Complex Diseases

There are five levels of complex diseases: Food, Metal, Stress, Pesticides and Poisons, and Trauma. You are surprised, aren't you?

In this episode, Dr. Thomas Santucci explains how Functional Medicine is applicable in resolving modern complex. The Medical Insider is looking and providing means of resolving health concerns using a different medical procedure. Check this out and learn more!

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Transcript

Intro
Welcome to "The Medical Insider" podcast, where we highlight real-life solutions to your health challenges, encorporate new technology and proven solutions from the past with a healthy dose of common sense while resisting the pitfalls of idiopathic classifications and economically-based medical doctrine. This is your host, Dr. Thomas Santucci. Let's get started.

Dr. Thomas
Welcome to this next version of "The Medical Insider". Today, I wanted to talk about a practical application of functional medicine. About ten years ago, I put together a chart with all the cascade of the different diseases that people were dealing with individually that were really part of an autoimmune continuum. Thyroid was first on that list. So ten years ago, we were getting a lot of autoimmune thyroid Hashimoto's thyroiditis patients that were being under-diagnosed. They go to their GP, he was basically saying, your TSH, which was the only thing they were measuring, was normal, sort of excusing them and saying, you know, it's from another thing or it's psychological. There was a lot of that in the day. When we realized that the functional ranges for thyroid were probably the most egregious of anything we had seen. So, you know, in those days, you could do a TSH between 0.5 and five and a half. And we realized the functional ranges were much tighter. They were in the 1.9 to three kind of levels. Basically, two to three would be a good number for TSH. In learning about the thyroid cascade, you understand that the hypothalamus talks to the pituitary. The pituitary sends a hormone signal to the thyroid. The thyroid then, you know, releases the T4 and a little bit of T3, and then it goes to the liver, the small intestine, some of the other organs, and it converts to the usable T3 form, and then it's transported to the end cells and understand every cell in your body as a thyroid receptor, and then it's basically activated in the cell. But there can be a problem with each one of those five levels. So from a nutraceutical point of view and understand, we were getting the education on this from a nutraceutical company. So they were then selling us something to intervene at each one of those five levels. Now, it was really a good step in terms of understanding that cascade, but not really a good understanding of the underlying cause of things. So it was another way to deal with symptoms. So it was kind of a Metafractor, you know, blend between the two worlds. We've learned now that we can go much, much, much deeper. So the so-called root cause medicine would say what's causing the underlying problem. And that's what I really want to talk about at this point. So when we're looking at causation and you're looking at big, big changes in large numbers of people, first you have to understand and recognize that the trends are changing. In the day, there wasn't massive amounts of autoimmune thyroid disease. There wasn't massive amounts of peripheral neuropathy. There wasn't large amounts of, you know, the neurodegenerative diseases. These are relatively new things, and it's not because they're suddenly being diagnosed, it's because there are more of them. So when we look at this, we say, what could possibly do that? And this is where your common sense comes in. This is where, you know, you can step back and be on an equal footing with the smartest people in the world and say, you know, when there's a 7000% increase in autoimmune disease, that's environmental and, you know, just sit with that for a second. And so what does environmental mean? So it means that the outside forces that shape the epigenetic expression of our genome are being affected in this case in a negative way. And in my personal opinion, the number one trigger for autoimmune diseases is food. We made a list of 22 different things that could affect autoimmune disease. When we were getting these very, very, very sick, especially nerve generative disease patients, we said, wait a minute, do we really think we have no idea what's causing this? Is that sensible? And the answer is no, it's not sensible. Two, do we have placebo-controlled, double-blind studies that prove that it's this rather than that? No, we don't have it. But also in a section on research that I'm going to do in the next couple of weeks, you're going to see that most things that have placebo-controlled, double-blind studies are not valid and that most medical procedures don't have that anyway. So there's a whole problem with the way intelligence is gathered and disseminated in medicine. But for right now, we'll basically say these things are not scientifically validated. But from a common-sense point of view, I think food is up there. When we're looking at the main egregious foods, where gluten and dairy are just at the top, the Monsanto wheat, the GMO wheat really has been investigated and really looked at as being a, you know, key suspect with that. There are people who have done much deeper dives into that than I'm going to do but one of the things that we do in complex acute autoimmune disease cases, which is about half the people we see, is we take them off of gluten and dairy right away. From a scientific point of view, we did about 500 HOA-DQB1 gene type tests, and 498 of them came back positive. Admittedly, in a group of people that were very sick. But that's a lot more than the 6% to 15% estimate that's being given as a national statistic for, you know, gluten intolerance and celiac disease. So it's a lot more than people realize. The next thing I think I would look at is metals, especially in the neurocognitive area. So we know that aluminum has a way of coming in and changing autoimmune function, but we also think that it makes a major contribution to