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 non-force doctor of chiropractic and practitioner of
functional medicine.
I use standard diagnostic tests to identify conditions other doctors miss, usually because
they don't want to do those tests because insurance doesn't pay for them.
Insurance pays for things that are medically necessary to diagnose a condition that needs
medical care like drugs or surgery or referral to a specialist, etc.
It often doesn't pay for things that just keep you healthy or reverse a condition, restore
health.
So if restoring and maintaining health naturally is your goal, then you're listening to the
right show and I really appreciate you tuning in today.
I've spent the last couple of episodes talking about one of the most common things that people
come to me for and other functional medicine practitioners and that is fatigue, tiredness,
lack of energy.
You're doing everything the same way you always have been, but slowly or suddenly you just
don't have the energy that you used to have.
How come?
What's wrong?
What's going on?
There's usually a reason that can be identified and if you've been to other doctors and told
there's nothing wrong with you but you don't feel right, there probably is something wrong
that can be fixed without drugs oftentimes even, especially if it's fatigue.
And there's a whole host of reasons for that.
During the last two episodes I covered what I consider to be the 12 most commonly overlooked
causes of fatigue because fatigue very rarely, basically never has one cause.
It's always caused by a whole bunch of things, minor things that accumulate, have a combined
effect that make you feel miserable.
So I'm finally going to talk about this case that I love talking about.
It's just one of hundreds of people that have come to me with some form of unexplained fatigue.
I'm going to call her Yolanda, not her real name.
She is a 47 year old hairdresser that came in complaining of gas, bloating, nausea, poor
concentration, headaches, dizziness, depression, anxiety, frequent colds and stuffy nose, cold
hands and feet.
And I always ask this, you know, how is your energy?
And she said if she had, if she thought about it, her energy was 50% less than it was five
years ago.
So I asked her some more questions and she revealed that she rarely exercises, mainly
because she's too tired.
She drinks five to six glasses of water today, per day, which she thought was plenty, but
in her case wasn't.
She craves starch and sugar.
She uses a lot of artificial sweeteners.
She has dry, thinning hair and hair loss, which was really upsetting to her as a hairdresser.
She's trying to make people's hair beautiful and she has products that work on most people
but weren't working for her.
She also complained of dry skin and easy bruising easily.
That was a sort of a new symptom.
She started getting bruises for no apparent reason.
She had some neck pain and back pain, severe cramps and heavy menstrual flow.
So I did my standard 55 point blood panel and identified a bunch of things that were
out of range on her test.
She had some problems with her kidneys showing up, some low minerals, low chloride, low calcium,
magnesium, her total protein was low.
I talk about low protein a lot, contributing to fatigue.
Her cholesterol was a little high.
Her liver enzymes were high, which was unusual.
She wasn't a drinker.
She wasn't on any medications that could account for that.
Her thyroid was low.
Her storage form of iron, ferritin, was low.
Her white blood cell count was low, which means she has some kind of chronic infection.
Her red blood cell count and hemoglobin were low.
And the average size of her blood cells was high.
All of that means that she definitely has both iron deficiency and B12 deficiency anemia.
So I put her on a handful of supplements, not a couple of supplements.
People always complain, oh, I don't want to take any supplements.
Well, would you rather wait till you need drugs?
I encourage everyone to get most of the nutrients, all the nutrients they can from their food.
But if they're not, if we test them, test you, and you're not getting all the nutrients
you need from your food, then the easiest way to resolve that, if you don't want to
end up dependent on drugs for the rest of your life, is to take a half of supplements,
usually for three or four months, until we retest and confirm that you're back on track
again.
And then we can cut that list in half or down to a third.
My goal is to get you to live a long and healthy life with minimal supplements.
There's three basic ones that most people need, a good multivitamin for the minerals,
vitamin D, and fish oil for the omega-3 fatty acids.
But anyway, she took a handful of supplements.
We retested her four months later.
She still had some signs of stress on their kidneys, but they were a lot better.
Her minerals were still a little bit low.
