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.