Discussion of Allergies
There is a great deal of confusion even amongst doctors about allergic reactions and the symptoms that they can cause. I have actually had some medical doctors tell my patients that "hives are the only true allergy." That simply shows the depth of their ignorance in this area.Over the last 10 to 15 years, with the emergence of the AIDS virus, information regarding our immune systems has ballooned. We now know that the classic allergy picture--itchy eyes, sneezing, runny nose--is just the tip of the iceberg.
We now know that allergic reactions can cause an entire host of unexpected reactions. [Listed in the next section is a partial list of symptoms that have been demonstrated to be allergic in nature.]
In reality, the immune response can be divided into four separate classifications. Type I allergies (immediate hypersensitivities) are your classic symptoms: hives, itchy eyes, sneezing, runny nose. This represents less than 10 percent of the immune system and is mediated by the IgE type of antibody. This is the reaction that is elicited with a skin prick test.
Type II allergy reactions are mediated by the IgA antibodies which are found in the mucous membranes of the mouth, eyes and digestive tract. They are also mediated by IgM and IgG and these two antibodies circulate through the bloodstream. They are delayed hypersensitivities and occur anywhere from four hours to four days after exposure. They are tested with IgG RAST blood testing, but it only gives you part of the picture for these allergies since the other types of reactions are not tested.
Type III allergy reactions are immune complement fixation reactions where the antigen and antibody react further with complement in the bloodstream causing further reactions. There is no isolated test for complement fixation reactions.
Type IV allergy reactions are cell activation reactions of the sort found in killer cells responding to tumors. They are mediated by the lectin/cytokine pathways and, with these reactions as well, there is no isolated test.
This is truly a case where the definition has limited the vision. Since doctors only believed that Type I allergies were important, they only tested for Type I allergies and they only saw Type I allergies.
At the RFHC we do a comprehensive whole blood test which will pinpoint Type II, III and IV allergies. Once you have pinpointed "hidden" allergies, Type I allergies become obvious since all of those reactions are very immediate. If you get a rash when you eat a strawberry, you are pretty clear that you’re allergic to strawberries. Therefore, I seldom test for Type I immediate hypersensitivities. When that is necessary, we use an IgE blood test instead of pinprick because it has been demonstrated to be more reliable.
With the upsurge in childhood asthma and autoimmune disease in the American culture, it is clear that allergies are becoming an increasing health challenge for many people. If you suspect that allergies are part of your health puzzle, please contact us here at the RFHC and we will be happy to arrange for testing.
Does this apply to you? If so see our information on Consultations.
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Symptoms Associated with Food Allergies
| JOINTS Ache-pain Stiffness Swelling Erythema-warmth-redness SKIN Itching (local or general) Scratching Moistness-sweating Flushing-hives Pallor-white or ghostly HEAD PAIN Headache-mild-moderate Severe migraine Ache-pressure Tight-explode Throbbing-stabbing FATIGUE Tired Generalized heaviness Sleepy-yawning Exhausted Fall asleep GENERALIZED Dizzy-lightheaded Imbalanced-staggering Vertigo-blackout Going to faint Chilly-cold Warmth-hot flashes MENTAL (DEPRESSED) Withdrawn-listless Vacant-faces Negative-indifferent Confused-dazed Depressed Crying-sobbing MENTAL (STIMULATED) Silly-intoxicated Grimacing More alert-talkative Hyperactive Tense-restless Anxious-apprehensive Fear-panic Irritable-angry SPEECH COMPREHENSION Mentally sluggish Concentration poor Memory loss (acute) Speech slurred Stammering- stuttering Speech paralysis Reads aloud poorly Reads without comprehension Hears without comprehension Math, spelling errors MUSCLE Muscle tremor-jerking Muscle cramps- spasms Pseudoparalysis-weak CONTACT WITH REALITY Poor contact Surroundings unreal Disoriented-catatonic stuporous False belief- delusions hallucination False perceptions Suicidal Desire to hurt self Maniacal-very highly disturbed |
NASAL Sneezing Itching-rubbing Obstruction Discharge Post-nasal drip Sinus discomfort Stuffy feeling THROAT, MOUTH Itching Sore-tight-swollen Dysphagia-difficulty in swallowing Choking Weak voice-hoarse Profuse salivation Mucus Bad taste Metallic taste EARS Itching Full, blocked Reddening Tinnitis-ringing in ears Earache Hearing loss Abnormal sensitivity to sound LUNGS-HEART Coughing Wheezing Reduced air flow Retracting-sob Heaviness-tightness Not enough air Hyperventilation Chest pain Tachycardia (rapid pulse) Palpitations (rapid, violent pulse) EYES Itching-burning-pain Tearing Infected Allergic shiners Eyes feel heavy VISON Blurring Acuity decreased Spots-flashes Darker-vision loss Photophobia (bright lights hurt) Diptophobia (double vision) Dyslexia Words "move around" GENITO-URINARY Mild/reduced urge to void Frequency Urgency-pressure Painful-difficult urination Dysuria-genital itch GASTROINTESTINAL-ABDOMINAL Nausea Belching Full-bloated feeling Vomiting Pressure-pain-cramps Flatus-rumbling Diarrhea Constipation Gall bladder symptoms Hunger Thirst Hyperacidity MUSCLES Tight-stiff Aching-soreness-pain |
William H. Phillpot, MD, A Phvsician's Handbook on Orthomolecular Medicine. 1977
Does this apply to you? If so try our self evaluating Food Allergy Questionnaire.[TOP]
Aspartame
It has been very difficult since September 11th to focus on anything other than the challenges we face as a nation. It has made many other concerns seem trivial. However, there is vital information which is not getting much attention and except on the Internet, and, in order to protect yourself and your loved ones, I believe it’s important to bring this information to your awareness. It is not an urban legend!!One of the most dangerous substances in the US food supply is aspartame and otherwise known as Equal(R), Spoonful(R); or NutraSweet(R). There are over 5,000 “sugar free” products on the market which contain this neurotoxin, and, now that the patent has expired, we can expect many more!
Were you aware that aspartame is the only substance ever approved for use by the FDA that was demonstrated to cause cancer in laboratory animals? It was given a “conditional” approval, but for all practical purposes, the conditions were meaningless. Sugar free products have exploded across the US and in other parts of the world, as well.
The sad irony: aspartame is not a diet product. In the Congressional record it states that "[Aspartame] makes you crave carbohydrates and will make you fat.” It has been documented by Dr. H.J. Roberts, a diabetic specialist and world authority on aspartame, that patients lose an average of 19 lbs when they stop using aspartame. But, this is only the tip of the iceberg.
In diabetics, aspartame causes retinopathy, memory loss, confusion, diabetic coma and death, due to uncontrollable blood sugar levels.
For those of us without diabetes, aspartame is a neurotoxin. Dr. Russell Blaylock, in his excellent book, “Excitotoxins: The Taste That Kills” documents the brain damage caused by this product. Aspartame at 86º F breaks down into phenylalanine and wood alcohol. The wood alcohol is a deadly poison and destroying the retina of the eye and the kidney. Phenylalanine depletes serotonin in the brain lowering the seizure threshold, and can cause panic attacks, manic depression, rage and violence.
Dr. Roberts has also written a book entitled “Defense Against Alzheimer's Disease” wherein he discusses the connection between aspartame poisoning and the escalation in Alzheimer's Disease. Hospice nurses are now seeing women of 30 years of age with Alzheimer's disease.
If you think you are safely using this product because you don't cook with it, stop for a moment and reflect upon what happens during the process of shipping and storing products containing aspartame. Temperatures of 86ºF are common inside warehouses and trucks during the summer months. How do you know that that can of diet Coke(R); hasn't been warmed beyond the safety limit?
Now, more and more authorities are sounding a warning concerning the epidemic of multiple sclerosis, Parkinsonism and Alzheimer's in younger populations, as well as seizure disorder in children and out-of-control diabetes. The following is a partial list of the symptoms caused by this artificial sweetener: fibromyalgia, spasms, shooting pains, numbness in your legs, cramps, vertigo, dizziness, headaches, ringing in the ears, joint pain, depression, anxiety attacks, slurred speech, blurred vision, memory loss and tremor. If you have any of these symptoms -- and even if you don't -- please stop using this deadly neurotoxin before it’s too late. There's very little that can be done after the damage advances.
If you have family members who use these products regularly, expose them to this information immediately. If they're still resistant, obtain the books and share the opinions of medical authorities with them. I have phone numbers where you can order each book. Just call the office and we'll be glad to give you additional information.
Every effort in Congress to put warning labels on these products has been killed by the food lobby. After all, Monsanto (who patented aspartame) is one of the largest companies in the world and has plenty of money to achieve its purposes. The only way people can protect themselves is through knowledge and accurate information. Tell your friends; tell your family; tell complete strangers! But, let's unite to boycott this toxin and get it off the market.
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Allergies and Your Health
Note: this text is from a lecture given by Dr RichardsI suppose the logical place to start this lecture is what's a chiropractor doing talking about allergies? Why allergies? I didn't get into this work because I wanted to. I think that allergy work, while it's some of the most rewarding work that I do, is also some of the most difficult. Because it's very difficult for people to make lifestyle changes and I tell everyone the same thing as they sit in my office wanting to know why they hurt so bad? This is what I can do for you and this is what you have to do for yourself. And the biggest component of allergies is what you have to do for yourself. I can prescribe the testing, I can tell you what's going on in your body but the question becomes how much of what you want to do for yourself are you willing to do? And sometimes speaking from experience making the changes that go with allergies is very challenging, I think it's very difficult. Our culture does not acknowledge that allergies are a valid reason for not eating things. There can be emotional feedback, there can be a lot of why are you depriving your child? Have you met some of that, Stephanie? Yeah, why are you depriving your child, that's a real famous one. Oh, go ahead, a little bit won't hurt you, that's a pretty famous one, too. And some people simply don't want to have to deal with the family pressures that they run into especially at this time of year. So for all of those reasons I think allergies are very challenging. But I couldn't practice ethically if I didn't address the issue of allergies and what they mean to people. Especially in terms of the kinds of chronic degenerative conditions that are so much a part of the American health scene. The autoimmune diseases, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, there's a bunch of other ones that aren't as famous or as well known. Chronic arthritis of all kinds, bursitis, tendonitis, depression, fatigue, chronic fatigue syndrome, I'm sure we've all heard of that, it's been in the news a lot lately. And allergies are a large component of chronic fatigue syndrome and I treat a lot of it very successfully. Um, what else? Polymyositis, which is probably a disease you haven't heard too much about but which is totally debilitating when people lose all their muscle strength little by little. That's an autoimmune disease which is allergy based. The list goes on and on and so for myself as a doctor of chiropractic specializing in musculoskeletal disorders, at least that's what everybody thinks, to not address allergies would be unethical, because I would just be providing a manual aspirin, a little bit of pain relief, and pretty soon it all comes back. And therefore very early on in my practice that this was an underlying issue for so many people and I set out to become as expert as one can be on a subject this vast. So I've learned a great deal about it and I'd like to share some of that with you tonight.
