Note: The text below is a transcription from the video above. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.
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Looking for so, if you are looking for chronic fatigue syndrome or for those of you who have been around for a much longer time and have been diagnosed with something called see, fids, which is the same thing then uh, then this is what we’re going to talk About for the next hour, so i’m Dr Martin Rutherford – i am a chiropractor since 1980, here in Reno.
I, but more importantly to this conversation i am a certified functional medicine practitioner and the largest part of my practice is dealing with chronic pain syndrome. I work together in a partnership on virtually all these cases with dr gates.
In fact, he does most of the hands-on work. These days, um dr gates want to introduce yourself. I am a chiropractor and a board-certified chiropractic neurologist and the importance of those of us emphasizing those two uh postgraduate certifications and and diplomates that we have is that we found out quite some time ago and and never has this been more applicable than to chronic fatigue.
That it’s all one body and when i first started to struggle with um uh several of these chronic issues. I i have, as many of you heard already, i’ve been diagnosed and confirmed as having peripheral, neuropathy and chronic fatigue and celiac and hashimoto’s um and um fibromyalgia.
Actually, remember them all, but the chronic fatigue. One is interesting because uh chronic fatigue is kind of the more vagus of all the things that we seem to treat because it is a multi-factorial problem, in other words, in english, it’s just a mishmash of a bunch of things and what we started out with in This clinic was dealing with fibromyalgia, specifically because that’s what i had that’s what was causing me most of my pain.
That’S what most people didn’t understand that what was going on and it was in my head – and it was this and it was – you know, go pull up your bootstraps or today it’s your big boy, pants or whatever, and – and i knew what i was feeling and So doing that research, we had no idea that we were ultimately going to have to become conversant in essentially the entire body, all at once.
Dr gates works with the brain and he works globally and specifically and completely with the brain. Why? The brain? Well, because the brain has a lot to do with a lot of these chronic problems, including chronic fatigue.
We started out in these situ in these types of conditions, working strictly neurologically with the brain and getting some pretty at the time. Spectacular results compared to what was going on out there um and then uh.
One of my colleagues alerted me to the fact that there was something called functional medicine on the horizon and sent me to um, who i consider one of my all-time mentors. Even though i haven’t talked to him in three years now, uh dr uh detection in uh in san diego, and he was talking about all of the things that you’re seeing coming out now with the gluten.
It’S got lung for anybody ever heard about it even even knew what gluten was and um and because i have a somewhat of a background in human anatomy and biochemistry i got to embrace that and – and it made a lot of sense to me – that none of These diseases, particularly what we’re going to talk about today, is one entity.
It’S not epstein-barr virus and trust me. We know because the guy right up the hill here is the guy who discovered epstein-barr, we’re in reno up the hill is uh lake, tahoe and and and a doctor up there who first promoted epstein-barr virus as the cause for what was then called sea fids, um And uh and uh now it’s just referred to as and i’m not going to get into the definition of that because now it’s referred to as chronic fatigue and, frankly, as dr gates and i were discussing yesterday when, when you’re in college and you’re studying pathology, i Mean you have this big thick book like this with every disease, knowing the man and it tells you what the disease is and how it’s going uh what what? What the cause, what the causes are, which is not always correct, but uh, and then they tell and then they go into.
Okay, here’s how your diagnosis! Here’S! What the symptoms are! Every disease in that book, i guarantee you has as the first symptom fatigue everyone. So, as we were talking about yesterday, it seems to be a if people come into us with chronic fatigue.
They have a multitude of issues which are just trashing their ability to create any energy. That’S essentially what we’re going to talk about today, but that’s also why our our team, here, our cooperation in having dr gates, who is certainly conversing in functional medicine, but primarily understands the brains, um uh potential, uh, uh contribution to your chronic fatigue problem and then having Myself, also, along with dealing with all of the things that you’re confused about, is it this.
Is it my god? Is it my thyroid? Is it my adrenals is a vitamin d deficiency? Is it what you know those types of things as we’re going to talk about the answer to that is yes, but the answer to that is not the same thing for all of you.
In fact, we could have a hundred of you come in of patients who come up with chronic fatigue, and they can either be greatly or uh or just minutely different in one aspect of how that person needs to be treated and uh and – and you all be Diagnosed with chronic fatigue, so i think that kind of sets the stage for who we are why we think we know a little bit about this main reason.
We think we know a little bit about this is because we’ve been treating it for a long time. We’Ve treated a lot of patients with this and and and actually our success rate went from not being real crazy about uh, taking care of chronic fatigue.
If you remember, everybody’s chronic fatigue, they’re heavy to now we’re pretty like okay, let’s bring it on, let’s bring in the product, because now we’re pretty certain at what we’re looking for and that – and it just took time to to kind of figure that out and see What actually was the whole lay of the land and so on and so forth, so um? So let me not talk for the entire hour here um.
You want to go on with a little bit of things that we were talking about, and the different aspects of chronic fatigue dr gates, has once again done. A lot of research pulled up a number of research patients, uh papers that uh that kind of back up.
What we’re going to be saying and maybe even at times have contributed to our decisions on how to proceed in treating various patients. Our our motto is: treat the patient and not the diagnosis in this office.
Aside from the results speak for themselves, but the more important motto is treat the patient and not the diagnosis and over the next, probably 50 minutes or so you’re going to you’ll you’ll come to understand why that is such an important motto to maintain and stick to.
