What is inflammation in the body? Is inflammation good or bad?

Hello, I'm Dr. Payam Hakimi from Body of Harmony and here to do another functional medicine, anti aging medicine episode with you today. I want to talk about inflammation. We hear inflammation a lot, especially from our doctors. Now we even hear it from our patients who basically search for it and come back asking for inflammation. The question is, is inflammation good or bad? Because we hear some inflammations are good, some inflammations are bad. So I'm going to explain what inflammations are, and then I'm going to tell you some of the tests that we do for inflammation to figure out why there's inflammation in the body. And then I'll give you some treatments at the end as we go along. So, number one, inflammation, good and bad. The good inflammations are the beginning stages of certain infections. We have to appreciate inflammation is part of the immune system. So as an infection is happening in the body, we want to be able to kill it. So we need some inflammatory response. Let's talk about sinusitis. As we get a sinusitis, what's gonna happen is we start getting irritation in the sinuses and then eventually you start getting congestion, you start getting headaches and then some runny nose. That's all an inflammatory process. And the reason it's there is because the body is opening up the blood vessels so that it can bring in white blood cells, cells that repair cells that take away the bacteria or the cells that were infected with bacteria and remove them from the body by either having runny nose or sometime post nasal drip. So that's a good inflammation. Another example of good inflammation, let's say we hit our knee, you start seeing a swelling in the area, or if you ever have had a sprained ankle, there's going to be an inflammation in the area. And the reason is because, same thing, the body is bringing in good cells so that it can repair the area. So these inflammations we like to keep there. We don't want to stop the flow of the sinuses. Naturally speaking, we don't like to stop a inflammation of the ankle or of the knee unless it's really interfering with everything that we're doing. Like what? Let's say we have a sinusitis and we can't sleep at night. And we know that most of the healing happens at night. So we give you some medication to clear that out. You can breathe better so you can sleep better, and the healing process happens as well. So it's important to appreciate that there is good inflammation. There's also bad inflammation, and that's what we need to focus on bad inflammation. You have heard it's the processes that happens in the body. And sometimes these processes stick around, and as they stick around, they start damaging the tissue, damaging the organs. And what happens is we get an issue later on in life. What are these inflammatory processes? Some of the ones that we know. Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, rheumatoid arthritis, thyroiditis. These are inflammatory processes that if they stick around in one place, they're going to cause more damage as we go along. Okay. Now, the good inflammatory processes are usually acute. That means they're there for a reason. They're there for 14 days, one month, and then they go away. That inflammation is gonna sort of stick around for a while. And sometimes it gets worse. As it gets around. The places of the body that take inflammation are skin. And we see acne. Sometimes acne is inflammatory in process, but we see acne, we see psoriasis, we see eczema. It's the mucous membranes. The mucous membranes like the sinuses, the vaginal area, those are all inflammatory processes. And then we see inflammatory process in the lungs. You know, people who have had asthma or complain of bronchitis on a regular basis, those are not good inflammatory responses, obviously. And then we have patients that get it actually in their digestive system. We have gastroesophageal reflux. We have Crohn's disease, We have colitis, ulcerative colitis. These are issues that are there due to an inflammatory process. Or we can have these inflammations in our organs. Some people get it in their thyroid, becomes thyroiditis or Hashimoto's thyroiditis. Some people get it in their joints. We call it rheumatoid arthritis. Or anywhere else in the body, like in liver, we call it hepatitis. But that's usually for a specific reason. So those are the differences between good inflammation and bad inflammation. There's some physicians that actually say obesity, atherosclerosis, and even type 2 diabetes are part of inflammatory process and need to be treated as such. Now, what can functional medicine do for you? We can figure out exactly what. What type of inflammation do you have? Is it a inflammation that's good? Is it a bad inflammation? Or even. Sometimes we call autoimmune diseases inflammatory processes that are eventually damaging your body. So we definitely have to deal with autoimmune diseases as well. What we need to do is a group of tests. Usually we run a complete blood work, liver and kidney function. We run all of your hormones, because certain hormones like cortisol will also tell us what's happening with your inflammatory pathways? Your good cholesterol and bad cholesterol will tell us what's going on with your inflammatory process. Then we can actually look at your mold. We can look and see if mold is causing inflammation. And we have some patients which get sinusitis, chronic sinusitis, because of the fact that they're exposed to mold all the time. At times we do a heavy metal testing that tells us how the functionality of the body has changed because of overload of, let's say, mercury in the body or aluminum in the body, or lead. So it's really important to know those as well. Another important test to do is a food sensitivity test, because we know a lot of stuff that we eat eventually end up in our body. And most of the time we don't know what our sensitivities are. Sensitivities are different than allergies. Allergies have a reaction that's very immediate. As soon as you eat, let's say tomatoes, there'll be a reaction. But food sensitivities, we don't necessarily know that they're causing abnormalities in our body. Like I used to eat eggs after a workout, and then after I did my food sensitivity test, I noticed that eggs are causing damage to my body and that was showing itself as chronic sinusitis, abdominal pain, bloating, and sort of irritation in my stomach. So it's important to know what's causing inflammation in our body. And that's one of the other tests that we can do. The other important test is a complete digestive analysis because we have to figure out exactly what's happening in our digestive system. You've all heard that people who, who have leaky gut syndrome, and leaky gut syndrome basically means food that's not digested properly ends up in blood and the body sort of mounts a reaction to that. So it's important to fix the guts as well if someone has any inflammatory processes. So those are the things that we can do in the office along with the rest of the medical work, like your ANA and CRP and ESR and everything that shows us your inflammatory panels. And based on the inflammatory panels, we can decide a supplement or treatment plan. I want to tell you a little bit about the functional medicine treatment plan for inflammation. For a lot of the autoimmune diseases and a lot of the inflammatory diseases, we use a medication that's called ldn, low dose naltrexone. And I've talked about this in my previous videos and I'll put a link as well, so that you can actually directly watch ldn. LDN is very important because it decreases inflammation and increases immunity. And it's been amazing in treatments of thyroiditis, Crohn's, arthritis, and a lot of these autoimmune and inflammatory processes in our office. The other thing that we use are supplements that help out with decreasing inflammation. And some of the supplements that we have. One of them is called inflam arrest and inflamma Rest is a combination of enzymes, because we know enzymes decrease inflammation. Turmeric, boswellia, rutin, quercetin. And these are natural substances that will actually decrease the inflammatory process in the body. The other one is inflamend. Inflamend, also an amazing supplement to decrease inflammation in the body. And this one has green tea extract and stinging nettle. Holy basil and ginger. Again, those are natural substances that decrease inflammation. We have another amazing supplement that's called Super Turmeric because it's a very concentrated form of turmeric. And we know how turmeric helps with decreasing inflammation. These are the supplements that work directly on inflammation. There are other supplements that your functional medicine doctors will tell you as well, and, and that is balancing out your cholesterol, your good cholesterol properly. So we give you supplements that have good omegas in them that will help out balancing out your good cholesterol panel. We know once your good cholesterol comes up, your inflammatory process actually drops a little bit. This was some of the treatment plans that we have at Body of Harmony for you. Please like us and subscribe to our channel and we'll bring you more information every week with different topics on functional medicine.