How Environmental Exposures Are Making Us Sick and What to Do, with Dr. Lyn Patrick

Chronic disease getting worse as you get older has nothing to do with aging. It has everything to do with the oxidative stress effect of the toxicants and the body burden that is accelerating as we age because we hang on to so much of that stuff.

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Hello and welcome back to the five Journeys Feel Freaking Amazing podcast. Ed can't be here today. He's missing out actually, because we have Dr. Lynn Patrick Lynn is a licensed naturopathic physician who has been in practice for 30 years, 39 years. She specializes in environmental medicine, treating exposure to toxins, intoxicants, and trains physicians and primary healthcare providers in environmental medicine in a year long training program@emeiglobal.com super excited to have this conversation because Lynn, this is near and dear to my heart. I always think of toxins as metals, mycotoxins and that other massive bucket which includes the flame retardants, the nail polish, the phthalates, the plastics, the styrenes, the gasoline fumes. So we're probably only going to have time to focus on one today and we could bring it back and talk about another. So what's the one you want to talk about? What's your, is it metals, is it mycotoxins or is it other?

Oh, this is so, you know, number one metal that's on the list, the ATSDR priority list is arsenic. There are at least conservative estimate, right? According to the EPA scientists, 11 million people in the United States that are potentially exposed to levels of arsenic that can cause cancer. It is a human carcinogen. It also is responsible for such bizarre things as gout. We think that now looking at the epidemiological literature, that there are many more health conditions that are related to arsenic. Peripheral neuropathy. Here's a good case to illustrate that. I had a nurse in my practice who luckily for her, worked in a law firm and was the environmental kind of researcher for cases that involved environmental toxicity. I live in southwest Colorado, ground zero for gas and oil. Historically always has been, might as well be Texas. Lots and lots of cases of exposure from there. She came in and she said I have this peripheral neuropathy. So numbness, tingling and Pain in her hands and her feet that was climbing up to her elbows and her knees, and she'd had it for a year. And she said, I went to see a neurologist and he checked me for arsenic in my blood, and I didn't have any. So he said, that's not the problem. But I know she even knew that one of the symptoms of arsenic exposure was peripheral neuropathy. And I said, tell me about what happened to you. And this is where environmental medicine is really like, let's talk about what happened coincident to the onset of the symptoms, at least within the last year. And she said, well, I was helping my husband build a deck in our backyard, a big old deck. And. And I said, did you wear gloves or a mask? And she was like, what? No, why would I have done that?

Why would I? Why would I have done that?

Right? So I asked her, is this treated wood? Is this outdoor treated wood? Now, this was a while ago, before they took arsenic out of the process of treating what was called cca, copper chromic arsenate used that the wood was actually dipped in. So it was in a tank. That's how they made outdoor wood. Now they just use copper chromate, which is not exactly safe either. But they took the arsenic out because they had had some fatal exposures of kids to the arsenic contaminated dirt and wood that the decks were made out of, right? And the dirt that was underneath the deck. So I said to her, you know, was this CCA wood? And she said, well, yeah, it was, you know, it's copper chroma carcinate treated wood. And I said, did it rain while you were building the deck? And she said, yeah, we had great rainstorms in the summer, you know, because we have monsoons. And so I said, okay, let's check your urine arsenic levels, which is where you're supposed to look according to the government, according to the atsdr, that's the place you're supposed to look.

And not provoked, which I thought was so interesting. Just literally go pee.

