Heal Your Chronic Illness and Take Your Life Back

Heal Your Chronic Illness and Take Your Life Back

Mary Vallarta:

Hey everybody. Welcome back to the virtual summit. I’m your host, Mary Vallarta.  As you know, we are here to talk about healing your chronic illness and taking back your life.  Basically how to balance your mind, body, and spirit to restore your health and vitality.

Mary Vallarta:

Today I have Dr. Bruce Hoffman and I am super excited to chat with him. Before I get into the questions, let me tell you a bit about who he is. Dr. Hoffman is board certified in anti-aging medicine, has a master’s degree in clinical nutrition, and is a certified Functional Medicine practitioner. In addition to his clinical training, Dr. Hoffman has studied with many of the leading mind, body, and spiritual healers of our times, including Deepak Chopra, Osho, Ramesh Balsekar, and John Kabat-Zinn. He has shared the stage with Deepak Chopra and Dr. John Demartini, and he continues to spread his inspiring vision of healing and wellness with audiences and patients around the world. Once ensconced in the practice of family medicine, he quickly realized that his interests in medicine were broader than just drugs and surgery. The allopathic medical practice was limited to treating symptoms and illnesses but fell short of restoring the patient’s health entirely. So Dr. Hoffman embarked on a journey to understand what constitutes the human experience and what the triggers and mediators are that perpetuate human suffering.  He wanted to do this not only to help patients be free of disease but to realize their maximum potential.  Dr. Hoffman welcome. That is quite a resume.

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

Nice to be here.  I’m looking forward to this conversation and seeing what we can come up with.

Mary Vallarta:

Me too. I’ve been looking forward to this conversation. I’m super energized to be speaking with you. Let’s get into it.  Dr. Hoffman, I love how you’ve combined the strengths of Western medicine with the mindful and spirit-centered approach of Eastern medicine. As your bio states, you didn’t actually start out this way. You were practicing Family Medicine. What pushed you to go into the path of functional and integrative medicine that takes mind, body, and spirit into account?

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

Well, the part leading to where I am now is quite interesting in that when I was a young boy in my teenage years, I went to boarding school and I had a teacher there. My teacher was very interested in not only Western psychology, particularly the work of Carl Jung but also very interested in Eastern mythology and religions, particularly the work of a subset of the Vedantic Hindu medicine called Advaita. Advaita takes the point of view that there is no “there out there”. Everything springs from one source. So there is just one mind, one consciousness, and there is no separation. It’s a very specific way of looking at reality. Many of the quantum physicists who came onto the scene at the turn of the century had a very similar point of view. When they dissolved matter into light, they said, all light is continuous. There is no separation

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

So this ancient, theological concept, was being married with Western physics. My teacher, Roger, I just hung out with him and we explored all these things and so I became very interested. When I was about 15 years of age, I had what they call a Satori experience, where I directly experienced this One Mind, One Reality. It descends upon you, and you just know that to be true. Before too long, you descend back into your dualistic past, present and future, gain and loss reality and the awareness is lost.  I still remember that. Then I had a second experience like that in my thirties. So having had two experiences of One Mind, One Reality. It sort of cemented, in my body based understanding, that was behind all systems of appearance.

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

Nonetheless, I continued my high school education. My mother applied for me to go to med school. I had no idea. I find myself in med school. I wanted to be a poet, go hang out with all the beat poets in San Francisco, but my mother thought I should have a more formal education. So she applied for med school and I found myself in med school. Actually, after six years of medical training, I became a Family Physician and fell in love with it. I actually loved what I did. I ended up in Saskatchewan, Canada, practicing Family Medicine. When I got to Canada practicing Family Medicine, it was very apparent that that system of medicine is very limited in terms of what you can offer. We call it the N2 / D2 system of medicine. Name of disease, name of drug. That’s about it.

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

But what happened was then I also came across a video by Dr. Larry Dossey, one of the great thinkers of the last 50 years in the field of integrative medicine. I watched Larry Dossey sort of draw out this long explanation as to how he combined East and West into his medical practice and his thought process. That triggered another huge explosion of interest and reignited my childhood experiences with my high school teacher and Advaita and psychology. All of a sudden this whole roadmap just opened up and I thought, this is a very interesting possibility. So I then just started learning as much as I could about the human experience. I became a student of as much as I could possibly absorb across all spectrums of human reality from toxicology to illumination. I started to develop a roadmap and with different teachers and different experiences and different ways of seeing and being exposed to different systems of information.  I did Ayurvedic training and they talk about different bodies, different systems of the body.  I spent time with a very well-known doctor from Germany who lives in Seattle by the name of Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt.  I spent years studying with Deepak Chopra and David Simon, et cetera, et cetera. And I just started to develop a roadmap for looking at the human condition from traditional medicine, then expanding it a bit to Functional Medicine and then moving to the brain and then to the emotions, then to the mental field, then to the soul and then to the spirit, which is beyond all confines to space/time. So I developed this roadmap of experiences at each level, diagnosis at each level, potential treatments at each level, because many people will want to go to an acupuncturist, which is at level three in this energy model, but they really should be seeing an oncologist or they’ll go to an oncologist where they really should be doing trauma work.

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

I tried to sort out all these different possibilities across all layers and levels and help teach/write a new curriculum, really for doctors or healers. Not really doctors. MDs should keep doing what they do. They do it well. Every patient that sits in front of me says well, why doesn’t my doctor know this.  Well,  because it wasn’t his interest and he didn’t train to know this. So give it up. Don’t even ask the question, don’t waste your time. We need a new curriculum for a new expansive model. That’s been my life calling, my life passion, and to which I’m still a student. I mean, I study more now than I did when I was young. I just keep expanding the knowledge base.

Mary Vallarta:

I think that’s what makes your work so fascinating to me. You have sort of like a 360-degree view since you’ve been on the MD side, the family medicine side, and then you’re now continuing to learn more about the Eastern methodologies. So you’re kind of taking everything and putting it all together to make these roadmaps that you’re talking about.

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

It’s not just Eastern, Mary,  it’s all systems of knowledge, you know, from phenomenology to theology, to psychology East to West, to up and down, it’s all layers, all levels. It’s not only Eastern insights. Some of it is Eastern, but it’s not only Eastern insights.

Mary Vallarta:

I see. Interesting. So integrating all that together is very fascinating and it gives you more of a well-rounded perspective. As you mentioned, MDs aren’t trained to have that type of approach. That’s why there’s a time and place where that’s going to be appropriate. There’s also another time and place where something else might be more appropriate for a patient. So I think that’s important to note. There is a lot of research coming to light on the important role that food plays on one’s ability to prevent disease and sometimes also reverse or heal. As you pointed out, there are such things called trauma. You’ll recommend people see some trauma specialists or stress. What are your thoughts on having more emphasis or focus on things like mindset, changing internal narratives, and healing emotional trauma when it comes to healing?

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

One of the great challenges of working with patients is when they present with complex multi-system illness, which is the only kind of patient I see these days, they are still very in that diagnostic mindset of “what do I have”? Usually singular, what one thing do I have? Is it mold or Lyme or Mast Cell or whatever? Then they start to think diagnostically and therapeutically in an allopathic way. When you start to have a broad spectrum of understanding the human condition, and you start to understand all the antecedents, mediators, and triggers that eventually ended up in biology and pathology/disease, you can’t stop yourself from taking a far more comprehensive history. So the healer of the future can commit both acts of commission, as well as acts of omission. It’s not what he knows, but it’s also what he doesn’t know.

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

So if you’re sitting in front of a patient and they are presenting  with symptomatology at this moment in space-time, it behooves you to ask every single possible trigger that may have led up to that presentation. It’s our Western understanding and consensual reality that diseases kind of fall out of the sky. It’s like, Oh, I’ve got rheumatoid arthritis. Then you can go to the doctor and get an immune modulator, or you can go to a naturopath and get an herb, but it’s still that singular mindset. When we look at patients from a more complex model, we have to start looking at not only diagnosis from a Western perspective, because you need to know that, that it’s an inflammatory and immune system-based disease based on autoimmunity, which has its links in leaky gut, et cetera, et cetera, and the genetic predisposition.

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

You’ve got to know that, but you’ve also got to understand how people arrive at a point in time with a diagnosis. You know, people, they inherit epigenetically the traumas of their forefathers. So if you don’t ask a history of their forefathers and the ancestors you are missing out on a piece. Then they get born into a family system, and whether or not they were adequately seen by the mothers in the first 10 years and by their fathers in the second 10 years and peers, and by the loved ones in the third decade, they don’t adequately myelinate the three different brains that grow up, the reptilian, limbic and adult brains. So if they are not self-regulated by external parental figures, they don’t learn to self-regulate themselves and they have a fragile personality structure very often.

Mary Vallarta:

So how do you help them uncover all of this information?

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

You’ve got to take a very thorough history. I take a two and a half to three-hour history and ask all of these questions.

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

Then those experiences, your epigenetic transfer, ancestral trauma, early childhood experiences that all gets then translated into your perception of reality, your internal dialogue, your thoughts, your value systems, your beliefs, and your defenses. So many people stay highly defended from feelings that arose in the first 30 years of life because they are too painful. So they’re defended and they are traumatized. That then translates into electrical messages in the brain, which you can read on a qEEG. I have a brain treatment center, which reads qEEGs. You can see hallmarks of early trauma on the brain. You’ll see the one brainwave, the [1] beta brainwave highly red, highly amplified. That then gets turned into chemical signals. That then starts to interact with your phospholipid cell membranes, which you can measure, which then turn on receptors, which then turn on genes, which then turn on proteins, which then turn on all the biochemistry that runs your life.

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

So you have this whole cascade of possible antecedents that can set you up for what’s happening at this moment with so-called symptomatology or disease expression, but it’s not just rheumatoid arthritis. It’s way back in the ancestry, trickling all the way down to physiology. And then you have the environment coming in. That plays havoc with your, your detox pathways and sitting on DNA. Sitting as adducts on your DNA and mitochondria affecting their expression of lipids and proteins. So if you don’t ask all these questions, you’ve got a limited roadmap and you got a couple of tools in your toolbox. You’ve got to have a very broad toolbox, and that’s why education becomes important. We have to educate healthcare providers of the future to broaden their toolbox. Not only to broaden their toolbox but also to broaden their self-understanding as well.

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

If a healer approaches a patient with a hero type approach, I’m all-knowing, and you’re all sick. They also perpetuate a very lopsided point of view. The patient’s well side doesn’t get activated. They don’t activate the healthy part of who they are. They identify with the disease, the doctor as the hero is going to fix them. That’s a very lopsided relationship. Often patients sort of, in order to survive that lopsidedness, they just don’t activate their intent to do what is required for them to activate the healer within. The healing archetype within. Without activating that there’s no outcome.

Mary Vallarta:

Right. So would you say your approach is also about giving power back to the patient? Like letting them realize that they have a big role to play in their healing?

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

We try to. Some people are highly defended.  People have value systems, a hierarchy of values. People will say that their health is a high value. They come to you to treat their health or help them treat their health. When you start to take a history, you’ll find out, particularly with men, by the way, this is like a big male thing. Their highest value is their career, making money, health is secondary. They often delegate their health to the loved ones, their spouses, or somebody else. They don’t really want to rob Peter, their career-making money, to pay Paul, to invest in their health. So they don’t raise health up as a value. Unless patients are prepared to raise health up as a value and become a participant in their own healing experience, they remain passive and they have what we call “projection of will”.

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

They project their will to heal onto you. If you rise up in the healing archetype “I’m all-knowing, I’m going to fix you”, you start working harder than the patient. It’s a very lopsided relationship, almost doomed to fail. So you’ve got to try and enter into their system and sort of feel where they are in their own evolution.  Is health a high-value? How healthy is their ego strength? Is it fragile? How much projection of will do they have? Do they have outer resources to assist them or are they without resources? Do they have personality disorders? Do they have what it takes to take on such an extensive journey? And, of course, finances.  Most of this isn’t funded by healthcare systems and nor should it be because it would bankrupt most of them.

Mary Vallarta:

Right. Also, one of the most important questions for them to know the answer to is why do they want to heal? Why do they want to get better?

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

On the first page of my 70-page questionnaire is “Why are you here, How can we help you, What is it you want to achieve?” and how committed are you to making the changes necessary? It’s interesting when it comes back 50% or 75% committed. Immediately I say we have to have this conversation first and find out what that’s about. Because if people haven’t been seen by their parents, if they haven’t been supported and challenged in a healthy, supportive, challenging way, which is how love evolves and how you develop a concept of self. You only develop a good concept of self, good ego strength if you are both supported and challenged by your parents, not just supported. If they don’t have a healthy sense of self, they can’t take on what is being required of them to sort of move through this experience. They just don’t have the resources to do so.

Mary Vallarta:

Right. That’s very true.

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

You have to find out where they are with that, you know, and where is health in their value system. You really have to ask that question before you launch into “tell me about your disease”. You have to find out who this person is sitting in front of you and where they are at in their hierarchy of values as to doing what it takes to get better. You know, there are many possibilities for healing. The first possibility is just treating disease. Get this symptom out of me. I want to do it quickly without money and without me being involved, just give me a pill. Mahatma Gandhi said the tragedy of modern medicine is that it works. There’s that possibility. Then the other possibility is they see symptoms as teleological. Those symptoms are actually asking them to enter into their own life, to try and find out why they are this way in space-time. Then they see mind, body connections.  That the way that they construct reality may influence the systems they put in place to support them and the way they perceive things and what they eat, it all plays a role. So they become more conscious of their own advocacy. That’s the second possibility. The third possibility for healing are those people who do not only want to be free of disease, which is sometimes not possible, you’ve always got some symptomatology and, but they want to live at the highest maximum potential. To do that, they have to go through a lot of personal development and personal growth to know their value systems, to know how inspired they are. To find out what wakes them up every morning. Are they called from above by some spiritual purpose or do they just get out of bed and just sort of see what happens?

Mary Vallarta:

Right.  So that brings us back to the why.  Let’s talk more about maximum potential, because I know that’s a big part of your work. Can you describe what maximum potential is?

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

Well, when a person wakes up in the morning inspired by what they do, that’s living at your maximum potential. They are living at their maximum potential. It’s a vision of what they are here to do on this planet while they’re in a body. In psychology, it was called a daemonic calling. Your inner constellated self calls you from above to become who you’re meant to be. So you’re just inspired to do what you do, and you know what you are meant to do and you throw all your life force into that outcome.

Mary Vallarta:

Which is basically their higher purpose.

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

Their highest value, their highest purpose. They don’t need to be motivated to get out of bed. They get out of bed and just do what they do. They stay up very late at night trying to manifest it. Their life force is invested in it. There’s that old image that I love, if you will go to a university and you stand outside and you look at the different levels of a university, the undergraduate student’s lights go out at four o’clock, the postgraduate at six o’clock, the doctoral students at 10 o’clock and the Nobel prizewinner’s their lights get switched off at one o’clock in the morning. They are just called into the daemonic calling. They just know who they are and what they meant to do.

Mary Vallarta:

…and that’s what pushes them, yes.

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

But that’s only the third possibility. The fourth possibility of healing is when you know that you are part of a connected whole. You don’t identify with your body, your emotions, your mind. You identify with that aspect of you that is beyond all of that.  Your deepest self, your soul, which is sort of linked to this one mind, this eternal consciousness. You know you’re not your body, you’re not your mind, you’re not your thoughts, but instead, you’re part of this continuous oneness and you stay connected to that in that field of consciousness that is that. I’ve had patients die, fully healed, connected to that aspect of themselves. They just know who they are. They know they are not their bodies, they’re not their minds,  they’re not their thoughts, they’re not their actions. They are beyond that.

Mary Vallarta:

That reminds me of the concept of  Satva  in Ayurveda.

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

It’s called Brahmi in the Vedantic model.

Mary Vallarta:

Oh, nice. I’m just getting into more Vedic studies. I’m in Ayurveda right now, which I’m really loving. That’s really what inspired my own healing journey.

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

I took my model from Ayurveda because I studied it for years and went to India and did an internship there.

Mary Vallarta:

That’s my dream. I want to go to India and study it one day.

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

But they have these koshas, these bodies. I took that model and added a few and I made the seven stages to health and transformation model based on Ayurvedic and Vedantic scriptures.

Mary Vallarta:

Oh, got it. So what are those seven stages? Can you share them with us?

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

Yes. Spirit, soul, mind, emotion, energy, physiology and structure, environment.

Mary Vallarta:

Okay. Interesting.

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

Yeah. They are based on the five koshas from the Vedantic philosophy, the five bodies, the five layers.

Mary Vallarta:

So obviously when your patients are working with you, I can only imagine some of them get challenged. Right? Some of them might get frustrated during this whole process. So how do you go about helping them and supporting them push through or be comfortable with feeling this discomfort? Cause a lot of times people run away from discomfort.

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

Again, it’s incumbent upon me if I’m doing a reasonable job, not to impose my model on them, but just ask what they want.

Mary Vallarta:

Ok, going back to that.

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

Some people just want to not have asthma.  They’re not interested in seven levels of healing. I respect that. Then I pull out all my functional medicine, toxicology tricks, and just treat asthma.  Treat triggers of asthma such as mold and food sensitivities and Mast Cell blockade and mitochondrial resuscitation. I do all my functional medicine things. Other people come to me and say, I’ve been sick my whole life and they give you 50 symptoms. And you know, immediately that that person probably has not had the most advantageous experience from either ancestrally or from birth. Almost definitely you can tell that. The adverse childhood experiences studies show that people who’ve had adverse childhood experiences had three to four times increased health disadvantages as they mature.

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

So you know when people tell you they’ve been sick for as long as they remember. You immediately go into early childhood trauma history and it’s always there. You can always tell. Interrupted bonds with their mothers. They have merged with mothers. They were sent off to boarding schools at young ages. They go to intensive care units and incubators and the mother has problems with the father so the mother takes her eyes off the child and doesn’t myelinate the child’s sense of self. Then mother’s offline. Then they have stillbirths and miscarriages and they’re all there in the history almost every time in a complex illness patient.

Mary Vallarta:

Hmm. So basically you meet them where they’re at.

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

Yes, I tend to meet them where they’re at. You try and work out each level.  At level one what’s going on? Is it food? Is it mold? You do your normal medicine. Then you ask deeper questions. Are some of these symptoms teleological? Are these symptoms bringing patients to you because they have to heal a part of themselves that they never integrated in their evolution? For instance, I had a patient with MS whose father was a very famous sports coach and she never felt seen by her father, always neglected. She had a superego that is highly punitive, and she didn’t feel ever seen. So she was constantly beating herself up and attempting/strivinh to become more than she could possibly be. She tried and tried and tried, but dad was always coaching the team.

