The Secret of Health Blog

Staying Away From Ticks

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Ben Johnson) — Tue, 26 May 2009 15:38:00 +0000

Previously we covered a little about ticks, one of nature's most unpleasant creatures. So unpleasant that we’ll want to avoid them as studiously as we can. How can we do that? For one we can avoid woody areas. Certain areas are known for ticks. Different areas are known for different types of infectious agents. Up on the mountain here near me there is a road called “Scratch Ankle” road. That’s because there are so many chiggers in that area that for whatever reason you can’t walk around in the grass there without getting chiggers. Why the chiggers like that particular grass on that particular spot on the mountain I don’t know.

Ticks are the same way. They love some areas and inhabit some areas more than others. If you’re going hiking in a national forest or state park, the forestry departments will actually know which areas are more likely to have ticks on them. First thing you can do is avoid those areas. The second thing is just physical protection: long pants, long sleeved shirts. I’d even recommend blousing your pants: tucking your pants legs down into the top of your boots and putting your shirt inside your pants so that they can’t crawl up under the pants or shirt. That way they all wind up at your neck as they crawl on up. It is definitely easier to inspect your neck than the groin or other areas.

One very common way to prevent ticks from latching on are chemicals. Deet is probably the most famous one. Then there is permethrin. Those are probably the two commonly used ones that you see in repellants for ticks. Deet being a repellant and permethrin being an insecticide. There’s a huge difference between the two. Deet in higher concentrations is quite effective at preventing tick bites, but it does need to be a higher percentage, probably 30-40%. Permethrin is an insecticide and that is a whole different animal.

Let’s flip back to deet just a minute. Deet is not highly toxic. There are a handful of deaths the last few years from deet and it was usually by people trying to commit suicide by drinking it. There’s virtually no known deaths. I think there was a child or two who died when their mother used deet on them 2-3 times a day for a period of a couple of months. I know that’s hard to fathom, but that sort of thing does happen. Don’t spray yourself down with it for weeks on end repeatedly, and certainly not children. Deet is heavily used in the military. You might occasionally see someone with a little rash or headache or drowsiness which might be associated with that but it’s certainly not a neurotoxin. It doesn’t damage the liver, kidneys or anything else. So if you’re going to pick one of these two it would be deet, as far as the chemicals.

Permethrin is a whole different animal. It’s an insecticide. It’s a neurotoxin. It’s a skin irritant. It decreases your immune system T-cell activity, K-cell activity, and lymphocyte activity. It is a very problematic chemical. It is not just found in bug sprays; it's also used as a pesticide on a lot of vegetables. That’s a good reason to wash your vegetables in hydrogen peroxide or other types of cleansing solution when you bring them into the house. Permethrin is known to cause cancer and damages liver, adrenals, kidneys even at minimal levels. Children seem much more susceptible than adults. To emphasize: if you’ve got to choose between permethrin and deet, it would certainly be deet.

Permethrin is nowhere directed to be put directly on the skin. On the other hand, deet can be sprayed on the skin and is OK’d by the FDA for that. Permethrin is strictly recommended for clothing if you are going to use it at all. Personally, if I get close to it I get neurotoxicity within hours. My ears start ringing and I have some other problems.

There are some quasi natural things which have been approved lately by the FDA for repelling ticks. Picaridin is a modified natural agent which appears to be quite effective at killing ticks also. If you’re wanting to go natural (which I would highly recommend) I’ve used natural oils for years with great success. Probably the most important one is the oil of lemon eucalyptus. That will repel ticks with a high degree of probability. Citronella is another one that is used. Soy bean oil is used and peppermint. These are oils because it is oil that seems to repel the ticks as well as keep them from biting. Essential oils, especially oil of lemon eucalyptus is important.

Next time I'll dive into Lyme disease.

The Summer Is Almost Here, & So Are Ticks

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Ben Johnson) — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:26:00 +0000

As the summer gets closer and closer I’m going to talk more about the particular maladies that affect these summer months. One disease that you might have heard of showing up more often during the hotter times of year is Lyme disease. If you’re going to talk about Lyme disease you have to talk about the vector of Lyme disease and that is ticks. Last week we talked about irritable bowel syndrome. This is only slight less pleasant. There are few things more icky than being bit by a tick and trying to pull that little blood sucker off. Then there’s the inflammation and irritation that follows, wondering if you’ve gotten a serious disease from it like Lyme’s or Rocky Mountain Spotted fever or one of the other number of diseases that they can carry. Tick bites are a big deal.

The amount of ticks out there is usually related to the number of deer in the area. The particular tick that carries Lyme disease, the black-legged tick (so if you’ve got a tick with white legs you don’t have to worry about Lyme’s disease) is also called the deer tick. This species of tick hang around deer, hence the relationship between deer and the ticks (and the name). Ticks carry this bacteria once they are infected with it, even as a nymph they carry the bacteria or whatever they have picked up the rest of their life.

I just alluded to the fact that there are different stages of ticks. There are larva, nymphs, and then there are adults. They all look about the same. If you’re using a magnifying glass, one’s just bigger than the other. I know that as a kid what we used to call larva now we would call seed ticks. You could literally have a hundred or two hundred on you real easy. An adult tick would lay an egg and they all hatched out. If you happened to walk right through where they had hatched out you could wind up with a lot of them on you. Those little things, you can hardly see them, which could be a big problem. It’s hard to get 100% of them off of you. Those usually occur later in the summer because the adults have to mature, find an animal to attach to and get some blood from before they can mature and lay their own eggs. Seed ticks are mostly a fall thing.

Where do ticks live? Their habitat is mainly woody, leafy areas with dried leaves or brush. They do not particularly like mowed lawns or groomed areas. The transition from yard to woods, the farther and more brushy you get the more likely you are to encounter ticks.

About 90% of all tick bites occur during May, June and July with June being the highest month. 90% of all tick bites and certainly Lyme disease occurs during those three months. This is prime season right now for tick bites. We’ll talk more about Lyme disease itself in my next post.

IBS: Quelling the Furor

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Ben Johnson) — Tue, 05 May 2009 19:57:00 +0000

I started talking about IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome) in my last post, exploring some ways that IBS affects us. So why does IBS happen? Neuro-transmitters are thought to be part of the problem. Maybe even serotonin levels. That’s why sometimes anti-depressants tried to treat IBS symptoms. Other possible areas are food allergies, dyes and grains. It’s kind of a hodge-podge of trial and error of trying to figure out what causes IBS.

Let me just make clear that bleeding, fever, weight loss, or persistent severe pain is not part of IBS. If that’s what is happening then there is something else going on. People with IBS should probably avoid large meals, meals that frequently cause bloating like cabbage, dairy products including cheeses, certain medicines, caffeine and coffee. Caffeine and coffee seem to be on every list. They certainly don’t appear to be very healthy for us. Last, but not least, avoiding stress, conflict, and emotional upsets are always factors in mitigating IBS.

Women have it a little bit more often than men. It seems that during menstrual periods it may be worse. We don’t know if that’s just because you feel worse during those times, thus everything is worse, or if it really is worse during menstrual periods.

It’s largely untreated. Probably 70% of the irritable bowel people out there don’t go to doctors, probably for good reasons. Doctors don’t have any great treatment or pills and tend to give laxatives, fibers, or antidepressants. That can be worse than constipation if you’ve got that. There are no clear cut answers.

There is a new drug approved by the FDA, lotronex. But, it has some pretty serious side effects (PDF link). You have to have a serious problem to even think about trying that.

As far as naturopathics are concerned probably the best treatment is coated peppermint oil if you can find that or get a compounding pharmacist to make it up. Other natural remedies are ginger and chamomile, valerian root, rosemary, and lemon balm. Those are how you would approach that from a more natural perspective.

So there it is in a nutshell. IBS is a serious problem in that it affects a huge quantity of our population. There is no great medicine treatments for the symptoms and there is certainly no treatment that will cure it. But we do know that stress is a huge factor in irritable bowel syndrome.

IBS: Uncomfortable Times

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Ben Johnson) — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 15:11:00 +0000

There are certain topics we are more comfortable talking about than others. In this post we’re talking about an uncomfortable one mentally and certainly physically if you have it: IBS, or Irritable Bowel Syndrome.

It’s estimated that 10-20% of the population of the world has irritable bowel syndrome. Theoretically that’s one of every five people listening in on this call today have problems with irritable bowel. It may be the most common syndrome that affects more people than anything else out there.

Some of us have different ideas and constructs about just what irritable bowel is so let me go over some of the ideas on that. First there’s abdominal pain even though there are a lot of things that cause abdominal pain. Discomfort and pain are the harbingers of IBS. Sometimes there is constipation and interestingly enough sometimes there is diarrhea. Even more interesting is that it alternates between constipation and diarrhea, sometimes in the same stool. Difficult to pass and infrequent bowel movements are common. People frequently have urgency with those which can be a significant problem if you at WalMart or out on a date or having a nice dinner. It can be very inconvenient. That is the major issue. It’s not only uncomfortable but it is inconvenient.

