May 2009 PDF
Don’t just mask your pain…
Reverse arthritis damage and start living pain-free today
If you’re like most folks, dealing with arthritis involves popping one…or maybe even several… prescription painkillers every day. I’ve known patients who spend their days watching the clock, waiting for six hours to pass so they can take their next pill. And these dangerous, addictive pills…which don’t do anything to actually cure your arthritis…are all that most mainstream doctors are trained to offer.
But I’ve learned something they haven’t. I’m going to show you an approach that I have used to help countless patients ease the pain and reverse the damage of arthritis. I’ve watched patients who followed these steps…the same steps I’m about to show you…straighten their fingers and walk without limps for the first time in years—their pain and stiffness gone.
And it’s all so much simpler than you might think. In fact, people are usually shocked when I tell them that their joint destruction is probably being caused by poor water retention. But once you understand what’s really causing your arthritis, it may be possible to…
Grow a new joint in 3 easy steps!
When you think of a “new joint,” the image of an artificial knee or hip may come to mind—the kind of stuff more appropriate with end state joint destruction. But I don’t see the sense of letting some surgeon hack into you, causing you months of pain and rehabilitation, when your body is perfectly capable of healing itself.
The key to avoiding—and yes, even reversing—joint degeneration isn’t always a surgeon’s scalpel…it’s as simple as getting your body to hold onto water.
You see, the cartilage in your joints is like a sponge. The younger you are, the more easily your body absorbs and retains the water your joint cartilage needs to let you move effortlessly and without pain.
As you get older, your body doesn’t hold onto water like it did in your younger years—and your joints begin to resemble a dried out, hardened sponge. After enough time goes by, the sponge (in this case, your joints) becomes cracked and brittle, and it begins to fall apart. You need to bring water back into your cartilage, which brings us to our first step for regrowing your joints:
Step 1: Activate the water magnet in your joints
You can’t give your joints the water they need by simply drinking more. You can chug water until it’s coming out of your ears, but most of it is just going to be flushed down the toilet.
The problem is, your joints have lost the electrical charge they need to hold onto water. When you’re young, your joints have a strong electrical charge, which attracts and holds water. But that charge begins to lessen as you age. Your joints are like a magnet losing its strength.
So before your joints can recover, they need to generate a sufficient electrical charge that draws water into the cartilage. You can get that electrical charge from a very simple molecule called sulfate—the best way to get sulfate is through methylsulfonylmethane, known more commonly as MSM.
MSM is an excellent source of sulfur that your body can easily transform into sulfate. Having an abundance of sulfate powerfully attracts water into your joints because it contains a strong electrical charge. It’s hard to get enough MSM through diet alone. Fortunately, it’s available in supplement form.
Step 2: Unleash the power of this joint-building duo
So you’ve taken your MSM and have all this sulfate…this powerful water magnet…running through your body. The key now is to keep the sulfate in your joints, where you need it. It needs to attach to something—and that “something” is glucosamine and galactosamine. You’ve probably heard a lot about glucosamine, and much less about galactosamine. They are both part sugar and part amino acid—and they basically string together and cross connect trillions of times in each of your joints, giving the negatively-charged sulfate something to stick to.
You typically don’t see galactosamine as a stand-alone ingredient in joint supplements. Instead, it’s usually delivered through chondroitin, which contains glucoasamine and galactosamine. But here’s what they don’t tell you—your body does not easily digest chondroitin. I’ve used a product called Knox NutraJoint Plus Glucosamine, Chondroitin & MSM, which partially digests the chondroitin, allowing the galactosamine to enter your system. It’s widely available online.
Step 3: Boost your levels of this key joint-repair hormone
With MSM, galactosamine and glucosamine, you have the building blocks you need to draw water back into your joints and eliminate arthritis pain. But how well these nutrients function in your body is regulated by a key hormone—and you need to make sure you have enough of it.
The body’s regenerative processes are driven by a hormone called IGF-1 (once known as sulfation factor), along with growth hormone, testosterone or DHEA, thyroid hormones, and vitamin A. But it’s IGF-1 that ultimately determines how much electrical charge attaches within your joints. Having enough IGF-1 is absolutely necessary to reversing the shriveling and drying effect that’s so common in your joints as you age.