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

Then the dad, when she was 18 or 19  I believe, her father got fired from the team. The next day she developed MS. The next day. That symptom was saying, dad, you were never there to take care of me. Now, look at me, I’m sick. He rose to the occasion. When he was fired, he was at home and he could be with his daughter. It was set up that way, that the symptoms drew that complexity together for it to be resolved. When she got that installed that she used that to use that in healing. It was very powerful. I have many, many cases and stories like that, where symptoms guide people to heal a part of themselves they’ve left behind.

Mary Vallarta:

Right. That is fascinating.

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

Symptoms don’t fall out of the sky.  They have intent. In my experience.

Mary Vallarta:

Yeah. I think that the more I speak to all of the experts that I’ve talked to so far, the more I’m realizing that symptoms are really an opportunity for people to get to know themselves on a deeper level.

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

I did a workshop with Mark Wolynn who is one of the great family constellations authors and workshop leaders out there. Once a year, we’ll do a workshop on illness and your family system and early developmental trauma. Almost to the person, we can link the rising of symptoms to events in the lifespan that needed to be resolved and healed. Once we linked them and made them conscious and gave them the homework to do, there was a vast new release of healing potential because you don’t heal until you have a new internal dialogue, a new story, a new narrative. If you have the old narrative, you create the same biochemistry. People with a new narrative, they have a new insight. It releases a potent internal life force that then constellates the biochemical pathways downstream to advocate healing.

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

So we would do this workshop. Mark was a master at family constellations. Patients would sit next to him, and we would ask what their problem is and they’d say thyroiditis or leaky gut or Mast Cell, mold, whatever.  Then you’d say, well, tell me about your mother. Tell me about your father. Tell me about your grandparents and your siblings. Then he’d put up people in this constellation and worked with them energetically as to what was going on in the system and how their symptoms correlated with the dynamics of the system, the entanglements of the system. They could see how their symptoms didn’t just arise from nowhere. They were contingent upon some of these entanglements that needed to be healed. Once they saw what they hadn’t perceived before because children will often tell themselves a story that’s not true.

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

They’ll say their mother was mean and angry, but their mother lost two children before they were born. The mother got very little from her mother. The mother was always bothered about the father who is out doing something or other. So the mother just had a little bit to give and unless the child sees that, and sees the mother through new eyes, the judgment of the mother will be there.  A person is half their mother, half their father. If they start judging half of themselves, guess what? They’re not open to the healing force, which is their whole self.  So everybody ultimately has to realign with their parental mothers and fathers. If you don’t say yes to your mother and father, your healing is going to be limited, no matter what you’ve experienced.

Mary Vallarta:

Because it’s pushing yourself away. They’re half of you like you mentioned.

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

That’s the setup for auto-immunity by the way.

Mary Vallarta:

Oh yeah, because you’re rejecting yourself and autoimmune, right? Oh my God, that is powerful. I don’t even know what to say right now, but it shows how important it is to really understand yourself, but also understand your parents.  Also understanding your grandparents because your grandparents affected your parents’ psyche. It affected how your parents treated you.

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

No question. 100%. There’s a one-to-one correlation.

Mary Vallarta:

So Dr. Hoffman, switching gears here a little bit because I’m also quite interested in anti-aging medicine, but I don’t know too much about it. Could you tell us a little bit about what that is?

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

It’s a myth.  I’ve trained in it but there is no anti-aging medicine. It’s a nice sort of slogan for slowing down the process of aging. Okay. We all age. You’ve got the hormones of youth and you’ve got these drives.  In the first 30 years, you can do no wrong. You just push yourself through everything. Then entropy sets in and you start to sort of come apart slowly but surely.

Mary Vallarta:

You’re noticing it now.

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

No question. The wrinkles and the skin sags.

Mary Vallarta:

The low back pain

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

Then you get the inflammatory diseases of aging. Then you get separated into either heart disease or cancer or one of those things. They are all driven by genetics and environment and lifestyle and mind/ body.  The more inflamed you are by your lifestyle, the more unresolved you are with multiple triggers, the more interleukin six and tumor necrosis factor and all the inflammatory signalings are flying around, destroying your mitochondria, which then reduce your ATP, which then reduce your life force. So what we do in anti-aging medicine is try and slow down that trajectory before all is lost.

Mary Vallarta:

Yeah. There’s no way that you can stop yourself from aging. It’s just really about how to stop those symptoms of aging or delay them, right?

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

Modify it so that your entropy isn’t like this.  Then you drop dead one day because your gene pools run out,  it’s time.

Mary Vallarta:

Yeah. It reminds me of my grandmother. She died, but she didn’t really die of any disease or illness. I think it was just because she was older and her body was just tired.

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

The genes give up.  Everything ends.

Mary Vallarta:

Yeah. So share some of the most important things you’ve learned from your spiritual teachers. You’ve named a lot of big names, in your bio, like Deepak Chopra and Osho.

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

So, here’s the answer. You probably won’t want this one.

Mary Vallarta:

Give us the real answer, not what you think we want to hear.

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

People who’ve had difficult upbringings, who’ve had some complexity in their early developmental years, will often go to find spiritual teachers to take the part of the good parent that they feel they didn’t get. So whenever I have patients come in who have spiritual teachers and gurus, I’m very suspicious. Having had very many spiritual teachers and gurus myself. Having been to India three times and sat on many mountain tops meditating. So that’s the first insight that I really want to emphasize. It’s not wrong. It’s just when people don’t heal with their individual mothers and fathers, they’ll find a great mother and father that will look upon them benignly.

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

You’ll find a lot of the great spiritual teachers who went to Burma and Thailand and India in the seventies, all of the Western students of spirituality. There are a lot of them. Jon Kabat-Zinn is one of them, Jack Kornfield is another. They all went and meditated for 15, 20 years, put on red robes and then came out of the forest, went back into cities of America, started to see people and all of a sudden realized, hold on a second, we are just performing spiritual bypass. These people have got messed up lives and they all went and became psychologists.  They all needed to heal the early traumas that people were trying to bypass to develop spiritual awakening. So that’s one of the greatest insights I’ve seen over the years. It’s not that spiritual teachers can’t provide some insight, but I always get a little uneasy when I see a guru sitting on a big white pedestal.  Then there are all of these devotees.  And I’ve done that for decades.  I’m judging myself.

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

Then I just always ask, what is it about this experience that was being bypassed? What is it that they are trying to gain? What, what layer and level is still unfulfilled in their evolution? That’s what my curiosity is because an awakening experience into Satori is a sort of a brief exposure where you go beyond mind/ body and you actually know that everything is unified. There is no past/present/future. There’s nothing to fear and you’re sort of eternal,  immortal and you’re never born and you never die. That is what happens when you awaken.  But to sit in front of a guru to try and get that experience, I’m not sure that’s the best use of your time.

Mary Vallarta:

Yeah. I think it’s just an illustration of how you’re still searching for answers outside of you.

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

That’s what Advaita says.  The essence of Advaita, which I learned at 15 was the very act of seeking prevents you from being who you are because you are that. So what are you seeking? You are already that thing.

Mary Vallarta:

What are you seeking? Exactly. I get that. That is really good advice when you think about it.  The answers are not out there. They are in here.

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

Carl Jung said the urge to be whole is evolutionary. You can’t avoid it. Dianne Connelly said all sickness is homesickness. You try to come home to the most integrated aspect of who you are.  You can’t just go and sit with a guru.

Mary Vallarta:

That won’t give you the answers.

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

It’s fun, and it’s very pleasant for a time. And I’ve done it for a long time, but you still got to go down the chakras and work your way through them. Early developmental trauma.  All of that stuff. You’ve got to heal that stuff.

Mary Vallarta:

If anything, it’s sort of a way where someone could continue resisting actually looking at themselves, getting to know themselves by sitting with a guru, and not ever advancing to internal examination.

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

Perfect, perfect example you just gave.  It really does, in many cases, exemplify and exaggerate, the very pathology that’s brought them to the guru in the first place, which is resistance and projection. By sitting in front of the guru they are refusing to face the very thing that they need to face, which is themselves and their defenses.

Mary Vallarta:

Yes. Fascinating. So aside from sitting or seeing your patients, one-on-one Dr. Hoffman, you also actually have online programs and courses that people can take. Can you tell us a bit about what those are?

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

Well, it’s funny, I used to do weekend workshops and all sorts of things. Then I condensed it all into a Friday afternoon lecture, a one-hour lecture for my new patients. Then the one-hour lecture became seven hours. I felt sorry for my patients. So then I took that lecture and made it into a book. So that book and those videos are available.

Mary Vallarta:

Nice.

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

Yeah. So if you want to learn Seven Stages to Health and Transformation, I have a video and I have a PowerPoint explanation of it all, but I no longer lecture to that degree. I’m going back and starting to do lectures on different topics like Alzheimer’s disease and Mast Cell Activation and mold exposure and various aspects of mind-body healing. Those are in development. Most of the time now I’m helping other practitioners. Guiding them through this new curriculum of Seven Stages to Health and Transformation where not only do they learn new skills, but they learn about themselves.

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

They have to stay congruent, they have to be present in that experience. I forgot to mention as part of my explanation, I went off at a tangent, that patients who don’t have good relationships with their parents have low trust. If they have medical PTSD or trauma from the medical system, that gets projected on you as a healer because all medical systems are very patriarchal and you are a parental figure. So if you’re sitting in front of a patient and there’s no trust established, there’s nothing you can do. So you have to ask that question first. You know I’m trying to teach people, other practitioners, how to be present with patients before they get more tools in their toolbox and go into courses and learn things.

Mary Vallarta:

That is so important.

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

How to develop trust with a patient. Sometimes you can’t, they’re too traumatized and you try your best, but it’s just not possible.

Mary Vallarta:

But that just shows the role that each person plays. The role that the practitioner plays and also the role that the patient plays. If either one of them is not invested, it’s not going to yield the highest potential outcome.

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

It won’t. Some people are too traumatized with too much mental health illness that they just can’t do what it takes to show up in that experience. Then you just have to admit that it’s not going to work out. You have to learn who is sitting in front of you. Also, know yourself through your own Myers – Briggs typology, through your own Ayurvedic typology,  you have to know if you’re Vata, Pitta, Kapha. Is that patient Vata, Pitta, Kapha because the Vata patient is not going to do what the Kapha patient does. They are an entirely different person.

Mary Vallarta:

Yeah. And then honoring and accepting that type of person and not projecting another type of person in that chair.

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

If I’m a Pitta practitioner in my hero archetype and I know everything, I’m going to tell you what to do. And the Vatta patient walks in and is very sort of inspired for like three days and then they lose interest. If you impose your value system and your Ayurvedic typology or dosha onto them, and you don’t resonate and know how to treat Vata patients, you will lose them and you’ll feel frustrated.  Like a Kapha patient, they always show up, they never do what you asked them to do, or they do very little, but they’re always very loyal.

Mary Vallarta:

Very loyal. And we’re talking about Kapha, Vatta, Pitta. Those are the different dosha constitutions, that we talk about in Ayurveda.

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

Then the Pitta patient, if you’re not the best in the city, they’ll leave you and go find the best.

Mary Vallarta:

They are looking for the facts. They’re like the fact-finder.

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

You’re not sharp enough and don’t have the best office and are always on time….

Mary Vallarta:

You gotta check all the boxes for the Pitta patients.

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

But as a practitioner, you’ve got to know who’s coming in the door because you’ve got to adjust the way you interact with them.  Knowing your Myers-Briggs typology as well, thinking people are not the same as feeling people. You’ve got to know that.

Mary Vallarta:

That’s very true. It’s sort of like detective work that you have to do when you work with your patients. Well, Dr. Hoffman, I can talk to you for hours. There are so many different questions that I can keep asking you, but for the sake of this particular interview, I’d like to ask if there’s anything else, one thing that you can leave us with here today that you didn’t get a chance to cover.

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

In regards to talking to well people? Or people with complex illnesses? Or could you give you more direction?

Mary Vallarta:

Yeah. Well, the title of the summit is Healing Your Chronic Illness and Taking Your Life Back, meaning taking control of your health, right? Being the person and seeing the power that you have to own your life, to own your health. And so what would be the last thing that you’d want to leave us with here today?

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

I think what’s most important is that people have to understand that if they present with chronic ill health or chronic complex illness, they have to try and find a practitioner who has a broad range of experience with multiple tools in their toolbox. They can’t just do one stool test and hope to heal. That’s number one.

Number two, they have to become their own patient advocates. If they are not invested in advocacy, there is very little that you can do.

Number three, they can’t project all the will to heal on the practitioner. They have to take some of that responsibility themselves.

Number four, they have to raise health up as a value. If the health isn’t one of the first or second values, it will default to number four or five, wherever you have your highest value, you will have your most order. Wherever you  have your lowest value you will have your most chaos. If health truly isn’t your highest value, be honest with yourself. Then look at it and say in the future, I will make it my high-value but right now I want to keep working and eating poorly and making money because that’s where my highest value is. Not wrong or right.  Just be honest and truthful and know your value system.

Mary Vallarta:

Wow. That is a great way to end the discussion. I feel like you beautifully summarized our conversation and added new thoughts to it. So I appreciate that. I will go ahead and make sure that I link Dr. Hoffman’s website, where some of his writings and programs are, so you all can take a look. I’ll also include that in the post-summit email. Dr. Hoffman, you’re also on social media. So what is your handle where people can find you and possibly connect with you there?

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

So Instagram. My staff said, “make sure you say this at the end”.

So Instagram is www.instagram.com/drbrucehoffman/

Facebook is www.facebook.com/TheHoffmanCentreforIntegrativeMedicine/

and then the website is www.hoffmancentre.com.

I also have a brain treatment center, www.braintreatmentcentreofalberta.com I think those are all the handles.

Mary Vallarta:

Yeah. I mean, there are more.  Do you have a Tik Tok? Do you have a Twitter?

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

Yeah. Yeah. Yesterday my Twitter account was activated by an assistant. I have no clue.

Mary Vallarta:

There you go. Well, Dr. Hoffman is on Instagram, so you can catch him there. I think that everyone’s on Instagram. So find him on IG. You should see the links in the handles below. Look at his website. There are a lot of resources there where you can get started if you are interested in everything that we’ve talked about. As Dr. Hoffman said, be truthful to yourself and meet yourself where you are. Stop, resisting, and meet yourself where you are, because that is an integral part of starting and continuing the healing journey.

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

Also, the outer aspects of healing often in complex illness have to be congruent with inner healing too. You can’t just take a potion or herb. It’s much more complex than that. You’ve got to take a full system approach. There is a lecture being posted on my website soon on YouTube, where I give a 1 ½ hour lecture on the Seven Stages of Healing which will summarize some of the things we’ve mentioned.

Mary Vallarta:

Ooh, yes. I’m gonna watch that for sure. Okay. Thank you so much for joining us today. Hope you got a lot out of this.  Dr. Hoffman, you are amazing. Thank you for speaking with me.

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

Yeah. It was nice talking with you.

Podcast: Looking at Lyme: Understanding Symptoms and Treating the Whole Person

Looking at Lyme

I was recently interviewed by Sarah Cormode for an episode of Looking at Lyme, an educational podcast created by the Canadian Lyme Disease Foundation, where I highlight the importance of taking an in-depth patient history to understand and document Lyme disease symptoms.

I also discuss several approaches to treating Lyme disease and explain why such a variety of symptoms amongst patients with Lyme disease exists.

Take a listen below.

I was recently interviewed by Sarah Cormode for an episode of Looking at Lyme, an educational podcast created by the Canadian Lyme Disease Foundation, where I highlight the importance of taking an in-depth patient history to understand and document symptoms.

I also discuss several approaches to treating Lyme disease and explain why such a variety of symptoms amongst patients with Lyme disease exists.

People with Lyme disease have a lot of different symptoms, the bacteria attacks the body in so many different ways. Sometimes it attacks the brain, the heart, the joints, you name it. Today I'm looking at Lyme, we're going to dive into functional medicine, we'll look at the body from a holistic perspective and meet a doctor who treats the whole body and the mind.

Getting treated early for acute Lyme disease is critical. Some people find the attach ticks and others might get a bull's eye rash. But that's not always the case. And without these telltale signs, people might not get diagnosed. The longer that you have the disease, the worse it gets, and the harder it is to treat. That's when we need to go to the doctor. So, let's do that. There are very few medical doctors with the expertise of Dr. Bruce Hoffman. He practices functional medicine, and we'll get him to tell us more about that. We reached him at his Calgary clinic. Good morning, Dr. Hoffman.

Good morning to you.

What's the first thing that you look for in a patient who potentially has Lyme disease?

Your patients present to a doctor's office with many symptoms and many complex, interlocking possible what we call in medicine, differential diagnosis. So, they present with a whole host of symptoms. And it's the task of the doctor taking the history to try and work out what may or may not be Lyme disease. And sometimes patients come in with some Lyme test and say they definitively have Lyme disease, or they have positive biomarkers for Lyme disease on some of the tests they've done. But when a closer history is taken, that may not be the case. So, there's quite a lot to really sift through when you're trying to differentiate whether somebody has Lyme disease or not. The most important thing is the symptomatology. You want to take a very definitive history. In my clinic, we use different types of questionnaires to try and determine whether or not Lyme may be a diagnosis. And we also then start to take a very specific history about whether they visited endemic areas, which is somewhat a moot point because Lyme disease is somewhat, you know, it's specific, it's everywhere. If they visit an endemic area, if they've been bitten by a tick, if they've had the rash, which is very uncommon, by the way. But we start to ask the history of exposure, history of tick bite, history of rashes and in a symptom history, looking over the variable symptoms that present with Lyme disease and/or co-infections that come along with Lyme disease. A lot of questions need to be asked, and you've got to sift through them and try and determine if Lyme disease is the primary presenting feature or are there any other coexisting disorders that interlock, like mold exposure, or heavy metal toxicity or food sensitivities? And there's many of them that may interlock with a symptom presentation. So, there's a lot to ask.

Yeah, it sounds like getting that patient history is just so critical. 

History is everything. You know, you've got to take a good history. You can’t have a patient walk in and say I've got Lyme disease, and I go, okay, let's treat you. No, no, you have to stop and really ask very specific questions.

And it also sounds like you mentioned that most of your patients don't ever remember having a tick attached or getting a rash.