Like many things, as you’ve discovered while we’ve covered a number of different topics, we in the medical establishment don’t know what causes it and a lot of times we don’t know how to definitively treat it. Frequently treatments consist of mere symptom management and that is certainly true for irritable bowel syndrome. We don’t have a clue what causes it. We know some things that affect it. We know that dairy products bother some people, among other different foods, and there may be some allergy situations as well. Whole grains are indicated as a possible irritant. There are a lot of different ideas there but it doesn’t affect everybody the same so there is no definitive answer as to what to avoid. It’s mostly trial and error with each individual that has the syndrome.

There is good news too. It doesn’t really seem to change the structure or the function of the normal parts of the bowel. They don’t get changed like with Celiac Sprue or Crohn’s colitis or things like that. It’s not known to lead to other diseases. That’s also good news. While it is uncomfortable and inconvenient it is not known to lead to other serious problems.

So why does IBS happen? We’ll talk about the possibilities next post, so stay tuned.

Sunlight: The Good (Or, How To Make It Good)

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Ben Johnson) — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 13:57:00 +0000

I interviewed a local nutritional specialist (who is a brilliant person, by the way) in preparation for this series on sunlight. He only had one recommendation. I usually don’t like to mention name brands or anything, but he said Life Extension had currently the only sunscreen that he would personally use out of a bottle. Otherwise, there are some other good things that can help protect you. Shea butter is one of those that is known to help block UVA and UVB. If I’m going out in the sun for any period of time I’ll take some Vitamin E supplements, at least 400 IU’s if not 800. I’ll take a couple of grams, that’s 2000 milligrams or more, of Vitamin C. You should probably take 800 IU’s of Vitamin D (what you get from sunlight, as we talked about previously) or more. Ironically, that actually is a good damage preventer for sunlight itself. Certainly you want to be taking Vitamin D all winter because that’s what you are not getting when you’re not out in the sunlight during the winter.

When I was in China a couple of summers ago there were Chinese out sun bathing. They were putting something on them. They were out there all day with it and didn’t get sunburned. It turned out that it was green tea extract. Because of the anti-oxidant properties, they would put green tea extract on them and they did just great. I was very impressed with the anti-oxidant properties of that. Now I don’t think any scientific, double-blind studies have been done on that for UVA and UVB so I don’t know that I could scientifically recommend it, but they were real happy with the results.

Maybe the most unheralded product for sunblock and sunscreen out there is probably MSM which is what it goes by in the nutrition shop. MSM is maybe one of the best things you can possibly take as an oxidizing prevention agent for sun damage as you are going out in the sun. I would take at least 1000 milligrams (one gram) of that, if not two, if I were going to be out in the sun for any period of time.

The amount of sun exposure varies according to your altitude. If you’re in Colorado and you are out there 10 minutes you can get burned on a sunny day because there is no atmosphere between you and sun. If you’re down at sea level and a little bit of tan, it might take you 30 minutes to get enough sun. I should also mention that the color of your skin affects how quickly you get enough healthy sun radiation.

There are a lot of different things that affect the amount of sun that you get. I mentioned the time of day: you might want to stay out of direct sun between 11 and say 3 o’clock when it is directly overhead. Also, don’t forget good old clothing. They even rate sports clothing and its sunblock ability. Get out there and get 15-30 minutes of sun and then put on your sunscreen that has UVA and UVB in it. Take your Vitamins E, C and D , and your MSM. Maybe you even want to drink a little green tea and spread a little shea butter on yourself. Then put your clothes on after a little while or just get out of the sun. Enjoy it more in the mornings or in the evenings. Your skin will be happier for it. You’ll live longer and everything will be well with your skin.

Sunlight: The Ugly and the FDA

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Ben Johnson) — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 15:49:00 +0000

Last time I started talking about UV radiation and ended with a note about melanoma and how sunlight can actually help prevent melanoma, in moderation. It’s currently the recommendation that you get 15 – 30 minutes of direct sunlight a day on as much of your skin as you would care to bare to whoever is around. This is a moderate amount that is very beneficial for manufacturing vitamins, preventing melanoma and things like that.

Beyond that you get into some trouble with damaging the skin. The way UVA damages the skin is through DNA mutation, and as we’ve all heard at some point in our life that can lead to cancer. There were a number of types of skin cancer, whether it is basal cell or melanoma or different types of skin cancer, that can arise from too much exposure. It also wrinkles the skin, damages the skin in other ways. Too much sun is not a good thing.

What about sun screens? We’ve all heard, yes, lather it on. Now we’re hearing it may not be effective and some are saying that it, in itself, is damaging. There is a huge conundrum, a huge mental problem going on. Do or don’t I? Let’s talk about those for just a minute.

Part of that problem has been caused by the government standard, the FDA nomenclature, if you will, the wording that they use. The SPF (sun protection factor) only takes into account the UVB part of the spectrum. Well, that’s the part that causes basal cell carcinomas and weathering of skin and some of the tanning. We thought as long as we were protecting the skin with UVB protectants, PABA and those type of compounds, we were doing a good thing. The problem is there is that other part of the spectrum, the UVA part that most of the common things in sunblock and sunscreen don’t block. That’s a part of the ultraviolet area that causes melanoma and other problems. So we haven’t been protecting ourselves for some time against a very, very harmful part of the light spectrum.

Now what do you do? They are trying to come out with some new sunscreens which protect against both A and B UV rays. Some people in the state of California (which is always on the forefront of what causes cancer it seems) are actually suing most of the major manufacturers of these sunscreens because they say they mislead the public into believing they were protected. They say it lasts 6 hours when it usually only lasts an hour or two. There is a whole lot of controversy in the area of sunscreens and sunblocks right now.

Next time I’ll tell you what I do when I go out into the sun, and what I think works best to protect your skin.

Sunlight: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Ben Johnson) — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 19:03:00 +0000

We’ve all had that experience where we’ve gotten too much sun. That night you’re laying in bed but you can’t sleep. All the sheets come off and you can’t make the air conditioner run quite fast enough to be cool, because you are on fire.

All of that because of a little sunshine. Soon it will be the season of sunshine and we all have a tendency to get a little too much at times. It happened at my house with some friends visiting over the weekend a while back. There was a young lady who was just white as a sheet but she was pinker than my wife’s roses when she left.

Sunlight – is it a good thing? Is it a bad thing? Well, yes. Like many other things it is good in small quantities but bad in large quantities. There’s been this huge debate for so long about sunlight and sun protection. At one point in time the standard medical dogma was “avoid all sunlight”. Well, that made cancer rates go up. We’ve specifically learned now that not getting enough sunshine (because of Vitamin D production) is a cause of cancer. Let’s go back to the concept of moderation; everything in moderation.

What type of sunlight do we get? There are two major types that are of concern; UVA and UVB. These are part of the sunlight spectrum, way down on the ultraviolet end of the wavelength, that tend to be damaging and yet also can be very helpful. For instance, Vitamin D is manufactured when that particular wavelength of sun hits us. Vitamin D is a wonderful thing. It gives us strong bones. It’s essential for incorporating calcium into the bones. It prevents rickets, osteoporosis later in life. So there are a lot of good things that Vitamin D does.

The scare with sunlight has been melanoma. Melanoma rates have been dramatically rising. There was this “stay out of sunlight because you’ll get melanoma” mantra that doctors would repeat. But now you have to scratch your head and say, “Did melanoma rates rise after people went indoors under fluorescent lighting for most of their life, or when they were out in the sunshine most of their life?” That makes you beg the question: is not some sunlight good for you? Again, standard medicine has come full circle to say yes, you need some sunlight every day, even to prevent melanoma.

Sunlight is a particularly interesting topic to me, so I'll continue to talk more on this subject soon.

Get A Little Closer

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Ben Johnson) — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 18:49:00 +0000

If you've been following the blog and wanted to know a little bit more about me and what I do, now you can. MeetDrBen.com has just been redesigned and it offers a bunch of new opportunities for you to keep in touch with me and my work. Take a look if you've got the time.

Ending the Rash

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Ben Johnson) — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 14:44:00 +0000

Well, last week we talked a little about what causes eczema, or at least what little we know of what causes eczema. But what about getting rid of it once we have it? The first thing many people do is use lotions and creams. Cold compresses can be used to decrease the itching caused by the histamine released by the white blood cells. Then people usually use over the counter steroid creams which have some benefit. If that doesn’t work they go to the doctor and they get the prescription strength steroid creams to decrease the body’s immune response to that area. Sometimes those areas can be so nasty that they become infected. Then standard medicine would treat that with an antibiotic. Certainly antihistamines are frequently given since histamine is involved in that whole inflammatory process.

In the “good old days” we used to use tar preparations with coal tar in it. I’m not sure what we were doing but doctors thought that was mildly suppressing the immune response. It was just really messy and ugly and hard to get people to put that on themselves. It’s still a valid therapy in terms of suppressing the immune response, but definitely not something doctors do now.

Interestingly enough, ultraviolet or sun exposure can dramatically improve eczema lesions. That’s always interesting. We’ve had this huge reaction for several decades against sunlight. Of course, as the saying goes: “nothing in excess, everything in moderation”. I’ve always said we probably need 30 minutes of direct sunlight a day. Of course, Vitamin D has gone down in a lot of people. Bone fractures have gone up because we’re not getting the Vitamin D the body produces when in sunlight. Sunlight is good in a lot of ways, from preventing depression during the middle of winter to keeping your bones solid with Vitamin D production. I won’t go too far down that rabbit hole right now, but I could talk a lot about the health benefits of sunlight.