Your doctor should check for your levels of IGF-1, as well as the other key repair hormones that its levels depend on, such as testosterone or DHEA, thyroid hormones, and growth hormone. Your IGF-1 levels can be low for a variety of reasons, and they can be brought back up through hormone therapy and regular exercise. (To learn more about hormone therapy, and the specific type of hormones I use with my patients, read, “Stop growing old gracefully.”)
Once you’ve achieved optimal IGF-1 levels, your body will be prepared to use MSM, glucosamine, and galactosamine to rebuild your joint cartilage. And that’s where the real magic begins. Fluid rushes into your joints, reinvigorating your cartilage and allowing you to move with a pain-free ease you haven’t felt in years.
There’s nothing more exciting to me than seeing patients who could barely walk into my office for their first appointment, come bounding up my steps a few months later, finally free from pain.
Dealing with painful rheumatoid arthritis? Stay tuned for next month when I’ll be revealing my breakthrough cure!
Follow this simple plan—and stop joint pain for good
1. Take MSM every day. This boosts your body’s sulfate content, which helps you attract water to your joints.
2. Supplement with glucosamine and galactosamine. The sulfate attaches to these building blocks so it can stay in your joints, where it belongs. The easiest way to get galactosamine is through partially digested chondroitin.
3. Have your doctor check to see if you have adequate levels of IGF-1. This important hormone is responsible for repairing damaged joints.
4. Have your doctor check your 24-hour urine for the hormones that determine your IGF-1 level (testosterone, DHEA, thyroid hormones, and Growth hormone).
5. Have your doctor replace these hormones in as safe a manner as possible.
Discover the safe, proven cure that can Knock out high blood pressure for good
If you suffer from high blood pressure, I’m willing to bet you’ve tried just about everything. Most of my patients have.
Maybe you started exercising more. You probably cut your sodium and worked on managing your stress, too. Then, a few months later you visit your doctor and—nothing.
You’ve probably said to yourself a hundred times, “I’m doing everything my doctor tells me to—so why isn’t anything working?” It’s a fair question—and you deserve an answer. So here’s the unvarnished truth…
Many doctors have no idea what causes high blood pressure
I’m not kidding. Even the American Heart Association admits it doesn’t know what causes high blood pressure 90 percent of the time. For these cases, instead of letting you know that they don’t know its cause, they call it essential hypertension.
Fortunately for you, my batting average is a lot better than theirs. I successfully treat high blood pressure all the time—without resorting to dangerous prescription drugs. That’s because I’ve learned something that most mainstream docs still haven’t— high blood pressure is often the result of a nutritional deficiency.
Many of my patients with high blood pressure suffer from a diminished ability to absorb certain vitamins and nutrients…and these deficiencies keep their blood pressure from normalizing. I simply correct the deficiencies and most of my patients who suffer from this form of high blood pressure are in the “normal” range within a few months.
I would love for this to happen for you, too, especially if you’ve been struggling with high blood pressure for years. But first you need to understand how your body regulates blood pressure, and how your nutritional deficiencies can disrupt this delicate system.
Your blood pressure: A precise balancing act
You might think of high blood pressure as a cardiovascular disease, but most of the time it really begins and ends with your adrenal glands. These little powerhouses sit on top of your kidneys and are responsible for how your body deals with stress. For starters, when your body is under stress, the inner adrenals (and I’ll talk about the outer adrenals in a future issue) release two hormones: epinephrine (adrenaline) and nor-epinephrine (nor-adrenaline). Your nerve endings also release nor-epinephrine during times of stress.
Although epinephrine causes constriction within most of your blood vessels, it actually opens up the blood supply to your heart, skeletal muscles, and liver. By contrast, nor-epinephrine constricts your blood vessels, clamping down on blood supply to everywhere but your brain. It’s this constriction that causes your blood pressure to rise.
On a continual basis, having too much nor-epinephrine in your system will result in high blood pressure. Ideally, your adrenals should be secreting 90 percent epinephrine and only 10 percent nor-epinephrine.