You know, the majority don't. I do have a number of patients who went to college in northeast in the United States, and they were out in the fields and in the forests, have a history of tick bite and rash exposure. But I would say that's probably 5% of my population. My patient population, it's very low.

Guess when we spend time in the outdoors, if we check for ticks and do a tick check and actually found one attached, we have something to at least document or same with a rash. If you found one, it'd be a good idea to get a photo of that to share with your doctor.

Absolutely. It would be lovely if we had that cookie cutter you know, clear cut, walked in the woods, got a tick, notices for within three days a high fever, headache, and then the Lyme disease rash. That's so seldom.

It's never that that clear? Is it?

Never. I wish it was easier.

So how critical is it then for people to get diagnosed and treated early?

Oh, if they've been exposed and there's definitely a tick bite. And the symptomatology of high fever, sore neck, chills and joints. If that occurs, you get them on antibiotics while waiting for lab data or getting the tick, if it's discovered, sent off to the lab for analysis. Definitely, I’ll put them on treatment right away. And there's different standards of Lyme disease treatment, depending on which school of thought you belong to. Some schools of thought say, you just need like a brief dose of doxycycline. And others say at least four to six weeks of treatment. It depends on your approach.

Do you have a preference?

Longer term antibiotics, definitely not a short term

Yeah, that was certainly my experience, I had about 10 days of antibiotics, and then all of my symptoms came back afterwards.

Absolutely. If patients have an acute exposure, and they have symptomatology, we do have a baseline laboratory test. And then we repeat it four to eight weeks later to see if there's any rising titers. And we send the tick off for analysis. I usually cover them with antibiotics for at least six weeks. 

Wow. That's great to hear. And so, what is functional medicine?

Well, functional medicine is this emergent system of approaching a patient from a very different point of view. Like my medical training is what we, I don't mean to be derogatory, but it's called the N2D2 method of diagnosis and treatment; name the disease, name the drug. You know, that's how we learned in medical school, we just look at differential diagnoses, what disease or symptom cluster does this person have, and what drug can I pull out to help them. That's the specific training, highly relevant, nothing wrong with it. But now we have this emerging cohort of patients who have this chronic multi system, multi symptom disease profiles, with many interlocking issues. And that model doesn't work. And I tend to see and many people who are outside of the so-called traditional healthcare system tend to see that cohort of patients. Functional medicine attempts to take an upstream history back to what we call antecedents, mediators, and triggers. We go and look upstream to see, first of all, what's your symptom profile now? But, when did you start to feel unwell? One of the most relevant questions I ask a patient is; when did you last feel well, and then you want to take it from there, backwards and forwards. So functional medicine looks backwards as to the timeline, or the potential triggers and inherited factors which may play a role, the triggers what may have triggered the illness, and then what we call mediators, what may be keeping that symptom cluster alive. In conjunction with that we look at, not so much as pathology and disease laboratory tests, but we look at functional laboratory tests. How is the biochemistry and the metabolomics? How are they functioning? Are they optimized? Or are they deficient within a spectrum? Traditional Medicine has a reference range of, you know, negative or positive. Functional medicine optimizes function based on individual susceptibility and genetics. It's a very elegant form of practicing medicine within chemical principles. Just old school sort of, you know, when did you last feel well; what happened and what may have been playing a role. No longer looking at single factors, instead, looking at multiple causative factors as to what keeps this patient still symptomatic. And I can tell you, from my experience, that there is never one reason why a person is not feeling well. There's usually a whole myriad and host of issues from poor sleep, poor diet, early childhood trauma, dental issues, food and gut sensitivities. It is complex, long list of what made you unwell. 

Yeah, absolutely. Why do the symptoms vary so much from one patient to the other?

You mean with Lyme disease specifically?

Yes. with Lyme disease specifically?

Well, while it depends on a whole host of factors, it depends on the individual immune response of the person, the total toxic load, the infectious load, the expression of the Lyme disease spirochaete, with or without co infections, the metabolic and nutritional strength of the individual, the immune competencies, the presence of natural killer cell functions, whether they can suppress the immune response. The fact that Lyme disease goes from different forms; the cellular form to an intracellular form, to a cystic form to a biofilm form then it comes and goes depending on your immune surveillance. There's a lot of reasons why somebody has waxing and waning of symptoms and feels variations in their symptom profile.

Is it possible for someone to have Lyme but not have any symptoms?

You can have positive laboratory testing for Lyme and be asymptomatic. Absolutely, absolutely. But you don't see those people because they feel good.

Yeah, definitely. Do symptoms flare and go dormant normally for some of your patients?

They do. They wax and wane depending on stressors, diet, travel and multiple factors affect the expression of symptomatology. Treatment or no treatment. Some treatments exacerbate the symptomatology quite dramatically. They get what they call the Jarisch Herxheimer reaction (JHR) where you put in a treatment and the patient's symptoms just go through the roof. And so, there's all these variations as to why people wax and wane and get increased symptoms at times. But yeah, we certainly have people with, with no symptoms, who have positive laboratory tests as well.

Dr. Hoffman, are you seeing a larger increase in the number of patients that you suspect to have Lyme disease and other co infections?

Absolutely. Yeah. As you know that the Lyme disease diagnosis is highly controversial, depending on which school of thought you belong to. Whether you belong to the sort of infectious disease society, the infectious disease group of medicine, or whether you follow the ILADS criteria for the diagnosis and treatment. Those are these two different schools of thought. Now you know, even with that, there's been a tremendous uptake in the Lyme disease diagnosis and co-infections due to global warming. The migration of songbirds further north and the spread of ticks deeper into the north because of global warming. It's been estimated, one study showed that the songbird flight path from South America to North America brought up to 32 million tick species. In the yearly migration just northwards from South America. So, there's a there's a huge increase in the diagnosis. For sure.

Yeah, especially for anyone who's living along any kind of migratory bird path.

Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And there’s this great Canadian researcher, John Scott, showing us published papers on this issue.

Yes, hopefully, we'll get him on a future podcast as well. I'd love to hear more about his research

Absolutely. Yeah.

So I was fortunate to go to the ILADS conference last year in Boston, and I learned about mast cell activation. And I was just wondering if you could tell me a little bit about that disorder.

Well, Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCAS) is a relatively new diagnosis. It's been around for a while. Dr. Lawrence Afrin is one of the leaders in the diagnosis and treatment. He's just recently published, which I co-authored, a criteria for the diagnosis. And the reason why that has been important is because previously at medical school, we learned about systemic mastocytosis, which is an increase in the number of mast cells that create disease processes. But mast cell activation syndrome is an increase in activity without an increase in number. And there are different criteria for the diagnosis. Mast cell activation syndrome is a very, very important concept to keep in mind when seeing patients with chronic systemic illness because you'll see it a lot. I see it a lot. Mast cells or white cells act as vigilante cells to try and protect you from incoming stressors. Whatever they may be, whether it's mental, chemical, environmental, infections or food, they spew out at least 1000, not 200 as one's thought, but more than 1000 mediators of inflammation. One of them is histamines. Everybody knows the histamine is a sort of allergy hive reaction. There are many other mediators of inflammation. People with mast cell activation syndrome have this heightened inflammatory response to ongoing day to day environmental exposures and present with a multitude of symptoms in multiple organ systems. And they travel from doctor to doctor you know, they go to the allergist and the rheumatologist and to the neurologists, but nobody ties the systemic nature of this condition together. So, it's important again to take a thorough history and elicit whether somebody may be presenting with mast cell activation syndrome. Now, interestingly, mold exposures and Lyme disease trigger mast cell activation syndrome. So you often get a cross mapping of symptomatology.

Well, what would be your best advice for someone who suspects that they might have Lyme disease?

Well, it's a very tricky one. Because here's my experience. People often want to believe in a one diagnosis - one treatment approach when they present with complex illness. And it's really doesn't do them any favors to adopt that attitude. Yes, you may have a classic exposure and symptom profile, no question about that. But when you've got chronic illness, and chronic multi system, multi symptom exposures, and you go into a Lyme test with a naturopath or an MD, they send it to the states or even they send it to the Canadian Winnipeg group. And you come back with a positive test, it doesn't mean that the reason for your symptom profile is Lyme. Lyme may be the trigger, but you may have a whole host of underlying issues that are playing a role in your symptom profile. And one of the great tragedies that I see in my practice is people who come to see me, they've got a positive Lyme test and they've been treated for Lyme. But it's really not the key diagnosis, there are 70 other underlying factors that are far more relevant than that positive laboratory test. So, in response to your question is just be extremely discriminatory, when you jump to the diagnosis of Lyme disease as causing your symptoms, it may not be that. It may be there, you may have a positive test. But it doesn't mean that Lyme disease is at the root of it. It may be that it is. But you can't just take a positive test and treat it as if that's it. And I see that 90-95% of the time. They just go get treated for Lyme, but it's not really Lyme that's causing a symptom profile. Sometimes it is, of course it is, but you've got to discriminate.

So it's that combination of diagnostic testing and patient history,

History, history, history. If you're not taking a two-hour history with your patient, a timeline from conception to present, plus even intergenerational issues because we know that you inherit epigenetically family trauma. It is very well studied and well researched. Now, if you're not taking a thorough history, and following the timeline and symptom presentation of that patient, at least a two-hour history, you can't really discriminate on a history basis, whether this patient is suffering from one illness or 15 possible comorbid conditions. You have to take that history, then you back it up with laboratory data. The more laboratory data, the better, which unfortunately and again, with our healthcare system, that sort of privilege and that sort of luxury of a two-hour interview with extensive lab data. It doesn't exist. You have to go outside the healthcare system to get that service, you know, which is a tragedy, but it's the truth.

I couldn't agree more. Thank you so much for your time, Dr. Hoffman.

Thank you so much.

My key takeaway from that conversation was just how important it is that a doctor gets a full patient history. I know that in my case, I had a lot of symptoms and it was really confusing to understand what was going on in my body. That wraps up another podcast. Thank you so much for listening. Stay safe in the outdoors.

A Positive Outlook During the COVID-19 Outbreak

The vast majority of the world’s population that has access to any source of media outlets is currently under the collective fear-driven news cycles of an upcoming apocalypse due to the emergence and spread of the coronavirus, COVID-19.  As I write this, a CCN alert flashed across my screen stating that there were 3,000 cases of coronavirus in the United States with 62 deaths. This number was updated six hours later to 3,155 cases. No doubt by this evening, this number will be adjusted upwards, a trend that will probably increase for the foreseeable future, the exact end-point being entirely unknown.

While all due caution is absolutely imperative and all medical guidance should be strictly followed, as I stated in my other pieces regarding coronavirus, parts one and two, I couldn’t help but reflect on what appears to be an innate tendency of all living systems to trigger homeostatic mechanisms that force self-correction whenever one side of its expression become too polarized to either extreme. It appears that evolution itself has to adjust course in light of new information by self-correcting evolutionary realignments.

We know from history that disasters are often followed by tremendous gains and achievements. The extreme horrors of World War II were followed by an extraordinary period of increased economic, social, and political global growth and relatedness, rather than nationalism, which was unprecedented in history. It was the same with 9/11. Immediately following those events, murder rates plummeted, and kindness and appreciation were unleashed upon civil servants, hospitals, demolition crews, and emergency medical services. Out of control real estate, airline, and hotel prices were corrected, and there was increased dedication to global causes. The list is much more extensive but undoubtedly real, when previous issues and statistics were assessed through this lens. 

One of the greatest and most well remembered political speeches of all time was delivered at the first inauguration by Franklin D. Roosevelt as the 32nd President of the United States. At that time, the nation was at the peak of the Great Depression and the speech was heard by tens of millions of American citizens.  

“So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is...fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and of vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves, which is essential to victory. And I am convinced that you will again give that support to leadership in these critical days.”

He went on to say, “There is no unsolvable problem if we face it wisely and courageously. There are many ways in which it can be helped, but it can never be helped merely by talking about it. We must act and act quickly.”

So, while we’re currently in the grip of the downward, fear-driven spiral that’s mostly emphasizing the potential catastrophic consequences that may or may not result from CoVID-19, how can we best compensate for those fears and reflect on the potential upside of this situation? And most importantly, what can we do to mitigate this fear-driven spiral into ennui, inaction and a potential sense of hopelessness?

What follows are some compensatory ideas that are in no way meant to downplay or minimize the suffering that many people have gone through or are about to go through. However, if we’re to embrace the homeostatic principles that there are no crises without blessings and we don’t live in a one-sided world where there are only losses without gains. So, let’s examine a few potential consequences that might arise from this present situation. 

  1. Global warming. The global warming crisis seemed to be almost impossible to reign in, despite the most well-meaning attempts by a subset of global political and environmental leaders. With all kinds of global travel grinding to a halt, it’s inevitable that at least a pause to the upward tend of global warming, primarily due to the carbon footprint induced by travel, will be inevitable. When climate change experts examine this effect in months or years to come, maybe their statistics can be used to convince others of the need for a more sustained and ambitious action regarding this omnipresent threat.
  2. Exotic animal trade. China stopped the trade in wild animals for the purpose of consumption such as dogs, rodents, yaks, snakes, porcupines, and bats when the link between animals and the coronaviruses was discussed. Officials from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention said they isolated the virus taken from a seafood and wildlife market in Wuhan believed to be the source of the outbreak. The coronavirus that caused the 2003 SARS outbreak was traced to the civet cat, a wild animal considered a delicacy in parts of South China. The civet is used in the popular dragon tiger phoenix soup, which is believed by locals to help with arthritis, stimulate poor blood flow, and revive decreased libido. The movement of humans toward recognizing animals as sentient beings may be assisted, a movement initiated and kept alive by the PETA president and founder Ingrid Newkirk and written about in her best selling book, Animalkind.   
  3. Consumerism. Our western culture is an extroverted and consumer driven one. Perhaps by sitting at home for extended periods, with the stores, at least at present, bare of many types of consumer goods, we can reflect on our impulse to seek emotional consolation outside of ourselves by buying new items that we may not need. I do realize that the beast of online shopping may be unleashed but here’s hoping that the online stores may not be able transport unnecessary consumer goods due to the transport channels being slowed down. 
  4. Possibility of increased relatedness. A series of recent posts by Rebecca Arendell Franks, who along with her husband and child has now been on forced quarantine in China for over 50 days, is quite illuminating. She said that, “Our family life has never been better. Usually, one weekend is long enough before I’m ready to send each of us back to school or work. But for SEVEN weeks, we’ve been home together with very little outside influences or distraction, forced to reconnect with one another, learn how to communicate better, give each other space, slow down our pace, and be a stronger family than ever before. I encourage you to read the link regarding this at the end of this article. 
  5. Nature emerging from the technological and human encroachment upon its domain. It’s been observed in Wuhan that the sound of birds singing has been heard for the first time in a long time since the crisis began. In Wuhan, Rebecca Arendell Franks commented, “Right now, I hear birds outside my window (on the 25th floor). I used to think there weren’t really birds in Wuhan, because you rarely saw them and never heard them. I now know they were just muted and crowded out by the traffic and people. All day long now I hear birds singing. It stops me in my tracks to hear the sound of their wings.”
  6. Learning new technologies for virtual relatedness. How does ZOOM actually work and can I teach my grandfather to hook up? 
  7. Learning to cook. Maybe we can now, instead of ordering food in or going out to a restaurant, learn to cook for ourselves and make that tasty, healthy recipe that we’ve always been meaning to get around to. 
  8. Examination of our national leader’s skill set in crisis management. 
  9. Exercise. Finally, the Peloton bike or treadmill can be put to good use!
  10. Non-drug based medicine. Examination and renewed interest, along with a certain amount of respect given, of alternative methods for treating symptoms of coronavirus, and indeed other viral related illnesses such as the three studies currently underway in China on the use of IV vitamin C for the treatment of corona related pneumonia. See blog posts part one and two for further details. 
  11. Lifestyle factors. An awareness of how lifestyle factors such as diet, exercise, sleep, and stress play an extraordinary role in immune efficiency.
  12. Business awareness. Small business will become aware of cash flow issues, staffing needs, and unemployment issues.
  13. US Federal Reserve slashing interest rates. Maybe now is the time where one can afford the mortgage on a new home that seemed out of reach a few years before. Or maybe people with fixed student loan payments can borrow money at a lower rate to pay those off. 
  14. Learning to connect with others non-locally. There’s a common misconception that in order to benefit from the full experience of another human being we have to be in their physical presence. Yet if we truly love someone and see both sides, the dark and the light, of their being, we can sit quietly, hold them in our hearts, and send deep love and appreciation to them for being in our lives. It helps if we have an understanding of the Einstein-Podolsky- Rosenberg paradox (EPR paradox) in quantum physics that showed that if one particle had ever been in contact with another particle, if they were separated across the full expanse of the universe in space and time, they’d be eternally intertwined or entangled. Einstein called it “spooky action at a distance.”  

(Please note this is a very simplistic explanation for quite a complex issue.)  

A few more quick positive outlook possibilities:

  1. Increased revenues for the medical device industry.
  2. Increased revenues for the supplement industry.
  3. Increased connection to neighbours to assist with grocery runs.
  4. Appreciation for the media and their updates.
  5. Appreciation for our doctors, nurses, and miscellaneous healthcare workers and politicians for rising to the occasion and setting minute by minute guidelines
  6. Appreciation for mobile device apps, Google, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter for keeping us informed.
  7. Appreciation and understanding of our own vulnerability.
  8.  Resetting of values and personal reflection on what is truly meaningful, including a reorganization of values and priorities.  

So, as we step back, reassessing our priorities both personally and collectively, these are a few thoughts I’ve had in these troubling and somewhat frightening times. If Nobel Prize winning chemist Ilya Prigogine is to be believed, even insentient material systems have an inherent drive to self-organization. When physical systems get pushed too “far from equilibrium” they escape this chaos by leaping into higher level states of organized order, referred to as “order out of chaos”. My challenge to all of you is, what inherent dynamic force may be at play in your life, driving you toward greater and greater wholeness, complexity, and consciousness in the midst of these very challenging times? What thoughts of this nature have come to your mind in these times?

While you contemplate having a positive outlook and these deeper thoughts, stay safe, follow your governmental and health directive guidelines, and do what you need to do to get through these times. We must attempt to move beyond the greatest fear, which is that of fear itself. 

See part one and two for specific coronavirus updates and treatment suggestions. 

Preventive and Treatment Strategies for COVID-19: Part 2

Keep Fighting Fit

It’s only common sense to keep our bodies as healthy as we can to help us to fight off all kinds of illnesses. Obviously, we’re always going to encounter germs in our daily lives but keeping our immune systems in good condition is an excellent defense strategy. 

