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.
I use standard diagnostic tests to identify conditions other doctors miss because they
don't do all of those tests.
Most people go to doctors that are paid for by insurance companies and insurance, there
is no such thing as health insurance.
What we call health insurance is medical insurance.
It doesn't pay to keep you healthy.
It won't pay for your gym membership.
It won't pay for you to get a good water filter or a HEPA filter or to do anything else that
will improve your health.
It pays to treat disease.
It pays for when you need medical care and therefore, in my humble opinion, it should
be called medical insurance, not health insurance.
It's important.
Everyone should have medical insurance.
Everyone is likely to need medical care at some point.
People get upset that it doesn't cover things that make you healthy and that's because that's
not what it's designed for.
It's designed for people to pool their resources so that some among the pool can draw from
it when they have a crisis.
It doesn't pay to keep you healthy.
If you want to be truly healthy, if you want to live long and live well, you're going to
need to budget for most of that yourself.
I wish it were otherwise and I try to make my services as affordable as possible so that
most people can get the care they need.
If you or someone you love wants a consultation with me, it's $100 per half hour.
I say $100 per half hour instead of $200 per hour because most of the time, it just takes
a half hour.
Send me an email.
Let me know what's going on with you.
I'll email you or send you a link to my website to get a seven-page questionnaire to complete
which gives you boxes to tick for all of your symptoms.
Most people have two or three things they're concerned about and think all the other stuff
doesn't matter.
Everything affects everything else so I really need to see any symptom, however minor, that
you're experiencing at least once a month or more.
Then when you come in, we review the answers that you put on that questionnaire and discuss
what's most appropriate for you.
I'll recommend appropriate testing and you can decide what you want to do from there.
For most people, 80, 90% of the time, it's $100 for a half hour consultation and then
you'll know what it will cost and what you need to do, what the next step would be.
One of the most common things people come to me for is fatigue, tiredness, lack of energy,
not feeling like you have the oomph that you need to do the things that you normally do
all day long, especially if nothing has changed in your life.
You're still eating the same, you're exercising, you're doing everything you think you need
to do to stay fit and healthy and feel good, getting good sleep maybe even.
For some reason, your energy is just declining year by year.
Well, if you've been to a doctor and they've told you there's nothing wrong with you and
you're still fatigued, there is something wrong with you and we probably can figure
out what that is.
I've been talking about the 12 most common causes, most overlooked causes of fatigue.
Last week, we covered the first six, iron deficiency anemia.
If you have a deficiency of iron, it's very often subclinical, meaning you get your blood
tested, your doctor tells you it's fine.
Well, it's not fine unless you do a ferritin test to really know if you have adequate iron,
not only in your red blood cell count, but store it up in your tissues so that your bone
marrow has enough iron readily available to make red blood cells and carry oxygen to all
of your tissues all the time.
That's number one, iron deficiency anemia.
Number two, pre-diabetes.
Most people know what diabetes is.
Pre-diabetes, the early stages of diabetes can definitely cause significant fatigue because
of the crash you get after having too much sugar in your blood.
Low protein.
Number three, lots of people who eat plenty of protein still have low protein when we
test their blood for a whole host of reasons.
Dehydration, not drinking enough water causes fatigue because your body needs water to flush
out toxins and keep your brain, kidneys, joints, cardiovascular system functioning properly
and if they're not, then you will feel fatigue.
Number five, subclinical hypothyroidism.
Lots of people, especially women over 50, it seems to me like half of women over 50
have subclinical hypothyroidism, meaning maybe they've been to the doctor and been told their
thyroid's fine, but when I test it and test for the normal function of the gland, not
just a single TSH test to see if their pituitary is working or not, if you do the actual thyroid,
proper thyroid evaluation, it is functionally low and that very frequently contributes to
fatigue.
It happens in men too.
Number six, chronic subclinical infections, meaning not a full blown high fever, runny
nose, aches and pains, cold or flu kind of infection, but an infection where you've got
a bug, a bacteria, virus, fungus, mold, something that's been in some part of your body, usually
the guts, the most common place and it's been there for a long time, but it doesn't cause
your white cell count to go up when you test your, when you do your complete blood count,
it causes your white blood cell count to go down because your immune system is so challenged
that it can never completely fight off that bad bug and it causes a drain on your system
and your white blood cell count goes down.
There are ways to boost it, to support the immune system, to fight, finally fight off
that bug once and for all and get your white cell count back up to normal and your immune
system functioning properly.
So that's the first six.
Number seven on our list of the dozen most commonly overlooked causes of fatigue, subclinical
B vitamin deficiency, anemia.
Again, subclinical meaning you can go to a hundred doctors and they'll all tell you you're
not deficient in vitamin D. They'll even test your vitamin D levels in your blood directly.
