Discovering The SURPRISING Benefits of Low Dose Naltrexone LDN

And the cell mediated side of this big immune system we have reaches out into areas that might be helped in modulation for cancer or autoimmunity or sensitivity to pain or neurological inflammation or whatever. You can kind of see why it's a add on a helper medication, low dose naltrexone, which can help other therapies work better in all of those settings. Welcome to my YouTube channel, everyone. I'm Dr. A and we talk about integrative medicine, integrative therapies and complex chronic illness on this channel. So this is a question that I got about low dose naltrexone. And a few sort of iterations of the question basically were what is it? What does it do when we take it? And then what kind of conditions do you use it in? Or have you seen it used ineffectively? So the first thing is it's a drug naltrexone at what we would consider normal dose, call high dose naltrexone. But normal dose is used in addiction medicine. It is an opiate blocker. It's used in that respect. So you might say, well, why would we use then a low dose of that medication? Well, there are certain medications where low doses versus high doses actually have two different types of effect. So for example, in this case with the drug naltrexone, if I'm giving big doses high dose, I'm going to block opiate receptors and have other sorts of effect. But I might actually, actually have maybe a suppressive effect downstream where when I use it low dose, I may have a smaller effect on the receptors and a different type of downstream effect on the immune system. And indeed that's why low dose naltrexone is used at lower doses. So for example, higher doses might, for the sake of argument, start at 55mg and low dose strategies might be anywhere from just above 1, just above 0 milligrams micrograms up through 4 or 5 milligrams, maybe a little bit more in certain instances. So low dose naltrexone has a big category of things that it does, but if we want to break nation, it can help with pain in certain instances and it is a direct effector of the inflammasome, they call it. So the inflammatory part of our body and it's in modulating the T cells. So T like Thomas T cells, you've heard of B cells, that's the antibody immunity. T CE cells are part of cell mediated immunity and they have subcategories. The famous ones are the cytotoxic or the killer T cells, those are directly killing something. But then there are T helper families, bunch of different families there, T regulatory families, and they all kind of work together. Now if that family of T cells is doing everything it's supposed to, it'll upregulate sometimes when we're say sick and downregulate and modulate the rest of the time. If we have cancer, if we have autoimmunity, if we have some other chronic inflammatory problem or even certain types syndromes going on, the T cell family is not autoregulating very well. And so one of the many ways that we can introduce help there is by bringing a regulator in. And so if we give high dose naltrexone, it doesn't work. But if we drop the dose down and give the low dose naltrexone, we could modulate the T cell families and we can bring back some of the natural orchestration and the natural up and down that goes on with the immune system. So in some cases, for example, we acute infection, we want it to go up, we don't want it to stay up, we also don't want it to keep going and attack our normal tissues. That would be autoimmunity. During cancer, there's different types of deregulation that can go on in the T cell family. This is why low dose naltrexone kind of works across that band of indications. So individually, areas that I have used it clinically in include people with autoimmunity, very common, people with cancer as a supportive therapy, people with chronic illnesses, including CFS, ME, fibromyalgia, things of that nature, and sometimes in chronic pain cases, depending on the type. So the areas, as you can see, cross over all of the more chronic types of conditions people have, but their intersection is through immunomodulation, which is really what the low dose naltrexone does. So another group of questions that we got around nal, because we've done a few other videos on this and but they were specifically asking beyond, okay, what have you used it for clinically? What might a patient expect? Well, there's a large range of responses people get with it. Some people with just the addition of low dose naltrexone within one to four weeks will notice that certain symptoms are starting to decrease. Other people it might be six months, other people it might take a shifting of the dose strategy. So there is low dose but low dose is on a spectrum. And so there are ultra low doses and sort of medium low doses. And kind of high, low doses, right? So they're still not as high as high dose, but they're all over the map. So for some people there's a little bit of work in adjusting to the particular case. But the changes that we see often revolve around changes in their inflammatory cascade in the body. So if the person is mostly experiencing pain, we would start to try and monitor their case and their dosing to see if it improves their pain. If they don't have primary pain problems, but they have a global autoimmune condition, then what we look for the low dose naltrexone to do over time is to help with the varied and numerous symptoms of the autoimmunity. And so that depends highly on which autoimmune condition it is. But let's say in the case of a digestive system autoimmunity, we would look for either modulation or decreases in the primary digestive system symptoms, et cetera in some people. And we see this sometimes in mast cell disorders, mast cell activation syndrome, et cetera, and in certain other situations as well, we will see an improvement in mental focus in some people mental status, sometimes we see improvement in sleep. I am currently preparing an update for a collaboration with the LDN Research trust where I'm a scientific advisor and the group of us get together and share information. So mine is looking at what are ways that we can optimize, the dosing, et cetera, this area. Well, in some of these collaborations we've had people from the psychiatry specialty mental health world who use ldn. And of course that's their patient population specifically I use it tend to be on chronic illness. But from my colleagues in the, in the psychiatry end of the nalrexone world, what we often hear is that it's a great help in modulating whatever the primary psychiatric neuro emotional diagnoses are. And so again, usually it's not a single therapy therapy, it's a helper therapy. But people may have a better response to their other therapies they're doing for anxiety or depression, for example, or potentially sleep issues, et cetera. We mentioned pain. Again, my use tends to be in chronic illness and cancer, so there is some pain involved there. But in my colleagues at the research trust who deal as pain specialists, often they will find that dosing the naltrexone in the lower end of the low spectrum, remember it's low as a spectrum and so at the lowest end of the spectrum they will get very good pain modulation in their chronic pain patients. So that is possible as well. And it generally will improve the immunomodulation. So other medications will work better. People often ask, what medication should we not use it with? Well, the main medication you should not use low dose naltrexone with would be opiate drugs. So opiates are a class of opioid analgesics and naltrexone is made to block the receptor where those drugs bind. So if we have a patient who needs opiates for pain control, you don't want that patient on naltrexone. That's not, it's going to be across purposes. So naltrexone kind of sounds like, oh gee, it does everything. And well, if you look at the fact that it largely helps to regulate the cell mediated side of this big immune system we have, and the cell mediated side of this big immune system we have reaches out into areas that might be helped in modulation for CANC autoimmunity or sensitivity to pain or neurological inflammation or whatever. You can kind of see why it's a add on a helper medication, low dose naltrexone, which can help other therapies work better in all of those settings. And that's why it seems to go in so many different directions. But there's a common link which is that certain part of the immune system that low dose naltrexone helps to autoregulate. All right, hope this answered those questions. Thank you for those. We're going to link some other things here at the end. Check out the main YouTube page, check out our mini content areas that we have on there as well. I'll see you all in the next video.