I think the first thing we need to talk about a little bit is the kinds of allergies. There's at least two or three different varieties, I'm just going to break it up into two easily understood categories. The first kind is immediate hypersensitivity reactions. You run into cat fur and you start sneezing. You eat shrimp and you break out in a rash all over your face. Or the famous strawberry rash, you know, you eat a strawberry and suddenly, there it goes. Or for myself I have that kind of allergy with walnuts, eat walnuts, have the roof of your mouth break out in blisters. That's pretty clear, you can make that connection really fast, those reactions occur suddenly, they occur practically immediately after you eat the substance, they are almost all centered in the skin and mucous membranes. That's why you sneeze, that's why your eyes itch, that's why your mouth breaks out, those are IgE mediated reactions. Now, immunoglobulin E, that's just the name they gave it, is the one that's in the skin and it's the kind of testing that doctors and allergists test for when they do the skin pricks? You know, they'll take little patches and they'll put little patches all over you and they'll say, you're allergic to this, you're not allergic to that, no, no, you're not allergic to any foods, you're just allergic to pollens and cats, right? I love cats, so, that's the word that keeps coming up. But the truth is that kind of testing and those reactions do not test for 95 percent of food allergies. And they don't address these issues of delayed hypersensitivity reactions which are far and away the most serious in our culture because those are the ones that lead to the degenerative conditions down the line. IgG's which is the other classification of delayed hypersensitivity reactions are blood borne reactions. They exist in your bloodstream as immunoglobulins. If you've ever had the measles you have what they call a titer, an immuglobulin titer, IgG, to measles. And they can test for that. If you've ever been exposed to something that you've developed a delayed hypersensitivity to in foods you have those same kinds of immunoglobulins in your bloodstream. Now the trick is that if you haven't been eating it for awhile it kind of goes into remission. That's because of the way the immune system works. In the bloodstream, we're talking here about white blood cells, lymphocytes to be specific, and there are at least six classifications of them and I'm not going to go into all that but there are two that are really important for our purposes. One of them are called B lymphocytes, I don't know who made up these name but they're what they are. They're the factories, they pump out immuonglobulins, so if you get exposed to measles after you've once had it there's another blood cell in your bloodstream, the recognition lymphocyte that says, "Oops, here it comes again." And it goes and it attaches to the B lymphocyte and it triggers the B lymphocyte to start pumping out measles antibody so you don't get sick from measles again. That's an extremely good response for you not to get sick again. The problem with that is when we're talking about foods, something we're ingesting that's supposed to nourish us, that we don't know we're sensitive to, you're constantly pumping out immunoglobulins to it and you're constantly in an inflamed and inflammatory state and you're having problems and you don't know why. It's the immune system gone wrong. Now if you don't eat those foods for awhile suppressor cells come along and turn those B lymphocytes off because you don't need that particular antibody, that antigen isn't around anymore. So it goes into a suppressed state and if you test for it at that point in time the likelihood is that you will not show a high titer. So when you hear these comments about blood testing for allergies not being reliable, that's what they're talking about. There's a 75 percent accuracy rate. And the only variation is have you had that recently or have you not had that recently. In my own personal case I'm extremely allergic to beef and tomatoes. When I retested I didn't show allergic to either one of them but then I hadn't eaten them in nine months either. And I know that I can eat them and have bad reactions so they're just something that's off my list. But that's the way in which the tests look inaccurate...it's not inaccurate. It's just your own body mechanism...
Because of that I'm not going to say it's because of that. There's a controversy. Not too many standard allergists do the cytologic testing, the blood testing, the ELISA/ACT, the delayed hypersensitivity testing...almost all of them do the skin testing because that's the one that's more readily acceptible. But again unfortunately it doesn't uncover the basic underlying issues. There are a lot more holistic doctors around now than there used to be, though, so more and more of them are doing it and I like that, that's very positive, because that's where we need to direct our attention in order to help people to really clear their system of allergies. You can't tell if you have a delayed hypersensitivity reaction in most cases because these reactions occur anywhere from two hours, four hours, up to four days later. Now if you ate something and four days later you have aching in your muscles and in your shoulder would you remember what it was? And most of us don't eat a mono diet, you know we eat pretty complex foods, so how can you isolate it? That's always the question, how can you know what it is? And that's where the testing comes in. The testing is very valuable on that basis because it gives you a place to start. Once you get your system cleaned out a bit you can tell, you can start telling what you're reacting to. But if you're constantly reacting you have no way to know, and that's always the problem. We've given you some neat handouts here and I'd like for just a moment to address that top one that has the card stapled to it. The very first picture, basics of food allergy. This is a wonderful illustration because a lot of allergies are hidden and people are not symptomatic all the time. This is the question I get more often than anything else, well, how come all of a sudden I'm having a problem? Right? The first situation, the top picture where the scales are in balance is what's called homeostasis, balance, basically, that's what that means. You know, this person is happy, there's a normal immune system and they're in good health and there's a certain sense of security and stability and nutrition is good and the environment is clean, right, and they've got good genes and good heredity, and over on this side they have some allergies, pollens and inhalants and maybe there's smog in this part of the world, there are also some food allergies on that list and maybe some kind of metabolic disease, maybe they have a low grade something or other, okay? But they're not symptomatic because their body can cope, you're compensating, you're working good, it's all working for you. Well, then you add a couple more things. Maybe you get an upper respiratory infection. Or maybe you get upset with your boss and storm out of the office and he or she shouts at you, okay? And the scale starts to tip and you might be starting into an allergic response. We have so many people come in and say they have a touch of the flu. There's no such thing as a touch of the flu. Most often that somebody was experiencing a delayed hypersensitivity low grade food reaction. They ache all over, they've got a little bit of a temperature, they've got a little bit of a headache, they've got some congestion, and it will clear up, maybe 24, 36 hours and it's gone, it never goes into a full blown disease. That's most often their body stress interacting with something they're allergic to. That's why we decided to do this lecture at this time of year. Because we see in our office so many people come in after the holidays just ill and they think they've caught something but what they've really done is that they've really abused themselves by eating a lot of things they don't ordinarily have, lots of sugar which also depresses the immune system, there's been lots of late nights and lots of shopping and all the things we do at this time of year and there they go, they go into the allergic reaction that's at the bottom of the page. All of a sudden the scale tips and you feel terrible. So what I like about this picture, you have control, control over a lot of these items. You have control over what you eat, you have control over how good your nutritional intake is, you have some good control over your outlook, right, there's a lot of positive things you can do about that. You also have a certain degree of control about how much stress you let into your life, what you accept and what you don't accept, what you're going to do and what your limits are and all those kinds of issues. So it allows us to maintain homeostasis for ourselves and not get ill on unexpected occasions.
The next page here, I think, is very very interesting. Because this table, 12.1, Principle Clinical Features of Various Stimulatory and Withdrawal Levels of Ecologic Disturbances, doesn't that sound just like a scientist? Really what it means is how do people respond when you either expose them to their allergens, or when you start withdrawing from their allergens. What happens? The midline on this is 0, behavior on an even keel as in homeostasis and we go up and down the scale in both directions. The stimulatory is on the top and the negative is at on the bottom. And with allergic reactions you can see both extremes, all the way up to manic and all the way down to severe depression into altered consciousness. Some people become so lethargic and depressed with their allergens they literally can hardly move, they can't function, they can't think, and that's the most extreme case of this. Some people experience nothing more than a mild case of heavy, hard to get out of bed, hard to move around, tired, can't function. At the other extreme are the children we see who are on Ritalin and are hyperactive and bouncing off the walls. A lot of those children have allergies as well as other problems. I actually see more of the down side of this in adults and the hyper side in children. There is a level in adults where they're exposed to their allergens, they're not really bad with them, and they use them as an alternative energy source to keep their energy up, and then they crash. So there's that low level, and then they crash. But when they get into real overload they go into the far extreme and feel really down, down mood, and down energy. And that's the more common expression that you seen in adults. The systemic allergic reaction list that he has here, tired, dopey, somnolent (in other words always going to sleep the moment you sit down), mildly depressed, swollen or edematous with pain, headaches, neckaches, backaches, neuralgia, myalgia (which is muscle aches), myositis (which is muscle inflammation), arthalgia (which is aching joints), arthritis (which is joint disease and inflammation), arteritis (which is inflammation in the arteries and chest pain) and cardiovascular effects. One of the primary symptoms of food allergies is pulse increase, tachycardia, you eat something and your heart starts to beat really fast and you end up in a cardiologist's office who says there's nothing wrong with you. Because there's nothing wrong with your heart or cardiovascular system, it's the allergies, they effect you that way, the stimulatory effect. And that is a really common picture. How many of you were raised with the belief system that it's normal to go to sleep after every meal because all the blood goes to your stomach. Heard that one? That was my family. It's not. Food is fuel. You're built physiologically to digest food and get energy from it, you don't need to go to sleep to do that, honest. But many many of us believe that and I have in fact patients who come to me with really severe allergies who don't eat all day. They get up, they go to work, they do their all day's work, they get home and they eat because they know the minute they eat they go unconscious they can't function, they can't think, they can't be in the world and so they save that until they get home at night. The most remarkable case of this that I personally have seen is a wonderful lady, high energy lady, she came to me in tears and said please don't tell me I have an eating disorder. Don't tell me I hide in the closet from my husband and eat cookies. She was very obese. She had gone from being a size 4 when they got married to being a size 24 in a matter of four and a half years. And she was distraught about this. They also wanted to have a child, her husband was wonderful. They had been to one doctor after another looking for a solution and they had been through all kinds of fertility stuff. They had just done all kinds of things, okay? And finally the doctors, because they couldn't figure out what was wrong with her, and she said to them, I live on turkey, chicken, and water, you know, she didn't eat. They didn't believe her, they just said, she's lying, out of our office, it's all your fault, she's psychotic. I consider that patient abuse. It's my personal opinion about it, I've heard too much about it and it makes me angry. Well, we tested her, and guess what? She's allergic to everything she's put in her mouth. Literally everything. And she was one of these people who wouldn't eat 'til she was done with everything she had to do because she has her own business and then she could go to sleep. She was eating one meal a day of 600 calories and she weighs that much. She's lost 75 pounds and she's one of the most disciplined people that I know, I really admire her ability to do that because it's been hard for her. But it's so wonderful to feel like a real human being. And she's had a very rigid program because as I said she's allergic to practically everything and we haven't wanted her to become allergic to more stuff. So we gave her a program where she'd eat...and her program was the most extreme, she'd eat like one thing every day and she'd rotate it. And every fourth or fifth day she'd repeat that because she wanted to be better and she truly has become better in the course of this. And that's a real common finding with people who have hypersensitivties, they can't lose weight. You know, have you ever heard these people who say it must be my endocrine system, I don't know what's going on, I diet and I follow the program and I don't lose weight. So we have a huge number of things to tell these people about how bad they are but nothing to tell them about why which is they're allergic. The inflammatory reaction holds the water in your body and you simply can't drop the weight. It just doesn't happen. Your body is not metabolizing normally. I don't give anybody weight reduction diets. I don't think it's necessary. You identify what they're allergic to the rest follows because of two things, 1) people start feeling better, they're not tired all the time, they can function in their lives and they do start to trim down to what is their normal body weight whatever that may be genetically for them. Everybody's set point is different and we don't know what that is. But people do find that point when you help them ...