dementias. So when we're looking at low affect, we're looking at autism, even things like multiple sclerosis or other brain autoimmune kind of conditions, we're looking at metals being a trigger. Again, a metals test in each one of these things has a way to validate it. So you have your overall plan, you have your suspicions, your differentials, and then you go and test. And so you can test for metals. So you can do something, in the day, we were doing something called a Comprehensive Urine Element Profile, basically, a metals test that would test 20 different metals. We're still doing it today. It's still being a causal, correlative factor. It's impossible to tell once there are this many factors, whether it's a primary thing or it's just adding fuel to the fire. But by taking metals out of the equation, a lot of times, we have a much, much, more workable solution here. The medical intervention is fairly straightforward. It's a [inaudible] detoxification, if you will, at the blood, bone, brain level. Six to 12 weeks, most people--you know we test pre and post, and most people have a clean bill of health afterwards. Certain professions, like contractors, dentists, and people that have worked with metals, especially heavier, noxious metals for a long period of time, may take longer. And the average person can get exposed to these and not know it. Aluminum is the most abundant mineral on their surface, you know, so it's there. And it's not a mineral, it's a metal. Normal people get exposure, certainly, the gluten and dairy, since we're doing that almost every day, and then metals. And so when we look at a person with premature aging, when we look at a person with autoimmune diseases that seem like they came from nowhere, remember that's that idiopathic thing. We're going to look at the food antigens and we're going to look at metals first. And in about, I don't know, 70% of the cases, it's going to make a big difference. Going down that list, certainly, stress is on that list. And I've had an on-again, off-again relationship with stress. We're in the Silicon Valley. You know, we're basically saying if you're here and you're breathing, then you know, you have stress. The amount of financial stress here is enormous. But we didn't really take it seriously until we were doing the adrenal stress index testing and seeing people, if there's, like, ten levels and complete loss of control is ten, there are tons of people walking around at eight and nine. So we're seeing this as an increased source of the inflammatory cascade. Runaways' different hormone cascades, like the sex hormone cascade, are interrupted by cortisol. So it's called a Pregnenolone Steal. And it's an old idea, but it's still really great and it's really a good way to understand what's going on. So if you look at the sex hormone cascade where you're going, you know, cholesterol to pregnenolone, to testosterone, to estrogen and progesterone, then cortisol can come in on from this side and stop pregnenolone from cascading. It's called the Pregnenolone Steal. And so for some of you, we're really dating ourselves. That's the first time I heard that was probably a quarter of a century ago, but it's still valid. So we look at the Pregnenolone Steal and see that all of a sudden, that person's testosterone is being severely limited or something the new bioidentical hormone therapy research has shown us that there's now an epidemic, worse than ever before of low testosterone. When testosterone goes down in men and women, it's not just the decrease in sexual capability and sexual urge in general, but it's also muscle mass, confidence, mental capability, and stress reaction. So again, in the day, we were dealing with stress, and we would do an adrenal stress test is going to test the cortisol, but it's also going to test the DHA. And they were kind of like sisters. They would balance each other out. But we now understand that sex hormone-binding globulin carries the DHA and testosterone. So now, stress can directly affect your sex hormones. And remember, testosterone is the primary sex hormone for both sexes. Men have ten times more of it than women do, but women make estrogen out of testosterone. So everybody needs testosterone, and everyone needs an uninterrupted pathway. So the stress thing is real. So we like some of those remedies, but we like them when they're specific to the individual. If we're looking at hormones, one of the things that always amazed me is the whole business, if you will, of pregnancy and the management of pregnant women. My mother had nine children, and so one of the things that we understood is that she had one personality in her normal life. Raising those kids and dealing with all that was probably a big deal, but she had another when she was pregnant. And so when a woman is pregnant, her body is flushed with progesterone. And so estrogen, you know, goes up in order to get the egg to be fertile. And then progesterone creates the changes in the uterus that allow for a healthy environment for the baby. So a lot of times when people are going to touch that mother, you know, like touch the stomach, they're actually, you know, wanting to bathe in that hormone. So it's very, very, very attractive. It makes the woman much, much, more kind of satisfied with life. It's one of those satisfying kind of hormones, and it produces a steady environment emotionally for the baby. When we're looking at that, we realize that you know, creating, you know, first of all, all those new cells, that environment, that hormone change, that two sets of detoxification pathways are a big, big strain on the woman. So one of the things we see in autoimmune triggers is when the female has the second baby, the third trimester of that creation process is the onset of a lot of autoimmune diseases. And there's a huge trendable statistic on this thing, and we don't recognize it. In my own family, you know, being 1950s Catholic, Italian, we didn't even consider not having less children. Now, I think people are a lot more cognizant that, well, children are a lot more difficult process to raise them and more expensive and much, much, more involved, but there really is a metabolic drain that