NATURAL & INTEGRATIVE MEDICAL THERAPIES Q&A | Medicine & Health Podcas
In this hour‑long podcast Dr. Paul Anderson answers listener questions about the spectrum of natural and integrative therapies. He explains how botanical/herbal medicine fits alongside conventional care, the reasons it is less common in Western practice, and how to choose qualified practitioners. He then moves to diet and nutrient therapy, distinguishing general “fill‑in‑the‑gaps” supplementation from pharmacologic‑dose nutrition, and links dietary choices to gut microbiome health. The discussion continues with movement/exercise, emphasizing graded re‑introduction after illnesses such as COVID‑19 or pneumonia because mitochondrial capacity is reduced. Sleep is covered next, with practical advice on sleep hygiene, tracking devices, and the importance of both quantity and quality for chronic‑illness patients. Dr. Anderson introduces constitutional therapies – Chinese, Ayurvedic, North‑American herbal, homeopathic, hydrotherapy – which assess a person’s whole‑body constitution and prescribe individualized treatments that can support or simplify other lifestyle interventions. Throughout he stresses the need for collaboration between integrative providers and primary‑care teams, clarifies licensing differences across U.S. states and Canadian provinces, and points listeners to his online resources for deeper learning. The episode ends with a preview of next week’s focus on specific integrative interventions such as hyperbaric oxygen, neurofeedback, IV therapy, etc.
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Mysterious world of how doctors think and how science works. This program exists to educate and empower you, the listener. Now here's your host, Dr. Paul. Good day and welcome to Medicine Health with Dr. Paul Anderson. That's me, I'm Dr. A. Today we are doing natural and integrative therapies in medicine. I got so many questions about the differences and similarities between natural and integrative therapies in medicine and a number of subparts of that that I thought, well, I just share some of the questions and talk through some of the answers. Today's focus will be the integrative side of medicine, natural side, naturopathic side, et cetera, and how that fits in. Because, you know, I've had some people write in and say, you know, it seems like your practice kind of goes across both ends of the spectrum. You seem to do some sort of typical physician type of work and interventions, and then it seems like you use integrative therapies and other stuff like that. So how does that all work? So I will just answer from my point of view. Again, like we always say, nothing on here is medical advice. This is just information. You should always take medical advice from your healthcare team. And if you— my only other advice around that is if you're really interested in something we talk about today, whether it's, you know, a type of a therapy or type of approach or whatever, When I say healthcare team, I do that to try and be inclusive, to say you may have a really great primary care provider and they may do all your regular primary care stuff. But if you want to get into something that works with diet and nutrition, or you want to get into something with physical medicine or any other thing, you may need another member of your team. And it doesn't mean they're going to take the place of another doctor or healthcare provider. them for a very specific type of care. Now, you may also find a primary care type provider who does these things, and so they can take care of, you know, your primary care needs. They can take care of, you know, integrative or naturopathic medical things, etc. You just need to make sure that that's part of their training and part of their background so that they actually know what they're giving you and, you know, what, what they're using. So what I want to do today is to go through these in the order— not really the order I got them, but just the order I listed out the questions, and then I tried to categorize them. And so we have things that I want to try and get to today, such as questions about botanical or herbal medicine, questions around nutrients and diet specifically, exercise and movement, sleep, and then Constitutional treatments versus other types of treatments. So what we'll do is we will start out— and I'm sorry, I'm having a little bit of camera trouble here, so hold on. Okay, that ought to work. So we'll start out again in no real particular order with botanical medicine or herbal medicine. So when we're talking about botanical or herbal medicine, um, that is really some of the oldest type of medical intervention, uh, that we know about in the history of you know, humanity. And that's, uh, very interesting. So if you go and you study medicine over time, what you'll find is that most medical traditions have many, many interventions that they do. Plant medicine, which can be called botanical medicine, herbal medicine, etc., is a really big one. And that's something that is almost universal in every traditional setting of medicine I've seen, including North American traditional medicines and South American and Asian and, you know, all of the other types. So herbal medicine— we'll just call it herbal medicine to keep it short— is the use of plants, plant constituents, and extracts, etc., to affect the change inside of your body. And so you might have— we've done some other videos about this, kind of more specific— but you might have a need for something, uh, that is a particular symptomatic outcome. And you might either feel that, you know, taking a drug for it would be too much, or you don't want to take a drug for it, or the side effects were too much for you. If you have a practitioner who is trained in herbal medicine, and they know, you know, what they're doing, they know how to monitor you and all that, or, or how to work with your other doctor to be monitored, then that practitioner may say, well, your symptom picture or the underlying causes for your symptom picture would lead us to believe that maybe some of these plant medicines might be helpful. And so when we're talking about that, then we have to think about, well, what are some ways to consider using plant medicines in a manner that would be helpful? Well, the first thing to think about is, can the issue that you're dealing with and that you want to deal with, with a plant medicine, herbal medicine, can it be effectively treated by herbal