Day 5 Thyroid summit
Its was a BIG day with Dr Greg Emmerson who is 6’7″ and Dr Steven Hotze from Houston, where everything is just BIGGER.
I found this pair were so inspirational – men of action, no whinging, go out and change it if you don’t agree types. Dr Emmerson has a food is your medicine approach, and since he thinks modern food has had the medicines increasingly bred out of it, he grows his own on a permaculture farm on the gold coast. He’s a fan of dandelion tea and weeds in general. I am a dreadful gardener so I have had to learn to eat the weeds and love them . But the ideas he kept mentioning of ‘medicine’ ‘mycotoxin’ I think is better thought of in terms of dose and situation – Bechamp’s terroir theory . After all one person’s weed is another’s cottage herb. Toxins and medicines are two sides of same coin. There’s a theory that humans don’t like bitter tastes to avoid poisoning in pregnancy and childhood. Being small I have had a few accidents with green leafies that really actually don’t want to be eaten ( buckwheat sprouts), and the purgative properties of violet leaves. Bug resistant plants like weeds are basically full of natural pesticides – which we can label medicine or toxin if we can’t metabolise them, and that is an individual genomic thing.
Dr Ray Peat phd, who incidentally is the man who inspired Dr Lee MD, who inspired Dr Hotze MD, on the wider therapeutic uses of bioidentical progesterone, thinks only the below ground parts of plants, or ripe fruit, is fit plant matter for human consumption. He doesn’t like green leafies.
So in 1978 I attended a meeting, actually I was giving a talk on hypoglycemia and Linus Pauling was there giving a talk on Vitamin C, when Dr. Ray Peat, a Ph.D. from Oregon was there giving a talk to doctors challenging them, saying, “why aren’t you all using progesterone, the second female hormone? It’s readily available, they can make it from yams, they can make it from soy, they can make it from 5000 different plants, it’s identical to what the humans make, it’s been out for 30 years in face creams, cosmetics, it’s wonderful for the skin, it’s available, the FDA can’t find anything wrong with it, why are you using only estrogen for post-menopausal ladies? http://www.keepsmilin.com/transcriptdrlee.htm
He has an interesting idea on using raw carrot as a between meal cleanse and for hormone balancing! that Dr Emmerson might like. Dr Peat says root crops are naturally rich in antifungals since they are surrounded by moisture all the time in soil, “The carrot salad improves the ratio of progesterone to estrogen and cortisol” http://raypeat.com/articles/articles/epilepsy-progesterone.shtml
Confession: I found Ray Peat’s work while looking for a diet that allows white sugar daily. Recently both the bitter and the sweet receptors have been linked to our immune system in the upper airways. University of Pennsylvania researchers say “Bitter taste receptors (T2Rs) in the human airway detect harmful compounds, including secreted bacterial products.” If something smells bitter we secrete antimicrobial peptides into the airways. When the sweet taste receptors of the nose are activated this is shutdown. Score one for aromatherapy and quitting sugar, but alas for diabetics, who have more sugar in their nasal mucus.http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3934184/
I agree with Dr Emmerson that the pace of modern inventions is moving uncomfortably fast for gross mammalian adaptation, so we should take a step back. But I can’t imagine living like our ancestors – full on paleo no way – just have a look at the experience of this month’s speaker Tracy Hohnke who was blasted back to 1800’s with her family for 4 months on the living history show ‘the Colony’. At least chocolate had been invented! Perhaps we have a better chance of keeping up than we realise since most of our cells are ‘not self’ but ‘other’ in a personal unique microbiome. I wonder how much of our health is thanks to exotic DNA? Who knows what buttons we can push epigenetically?
Detox: Create a Virtual rainforest:
Absolutely agree with Dr Emmerson that yoga is fantastic, and that we should be out in the rainforest, but preferably at a Byron hinterland spa with all mod cons. (My mum and aunt were fans of the Swami Sarasvati show. Swami had lots of painful impossible poses for us every morning. I never imagined it was spiritual or relaxing until I stumbled across Haven Yoga special stretch and breath version while putting up Astrotas posters 🙂 It crossed my mind Dr E should have an aversion for nature after catching a horrid parasite that ruined his health in Papua New Guinea. Perhaps it was a case of terroir since his family history is one of thyroid issues. I’m not big on camping. Dr Horowitz will scare us all out of the forest on Day 6 of the thyroid summit with his talk on Lyme disease.
How generous is youtube with hours of free music videos for meditation and yoga – lets put one on the big television and nebulise a little eucalyptus oil to complete the illusion
Dr Emmerson talked on the importance of minimising and removing environmental toxins like mould to which he is allergic. Depending on genetic MTHFR status of an individual detoxifying can need a little extra help. Zeolite he reccomends does sound like an excellent choice as it binds ammonia, which is problematic for us MTHFR A1298C mutants. also see CBS pathway from day 1 but the potential benefit is probably more than cancelled out since aluminium in zeolite is itself a detox problem! Zeolite is an aluminium compound shown in the animal feeding test mentioned on Dr Ray Sahelian’s excellent website to cause accumulation of the metal in bone and cartilage.
Where to Get Dessicated Natural Thyroid
http://www.hotzepharmacy.com/ – compounds slow release natural whole dessicated thyroid.http://www.stopthethyroidmadness.com/armour-vs-other-brands/ has list and helpful notes about various dessicated thyroid suppliers – including several supplying australians
does not need prescription. http://www.acpharm.com.au/ is in Sydney.
Forest Labs prescribing notes for Armour Thyroid are a useful read http://www.frx.com/pi/armourthyroid_pi.pdf%20
Dr Hotze – this guy is utterly fearless! He doesn’t fart about with saliva or blood tests for any hormones – he just treats the patient on a good old clinical diagnosis. He is sueing the govt over Obamacare! http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-Texas/2014/04/08/Obamacare-Lawsuit-from-Houston-Moving-Forward
He started looking at natural therapies when his father almost died on the table undergoing a balloon angioplasty. Hotze senior, an engineer, reasoned that this was in fact a violation of basic engineering principals to stretch a calcified stiffened tube and not expect it to burst, and asked his son to go look into vitamins after reading a newsletter on heart disease from Dr Julian Whitaker.
I’m a fan of Linus Pauling’s metabolic draino recipe which will simultaneously stomp out inflammation, rebuild collagen and pull off the Lipoprotein(a) mentioned as being rather hard to treat with high dose niacin; equal parts sodium ascorbate and lysine powder eg. 6 grams of each divided into three doses. lpi.oregonstate.edu/fw12/lipoprotein.html (the only caveat being I would suggest testing copper levels. I am a small labrat. On megadose vit c after months I did find it is possible to drop your copper levels if your diet/gut is suboptimal, both also bad for collagen. The FBC will show a neutropenia. Other than that the earliest side effects were all good – losing stretch marks, varicose veins and the old lady swollen ankles 😉
ASTROTAS 