Go here, go pee in a cup, right? So I had her go pee in a cup. We sent it into the lab, and she had arsenic levels still because. And this is the part of the mystery that, you know, an astute listener will get right. She still had high levels of arsenic in her urine. Now, arsenic has a very short half life in the body. Hours to days, in and out. It does its damage very quickly, but there's some potential evidence that it might be stored in the body, in the tissues, but not stored in the blood. That's why you have to look in the urine. But I thought, oh, my gosh, what if that's not the only place she's getting the arsenic? What if that was the main exposure? But she still got urine levels in her. Arsenic levels in her urine because she's still exposed. And sure enough, she had a well and private wells. As you know, if you have less than 25 people on a well, nobody comes out to check your. Your metal levels in your well. They don't have to, right? It's not municipal water. So I said, have you checked your well water? And she was like, oh, no. You know, she was very embarrassed. But, you know, not everybody has the time to go out and check their well water levels. And sure enough, she had more arsenic that she was continually getting exposed to through her well water. What did we do? Number one rule of toxicology is you remove the exposure from the person or the person from the exposure. So we had her get just a basic reverse osmosis charcoal filtration water filter for her well to get the arsenic out. And then because we suspected and we knew it would not hurt her, we gave her a chelating agent, dmsa, which is a prescription drug to help remove arsenic from her body, if there was any there. The good news is she recovered from the peripheral neuropathy. Within a month, it went away. And remember, this woman had had this terrible numbness, tingling and pain for over a year. Kept her from sleeping. You know, she was kind of a mess. And within a month, she started getting better. Now, I didn't know all this stuff when I first started practicing medicine. And who knows how many cases of arsenic exposure I missed because, you know, medical schools, we don't learn this stuff. You didn't learn it in your medical school. I didn't learn it in naturopathic medical school. That needs to change. That's part of my mission. But know that your doctors are not going to have seen the neurologist practicing neurology, right? He's supposed to know that arsenic is not measured in the blood, it's measured in the urine. He didn't even know that. And I cannot tell you how many doctors I've seen make that mistake in the last 20 years and tell their patients, oh, no problem, you know, no arsenic here. Maybe not at the moment. But what about historical exposure that's already caused damage to the peripheral nerves.

So this is so profound, Lynn, because you and I have the same philosophy, that we're meant to be vital, vibrant, healthy, alive. Able and interested in intimacy until you're at least 100. And that every decade gets better than the one before. You and I are on that same wavelength. But the majority of people go when you start to get a symptom, they go, well, I'm just getting older, or my family all has that, or that's in my genes. It's sort of an expectation of failure. And so my first to the fourth point that we're making is these are not just from getting older. You're not just getting older, you're getting sicker. And that's why you're getting worse, because you're getting environmental exposures that are making you sick. Like, God, I have hearing loss. And I wish I knew about mercury and hearing loss 30 years ago.

And lead.

And both, by the way, lead.

You know, they have found early hearing loss in adolescents at blood lead levels considered perfectly safe, you know, far under three and a half mics per deciliter in the blood in adolescents who are exposed to lead.

I wish I knew. Right, yeah.

Mercury. I mean, that's a whole. We could talk. I could talk about Mercury for 150 years, I think. But the point is, I want. I want to underscore your point, if you look at the data from the Environmental Protection Agency, they did a study called the N HAT study, National Human Adipose Tissue Study, where they took 20,000 adipose tissue samples and looked at what was in them. Now, this has been so deeply buried by the epa, I can't tell you how hard it is to find it. But I found it and I have it, and I use it to teach my docs, because guess what was in that adipose? All kinds of solvents, metals, pesticides. I mean, we carry a body burden in our adipose tissue. And the EPA has admitted that as we age, that body burden increases. And it is a fairly linear increase. Right. So you and I know that because we see it in our older patients. And that is absolutely. I totally agree with you that the phenomenon of chronic disease getting worse as you get older has nothing to do with aging. It has everything to do with the oxidative stress effect of the toxicants and the body burden that is accelerating as we age because we hang on to so much of that stuff. And I now think. Wendy, I'll tell you, after reading the N HAT study and other studies, I do believe I used to say this was not true, but I've changed my mind. I do think that mercury and arsenic are sequestered in the adipose tissue. We hang on to Them we know they're in our tissue. Tissue. Right.

We do. They gotta go somewhere, Lynn. Right. So your. Your fat, your bones, your organs, your brain. But so one, my request is that you send me that study.

The Nhat study. You really want it?

I do. Well, you know, ignorance is bliss. Knowledge is power.

It was printed on a typewriter. That's how old it is. But, yes, I'll send you the whole thing. You can take a look at all. But it is a mind blower.

