Staying Away From Ticks

Previously we covered a little about ticks, one of nature's most unpleasant creatures. So unpleasant that we’ll want to avoid them as studiously as we can. How can we do that? For one we can avoid woody areas. Certain areas are known for ticks. Different areas are known for different types of infectious agents. Up on the mountain here near me there is a road called “Scratch Ankle” road. That’s because there are so many chiggers in that area that for whatever reason you can’t walk around in the grass there without getting chiggers. Why the chiggers like that particular grass on that particular spot on the mountain I don’t know.

Ticks are the same way. They love some areas and inhabit some areas more than others. If you’re going hiking in a national forest or state park, the forestry departments will actually know which areas are more likely to have ticks on them. First thing you can do is avoid those areas. The second thing is just physical protection: long pants, long sleeved shirts. I’d even recommend blousing your pants: tucking your pants legs down into the top of your boots and putting your shirt inside your pants so that they can’t crawl up under the pants or shirt. That way they all wind up at your neck as they crawl on up. It is definitely easier to inspect your neck than the groin or other areas.

One very common way to prevent ticks from latching on are chemicals. Deet is probably the most famous one. Then there is permethrin. Those are probably the two commonly used ones that you see in repellants for ticks. Deet being a repellant and permethrin being an insecticide. There’s a huge difference between the two. Deet in higher concentrations is quite effective at preventing tick bites, but it does need to be a higher percentage, probably 30-40%. Permethrin is an insecticide and that is a whole different animal.

Let’s flip back to deet just a minute. Deet is not highly toxic. There are a handful of deaths the last few years from deet and it was usually by people trying to commit suicide by drinking it. There’s virtually no known deaths. I think there was a child or two who died when their mother used deet on them 2-3 times a day for a period of a couple of months. I know that’s hard to fathom, but that sort of thing does happen. Don’t spray yourself down with it for weeks on end repeatedly, and certainly not children. Deet is heavily used in the military. You might occasionally see someone with a little rash or headache or drowsiness which might be associated with that but it’s certainly not a neurotoxin. It doesn’t damage the liver, kidneys or anything else. So if you’re going to pick one of these two it would be deet, as far as the chemicals.

Permethrin is a whole different animal. It’s an insecticide. It’s a neurotoxin. It’s a skin irritant. It decreases your immune system T-cell activity, K-cell activity, and lymphocyte activity. It is a very problematic chemical. It is not just found in bug sprays; it's also used as a pesticide on a lot of vegetables. That’s a good reason to wash your vegetables in hydrogen peroxide or other types of cleansing solution when you bring them into the house. Permethrin is known to cause cancer and damages liver, adrenals, kidneys even at minimal levels. Children seem much more susceptible than adults. To emphasize: if you’ve got to choose between permethrin and deet, it would certainly be deet.

Permethrin is nowhere directed to be put directly on the skin. On the other hand, deet can be sprayed on the skin and is OK’d by the FDA for that. Permethrin is strictly recommended for clothing if you are going to use it at all. Personally, if I get close to it I get neurotoxicity within hours. My ears start ringing and I have some other problems.

There are some quasi natural things which have been approved lately by the FDA for repelling ticks. Picaridin is a modified natural agent which appears to be quite effective at killing ticks also. If you’re wanting to go natural (which I would highly recommend) I’ve used natural oils for years with great success. Probably the most important one is the oil of lemon eucalyptus. That will repel ticks with a high degree of probability. Citronella is another one that is used. Soy bean oil is used and peppermint. These are oils because it is oil that seems to repel the ticks as well as keep them from biting. Essential oils, especially oil of lemon eucalyptus is important.

Next time I'll dive into Lyme disease.

The Summer Is Almost Here, & So Are Ticks

As the summer gets closer and closer I’m going to talk more about the particular maladies that affect these summer months. One disease that you might have heard of showing up more often during the hotter times of year is Lyme disease. If you’re going to talk about Lyme disease you have to talk about the vector of Lyme disease and that is ticks. Last week we talked about irritable bowel syndrome. This is only slight less pleasant. There are few things more icky than being bit by a tick and trying to pull that little blood sucker off. Then there’s the inflammation and irritation that follows, wondering if you’ve gotten a serious disease from it like Lyme’s or Rocky Mountain Spotted fever or one of the other number of diseases that they can carry. Tick bites are a big deal.

The amount of ticks out there is usually related to the number of deer in the area. The particular tick that carries Lyme disease, the black-legged tick (so if you’ve got a tick with white legs you don’t have to worry about Lyme’s disease) is also called the deer tick. This species of tick hang around deer, hence the relationship between deer and the ticks (and the name). Ticks carry this bacteria once they are infected with it, even as a nymph they carry the bacteria or whatever they have picked up the rest of their life.