But that ratio can get disrupted fast. You see, your body actually makes epinephrine in a multi-step process. First, your body manufactures nor-epinephrine, and then it converts it to epinephrine. So, if your body lacks any of the key nutrients it needs to support this conversion process (and I’ll talk about those nutrients in a moment), you’re not going to have enough epinephrine. Now you’re in trouble.
Mainstream medicine has been achingly close to understanding this, but they’re not there yet. That’s because they’re too obsessed with a byproduct your body forms when it’s having trouble converting nor-epinephrine to epinephrine. In other words, they’re buying into…
The great homocysteine myth
Doctors have long understood that people with high blood pressure have elevated levels of an amino acid called homocysteine, which can damage blood vessels. But what they’ve failed to understand is that high homocysteine levels are just a symptom of a larger problem—a nutritional deficiency that’s affecting how well you convert nor-epinephrine to epinephrine.
You see, your body depends on a nutrient called SAMe to conduct this conversion process. And every time SAMe converts nor-epinephrine to epinephrine, it creates homocysteine as a byproduct. Your body does this at least one billion times a second, according to some authorities.
Now here’s where the nutritional deficiency comes into play—ideally, your body should convert the homocysteine back into SAMe. But it depends on several key nutrients to make that happen. Without those nutrients, you end up with too much homocysteine in your system. Even worse, your SAMe levels become depleted, and now you’re not making enough epinephrine (among other things I’ll discuss more in the future).
Now you’re left with blood vessel damage (from the homocysteine) and high blood pressure. That’s some double-whammy! And for the triple-whammy, your heart will not receive enough blood during times of exertion because its vessels are less able to dilate when you’re deficient in epinephrine.
To see if a nutritional deficiency may be causing your high blood pressure, have your doctor check your homocysteine levels when he conducts the standard complete blood count (CBC) test. If your homocysteine levels are high, you have a deficiency —simple as that.
Get the nutrients you need—and watch your blood pressure drop!
Your body depends on certain nutrients to manufacture nor-epinephrine and convert it to epinephrine. A basic building block of nor-epinephrine is the amino acid tyrosine. This can also be obtained from the amino acid phenylalanine, which is found in many protein-rich foods, like meat.
Having enough tyrosine (and most people do) is only one part of the story. To make nor-epinephrine, tyrosine needs to interact with adequate supplies of the following nutrients, many of which also support the conversion of nor-epinephrine to epinephrine:
- Vitamin C
- Vitamin B6
- Vitamin B12
- SAMe
- Tyrosine or Phenylalanine
- Tetrahydrobiopterin (made from folate)
- Methionine
- Trimethylglycine
I wish I could tell you that there was one supplement formula that contained every one of these nutrients…unfortunately, there isn’t. Source Naturals (www.sourcenaturals.com) probably comes the closest, with a product called Homocysteine Defense. It has trimethylglycine (TMG), vitamins B6, vitamin B12, and folic acid. Many of my patients see significant improvements just from using this product. In other cases, I’ll also have them supplement with some of the ingredients that are not in the formulation, such as SAMe.
One more thing…If you’re loading up on these nutrients and your homocysteine levels don’t drop, you may suffer from an inability to orally absorb certain B vitamins (For more on this, see “The blood pressure trigger no one’s talking about.”). If you fall into this category, your homocysteine levels will not decrease until you receive weekly vitamin B injections.
Either way, the basic principle is the same—correct your nutritional deficiencies, and watch your blood pressure drop. I’ve used this method to help patients achieve their first normal blood pressure readings in years. In a period of just weeks, they eliminated the headaches, nausea and other unpleasant symptoms of high blood pressure—and undoubtedly added years to their lives. Now you can do the same.
The blood pressure trigger no one’s talking about
Here’s one cause of high blood pressure you may have never heard about—abnormally large red blood cells.
Think about it—when your cells are too large, your heart has to pump harder (thus raising your blood pressure) to squeeze the cells through your tight capillaries. To see if this is the cause of your high blood pressure, have your mean corpuscular volume (MCV) reading checked when you get your CBC test. If the MCV levels are high, that could be exactly what’s causing your high blood pressure. The good news is that often times your red blood cells enlarge abnormally because of the same nutritional deficiencies leading to a rise in your homocysteine level.