I wanted to talk just a little bit about how you personally might determine if you had allergies and didn't know it. I think it's the last page, Food Allergy Associated Symptoms. This is a symptom list of all the symptoms that are associated with delayed hypersensitivity reactions. It's a pretty long list. I would recommend that you kind of go through this and notice yourself, check off the things that apply here. If you check off more than 10 of these items, the likelihood that you have allergies is enormously high. It's even higher if you check off something in a bunch of different categories, like one thing in joints and skin and head pain and muscles and eyes and gastrointestinal and nasal and if it's scattered over your whole body we're talking about something that's systemic, we're talking about something that's affecting you all over and those are most likely delayed hypersensitivity reactions. So this is just kind of a little self check that can help you to notice during this time of year when we're all going to be doing all the things that are festive, the cooking and the parties and all the different social events. Start to notice if you start having those kinds of reactions, if you feel badly after you eat certain things. For a long time before I did my own personal allergy testing I couldn't figure out why I could drink alcohol as long as it wasn't wine. Wine destroys my knees, I can't stand up, I get very very weak very very fast and then I get exhausted and you give me half an ounce of wine and I look like somebody who's tied one on and who's drunk. Well I'm very allergic to yeast and that was the answer, it's the yeast in wine and I simply can't handle it. Give me something that's been distilled and I'm okay. And it answers a lot of those little mysteries, fun things that you need to know about for yourself. But there's a couple of other areas I want to touch upon. One is that in the work that I do what I see so much is that people won't have been allergic and then they start building allergies and as we get older we get more and more allergies and my question has always been why? One of the biggest problems that we have is bowel toxicity here in the United States. The number of bowel parasites is frightening. We like to think of ourselves as an enlightened country that hasn't got these third world problems? Well, guess what. May be I should say guess again. We have an enormous variety of parasites that exist in our bowel. Many of them contribute to the leakiness in the bowel. Now what does that mean? I better go back and describe that. The bowel is designed to digest food completely and what's supposed to get into your bloodstream are simple compounds like a single or double amino acid or a single sugar molecule or a broken down short chain fatty acid. The body and the gut are designed to reduce it to that simple common denominator. Well when you don't digest well or you have a process going on that makes the bowel wall friable and leaky where you've got sores and that kind of thing, what actually gets into your bloodstream are what we call macromolecules, large lengths of protein that are antigenic. That triggers your immune system, more commonly than anything else...And the basis for much of that is twofold. Either bowel parasites or inadequate digestion. One of the most common bowel parasites is yeast, because of the use of antibiotics, both medically and in the food that we eat. We have enormous amounts of yeast in our gut that can invade just like, ever seen a mushroom growing out in the lawn, you know how it grows under the ground and it spreads, it spreads into the gut, into the gut wall. And that's a trail for the macromolecules to go through. And there are other parasites, protozoans, and a lot of amoebas that have come into this country through various immigrant groups. I think that salad bars should be avoided by all means because a lot of the food handlers don't practice good hygiene. And I watch people come into my office and they pick them up at salad bars and things of that sort. Then the other issue is poor digestion and inadequate digestion. How many of us leave our office and we have 20 minutes so we run over and get this sandwich and we eat it just as fast we can because we have to make three phone calls and besides which we have a patient coming in 20 minutes. I'm very bad about this, I admit it, I'm trying to change that pattern but that's an old pattern for me. We're not designed to digest under those circumstances, it's just ridiculous to ask your body to process food when you're racing around like a crazy person because the adrenal stress shuts down the entire digestive tract and yet at the same time you're hungry. So what's the trade off, right? We have to do something about that. But our society has really changed in ways that are not functional for us and having adequate meal times and time to sit...is really lacking... So the work we do in our office and testing that we do does a couple of things. It identifies any underlying problems, it promotes proper digestion by whatever means necessary whether that's some kind of digestive aid, or getting rid of the parasite that you've got, or whatever that is, the testing will show that. And then we identify the allergies and set up a program whereby you can eliminate the things that are making you sick and start feeling better and not get sick all the time. I think those are two really important features of the program. So many people just think it's okay that I get sick every year. I get the cold or I get the flu or I get something and I have it once or twice or three times a year, you know, that isn't necessary. It really isn't. And we've had people through our office that have demonstrated that it isn't necessary. Or if you do get sick it's very mild and it goes away very very quick because your immune system is strong and healthy. And that's the goal for everyone.
Now there's a way to kind of provocatively test yourself. If this is something you're real allergic to you'll be able to tell. If you take your pulse and then you eat a big helping of it, just eat that one thing, don't eat a lot of stuff, just that, and then take your pulse again. Over the period of the next half hour, take your pulse every five minutes. If there's an increase in your pulse rate the likelihood is that you're allergic to whatever that was. There are other more subtle ways. If you eat something and your nose immediately starts running and you get the sniffles and you have to blow your nose or you sneeze, you're allergic to it. The unfair part of this, the really unfair, is that the things you crave the most and your most favorite things are the things you're allergic to. That's because the inflammatory products that are produced in an allergic reaction are something called bioactive amines. Now in biochemistry and the way our bodies function we use amines for energy. Adrenaline is a bioactive amine. All the compounds that mimic adrenaline are called sympathelmanetic amines and it boosts our system and gives us that surge and keeps us going. Well guess what when you've got food allergies and you're tired all the time what do you want? You want the high. You want the kick. And it is a very very addictive process. You really do get addicted to the foods you're allergic to. There's some of this coming out just a little bit in some of the 12 step programs with OA about how certain people have addictive foods that are their triggers. Those are allergens and there may be more than one. But that's the reason why I think it's so unfair, it's all the things we like the most that we're generally allergic to. So that's a good place to start, look at that list and see how you react to it. If you can go completely off of it for 4 to 5 days and then test it you'll get a better response, you'll be able to tell more clearly, because otherwise you're reacting constantly and it's hard to tell. The other thing that we have given you is sources of pure foods. It's at the back of the list of hypoallergenic recipes, our colorful allergies and the holidays handout. These recipes come from readily available book called the Allergy Self Help Cookbook. But the suppliers that we've talked about here are the places where you can get pure foods. One of the big problems for us is that our food supply is so polluted. Commercial meats is probably top of that list. Now I'm not a vegetarian and I don't advocate vegetarianism except for those people who have strong beliefs about it. But I will tell you that the American meat supply is loaded with drugs and hormones and is very non-healthful. It is so non-healthful that the European common market refuses to allow it to be imported because they are concerned about the hormone levels in our beef. There are several places that you can get good meat. Trader Joe's being one of them, they have frozen natural beef from Dakota Farms that is range fed and has nothing in it and they also have these chickens that are raised free so they're not dosed with antibiotics just to keep them alive. Mrs. Gooch's has an excellent butcher all organic, and the other two listings here are for other variety of eggs. Lot of people who are allergic to chicken eggs, they can handle duck eggs, they can handle quail eggs, they can handle goose eggs, so it's worthwhile if you want to do some baking and you have to have eggs, to know these other sources. But there are other sources available if you need to do that kind of cooking. And the recipes that are here are provided for you so that it gives you some alternatives. For those people who know what they're allergic to, it shows you how to use other things. A lot of people are allergic to dairy, a lot of people are allergic to eggs, a lot of people are allergic to wheat, so the diet books and the cookbooks tend to focus on those items. I will say to you that there's no good generalization about who's allergic to what. In the years that I've tested I've seen everything. I have a lady in my practice who's allergic to kohlrabi and every other vegetable because she's a gardener and she's gardened for years and all the things she's grown she's allergic to. She's not allergic to meat but she doesn't like them. But kohlrabi is the funniest one I've come up against yet. But these recipes give you some alternatives that you can try to make, some of them are really tasty, some of them are fair, none of them are really awful. I've had some really awful ones, I don't think any of these fit that category. They're an opportunity for you to cook some things that you can have and share with family and friends and not feel so set apart. I think that's an issue at this time of year. It's necessary especially with children, I have so many children with allergies in my practice, to give them good alternatives, things they do enjoy, things that make them feel included. Like at school when they have parties and they have their little get togethers, birthdays, it's good to be able to make something that your child can enjoy and can share with their friends. I can't overemphasize that enough. I strongly believe that the only way to make a program like this work is to accentuate the positives, not constantly focus on I can't, I can't have that, I can't, I can't eat , I can't, instead, this is what makes me feel good and this is what I enjoy. These are alternatives we have to give ourselves and our children in order to have healthful eating. The other just doesn't work. Pretty soon what you have is a rebel, well I don't care, I'm going to have it anyway. Okay.
Okay, I think that I pretty much covered the items that I felt were really important to share with you this evening and so what I'd like to do now is open up the floor to questions, if anybody has things they'd like to ask me, I'd be more than happy to answer whatever questions you might have.
Q? Yes, Stephanie? The question is is it possible to build your system up to tolerate foods that you're now allergic to? Yes, but not all foods you're presently allergic to. There are real degrees in these reactions and for some people they can eliminate the ones that are not so severe for themselves. It's multifactorial. That requires looking at the health of the gut, getting the digestive capacity, that involves looking to see if you have a heavy metal body burden, you know like fillings or some other exposure that's depressing your immune system, and then doing rotations to where you aren't so sensitive to things. And for those people who are so severely sensitive, they may have to rotate forever, other people won't have to, yeah, their system gets better and the allergies go away, but you have to do the first step. You have to relieve the burden of the constant irritants before you can start to rebuild the immune system.
