Energy, Disease, and Aging

I recently returned from an international conference on mitochondria, cellular energy, and aging. Attendees at this conference included medical doctors, naturopaths, veterinarians, dentists, nurse practitioners, chiropractors, acupuncturists, and even a smattering of interested lay people.  They came from the U.S., Canada, Australia, Thailand, India, the Phillipines, and other nations.

Much of what we learned was necessarily technical and wouldn't be of interest to our patients and blog followers.  What will be of interest to you is how what we learned can help you live longer and healthier.  In the coming months, we will continue to expand our services in the tradition our patients have come to expect.

Meanwhile, I thought I would share with you some random notes from the conference:

What is health?  

Health is NOT the absence of symptoms.  It is NOT the absence of disease.  It is NOT the absence of abnormal tests.  

HEALTH IS THE PRESENCE OF CELLULAR ENERGY, which requires optimal oxygen utilization.  This is not the same as oxygenation.  When you come in for an appointment and we check your vital signs, we also check your oxygen saturation.  Any level less than 90% is concerning.  This is typically the result of an acute or chronic disease, such as pneumonia or COPD (also known as emphysema).  Ideal saturation is 95-100%.  However, an oxygen saturation of 100% does not mean a person is healthy.  Transporting oxygen from the air we breathe to our lungs, then to our red blood cells, then to cells throughout the body, is a critical process.  If oxygen saturation drops too low for very long, we die.  Unfortunately, far too many of us with "normal" oxygen saturation aren't fully living because our mitochondria--the power "generators" in our cells--are no longer able to fully utilize the oxygen that reaches the cells.

The Mitochondrion

"Damage to mitochondria is THE cause of aging and degenerative disease."  What is meant by "degenerative disease"?  Cancer, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, Alzheimer's, high blood pressure, arthritis, COPD, and much more.  Sounds like a "who's who" of diseases that hardly existed a hundred years ago.  Why has the incidence of these diseases skyrocketed in the last century?  It has everything to do with lifestyle, both personal and global.  This is the subject of an entire article by itself.

Meanwhile, what can each of us do to save our mitochondria, thus reducing our current disease burden or preventing the development of disease down the road?  Five areas of intervention were discussed:

• Diet
• Don’t eat junk unless you want to be junk.  Eat what your great grandmother would fix.
• Avoid processed foods.
• Watch the carbohydrates.  "Sugar and excess carbohydrates are the death knell to mitochondria."  We have been gratified to see increasing numbers of our own patients discover the benefits of sugar-free living over the last few years, and are pleased to see this issue gaining international attention.

• Detoxification
• Liver toxicity
• The liver is one of the body's filters.  From time to time, it could stand a good cleaning out itself.
• Many of our patients report dramatic improvements in their health after following our week-long liver detoxification protocol.
• Heavy metals
• Heavy metals such as mercury, lead, cadmium, and aluminum wreak all kinds of havoc in the body.  A few common effects include fatigue, depression, hypothyroidism, testosterone deficiency, heart disease, cancer, autism, and Alzheimer's disease.
• Heavy metals are found in the water supply, food supply, antiperspirants (it's best to look for brands that do not contain aluminum), "silver" dental fillings, vaccines, cigarette smoke, car exhaust, factories, and many other sources.  Limiting exposure the best we can is critical to our long-term health.
• Even low levels of heavy metals--especially mercury--can be particularly poorly tolerated in some people.  In other words, levels of heavy metals that are considered "acceptable" by traditional authorities can be very toxic to some people.  People with autism are particularly sensitive to even small amounts of these poisons.
• Blood tests are useless for determining one's body burden of heavy metals.  Such metals circulate for less than a month after exposure, thereafter taking up residence in tissues such as the brain, thyroid, adrenal glands, bone marrow, heart, liver, and fat cells.
• The body does not have a mechanism for detoxifying heavy metals on its own.  In our office, we remove heavy metals through a remarkable process called chelation.
• All “silver” (mercury) fillings need to be removed from teeth.  Small amounts of mercury are released into the body every time we chew food or drink hot liquids.  Once these fillings are removed, a complete course of chelation will rid the body of decades of accumulated mercury and other destructive metals.

• Hormone replacement
• Testosterone, estrogen, thyroid hormones, and adrenal hormones all play important roles in mitochondrial oxygen utilization.  It should be no surprise, then, that men and women who are deficient in one or more of these hormones have more fatigue and increased chronic diseases.
• Where possible, we strive to support the body's own ability to produce adequate amounts of these important hormones.  When this is not possible--as in menopause and andropause, for example--we provide bioidentical replacements to restore healthy youthful levels.

• Stress control
• Three kinds of stress tax mitochondria, especially in the adrenal glands: mental (like studying for a big test in school), emotional (what most people think of when they hear the word "stress"), and physical (exercise, illness, surgery, unhealthy diets, etc.).
• Common offenders include too much caffeine (adrenal glands in particular do not like stimulants), too much alcohol, too much exercise, not enough sleep, toxic emotions, allergies, and sugar.

• Oxidation therapy
• Nobody with any chronic disease has optimum oxygen utilization.
• Reactive oxygen species (obtainable in our office) jump-start impaired mitochondria throughout the body.  They can also be used to facilitate joint healing.

Stay tuned for more!

Focusing On What Really Matters

These days, everyone’s attention is focused on cancer.  This makes sense since it is estimated that one in eight American women will have breast cancer during her lifetime, and that’s just one of many cancers that plague Western society.  However, what might come as a surprise to some is that heart disease kills more American men and women than all forms of cancer combined.