I have found that patients with both elevated homocysteine and MCV levels may no longer be able to absorb B vitamins orally. I have had excellent results giving these patients weekly injections of B vitamins, in addition to having them ingest the nutrients I discuss.
Is your heartburn med causing your high blood pressure?
If you’re taking a proton pump inhibitor to treat heartburn, there’s a good chance it may be at least partially to blame for your high blood pressure.
You see, these medications basically shut down your stomach’s ability to manufacture acid, which leaves you less able to digest proteins. Here’s one problem with that: The phenylalanine you need to manufacture epinephrine is contained in protein-rich foods. Your body can’t make it.
For this reason, if you are taking a proton pump inhibitor or have any doubt about your digestion ability, you should be taking phenylalanine in supplement form. For more information on this topic, read Dr. Jonathan Wright’s book, Why Stomach Acid is Good for You. This is available at Amazon.com and other online booksellers.
Stop growing old “gracefully” and get ready to…
Look and feel younger next year!
You don’t need a magic potion or rocket science to turn back your body’s clock. Just a substance manufactured by your own body. When it starts to run low, that’s when you begin to look and feel old and worn out.
Don’t waste another day feeling or looking older than you are when you can unleash your body’s very own “fountain of youth”—and start enjoying the benefits of looking younger and feeling more vibrant—starting today.
The breakthrough therapy that turns back your body’s clock
You might not realize it, but most of us treat our cars better than we treat our bodies. Think about it—if your car ran out of oil or transmission fluid, you wouldn’t just throw your hands in the air and wait for it to break down. You’d replace these vital chemicals.
Well, your body needs this same type of regular maintenance. As you age, you produce less of the critical hormones you need to beat back the diseases of aging. In fact, guess what diminished memory, wrinkled skin, bone loss, joint destruction, obesity, diabetes, and heart disease all have in common? They’re all linked to low hormone levels!
I’m amazed by how many of my colleagues in the medical community fail to grasp this basic concept. And here’s why—they’re absolutely obsessed with genetics as the cause for aging. But, as I’m going to show you in a minute, having perfect genes won’t make a lick of difference if you aren’t producing the hormones you need to activate those genes.
That’s why I’ve had so much success using bioidentical hormone replacement therapy in healing the “diseases of old age.” When I first recommend bioidentical hormones to my patients, many of them haven’t heard too much about it—other than what they’ve picked up by watching celebrities like Suzanne Somers rave about it on TV.
But when these patients return a few months later looking and feeling years younger, they’re walking billboards for bioidentical hormones. And, by the end of this article, you’re going to be just as excited by this breakthrough therapy as they are. But first you need to understand the important role hormones play in your body, and why hormone deficiency is…
The single greatest reason our bodies fail as we age
You see, I didn’t always appreciate the importance of hormones in the aging process. Like most doctors, I had been schooled to believe in the luck of the draw—either you had good genes or you didn’t.
But I came to understand that this type of thinking is literally ruining my patients’ lives. Think about it—if you believe it all comes down to genetics, then you can’t truly heal anyone. You just manage symptoms. Someone has arthritis, and you prescribe a painkiller. When a patient develops diabetes, you prescribe insulin. Meanwhile, no one is ever really getting better.
Sounds familiar, right?
I spent the first part of my career practicing medicine this way, and I knew there was something fundamentally wrong with it. So I took a prolonged sabbatical from my medical practice and buried my nose in research—anything and everything I could find. It was a huge undertaking, but after a while, the pieces started coming together, and I had an epiphany:
It’s not your genes that fail you as you age—it’s your hormones
When you’re in the “prime of life,” you have optimal hormone levels, but production falls off as you get older. And here’s why that’s so important—hormones, as I’ll show you in a moment, initiate your body’s healing and repair processes. That’s why you can be on the go from sunrise to sunset when you’re 18 and feel great—but a five-minute walk makes you sore when you’re 70.
Your hormone levels are too low to keep up with the wear and tear you put on your body. And that’s when you start to show the signs of aging.
So where does that leave genetics?