medicine, by a plant medicine? And that's actually a really good question to ask from the outset. And the answer is usually yes, because there are many herbal medicines that are helpful to treat things. But sometimes, especially if you've been on drugs for that particular problem, uh, your body might be used to the pharmaceutical approach and it may take a while for an herbal approach to kick in. Whereas in other cases, if let's say you had a lot of side effects from the pharmaceutical approach and you went off of it because of the side effects, you could just go and try an herbal approach with appropriate help, and it may be very, very useful. So a lot of it is about monitoring too. Now, if it's something pretty straightforward, like I would just like an herbal approach to my sleep, then that might be something that someone might give you one type of herb or a mixture of herbs, or maybe a combination that is aimed at, you know, particular symptomatic management. And then the monitoring would just be, well, we're going to give this so many days or maybe a week or 2, and we're going to see if this works for you. Now, one of the things that you'll see if you use a botanical medicine approach, herbal medicine, is some of them are very, very gentle. And so that might be the perfect thing for you, but sometimes you have to give them, you know, a week or 2 before you really notice a big change. Other things cause more rapid results, and rapid results doesn't always mean that that's better, right? We sort of have this idea that, you know, bigger and faster is always better, but if you're a real sensitive person, rapid results might not be what you're going for. But for example, and we've used some of these examples before, there are herbs that, you know, have some research around, let's say, sleep or anxiety, such as kava. Okay, and that one can hit a little harder and kick in a little faster. Also using cannabinoids is another one, whereas there are other ones on the other end of the spectrum that may be more gentle, such as like chamomile or maybe passionflower, things of that nature. So this is why you really want to work with somebody who knows what they're doing and knows the indications for these different plant medicines. I think that the other question I got about botanical or herbal medicine was really, why don't we see more use of these botanical medicines today in modern medicine? The answer that I usually give is, well, you can depending on where you are. In Europe, for example, it's a lot more common. to find the use of botanical medicine alongside of standard medicine, or instead of, or whatever, because as a lot of my European colleagues have told me, you know, they don't really see a division between what we classically call Western medicine, you know, drugs and surgery and stuff, and some of the more traditional approaches. In North America, we kind of make that distinction. In most of Asia, they don't make that distinction. So it really depends a little bit on where you are. The other thing is, if you think about the evolution of modern medicine, there were some things that you could treat pretty effectively with, say, a botanical or herbal medicine approach if you really knew what you were doing. But they may have been very critical illnesses or things that move too quickly to get under control, and people, you know, would get really be sick or die. And so some things like, let's say, antibiotics in certain cases, uh, would be used and they would work faster. And, uh, let's say pain medication from prescription point of view would work faster and better than a botanical approach or whatever. And so a lot of modern medicine was more based on convenience and the availability of, well, I've got this drug I can give you and bam, you're gonna you know, feel it now, you know, or if I give you, you know, a sleep drug, you're probably going to feel it the first time you take it. Whereas sometimes with the botanical medicines, that was a little more gentle. Now, that's why we don't see it in Western medicine a whole lot mixed together. But the other thing you can see is there's more and more of it going on. There are more and more providers getting interested in non-traditional drug routes for treating things. And so botanical medicines are, you know, they're— they were the precursors to drugs. If you've ever taken a pharmacognosy class, that's the study of the plants that became medications. So there's certainly many, many of those out there in the world. Um, and so it, it's easy for a lot of practitioners, if they're going to add on an integrative approach, to think about botanical medicines because number one, They are often studied a lot like we study drugs. They're often dosed similarly to the way that drugs are dosed, etc. Now, there are different approaches with botanicals, and I'm going to run out of botanical medicine time here in a moment, but there's different approaches, and it's important that your practitioner and you, you know, have a talk about the way that they do herbal or botanical medicine. And so one way might be that they may look at your symptoms as a collage of things and give you a combination herbal product that has a number of herbs in it that are aimed at the underlying symptom picture or what they believe to be the underlying cause areas. This is very common, for example, in Chinese medicine herbal approaches. Usually it's not just, oh, I'm not sleeping well, so I'm going to get herb X over here for not sleeping well. more of a Western herbal approach. Nothing wrong with it, it's just more of a Western approach. Chinese medicine is going to look at a lot of signs and symptoms that match up to the way that Chinese traditional diagnosis is done. And so it's important to know what perspective your herbal practitioner is coming from. So if you're looking out there, and I get a lot of questions about where do I find a practitioner and all this, so the first thing is to find out what kind of practitioners are licensed in this state or jurisdiction you're in. Now, if you have— in all states that I know of in, in the U.S. and all provinces in Canada, I believe, have, for example, acupuncture and oriental medicine practitioners. Now, sometimes they have tiers of licensing, so sometimes they just do acupuncture, sometimes they do acupuncture plus Chinese herbal medicine. Sometimes that's all under one license, so just look and find out. But as a universal place to find practitioners, if