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(Audio transcript below) Welcome to AIM For Health: Root-Cause Conversations with Dr. James Biddle. All content from the conversations in this podcast are created and published for informational purposes only. This is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice and should not be relied on for personal medical decisions. Always seek the guidance of your doctor with any questions you have regarding a medical condition. Hello, we are back with our podcast “Ask Dr. Jim Bob”.  I am James Robert Biddle, MD, board certified internist, and here to help me is our new-patient coordinator, Joy Lambert. Hello Dr. Biddle – Hello everyone! So today is October 1st, 2020, and we are going to not talk directly about medical things today, but we are going to talk about why. Why. Why. Why are you here? Why are we going to talk about why? We are going to talk about why because why is the core as to why people come to us and why we do what we do. Right. It’s the motivation, it’s the hope, it’s the reason.  A couple of years ago I wrote this little book called “Reclaim Your Health – an Integrative Medicine Pathway” and I spent quite a bit of time writing about “why”.  Because I see patients who are very motivated to reclaim their health. Yes. And they are the ones who have a very strong why.  They are there doing it for their kids, for their wife, for their Lord, you know, whatever it is that is motivating them.  You have got to figure out your why.  And then we see people who are not so motivated.  And then they have a hard time being part of the team. Yes. And in this type of medicine we don’t get results unless the client is the biggest part of the team. Right.  There’s a lot we can do, but there is a lot we need each person to do as well.  Right.  So we are very interested in clients finding their why and understanding their why, and using their why as a motivator. Absolutely. And we are going to talk a little bit today about our whys in two levels, maybe more… We will see where this goes. When I woke up at 5:00 this morning I was laying in bed thinking about this talk and our whys, and I was thinking about my own whys.  And I just did a little meditation retreat last weekend looking at some of that, and there is the level of why like “why do I get out of bed today?”  Up close and personal why – right?  Just why not stay in bed? Some days that would be easier. Right.  And then there is kind of a level of “Why keep this practice running?”  And we have talked – I could double or triple my income, go work in the system and be a regular Internal Medicine doctor and not work as hard, and make two or three times more money, but instead I choose to keep this practice running. Yes you do – for 23 years now I might add. And we will talk about that why.  And then there is the bigger why.  A lot of people are struggling, I meet people who are suicidal, and they are having a hard time finding their why to even stay in a body. Right. I meet a lot of people who are sick and suffering, and they have got to have kind of that bigger why. Why is it worth it? Why is it worth it – that’s right.  And if you can’t find that, you have got to dig into your belief system which is part of what I was polishing up last weekend doing this meditation retreat, you know, finding that why again.  I haven’t lost that why, I was just needing some reinforcement because times are hard. They are very hard! I’ve got to stay motivated.  So my why for getting up in the morning is definitely my family – right?  I’ve got a little girl Raina who just turned 5.  She is a delight

(audio transcript below) Welcome to AIM For Health: Root-Cause Conversations with Dr. James Biddle. All content from the conversations in this podcast are created and published for informational purposes only. This is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice and should not be relied on for personal medical decisions. Always seek the guidance of your doctor with any questions you have regarding a medical condition. Hi, welcome back.  This is “Ask Dr. Jim Bob”.  I am Dr. James Robert Biddle, I am a medical doctor, I am board-certified in internal medicine, and I have been running Asheville Integrative Medicine for 23 years now, and to help us today is our ever-present new-patient coordinator, Joy Lambert.  Hi Joy! Hi Dr. Biddle – Hi everyone! Today we are talking about – Today we are talking about men! Men? We’re talking about men.  Men at work? No – men and their hormones. Oh, their hormones. I know it’s a myth, so I thought we would start off by busting that myth.  Do men have hormones? Men have lots of hormones. The big difference is men’s hormones are steady-state rather than cycling, which is why there is that myth.  So women’s hormones change through the month as they go through their cycles, once they are between the ages of like 13 and 50.  But men have testosterone every day of the year which is their blessing and their curse. Well, let’s learn more about that. Right.  So men do go through male menopause and we call that andropause. And the big difference is that women go through menopause predictably, somewhere between age 45 and 55 for most women with the average around age 50-52, although I have known women who have gone to age 62 before they really go into menopause. Wow – that late! Yes, it’s amazing. That’s interesting.  But, they are going to go through menopause because evolutionarily, if they get pregnant after age 60 they are going to die during childbirth probably, and so the ovaries shut down and they are not going to get pregnant, so that is a way to keep them alive longer so they can contribute to their community and their grandchildren and children and great-grandchildren, and all that. So there’s a reason why women go through menopause. There’s a reason why women go through menopause, but men never get pregnant, so they don’t need to go through andropause.  At age 50 5% of guys are low in testosterone and at age 70 it is 70% in America.  So there is a very steep curve between 50 and 70, but if you can, be like Jack LaLane and be 80 and still have normal testosterone and good muscle mass and all that. Absolutely! So when you start to lose your testosterone in men you get symptoms and those symptoms include fatigue, apathy, grumpy old man syndrome, That never happens… Mood instability, erectile dysfunction, lack of muscle mass, putting on more fat mass – you just lose your get up and go.  It’s also associated with some serious stuff like increasing risk of diabetes, heart disease, and dementia.  So it is one of the major predictors of who ends up in a nursing home and who doesn’t. Their testosterone levels? Their testosterone levels. Well I am excited to learn more about this.  So it sounds like men don’t have to go through andropause but if those symptoms are presenting themselves, that’s an indicator that something is not in balance. Yes, they may be going through it. All right, ok.  Well, my first question is about testosterone.  Does testosterone drive men’s hormones, all of their hormones, or do their other hormones or glands drive the testosterone – how does that work? Well, testosterone has a precursor called DHEA and DH

(audio transcript below) Welcome to AIM For Health: Root-Cause Conversations with Dr. James Biddle. All content from the conversations in this podcast are created and published for informational purposes only. This is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice and should not be relied on for personal medical decisions. Always seek the guidance of your doctor with any questions you have regarding a medical condition. Welcome back – This is Ask Dr. Jim Bob.  I am James Robert Biddle, medical doctor, internist, and here to help me with this question and answer session is our new-patient coordinator Joy Lambert. Hello everyone, hello Dr. Jim Bob! Today we are going to talk about – We’re going to talk about heart disease.  That’s a big topic but it’s something we all need to know about. What in the world is heart disease? You know, I was about to ask you that question. Oh yes, that’s right. That’s right – you’re the doctor, tell me about it. All right.  So every muscle in our hearts – the heart is a big muscle that pumps blood.  And muscles need a lot of blood flow themselves.  So not only does the heart pump blood to every other part of your body, but it pumps blood to itself.  So the main artery that comes out of the top of your heart is the aorta.  And right after it exits the heart there are these little holes that carry arteries that carry blood to the heart muscle itself.  Those are called the coronary arteries. Ok. Because they feed the heart.  And it is when those get clogged that you develop heart disease. Then the heart cannot feed itself which makes it hard for it to do its job. Right.  So if you get a gradual blockage of those arteries, usually from plaque, cholesterol plaquing, then you get a relative lack of blood flow to the heart called ischemia and that results in a heart pain called angina.  And if you get a sudden blockage of that artery from a plaque rupture causing a blood clot, then you get a heart attack or a miocardial infarction. Oh, here’s a quiz – What is the most common first symptom of heart disease? Well, I think I know the answer. What is it? Death. Sudden death, you’ve heard this before. Yes.  It’s not angina or a heart attack that you survive.  That’s what we know about because we meet those people, and that’s what all the money is spent on, but usually people don’t know they have heart disease and the first thing that happens is the widow maker event. Which is terrible. So that is what we are trying to avoid. Exactly. And the studies that conventional doctors do like a stress test – well they do a whole bunch of things to look for risk factors, we’re going to talk a lot about risk factors for heart disease, but if you go into the cardiologist and say do I have heart disease?  They will put you on a treadmill test, do a stress test on you – right? Right, make you run, and hook all the electrodes up to you and print off some graphs and see what is going on. Well guess what?  A stress test has almost zero predictive value for the future. And why is that? Because a stress test tells you right at this moment are you having ischemia, in other words if you are having a symptom like chest pain, is that chest pain angina from your heart? Or is it acid reflux with a contraction of your esophagus?  Or is it pleurisy with inflammation of the lining of your lung? Or is it chest wall pain with a rib that is out?  Or something like that – so that is what a stress test is actually good for, is answering the question – What is this chest pain?  Is this chest pain caused from ischemia right now?  But I could have a normal stress test today and th