It’s not that genes don’t play a role in the aging process—it’s just that most doctors and scientists aren’t seeing the whole picture yet. They’re technically right when they say that genes direct your body’s healing process. But they fail to appreciate that genes are like a light switch—they’re either in the on or off position.
And your genes will not be in the on position, directing your body’s important repair work, unless you’re making enough hormones.
The gene activation process may seem a little complicated, but it’s really not. Your glands release hormones, which flip your genes into the on position. Your genes, once activated, send a message to your cells to manufacture new proteins to replace the old, worn-out proteins in your body.
But with every decade that goes by, your hormones diminish. Your genes don’t activate, your cells don’t get the repair message, and you start to look and feel older.
Of course, you don’t notice this right away. It takes years, and that’s why so many doctors don’t realize it’s happening. But once you hit 50, the evidence that your body hasn’t been repairing itself is carved all over your body—wrinkles, age spots, achy joints, memory loss, lack of energy, you name it. You’d call them signs of old age. I’ve come to call them signs of diminishing hormones.
Unleash the power of hormones—and feel 10 years younger
So now you understand that maintaining optimal hormone levels is critical to reversing the aging process. But there are more than 100 hormones in your body, and you can’t possibly monitor them all.
The good news is, you don’t have to. You see, only a handful of hormones are responsible for turning your genes on and off. They include:
- Steroids, such as estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, DHEA, and cortisol
- Thyroid hormones
- Vitamin A
So your first step is to have a doctor measure your levels of these key hormones. Make sure he uses a 24-hour urine test, which measures hormone production over time and will give you a more accurate picture than a saliva test. I have found that many doctors are not experienced using and interpreting this test. The best resources nationally on 24-hour urine analysis are probably my clinic in Whitefish, Montana (visit www.thebodyheals.com and click on consultations) and Dr. Jonathan Wright’s clinic in Washington (www.tahoma-clinic.com).
You’ll find that many doctors who have been studying hormones for a while, like I have, can often guess at where you’ll be deficient just by looking at your gait, facial tone and expressions, and body contours and textures. Certain hormonal deficiencies will trigger these symptoms—for example, people with a DHEA deficiency may suffer from fatigue, memory problems, and joint pain.
Once your doctor has your hormone “report card,” he should also talk to you to see if other factors, such as stress or nutritional deficiency, may be contributing to your low hormone levels. That information is critical to helping you get the most out of hormone therapy.
The final step is to get you on a hormone replacement regimen that will help your body start healing at the basic, cellular level. This therapy should be individualized to you, based on your body’s needs. Some patients low in cortisol may need 15mg/day of supplementation, while others will need more.
Some doctors may try to put you on “patented” hormones, which are the new darlings of mainstream medicine. If that happens, here’s what you should do…
Don’t just ask for bioidentical hormones… insist on them
The science can be a little complicated, but let me say this as simply as I can: Patented hormones just don’t work as well. You see, when your hormones bind to specific genes, they create vibrations that carry the repair message to your cells. Patented hormones are abnormally shaped (they have to be in order to receive a patent in the first place), and this slight alteration changes the repair message. It’s like a piano that’s out of tune.
Bioidentical hormones are the same shape as the hormones your body makes naturally, so they trigger the correct repair message. And they work fast. My patients often feel 10 years younger in a matter of just a few months.
I’ll be honest—I lose a lot of patients this way. People who have been on bioidentical hormone therapy for a while find they don’t need to see me as often for diabetes, arthritis, and many of the other diseases of aging. They’re too busy enjoying their lives again.
It might be bad business, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
How to avoid the estrogen trap
As revolutionary as bioidentical hormone therapy is, there’s a common mistake that many practitioners make. Many doctors—both mainstream and alternative—frequently prescribe dangerously high estrogen dosages.
You can easily avoid these overdoses by starting with a foundation of precursor steroids (don’t worry…a bio-identical savvy doctor will know what they are). When your other steroid hormone levels are corrected first, you’d be amazed at how little estrogen you actually need.
Here’s the bottom line: Bioidentical hormones are one of the most powerful weapons in the fight against accelerated aging. But, as with anything, you don’t want to overdo it. Make sure they’re prescribed in the lowest effective dose, and that your levels are checked regularly.
