Multiple Sclerosis - WHAT ARE INTEGRATIVE APPROACHES

Good day. Welcome to Medicine and Health with Dr. Paul Anderson. That's me. I'm Dr. Paul. And today we're doing a short series of 4 installments on multiple sclerosis, or also known as MS. And what we've gone through is, what are the signs and symptoms? What's the diagnostic pathway to that? We looked at things that might aggravate MS or things that might mimic MS that aren't MS. And we looked at how difficult it is to sort through those things. Well, the other thing to consider as you're going along is that any sort of intervention, whether it's from sort of the standard neurology specialty intervention or integrative and naturopathic interventions and other things, in order for them to do the best job that the intervention can, it has to be aimed at the right target. So, for example, if you just take an example from non-multiple sclerosis here, because many people have experienced this, if you, for example, have a headache and the headache is actually due to you having extremely high blood pressure, if I give you pain medicine for your headache, your headache might feel better. but I'm not really aiming at the problem, which is your super high blood pressure. Okay? On the other hand, if I control your blood pressure, your headaches may go away. Or let's say, for example, we don't realize that you have diabetes and you have some peripheral nerve problems, and we're looking at, you know, other things that aren't diabetes as the cause, and we're treating those. Well, if we don't correct your diabetes and get that under control, the peripheral nerve other problems are not going to get better treating other stuff. It was kind of the same with multiple sclerosis, where we have so many targets to look at, and we have this phenomenon where it could be totally multiple sclerosis, it could be a mixture of multiple sclerosis and aggravating factors, which is probably the most common, or it could be completely other aggravating factors that are not multiple sclerosis. And over, you know, the last 3 decades, I've had lots of multiple sclerosis as patients. And I've had people in each of those categories. And the biggest thing is we have to target our therapies at— to the degree we can figure it out, what's really going on. So the first thing in an integrative medicine or an integrative and naturopathic medical approach would be to first look at the diagnosis and check it out. Well, is that diagnosis correct? So I have had people who've had diagnoses, we've gone back through their records and we've looked, and then we found, well, there's these other reasons that might be triggering these symptoms. And you never know until you treat the other reasons. But certainly that's one of the more fast-track ways to figuring out, you know, if the symptoms are really from the MS or not, is to treat the other things that may be causing the problem. Now, sometimes the diagnostic workup, especially in modern times, is very complete. You've got the criteria of the 2 areas in the central nervous system that are showing damage. You've got a series of 2 or more exacerbations of the right kind of symptoms over time. You've got maybe a fairly positive lumbar puncture spinal tap. You know, as I mentioned, your imaging fits. And then they did some screening tests, and none of that was None of that showed anything wrong. So that's weighted more towards, well, this is probably a classic MS case. Now, the first thing that I've seen in classic MS cases is people with multiple sclerosis often have many other things going on that should be looked into regardless of how solid their original MS diagnosis is. And this is not to say that their multiple sclerosis diagnosis and the regular treatment they're getting, like we just talked about in the previous episode, are bad or the wrong thing. It just means they got other stuff wrong too. Analogy would be, let's say you're the first person I talked about there where you got blood pressure problems giving you a headache, and we fix the blood pressure problems and the headaches go away, but then we don't know that you're also diabetic and that's causing other problems. Wouldn't it be better in addition to treating your primary, you know, blood pressure issue, to also then realize you've got a diabetic problem and treat that as well. So in these cases where there's, you know, truly an MS picture, our job on our side of the ledger is to look for all the other things that may be aggravating the MS. And my experience is, if we decrease those things, then the MS picture gets better as well. And then you have the potential that it's not MS at all, and it's all of these other things colluding together. And like I say, I've seen all 3 of them. So generally speaking, what are areas that we can work on? Well, the first thing is testing. And as I said earlier, places that we want to test include chronic infectious diseases. We also want to check and do a screening for toxicities and body burden. which include, um, mold and mycotoxins, chemical toxins. It also includes, um, heavy metals, and there's a few other toxic influences you can take a look at as well. So the toxicity and the chronic infection, that really in my mind has to be looked at. Now the next thing you can kind of look at, but you kind of treat empirically, is your immune balance. We'll look at that. And then other signs of inflammation. So there are global inflammatory markers and autoimmune markers you can look at in your regular lab testing. Now you might say, well, would my neurologist have done all of this or not? Sometimes they do, sometimes they do part of it. So that's another reason why collecting Collaborating, and you as the patient being in charge of your care, and having you know the neurologist do what they're you know good at, and having someone else take a second look for all the other stuff. Usually that's a very good way to to navigate this. Now, because you're basically going to treat what you find in the other areas, it's sort of like if there's infectious things, that's the focus. If there's toxic things, that's the focus. If there's immune balancing, that becomes the focus. Or if it's a little bit of of everything, it's all the focus, right? But there's a few things I've seen that be, uh, are worthwhile as far as mentioning. One of them is low-dose naltrexone. We've done entire little, uh, short videos on this on the YouTube channel. So naltrexone is a relative of naloxone, which you probably— Narcan, which is an opiate blocking drug for overdose. Naltrexone is an oral drug normally that is used similarly at higher doses. It can be used for eating disorders and other stuff. In emergency medicine, it is a backup drug for overdoses. Some people don't realize that, but it is. If you're out of naloxone, you can use naltrexone. There are case reports telling you how to do that. But what we do is we use it at very low dose, and it's very good at immunomodulation. So low-dose naltrexone. Also with some folks, There was a trial a number of years ago that now has spawned other trials on using the 3rd type of estrogen known as estriol in a moderately high dose. And that we have found to be helpful with many people. And now because it's been in a couple of trials, you're more likely to be offered estriol as a potential therapy. There's also a large number of plant medicines, which again would be aimed mostly at your underlying problems. So whether that's inflammation or whether that's immune dysregulation or infections or toxicity. So there's not like a magical good-for-MS type of a botanical. It has more to do with what are your other problems that are going on. And then there's nutritional support. Nutritional support's critical because that helps your immune system stay online and stay spunky and stay, you know, in the game. as it were. Also, we tend to use with people a lot of cannabinoid medicine. Now, in our state in Washington, we've had medical cannabis prescribing for a long, long time. Now, of course, there's recreational, but we guide people towards the right type of cannabinoid mixtures to not only help with symptoms, but also to help with the immune regulation. And then for those who are interested, probably the oldest and longest-running look at integrative therapies, dietary therapies for multiple sclerosis, was from Oregon Health Sciences University. And the doctor's name is Roy Swank, S-W-A-N-K. You can look up Roy Swank, MD, PhD at OHSU. And there's a website that goes into the way that he would treat patients. He passed away in his 80s, and I inherited a number of his patients and was able to take care of him for a while after he passed away. But we are out of time for today. I want to thank you for listening. Thank you for liking, sharing, and subscribing. And do the notifications so we get, uh, you know when we're on, because they don't always tell you. So whether you're watching on CTR Network Live or Facebook Live or any of the Podburners, uh, or on YouTube, just check us out. And you can always find us if you get lost at dranow.com. Thank you very much, and I'll see you all next week.