That's one. But two, if you do everything right, you aren't losing weight. It's because you are storing toxins in your fat and you need to get rid of the toxins so you can lose the fat. The body's smarter than you are. You're not going to lose weight until you get. Lose the toxins. So for all these women listening who are like, I eat right, I exercise, I sleep enough, I'm not a stress ball, and here I am. I can't lose it. It's toxins. Yeah.

Wendy, we have to stop victim blaming. We have got to do that. I mean, our culture is so bad at victim blaming, you know. Yes. We have to take responsibility for what I put in our mouths, you know, and what we drink and all that stuff. We've got to do that. But we have to stop blaming ourselves for the effect of toxicants that we are exposed to unknowingly, that we hang on to without our knowledge.

Yes.

So.

So, okay, so that was point five. So let's. I want to drill into for people listening. What. And by the way, we're not going to finish. Like, I haven't even gone near the questions that you gave me because this is such a huge topic. Yeah, we're going to do this. We're going to do more of this. But what. When you were looking at arsenic, lead and mercury, let's limit it to those three. And cadmium, maybe. Now let's go for arsenic, lead, mercury. What are the clinical things that the listeners would go, oh, maybe I had an exposure. Aside from living on this earth having mercury fillings, having osteoporosis and eating rice, what are the things that people are going to notice in their life that, that they're. That they might wonder are. Are. You can track it back to, I mean, hearing loss for me.

So I have a friend, wonderful, brilliant internist in San Francisco. Her name is Jane Hightower. If you guys have not read Diagnosis Mercury, if you've not read this book, this will blow your mind because it's her story. About how she started out getting a call from a dermatologist friend of hers who said to her, I just heard this bizarre thing on the radio as I was driving to work. This is how this all started, that women who are losing their hair, it's because they're eating too much tuna fish. And she said, I have never heard that before. They didn't teach us that in medical school. That's bizarre, right? And so. She decided after much kind of headbanging and trying to figure this out, that there might be a connection between those two things. And it led her to do an in office study. She had a high end, meaning her consumers had lots of money to spend on fish. High end practice of internal medicine in San Francisco. She ended up publishing one of the first studies looking at that demographic of men, women and children and their symptomology and their blood mercury levels and the amount of fish they ate. And so she actually calculated their fish intake. So if they were eating ahi tuna, if they were eating sushi, if they were eating swordfish, if they were eating mackerel, and now we know other fish like bass, you know, even lake and stream fish, and she had calculated that they were at risk. She looked at their blood mercury levels and you know, the safe level According to the EPA is 5 micrograms per liter of blood. She was finding levels of 40, 50, 70. And these patients had. And these are the five symptoms they had insomnia, fatigue, headaches, muscle pain and joint pain and difficulty concentrating and memory loss. Right. So those were the five things. They might not have all of them, but they at least had one of them. And so she was able to identify the source of the problem, get them to stop eating fish. And then she continued to check their blood mercury levels as time went on. And it took anywhere from. And this is where we get to the. Some people are good at detoxifying mercury, some people are terrible at detoxifying mercury. Anywhere from a couple of months to over a year to get their blood mercury levels back down to normal. Now, just because their blood mercury levels went down to normal doesn't mean their body tissue levels of mercury went back down to normal because we hang on to mercury in our tissues. The second largest reservoir of mercury in the body after the kidneys is actually the liver. Everybody thinks it's the brain, but it's the liver. So we actually hang on to mercury in our liver. And that's one of the reasons that people might have elevated liver enzymes. When they don't drink, they eat pure food, maybe they don't have amalgam fillings, but they are eating fish. Right. So she really took, she, she really broke the mold.

You know, I, I have a question about mercury, Lynn, because with all of these wildfires, forests sequester mercury.

They do. The conifers. Yes.

And when the forests burn, out comes the mercury. Do you know of any studies going on that are looking at the levels of mercury in our food as a result of wildfires? Because it's heavy, so it falls.

