Exclusive Dr. Hyman+ Ask Mark Anything: Kidney Issues, Benign Prostatic Hyperplasia, And More

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Hi everyone. Welcome to another episode of Ask Mark Anything. My name is Harshil Parth and I'm the Dr. Hyman Plus Community Manager. I'm joined by Darcy Gruttas. Hi, Darcy.

Hi.

Darcy is one of the producers of Longevity Roadmap docuseries. And of course, we're here with our expert, Dr. Mark Hyman. Hi, Dr. Hyman.

Hi, everybody.

Thanks for being here today. So let's go ahead and get started and ask Mark anything. So our first question is, does hyperbaric oxygen therapy have a place in functional medicine? And if so, would it have positive effects on autoimmune disorders affecting the skin?

Wow, that's a great question. Well, there's sort of two questions. One is hyperbaric oxygen in general, and two is what conditions does it treat? And I think this is a really powerful therapy. I really like therapies that are using kind of biological influences to regulate our body systems. And, you know, medications often have side effects, they have unintended consequences. They may help one thing, they may cause another problem. But, you know, treatments that are kind of using biological substances like oxygen, for example, can be very effective. And basically, for those of you don't know, hyperbaric oxygen is oxygen under pressure. It was developed when people were scuba diving. When they came up too fast, they'd get nitrogen in their blood. They had to kind of quickly put them back down under the water, essentially by putting them under two atmospheres and more pressure, which is like 66 feet under the water. So, that basically was used to treat what we call the BENS. However, it's incredibly helpful for many, many conditions in medicine, from wound healing, which it's approved for, if you have diabetic ulcers, if you're having poor, poor wound healing, it can drive circulation, oxygen into the tissues and really help. It's also being used in, in neurologic conditions. So people who have stroke. I've had many patients who had stroke who use it and helps bring back blood flow to the brain. People with Alzheimer's, people with Parkinson's, kids with autism, cerebral palsy. It's really quite an interesting therapy for helping to heal the brain. It also is incredibly helpful in infections. People have, for example, have Lyme disease, chronic fatigue syndrome, autoimmune diseases for sure can be influenced by air improving the body's oxygenation and in using this as a stimulation to help repair and heal the body. Now it's a bit of a stress. It's what we call a hormetic stress. I write about it in my book, Young Forever. It's a com, a hormetic, hormetic stress means something that actually is sort of a stress. It doesn't kill you, but makes you stronger. And, you know, being under, you know, 66 feet of water is like a lot of pressure on your body, high oxygen concentration. Our bodies aren't used to, and it's, it's kind of a stress, but it, it kicks into gear your body's own repair and healing systems. So it increases stem cell production, it increases your antioxidant systems, it reduces inflammation, it helps to actually increase the ability of the body to sort of repair and heal and kills infections because bugs don't like high levels of oxygen, sort of like Lyme disease, for example. And it also increases, you know, one study I wrote about in the book, which is very impressive from Israel, it increases the the telomere length. So it increases telomeres more than anything else known, which, and there are a lot of things that actually increase telomere length, lifestyle therapies, exercise, vitamins, so forth. But what this does is actually increases telomere length more than anything else. It also kills zombie cells, which are another part of the aging process where our cells turn into these zombie cells that don't die, that spew out inflammation everywhere. And that actually is reducing those that we call senescent or zombie cells. which are very hard to kill. So there's a lot of things we're just still learning about. I personally used it when I had, you know, mold toxicity as a really helped me clear my brain and also helps with post COVID syndrome. People have brain fog and cognitive issues around COVID. It can be extremely helpful. So I think it plays a really important role in medicine. Hyperbaric medicine is really important. It's not unfortunately covered for most of the indications that I just mentioned. It is covered for things like wound healing and certain other medical indications, but typically there are in traditional medicine hospitals where they have these, they're not used for kind of off-label indications. And so you have to go to other hyperbaric centers and they're all around. It's not cheap, it is kind of expensive, but if you have something serious, it can be a really helpful therapy.