As we’re going through our daily routines, so yeah – and we were talking about how a lot of medical doctors won’t even acknowledge chronic fatigue as a diagnosis and dr ruth and i were discussing as a legitimate diagnosis yeah, we were discussing how there were these articles on The pubmed database, where they were talking about this forum that was composed in england, where they were discussing chronic fatigue and they actually didn’t release their conclusions because there was actually what appeared to be a fight between two of the members within this forum.
And an apology was written, i believe, in the journal of internal medicine in 2013 by one of the members saying that you’re sorry, for you know the personal tax made, and i only go on that tangent to for the purpose of the chronic fatigue patient.
Knowing what they’re up against so his personal attack was against the people who said there is chronic fatigue and he’s saying, like i believe they made a personal attack against him. He made a personal attack against them.
Chronic fatigue exists, they were saying it doesn’t exist right. Dr rutherford and i know many medical doctors, we’re friends with medical doctors who really don’t think that chronic fatigue exists and we go toe-to-toe with them.
But it’s not a commonly accepted diagnosis. I read another article out of i think it was endocrinology. I can’t remember what year where they’re saying how so many endocrinologists are presented with patients who come to them with this complaint of fatigue, their fatigue? They don’t know why and the endocrinologist runs the standard laboratory, testing for diabetes and hypothyroidism and addison’s disease, which is a disease of the adrenal glands and lots of times.
It comes back normal and they said well. We need to keep doing this, but we still don’t know what’s going on with these fatigued patients, however, there is a plethora of data that is talking about what could be wrong with someone with fatigue kind of like what dr rutherford alluded to.
It’S not one thing. It’S probably 20 things and before i get into that, there’s also this thing encephalomyelitis and they’ll commonly say chronic fatigue, slash myalgic encephalomyelitis. Let me tell you that is a touchy diagnosis with a lot of neurologists because lots of times myalgic encephalomyelitis patients will have kind of ms symptoms, but they’ll also have fatigue and it’s really huge.
It means muscle pain, mm-hmm inflammation of your brain, but it’s highly controversial. It’S something that’s talked about in the alternative literature, but not in the mainstream. Allopathic literature uh very much.
But the alternative literature has been able to come to understand that it’s there because of mris – and i don’t know that not necessarily for myalgic encephalomyelitis, okay and there’s kind of some some underlying theories as to why it’s happening infectious-wise, it seems to occur on military bases.
Things like that that i’m not going to go into okay but um, don’t want to get controversial, exactly we’re not going to get controversial. So so that’s what the chronic fatigue patient is up against and that’s why we see a lot of these people and you know we’re seeing some pretty neat things with chronic fatigue.
Patients. Let’S just start, let’s start with thyroids, but what you’re up against is it’s not one thing? It’S not even close to one thing: it’s accumulation of different systems in the body that are breaking down for a variety of different uh causes and reasons we’re probably not going to even come close to being able to discuss them all, but we’ll probably hit the ones That are there probably 80 yeah, the big percent of the time or more and and and the rest, maybe we’ll do little vignettes on here and there, but i think that’s the main thing to understand is you’re not crazy.
If you’re fibromyalgia and you’ve been diagnosed as chronic fatigue, they’re almost one in the same except fibromyalgia, patient has a few other things going on. True that the pure chronic fatigue patient doesn’t have going on we’ll probably touch on that before this is before this is over and so um just to try to clarify some things so um watch i seem to have interrupted.
Someone should go ahead. Oh we’re good! This is perfect, so thyroid, let’s start with thyroid, so, okay, so we’re going to start with all the things that contribute to chronic fatigue syndrome, patients as they have been diagnosed or have, as have diagnosed themselves, often better over the internet when they have come to our Office and said i have one yesterday who essentially that’s what happened, who um, who diagnosed themselves with chronic fatigue in the consults that i do, that we do that.
I do before we try to determine whether the patient is appropriate for the program um. I hear a lot of things and and and that are consistent, we’ll try to answer those, but i i tell people the big things we’re going to be looking for is thyroid blood, sugar, adrenal and gut problems.
That’S not everything, but within the framework of that, that’s that’s, usually, that’s, usually a good core to start with, with the um with the chronic fatigue patient. So i am going to defer to dr gates, as he is about to start with, probably one of the biggest issues.
That’S involved, i think, has been involved with virtually every fibromyalgia patient that has walked in this door, and certainly i i think we could say close to that with with the chronic fatigue patients absolutely i’ll defer to you on that so relative to thyroid.
Most of you have had your thyroid tested now. What does that mean? That means that they have tested a chemical called tsh that comes from the brain to the thyroid, telling the thyroid to work. If the thyroid is not able to make thyroid hormone lots of times, tsh will go up.
That is standard medical practice. Now, if you’re lucky, maybe you’ve had a t4 test as well. T4 is the inactive thyroid hormone that is produced by the thyroid gland and that t4 has to circulate throughout the body and be converted to t3, which is active, thyroid hormone now, wouldn’t they get a t4 standardly because commonly a general practitioner is only going to do A screening test and that’s the tsh and most medical textbooks say just do a tsh.
Maybe do a t4. You really don’t need to do anything beyond that. I mean that is from the textbook. We’Ve had patients who have referred back to their doctors for certain conditions and the doctors even pulled out the textbook saying you know this is what we’re taught.
This is what we’re showing and that’s not meant as a denigration to any allopathic professionals out there. Trust me we’re not anti-medicine, we say it every week with great respect, but we’re talking about a different paradigm here, plus they’re working a little restricted.