Yeah, we're not there yet. The University of Washington, actually, they had some brilliant researchers who put a. There's a specific sensor that you can use, and I'll talk about where that's been used in human research. They used this sensor and they went up in the air and flew above the wildfires in, on the Pacific Coast, 2017-2020, when we had those wildfires. And I believe they're still doing the same thing now with the wildfires in British Columbia, which are, of course, engulfing forests with trees with needles. So the trees with needles, all the pine trees, all the conifers, have a very, I want to say, ingenious and useful capacity to sequester mercury from the environment. Right. They're doing us a big favor. But when they are burned and the soil too, there's some mercury in the soil. All of that becomes airborne and it becomes part of the pollutome that we're all exposed to from wildfire smoke. So we won't talk about wildfire smoke today, but what you're thinking is the next step, which is where does that wildfire smoke land? And do plants that are not. That don't have needles actually sequester mercury as well? I'm not a botanist. I don't know the answer to that. I would imagine, no, because they did do some studies in the area around Minamata. So for those of you that don't know the Minamata disaster that was in Japan, the Bay of Minamata became heavily contaminated with mercury as a result of a company there flushing mercury into the bay. And many thousands of humans were affected with acute mercury poisoning as a result. To this day, they still have people who are sick from Minamata disease, it's called, and it's so bad because in Japan you're not supposed to marry people with Minamata disease because you might have children that have some form of mental retardation. So back to the food question. I don't think so, but I have not seen any studies actually looking at that, you know, who the person to talk to. About this is who would know the answer? And you should have her on her show because she is amazing. Colleen Kavanaugh used to work in Washington D.C. on food policy and got so fed up with it that she started her own company with transparency. We just had her in our grand rounds for our physicians training program where she actually assays all of her food that she sells for pesticides, including glyphosate and metals with total transparency. So you can actually look at the results of that testing.

I've heard her name, so we'll have her on. Thank you.

Check her out. She is amazing. She's doing. She's making real change in the food world because where she goes, everybody's going to have to follow eventually. Right?

So I have a question for you, Lynn. You know, we've talked about removing the exposure or removing the person from the exposure, but when people. So if you live on this earth, you're exposed and we have scratched the surface of the exposure. Are there some things that you can say to the audience, okay, do these four or five things, aside from sauna and dry brushing, are there some things that people can do that is like a pick list. Here's your top five. Pick a few. Do them every one to three days or whatever. Is it prescriptive? Do you have something like that?

Oh, no. Prescriptions. Every. Well, it's stuff that I would put on a prescription pad, but I, I.

More mean, you know, like, is it, is it sort of put in a nice little package for people that they can go, okay, I'm going to do these three things, you know.

Well, here are my go tos. Water filtration is no longer voluntary. No longer. We have two. My colleagues that I work with, Dr. Tina Bowden and Dr. Ann Marie Fine, have done an excellent job of lecturing. It's free on YouTube. Just look up the national association of Environmental Medicine. Their recordings of their lectures are on There it is the down and dirty about water contamination. So water filtration necessitates a reverse osmosis type with activated charcoal filtration type filter. If you are on a budget and you cannot afford it, I would suggest something like zero water, which is a pitcher, right, that you pour water into through a filter. And that technology is actually very good for arsenic and lead. And they have been checked out. They actually have gotten approval from the NSF organization for the efficacy or the efficiency of their filter. The only problem is the more arsenic you have in your water and the more lead you have in your water, the more frequently you're going to have to change that filter. So fortunately, they do sell bulk filter packs. So the zero water filter, I've actually looked into them. We just need a webinar on this. We're doing a course for consumers on how to survive a chemical disaster. And I talked about the zero water filter. So that's number one. Number two, if at all possible, if you do have the budget for an air filtration system, get an air filter for your indoor environment. Unfortunately, the good ones, the good air filters are expensive. The Austin Air, which is the one that the Cancer Free Economy Network, which is a wonderful group of scientists that I support, they recommend the Austin air and the EPA recommends the Austin air filter because it has 12 pounds of carbon in it and it's actually very good at getting stuff out of the air. The other air filters, we could talk about them for 100 years. But air filtration, I think is a real necessity, especially for people who may be exposed to urban air, wildfire smoke, or the people of East Palestine. If you live near a railroad track, you should probably have an air filter.

It's still an issue for them. I was just reading about that in the New York Times. It's still an issue.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. I've been intimately involved there. Dioxin has a half life of decades in the human body.