Naturopathically you would want to probably use some extracts of echinacea. If you’re going to use something topically that would be something like comfrey extract, plantain, burdock, dandelion, black walnut or even pansy extracts have been used for that in the past. All those are good. Evening primrose oil, again, has some healing qualities and can be of value there. B12 is thought by some to have some benefit in eczema. Zinc can always be of some benefit for anything involving the skin.

There are some new suggestions about very acid water being an effective treatment. I’ve seen several patients in recent months who have been cleared of their eczema and even psoriasis using acidic water. That is very interesting. We don’t have a clue why that is working, like a lot of other medicines. Just an observation as I’ve seen several people use that for eczema and psoriasis. I’m always surprised at some therapies and amazed, but I’ve always got my ears open and am always interesting in hearing what works. If you all have any wonderful, strange remedies out there for things that nobody else knows about or is not widely disseminated you are welcome to share with me at any time.

The Rash to End All Rashes

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Ben Johnson) — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 15:52:00 +0000

Today’s topic is eczema. A lot of us have had eczema at one time or another or had a child who had it. The NIH says there are about 15 million people in the United States on a yearly basis affected by eczema. That’s not insignificant. Eczema tends to be more prevalent as a child. The good news is that it usually diminishes as we get older. But, as you know there are some people who have just a terrible time with eczema. My daughter didn’t get it classically as a infant. She was probably 7 or 8 before she got it. Then she had it horribly for a number of years. Some people get it when they get older. In some it doesn’t show up until they are adults.

What is eczema? It’s always interesting to look at some of the really big diseases that affect a whole lot of people. With all the billions of dollars that we do in medical research every year and all we think we know, a lot of times we still don’t know a lot about some diseases. Eczema is one of those that we don’t know why people get it.

Some people think skin allergens. Other people think dust mites. Others think chemicals. Part of it is probably a disordered immune response. It is just not well defined. It usually appears as a rash on kids on forehead, cheeks, forearms and scalp. On adults it’s a more classical case of appearing on the neck, elbows, knees and ankles. It looks a little different in adults and children.

The good news is that it’s not contagious. You don’t have to worry about catching it. The bad news is, if your mom or dad had it and your grandma and grandpa you’ll have some pretty good odds that you’ll have some trouble with it, too. There is certainly a genetic component to it.

Prevention ideas include trying to prevent coming into contact with whatever it is that is stirring you up first. If it’s wool, change to polyester. If there are a lot of dust mites in the home you try to change the environment. If there are chemicals, remove those. In the prevention/treatment arena you can moisturize those areas with lotions and creams to try to keep those physical things from encountering the areas of concern. At the same time moisturizing is believed to help eczema, not just prevent it. I can’t honestly say I’ve seen a lot of results from that when I’ve treated eczema, but that’s the first thing you want to do medically.

It’s interesting that sudden temperature changes seem to stir eczema up. It’s one of those observed phenomena that medicine doesn’t have a clue as to why that would be so. Sweating and overheating is thought to, but I see a lot of it in winter. One thing for sure is that we absolutely know that stress encourages and makes people with eczema get worse or pop out when they haven’t been having any trouble with it lately. Some people believe there are food allergies involved. Again, there is a lot we don’t know.

Next post I’ll talk about what we can do, medically, to treat eczema.

Your Mind Is A Muscle

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Ben Johnson) — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 15:24:00 +0000

Continuing our discussion about Alzheimer’s disease, we are going to ask: who does it happen to? The huge majority of victims are over 65 years old. In fact it is considered an age-related dementia. It seems like women are in a preponderance of 16% to 11% over age 71. But you have to remember those are statistics. They may not reveal the whole truth because we know that women live longer than men and this is an age-related disease. If you take out the fact that women may live longer, at a given age the percentages are pretty close to equal.

Again, there are only a few things very definable about this disease. One of those is that we know for a fact that more educated people don’t’ get the disease at the same rate. For instance, if you have 12 years of education or less as opposed to someone with 15 years of education you have a 35% greater risk. That’s huge. It harkens back to the saying, “If you don’t use it, you lose it.” And we also know that staying active with your mind will help delay onset of dementia.

Race also is a factor in that African-Americans tend to have Alzheimer’s more than Caucasians, but when you take out the education factor then it becomes pretty equivalent again. Just about the only statistic that really matters is education and how much you use your brain over the years. That’s the take-home message there if you are still younger.

There are a number of drugs out there to treat Alzheimer’s, and needless to say they are all very, very expensive drugs. None of them have been shown to delay the onset of Alzheimer’s or to change the ultimate outcome, though they may help for a few months. Of all the meta-analysis studies (meta-analysis is when you go back and study all the Alzheimer’s studies and what different people were on and took and tried, whether they were living in the Bahamas or North America, what kind of water they drank or what kind of toothpaste or whatever) the thing that pops out is it seems the people who have taken Advil-type preparations, non-steroidal anti-inflammatories (that’s what we call that group of medicines as a general rule) have delayed onset of dementia as a whole more than those that don’t take non-steroidals. It seems like people who are always taking this for their arthritis or whatever, and take it on a continual basis for a number of years don’t get Alzheimer’s at the same rate as the general population.

If there is a drug that can help you with your Alzheimer’s I would go and put my money on a $2 bottle of generic ibuprofen rather than a $20 - $30 a pill drugs that big Pharma has come out with. More is not better here. New is not better than old.

Stress, of course, is always a factor in disease. Stress is the cause of disease. Certainly stress causes cortisol release, causes all the growth hormone to go down, all of the good things to go down and all the bad things to go up. So you’ve just got to figure that in here some place, although they really haven’t done any honest studies on that.

Alzheimer’s is intriguing. It’s a little bit fearful and concerning to us, especially as we get older toward that magic number of 65. Take your Advil, stay out of stress and keep studying. Keep learning, keep growing as a person.

Losing the mind to Alzheimer's

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Ben Johnson) — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 17:53:00 +0000

Alzheimer’s is fascinating and intriguing and it’s concerning. At any point in time, many of us are starting to get up there in age. I’m certainly one of them.

It’s of great interest because we see it in action. People can, if we can use the vernacular, “lose their minds” and it’s very sad. It’s pretty scary to realize that we are all aging also. We think about it. Especially when we see someone in that state we really think about it. We just have to wonder, “Am I going to lose my mind some day? Is that going to be me?”

Probably 20 years ago we had never heard the term Alzheimer’s. We called it senile dementia or this or that. As we improved imaging technology, mainly CT and MRI we began to see more specific symptoms related to structural changes in the brain. That’s when Alzheimer’s started becoming more of a thing. Today, Alzheimer’s represents 70% of all dementia. So it’s basically what we used to call senile dementia. It seems to be increasing and getting worse.

Let’s define what it looks like and what it is. It’s a loss or decline of memory or other cognitive skills. That can include speech, hearing and understanding speech or reading the written language. It can be failure to recognize or identify object in terms of being able to feel them. You put a cell phone in an Alzheimer sufferer’s hand and they can’t tell you that’s a cell phone. You put a familiar letter opener in their hands and they can’t tell that’s a letter opener or scissors or something like that. Or it can be motor skills that you lose, the ability to walk and function. Or it can even be abstract thought and judgment and the ability to carry out a task.

Those are all different things, from being able to identify something in your hand to being able to carry out a complex, abstract task. That’s because different areas of the brain can be more affected than others, or sooner. It’s all according to what area of the brain is affected, that’s what would show up first, if you would. Eventually the whole brain is involved. It is a whole brain disease. It’s just that it is going to show up some place first. That’s why it appears one of those places before it does the others. It will eventually encompass them all.

The economic impact is almost incomprehensible. Just the loss of income to the nation from the care-givers, someone who has to stay home and take care of this person because they are a danger to themselves and their family, is a staggering $100 billion a year. That doesn’t include people who are hospitalized or in nursing care facilities.

What happens in Alzheimer’s? The truth is, we’re still learning a lot about it. We know a few things and there’s a whole lot we don’t know yet. There are about 100 billion nerve cells in your brain. Each one of those nerves may have millions if not up to a billion other little touch points where it touches on other nerves. If we can borrow a phrase from Saddam Hussein, it’s the mother of all networks. It’s the ultimate network, your brain. It’s just incredible. Each cell will connect millions and millions and millions of times to other nerve cells and axons (the shaft of the nerve, going from one to the other). So this is an extremely complex, intricate, inter-related piece of matter that we’ve got between our ears.

Those little connections are called synapses. We know for a fact that these synapses become damaged and start to disappear as Alzheimer’s progresses. As they disappear, the nerve axons begin to die and then the nerve cells themselves begin to die. These nerves have different signal patterns than healthy nerves. You begin to lose the interconnectedness of all the different synapses: the reason why Alzheimer victims begin to forget things. Then there’s a whole lot of dead debris laying around the brain, if you would, from all these dying cells.

We notice that there’s a substance that we call amyloid there, or specifically beta-amyloid which is a little tiny protein fragment. There’s a huge debate about whether this is the cause or the result. Is it an over production of beta-amyloid? Okay, let’s figure out how to stop the production, or help the body clean it up. We know that the beta-amyloid does jam the synapses, the little connections we were talking about. Ultimately those little pieces of beta-amyloid build up into plaque which we can physically see on MRI.