(audio transcript below) Welcome to AIM For Health: Root-Cause Conversations with Dr. James Biddle. All content from the conversations in this podcast are created and published for informational purposes only. This is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice and should not be relied on for personal medical decisions. Always seek the guidance of your doctor with any questions you have regarding a medical condition. All right – Welcome back to Ask Dr. Jim Bob!  I am Dr. James Robert Biddle, MD.  I am an internist, I run Asheville Integrative Medicine, and we do this show to answer your questions and educate the public about important topics in Integrative and natural medicine.  Here to help me out is our new patient coordinator Joy. Hello every one, hello Dr. Jim Bob!  Hello – and today we don’t have a big topic like we sometimes do.  We just did a series of like 4 talks on heavy metal toxicity, for example. That’s right. But we are going to have the potpourri or the smorgasbord, or potluck if you will, of Integrative Medicine today. Yes – so we have been listening to what people are saying when they call in to talk to us for various reasons, and we have been fielding questions from the public, what you want to know, and so today we have put together a list of questions that we are just going to go through and answer them.  If this inspires you and you want to learn more, please send us more questions so we can keep on. Keep on keeping on.  What’s our first question? So our first question today, which kind of dovetails off the series we just finished on metals, is – What are 3 simple lifestyle tips to help reduce exposure to metals and toxins? Right.  I don’t know how simple these are going to be, but the first thing is don’t use antiperspirants because almost all antiperspirants have aluminum which absorbs into your body, goes to your brain, increases your risk of Alzheimer’s and other problems.  And the aluminum poisons your sweat glands.  That’s why it keeps you from sweating.  But it is poisoning you. And we need to sweat – that’s part of how we detox. We need to sweat.  You can use deodorants, preferably more natural deodorants, and that keeps your sweat from stinking so much. You can bathe regularly, and you can even sneak off in the middle of the day several times and get a wet paper towel and do a sponge bath of your armpits, which is basically my way of managing it for the most part.  But you don’t want to use antiperspirants, that’s #1. Dr. Biddle, can I tell you a secret? Sure. I have gotten off of antiperspirants and deodorants for over 2 years now.  I use nothing. Because I went through a lot of detoxing protocols that you helped me with, and to be honest everyone – that first week or two when you go off antiperspirant it can be brutal in terms of the odiferous factor coming out from under your arms, but once you clear that out and really help your body cleanse and detox, the smell dissipates. Right. And so now I don’t use anything. Right.  The next thing I am going to say is not so simple, but it is very challenging.  Don’t live in an old house.  And here’s the problem – houses built before 1984 have lead paint and that lead paint also has mercury in it as a fungicide to keep the fungus from growing on your walls, and so older houses – you can paint over the lead paint everywhere except for the windows.  Windows that open and close you have to actually completely replace those windows to get rid of all that lead.  So people who are living in houses build before 1982-1984 are really in a pickle, and then they also have mold issues. Right. So I was happy to finally be able to build my own house, not that I built it – I contracted to have a house b

(audio transcript below) Welcome to AIM For Health: Root-Cause Conversations with Dr. James Biddle. All content from the conversations in this podcast are created and published for informational purposes only. This is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice and should not be relied on for personal medical decisions. Always seek the guidance of your doctor with any questions you have regarding a medical condition. All right – so we are back talking about heavy metal chelation and treatment of toxic metals.  This is Ask Dr. Jim Bob, I am James Robert Biddle.  I run Asheville Integrative Medicine and our new patient coordinator Joy is here to help me out. Hello. And today is the 10th of September 2020.  We just talked about testing strategies for heavy metals and now we are going to talk about treatment strategies. Yes, what do we finally do with all this information? The first thing I have to decide when I find somebody with heavy metals is Do they also have vascular disease? And what sort of impact does that play? Well, because if you have clogging of the arteries to your heart, your neck and head, your pelvis, your lower extremities – then that really increases our desire to do IV long chelations on you.  The magnesium-EDTA chelations which are 1 ½ to 3 hours, because those will open up those arteries by making the plaque lay down flatter. Compressing it. Yes.  It doesn’t get rid of the plaque, but it compresses the plaque by making vulnerable fluffy plaque into stable plaque, and that has been shown to decrease the risk of plaque rupture, and therefore heart attacks.  Now people will often get very disappointed, because they will do a calcium score which is a CT scan of your heart to see how much plaque is in your arteries.  Then they will do chelation for a while, and then do another calcium score and they will be in a rage that their calcium score went up, even when they are doing chelation.  I try to explain to them in advance it does not stop the progression of the heart disease.  It just keeps you from having an event.  What stops the progression of the heart disease is your lifestyle. Exactly. How you eat and how you exercise, and then working on your risk factors.  Treating blood pressure, sleep apnea, diabetes, and What is the biggest risk factor ever studied for heart disease?  It’s elevation of heavy metals.  So it does treat that risk factor also, but it is only one risk factor among many.  So if you have heart disease also, then it makes IV chelation a lot more attractive.  If you don’t have heart disease, IV chelation may be unnecessarily expensive and inconvenient.  Because you have to come here and pay extra and all that.  So we can often do chelation orally for heavy metals. Something you can take at home. Something you can take at home.  So again, starting with EDTA – until recently EDTA was not very useful orally because only about 7% is absorbed. 7? Only about 7%.  If I give you 100 mg of EDTA, 93% comes out the other end and only about 7% goes into you. Because it’s going through the digestive system. Yes.  It is just not a very absorbable molecule, but in the last few years a liposomal form has come out. And what is liposomal? It’s where you take that molecule and surround it with a fat molecule, you put it right in the middle of a fat globule, and that then makes that highly absorbable to where you are getting more than 50% absorption.  And so now we are able to use a liposomal oral EDTA to take out all the heavy metals except for mercury.  So that is one of our prime strategies now. If someone is very sensitive to chelating and they have a lot of toxins and they get the brain fog and all of the symptoms at first, unti