I just alluded to the fact that there are different stages of ticks. There are larva, nymphs, and then there are adults. They all look about the same. If you’re using a magnifying glass, one’s just bigger than the other. I know that as a kid what we used to call larva now we would call seed ticks. You could literally have a hundred or two hundred on you real easy. An adult tick would lay an egg and they all hatched out. If you happened to walk right through where they had hatched out you could wind up with a lot of them on you. Those little things, you can hardly see them, which could be a big problem. It’s hard to get 100% of them off of you. Those usually occur later in the summer because the adults have to mature, find an animal to attach to and get some blood from before they can mature and lay their own eggs. Seed ticks are mostly a fall thing.

Where do ticks live? Their habitat is mainly woody, leafy areas with dried leaves or brush. They do not particularly like mowed lawns or groomed areas. The transition from yard to woods, the farther and more brushy you get the more likely you are to encounter ticks.

About 90% of all tick bites occur during May, June and July with June being the highest month. 90% of all tick bites and certainly Lyme disease occurs during those three months. This is prime season right now for tick bites. We’ll talk more about Lyme disease itself in my next post.

IBS: Quelling the Furor

I started talking about IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome) in my last post, exploring some ways that IBS affects us. So why does IBS happen? Neuro-transmitters are thought to be part of the problem. Maybe even serotonin levels. That’s why sometimes anti-depressants tried to treat IBS symptoms. Other possible areas are food allergies, dyes and grains. It’s kind of a hodge-podge of trial and error of trying to figure out what causes IBS.

Let me just make clear that bleeding, fever, weight loss, or persistent severe pain is not part of IBS. If that’s what is happening then there is something else going on. People with IBS should probably avoid large meals, meals that frequently cause bloating like cabbage, dairy products including cheeses, certain medicines, caffeine and coffee. Caffeine and coffee seem to be on every list. They certainly don’t appear to be very healthy for us. Last, but not least, avoiding stress, conflict, and emotional upsets are always factors in mitigating IBS.

Women have it a little bit more often than men. It seems that during menstrual periods it may be worse. We don’t know if that’s just because you feel worse during those times, thus everything is worse, or if it really is worse during menstrual periods.

It’s largely untreated. Probably 70% of the irritable bowel people out there don’t go to doctors, probably for good reasons. Doctors don’t have any great treatment or pills and tend to give laxatives, fibers, or antidepressants. That can be worse than constipation if you’ve got that. There are no clear cut answers.

There is a new drug approved by the FDA, lotronex. But, it has some pretty serious side effects (PDF link). You have to have a serious problem to even think about trying that.

As far as naturopathics are concerned probably the best treatment is coated peppermint oil if you can find that or get a compounding pharmacist to make it up. Other natural remedies are ginger and chamomile, valerian root, rosemary, and lemon balm. Those are how you would approach that from a more natural perspective.

So there it is in a nutshell. IBS is a serious problem in that it affects a huge quantity of our population. There is no great medicine treatments for the symptoms and there is certainly no treatment that will cure it. But we do know that stress is a huge factor in irritable bowel syndrome.

IBS: Uncomfortable Times

There are certain topics we are more comfortable talking about than others. In this post we’re talking about an uncomfortable one mentally and certainly physically if you have it: IBS, or Irritable Bowel Syndrome.

It’s estimated that 10-20% of the population of the world has irritable bowel syndrome. Theoretically that’s one of every five people listening in on this call today have problems with irritable bowel. It may be the most common syndrome that affects more people than anything else out there.

Some of us have different ideas and constructs about just what irritable bowel is so let me go over some of the ideas on that. First there’s abdominal pain even though there are a lot of things that cause abdominal pain. Discomfort and pain are the harbingers of IBS. Sometimes there is constipation and interestingly enough sometimes there is diarrhea. Even more interesting is that it alternates between constipation and diarrhea, sometimes in the same stool. Difficult to pass and infrequent bowel movements are common. People frequently have urgency with those which can be a significant problem if you at WalMart or out on a date or having a nice dinner. It can be very inconvenient. That is the major issue. It’s not only uncomfortable but it is inconvenient.

Like many things, as you’ve discovered while we’ve covered a number of different topics, we in the medical establishment don’t know what causes it and a lot of times we don’t know how to definitively treat it. Frequently treatments consist of mere symptom management and that is certainly true for irritable bowel syndrome. We don’t have a clue what causes it. We know some things that affect it. We know that dairy products bother some people, among other different foods, and there may be some allergy situations as well. Whole grains are indicated as a possible irritant. There are a lot of different ideas there but it doesn’t affect everybody the same so there is no definitive answer as to what to avoid. It’s mostly trial and error with each individual that has the syndrome.

