Ep 04: WTH ?!? A FAN-C approach to Parkinson's

Consciousness in action. And you are taking action into your consciousness by tuning into Contact Talk radio and on tunein.coming&FM and up snap mobile contact talk Radio. Welcome to what the Health an independent approach to your health span. Have you noticed how our healthcare system may not have your best interest in mind? Join Dr. Eckel in this fun and sometimes disturbing exploration of the state of healthcare and what it means for you. Now, here's your host, Dr. Eckel. All right, welcome back to what the Health Everybody. I am Dr. Greg Eckel of Nature Cures Clinic here in downtown Portland, Oregon. Here coming at you today with the topic of Parkinson's disease and my upcoming book, Shake It A Fancy approach to Parkinson's Solutions. You know, it's a topic near and dear to me. Chronic neurodegeneration. It's been a long path in this medical career and field for me. And arriving at this topic out of personal tragedy and wanting to turn that into something to show for and share, basically what I'm calling Soraya's gifts. For those of you just tuning in, episode four here, we've got the previous episodes@naturecuresclinic.com on the website and also at Contact Talk Radio here on your web browser. You can check them out and get an in depth kind of beginning from the very beginning of this help what the Health podcast. And I'm super excited to share this one. It's a labor of love. Shake it Off. A fancy approach to Parkinson's. So fancy is fanc. And this is a program I put together over 18 years. Each individual piece I've been have put into practice over this time helping thousands of patients over the last two decades in the healthcare system. But this one I'm really proud of came out of really my personal tragedy of losing my wife to Creutzfeld Jacob disease, which you may be thinking, well, that's not Parkinson's, Doc. What are you talking about here? Well, one of the things that I uncovered, swinging for the fence, looking for some remedies for incurable condition, especially when it's your loved one even more so. Right. The love of my life went looking for, you know, remedies and I went to PubMed and looking at, you know, what do we have research on? Is this an uncurable condition? And so really came across these prions which are unfolded proteins or misfolded proteins and they just get reconfigured and you learn, you know, when you're talking about mad cow syndrome and animals, it's scrappy and goats, it's you know, different. It's in each species on the planet. But we'll talk about it in people in Crutzfeld Jacob disease right now, these prions. So I got the prionic textbook, and lo and behold, you look at all of these other misfolded proteins in different neurologic conditions, and I got to thinking, wait a minute, these are all in the prionic disorders textbook. Amyloid plaques, alpha synuclein, you know, so we're looking at dementia, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, you know, pretty big categories of conditions. And with no known cure. You know, the status focus of mine in medical practice has been neurology over the last two decades. And coming across this is like, well, maybe there's something here. Maybe this would explain why we haven't found any, really any corrective agents in modern medicine for chronic neurodegeneration. I mean, at this point, if you've got Parkinson's, you're looking at getting an implant put into the central nervous system. I mean, that's a pretty invasive surgery. So, you know, looking at it with. In particular for psoria, looking for, you know, different remedies of things that I could put in. We're going to talk about all of that that all went into this book. So I didn't write a book on Crisfville Jacob disease because not many people have that. There's 300 cases in North America a year. One in a million chances of getting that. So big facet of my practice has been Parkinson's. So I figured, you know, let me share this with that community to start with. And it has been really amazing to see the results that we're getting for folks. I've got, you know, oftentimes, you know, what happens for folks in the system is they'll go through and they get sick of it. Right. It's just like they're serially monitored every year. They're getting worse and worse. They go see their neurologist and they get the battery of tests, and I ask them when they come back, okay, well, what did they say? And, you know, a couple patients really at the beginning were like, well, they haven't. They didn't say anything. They actually just said, see you next year. They didn't even tell them, you know, how they were doing. Of course, had they said, well, you're getting worse. My patient was like, basically, yeah, that, you know, Victoria was her name. And she just said, yeah, I could have told you that, Doc. Like, I know I'm getting worse. You know, my tremor's worse, my gait's worse, my speech is worse, digestion is worse. And so, you know, it can get super, super depressing because that's all we got. We got medicines, right? You get basically diagnosed and then put on Levodopa carbidopa. And if the medications work, then you have a firmer diagnosis of Parkinson's disease. Well, I just thought, you know, there's a better way. Maybe we can provide a little bit more hope. Not false hope, but hope. Like maybe there's something we can do here for these more quote unquote uncurable conditions. You know, I've shared previously on what the Health. I'm a firm believer in the body's ability to heal itself. I always leave the door open. Mindset is very crucial on that too. But I will leave the door open for spontaneous remissions again. Tome of 500 case series of spontaneous remissions. When I was a second year medical student at National University of Natural Medicine, which was NCNM back in the day when I went and it really left that book and the philosophy of naturopathic medicine really left a lasting imprint on me where I am not going to be false hope. I'm a straight shooter. I definitely let people know what a prognosis is. But I am not going to limit somebody's