Follow these steps: 

  • Get enough sleep, ideally seven or eight hours each night. 
  • Try to reduce stress where you can in your life. 
  • Make sure you’re on a diet that contains plenty of plant-based antioxidants, minerals and vitamins and eat healthy food to keep your body and immune system in good shape. 
  • Make sure that you always get enough exercise whenever you can to keep everything in working order. 
  • Stop consuming all sugar
  • Stop smoking or vaping immediately. 

Get some N95 facemasks before supplies are gone. 

  • An N95 respirator is a respiratory protective device designed to achieve a very close facial fit and very efficient filtration of airborne particles.
  • The ‘N95’ designation means that when subjected to careful testing, the respirator blocks at least 95% of very small (0.3 micron) test particles. If properly fitted, the filtration capabilities of N95 respirators exceed those of facemasks. However, even a properly fitted N95 respirator doesn’t completely eliminate the risk of illness or death.

N95 respirators aren’t designed for children or people with facial hair. Because a proper fit cannot be achieved on children and people with facial hair, the N95 respirator may not provide full protection.

A full list of FDA approved respirators is provided below. These might already be out of stock everywhere but put orders in regardless of the backorder. 

  • 3M™ Particulate Respirator 8612F
  • Pasture Tm F550G Respirator
  • Pasture Tm A520G Respirator

Transmission through the eye is a common vector for the aerosolized virus. One of the common transmissions is touching public items then touching your face and transmitting it through the eye. Frequent hand washing and excellent hygiene are paramount.

Drug treatments

It’s important to be aware that there are at present no antiviral treatments that are effective for the treatment of Covid-19. There are currently no vaccines available for SARS-CoV-2. The present treatment approach is for supportive care and symptom management only. If people become severely ill, vital organ function support is necessary, usually in a hospital or ICU setting. 

Here’s a link to the number of drugs that as of February 2020 were being studied for the treatment of Covid 19. . 

The CDC also has a site discussing antiviral medications for the flu here

A Chinese multicenter collaboration group suggested this malaria drug might be useful for the treatment of Covid-19 pneumonia. In another recently published paper, the use of hydroxychloroquine, 400 mg twice daily followed by a maintenance dose of 200mg twice daily for four days, was found to be more potent than chloroquine to inhibit SARS-CoV2. Hydroxychloroquine was also shown to have fewer side effects than chloroquine while still addressing the inflammatory cytokine storm induced by the virus. 

The recommended dose of chloroquine phosphate was 500mg twice daily for ten days. 

This drug is traditionally is used as an antiparasitic and has been studied for the treatment of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) coronavirus. This drug has been shown, in test tube studies at least, to have activity against MERS-CoV and other coronaviruses. Further studies are being undertaken to determine its true efficacy. The recommended dose was 1000mg twice daily for 10 days.

A 62-year-old man who became Spain’s first coronavirus patient is believed to have made a full recovery after being treated with an HIV drug called Kaletra or lopinavir-ritonavir. Miguel Ángel Benítez was admitted to the Virgen del Rocio Hospital in Seville, where he received an antiretroviral drug, which has been used to treat HIV and AIDS for over ten years. The drug was combined with interferon beta, which is a protein that prevents cells from becoming infected and is administered to multiple sclerosis patients. Santiago Moreno, head of infectious diseases at the Ramón y Cajal hospital in Madrid, said that the “SARS-CoV-2 protease is very similar to that of HIV,” using a name that sometimes refers to the novel coronavirus.

In this February 2020 article it was discussed that “Coronavirus infection (regardless of the various types of corona virus) is primarily attacked by immune cells including mast cells (MCs), which are located in the submucosa of the respiratory tract and in the nasal cavity and represent a barrier of protection against microorganisms. Virus activate MCs which release early inflammatory chemical compounds including histamine and protease; while late activation provokes the generation of pro-inflammatory IL-1 family members including IL-1 and IL-33.” The article proposes for the first time that inflammation by coronavirus may be inhibited by anti-inflammatory cytokines belonging to the IL-1 family members. 

It may be that individuals with MCAS are at higher risk for developing the serious consequences of this infection and thus may benefit from much stricter control of the mast cell activation syndrome if infected. Nebulized cromolyn and/or glutathione or n-acetyl cysteine (NAC) and/or IV Benadryl may be extremely helpful in these conditions.

In addition to the previous suggestions, there are a number of natural substances and supplements that can be of help in lowering your risk of becoming infected with the current coronavirus. Many of these approaches are not specific treatments for the coronavirus but have been studied and referenced in the literature as having antiviral effects.

It’s common knowledge that vitamin C is good for us but there have been clinical trials in China regarding the intravenous use of vitamin C to help treat patients suffering from Covid-19. A dose of between 100 and 200 mg/kg body weight (this is equal to quite a low dose of between 7.5 and 15 grams for a 180 lb person) was given to patients intravenously for three consecutive days and was very effective. There are currently three clinical trials sponsored by the Chinese government studying vitamin C. Dr. Tom Levy and Dr. Jeanne Drisko from the integrative U.S. medical community are involved in the Chinese studies. Dr. Richard Cheng MD PhD, who has been studying IV vitamin C, is suggesting the use of oral vitamin C.  The one study can be found at the clinicaltrial.gov website. High dose vitamin C at 20 grams has been used in ICUs for some time in an attempt to reduce mortality from septic shock, in one study from 40% to 4%. However, most hospitals refuse to administer IV vitamin C for viral infections since it’s not considered standard of care. It’s quite likely that these Chinese studies will place high dose IV vitamin C therapy for viral infections a part of mainstream treatment in the future.   

In the United States, doctors who have pioneered vitamin and mineral therapies have also been studying the effects of intravenous vitamin C, with a February 2020 paper being published. “Early Large Dose Intravenous Vitamin C is the Treatment of Choice for 2019-nCov Infected Pneumonia” recommends this for the treatment for pneumonia resulting from the virus. 

A recommended minimum oral daily dose of vitamin C is 2,000mg. Twice daily dosing is recommended due to the water-soluble nature of vitamin C and the fact that it’s quickly metabolized. If one wants a liposomal formulation, certain brands do provide this option or you can make your own by adding https://klinghardtinstitute.com/one or two teaspoons of Body Bio PC (phosphatidyl choline) to 2 grams of powdered vitamin C and stirring it vigorously. Divide your dose and take twice daily. Watch for diarrhea if your dose is excessive.

This is also very important. It’s recommended that we have a minimum of 2,000 IU and a maximum of 10,000 IU per day. The usual daily dosage for vitamin D is 1000 IU per 25 pounds of body weight. It’s best to get vitamin D levels measured and to have serum levels in Canada between 150 and 200 nmol/l. People tend to have lower vitamin D levels in the fall and winter months due to fewer hours of sunlight. However, our bodies need vitamin D to support our immune system so we need to make sure that we’re getting enough of this vital ingredient. All the cells in our bodies have receptor sites but only two types are in every cell. These are thyroid hormone receptor sites, which are responsible for metabolism, and vitamin D receptor sides. This gives you some idea of the importance of vitamin D in maintaining our overall health and wellbeing. Research indicates that vitamin D may even be more effective than the flu vaccine when it comes to flu prevention. Consequently, it’s a good idea to include vitamin D in the fight against Covid-19.

It has been reported by many clinicians that high doses vitamin D of 50,000 IU over three days is highly effective in treating acute viral infections. This dosing is contraindicated in any person with lymphoid malignancies and in any patient with granulomatous diseases such as sarcoidosis, where high calcium levels are an issue. Also, a relative contraindication is pregnancy. This is by no means an approved treatment for Covid 19.   

This has been shown to be effective in fighting infections and also supports the immune system. Zinc can help to prevent coronavirus and other viruses multiplying in the throat and nasopharynx, which is the space above the soft palate at the back of the nose connecting the nose to the mouth and allowing us to breathe through our nose. When you begin to exhibit symptoms of the illness zinc capsules can be taken several times a day. The recommended dose for zinc is between 40 and 50mg per day.

This has also has some antibacterial and anti-viral properties. If you use an official product such as Argentyn 23 you have a clear idea of how much silver you are putting into your body and don’t run the risk of taking too much. If you have viral symptoms, the recommended dosage is one teaspoon seven times per day. However, this is only a short-term solution as there are side effects such as skin discoloration if silver is used for too long.

This herb has been used in traditional Chinese medicine and Ayurveda for a long time. It’s been shown that the herb’s compounds have anti-inflammatory, antiviral, and antioxidant benefits. The herb boosts the immune system and is often employed to fight cold and flu symptoms. As a result it does have a role to play in treating the latest version of coronavirus, at least in the short term. One capsule twice a day is the recommended dose of the herbal supplement if you exhibit symptoms of the virus. There are a number of referenced articles that demonstrate its effectiveness against the influenza virus, particularly with regards to respiratory symptoms. Lyme patients with active disease may have a Herxheimer reaction as it increases lymphocyte proliferation and interleukin -2. 

Another natural short-term solution if you have typical flu symptoms, such as a cough, sneezing, and a runny nose, is elderberry extract taken up to six times a day. Elderberries come from the European elder tree, which is not the same as the American Elder, Elderflower, or Dwarf Elder. People believe the extract helps with the common cold, influenza, boosts the immune system, and reduces inflammation.

Is also known as marigold and has been used as a medicinal herb for a very long time. The plant’s extracts have antiviral, antigenotoxic, and anti-inflammatory properties that can be used to treat some of the symptoms of Covid-19. 

Also known as dandelion, this can also be used as an anti-inflammatory supplement. Dandelion also has antioxidant properties and some studies indicate that it has antiviral benefits and is good for our immune system. 

This is known to be a potent antiviral, particularly in animal models infected with corona virus. Dr. Ramzi Asfour, an infectious disease physician, suggests Beekeeper’s Natural propolis spray. Propolis increases cellular immune responses and has antiviral properties. Propolis can also be dispensed in a vaporizer (available from Ki Science) and has been shown to neutralize circulating mycotoxins in the air. 

Most commonly known as skullcap, this is another flowering plant with medicinal qualities. It has been used to treat conditions such as respiratory infections and inflammation and have antibacterial, antiviral, and antioxidant properties. 

Also referred to as sweet wormwood this has been used in traditional medicine for some time and has been employed in medicines to treat malaria. There are some indications that the plant may also be used to treat some coronavirus symptoms, particularly the SARS related coronavirus.

Dr. Klinghardt, in his extremely informative PowerPoint presentation, has recommended placing calendula, licorice, scutalaria, andrographis, artemisia, and dandelion tinctures, calculated for their weekly dose, in a blender with 100mls of clean water and 14 grams of vitamin C powder. Add two tablespoons of liquid Body Bio PC phosphatidyl choline and blend for a few minutes. Put this mixture in a glass and keep in the fridge. Each day, drink one seventh of the dose.

This product contains 19 different herbs with antiviral and immune modulating effects, including licorice, skullcap, dandelion, and rosemary.

Some patients have access to peptides with immunomodulating effects. I recently returned from a peptide conference in Los Angeles and the following peptides were suggested for their antiviral and immune modulatory effects.         

  • Thymosin alpha 1 – This is the most recommended peptide for immune stimulation. This should be used as a treatment adjuvant and a prophylactic and can help with many conditions beyond viral illness. The recommended daily dose in 450mcg.
  • Thymosin beta 4 – Natural killer cells are essential for defense against tumors and virus-infected cells. The cells are activated in by ONF-Gamma. This is activated by IL-18, which TB4 upregulates. Therefore, TB4 has ben studied for many Immune related diseases. Caution is warranted with cancer patients as it can increase the growth of cancers.
  • LL 37 (cathelicidin) – This peptide has broad spectrum antiviral/microbial, fungal effects. Peptides such as LL 37 are key components of innate defenses against infection, with both microbial and host defense modulatory functions. In addition to their well documented bactericidal potential, CHDP have more recently been shown to have antiviral properties. LL 37 has ben shown to be highly effective in preventing viral attachment to cells. It’s been used in several virus studies and has been anecdotally reported to work well with respiratory tract viruses.
  • Pentosan polysulfate – Polysulfates are highly potent and selective inhibitors of the in vitro replication of HIV and other enveloped viruses such as coronavirus. The anti-viral activity of polysulfates is a result of their shielding of the positively charged sites in the V3 loop of the viral envelope glycoprotein gpl120, which inhibits viral entry into cells and allows for immune clearance. The usual dose is 2mg/kg.
  • Selank – This is a variant of the immune molecule tufstin and has potent antiviral properties in addition to its neurological effects. The antiviral characteristics of Selank were evaluated both in vitro and in vivo against the influenza virus strain H3N2 and H5N1 and the type 1 and 2 Herpes virus. It was revealed that Selank might have a prophylactic effect during influenza infection and a therapeutic effect during a herpes virus infection. It could also be helpful with Covid-19.

The Hoffman Centre Programs for cold and flu treatment

We have developed a number of potential programs for acute cold and flu treatment. While the details aren’t specific to coronavirus many of the recommendations are applicable to dealing with virus that commonly infect us in the winter months. These recommendations are in no way a substitute for quick and rapid communication with your healthcare providers and the guidelines as issued via websites (like this one), previously mentioned at the beginning of this article.

Any treatment that you decide to undertake should start at the first onset of symptoms. The following instructions are to be followed for the duration of symptoms unless otherwise stated. 

Immediately stop consuming any sugar, since this paralyzes your white blood cells, the body’s first defense against illness. Make sure you also get plenty of sleep, at least between 7.5 and 8.5 hours per night. Hot apple cider vinegar baths twice a day will help to speed up the progression of the cold and reduce your fever, potentially halving the amount of time you may have symptoms. Add two cups of apple cider vinegar to a full bath of hot water and soak for twenty minutes, remembering to fully submerge your body. If the illness has affected the chest, you can steam water over the stove, add eucalyptus drops, and breathe in the vapor for some relief from your symptoms.

Please note that this treatment program is not to be undertaken if you are pregnant or breastfeeding.

Adult Dosage (age 16 and up)

Oscillococcinum is the first supplement to take at the first sign of a cold or flu. This works better for flu like symptoms (not cold symptoms) and you simply need to follow the directions on the package.

  • Vitamin D – 50,000 IU for three days. Contraindication to use of high dose vitamin D is lymphoid malignancies, pregnancy, and granulomatous diseases such as sarcoidosis
  • Mycelized vitamin A – 100,000 IU for three days. Contraindicated in pregnancy. 
  • Vitamin C – 1 to 2g two to three times daily (titrate dose upward to bowel tolerance)
  • Astragalus Tincture – 1 dropper three times daily
  • Echinamide Anti-Cold tincture – 2ml three times daily
  • Probiomax probiotic – 1 capsule two times daily 
  • Saccharomyces Boulardii – 2 capsules twice daily
  • Garlic/allicin – 2 capsules three times daily after meals. Open the capsule in 6oz of water and let sit for two minutes before drinking.
  • Argentyn 23 colloidal silver  – 1 teaspoon three times daily in water
  • Andrographis – 2 dropperfuls twice daily in water
  • Transfer Factor Multi Immune – 2 capsules twice daily
  • DHEA – 50mg per day for two to three days will boost the immune system and fight infection. Note that this is for adults only.
  • For muscle aches take arnica and/or magnesium malate – 2 caps three times daily
  • Add anti-viral supplements such as olive leaf extract – 2 capsules three times daily, oil of oregano (brand name ADP) 2 capsules three times per day and lysine 500mg 2 capsules three times daily

IV Treatment for 3 days

  • IV vitamin C – 15 to 35g once per day. Check for G6PG enzyme deficiency first
  • Alternatively – IV Hydrogen Peroxide, once per day

Child Dosage (2 years and older)

  • Mycelized vitamin A – 10,000 IU for three days
  • Vitamin D – 10,000 IU for three days
  • Vitamin C – Between 250 and 500mg three times daily (to bowel tolerance)
  • Echinamide Anti-Cold – Between an third and a half a dropper three times daily 
  • Probiomax probiotic  – Half a capsule twice daily
  • Saccharomyces Boulardii – Half to a full capsule twice daily
  • Garlic – Half to a full capsule twice daily after meals. Open capsule in 6oz of water and let sit for two minutes before drinking. Note that it is difficult to get a child to take this.
  • Argentyn 23 colloidal silver – Half a teaspoon three times daily in water
  • Transfer Factor Multi Immune – 2 capsules daily

Maintenance and Prevention 

Remember to stop consuming any sugar immediately, since sugar paralyzes your white blood cells, which provide your body’s first defense against sickness. Make sure you get at least 7.5 to 8.5 hours of sleep each night as well. This treatment program is not for women that are pregnant or breastfeeding.

Throat Infection

  • Zinc – 30 to 50mg lozenges. The topical antimicrobial effect can be important in infections of the throat.
  • Biocidin throat spray – 2 sprays three to five times daily
  • Propolis throat spray – 5 sprays three times daily
  • Argentyn 23 throat spray- 3 sprays three times per day
  • See your doctor for a throat swab to exclude strep throat and/or mononucleosis

Nasal Irrigation

Use a Neti Pot, particular with upper respiratory infection, for three days. 

  • Place one dropper full of Nasya wash into your Neti Pot with warm water and a heaping quarter teaspoon of pure non-ionized Neti Pot Salt. 
  • Stir until salt is dissolved. 
  • Add three drops of Echinacea Anti Cold and Core Phyto Lavage to the solution. Use this to perform the nasal wash as directed by the Neti Pot instructions on the bottle.

Air Spray

  • Add a quarter teaspoon of salt to the bottom of an empty spray bottle. 
  • Add five drops of Thieves, an essential oil by Young Living, on top of the salt as this will help to dissipate it, 
  • Fill bottle with warm water. 

Now you now have an air spray that will assist in lowering counts of viruses, bacteria, and molds in the air. 

  • Spray your home, office, and other areas a couple of times a day. 
  • You can also put Thieves drops into your palms and cup your hands over your face then inhale five or six times. 
  • This will prevent you from contracting a sinus or lung infection, especially during long distance flights.

Dr. Alex Vasquez Recommendations

Dr. Alex Vasquez is an internationally recognized author, presenter, and teacher, particularly with regards to immune related disorders. He earned three doctorate degrees from fully accredited universities in the United States and has worked in various clinical facilities ranging from private boutique clinics to inpatient hospital settings. Dr. Vasquez has published 120 books, articles, letters and editorials in various magazines and peer-reviewed medical journals, including British Medical Journal, Journal of the American Medical Association, Nature Reviews Rheumatology, and Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

What follows are his recommendations for viral infections and are not meant to be specific treatments for any infections, particularly coronavirus. I’ve included these references for those curious patients who are always checking out protocols online.  

