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
finding conditions other doctors miss by doing
more comprehensive testing, usually, and always
doing more progressive analysis of those tests.
To identify things that otherwise fall under
the radar, where things that are, for example,
your liver or your kidneys or your immune system
need a little extra support. Perhaps you need
more protein in your diet. Perhaps you need to
simply get a little bit more exercise. There
are a whole host of things that just normally
do not come to the surface when you get a standard
medical workup. Little things that maybe you've
heard about before even, but it's never just
one thing. That's the most important thing. One
of the most important things to understand is
if you have a problem that is not being resolved
to your satisfaction, it's not one thing. It's
never just one thing that you need to discover
and fix. It's usually a bunch of little things
that are usually relatively easy to fix, correct
with better food exercise. Today we're going
to talk about true healing. There's some exciting
things that came out in the medical press written
by eminent physicians that talk about what's
missing from modern medicine, true healing. So
I'm excited to talk about that. We're also going
to get into some of the latest research on the
importance of exercise, especially exercise designed
to build muscle strength. But before we do that,
here is a quote from ancient Egypt. Did you know
that in ancient Egypt, for a headache, Doctors
prescribed goose fat rubbed into the eyes with
a helping of donkey liver. No, I'm not making
this up. It comes directly from the Cajun papyrus
on which was recorded actual medical practice
in ancient Egypt. Goose fat rubbed into the eyes
with the helping of donkey liver for headache.
Well, regardless of whatever your doctor has
recommended, if you're not happy with the care
you're getting, there are other options. So this
is exciting. A prominent medical doctor. Well,
this headline for this report in MedPage today,
the headline reads, Spotting Trends in Patients'
Tests. Well, I've translated that into my own
headline as follows. Prominent MD discovers what's
missing from medicine, treating people instead
of conditions. He goes on to suggest that there,
well, in the article, he suggests that there
should be an easy way to monitor relative changes
over time instead of just waiting until the results
on one test are outside the standard broad medical
range, basically until obvious disease that requires
medical care presents itself. Well, there is
a name for this. It's called functional medicine.
I track all of my patients' tests over time,
many going back 10 years or more. I haven't taken
a poll, but I imagine most of my functional medicine
colleagues do the same. So what does this say
about mainstream medicine? If you're constantly
being handed off from one physician to another
when a shift changes at the hospital, or you
renew your insurance, or you simply get fed up
yourself and choose to change doctors. I'm sure
lots of mainstream medical doctors track their
patients' results over time, but apparently not
enough. According to Dr. Fred Pelsman, associate
professor of medicine at Cornell University in
New York City, now called Weill Cornell, he's
been a practicing internist for 30 years, and
he's the medical director of Cornell Internal
Medicine Associates. So he says, for example,
if someone's hemoglobin, a standard blood test,
if someone's hemoglobin can drop from the upper
limit of normal all the way to the lower limit
of normal, a really significant span, literally
representing the loss of about a third of a body's
total blood volume, without anything being highlighted
as abnormal. And of course, that's true. That's
what I mean when I say the broad medical range.
If you're just outside this range or just inside
this range, then you're told you're fine. If
you're just outside, you might have disease next
week, you might drop dead next week, but you're
told you're fine if everything is within the
broad medical ranges. They're designed to...
diagnose and treat full -blown disease that may
require pharmaceuticals or some other type of
medical treatment. So Dr. Pelsman goes on and
says, what happens when things are slowly changing,
clinically inching along, moving in small steps
in the wrong direction? And he goes on to list
an example. He quoting Dr. Perman here, about
a year ago, a patient came in with worsening
renal function, kidney function, and looking
back over the last year's worth of labs, He saw
an insidious decline in their estimated glomerular
filtration rate. This is just a standard kidney
test measuring the effectiveness of your kidney
function as a filter, filtering your blood. He
goes on to note that over a decade ago, this
patient's creatinine had been on the low side
of normal. Creatinine is another standard kidney
test. It's produced by the breakdown of muscle
tissue. So he says it's over a decade ago. It's
been on the low side of normal. And every year
it had been inching up only in teeny increments
that are hardly noticeable one at a time. But
when you graph it out over a longer period, you
could see this. an exorable climb from 0 .4 to
0 .6, 0 .7, 0 .9, 1 .0, 1 .2, 1 .4. And then
suddenly it hits 1 .5 and the system flags it
with a little red arrow. Alarm bells went off
and people started to panic. And this is, I'm
still quoting Dr. Pelsman here. He says, it might
be nice if we could figure out a way to spot
these trends, catch these changes before they
lead to irreversible harm. If we can catch these
trends before they lead to irreparable harm,
maybe we can interject earlier, stop a medicine
or over -the -counter treatment that may be harmful,
or start something that may protect them, protect
their kidneys, maybe order additional testing
to make sure nothing truly bad is going on. So,
of course, what he's describing is what functional
medicine practitioners do with all of their patients.