Her total protein was great, because she was now absorbing the food that she was, the protein
that she was already eating.
Her cholesterol was better.
Her liver was a little bit better, still not quite perfect.
Her thyroid was almost completely normal now.
We gave her some supplements for that, and it was working fine.
Her ferritin was way better, because she was getting enough iron now, and it was building
up in her storage tank.
Her white blood cell count was still low, a chronic infection that causes that can take
a while to completely correct.
Her red blood cell count and hemoglobin and the size of her red blood cells, basically
her anemia from iron deficiency and B12 deficiency were completely normal now after four months
of taking the supplements to fix the iron deficiency and B12 folate deficiency.
It was completely resolved.
And so that was exciting for me, but the funny thing was when she's sitting in my office
and I'm explaining all this to her, she's kind of like, it's like I'm trying to get
through it.
There's a lot of stuff to report, and she's not, she's trying to interrupt me basically.
She's saying, look, Dr. Binkley, thank you very much.
I'm really glad to hear that.
Well, I got to tell you, I don't really care what the tests say.
I want to tell you, I have no more gas, no more bloating, no more nausea.
It's gone.
I feel like I can concentrate again.
The headaches I had are gone.
I have no more dizziness.
My friends have noticed that I'm less depressed and anxious than I used to be because I'm
actually going out and hanging out with them more now.
She has no more colds or stuffy nose.
Her hands and feet are still a little bit cold, but much less often.
But the most of all, her energy is not only not 50% less than it was five years ago, it's
better than it was five years ago.
She has more energy than she can ever remember having in years, and she was super excited
about that.
Of course, I was very happy to hear that, and I asked her some more questions.
She reported that she's now exercising three to five days a week because she has the energy
to do it.
Then that exercise keeps your heart healthy and strong, blood pumping, oxygen flowing
to all yourselves, and gives you more energy.
She's drinking two quarts of water a day instead of five to six glasses.
Her body weight and for her condition, she needed to drink at least two quarts of water
a day, and she was doing that and feeling better as a result.
She's eating much less starch and sugar, and the cravings are going away.
Still a little bit of a craving for that, but she's able to resist it and feel so much
better.
She feels worse now when she eats too much of that stuff.
She's doing no more artificial sweeteners.
Most important to her, the thing that she was most excited about, as I mentioned previously,
because she's a hairdresser, is her hair is thicker and less brittle.
It's not breaking off anymore.
She was super excited about that.
Her skin was back to normal.
She had no more bruising.
Her neck and back pain were 70% better.
I told her if her neck and back still hurt, I could treat her with chiropractic for that,
but she wasn't coming to me for chiropractic.
She was just doing the nutrition stuff.
Just from controlling that inflammation and getting oxygen to all of her cells and all
the nutrients, her body needs to heal and repair, her neck and back pain were 70% better.
Her menstrual cramps were 50% less, and her menstrual flow had returned to normal.
That's just one example that's actually pretty typical of what can happen when someone has
fatigue that no one else has been able to figure out the cause of.
We just do a few things to identify the many causes.
It's never one cause.
It's usually a whole bunch of little things that add up to a big effect.
We identify all of those little causes and make the necessary changes.
Eat a little bit better food, exercise a little bit, and take the supplements to restore the
deficient nutrients, and your body starts working again, and you tend to feel better.
You get the energy back that you should have and develop a strategy to keep it that way
forever.
I'm Dr. Todd Binkley.
You're listening to Safe, Effective Natural Solutions to Almost Any Health Challenge.
So who do you know who struggles to do the things that used to be easy, or who's always
sick and takes forever to get well if they have a cold or a flu that lasts for a few
weeks instead of a couple of days?
Who do you know who suddenly feels 10 years older than they actually are or looks even
older or who never feels like going anywhere anymore?
Do you know somebody who's gained weight while still eating the same food or never wakes
feeling well rested?
Do you know someone who's anxious or depressed for no reason or is addicted to sugar and
caffeine and other stimulants?
Do you know someone who used to love long walks or hiking or dancing?
