7 SURPRISING Ways to SPEED UP MCAS Healing (AND REDUCE HISTAMINE)

So that's why there's a lot of crossover between toxic experience, especially mycotoxins and mast cell problems, because they go hand in hand. Hey, it's Dr. A. And on this channel we talk about all things integrative therapies and many, many other things. And today I'm responding to questions that have been asked is around mast cell activation syndrome or MCAS and histamine overload. Of course, it's much broader than histamine overload. So let's get into it and let's big ways that we can help with the mast cell spectrum to try and improve the balance between chronic inflammation and healing. So number one, this is where most people start. Go to your general practitioner. This is where they will start, where most everybody will start. And that would be pharmaceuticals. So prescription medications, maybe over the counter medications that will block some of the inflammatory mediators. Now what you need to remember is although we call it mast cell activation or mast cell disorders, E mast cells are part of a four part system. So they're one of the four parts. And there are different cell types that they all release this family of chemistry. So a lot of the times the prescriptions will start with antihistamine substances, things such as Benadryl, diphenhydramine or maybe sertrazine or maybe other types of antihistamines. And a lot of times there'll be a mixture of what we call histamine type 1 and histamine type 2 receptor blockers. Because it turns out that although the histamine type 1 are, you know, big drivers of inflammation, they work with histamine type 2 and eventually type 3 and 4. And so a lot of times the drugs that are used try and cover H1 and H2. The next thing would be mast cell stabilizing substances, drugs such as chromolin. There are is an over the counter in North America called nasal chrome, which is a nasal spray and helps somewhat with at least inhaled mast cell activation. There are eyedrops of cromolyn, there's inhalers of cromolyn, there's liquid forms. You in obviously oral forms as well. But cromolyn is a drug that falls into a category that kind of crosses over with natural substances. If you're real bad off, you might be given steroids. And why would you be given steroids? It's because steroids cover the other inflammatory mediators that may not be as well covered by the histamine drugs, for example. Now this doesn't always work, but those are the categories that are given in the prescription area. One of the things you need to be thoughtful about is although the drugs don't always work, work sometimes if you are very reactive and you're having mast cell disorder problems, mast cell activation syndrome in the whole spectrum there, sometimes you might get so activated that you may go into a life threatening response such as an asthma attack, anaphylaxis, allergy, continuum, et cetera and at least acutely you may need these drugs. Now are they, are they a great long term solution? Not for most people. Are they something that might keep you from having a very, very bad medical event or. Yes, sometimes they are. So sometimes they do have a place in the structure. There are also some atypical type of antihistamine slash anti inflammatory mediators that are not steroids that are used in the drug category. Those might be things such as say cyproheptadine covers histamine, but some other receptor blockades, low dose naltrexone, we talk a lot about, talk about that later as well. And other things in the drug area number two might surprise you. We did a whole video on that. We'll probably link that. At the end is fasting that I would do this supervised. I'm not recommending anyone go out and just fast on their own. But one of the things with fasting you have to keep in mind is it can reset mast cell activation, but you generally will get worse the first two days that you are fasting. So let's say you're doing a control fast with a provider who, who is keeping you safe. Fasting. Okay, you want to work with somebody. If you're doing long term fasting, the first two days you're going to have more mast cell aggravation because histamine levels rise. And then after the 48 hours the histamine levels and the other inflammatory markers drop. And we have some collaborations with other providers we've done where they've done this fasting approach to resetting mast cells. So fasting can come in to it, but you want to remember it will get worse the first two days. So you may need acute medications or some strategy during that time. The next thing would be our friends from the plant world. You might call these botanical medicines or herbal medicines or other things like that. And a lot of these are going to cross over with what we might call, you know, the mast cell supplement category. But in the plant medicine end of the world you're thinking about things that would actually be structurally related to the drug cromolyn. So chromolin is actually a flavonoid and flavonoids are under the umbrella of polyphenols, which generally come from plants. Cromolyn is a highly purified extract. It comes from a particular type of a plant, but there's others. And so some of these you may have heard about would be like the bioflavonoids, hesperidin, luteolin, qu, quercetin. There are many, many other types of polyphenols or bioflavonoids. But the idea behind these is, as opposed to the steroid that's going to go and block the ability to have the inflammatory cascade, the flavonoids, whether it's the drug cromolyn or the other bioflavonoids, they go and they sit at mast cells and basophils and eosinophils, all the inflammatory cells, and they try and sit there and calm the receptors so they downregulate the receptor activity so that then they decrease the amount of mast cell activation. Remember, it's not just mast cells, but that's who we blame. So there are some plants that can come in there. Now, do they universally work? No, some people aggravate by them. So this is where ideally working with somebody could be very helpful. There's other supplements though that can help with the immune response. So