NATURAL & INTEGRATIVE THERAPIES Medicine & Health Podcast

This is a show about opening the often 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 Anderson. Good day and welcome to Medicine Health with Dr. Paul Anderson. That's me, I'm Dr. Paul, and today we are, uh, doing number 2 in our little series about integrative and natural medicine therapies in medicine, how they fit in, what they do, all of that. So if you were participating in the last one of these, we talked about a lot of the real kind of ground floor therapies such as nutrient therapies, dietary therapies, botanical medicines or herbal therapies, exercise, sleep, You know, all of these different things. And then we ended up talking about constitutional treatments, uh, things such as constitutional Chinese medicine treatments or hydrotherapy or homeopathy, etc., etc. So we kind of broke down what those are, etc. And, uh, today we want to go to part 2 of that, which is the more— I would say these are more the interventional type of therapies. So Everything is an intervention that you do, of course, but these are just sort of at a next level as far as therapeutic intensity, maybe, etc. And so my purpose today was to kind of segue from that last discussion that we had and move into these new therapies. Now, again, just for reference, when I— if I say I'll put something in the show notes, that's on, on the YouTube channel. And so we're hosted, we're broadcasting right now on CTR Radio Network, and they're live streaming to Facebook. So there won't be any posts there on Facebook. We're also, though, this podcast Medicine and Health with Dr. Paul Anderson is on just about every podcast burner you can find. So you can find us there. And then, like I say, the YouTube channel is where I will actually put show notes in the description box. So that's what we do there. If If you want to find the YouTube channel, DRA Online, Dr. A Online. And if you can't get it that way, go to my hub website, which is dranow.com, and there's links to everything pretty much that I do on there. So we'll move right in here and start to talk about the different types of modalities or interventions, etc. And something that You know, I have to drink a little water today just because I've been talking, doing interviews all day. So something that sometimes people bring up is, well, what's the deal with, um, you know, so we've got the big umbrella of medicine or healthcare, then we've got this idea of integrative medicine, uh, or natural medicine or naturopathic medicine, and then a bunch of other things that can go on in medicine. Um, what is, you know, natural or integrative or naturopathic, etc., about, uh, these sort of things you want to talk about today? So the big ones I want to talk about today would be injection therapies, intravenous therapies, hyperbaric oxygen therapies, hyperthermia or heat therapies, neurofeedback, and then photodynamic therapies. And many of these are procedure-intensive or equipment or other thing-intensive. And so sometimes— and I know just going back to the days of doing the cancer research, the human cancer research that was funded by the National Institutes of Health, I was part of an integrative team. And we were connected to the larger Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, which includes University of Washington, Seattle Children's Hospital, and a number of other places— Fred Hutchinson, some real famous places, and Bastyr University. And we were doing integrative oncology research. And so, you know, sometimes people would say, well, What— number one, what's integrative? Number two, I don't think it's very, you know, natural of you to be doing intravenous vitamin therapy or whatever with people, uh, you know. So how does that all fit in? Well, everybody's got a different, you know, view of integrative versus natural or naturopathic or, you know, whatever else you want to talk about. And the way I look at it is, if we look at the big umbrella of healthcare and medicine, and then we go to Integrative therapies— integrative therapies is a bigger, broader band, and that could include things like natural therapies, could include those basic therapies that are sort of ground floor therapies we talked about last week, you know, which include diet and nutrient therapy and sleep and exercise and other things of that nature, herbal medicine. The world of integrative and naturopathic and natural medicine includes other things, and many of these things have crossovers to the more what we maybe call Western medicine side of things. So what's integrative about it? Well, integrative medicine at its base, the idea is we're going to take a broader look at whatever you've got going on, and if we need something from the real hardcore, um, Western medicine playbook, we can bring that in, uh, to your, uh, to your case and your care, such as a surgery or something of that nature, or a drug therapy, etc., etc. In, uh, many other countries where I have colleagues, they don't stop there with, you know, so we say Western medicine and, you know, know, in a lot of European and Asian countries, they don't stop there with, say, surgery or drugs and that sort of thing. And they will actually be more integrated in that they might do surgery, they might do drugs, but then they might do diet and nutrient therapy or exercise therapy or all these other things. So the idea of integration is simply not saying one thing is better than the other or one thing supersedes the other. It's just there's a time and a place for a lot of things. And what we've done in Western medicine largely is