There is good news too. It doesn’t really seem to change the structure or the function of the normal parts of the bowel. They don’t get changed like with Celiac Sprue or Crohn’s colitis or things like that. It’s not known to lead to other diseases. That’s also good news. While it is uncomfortable and inconvenient it is not known to lead to other serious problems.

So why does IBS happen? We’ll talk about the possibilities next post, so stay tuned.

Sunlight: The Good (Or, How To Make It Good)

I interviewed a local nutritional specialist (who is a brilliant person, by the way) in preparation for this series on sunlight. He only had one recommendation. I usually don’t like to mention name brands or anything, but he said Life Extension had currently the only sunscreen that he would personally use out of a bottle. Otherwise, there are some other good things that can help protect you. Shea butter is one of those that is known to help block UVA and UVB. If I’m going out in the sun for any period of time I’ll take some Vitamin E supplements, at least 400 IU’s if not 800. I’ll take a couple of grams, that’s 2000 milligrams or more, of Vitamin C. You should probably take 800 IU’s of Vitamin D (what you get from sunlight, as we talked about previously) or more. Ironically, that actually is a good damage preventer for sunlight itself. Certainly you want to be taking Vitamin D all winter because that’s what you are not getting when you’re not out in the sunlight during the winter.

When I was in China a couple of summers ago there were Chinese out sun bathing. They were putting something on them. They were out there all day with it and didn’t get sunburned. It turned out that it was green tea extract. Because of the anti-oxidant properties, they would put green tea extract on them and they did just great. I was very impressed with the anti-oxidant properties of that. Now I don’t think any scientific, double-blind studies have been done on that for UVA and UVB so I don’t know that I could scientifically recommend it, but they were real happy with the results.

Maybe the most unheralded product for sunblock and sunscreen out there is probably MSM which is what it goes by in the nutrition shop. MSM is maybe one of the best things you can possibly take as an oxidizing prevention agent for sun damage as you are going out in the sun. I would take at least 1000 milligrams (one gram) of that, if not two, if I were going to be out in the sun for any period of time.

The amount of sun exposure varies according to your altitude. If you’re in Colorado and you are out there 10 minutes you can get burned on a sunny day because there is no atmosphere between you and sun. If you’re down at sea level and a little bit of tan, it might take you 30 minutes to get enough sun. I should also mention that the color of your skin affects how quickly you get enough healthy sun radiation.

There are a lot of different things that affect the amount of sun that you get. I mentioned the time of day: you might want to stay out of direct sun between 11 and say 3 o’clock when it is directly overhead. Also, don’t forget good old clothing. They even rate sports clothing and its sunblock ability. Get out there and get 15-30 minutes of sun and then put on your sunscreen that has UVA and UVB in it. Take your Vitamins E, C and D , and your MSM. Maybe you even want to drink a little green tea and spread a little shea butter on yourself. Then put your clothes on after a little while or just get out of the sun. Enjoy it more in the mornings or in the evenings. Your skin will be happier for it. You’ll live longer and everything will be well with your skin.

Sunlight: The Ugly and the FDA

Last time I started talking about UV radiation and ended with a note about melanoma and how sunlight can actually help prevent melanoma, in moderation. It’s currently the recommendation that you get 15 – 30 minutes of direct sunlight a day on as much of your skin as you would care to bare to whoever is around. This is a moderate amount that is very beneficial for manufacturing vitamins, preventing melanoma and things like that.

Beyond that you get into some trouble with damaging the skin. The way UVA damages the skin is through DNA mutation, and as we’ve all heard at some point in our life that can lead to cancer. There were a number of types of skin cancer, whether it is basal cell or melanoma or different types of skin cancer, that can arise from too much exposure. It also wrinkles the skin, damages the skin in other ways. Too much sun is not a good thing.

What about sun screens? We’ve all heard, yes, lather it on. Now we’re hearing it may not be effective and some are saying that it, in itself, is damaging. There is a huge conundrum, a huge mental problem going on. Do or don’t I? Let’s talk about those for just a minute.

Part of that problem has been caused by the government standard, the FDA nomenclature, if you will, the wording that they use. The SPF (sun protection factor) only takes into account the UVB part of the spectrum. Well, that’s the part that causes basal cell carcinomas and weathering of skin and some of the tanning. We thought as long as we were protecting the skin with UVB protectants, PABA and those type of compounds, we were doing a good thing. The problem is there is that other part of the spectrum, the UVA part that most of the common things in sunblock and sunscreen don’t block. That’s a part of the ultraviolet area that causes melanoma and other problems. So we haven’t been protecting ourselves for some time against a very, very harmful part of the light spectrum.