For example, here's a 55 -year -old man that
came to me with elevated BUN, blood urea nitrogen.
Nitrogen is produced by the breakdown of protein
in the body. This is a 55 -year -old man who
looks totally fit and healthy, and he has no
symptoms. My favorite kind of patient. He just
came in. He wanted to check and make sure everything
was okay. He was interested in prevention. If
there are any medical doctors listening out there,
yes, people actually come in with no symptoms
and pay to make sure that they're as healthy
on the inside as they look and feel on the outside.
So this man initially had a number of things.
A slight iron overload. His ferritin level was
339. That's a little elevated. He had a low white
blood cell count and extremely low vitamin D
in his blood. Interestingly, his serum protein
was also low. So two years later, his ferritin
had gone up to 405, which can cause damage to
the kidneys and the liver. His blood urea nitrogen,
the kidney test, one of the kidney tests, had
inched up another notch from 18 to 19. Most doctors
would ignore this, really, until it gets to 20,
the blood urea nitrogen. So he came back six
months later, and his ferritin was now down to
253, still a little high, but relatively safe
for his liver. heart and kidneys because he had
donated a pint of blood. That's what I told him
to do when he came in the first time. Go donate
a pint of blood and that will bring your ferritin
down. Well, even though we reduced that stress
on his kidneys, his bun was now up to 27. It
jumped eight points and is seven points outside
the broad medical range, highlighted in red on
the report. And I asked him, Are you doing anything
different? Are you eating a lot of protein, for
example? Among other things, I asked him a bunch
of questions about his diet. But basically he
revealed that he had begun taking a couple of
protein shakes every day. So in addition to the
food in his diet, he was taking around 180 grams
of powdered protein from one of these cheap,
crappy, muscle -building shakes that you see
in stores full of sugar, cheap vitamins and stimulants.
To top it off, his protein level was still low.
It had gone down from his previous test. His
previous test was just a little bit higher, still
low. So he's clearly not absorbing this protein,
and it was stressing his kidneys for no good
reason. So I recommended some betaine hydrochloric
acid. This is a supplement you can take to supplement
the acid produced in the stomach to help absorb
the protein that he's eating, mostly chicken
and fish, some beef. And a year later, retested,
his kidneys were better. His protein was now
up to the perfectly healthy range. But his iron
had started to creep back up again. And his kidney
tests were about the same as the year before,
still just a little bit high. And his vitamin
D was a lot lower. So he'd obviously stopped
taking the 5 ,000 units of vitamin D I recommend
every day for most adults. So this time he took
all of the supplements I recommended and he donated
a pint of blood to bring the ferritin down. And
six months later, his... Kidney function is back
to normal. His protein is good. His vitamin D
is well into the healthy range. And this whole
time, he's never had any symptoms at all. He's
just interested in prevention. So that's one
of my favorite types of patients. So here's a
final word from Dr. Pelsman. He says, it's true,
not everything that's flagged as bad is bad.
But it's also true that not everything that's
still in the normal range is as normal as we
think. So building systems to help us spot and
keep track of trends will likely help us take
better care. of patients and the endless noise
of data we receive from all these tests. I'm
Dr. Todd Bankley. You're listening to Safe, Effective,
Natural Solutions to Almost Any Health Challenge.