I don't recommend testing your vitamin B blood levels.
That test is really just to see if there's something wrong with your liver, to see if
it's too high often, too low for other reasons.
But the main thing is it doesn't really matter.
It's kind of an exception to the rule.
It doesn't really matter how much B12 is in your blood.
What really matters, the best test, the most functional test is B12 and B6 and to a certain
extent B12, most importantly B12 and folate and to a certain extent vitamin B6 are essential
for your bone marrow to be able to make adequate red blood cells.
So the best way to test if you have adequate amounts of those in your system is to just
look at the CBC.
When you lack sufficient vitamin B12, folate and sometimes B6 to make red blood cells in
adequate amounts, then your red blood cells which have an average lifespan of about three
months will get bigger.
So on a complete blood count is a measure of the size of your red blood cells, the average
size of your red blood cells.
It's called MCV, mean corpuscular volume.
That means just the average size of a red blood cell.
It's a couple other tests that measure that as well.
A little bit too technical for this, but the bottom line is looking at a complete blood
count is the best way to tell if you're deficient in vitamin B12, folate and sometimes B6 because
your old red blood cells that are trying to take up the slack because you're not making
enough new red blood cells that you need to carry oxygen to all of your cells, your older
red blood cells that are nearing the end of their lifespans get bigger on average to take
up the slack.
So that's number seven, vitamin B deficiency, anemia, very, very common.
I see this all the time.
Number eight, vascular inflammation.
Have you ever had a sed rate test?
Well, probably don't even know what that is.
So sed rate, sedimentation rate, erythrocyte means red blood cell, erythrocyte sedimentation
rate, ESR.
I know that's kind of technical, but it's an important test that most doctors never order.
Unless you have rheumatoid arthritis or multiple sclerosis, some kind of an autoimmune condition
or a chronic known chronic inflammatory condition, most doctors do not test your sedimentation
rate, your ESR.
And this is a very important test.
It measures blood viscosity.
So it measures how thick your blood is.
If you've ever had, if you've ever gone to give blood or have a blood drawn and they
say, oh, you know, your blood's really thicker, it's, you know, they find a vein, okay, but
your blood comes out really slow.
It's more like milk or cream instead of water.
Well, that is because your blood is viscous.
It's thicker than normal.
And always, always, always the cause of increased blood viscosity is inflammation.
So inflammation, the debris, the inflammatory debris produced by many, many types of illness
and stress accumulates in your bloodstream and causes your blood to become thicker.
And so this test is very simple.
They just takes a sample of blood, set a timer and see how long it takes for the red blood
cells to sink to the bottom of the test tube.
Erythrocyte, red blood cell, sedimentation rate.
How long does it take for the red blood cells to settle to the bottom?
So it's an important measure of inflammation.
Everyone should have that test done because so many chronic disease involve chronic inflammation.
And you know, doctors don't test it.
Most doctors don't test it because they're not going to put you on steroids or heavy
gun anti-inflammatory medications unless you have, you know, some full blown inflammatory
disease like irritable bowel syndrome or Crohn's disease or rheumatoid arthritis, et cetera.
But everyone should test this because you can reduce inflammation with just eating better
food, getting adequate amounts of vitamin D, eating less grain, starch and sugar, and
in some cases taking supplements like turmeric, fish oil, a whole host of other things.
There's lots of natural ways to reduce your inflammation.
And if you reduce vascular inflammation, it makes your blood flow better.
It makes your all of your, it provides more oxygen, makes it easier for your heart and
your circulatory system to provide oxygen to all of your cells, which has the net effect
of increasing your energy.
So if you have vascular inflammation, it causes the opposite effect.
It causes fatigue and lack of energy.
But this is really important because reducing, preferably eliminating, but reducing to as
little as possible any inflammation in your bloodstream is also super important for preventing
heart disease and dementia and even cancers.
Reduce your risk of cancers, reduce the side effects of treatment on, if you get cancer,
most of the causes of chronic disease and death throughout the Western world involve
some component of vascular inflammation.
But it's also nice just to have more energy.
Number nine, number nine on our list of the 12 most commonly overlooked causes of fatigue,
vitamin D deficiency.
So there are three things that I always tell anyone they should consider supplementing,
even if they don't do a consultation with me, even if you don't ever do any blood testing.
There are three things that I've just found on thousands of people over 30 years that
no one, 30 plus years, three things that people, most people do not get enough of from their
diet and they are adequate minerals from a good multivitamin with absorbable minerals,
which is always a four capsule a day dose unless you weigh less than 120 pounds.
Maybe it might be three, but one a day multivitamins are useless.
The minerals that your body can actually absorb take up space.
They're bulky.
