Hidden Triggers Sabotaging Your Skin

Welcome to Integrative Medicine with Dr. Leland Stillman, the podcast where we explore the best of East and West, old and new, conventional and unconventional, in search of answers to medicine's toughest cases and most difficult problems. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Diagnostics and therapeutics discussed on this podcast may or may not be right for you, so talk to a qualified practitioner before taking action based on what you learn here. If you'd like to become a patient at my practice, go to stillmanmd.com to schedule a complimentary discovery call. Thank you for listening and welcome to today's episode.

Does the itch just keep coming back? I'm Dr. Leland Stillman, and I see this all the time. Patients who are doing everything right, they feel like they've tried everything. They've tried creams and powders and pills. They've been to doctors and more doctors and tried all kinds of crazy stuff they may never have thought they would try by people or from people on the internet who they'd never met. I see this all the time and we help people finally understand what's really going on with, you know, what is dysfunctional about their immune systems. So today I'm going to break down how I look at recurrent itching through the framework of what we call repair deficit in my practice. And then some of the things that we share with patients that we believe long-term has a huge impact on whether or not their immune systems are going to continue to be really confused or whether they're going to get back on track. All right. So what's the problem? The problem that a lot of my patients face is they have recurrent intractable, seemingly never-ending itching, and they've already tried a lot of things. They've tried steroid creams. Maybe they've tried allergy shots. Maybe they've tried over-the-counter supplements, herbs, you name it. What they'll notice in the pattern they almost always describe is that they've started things. They've seen some relief. They've seen some improvement. But then what happens is over time, the things that they were doing stop working. And this is a concept that I call therapeutic runway. What ends up happening in our bodies is a lot like what happens when you try to patch a tire by the side of the road. If all you've got is a blown tire, and sometimes that's all it is, you picked up a nail, you ran over a big piece of debris, or the tire just wore out and you patch it. You might be able to get another, I don't know, 10,000 miles out of that tire. But sometimes what happens is your tire busts because you've got an underlying problem with something like your wheel alignment or an axle. Something is causing an abnormal wear pattern on the tire. If that's the case, then patching the tire buys you a little bit of time, but the underlying problem is just gonna burn it out faster. Now, the reality is our bodies are not like cars, which means you don't get an infinite number of tires. And what I see happening with patients who have itching is that they run from one tire patch solution to another, and then they run out of runway. Time to fix the underlying problem before it becomes overwhelming. So it's actually pretty common for me to see patients coming to me who have itching that nothing will relieve, and they're not sure what on earth to do next. This brings me to the real problem behind the problem. And I often tell patients, you don't have an itching problem, you have an itching result. The real problem is upstream from the itching. Why is the immune system malfunctioning? So let's get into a little bit of how itching works. So your skin has these cells, they're called basophils and mast cells, and these cells have histamine in them. These cells are supposed to protect us from parasites. Unfortunately, because of our modern polluted environment, heavy metals, pesticides, organic pollutants, and more, these cells, as that total toxic burden rises, start to become more and more sensitive, and the immune system starts to be triggered by more and more things in the environment. So in a healthy person, they're not being triggered. To itch by pet dander or pollen or a food they just ate. But as the immune system becomes more and more dysfunctional, it starts to react to more and more things. And these mast cells and basophils that create this reaction of itching through the thing that they release called histamine, as well as other chemical mediators, they start to explode basically more and more. And that's really what itching is. So when I look at a patient with itching, What I believe I'm looking at almost invariably is someone who has a total toxic burden in their body that is causing their body to have this abnormal response to environmental or dietary stimuli that then causes these cells to degranulate and create what they feel as itching. So the name of the game in these cases, in my book always, is reduce the total toxic burden as aggressively as we can within reason. Because what you will find is you can push people too hard or too fast in order to detoxify. And this brings me to the case I want to share with you today, which is really interesting. I saw this recently, and this is not an uncommon scenario. So we started to work on this case, and a woman who'd, who'd finally gotten some relief from her itching with a variety of over-the-counter things, and some of her other problems started to improve. She got really significant, meaningful progress on deeper, more fundamental issues. But as that happened, Her itching actually paradoxically got worse. Okay. And this is one of the things that really confuses patients. And I totally get why. As some more serious issues start to resolve, oftentimes old issues that you thought you'd solved will arise. They'll rear their ugly head, so to speak. Why this happens, we're not entirely sure, but we see it consistently enough to know that this is not just patients hallucinating or going crazy. And it's also not the process failing. In fact, it's it's consistently a sign that the process is working. And if the patient keeps going on the other side of the worsening of the itch, they're going to see a significant improvement. That's not a guarantee. Individual results vary widely, and there's many reasons for people to develop itching, many of which are unrelated to toxins, but that's overwhelmingly the trend that I see in patients who are struggling with itch and itching. And we call it technically pruritus, but that's a $10 word for a $5 thing. I see this all the time. And sometimes the analogy I'll draw for patients is that your immune system is a lot like like a fire department, right? So when you have small fires, small toxic burden, little infections with, you know, run-of-the-mill bacteria or parasites, it's manageable. There are enough fire trucks and there's enough water in the city water system to keep things under control. But as toxins accumulate in the system and the immune system gets derailed, and there's more and more fires raging out of control all over the body, what we generally tend to see is that patients develop more and more symptom burden. And oftentimes this takes the form of weird skin rashes that nobody can figure out, nobody can solve, and no amount of drugs, pills, potions, powders, biohacks, supplements, and other tire patch measures get the job done. We have to go deeper if we're really going to understand why these people are sick. And that's why what I tend to do in these cases is start with fundamental lab testing, a very broad suite of blood