Here's another and even more encouraging piece
in the medical press titled Reclaiming the Healer's
Art in Medicine. This is written by Thomas McGinn,
MD, Master of Public Health, Professor of Medicine
at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. He
says, Dr. McGinn says to be a healer is not merely
to deliver care, but to create comfort. Yes,
science is central, but healing encompasses something
greater. Wisdom, empathy, curiosity, and the
ability to sit literally and metaphorically with
our patients. Healing happens in the relationships.
Today, the vocation of healer feels endangered.
administrative pressures, clinical throughput
demands, getting as many people in as in a small
amount of time as possible. Technological overload
are pushing healing to the margins. Physicians
have become data input machines and begun to
compartmentalize ourselves, turning on and off,
losing continuity, not only of care, but of presence.
This is Dr. McGinn, professor of medicine at
the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. He
goes on to say, our task, I believe, is to reclaim
the space for healing. As leaders, we must relieve
the burdens that keep clinicians from their calling.
We must re -engineer the system to make room
for curiosity, culture, time, and attention.
Healing cannot be scaled. It must be protected,
nurtured. This is amazing, right? This is a really
great, great idea. I hope all doctors are reading
this. He goes on, as we reimagine that stem,
we must also recognize that technology, often
seen as the culprit in depersonalizing care,
can, if deployed with intention, become part
of the solution. One example is the emergence
of ambient artificial intelligence -assisted
Scribe technology. Well, that's a mouthful, but
these are tools that are now capable of capturing
the clinical conversation in real time, allowing
documentation to fade in the background and enabling
clinicians to return their full gaze to the patient
in front of them. Imagine a clinical visit where
you no longer type or click through screens,
but instead sit eye to eye with the patient,
unhurried, as the chart writes itself in the
background. This isn't science fiction. Science
fiction, it's happening now. But the impact of
these tools depends on how we implement them.
We must ensure that such technology is used to
augment healing, not just improve time management.
So technology should serve to enhance the patient
-physician relationship, not replace it. When
it does, it can restore one of the most vital
and currently endangered elements of clinical
care, human connection. And he closes with this.
In this moment, when trust in science is under
attack, we need to recenter the healer, not just
as a clinician, but as a voice of wisdom. science,
and hope. Well, here, here, I say kudos to you,
Dr. Thomas McGinn at Baylor College of Medicine
in Houston. Healing has always been at the central
focus of my practice. It's right there in the
name of my office, Binkley Healing Center. And
I'm privileged. One of the most consistent remarks
I get when a new patient comes in is how warm
and comfortable my office feels. Well, you're
immediately greeted upon entering by the smiling
face of my wonderful assistant, Victoria. And
whenever you choose to consult with me, you will
receive the wisdom gleaned from my 35 years in
practice. We will sit together eye to eye. You
will have my empathy and curiosity and my full
attention. It costs a lot less than you might
imagine to take responsibility of your own health
and get a little help along the way if you're
not getting the care you need. Shoot me an email
at drbinkley at binkleyhealingcenter .com. You
can even text me at 805 -218 -39... If you're
surprised that I'm giving my cell phone out on
the air, please note that the ringer on my phone
is always off. But I will reply if you leave
a text. I'll even reply to a voicemail. It may
take a day or two because I often forget to check
voicemails. But I'd love to hear from you. Send
me your questions, things that you'd like to
hear about on this show, for example. Moving
on to the subject of strength, building and maintaining
muscle strength. So this is a study titled Hand
Grip Strength and Trajectories in Preclinical
Obesity. While I've retitled this, my summary
of this title is Reduce the Damaging Effects
of Obesity by Building and Maintaining Muscle
Mass and Strength. So grip strength is something
that you can measure with a little tool called
a dynamometer. It's just a tool that you squeeze
in your hand and it's got a little dial that
measures your grip strength. So it's a standard
tool that's been around for many, many years,
decades. And grip strength, this article was
in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and
Metabolism from October of 2025, just came out.
Grip strength has been increasingly recognized
as a predictor of chronic disease risk and mortality.