you're interested in a Chinese herbal approach, you can find acupuncturists or acupuncture and oriental medicine practitioners pretty much anywhere in North America and certainly a number of places in Asia. There are also traditional herbalists. There are people from, say, the American Herbalist Guild, AHG, who are trained and certified herbal practitioners. And they're going to work usually from a more Western herbal approach, which could be constitutional like Chinese, or it might be a little more symptom and disease specific. But they're going to be doing that, and those are very good practitioners. You know, just find out what their scope is, what they're allowed to do, what they're not allowed to do, etc. And then the other thing that I usually recommend is if you're not— let's say you're trying to replace your blood pressure medicine, because it's really common, people want to get off their blood pressure medicine and they want to use an herbal approach. Well, that's fine as long as the herbal approach can take care of your blood pressure problem. And so what you have to do then is work with a practitioner who's able to monitor you now. In many states, it's not under the licensure of, say, Chinese medicine or Western herbalist licensing to monitor your disease process. Your primary care would have to do that. So you have to kind of work together with the 2 practitioners. The other thing you need to know is some of the blood pressure medications, for example, many medications, but especially with blood pressure medications, have to be tapered because a sudden withdrawal of many blood pressure medications or other things can be quite dangerous to some people. So you have to know that that's important as well. So those are all things to consider. Now, when would be a situation where you could have somebody who was trained to do the herbal medicine approach and also trained to do the pharmaceutical approach and could do the taper, you know, all under one roof? Well, in some states, There are groups of physicians who are called naturopathic physicians or naturopathic medical doctors, and they have specific training in these integrative therapies, but also in many of the states are licensed as primary care doctors. And so, you know, for example, you know, in my state of Washington here, a naturopathic physician who's licensed could both monitor and change your doses on your blood pressure medicine and also incorporate an herbal approach, whether that was to take the place of it or, or partly take the place or whatever it's doing. But you have to check with the practitioner and find out, you know, what are they licensed to do and what aren't they licensed to do in your location. Same way in Canada, it's different in every province, different in every state. Now there are also people, uh, physicians who are integrative medicine practitioners, and usually you can find that by doing a search for integrative medical practitioners, and that includes MDs and DOs and nurse practitioners and, um, uh, physician's assistants in some cases. And, you know, anybody else who has a license to do, uh, primary care type medicine often, uh, will be in, in and around there. So again, just if, if they are able to prescribe, monitor, and take care of both sides of the equation, great. If they aren't and they're doing just the Chinese approach or just a Western herbal approach, you just want to make sure that you understand that they're communicating with your primary care or whoever manages that other med to make sure you're going to be okay. Now, the next one I got a lot of questions about was around the idea of diet and nutrient therapies. Okay, so I think beyond herbal botanical medicine, diet and nutrient therapy are all the rage with people. People know that diet is important. They know nutrients help your body work. They may not know all the ins and outs of that, but that's That's a pretty common thing, which is probably why I got so many questions about it. So what you want to think of when you're thinking of diet nutrient therapy is, is that the same or is there some sort of weird division? And normally when we talk about a dietary approach or a dietary therapy, we're really talking about what you're eating. So it's what you're eating, the timing in which you eat it, the macro and micronutrient mixtures of what you're eating, what kind of fluids you're taking in with the food, all of that sort of stuff. So your diet is literally what you're eating and drinking. And so we can manipulate that to change your health in many cases. Then there's nutrients and nutrient therapy, and that's where the micronutrition is usually assessed and maybe given to you. as a therapy. So in addition to what you're eating, you might do some micronutrition therapy where you might take a multivitamin, or you might take a specific B vitamin, or you might take, you know, a fatty acid or an amino acid or something like that. So in nutrient therapy, what you're looking at often is vitamins either in combination or separately given Minerals, amino acids, fatty acids, and other fats, you know, such as phospholipids, etc. And then things from plants like your polyphenols, your flavonoids, all of those things that come from plants and cross over to the plant medicines. And sometimes, you know, there, there obviously there are herbal things or botanical things we eat, so these things aren't always in totally separate buckets, right? Sometimes you have people add certain herbs or spices more to their meals just to get those levels going in higher, as an example. So if someone says that they do, you know, nutrition therapy, often what they're looking at, that would be supplemental nutrition things. So beyond your diet. Now, obviously, the better your diet is, the less usually of supplemental nutrition therapies you need, but both have a place. Now, for example, there can be sort of a general and a specific approach to nutrient therapy. So general approach would be, well, you're eating a modern standard North American diet, you're doing the best you can, but there's probably some, you know, vitamins and trace minerals and things that you might not be fully getting in your diet. And people will look and say, well, gee, how could that even be? And the answer is that a lot of the food that we eat nowadays is devoid of nutrients that used to be common in that food. And so when we think about that, then a general nutrition strategy would be, well, I don't know