Now what do you do? They are trying to come out with some new sunscreens which protect against both A and B UV rays. Some people in the state of California (which is always on the forefront of what causes cancer it seems) are actually suing most of the major manufacturers of these sunscreens because they say they mislead the public into believing they were protected. They say it lasts 6 hours when it usually only lasts an hour or two. There is a whole lot of controversy in the area of sunscreens and sunblocks right now.

Next time I’ll tell you what I do when I go out into the sun, and what I think works best to protect your skin.

Sunlight: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

We’ve all had that experience where we’ve gotten too much sun. That night you’re laying in bed but you can’t sleep. All the sheets come off and you can’t make the air conditioner run quite fast enough to be cool, because you are on fire.

All of that because of a little sunshine. Soon it will be the season of sunshine and we all have a tendency to get a little too much at times. It happened at my house with some friends visiting over the weekend a while back. There was a young lady who was just white as a sheet but she was pinker than my wife’s roses when she left.

Sunlight – is it a good thing? Is it a bad thing? Well, yes. Like many other things it is good in small quantities but bad in large quantities. There’s been this huge debate for so long about sunlight and sun protection. At one point in time the standard medical dogma was “avoid all sunlight”. Well, that made cancer rates go up. We’ve specifically learned now that not getting enough sunshine (because of Vitamin D production) is a cause of cancer. Let’s go back to the concept of moderation; everything in moderation.

What type of sunlight do we get? There are two major types that are of concern; UVA and UVB. These are part of the sunlight spectrum, way down on the ultraviolet end of the wavelength, that tend to be damaging and yet also can be very helpful. For instance, Vitamin D is manufactured when that particular wavelength of sun hits us. Vitamin D is a wonderful thing. It gives us strong bones. It’s essential for incorporating calcium into the bones. It prevents rickets, osteoporosis later in life. So there are a lot of good things that Vitamin D does.

The scare with sunlight has been melanoma. Melanoma rates have been dramatically rising. There was this “stay out of sunlight because you’ll get melanoma” mantra that doctors would repeat. But now you have to scratch your head and say, “Did melanoma rates rise after people went indoors under fluorescent lighting for most of their life, or when they were out in the sunshine most of their life?” That makes you beg the question: is not some sunlight good for you? Again, standard medicine has come full circle to say yes, you need some sunlight every day, even to prevent melanoma.

Sunlight is a particularly interesting topic to me, so I'll continue to talk more on this subject soon.

Get A Little Closer

If you've been following the blog and wanted to know a little bit more about me and what I do, now you can. MeetDrBen.com has just been redesigned and it offers a bunch of new opportunities for you to keep in touch with me and my work. Take a look if you've got the time.

Ending the Rash

Well, last week we talked a little about what causes eczema, or at least what little we know of what causes eczema. But what about getting rid of it once we have it? The first thing many people do is use lotions and creams. Cold compresses can be used to decrease the itching caused by the histamine released by the white blood cells. Then people usually use over the counter steroid creams which have some benefit. If that doesn’t work they go to the doctor and they get the prescription strength steroid creams to decrease the body’s immune response to that area. Sometimes those areas can be so nasty that they become infected. Then standard medicine would treat that with an antibiotic. Certainly antihistamines are frequently given since histamine is involved in that whole inflammatory process.

In the “good old days” we used to use tar preparations with coal tar in it. I’m not sure what we were doing but doctors thought that was mildly suppressing the immune response. It was just really messy and ugly and hard to get people to put that on themselves. It’s still a valid therapy in terms of suppressing the immune response, but definitely not something doctors do now.

Interestingly enough, ultraviolet or sun exposure can dramatically improve eczema lesions. That’s always interesting. We’ve had this huge reaction for several decades against sunlight. Of course, as the saying goes: “nothing in excess, everything in moderation”. I’ve always said we probably need 30 minutes of direct sunlight a day. Of course, Vitamin D has gone down in a lot of people. Bone fractures have gone up because we’re not getting the Vitamin D the body produces when in sunlight. Sunlight is good in a lot of ways, from preventing depression during the middle of winter to keeping your bones solid with Vitamin D production. I won’t go too far down that rabbit hole right now, but I could talk a lot about the health benefits of sunlight.

Naturopathically you would want to probably use some extracts of echinacea. If you’re going to use something topically that would be something like comfrey extract, plantain, burdock, dandelion, black walnut or even pansy extracts have been used for that in the past. All those are good. Evening primrose oil, again, has some healing qualities and can be of value there. B12 is thought by some to have some benefit in eczema. Zinc can always be of some benefit for anything involving the skin.