(audio transcript below) Welcome to AIM For Health: Root-Cause Conversations with Dr. James Biddle. All content from the conversations in this podcast are created and published for informational purposes only. This is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice and should not be relied on for personal medical decisions. Always seek the guidance of your doctor with any questions you have regarding a medical condition. Welcome back!  We are doing a podcast called “Ask Dr. Jim Bob”.  I am James Robert Biddle, MD.  I am a board-certified internist running Asheville Integrative Medicine for the last 23 years and with me to help me out is our new-patient coordinator Joy. Hello – Hey Dr. Jim Bob, hey everyone! We are continuing to talk about heavy metal toxicity. Yes we are. And what is on our agenda today? Well, just to recap in case anyone is just joining us now for the first time – we have already talked about what metals and minerals are, the ways in which some of them benefit us, and we spent the past episode or two talking about heavy metals and the ways they can harm our health. Right. So now that we have all that background information, today we are going to talk about how do we test for these metals and then if we find them, how do we get them out of our bodies? Good.  And I will mention today is September 10th of 2020. So the first test we do for just about anyone who is becoming a new practice member with us is a hair analysis.  So Dr. Biddle – what is a hair analysis? And why do we do it? A hair analysis is the test to most likely get me called a quack. Why’s that? Because conventional doctors don’t understand it and don’t believe it, and with some good reason.  But I would like to point out that the medical board of North Carolina will use a hair analysis on doctor’s to see if they have been abusing drugs.  So obviously the medical profession does believe in hair analysis for measuring substances – right? Right. So, basically we cut your hair – we take the inch closest to the scalp, and we can see all kinds of things about this. What do we see? You can even use toenails and fingernails.  For example, I believe they used toenails from the body of Napoleon Bonaparte to show that he was poisoned with arsenic. Really?! Yes.  So we can see both nutritional minerals like calcium, magnesium, zinc, boron, molybdenum – all those different things in the hair, and we can see heavy metals like lead, mercury, cadmium, aluminum, arsenic, and all the rest of them.  What is wonderful about a hair analysis is you get a whole bunch of data points for around $100.00-150.00. Right.  Currently running about $115.00? $115.00 is what we are charging for a hair analysis.  We can get all these data points.  However, the hair analysis is not for the amateur to interpret because you can have some problems with a hair analysis. Like what? You can have the lack of excretion – Poor excretors. Poor excretors or time passage.  So for example, I didn’t have my first hair analysis until 15 years after I was a house painter and got toxic in lead, and so only a tiny bit of lead showed in my hair 15 years later because it is all stored in my bones. I see. And we will talk more about the chelation challenge; we saw a lot more come out in my urine.   The next is you can have poor excretors, so people have got chemical sensitivities and low molybdenum, and they are not really able to put the metals out into their hair, so we won’t see them in the hair. I fell into that category.  Right. Which at first, I looked at the hair analysis and it was like “Oh, sweet! I

(audio transcript below) Welcome to AIM For Health: Root-Cause Conversations with Dr. James Biddle. All content from the conversations in this podcast are created and published for informational purposes only. This is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice and should not be relied on for personal medical decisions. Always seek the guidance of your doctor with any questions you have regarding a medical condition. All right, welcome back to our podcast, Ask Dr. Jim Bob.  I am Dr. James Robert Biddle.  I run Asheville Integrative Medicine, and I have our new patient coordinator Joy to help us out today. Hello everyone!  So the next one on (our heavy metals) list is cadmium. Cadmium. What is cadmium? Cadmium – let’s see.  I have a little note here: cadmium was identified in 1817 by a guy in Germany and named after a mythological Greek character Cadmis.  Anyway, cadmium is another heavy metal that is used in paint pigments a lot, like cadmium red.  So we can see artists who are painting on canvas and such who are not protecting themselves, not ventilating well and getting this on their skin can become cadmium toxic.  And cadmium is also concentrated by tobacco – cigarette smokers have high cadmium levels. Would that apply also to secondhand smoke exposure?  It also does apply to secondhand smoke, that’s right.  What I find interesting is all of these were used as medicines like 100-150 years ago. Really? Yes.  I have a little book, it’s the 1899 version of the Merck Manual.  Because I bought the 1999 Centennial edition and they sent out the 1899 version and there is a whole bunch of cadmium preparations, a whole bunch of lead preparations, a whole bunch of mercury preparations… Why do you think they were using it as medicine? Well because in some ways it temporarily inhibits your immune response so it can decrease inflammation just like steroids do.  It makes you worse in the long run, but it can make you feel less inflamed in the short run. A little bit of immediate relief. A little bit of immediate relief, right.  Meanwhile you are kind of poisoning yourself. So cadmium, what I know about cadmium as far as it toxicity levels is cadmium has an estrogenic toxicity.  So cadmium is associated with increased risk of breast cancer. Really? Besides that I don’t know a whole lot about the other.  Here it is talked about causing enlarged joints and glands, but I don’t know a whole lot about the actual symptoms of cadmium.  I know a bit more about the next one which is antimony. Antimony – what’s that? Antimony is often used in gunpowder, so that is the place I’ve seen it.  It has also been used as a malarial treatment before, for tropical diseases, for parasites.  It can also be in well water as an industrial contaminant, and I have seen a few kids high in antimony and they all had aggressive issues.  They are the kids who are hitting the other kids over the head with toys in the playground. Really? Yes, so antimony can be a problem. Next we have aluminum, and I think most people have heard about aluminum being an issue in dementia risk. Right, because it goes to the brain, does it not? It does tend to go to the brain.  It’s found in the brain plaques.  Interestingly aluminum is the most abundant metal in the crust of the earth, yet it is never found free in nature, it is always bound up.  Obviously we mine it and then isolate it and use it in all kinds of things from aluminum foil to cans and utensils. And we put it directly on our bodies in antiperspirants and it’s even in baking powder. Right. Really important things to keep an eye out for so that you are not just placing it directly on your

(audio podcast below) Welcome to AIM For Health: Root-Cause Conversations with Dr. James Biddle. All content from the conversations in this podcast are created and published for informational purposes only. This is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice and should not be relied on for personal medical decisions. Always seek the guidance of your doctor with any questions you have regarding a medical condition. All right, welcome back to our podcast, Ask Dr. Jim Bob.  I am Dr. James Robert Biddle.  I run Asheville Integrative Medicine, and I have our new patient coordinator Joy to help us out today. Hello everyone! Today being September 2nd, 2020 and this is part 2 of Heavy Metal Toxicities. Right, so in the past two episodes we have been discussing what heavy metals and minerals are in relationship to the periodic table and how they can impact the body.  We focused on helpful minerals and how we need them to function properly last time.  In these next episodes we are going to dig in to how heavy metals specifically and sadly harm the body and why it is so important to get them out.  Then we will wrap up this series later with a look at how we actually get the metals and toxins out of our body.  So we have a lot of ground to cover today. That’s a lot of ground to cover.  So – this is actually part 3 then, because we split that first recording into two. Right, and this is probably going to be a 2-part today as well everyone, so buckle in – there is a lot of information.  So to clarify – the how we talked about last time.  The how of how heavy metals poison us is because they look like nutrient minerals and they poison enzymes.  That’s the main mechanism.  There are several others – they cause oxidative damage the same way that free radicals cause oxidative damage like rancid fat and things like that, but that is the main one.  So what we are actually looking at is the data showing the damage that they do.  The types of damage that shows up, and we are going to take these metal by metal.  We are going to start with lead. Yes. And I put together a list of some data a long time ago concerning kids and how these different metals, especially lead and mercury affect kids.  So I am going to go through some of these in kids, starting right from birth.  So here is a study in 1999 from the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology showing that in neonatal kids, right after birth, even if you look at moms who have normal lead levels – so the blood level is considered normal up to 10 mcg/dL.  So a level of 10 in the bloodstream.  So this is less than 10, but if you take the high normal compared to the low normal, there is a dose effect trend in poorer attention and poorer motor control.  So right at birth you can measure deficits in children on high-normal lead levels from the mother. And aren’t blood levels in and of themselves tricky or a little bit deceptive in terms of whether or not you actually have a lead burden?  Yes, they do show a lead burden we are finding, but the normal range is so generous that almost nobody is above the normal range and the only time that the blood levels are really useful is when you have a job where you have ongoing lead exposure – so if you are working in a battery factory or a smelter, or something like that – Right. And they are monitoring you for occupational exposure, then blood lead levels or mercury levels make sense.  But they do not show what happened to you years or decades ago.  So we’ll see – well, I’ll talk about it right now.  There is a study done by the VA Hospital system looking at lead levels and heart disease risk in male veterans.  And there was no difference in blood levels – everybody’s blood lead level was basically the same. Ok. But they used x-rays lo