specifically what to take, but I'm going to take a multivitamin and a multimineral and maybe a multi-amino or something. And I'm just going to do that to kind of COVID the bases, sort of fill in the gaps, right? And usually those things like multivitamins and multi-minerals and stuff are set at such low doses that they're very safe to take every day. Then on the other hand, there's sort of a specific— or what I like to look at as a pharmaceutical approach to nutrient therapy. And that might be where, for a particular reason, you are prescribed a higher amount of a nutrient. Okay, so, and none of these— again, none of this is medical advice, just examples of things. But sometimes we will give people who are in cold and flu season, you know, higher doses of vitamin C than they would ever get from their food, from their food that they eat. And so they might take it with every meal, you know, up to the point of— we call it bowel tolerance, where the bowels get a little loose, you back off on the dose. And we might do that just to help them saturate their vitamin C stores, which doesn't stay in your body very long because it's water soluble, during exposure to things or while you're flying on planes or, you know, other stuff like that. We might give you a pharmacologic dose of vitamin D if your vitamin D levels are low to fill the tank up to, you know, get your levels back up to normal, etc. So those would be like really specific nutrient goals. Now, Sometimes you might also be prescribed or advised to take, you know, a high dose of like an oil, like omega-3 oils. They even have a couple of prescription items which are high-dose omega-3 oil now, which is basically the same as the supplement versions. They're just a little more concentrated. But you might be given that for, you know, high triglycerides or other types of cardiovascular issues or neurological issues. When you get over then to diet therapies, then you're thinking about sort of macronutrition, which then becomes micronutrition. Now, how does that work? Well, a macronutrient is going to be kind of what you would see on your plate. So is it a carbohydrate, a fat, or protein? A micronutrient is going to be what that breaks down to. So fats are going to break down largely to fatty acids. The protein is going to break down to amino acids and the carbohydrates are going to break down to sugars. Now, most foods are mixtures. Some are pure fat or pure carb or whatever. Most are mixtures and most foods then have some other things in them. So you might have a protein source, but it also has a lot of B vitamins and minerals in it. Might have a fat source that has fatty acids but may have some other things in it. Such as a fat-soluble vitamin like vitamin E, and so on and so forth. So your diet is important from what's going in, the volume of what's going in, the mixture of the macronutrients, and then certainly, you know, how much you're eating, the timing, and the liquids. Now, let's include liquids with diet because we eat and we drink, right? So, you know, here I've got my water. With lemon squeezed into it. It's very good to keep me from coughing while I'm speaking to you. But if I don't drink any fluids at all and I'm eating, I'm going to tend to be dehydrated. Well, being dehydrated is going to be a problem for the micronutrition getting in because most everything, when it breaks down in your GI tract, requires a transporter. Most of the transporters require water molecules and some require other things such as sodium and energy and stuff like that. Now, the diet therapies would be specifically taking and changing your diet with an outcome in mind, right? So if you look at for— and I'm not promoting any one diet here, I'm just giving you examples of things. But if you look at, for example, the most researched diet, with respect to health outcomes, you're looking at the Mediterranean diet. There's sort of the global Mediterranean, then there's modified versions of the Mediterranean diet. Mediterranean diet can be very, very useful for a lot of things. General overall health outcomes seem to be better on it. In some people, for example, their cholesterol and blood sugar might be better on it. That's usually with a modified Mediterranean diet. Um, you know, it just depends a lot on your body and what it receives. Then you may also look and say, well, um, you know, I was recommended to go on a high raw food, you know, vegetarian diet or a vegan diet. Well, again, I'm not making recommendations here. I'm just saying that sometimes for a therapeutic outcome, that might be recommended too. There's certain genetic abnormalities that can be aggravated in an omnivore diet that are maybe better with a vegetarian or vegan diet. Some people just feel better on it. There's a lot of reasons why people may choose one diet over another. Then there are some of the more carbohydrate-restricted diets like the Zone Diet is a, like a 40-30-30 macro breakdown. And then there's like ketogenic diets. where there's more fat, a little bit of protein, and almost no carbohydrates. Those type of diets I've seen used a lot in the oncology space. I've seen them used in people with diabetes, seen them used for a lot of other things. And just like every diet, they just, they require working with someone. If you're going to do a therapeutic diet and you're trying to get a therapeutic outcome such as shifting your your blood lipids, you know, your cholesterol, triglycerides and stuff, or lowering your blood pressure, or helping you with your immunity and your immune function or whatever. You really want to work with somebody who can help you, and it's not just sort of giving you the diet and pressing play, but also to monitor you, just like we said with the herbal type treatments. You need someone to do monitoring. Okay, monitoring is very, very important if you're doing a therapeutic diet. Now, you can buy a million books about this diet, that diet, etc. And a lot of them, of course, are written kind of for the mass market. So they're going to give you good middle-of-the-road advice. I'm not against you educating yourself and, you know, using a book and, you know, looking at it. Just make sure if you use a book about a diet that's terribly different from the way you eat, that you read the whole book and look look for the subtleties as far as, well, you know, if you're losing too much weight on it, do this, or if you're, uh, something else is happening, do this. Uh, so just make sure that you're