to segregate what we might think of as, say, evidence-based medicine or modern Western medicine and make that a smaller box of therapies. But in reality, just because in maybe the US and Canada we don't do something as often as they might do it in Asian countries, or you European countries, for example, doesn't mean it's not part of medicine. So here in the in the West, we have to add this modifier like integrative medicine. You also then a little more narrow term be natural medicine because the things we talked about you know last week with diet and nutrient therapy and sleep and exercise and botanical medicine, etc. Those are very basic ground floor natural sorts of interventions. And many of the things we're going to talk about today either are natural interventions or relate to that. But that's sort of where that comes from. And then if you look, sometimes the term like naturopathic gets added in there as another modifier or descriptor, and that may have to do with the type of physician that you are working with. In many provinces in Canada and many states in the United States, there are physicians who are licensed and practice as naturopathic physicians or naturopathic medical doctors. And that's a whole other category that goes on as well. And most of them, you know, definitely practice the stuff that we talked about last time. plus the stuff we'll talk about today. And in many states, they also embrace, you know, the rest of Western medicine. So the way I look at it is, uh, there very rarely are completely wrong therapies to use with patients, especially with cancer and chronic illness. But there can be times and places where those therapies are more appropriate. And so my employing of integrative natural therapies, naturopathic medicine, in the overall practice of medicine is to find the best time and the best place for each of these things to come in. And so I am not, you know, for or against more, more than one or the other of any of the therapies, whether it's drugs or surgery or or natural therapies or something in between. What I'm for is clinically deciding appropriately, when's a good time to do this thing? Okay? When is that a waste of time? When would we employ this? When should we wait to employ this? When would be a good combination of patient needs surgery, but they also need X, Y, and Z? How do we mix those things together? And that largely has had a lot to do with the way that, you know, my practice and the research I've been involved in, the writing, has a lot to do with that. Okay, so we'll get right into the, uh, the therapies. I just want to kind of talk top-down about these. What are they? Why would we do them? Uh, or, or why would some practitioner do them? And, uh, how do they fit in as an integrative therapy into the bigger picture of, uh, you know, Western medicine, naturopathic medicine, integrative medicine? that whole collage of medicine. And in my mind, uh, you know, more tools in the toolbox is a good thing. But just like working with, uh, somebody with tools, let's say a carpenter, if you go to a very experienced journeyman carpenter, they may have a lot of tools, but they only pull them out of the toolbox and use them at the proper time and in the proper place. Same exact thing with therapies, whether they're very basic natural things or interventional or more Western medicine, etc. There's a time and a place and an application for everything, and they are not mutually exclusive. Some things to consider. The first thing I want to talk about would be peripheral injection therapy. Injection therapies, and that could include things like intramuscular vitamin injections. You get a B vitamin shot, something of that nature. It could include more of an orthopedic type of an injection therapy such as prolotherapy or some of the regenerative therapies that might include, say, stem cells, et cetera. It could include neuromuscular orthopedic therapies such as trigger point therapy, which can be done in a number of different ways. Trigger point therapy can be done manually with your hands. It can be done with acupuncture needles, or it can also be done with an injection therapy. And if you look at the books written by Janet Travell, MD, who I believe must have passed away now, but when I was first doing injection therapies and learning I had a very positive experience in my education and learning injection techniques in hospital settings, in emergency room settings, and then also in clinical settings. Because one of the things when you get beyond, say, just a standard intramuscular injection for, say, a vitamin shot or something, you have to know where needles go when you put them inside of people. And so if you're doing something like a prolotherapy or regenerative therapy or a stem cell therapy, and it's got to go in the knee joint or it's got to go, you know, to certain ligaments, you know, around the ankle or something like that, you need to know where those are and how to get the needle there. So there's a lot of needle skills involved in these. Well, if you're doing trigger point and you're doing it manually with your hands, you still need to know where to go. But as soon as you start invading somebody's skin, you need to know, you know, the anatomy of the area where your needle's going and where you don't want it to go. For example, a lot of the trigger points are on your back, and a large portion of your back is also right above where your ribs and your lungs are. And the last thing that you want is somebody to be injecting and drift a needle into your pleura or a lung or whatever. It happens