healing ability and or the ability of the body to heal. So, you know, we really look at it. I codified it in this. It was a great, great process. This is my first book coming out this fall. I'll keep you posted here on the show and on the website. It's called Shake It Off. A Fancy Approach to Parkinson's. I'd like to say that I came off with the Shake it Off, but a good buddy of mine was the mastermind behind that. Just a quick aside on it. We did actually approach Taylor Swift on licensing her song. In my circle of influence, I had actually got to her producer and found out that she does not she doesn't promote conditions for people, adults basically only children, causes and animals. Just for future reference, anybody out there wanting to license a Taylor Swift song, but it is to really solidify thought process and a writing process and with the editors. I'm very pleased with what's coming out and I really the goal of the book and the information what I'm going to share with you today is to let you know if you have a loved one or if you have concerns of chronic neurodegeneration runs in the family or watching your parent or grandparent go through it. Well, there are, there's a lot of things you can do to get proactive. There's a lot of things that you can try as far as treatments go that are really out of the box and you know, really maximize your body's healing potential. And, and that's what we're going to share today is the whole process. So you know how I got here again, trying to turn the personal tragedy into triumphant sharing. My purpose and passion is to help as many people as I can achieve optimal wellness through an integrative care model. So we meet folks where, we meet you, where you're at and you know, we address that. We look at your genetics, your family of origin. It can even go back intergenerational traumas. You know, it's made my job much harder as I look at making a systematic approach and, or codifying a thought process into a program to individualize treatments for each person coming through. So much so, you know, I am on a mission with this. I have a mini summit coming up online that I'm really excited about. I'm going to announce it right now. It's coming out August 24th, so keep your calendars open. That's a Saturday. It's a half a day. I interviewed seven experts around the globe on different facets that I feel are integral for a comprehensive, complete program for folks with Parkinson's. And this would actually apply for all neurodegenerative conditions. Multiple sclerosis, autoimmune conditions that affect the brain. Crutzfeld, Jacob, Parkinson's, dementia, Alzheimer's. All of these aspects that we don't have any known cure. So we've got to take a broad, whole person healthcare component, right? We're bringing back healthcare to promote thriving again. Not just surviving, not just getting by, but actually thriving. And you know, we see it time and time again. I've got some great testimonies up online and my YouTube channel as well, around folks that we've helped and we keep them employed. They're in the workplace, they're productive, they're creative, they're still, you know, we're working on their quality of life. I would not say that we're curing anyone of anything. And in fact I say I do a lot of nothing all day. It's your body and it's the medicine that really, that's where the magic happens, that's where the healing occurs. You know, I'm a great guide. I'm doing research all the time. I'm uncovering these remedies that have research or possibilities and we're going to put them in and try them out. And that's how it works, right? It's called the practice of medicine for a reason. But you want a trusted guide. You want somebody that's been around the block a few times, that has a life experience, but also has the clinical evidence and experience to know what to expect. Because honestly, when I was a new practitioner, I gave up too soon. I'm impatient. I'll be honest with you. I'm impatient. I like to see results from my patients. You know, I think I gave up on some treatment programs a little bit too soon early on in my career. And that's a hard thing to admit at this point, 18 years in. But I've grown. I'm helping people at a deeper level. And it really is important to know, you know, I've seen these things reverse. I've seen spontaneous remissions. We've. We get people's function back. Maybe not 100%, but let's say 65 to 95%. Sometimes, of course, we're going for 100%. But in particular, what we're looking at here is really addressing you as the whole dynamic, being that you are, the aspects that go into this. I want to start out by talking about assessment, this kind of chronic serial monitoring without many options. I mean, in fact, none is really. It's super depressing. And I've seen it happen through time where, you know, they're just come back folks come back from the neurologist defeated, like, well, they had nothing for me, Nothing new, no new meds, there's nothing in the pipeline, possibly. I get this brain stimulator put in, right? There's more buzz about that going on. But, you know, in a workup, when we look at us, you know, what happens in the macrocosm happens in the microcosm. So in our environment, why are rates of brain degeneration going up? You know, the stats are staggering on dementia. Over 65 years old, 50% of people. Now half people are expected to develop dementia and Alzheimer's. And you know, like, does it have to be like that? Like, we are getting exposed to 80,000 chemicals a year. We know that in the United States, the NHANES data shows that heavy metals abound everywhere. In fact, I had to stop when I first learned about that as a student. 