These are really important questions to think about and ask people, and I've actually written
them down in a PowerPoint presentation that I give on this subject.
So that brings me to a question.
Would you like to hear a PowerPoint presentation in my office of me talking about how to eliminate
fatigue or how to naturally reduce your risk of heart disease or strokes or lower your
cholesterol or any of these other conditions that I talk about?
I've been thinking about this.
I've been talking to some of the many patients that come in, have come in from listening
to the show.
I'm strongly considering doing talks like this in my office on a Wednesday night.
Seems to be I've been taking a poll.
Most people say a Wednesday night, maybe 6 p.m. would be a good time.
I've already got a couple of dozen talks like this that I've been doing over the years that
I've gotten really good responses for, and I've just gotten out of the habit.
I've done them in the office.
I've done them at Rotary Clubs.
I was invited by the Heart Aware Program at Community Memorial Hospital a few years ago.
I did a talk there on, when I did the first talk there on diabetes, they used to do a
talk every, on a Thursday night once a month and sometimes have a cardiothoracic surgeon
come in and talk about the latest surgeries for atrial fibrillation or bypass surgery
or whatever.
They get some kind of doctor to come in and talk about a heart condition related subject
once a month.
I did a talk on diabetes and basically talked about how medical care for diabetes is terrible
and people should instead focus on taking better care of their cells and you can reverse
diabetes.
They told me that they used to usually get about 25, 30 people for those talks, and I
told everybody, all my patients and some other contacts about my talk.
We had 70 people there and they have the people fill out a review afterwards each time and
they said it was the best reviews and the best attended event of that program they'd
ever had at the time.
So I kind of miss doing that.
If people want to hear it, I'm happy to do it again at my office.
I'm thinking about doing it on a Wednesday around 6 p.m. or so.
So please email me.
Please let me know if you would like to attend a free live presentation about some of these
things I talk about on the radio all the time and what subjects you'd be most interested
in hearing about.
I'll usually do a talk for about 30 minutes and then open it up to questions.
So if you have questions that you'd like to ask in person or just meet me or come check
out the office or bring somebody in that has some questions and wants to just get a little
bit more information before they commit to getting an exam or scheduling a consultation
or anything, this would be a great opportunity to just come in and find out what's possible
and get your questions answered.
So please email me.
Let me know if you'd like to come to a presentation and the topics you'd like to hear about and
let me know if a Wednesday night around 6 p.m. would be a good time for you to come do that.
I'm Dr. Todd Bankley.
You're listening to Safe, Effective, Natural Solutions to Almost Any Health Challenge.
We've been talking about fatigue and I told, I think on the previous episode, if you go
to my, I have a dedicated website about fatigue called FatigueFreeLiving.com.
If you go to that website, you can hear some of this content that I've been presenting
here and also get the 12 most commonly overlooked causes of fatigue that I've been talking about
and surprise, another dozen commonly overlooked causes of fatigue.
I could easily come up with a dozen and I came up with a dozen more on top of that.
So another dozen commonly overlooked causes of fatigue or number one, low serum ferritin.
So you can have iron deficiency anemia just from a low white cell count.
We've talked about the ferritin test and the importance for that.
That's a commonly overlooked cause of fatigue.
Mitochondrial dysfunction.
Number two, the mitochondria is the part of every cell in your body that makes energy.
It's the powerhouse of every cell.
So if those mitochondria are not working and there's a whole bunch of reasons that that
can happen that usually require some supplements to fix, exercise can help.
Dramatic way to improve fatigue.
Number three, adrenal fatigue.
So lots of people have heard about adrenal fatigue, but it's kind of sometimes carelessly
used I guess I want to say.
Adrenals produce adrenaline, epinephrine.
They also produce cortisol, the stress hormone.
It's also the hormone that wakes you up first thing in the morning.
And a lot of people that have fatigue have exhausted adrenals, depleted adrenal function.
And the best way to test that is with a saliva test.
So it doesn't show up well on a blood test.