Antiviral

  • Powdered Glycyrrhiza Glabra – 1.5g BID for a maximum of four weeks. Works as a tea. This is a great expectorant but avoid in heart failure patients, monitor BP and potassium
  • Zinc – Between 20 and 50mg a day
  • Selenium – 400 to 600 ug per day
  • Iodoral Iodine/Iodide – 12.5mg a day for two weeks
  • Melissa officialis – Dose variable depending on formulation
  • Carica papaya leaf extract
  • Grape seed extract (see Biotics Research Bio-Cyanidins below)

Viral Anti-replication

  • SAMe – 400mg TID plus Betaine TMG 3g BID for one week
  • Methyl-Folate – 1.6mg od for one to two weeks
  • Alpha Lipoic Acid – 300 to 400mg TID plus Thiamine 100mg (or B Complex High Potency)
  • NAC – 600mg BID to TID between meals

Immunonutrition

  • Paleo-Mediterranean Diet with no refined carbohydrates 
  • Protectamin Whey Protein – 45g a day for immune dipeptides, if dairy tolerant
  • L-Glutamine powder – 9g TID between meals 
  • Vitamin A – 100,000 IU load for three to five days, then 25,000 to 50,000 IU for two weeks (not during pregnancy)
  • Vitamin D3 – 100,000 to 300,000 IU load for one dose, then 10,000 IU for ten days to increase endogenous antimicrobial peptides
  • Nordic Naturals Arctic Cod Liver Oil without vitamin D – One teaspoon TID with meals
  • Selenium – 600-800mcg/d plus 800 IU vitamin E per day
  • Melatonin – 20mg qHS
  • Ubiquinol CoQ10 – 300mg od to protect the mitochondria
  • Biotics Research KappArest – Three capsules BID as NFKB hijacked by viruses for replication
  • Biotics Research Bio-Cyanidins – One tablet BID (contains marine pine bark and grape seed extract)
  • Biotics Research UltraVir-X – One capsule TID (Red-rooted sage, Boneset, Actratylodes, Sweet Violet, Wheat Grass, Bupleurum, Astralagus, Bee Propolis, Maitake, Black Walnut, Hesperidin, Rutin)
  • Biotics Research POA-Phytolens (Cats’ Claw, Lens esculenta extract) – One capsule TID
  • Consider broad spectrum multi such as Metagenics PhytoMulti at two tablets per day (adjust dosage of Zinc and Selenium above)

Treatment and Vaccines

  • There is no vaccine currently available to combat the current coronavirus outbreak. 
  • The best advice is to protect yourself in some of the ways outlined above and avoid contact with infected individuals or locations where you might encounter potential carriers of the virus. 
  • There’s no specific antiviral treatment that’s recommended for patients with the Covid-19 virus. 
  • Those infected should receive the medical treatment required to deal with their symptoms, including care of vital organs in the most severe cases. 

In Conclusion

  • While we still don’t know everything about the current Covid-19 virus, common sense and taking precautions and preventative measures will be a great help. 
  • The feeling in the medical community is that the virus is likely to become less aggressive and less dangerous over time, as many viruses do, although this is far from certain. 
  • Many viruses adapt, mutate, and continue to live with us everyday. Time will tell if the latest threat will follow the same pattern in the coming weeks and months.

As a final note, in the current circumstances, if you’re suffering from what you’d describe as symptom similar to flu such as a cough, fever, chills, or an aching feeling in the body, please don’t visit the office. If you have an appointment we can do a phone consultation instead or even connect via zoom online. Staying at home will allow you the opportunity to recover and also reduce the likelihood that you’ll pass on the virus to others.

Resources

 Expert consensus on chloroquine phosphate for the treatment of novel coronavirus pneumonia. Zhonghua Jie He He Hu Xi Za ZHi 2020 Feb 20. 43:E019
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32150618
 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1876034116300181
https://nypost.com/2020/03/05/coronavirus-patient-in-spain-reportedly-recovers-after-being-treated-with-hiv-drug/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32013309/
https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04264533
 http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v16n11.shtml
 Epidemic Influenza and Vit D. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16959053
 https://www.argentyn23.com/
 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00705-016-3166-3
 Biol Pharm Bull. 2009 Aug; 32 (8) : 1385-91
https://www.webmd.com/vitamins/ai/ingredientmono-434/elderberry
 http://insajournal.in/insaojs/index.php/proceedings/article/view/305
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28480383
 Ferreira L, Effect of the ethanolic extract from green propolis on production of antibodies after immunization against canine parvovirus (CPV) and canine coronavirus (CCOV). Brazilian Journal of Veterinary Research and Animal Science 49.2 (2012):116-121. http://www.revistas.usp.br/bjvras/article/view/40267
Dr Horowitz newsletter 
 https://kiscience.com/product/propolair-propolis-diffuser-therapy-model/
 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211383520302999
http://www.hdbiosciences.com/Download/Identification%20of%20natural%20compounds%20with%20antiviral%20activities%20against%20SARS-associated%20coronavirus.pdf
 Antiviral Research 67, No 1 (2005): 18-23
 https://klinghardtinstitute.com/
 Courtesy of Tailor Made Pharmacy.
 https://www.inflammationmastery.com/

What You Need to Know About COVID-19: Part 1

Every day brings a new update about the spread of coronavirus. There are more cases all around the world every day and naturally people are very concerned. There’s certainly not a shortage of stories in the media but is the virus as dangerous as it’s being portrayed? And is the hysteria that’s being generated potentially more damaging than the threat posed by the virus?

In Canada, you can get the very latest updates courtesy of the federal government, including the current situation in different parts of the country, the risk to Canadians, how the government is monitoring the virus, travel advice, and the symptoms, treatment, and risk factors here.

A similar range of information is available for Alberta residents here. For those of you in the U.S. you can access pertinent information here

Mass panic is certainly not going to help the situation but neither will complacency. Despite the fear being whipped up on social media and in the traditional media reports, it’s perfectly natural to be anxious about this situation. This outbreak isn’t to be casually dismissed as it is very serious and everyone needs to accept that and not be in denial. We all need to work together to get through this. We may not know everything about the coronavirus yet and vaccines, treatment and indeed cures are still some way off, but we need to determine strategies that are going to work to protect ourselves and prevent the spread of the virus. So what exactly is coronavirus?

The Virus

Coronavirus is an illness that mostly affects our respiratory system. Doctors are still learning about the virus but it is thought to primarily be airborne, which means that it can be spread from one person to another. When a person coughs or sneezes they produce what are known as respiratory droplets. These can be breathed in by other people that are nearby or left on your hands if you touch your face after coughing or sneezing. In China, the fact that the illness seems to be mainly transmitted to family members, healthcare workers and others in close contact with an infected person strongly indicates the transfer of the virus is by respiratory droplets. The droplets can also remain on objects that have been touched, such as door handles, keyboard, elevator buttons, and many other everyday items. The virus can then spread if a person comes into contact with a surface that’s been contaminated. 

It has been suggested by recent studies that asymptomatic patients are also able to transmit the infection. This means that isolation might not be as effective a weapon against the virus as was previously thought. Researchers followed viral expression through infection through throat and nasal throat swabs in a small select group of patients. The researchers discovered that there were increases in viral loads at the point when the patients became asymptomatic. Doctors in Wuhan, China, studied 425 patients that had the virus. Many of the earliest cases were linked to direct exposure to live animal and seafood markets. However, later cases were unconnected to the animal markets, reinforcing the theory that the virus is transmitted between humans. 

There are believed to be many different types of coronavirus but only 7 of them can cause disease in humans. Some of the coronaviruses that usually affect animals are also able to infect people. The diseases Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) are also caused by coronaviruses that moved to people from animals. Like MERS and SARS, COVID-19 is believed to have originated in bats. Before the illness was brought under control in 2003, SARS infected more than 8,000 people and almost 800 died. 2,465 cases of MERS have been reported since 2012 and 850 people have died. The mortality rate for SARS was around 10%, whereas for MERS the mortality rate is around 34.5%.

The coronavirus that is currently in the news is called SARS-COV-2 (formerly called 2019-nCOV). The disease that it causes has been called Coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19). Once someone has the virus, the symptoms can be very mild but for some people they can be very serious and endanger life. Although we’re still learning about COVID-19 it does seem to be milder in its effects than SARS or MERS, with only a 2% mortality rate. Initially, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported that the worst severe cases in China were mostly in adults over 40 years old with significant comorbidities. This means that the patient has more than one chronic medical condition. The illness also seemed to affect more men than women, although this could change as the outbreak continues. As of March 12, 2020, COVID-19 had been confirmed in more than 128,343 people, mostly in China. To date 68,324 people have recovered from the infection. By this date, the virus had caused more than 4,720 deaths and has spread to more and more countries. These websites have information on the global situation that is updated regularly. Keep in mind that an estimated 291,000 to 646,000 people die worldwide from flu every year.

Symptoms of Coronavirus

A person that has Covid-19 might not show any symptoms at all for between 2 and 12.5 days, with the average time being 5.2 days. This one can easily pass it on to others without even knowing that they are infected in the early stages. The average time from infection to symptoms appears to be 12.5 days. The pandemic worldwide appears to be doubling every 7 days and every infected person appears to infect an average of 2.2 others.

Symptoms can include:

  • Fever
  • Cough
  • Breathing difficulties and shortness of breath.

While some of the symptoms are similar to colds and flu that people suffer from throughout the year, there are important differences. With the common cold we suffer from a runny nose and there is sputum or phlegm. This is the mixture of mucus and saliva that we cough up from our lungs when we get sick. With the coronavirus there’s a dry cough but no runny nose. This may occur in a small percentage of patients (4%) but it’s thought this is because they already have some form of flu or cold symptoms.

If nasal congestion does occur with this virus, it is usually very severe. If there is an associated sore throat, it can last for three or four days. The virus might then move to the trachea and lungs, resulting in pneumonia that can last for five or six days. Breathing difficulties and a high fever are also likely at this stage of the illness. People infected might have one or more other symptoms including headaches, muscle pain and stiffness, fatigue, loss of appetite, chills and sweats, a rash, dizziness, stomach upsets, or nausea. Numbers do vary but around 90-98% of people have a fever, 80% a dry cough, and 30% have trouble breathing and extreme fatigue. Acute respiratory distress syndrome developed in about 29 % of patients infected. Even though pneumonia is involved, 80% percent of these cases are mild and the person doesn’t need to go to a hospital. About 15 % had severe infection and 5 % were critical. The Chinese CDC analysis of 44,672 patients reported that the fatality rate on healthy people with no reported comorbid conditions was 0.9%.  

In general, children, younger people, and young adults seem to get mild versions of the illness. Those at the highest risk are people aged 70 to 75 or older that have existing medical conditions such as cardiac problems or pulmonary issues such as emphysema. The virus is also more likely to affect people with weakened immune systems, kidney disease, diabetes, hepatitis B, and cancer.

Protecting Yourself

There are a number of ways that you can protect yourself from being infected by the Covid-19 virus. Many of these are things should be part of our daily routines to prevent the spread of germs and keep our bodies healthy.

  • Washing your hands regularly throughout the day with soap and warm water for at least 20 seconds each time will help to keep infection at bay. 
  • All surfaces of the hands need to be cleaned, front and back, between the fingers and under the nails. You can use an alcohol-based non-toxic hand sanitizer (60% alcohol-based) if there’s no soap and water available. However, always use soap and water rather than hand sanitizer whenever possible. 
  • Always wash your hands before eating and touching your face. This is something you may have heard quite often recently, but infection can be spread via the nose, mouth, or eyes if your hands aren’t clean. Admittedly, the virus can only survive on your hands for between and ten minutes but although that may not seem long you could touch another part of your body in that time and spread the virus. 
  • Things that are frequently touched in the home, workplace or other locations must be regularly cleaned and disinfected with wipes or cleaning sprays. The virus can survive for up to twelve hours if it falls onto a metal surface. On fabric it lives for between six and twelve hours but regular laundry detergent will destroy the virus.
  • Gargling can work to protect your throat from the virus. You can use a standard solution from the drugstore but really one made from salt in warm water is all you really need. 
  • It’s also a good idea to drink plenty of warm liquids such as tea rather than cold drinks, either with or without ice. 
  • Some people have also found bee propolis mouth spray to work well. Propolis is a substance created by bees to protect their hives against bacteria. As a spray it helps to relieve a sore throat or other mouth issues and strengthens the immune systems. It also encourages antioxidants in our bodies. Antioxidants are molecules that neutralize free radicals, which are unstable molecules cause cell damage. CAUTION: Propolis is not to be taken if you have a Honey or Bee allergy.
  • If you’re showing no symptoms and remain healthy, avoid contact with others that are sick since the virus is considered to be airborne and spreads very quickly. It’s believed that the virus can travel between six and eight feet when it’s airborne. 
  • If you are sick with the virus, avoid contact with other so that you don’t help the virus to spread. Stay away from work or school and isolate yourself at home until you can recover. 
  • If you’re coughing and sneezing, try not to do this into your hands but into the crook of your arm or use a tissue to cover your nose and mouth and ensure that tissues are safely disposed of in the garbage. 
  • If you’re sick and have no choice but to go outside your home, wear a mask that covers your nose and mouth. This will stop you from infecting others while you’re out. However, bear in mind that if you don’t already have the virus a mask this will not protect you from catching the virus from an infected person that isn’t wearing a mask.

Resources

#.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMc2001737
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2001316
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMONnSecl445zOPy7-KXJKw?utm_source=Klinghardt+Institute+Newsletter&utm_campaign=72be1085f0-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_03_09_05_16_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e85a79fc40-72be1085f0-154835213&mc_cid=72be1085f0&mc_eid=980e013edf 
 https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/924268.
https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6
 https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/locations-confirmed-cases.html
http://cdc.gov/media/releases/2017p1213-flu-death-estimate.html
Li Q, Guan X, Wu P, et al. Early Transmission Dynamics in Wuhan, China of Novel Coronavirus-infected Pneumonia. N Engl. J Med. 2020 Jan 29 
 https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/about/symptoms.html

Functional Medicine Podcast: Healing Wisdom With Dr Bruce Hoffman

Dr. Bruce Hoffman joins Pandora Peoples on WOMR and WFMR radio to discuss the origins of The Hoffman Centre and the benefits of the integrative approach to functional medicine. Dr. Bruce Hoffman utilizes the ayurvedic model through a program he developed called, The Seven Stages of Health & Transformation™ that brings to light the hidden causes of what may be making you sick, and what you can do to heal yourself.

Full Transcript

00:12

You’re tuned in to 92.1 WOMAR, FM Provincetown and 91.3 WOMAR, FM Orleans, the voice and spirit of Cape Cod. I bid you welcome to another episode of Healing Wisdom. I’m your host Pandora people’s chartered herbalist and psychic medium healing wisdom explores Mind Body soul connections as we discussed the healing effects of the arts, metaphysical concepts, intuition and the spiritual aspects of everyday living. Healing wisdom begins in the heart. Our theme music is provided by mystic Pete

01:00

Hello, hello, hello, hello, Cape Cod and beyond. My guest today is functional medicine Dr. Bruce Hoffman, founder of the Hoffman Center for Integrative and Functional Medicine. His center encourages people to become involved with the process of health, restoration, self-master their health issues and make health a primary value. Dr. Hoffman has dedicated himself to research and education in cutting edge health care wellbeing and living a meaningful life. Welcome, Bruce, thank you so much for being with us.

01:28

Excellent. Thanks Pandora

01:29

So first off, what inspired you to go from an allopathic practice or a traditional practice to an integrative approach to functional medicine,

01:39

Curiosity more than anything and frustration at the drug-based model, you know, when you go to med school, you learn this is called n squared d squared, medicine = name of symptom name of drug. Although it’s interesting, it really limits your diagnostic and therapeutic options. So, when a patient presents say with complex illness, where there’s a mind -associated issue, and or environmental issue, nothing you can do with a drug based model, you know, you just diagnose a disease find a drug or refer to a specialist. And that’s it. It’s over. Whereas in an integrative model, you look far and wide for what they call in functional medicine, antecedents, mediators and triggers. So, you look upstream, you know, and in a functional model that I use functional medicine workup that I use, I’ve expanded beyond pure functional medicine into what I call the seven stages to health transformation. And I use an Ayurvedic model to explain the different layers and levels that come to the table when you’re trying to diagnose and treat somebody. Anywhere from the family systems into which they originated into the early emotional experiences and ego development and defenses, through to unresolved emotional traumas through the brain states and brain functions and then into biochemistry and toxicology. So, it’s a much broader diagnostic roadmap that we use ana a therapeutic roadmap, and I just found the drug-based model limiting. I enjoyed being a traditional MD. But now that I practice a much more expanded paradigm, it’s much more exciting and your results are tremendous when you apply this sort of wider model, you know.

03:17

Yes, indeed. So, after studying traditional Ayurvedic medicine, traditional Chinese medicine, homeopathy and looking at health care, from a mind, body, spirit perspective, I’m wondering what fundamental conclusions you’ve drawn about wellness that led you to your inspiration and the creation of the Hoffman Centre.

03:37

Wellness is a strange term because it denotes what I really try and help people with, which is to try and live in a state of maximum wellness, maximum potential. And that moves everybody from a disease-based paradigm into what we you know, what is called a wellness paradigm, but is somebody living at their maximum potential, are they fulfilling the desires of their most innate, instinctual talents and abilities, and illnesses and symptoms often sort of create a, what would the word be, they create a block in that person’s trajectory towards optimal performance of their destiny? And so, we use symptoms and diagnosis to, to sort of ask a lot more deeper questions and dive right into the potential reasons why a person may not be fulfilling their ordained destiny. And that’s what I love to do. And so that’s why I created the center to try and explore those possibilities with people and it’s very rewarding, and not everybody, somebody may just have something that’s physically based but many people with chronic illness have led many layers and levels of stressors on their systems, and the detective game of trying to diagnose and treat is what inspires me to keep doing what I love to do. 10 Center.

05:00

Very cool. I’m wondering what some of your fundamental theories that you’ve developed are as a result of your work that you could share with us or what some of your underlying ideas are, that are part of your mission.