There are some new suggestions about very acid water being an effective treatment. I’ve seen several patients in recent months who have been cleared of their eczema and even psoriasis using acidic water. That is very interesting. We don’t have a clue why that is working, like a lot of other medicines. Just an observation as I’ve seen several people use that for eczema and psoriasis. I’m always surprised at some therapies and amazed, but I’ve always got my ears open and am always interesting in hearing what works. If you all have any wonderful, strange remedies out there for things that nobody else knows about or is not widely disseminated you are welcome to share with me at any time.

The Rash to End All Rashes

Today’s topic is eczema. A lot of us have had eczema at one time or another or had a child who had it. The NIH says there are about 15 million people in the United States on a yearly basis affected by eczema. That’s not insignificant. Eczema tends to be more prevalent as a child. The good news is that it usually diminishes as we get older. But, as you know there are some people who have just a terrible time with eczema. My daughter didn’t get it classically as a infant. She was probably 7 or 8 before she got it. Then she had it horribly for a number of years. Some people get it when they get older. In some it doesn’t show up until they are adults.

What is eczema? It’s always interesting to look at some of the really big diseases that affect a whole lot of people. With all the billions of dollars that we do in medical research every year and all we think we know, a lot of times we still don’t know a lot about some diseases. Eczema is one of those that we don’t know why people get it.

Some people think skin allergens. Other people think dust mites. Others think chemicals. Part of it is probably a disordered immune response. It is just not well defined. It usually appears as a rash on kids on forehead, cheeks, forearms and scalp. On adults it’s a more classical case of appearing on the neck, elbows, knees and ankles. It looks a little different in adults and children.

The good news is that it’s not contagious. You don’t have to worry about catching it. The bad news is, if your mom or dad had it and your grandma and grandpa you’ll have some pretty good odds that you’ll have some trouble with it, too. There is certainly a genetic component to it.

Prevention ideas include trying to prevent coming into contact with whatever it is that is stirring you up first. If it’s wool, change to polyester. If there are a lot of dust mites in the home you try to change the environment. If there are chemicals, remove those. In the prevention/treatment arena you can moisturize those areas with lotions and creams to try to keep those physical things from encountering the areas of concern. At the same time moisturizing is believed to help eczema, not just prevent it. I can’t honestly say I’ve seen a lot of results from that when I’ve treated eczema, but that’s the first thing you want to do medically.

It’s interesting that sudden temperature changes seem to stir eczema up. It’s one of those observed phenomena that medicine doesn’t have a clue as to why that would be so. Sweating and overheating is thought to, but I see a lot of it in winter. One thing for sure is that we absolutely know that stress encourages and makes people with eczema get worse or pop out when they haven’t been having any trouble with it lately. Some people believe there are food allergies involved. Again, there is a lot we don’t know.

Next post I’ll talk about what we can do, medically, to treat eczema.

Your Mind Is A Muscle

Continuing our discussion about Alzheimer’s disease, we are going to ask: who does it happen to? The huge majority of victims are over 65 years old. In fact it is considered an age-related dementia. It seems like women are in a preponderance of 16% to 11% over age 71. But you have to remember those are statistics. They may not reveal the whole truth because we know that women live longer than men and this is an age-related disease. If you take out the fact that women may live longer, at a given age the percentages are pretty close to equal.

Again, there are only a few things very definable about this disease. One of those is that we know for a fact that more educated people don’t’ get the disease at the same rate. For instance, if you have 12 years of education or less as opposed to someone with 15 years of education you have a 35% greater risk. That’s huge. It harkens back to the saying, “If you don’t use it, you lose it.” And we also know that staying active with your mind will help delay onset of dementia.

Race also is a factor in that African-Americans tend to have Alzheimer’s more than Caucasians, but when you take out the education factor then it becomes pretty equivalent again. Just about the only statistic that really matters is education and how much you use your brain over the years. That’s the take-home message there if you are still younger.

There are a number of drugs out there to treat Alzheimer’s, and needless to say they are all very, very expensive drugs. None of them have been shown to delay the onset of Alzheimer’s or to change the ultimate outcome, though they may help for a few months. Of all the meta-analysis studies (meta-analysis is when you go back and study all the Alzheimer’s studies and what different people were on and took and tried, whether they were living in the Bahamas or North America, what kind of water they drank or what kind of toothpaste or whatever) the thing that pops out is it seems the people who have taken Advil-type preparations, non-steroidal anti-inflammatories (that’s what we call that group of medicines as a general rule) have delayed onset of dementia as a whole more than those that don’t take non-steroidals. It seems like people who are always taking this for their arthritis or whatever, and take it on a continual basis for a number of years don’t get Alzheimer’s at the same rate as the general population.