They won't fit into one tablet.
There's all one a day multivitamins are not really going to do what you think they're
going to do.
So a good multivitamin mainly for the minerals, adequate fish oil for the omega-3 fatty acids
that have so many beneficial effects on your brain and heart health, joints, controlling
inflammation, a very long list and vitamin D. The adult dose for vitamin D, standard
adult dose.
You want your immune system to be healthy and your heart and your brain and virtually
every tissue in your body.
Look up benefits of vitamin D online.
There's thousands and thousands and thousands, hundreds of thousands of studies documenting
the beneficial effects of vitamin D.
But most people think, oh yeah, I'm taking vitamin D. I take a thousand every day.
Well, a thousand international units of vitamin D is what you should give a newborn infant.
That's an infant dose.
The RDA for vitamin D is 400 units a day, a little bit more if you're pregnant or elderly.
And that's just ridiculous.
That's barely enough to keep your bones from collapsing.
So that's what that RDA is based on.
The RDA, 400 units is enough to prevent rickets or osteomalacia as to prevent your bones from
collapsing.
It won't even prevent osteoporosis and it certainly won't keep your immune system strong.
Your immune system is totally dependent on adequate amounts of vitamin D and adequate
amounts the research shows as having a blood level between 50 and 90.
50 and 90.
So the only way to really know if you're getting adequate vitamin D is to get a blood test.
And don't just get the test.
Most doctors will order this test for you now because the information on it is out there.
Most doctors know that it is important and its effect on your immune system.
But they ignore most of the more important functional research that shows all the things
that I'm always talking about.
And on the form, lab core request, hospital forms, whatever lab, the medical range for
vitamin D is now 30 to 100.
Ten years ago it was 20 to 100.
They raised it up to 30.
But that's still not enough.
It should be between 50 and 90.
So if you ask any doctor to order the vitamin D test for you, they probably will and your
insurance will pay for it if they do.
But don't just ask them if it's normal.
Ask them the number.
The number you're looking for is somewhere between 50 and 90.
So most doctors will say your vitamin D is fine if it's above 30.
They might even say it's high if it's 40, which is ridiculous because the medical range
is 30 to 100.
The healthy range is 50 to 90.
It is possible to take too much vitamin D, but it almost never happens.
And when it does, you just stop taking vitamin D for a month and stay out of the sun and
it goes back to normal.
So most people are vitamin functionally vitamin D deficient for your immune system to function
normally, which will prevent fatigue.
If your immune system is not functioning normally, you will be fatigued.
Most people need to take 5,000 units of vitamin D per day.
Number 10 on our list of the 12 most commonly overlooked causes of fatigue, hydrochloric
acid deficiency.
So your stomach makes hydrochloric acid.
You often hear that it's important to maybe drink alkaline water and eat vegetables to
keep your system alkaline.
You know, you don't want to be acidic.
Acid is bad.
Well, acid is bad in a lot of places, but there's two places in your body where you
want to be acidic.
You want your skin to be slightly acidic.
So you know, constantly washing all of the skin cells and the normal, there's a normal
film on your skin that keeps it healthy, even a microbiome, normal bacteria that live on
your skin to keep it healthy.
And if you're constantly washing all that off with really strong soap, which is all
soaps are alkaline, then it can cause skin dryness, dandruff, skin rashes, et cetera.
You want your skin to be slightly acidic, but much more important, your stomach should
be a boiling cauldron of strong hydrochloric acid.
Hydrochloric acid is one of the strongest, not the strongest, but near the top of the
list.
It's one of the strongest acids in chemistry and your body makes it every day in your stomach.
You have parietal cells in your stomach that make hydrochloric acid to digest your food.
And these cells are surrounded by mucus producing cells that protect the rest of your stomach
from the effects of that strong acid.
So it's a beautiful system.
It's got this wall of mucus making cells that protect the stomach itself with interspersed
with little jets that squirt out really, really strong acids so you can digest your food without
digesting your stomach.
Well, if that mucus breaks down in your stomach, then you get an ulcer.
If that mucus breaks down in your small intestine just past the stomach, then you get an ulcer
in your stomach.
Fortunately, most people don't get that.
And the other thing that you think about with too much acid is GERD, gastroesophageal reflux.
If you're getting heartburn, if that acid that's supposed to be in your stomach leaks
up into your esophagus, into the tube that goes from your mouth and the back of your
throat down to your stomach, you don't want acid in that either.
You want strong acid in your stomach and you want a strong muscle sphincter, the valve
between your esophagus and your stomach to close off and keep the acid in your stomach.
So many, many, many people have hydrochloric acid deficiency as they get older.
Even 20s, 30s, and 40s, I see people with this.
There's many reasons for that.