(Audio transcript below) Welcome to AIM For Health: Root-Cause Conversations with Dr. James Biddle. All content from the conversations in this podcast are created and published for informational purposes only. This is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice and should not be relied on for personal medical decisions. Always seek the guidance of your doctor with any questions you have regarding a medical condition. Right.  So what is the next thing to talk about with heavy metals. Well, one of the things I wanted to know more about was testing. Oh, you wanted to talk more about different nutritional minerals. Oh sure! Right.  So I started talking about zinc and zinc is the second most important one. Is there a first most important one? Magnesium. Yes.  Magnesium runs over 400 known enzymes in the body, including your ability to make neurotransmitters, your ability to relax your muscles.  It’s like too numerous to count. Right. Now luckily I don’t know of heavy metals that particularly poison magnesium within the enzymes. So if you are low in it, it’s just a matter of supplementing or getting it in. Right.  About two thirds of Americans are low in it.  Half of them are low in zinc, two thirds – so it is the most deficient enzyme and it is the most important one.  Every time you eat sugar you waste magnesium.  Every time you drink alcohol you waste magnesium.  All diabetics are low in magnesium.  So what sits right under magnesium is calcium on the periodic table of elements.  So what is nature’s calcium channel blocker? Magnesium.  So anything that your doctor is treating you with a calcium channel blocker they should also give you magnesium and then if you get enough magnesium you may be able to give up that calcium channel blocker, whether that is cardiac arrhythmia or high blood pressure, relaxing smooth muscles, but also any time they prescribe you an antidepressant, those enzymes in your brain that make your dopamine and your serotonin, your feel-good neurotransmitters, that you are trying to get more of by taking an SSRI like Prozac – they would all work, all those medications would work better if you give them with magnesium, but no doctors ever prescribe magnesium. There’s no money in it. There’s no money it in and you get kicked out of the country club.  I actually know two medical practitioners in Asheville – one was a physician and one was a nurse practitioner, one was in cardiology, one was in psychiatry, and then started prescribing magnesium.  And of course they don’t practice solo, so – Other people knew what they were doing. Right, they were in practices with 10-20 other practitioners and they get called in to the boss’s office and told to stop doing that or else they will be fired.   Not because there is anything wrong with giving magnesium.  You cannot overdose somebody on magnesium unless they have kidney damage.  If you have healthy kidneys, you will pee off extra magnesium and if you take too much magnesium, you just get the runs and you will stop doing that. Unless you are chronically constipated – some people do that on purpose.  Right, but you still won’t overdose yourself unless you have kidney damage.  So this magnesium is the one thing we put everybody, every single person – that is the first thing I want on their supplement list is magnesium.  And zinc, about half the people end up on zinc.  You can tell zinc – interesting little thing, white spots on your fingernails is a sure sign of zinc deficiency.  If you have little white spots on your fingernails, that is a sign of zinc deficiency. You know, I never knew what that was from. That’s what it is from. Huh. Now we can talk ab

(Audio transcript below) Welcome to AIM For Health – Root Cause Conversations with Dr. James Biddle. All content from the conversations in this podcast are created and published for informational purposes only. This is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice and should not be relied on for personal medical decisions. Always seek the guidance of your doctor with any questions you have regarding a medical condition. Well welcome back – this is our podcast called “Ask Dr. Jim Bob”.  I am Dr. James Robert Biddle, Board Certified Internal Medicine, and here to help me out is our new patient coordinator at Asheville Integrative Medicine, Joy Lambert. Hello everyone – good afternoon. Well, I don’t need to ask you what we are going to talk about – we are going to talk about heavy metal toxicity. Yes we are! For this podcast and the next two or three! Yes, this is a huge topic, it is one of the cornerstones of what we do here and something that people generally just want to learn more about.  So we are going to break this up into a series, so we have a lot to look forward to in the coming weeks of learning. Right, and I would just start by saying why it is such a huge topic – because it’s hidden.  It is completely ignored by conventional medicine.  Why?  Because there is no money in it for big pharma. Nope. It affects every cell in your body and therefore every organ system.  It is not owned by any discipline of medicine because it crosses cardiology and GI and neurology and – everything.  I have had my own personal experience with it. Yes, and I want to ask you about that a little later on as to why this is so important, even personally. Yes, so we dig down deeper and deeper into people’s cases and more than half the time in people with chronic illnesses we end up finding significant toxic heavy metals as their kind of deepest sabotage.  We find that we cannot get chronic infections resolved until we get rid of it.  We can’t get the metabolism straightened out until we get rid of it, so I don’t know how I would really practice Sherlock Holmes medicine without dealing with heavy metal toxicity. Right, the cornerstone of what we do is that we want to practice root cause medicine and so many times this is at the root. This is at the root – the deepest root. Yes, exactly.  Well let’s dive in, I am excited to start learning more! Yes. Ok – so, we are going to start off with more of an introduction today to get everyone’s ears tuning, make sure we have good foundational information.  So Dr. Biddle – What are metals? Nobody knows. What? You didn’t expect that did you? No, I didn’t! I caught her off guard!  You know, I did a deep dive in this back in about 2006 because I was on the board of ACAM, the American College for the Advancement of Medicine for 6 years and I was chairman of the educational program.  I taught the introduction to heavy metal class to other doctors.  At one time ACAM was the largest group in the United States of Integrative doctors, and it is still the largest group that teaches chelation therapy which is how you get heavy metals out of the body. Right. So for 6 years I basically taught other doctors about heavy metals and at the start of that process I did a deep dive into heavy metals and what I learned is they are poorly defined, because not all toxic metals are heavy, not all things on the periodic table that are toxins are metals.  So what we really end up focusing on is what is toxic to the body that the body should never have.  There are many things that you do need that can become toxic at any dose. Too much of a good thing. If I give you 5 gallons of water to drink right