If there is a drug that can help you with your Alzheimer’s I would go and put my money on a $2 bottle of generic ibuprofen rather than a $20 - $30 a pill drugs that big Pharma has come out with. More is not better here. New is not better than old.

Stress, of course, is always a factor in disease. Stress is the cause of disease. Certainly stress causes cortisol release, causes all the growth hormone to go down, all of the good things to go down and all the bad things to go up. So you’ve just got to figure that in here some place, although they really haven’t done any honest studies on that.

Alzheimer’s is intriguing. It’s a little bit fearful and concerning to us, especially as we get older toward that magic number of 65. Take your Advil, stay out of stress and keep studying. Keep learning, keep growing as a person.

Losing the mind to Alzheimer's

Alzheimer’s is fascinating and intriguing and it’s concerning. At any point in time, many of us are starting to get up there in age. I’m certainly one of them.

It’s of great interest because we see it in action. People can, if we can use the vernacular, “lose their minds” and it’s very sad. It’s pretty scary to realize that we are all aging also. We think about it. Especially when we see someone in that state we really think about it. We just have to wonder, “Am I going to lose my mind some day? Is that going to be me?”

Probably 20 years ago we had never heard the term Alzheimer’s. We called it senile dementia or this or that. As we improved imaging technology, mainly CT and MRI we began to see more specific symptoms related to structural changes in the brain. That’s when Alzheimer’s started becoming more of a thing. Today, Alzheimer’s represents 70% of all dementia. So it’s basically what we used to call senile dementia. It seems to be increasing and getting worse.

Let’s define what it looks like and what it is. It’s a loss or decline of memory or other cognitive skills. That can include speech, hearing and understanding speech or reading the written language. It can be failure to recognize or identify object in terms of being able to feel them. You put a cell phone in an Alzheimer sufferer’s hand and they can’t tell you that’s a cell phone. You put a familiar letter opener in their hands and they can’t tell that’s a letter opener or scissors or something like that. Or it can be motor skills that you lose, the ability to walk and function. Or it can even be abstract thought and judgment and the ability to carry out a task.

Those are all different things, from being able to identify something in your hand to being able to carry out a complex, abstract task. That’s because different areas of the brain can be more affected than others, or sooner. It’s all according to what area of the brain is affected, that’s what would show up first, if you would. Eventually the whole brain is involved. It is a whole brain disease. It’s just that it is going to show up some place first. That’s why it appears one of those places before it does the others. It will eventually encompass them all.

The economic impact is almost incomprehensible. Just the loss of income to the nation from the care-givers, someone who has to stay home and take care of this person because they are a danger to themselves and their family, is a staggering $100 billion a year. That doesn’t include people who are hospitalized or in nursing care facilities.

What happens in Alzheimer’s? The truth is, we’re still learning a lot about it. We know a few things and there’s a whole lot we don’t know yet. There are about 100 billion nerve cells in your brain. Each one of those nerves may have millions if not up to a billion other little touch points where it touches on other nerves. If we can borrow a phrase from Saddam Hussein, it’s the mother of all networks. It’s the ultimate network, your brain. It’s just incredible. Each cell will connect millions and millions and millions of times to other nerve cells and axons (the shaft of the nerve, going from one to the other). So this is an extremely complex, intricate, inter-related piece of matter that we’ve got between our ears.

Those little connections are called synapses. We know for a fact that these synapses become damaged and start to disappear as Alzheimer’s progresses. As they disappear, the nerve axons begin to die and then the nerve cells themselves begin to die. These nerves have different signal patterns than healthy nerves. You begin to lose the interconnectedness of all the different synapses: the reason why Alzheimer victims begin to forget things. Then there’s a whole lot of dead debris laying around the brain, if you would, from all these dying cells.

We notice that there’s a substance that we call amyloid there, or specifically beta-amyloid which is a little tiny protein fragment. There’s a huge debate about whether this is the cause or the result. Is it an over production of beta-amyloid? Okay, let’s figure out how to stop the production, or help the body clean it up. We know that the beta-amyloid does jam the synapses, the little connections we were talking about. Ultimately those little pieces of beta-amyloid build up into plaque which we can physically see on MRI.

Another hallmark on the cellular level of Alzheimer’s is there are tangles inside the cells, tangles of proteins inside the nerve cells themselves. They have given those a name: “tau twist”. The other thing we know is there’s a huge amount of inflammation and oxidative damage due to highly reactive oxygen species in the brain. Those are called oxidizers. You neutralize those with anti-oxidants. But there’s a problem because a lot of anti-oxidants don’t cross the blood/brain barrier very well. So your normal, routine anti-oxidants might not be quite as effective. There are a few that do cross the blood/brain barrier. It seems the medical community would do well to best pay attention to those.