Most doctors will send you to test your adrenals by just having you do a first thing in the
morning, 8.30, 9 o'clock in the morning serum cortisol test.
And you know, that's useful information, but it just doesn't tell you the whole picture
because a lot of people who have adrenal fatigue will be able to produce adequate amounts first
thing in the morning because that's when the peak always is.
But then it tapers off during the day normally, but if it tanks during the day, if you just
barely crank out enough to wake yourself up in the morning and then it immediately tanks
middle of the day, afternoon you're exhausted all day, often don't get a good sleep.
So adrenal fatigue is a very commonly overlooked cause of fatigue that can be identified properly
best on a saliva test of your adrenal hormones.
Number four, stress on the liver.
Stress on the liver is most commonly caused by medications, properly prescribed medications
have to be removed from your body mostly by the liver and that can cause stress on the
liver.
Anybody that's on a lot of medications, that's why liver tests are included by most doctors
on a standard liver panel.
When they're doing your routine blood work, they will always do this two standard liver
enzymes AST and ALT among other things to make sure that the drugs they're giving you
aren't trashing your liver.
But toxins that we're all exposed to, heavy metals, mold toxins, chemicals from the workplace,
chemicals in the water and the air we breathe, pesticides, chemical fertilizers that are
blowing in our open windows at night from fields miles away.
All the toxic debris from the fires that we have in Southern California that blank at
the surface of the earth and then are airborne again every time the wind blows or some guy
with a leaf blower is stirring that stuff up again outside your window.
Love those people.
All of this stuff ends up in your system, causes stress on the liver because it's mainly
your liver's job to get rid of that stuff.
And also really importantly, iron overload.
So I've talked about testing for iron.
I always do the ferritin test.
I talked about it to identify anemia.
But the other really important, one of the other important reasons to test ferritin,
the storage form of iron, is to find, identify iron overload.
So many people, and they almost never know it if they do, have too much iron in their
body.
If you have too much iron in your body, then it damages the liver, damages your heart,
can cause all kinds of havoc if it builds up too high over time.
So it's really important to test for that as well.
And the test is serum ferritin.
And I include that on my panel test, everyone for it.
And I see people with iron overload several times a year, every year.
And the solution is simple, just donate blood.
So you know, the blood bank is always looking for people to donate blood.
And you know, they'll ask you if you have iron overload.
But if it's not that bad, you can still donate blood.
It's just a little bit tricky, confusing sometimes.
But ask me about that.
And the solution to iron overload is just to donate blood.
And sometimes just doing it once will resolve the problem.
If it's just minor things, sometimes you have a hereditary iron overload, which can be identified
with a gene test.
And then, you know, you're always going to have it, but you can manage it by donating
blood regularly.
Typically every six months, sometimes once a year is enough, sometimes more than once
every six months is typical.
So that's number four, stress on the liver.
Stress on the pancreas, number five.
So stress on the pancreas causes fatigue.
So poor diet, mainly eating too much grains, starch and sugar.
Too many things made from flour, cookies, cakes, crackers, waffles, potatoes, corn,
any starchy vegetable.
I say grains, starch and sugar, because everyone knows what sugar is.
But starch, anything, bread, pasta, anything made from flour and starchy vegetables like
potatoes and corn are almost the same thing as sugar once you swallow them.
They turn into blood sugar within minutes and spike your blood sugar almost as bad as
if you ate sugar out of a bowl.
So grains, starch and sugar.
Stress your pancreas because your pancreas has to produce insulin to keep your blood
sugar under control.
That's not even its job.
If you aren't overloading yourself with too much starch and sugar, too many carbs, too
many bad carbs all the time, then your blood sugar is supposed to be maintained by your
liver.
You eat meals and then your liver stores up some sugar to keep you going between meals
and then releases it when you need it to keep your blood sugar normal.
It's only when you eat way too much starch and sugar that your pancreas has to kick out
excess insulin.
It's always supposed to make a little insulin to escort sugar into your cells when you need
it.