1997, I believe in environmental medicine class, I started testing everybody for heavy metals. And geez, you know, it started coming back. Everybody had heavy metals. And then it's like, well, what do I do with this? Do I chelate? Do we do heavy metal? Chelation with every single person coming through. Some would argue, yes, that would promote health. What my mode was was like, okay, we know it's there. We need to address that heavy metal burden. But really, is it causing you your health issue? And in particular with chronic neurodegeneration and the fat that's in our heads, we could call each other fat heads, right? We got a bunch of myelin sheath and fat up there, about three pounds of it. We fat throughout our body, some more than less. But the brain is really what we're concerned about here. With chronic neurodegeneration, well, we gotta assess it, you know, early on, probably 15 years ago, Dr. David Perlmutter put a YouTube video out of a gentleman with the classic stair step, stuttered gait of Parkinson's and the pill rolling. And he did a glutathione push via IV and showed this guy's stride just opened up and got elongated and smoothed out. Like really, it was like a miracle. And so I was doing glutathione at that point and thought, okay, well yeah, let's start using it. And I ran it on about 10 patients and did not get one single change. I thought, okay, well am I using enough? My doing it long enough? Yeah, all of those things were in. And then the aha moment was like, wait a minute. Okay, we know metal burden in people, right? I had stopped testing everybody. But for chronic neurodegeneration, brain health, this is definitely a test that you got to get done. You do a pretest with a morning void and then you come into the clinic and we do an IV of EDTA with sometimes a push of DMPs on there followed by the glutathione. Very safe time tested protocol that does not flare, people, because people can get really sick when you mobilize metals and then you collect your urine for six hours, you compare your pretest to your post test and you know, really look at what is the body's burden of metals at that point in time. It doesn't mean that's the full body burden, but that's what's in the connective tissue at that moment. It's in the connective tissue. We know it's in the bone and quite possibly and probably your brain as well. So we gottawe gotta check that out. So I did that and I did a round of chelation on these patients and then I did the glutathione pushes and actually we were getting improvement. Improvement with their speech, improvement with their gait, improvement with lessening and or reversing halting the tremor. And that was just on metal burden. So definitely on assessments. You want to really check that out. The other aspect, there's been some published data on calling Parkinson's hypothyroidism of the brain. And this is, you know, low thyroid levels. Then the thyroid, you know, sits on the throat right here. It's responsible basic metabolic rate, temperature regulation of the body, kind of the hair, nail and skins. Also on the, on the bowels. It also affects the bowels. So one of the early symptoms of Parkinson's they're saying could be one to two decades, 10 to 20 years before, or an actual clinical diagnosis of constipation. Now constipation, if you have constipation, don't think Parkinson's immediately. I think, you know, maybe you're not having enough fiber. You got to eat 4 cups of vegetables a day, folks. But it's definitely in the background, especially you know, if these things run in the family and, or if it doesn't go away with improvement of diet. You know, we really got to look at why do you have the constipation. The. So the thyroid is one of those big ones that you gotta rule out. So hormone balances, when you go to see the neurologist, they're not checking your hormones, they're not looking at that. They've got Parkinson's really just in a motor system, motor systems degeneration. So it's more on the gait and movement. It's a movement disorder, not a whole person diagnosis yet. But there's growing evidence that we need to really treat you as the whole dynamic being heart centered, being that you are and, and address all of those facets as well. Because there are more and more symptoms being put onto a Parkinson's diagnosis as we just basically observe people with greater scrutiny and time. We're seeing, oh no, there are these other external to the central nervous system symptoms kind of affect. Emotions are definitely being put in there as well. And quite honestly can just get depressing having a condition. What there is no known cure and very little hope really other than just trying to slow the decline. So it's either a slower, fast decline in conventional land and you know, we want to really attempt to stem the gap there and change that for folks. So thyroid and hormones got to get assessed. Then there's a really interesting concept. It's called molecular mimicry. You can put that into PubMed and search conditions. So if you type in Parkinson's disease and molecular mimicry, well, what comes up is a bunch of Viruses. And so we test for three different viruses that could be flying underneath the radar. So you don't necessarily have the illness, but you have a low grade issue in your immune system. It's a distraction. It's really, it's pulling your vital force and vitality in a different direction, which is not towards Wellville. And it's a distraction, quite honestly, to your whole innate healing ability. And so molecular mimicry with viruses. So we're looking at herpes simplex virus, cytomegalovirus and Epstein Barr virus. And we run some titers and chronic titers. Epstein Barr, better known as the kissing disease or mononucleosis. So if you had that as a teenager or 20 something, you quite possibly could have some remnants of Epstein Barr. Herpes simplex virus. That's a cold sores or genital sores. You know, 50% of the population has some type of herpes simplex virus. So it's not even considered std, sexually transmitted disease. It's just kind of ubiquitous out there. And then you get into cytolomegalovirus, which is another virus that can fly underneath the radar of your immune system and just drain your vitality. So we got to rule those in or rule them out because. Because if they're there, it gives us another possibility with IV therapy, Chinese herbs on antiviral therapies as well, which those three stones alone never get overturned in conventional analysis and really can provide some super unique treatment approaches. And