Q? The question is, are there symptoms that are specific to food groups that go across lines (in?) people? Dairy is probably the only one that has a common symptom which is mucous production. Dairy is basically white blood cells, it's lymph, cow lymph or goat lymph or whatever kind of milk you're drinking. It's produced by the white blood cells with a little protein thrown in and tends to be highly antigenic to lots and lots of people and it produces mucous. But beyond that I can't generalize because people react so individually, we're all biochemical wonders, we're all unique individuals, and you don't see real common reactions that go across the board. One person might get depressed and another person might have an asthma attack, it could be that varied. Thank you, that was a good question, too.
Q? Milk can have a...in lowfat milk, the problem is not the fat, the problem is the protein, it's the protein you're allergic to, and all milk has it, even nonfat milk has it and while you don't get the fat content, you still get the allergens. When you talk about someone who snores really loudly there can be a number of things going on and one of them can be that the nasal passages are just so congested and there's so much sinus up in there that they can't breathe right and that's why they snore the minute they start to relax. In an attempt to breathe they're breathing through their open mouth.
Q? How do I know that sugar suppresses the immune system? There have been a number of clinical studies and they take white blood cells in vitro, they look at them under the microscope and expose them to sugar, and they slow down and stop. What they do is they have bacteria and they watch the white blood cells engulf the bacteria, that's what they're supposed to do, right? And then you put sugar into the mixture and they don't recognize the bacteria, they don't move toward the bacteria, that's called "chemotactic" effect, they become like, paralyzed. And there have been at least a half a dozen studies in the last ten years that demonstrated that. ...Nothing to do with allergies, it's the effect of sugar on the immune system, especially white sugar, because white sugar has no food value of any kind and it has no vitamins or anything and all it's got in it is chemical residues, 37 chemical residues, bleach and that kind of stuff and apparently it's poison to us even though we like it.
Q? Yes, Stephanie? ...Less, and it depends on what you're talking about. If you're talking about fructose that's been refined, it has an effect on depressing the immune system. If you're talking about fruit sugars in fruit in its natural state, no, much less. If you're talking about concentrated fruit juices it has an effect because they concentrated that sugar down, they extracted it and dehydrated it a little bit to make it even sweeter so you're overloading your system with sugar.
Q? Oh, yes, absolutely, parasites have an effect. The question is given that so many us have food allergies and parasites in our bowel, that's really it, even if we stopped eating to get rid of the allergies, wouldn't we still notice stuff because we have parasites? Yes, that's the answer to that question, you would still notice stuff because you have parasites but it's a matter of degree, you'd feel better, right? Some of it would stop, maybe not all of it, but some of it would stop. ...It's very difficult especially if you have a lot of problems in your bowel, yes, and I tell people how to test themselves because some people are real interested in self testing and self health. But I tell you the truth, I don't recommend it with people who come to my office. I tried that route, and it was so frustrating for all of us and we didn't get the clinical results, people got worn out and tired and frustrated that I just say to people, look, we've got to do blood tests or we will never know. And we can go on like this for years, this is boring, let's get to the bottom of it and fix it. And so I've gone over to doing testing because it's the only way to tell.
Q? I'm glad to do that, that they do blood testing for allergies in Europe, I'm really glad, there's a lot of stuff they do in Europe that we don't do here. A lot of the information that I have has been published in Lancet in Britain and the various German journals and the Swiss... The Swiss have done this huge study about food irradiation; you know, we have enormous amounts of food irradiation and nobody knows it. The FDA decided that as long as it doesn't have radioactivity left in it nobody has to know that their food has been irradiated. Well, guess what, the Swiss studied it and found out the alterations in the proteins and the molecules cause all kinds of strange disorders including pituitary cancer which is very rare, and various...I can't remember all the other conditions and they don't allow food irradiation in the common market because of that. Anything that you see on the shelf that doesn't have to be refrigerated... that the germ(inelle?) cell has been killed off by gamma radiation x-rays, hard radiation. They do that to most of the wheat, they do that to most of our bread, fruits and vegetables, yeah, cereal products. The idea is that they want to kill the "vermin", they want to increase shelf life for the distributors and manufacturers and it's really very very detrimental. One of the things that I have started doing is I buy most of my produce now at Gooches. They don't irradiate over there. The difference in taste... You know, we get really kind of used to things, it's hard for me to go now to a market and buy produce, it has no taste, it tastes like cardboard, all of it. So I usually buy my produce over there.
Q? What about the other kinds of products, baked goods and the like, at Gooches? I think that Gooches Market has one of the most stringent requirements for being in their market of anybody that I know. They have a whole committee of people that does nothing but research the various product lines and you may sometimes see something disappear over there and when you ask they have discovered either that there is animal testing involved in it and they didn't know that originally or there's been some kind of processing that does not meet their standards and irradiation is on that list. They're very very careful. That's partially the reason why some of their stuff is more expensive. It's because they spend so much time and money up front and on top making sure about purity and quality.
Q? The question is what's involved in coming to my office to have a program of testing? Well, the first thing that happens when you walk in the door at my office is we give you paperwork. There's a whole set of forms to fill out. And one of these forms is called a Patient Diagnostic Questionnaire. And it's a really really exhaustive system survey form, where all the different systems of your body, there's something like 150 questions about different parts of your body. When you answer that then I get a picture, a beginning picture of you which is a jumpoff point for our conversation. I then take a complete history about what your various problems are, what you've been seeking relief for, when I look at your symptom survey form I will see, oh, there's this item and this item and that item and they all indicate food allergies in all these different systems, I think we should do allergy testing. And here you also have something that says that you don't digest real well so we need to do some bowel studies, we need to find out what's going on in your bowel, we need to find out how well you're digesting, there's a simple urine test that tells us that, and I then do a physical exam. And the physical exam that I do is both what you expect a doctor to do, all the doctor stuff, you know, we listen to your heart and lungs, we take your pressure, but we take your pressure differently. We're looking for whether or not your endocrine system functions properly. So we may take your blood pressure sitting, laying down, and standing up because we want to know what happens to you when you lay down and then stand up. Is your body responding the way that it should? A lot of the other items that I take note of in the physical are based on nutritional deficiencies or things that your body is telling me might be wrong like...if you rub back here and it's rough and you have those little neurals of like bumps, that's called hyperfollicularis keratosis, isn't that great, HFK for short, that's indicative of a fatty acid imbalance, it means you're not getting the right oils. Just that simple. And as much oil as we eat in this culture, as much fat, a lot of us don't eat the right ratios. Then we do a chiropractic exam and after I've determined everything that's going on, I will then tell you what further testing might be required, and what I can see structurally that you might want to address, and then it's up to you as to what your next steps are. That's the integrated program because I don't think, this is a personal belief of mine, that you can treat a person as isolated compartments. I don't think I can treat your neck and your knee without addressing the rest of you, I mean that's insane, and so when you find out the whole picture of what's going on with somebody, people get much much better, and they start feeling well, and that's really what I do, I want people to enjoy optimum health on every level.
Q? How we decide what to test for in the food allergy test. The major test that I do in my office is sent to West Virginia, we send you out and have the blood drawn and mail it to West Virginia overnight Airborne Express. There's a panel that they do that is 230...Rose, is it 235? 237? Somewhere in that number...237 odd different things, foods, chemicals, additives, food colorings, pesticides, metals, huge number of preservatives that's on that list, artificial sweeteners, huge number of different things. For most adults I recommend they have that test. Now there are other panels, but there aren't any of them that do all of that. When I first started out I tested nothing but foods and I would find that people would eat something that they weren't allergic to and then they'd have a reaction. What's going on? It's the way it's processed, it has nitrites in it, or has MSG in it, or it was colored, there's something else going on, and so without those other factors it's really hard to get clear about what you're really reacting to. Oh, sulfites and metabisulfates, that's a biggy for a lot of people. And so that's usually the test that I recommend. For some people where they don't have any delayed hypersensitivity reactions, you see this a lot in kids, with really really bad skin problems and eczema, those are mostly immediate reactions, and we do a different kind of testing. We do immediate testing. There's a variety of different panels.
Thank you very much. You've been a really good group, it's been a pleasure speaking with you this evening.
Does this apply to you? If so see our information on Consultations.
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CFIDS (Chronic Fatigue)
Recently, I have been seeing a great many people with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome - now called "Chronic Fatigue Immune Deficiency Syndrome," or CFIDS for short. In almost every case, they are medical "failures." They have gotten no relief; all they've been given is a diagnosis - as though categorizing and naming the syndrome afforded relief.CFIDS is really a very old problem. It is a constellation of symptoms caused by disordered physiology. That makes it pretty easy to treat once you identify what specific parts of a person's metabolism need support. And, while there are similarities, each person is unique and needs a unique prescription. That very uniqueness means CFIDS does not match the medical model of one treatment per disease, regardless of who has it.
At its root, CFIDS begins as a stress disorder. Long-term stress exhausts the adrenal glands which become less and less effective in maintaining homeostasis (the balanced state of physiology where the body constantly corrects itself, coming back to normal each time).
The adrenals use the immune system as a primary tool in maintaining homeostasis; we call this the "immune response." And, as the adrenals weaken, the immune system deregulates. The result: chronic viral infections and, for most people, delayed hypersensitivity reactions. What makes the picture confusing from a medical point of view is that you have two seemingly contradictory states co-existing: hypovigilance (the inability to fight off infection) and hypervigilance (allergies) in the immune system. It only makes sense when viewed from the perspective of the immune response as effect - not cause.
The single most important physiologic function to support in CFIDS is the adrenal gland. Secondarily, the gut and digestion need to be normalized and, for many, allergies identified. The longer CFIDS has gone on the higher the likelihood of allergies and the greater the number of reactive substances.
Once your physiology starts to normalize, you can get back in control of your own life by beginning to notice what factors trigger an attack of fatigue. The trigger may be environmental; it may be emotional; it may be a lifestyle issue.
The key factor is feeling well enough to notice the differences and having enough information about yourself to know what to look for. Once you reach that point, you can make decisions that are more effective in managing your life. Most people see marked improvement in 6 months to a year. For some, the results come even faster.