occasionally, but that's why needle skills are very important. Whether you're doing a standard orthopedic injection, you know, of the knee joint or the shoulder joint, or where you're doing trigger points or whatever. So the idea behind these, though, is let's say we're keeping it to the needling sort of modality here. The idea behind these peripheral injections is it gets the product that you are injecting into the site of action. faster than if you were to say take something by mouth, right? So if that was an intramuscular injection, say a B12 shot or something like that, most of us have gotten a, you know, maybe a B vitamin shot or something. You get it in the deltoid, in the arm muscle, or maybe, you know, in the hip. The needle goes in, it goes into, it should go into the muscle. The reason for that is then when it's injected, it depots in around the muscle where there's a ton of blood And so it goes in the muscle and then the capillary blood flow around there kind of sucks those nutrients out, puts them in the bloodstream. It's not as direct as an intravenous injection, which we'll talk about in a moment, but it's a way to increase the amount of something going in the body without having to take it orally. Now, if it's a therapeutic injection that may not involve a nutrient or something, that again is a way to get the whatever you're injecting injecting into the location you want it. So if I have, you know, injured my knee and I want to do a regenerative injection in the knee, or an anesthetic injection or whatever other kind, I get the needle into the joint space of the knee and I inject it. And then that has a benefit over what I could take orally. So that's the basis of injection therapy. Now, with trigger point therapy, you're going generally into trigger points which are in muscles, and that's kind of a different skill set. And there are people who do this in a multitude of ways. So again, if you look up Janet Travell, MD, her work— she has some very wonderful textbooks and interesting history if you want to read about a doctor with interesting history. But with the trigger point therapy, The needle goes in and you actually get a, usually a response if you're in the right place. It can be a twitch response or other things. And it's literally like if you're feeling along a muscle and you'll get to, you know, people call it a knot or something in the area. The idea with trigger points is they can recreate a pain pattern that you might have thought was from something else. So you might go in and you might If you look at a trigger point chart, and again, with the magic of the internet, you just Google trigger points, go to images, you'll see all these charts. And you'll literally see, okay, if it comes from this place here, it has a radiation of pain that goes like this, or it goes out, or it does whatever. Those are classic trigger point patterns. So then you would go along and you identify where those are, uh, and by palpation, and then you would prep the skin and all of the things you do for injections, and put the needle into the area you think the trigger point is. And usually when you hit that place in the muscle, there'll be a twitch or there's some other responses. And then you, if it's a dry needle, like an acupuncture needle, you just leave it there or agitate it. If it's an injection therapy like Dr. Travell did, then you would inject. Something. Now, that something could be a lot of different things. Often it's an anesthetic. Sometimes it's an anesthetic mixed with something else. The idea there being that you want to disrupt the electrical activity, the neurological activity around that trigger point, and release it, so to speak. And you, like I said, you can do that with your hands if you're trained, etc. So there's many reasons why injection therapy has come up in the realm of integrative natural naturopathic medicine. So this is one of those areas where there's a lot of crossover because the techniques and the technology for an injection is the technology for an injection. So if you're in the hospital and they're going to give you a steroid shot, it's going to be the same process and procedure if it's going in a joint as if you're going to do a regenerative injection in joints. It's different stuff going in. So that's the other thing about the big umbrella of integrative, and then maybe natural, naturopathic, etc., uses of those, is a lot of the technology, a lot of the way we get there, is literally exactly the same, uh, as it would be for a more Western medicine applied drug treatment, etc. So. Like I was saying earlier, you know, uh, something that I found to be a great benefit when I started doing some of these other types of therapies was my original exposure to them was more in the Western medicine system, the hospital system, etc. And so, uh, when I was taught to do, you know, knee joint injections or shoulder injections or other injections of steroids or anesthetics or other stuff like that, Then if I went and I was going to do some other injection product in there for, say, regeneration or pain or whatever, the, the technique and the equipment's exactly the same. It's just what you're using is different. That can be very useful. In, uh, many, many years ago, before I got as involved in cancer and chronic illness, I worked with a lot of physical medicine doctors of different types, and a lot of times they would refer me their injection patients as they were working with them, you know, after a car accident or injury or something of that nature, and did a lot of things like trigger point therapy and