we've seen. I had a patient, Stewart, came in referral from another patient with Parkinson's and, and his predominant symptom was tremor. And we got the tremor reduced to nil, except for when he was under high, high stress, the tremor would come out. So it was kind of a good guidepost for him in that he knew like, I got, I need a timeout, I need to change my mindset. I got to get in a different situation. If the tremor started coming back, it was a linking like, oh, I have high stress right now. I need to address this, do some mindfulness meditation, those self care, self love activities, singing, even getting into the gym and starting to box along those lines. So you know, it can be. For Stuart, it was really, it resolved. You'd never know he had Parkinson's. Right? He and his wife just moved, got rid of the tremor. They were happy, happy, happy. And that was with that discovery around the metal burden. We would have never tested for that had it not been for Dr. Perlmutter back 15 years ago. Putting that YouTube video up there and really tipping the hat to heavy metal. So on an assessment, I am going to have a webinar on this as well. It's going to piggyback on to my mini summit that's coming up August 24th online. So stay tuned here. I'll get the registration information as soon as it's available and I'll post it on underneath the videos here. Just a reminder, if you're just tuning in, this is Dr. Greg Eckel. I'm Dr. Greg Eckel of what the health podcast where healthcare is to promote thriving. And my website is naturecuresclinic.com you can tune in there. If you're just getting in now, you can go to the website after the show and really start from the beginning to hear what we're talking about, which is Shake It Off, A Fancy Approach to Parkinson's Solutions, my upcoming book, and also some summits of the same name. I have a much larger summit coming up in 2020, April 6th through the 12th. And in that, we're going to be interviewing about 30 to 40 world experts on Parkinson's and chronic neurodegeneration and really providing a roadmap and some possibilities and possibilities, probabilities for folks with chronic neurodegeneration to, you know, maybe put a little bit more wind in your sails. There's a lot of us out here working for you. Looking to get results clinically is really important. You know, I like to say I'm a clinician's clinician. We want to use what works to move the bar for your health. The other aspect of the assessment is on gut health. Right. I mentioned that constipation could be one of those early signs that shows up. And what. There's some great testing right now. The GI MAPS test and viome are two, two different pathways that you can go with this. My current favorite is GI maps testing. We test your stool because that gives us, you know, the stomach is the second brain. And so you got to look at that digestive process, constipation possibly being one of those primary symptoms of Parkinson's. And we gotta assess the gut, right? That's where I come from. In my Chinese medicine and naturopathic background. It overlaps in the spleen and stomach camp. This lovely yellow on my wall, actually representative of that. It's also the color I want to live in Portland, Oregon in February when it's just dismal out here in the Northwest. But the yellow camp, it is the spleen and stomach camp. And that's a specific lineage of herbs. My herbal teacher, Dr. Long was amazing in that spleen and stomach camp. And it's the overlap with the naturopathic medicine of treat the gut, heal the gut. You, you know, food is our best medicine camp. And we definitely got to address that with our patients all the time. Every new patient gets a diet diary coming into my clinic. So gut health, you know, that is definitely on the table and needs to get addressed in a comprehensive way for, to really put together a comprehensive program. So what is this fancy approach? Right, so that was a big wind up. The A, the assessment. I kind of jumped right in there. F stands for functional and the functional, I like to say naturopathic docs, we're the old school or the original gangsters of functional integrative medicine. When I go to these conferences and meet with medical doctors and providers of other degrees, they're all so envious of. Oh, you went to naturopathic school. Because really our thought process, the way that we think about health and the ability of the body's ability to heal is so far different. Like their, their conventional training really still colors the way that they assess and address and develop programs. And there's nothing wrong with that. I just like to say, you know, naturopaths and naturopathic physicians, we're the old school guard. But really getting into that abundance mindset of really trying to help as many people as we can. The functional integrative medicine movement is so exciting because finally we've got more and more people coming on board. I remember going to these conferences 20 years ago, like ACAM American College for the Advancement of Medicine or American Academy of Environmental Medicine. And you'd see these doctors their first time in and they had been thinking holistically their whole career. So just feeling like an outcast, a stranger and alone. And then they get there and they're like giddy like kids of like, oh my gosh, my tribe. These people think like me. How can this be? How did I not know that they were here? And so, you know, it is a growing movement. It's really, it's a really exciting time to practice and it's an exciting time to be alive because we've got this awakening of the medical profession and this integrative care model of how do we best meet you where you're at? You know, one of the monikers that I have for nature cures clinic is called east meets West. Naturally, you know, we've got it. I've got a DEA license, can prescribe anything on the planet in this great state of Oregon. I just choose not to here, 18 years into practice, our bodies are able to heal given the right information. So I feel very confident with that in that body. Given the right information, we can get it to heal. So