Sometimes the insurance companies are a little bit on their back to keep testing to a minimum. Exactly. Those are the two reasons you may not have gotten tested because we’re asked this regularly. So i i think these are important points to bring out since we hear these questions, if not daily, at least weekly, so it’s a different paradigm, and so so you’ve had your tsh and t4 tested now for i’m pedantic in these conversations, just because i know some Of you are saying: well, why do these guys know what they know and where they’re getting their information so in the journal thyroid 2011? For some reason it didn’t get sent to my email.
They had a great study where they talked about something of hashimoto’s, which i’ll explain and thyroid patients, and how basically hashimoto’s is where the immune system will kill the thyroid, but many times the thyroid test, meaning your tsh and your t4 won’t be abnormal for some length Of time, but they talked about how many hashimoto’s patients are extremely fatigued now get.
This 10 percent of the population is now being shown to have hashimoto’s thyroiditis. We talked about those research articles in our hangout on the thyroid. If you want that those references, so ten percent of the population has hashimoto’s thyroiditis you’re out there with chronic according to the study, according to estates you’re out there with fatigue, but your thyroid tests are normal and your doctor is saying you don’t have a thyroid problem.
Just consider that there is a possibility that your immune system is killing your thyroid. That’S one possibility, and the reason i’m going to interrupt here is i didn’t say that to say that the testing world in the in the study world is perfect, because it’s far from perfect, i think we all know, but in our clinical practice, which is very attuned To autoimmune problems because a lot of these chronic problems, a lot of these chronic conditions have autoimmune problems as a as a uh.
As a component, significant component uh, we’ve seen probably up to 90 percent of our thyroid patients, who have come in here, who have been either diagnosed as a hypothyroid and not responded to care they’re taking their medication.
And it’s not getting better and they don’t know whether it’s helping out up to 90 percent of them have had hashimoto’s and labcorp did put out a uh kind of uh a bulletin. If you will, what is it yeah as long as five years ago? No, it was uh, it was two and a half years, two and a half years.
That’S why we’re a good team, two and a half years ago to all doctors, saying that if you have a patient that has hypothyroid has been diagnosed with hypothyroid according to their tsh and our t4 check them for hashimoto’s, because there’s about a 95 probability, that’s lab Core, okay and everybody knows what lab core is.
So i just want to make that clear, because you’re looking for real information here, okay and the studies, they kind of approach, these things kind of gingerly – they don’t want to shake up the world all at once.
But when you come in here and you need or you go somewhere and you and you’re trying to get better, we need to deal with the realities of what it is as opposed to maybe what the what what the study said.
But that was a big breakthrough for us that they even acknowledged yeah. It was a really nice piece of data. So then, let’s talk about thyroid conversion, so let’s say somebody has hypothyroidism and they’re being treated with thyroid medication, which is usually a derivative that will increase the inactive thyroid hormone in the body synthroid with rocks and one of those two um.
But that’s inactive thyroid hormone and basically they’re banking on the fact that the person will convert that inactive thyroid hormone to active thyroid hormone. Now, if that being said as well, we see patients very commonly who are on thyroid replacement, who are still fatigued, and you have to ask the question: why are they still fatigued? Is it possibly related to the thyroid, and at this point that’s another good point? We’Re probably doing this probably a little bit late at this, but the reason that we’re taking thyroid first is because thyroid controls.
What a lot pretty much everything and it controls your energy yeah, no energy fatigue. It controls your temperature. It controls way more than that. But if you’re chronically fatigued i mean – and you know anything about physiology – the first thing you should be looking at semi-thyroid if their heat is off cold yeah.
If your basal temperature is 96.7 yeah, you should be looking at thyroid, because i mean that’s where you’re going to get the most success in the first part of time, dr gates is going over the intricacies of thyroid versus how thyroids being treated at this moment based On a medical model that has just been forced on the doctors and um, and a lot of you have priority experience that so and so, if you have chronic fatigue out there, what we’re getting at is you probably need to have your t3 tested as well? So not only your t4 but your t3, and you have to look at the conversion of t4 to t3 many times t4 will be at the high end of the range for somebody which is inactive, which is inactive, t4, doesn’t do anything, and so say you have Hypothyroidism you’re taking synthroid and your t4 is at the high end of the range.
I really like how quest diagnostics labels their lab tests because they put a little access to where you are within the parameter of the lab value. Low and high. Are you up here and then, if you look at the t3 many times the t3 is down here, we just see that so commonly that’s what i’m going to throw it out there.
That’S our clinical experience, so that’s also something you may want to look at. If you have fatigue as well – and you know we have to reference doctor detection fantastic book, it’s called. Why do i have thyroid symptoms when my lab tests were normal, and so you may want to give that a read as well.
If you have fatigue in yourself and if you have fatigue, you probably wouldn’t look that book up because it talks about thyroid. But a substantial portion of that book is devoted to the symptoms of chronic fatigue.
And it’s it came out about three and a half years ago. I think it’s still, even though, even though we have even changed our our method since then, that is still the basis of of addressing a thyroid and then the main issues that it seems to be involved in a lot which is virtually every chronic problem.
That comes in this office, so thyroid’s a biggie thyroid. It’S like thyroid is number one. If you get chronic fatigue you you need to find someone who knows how to evaluate a thyroid. He talked about tsh t4.