If you've been diagnosed with CFIDS and have had unsuccessful treatment - don't suffer needlessly any longer. Call the office and make an appointment today.
Does this apply to you? If so see our information on Consultations.
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Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Questionnaire
Note: we suggest that you select the text of this questionnaire and copy it to a word document so that you can answer the questions and determine your score.This symptom checklist cannot be used to diagnose Chronic Fatigue Syndrome unless other disorders have been ruled out by physical examination and appropriate laboratory tests.
___ 1. Fatigue (95%) - usually made worse by physical exercise
2. Cognitive function problems (80%)
___ a) attention deficit disorder
___ b) calculation difficulties
___ c) memory disturbance
___ d) spatial disorientation
___ e) frquently saying the wrong word
3. Psychological problems (80%)
___ a) depression
___ b) anxiety - which may include panic attacks
___ c) personality changes - usually a worsening of a previous tendency
___ d) emotional lability (mood swings)
___ e) psychosis
4. Other nervous system problems (75%)
___ a) sleep disturbance
___ b) headaches
___ c) changes in visual acuity
___ d) seizures
___ e) numb or tingling feelings
___ f) dysequilibrium
___ g) lightheadedness - feeling "spaced out"
___ h) frequent unusual nightmares
___ i) difficulty moving your tongue to speak
___ j) ringing in ears
___ k) paralysis
___ l) severe muscular weakness
___ m) blackouts
___ n) intolerance of bright lights
___ o) intolerance of alcohol
___ p) alteration of taste, smell and/or hearing
___ q) non-restorative sleep
___ r) decreased libido
___ s) twitching muscles ("benign fasciculations")
___ 5. Recurrent flu-like illnesses (75%) - often with chronic sore throat
___ 6. Painful lymph nodes especially on sides of neck and under the arms (60%)
___ 7. Severe nasal and other allergies often worsening of previous mild problem (40%)
___ 8. Weight change - usually gain (70%)
___ 9. Muscle and joint aches with tender "trigger points" or fibromyalgia
___ 10. Abdominal pain, diarrhea, nausea, intestinal gas - "irritable bowel syndrome" (50%)
___ 11. Low grade fevers or feeling hot often (70%)
___ 12. Night sweats (40%)
___ 13. Heart palpitations (40%)
___ 14. Severe premenstrual syndrome - PMS (70% women)
___ 15. Rash from herpes simplex or shingles (20%)
___ 16. Uncomfortable or recurrent urination - pain in prostate (20%)
17. Other symptoms seen in less than 10% of patients
___ a) rashes
___ b) hair loss
___ c) impotence
___ d) chest pain
___ e) dry eyes and mouth
___ f) cough
___ g) TMJ syndrome
___ h) mitral valve prolapse
___ i) frequent canker sores
___ j) cold hands & feet
___ k) serious heart rhythm disturbances
___ l) carpal tunnel syndrome
___ m) piriformis muscle syndrome causing sciatica
___ n) thyroid inflammation
___ o) various cancers (rare)
___ p) periodontal (gum) disease
___ q) endometriosis
___ r) easily getting out of breath ("dyspnea on exertion")
___ s) symptoms worsened by extremes of temperature
___ t) multiple sensi-tivities to medicine, food and other substances
With thanks to Daniel Peterson, MD, Paul Cheney, MD, PhD, and Jay A. Goldstein, MD
To Score: more than two positive answers on questions 1-5 plus more than four positive answers on questions 6-17 indicate a high probability that your symptoms may be due to chronic fatigue.
Do you think you have this condition? If so see our information on Consultations.
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Auto-Immune Diseases - The Mystery Illness
Note: This is text taken from a talk given by Dr RichardsI have been asked on various occasions to give presentations on lupus, on multiple sclerosis, on rheumatoid arthritis--all of these degenerative diseases that tend to be a very large problem in America. And the thing is, it doesn’t matter what you call it, it’s all the same thing. And that’s what we’re going to talk about tonight. In order to set the scene for this, why don’t you turn on our overhead, that’s our title page of AUTO-IMMUNE DISEASES--THE MYSTERY ILLNESSES. There’s a reason why I termed these "mystery illnesses". They are all considered to be syndromes because in medicine the etiology or the cause is unknown. There are a lot of theories about cause and causation but the truth is our knowledge has not even advanced to the point where we can truly tell you what causes it. I can give you some ideas because we’ve learned a little bit more. I can certainly talk about the mechanism that underlies it. But for me to say to you "X" causes "Y"--there’s none of us that can say that. We now know a little more about diabetes and what causes that and why that’s an autoimmune disease and that was just discovered within the last twelve months. So knowledge is advancing in this area and whereever possible I’ll tell you the latest. But as I said what we’re going to focus on tonight is process more than anything else. Now you may want to turn that off because the first thing I want to discuss isn’t a transparency. It’s this. You folks all have one of these and the reason I’m giving it to you--well we couldn’t make a transparency out of it for obvious reasons--they only come in 8-1/2 x 11, right? And this cuts this thing right in the middle so there would be no way to make it sensible. But if you would open it out I just want to take you on a brief tour of the immune system because unless we understand something about the immune system we will never be able to understand auto-immune disease. This particular article or chart is a simplification, remember this is simple compared to the actual way the immune system works, and it was adapted from a beautiful article that appeared in National Geographic in 1986 and everything was in color, it was fabulous. You may notice it’s annotated here June of 1986 so if you have access to that you can go in and look at it in more detail in color. It actually starts on the right hand side of this page levels 1 and 2 "Creating the Forces." Talking about the stem cells and the bone marrow that big "S" which travel through to the thymus and the spleen where they mature into different kind of T cells. T cells are our lymphcytes and we have several different populations of T cells. We have killer cells, we have suppressor cells, we have helper cells, and we have null cells. We call them null cells because nobody’s quite sure what they do yet. Okay? And in the spleen and thymus these cells which are an extension actually of the nervous system mature and are put out into your bloodstream for a very specific reason. Coming over to the left hand side #3 Recognition of the enemy. This entire process is designed to identify the difference between self and non-self. So a bacteria or virus is clearly non-self. All right? A cancer cell changes so that it becomes non-self. What happens in auto-immune disorders for reasons no one is terribly clear about: certain tissues in the body (certain organs) start to be identified as non-self and the immune system attacks them on an ongoing basis indiscriminately because there’s no turn-off mechanism. They never go away, right? Unless you die. You’re always going to have a pancreas, you’re always going to have joint tissue (synovial fluid, tissue in your joints, that’s rheumatoid arthritis), so there’s a constant and continuous cascade by the immune system. If you look at this chart, let me just briefly tell you what is happening, the helper T cells meet a macrophage that has destroyed a virus. Let’s talk about it in a viral setting. It connects to that macrophage and identifies the antigen which the macrophage has very smartly pushed out to the surface so this T cell can tell if there’s some kind of foreign invader in the body. It identifies that and then goes over to the killer T cells, activates them, the killer T cells turn on the B cells which are these little--they have factories, you may have those little chutes that they have coming out of them are actually supposed to be a factory because they manufacture antibodies ongoingly. And the killer cells turn them on so pounds and pounds of the antibody can be turned out to attack this invading organism. And the killer cells shown down in level 5 in addition go directly on the attack together with these antibodies. Then what’s supposed to happen is level 6, slow down, the suppressor T cells calm this whole response down and allow your immune system to return to normal. In the auto-immune disease, level 6 is missing and so the attack just continues. So the goal of all therapy around these conditions is aimed at minimizing this attacking factor, turning that part of it off, okay? Now we do that in a variety of ways which I will share with you as we go along. On the back of this it’s is a little bit about interleukin and how the actual proteins that the different cells secrete potentiate this response and actually magnify it. So the inflammatory products that are secreted continue to make the immune response higher and higher and higher. That’s why I gave you this piece of paper. I don’t expect you to answer any quiz questions, there will be no quiz this evening, but when you go home you may want to read it in greater detail, I’ve given you a very quick summary because what I want you to appreciate about this is that the immune system is a little bit like a very complex symphony and we’re only starting to learn about it. Any immunology book that’s more than 5 years old is hopelessly out of date at this point because we’re gaining so much information so fast and the goal in therapy for everyone that I work with and talk to in all these national seminars is always to optimize the person’s entire metabolism so that the immune response can be brought under control, okay? And that’s a little bit more about what we’re going to talk about this evening.