Why aren’t we as a society doing a better job of preventing and treating heart disease?  As with everything in medicine, the answer has to do with money.  But that is the subject of another article.  While Grand County Wellness Center cannot change what government, insurers, hospitals, and other doctors do, staff providers routinely help one patient at a time identify and change specific risk factors, thereby preventing disease instead of waiting until it happens.

Twelve years ago Dr. Andrew trained with a group of preventive cardiologists who taught him that standard cholesterol testing has very limited value in predicting heart disease.  It is stunning that even today, patients and doctors alike talk about the traditional cholesterol numbers as if they mean something.  When studies demonstrate that half of people with heart attacks have normal cholesterol—and many of these are already taking statin drugs—this should be a clue that the cholesterol theory of heart disease is missing the boat.  Doctors are looking at the wrong numbers and trying to make those numbers better with drugs instead of identifying and treating the true underlying causes of heart disease.  It should not surprise anyone then, when they get a "clean bill of health" from their doctor shortly before their heart attack!

Grand County Wellness Center staff do not waste patients’ money on traditional cholesterol testing.  Instead, they order advanced tests that reveal a lot more about what's going on in patients’ arteries.  They sit down with patients to review test results, discuss any abnormalities identified, and provide options.  Because drugs are the least-effective and highest-risk agents for preventing and treating heart disease, those who are looking for an artificial chemical solution to their problems will usually be disappointed.  Ironically, medical schools do not teach future doctors about several of the causes of heart disease.  Why?  Because there is no drug to treat them.  Instead, the treatments are already found in nature.  As much as multinational drug conglomerates would like to, they can't patent the foods, vitamins, minerals, herbs, and hormones that have prevented and treated heart disease—and so many other diseases—for thousands of years.

Fortunately—the body being a wondrous symphony of chemical and electromagnetic activity—many of the factors that prevent heart disease also prevent cancer and other diseases.  Thankfully, patients don’t have to leave Grand County to find cutting-edge diagnostic and treatment regimens to restore that symphony.  In fact, many come to Moab from Salt Lake City, Denver, and places even farther away because they are unable to obtain these services in the big cities.  Not surprisingly, GCWC patients often discover that treatments they have been receiving for years are now starting to be recognized by their cardiologists and even some popular media medical advisers.  GCWC is continually expanding its services, bringing breakthroughs from around the world to bear on common problems for which drugs and surgery have limited effectiveness.  Due to a relentless pursuit of the latest in medical science and technology, you can always count on GCWC to be ahead of the curve—even in Moab and Provo.

That Purple Pill: Panacea, Poison, or Both?

Back in medical school we learned to prescribe proton pump inhibitors (such as Prilosec) for heartburn. Then, when patients got osteoporosis, we were supposed to prescribe bisphosphonates (like Fosamax)—which cause ulcers, jaw bone destruction, and many other problems—and horse urine hormones (Premarin)—which cause breast cancer, heart disease, and strokes. Then, when patients had their heart attack, we were supposed to prescribe statin drugs (such as Zocor)—which cause liver damage, depression, diabetes, muscle damage (including the heart muscle), hormone deficiencies, and so forth. You get the picture.

Prescribing acid-blocking drugs to treat heartburn is based on the presumption that there is too much acid in the stomach. To be sure, a gastroenterologist could do a scope and place a pH probe in the stomach to monitor its acidity for 24 hours. In practice, I have never seen this done. Doctors will often prescribe acid-blocking drugs after seeing abnormalities in the esophagus or stomach during a scope procedure but, again, they are making the assumption that too much acid is the cause of those abnormalities, which is anything but scientific.

Like depression, ADHD, headaches, chronic fatigue syndrome, and the rest of today’s vogue illnesses, heartburn is not a disease at all. It is merely a symptom of an underlying imbalance. Paradoxically, most people with heartburn do not have too much stomach acid. Instead, many have too little. But when any acid at all gets into the esophagus—where it doesn’t belong—it can cause intense burning, chest pain, difficulty swallowing, chronic coughing, hoarseness, etc. 

In combination with other agents, acid blockers are very effective in the treatment of ulcers. Healing occurs in a matter of weeks. Unfortunately, many patients first present to us after decades of treatment with these drugs, which were originally FDA-approved for treatment courses lasting eight weeks. What their doctors did not know is that the human body requires stomach acid to digest proteins and absorb vitamin B12 (think fatigue and anemia) and key minerals, such as calcium, magnesium, zinc, iron, chromium, molybdenum, manganese, and copper. Most people were never warned that long-term suppression of stomach acid can cause osteoporosis, yeast overgrowth, hair loss, charley horses, food allergies, rashes (including hives), diarrhea, constipation, weak fingernails, acne, asthma, bloating, belching, gas, gallbladder problems, autoimmune diseases, thyroid disease, and much more. Most of these effects don’t even make it to the rapid-fire list of dangers you hear during the last 10 seconds of the commercial telling you how your life is going to be transformed by that purple pill. Unfortunately, because many of these effects take years to develop, people don’t realize they were caused by the magic pill that keeps their heartburn away.

Before you or someone you love reaches for any magic pill to make your symptoms go away, seek out a doctor who is trained in finding and treating the causes of gastrointestinal symptoms, not just suppressing them. Alternatively, if bloating, belching, gas, constipation, diarrhea, nausea, or any other symptom has become such a way of life for you that you have convinced yourself it is normal, think again. While you may think they are just annoyances you have to live with, in reality they signal imbalances that can eventually lead to serious diseases, such as colon cancer. A little detective work and a few changes now may not only make the symptoms go away but also save you a lot of money, unnecessary procedures, and serious diseases in the long run.

Dr. Andrew is board-certified in Family Medicine and has additional training in Functional and Anti-Aging Medicine.