happens on women that should be addressed. So one of the things that I personally think is that after the first delivery, after the first successful pregnancy, the woman really has to take some steps to reassert and to re-establish her cellular reserves. There are a couple of places in the whole female cascade where we're just ignoring obvious things. So pregnancy should be like running a marathon. You have to recover afterwards, not you just go do it again after three months. And then menopause is another one of those where we're going to go in at the hormonal level and do something about it. Some of these things have very predictable negative consequences. The year a woman turns menopausal, her likelihood of cardiac disease and of osteoporosis goes up to ten times. So this is something that we know. This is something that we can do something about, and this is something that we don't do something about. So that was one of the first things we put in place when we established the men's and women's health clinic. We basically said, if you're a menopausal female or if you're, you know, pre-menopausal and we can anticipate this, that the day that happens there's a plan for you. Similarly, for women that are of childbearing age, it's not just grin and bear it. It's have a plan. It's go in, and make sure your cellular reserves are what they should be. The next level is pesticides and poisons. And this is another one of those worlds that we just don't know what we don't know. Sort of going back historically. Everyone knows that DDT is illegal in the United States. So the reason DDT is illegal in the United States is it doesn't work anymore. The insects habituated to it. And remember, bodies and physical systems habituate to drugs almost all the time. That's why taking a drug over time usually has a negative effect after a while, we get used to it. So either have to take more or it just stops working. So I'm not religiously against surgery or drug therapy, I just think that anticipating the underlying cause and actually dealing with the root cause is a more efficient thing to do in the long term. So when we're looking at pesticides and poisons, this is usually a situation where the person does not know what's happened. One of the things we're testing for lately and getting positive results is arsenic poisoning. And arsenic poisoning is basically rat poisoned. And a couple of people, they had bought it for their guest house or they had, you know, just put it in and really didn't think anything of it. And all of a sudden they're having, you know, cognitive problems, memory problems, mood kind of problems, and we're testing for and finding arsenic in them and their families. So it's really an environmental thing. It's not the kind of thing that normal people think they have, and yet it's pretty prevalent in our society at this point. The last one I'm going to list is trauma. So in this, I'm really talking to males. Part of the male psyche is that we can ask a male who has, you know, six things wrong that we've put on a list. And we're talking about. We're talking about interventions. And you walking in the middle of it and say, how are you? And that person will say, great, how are you doing? We're fine. We've just established there, anything but fine. So to some degree, men and some women, now, they're never going to register trauma. I had over, well, I would say ten very serious car accidents. And I was always fine. I went out of surgeries and went down and got hamburgers afterwards. I was always fine. The reality was, you know, I had no capacity to actually understand my own situation because of the way my brain was set up to deal with trauma. I didn't view anything as being traumatic as long as I survived. There are a lot of people like I was. So one of the things that we do is we kind of try to go in and say, you know, what's the real history here? How many times have you been in hospitals? How many broken bones? How many--you know, how long have you undergone a certain kind of stress? And then what is the environment in that you're creating your 100 million new cells every day? And a lot of times when you do a deep dive like that, and that's not a consult that takes six minutes, that's a consult that takes an hour. So when you do a deep dive like that and you actually, you know, you can do it for yourself or you're actually doing an introspection and say, you know, at age 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, what has my body gone through? Not what do I remember? What's actually real? And then which of these things is a likely candidate for things not being almost perfect? So we kind of don't buy the old age model. It's an easy out. It's sort of a flip and dancer, but it's really an irresponsible answer. So if you look at I'm Italian. So in Italy, the 70-year-olds, I'm almost 70 years old now. The 70-year-olds take three-hour walks at night on the Plaza. They're social, they're still sexual, they enjoy food, they enjoy each other, and they love where they live. There's a lot of involvement at that point. We have a lifestyle that kind of curtails activity. And, you know, the post-2020 stuff, the post-Covid stuff is just really, really taking a bite out of all that. When we look at what is normal aging, what I'd invite you to do is go back two generations and look at those people. So go back and look at where your genetic material came from and look at the successful people and see how they were. It is doubtful that you are as strong as they were. It's doubtful that you have the energy they have. And it's doubtful that you have the vitality that you have. In general, we're viewing this latest generation of people as being the sickest people that have ever existed in the United States. So it's the first generation of people that are less healthy than the one before. And I would invite you to investigate these autoimmune triggers and really question whether you've had exposure to them or whether you've sufficiently, you know, backfilled not just the autoimmune triggers, but the cellular reserves that it takes to live a healthy, vital, full life. Thank you.

Outro
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