Yeah, that's so helpful. Thank you for all that information on that. Darcy, over to you for the next one.

All right.

So our next question is, what is benign prostatic hyperplasia or pH and how to be treated?

Great question. So, you know, most people understand that people get prostate issues when they get older. If they're guys, obviously women don't have prostates. So it's in the margin of the prostate gland in and can be an overall enlargement of the whole gland or just an enlargement of the kind of area in the middle that goes around the urethra, the tube that empties your bladder. And when that happens, it sort of squeezes the exit from your bladder and you can get into trouble where you can't pee. And so the symptoms typically are getting up frequently at night, urgency like I gotta go now, trouble getting started peeing. So you might not be able to get going. You feel like you gotta pee, but you can't actually start to pee. You might get a split stream of your urine, so it looks kind of funny. All those are signs that there may be enlargement of your prostate. Now, there are treatments for it, medications, Clomax, there's herbs for it, saw palmetto can be very effective, which I've used. And also, and there are many other compounds that can be used. One of the products is prostate I think it's 5LX, which you can get on our online store. And it has a combination of herbs and other compounds that can be effective. It also can be treated with surgical techniques, laser, more sort of advanced radio frequency techniques. So there's ways to treat it to help men who get problems. But it's one of those things for guys where it's like, oh boy, this is really impairing my lifestyle. I can't drive in a car without, I can't sit in a plane. It's hard when you have to go that much. the question is what's causing it? And as functional medicine doctor, I'm always like asking why, why do people get BPH? Why do people have enlarged prostates? And this is a phenomenon that doesn't necessarily affect everybody. So a lot of it has to do with lifestyle. So highly sort of Americanized diet that's full of starch and sugar, driving insulin resistance is probably, you know, the biggest cause. Alcohol can be a factor. A lot of food additives can irritate and make you kind of go more often, but it is, it's a really common condition for guys as they get older. , and most have to sort of manage it a little bit. I'm, I'm sort of lucky. I'm 63. I'm still, I'm okay. But I remember my dad used to, it's a funny story where we were in a train station and we were, I think we were on a train and he'd like had to go and it was like a big line and he literally like could not handle it. And he ran and peed in the sink because it was like, it was so uncomfortable. So it's a kind of a nice memory I have of my dad in Barcelona, I think we were.

So, but it's not a fun thing when you have it. Yeah, and we have a follow-up question, which is, is there a connection between high estrogen and BPH?

Not necessarily. There is a hormone that's made, it's called dihydrotestosterone, which is a very stimulating version of testosterone that can cause an enlarged prostate. So we can measure di hydro testosterone in men, we can see that this may go up and there are ways to modulate it. One of the ways is using a 5 alpha reductase inhibitor, which is the natural version of saw palmetto, or you can use some of the drugs like finasteride or, or, or, I forgot the name of it. It's not, it's, that's the name of the, the, the brand, the generic name. I don't remember the brand name of the drug. Propecia is used for hair loss. It's the same mechanism. So it blocks testosterone conversion from testosterone to dihydro testosterone. which reduces the sort of stimulation of the prostate.

All right, that's super helpful. Thank you. And over to Herschel for our next question.

So our next question is about a supplement. And of course, there's so many supplements out there. It's trying to get a handle on which ones, you know, everybody needs. So this one is about Berberine. What is Berberine used for and who can benefit from using Berberine? Are there any pros and cons to it? And does it have any effect or beneficial role on gut health?