Tsh is your brain. You know finds out. You don’t have enough thyroid hormone. Your brain says i can put this thyroid stimulator to stimulate it to make more, it makes a bunch of stuff called t4 97 of which does nothing.
It’S inactive until it gets somewhere and dr gates is explaining that a lot of once it gets somewhere. Then it’s converted into something called t3. That’S what gives you the energy and there’s a lot of blocks and impediments of it getting converted from t4 to t3.
A lot that’s what that book talks about he’s and he’s talking about that now, and this is a cornerstone of virtually every chronic fatigue, practice that our chronic fatigue patients has come in here is figuring that aspect.
This is one aspect of all the cases. It’S rarely the only one but figuring out that aspect of why they’re not getting their t3 the active hormone either into their cells, or why it’s not converting in their liver geez.
If you’ve got a liver problem, that could could that be a problem. If that’s where most of it is converting into an active form, yeah, you have a gut problem or 20 of it is converting into your active form, and it’s and you’ve got a bad gut.
It’S not converting. Could that give you thyroid symptoms like chronic fatigue? Yeah, if you have, if you’re taking drugs, that are interfering with the proteins that carry these little things all around the? Where they’re supposed to go, or that’s that’s damaging the little, what they call receptor sites on the cells so that this active hormone can’t get in the cells? Are you going to get all the symptoms yeah? How many markers do you need to really assess? All of that and eight to ten eight to ten thyroid markers right, but can you even assess that without knowing what’s going on in the liver, so you need a truly complete metabolic panel, exactly what’s a complete metabolic panel these days when you get it from the Patient who walks and says yeah, i just had a complete metabolic panel back how many markers 20 12.
– i’m i’m counting this 14 and maybe you’re not 14.. You know it’s a couple, but if we, but but in the one that we do, how many is it? It’S five pages of leftovers five pages long and that and you need that to know if your liver is messed up.
I saw one yesterday. No, my liver is perfect. You just talked about the ranges. Okay, so in our world you don’t want to see your liver enzymes up about 22-23. You don’t need to get too much into this.
All you need to know is this, ladies, was 64 yesterday and in that lab in our world. That’S really hot! That means your liver is trying to do something if your liver is trying to do something, it may not be able to help you to make active hormones and by the way, in that lap, hers was 64.
. 65 was abnormal. So in that lab she was normal. No problem liver is fine, everything’s good, just trying to bring to you the the commonsensical logistics of why you might be sitting there going, but all my blood tests are normal.
Well then, let’s go with tsh, so many doctors may doctors were trained that the tsh. If it’s above eight, that’s when you start treating a person for hypothyroidism, just know that the values have changed dramatically over the last few years, there’s something called subclinical hypothyroidism.
Look it up and the new reference range now for tsh the high value is 3.7. It used to be 4.5, it was 5.5, it was even higher than that in the past, and so someone could be sitting on a tshf4 and their lab test may be normal according to that lab.
But maybe you have a problem, maybe there’s something going on with your thyroid. Maybe you need your thyroid to be serially tested repetitively over a number of weeks to see what the pattern of your thyroid really is because with any lab test, it’s just a snapshot.
That’S all it is it’s a moment in time as to what your body is doing. So, let’s go on to the adrenal glands, so you have to compare that lab test. I’M going to add two things in here in our world. You need to be between, like 1.
6 and 2.8, 1.8 and 2.8. Now again, these numbers i’m throwing them out just to let you know that this is what we’re seeing clinically, and we have seen these numbers come down from from these high numbers that are diagnosing everybody’s normal and they keep coming down more to what we’re seeing every Day in practice, so putting a lot of time in on this thyroid, but it’s worth putting time in on because it’s something that you really need to understand, because so many of our people came in and they’re, not even thinking thyroid anymore.
It’S kind of now. I have my thyroid checked and it’s fine, and then i have to spend 20 minutes to convince that person that their thyroid probably isn’t fine, because they have like 20 out of 20 symptoms of thyroid.
So the point last point i want to make is: you need a very, very good history and if a person has 20 out of 20 symptoms of thyroid problems and their blood tests are normal, that is a huge red flag. If that person is taking thyroid medication, like the lady yesterday and i said so, how’s it working and she goes that means she doesn’t know because there’s been no significant change in symptoms.
That’S a huge red sign, a red flag. So there are a lot of things that you need to give the doctor a good history on, because the testing is snapshot in time and it may be totally different the next day.
So these are the practicalities of what you need to know. To try to get out of this chronic fatigue, issue and thyroid is just the tip of the iceberg. Adrenals, okay. So now we’re going to talk about the stress response.
Anxiety has been acknowledged with people who suffer with chronic fatigue. We’Ve said it, i think, in every hangout we’ve talked about this far this year we got to mention it. Dr robert sapolsky. The book is called why zebras don’t get ulcers.
You have to read it because in our clinical experience, so many patients who suffer with fatigue have been through insane stress, psychological, physical, sexual abuse as a child, continual physical abuse as an adult um.
You know horrible financial stress it goes on and on and on, and that perpetual stress drives our stress mechanism beyond really what it’s made to do. We as human beings are not meant to be. That stressed out that’s the consensus in the stress literature and when you’re under that type of stress continually, our stress, glands, trimmed our adrenal glands just means they’re.
On top of our kidneys, they release stress hormones. They start to release stress hormones all the time and now there’s this thing called functional, hypercortisolism, that’s being acknowledged. Cortisol is the one of the chief stress hormones, the other one is adrenaline for simplicity’s sake, and so that cortisol starts flooding throughout the person’s body and it causes basically release of of sugar into the system so that the person can have sugar going into the muscle.