Before we do that I’m going to go into some of the common autoimmune disorders, I just touched on them briefly and there are a lot of conditions that (this is an overhead we’re going to turn it off) there are a lot of medical diagnoses now that are recognized to have an autoimmune component some of which you may never have thought of as being autoimmune, okay? I put them in alphabetical order because it was the easiest way I could think of to organize it. Addison’s Syndrome is the frank destruction of the adrenal glands, it’s always fatal in its final stages and in this disease the adrenal glands are destroyed by the body and you finally cannot regulate your blood pressure, cannot regulate your immune system, nothing, heart rate, and the person dies. Asthma, a great deal of asthma is now believed to be autoimmune, there’s a kind of adult-onset asthma where the lung tissue itself is being attacked by the body. Blooddiscresias-that’s a big word-it means things like some of the anemias and the loss of blood cells rather than too many blood cells. We always think of leukemias as the blood disease where there’s too much of something and this kind of disease we don’t have enough—we don’t have enough platelets, we don’t have enough neutrophils which fight off bacterial infections, we don’t have enough red blood cells so we get anemic. There are a whole variety of these, different names, but they’re all the same and they’re all considered to be autoimmune. We now know that diabetes is an autoimmune condition, as I said, this was defined just within the last year. There’s been in the alternative health community a suspicion about this for many many years. People who have diabetes in their family should never take dairy products. We’ve been telling people this for years. Milk is a big offender with diabetes. There was an elegant research done and it was published in I don’t remember, it was either the New England Journal of Medicine or the Journal of the American Medical Association and I always get them mixed up, so it’s in one of those journals, about the surface proteins on the islet of Langerhorn cells, the ones that make the insulin in your pancreas. There’s a 12 amino acid chain that exactly matches the 12 amino acid chain in milk, lactoglobulin and the body is identifying that chain on the milk and then attacking the pancreas and destroying it and as we know there’s a genetic component to it. So the unanswered question is why do certain families have this tendency to not be able to process milk and why does their immune system identify it as a foreigner and start attacking their own body. There’s a lot of unanswered questions, you’ll find that out as we proceed. Fibromyalgia and polymyositis, this is the kind of muscle pain that is seen in chronic fatigue syndrome. People with chronic fatigue start with fibromyalgia, they start with extreme muscle pain. They used to call it muscular rheumatism, that was the diagnosis I was given at 18, told me I’d never be able to make anything of my life, I’d have to spend half of my life in bed if I wanted to function at all, because I had this condition. And I have control of it and I’ll tell you how as we go forward. Glomerulonephritis is an autoimmune disease that attacks the kidneys, that’s what that’s about. There’s a certain type of chronic active hepatitis, there is no etiologic agent for it, there’s no bug, there’s no virus, there’s no nothing. These people constantly have elevated liver enzymes which is hepatitis because their body is destroying their liver cells. Hyperthyroidism, maybe some of you know people who have this, Graves Disease where the eyes will begin to bulge and they get real shaky? Autoimmune. We’ve known for a long time that Hashimoto’s was, Hashimito’s thyroiditis is an inflammation of the thyroid which goes into extreme hyperthyroid and can be fatal because it races the heart so badly. Then it destroys the thyroid and the person goes into low thyroid. There’s a kind of infertility also that is autoimmune where the woman actually destroys her own eggs so that it never implants. Inflammatory bowel disease (you know the one I left out? Crohn’s disease. I look right at it and I didn’t put it in. Well, we’ll put it in here) and Crohn’s disease, they’re both autoimmune conditions. And of course lupus and multiple sclerosis, they’re autoimmune. Myasthenia gravis, perhaps you folks know people, the first sign of it is that they can’t keep their eyelids open, their eyelids just droop. It’s a destruction of the neuromuscular junction that controls muscle contractility, it’s a very specific point that is destroyed in the joining of the nerve right into where the muscle is activated and that’s obliterated for these people by antibodies. There’s a type of allergic bronchitis and pneumonitis which is autoimmune and of course rheumatoid arthritis and Shogun’s Syndrome I don’t know if you are familiar with it by that name, it’s also called scleroderma. These people their skin gets hard and their esophagus becomes like a pipe, it’s gets almost calcified. That’s also an autoimmune condition. Now, these conditions all have some common features, there is no known causative agent, there’s no bug, there’s no, you know, that’s why they call them syndromes for the most part and you have progressive destruction of the body’s organs or tissues by an antibody. That’s the common feature to these conditions. The way they’re differentiated medically and the reason why they all have different names is that the target organs varies from condition to condition and from individual to individual. The process is, as I said, the same, it’s only the target organ that is different and we just don’t know enough yet to know why. We now know as I said about diabetes but for some of these we just don’t know why does one person show up with lupus and the next person shows up with multiple sclerosis, it’s a mystery. So what I’m going to do now is show you an organ system chart. This is the end organ effects of allergies, you may notice I keep coming back to this word allergy. All of this is precipitated by our body’s immune system being allergic to something and we’ll talk more about about that in a moment. In the respiratory tract you’re going to see a runny nose, um, there’s a certain type of otitis media that is very allergic, you get lots of fluid and no pus, treating it with antibiotics is useless, inner ear infections caused by allergies, asthma, and again our pneumonitis and allergic bronchitis. In your gastrointestinal tract you’ll find oral manifestations of food allergy, blisters, sore mouth, all of that stuff, celiac disease, celiac sprew, which is a very very intense diarrheal disease, sensitivity to gluten, no wheat or any kind of grain that has gluten in it, it just scours out the intestinal tract, destroys the intestinal lining and these people can die from malabsorption if it’s not treated properly. Again we have our inflammatory bowel disease and irritable bowel disease, there’s a slight difference there bascially it’s the same process. Crohn’s disease and then pediatric GI distress secondary to allergies. How many of you folks have known babies who spit up constantly or in the most extreme case have propulsive vomiting? That’s a child who’s allergic and in general that child will remain allergic to that substance throughout their entire life even though they tell you they outgrow it. They just don’t react as severely, right? But if you put this child back on those substances to which they were allergic in infancy the greatest likelihood is they’re going to go on into some of these other conditions. This is why I’m so adamant about it, I treat a lot of children, a very large pediatric population in my practice. You never outgrow an allergy, you may be able to calm it down but you never outgrow it, okay? In our skin we see some of our more common, what we think of when we think of allergy, right? Eczema, something that’s itchy or hives, those are the kinds of things we think of, we’ve been trained to think that way. Lupus, however, in the skin is another one of these phenomena. Now in our central nervous system we see different manifestations, some people get migraines, I used to get migraines all the time until I figured out what was triggering them. In kids you see a hyperkinetic syndrome or attention deficit disorder. Lots and lots of kids with allergic phenomenon go into that. Mood swings is a big feature of this. How many people do you know who are being medicated for panic attacks? And in many instances it’s an allergic phenomenon, it isn’t actually a "psychological disorder" at all. Depression, mania and irritability also go with this. And of course in MS we see it as plaque formation in the central nervous system. You get deposits laid down in the end stages. In rheumatology we have our joint pain and destruction of the connective tissue, that is scleroderma, that is rheumatoid arthritis, that’s the mechanism in those disease, and in the cardiovascular system, Prinzmetal’s angina, this is an atypical angina which does not respond in the normal way. Most people with angina, if they exercise they get pain, if they rest it goes away. That’s the typical classic pattern. This usually comes at rest for no apparent reason. Unfortunately it’s often medicated exactly the same way as classic angina but the medication does no good. And you can see also in this cardiomyopathy which is some destruction of the heart cells in certain conditions. It depends on whether the allergen attacks that part of the body. Then we have a bunch of other organs that are affected as we’ve already discussed, kidneys, adrenals, thyroid, the eyeä There’s a triad, there’s this really funny disease, I even knew a kid who had it when we were in school and it attacks the uvea of the eye and the iris of the eye and the urethra and it’s an autoimmune condition. Again, starting from being allergic to something. Now this whole chart thing comes from Allergy Immunotechnologies, this was a laboratory that did a lot of testing some years ago. I don’t use this lab, I use a different lab, but I do have their bibliography so if anybody’s interested they can receive that. There’s just so much information out there I can’t include it all. Now you do have this next chart. This is Food Allergy Associated Symptoms and I gave you this oneäthis comes out of Dr. Philpott’s book back in 1977, you might want to look at the one you have in your handouts since we have some bottom that’s missing here. The reason why I’m giving you multiple sources and multiple looks as the same material is only for one reason. For some people this material may seem new or startling but there are so many authorities in the field and they are all saying the same thing. Dr. Philpott wrote his book back in 1977. We’ve known about this since at least the early 70’s and probably the late 60’s it was starting to come clear. Back in the 60’s everybody was talking about hypoglycemia, remember, low blood sugar, remember that one? Well we now know that hypoglycemia is a reaction to food allergies. 95% of the time, if you have a person who has extreme episodes of low blood sugar it’s because they’re allergic to something and they’re having a reactive hypoglycemia. So most of the people in the field don’t even run the glucose tolerance test anymore. Thank goodness! I had a 6 hour one and thought I was going to die. It was not a fun test. I don’t know, did anybody else take that test? Where you sit there and shake for six hours? By the time it was over I thought I was going to pass out. Did it effect you that way? (äthey thought you had water. Oh, that’s a good one. That’s very good.) And of course it has it’s dangers, too. You never want to give that test to anyone with incipient diabetes. You will put them into a coma. So Dr. Philpott arranged what we talked about by system in the body and if you read this over you will find the kinds of symptoms that medically they group and give a name to, okay? If you look here with speech, this slurred speech or stammering or stuttering or even speech paralysis. There are two of these conditions, I think multiple sclerosis is one that has scanning speech, where people start speaking in a monotone. Again it’s the effect that the allergy is having on the central nervous system and this is where it shows up is in the speech centers. Um, again the double vision, under vision we have diplophobia, there it is, double vision. That’s another feature that has been assigned to one of these diseases rather than another one. But all of these can be elicited through exposure to just the right allergen for that particular person. One of the reasons is why it’s confusing is that no two people have the same set of allergens. So where do you start, you know? You want to do a double blind study you want to give everybody the same thing and see how they react to it. That doesn’t work in this kind of a situation because each person’s allergies are totally unique. And whereas I might react really bad to polyester you might react to down. You just have to know which it is. So at this point I’m going to take us into how organ imbalance creates immune system dysfunction. This could be subtitled åMore Than You Possibly Ever Wanted To Know About Physiology But You Really Need To Know It’, okay? Because this is the basis for everything and knowing how your body works makes it much easier to understand what’s going on. And you notice I don’t start with the immune system. I start with the bowel because the bowel is outside of your body and your immune system starts at the gut border and for many of us this is where our problems start. We don’t have the right kind of defenses right there where the rubber meets the road, right? Where you’re introducing these things right into your system. Dr. Baker, Sydney Baker, who’s quite a remarkable medical doctor who gives a lot of talks at some of the functional symposiums that I go to, he likes to talk about your bowel as a membrane the size of a tennis court. Because that’s what it is, it’s just about that size, and it’s all folded and looped, it’s inside of you, right, but now the question is is your tennis court dirty or clean? Because for most of us we have some pretty severe problems in this area. The gut gets off because of too many antibiotics, it may not be that you’ve ever taken an antibiotic, but do you eat commercial meat or do you eat chicken? Both of those are laden with antibiotic residues. What do you get, 50%, I’m going to approximate, I think it’s 50% of all the antibiotic produced in this country is used in livestock feeding and those residues get into our food supply. We also have an awful lot of parasites in this country, you know I do bowel testing all the time and I would say something like 30% of the people that I test have some kind of parasite which to me is an extraordinary high number. And I’m not talking about yeast, I’m talking about protozoans and/or worms. There’s a lot of that out there, much more than we like to admit. It’s really interesting, if you send a bowel exam into any of the local big laboratories, you know the commerical laboratories around here, they always come back normal. I just had this happen, I’ve got a little girl in my practice, she’s 8? 