But it is not your pancreas' job to lower your blood sugar when you're eating way too
much starch and sugar all the time.
That's what causes diabetes.
So stress on the pancreas from poor diet and alcohol, a few other things will result in
pre-diabetes, diabetes, and the fatigue that results from that.
Number six, low testosterone.
So men, you know, as they get older tend to often have reduced levels of testosterone
and most people are familiar with the effects that that can have on your energy.
For women, low progesterone can cause fatigue.
So the best way to test for that for postmenopausal women especially is a saliva hormone test,
not a blood test.
Again, most physicians test hormones with blood tests and you have to test the blood
for thyroid hormone.
You have to test the blood for pregnancy issues, for certain other, you know, hormone issues.
But for postmenopausal women who are considering whether, want to know whether they, you know,
have estrogen and progesterone that's so low that they might need hormone replacement
therapy or maybe they don't want to take hormone replacement therapy, they want to know if
they can, you know, do something about the symptoms of menopause, you know, night sweats
and hot flashes and all the rest, it's important to test the saliva to a salivary hormone test.
Much more accurate way of determining your average level throughout the day of a constantly
varying parameter.
Your sex hormones, your estrogen and progesterone in a postmenopausal woman is going up and
down, up and down, up and down every 10 minutes.
If you do a blood test, you're getting a snapshot in time of something that's constantly changing.
Whereas if you do a saliva test, you're getting the average throughout the day.
So I encourage doing a saliva test for progesterone.
Number eight, chemical toxicities.
So we're all exposed to chemical toxicities.
Number nine, heavy metal toxicities.
Number 10, mold toxicities.
So I've mentioned a little bit about these already.
We're all exposed to these things.
People are always surprised when I test for them and the tests prove, you can find out
that they're mostly, usually urine tests and these things will show up.
The very sensitive equipment will measure the amount of lead, mercury, arsenic, cadmium
and uranium for the heavy metals.
Chemical toxins like pesticides and fertilizers.
Mold toxicity, if you've ever been exposed to mold, even if it was 10 years ago, it's
very likely that some of the toxicity from that exposure is still built up in fat cells
because your body shoves it in there to get it out of circulation and it stays there forever.
So dysbiosis in the gut.
Number 11, insufficient beneficial bacteria.
Too many bad bacteria.
Saps your energy, stresses your immune system, causes fatigue.
And number 12, sleep apnea.
If you find yourself waking up in the morning or your spouse notices that you stopped breathing
in the middle of the night, if you're not getting adequate sleep, this is obviously
going to cause fatigue.
So there we go.
Another dozen commonly overlooked causes of fatigue.
I appreciate you bearing with me spending so much time on this subject because it's
so important and so commonly overlooked.
People a lot of people have fatigue that they don't really need to have because most doctors
never even look for these problems.
Medical standards of care mean you get the same treatment everyone else gets, but you
are as different on the inside as you are on the outside.
And restoration of health requires personalized care.
Fatigue never has one cause.
It's always the result of several problems which are often easy to fix.
So regain the energy you had five years ago, six years ago before COVID, before whatever
mysteriously set you back if you have fatigue.
Doing this could change, telling someone else about this could change their life.
Get your husband, son, sister, mother, neighbor, coworker or friend back, you know, that normal
person that that normal version you remember who liked to go dancing or cycling or running.
Reclaim the health you deserve.
So don't wait until drugs and surgery are the only option.
You can identify issues that are very commonly overlooked and treatable with functional testing.
Thank you as always.
Thank you for tuning in.
I look forward to speaking with you right here next Friday at 2 p.m.
I'm Dr. Todd Bankley.
There is a safe, effective natural solution to almost any health challenge.
Remember the condition of your body is far more important than any disease you've ever
been diagnosed with.
Do something to be healthier this weekend than you were last weekend and make this weekend
the best one ever.
You've been listening to safe, effective natural solutions with Dr. Todd Bankley.
If you have a health question you want discussed on the show, email your health questions to
Dr. Bankley at bankleyhealingcenter.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.