Another hallmark on the cellular level of Alzheimer’s is there are tangles inside the cells, tangles of proteins inside the nerve cells themselves. They have given those a name: “tau twist”. The other thing we know is there’s a huge amount of inflammation and oxidative damage due to highly reactive oxygen species in the brain. Those are called oxidizers. You neutralize those with anti-oxidants. But there’s a problem because a lot of anti-oxidants don’t cross the blood/brain barrier very well. So your normal, routine anti-oxidants might not be quite as effective. There are a few that do cross the blood/brain barrier. It seems the medical community would do well to best pay attention to those.

Next time I post I’ll talk more about who is more at risk for Alzheimer’s, and what treatments exist for this terrible disease. Stay tuned.

Treating Pneumonia

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Ben Johnson) — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 20:21:00 +0000

Before we continue our talk about pnuemonia, first I’ll cover (and re-cover) a few important basics about the disease.

How do you get pneumonia? Well, if it’s community acquired your immune system may be already compromised a little bit. We know what causes that. It’s called stress. I’ve already mentioned in my previous posts that age is a factor. Smoking and drinking are certainly issues there. Heart disease, lung disease such as asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) or emphysema can be factors. Finally, poor health, AIDS and chemotherapy, basically people whose immune system is damaged can have a higher risk of pneumonia.

If you’re a hospital patient and you’ve received gaseous anesthesia (which almost all anesthesia has gasses involved with it these days) that just hammers your immune response. It drives your immune response into the ground. Then, you’re probably having a surgical procedure. Remember, the body can’t only fight infection, it’s having to repair all that surgical damage. So the immune system is, by nature of the procedure, compromised when you’ve had a surgery and gaseous anesthesia. That’s probably one of the reasons that we have a problem with pneumonia in the hospitals. Then, of course, the bacteria in the hospitals have all been talking to each other and remember so they can communicate a resistance to an antibiotic. You can begin to see that the problem can really snowball in a hospital setting.

How is it diagnosed? Your history and a stethoscope with trained ears can usually make the diagnosis. If the doctor is not sure or they need to help pay for the X-ray machine or they want to be totally confident for everybody, they can do an X-ray, and certainly blood cultures may be appropriate to check for circulating bacteria in the blood at some point.

For treatment, have plenty of fluids and appropriate pain medicine for the pain. Again, as I mentioned earlier antibiotics are a cornerstone for treatment by standard medicine.

Naturopathically, probably the number one important things are Vitamin C followed closely by fresh garlic. Cayanne pepper is thought to be important as well as vitamin A, and of course some other immune stimulants: echinacea, shitake, beta 1-3 glucan, uva ursa, una de gato (otherwise known as Cats’ claw), jatobá, and alfalfa. These are a number of things that can be beneficial in the natural arena and I would certainly encourage them.

Most importantly: how not to get pneumonia. If it’s hospital pneumonia, don’t go to the hospital if you can help it. As far as community based pneumonia, number 1, get out of stress. So much of what I talk about in terms of disease is so directly linked to stress.

The natural things we mentioned, probably garlic and good doses of vitamin C and zinc are your greatest preventative medicines there. Again, staying out of stress, living life in love and integrity and forgiveness, and a well-rounded diet of supplements will go a long way in preventing most diseases, but especially pneumonia.

Feeling Breatheless?

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Ben Johnson) — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 19:02:00 +0000

Pneumonia is a pretty life impacting disease, and when you’ve got it you’ll know it’s serious. It starts out with a dry cough and progresses to a wet cough, usually a productive, green-yellow, wet cough which can even have an odor to it. Breathlessness is the big symptom. Sometimes people don’t seek help until they’re short of breath. They can’t get enough oxygen because the lung tissues are compromised. They swell because of all the white blood cells moving in to combat the infection. The membrane gets thicker in the lung and the oxygen can’t get across the membrane. There’s one thin cell wall between the oxygen-laden air you breathe in and the red blood cells that pick it up which gets so broad that the oxygen can’t get across there to get picked up by the red blood cells. The breathlessness is nothing mystical. It’s just a physical distance that’s created by the swelling.

People lose their appetite during a pneumonia bout because when they don’t have enough oxygen their body knows that they don’t need to be doing anything extra like walking or doing this or that. At the same time digesting food takes a lot of energy and a lot of blood flow to go down there and take all the enzymes and to carry the food away and to process the food in the liver. Loss of appetite is a hallmark of pneumonia.

Then, of course, you can get aches and pains all over. Frequently pleurisy can develop when you get pneumonia – a little fluid between the lung wall and chest wall. That will be significant pain. That’s not a little bit of pain, that’s sharp pain. Usually every breath you take you know about it.

Complications include pleurisy as well as breathing difficulties that can become so acute that you need to be hospitalized with oxygen. Certainly if I could I’d want to do the oxygen at home. Hey, we know that up to 18% of the people who die in the hospital die of pneumonia. I don’t want to go there, right? You might get another infection on top of it such as septicemia, where these bacteria wind up in the bloodstream. The lungs are extremely thin. They are one cell thick and a lot of times that’s a very thin cell that’s kind of spread out where there’s no nucleus or anything. But the cell gets real thin there. It’s fairly easy for bacteria to get into the bloodstream from the lungs. When you’ve got bacteria circulating in the blood then you’ve got a serious life-threatening issue right then.

Of course, I’m not advocating that someone not go to the hospital if they’re in need for medical attention. But if all you’re doing at the hospital is sitting in a bed receiving oxygen, that could be something you can do at home and not worry about the increased risk of bacterial infections you might find at a hospital.

We’ll talk about treatments for pneumonia next time.

Drowning Alive

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Ben Johnson) — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 16:19:00 +0000

As I normally do when I begin a talk about a particular health concern, I like to begin by talking about how relevant this concern is by listing a number of statistics that show the impact of the subject at hand. In this case I’m going to talk about pneumonia. Many of us have had pneumonia in our lives. Over 1% of the population every year has pneumonia. That’s pretty big for a disease that can impact life pretty harshly. That’s almost as common as getting a cold. In the general population a little over one out of 100 people every year gets pneumonia. It’s the fifth leading cause of death; 65,000 people a year die from pneumonia. It’s the 8^th cause of death if you are in a hospital. The economic cost is about $40 billion a year.

It’s interesting to see how the medical community divides up pneumonia. You would think they would divide it by bacteria, and viruses. Instead they divided it up into hospital-acquired pneumonia and community-based pneumonia. You’ve got to know there’s a problem in our hospitals if they are dividing diseases according to whether you got them in the hospital or you got it at home or out in the community. That’s just a little reality check there.

There are different types of pneumonia according to the normal categories of bacterial, viral, fungal, and inflammatory pneumonias. We talked a little last week about bronchitis. That’s where that type of pneumonia would begin.

In the viral category you have flu which we’re all familiar with. There are two categories of people that pneumonia is really dangerous for: infants and folks over 65. If you look at that, probably the danger for those over 65 is influenza. If you’re talking about an infant it’s a whole different category. Respiratory seneschal virus and other childhood viruses, even chickenpox, can become pneumonia and childhood diseases like measles. But RSV is certainly the biggest one among children.

Almost always, it’s a standard in medicine that we should not put people on antibiotics who get a viral infection. However, pneumonia is probably the perennial disease that gets treated, day in and day out, with an antibiotic because if you’ve already got pneumonia your lungs are already significantly compromised. Even if it did start with a virus, there are hundreds of different kinds of bacteria in our lungs already as part of the normal bacteria. One of those is soon going to take over because your lungs are immuno-compromised from using up your immune system fighting the viral particles there. Sooner or later if you have a viral pneumonia you’re probably going to come down with a subsequent bacterial pneumonia. So it’s pretty standard operating procedure in medicine, certainly if you’re admitted or if you are out-patient, if you get the diagnosis of pneumonia to go ahead and start you on a antibiotic.

Doctor’s are trying to back off of antibiotics because we’re getting all these MRS’s (methicillin resistant bacteria). These bacteria are smart little rascals. They can even transfer knowledge of immunity or resistance toward antibiotics between themselves. You may have gotten an antibiotic and then you sneeze or kiss or share some of your bacteria with somebody else, and the bacteria you gave to someone else can transfer the knowledge of resistance to that bacteria to your bacteria. So these are not just dumb little bugs multiplying out there that we’re dealing with. There is certainly some intelligence and knowledge that they swap among themselves.

Certainly there are atypical pneumonias like Legionnaires' disease. Back in 1976 a bunch of people came down with an infection, pneumonia, at the head table right under an air-conditioning vent at a American Legion conference in Philadelphia. That’s how the bacteria got its name. Six out of 8 of those people at the head table died. Other people died and a lot got really sick from pneumonia from that bacteria which was in an air-conditioning system. Other people have died since that happened.

You probably heard on the news in 2003 about SARS, acute respiratory syndrome. Again, that’s viral. Then there are other bugs such as TB. It is still out there and it’s making a comeback. Certainly fungi can cause pneumonia. Funguses are much more important if you consider a person who is getting drugs for cancer treatment or an AIDS patient, someone whose immune system is compromised. Those are the people you really watch out for with fungal infection.