So they can fight the lion or they can run from the line. But when it’s chronic, the effects of stress can be incredibly deleterious to the individual. They may be depleting b vitamin source which i don’t even want to get into yet, and a host of problems and the adrenal glands don’t seem to be like a muscle when you activate a muscle repetitively, the muscle gets stronger when you activate the adrenals chronically over Time it seems as though they start to fatigue out, and we see.
Many patients who have fatigue cannot seem to regulate their blood sugar and we see that their cortisol oftentimes is either low. It’S out of rhythm, and so one of the chief purposes of having cortisol is so that you can walk out into this desert here in nevada and fast for 30 days.
As long as you have water, you should be able to survive. That right i mean so many of our fatigue. Patients can’t go three hours without eating something normal cortisol, good, low, cortisol, bad high, cortisol, really bad, and so many of our fatigue patients have poor memory.
I have this brain fog. I can’t remember short-term memory loss. I go into a room, i don’t forget my keys, i don’t know where they are. I can’t get my words out and then um. The here is very cool and here’s a point i want to make the adrenal glands are in the alternative world uh.
If you, those of you who have uh, been to alternative doctors – and honestly i mean i don’t consider us alternative doctors, but we are what we are. I mean we’re. Basically, this is what the problem is.
This is what it is, we’re not anti-medicine. We actually work. Integratedly with medical doctors, when the case calls for it um, but the the concept of, if you can’t fix the adrenal glands, you can’t fix anything, has some merit.
I think it’s the wrong target, based on what we have seen frequently the adrenal glands are being are being stimulated by stress, but i wanted to define stress a little bit more. The stress could be coming from your brain, and this is where our advantage is.
I think when we’re working with chronic pain patients again i go back to dr gates and the fact that he is a board-certified chiropractic, neurologist and or it can become be coming from. Multiple sources in your body.
Stress bad gut problem, a liver all of these parasites. What all these things that are disparate out there in the alternative world can uh create a stress on your system, which also contributes to depressing or exhausting your adrenal gland, which responds by overreacting, and so the question is: is it the brain? Is it the metabolic uh abnormalities that we’re talking about here, the nutritional, abnormalities, the gut problems and the autoimmune problems, and that food allergies, and all that or is it both both and and it’s usually, both usually both, and we do testing that shows that rare? Is it one or the other i mean we’ve seen it? We have we’ve seen it and and that’s a very fortunate person when they come in because it just makes it easier to deal with but uh, but usually both and relative to the memory problem.
Dr sapolsky, you can watch his videos on youtube and i i can’t thank him enough for all the work that he’s done in the stress literature, but he talks about elevated levels of cortisol relative to hiv patients.
He uses it as an example. Here’S a nice article out of current alzheimer’s research 2013, where they basically say that high levels of cortisol do damage the brain relative to memory, and this is something we need to look at from a causative standpoint of alzheimer’s.
So so anyways, i’m not saying if you have fatigue that you’re going to get alzheimer’s. What i’m saying is that the high levels of cortisol we have observed in many chronic fatigue patients to be a significant issue, so stress is a major player.
I think everybody that i talk to pretty much gets that so so much of the time your chronic fatigue is set off by some sort of a trigger uh. The triggers that we hear are, after my last child next thing you know i couldn’t get out of that.
I had that one yesterday, a car accident saw some sort of trauma surgeries some sort of a surgical trauma. For me, it was pneumonia, an overwhelming infection that i let go too long, because i was an idiot and i didn’t know what i that i couldn’t wasn’t going to get well on my own uh, but stress is like humongous it’s it’s just so many people come In here and stress, and then they usually get it, i’m doing the initial consult, so i’m usually the first contact and they usually get it.
They usually get. I was so stressed and, and then all of a sudden it went down – and the point i wanted to make here is in the end, once we fared all this stuff out figure out, what’s causing the stress: where did they have high iron low iron? Do they have high blood sugar, low blood sugar? They have an autoimmune thyroid that have a conversion there’s like 100 things that you need to look at.
That’S why we’re not going to cover them, but in the end, it’s really about figuring out how to help them with non-drug strategies for the most part to control, stress and diet. In the end, once you figure everything out, it’s not even about a lot of supplements.
Usually, there’s some involved for the people who come in here who are pretty serious but not a lot. We have a lot of people come in here with like bags of supplements and bags and drugs, not good, not good.
If you have a chronic fatigue patient, if you are a chronic fatigue, patient, not good! That is not good. It’S just too complex for the biochemistry of the body. It’S it’s altering their function in the brain, um, it’s putting stress on your adrenal glands and your liver and so on and so forth.
So, what’s the next one that you’d like well, let’s talk about immune inflammation, and so – and this ties in with stress because stress, can imbalance the immune system. Chronic stress can imbalance immune system, so they’re now showing this is journal of translational medicine 2013, where they’re talking about immune chemicals, when they’re elevated in the system are potentially a culprit of chronic fatigue, and we see this across the board and this ties in with the Hashimoto’S, why is it when someone has hashimoto’s, which is where the immune system kills the thyroid, but the thyroid test often can be normal in the beginning of that.
Why are they so fatigued and the hypothesis is that? Because the immune system is so revved up, it’s almost like you have a cold all the time when we have a cold or a flu, we feel fatigued. Don’T we lots of times? That’S because the immune system is so so fired up that those little immune messengers can cause our brain neurons to not fire as well as they should.