beyond the polyphenols, we might look at things that would generally decrease the amount of inflammatory triggering. And you might think, well, okay, I bet you're going to talk about antioxidants, right? And a lot of people, this is a side question that relates in here, so I'll put it in here. They'll say, why, when people are having allergic phenomenon or mast cell disorders, etc. Why are antioxidants so important? Well, there's a couple of reasons. One of them is the mast cells and the other cells that send out this inflammatory chemistry, the better the antioxidant status, the less they will send out inflammatory chemistry. So that's one. The other thing is, aside from that, a lot of the pro inflam immune cell activity separate from the mast cells and the basophils and eosinophils and stuff comes from imbalances in the T helper and T regulatory cells as part of cell mediated immunity and maybe even some B cell abnormalities. And it turns out that one of the things that helps to keep the orchestration of cell mediated immunity orchestrated is enough antioxidants. So if I have mast cell activation syndrome, mast cell disorders of any kind, I would be burning up my antioxidants. And so I'M going to need more than the aver. Why antioxidants become important. So we always start with the first, the Core 3, which is supportive glutathione. We've got a whole playlist on glutathione, vitamin C and vitamin E and those together will work. Then you might look at fats like phospholipids, phosphatidylcholine, cytokoline, glycerophospholocholine, other types of phospholipids. You might look at omegas, especially omega 3. Oils can be useful here. But you have to kind of stack the antioxidants. You have to remember that somebody with mast cell disorders of any kind are going to burn up antioxidants faster. Otherwise, you know, somebody without mast cell problems would the next thing may be surprising, may not. And that would be depuration and detoxification of the body. And so depuration, detoxification of the body mean to lower the amount of toxicant substances and maybe toxins that are in the body so that we have less pro inflammatory junk in the system, so to speak. Now what does that really mean? The mast cell family? Remember there's this sort of quartet. Mast cells are the name brand and then there ones that get involved, they hyper react in mast cell disorders and so they can hyperreact for any number of reasons. Some are genetic, some are dietary, some are outside influences such as allergic phenomenon. But also some are due to toxins and toxicants in the body. Now many of us hear toxin, toxicant we think of like metals like mercury or lead or something bad for us. Certainly those are not good. But also there's lots of chemicals in the environment and there are things like biotoxins like mo mold, mycotoxins that can be in our environment but also we can store them in our body, especially in the liver. And a lot of times people will move and they'll get out of a very mold, toxic, mycotoxin rich environment and they will be releasing those many of the mycotoxins for a long time afterwards. So that's why there's a lot of crossover between toxic experience, especially mycotoxins and mast cell problems because they go hand in hand, one is triggering the other and then the other causes a lot of the symptoms. So depurating and detoxify, this is something that should really be worked on with a practitioner who does that type of work. The next thing that fits into depuration is sweating. And we've got many, many other Videos on heat, therapies and sweating, et cetera. And so we just want to think about what ways we can sweat. Now certainly if you have a sauna, that's a great way to do it. You have to start small. Usually if you get really sick when you go in the sauna, often that means you have a lot of toxicity that you're trying to sweat out, you might be dehydrated, there's any number of things. So if you get sick when you go in a sauna, again, work with a practitioner who does therapies and depuration using sauna. They might need to get you to really hydrate, give you electrolytes and have you start with really small sauna increments. I've had patients where we had to start with, you know, two to three minutes, then build up to five and then build up, you know, longer over time. But sweating can help not only with the excretion of many of the chemical toxicants, but even some of the metal toxicants as well. And then the final one, number seven, believe it or not, is dietary intervention. Now, in the world of mast cell activation, the primary dietary intervention that people will use would be a low histamine diet, which certainly, if you're going to pick one of the diets, low inflammation diets, low histamine diet would be good. But I would recommend, because you can go online and find a thousand low histamine diets, is to look at either a university based publication where they, they have specific diets, low histamine being one of them, or look at a well curated mast cell resource that will have different of low histamine diet approaches. Now I said in regard to diets, low histamine is the most common one. What are other ones that might be employed? And these do have some crossover. Some people are more sensitive to salicylates, for example, so you might be on a low salicylate diet and then look at the histamine diet and see where the crossover is. Some people are on low phenolic diets, some people are on many, many other types of diets. Again, if you can do a general low histamine diet approach, the idea is that that's not the cure, but it's like while we're having these mast cell responses, let throw more histamine in or more histamine triggers into our body while we sort out what we're going to do with the inflammatory response. All right, I'm Dr. A. Thank you guys for listening. Take a look here at the end we're going to link. We've got long amounts of playlists on mast cell disorders, et cetera. You can go through there. I've got many other playlists there. And we'll link some of our favorite videos here, and I'll see you all on the next video. Thanks, Sam.