(audio transcript below) Welcome to AIM For Health – Root Cause Conversations with Dr. James Biddle. All content from the conversations in this podcast are created and published for informational purposes only. This is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice and should not be relied on for personal medical decisions. Always seek the guidance of your doctor with any questions you have regarding a medical condition. Hello. Welcome to our podcast called ask Dr. Jim Bob. I’m Dr. James Robert Biddle. Yes, that’s Jim Bob, if you take “James Robert”. >>   Yes, it is! At Asheville Integrative Medicine and I have our new patient coordinator, Joy Lambert, here to help me out. >>   Hello everybody. Welcome back. And Joy, what will we talk about today? >>   Today we are going to talk about Epstein BARR, virus, something many people may not have heard much about or heard that phrase before. Mono!  >>   Also called mono.  Teenagers kissing disease. >>   Apparently it’s gone beyond that. And well, this is actually something I’d love to learn a lot about because come to find out, I’ve recently dealt with reactivated mono or reactivated EBV, and I didn’t know I had it in the first place so I thought, this is something to learn about!  And me too, I got sick this winter. I’ve got a four year old in a preschool, at least until COVID-19, and got four different infections right in a row, right before and after Christmas, and then I couldn’t recover, so I worked myself up, and turned out to be a reactivated mono. And I felt like I was going to die! >>   Oh yeah, the exhaustion was unbelievable. There’s not enough caffeine in the world.  Right, right. Did not want to get doing anything. And what surprised me even more than the exhaustion was the apathy. >>   Right. I didn’t care. It’s like, I want to, but I didn’t even have enough energy for that!  I want to want to, but I couldn’t. >>   And it’s upsetting because it’s like, is this me? And it’s like, no, it’s the illness. But what is it? And so that’s what we’re going to talk about today. What it is…it’s a virus and it’s a virus in the herpes family. There’s a number of viruses in the herpes family. So Epstein BARR virus causes a disease called mononucleosis when it’s acute, but we generally all talk about it and call it reactivated mono. Because when you have your monocytes, which are particular type of white blood cell goes up….And if we’re a little bit muffled, I apologize, but since Joy and I are in the same room talking to you, we’re each wearing a mask to protect each other from the COVID-19 virus should we be asymptomatic carriers at the present moment. So we’re a bit muffled. I apologize for that. We’ll be as clear as we can be. So there are different types of herpes viruses. Most of us, the first one we get is a chicken pox, of course, but you don’t get it any more cause they get vaccinated against chicken pox, but I had chicken pox. >>   I did too. In fact, I, I went to a chicken pox party to get it over with.  Yeah, me too. I was the youngest of four children. So my chances were good and I definitely got it. I still have a scar on my wrist from it. Then later in life you can get shingles also called herpes zoster. >>   What’s that? That is reactivated chicken pox or varicella virus. So that once you have that virus, it lives in your spinal cord for the rest of your life. And then it can come out along any distribution, and it causes a painful,

(Audio transcript below) Welcome to Aim For Health: Root Cause Conversations with Dr. James Biddle. All content from the conversations in this podcast are created and published for informational purposes only. This is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice and should not be relied on for personal medical decisions. Always seek the guidance of your doctor with any questions you have regarding a medical condition. Hey, Joy. Welcome back. >>   Welcome back, Dr. Jim Bob. So we’re listening to ‘Ask Dr. Jim Bob’, I’m James Robert Biddle M.D. and I run Asheville Integrative Medicine, and our new patient coordinator, Joy Lambert is here. We’re doing part two of diabetes podcast on July 23rd, 2020. And part one covered, “What is diabetes? How do people get diabetes and what are conventional treatments for diabetes?” Now we’re going to talk about how do you get rid of type two diabetes. >>    Right! Because you left us with the hope that this is reversible. So what are we going to do? That’s right. Well, since the last time we talked about medications, I’m going to just reiterate that we do like Metformin. And there’s a group called Life Extension Foundation that puts out a magazine, and they sell supplements and they sell “do it yourself” labs. And they usually don’t like any prescription medications, but they wrote a 10 page article a couple of years ago in favor of Metformin, for the same reasons I’m in favor of it, in that it decreases obesity, helps you lose weight, decreases insulin resistance, and helps you recover from diabetes at the same time as decreasing cancer risk. >>  Those sound like good thing!. That’s right. And we talked about some people don’t tolerate Metformin because it gives them gut irritation and loose stools and the major side effect you gotta watch out from Metformin is it can make you  B12 deficient. So you’ve got to watch out for B12, besides that it’s extremely inexpensive and most people tolerate it well in lower dosages. So we use that a lot, but the fundamentals before that is diet and exercise…it’s lifestyle! >>   Absolutely! And we’ve got to see the stress response. We talked last time about testing for sleep apnea. So we’re not going to go into that again, but we do an overnight pulse oximeter on people. We have to teach them how to eat. And we talked about the fundamentals of that is you need adequate protein. You need healthy fats, and to know a healthy fat from an unhealthy fat, and, you need lots of fiber, and you need less carbs. And that’s all an individual kind of a calculation for people based upon what they weigh. How much of that is muscle versus fat, how much insulin resistance they have, how much they exercise, how old they are. >>   And this is something we can help all of our clients figure it out as they get started.  We can help our clients figure that out. That’s right. I mean, the fundamentals are: eat less sugar and starch, eat more fiber. I’ll say more about fiber….the American eats about 15 to 20 grams of fiber a day. >>   Is that enough? No, not nearly. The recommendations are about 30 grams of fiber a day. What’s really good is about 40 to 50 grams of fiber a day. What indigenous cultures eat is about 80 to 100 grams of fiber a day and fiber stabilizes blood sugar, cause it slows down how fast we absorb the sugar. It is the substrate for your good gut bacteria, your probiotics, right? Everybody’s talking about the biome, right? The microbiome. And the only two things that actually have been shown to change your microbiome are how well you eat, meaning how much fiber you eat, and how well you avoid pesticides, like Roundup in your diet, and how

Welcome to Aim For Health, Root Cause Conversations with Dr. James Biddle. All content from the conversations in this podcast are created and published for informational purposes only. This is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice and should not be relied on for personal medical decisions. Always seek the guidance of your doctor with any questions you have regarding a medical condition.  Hello, this is James Robert Biddle, MD at Asheville Integrative Medicine. We’re doing a show called ask Dr. Jim Bob. And today is July 23rd, 2020. And our new patient coordinator, Joy Lambert, is here to help us out. >>    Hi everyone. Good to see you. Good to hear with you, haha. What are we going to talk about today? >>   So today we are going to talk about a very big topic that can affect a lot of people, diabetes. We hear a lot about it, but I want to know more. Diabetes. What do you want to hear more about? >>    Well, first of all, I want to make sure I have a solid understanding of what it is. So I’d like to go back to the basics and start with, what diabetes? Right. Well, very simply it is uncontrolled blood sugar. And why is uncontrolled blood sugar so bad for us? The answer is caramel. >> Caramel? Like the ice cream topping? Yeah, like the ice cream topping. It caramelizes us. Have you ever made caramel? >>   Yes.  You just put sugar in the pot, cook it. With what? >>   Butter. And butter has protein in it. It’s a dairy protein. And what happens when you cook it is the sugar gloms onto the protein and makes that caramel. >>   And you’re saying that happens in our body? In our bodies! It is a normal part of aging. We are all getting caramelized, constantly. It is the major way that we age….is the proteins in our bodies get “sugared” and destroyed. Once you caramelize a protein it is no longer functional. So the proteins here that are very important are the proteins on our tiny nerves, and our tiny blood vessels, and our kidneys, and our eyes and our heart. And when your blood sugar is high, they caramelize at a much higher rate. And that causes premature aging, which then causes diabetic damage and complications. >>    So consuming sugar is literally fueling the fire of aging and the caramelization process with it.   It is, but if you’re not diabetic, you can consume sugar and your blood sugar won’t move. >>   How do you do that? Well your pancreas releases a hormone called insulin, which controls blood sugar, because keeping that blood sugar normal – between about 80 to a 100 is vitally important because our we are a wonderful product of (insert your belief system here)…..but in biology we have these wonderful mechanisms for what’s called homeostasis and keeping things at good levels. And so the most important thing to understand about blood sugar is that it will make you age prematurely through caramelization. And then this is what causes the diabetic complications. But again, if you’re not diabetic yet, your blood sugar will never get very far out of range because your pancreas releases insulin. >>    And so the insulin regulates our blood sugar?  Right. And how does it do that? Where does the blood sugar go? >>  Where does it go? So you eat a lollipop and your blood sugar tries to spike and your pancreas goes, Oh, no, let’s make some insulin. And the insulin says to all the cells in your body “take up the sugar”, and what do we do with it? We have two choices. We can either burn it for energy or stored as fat. So insulin says, especially to the liver and the blood vessel walls and other places, “store fat, store fat, store