It can cause inflammation throughout the system, and it can cause this general feeling of malaise and fatigue. Well, there we’re now seeing that autoimmune problems that autoimmune basically means where your immune system is attacking you or your immune system, is inflamed against some bacterial viral antigen chronically that that immune inflammation is a huge culprit for patients who are fatigued and the current hypothesis we’re At the international conference of human nutrition and functional medicine is that it’s damaging the energy producing they’re called organelles they’re called mitochondria.
So basically, the powerhouse of our cells is called the mitochondria, and it’s not that this immune inflammation is damaging those mitochondria we’re going to get more into the mitochondria next, but that is one potential mechanism of that.
So we’re going to add to that. I would pick this one out and say so i think inflammation is kind of a hot button word today, as it should be um. It is a component in a lot of our cases, some more than others.
There are tests for it that frequently aren’t run and when they are run from my experience, maybe the positive results are not translated properly to the patient in regard to what’s going on with them uh, but – and there are a lot of avenues out there that are Anti-Inflammatories that quote-unquote work okay, but they do not get to the cause, as we so often hear.
I i have earlier in my career. I had done uh for a couple years. I had really immersed myself in nutrition and i wasn’t really satisfied with the tools that were out there back in the early 80s and the 70s, the diagnostic tools um, i’m not going to get into something, because people will probably think i’m like criticizing them and technically I’M not either i wasn’t good at them, but uh, but i couldn’t get the concept of okay.
I have this problem so now i’m going to take this vitamin and that’s getting to the cause of the problem where the drug is not. So we have a lot of. I saw an article on non-steroidal anti-inflammatories yesterday, where they’re trying to decide which one that hurts the heart less so non-steroidal.
It’S in yesterday’s. I think it was on abc news, uh health uh health section, so that you can access that which, which one do we want to? Okay, that which one hurts the heart, less okay and, as many of you probably know that, there’s a lot more damage than that.
They have seriously more strong anti-inflammatories than that in the alternative field. There’S a lot of uh that over the last years, a lot of different types of pomegranate juices and – and i won’t get into into the specific uh names of a lot of this.
A lot of these things and they are anti-inflammatory and for some people, they’re almost miraculous. If that person has an uncomplicated case and they don’t have an autoimmune problem, that’s perpetuating their and their issues and their multiple problems.
Uh. They don’t have multiple problems. That will be the person that will take that juice, have a miracle reaction and go whoa. That’S what it is. It was inflammation and so on and so forth. That’S not our patient.
Our patients have tried all that before they got in here. So the point i wanted to make is how many, how many different causes are there that create inflammation 25? We went over yeah like 25., so what the functional approach is is to figure out which of those 25.
Do you have too much iron? Have you even heard of that? I mean probably a couple of times a month. We do blood tests and find out somebody’s got something called hemochromatosis. Trust me, you are rarely rarely rarely tested for that.
However, it shows up on your complete metabolic panel, which is not complete as low serum iron. No, it’s low iron in your blood for those of you who have some conversants with with this stuff. That means you should look you’re they’re, looking at anemia there’s a lot of markers for anemia.
I don’t know they’re, not always done okay, so the person has low blood iron and the knee jerk reaction frequently is take more iron, not a good thing. If you have not having the complete iron panel done to find out that you have too much iron being stored in your cells, which is why it’s not in your bloodstream and the marker is ferritin and the and the marker that you should be looking for, is Ferritin, so if your ferritin is high, you don’t want to take more iron because it’s going right through your blood into the cells there think of a 1956 chevy sitting on the side of the road in monterey, california, where it’s nice and humid and wet rusting away.
That’S what that does to yourself that creates inflammation. That kills you frankly, and we see it semi-regularly and then that ultimately can have all the stresses that we talked about on the adrenal gland.
This is just one of the 25 different things, so is taking pomegranate juice. For the rest of your life going to be a good idea, for that, probably not, is it going to be helpful, it’ll probably quench it down, but wouldn’t you rather find out that you have too much iron go, give blood, take it out of your system and And all of a sudden, you feel like a normal human being, so i’m just using as one example of the 25 different entities that we’ve been fortunate enough to be available to.
So that’s what has to be worked out in a chronic fatigue case, because that will massively drain you uh, i mean of energy, so it’s complex, but the mechanisms are understood as to what needs to be looked for.
You just need to do the testing and look for them, and then why don’t we go with viral infections? Okay, i want to do gut at some point, because people really when i first start doing the consults a lot of times.
They have a very difficult challenge to okay to kind of connect, their gut problems, meaning everything in here from your from your liver to your gallbladder, to your small intestines, particularly in your large intestines.
So let’s do that and then let’s do gut and then we can do whatever else behind it. So viral infections have been hypothesized to cause chronic fatigue. As dr wether mentioned, there’s a gentleman in our our radius, who um was treating a lot of patients for chronic fatigue based on having certain viral infections.
Some of that research has now gone to the university here and you can look up some of the research on the xmrv viruses. The university here is university of nevada reno and i don’t want to go into it any more than that.
But it’s fine there’s! No denigration there because the problem that we see with chronic viral infections is that everybody’s looking for one virus, this virus that virus the epstein-barr. Yes – and you know, we’ve talked second: we’ve been with researchers who have found up to 15 different viruses being associated with fatigue.