prevention and treatment. So I like to. These are kind of one and the same, but on the preventative front, one of the things that I have in my book is doing qigong and super brain yoga and. Well, hold it, we're going to back up. I want to finish fancy. So F is for functional. That's the integrative naturopathic functional medicine model, treating whole dynamic people moving through time and space. So addressing you as the whole dynamic being that you are a is assessment. So I covered that with some of the testing that I recommend that every chronic neurodegenerative patient gets. N stands for nerve health. So we want to inform what's in your blood. We use Chinese medicine and acupuncture to help circulation and get the blood flow going to the areas we need. And then we get herbs, supplements and food to inform what's in the blood. So a case in point, how that works. And you know, everybody talks about qi or energy with Chinese medicine and which that exists, but it's kind of an esoteric, broad concept and really to bring it into something that we can relate to in the West. I like to say we like blood in our bodies, not on the floor. Right? We can all get behind that statement. Well, the ancient emperors of China were obsessed with blood flow. And I know this because the Wang de Ne Jing, which is the Yellow Emperor's internal medicine classic, a mouthful, yes, but very pivotal classic medical text in the Chinese medicine canon. In there, they were weighing organs with and without blood. And I thought, why are they doing that? Right? And I asked Dr. Long, my pathology teacher, said, look, Doc Greg, you got cadavers at the end of the hall and you're studying the body. I was like, okay, yeah, ancient times they had scales, they're weighing organs with and without blood. Okay, made sense. 19. When was that? 97, 98. Couple years ago, somebody reinterpreted that classic textbook. And what they put, they put more emphasis on the character for blood. And the light bulb went off. It's like, wait a minute. This is why they were, this is why they were measuring it. They wanted to know how much did that organ network control of blood flow. So they weighed the organ network with all the vessels that led into it with blood and then drained all of that blood out and then weighed it without blood to see how much blood flow did the organ network control. Well, why was that important? Right. If I cut the blood flow off to my finger, what would happen to it? Yeah, it would fall off. That's how important blood flow is. So what travels in the blood are the healing properties of the body. Oxygen, vitamins, minerals go in, carbon dioxide, waste products come out. All of the hormones travel in the blood. Your immune system travels in the blood. The innate healing ability of your body travels in the blood. Food informs what's in your blood. That's why food is one of your best medicines. If you have an essential fatty acid or essential amino acid deficiency, your body doesn't have the building blocks for healing to occur. That's why it's just ridiculous that I hear doctors all the time say, oh, diet doesn't matter for your condition. It's like, how absurd is that? It's how the body heals. It's the building blocks for healing. So we definitely want to address that diet component, but that's in the N for nerve health. So we want to get foods into you. Omega 3 fatty acids, DHA in particular is a mega food for your brain and for your nervous system and for your nerves. I have a brain health smoothie that we can make available for folks too. These are things like on a daily basis, we got to feed that thing. We got to feed our body the information so that it at least has the potential to heal. So many times I'll see people come into the clinic and they have anemia and they're like, oh, my conventional provider said that's just so normal. And they just blow it off like it's nothing. What does that mean? You have anemia means you don't have enough red blood cells to carry oxygen to the rest of your body. There's no way your body is going to heal as quickly or as rapidly as if you had oxygen. So it doesn't matter what we put on top of that platform. If you don't have enough red blood cells carrying oxygen in, the healing capacity of your body is diminished. Right. I mean, it just makes sense when you put it that plainly. So that's N of the nerve health. And then fancy, then is spelled with a dash and a C. The C goes for cell. And that's really where I put regenerative medicine, this stem cell therapy. I talked about regenerative medicine in episode two, so you can go back and have a full deep dive on that one. But this one is cell regenerative medicine to help the body heal. This is one of the biggest gifts that I got when I was trying to work with my wife Sariah was I needed to get these stem cells up into her brain any way that I could. And I found and discovered this intranasal procedure. Well, I had that procedure done. I had an intranasal stem cell procedure done. Put up into my sinus cavity surrounds my brain stem, through the cerebral spinal fluid went in there and kind of systemic. Within 24 hours. Those cells were throughout my whole body. How do I know they went throughout my whole body is my hip. I had chronic hip pain for a decade from my then 6 year old boy, Simon. We were in Colorado, inner tubing went over a little waterfall. The inner tube flew out from under us and papa instincts or grabbed the boy because it was pretty, it was a really nice river. We were in in Colorado, inner tube out grabbed the boy, right hip, right on the rock in the bottom of the river. So that talk about some pain, that was pain. I had pain for a decade and I'm in the industry. I was getting massage, I was doing chiropractic, naturopathic manipulation technique, acupuncture, yoga, physical therapy. I went so far as to have injections, trigger point injections, prolotherapy. I mean really the only time I've tapped out of a procedure was prolotherapy. It was just so painful and you know, it's like chronic pain component is like just dogs you and eat your life force away. So it was