prolotherapy and other regenerative things to help people. who had had a trauma heal, and, uh, and it was usually very, very successful in doing that. But again, the integration part is, you know, they were doing whatever type of physical medicine they provided or their team provided, uh, and, and my role was, uh, to do the injection part of it to help with the healing, etc. So related to injections, peripheral injections, are intravenous injections. And this is another one of those things where you have the same technology, the same equipment, and everything that I would do an intravenous therapy in a hospital. So it'd be all the same stuff as I would do an IV therapy with more of a natural bent or an integrated bent or whatever you want to call it. The difference is what goes in it. Now, sometimes the what goes in it might be real similar, okay? And the what goes in it, you know, for example, most of the time in a hospital you get an IV bag hung and they put the IV in you. It's going to be for rehydrating you, hydration IV. Depending on your disorder, they might put some vitamins in there. If you are in for a while and you can't eat, you might get intravenous TPN, total parenteral nutrition. And then they may intravenously administer drugs to you. Okay, so that's the normal uses or the common uses of IVs. Obviously, almost everybody who's ever been in surgery, you've had an IV going. That's for a number of reasons that have to do with management of your body through the surgery. Things are real bad, you might have 2 or 3 IVs depending on what's going on. But normally, when you're thinking about, okay, so that's the technology for IV therapy, we extrapolate that over to what else could we do intravenously. Um, one of the things, for instance, in the National Institutes of Health research that, that I was involved in was what if we had cancer patients who were stage 4, so advanced cancer patients, and we did different types of IV, intravenous nutrient therapies with them, would that help them, their quality of life, their length of life, those sort of things? And those were questions that we were asking. Those were procedures we were doing with patients, etc. And so one of the things about that is people would say, well, let's say you're doing— you're going to do intravenous vitamin C therapy or something like that. Why can't I just take vitamin C? Well, you certainly can. You take it orally. But much like the discussion around peripheral injections, where you might get a B12 shot if you're low in vitamin B12, you could certainly take vitamin B12 orally. This would take a lot more orally to get your levels up than it would with a shot. The other thing about intravenous therapies is it goes right into your vein, so there's no absorption in the middle. It just goes to 100%. available. If I eat nutrients from my food or I take a vitamin or something like that, it's a variable amount of absorption based on how well I digest and how well I absorb the nutrients from the food or the supplements that I took. So in really, really sick people— and this is actually one of the things that originally many decades ago got me into trying intravenous nutrient therapies with patients was the sicker the patient is, the worse their absorption is orally. And you get somebody who's so sick, it's a lot like, um, they have, uh, overdrawn their bank account, uh, metabolically speaking. And so you can get oral nutrients and stuff into them to start to help them heal up. If they're real sick and they're really in the, in the negative metabolically, they're overdrawn, um, intravenous therapies are probably a better way to get those things back into their system. And so intravenous therapies are used a lot for that. And this is the area that I work in, and I do physician training, etc. And so is this something that everybody needs? Well, no, everybody— almost, almost nothing everybody needs in medicine, you know. Not everyone needs penicillin, not everyone needs aspirin, not everyone needs a whole bunch of stuff, right? I mean, we all need to sleep, we all need to eat, we all need to do the stuff we talked about, you know, last time. And so the idea of intravenous therapy is unique, it's novel, it's— you add nutrients to it, it's, you know, kind of cool and seems kind of high speed. I prefer to reserve intravenous nutrient therapy for people who have a very high need for something that only putting it in their vein will do. Um, if you have a relatively healthy person, um, who is sick but is digesting and absorbing well, and they haven't been sick for a long time and all of that, They will probably do very fine with all of the stuff we talked about last time— diet and nutrient therapy, sleep optimization, exercise, all those things. If you have somebody who's been sick for years and/or has a very damaged digestive tract, they still need to do all those good things, but you can move their case forward in a healing direction much better with intravenous therapies. Now, I've done other programs, I'll probably do others in the future about what we would put in there and why and all of that. But just suffice it to say that an intravenous approach is one way where you can go around the digestive system, you get all the nutrient or whatever you're putting in the intravenous bag. right in and you can have an effect on the body. And that could be any number of, you know, vitamins, minerals, amino acids, complexes like glutathione, some lipids like phosphatidylcholine, and a number of other things too. The biggest thing that you want to look for if you're looking for this