So this is based on data from the UK Biobank,
a nationally representative and continuously
updated biomedical database in the United Kingdom,
and comprising over 500 ,000 participants who
were recruited from 2006 to 2010 in England,
Scotland, and Wales. Muscle strength more accurately,
their main conclusion is that muscle strength
more accurately reflects body composition distribution
compared to standard measurements like BMI. And
specifically, the people with more muscle strength
had much less abdominal obesity. We're going
to come back to that, but abdominal obesity is
the main focus. It's the worst kind of obesity
you can have. It's much more important to not
have. obesity in your abdomen than any other
part of your body. So additionally, individuals
with higher grip strength exhibited significantly
decreased levels of hemoglobin A1c, which is
a measure of your blood sugar over three months,
a standard diagnostic test for diabetes. And
individuals with higher grip strength also had
lower triglyceride levels. So triglyceride is
fat in your bloodstream that creates an inflammatory
response. So this means that if you have greater
grip strength, it's going to improve your body's
ability to handle sugar. and fat, which is going
to result in less abdominal obesity. Another
similar study showed that, in fact, reduced grip
strength is associated with increased risk of
type 2 diabetes, including elevated hemoglobin
A1c levels. So the people with the highest grip
strength unsurprisingly reported greater engagement
in regular physical activity. Interestingly,
far fewer of them smoked currently or in the
past. And other studies have shown that smoking
is a strong determinant of declining Muscle strength.
So this strong correlation between grip strength
and the progression of obesity and mortality,
disease causing death, may be explained by several
mechanisms. They go on to say, firstly, obesity
directly impairs organs and tissues. directly
impairs organs and tissues. It accumulates around
your organs and tissues, contributes to limitations
and activities of daily living, meaning you're
going to exercise less. Second, the people with
the most grip strength have significantly lower
CRP levels. Well, CRP is a standard test that
I do on all of my patients. It's a well -established
biomarker for systemic inflammation. Inflammation
throughout your body has been linked to an increased
risk of cardiovascular mortality and metabolic
disorders like diabetes and fatty liver disease.
So many previous studies have showed that reduce...
Muscle strength is strongly associated with elevated
CRP levels, increased inflammation from that
fat around the belly. It's the fat around the
belly. Obesity is actually a chronic, low -grade
inflammatory state. This oversized adipose fat
tissue attracts immune cells, things called monocytes
and macrophages, which in turn promote the secretion
of pro -inflammatory cytokines, such as tumor
necrosis factor and interleukin -6. These are
a mouthful, but these are pro -inflammatory.
When you say what, you know, what people often
ask me, what is inflammation? Literally, what
is that? Well, it's a process that's designed
to heal you in a crisis, but it often gets put
in overdrive. And if you heard about, if you
remember people dying from COVID, many of them
died from a cytokine storm that would just overwhelm
their lungs and their cardiovascular systems
and result in their death. So cytokines are a
type of pro -inflammatory chemical, and they
lead to local or systemic inflammation everywhere
in your body, as well as oxidative stress. Thirdly,
This is the third reason, the third effect connection
between strength and obesity. Skeletal muscle
itself, your regular muscles, your biceps and
your muscles throughout your body, that system
of muscles is an active endocrine organ that
secretes chemicals. Your muscles secrete chemicals
that regulate blood sugar and insulin sensitivity.
So if you reduce muscle mass or strength, it
interferes with proper energy metabolism. Reduced
muscle strength has also been shown to be strongly
associated with reduced bone density and directly
with cardiovascular disease. So in summary, reduce
the damaging effects of obesity by building and
maintaining muscle mass and strength. How do
you do that? Lift weights. Do any kind of weight
-bearing exercise will help build and maintain
bone density and muscle mass. Something as simple
as grabbing a hold of a hand rift. This is one
of the things I teach my elderly patients if
they're too frail to go to a gym and just want
something simple they can do at home. The muscles
in your legs are the biggest muscles in your
body and doing something as simple as holding
on. to a handrail or the edge of your kitchen
sink and slowly bending your legs, squatting
down. Squatting down and up, not going further
than 90 degrees for your knees, making sure it
doesn't hurt your knees, but also holding on
so there's no risk of falling and going really,
really slowly. When I show this, people like
to squat down slow and then they jump back up.
