your total for most people, it is very slightly by age and gender, but you want your blood sugar level to be somewhere in the sevens for most people. Seven point something.
And most I see lots of people all the time they come in and it's six point eight, six point six, six point three. You know, anything below seven is usually too low and low enough to contribute to fatigue and also impair healing and repair.
Protein is the basic building block for nearly every tissue in your body.
Most of the structure of your organs and tissues is collagen and other proteins that your body has to make from food. And if you're not eating adequate protein, then that's obviously not going to happen.
But even if you're eating adequate protein, if you're not absorbing it, if it's not entering your bloodstream, then it's not going to enter your cells.
And the only way you can know if you're getting adequate protein is to test it. And I see this all the time. People who are eating meat, fish, chicken, every day, large amounts of protein, their serum blood protein still shows up low.
How can that be? I'm eating, I eat a big steak or piece of chicken or fish, something every day, and it's still low.
Well, because you're not what you eat. You're not what you swallow anyway. You are what your body is able to digest and assimilate.
And it has to at least, it has to go beyond your stomach after you swallow it. It has to be digested into your bloodstream and be escorted into cells.
And that's what's missing. So a lot of people eat plenty of protein, but lack sufficient hydrochloric acid in their stomach to digest it, or sometimes other enzymes, or sometimes they're just not eating enough protein.
So low protein, very common cause of fatigue. Number four, dehydration.
Most adults really need to drink two quarts, maybe even a gallon of water a day to flush out toxins and keep their brain and their joints and their kidneys and their cardiovascular system functioning properly.
Water is the basic solvent, the solution that is required for everything to flow in your body. And people think, oh, if I'm not thirsty, then I don't need any more water.
Well, that's not true. Water is so important that if you're not giving your body enough water to do everything it needs to do, then it will prioritize.
It kind of does a little triage and it will use the water that you are giving it. After a while, it will use whatever is available to keep important things like your heart beating and your liver and your kidneys functioning.
It's much less important functions like maintaining hair growth and skin and nails, much less important. And then after that, your joints start to go by the wayside and eventually even your muscles become dehydrated and you feel stiff and achy all the time.
So you can survive with minimal amounts of water. But there's a really great book came out a few years ago by I think it was a well, it was some kind of it was maybe an Iranian doctor or some doctor that was in.
Yeah, I think it was an Iran. A doctor was the book is called Your Bodies, Many Cries for Water. Your Bodies, Many Cries for Water.
And it's about a physician that was a political prisoner in some horrible country and he was thrown in jail and thrown in prison and said, OK, we can kill you now or you can become the prison doctor.
And he thought for a moment and he chose to become the prison doctor and then was immediately sort of dismayed to find out that there was no drugs, no equipment.
The clinic in the prison had nothing really to treat anybody for any medical condition.
And so he just started giving everybody water because that was all he had available and he knew how water, how important it was. And he records this amazing book, he records literally miracles happening in these poor, miserable people who knows why they were there.
Probably a lot of them deserve to be there. But the bottom line is it's a great example of how important water is. You can literally save people from conditions that might otherwise cause death by just giving them enough water for their body to flush out toxins and heal and repair basic tissues.
So that's number four on our list. Number five on the list of the dozen most commonly overlooked causes of fatigue is subclinical hypothyroidism.
Why do I say subclinical? That's kind of a technical term. Well, because lots of people go, especially women over 50, I think probably half women over 50 have subclinical hypothyroidism.
What does that mean? It means they go to their doctor, they have fatigue, they go to the doctor, they get their thyroid tested and they don't even test their thyroid.
They do one test which is called TSH, thyroid stimulating hormone. TSH, thyroid stimulating hormone, isn't even a thyroid test. It's a pituitary test.
The pituitary gland makes this hormone to tell your thyroid to make more thyroid hormone if it's low. And it's a great test, it's an important test, but it doesn't tell you the whole picture.
It can be fine and you can still have functional low thyroid. So to really know if you have low thyroid, you need to test, among other things, your free T3 level.
So you may not need a prescription for levothyroxine or synthroid, the most common form of thyroid hormone medication, but think of the thyroid as the furnace of the endocrine system.
It kind of keeps everything else cooking at the proper speed and temperature and a slight deficiency has profound long-term effects.
Number six on our list of the most commonly overlooked causes of fatigue, chronic subclinical infections.
Well, everyone knows what an infection is, at least when you have an acute infection. If you have a fever, you have aches and pains, you have cold or a flu, people are familiar with that,
but most people are not familiar with a chronic infection. That's something that means you have some kind of a bug somewhere in your body that your immune system has never been able to completely fight off.
And so it persists and creates a constant strain on your immune system. Three most common places that this happens are in your gums, your sinuses, or your gut.
Well, you usually know it if you have a gum infection and you usually know it if you have a sinus infection.
You usually often don't know it if you have too many bad bacteria in your gut, that too many bad bacteria and not enough good bacteria that are constantly straining your immune system.
So this shows up as a diminished white blood cell count. When you do a complete blood count, your white blood cell count will be low as opposed to high, like when you have an acute infection, a cold or a flu,
your white blood cell count will go down because your body is unable to keep up with demand.
So most doctors ignore this because it's not an acute infection that requires antibiotics.
There's no medical treatment really for a subclinical chronic infection.
There are numerous natural treatments, just eating better food, taking some supplements that are essential for boosting your immune system.
Something as simple as just getting adequate amounts of vitamin D can often cure a chronic subclinical infection and fix your fatigue.
We're about to run out of time. I've been talking about the 12 most commonly overlooked causes of fatigue.
We've gotten through six of them this week, so next week we'll go through another six, perhaps even more.
In the meantime, check out my Fatigue website, FatigueFreeLiving.com for more information about this.
And as always, thank you for tuning in. I look forward to speaking with you right here next Friday at 2 p.m.
Have a wonderful weekend.
Thank you. 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.