type of therapy is you want to have it done at a healthcare provider's office who does this a lot. They're specially trained to do it. There are places, you know, where there's, you know, IV bars and rehydration vans that drive around and stuff. And it's not that those are good or bad, it's just that you want to look at the credentials of who's providing it. You know, if it's a nursing service who's going to come and do an outpatient, you know, nursing intervention to you, Nurses are trained to do this, and they're, you know, they're not going to put their license on the line generally to do something, you know, way out there. If it's a physician type or a nurse practitioner or somebody with a license to do that, great. As long as they've been trained, good to go. If it's a clinic, you know, that you're not sure what the qualifications of people are, just check into that. You know, it's like I said, it's not good or bad. It's just, it should be done in a setting where Number one, it's within the license of the person giving you the IV to actually do the IV and to provide the IV for you. But also they have the facility or the facilities or a pharmacy to make the IV appropriately and safely so that you don't have any untoward effects from that particular intervention. Now, another potential intervention to think about beyond these injection and IV therapies is going to be the, uh, some other maybe technology-dependent interventions. And they're not necessarily separate from Western medicine, but Western medicine might use them in a more narrow manner or more rarely or something of that nature. So we'll now move into a couple of other interventions that we want to talk about. This time. So the next one we want to talk about is hyperbaric oxygen. I recently did an interview with a physician in Europe who has a hyperbaric oxygen basically webcast that they do, and they enter— they use this in their practice, etc. You can find those links Uh, on my YouTube page or go to the Facebook page or whatever. But hyperbaric oxygen therapy is the use of a hyperbaric chamber and usually oxygen, but it could be room air depending on the protocol, to pressurize your body so that the concentration of oxygen in your plasma, the liquid part of your blood, rises, and then the concentration of oxygen that goes into your cells and feeds the oxygen-dependent systems turns over the O2 in your cells and the CO2 coming out faster. So when you're thinking about hyperbaric oxygen, you know, we think about it, of course, for dive injuries. People, you know, they're going to get the bends or they have the bends, put them in a hyperbaric oxygen oxygen tank and, uh, and repressurize them, you know, down to the level they were at, and then bring them up more slowly so that the nitrogen is dispersed. Any bubbles that form are dispersed. But medically speaking, you can also use hyperbaric, uh, for wound healing, burn healing, uh, post-radiation injury, all, all manner of other things. And in the United States and in Canada, Insurances sometimes will pay for it if you have particular problems. That could be certain healing problems after surgery, especially in the elderly, burns, as I said, also now approved for post-radiation injury, and there's a short list of things. What we're finding is that hyperbaric oxygen and there's there's research that just was published recently by Dr. Paul Harch, H-A-R-C-H. Just go look up Paul Harch, MD, and he has a lot of research on his website. He just published a really nice review. And then, uh, there's some research coming out in the next month or two talking about, you know, some more modern uses of hyperbaric oxygen. In our clinic, we tended to use it in a number of cases. One was with patients with cancer who were doing metabolic protocols. So that was one reason— patients with cancer timing it between their radiation or for radiation damage. Chronically ill people for increased oxygenation, we would couple that with other therapies. Also traumatic brain injury and other problems that occur occur after motor vehicle crashes, things of that nature. So hyperbaric oxygen, again, you want to go to a place where they have the proper equipment, they have the proper training, and they know what they're doing. And so you might say, well, you know, is this sort of like an IV where it's kind of the same in the hospital as it has— as it is in an outpatient clinic? And basically the technology and the science is the same whether you get it in the hospital or not. Um, but the hospitals are going to be much more narrow in why they employ hyperbaric oxygen. So, uh, in the hospital, it's going to be dive injuries. Certainly you need hyperbaric oxygen for that. Um, and, uh, as I was saying, you know, burns and other healing things, but they're going to limit it to that. So it's going to be harder to get a hyperbaric referral in a hospital for any of the other indications. Such as brain injuries and, you know, a number of the other things that we've talked about. The use of hyperbaric is pretty straightforward. As I said, it's a chamber system. It's going to have pumps involved to change the pressure once you're in the chamber. And then in most cases, there's going to be supplemental oxygen going in, which is Very useful, and some of the new research coming out is looking at you know different pressure systems and air and other stuff of that nature. So it's it's an interesting and growing area of integrative natural naturopathic type medicine. The next thing I wanted to bring up would be heat therapies. Hyperthermia is the technical term for heat