But how are you going to run a research study on 15 different viruses? I mean it’s hard enough alone, when you’re being really precise in a research laboratory setting to do one virus accurately, it’s almost impossible yeah.
So these intracellular infections, which can be viruses to pseudobacterial like microplasma, we have observed – and there is data to support it to be associated with mitochondrial problems or making enough energy.
We observe that clinically and there’s even some research. This is kind of an interesting journal. I’Ve never so go back to the mitochondria. It’S the little. It’S the little organelles, the little uh factory in your cells that makes energy energy, chronic fatigue, no energy, poor, mitochondria, no energy – and you know there is some research out there, which this is advanced.
Mind-Body medicine, which is seems like kind of an interesting journal, probably doesn’t have a high impact score, but they were. They were referencing studies where they’ve said that chronic fatigue patients have been improved by taking antiviral medications, basically a herpes medication and they’re, basically trying to see if it would help children with chronic fatigue syndrome, and they saw some preliminary good results.
However, nothing extremely conclusive, but this is something that a lot of people treating chronic fatigue patients struggle with, because one thing won’t necessarily help that intracellular infection and you have to try quite a few things to start clearing out those intracellular infections.
By that i mean viruses or microplasma things of that nature and also um. You know there can be multiple intracellular infections going on. It can be difficult, but it can be a huge piece to the puzzle for these patients.
We had one patient who here’s a tangent, so hashimoto’s patients are being shown to have intracellular infections in their thyroid. 80 percent of them have human herpes virus 6 within the thyroid tissue itself.
So we put this patient on a viral treatment after she had done pretty. Well, but she wasn’t completely better, and that was the thing that completely helped her fatigue was getting rid of that virus and doing the viral treatment.
Viral management is probably the best way to say for me. The beta carotene has been huge and really helped me a lot, and that has that has some. It has been shown to have effects on viral problems and uh, as dr gates was saying, viruses can have a lot to do with attacking or your thyroid and other things, and this goes into the immune system, where the we’re commonly seeing one side immune system may Not be strong enough to kill the virus or ribs by the virus, so we use natural uh agents to basically get the immune system to do its job and clearing out these these bad guys in your cells, so to speak.
I think the point i want to make on that is the the confusion that the patient, who comes in that first day, who has done their research on the internet or who has done their research in some popular newsletter from one of the popular doctors out there? Who needs to put content out on a regular basis? It’S not just mycoplasm or it’s not just katsaki virus.
We have we some of the most difficult patients we run into, and i must tell you this is a challenge the patient comes in and they’re certain it’s. It’S mycoplasma, nobody else has been able to get rid of it.
That’S what you need to get rid of, because that’s what they read on on, wherever they read it or heard wherever they heard it. Could that be a factor? Yes, have we seen it to be a factor most of the time? No, have we seen it to be a factor in some cases in some cases, in some cases? Yes, the point i’m making is you can’t be dogmatic when you’re getting into these chronic problems, treat the patient, not the diagnosis.
We have the candida group everything’s candida, we have the parasite group, everything is parasites. Okay, all of those are on the table. All of those need to be assessed against that person’s specific history, starting with the trigger what happened for me, it was pneumonia.
Does it make sense that ultimately treating a virus you know would have an effect on me, but starting with the trigger stress, all right, starting with the trigger then going through the history assessing the symptoms and, as you take a chronological history, if you understand the systems You’Re going to literally hear that person telling you the one system first started this functioning, then the next system almost like in order and and then you can start to evaluate all of these disparate pieces was it stress that was a trigger, but stress happens to be One of the triggers that is ongoing, uh as part of the problem was it: is it uh? Is it microplasm or is it from the pneumonia which a lot of people get pneumonia get this mycoplasma later on, which was not a problem with me, um uh, it just thought it was candida.
Is it parasites, you know, as a parasite, can parasites be a part of affecting your immune system, causing your immune system to over work as dr geishas got talking about and then making you tired, yeah we’ve seen it? Is it in everybody? No, does everybody have parasites? No do a lot more people have parasites than maybe what we think maybe, but that’s all has to be assessed because every one of those things is a drain on your system and again i just go back.
The fact of you can’t be dogmatic about this. Everything is on the table to be looked at and needs to be teased out through a thorough history and ultimately exam. Do you want to finish up with the gut, because i think we’re getting wet? Did you think there’s something more i mean we could go on.
We could talk about this for 10 hours right, and so i think that’s important. Okay, i mean, because i hear it, people are starting to become conversant with. The fact that 70 of their immune system is on is in the uh is, in the gut.
A specific part of the gut called the ilium and and and all you got to do is take probiotics. If you watch television and and there you go, life is good and virtually everybody’s walking in here who has gut problems, has figured out to take probiotics but they’re still walking in here.
So the gut is, i didn’t know 70 was in the helium. I didn’t know most of it was an alien yeah, interesting wow yeah there you go. That’S very unusual. He’S gonna go. Look that up now make sure i know what i’m talking about.
No lymphoid tissue. You can look it up so um, so yeah. So why the gut? Why would the gut be a player in chronic fatigue because most of this immune inflammation, which may be spreading throughout the body may be non-specific or in our experience there seems to be a relationship between foods that we eat and this hashimoto’s problem and there’s also this Concept called intestinal hyper permeability, look it up go into the pubmed database type, better known as the leaky gut and the in the label, the popular literature, and so in essence, that’s as dr uther says, where 70 of your immune system is – and this is an area That can really be changed through changing someone’s diet, using certain agents as i’ll, say, or supplements to clear out candida to clear out a parasite to clear out bad bacteria, small intestinal, bowel overgrowth that may be precipitating or causing the intestinal hyperpermeability.