05:18

Certain things that stand out, when I have somebody sitting in front of me with a complex illness, a) you’ve got to take into account all the basic lifestyle factors, diet, sleep, exercise, stress, if you don’t look at those in great detail and sort of dissect them into the multiple subsets, you know, like a diet, for example, there’s many different diets that you can therapeutically apply and what may fit one person may not work for the other. You have to really know your nutrition and dietary issues in great, great detail. A high histamine diet versus a ketogenic diet versus a paleo autoimmune diet versus the Ayurvedic Vata pacifying, that there’s many, many permutations, you got to know those things thoroughly. So that’s huge. And as you know, diet affects the gut microbiome. And the gut microbiome affects the vagus nerve and the vagus nerve runs into the brain. So, your brain-gut microbiome is huge. If you’re not looking at the gut-brain microbiome you can’t really work out what’s going on. So, diet is big. The gut microbiome is big.

Dentistry, I use a lot of dental insights in order to try and ascertain what may be going on particularly with people’s brains, because the inferior alveolar nerve in the lower part of the jaw runs back into the brainstem as well. So, you get a lot of toxic buildup in root canals, cavitation sites, etc, etc. So, dentistry, a lot of respect for dentistry. Everybody to get a panorex X ray and a 3D Cone Beam CT scan of the jaw, and then I send them to a biological dentist to do a complex workup and treat accordingly. So, dentistry is big. Diet is big.

Sleep, sleep, almost everybody I see has a sleep study, not one of those sleep apnea tests they take home. Do a full in-house sleep study. And I rely on that tremendous extensive can’t tell you how many people suffer ill health from sleep issues, sleep is huge. Which brings me to the whole thing of emf, electromagnetic field exposures, radio frequencies and electrical fields, magnetic fields. That has become a very dominant part of my intake history taking to see what people are doing, how much screen time, are they using blue light blocking glasses, are they turning off their routers at night? So, I take that all of that into account? Huge, huge, huge.

And then another piece that is huge in my work is I really don’t start to work with somebody unless I understand the family system into which they originated. The ancestral lineage not from a genetic but from an epigenetic perspective, what are the experiences of their mothers and fathers and grandparents? I find that is where I really begin my curiosity through taking a history. Are you in relationship with your mother or in your relationship with your father, if people say I can’t stand my mother, I can’t stand my father, I don’t want anything to do with them’ I know right then my task of healing is being brought to a halt. You can’t heal somebody who isn’t aligned with their family system in a flow of love, can’t do it. It doesn’t work. You can treat a symptom but you’re not going to help that person reach their maximum potential if they’ve shut down the influences of their parents or their ancestors, because people are half their mother, half their father, if you say no to your mother or say no to your father you are saying no to half of your life force. And that needs to be worked through. And I use family constellation therapy for that. And things like that, you know?

08:45

Yes, I was going to ask what you do for that for that situation? Because that, you know, there are a number of folks who are.  Is it family therapy?

08:57

No, it’s not family therapy, its family constellation therapy. Its different form family therapy

09:01

Can you explain that?

09:02

Well, you take a history or you ask people certain questions about their family of origin. What do you blame your mother for? What do you blame your father for? Those are the first question. And if they have a whole string of complaints that begins the diagnostic and therapeutic process. It was developed by Bert Hellinger, called family constellation therapy. He just died a few weeks ago, actually. And it’s a method of working people up through understanding the entanglement of the family system. We try to understand the laws that operate in family systems and those things that lead to good outcomes and those things that blocked the flow of energy in a family. You have to sort of study it and learn it.

09:46

Yes, it’s very, very intriguing. I’m wondering if you could just mention briefly, you described turning off your routers at night. So, these electromagnetic fields that we’re constantly in relation to in this digital age. They are really, truly bad for us.

10:03

Depends, yeah, there’s certain subtypes of people are more susceptible than others. And some work is  being done on basic detox for liver cytochrome p 450 enzymes. Liver enzyme pathways, detox pathways, people with certain liver detox enzyme susceptibilities do much worse, in terms of the electromagnetic hypersensitivities. So, when you sleep at night, you should be in a very deep parasympathetic healing state. Most people you see, particularly say in inner cities, have about two volts running through their body from the electrical fields around them. And then they have these electromagnetic radio frequency fields. This is from the cell phone towers and routers, like if you live in a condo, you’ve got everybody’s router beaming into your bed at night. And when you’re sleeping at night, you are meant to be in this very deep, relaxed state. But if you are surrounded by radio frequencies and electric fields and magnetic fields, you’re in a stress state. And that opens up the blood brain barrier, opens up the gut barrier, leads to suppression of melatonin, the whole glymphatic system or brain detox system doesn’t work, you’re in big trouble. And it’s not being emphasized enough, you know. And then with dentistry, if bite problems and grinding, you don’t detoxify through the glymphatic system and down through the, you know, through the lymphatics that go down through your internal jugular vein and other parts of your neck and thoracic region. So, you want to know these things. I send in Baubiologists or building biologists into homes to measure all of these things before I start treating people with cognitive difficulties or sleep difficulties. They go turn off routers, they help people with sleep, you know, screen time, they use blue light blocking glasses, they do all of these things. So, it’s an integral part of the work I do?

11:41

Well, that’s very exciting. I’m just wondering, I used to erase floppy disks by just touching them. So, I obviously have some sort of electromagnetic thing going on. would that mean that I would be more susceptible to energy from digital influences or to electromagnetic? Well,

12:01

I don’t know. I used to feel tingly and confused when you arrived cell phone towers. They go crazy. They can’t handle it.

12:10

Well, I used to be affected by Bluetooth. So yeah, perhaps perhaps. So environmental and lifestyle factors are considered by functional medicine doctors to be as you’ve been speaking about it very important, especially in complex situations with patients with chronic illness. So have certain input environments or lifestyle factors been linked to chronic Lyme disease.

12:31

Well, lyme disease is an immune disease, right? So, the bug gets entry if your immune system is compromised. So, you need to have reduced natural killer cells for Lyme disease to take hold. And so, to treat Lyme disease, you know, there is a whole emphasis on using whole rotating antibiotics and, and using herbs and/or pharmaceuticals to treat it. But really, it’s an immune incompetency disease. So often when you have a compromised immune system, you’ve got to look at factors that may have led to that and one of them, apart from the genetic imbalances in immune competency is stress. Stress is the greatest suppressor of the immune system. We know, people with stress they get viruses, they get colds and things; that’s the same principle, your surveillance system of our immune system gets compromised under chronic stress. And what causes chronic stress. Well take your pick, hundreds of factors cause chronic stress, it doesn’t just have to be a boss that gives you a hard time, it can be poor sleep, it can be poor diet, there’s many things that cause chronic stress. That dental infection that hasn’t been treated; they all can cause chronic stress in the body. So, for Lyme disease, the thing you got to look for is immune competency and that’s why one of the tests we do is called natural killer cell function, or CD 57. And we look at that to see if that’s suppressed. If that’s suppressed, your ability to fight Lyme disease is compromised and Lyme disease and co infections can run rampant. So, it’s just one of the things we look. There are genetic components to this as well. One researcher has done work on the genetics of people with Lyme disease, and specific markers that are upregulated. And then anything that compromises your overall resilience and homeostasis and mitochondrial resilience, anything, diet, any other factors, lack of exercise, obesity, any of them.

14:23

And if you’re tuning in just now, you’re listening to healing wisdom on WOMR 92.1 FM in Provincetown and WFM are 91.3 FM in New Orleans and streaming at Womar.org. We are speaking with Dr. Bruce Hoffman, functional medicine doctor, founder of the Hoffman Center for Integrative and Functional Medicine.

What are risk factors in Alzheimer’s? Have you seen significant improvements in patients with Alzheimer’s using integrative approaches?

14:53

Yeah, Alzheimer’s is very fascinating. I don’t know if you’re aware of the recent work that’s put out by Dale Bredesen and his group. He wrote a book called The End of Alzheimer’s. And I wrote a summary of that book on my website, there is a blog on it. Alzheimer’s is fascinating. He’s worked out that there’s six subtypes of Alzheimer’s disease and 36 biochemical pathways that need to be addressed. And he basically says that Alzheimer’s has six subtypes. The first can be anything that’s inflammatory, then anything that’s deficient is number two, anything that’s blood sugar, glucose, insulin related is number three, anything that’s toxic, like mold and heavy metals is number four, anything that’s cardiovascular related is number five, and anything that is head injury related is number six.  Those are the six subtypes of Alzheimer’s disease. And there’s many biochemical pathways that you look at when treating Alzheimer’s. So, for instance, all the deficiency issues, one of the main deficiencies in Alzheimer’s is all the hormones: growth hormone, testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, DHEA. So, we look at all of those pathways and try and repeat them, when we are treating Alzheimer’s:  inflammatory, all inflammatory chronic conditions, you know, eating an inflammatory diet, mold, illness, heavy metals, look and treat all of those issues. People with high blood sugar, high insulin, insulin resistance, treat that, that has a huge effect on people’s brains. And then a key underlying factor that seems to be very problematic if anybody has what’s called the Apoe 4/3 or 4/4 gene, that predisposes to a much higher risk later on in life of Alzheimer’s disease. We test for that gene, hopefully, you know, if you have a 3/4 or 4/4 gene, you should really increase everything you can in terms of lifestyle factors to make sure that gene doesn’t get expressed later on in life. There’s a whole website devoted to people with the Apoe4 gene, what they need to do in order to down regulate the risk? Well,

17:08

Yes, it’s interesting, because I know with my own grandmother who suffers from Alzheimer’s and my mother-in-law, and also one of my clients, it’s amazing how quickly an anti-inflammatory diet can help heal the brain. I mean, it seems like overnight, a person can have access to memories that they didn’t have before.

17:31

The other thing we do is, down regulating the gut microbiome and neuroinflammation through the vagus nerve. But we also assess all the fats. I test with the Kennedy Krieger fatty acid analysis and we look at all the Omega 3/6/9 and saturated fats and we treat very aggressively with the ketogenic diet and high fat intake, particularly something called phosphatidyl choline. Choline is one of our key nutrients to help restore brain function back to normal. In fact, the patient I saw just now had a huge deficiency in phosphatidyl choline with cognitive deficits.

18:11

Wow, can you dispel the mold myth mold illness is not an allergy, correct?

18:21

You do get IgE mold allergies, but we do not worry about that. That’s the least of one’s worries. Mold is a huge trigger of the innate immune system causing a condition called CIRS; chronic inflammatory response syndrome. And that plays havoc with your inflammatory cytokines, which then down-regulate areas in the brain, particularly the melanocyte stimulating hormone, MSH. And MSH controls many things; sleep, pain, gut function, and all the sex hormones and the diuretic hormones. So, when you get exposed to mold and you get inflamed from mold, and it appears that only 25 to 35% of people have a susceptibility to mold illness. They don’t downregulate the mycotoxins that are expressed. And they get very inflamed with consequences to their brain, consequences to their hormone’s, consequences to  mitochondrial and to oxygen delivery, sleep, gut function. Amazing. So moldy allergies is the least of our worries.  I don’t see people with mold allrgies, I see people for mold toxicity, mold inflammation. It’s a whole different subset, not taught, not understood. Respirology don’t know about it. The insurance companies certainly don’t want to know about it. It’s a huge problem. And I treat mold illness all day. Huge. Most homes are moldy.

19:46

Yes, many, many homes on Cape Cod, for example, are moldy. There’s just a ton of dampness and can you talk a little bit about mold illness?

19:55

Yeah, well, I work like as much as I work with a dentist and I work with building biologists for EMF’s, I work with mold, remediating indoor air specialists, we send people into homes to do a visual inspection. Anybody that I suspect, with mold illness, we have a questionnaire. And if people score very high on the questionnaire, we immediately suspect mold. And then we ask questions. Do you have any water damage? Do you have any damp areas? Do you have any condensation on your windows? Do you have any visible mold downstairs, or air conditioning? Have your ducts been cleaned lately, a whole bunch of questions. Then we send in the mold inspectors to go and do a good visual inspection, which takes hours. If somebody walks in with an air sample and waves it around and says you don’t have any mold in the air, run for the hills, because that’s was not a proper mold assessment. We also send people home with ERMI kits where they actually take swabs for DNA particles of mold, they take a swiffer cloth, mold samples from dust collected, or they vacuum the carpets and they collect the DNA spores and send it off to a lab to measure it. And then if they’ve got mold in their home, we assess the degree of the mold. And then we send in a remediation crew, and then we start to treat the mold illness. And there’s about 12 steps in how to treat mold illness. First step is to get out of the moldy home. Second step, bind the mold with binders like cholestyramine or charcoal or whatever. And then there’s a whole series of other steps that you do.

21:29

What are your thoughts on ozone for killing, mildew and mold?

21:33

Doesn’t work?

21:35

Oh, no.

21:38

It affects our immune system. Yes.

21:42

Mold exposure causes inflammation upregulation of the innate immune system which causes inflammation.

21:51

Yes. So I’m wondering about andropause. And why is it worth talking about? It’s not something that you know, people talk a lot about menopause, but not so much about andropause.  And I noticed that was on your website. I’d love to hear

22:06

Andropause. Yeah, it’s grumpy old men. Yeah. Men age slower than woman so they’re not as you know, andropause, it takes a year or two.   Women and perimenopause take about a year, but they notice when they start getting hot flashes and night sweats, it’s pretty quick. Men, their testosterone levels fall slower. And they don’t go into like an acute sort of jump off a cliff so to speak, it’s a slow, gradual decline, they put on weight, they get grumpy, they get depressed and they ache.  Their libido goes down, erections go down. And when you start measuring all the sex hormones, you find that they are deficient or you know, low normal. And that you know, usually in the age 50 onwards, and we measure all those hormones and treat accordingly and it can have tremendous effect when you start treating, particularly testosterone, dhea, sometimes growth hormone very seldom, melatonin, and then using thyroid hormone and adrenal support, some can make a tremendous difference to people’s wellbeing. So andropause is a real and undiagnosed, under treated condition. It is very rewarding once diagnosed and treated appropriately, you know.

23:28

Yes. Now this might seem like a strange thought. But I’m wondering if there is an evolutionary reason that people as you know, over a certain age tend to get up earlier. And earlier. And you know, if the oldest troubled sleep, maybe has, you know, if that’s really how people were living, organically naturally. I mean, I know, overall, people are dying, at much older ages, and so on and so forth. But I always wonder about this early rising business that seems to happen and be so much a part of our hormonal evolution over our lives.

24:06

You mean why older people sleep less.

24:08

Yes.

24:11

So succinctly said,

24:15

Multiple factors for that, you know, I mean, it’s definitely based on diminishing hormones, particularly, melatonin, melatonin levels go down as we age, too.  Melatonin is a major brain antioxidant. It’s also what turns on the suprachiasmic nucleus, which tells you that it’s nighttime. So, melatonin deficiency, as we age, affects the suprachiasmic nucleus and affects the ability of somebody to stay asleep for longer periods of time. There are many, many factors, but that’s just one of them.

24:53

As we go into colder months, it’s very important that we use preventative measures and make sure that we’re as healthy as we can in the fall so that going into winter, our immune systems are as strong as possible. I’m just wondering what your thoughts are on just simple things, people can start doing better to take care of themselves in the colder months?

25:14

Well, the thing that I always worried about the colder months is when people go indoors, and they shut themselves in. And so I always want you to worry about the indoor air quality, and these tightly sealed homes. So, when we not exposed to the outside sunlight, when we get sealed into our homes for six months of the year, the question is, what is the quality of your home? What is the quality of the indoor air? Are you being exposed to mold spores and mold toxins, volatile organic compounds, off gassing? That’s the thing I’m most concerned about in winter months, and many, many patients will tell you “ in October when winter comes, I get sick, I get worse, I get depressed”, or I get this or that”  a lot of it’s to do with the fact that they get sealed into their homes, and they don’t spend any time outside, you know. So that’s what I started to think about – quality of indoor and environmental indoor homes.

26:16

Okay, so we have one more minute left. So, my final, final question is just, if you could, if you could tell everyone, one or two things that would help improve most people’s lives, you know, mind body spirit, what would that thing be?

26:34

If you’re not connected with your mother and your father, if they are alive or dead, go do some work and try and reconnect yourself to their life spirit and to their love. If you’ve got a complaint about your parents,  go do your work. I really mean that.

26:57

If you cannot say yes to your mother and father for giving you life, your work is incomplete. If you are in complaint about your mother and father, you have got work to do. They gave you life, be grateful. All the rest was just an excess. It’s just the fact they gave you life that was enough. That if you’re not aligned with them, and the flow of love isn’t from you, to them to your children, you need to do your internal work to try and correct that. That’s what I say is the principle, the cardinal aspect of healing.

27:29

Thank you so much, Dr. Bruce Hoffman for joining us today on healing wisdom.

27:34

Okay, thank you very much. Thank you so much. Bye.

You’ve been listening to healing wisdom. I’m your host Pandora people’s certified chartered herbalist and psychic medium. You can find healing wisdom podcasts at Womar.org. Contact me with any feedback questions or show ideas at peachy pandora@yahoo.com. A big thanks to the Wizard of operations Matthew Dunn. Join me again next week.

The Ketogenic Diet – The Secret to Neuroprotection

Ever taken a trip to the grocery store only to forget why you went there in the first place? Or perhaps you have difficulty concentrating on something you usually enjoy, like reading a book. In either of these cases, you usually don’t feel as if your brain is working normally.

  • Maybe you’ve lost confidence in your mental abilities.mol
  • Maybe your doctor has dismissed your brain fog as a consequence of aging.
  • Maybe you’ve struggled with chronic migraines or cluster headaches for what feels like forever.
  • Maybe you’re apprehensive regarding a future that involves living with neurodegenerative disease.

Sound familiar?

Well, I’m here to tell you not to lose hope. There are ways in which conventional Western medicine is letting us all down. The idea of losing cognitive functions, your memory becoming poorer, or even not being able to recognize the faces of your family, is all pretty scary. Every 65 seconds a patient in the US develops Alzheimer’s disease and there’s no magic pill that cures it.

Fortunately, there’s another way.

As a functional and integrative doctor, I find the issue of cognitive decline to be on my mind regularly. My patients are concerned that they won’t be able to work, socialize, or enjoy hobbies for much longer. They even worry that they’ll have to give up on life.

However, I’m able to help them treat their neurodegenerative progression from the inside. By adopting the ketogenic diet for neurodegenerative diseases, you can change your life and turn back the clock. Dr. Dale Bredesen’s extensive research and treatments have shown that the effects of Alzheimer’s disease can be reversed with simple lifestyle changes. A modified version of the ketogenic diet is the backbone of Dr. Bredesen’s protocol and the science behind this is truly incredible.