getting a good resource and a good reference. What I tend to see now is the people that, you know, will pick up a book or maybe, uh, do a, do an electronic version of a book, they will, um, often do that and then A lot of times with books, there'll be a Facebook group or a YouTube channel or something with elaboration on it, which I think is a really nice thing, especially with diets. So back when I did a lot of therapeutic diet prescribing, when I was sort of at a different place in my patient care career, what I would often do is give them material to take and read and, and educate themselves with. This is a little bit before a lot of the online stuff we have now, uh, so I tend to do it more with handouts or book or whatever. And then I would have them try it, and then in a month I'd have them come back with their questions. If they really had tried it, they would usually come back with a number of questions. If they hadn't tried it, they would probably not come back, or they would come back and just say, man, that's not for me. And then we talk about that and decide if we want to make some changes. But generally, if someone did try it, and, you know, nowadays you could watch a YouTube video or some other thing, um, or listen to an ebook, and, you know, you write down, you know, what you're going to do, then you have some questions. Normally, after you get your educating done around the dietary change, you're going to have specific questions, and that's good to work with somebody who does that. So diet is about all those things. Now, what else has diet got crossed over with? Well, one big thing is your gut health, so the health of your digestive system. Now, this will maybe show my age a little bit and also the bias of some people who trained me, but when I was in a portion of my medical training and I was an intern, on the, what we call this, the Western medicine side of learning medicine. I recall one of a number of my mentors and people training me telling patients that what they ate had nothing to do with the health of their digestive tract, which just seemed odd to me, but I was not there to question their advice. And what I found out was that's not an uncommonly held idea in Western medicine. But literally what you eat is not just there to break down from macro to micro mineral. It's also there to help with the balance of feeding the flora, the good bacteria and the bugs that are in the GI tract. So for example, if you're eating in a way that has a lot of junky sugars, junky carbohydrates, or a lot of inflammatory things like inflammatory oils and fats and stuff, and all that, that will affect the digestive tract health. And when you affect the digestive tract health, the good bugs, as we call them, the gut flora, are not just there for, you know, looks. They're not just there to, you know, help out a little bit. They do a lot of things with metabolizing, helping you metabolize food and waste products. They also do a lot of things that can be either very good or very bad with respect to inflammation. And there's, you know, trillions of good and bad organisms down there, and there's always going to be some bad ones. But what you want to do is balance out so that you're feeding the good ones as much as possible, so that the ecology and the health of your digestive tract can be as positive and good as possible. So your gut health is very important with your diet. You get more mileage out of your food. nutritionally, and you get less side effects and less gastric upset if your digestive health is good and in a good place. And the other thing I mentioned earlier is liquids. So again, if you're, you know, staying hydrated and you're drinking water through the day, etc., that's probably better for you. I have run into people that don't drink any water, and the only things they drink, you know, are, say, coffee and tea or high-sugar juices or other stuff. And again, you know, those things in moderation may not be bad, but if that's all you're existing on for your liquids, that's going to create problems with you, usually for hydration, etc. And then certainly if you're having other things, you know, that may be more on the toxic or depleting end of the spectrum, you know, such as alcohol or something like that, you need to factor that into your considerations around your diet. So like a common thing is somebody goes on a carbohydrate-modified diet. So they're going to go on like the Zone Diet or low-carb keto or something. And they forget that what they like to drink is fruit juice, and they forget to look at the label on the fruit juice, and they see that if you're doing a carbohydrate-restricted or carbohydrate-moderated diet, usually you don't drink fruit juice because it's going to have a lot of carbohydrate in it. So those sort of things just become important to look for, important to look around at. The final thing I'll say with respect to diet is sometimes your diet might be part of your treatment plan, part of the flow of treatment, because the practitioner is going to specifically intervene in your diet based on maybe some inflammation markers, maybe some inflammatory markers around food sensitivity or food allergy or other things. And I've done other programs on food sensitivity versus allergy, but the short version is Most food allergy that we consider as like a medical food allergy would be something that you would get very sick or even die from. So like shellfish or latex foods, or, um, you know, for some people it's a particular, you know, you, you know that that's not— that's bad for you. And so that type of allergy is more of like your classic traditional type 1 allergy. Now you can also have sensitivity that is immune-mediated, and it may not be allergy, quote unquote, but it just doesn't make you feel good. These are things you usually don't die from, but you can get quite sick and quite inflamed from. So practitioner might run a food allergy test looking at the type 1 reaction markers, but then they may also run a food sensitivity test and look at other things such as IgG or IgA, or they may look at histamine-mediated response or, or a mediated response test. All of those things may not be a true allergy, but if they show up positive, they can be just not good for you or very pro-inflammatory. So in some folks, like with chronic illness, chronic inflammatory diseases, any type of chronic illness, if we're really trying to get kind of underneath what they put in their mouth for food and