just a blessing to try this procedure out because I got challenged by first patient that actually could talk with Parkinson's. He said, you know, hey doc, that's great information on the research, but have you done it? It's kind of a new procedure. And you know, I thought for a minute I was like, no, you're right. He said, okay, you go get it done and if it doesn't kill you, you can do it on me. So the rest is to be, you know, stories to be told. So we did it and it really, it helped his speech, it helped his energy, helped his gait. So we got, we got some good benefit going there and you know, so the cells regenerative medicine is that fourth. So functional is the F, A is assessment, N is nerve health and C is the cell which for regenerative medicine. So it's the fancy approach to Parkinson's. I want to thank you guys for tuning in. This is what the health and I'm Dr. Greg Eckel of naturecures clinic.com. if you're just tuning in now and you want to catch the beginning of the show, please check out my website, we'll have it the RSS feed there. You can also check out Contact Talk Radio as well and we'll have it up on their page. So thanks for coming in. We're talking about my upcoming book, Shake It Off, A Fancy Approach to Parkinson's. So now we've gone through the program, now we're going to get back to the prevention. So there are pieces, of course, circulation. We just talked about how important blood flow is, right. And what travels in the blood and then you've got to get circulation going. And so two of my favorites are qigong and super brain yoga. And I'm going to start with the qigong. I studied Jinjang school of qigong, which is muscle tendon changing qigong. I studied that in Chengdu in Sichuan province with my teacher Dr. Wang, lineage holder, also the past physician for the Olympic diving team of the Chinese. He was also recognized by the Chinese government, which is no small feat for being a lineage holder of this variety of qigong. Qi is energy, gong is work and this is, you know, more people are familiar with Tai Chi. So qigong is the umbrella that Tai chi fits under. But it is a. So in my book what I do share is the universe stance or the mountain pose with cloud hands. And you know, I have some videos up for that in the resources section. But it's a great, great way of even if you don't have the movement capabilities, if you're feeling too unstable or out of balance, visualizing the movement. So watching me on the screen and visualizing yourself doing it like this is what the great athletes do for practice and what the Scans of functional MRIs of the brain show is you're just thinking you're moving your body actually lights up the same areas of your body. This is why the pro athletes, they'll look at, okay, it's the buzzer. I'm going to send up the buzzer beater. So I'm going to practice that over and over and over again in my brain so that when it comes time to do it, I've already have the pattern in there and that I know is a swish. We're going for the three point swish or whatever it is. Hockey is my favorite sport. So it's, you know, scoring on the penalty shot and or overtime, goal, whatever you want, right. As kids we used to pretend we were winning the Stanley cup all the time on the street. So you know, though, but the patterning is really important. My chi gong instructor and mentor and teacher, Dr. Wong had talked about Folks that had stroke and couldn't move their bodies. And so he'd go into the hospitals and give them these maneuvers and lo and behold, they would get better. But you got to practice, right? The mind is a goal achieving machine. And so you got to watch what the thought process is up there. But you also, you got to stay diligent and practice. Practice makes perfect with that stuff. The other one on a preventative fashion is called super brain yoga, where you take your left hand over your right earlobe and your right hand over your left earlobe. Imagine if these were my earlobes. That's what it looks like. And then you do squats in a series of seven. There's some great YouTube videos on that, functional MRIs. They're using that with kids in developmentally disabled and or learning disabilities and showing some amazing improvements in their brain scans and also on their activities in school. So it's actually a procedure kind of. I do that on a daily basis in series of seven, work up to 21 squats a day. It also will increase your happiness factor. So it's a really nice side effect. But those two I have in there is preventative and treatments because it is. Parkinson's disease is a movement disorder. It's a balance disorder. You know, you start to get the alpha synuclein, these proteins that are misfolded that are similar to prions in the central nervous system and they congest the central nervous system. And that's where we start seeing the degradation of the body. This is also, I think, why we haven't seen any breakthroughs in Parkinson's in over 200 years is everybody's focused on the dopaminergic receptors and dopamine production in the brain. That's the end stage of the disease, folks. So we want to really move upstream as a preventative, but also other aspects of care if we can get at it, clear those proteins out of the brain. I developed a nasal spray kind of jumping ahead here, but I'm excited to share it with you. I developed a nasal spray of DMSO and hocl where my patients are telling me when they get it in the right spot of their nose. So you just inhale both sides, they'll notice their speech is less slurry. And this was a big piece. I didn't even know, you know, before I got into chronic neurodegeneration. And I didn't even know that this was a piece of the puzzle for these folks. But their minds are about three sentences in front of where their mouth is. And so they get really a slowed down ability to speak and then the slur starts to get, the speech gets slurred along those lines. So this nasal spray has been a really nice adjunct. You know, I've had some patients lead meetings and you know, their colleagues at work say wow, what are you up to? I could really understand you better