If anyone, starting with the most obvious one, if anyone is taking any kind of acid
blocking drug from the simplest things like over the counter, Tums, or Tagamet, all the
way up to prescription proton pump inhibitors like Nexium, any acid blocking drug, Protonics,
Prevacid, anything that blocks acid in your stomach is a problem because you need acid
in your stomach.
You don't want acid in your esophagus because if you let that go on for too long, you can
get an ulcer or you can get a dramatically increased risk of throat cancer.
So that's not good and there's ways to test for that.
But there's lots of ways to keep acid strong in your stomach without having it leak up
into your esophagus.
And that's part of the subject for another talk.
But hydrochloric acid deficiency is really important because if you don't have enough
acid in your stomach, then you won't digest protein.
It's really the most common cause of low protein people.
I talked about earlier if you're, you can be eating a steak every day and still end
up with low protein in your bloodstream if your stomach isn't making enough acid to break
down that protein so that it can enter your bloodstream and enter your cells.
Hydrochloric acid is also essential to break down vitamin B12, iron, calcium, and a host
of other minerals.
So let's say that again.
You have to have adequate hydrochloric acid in your stomach to break down, digest, and
assimilate protein, vitamin B12, iron, calcium, magnesium, and several other minerals.
Well, we've all heard of these.
These are really important.
And it's also your first line of defense.
Hydrochloric acid in your stomach is the first line of defense against all intestinal infections.
So if you've ever heard of somebody who went out and had a bad meal and someone next to
them with them had the same food, you get sick, the other person didn't, what's the
difference?
Well, it's partly a numbers game.
If you ate the exact amount of the same food, so you've got, you're introducing the same
number of pathogenic bacteria into your stomach, then the difference is one person had more
acid in their stomach to kill those bacteria before they got into your bloodstream to cause
an infection.
So both chronic infections and deficiencies, anemia caused by B12 and iron deficiency and
low protein, all of these things cause fatigue.
Hydrochloric acid is a very common cause of fatigue because of these things.
Number 11 on the list of the most common causes, overlooked causes of fatigue, coenzyme Q10
deficiency.
CoQ10 is essential for every cell in your body, especially the kidneys, heart, all of
your muscles.
It's made by your liver, but natural production of it peaks around age 25.
After age 25, you know, when you're young, you can, you, you, you injure yourself, you
do all kinds of crazy things in excess and you recover quickly in part because your body
cranks out coenzyme Q10 to rebuild, produce energy in the mitochondria, the powerhouse
of every cell in your body and keep your heart and your muscles strong, keep your kidneys
functioning.
But after age 25, that production starts to decline.
And so there's easy ways to test for this, to see if it's deficient.
And many people are deficient in coenzyme Q10.
And if you are, that will dramatically increase your risk of fatigue.
Number 12 on the list of the top 12 most commonly overlooked causes of fatigue side effects
of medications, especially two classes of medications, statin drugs that lower cholesterol
and mood altering drugs for anxiety and depression.
So all the statin drugs, Lipitor, Atorvastatin, Zocor, Simvastatin directly block the production
of CoQ10 in the liver.
So that's how they cause a lack of energy because you need CoQ10 to produce energy in
every cell in your body and you need CoQ10 to keep your heart strong.
So very few people really need to take statins if they're willing to eat better food and
take safe, effective cholesterol lowering supplements instead of cholesterol lowering
drugs.
Antihistamines, muscle relaxants, and especially antidepressants like Trazodone, Lexapro, Paxil,
Prozac, Cymbalta, Effexor, Elivil, and some blood pressure drugs, beta blockers like Metoprolol
and Propranolol, opioids like Hydrocodone, Oxycodone, Codine, and Tramadol, and benzodiazepines
used to treat anxiety and seizure disorders like Larazapam, which is Ativan, Diazepam
or Valium, Alprazolam or Xanax, Clonazepam or Clonapin.
These are all really common, you know, millions and millions of people take these drugs and
they all frequently cause fatigue and drowsiness.
So many people need these drugs, but safe, effective natural alternatives are often available.
I'm Dr. Todd Binkley.
We have gotten through the top dozen most commonly overlooked causes of fatigue.
Check out my other website, FatigueFreeLiving.com to see more information about that and one
of the many, many, many case studies that I've had the good fortune of helping people
with over the years to eliminate fatigue and keep it at bay forever.
Thank you so much for listening.
If someone you know has fatigue and has been told that there's nothing wrong with them,
please tell them about this show, which will be available on my website in a week or so.
And on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, etc.
All the past episodes of this show are available there for you to share with friends and loved
ones to find out how they can take better care of themselves and live long and live
well.
Thank you for listening.
I look forward to the privilege of speaking with you right here next Friday at 2 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
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.