is it good for them or not. There's general things you can do. You can clean the diet up of processed foods, take those out, eat more, you know, raw vegetables, do whatever. You can do these basic things, eat less toxic foods, etc. But if the person's really inflamed, you might want to look and make sure there's not a food that might be good for you, quote unquote, that they eat every, you know, day, uh, or 5 times a week, and it turns out that that particular food is creating a lot of inflammation in their body and, and the sensitivity reaction, they need to take it out. Now, I had a question, uh, someone was saying, have you ever had a true food allergy where the person did not get allergic anaphylactic reaction? And the answer is yes. So allergic anaphylactic reaction is everywhere from a true allergic reaction that may have an itchy rash and wheezing and, you know, runny eyes and maybe diarrhea, other stuff like that, all the way over to anaphylaxis where you can go into shock from the allergic response. These are dangerous things, right? So I've had people where we had these really odd medical findings like a dysrhythmia, an arrhythmia in their heart, And it was periodic. It only came up certain times. We couldn't trace it down to anything. And I found people where they had a true type 1 reaction to a particular type of food. And then when we told them, we said, do you ever get, you know, hives or itchy or wheezing or anything when you, when you eat this food? And they'll say no. And we'll say, well, take it out of your diet. And then, um, in you know, 2 weeks, 4 weeks, 6 weeks, we'll have you try it again and just see what it does. And indeed, what happened is when they went out of their diet, their periodic dysrhythmia stopped. And as soon as they tried that food again, the dysrhythmia started back up. So sometimes it's not throat-closing allergy anaphylactic reaction, it's other stuff that, that the food allergy will create. Most of the time, those other things you know, the non-allergic anaphylactic things are going to be your food sensitivities. But either way, let's say you've got 7 or 8 foods that are just plain inflammatory and your body's dumping out a lot of histamine or whatever in response to them. Sometimes it's good to just take them out of your diet for a period of a few months. And then what we would normally do is once a person has healthier and stronger. Let's say it was 5 foods. We'd have them challenge each one of those foods one, just one day at a time. So, you know, if the first thing was chicken, for example, we'd not put any of the other foods in, but just have them have chicken. And if no response, then the next day we'd have them have chicken again. If no response, you know, then they might be able to incorporate chicken back in because their gut's healthier. They're healthier, they've moved on in their, in their health journey. And I've had other people where— and I'll pick on— it doesn't have to be chicken, it could be anything. It could be soybeans, it could be pinto beans, it could be carrots, cows, whatever. Okay, chicken is what we're picking on today. So I've had other people though where that response was true and they took it out for 3 months, everything's healed up, working better. They Challenge it day 1, challenge it day 2, no problem, no problem. If they eat it more than 2 or 3 days in a row though, they start to feel sick again when they eat it. And so there are people for whom putting a food back in might have to be an occasional thing. So I can tolerate it once or twice a week, I'm not going to eat it every day. Okay, so that's another way to sort of use diet as a therapeutic intervention. Now there are some— so we've talked about, you know, things that we put into ourselves as far as therapy. So nutrients and specific nutrition, diet and macronutrients going to micronutrients, botanicals or herbal medicines. Then there's other stuff that we just do, the lifestyle type things. Now diet gets included in lifestyle, of course, but one of them is what we like to call movement, also known as exercise. But one of the things that we found out, especially with the chronically ill or the very sick cancer patient population, is if you go and tell them, hey, I need you to start exercising, they might shake their head yes, but they're probably not going to do it because they feel so bad that the thought of exercising is not a happy thought. And this can be even if they used to exercise a lot before they got You know, cancer or chronic illness. So the idea of movement is everybody moves to some degree or another. Even if you're bedbound after a surgery, you move a little bit. You know, you can't not move all the time. So what we normally do with, you know, with healthy people, it's a little easier. It's like, well, let's get on a schedule and get more movement going and whatever. With sick people, it's more Well, let's look at where you're at. Let's look at what your capacity is. And also let's look at how sick you've gotten or how sick you've been. Now, in the case of like this, just came up with some COVID patients, post-COVID patients. What I have to warn them is that after COVID for a number of weeks, they have to be very careful with their exercise level. So they need to do movement and exercise, but they have to scale it back. And so with COVID what we normally do is if, you know, let's just sake of, you know, examples here, let's say they were usually jogging 2 miles a day every day, okay, or 5 days a week, whatever, and they get really hit, knocked down by COVID. Same thing happens with pneumonia or whatever. Um, when they come out of it and they're starting to retrain one of the things that can happen, because viral illnesses like COVID or big bad illnesses like pneumonia, all that stuff, they're very hard on the energy-producing part of your body, the mitochondria. And so the mitochondria don't all come back online as tough as they used to be. So, uh, in a post-COVID, if the person's having a little bit of trouble, we might say, well, you used to do 2 miles and that's your, your goal is to get back there. But if you go out and you do 2 miles, By the second day, you'll have no energy and you'll be fatigued and all your joints will hurt and everything else. Well, you're not going to stay that way, but we have to have you do like a graded exercise increase. Meaning, I know you used to do 2 miles a day. Now, if you do 2 miles a day for 1 or 2 days, you're dead for 5 