But if you want a simple exercise to increase
muscle mass, if you're older, if you want to
give somebody you love something that they can
do. Somebody you love who you know would benefit
from more muscle mass and strength. You can do
squats at home, holding on to something so they're
not going to fall back. And also, the most important
thing is to go down slowly and, most importantly,
come up really slowly. And that's going to help
build muscle strength. It also helps with your
balance. It's going to build muscle mass and
maintain muscle mass and strength in your legs.
Here's another study titled Cardiometabolic Outcomes
Among Adults with Abdominal Obesity and Normal.
Body Mass Index. The most common test to measure
body composition is the BMI, Body Mass Index.
And this is basically just more evidence that
fat in your gut is the worst kind of fat. And
how do you reduce it? Well, not with sit -ups,
not with doing core exercises. Getting rid of
fat around your belly. To do that, you have to
get rid of fat everywhere in your body and build
muscle mass. So think of reduced time -restricted
eating or intermittent fasting. Think of eating,
try eating breakfast and lunch and or only a
lot of people. I only eat breakfast and lunch.
I always forget. Most people skip breakfast that
do time restricted eating or intermittent fasting.
They skip breakfast and only eat lunch and dinner.
So they're only eating six to eight hours a day.
10 hours a day and leaving the other 12 to 16
hours a day for their body to rest and digest.
So I recommend not eating right before you go
to bed. You don't need food to sleep. You need
food in the morning. I eat a hearty breakfast
in the morning. I recommend it for other people
as well to eat some hearty, healthy, savory protein
in the morning and eat a big lunch. But however
you want to do it, if you just spend less time
eating and digesting your food every 24 hours,
then it tends to make it easier to build and
maintain muscle mass and save less fat. So, yeah,
you can't spot reduce fat from your belly, but
just reducing the time that it takes for you
to digest your food and the calories, fewer junk
carbs, and then, of course, doing cardiovascular
exercise and weight training to build and maintain
muscle mass. So this was a study that came out
in October of 2025, just came out in Journal
of the American Medical Association. This was
a study of 471 ,000 participants around the world.
22 % had normal weight abdominal obesity. So
that means they're not overweight at all. They
have normal weight, but they have a belly. They
have excess fat around their abdomen and relatively
probably not as heavy in their arms and legs,
either part of their body. So normal weight abdominal
obesity was consistently associated with increased
hypertension, diabetes, high total cholesterol,
and elevated triglycerides. All over the world.
So again, these are people who are not overweight.
They have a normal weight, a reasonable body
mass index, a reasonable weight for their height
and size. But they have more fat around the middle
of the body. And just that, just that changed.
22 % of the people around the world that had
that had dramatically increased risk of high
blood pressure, diabetes, cholesterol, and triglycerides.
So this shows basically that abdominal visceral
fat is a stronger estimate of cardiometabolic
risk than BMI because of the inflammation, because
of the inflammation, chronic inflammation, systemic
inflammation around the body, and the metabolic
effects, meaning the increased risk of diabetes
and related disease conditions, the effects of
diabetes on the liver and the kidneys, for example.
So normal weight, abdominal obesity is defined
as a normal body mass index, BMI, of 18 .5. to
24 .9. And you calculate, you can just Google
body mass index and punch in your weight and
your height and it'll calculate it before you.
But the formula, it'll calculate it for you.
The formula is your weight in kilograms divided
by your height in meters squared. So yeah, just
Google BMI, punch in your weight and your height
and you'll get your BMI. So these are people
that have normal BMI between 18 and 25, say,
but with a waist circumference of greater than
31 and a half inches for a female. and greater
than 37 inches for a male. So if you have a normal
BMI, but a waist bigger than 31 1⁄2 inches for
a woman or 37 inches for a man, then you have
abdominal obesity and you have a much increased
risk, a much higher likelihood to have high blood
pressure, diabetes, high total cholesterol, and
triglycerides, and the resultant increased risk
of cardiovascular disease and death. Well, we
are once again out of time. I don't know where
the time goes. As always, thank you for tuning
in. Come check out my talk on toxins at my office
this Wednesday at 6 p .m. And remember, the health
of your body is always more important than any
disease you've been diagnosed with. 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 2 p .m. for safe, effective
natural solutions here on 98 .3 FM, The Word.