What are we saying here? Basically, what we’re saying is what we see is that the cells of the intestines should be tightly bound together. What we’re now seeing through laboratory testing is that those cells can start to separate slightly and bacterial components can flow into the bloodstream, as well as larger food molecules than should be there.
Those food molecules can look like the thyroid. They can look like the cerebellum. They can trigger the immune system to get overreactive, and then all of you want to know what can this be helped in our clinical experience, we’re seeing that through getting rid of the bad bacteria that are in the intestines getting rid of the candida getting rid of The parasites and going back in and cleaning up and healing this gastrointestinal tract and removing the foods that seem to be exacerbating the immune system, we’re seeing some very, very interesting, interesting results relative to fatigue.
So we’ll say that i mean we had a huge crop of fatigue. Patients come through this. I can’t even remember how we have more coming through, based on the consults from last week in this week, and a huge percentage of them responded just to this right, dr gates is describing the mechanisms of creating food allergies is what he just described.
So you get this so you get this food that you’re eating think about how think about the close relationship with a gut and your environment. You take your environment, better known as food, and you stick it in your mouth and hopefully you chew it a little bit before you put it down through your inflamed esophagus, which you’re taking the purple pill for, and then it gets into your gut and your gut Is supposed to like, in your stomach, it gets into your stomach and your stomach’s supposed to be acidic enough to be able to break it down.
Those of you are taking the purple pill. I can assure you you’re not breaking your proteins down as well as you should be. That’S a whole other topic. We are going to get into eventually not today and then that bolus, which is too acidic and sh and and for those of you who are the alkaline, acidic guys stomach acidic intestines.
Alkaline intestines doesn’t like it when it gets down in there and it’s acidic, and so that irritates the gut. So this food that you have taken from the environment is now going to go into your gut and, if it kind of makes it past that gauntlet, you have anything left, that’s nutritional to absorb for those of you who have vitamin b deficiencies and magnesium deficiencies and Iron deficiencies and are taking supplements for it.
Maybe because you haven’t broken it down properly, i haven’t absorbed it, but if you have – and you get to the point where you have a leaky gut, then what occurs is a lot of that food that hit from the universe from from nature, that’s supposed to be Broken down and go into our bodies and become part of us and give us energy in these energy-making mechanisms that dr gates was describing.
These mitochondria either is bad food or it makes past that gauntlet and doesn’t get broken down properly and when it’s not broken down properly, it’s supposed to end up in the toilet, not going through these junctions in your gut, the dog gets talked about and into your Bloodstream and when that happens, your immune system doesn’t like it.
Your immune system sees it as a foreign invader; it attacks it just like it would attack a virus or a bacteria, a very energy draining uh mechanism, and then what happens? Is you ultimately develop a food allergy? So if you’re, one of the folks who’s going to come in here, has been doing a lot of research and one of the first things you’re going to tell me is why i eat better than anybody.
Let me tell you right now: you have a gut problem. You probably have intestinal permeability, there’s a good chance. You have the gluten sensitivities that you’ve heard about and if you have a gluten sensitivity, trust me that is just the tip of the iceberg.
Um, you may have celiac, where you actually have an autoimmune problem relative to that uh gluten and going in there and that’s another whole topic. But i’m just trying to draw the complexion and then now you have now you have an immune system.
That’S over firing, which we’ve already talked about immune problems, putting a strain on the system, chronic fatigue. You have another source of inflammation. Oh all, my joints ache every joint in my body, aches and if you are fortunate enough, where it’s just your gut, which is probably already screwing up your liver and your adrenal glands on top of it in your immune system, if you’re fortunate that it’s your gut, That simply needs to be healed and and oh by the way fire in the belly fire in the brain.
So if you have a bad gut problem, there’s a good chance you’re going to have um short-term memory, loss and brain fog and things of that nature, because that inflammation is going to inflame the neurons in your gut and we go on and on dr gates mentioned.
Cerebellum, sometimes those inflammatory markers will have a propensity for not just the gut but the thyroid energy draining and something called your cerebellum which we’ll get into it another time balanced disease.
A lot of you will develop dizziness and vertigo and balance problems all from your gut and gut meaning, meaning esophagus stomach not breaking down your foods, not digesting them properly, not absorbing them properly, not eliminating them properly.
It can be that significant. Those are the big factors that i see i mean overall, i i talk globally and uh and and we’re very blessed to be together because he knows a lot more about the specifics of stuff than i’ll ever know, and that is what makes our i think our Program strong because we are familiar with the specifics.
In fact, i saw some new supplements up on our shelf today that nobody has told me about so i’m going to get schooled on uh on on how those are doing a better job and so uh, and so we are continually looking at all of these things And there are better better ways to take care of it, but in the end, once you figure out what the food allergies are in a case like that, once you get the gut healed, what you find out, what might be perpetuating that leaky gut is it stress, Is it your brain? Is it a parasite that nobody picked up? Is it an h, pylori? Oh yeah, i had h pylori and uh and i got it taken care of.
Did they test you to see if it was taken care of um? No? Well, you, but you still have all the symptoms of it yeah, so you have to figure out all of them, because those things will perpetuate a leaky gut stress will perpetuate a leaky gut food allergies.