Then there are physical ways you can get pneumonia. If you were to breathe in some caustic chemicals with a lot of alkali or acid in it that could burn your lungs. You might also aspirate some food and the bacteria that was in the food or the bacteria in your lungs could begin to grow. The immune system doesn’t just fight bacteria and infection. It also takes care of damaged tissue and cleans up the debris and lays down new tissue and does repairs. While your immune system is mopping up all the damage from the aspirated food it has to be able to take care of any bacterial infection as well. The immune system is a multi-tasking genius that our Creator designed in our bodies.

Next time I’ll talk a little about what pneumonia looks like and then we’ll deal with the treatments.

Get Rid of Your Allergies

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Ben Johnson) — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 19:09:00 +0000

Earlier this week I talked about allergies and their causes. I wanted to add a note about bronchitis before we talk more about treatments. While allergies certainly cause a good deal of discomfort in the nasal passages, they can also be the cause of many cases of bronchitis. Everything I said about the nose and nasal passages relates to the lining of the lungs and the bronchi, too. Even though your nose filters out a lot of those particles of pollen, a lot of them still do get down into the bronchi and lungs and they land there. The same response is going on in the lungs that is going on in the nose (which you can read about in the last post) except your lungs have all these little hair-like fibers that brush the mucous and pollen up toward the throat when you, for lack of a nicer way to describe it, hock it up and clear your throat to spit it out.

What are some treatments for allergies? Standard medical treatment relates first of all to making a proper diagnosis of whether it’s an infection or whether it’s allergy. The common practice is to treat bacterial infections with antibiotics even though that may not always be prudent or wise. That’s frequently what’s done. We probably need to reserve antibiotics for more severe conditions, longer-term bronchitis, or even pneumonia and let the body heal itself in most of the other instances. If the white blood count does show that it is allergic or if the doctor’s clinical examination wisdom along with your history provide that information, that’s good.

After that, the standard medical treatment are anti-histamines and steroids. Steroids have gotten a pretty bad name because of the medical steroids that we use, the artificial steroids. If I’m ever going to put a patient on steroids, I like to use what the human body makes and that is cortisol or hydrocortisone. That can be used with relative safety and impunity especially for short periods of time as opposed to the artificial steroids. As long as we can use a very, very identical thing to what the body is making usually we don’t get into a whole lot of trouble.

There are some good homeopathics for allergies. You may want to consult a good homeopath because there are some practical homeopathics. Some beneficial supplements include Vitamin C, which has been known to help allergies and allergy-related issues, as well as bioflavonoids. If you are having allergic reactions you should probably avoid aspirin and ibuprofen and drugs like that. Of course you want to avoid cigarette smoke and things like that which are very irritating to the bronchi and sinuses.

You should consider the possibility of keeping your windows closed and using good air filtration. If you don’t have a central furnace you might want to consider a room HEPA filter. Frankly, the more you pay for those filters, or the finer particle it filters, probably the better you are. Live plants in the house can help filter some things. There is a caveat there. Sometimes if you are watering them too much you can grow your own mold and mildew and create your own problems. A word of caution there.

It is interesting to note, medically, that people with a bacteria in their stomach (helicobacter pylori) have a significant association with allergies. In other words if you take 1000 patients with seasonal allergies (rhinitis, bronchitis, sinusitis) and test them for helicobacter pylori a dramatically more significant percentage of those will have that bacteria than if you just test a random population without any sinus problems. That bacteria is associated with allergies for whatever reason. We don’t know that connection.

Other natural things that can be used are echinacea, golden seal, and bromelain. One very practical thing to do is good old saline nasal spray. Just washing those allergens off of the membranes in your nasal passages can have a significant benefit. If you’ve been outside a good thing to do is take a shower before going to bed. Your hair is a great pollen magnet. You lay that on your pillow and rub your nose in it as you go along in your sleep. Those are just some practical things to do.

Finally, as I mentioned last post, stress reduction and stress avoidance is the most significant thing that we can do. Any overflow of stress can exacerbate allergies and cause them to manifest.

What Are You Allergic To?

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Ben Johnson) — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 16:41:00 +0000

In a few months the temperature will start warming up and Spring will be upon us. Spring is traditionally the season for allergies, when pollen and other foreign particles are in the air in huge quantities. Rhinitis, sinusitis, bronchitis during this time of year can all be allergy related. It’s not just a little problem. It’s the fifth leading cause of chronic disease in North America. It causes more than 15 million doctor visits each year. An estimated $8 billion dollars is annually expended on costs related to allergies. It’s just astronomical the numbers related to this. It’s probably the leading cause of absenteeism in work. I struggle with that because I also hear that back pain is the most common, but it’s right up there at the top. It’s nothing to sneeze at!

A lot of people don’t even know that they have it. I was with my mother in Athens, Georgia some time ago. We were talking about allergies and springtime allergies. I said, “Don’t you have some?” She said, “No. I seem to finish every winter with a little cold right as spring arrives, but no, I don’t have allergies.” Well, I hate to tell you, Mom, but if you have a seasonally recurring cold that seems to happen about the same time every year including stuffy, runny nose, sneezing, wheezing, it may well not be a cold at all. It’s probably allergies.

Why does it seem so much like a cold? Because your body is responding to foreign invaders in your body, particularly in the sinus passages and in the lungs. There is an altered immune response to the effect of your body attacking pollen just like it would a bacteria or a virus. So for all intents and purposes it is almost impossible for you to tell the difference sometimes. You may relate it to the yellow stuff landing on your car or when you see the ragweed floating through the air in little pollen pods in the fall. If you take an anti-histamine and notice that it gets better, you’ll know it’s an allergy. If no one else has a cold or it’s not cold season it is sometimes then related to allergies and we have an ah-ha moment. “This may not be a cold.”

The very same process happens with pollen as it does with bacteria and viruses. There are something called mast cells in your skin that when they come in contact with these foreign particles they release histamine. That’s where the famed anti-histamine works as a treatment. But your basophils, a type of white blood cell, also release histamine. The purpose of basophils is to dilate small blood vessels so that more white blood cells can get out of the blood vessel and into the tissue to fight these foreign invaders. The white blood cells come there and they attach these particles creating the stuffiness and the inflammation and drainage you get from allergies.

A lot of people get a very inflamed nose. I’ve had a lot of people when I did family practice who would come in and say “My throat is so dry and scratchy.” I would look in the back of the throat and it was just slimy, red and wet, if I can be that descriptive. It was because the drainage from their nose was very caustic. The reason why drainage occurs is because the body is making this material to kill bacteria, fungi, and viruses, so of course it’s going to be caustic material. It has hydrogen peroxide in it. It has histamine in it. It has all kinds of cytokines and chemokines that are really designed to kill cells. No wonder it is irritating to the front of the nose when you blow your nose and to the back of the throat as it drips down.

It’s interesting, the percentage of the population having significant allergies have doubled about every 15-20 years. There is something going on out there. We have so many new things in our environment, all the way from plastics to MTBE in your gasoline. There are hundreds of new toxic substances created every year and we don’t even realize a lot of times what they are or where they’re coming from. We now literally have thousands and thousands of man-made chemicals that didn’t exist in organic chemistry. Our bodies had never had a chance to look at or respond to them until just a short span of time relative to human history and bio-development, certainly in the last few decades in relationship to modern history.

In the end, the rise of allergies in our population may have as simple an explanation as the good old “s” word, stress. Every year the government produces a productivity index. Since they’ve been keeping that, the productivity of Americans have gone up, (except for recently with the recession). What does that mean? That means that you’re doing more in less time. That sounds like a good definition for stress to me. As we do more in less time, certainly our stress level goes up. So that in and of itself would be a valid cause for immune dysfunction.

I'll talk more in my next post about one of the side effects of allergies: bronchitis. Stay tuned.

The Life and Times of Fibromyalgia

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Ben Johnson) — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 15:54:00 +0000

In my last post I joked that given the commonality of some of the symptoms of fibromyalgia, we all have it. Actually it’s estimated that 1-2% of the population has it which would be millions and millions of Americans.

The history of the disease is interesting. Years ago, I can remember when I first started medicine, it was a huge question of whether this was just malingering or what this was. That may have something to do with the fact that most of the primary doctors back then were male and most of the people who get this are female. Women were widely told “This is all in your head. Go home. You’re just depressed. Take an anti-depressant.” We blew them off. That was not a good period of time in the medical field. We needed to recognize that there was an honest problem. We may not know what to do about it, but giving people recognition that, yes, there’s an actual problem here has some benefit in and of itself.

It was ignored by medicine for a lot more years because we didn’t really have anything to do for it and still don’t have a lot to do for it today. Doctors don’t like to admit they can’t help people with their problems. Patients don’t like to be told there is no help. Still, today, there is some denial or a lot of ignoring. Because of its insidious and slow onset, it is frequently not even recognized. A person might be coming in complaining of TMJ (temporal mandibular joint) pain and not have read an article or put the rest of the pieces together. The doctor is rushing from one patient to the next and he doesn’t ask questions. It can go unrecognized for long periods of time. It’s frequently under-diagnosed and misdiagnosed. There are a lot of pitfalls there from the medical side of things.