Welcome to Aim For Health – Root Cause Conversations with Dr. James Biddle. All content from the conversations in this podcast are created and published for informational purposes only. This is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice and should not be relied on for personal medical decisions. Always seek the guidance of your doctor with any questions you have regarding a medical condition. Hey, this is Dr. James Biddle, otherwise known as Dr. Jim Bob, and this is the 18th of June, 2020. We’re going to talk about sleep apnea! And this is our new patient coordinator, Joy Lambert, to help me out with this. If our voices are a bit muffled is because we’re sitting across the desk from each other with masks on because we’re still in the pandemic. So we are doing our physical distancing, not social distancing, but physical distancing, and protecting each other by wearing masks. So sleep apnea. >>    Right? What is sleep apnea? Because it really provokes an emotional response from people. And I thought, maybe we should understand that.  Yeah, nobody wants to have it, right!? >>   No! Nobody even wants to be tested for it, because they don’t even want the risk of having it. They don’t want to find out about it. Well, apnea is the absence of breathing. And so sleep apnea is when you stop breathing when you’re asleep – not to be confused with insomnia, which is when you don’t sleep, you only have sleep apnea when you’re asleep. So therefore you usually don’t know you have it because you’re asleep and you’re not there to watch it. >>    Now, when you say stop breathing, what does that mean, exactly? How long? Well, it can be anywhere from about 15 seconds to almost two minutes. >>   Almost two minutes? Yeah. >>   But at three minutes without oxygen, isn’t that when you start having problems? Yeah. Yeah. And I had one patient in his thirties forget his C-PAP machine when he went to spend the night at his girlfriend’s house, and he slept on her couch and woke up dead. Well, she found him dead in the morning. So this can be…..that’s an extreme case…but this can be lethal. My own brother will not go to sleep without his treatment device because he wakes up gasping. But that’s rare. The vast majority of people with sleep apnea don’t know they have it. And that’s the big problem. Because then they’re in denial and all they know about is they don’t want to wear this mask on their face that they associate with Darth Vader. >>    Well then the question stands, if you don’t even know that you have it, if you’re not aware of it, you’re not waking up gasping in the middle of the night, then why do we need to be concerned about it? Right, why bother? Yeah, I guess it wouldn’t matter except it causes a whole host of medical issues. So when you block your airway off at night, and most apnea is obstructive sleep apnea where the base of your tongue blocks the back of your throat, and we’ll talk about the other type (central sleep apnea) a bit later, but most of it is obstructive sleep apnea. And when you’re in the deepest stages of sleep, then your muscles of your jaw and your neck relax, and the base of your tongue blocks your airway and you stop breathing. And then you come out of deep sleep in shallow sleep, you kind of roll and flop around and you open up your airway and you know, SNORT, right, to start breathing again. >>   Yeh, the gasping. But usually that does not wake you up. It just keeps you from getting deep sleep. But if you don’t have long stretches of deep sleep, like at least 20 minutes at a time, you don’t transfer your your

Welcome to AIM For Health: Root Cause Conversations with Dr. James Biddle. All content from the conversations in this podcast are created and published for informational purposes only. This is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice and should not be relied on for personal medical decisions. Always seek the guidance of your doctor with any questions you have regarding a medical condition. Hi, this is Dr. James Robert Biddle. I’m at Asheville Integrative Medicine. Today is the 16th of July, 2020. We’re doing a little show, a podcast we call ask Dr. Jim Bob. >>    Hello everyone. This is Joy Lambert, new patient coordinator with you as well. And, Joy, what we’re going to talk about today? >>    So today we’re going to talk about PANDAS. That’s right, I said PANDAS, but I’m not talking about the cute black and white teddy bears. I love the teddy bears! >>   I do too, but there’s another type of PANDAS that not a lot of people know about, and this is something I don’t know a lot about, so I’m looking forward to learning as well. I’ve got a whole bunch of questions for you…  It will not give you warm fuzzies… >>   … No, unfortunately not, but I wanted to talk about PANDAS. We’ve had some inquiries about it, so I thought this would be a good one to jump into. So what is PANDAS? PANDAS stands for Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorder Associated with Strep. And what that means is, you get a strep infection and then there’s a protein on the strep that your immune system starts to attack, that happens to look like a protein on your brain. >>    And when you say strep, you mean strep like we all think of you get strep (throat)? Yeah. Group A beta hemolytic strep. There’s lots of types of strep. There’s good strep in your gut, there strep that grows in women’s private parts, there’s all kinds of different types of strep. You know, there’s a strep from under-cooked hamburger (which is) a little bit different… >>   Right, but we’re talking about strep throat. We’re talking about strep throat, but the funny thing is you don’t have to have an obvious strep throat to get this. And this is actually the classic example used in medical school to teach doctors that infections can precipitate autoimmune disease. Because before 60 years ago in the United States, one of the leading cause of heart problems (and congestive heart failure) was damage to your heart valves from rheumatic fever and rheumatic valvular heart disease. And that was the very same thing, but the target, rather than being on your brain was a protein on the heart called an M protein for myocardium protein. So you would get a strep infection, it would get untreated or out of control, and you get rheumatic fever, which means you have these really high fevers and skin rashes. Scarlet fever goes with this same…sort of thing, same thing basically. And then you end up with an auto immune disease of your immune system attacking and destroying your heart valves. Now I have never seen a single case of this in my entire career. I’ve seen people who had it when they were kids who are now old people and have pig valves and mechanical valves because their valves were destroyed, but I’ve never seen an actual case. And I assumed it had gone away completely. I just looked it up…it turns out in developed countries, there are still about three cases per a hundred thousand populations. That means, you know, in Asheville, we should have three people who still have this. Now this is prevalence, not incidence. This is not per year. This is per lifetime. So in Asheville, three people in their lifetim