Yeah. So, you know, berberine I've used for years and years in my practice. It's a, it's from a plant, from various kind of plants, like including golden seal, Oregon grape, but, and various other compounds. And it's kind of, it's kind of a yellowy substance, and it's, it's incredibly helpful for people with cardiometabolic issues with, it's an antimicrobial. So I've used it sort of to treat, you know, overgrowth of bacteria in the gut and dysbiosis is incredibly helpful for people with diabetes, high cholesterol, high blood pressure. in liver issues. So I think I find it a really important compound when you're treating people with cardiometabolic disease to help, you know, you know, and really kind of improve their overall metabolic health. So it's part of my toolkit for people with elevated cholesterol, blood sugar, high blood pressure. PCOS can be very effective for that as well. Women have PCOS. people with high triglycerides also. So I find it a really useful herb. I use one called CM core by Orthomolecular Sciences, but there's a lot of them out there. And I think it's not like a panacea, but I think it's a good tool in the toolkit.

All right, super helpful for that. Thank you, Darcy, over to you for the next one.

All right, I'm just gonna read it word for word here. What could be the possible causes of having a urine test that came back positive? for having red blood cells in it.

Yeah. So, you know, red cells in your urine are, are not uncommon. They can come from a bladder infection. They can be caused by something going on in your prostate, like a prostatitis. They can be, if you're, if you're female, it can be from a urine tract infection, but it can also be from something more serious like, you know, autoimmune disease in your kidney or. a tumor in your bladder, your kidney, or maybe even a stone. So we basically, you know, take it very seriously. We want to see what's causing the blood. Also, also for women, if they're having their period, you can kind of get a contaminated specimen. But basically it's a warning sign that something's wrong and they need to go digging. And then you can do various further testing such as, you know, a cystoscopy, which puts a scope up your urethra into your bladder. You can do imaging of ultrasounds, MRIs, intravenous polygram, which is a way of looking at the whole bladder, kidneys, urethra, ureter combination. So I think it's a serious thing. So you want to check it out.

Yeah, and I have a follow-up question to that, which is, can you speak to the best way to support kidney health? Let's just say that's kind of what's causing our issue is kidney issues.

I mean, listen, I mean, you know, it's important to, well, first of all, it's just a term to stay hydrated because your kidneys are basically flushing out toxins. So, so you want to stay hydrated as a way to keep your kidneys healthy. But there are, you know, a lot of things that cause kidney damage. And, and I sort of break them down into things like, sort of metabolic issues, which would be related to insulin resistance, pre-diabetes, diabetes, high blood pressure, and all that drives damage to the kidneys. So the biggest cause of kidney failure is basically insulin resistance, which we talked about over and over and over on the podcast. And, you know, I've written about for years, it is the central thing driving aging and almost everything. So sugar and starch, I know you're tired of hearing me say this, but flour and sugar are the, or anything that turns the sugar in your body quickly is, is driving high insulin levels, which creates a cascade that leads to inflammation, leads to insulin resistance, it leads to high blood pressure and all these things and then ultimately diabetes, which ultimately damage your kidneys. So that's probably the biggest thing. Other things that can be factors are kidney stones. So you want to make sure you stay well hydrated because you want to prevent kidney stones. Oxalates can be a problem for people if they're, you know, so genetically predisposed to kidney stones, so they may not want to eat too much spinach or beets or beet greens particularly. And then there are also ways that, you know, you sort of can think about autoimmune kidney disease. And I've had many, you know, many common autoimmune kidney disease like IgA nephropathy can be caused by leaky gut. And so keeping your gut healthy is really important. Gluten, I've had patients who've really had serious gluten issues, celiac disease, but it manifested as a kidney failure. So you have to kind of keep an eye on this. Also, one of the things people don't realize is that if you take a lot of Advil or Aleve or any of those non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, they do tend to kind of be hard on the kidneys and can cause kidney failure. Alonzo Morning was a basketball player who, you know, had a lot of, you know, injuries and this and that. He was always taking tons of Advil and ended up having kidney failure. Like, in his 30s. So it's not a huge risk, but if you're taking this stuff on a regular basis, you have to be careful. I have a patient right now who's been on anti-inflammatories for a long time and his kidneys are not doing great. So I think we just had to be smart about our lifestyle and diet and all the things we just talked about.

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