LDN Video Interviews and Presentations

 

Nellmarie Bodenstein, GP - Clinical use of LDN in South Africa - 2022 Conference (LDN, low dose naltrexone)

 

 

Akbar Khan, MD - Cancer - 2020 Conference; Bahamas (LDN, low dose naltrexone)

 

 

Paul from the US talk about LDN, Chronic Pain, TMJ, Cancer and Sleep Issues

Paul Pain.mp4

Lindda: Welcome to the LDN Radio Show brought to you by the LDN Research Trust.  I'm your host Linda Elsegood.  I have an exciting lineup of guest speakers who are LDN experts in their field.  We will be discussing Low Dose Naltrexone and its many uses in autoimmune diseases, cancers, etc.   Thank you for joining us. 

Today I'd like to welcome our guest Paul from the United States who takes LDN for sleep issues and pain.  Thank you for joining us today, Paul.  

Paul: Glad to be here. 

Linda: Can you tell us how long ago it was when you started having issues?   

Paul: I can say that I've had TMJ pain since the 1990s and neck pain probably since the early 2000s.  I spent a lot of time at doctor's visits investigating how to resolve those and never really found a solution to reduce the pain. The best I could do was massage, I think, which helped a little bit but only helped for a few hours at most.  It really disturbed my sleep.  I have a very hard time sleeping.  I fall asleep and within an hour I wake up because of neck pain, and I have to turn.  I probably bought a thousand dollars worth of pillows trying to resolve the neck pain and sleep, but it's very disturbing. I have an Ora ring, which measures my sleep disturbances, and it's basically a bunch of lines indicating movements non-stop throughout the night.  

Typically I'd wake up four or five times a night and have to get up because I was in so much pain.  I don't know why, but after the last 10 years it got to the point where my legs would start aching while I was sleeping.  It doesn't bother me during the day, but the longer I slept, the more my legs ached.  I had to get up, so I was typically getting up four or five times a night.  I could blame prostate issues, but it really wasn't,  it really was sleep issues and neck pain and leg pain that would cause me to lose sleep, and I had very, very bad sleep.  I investigated having surgery in my jaw and surgery in my neck.  Jaw surgery is not covered by insurance and it was like fifty thousand dollars out of pocket, and with a only a 30% chance that would be successful.  Neck surgery was probably a little bit more. It was paid by insurance, but it had a lot of risk to it as well.  

So I've never pursued that, and last year about this time I started investigating stem cells as a way to do it, and the cost of that was between ten and twenty thousand dollars, and you go to a foreign country and you don't know really know what you're getting, and nobody had any good data to say that it was going to be successful in treating my pain and whatnot. Then I stumbled across LDN, and…

Linda: Hang on a minute before you get to LDN, Paul.

Paul: Okay sure.

Linda: What medication were you given for the pain?  So I'm not talking about your massage, I'm talking about actual painkillers.  

Paul: I've been taking painkillers to sleep now for two decades. Heavy doses.  I was taking Valium for about 15 years of that, until I moved away from where I was living and I lost that doctor that would give it to me.   I was also taking heavy doses of NSAIDs, drugs like Tylenol and the typical.  I take two painkillers before bed, and then I take two about three in the morning just to see if I could get through a night, and usually they didn't really kill the pain.   I tried to avoid them during the day because I know the liver toxicity of some of these drugs, so I was basically in a regimen of painkillers.  I took one called meloxicam.  It's supposed to work 24; and then I take others on top of that one. I was taking multiple different types of painkillers constantly. 

Linda: If you had to say at that point your pain level was on with 10 being the highest, what would they have been roughly on a daily basis?   

Paul: 9.5.  

Linda: Really even with all those?  

Paul: I would cry almost some days, there was so much pain. 

Linda: I mean, that must have impacted your life. Were you able to function?  

Paul: Yeah.  I function, but I was often kind of grumpy, my wife at the time thought, most of the day, just not happy with that, but yeah, it's just  angry and grumpy most of the days.  Yeah, just not a happy person at all.  

Linda: Apart from seeing your doctor did you see a pain specialist at any point?  It sounds as though you've spent a lot of money trying to find answers.  

Paul: No, I do a lot of research.  I mean, my background is that I  spent 40 years doing research and reading research papers and stuff, and  opioids seem to be about the only thing doctors could give you, and I didn't want to do that.  I have a brother that's kind of addicted to opioids.  He had back problems, and you just can't get off the opioids, and I don't want to go that route.  I really am trying to be stoic about it and just bear it. But you know, some days I just, you know, it's been very hopeless. But basically it was a lot of investigating. I don't have much faith in the medical profession, to be honest with you. I just don't see them as being responsive to pain issues at all.  It's like unless they can do surgery, or you know, that you go to a specific specialist, and they recommend what they do as a solution. Like, I went to see this jaw specialist.  Of course the only solution was the surgery in my jaw.   I went to a dentist about that and he says the only solution is to do braces for you. Everybody's got their solution a little but no one guarantees the solution is going to work.  

Like I said, I watched my brother, who has had three back surgeries. Everyone promising that they're going to cure his back problem.  I'm very skeptical about what the traditional doctors can do for you.  My research really didn't give me a high degree of confidence that anybody really had a solution the pain problem, because there's multiple issues between my legs, my neck, my jaw.  

Linda: Was it your own doctor that prescribed LDN, or did you have to hunt for an LDN doctor?  