(audio transcript below) Welcome to AIM For Health: Root Cause Conversations with Dr. James Biddle. All content from the conversations in this podcast are created and published for informational purposes only. This is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice and should not be relied on for personal medical decisions. Always seek the guidance of your doctor with any questions you have regarding a medical condition. Hello everybody. I’m Dr. James Robert Biddle at Asheville Integrative Medicine. Today’s the 9th of July, 2020…and, what are we going to talk about today, Joy? >>    So we have had a lot of great feedback from people who listened to a podcast we did recently on stress and the mind-body connection and stress management, and people want to know even more. So today we’re going to do a follow-up and talk about some things that we didn’t go over the first time in regards to stress… going over things pertaining to supplements, breathing, and other things we can do to help reduce our stress. Yeah. Last time we talked mostly about behavioral things like eating, exercise, resting, grounding.. >>     Meditating…. Yeah.  All right. Well, number one on my hit parade is always magnesium. >>   Yes. Supplements.  Yes, supplements we’re going to talk about, and the number one supplement for me is magnesium, and funny (interesting)….when we get to diabetes, it’s magnesium (we need), heart disease….it’s magnesium, depression….it’s magnesium. Why? Because magnesium is our most important nutritional mineral. It runs over 400 known enzymes in our body. >>   That’s incredible. And two thirds of Americans are deficient in it. >>    Why are we deficient in magnesium?  Because we don’t get it in our diet enough. You get magnesium from eating a real food, not processed food, especially your vegetables, and Americans just don’t eat their vegetables. Or, they’re over-cooked or over-processed, and then every time you eat sugar, you waste magnesium. >>    Right. Sugar, alcohol…there’s other things we’re doing that’s kind of sabotaging our magnesium supply.  Exactly. So our original native diets had huge amounts of magnesium and potassium in them. And now instead we get actually more calcium and sodium in our diets and less magnesium and potassium. So we’re always, in our practice, trying to increase our magnesium and potassium intake. >>    What are some foods that have magnesium in them?  Well, greens! Greens have chlorophyll, which is interestingly almost identical to our hemoglobin except in the center of the chlorophyll, rather than having an iron, which makes our blood red, it has the magnesium, which makes the plant screen. >>   Hmm! Fascinating. Yes. And also Vulcans, if you have green blood. >>   Hahaha! Live long and prosper. Yeah. It’s shown that you’ve got to get about 300 milligrams a day of magnesium to do things like stabilize your blood sugar and control your blood pressure and make your neurotransmitters to help with anxiety and depression.  The downside to magnesium is if you take too much of it, you’ll get loose stools. Magnesium moves your bowels. And here’s an interesting paradox. The more deficient you are in magnesium, the less you’re going to tolerate before you get loose stools, because your ability to absorb magnesium is indeed a magnesium dependent enzyme in itself in your small intestine. So if you’re very deficient in magnesium, even small doses, it will give you the runs….which means if you get the runs with just a hundred milligrams of magnesium, you know you’re very, very deficient. And

(audio transcript below) Welcome to AIM For Health: Root Cause Conversations with Dr. James Biddle. All content from the conversations in this podcast are created and published for informational purposes only. This is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice and should not be relied on for personal medical decisions. Always seek the guidance of your doctor with any questions you have regarding a medical condition. Hello! Welcome to our podcast. I’m Dr. James Robert Biddle, aka: ask Dr. Jim Bob, and today’s the 2nd of July, 2020, and I have our new patient coordinator, Joy Lambert here to help me. Hi Joy. >>   Hello, Dr. Jim Bob. Hello everyone! What are we going to talk about today? >>    We had someone call in and they wanted to know more about the practice and they said they’d been listening to the podcast.  I asked what they’d like to hear about, and they would love to learn more about how what we eat affects our energy levels. How different foods, or what goes on with digestion….how can we eat some things and we feel really good…and other things might make us feel heavy groggy…..what’s that all about?  Right. Well, I guess first we got to talk about digestion. >>   Yes. What is digestion? There’s four main phases to digestion. I mean, once you find it and catch it, that’s the first place (we start) Hunter-gatherer, right? >>   Haha, right. Procuring it! Then you got to chew it and break it down into smaller particles and mix it with your saliva. And saliva actually has enzymes in it that breaks starches into sugars. So a lot of people are very proud. They’ll say, I’ve cut out sugars and I’ll ask them what they’re eating. And there’ll be like, well, I had a banana or this and that, you know, or bread or potatoes, pasta. And guess what? By the time those things hit your stomach, they are sugar. And so you can get a very good blood sugar rush, even though you think you’re eating complex carbohydrates. So that’s the first phase. >>   Is Chewing? It’s chewing and saliva. >>   And the more you chew the better. That’s what we’ve heard. That’s not just a myth. You actually are supposed to chew your food up really well.  It’s not just for the fancy ladies and finishing school. You’re supposed to chew each bite 30 times. You really should chew your food well, and one of the greatest meditation practices that I ever heard about, from a tradition in the country of India, is to put your fork down after you take a bite, and chew consciously…and be aware of the food going all the way down your esophagus and hitting your stomach before you pick up the fork to take your next bite. Which is very different from the way most of us are taught to eat, especially in medical school and residency. >>   You’re just shoveling it in. You just shovel it in, so you can run on to do the next task. So conscious eating is a whole different ball game. It could help a lot of people, especially who have esophageal swallowing dysmotility problems. >>   Well, and if you’re slowing down and chewing and eating deliberately like that, that gives you more time to enjoy dinner conversation or lunch conversation.  It does. And it also activates your relaxation response and turns off your fight or flight response. And that turns on your vagus nerve, which then actually helps you to make stomach acid and the protective layer of mucus that protects your stomach from your own acid, and helps your pancreas to make bicarbonate and digestive enzymes. So if you’re eating in as even a subconscious anxious state of mind, or in a hurry, you’re shunting all your

(audio transcript below) Welcome to AIM For Health, Root-Cause Conversations with Dr. James Biddle. All content from the conversations in this podcast are created and published for informational purposes only. This is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice and should not be relied on for personal medical decisions. Always seek the guidance of your doctor with any questions you have regarding a medical condition now onto the show. Hi, this is Dr. James Biddle and we are doing a show today called ask Dr. Jim Bob, and we’re Asheville Integrative Medicine. Today is the 24th of June, 2020. And I have our new patient coordinator, Joy Lambert to help us out. Hi joy. >>    Hello Dr. Jim Bob! What are we talking about today? >>   So we had a client in the office last week, commenting on how much she enjoys listening to the podcast. And she asked us if we would be willing to talk about stress and the mind body connection? Absolutely. It is very useful. Please do send your questions in and we are happy to tackle them. >>   We want to know what you want to know. And obviously this is a huge topic, as most of them are, so we have to pick out the biggest part and here’s the thing. Our brains are so big and so efficient that we can no longer tell the difference between what we think and imagine, versus what is happening in physical reality. So it used to be, when you look at your animals, like your cat or your dog, they’re pretty much in the present moment, right? Unless they’ve developed some really bad neurosis, but you know, when a fireworks are going off, your dog is very, very frightened. But they’re not still frightened two weeks later. >>  No, they’ve forgotten about it. Right, they don’t think about it. But we think about it. We have great memories and we run that over and over in our head. And for us the fireworks are still going off, and they can go off 80 years later. So we’ve got to diffuse that, and there are many ways to do that. That’s deep work. What we like for people to do themselves…we like EFT, “Emotional Freedom Technique” also called tapping. >>   Tell me about that. When you tap …you use your body. I like mind body therapies. So you’re using your acupuncture points and your acupuncture meridians, and you’re tapping on them at the same time, you’re doing affirmations such as, “I deeply and completely accept myself. Even though I have this issue, I deeply and completely accept myself.” And meanwhile, I’m tapping on these acupuncture points above my eyebrows and next to my eyes and on my face.  And that’s a way you can work on stuff yourself. Now, if you have actual PTSD, you can possibly trigger yourself too much trying to work by yourself. So then you want to work with a therapist and the best therapy for that is called E M D R. >>   And what does that stand for? Eye Movement, Desensitization and Reprogramming. And that was developed originally on Vietnam Vets who were hospitalized for years with PTSD. And they wake up in the night with these terrible nightmares. That would be the same nightmare and never finish. And it comes from the knowledge that when we dream and process our eyes flitter back and forth side to side. >>   The rapid eye movement. Yes, REM sleep. And that’s how we process things. And so they would have these vets go through the story of their dream while they’re doing this rapid eye movement with a therapist. And when they would get to the right place and actually get a process, then the next night the vets would go back and have that nightmare again, but it would finish and then it’d be done and then we wouldn’t have anymore.