Next time I post I’ll talk more about who is more at risk for Alzheimer’s, and what treatments exist for this terrible disease. Stay tuned.

Treating Pneumonia

Before we continue our talk about pnuemonia, first I’ll cover (and re-cover) a few important basics about the disease.

How do you get pneumonia? Well, if it’s community acquired your immune system may be already compromised a little bit. We know what causes that. It’s called stress. I’ve already mentioned in my previous posts that age is a factor. Smoking and drinking are certainly issues there. Heart disease, lung disease such as asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) or emphysema can be factors. Finally, poor health, AIDS and chemotherapy, basically people whose immune system is damaged can have a higher risk of pneumonia.

If you’re a hospital patient and you’ve received gaseous anesthesia (which almost all anesthesia has gasses involved with it these days) that just hammers your immune response. It drives your immune response into the ground. Then, you’re probably having a surgical procedure. Remember, the body can’t only fight infection, it’s having to repair all that surgical damage. So the immune system is, by nature of the procedure, compromised when you’ve had a surgery and gaseous anesthesia. That’s probably one of the reasons that we have a problem with pneumonia in the hospitals. Then, of course, the bacteria in the hospitals have all been talking to each other and remember so they can communicate a resistance to an antibiotic. You can begin to see that the problem can really snowball in a hospital setting.

How is it diagnosed? Your history and a stethoscope with trained ears can usually make the diagnosis. If the doctor is not sure or they need to help pay for the X-ray machine or they want to be totally confident for everybody, they can do an X-ray, and certainly blood cultures may be appropriate to check for circulating bacteria in the blood at some point.

For treatment, have plenty of fluids and appropriate pain medicine for the pain. Again, as I mentioned earlier antibiotics are a cornerstone for treatment by standard medicine.

Naturopathically, probably the number one important things are Vitamin C followed closely by fresh garlic. Cayanne pepper is thought to be important as well as vitamin A, and of course some other immune stimulants: echinacea, shitake, beta 1-3 glucan, uva ursa, una de gato (otherwise known as Cats’ claw), jatobá, and alfalfa. These are a number of things that can be beneficial in the natural arena and I would certainly encourage them.

Most importantly: how not to get pneumonia. If it’s hospital pneumonia, don’t go to the hospital if you can help it. As far as community based pneumonia, number 1, get out of stress. So much of what I talk about in terms of disease is so directly linked to stress.

The natural things we mentioned, probably garlic and good doses of vitamin C and zinc are your greatest preventative medicines there. Again, staying out of stress, living life in love and integrity and forgiveness, and a well-rounded diet of supplements will go a long way in preventing most diseases, but especially pneumonia.

Feeling Breatheless?

Pneumonia is a pretty life impacting disease, and when you’ve got it you’ll know it’s serious.  It starts out with a dry cough and progresses to a wet cough, usually a productive, green-yellow, wet cough which can even have an odor to it.  Breathlessness is the big symptom.  Sometimes people don’t seek help until they’re short of breath.  They can’t get enough oxygen because the lung tissues are compromised.  They swell because of all the white blood cells moving in to combat the infection.  The membrane gets thicker in the lung and the oxygen can’t get across the membrane.  There’s one thin cell wall between the oxygen-laden air you breathe in and the red blood cells that pick it up which gets so broad that the oxygen can’t get across there to get picked up by the red blood cells.  The breathlessness is nothing mystical.  It’s just a physical distance that’s created by the swelling.

People lose their appetite during a pneumonia bout because when they don’t have enough oxygen their body knows that they don’t need to be doing anything extra like walking or doing this or that.  At the same time digesting food takes a lot of energy and a lot of blood flow to go down there and take all the enzymes and to carry the food away and to process the food in the liver.  Loss of appetite is a hallmark of pneumonia.

Then, of course, you can get aches and pains all over.  Frequently pleurisy can develop when you get pneumonia – a little fluid between the lung wall and chest wall.  That will be significant pain.  That’s not a little bit of pain, that’s sharp pain.  Usually every breath you take you know about it.  

Complications include pleurisy as well as breathing difficulties that can become so acute that you need to be hospitalized with oxygen.  Certainly if I could I’d want to do the oxygen at home.  Hey, we know that up to 18% of the people who die in the hospital die of pneumonia.  I don’t want to go there, right?  You might get another infection on top of it such as septicemia, where these bacteria wind up in the bloodstream.  The lungs are extremely thin.  They are one cell thick and a lot of times that’s a very thin cell that’s kind of spread out where there’s no nucleus or anything.  But the cell gets real thin there.  It’s fairly easy for bacteria to get into the bloodstream from the lungs.  When you’ve got bacteria circulating in the blood then you’ve got a serious life-threatening issue right then.  