It’s also interesting that people in Africa or India or other places don’t seem to get fibromyalgia. It’s kind of a European/American disease. What is it? What causes it? Is it stress? Is it microwaves in the air? Is it fluoride in the water? We don’t really know what causes it or where it comes from. We do know that there is disturbance of sleep patterns. We do know that there are different alterations of neuro-hormones in the brain. There is low growth hormone. There is a derangement of things in the brain. We know that some of those things can be diagnosed, but part of the diagnosis is that all of your blood tests and X-rays will be normal even if you do have fibromyalgia. It’s important for us to have a diagnosis in case it’s something else medically that we can treat.

But it’s very interesting to note that there is a continuum of fibromyalgia. That continuum is directly related to the amount of stress the patient is in. The more stress they have the worse their fibromyalgia is.

The one thing that we can universally prescribe that we know that helps is not a drug. It is not a pill that medicine knows to prescribe; it is simply exercise. That’s a hard thing to get somebody to do who is stiff in the morning and hurts all over. But that’s the one thing that we can consistently encourage patients to do is exercise.

In the alternative medical field there are certain things we’ve tried: alpha lipoic acid, B12, and magnesium certainly should be tried. Also acetylcysteine, glutathione, and Omega-3’s are always important and particularly important for fibromyalgia because of it’s anti-inflammatory needs. It is an inflammation of sorts. L-arginine can be beneficial because it increases nitrous-oxide and that helps control pain out there.

Medically things that doctors try are P3, thyroid supplements; doxaphene as kind of an anti-depressant; and oxytocin shots can be beneficial. Testosterone may be of some benefit. There are some things to try medically.

The huge thing, the real take-home note here is the continuum of stress and it’s relationship to fibromyalgia. The more stress, categorically, the more pain and the more significant a problem this is going to be on a daily basis. And that's the skinny on fibromyalgia.

Fibromyalgia: Pain With No Cause

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Ben Johnson) — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 15:35:00 +0000

Fibromyalgia is an interesting, intriguing problem which I have personally experienced. My case is actually quite unusual because I’ve read articles that said that around 90% of the people who have this are women. I guess that makes me fairly unique as a man having personally experienced fibromyalgia.

It’s kind of interesting what medicine does with it and where they place it and it’s treatment. It is included medically as an arthritis, in the arthralgias. In fact, the most common one, only after osteoarthritis. Yet it doesn’t have anything to do with joints. It’s related to muscles and tendons and pain.

Fibromyalgia defined, is pain bilateral all over the body that lasts greater than 3 months. Doctors have 18 specific sites that they test and you have to have 11 of those 18 to qualify officially for having fibromyalgia. It’s characterized by aching, by pain in these spots, and by disturbed sleep patterns. People rarely get good stage 4 sleep and that causes some other problems.

Fatigue is a major symptom. Morning stiffness and depression are other symptoms, but not primary depression, only secondary depression. You don’t have depression and then get this as a result of it. The depression comes because you’re in pain and there doesn’t appear to be any hope because there aren’t any good medicines, because it is going on for a long period of time, and because it actually changes neuro-transmitter levels of good feeling things in the brain; oxytocin and dopamine and different brain chemicals that help us to feel good.

Recurrent headaches are another of the symptoms. It’s not migraines, you can actually get worse headaches than that, muscle tension headaches, usually of the occipital nerves in the back of the head.

Also, you can get tender lymph nodes. There can be bowel and bladder disturbances, and in fact irritable bowel syndrome is one of the things that characterize fibromyalgia. Finally, some lesser symptoms include sensitivity to heat and cold, anxiousness, dizziness, occasional palpitations of the heart and even decreased coordination. Sounds like that wrapped all of us up in there together. I guess we’ve all got fibromyalgia.

In my next post I'll talk a little about the history of fibromyalgia in the medical community and the possible causes of fibromyalgia.

Achy Bones: Rheumatoid Arthritis

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Ben Johnson) — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 15:15:00 +0000

Let’s talk about rheumatoid arthritis. Less than half the number of people get it than get gouty arthritis, which I talked about in my last post, but it’s a much bigger problem because it’s much less easily treated. People over the years are probably going to become debilitated by it at some point in time.

We don’t know what causes rheumatoid arthritis. There seems to be some genetic predispositions. Caucasians get it more than other races. There are certainly environmental factors. We do know that women get it about 2-3 times as often as men. We certainly know there are some immunological factors involved. Why that is we don’t know. There is certainly a sign of a deranged immune response where the body starts attacking itself. There’s something in the synovial linings of the joint that the body identifies as wrong. It frequently occurs after another infection, virus or bacterial infection. The immune system, in fighting that infection or whatever it was, identifies a certain part of your body as the enemy. There must be a structure in the joint surface or synovial lining that looks enough like that which the body starts attacking.

It’s kind of the opposite of gouty arthritis. You usually get a number of different joints involved at the same time. It’s not immediate, rapidly developing pain like gout. It’s usually much more insidious, slow, and over time there’s a little bit of ache and then a little bit more. It will come and go. We're all familiar with the phenomena of people being able to predict the weather by the arthritis or at least predicting when the weather changes. That is simply the barometric pressure changing and it does make people with arthritis hurt.

We’ve tried many things over the years to treat rheumatoid arthritis, from non-steroidal anti-inflammatories to injections of gold, even oral gold. Gold creates an immune response. It lowers the immune response as do a lot of heavy metals; lead, platinum, gold. A number of heavy metals lower immune response. That’s a fact. In my cancer clinic in Atlanta that was one of the first things I looked at was heavy metal toxicity, to lower the burden on the immune system and allow it to begin to respond again with these patients.

Immune alteration is a great big problem with rheumatoid arthritis. Non-steroidals have been a main stay even though they do not alter the course of disease. Then we try gold and platinum and things like that. We’ve even tried cancer drugs; cyclosporine and other very toxic cancer drugs to try to decrease the inflammation. We know that they damage the immune system and lower the immune system. That’s why we always check the white blood count when the patients get chemotherapy and they come back in. Doctors are using that to try to lower the immune response in rheumatoid arthritis.

Alternative medicine wise, the things that work we’ve mentioned for both of the other arthritis’; anti-inflammatory agents, digestive enzymes. There’s not a whole lot in the alternative field that benefits this type of disease either. We do, certainly, need to remember that in relationship to my work with The Healing Codes arthritis is related to both self-control and patience. As it concerns emotional issues, we know that a lot of times these arthritis’ onset after an emotional event, after a sickness or a traumatic event. We certainly want to look at the emotional issues related to that. How can we get well if we haven’t changed that emotional issue?

In my last post I mentioned fibromyalgia. It deserves it’s own post, so next time we’ll talk about fibromyalgia.

Achy Bones: Gout

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Ben Johnson) — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 18:42:00 +0000

Last week we talked about osteoarthritis because it affects the biggest group of arthritis sufferers. About 20 million people in the U.S. have doctor-diagnosed arthritis. If you look at statistics 5 years ago more people had arthritis than they do today. You have to scratch your head over that. Well, the CDC changed the criteria. Back then it was people reporting joint pain and arthritis. Today it has to be physician-diagnosed. All of a sudden the numbers when way down from 50-60 million people to 20 million people. If you’re looking at numbers, according to what vintage your numbers, they will vary dramatically.

This week and next we’re talking about the next two most prominent types of arthritis: gout and rheumatoid. Rheumatoid gets our attention more because it’s so chronic and debilitating. There are actually twice as many people who have gouty arthritis than rheumatoid. I guess it’s a good thing since gout is more treatable.

Then there’s another group of people, nearly as many as have gout, and twice as many as have rheumatoid. These are people that have fibromyalgia. That’s been now kind of included in the arthritic “family” if you would. By the way 90% of fibromyalgia patients are women. Doctors were telling women just a few years back that they were hypochondriac or that it didn’t exist. But we were, as a group of physicians, disrespecting women and ignoring their symptoms. Much worse than that, impugning them by suggesting that it was only in their minds. I ask forgiveness but I can’t speak for the rest of the medical community

Today we’re going to talk specifically about gouty arthritis. Gouty arthritis is a situation in which uric acid builds up in the system and it forms crystals. The solution becomes super-saturated with uric acid and so it crystallizes. If you put too much sugar in your tea and keep putting more and more sugar in until it’s in solution while the tea is warm, when you put it in a refrigerator it can actually precipitate out. The same reason honey goes to sugar after a while if it just sits there on your shelf. It will crystallize. That’s the type of situation we have here: crystallization.

When there is too much uric acid in your system, your kidneys aren’t clearing enough. That can be a genetic predisposition and can also be a situation where it’s environmental to some degree, in the sense of what we’re eating. If we’re eating to many rich foods, too much meat with fat in it that can contribute to gout. Alcohol can also precipitate gout. In the past it was known as the rich man’s disease, back as early as the 1500’s. These were people who were able to afford lots of wine and ducks, fatty foods and things like that to eat.

Gout is crystals that form in the joint space. These little crystals are just like if you’ve ever gotten into fiberglass. It itches. It irritates. This is kind of like fiberglass in your joints. These pointy little crystals just irritate the heck out of the synovial lining. As a result it becomes inflamed.

Gouty arthritis usually occurs in one joint to begin with. If you’ve got one joint that’s inflamed and hurting then the first question in your mind should be whether it’s gout. The body demographics have changed over the years. First-time attacks occurred 70-80% of the time in the great toe. But in recent years that’s decreased. We’re getting much more in the knees and elbows and hips these days than we did in times past. It’s interesting to see that for centuries it stayed the same with the great toe being the fist joint to show up and then it’s changed a little bit.