therapies. in medicine. And hyperthermia, you hear a little bit more about in, uh, countries that are not the United States and Canada. So they do it a lot in oncology in Europe. They do it a lot in infectious disease in Europe, also Asia. In the United States and Canada, there are some centers that have the 2 types of hyperthermia medical treatments. And in the United States, uh, currently, if you're getting medical hyperthermia that's part of the system, the standard medical system, you're probably still going to be in a clinical trial. And that's because certain types of technology are still being researched in the United States. I'm north of Seattle, and so sometimes we would have people we would refer just across the border. So it was pre-COVID anyway, and there were centers up there that had fully functional hyperthermia units, especially for cancer patients. So when we think about hyperthermia, it's bringing the body temperature up, and it used to be That we thought, well, there is, you know, heat, heat is heat and body temperature is body temperature, which is true, and the effect is one effect. Well, what we found out in research mostly from Europe is there is actually— you can break the increase in the core temperature in a human down into 4 different stages. And so there is really 4 stages of heating the body up in hyperthermia. So if you want to get to stage 3 or 4 reliably, that is done in a facility with a medical hyperthermia device that gets you very hot, either all over or in a location. So the 2 types of hyperthermia that are used medically in hospital and outpatient centers that get you up to stage 3 or 4 hyperthermia are going to be whole body hyperthermia, where You're literally in a system that's usually on a hospital, special hospital bed, and there's a kind of— I don't want to say tent, but there's an enclosure around you with the heating elements inside, and it really heats you up quite warm. Normally, you are being heavily monitored through that therapy. You're— they're going to have an internal temperature monitor. You're going to probably have an intravenous drip going to hydrate you and give you any medications you need, etc. And in many cases, you'll be mildly or consciously sedated while you're doing that because it does get you quite hot. Now, whether or not you get sedation, how much sedation, depends on where you're going and who's doing it and all of that. There is also at hyperthermia, medical hyperthermia called local regional hyperthermia. And that's where, again, you're on a special type of a bed that has transducers on both sides of you. So you're laying there and the bottom unit is matched to where the top one is. And so this is used a lot. Let's say you give a therapy like chemotherapy or some other thing Then, and there you want the liver to concentrate it. You can do local regional hyperthermia over the liver, you know, after you do the other therapy, and it brings more blood flow in, changes the cytokines, the chemical messengers, and all of that stuff. So it's just different ways to heat people up, and both of them get you up to grade 3 or level 3 or 4 hyperthermia. You also can do heat therapies in a therapy we talked about last week in the more constitutional therapies called hydrotherapy. And that's often— hydrotherapy is many things, but one classic hydrotherapy, especially in the naturopathic medical tradition, is a way to heat the body up and then to rapidly Cool it down and you cycle that. A lot of times there'll be 3 cycles of heat them up, cool them down, heat them up, cool them down. And the reason behind that is instead of a static heat going into the body, you have a response by the body when you heat it up and then you suddenly cool it down. The body then has to create a particular immune response, etc. So that's one way to use heat. Well, another thing that people will do is they might use a sauna system to heat the whole body up, which many, many of us have been in a sauna or seen a sauna. And the thing that you want to remember with that is saunas, generally, depending on which kind, if there's 4 levels of hyperthermia, a sauna will move you into the first level for sure, and usually the second level. And what we found with hotter saunas— these are usually infrared saunas— what we found with an infrared sauna setup, if it had the proper heat units in it clinically, that we could get people right to the edge of the level 2-3 borderline heat-wise. And that was with an internal temperature model. And the nice thing about that is that you, you can begin to get a lot of the immunologic effects of hyperthermia once you get to level 3. Okay, so if you are really trying to achieve fever therapy and you are trying to get up there to level 3, 4, You're going to need to be either in a hospital or in an outpatient facility that specifically has the hyperthermia equipment to get you there, or has a local regional hyperthermia unit that's going to get the organ in question to that level. Okay. For example, the hospital— one hospital, well, a number of hospitals I work with outside the country have both types of hyperthermia units, and they're often used with either infectious disease patients or they would be used with cancer patients as well. As I said, in the U.S., a lot of it is still under institutional review covered studies, and so you're not going to be getting as much probably access to that here. A little bit more in Canada. And a lot in Asia and Europe, certainly. So hyperthermia is a lot of different things. It's all heating the body up. There's different ways to get there. Just