Can Low Dose Naltrexone (LDN) Treat Psoriasis?
I would like to talk about how helpful oral Low Dose Naltrexone is in treating psoriasis. I have used LDN in treating psoriasis. I showed you those two cases. One about the hand and the elbow pictures of psoriasis. It's very beneficial. My friend and colleague Pam Smith said she would watch the presentation, so I'm assuming she's out there somewhere. I've heard her lecture multiple times on autoimmune diseases and one of the things she always is a proponent of is having the patient stop eating gluten, do a GI repair protocol to restore the health of the gastrointestinal tract and then have the patient start taking Low Dose Naltrexone. This is the protocol for any autoimmune disease in general. Until proven otherwise, they probably have a gluten sensitivity. They may not have celiac disease but they have a gluten sensitivity, and I've had other colleagues that not only do they say reduce gluten they say get rid of grains in general because what happens with grains is you're grinding it into flour and that makes the food high glycemic. If you're eating flour produced products for not all but most of them or a lot of them and the high glycemic index foods are going to create more inflammation too, so in order to help the gut stop having the leak and having the inflammatory process then that makes a lot of sense.
Where I was going with this is I've seen a lot of patients who walk in who have psoriasis and they have bad diets and a lot of them are overweight. I'm not saying everybody with psoriasis, they're certainly not the case but a lot of the patients I saw with psoriasis are obese or overweight. Weight loss, decrease in proinflammatory foods, fixing the gut, oral Low Dose Naltrexone I think is one of the other adjunct therapies to put in the mix for sure.
Would any form of LDN stop psoriasis? I think LDN orally would be the most efficacious way to treat psoriasis because psoriasis is a very broad treatment or autoimmune presentation. The immune immunomodulatory effects from the oral LDN would be more beneficial to treat the disease than the topical. The topical is usually just a short-term periodic treatment. It is not going to address the underlying immune problem that's associated with psoriasis. Of course, when you're treating psoriasis it is the dietary changes, lifestyle changes, the GI repair protocols that are necessary to help the psoriasis never return or to be controlled. The patient should know I don't see a whole lot of resolution, the entire resolution of psoriasis. Maybe other people have but I've not seen it. It's more of a management disease. Extremely beneficial management process.