Of course, I’m not advocating that someone not go to the hospital if they’re in need for medical attention.  But if all you’re doing at the hospital is sitting in a bed receiving oxygen, that could be something you can do at home and not worry about the increased risk of bacterial infections you might find at a hospital. 

We’ll talk about treatments for pneumonia next time.

Drowning Alive

As I normally do when I begin a talk about a particular health concern, I like to begin by talking about how relevant this concern is by listing a number of statistics that show the impact of the subject at hand. In this case I’m going to talk about pneumonia.  Many of us have had pneumonia in our lives.  Over 1% of the population every year has pneumonia.  That’s pretty big for a disease that can impact life pretty harshly.  That’s almost as common as getting a cold.  In the general population a little over one out of 100 people every year gets pneumonia.  It’s the fifth leading cause of death; 65,000 people a year die from pneumonia.  It’s the 8^th cause of death if you are in a hospital.  The economic cost is about $40 billion a year.  

It’s interesting to see how the medical community divides up pneumonia.  You would think they would divide it by bacteria, and viruses.  Instead they divided it up into hospital-acquired pneumonia and community-based pneumonia.  You’ve got to know there’s a problem in our hospitals if they are dividing diseases according to whether you got them in the hospital or you got it at home or out in the community.  That’s just a little reality check there.

There are different types of pneumonia according to the normal categories of bacterial, viral, fungal, and inflammatory pneumonias.  We talked a little last week about bronchitis.  That’s where that type of pneumonia would begin.  

In the viral category you have flu which we’re all familiar with.  There are two categories of people that pneumonia is really dangerous for: infants and folks over 65.  If you look at that, probably the danger for those over 65 is influenza.  If you’re talking about an infant it’s a whole different category.  Respiratory seneschal virus and other childhood viruses, even chickenpox, can become pneumonia and childhood diseases like measles.  But RSV  is certainly the biggest one among children.

Almost always, it’s a standard in medicine that we should not put people on antibiotics who get a viral infection.  However, pneumonia is probably the perennial disease that gets treated, day in and day out, with an antibiotic because if you’ve already got pneumonia your lungs are already significantly compromised.  Even if it did start with a virus, there are hundreds of different kinds of bacteria in our lungs already as part of the normal bacteria.  One of those is soon going to take over because your lungs are immuno-compromised from using up your immune system fighting the viral particles there.  Sooner or later if you have a viral pneumonia you’re probably going to come down with a subsequent bacterial pneumonia.  So it’s pretty standard operating procedure in medicine, certainly if you’re admitted or if you are out-patient, if you get the diagnosis of pneumonia to go ahead and start you on a antibiotic.  

Doctor’s are trying to back off of antibiotics because we’re getting all these MRS’s (methicillin resistant bacteria).  These bacteria are smart little rascals.  They can even transfer knowledge of immunity or resistance toward antibiotics between themselves.  You may have gotten an antibiotic and then you sneeze or kiss or share some of your bacteria with somebody else, and the bacteria you gave to someone else can transfer the knowledge of resistance to that bacteria to your bacteria.  So these are not just dumb little bugs multiplying out there that we’re dealing with.  There is certainly some intelligence and knowledge that they swap among themselves.  

Certainly there are atypical pneumonias like Legionnaires' disease.  Back in 1976 a bunch of people came down with an infection, pneumonia, at the head table right under an air-conditioning vent at a American Legion conference in Philadelphia.  That’s how the bacteria got its name.  Six out of 8 of those people at the head table died.  Other people died and a lot got really sick from pneumonia from that bacteria which was in an air-conditioning system.  Other people have died since that happened.

You probably heard on the news in 2003 about SARS, acute respiratory syndrome.  Again, that’s viral.  Then there are other bugs such as TB.  It is still out there and it’s making a comeback.  Certainly fungi can cause pneumonia.  Funguses are much more important if you consider a person who is getting drugs for cancer treatment or an AIDS patient, someone whose immune system is compromised.  Those are the people you really watch out for with fungal infection.

Then there are physical ways you can get pneumonia.  If you were to breathe in some caustic chemicals with a lot of alkali or acid in it that could burn your lungs. You might also aspirate some food and the bacteria that was in the food or the bacteria in your lungs could begin to grow. The immune system doesn’t just fight bacteria and infection.  It also takes care of damaged tissue and cleans up the debris and lays down new tissue and does repairs. While your immune system is mopping up all the damage from the aspirated food it has to be able to take care of any bacterial infection as well.  The immune system is a multi-tasking genius that our Creator designed in our bodies. 

Next time I’ll talk a little about what pneumonia looks like and then we’ll deal with the treatments.