one parting word about hyperthermia. And now there's a physician from Europe who's a radiation oncologist and also a hyperthermia expert. And he and I were teaching at a cancer conference one time. We got to trade notes about different things that we were doing because it turned out there was, uh, he's a cancer doctor from Europe and has a number of hospitals he works with. A lot of crossover with some of the things we learned at cancer research and what he was doing with cancer patients. So we literally traded notes after we had both spoke at this conference. And one of the coolest things that I found from his work presenting, and his name was Dr. Sahimbas, S-I-H-A-M-B-A-S, I believe. Dr. Sahimbas, if you try different iterations of the spelling and hyperthermia, you will find him in Europe. But what he presented was I believe it was German research that literally showed these 4 levels of body heat rise and change. And then downstream there was a grid, and, and then downstream on the grid it showed, okay, what was the temperature range for that, but then what happened with these different effectors of immune function, which was very, uh, interesting, very, uh, useful information because it showed that all heat has an immunologic response, but the different levels— that the higher you go, the more of an immunologic change that you have. Which is why the hospital-based or the big outpatient hyperthermia center-based systems tend to go into level 3 and 4. And as I said, in, in the U.S., because of, uh, of research rules and things. Uh, you could do plain hyperthermia, say, with a sauna system, and certainly get people to a 2 and usually right to the edge of the 3. Um, but you have to be careful what you called it, because if you move into medical hyperthermia and you're calling it that, then you're going to need to be under an IRB and under a study. Another thing I wanted to bring up, uh, was the use of neurofeedback. Now, this is a very— it's really very standard, uh, medical neurology-based technology. So most of you have heard of the electroencephalogram, so the put pads on your head and there would be a readout, you know, kind of like an EKG for your heart. This is EEG for your brain, and it would give a readout. Okay, they might look at it, and this is commonly done in seizure disorders and things of that nature because looking at the electrical activity inside the brain. The EEG is an incredibly useful tool, but it's incredibly, or moderately incredibly, hard to decipher unless you happen to be a neurologist, etc. And so the advent in the last few decades of better computer systems and computer modeling has moved the standard EEG to, uh, a more clinically useful tool for 2 things, one of them being diagnosis of the problem and the other actually being part of the treatment of the problem using neurofeedback. The same systems now, because of the computers that operate them have the ability to do diagnosis and treatment, which is really cool. Now, the way that this works is either you have a particular— there's like a cap, it's got the openings in all the right places, and the little probes, they don't, they don't go in your skin, they just go on your skin. Little probes are in the right places, and those hook up to an interface. The interface goes to the computer. Then you collect the data. In even more modern times, without having to wear the cap, they have these head— it's not really a helmet, looks kind of like a weird helmet, but it's basically like a helmet with these fingers that come down and they go on to all of the places where an electrode would normally go. Much better for children or just anybody who doesn't want to have a cap and a bunch of electrodes stuck onto them. These are really nice, and they allow the feedback of, uh, those 2 areas— diagnosis and treatment. So for diagnosis, the modern neurofeedback systems that are based on advanced EEG technology and then the computer doing the thinking can map the brain very well, and they map for activity in the brain, and then they can compare your brain activity to thousands and thousands and thousands of people in a standardized model and look at, okay, this area of the brain is getting the normal amounts of activity, this area is under-functioning, this area is over-functioning. And then through the use of that same technology, and again you would be, you know, wearing the electrodes, etc., you can use a different side of the computer modeling technology then to do a feedback, and they call it neurofeedback. And so those involve mental mental work while you're— while the scan is going on that actually feeds back to something usually on a screen. Now, neurofeedback, kind of like hyperthermia, has many different levels of neurofeedback. The kind I'm talking about that uses EEG technology that's more advanced— there's names for it, but that's not important— uh, is usually a higher-grade type of neurofeedback. There's plenty of neurofeedback you can do. This just happens to be based on EEG neurofeedback technology. And I've done this and used it in practice, but I've also just used it, you know, as a demo on myself to see what this feels like and looks like. And so using the information being gained from the EEG on the brain, then there will be a screen and you will have a particular job to do. It'd be like a game, right? And they have all number of games that are available. Uh, and so it might be, uh, you know, focusing on a particular— uh, you know, there's a one called, I think, the Tiger Race or something. It's tigers racing of different colors, and yours is the