Standard medical treatment for gout is non-steroidal anti-inflammatories that we talked about the other day. Then some treatment drugs are Probenecid and sulfuric tyroione, Allopurinol and things like that. They do a fairly effective job of taking care of gout and keeping the uric acid out of the body. Natural treatments include curamin, MSM, and digestive enzymes. Digestive enzymes are interesting because if you put them in the bowel with food, they help digest food. But if you take them on an empty stomach they go into the blood stream and are very anti-inflammatory there. Black cherries as an old-wive’s treatment are known to help gouty patients. We don’t know the mechanism because none of the big labs are going to put a couple million dollars into research in that. It’s probably not patentable.

Then just recently in the last year I’ve heard of a gentleman who stumbled across, just by the power of association with his own personal experience, that baking soda helped his gouty arthritis. He mentioned it to other people who had gout. They used it and so this has become another “ma and pa” treatment. I just personally treated four or five patients with bicarbonate. It’s worked on every one of them. It’s an intriguing, new, alternative, very inexpensive treatment which you can find in any grocery store, probably in your own cabinet in the kitchen. That’s interesting to see how that’s going to turn out and what percentage of people are benefiting over time.

I'll talk early next week about a third type of arthritis: rheumatoid arthritis.

Achy Bones: Osteoarthritis

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Ben Johnson) — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 19:22:00 +0000

I thought we’d share some on arthritis today because it is a significant problem and probably the number one cause of disability in America. About 50% of adults over the age of 65 have arthritis that impairs normal daily activities. We’re talking over 20 million people with osteoarthritis and another 10 million with other kinds of arthritis. It’s an incredibly disabling event that is happening to a large percentage of adult America. I thought it would be interesting for us to gain a little knowledge and understanding of that area.

In truth, the term arthritis is kind of a catch-all for multiple problems. In fact there are probably over 100 conditions that could cause arthritis. It’s a highly diverse topic. By and large probably 40 – 50% of all arthritis would fall under the category of osteoarthritis. There are others: gouty arthritis, lupus arthritis, fibromyalgia, juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. There are all different kinds of arthritis. I thought we might cover osteo today and maybe next week work on some of the other arthritises. They are really different things completely. What they have in common is that they just all manifest in the joints. It looks like the same critter but there are a lot of different possibilities there.

So what is arthritis? It’s a condition of the joints that is usually characterized by pain and stiffness with limited range of motion and swelling. As I just mentioned there are a hundred different things that cause that. It can involve, also, the immune system and even other organs in the body including the bowel and spleen and liver and other parts of the body and has significant implications for other parts of the body. But when we think of the term arthritis we usually think of joints and joint pain.

Certainly the most common joints affected are our fingers. Usually the knuckle joint first and then the next up. These joints in our hands are the most commonly affected. However, the ones that get us the worst are usually hips and knees. Those are the big ones that wind up in surgery. When you think of the economics of having a huge problem that you have to deal with you usually think of hips or knees, but by far and away the most common daily problem that we encounter is arthritis and osteoarthritis of the hands.

As far as male/female it’s usually about 50% of women, about 40% of men. That may be due to calcium loss during pregnancy and things like that. It could also be related to less exercise. There are a lot of things we don’t know about it. We have some statistical numbers, but that doesn’t necessarily relate to fact or reality of what is actually going on there. You can take some guesses. If women have it more than men, maybe it’s because of babies. Maybe it’s because they aren’t as physically active. Who knows? We really don’t know the answers to those questions.

What’s going on in that joint when osteoarthritis occurs? Normally is there is cartilage on the surfaces so that the bones don’t rub bone to bone. Then you have a little sack around the joint called the bursa that holds fluid on there. It’s kind of a lubricant on the two joints which are surfaced with cartilage. That cartilage begins to break down. Realize that cartilage doesn’t have any blood. It has no nerves and it has no lymphatics. It’s kind of a unique tissue in the body. It grows slower than molasses. It’s like brain cells. They grow very slowly and reproduce very slowly. It’s a different sort of situation that the muscles or other tissues of the body, even kidneys or liver or bowel because it grows so very slowly. Cartilage is composed of about 95% water.

So those joints begin to get inflamed, whatever may be the cause of it, and there are lots of different causes. Osteoarthritis begins to happen a lot of times even in your teenage years. By the time you’re 50, half of us have some osteoarthritis. By the time you’re 70 it’s almost universal.

It’s interesting as you look at different other vertebrates in the animal kingdom. Most people might think you get arthritis because you’re walking and standing. But whales and porpoises have arthritis. They’re surrounded by water, that’s a pretty good cushion. It’s interesting that the only two animals that don’t get arthritis are bats and tree sloths which hang upside down to sleep. So let’s hear it for the inversion tables here. I propose that we have a study. Anyone who wants to enter my study to sleep upside down on an inversion table every night, we’ll publish a paper in about 10 years and tell whether that had an effect on you. I’m just joking about that. But it would be interesting to see if people that use inversion tables daily have a little less arthritis.

Anyway, you’ve got this cartilage which has no nerves, no blood vessels, no lymphatics. You’d think that trauma would have a lot to do with causing arthritis. If trauma were a cause then long-distance runners would all have osteoarthritis. They don’t. They don’t get it at any different rate than the rest of us.

There are only a couple of things that are known to prevent osteoarthritis. One is weight control. If you are over weight you should modify that and change that. Exercise, you might think, would pound the cartilage, causing damage. Actually this is beneficial because there are no blood vessels going to it. The way it gets its nutrition is by compression and relaxation. It kind of pumps the fluid of the joint in and out of the cartilage surfaces as you exercise. That’s why you would think, okay, my joint is hurting, I should stop using it. Instead, the exercise is beneficial to it because it pumps nutrients and oxygen into the cartilage surface.

Treatments – the common varieties such as acetaminophen, aspirin, and other non-steroidal anti-inflammatories are hugely and broadly used with some significant benefit. There are also downsides to a lot of those. The acetaminophen can harm the kidneys; the non-steroidal drugs may cause bleeding from the bowels.

Natural things that are of benefit I would put fish oil right at the top of things I would do to keep my joints healthy and functional. If you’ve got some osteoarthritis, certainly chondroiton sulfate and glucosamine are highly beneficial. Curcumin is a known anti-inflammatory. There are others such as nettle leaf. And I certainly won’t forget MSM. Those are good things that have benefit for osteoarthritis.

We’ll talk about some of the other forms of arthritis next week and what we can do about those.

Preventing Cancer

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Ben Johnson) — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 19:00:00 +0000

Okay, last week we talked about some of the traditional cures you’ll find for cancer in the medical field, and a little about the effectiveness of those treatments. Now we’ll ask the question, what can I do to prevent cancer or maybe treat it more naturally? Again, let’s go back to the causes. We’ll start with the number one cause, emotional issues. I tell every patient that I have, every one that I ever advise, two primary things: you have to be living in forgiveness and living in love. Forgiveness is the greatest emotional issue of life. You might have heard myself and my friend Dr. Loyd both talk about that in the past through The Healing Codes. I encourage you to go and investigate more of that because forgiveness is the greatest issue of life.

Unforgiveness simply ties you to that person you don’t forgive. It doesn’t hurt them at all. You’ve got to let it go and cut the rope. You’ve got to be living in forgiveness. The positive side of that is living in love. That restores the joy to your life, and happiness. Happiness is not about stuff, it’s about where you’re living your life. Those are emotional issues. That all relates to cellular memory and the other things that Dr. Loyd and I love to talk about.

Hypoxia. If you’ll remember, we talked about low oxygen tension in the blood a few weeks ago. That’s a huge one. How do you get the oxygen tension up in your blood? By changing your pH. The way to do that is to eat alkaline-ash foods and drink alkaline water. Those are really important issues if you’re trying to prevent cancer or get better if you have it. You want your body PH to be alkaline. That allows oxygen to turn loose out there on the other end and oxygenate the tissues. If cells can just have oxygen they can work miracles as far as staying healthy and utilizing the energy and the resources that they’ve got.

What are alkaline-ash foods? Basically that’s lots of vegetables, less meat, healthy fruits. That’s it in one sentence or less. You’ve got to move the pH and shift that.

Environmental toxins – I’ve mentioned heavy metals earlier. Unfortunately there are not many natural ways to get heavy metals out of our bodies. EDTA and DMPS, DMSA are FDA approved drugs. They remove metals very effectively from the body and they have virtually no side effects. This is one place where I’m just going to recommend drugs. If you have heavy metal toxicity, if you have a “silver” filling in your mouth then you have heavy metal toxicity. If you live in America and drink water that comes through our pipes and breathe the air that has metal in it and live in a city where everything is metallic, then you probably have enough heavy metals where you need to get some out of your system. It dumbs down the immune system and the immune system can’t deal with heavy metals very easily.

There are all kinds of other environmental toxins that you want to decrease your exposure to those: pesticides, all kinds of chemicals. Wash your food or if you can afford it buy organic. If you can’t buy organic, at least wash your fruits and vegetables off with hydrogen peroxide or other detoxifiers and neutralizers that are designed for that.