lab testing, as well as hair tissue mineral analysis. What we generally find is that these patients are depleted. They do not have the right nutrition in order to eliminate the toxins that they're being exposed to as part of modern life. What we'll also often find when we look into their diet and their lifestyle beyond their labs is that they've got a variety of different exposures in their day-to-day life that are really causing this accumulation of toxins that then destroys immune tolerance and triggers these immune manifestations. Okay. So that's our general approach. And the overall philosophy is that the immune system isn't broken. It's been overwhelmed by the number of toxins in the environment, and it's also been depleted of nutrients both because of the toxins and because of the modern day, just wear and tear of life. So the things I share with patients that I'm passionate about, and these are just a few things that I think really matter for long-term proper immune regulation. So number one is eliminating aluminum. I am very serious about this. I don't drink aluminum canned beverages. I don't use baking soda or baking powder if it's got aluminum in it. I certainly don't use aluminum-based deodorant. If anything's packaged in aluminum, if it's wet, if it's got water in it, there is a real likelihood that it is loaded with aluminum.. And I know that because I have seen some absolutely insane levels of aluminum in my patients who've been consuming things packaged in aluminum. Now notice that I said liquids packaged in aluminum, dry goods. So like stick packs of electrolyte solutions, like my favorite SkinSips, I tend not to see that, or I haven't yet seen that with those. It's because they're dry. You need water to get the aluminum out of the packaging into the product. Aluminum cans, aluminum, like foil packets with like goop or some kind of gel in them. Totally different story. Those two products are the highest aluminum levels in the practice ever, and that I've ever seen anywhere out of hundreds, if not thousands of tests that I've now seen both in my own practice and from other practitioners who run HTMAs. And for the record, there's no way that that aluminum is coming from an outside product. I know because I vetted the product the person was using. Okay. Second thing I share with people is turning their Wi-Fi router off overnight when they're not using it, obviously. And I also like when people minimize their exposure to wireless and electromagnetic Wireless radiation from cell phones, Wi-Fi routers, and Bluetooth. This one may surprise you, but it turns out that my friend Ole Johansen, PhD, one of the world's experts in the effects of electromagnetic fields on human biology, has clearly documented that these fields can, particularly in susceptible individuals, trigger the activity of the very cells that cause itching. Pretty amazing. So some of my patients notice a huge improvement in their overall health when they reduce their exposure to these things. That's a very unpopular opinion with a lot of people, and some people think that I deserve a tinfoil hat for that one. But I gotta tell you, I just listen to my patients and I was skeptical that that would make a difference when I first started recommending it. And frankly, I started to only recommend it later once patients were already starting to feel better, and I was amazed by what they came back to me and told me. I have even had patients tell me, Dr. Stillman, just doing that, something simple like turning off the Wi-Fi router at night. Gave them better results than some pharmaceuticals or bioidentical hormones. Pretty powerful, compelling results. And that's why I continue to talk about it on social media. And I continue to talk to patients about it in our practice. The third thing that I shared with her and that I often share with patients in this position is to focus on protein and roots at each meal. So root vegetables, carrots, sweet potatoes, rutabagas, and so on. Why? Most people are under-consuming protein in general. And what I found putting people on higher protein diets is a lot of problems tend to go away. Part of this, in this particular instance, is driven by the fact that we need protein, specifically amino acids like cysteine and glycine, as the building blocks for something called glutathione. What is glutathione? Glutathione is the main cellular antioxidant and detoxifying agent. When you do not have enough glutathione, you cannot get rid of toxins. What you'll tend to see in people with a high toxic burden and allergic or autoimmune conditions and problems is that they have low glutathione levels. And one of the things that has impressed me most in my practice is that when you give these people the building blocks for glutathione, cysteine and glycine, some amazing things can happen. And we can only blame the, these things oftentimes on the possibility that their body is now eliminating more of the toxins that are making them sick in the first place. Now, there's many other things that protein does, and that's why I'm very passionate about getting patients to eat the appropriate amount of protein for them. And there's way more that I can share with you on this, but for the interest of brevity, we're going to limit it to that right now. Roots, root vegetables. Why am I so passionate about root vegetables? So root vegetables are rich in fiber. They are also great for the microbiome, and they also have a lot of the minerals and vitamins that we need that can both displace toxins directly. I'm talking about elements like copper and manganese, let alone zinc. And they also are essential for cellular energy generation. And what I've been really impressed by is that when patients shift from a more grain-based diet, which is what most people are doing to get their carbs, towards a heavier load of root vegetables, they have more sustained energy, they have better sleep, they have better stamina, and they start to finally eliminate some of the things their bodies have been holding onto. And we see this very clearly in their hair testing as toxins come out of the body. So just a couple of things I share with patients who are struggling with this. By no means is that everything that I share with them or that we rely on to get great results, but those are 3 things anyone can do and anyone can look into. I cover more things like this. In fact, I cover the top 7 habits that I really rely on to get patients great results. And my 14-Day Reset. The link below takes you directly to it. Check it out, learn what it's about. I am planning a 14-Day Reset implementation masterclass workshop as part of the launch of our upcoming immune wellness program. This program I'm very excited about. We're going to be teaching our method live twice a week in group calls, and we're going to have a Q&A as well every week. So you can answer or get your questions about things answered anytime. You're just going to have to submit the question via the link. I'll get the questions and I'll give you my answers and they'll come out as a dedicated recording plus an executive summary that's really easy for you to get all the details from. So stay tuned for more information about our Immune Wellness Program coming out soon. Take the 14-Day Reset, links below. If you opt into the 14-Day Reset, you're going to get an email when the Immune Wellness Program comes out. So that's the best way to keep in touch with us in order to be the first to know when that program launches. I hope this video has been helpful for you. Take care and have a great day.