yellow one, and you're trying to, you know— so the more that you focus and the more balanced, uh, you're using that part of your brain the faster your tiger runs. They also have some with, you know, you're hitting a ball and they have, you know, many other things. What you find is, is that the more distracted you get, the, the worse you're doing in the game. But also, if you're, if you're kind of over-focused and over-trying, you'll actually do worse in the game as well because you're not focusing in on uh, the part of the brain you're exercising. So it's, it's like exercising pieces of your brain. And it's used a lot with people after traumas of any kind. So it could be mental-emotional traumas, it could be physical traumas like a brain injury, uh, it could be, you know, slip and falls or other stuff like that. It's used a lot in, uh, the neurobehavioral world So you could think of it with the attention deficit spectrum, uh, the autism spectrum, many, many things would be very useful for it called neurofeedback. And again, it's, it's one of those things where it's, it's got its roots in, you know, medicine, Western medicine, uh, with the EEG. This is just different application. Okay, so neurofeedback, very, very useful. And again, just like all the other technology or, or or, uh, you know, medically oriented things, just make sure whoever's doing it is trained to do it, uh, they have the right equipment. When you look at neurofeedback though, as opposed to say intravenous therapy where they're sticking a needle and stuff in your vein, neurofeedback, there's a lot broader range of practitioners who are doing it because, um, while it does involve technology and everything It's not, you know, injecting something in you, or it's, you know, it's not doing other things of that nature. So there's a lot of neurofeedback centers that are very, very good, and they're run by different levels of practitioners. And again, just, you know, ask about their technology and their training and, you know, how many people they see and, you know, all those sorts of things. The final one I wanted to talk about, um, which is good because we're, uh, at the end of our time Is photodynamic therapy. Now, we often talk about you know FDA approval and FDA clearance and all this business, which is always important if you're in the United States. Not important in other countries, but they all have their own regulatory bodies. And photodynamic therapy, if you look it up, has a few other names. But it is an approved therapy that is often used in dermatology. You might consider that reasonable. It's light and skin and all that. And also to a smaller degree in oncology, treatment of cancer, and a few other things. That's, that's in the US that we do that. The nice thing about that is that it's It's a lot like neurofeedback. It's available. It's kind of, you know, it's got definitely got its roots in standard Western medicine, etc. But a lot like neurofeedback or hyperbaric, there's a lot more uses for it as we get better technology and ability to manipulate light better than, you know, we've originally approved the treatment for. So, for example, there are dermatologic reasons why your dermatologist may have you come in and use a helmet-like device that has a particular wavelength that goes in the photodynamic wavelength. Or you might have a particular use of photodynamic therapy, sometimes in eye things, eye problems, sometimes in Other, as I said, maybe in oncology, et cetera. Photodynamic therapy can be external, like the helmet, or there's these, you know, light beds or other things externally. It can also be done as an endolaser, meaning it goes inside of the person. One of the people that I've learned the most about photodynamic therapy, again, a physician from Germany, They will thread endolaser into tumors, into other places from the outside of the body. And also we use it sometimes, endolaser, into a vein to irradiate or otherwise manipulate the light going across the plasma. So photodynamic therapy is another thing you'll, you'll hear about. Again, if you got somebody in there doing External stuff with a lamp or a light bed or a helmet, you know, probably anybody who's trained, that's, that's fine. If you have somebody, you know, using endolaser and they're putting it in a vein or inside your body somewhere else, you know, I would just inquire about the technology they're using. Is it under their licensure and, and the training they took and all of that business? Because just like any other interventional therapy, You want somebody that's, you know, comfortable with it, has the right equipment, and has the facility that makes it safe for you to do. Well, we are just about out of time here, and so I want to wrap up by saying, uh, it's Dr. Paul Anderson with Medicine and Health. Today we've been talking about natural integrative and naturopathic type therapies that are Under the big umbrella of medicine, the little bit smaller umbrella of integrative medicine. And we are— did part 2 today looking at the more maybe technology-intensive types of therapies such as IV therapy, injection therapy, hyperbaric therapy, photodynamic therapy, hyperthermia, and neurofeedback. We're here every week on CTR Radio Network. That is our home. And we're live streaming on Facebook, but then we're going to put this video over onto YouTube. Channel is DRA Online, Dr. A Online. And you can always go to my hub website, dranow.com, and find my book links and my videos and all of that that goes on there. But thank you very much for listening. I'll see you all on the radio next week.