days. So we have to retrain your body. And it seems so crazy, even if, you know, well, I only had COVID for a week, 2 weeks, 3 weeks, how can I be so sick? Well, it's because the mitochondria get turned down really easily. So when it comes to that, what I tell them is you're going to do baby steps of increasing. So whereas when you first started jogging, maybe you start with a half mile and got used to that, and then you did a mile, then you did a mile and a half, and 2 miles. Now what you're going to do is you're going to go for, you know, a speed walk for a quarter mile. Do that for 3 or 4 days. If that works and you don't crash, then do it for a week and then go to a half-mile speed walk. Okay, if you do that for, you know, a week or 2 and you don't crash, then go to, you know, another half mile, another half mile. Then that goes okay and you're up to 2 miles of a speed walk. Go to, you know, jogging for a half a mile. If that goes okay after a week or 2, Go to a mile. That goes okay. Go to a mile and a half, 2 miles. The problem people do is they jump back into their exercise that they were doing before, and they don't realize how depleted the mitochondria in the cells are. And then the big crossover point there is the viral illness sucks the energy out of you and your mitochondria. Then you go to try and work out or run or do whatever your movement and exercise is, and you wind up— Your mitochondria are supposed to get you through that, like they're in our muscles, right? So you're not going to have the resistance. You got to build it back up slowly. And that's especially hard for people who used to do a lot before they had like COVID or pneumonia or something of that nature. Then there's sleep. And people think, well, everyone sleeps. Well, no, not everyone does sleep. And not everyone sleeps well. And so, you know, it used to be very difficult for us doctors to do anything other than say, are you sleeping or not? Or, you know, keep a sleep log or something like that and sleep better. Or maybe you'd get a medication to sleep, or you'd get a, you know, maybe a botanical mixture, you'd take some over-the-counter to sleep. Nowadays it's a little bit better because we can have these devices, whether it's like, you know, like an Oura Ring or, you know, one of the watches or a Fitbit or whatever. I don't rep any of those, just whatever you like. But anything that will track your sleep quantity and quality, very useful. And in the early days of these sort of sleep systems coming out that were electronic, that didn't require you to go into the hospital or into a sleep center to do a sleep study, we could get the readouts with these things within people with chronic illness and see that the more nights that we strung together with not only enough hours of sleep, but also with deep enough sleep and the right potential and ratios of REM sleep to light versus deep sleep and all this stuff, the better they would get and actually the healthier they would feel. And with the advent of everybody being able to wear a Fitbit or a watch or an Oura Ring or whatever it is they're doing. Now we can track those things every night and see how we're doing. And I think that's very, very important. So sleep becomes a really important quantity in your health. Now, a lot of times, you know, kind of like diet, you know, you might be working with a practitioner, they don't ask you about your diet at all, or they don't ask you about sleep, or they don't have whatever. That happens With practitioners, of course. And sometimes it's just because they're busy, you're busy, you're kind of moving on to the next thing. If it's in the primary care North American model, it's sort of like, what's your problem that you want to deal with today? And if it doesn't— if it's not sleep, but you're here for your blood pressure, we're going to deal with the blood pressure. And they may not ask you about your sleep. Well, sleep deprivation can lead to raised blood pressure and all sorts of problems. So So it actually does tie in, but it might be one of those things where, you know, with sleep or diet or herbal medicine or whatever, you might want to, you know, add someone to your healthcare team who can just work with you on that if you're really having struggles. So like, let's say you have chronic fatigue or you have some other chronic issue and you get a, you know, you get one of these devices, track your sleep, and you realize your sleep is horrible, you know, and you might even be unconscious for a certain number of hours, but you're not getting REM sleep, you're not getting a good ratio of deep and light sleep, that's a great time to work with somebody who can help you out with that. Now, if you're looking online, and again, please run everything by your healthcare providers. I'm just giving you ideas here and information. This is not medical advice. But a lot of times, if you want a place to start, There's a whole category of information called sleep hygiene. So like dental hygiene, only this is sleep hygiene, right? And the sleep hygiene information that's out there, just like everything on the internet, you know, buyer beware. Some is really good, some is really bad. But basically, you're going to see a lot of the same recommendations about the, you know, the cycles that you put your body into. And how to get yourself more in line with going to sleep at night, how to get better sleep at night, what not to eat and drink before you go to bed, etc., etc. So sleep hygiene is a good place to start too. But I cannot overstate how much people with chronic illness were helped when we got a hold of their sleep quality. So not just quantity, but their sleep quality became very, very important. Now, if there's obvious things like you have sleep apnea and you're not breathing part of the night, et cetera, that's just got to be fixed. That's a medical problem. But some people, it's not that they have apnea, they pass that test, but they just sleep horribly and they don't go in enough REM, they don't get enough deep sleep, et cetera. You'll never get better without working on that, just like you'll never get better without working on your diet or any other thing. We're down to the last, uh, bunch of minutes here, handful of minutes. Uh, so a couple of things I want to talk about in the time that we have remaining, and then there's a whole section on interventional, uh, integrative or naturopathic medicine that we're going to do next week because we didn't get