The History of the Ketogenic Diet

While the ketogenic diet is currently very popular due to its fast and effective results related to weight loss, the diet actually started out as a medical therapy in the 1920s. Doctors saw that fasting was beneficial regarding controlling seizures in epileptic children, but restricting food was not a sustainable solution in the long term.

The doctors reasoned that when you fast, your levels of glucose and insulin drop and ketone bodies appear in your blood and urine. Ketone bodies indicate fat breakdown, so the doctors realized that a high-fat diet could build up levels of ketones that were sufficient enough to mimic the benefits of fasting, thus reducing their young patients’ seizures. Epileptic children who were prescribed the ketogenic diet did indeed stop seizing. However, the ketogenic diet never became a popularized form of therapy for epilepsy once anticonvulsant drugs were fully researched and then put into production.

The therapeutic effects of the ketogenic diet were only really rediscovered towards the end of the twentieth century. Many parents of epileptic children that were frustrated with the severe side effects of anticonvulsant drugs, and worried about the impact of seizures on their child’s cognitive abilities, did their research and decided that inducing ketosis was something that they’d like to try.

While the ketogenic diet isn’t the first option that medical practitioners explore when treating children with epilepsy, it has garnered more interest in the medical community as new and exciting applications have been discovered and research is increasingly being undertaken into the neuroprotective characteristics of the diet.

It’s important to realize that ketosis isn’t an unusual state for human beings. Infants are naturally in ketosis much of the time, since breast milk is high in medium chain triglycerides or MCT. We are naturally in ketosis during sleep, fasting and exercise as the body and brain have become accustomed to metabolic flexibility, shifting between glucose and ketones as fuel sources when the need arises. As human beings become more sedentary and accustomed to eating three meals a day with snacks, often well into the night, these diurnal and seasonal changes became a thing of the past.

What Neurological Disorders Does the Keto Diet Help Treat?

Following the ketogenic diet is often a game changer for patients suffering from:

  • Parkinson’s disease – Keto improved the condition of patients in a small study.
  • Traumatic brain injury – There has been success in an animal study, with potential for human application.
  • Epilepsy, Stroke, Migraine – All three conditions share similar characteristics, migraine patients are at an additional risk for stroke, and patients often deal with epilepsy and migraine together. Migraines and epilepsy share similar symptoms and often epilepsy medications are used to treat chronic migraines off-label. As the ketogenic diet has reduced the number of seizures for epileptics, chronic migraine patients have also experienced longer gaps between migraine attacks.
  • Chronic cluster headaches (CCH) – There has also been success for chronic cluster headache sufferers, suggesting that the anti-inflammatory nature of the ketogenic diet is particularly healing for CCH patients.
  • Autism – A ketogenic diet has had some success in reducing some symptoms of autism. One of the leading contributors of autism may be mitochondrial dysfunction and the ketogenic diet improves mitochondrial function.
  • Brain tumors – Many cancer patients have seen success with the ketogenic diet slowing down their tumor growth as several types of tumors require glucose and a very high carbohydrate diet. However, the ketogenic diet is not a one-size-fits-all remedy for cancer. Studies are ongoing.
  • Trigeminal Neuralgia – A study shows promise of relief for sufferers of this severe form of facial pain after adopting the keto diet.
  • Multiple Sclerosis – Research is ongoing, but there does seem to be potential for the keto diet to protect neurons from further damage.
  • Alzheimer’s disease – The ketogenic diet benefits Alzheimer’s disease patients because it combats insulin resistance, inflammation, gluten sensitivity, obesity, and leaky gut.

You’ll learn more about each of these subjects below.

The ketogenic lifestyle is also a fantastic solution for healthy individuals who wish to avoid neurodegenerative disease or cognitive dysfunction. The only good way to ensure better health when you’re older is to take action today. Even if you have the APOE4 gene, meaning that you’re more susceptible to developing Alzheimer’s, or have a formal diagnosis, you can benefit from the ketogenic diet. It’s never too late to start.

Neuroprotective and Disease-Modifying Effects of the Ketogenic Diet

There are a number of ways in which following a ketogenic diet can protect your brain and even reverse neurodegenerative disease. By severely restricting your carbohydrate intake, reducing protein, exercising regularly, and increasing your consumption of good fats, you encourage your body to look for an alternative energy source to sugars and carbohydrates. If you eat to a calorie deficit, your body begins breaking down fat stores and inducing a state known as ketosis. The brain prefers ketones to glucose as they cross the blood-brain barrier much easier since they don’t rely on transport proteins. They also produce less in the way of free radicals or oxidative damage, the key biochemical process underlying most forms of chronic disease including neuroinflammation and neurodegeneration. However, if you’re eating to maintain your existing weight, the fat is supplied purely through your diet.

The Power of the Humble Ketone

Most of your body can use the fat stores or dietary fat to power your cells. However, your brain and the central nervous system can’t access this energy in the same way. As a result, your liver breaks down the fatty acids and a by-product of this chemical process are ketones. These are your body’s alternative energy source.

Ketones are made up of acetone, acetoacetate, and beta-hydroxybutyrate.

Ketone bodies are capable of crossing the blood-brain barrier and are the only source of energy the brain can use that can replace glucose made from carbohydrates. As such, ketones can fuel up to 75% of the energy needed by your brain. The other 25% or more of your energy continues to be fueled by glucose, but it’s glucose that’s made by your body from the few carbs that you do eat and also by your protein sources.

Ketones are an amazing form of energy for your body and have a host of benefits for your metabolism and health.

Concentrating on neuroprotection, here’s a list of ketosis brain benefits:

  • Ketones are water-soluble and cross the blood-brain barrier in proportion to your blood levels. Consequently, they can compensate for an existing neurological disorder where there’s a regional brain glucose deficiency. It’s been observed that studies show reduction in glucose utilization in the Alzheimer regions of the brain in the temporal and frontal lobes long before cognition declines. This is due to insulin resistance, a concept that’s well described a little later.
  • When the cells of your body, and specifically those of your brain, convert ketones into adenosine triphosphate (ATP) via the mitochondria, ATP generation is markedly improved in mitochondria that are fed ketones. The keto diet improves the efficiency of your brain cells.
  • Ketones inhibit reproduction of the HDAC enzymes, which protect and repair the neurons that make up your double-stranded DNA. Ketones therefore have a powerful role to play in epigenetics and future research may potentially shed light on how they protect your brain.
  • The beta-hydroxybutyrate in ketones suppresses your NLRP3 inflammasome, reducing inflammation in your body. The mechanism is pivotal in the development of Alzheimer’s disease and related brain tissue damage. In animal studies, beta-hydroxybutyrate was found to suppress oxidative stress, protecting the integrity of the DNA and overall health.

What Is Insulin Resistance and Why Is It a Problem?

Normally, the insulin hormone is produced by the pancreas. Insulin joins your bloodstream to regulate the amount of glucose in your blood. In a healthy individual, when the insulin detects too much glucose in your blood, it signals muscles, tissues, and your liver to absorb the glucose.

The glucose is then converted into ATP, ready to be used as cellular energy or broken down by your liver. The levels of glucose in your bloodstream need to be controlled because they can be toxic at high levels.

When you have insulin resistance, which is often a precursor to diabetes, your body ignores or resists the insulin signal to absorb glucose. The levels of glucose build up and your pancreas creates more and more insulin in order to trigger glucose regulation.

Obviously, any condition that may lead to diabetes is a concern, but insulin resistance also has an impact on your neurological health. Sugar is a known inflammatory and inflammation can disrupt the careful balance of your blood-brain barrier.

More crucially, insulin is a signaller that aids neural cell survival. If there are high levels of insulin in your bloodstream, the amount of insulin should be reduced and your body needs several enzymes to break it down.

One enzyme called insulin-degrading enzyme (IDE) can break down insulin. However, if it’s responsible for working on an overabundance of insulin, the enzyme can’t be used to degrade amyloid beta. Amyloid beta in the brain contributes to Alzheimer’s disease.

However, if you increase your insulin sensitivity, it’s possible to reduce your chances of developing Alzheimer’s disease. Ketones also modulate your neurons by reducing glutamate toxicity and inhibiting gamma-aminobutyric acidergic (GABAergic) effects, limiting seizures if you’re epileptic.

The Mind-Gut Connection

In integrative and functional medicine approaches, it’s understood just how important the health of the gut is in relation to achieving optimal overall health. Understanding the connection between your brain and your gut microbiome is crucial to maximizing the neuroprotective conditions of the ketogenic diet. Sugar causes inflammation and can trigger conditions such as leaky gut. Eating whole foods and reducing your carbohydrates and processed food intake helps to heal your gut. Improving your gut microbiome actually improves your cognitive abilities as well

Keto Helps You Sleep Deeply

A lower-carb diet, such as the ketogenic diet, may help reduce your symptoms of sleep apnea or other sleep airway disorders. Quality of sleep and deep REM sleep are crucial for keeping your brain healthy.

An airway sleeping disorder usually results in your brain not receiving enough oxygen at night. The effect of a lack of oxygen is that your brain can’t fall into a deeper sleep and your brain is unable to perform certain neuroprotective tasks, such as autophagy where old cell components are recycled.

The recent discovery of the glymphatic system in the brain is of great interest to researchers examining neurodegenerative diseases. The glymphatic system only works while you’re asleep and removes excess fluid and waste products from the brain and spinal column tissues. Amyloid beta proteins are a form of waste in the brain that the glymphatic system deals with. Links have been established between these proteins, your cholesterol levels, and the lymphatic system in regard to neurodegenerative diseases.

The glymphatic system also delivers central building block nutrients, some of which are used in improving your cognitive functions. Unfortunately, with sleep apnoea your body is unable to undertake these functions, leading to neurodegeneration.

Ketogenic Basics: Macronutrients and Keeping Track

Macronutrients are another term for the basic food groups:

  • Protein
  • Fat
  • Carbohydrates

Both the standard American diet and calorie restrictive low-fat diet are heavily slanted toward the consumption of carbohydrates. In the ketogenic diet, the values are flipped on their head. On the keto diet, you aim for a high-fat intake, medium to low amounts of protein, and low levels of carbohydrates. A good rule of thumb is to not eat foods with a glycemic index of more than 35. Here is a link to a food glycemic index database that should be useful.

The original ketogenic diet for epileptic children focused on a 4:1 ratio, or four parts fat to one part carbohydrates and protein. However, this is at the extreme end of the ketogenic diet and is usually too difficult to attempt at home.

Generally, you should aim for your intake to be:

  • 60-75% fat
  • 15-35% protein
  • 5-10% of carbohydrates, although the lower the carbohydrates, the better.

Use a quality online ketogenic calculator to adjust your macros. This one has options for eating to maintain weight, lose weight, or gain weight.

To track whether your body is in the state of ketosis that’s creating ketones and using them as your body’s main source of energy, it’s advisable that you invest in a good ketone and glucose meter. By using it, you can keep an eye on what foods your body responds to after a meal. Tracking your ketones through beta-hydroxybutyrate levels in your blood is the most accurate way to keep tabs on whether you’re in ketosis. Unfortunately, ketone breathalyzers or keto sticks aren’t accurate enough to be reliable.

Ketogenic Neuroprotective Basics: The Diet

PLENTY OF VEGGIES AND FRUIT

Although an outsider may think the mainstream version of the ketogenic diet is mostly made up of bacon, the focus is actually on plant-based foods to promote the diet’s neuroprotective benefits. While it’s true that many vegetables contain high amounts of carbohydrates, these are usually tempered by fiber and the resistant starches that are found in complex carbohydrates.

Your body has a harder time breaking down complex carbohydrates, so they don’t raise your glycemic index so sharply. Simple carbohydrates, on the other hand, are sugars or carbohydrates that break down easily into glucose.

Here’s a guide to vegetables and fruit on a neuroprotective ketogenic food plan:

Eat frequently:

The majority of the diet should consist of organic, non-GMO, seasonal, local, colorful, deeply pigmented non-starchy vegetables with a limited amount of starchy vegetables.

Cruciferous vegetables – These contain sulfur, an important building block for production of amino acids, especially glutathione, which is the main brain antioxidant. These types of vegetables are ideally consumed after being lightly sautéed at medium heat or lightly steamed.

  • Alliums (onion family -shallots, garlic, leeks)
  • Brassicas (cabbage, broccoli, Brussel sprouts, bok choy, cauliflower)

Leafy green vegetables – These are at the top of the list for the ketogenic diet. They contain high levels of nutrients beneficial to your brain health, such as vitamins, minerals, polyphenols, carotenoids.

  • Spinach (caution if histaminic and high oxalates)
  • Kale (caution if high oxalates
  • Lettuce

Mushrooms – These contain sulfur and beta-D-glucan, which may help the reversal of cognitive decline through immune enhancing effects. There are many varieties, including Portobello, shitake, reishi, oyster, and white button mushrooms. Add them to sauces, stews, and for flavour when cooking other vegetables.

Resistant starches – The good bacteria in your gut microbiome can feast on resistant starches and fibre and they excrete short-chain fatty acids crucial for your wellbeing.

  • Rutabagas
  • Parsnips
  • Sweet potatoes
  • Green bananas

Herbs and spices – These contain antiviral and antimicrobial properties and are an essential part of a ketogenic diet. This extensive list includes ginger, turmeric, basil, bay leave, chives, cilantro cinnamon, coriander, cumin, lavender, marjoram, mint, oregano, parsley, rosemary, saffron, sage, thyme and more. Herbs and spices have been widely studied to determine their medicinal properties.

Nuts and Seeds – These are rich in vital brain protective nutrients and contain excellent sources of fat, protein, vitamins, minerals, and fibre. These should be raw, fresh, organic, and soaked if possible, thus reducing lectins and phytates. Use dry, roasted nuts where possible if you’re unable to roast them yourself. Roast at low temperatures (77-104 degrees C) while frequently turning the nuts during the process. Nuts that have already been roasted in added oils are usually rancid and oxidized, increasing the risk of inflammation. All nuts and seeds should be stored in the freezer or refrigerator to retain maximum freshness.

Eat sometimes:

Starchy vegetables

  • White potatoes (caution if high histaminic and sensitive to nightshades and not usually advised)
  • Corn (not the best food due to it being high glycemic, moldy, or GMO, amongst other issues)
  • Squash

Nightshades – These inflammatory vegetables contain solanine, a toxin that plants produce to deter animals from eating them. Solanine can stimulate the acetylcholine neurotransmitter in your brain and nervous system. For most people, this is of no concern, but for a patient facing early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, an imbalance in neurotransmitters can complicate matters.

  • Peppers (caution if high histaminic and pain syndromes)
  • Tomatoes (caution if high histaminic and pain syndromes)
  • Eggplant (caution if high histaminic and pain syndromes)

Legumes – Eat these with caution as legumes can raise glucose levels in the blood and shouldn’t be eaten in the early weeks of adopting the ketogenic diet. Depending on the severity of your insulin resistance, you may not be able to eat them.

  • Peas
  • Beans

Fruits – Small berries contain polyphenol compounds that can play a role in reducing cognitive decline:

  • Wild berries such as blueberries have been extensively studied for their antioxidant effects on brain health
  • Avocado is high in fibre, nutrients and beneficial fats
  • Olives
  • Lemons and limes (caution if high histaminic)

CONTROL YOUR PROTEIN

You may find it easy to go overboard with animal-based protein when beginning the ketogenic diet, but it’s crucial to calculate your daily allowance of protein. It’s advisable to employ the one gram of protein for each kg of your weight equation. For example, if you weigh 80kg you can consume up to 80g of protein per day.

Eating protein to excess ensures that some protein is converted to glucose, increasing the levels of insulin in your bloodstream. Think of your controlled amount of protein in the same way as when your ancestors would share a part of the communal hunting kill, only eating a small part of the animal. The rest of the time it was possible to get enough protein through plant-based food sources and this remains true today.

As much as possible, ensure that the protein you eat is organic, grass fed, grass finished, hormone and antibiotic free, and that the animals are not subjected to the stresses and toxins of concentrated feeding operations. To prevent muscle wasting, ensure weight training and weight bearing exercises are incorporated into your routine.

On a neuroprotective ketogenic diet, vegetarians need to get their protein from vegetables, nuts, seeds, tempeh, and beans. However, these are often incomplete proteins and vegetarians will need to supplement with omega-3’s, vitamin B’s, Vitamin D, and choline.

Eat frequently:

Oily fish – These are rich in Omega-3 and Omega-6 and both are excellent for brain health. Farmed fish or shrimp should be avoided. The least contaminated fish, which are smaller and don’t live as long, are known as the SMASH fish.

  • Salmon – The least contaminated are wild Alaskan and sock-eye
  • Mackerel – Fish from the United States and Canada is low in mercury, whereas King and Spanish mackerel are high in mercury
  • Anchovies
  • Sardines – Canned sardines are high in histamine and Pacific sardines are the best.
  • Herring

Free range eggs – These are full of protein and good fats, especially choline, which is a key nutrient for acetylcholine, the main neurotransmitter for memory. However, eggs can trigger a histamine response so caution may be warranted. A list of foods high in histamine and possible substitutes may be found here.

Eat sometimes:

  • Grass-fed beef – This is an acceptable occasional treat, but it’s incredibly easy to go over your protein allowance with a good steak.
  • Free-range chicken – While fantastic as part of a salad this shouldn’t be the main focus of the meal.
  • Meats are generally considered as a condiment, not as a main course.

Avoid eating:

Processed meats often contain hidden sugars, histamine, wheat, gluten, and other inflammatory ingredients.

  • Salami
  • Chorizo
  • Shaped ham
  • Bologna

Fish containing high levels of mercury, since this is known to cause cognitive decline.

  • Tuna
  • Shark
  • Swordfish

Dairy can be highly inflammatory as the lectin in dairy can irritate the gut, so dairy should be avoided as much as possible.

  • Milk
  • Cheese
  • Cream
  • Yoghurt

Alcohol is a known neurotoxicant and solvent and should be avoided, especially if you have the APOE4 gene. Alcohol will slow down fat loss in those patients that use the ketogenic diet for weight loss reasons. Many alcohol drinks such as beer, wine, cocktails, mixers, and flavoured liquors contain carbohydrates. Alcohol is ethanol, which is easily broken down into sugar.

Peanuts are a legume known to be moldy and inflammatory. If you’ve been exposed to mold, download my mold exposure guide here.

GOOD FATS VERSUS. BAD

Although the ketogenic diet is high in fat, not all fats are created equally. Developing an awareness of the different varieties of fat and what foods are good sources of fat ensures that you’ll find it easier to maintain the neuroprotective ketogenic diet in the long term.