So yes, okay, so filter your water, filter your air, do a sauna if you can. What else?

Number three. Dr. Russell Jaffe, who's a friend of mine, used to be a senior research fellow at NIH and now has his own research laboratory, has shown that given the average number of toxicants that we are all exposed to, we have to get into our bodies at least 3,000 milligrams of vitamin C, better known as mineral ascorbate, every day just to filter out the kind of ambient air and water toxicants that we're exposed to. So that's 3 grams. Most people think of that as a high dose. I don't think of that as a high dose at all.

We do 50 for cancer. So I'm like, yeah, whatever.

Yeah, well, yeah. Yes, 60 IV. So orally it's hard for people to get that much in orally, but 3000 mg, please. At least 3000 mg. We know that buffered mineral ascorbate is kind of the scientific term that we use. It's vitamin C attached to a mineral. So that mineral is either going to be magnesium, potassium or zinc or maybe sodium. It's cheap. It's something that everybody can do Every day. And if you can double that dose without getting loose stool, do it. You may need to split that dose up into two or three or four different doses. We metabolize vitamin C very, very quickly in the body. So that's number three. Everybody needs to be, you know, there are many supplements we can talk about, but there's, there's good data on pregnant women taking vitamin C and losing significant amounts of lead in their urine and having perfectly normal and healthy outcomes after that. So we're talking about, I think that was 1000 or 2000 milligrams of vitamin C daily throughout their pregnancy. So it's safe even for pregnant women.

And I always say to, I mean, I'm an ob gyn. I'm like, we don't touch you if you're pregnant. I don't want to do anything to you because it's going to transmit right into the baby.

That's my one exception. My one exception. Because it is documented in the medical literature, I can say this does appear to be safe. This cohort had, all of them had normal, healthy to term outcomes.

Right. Okay. Okay. So top three, filter your air, filter your water. 3,000 milligrams or 3 grams of buffered ascorbic acid daily.

Yep. Buffered mineral. Ascorbate mineral.

Sorry. Okay. You just highlighted something that I always say to people, which is you can't study yourself because you don't have two of you to say what would have happened if you hadn't done something or if you had. But you understand the impact of removing the risk of cancer and removing all of the things that cause genetic malformations and inflammation and ultimately lead to disease. And it's very impactful. So I want to highlight. You don't know what you would have gotten, but you're pretty sure you would have.

Yeah. So I'm 68 years old. I'm the healthiest I've ever been in my life. But I'll tell you, I practice a full tilt boogie detoxification lifestyle.

So tell me about that. Like, what does that look, what does that mean to you? What does that look like?

Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday I have a six person sauna and we have girls night three nights a week, which is girls detox night.

So we go, okay, wait, what do you wear? Like, I wear, I wear a tank top and underwear. So are y' all naked or are you just like. Is it. Let it all hang out.

How does it's, you know, it's each to their own.

Okay. So you show up as you are and how long do you spend in the sauna and how hot is it?

So the science about sauna. I just did two podcasts on my podcast about sauna and the science on sauna. But I'll tell you because I didn't have a study to back this up, but clinically, between 20 and 30 minutes you're going to plateau out in terms of what you're getting rid of. So a good full on sweat for 20 to 30 minutes is what you want. So it's not like from the moment you step into the sauna, it's from the moment that you know that you are sweating because you're not eliminating until you sweat. So we use a loofah or a dry brush and we get our entire bodies sweating. And just fun fact, the most elimination occurs in the scalp area. The scalp area has more of the sebaceous glands that we call the detox glands, right? So these are special sweat glands from which we excrete this stuff called sebum. You know, you can call it oil or whatever you want, but that's what comes out of the scalp. So very important to wash your hair after you sauna. You know, my patients never wanted to do this and we explained to them if you want to get better, you have to use an oil based soap and you have to clean your entire body. So after that we jump in the cold plunge. Now that's not necessarily specifically for detoxification, but it's great for the autonomic nervous system, right? There are all kinds of benefits for alternating hot and cold.

How long do you spend in there.