today. So it's noticeable, it's nice to get that third party kind of independent feedback of wow, we're actually seeing some change here for you which is nice on. So that's prevention on movement along those lines. And then that was one treatment. So on a treatment component, what, what's involved in the fancy approach? So depends on those assessments. So if you have heavy metal burden, you gotta get into some chelation, we gotta get the lead out, so to speak. Four main metals that I find in people, cadmium, arsenic, mercury and lead. Doesn't mean that there aren't other ones in there. But those are the four tops that I see in Parkinson's, people with Parkinson's. If you have a chronic viral panel, low grade viruses, then that will change up. What IV therapy we do, what botanical medicines, what supplements we do, we're going to do some antiviral protocols with you. If the gut health is off, if you've got a ton of inflammation in your gut, well we got to heal that up. And so we're doing, you know, diet intervention, we're doing some supplements there, possibly some IV as well for nutrients to help heal the gut and get the gapping of the cells so that larger food particles don't get into your bloodstream. That's the crypts kind of the tight junctures of your epithelial lining of your gut, they start to gap and inflame and larger food particles get in. It ramps your immune system up, start getting into some autoimmune possibilities and potentials there. So the program, so you know, the testing does, does help guide the way. But the different facets of what we put together. I've got a brain regenerative program where we're doing regenerative medicine. We're getting these stem cells in and the stem cells aren't doing, they're not healing. I like to say the stem cells are the conductors coming into your innate healing ability. And they're secreting this exosome which are the pieces and parts for their anti inflammatory cytokines and growth hormones and peptides and other signaling units coming in to help inform your own innate healing ability. So it's your body healing your given the right Information. And our job is to remove obstacles to cure that we would have tested for in that assessment. I put acupuncture in everybody's plan. There was some great research out of UCSF showing acupuncture as a standalone therapy for Parkinson's disease. So that's definitely a piece. I was doing that before I got into regenerative medicine. And we would help with gait stability, speech and tremor with doing scalp acupuncture and systemic treatments. I like the Dr. Ton style acupuncture for balance method and also seasonal balancing of depending on time of year and where the energy is on your meridians. Hyperbaric oxygen, which I think in the future we'll do a full show on because it is that impressive. Hyperbaric oxygen is a chamber that you go into. It pumps the atmosphere 1.3 to 1.4 atmospheres of pressure. Kind of similar to the feel of being nine feet under the water. That's the same like 1.3 to 1.4 atmospheres of pressure. Not that there's water in the tank, but that that's kind of the similar feeling there. And we do 95% pure oxygen on a, on a rebreathing mask, on a nasal cannula. And that increases the oxygenation of your body. That again informs what's in your blood. And if we talk about the acupuncture, Chinese medicine, this concept of the healing properties of the body travel in your blood. We put extra oxygen in there. We want these cells to last as long as possible in your body. And so we give you more oxygen and we get that going there. I also use lasers, so pulsed electromagnetic frequency and low level laser therapy. So this is light therapies, 660 nanometers. There's blue light, red light. A lot of this research coming out of Germany. But this also can help reconfigure proteins. There's a vielight. I just met one of the founders of vielight down at a human consciousness gathering in San Francisco. I was down there over 4th of July and got into a great conversation with them around that. I love the gathering too on human consciousness. I thought that was pretty radical to be able to participate in that. But the V light is infrared light on circulation right there at the brain. I put the pads on the body. So however we get those lights into you, we do use lasers. And then of course IV therapy with glutathione. There are a lot of different nutrients that you can do via iv. And I like at this point, when you're in a chronic neurodegeneration diet alone, it's going to be really hard to correct this because you've gone so far into a degenerative state that we not to go to heroic efforts, but we really want to maximize your healing potential of your body. So we use multivitamin minerals, we use glutathione, we use poly mva, we use. Well, we'll just start with those. NAD is the other one for mitochondrial dysfunction and energy production in the body. And we'll kind of rotate those through time depending on specifically what you need. I also take pulses in a Chinese medicine fashion. One of my main mentors in herbs. It's a Taiwanese style of herbs. Dr. Jimmy Chang really did me a great service in my patient base on expert professional combining of formulas in the Taiwanese style of herbology. Used some really potent Chinese herbs as well. Again informing what's in the blood. Then we do acupuncture to get the circulation and really help your body heal itself. All right, I'm going to pause for station identification. This is Dr. Greg Eckel and you're listening to what the health here on the contact talk radio. If you're just tuning in, please check my website, naturecuresclinic.com and you can watch this show from the very beginning and also the other episodes. We're looking to really educate you around healthcare to promote thriving. I'm a big longevity fan and healthspan gone on public television stating I want to live to be 150 years old. When you put that out there, people kind of look at you a little bit funny. Like, are you serious, Doc? But yeah, I definitely, I want to live that long with my mind, full faculties, my body, my strength and