(audio transcript below) Welcome to AIM for health: Root Cause Conversations with Dr. James Biddle. All content from the conversations in this podcast are created and published for informational purposes only. This is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice and should not be relied on for personal medical decisions. Always seek the guidance of your doctor with any questions you have regarding a medical condition. Hey, I’m Dr. Biddle and today is the 3rd of June, 2020. And then I have our new patient coordinator, Joy Lambert to help us out today. Hi joy. >>    Hello! It’s good to be back. Yes! So we have people sending in questions. What do we have today? >>  So a question that came across my desk today is people are wanting to know, is there a connection between sluggish bowel habits and hypothyroid?  Absolutely. Are we done? Should we go home? >>   Well, no! What’s the connection? What’s the connection…..!? Well, if you’ve got sluggish thyroid, you’ve got sluggish bowels and why is that word, metabolism. >>  Well, what is metabolism? It’s basically how well you turn food into usable energy in your body at the cellular level. And what drives the metabolism!? The thyroid. So your thyroid gland of course makes thyroid hormone. And that travels through your bloodstream and tells all your cells to be active. You know, and it’s almost easier to say what happens when you lack thyroid hormone, because that shows you then what thyroid hormone does. So if you have somebody whose thyroid just shuts down completely, and they’re not diagnosed after a few months, they’ll have all kinds of interesting things. They’ll of course have mental dullness, they’ll have a weight gain, they’ll have fluid retention and this very weird stuff called non-pitting edema, meaning that when you press on it, it does not make it a little bump. It just doesn’t really give at all. It’s called myxedema, and it’s not so much fluid it’s more like a fatty fluid under there….very interesting…from the lack of the metabolism going on…and they get the dry hair and hair loss and dry skin and dry nails and coarse facial features. And of course, constipated. Everything just kind of stops moving because every cell in your body now doesn’t have the cellular energy production, energy production of ATP, which is kind of our little dollar bill currency of energy that we turned food into to actually do things in our cells. And so every cell in your body is not doing what it’s supposed to do. A couple of fascinating things about that…..I had one patient go to another practitioner who’s not really licensed. And you know what…they did muscle testing and said, Oh, this thyroid hormone is not good for you, you should stop it.  And so six months later she was in the intensive cardiac intensive care unit with a pericardial tamponade. There’s a sack around your heart called the pericardium. And there’s a little thin layer of fluid to lubricate it so that your heart can beat and have a smooth surface to meet on inside there. But that can fill up with fluid and then push on your heart so tight that your heart can’t then relax to fill up with fluid anymore. And she almost died from not taking her thyroid hormone. So that’s kind of the extreme case when I was in residency. In my actual medical school inpatient psychiatric rotation, I met a young man in his twenties with myxedema madness. He had temporary psychosis from a complete lack of thyroid hormone. He had hypothyroidism and had not been diagnosed. And that made him crazy. I mean, literally by the definition of crazy, he could not understand conscious reality and what was going on. He was see

(Audio Transcript Below) All content from the conversations in this podcast are created and published for informational purposes only. This is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice and should not be relied on for personal medical decisions. Always seek the guidance of your doctor with any questions you have regarding a medical condition. Hello, I’m Dr. Biddle and we’re going to talk about the thyroid gland today and problems with the thyroid that are often missed by conventional medical doctors. And to help me out, I have Robyn Paulete, who is our educational outreach coordinator. And we’re of course talking on the phone because this is done during the COVID-19 stay at home and stay safe orders. So I hope this technically works out okay for y’all listening at home. The first thing I want to do is just introduce the thyroid gland. So the thyroid gland sits right above your chest right at the bottom of your neck, in the front. It moves up and down when you swallow. If it’s enlarged it’s called a goiter, and you may have at some point seen somebody with a goiter there. The thyroid makes a hormone called “thyroid hormone”….. actually, it makes a couple of hormones. A thyroid hormone is more complicated than just one hormone, which is the the root of our conversation today. Thyroid makes the thyroid hormone called T4 or thyroxin. And what does thyroid hormone do? It keeps you alive! It helps your to create energy at the cellular level. So if you don’t have enough thyroid hormone, or if you don’t make the right types of thyroid hormone, then you’re going to feel a lack of energy. And that shows up throughout the body. It shows up as fatigue, weight gain, mental dullness, sluggishness, especially in your bowels. A lot of times constipation…if it shows up as swelling and bloating it’s called myxedema. It’s fluid between your tissues and it can even show up as psychosis. When I was in my residency doing my psychiatric rotation on an inpatient, I got to see a young man who had an acute hypothyroidism that was undiagnosed, and he had what’s called myxedema madness, which is a psychosis from a lack of thyroid hormone. I had one other kind of alternative practitioner take one of my patients off of thyroid hormone and six months later she was in the cardiac intensive care unit with pericardial tamponade, which means she had fluid between the sack around her heart and it was filling up with fluid so her heart couldn’t beat. So you can’t just stop your thyroid hormone treatment if you need it. Everybody needs thyroid hormone. You can’t live without it. >>    I’m curious about how come there are so many undiagnosed thyroid disorders. If this hormone is so important, and it seems like we’re deficient in it, wouldn’t the symptoms be pretty obvious? Tell me more about how there are so many undiagnosed thyroid disorders?  Well, that kind of goes upon what are your diagnostic criteria?  I have a medical license in North Carolina and I am very interested in keeping my medical license in North Carolina. I don’t want to lose it. And so everything I do in my practice, I run through a filter in my brain that says, can I defend this in court? Can I defend this scientifically? And if I can’t, then I don’t do it in my practice. And so when I do diagnoses of actual hypothyroidism, I use the conventional criteria, which means you have an elevated TSH. And TSH is the pituitary hormone that we make called Thyroid Stimulating Hormone. And it’s the hormone that goes from your brain and your pituitary to your thyroid gland through the bloodstream and tells your thyroid gland to make thyroid hormone. And if your thyroid gland is sucking wind and not doing well, then your TSH goes up pushing on the gas, telling your thyroid gland