7. Seven, and if you looked at her you would know she’s sick. She looks faded and she’s kind of grey and she hasn’t been feeling well for weeks and they sent in a bowel sample and it came back that it’s totally normal. Well it’s not totally normal. We sent it in to the laboratory that I work with on the East Coast, this child has Blastocystis hominis, which is considered to be a normal commencil by the medical community and we’re only starting to find out that it can cause serious malabsorption problems and you’ve got a little 7 year old and she’s in trouble. She’s got gut pain, she doesn’t want to eat, she’s got diarrhea, she just doesn’t feel good all the time. And on top of that she has a couple of abnormal bacteria and no good bacteria in her gut at all. This laboratory cultures for us in addition to doing a microbiology exam, they will do a culture and let us know what’s there. She’s fortunate she doesn’t have yeast but she’s got all this other stuff going on. So you have to find laboratories that specialize in this to get really good information. The other thing that does this to us is chlorinated water or here in Pasadena, hmm, I have to take some Lactobacillus tonight, we have chloramines in the water. Now it kills the fish, you have to treat it before you can put it into your aquarium, but again they have a very bad effect on the bacteria inside of your intestinal tract. And there are other exotoxins, åcause there’s all kinds of things that will kill them. In fact, I recommend people once they get their bowel better, take Lactobacillus every night, take it at bedtime, it can only help you. We call this condition gut dysbiosis, abnormal critters, flora and fauna, and the result of this is something called leaky gut syndrome. Instead of getting good stuff into your system, you know, you’re only supposed to absorb at the most di-saccharides and di-peptides, that means, your body takes protein, chops it all up into little two units of amino acid and that’s what you take into your body. That’s what’s supposed to happen. But when you have leaky gut syndrome all kinds of stuff gets through because the border is not intact, so things are getting into your bloodstream that your body goes, uh-oh, this is a macromolecule, this is a big guy, this is dangerous. And that’s what happens over and over again. And it goes straight to the liver without passing "Go", there is no bypass. The portal circulation drains the intestinal tract and it goes through the inferior vena cava directly into the liver where the liver is like a big huge filter, it’s like, just imagine yourself with a spaghetti strainer, you know one of the wire ones, that’s how the liver acts, and it’s supposed to catch all of this stuff and clean your bloodstream so that when it gets to the heart and goes out to the rest of your body and into your brain everything’s fine. Well, the liver can do that for awhile, but after awhile it does become toxic. It only has 500 known functions, there are probably more we just haven’t discovered them yet, it’s a huge biochemical factory and one of its main things is to detoxify toxins. External toxins and internal toxins. If it wasn’t able to detoxify the estrogen that you gentlemen produce you’d all be walking around with breasts because 15% of your hormone production is estrogen. You can see this in men who drink a lot and are alcoholics, they start developing what we call gynecomastia, their breasts start to grow, because their body can’t detoxify the estrogen. We have the same problem, we have more estrogen than they do, and if your liver can’t detoxify it you increase your risk of breast cancer because the target organ for estrogen is your breasts and all kinds of changes occur because of that. So the liver is incredibly important and a toxic bowel really messes it up and what happens is there are small organelles inside the cells, I think this is like, this comes under my belief of a miracle, okay? Not only do we have cells in our body but inside the cell there are these littler structures known as organelles and these are called mitochondria. The mitochondria are these enzyme factories where they have all these enzymes lined up and they do all of the production of energy, theyä
But the thing about the mitochondria that I find as miraculous, is that every single one of them that you have came from your mother. Mitochondria are only passed through the egg, so they’re like an eternal maternal line, there are no mitochondria in the sperm, sorry guys, so there’s a whole branch of genetics now that is studying cellular mitochondria to try to determine how humanity spread out over the globe, because they can trace it back to the mitochondria change, which I think is just magic, I’m just fascinated by it. So we’ve already talked about the fact that the bowel makes your liver toxic and the other thing that does is environmental insult, you know, chemicals, whether it’s chemicals that you put on your hair, or chemicals you put on your lawn, or chemicals you put in your pool, or something you spray around the house to keep the cockroaches down, or something they put in your food to preserve it, all of that goes through your liver regardless, okay? So that’s the other issue that we face and in the United States, essential nutrient malnutrition. We are the most overfed and undernutritioned (I made that word up) people in the world. Our food is overprocessed, we have almost no antioxidant content in our foods anymore and that’s one of the major things the liver needs for this process. We really are struggling with the fact that the food we are getting into our system is not, it doesn’t contain the food value that our bodies need in order to function. The RDA’s, the recommended daily allowances, fascinating piece of information came out of this last cancer symposium that I was at, they were established at the end of World War II for the United States to decide how much food they needed to send over to Europe just to keep people alive so nobody would get scurvy and beriberi and all those deficiency diseases because you know we were shipping huge quantities over there. And it’s been turned into something entirely different. It has nothing to do with what we need, it has to do with what will just barely keep us alive. And so when you eat enriched flour products you know bread and macaroni that’s been enriched, there’s practically nothing in it, it’s just the bare bare minimum. And for children this is really a big problem, you see it in children all the time. Asthma in children has gone up 30% in the last 10 years. That’s scary, I think that’s really frightening. And the autoimmune diseases were almost unknown before 1940. So something’s going on, and this, it is my belief, is part of it.
So we have a triad of the liver, the bowel and the adrenals. So let’s talk just briefly about the adrenal glands, these little they’re probably no bigger than the end of your thumb and they sit on top of your kidneys which are no bigger than your fist and we call the pituitary the master organ but it’s the adrenals that are the master gland because the adrenal hormones keep everything in a state of balance when your pancreas pumps out insulin and brings your blood sugar down, your adrenals pump out epinephrine, cortisone, whatever you want to call it and bring the blood sugar back up. That’s its job, right, to oppose that process. When your heart rate slows down too far the adrenals pump the heart rate up. If you need to fight or flight or whatever, you know you have some activity, the adrenals are responsible for all of that, they shunt blood into your limbs, they sharpen your mental acuity, they increase your heart rate, they increase your blood pressure so you can get ready to perform. And as the process of metabolic toxicity progresses, the liver has a problem with cholesterol production and the lack of cholesterol, now this is going to shock you folks, we’re so ovewhelmed with the idea that cholesterol is bad for us, if you don’t get enough cholesterol you die, the adrenal glands need it to make coritsone as well as all of your sex hormones. One of the first things that happens to people when they get really sick, especially people with chronic fatigue and to some extent with these autoimmune diseases, is they lose their libido. Their body is not producing the sex hormones they require because their liver is so toxic. And the adrenals become less and less able to compensate and support your whole body function. I mean I have people who can go to stand up and you have to hold them because they’re kind of swaying until their blood pressure rises enough that they can get blood to their head so that they can function. That’s a primary sign of this. And the adrenals use the immune system to maintain your body in a state of balance. That’s really what they do. Both the adrenals and the immune system, I made reference to this before, are extensions of the central nervous system. The center of the adrenal, the adrenal medulla, are neurons, that’s what they look like, and that’s what they are. And if you look at white blood cells under an electron microscope they look like neurons, too. They have all the same receptors on the surface, they’re floating neurons. So we have this whole system which we think of as being just in our brain that regulates our entire body. As I said, I think it’s pretty miraculous.
So, what happens in the immune system? Well, as adrenal regulation fails, your immune system becomes very disregulated and it looks very confusing. There will be both hypervigilance and hypovigilance, a lot of allergies, a lot of these reactions with MS and RA and all this stuff going on and at the same time chronic infections and viruses and things, it’s because the adrenals are not doing their job. You know that medically they treat a lot of these conditions with cortisone. Cortisone is designed to bring the acute phase down. Well when you do that it has two effects: it has a temporary effect on the condition or the inflammation that’s currently happening but it further suppresses your adrenal gland, it turns off the feedback loop in your body that causes your pituitary to secrete to tell your adrenals to make more cortisone. That’s why when you take prednisone or cortisone you’re supposed to taper it. Because if you stop it abruptly you won’t have anything to fall back upon. And so in some ways the treatment is part of the problem. It potentiates this problem, because it’s throwing in another disregulating factor and cortisone is one of the few things I’m really opposed to. It really really worries me. Adrenal function and adrenal hormones are a complex mixture, there’s probably 30 or 40 of them and you take one of them out and give it to somebody you’re upsetting that entire picture. There’s no mineral corticoid regulation in that, that’s a whole different enzyme system and it isn’t in the cortisone. They’ve taken one little piece of it and synthesized it and used it because it does what it really does is it turns off those T-helper cells, right, that we talked back about in the beginning, so it brings the immune response down and it turns the suppressor cells on and the helper cells off and so they feel like they can squelch it by doing that in the short-term and eventually it doesn’t work anymore. That’s the problem. Now, this is a very very important statement. The body always attempts to maintain homeostasis, the bodies want to be well. They always try to come back to a state of health. So the goal, or the challenge, for me is to find where in the process the individual person is and do the proper intervention that will allow the body to do that. So every new person is like a new Chinese puzzle, you have to find out all the answers and all the pieces so that they know what to do for themselves. And the next slide talks about that, how to assess your immune status.