On the positive side you can be taking anti-oxidants. That’s spelled f-r-u-i-t usually: blueberries, blackberries, grapes, grapeseed extract, wine, all different kinds of fruit. You can help yourself out and buy a good anti-oxidant formula from your nutrition store that would have grapeseed extract in it, alpha-lipoic acid, vitamins C, vitamin E and other anti-oxidants. Those are very, very significant.

If I had a choice and I could only take my vitamin pill every day or my anti-oxidant, I would probably choose my anti-oxidant. They are just huge. We have so many oxidizing things in our environment that anti-oxidants are very significant.

The food, the way it’s grown and processed and delivered to us these days, have significantly less anti-oxidants in it than if you grow your own in the garden. You may need a boost there from those.

Radiation. Well, the best way to probably avoid radiation is not to go to the doctor’s office and get X-rays. Let’s talk about testing here for a little bit. There are common uses of X-rays. There are radiation studies like PET scans and different uptake studies, and there are CT’s. These are all using radiation. There is also a test called MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) with which you can see almost everything you can see on a CT (even better sometimes), that doesn’t have radiation. There is also ultrasound. The point is, there are other ways to study things without radiation.

Stay out of sun beds, tanning beds and things like that. Stay out of the sun during solar flares. On the other hand, we probably should get 15-20 minutes of direct sun every day. It’s pretty healthy for you because you need your vitamin D3 which helps prevent cancer. It’s very, very healthy for you. It’s the over exposure where we go out for an hour or two when we’ve been inside under the fluorescent lights all the rest of the week that is so damaging.

We’ve mentioned viruses as a cause of cancer. There’s just not a whole lot to do about viruses except to keep your immune system totally up to speed. Staying out of stress is probably the number one thing. Orally there are some things that are probably good for helping your immune system fight viruses. These include the arabano dilactan, beta 1-3 glucans, things like that available at a nutrition store.

Alternative medically there is hydrogen peroxide, ozone, ultraviolet blood irradiation that can help and silver may be an agent that may help with viruses.

That’s a wrap on our talk on cancer. I know I’ve dwelt on the topic for a while, but I wanted to share that with you. Hopefully it will be valuable information for you that will be of some practical benefit. It’s a huge subject and we could talk about it for hours. There are books written about it inches thick. In comparison this is less than a thumbnail sketch, but there it is.

Standard Treatments for Cancer & Why They May Not Work

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Ben Johnson) — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 16:12:00 +0000

We’re continuing from last week. We talked about cancer, what it is, a little bit about cancer cells and the causes of cancer. If you didn’t see that post I urge you to go back and look at it. It will be very informative.

Let’s talk about how standard medicine treats cancer and then we will move on to other possibilities next time. There are currently three ways to treat cancer: surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. Let me say this very loud and clear. If you are going to get a standard medical cure for your cancer it should probably be surgery. That is: if the cancer is singular, if it is still one single tumor, if it hasn’t spread yet, and if they can go in and do a good “no touch” technique and remove the whole thing. You notice there are a lot of “if’s” in there. If they can do all that and get it out, then you do have a chance of a standard medical cure, and that would be surgery.

The caveat to that is if they don’t get it all or if they biopsy it and run a needle through it cutting across lymphatics and veins and go through that tumor and back out again. Or they might not do good surgical technique when removing it. In either case, they have just spread it. That would be a problem. The point stands, however, that surgery would be the best standard medical cure, given the right conditions.

The next standard way of treating cancer is radiation. Radiation, which are X-Rays as I mentioned last week, causes cancer. It’s interesting – I guess you could say we’re treating fire with fire there. Radiation is frequently used to kill cancer cells. We also know that it does increase the risk of cancer of whatever you are radiating later. If you don’t kill all the cancer it increases the chance of having multiple lines of cancer cells instead of just one. There are some definite downsides for radiation. It also damages the immune system locally and to some degree more broadly. But it certainly damages the immune system less dramatically than chemo does.

What I used radiation for in my alternative cancer clinic was mainly to de-bulk tumors. I didn’t use it a whole lot of times, but there is a new form called IMRT which helps you get less radiation. Radiation therapy is getting a little better. If you have an IMRT machine locally available it can be of benefit.

Chemotherapy works by damaging cells that are in the state of division. Whatever cells in your body are dividing it’s going to damage those cells. The theory behind chemo is that your cancer cells are going to be the most rapidly dividing cells in your body so it’s going to do more damage to them than it does to any other organ system or any other cells. Unfortunately that is not true for a lot of tumors. A lot of them are fairly slow growing. The slower growing the less true that would be.

The other problem there is the most naturally occurring rapid division in your body is from your immune cells. Therein lies a huge problem. If you ask a chemo doctor, “Doctor, could this chemo possibly ever kill all of the cancer cells?” the answer will always, absolutely, 100% of the time be no. Chemo can never kill 100% of the cancer cells. You kind of scratch you head and go, “Well, okay, if chemo isn’t going to kill 100% of the cancer cells then what’s going to kill the rest of them?” The answer is your immune system. Then you go, “Okay, I thought chemo damaged my immune system. Isn’t that why you check the white blood count every time I come in before you give me another dose?” Therein lies the catch 22 with chemo. It damages the only thing that can possibly save your life. Unless your immune system steps up and kills the last 10 or 20 or 30% of the cancer cells you will not survive.

There are a few cancers, usually leukemias, lymphomas and blood type system cancers, and testicular cancer that there are some very effective chemos for. You can count those on your fingers. The others are poorly responsive to chemo in general. Outside of the handful of cancers that are very responsive it may not be a good way to go.

Next week, we’ll talk about some natural means of preventing and treating cancer. Stay tuned.

Cancer & It's Causes: Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Ben Johnson) — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 20:37:00 +0000

Last week I started a multi-week talk about cancer. I began with defining exactly what cancer is: a cell that loses the knowledge of when to stop growing. I also talked a little about how emotional issues and wrong beliefs can be the primary causes of cancer because of the latent stress they cause to the body. This week I’ll talk more about phsysiological causes of cancer.

First we’ll talk about hypoxia. Hypoxia is a scientific word for not enough oxygen in the tissues. Oxygen deficiency is a cause of cancer. We’ve known that for over 80 years. Dr. Otto Warburg described that in 1925 and won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1931 for discovering the cause of cancer was low oxygen at the tissue level. Some of you are also aware that an acid pH causes cancer. These are actually one and the same thing. The acid pH prevents the delivery, the unhooking of oxygen out on the tissue level. So the cells don’t get oxygen when you have an acid environment in your body. That’s why having enough oxygen in your tissues is so critical. There are medical tests that look for this. You put a probe on your finger and it tells you how saturated your blood is with oxygen. Unfortunately, you can have 100% oxygen saturation in the blood and have extremely poor delivery of oxygen out in the tissues because of that acid pH in the environment.

Another cause of cancer are environmental toxins. I was reading an article in the paper here a couple years ago. It was talking about the annual meeting of all the water treatment plant people that treat water for people to drink. They said they knew that chlorine caused cancer. They just didn’t know what to do about it because they couldn’t treat enough water for everybody without the chlorine. There are known environmental toxins; lead, mercury, chlorine, the different chemicals, pesticides; all kinds of chemicals that we have, unfortunately, in our environment. We’re still putting a lot of these toxins that help facilitate cancer into our system.

We all know that radiation causes cancer. Madame Curie, the discoverer of X-rays, died of, you guessed it, cancer. She didn’t know to protect herself with lead shields and lead aprons because she’d just discovered X-rays and didn’t have a clue that they caused cancer. We get natural radiation from the sun and from space. It’s raining down on us all the time. The medical community is, oddly, pretty free with radiation. There was a period when we were much more careful with radiation. For example, my daughter was getting an X-ray taken a couple years ago and I asked for a shield to put over her ovaries. They looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “Why would you do that?” Well, X-rays damage tissue and they cause cancer. Right? “Oh, this isn’t much radiation.” We kind of treat it cavalierly and with bravado. “Oh well, it’s just a little bit of radiation.” Sadly, our medical environment is a significant source of radiation. Woman are encouraged to get mammograms. That’s a lot of radiation, especially if you talk about having it every year. It may be that you may not be able to not have cancer at some point in time if you get enough radiation.

Another potential cause out there is nutrition, or should I say the lack of nutrition. You’ve got to have the right nutritional things to provide for proper cell structure, proper materials to grow, to maintain health, and the proper detoxifiers or antioxidants. Nutrition or lack thereof can be put in that list of potential causes for cancer.

I’d probably list the last cause of cancer as viruses. Every cancer cell will have a virus in it. Viruses play two roles in cancer. One is as a direct causative agent in the cells, helping them lose control. On a broader scope, we all have viruses hanging around. You might’ve seen or heard of somebody having shingles when they’re 70 or 80 years old. Where has that virus been? Where did that come from? That came from when they were 8 or 10 years old and got chickenpox and now 7 decades later it’s popped out and bitten them. Where was it all that time? It was right there in the body. Viruses are tough critters. They live in our bodies and our immune system has to stay constantly vigilant to protect us from them.

There are some of the causes of cancer. This is a really big subject. What I’m going to do is come back next week and share some more about current therapies and other ways to look at treating cancer. Come back next week and we’ll give you the rest of the story.