community. You know, I was just here living in the northwest. It's kind of a little slice of heaven. Out hiking in these mountains. I went for mountain stream dip and old growth forest fern moss. Just green, big trees. Love it. It is heaven. So to be able to move my body pain free with my strength, with friends, I mean, it couldn't get any better than that. So why not? And these are remedies that have come from my kind of personal tragedy story of losing my wife over a year ago to a chronic neurodegenerative condition. On some sense, I'm calling them Soraya's gifts. It really helped lift the veil, kind of reinstated my faith actually in an odd, odd fashion. But for that I'm forever grateful. Opened my heart and ability to talk to people and really take deep dives and for the body's healing potential. And also our minds. Our minds. And so the mindset is the kind of the final piece of the puzzle here. When we're talking about our health and not well wishing, not woo woo, not, you know, not just make believe, you know, great book by, oh, I forget the author, but mind into matter. Matter and yeah, mind into matter and how there is a tremendous amount of research on using the brain therapeutically and really creating our own reality. Our mind can create this world out here on actual physical, like I'll wrap my computer. This physicality, I mean my whole clinic came out of our dream of this is what it looks like. Businesses that you walk into or different products that are created that is out of somebody's, that's out of thin air. Like we're all kind of magicians. Abracadabra is, you know, my words speak into reality and make it happen. So we want to maximize that healing potential with using our mindsets. You know, I like to say our mind is a powerful manifester and goal achieving machine. So if you're thinking, you get online and Dr. Google it and you're just, you got no hope and you're desperate and dismal and it's like, you know, the authority doctor is saying, well this is what it looks like. You know, from diagnosis to finish line, you're looking at five to 15 years and it just goes downhill. And if you full on buy that hook, line and sinker, they're not more powerful than you. You are a creator in your reality and so you really want to guard against that and really watch what you put in there and whose advice you're taking and how you filter it through your own intuitive sense. And so if this is making sense, please reach out to me and let's talk. But also I just want to encourage you to really open, open up those blinds and open up your mind to that reality and possibility. Again, it doesn't mean that you're doing anything wrong because that can be a slippery slope of blaming, blaming an individual for creating their condition. And I would never want to do that. But I do want to maximize our healing potential. And that would be really by working on our mindset. I like to, you know, early on in my career I would accept anybody into my practice and try to push or pull them and just get super frustrated and it wouldn't work and then they would go away. And you know, life is way too short for that. You know, we're looking at Naturecures clinic. We're looking for motivated folks that are ready to make change, ready to go anywhere, do anything. I got people flying in from around the globe to be treated at our clinic here. And why? It's because we get results for people and we listen and we're heart centered beings and we connect. I want to be your provider. I want to create this clinic to be your provider for life and your families and be your trusted source to go to for the truth around health and healing and and possibilities around always researching and studying but also implementing and seeing what actually gets traction in the real world, what actually makes a difference clinically for people to get wind in their sails and have them feel better. So I want to remind everybody I have a online summit. It's a mini health summit on Parkinson's. It's a Parkinson's summit online. It's going to be Saturday, August 24th. You can sign up for that as what an outcome of that. I am going to hold a webinar on assessment that a part of the fancy approach to Parkinson's. So again my book is coming out this fall. It's called Shake It Off A Fancy approach to Parkinson's Solutions. The F stands for functional functional medicine addressing whole dynamic heart centered beings. The A stands for assessment making sure you get a complete assessment looking at different facets of care because that can give you different programs to plug into and possibilities for your body to heal. N is for nerve health. So we want to give your body nutrients and information and dietary guidance to help make sure you've got the building blocks for your nerves to heal. And then C it's dash C. C stands for cell and it's regenerative medicine. It's the stem cells and exosomes that can come into the body to help the body heal again. This is what the health I'm here on Tuesdays at 2 to 3pm Please send in your questions as well. I want this show to be for you. I'm Dr. Greg Eckel. My website is naturecuresclinic.com so if you're just tuning discussion was around Parkinson's disease. Parkinson's disease and my upcoming book Shake it A fancy approach to Parkinson's in addition to mini summit coming up here in the fall August 24th and then we have a monster online summit coming up. It's the Parkinson's Solutions Summit in April 2020. April and April is Parkinson's Awareness Month. I hope that you're enjoying the show. Please share it with your friends and family. Subscribe to the channel. Leave us a review on itunes and keep coming back. Tell your friends and family we're here for you. How I got into medicine, I wanted to be in service to people and it is my purpose and passion is to help as many people achieve optimal wellness through an integrative naturopathic care model. So again, thank you for tuning in, getting educated, and please share this information. Share the health we're here to promote health care that promotes thriving, and we want you all to thrive out there. Sam.