I can only say thank goodness it’s no longer by guess and by golly. You know, we did a lot of by guess and by golly for a lot of years. Um, we now have a number of tests that are extremely valuable and helpful and what this chart does is it shows you what I use to decide what tests we need to do. I guess you would call this my diagnostic paradigm if we had to put a label on it. When I’m taking a history, there are some things I want to know about, okay? I want to know what your appetite’s like. I want to know how your bowels function. I want to know how many times you’ve been ill or how many times you’ve taken antibiotics. Do you get a lot of upper respiratory infections? Do you get a lot of sinusitis? Do you get a lot of chest pain? Do you have reflux after you eat? I mean, I’ve got all of these questions, you can’t imagine, I want to know everything, more than you probably anybody would want to ask you. And out of this I start to get a picture, like frequent headaches? I have it under liver, it can also be stomach but it’s liver mostly. Sensitivity to perfumes and chemicals, that’s definitely a sign of liver problems. If you have back pain, I don’t know if any of you have ever had this experience, you have a sudden fright or an almost car accident that just misses you, something like that? And all of a sudden you feel like somebody’s been beating across here. Has anyone else ever had that experience? I’ve had it happen to me a couple of times because I’ve had a couple of near misses on the freeway. That’s adrenal pain, pure and simple, and when that happens it says your adrenals are under stress. And it tells you where to look if you’re the doctor. Fatiguability and dizziness upon arising, that’s again adrenal, and again we have this swollen gland and severe fatigue, all of this goes into the immune system. So, I go and I do my physical exam and I have a lot of things to look at. There’s a liver punch where if you hit somebody and there’s a jarring pain all through their body on the right side, they have liver inflammation, it’s just that simple we know that immediately. And there are some indicator fibers on the body that will tell you specifcally whether or not the liver is involved. You folks ever get headaches that start right here? That’s the liver fiber, the primary liver fiber in the whole body and I have so many people who come in and say, "Oh, I’ve just got this headacheä" and they put their hands right on it, there’s no way to miss it. I feel really fortunate that I’ve been taught to read the body like that, by the way, it’s a big help. So going down all of these things, including our blood pressure test, if you have a bad adrenal function and you go from lying to standing your blood pressure will drop, sometimes 20 or 30 points. It’s supposed to go up 10, it’s supposed to get your blood to your brain when you’re standing up, right? But I have so many people it just plummets. So from that point we go to the next which are the tests and each person has an array of testing that may or may not need to be done depending on their symptoms. I tend to be an absolute fanatic about bowel tests; anybody who’s been to my practice will tell you that. And there’s a really good reason. I’ve been doing this work for about five or six years now and in that time I’ve had a handful, it’s probably four, it might be five, people who came to me for help, and they’re people who years and years and years ago somebody gave them an allergy test and that was all they did. So these people have been avoiding those foods for all those years and now they’re allergic to everything else they’ve been eating because nobody ever checked their bowel function to see how they were digesting, if there was something abnormal there. These are the most pitiful people you have ever seen, they can’t eat anything, they get these horrendous reactions, two of them are frankly psychotic and can’t be helped. I mean one man we actually had to commit him. And it’s because this allergy phenomenon has gone to such extreme extent and it taught me an invaluable lesson, I feel terrible for them, but you have to start in the bowel. You’ve got to be sure that that gut is working, those people are digesting, they have the right flora and fauna, they’ve got their protections intact. And then anything you do after that is going to be effective, okay? For people with autoimmune disease, the most important test up here is the ELISA/ACT test. The ELISA/ACT test is an allergy test that I’m going to talk a little bit about because there’s a lot of confusion about allergies and the different kinds of testing. And then something else may be indicated. I usually do some kind of stool evaluation and a blood chemistry. We don’t get into the liver cleanse which is this oxidative stress and hepatic detox challenge until the very end, we never go to that until you’re sure everything else is better. What’s the point? Why would you put a clean filter into that stream if you haven’t got the downstream stuff taken care of. I recently had a man come to me. He’d gone through the entire liver detox program. He took time off from school, he went to Hawaii, which isn’t bad, but while he was in Hawaii he was miserable because he was doing this program and it lasted like 13 weeks. And he came to me because he was starting to feel bad again. So we went back here. We did a bowel exam on him. He’s got the worst bowel I’ve ever seen. He’s got 3 yeasts and a parasite just all kinds of stuff. They have a, they call it a dysbiosis index, 0 to 4 is normal, 6, 7 and 8 is mild, above 8 is moderate, 10 is severe. His was 18. And nobody had ever looked at it. So you’ve got to look at all the right things. This is the reason why we work the way we do, and we go into such depth with people. We’ve got to cover all the bases for people to really get well.
Let’s talk now a little bit about the ELISA/ACT test. Put Dr. Jaffe’s article up first. I just want you to know that this is available. This article, Immune Defense and Repair Systems in Biologic Medicine, Autoimmunity, Clinical Relevance of Biologic Response, Modifiers and Diagnosis Treatment and Testing, Dr. Jaffe is the director of Serammune Laboratories which does the ELISA/ACT test. This is one of the best articles I have ever read on the subject. It’s about 40 pages long and it’s quite detailed. You can call our office and we have copies of it if you’d like to receive one we’ll mail it to you. I have a lecture in the back (tapes available this evening, they’re $10.00, right?) that was based on this, and it has a lot of the charts wrapped around it as handouts. And I cover it in a little more English than he does. But if you’re one of those people who really likes the technical and who wants the bibliography, call for this article, we’ll be happy to give it to you, it’s all there.
This is a picture of the ELISA/ACT test. Now, I want you to hearken back to our initial conversation and that chart we looked at with those pictures about the immune system. Everything in that picture was delayed hypersensitivity reaction. Not the kind of thing that happens right away where you eat a strawberry and get a rash, that’s type I, right? You know what that is. That’s type I, acute IgE allergies. That’s the one thing the ELISA/ACT does not test for. That’s about 10 percent of the immune system, and I will tell you that people who have these allergies usually know what they are. They come in and they say to me, "I can’t get around ragweed or I sneeze my head off." You know, or I can’t do this or I can’t do that. The mystery exists in the rest of this, the stuff that’s circulating in your bloodstream. Because these reactions take place where people just can’t figure it out. And this what the ELISA/ACT test tests. And it’s the only test out there that does. The skin pricks, you know the ones that they do in the dermatologist’s office? That’s Type I. That won’t give you any useful information. It’s notoriously inaccurate for foods, and the reason is that most foods are a delayed hypersensitivity issue, they’re not an immediate issue, there’s a few but not very many. Mostly you’ll find inhalants and, you know, what the popular ones? Dust mites and molds and cat dander and you know that kind of stuff. That’s what shows us on those skin tests. But it’s not going to be the kind of thing that is going to help you with moderating what’s going on in your bloodstream. The ELISA/ACT does that. They test 300 foods, chemicals, additives, therapeutic foods (which is herbs) and they’ve added a whole panel of common chemicals (they’ve done food additives for a long time, things like saccharin and food colorings and preservatives and monosodium glutamate and all that stuff) but now they test you all these chemicals that you get exposed to with gasoline, polyester, plastics, all of that kind of thing is included in this test. That is the single most valuable addition they ever made to this panel, because what I have discovered over the years of doing this is that some of my sickest people are the people who are allergic to chemicals because they’re ubiquitous, you just can’t get away from them. And they cause many more problems than foods you can avoid, actually. The ELISA/ACT people send us back a very detailed printout with everything that you’ve reacted to and then they send back a booklet of descriptions that describes common sources of all of these things plus a little handbook of different thing they may or may not advise you to do. I take all that material and I customize it based on what we’ve learned about your history because I’ve worked with you and I prepare a rotation diet. Most people I put them on a rotation diet for 4 to 6 months, avoidance and rotation. That gives us time to get everything else straightened out. And once they start feeling better then you can look at adding some of these things back in. And depending on what the allergens are there’s all kinds of lifestyle modifications and it’s totally unique to every single individual. I sleep in a bed that’s nothing but cotton and down. I’m desperately allergic to polyester. You put me in polyester and I’m just trashed. And for years and years and years like everybody else, right? I had polyester sheets and polyester pillows and thinking I was doing a good thing. And I would get up in the morning like thisäit was absolutely awful. And everybody has a different thing. Some people are allergic to the kinds of chemicals you find in the indoor environment, that come out of the woods and the glues and the different thingsäwe get air purifiers, I mean there are ways to handle each of the different items and there are so many of them that it would be very difficult to go into it in any more depth than that. But the point of this conversation is, let me bring you back to the point. It doesn’t do a bit of good to get a label, right? It’s so interesting in our culture, I remember this because I was 18 years old, and nobody knew what was wrong with me. I was ecstatic when somebody told me I had fibromyalgia, gee, I thought it meant something. But it didn’t, there was nothing to go with it except the label, right? So you can get a label and I’ve had people in my office, they desperately want a label, they want to know what it is. But the truth is, it’s you reacting to your environment and until you know the ways in which that happens, you have no power over it. Being given a name, like somebody says, you have rheumatoid arthritis, to a doctor’s mind that sets you on a course, on a certain therapeutic protocol, they have stage I treatments and stage II treatments and stage III, they start with cortisone and they end up with gold. And all of these treatments one thing after the other there’s further and further tissue destruction, disability and pain. You know, in the doctor’s mind that label means something but it doesn’t mean that you’re going to get better. And I think that’s the piece that we miss so often. We all of us, I know that I did when I went into school, I started to be an M.D., decided about, thank goodness, halfway through before I accumulated a lot of student loan debt that I really wasn’t suited to go into medicine. I don’t like all those machines. I’m not oriented that way. But I had the point of view that it meant I would get better if there was something wrong with me. So it was a great shock to me when I started studying diagnosis in chiropractic school that that’s not what it means at all. A label is nothing more than an indication to the doctor which drugs to give you. Whether or not they’re effective and whether or not they understand the processes that underlie them. Some of my medical books are really scary because there’s so little we really understand. And any doctor who’s honest will tell you that. There’s an awful lot we don’t understand than that we do understand. And this paradigm that I presented to you is a changing paradigm, the liver panel, the oxidative stress, hepatic detoxification work, it’s brand new. It was developed in the last five years. So we’re constantly learning now, and we’re constantly out there looking at health from a functional point of view. Functional medicine is one of the names for it, complementary medicine, alternative health care’s been out there a long time so we’re looking for other names for it, but it’s all the same thing. It’s this idea that you can be well and given a little guidance and assistance that’s what I would wish for all of you. That you can be well. And if you are well then congratulations.
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Case Profiles
Case Profile (Allergies)"The first time I visited the Richards Family Health Center, I was barely able to walk 50 feet. My husband had to literally take care of me for two whole months. I visited several M.D.'s but none of them could find anything "wrong" with me. A few of them suggested that my state of health was psychologically induced, so they just told me to rest. All of the doctors prescribed anti-depressant drugs or some other related medication. I thought I was dying.
"A friend of my mom suggested that I visit the Richards Family Health Center. She spoke very highly of Dr. Richards, so I thought 'What do I have to lose?'
I was very surprised after my first visit because Dr. Richards actually LISTENED to everything I wanted to say. She thoroughly explained the treatment plan to a point where I was comfortable.
"After my first visit, I felt better. After three weeks of treatment, I noticed a big difference in my health. I had more energy, I could walk unassisted and I was feeling better about myself and life in general.
"I'd like to add that the staff is great. I feel very much at home whenever I come into the office and they make me feel like a whole person, not just a patient. If it wasn't for Dr. Richards and the Richards Family Health Center, I know I'd be in bed still wondering what's wrong with me. My husband and family can never thank her enough." --TO
Hidden food allergies are often the key to "unexplained" illness. It's very rewinding to assist someone in regaining a normal life.
Dr. Richards
Case Profile (Allergies, Intestinal)
I just got a bonus in my new job and I am writing to thank you. A year ago I could never have held a full-time job, much less out-performed younger people. I had little stamina and had trouble breathing.
Your evaluation disclosed that I had severe allergies, as well as Candida. Over the course of the past year, following your instructions, I eliminated polyester from my wardrobe and bedding, as well as other allergy-related substances, filtered my air and water, eliminated the Candida through a combination of diet and homeopathic treatment and, of course, received regular treatment in the office.
Today, I breathe normally. Also those nasty headaches are a thing of the past. I know how I feel is up to me, so with your guidance and my determination to feel better I have a great second half of my life to live.
Thank you very much for your incomparable counseling and treatment. I know I can say this for many, you have "saved" more than one of us. --Gratefully, CD
These are the experiences that make my practice worthwhile. Actually many of us are allerg