to it this week. Um, but I wanted to talk about, um, The idea of constitutional prescriptions. Okay, now I've talked about these before with respect to like post-COVID and other stuff like that. And your doctor, your healthcare provider may not do any of these, but sometimes they're really good if you have either, you know, just for health maintenance or you have something going on, you know, that you're really looking, you know, to round out your medical care for chronic or acute illness, constitutional approaches can be very helpful. And a constitutional approach— so back we did some talks about symptoms and signs, and constitutional symptoms are things that are sort of whole body-wide, like fever and stuff like that. Well, constitutional therapies include things like I was talking about traditional Chinese medicine, traditional other Asian medicines, There is a, a version of a traditional North American approach, uh, traditional North American, you know, herbalist approach. There are many other things that are done, and this is where they're looking at you as a whole person holistically, and they are going to, um, prescribe whatever it is that they do based on your constitution. Now This kind of goes back to, well, what is a constitution? Well, we all, you know, have friends and family, look at them and you'll say, you know, this person, you know, they tend to seem to be a little more anxious. They tend to be, you know, have very poor resistance to infections. They have this, that, or the other thing. Those are constitutional signs and symptoms, and they're not good or bad. They're just who we are. You know, some of it's our exposure, some of it's our epigenetics, some of it's our genetics, etc. It's just part of the way we are. And so part of your induction into these types of medicine might be a long interview asking you about how do you sleep. If you get stressed, do you tend to want to sleep more or less? Do you tend to get anxious? Do you tend to get nervous? Do you tend to get more depressed than anxious? Do you get both? How do you digest? Do you do better in heat or cold? Do you do, you know, all of these sort of things, right? So constitutional approaches can be things, and they might use a therapy that then is folded in with other therapies. So I mentioned traditional Chinese medicine or other versions of Asian medicine. There's also Ayurvedic medicine. There are traditional forms of medicine in most places in Europe. And certainly in the former Eastern Bloc countries. As I said, there's some in North America. There's definitely some in the Southern American states and the Southern American continent is what I mean. So those sort of things. There's also things like hydrotherapy, which we think of sort of narrowly in American physical medicine, but it actually can be a constitutional treatment. There are homeopathic medications. Now, Homeopathy, we didn't really get into, but it's a little bit like herbal medicine where there's both specific things for like acute problems, like I have a headache today or whatever, or there's a constitutional prescribing approach. And if you go to a homeopathic provider, again, you want to ask the same questions like with your botanical medicine or your diet provider or whatever, you know, what's your scope of practice? What do you do? What don't you do? if we're going to work on a medical condition I have, can you monitor that, or should my, you know, primary care do it, or whoever? Just, you know, just the normal questions that you'd want to ask. And those are constitutional treatments. Now, constitutional treatments, in my experience, can be wonderful for either getting kind of back on track when you've just sort of been sick for a while or whatever, and also for maintenance of optimal health, uh, because usually from the constitutional treatment then It will work on you as a whole person, and then these other things like, say, diet and nutrient therapies, movement and sleep, and all this other stuff may be easier to tackle when you're dealing with a constitutional approach. Now, we are in the last little bit, so I do want to normally say this, but if you're watching this live on Facebook Live or you're doing a download or streaming on CTR Radio Network, which is my home, CTR Radio. Uh, great, you're probably seeing this live. We're on all the pod burners that I know of. If you want to listen to audio, just go there, look up Medicine and Health with Dr. Paul Anderson, my, my real name, my full name, Paul Anderson. Uh, we're also, uh, on my YouTube channel. We put all these over there. I've got shorts, I've got long stuff, etc., over there on the YouTube channel. And you can look that up on Dr. A Online, D-R-A-O-N-L-I-N-E, on YouTube. Or you can just go to dranow.com, and there's a, there's a hot link to everything I do, including YouTube, etc. You can all go there. And, uh, this particular one, uh, this particular YouTube won't have a lot of show notes, but if I do put show notes, they go on to the YouTube Channel. All right. So it looks like we're really rocketing into the home stretch here. But we never know. So sometimes there's that with, with the wonderful world of electronics. So today we've talked about natural and integrative therapies, and we went through the kind of the big ones, certainly not everything: diet and nutrient therapy, specific nutrition or pharmacologic nutrition as I call it, herbal or botanical medicine, constitutional medical approaches, movement or exercise therapies, sleep. Some of the lifestyle sort of interventions that can be done, and we sort of broke those all down and what's going on with them, etc. And then we got into constitutional treatments that may, you know, may cross some of those boundaries, may include all of those things, etc. And what we're going to get into next week when we talk here on the radio or the podcast, whichever you're watching, It's all recorded the same way. When we do that, we're going to get into interventions in integrative or naturopathic type medicine. So what interventions mean is something that's done to you. Now you could say a diet is an intervention, but these would be things more like involving, you know, equipment like hyperbaric oxygen or neurofeedback or Uh, you know, photodynamic therapy, IV therapy, all of these different things that we're able to do now. But that's it for me today here on Medicine and Health with Dr. Paul Anderson, and I will see you all on the radio very, very soon.