In the cold plunge? It depends on the temperature and the season. So in the winter when we have to chop holes in the ice to get in, cold plunge, it's in and out. I'm not Wim Hof. I can't stay in there very long, but at least I get in right. I give myself 5,000 gold stars for that. In the summer when it's warmer and the temperature is in the high 40s, low 50s, then I can stay in for several minutes and really that's all you need. So that I think if we're talking about what can we all strive for to adopt to really try to decrease our body burden of things that we are hanging on to. Sauna is a wonderful tool. Now I know that not everybody can have a six person sauna or even an outdoor sauna or anything more than a little zip up sauna, but I'll tell you another great story is that I was on my way to A conference, environmental medicine conference. I live in a small town near a small city. They fuel the plane with the doors open. So I got on the plane at five o' clock in the morning. Little tiny plane. They were fueling it and the fumes were just coming right in the door. And I thought, this is not good. There's nothing good about this. They should have the oxygen masks down for everybody. And I talked to the stewardess and she's like, you know, get over it. This is what we do. So I got to the conference and I felt. So I am one of those canaries for solvents, and the jet fuel has a lot of solvents in it. So I was feeling terrible and I had to talk the next day. And the gentleman who was there with his little zip up sauna said, take it up to your room. Use it, please. And I don't really, you know, I'm not a great fan of the zip up saunas. I think there's some issues with the material. But I was desperate. So I brought up to my room, got in it for an hour, got out, took a shower, soapy shower with whatever Soap I had. Dr. Bronner's, I think, is a great soap. And I got up in the morning and I felt like $100. I mean, well, these days I felt like a billion dollars. So I have to say, I think there is. And that's not the only time that's happened to me, but it's the most impactful for me. It was like, okay, sauna really does work. And it does work for some reason.

So everything is better than nothing, right? Like everything you do, anything you do is better than not doing anything. Get in the game, even if it's not a perfect game.

Oh, I'll tell you, I have worked with lots and lots of folks who have no disposable income at all. I used to run an AIDS clinic that was fully funded, right? We had grant money to treat 100 AIDS patients a year. So my folks who don't have disposable income, I teach them how to get a small heater, go in their bathroom, put a towel under the door, turn the heater on, get the heat up to 100 degrees or whatever temperature it is that they can sweat and do it, and then get in a sauna and shower up with some Dr. B's and do that every day. And I've gotten a lot of multiple chemically sensitive patients better. Not just through that mechanism, of course. There are other things they have to do. But that was. I Think one of the main ones, so anybody can sweat, you don't have to have the money to buy an expensive sauna.

Okay, I think we should stop there, Lynn, because there's so much more to talk about. But this is a good sort of.

Place and I'm happy to come back.

Yeah, let's have you back in. And where can people reach you?

So I have a company called E M E I stands for Environmental Medicine Education International, but it's a lot easier to say EMEI Global. And that's our teaching platform. So mostly, you know, I teach to physicians. And we are now just getting ready to launch our consumer course. So this is for everybody, because East Palestine really did it for me. It's like, okay, there was no guidance there. No guidance was given to those people. It was a failure of public health. So we're, we're teaching consumers about risks for chemical exposure and how to mitigate those risks. So talking about air filtration, water filtration, simple supplementation, things like that.

Okay, great. So emeiglobal.com we'll put that in the show notes so people can reach out to you. And I'll close out the show by saying thank you so much. I mean, I love what you're doing. I honor what you're doing because it resonates so deeply with me. And thank you for being a champion for our health.

Well, you and I need to clone ourselves times a million, right? That's our job and that's our mission.

If you're listening to this and this kept your attention, follow like pass it along. Because it's the passing along part. It's our commitment is to reach 100 million people. And, and that's going to be a big job, right? We can do it, we can get there, but it's going to take passing it along. So if you're listening, pass it along to someone who this would be valuable for. So thanks for joining us, Lynn. Thank you for being here. Our guest is Lynn Patrick. She's amazing. Huge resource. And thanks for listening to another episode of the Feel Freaking Amazing podcast. I'm Wendy Trubo. I this is Lynn Patrick and we'll see you again. Don't go it alone.

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