Eat frequently:

Monounsaturated fatty acids (MFUA)

  • Avocados, avocado oil
  • Olives, extra virgin olive oil
  • Nuts and seeds, although be careful of walnuts, pecans and peanuts if high histaminic. Many nuts are also moldy
  • Walnuts have been associated with brain health but must be eaten raw. Macadamias are similarly highly desirable for maintaining brain health

Polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) that include Omega-3 and Omega-6.

  • Seed oils such as walnut oil, macadamia oil, or sesame oil
  • Cod liver oil
  • Algae
  • Chia seeds
  • Fish, nuts, and seeds

Saturated fatty acids (SFA)

  • Animal fats are great for this but can be highly reactive in histaminic patients
  • Butter from grass-fed goats, sheep, or A2 cows, although in small amounts as dairy this is an inflammatory
  • Coconut oil
  • MCT oil
  • Free range eggs

Cocoa butter and nuts

  • The fat in chocolate comes from cocoa butter and is made up of equal amounts of oleic acid, a heart-healthy monounsaturated fat also found in olive oil, stearic and palmitic acids, which are forms of saturated fat.
  • They also contain flavanols and have four times the antioxidant properties of dark chocolate.
  • Dark chocolate (over 86%), also has brain health properties.

Avoid eating:

Trans fats and synthetic hydrogenated fats result in raised low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol levels. High levels of LDL cholesterol can occur at the onset of Alzheimer’s disease in middle age.

  • Avoid all seed, grain, bean and partially hydrogenated oils such as soy, corn, canola, peanut, sunflower oil, safflower (usually adulterated with oleic acid mix), cottonseed, and palm kernel.
  • Avoid all foods processed with trans fats such as crackers, cookies, cakes, chips, microwave popcorn, frozen dinners, pizza, creamers, margarine, cool whip, and fast food.

Testing for fats

With regards to fatty acid intake, it’s best not to engage in a guessing game regarding which fats you need in what ratios. It’s advisable to conduct the Kennedy Krieger fatty acids analysis through a company called Body Bio. In this way, your exact fatty acid dietary deficiencies and excesses can be measured and managed effectively through the correct ratios of biologically active fats, either through food, cooking, or supplementation. Phosphatidyl choline is an essential fat for cardiovascular, mitochondrial, and cognitive health and the levels are best measured before embarking on an extensive therapeutic fatty acid regime.

Saturated fats and cardiovascular risk

People with the ApoE4 gene need to be cautious when using increased amounts of saturated fats, as these are known to raise LDL particle number and APOB, a lipoprotein associated with increased cardiovascular disease. Although the increased saturated fats may increase cognitive health, in the long term it may lead to increased cardiovascular risk factors that are not beneficial. Therefore, it is advised that one monitors one’s cardiovascular risk factors including but not limited to APOB, oxidised LDL, LDL particle number and size, and HDL particle number and size. Increased saturated fats are known to lower triglycerides, increase HDL, and shift LDL particle size from the smaller dangerous particle size to the more advantageous larger ‘fluffy’ type, which is known to be cardioprotective.

Cooking Methods

The way you cook your food is almost as important as the food you choose to eat. Many everyday methods of cooking food can result in advanced glycation end products (AGE). These glycotoxins are produced when there’s a reaction between protein or fat and sugars, so AGEs can instigate inflammation and are bad news for brain health.

Methods to use:

  • Vegetables prepared raw
  • Steaming
  • Boiling
  • Marinating in lemon, lime, or vinegar (caution if histaminic)

 Methods to avoid:

  • Roasting
  • Broiling
  • Frying
  • Grilling

Fats to cook with:

  • Choose oils with a high smoking point, such as avocado, coconut, ghee, and animal fat

Foods to Avoid and Why

GRAINS AND GLUTEN

Grains are dense in carbohydrates, contain lectins that are known to be associated with ‘leaky gut’, phytates, and enzyme inhibitors. Gluten is a known inflammatory agent, especially when it provokes an autoimmune inflammatory response to brain proteins such as myelin and tubulin. Foods to avoid include:

  • Wheat
  • Barley
  • Oats
  • Corn
  • Rye
  • Soy
  • Flour
  • Bread
  • Polenta
  • Pasta
  • Tortilla wraps
  • Noodles
  • Rice
  • Nachos
  • Popcorn
  • Crackers

DAIRY 

Dairy foods are inflammatory particularly as the dairy cows in the United States are A1 cows that produce a protein similar to lectin. A2 cows do not contain these lectins. Furthermore, casein and whey, the two milk proteins, are frequently cross-reactive with gluten.

SUGARY OR CARBOHYDRATE LADEN FOOD

The glycemic index is too high with these types of foods:

  • Agave
  • Alcohol
  • Cane sugar
  • Candy
  • Cookies
  • Cake
  • Dessert
  • Fries
  • Fruit juices
  • High fructose corn syrup
  • Honey
  • Ice cream
  • Maple syrup
  • Pastries
  • Pizza
  • Potato chips
  • Soda
  • Anything containing sugar
PROCESSED FOODS 

  • Microwave dinners
  • Convenience food
  • Anything out of a packet

FRUIT WITH HIGH GLYCEMIC INDEX

  • Melon
  • Pineapple
  • Yellow bananas
  • Grapes
  • Cherries
  • Apricots
  • Mango

Food Intolerances and allergies – All patients that are using the ketogenic diet for cognitive health should be extensively tested for food sensitivities, gut ecology and permeability, leaky blood brain, and antibodies to brain proteins (detected using Cyrex labs 2, 10x, 12 and 20).

Different Ketogenic Diets 

STANDARD KETOGENIC DIET (SKD)

This diet is typically recommended for most people and is very effective. The diet focuses on high consumption of:

  • Healthy fats (70% of your diet)
  • Moderate protein (25% of your diet)
  • Very little carbohydrates (5% of your diet)

Keep in mind that there’s no set limit to the fat because energy requirements vary from person to person, depending on their daily physical activities. The majority of your calories still need to come from fats and you still need to limit your consumption of carbohydrates and protein for your diet to become a standard ketogenic one.

TARGETED KETOGENIC DIET (TKD)

This is generally geared towards fitness enthusiasts. In this approach, you eat the entirety of your allocated carbohydrates for the day in one meal, around 30 to 60 minutes before engaging in exercise.

With this diet the idea is to use the energy provided by the carbohydrates effectively before it disrupts ketosis. You eat carbs that are easily digestible with a high glycemic index to avoid upsetting your stomach. When you’re done exercising, increase your intake of protein to help with muscle recovery then continue consuming your fats afterward.

CYCLIC KETOGENIC DIET (CKD)

This one is generally focused more on athletes and body builders

Cycling between a normal ketogenic diet, followed by a set number of days of high carbohydrate consumption, also known as “carbo-loading”

The diet takes advantage of the carbohydrates to replenish the glycogen lost from your muscles during athletic activity or working out. This usually consists of five days of SKD, followed by two days of carb-loading. During the ketogenic cycle, carbohydrate consumption is around 50 grams, but when you reach the carb-loading cycle, the amount jumps to 450-600 grams.

This method isn’t recommended for people that don’t have a high rate of physical activity.

HIGH-PROTEIN KETOGENIC DIET

This method is a variant of SKD, in which you increase the ratio of protein consumption to 10% and reduce your healthy fat consumption by 10%. In a study involving obese men that tried this method, researchers noted that it helped reduce their hunger and lowered their food intake significantly, resulting in weight loss.

If you’re overweight or obese, this diet may help you initially, before you can transition to SKD after you normalize your weight.

RESTRICTED KETOGENIC DIET

As mentioned earlier, ketogenic diet can be an effective weapon against cancer. For this method to be effective, you need to be on a restricted ketogenic diet. By restricting your carbohydrate and calorie intake, your body loses glycogen and starts producing the ketones that your healthy cells can use as energy. Cancer cells are unable to use these ketones and starve to death.

Meal Examples

1st Meal

  • 4 to 5 cups of organic vegetables
  • Some limited starchy vegetables, such as sweet potato
  • One or two pasteurized eggs, lightly cooked or poached
  • Olive oil, MCT oil, or ghee as a dip for the vegetables
  • Use of spices, herbs, and sea salt for flavouring

2nd Meal

  • Organic, seasonal vegetables, either as a salad or lightly steamed
  • Small serving of fish or chicken
  • Healthy fats such as avocado, olives, nuts or seeds, and/or olive oil
  • Seasonings such as herbs, spices, and sea salt

Snack example

  • Coconut yoghurt or coconut milk kefir
  • Blueberries
  • Walnuts, almonds, or macadamias
  • Cocoa nibs
  • Coconut flakes
  • Stevia

Shake example

  • 2 tablespoons of Body Bio phosphatidyl choline
  • 1 tablespoon of Body Bio balanced oil
  • 1 tablespoon of MCT oil
  • 1 scoop of amino acid powder
  • Lions mane, turmeric, and /or mushroom powder
  • Stevia and vanilla to add flavour

Please note that the above ratios would be determined based on a fatty acid test

Neuroprotective Keto: Fasting and Exercising

Fasting and exercising aren’t optional when undergoing the ketogenic diet for neuroprotection. The good news is that neither has to be conducted to the extreme on order to get results.

Fasting is an effective way to stimulate ketogenesis, the process that produces ketones. Fasting also enables autophagy, as discussed above in the section about sleeping. Autophagy is an advantageous function that removes damaged proteins from the brain, protecting it from a dangerous build-up. Fasting has also been shown to have a number of other health benefits, including improved cardiovascular health, reduced cancer risk, increasing longevity (by increasing the sirtuin gene) and repairing damaged DNA.

Here are the easiest ways to incorporate fasting into your daily routine, without feeling like you’re missing out or that you’re going to be hungry:

  • Fast between the end of your dinner and your breakfast the next day. Aim for twelve hours without snacking. Individuals with the APOE4 gene may need to increase the fasting state for sixteen hours.
  • Make sure you eat your evening meal early so that you have a minimum of three to four hours between your evening meal and going to sleep.
  • Your body’s calorie burning clock is most effective in the morning and least effective at night. You don’t need food for energy at night so by eating less at that time you induce a fat burning state that helps prepare your body for detoxification and repair.
  • Water, black tea, or coffee are all allowed during the fast, particularly in the early morning. Stevia may be used as a sweetener

Remember that once you are fully in ketosis you won’t experience hunger pangs in the same way. In fact, you may be able to go even longer between meals.

Exercise is crucial for neuroprotection as it helps reduce insulin resistance, aids ketosis, and reduces stress. A combination of aerobic exercise and weight training can improve your sleep at night via vascular function in your brain and protect the hippocampus, which can often shrink in those suffering with Alzheimer’s disease. Start slowly and build your way up to a full program of activity.

Individuals with insulin resistance may have a harder time inducing ketosis and may suffer from carbohydrate cravings. Ask your doctor to measure your insulin, fasting glucose, and hemoglobin A1c levels. HbA1c is a measurement of your average glucose levels over three months. Using high dose medium chain triglyceride fats (MCT) or coconut fats assists in helping you overcome sugar cravings and glycotoxicity. One has to increase these fats slowly and use fat digesting enzymes containing lipase and emulsification aids such as ox-bile to initially assist in the increased fat load. Another way to combat the initial sugar cravings is to increase fats in your diet such as nuts and seeds, avocado, or non-starchy vegetables cooked in ghee, coconut, or avocado oil.

Neuroprotective Keto: Supplementation

As mentioned above in the section about the mind-gut connection, your brain and gut have a special relationship. In order to achieve neuroprotection, it’s necessary to heal your gut by encouraging your good bacteria to take charge. The best way to improve your gut microbiome is to take probiotics and prebiotics.

Probiotics contain the good bacteria that are able to take carbohydrates and convert them into lactic acid, which suppresses your bad bacteria. Probiotic should be used with caution if histaminic but include:

  • Kombucha
  • Miso
  • Pickled vegetables
  • Yogurt (unsweetened)
  • Kefir from coconut
  • Kimchi
  • Sauerkraut
  • Tempeh

Prebiotics comprise food that’s indigestible for you, but it can be digested in your colon by your good bacteria. The bacteria break probiotics down into materials that aid the maintenance of your gut. Many of the resistant starches and fibrous plants listed above count as prebiotics.

Here are a few further examples of prebiotic supplements:

  • Organic psyllium seed husks
  • Plantain
  • Green banana starch
  • Inulin
  • Acacia fibre

When you begin the ketogenic diet it takes a few days to achieve ketosis. In the meantime, you may experience some side effects, often referred to as ‘keto-flu’ by some people. With this condition, patients often experience:

  • Feeling run down
  • Brain fog
  • Headaches
  • Fatigue
  • Abdominal pain
  • Constipation
  • Diarrhea
  • Poor mood
  • Muscle cramps

All of these symptoms are perfectly normal, considering that you’re detoxing from sugar, training your body to run off ketones, and often experiencing the loss of electrolytes and dehydration. However, there are ways to combat this as follows:

  • Caffeine dehydrates you so you need to drink plenty of water to reduce dehydration symptoms, such as fatigue or headaches.
  • While iodized table salt is usually considered something that’s best avoided, increasing your intake of high mineral sea salt improves your water retention and replenishes your salt levels.
  • Supplement with magnesium in liquid form and foods rich in potassium, such as avocado, nuts, mushrooms, leafy salads, and bone broth.

You’ll discover that following the ketogenic diet is extremely rewarding because you’ll begin to feel some benefits within weeks. However, it may take at least six months to begin to feel the full advantages when attempting to reverse cognitive decline. The ketogenic diet tweaked to improve neuroprotection is a powerful tool in your quest for optimal health. Too often we treat the symptoms of disease when we could have headed off the condition years or decades earlier. Your body is amazing and can reverse the impact of poor diet, stress, and sometimes even genetics if you make the necessary changes.

What do you have to lose? Schedule an appointment at the Hoffman Centre For Integrative and Functional Medicine and get started with the ketogenic diet today.

Resources:

  1. https://www.alz.org/alzheimers-dementia/facts-figures
  2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25324467
  3. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2367001/
  4. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29359959
  5. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11936-013-0236-7
  6. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28527061
  7. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4759386/
  8. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4074854/
  9. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5110522/
  10. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5816269/
  11. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4709725/
  12. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3044446/
  13. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4937039/
  14. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14769489
  15. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4937039/
  16. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24140022
  17. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29697540
  18. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25686106
  19. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3193914/
  20. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23223453
  21. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5671587/
  22. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16266773
  23. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28372330
  24. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5559698/
  25. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29361967
  26. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2647148/
  27. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28466758
  28. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5347443/
  29. https://www.glycemicindex.com/foodSearch.php
  30. https://keto-calculator.ankerl.com/
  31. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3372091/
  32. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3211071/
  33. http://www.pnas.org/content/108/7/3017
  34. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2821835/
  35. Mercola A Beginner’s Guide to the Ketogenic Diet: An Effective Way of Optimizing Your Health
  36. https://www.apollohealthco.com/dr-bredesen/ Dr Bredesen’s ReCODE Report Nutritional Guidelines Ketoflex 12/3
  37. https://bodybio.com/
  38. Organic Creamed Coconut
  39. Quality Nuts and Seeds  – www.ranchovignola.com and https://nuts.com/nuts/pili
  40. Quality Olive Oil – www.rawelements.ca
  41. Nut pods unsweetened coffee creamer – www.naturamarket.ca
  42. MCT emulsified coffee creamer – www.onnit.com
  43. Exogenous ketone powder – www.perfectketo.com (salted chocolate caramel flavor is best)
  44. Ketone and glucose meter – www.keto-mojo.com
  45. Humanly raised Certified organic beef, pork, turkey, chicken, and eggs https://www.sunworksfarm.com/certified-organic-beef/     (Bush Lane Organics/ Community Natural Foods/ Amaranth Whole Foods/ Planet Organics-chicken & eggs mainly, other meats can be ordered). Also TK Ranch meats at https://tkranch.com/

Depression, SSRIs and Self-Advocacy

Depression

A recent study has concluded that SSRIs, when treating for major depressive disorder, are not that much better than placebo. Depression as a symptom and as a formal diagnosis, is too simple a label to attribute to a person who feels and experiences life without joy or pleasure and who may have real physiological changes that render his/her life unpleasant, if not unbearable. By attributing a diagnosis to a person such as “depression,” the patient and the diagnosis become frozen in time and separated from all possible antecedents, mediators and triggers. All further enquiry into the timeline of causation comes to an end and the patient (and the doctor) now objectify and identify with the diagnosis, as if some foreign entity, called “depression” just mysteriously fell out of the sky.  Add to this scenario the fact that ones entire medical school training is not aimed to enquire as to upstream causation. In the truest N2D2 tradition of medicine (name of disease, name of drug), we are trained to thread together a constellation of symptoms, arrive at a diagnosis and prescribe a treatment1; all under the 15 minute timeline and the approximately $40.00 fee that the Canadian health care system provides for a consultation. It does not take much to deduce that this is a hopelessly inadequate scenario and not one to foist onto ones worst enemy.

Depression, as a diagnosis, has a litany of possible antecedents (ancestral and genetic predispositions and inheritances), triggers (events that trigger the manifestation of the constellation of symptoms that coalesce to form a diagnosis) and mediators (lifestyle events and behaviours – diet, sleep, food, stress, exercise – that continue to contribute to the diagnosis). From ancestral trauma (that we now know to be epigenetically inherited), to early conception and birth trauma, to adverse childhood experiences and complex trauma, to head injuries, to genetic weaknesses in detoxification and methylation (creating scenarios of over and undermethylation) nutritional and hormonal inadequacies, to toxic insults such as mercury, lead, copper toxicity, mold, Lyme disease and co-infections, to sleep apnoea, to relationship struggles, workplace difficulties, transition from first half of life ego demands to second half of life soul demands; the list is long and complex.

Self-Advocacy

Unless doctors/healers of the future are trained in a new paradigm (Functional Medicine is putting up a valiant effort to educate future health care providers in this methodology), have sufficient life experience and have spent a large portion of their learning years investigating and researching the multiple layers and levels of complexity (7 Stages to Health and Transformation) that may contribute to the origins and continuations of  symptom or disease processes, you, as a health care consumer, will always be at the mercy of their experience (or inexperience) along this continuum. That is why it is imperative that all patients, as much as they can muster the lifeforce to do so, become advocates of their own health and treatment protocols. Patient self-advocacy, combined with a serious intent to do what it takes to get well, is always at the root of successful health outcomes. Or, if faced with a depressive illness or episode, we can hand over all power to the physician/healer we have consulted, take an antidepressant and hope for the best. Your choice.

Resources

  1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28178949