Paul: No, actually. There is another part of my story.  About 10 years ago I was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and I did some research then and one of the things I found was that people that take Metformin have much more extended lives, and across they seemed to have,  I don't know what the word is, progression, of the prostate cancer.  I started taking metformin six, seven years ago through a company called Ageless Rx I found in the US that would prescribe it for me. And  probably in the fall of last year, I saw they started offering LDN, and I don't remember what that pitch was. I think it was for pain, but so I started investigating what LDN was. I started reading  research papers on PubMed about LDN, and so that's where the idea initially came from is Ageless Rx. It is just a company in the US. Anybody in the US can get LDN from them, but basically you don't need to go to your doctor, and you know I've had experience with doctors that, you know, they scold me if I tell them I'm on Metformin because I'm not diabetic,, you know and you know that they're actually getting mad at you if you're not following the "standard of care." In the US they have this thing called Standard of Care, and that's all you know.  That's what the doctors follow, and you’re not going to go in anything that's outside of standard care. And so I've not really ever approached a doctor, because I've had experiences with three or four of them that have not been happy that you might tell them what I'm doing with the Metformin.  Ageless Rx is where I found this, and I started reading about it and how it worked.  The mechanisms of action and how it blocks the opioid receptors, and then you know, during the day they bounce back and produce more endorphins and whatnot.  So  it looked like it might be helpful, and certainly maybe help with sleep, maybe help with pain. And then even maybe there's some indications that it might help with cancer.  So I thought it looked like a no-lose solution that I might try, and that it wasn't going to cost me ten thousand dollars like going to Mexico for stem cells, and it wasn't going to have the risk of  jaw surgeries where I'd had my jaw wired shut for eight months or whatever. And I think it was December, I started taking it, late December.

Linda: So, when you first started LDN, did you have any side effects?  Did it make your sleep worse, or did you notice you slept better?  

Paul: So, the very first thing when I started, they gave you 1.5 mg pills, and they said take one and a half for ten days, and then move up ten days to three, and then next 10 days to four and a half.  That was their prescription. The very first night was strange, because I slept all the way to 5 am, which was shocking.  Actually, I felt a little bit of euphoria when I woke up.  It's the only time I felt that, was the first night.

The next morning, I had, maybe this is too TMI, but I had loose bowels that next morning, that was it as far as the side effects go.  I did, during the first months, start to have dreams, but if you  look at my sleep, you know things on my aura app, you see that I was getting 5 to 15 minutes of deep sleep at night, and less than 20 minutes of REM sleep at night. So it wasn't surprising to me that I started having dreams.  People talk about having dreams, well this is the first time I had dreams in decades, really.  I started having dreams because my REM sleep immediately increased to well over an hour, and the deep sleep has progressively grown, and now I get close to two hours of deep sleep, and two hours of REM a night ,which is amazing  because I haven't had that in decades, But in the first 10 days I slept eight hours without getting up, and that was the first time probably since I was in my 30s that I've done that.  That was a long, long time ago, because I'm 70.  I've slept through the night three or four times in the last couple months.  I don't usually  get up more than once a night to go to the bathroom, but I don't wake up in the middle of the night with pain.  My movements as defined by the Aura ring, it  has these little dashes that show movement throughout the night, and it's gone from hundreds to maybe a dozen times I move through the night. I said my sleep has been remarkably improved, and I don't wake up with a sore neck or sore jaw, and my legs don't hurt at all during the night.  It's really been amazing to me, the changes taking this drug, and to me it's like I said, one side effect the first morning and I've had no side effects at all other than what people call dreaming.  A side effect, that would be it, but I'm not opposed to dreaming. It’s actually kind of interesting, because I'm remembering things from my past I hadn't thought about for years, and so it's actually kind of pleasant.  A lot of the dreams.

Linda: The pain: how long would you say you'd been on LDN before the pain receded?   

Paul: I'd say within 10 days it started to reduce, because I was able to start sleeping longer.  The last month and a half I haven't taken any painkillers.  That's amazing.  Which is the first time since 2000 that I haven't gone a day without taking painkillers.  That's a long time that I was taking them.  

Linda: What would your pain levels be today?  

Paul: Right now I'd say 2 or 3.  People tell me 2 or 3 doesn't stop you from achieving everything you want to achieve in a day.  My wife, we live in the mountains of Colorado, and my wife likes to go hiking, and after about a mile my neck used to hurt so much I couldn't go on.   I'd have to stop, and now we go on 5 to  10 mile hikes. I'm mountain biking now.  I'm doing it without pain. It’s really changed what I'm able to do outside. And just the day-to-day living, too. 

Linda: Have you been back and had any tests for your cancer?  

Paul: No, I haven't.  But  I'm gonna get some blood work maybe in July, and see the inflammation level.  Because of all this, I  do blood markers a couple times a year.  I had one beginning in January.  It didn't show any difference, but that was probably a week after I started.  A couple times a year I take a full panel blood work, and I actually order tests way beyond what doctors order.  I do a lot of inflammation biomarkers and things like that.  On a daily basis I  record a lot of my biometrics.  Blood pressure, heart rate variability.  I record my sleep every night, and I get a spreadsheet and stuff.  I'm kind of an engineer by background, so this is part of my retirement past time, just looking at data.  I look at a lot of data.  I'm gonna do that and and I'll see what happens, and I think second quarter, middle late June, I'll take another blood sample and see.   I'm hoping to keep my fingers crossed that my inflammation markers will go down because they have been going up.   I mean they've been pretty high.  I have a lot of inflammation in my body. 

Linda: Did you clean up your diet? Are you on a healthy diet? Do you take supplements as well?  

Paul: Probably, about four years ago, I started changing my diet.  We don't eat sweets, we don't eat bread, we don't eat rice, we don't eat pasta.  I have a very low carb diet I've had for the last four years.  You know, basically something called a Warburg effect. I don't know if you're familiar with that, but he's a German that figured that cancer loves sugar. That kind of eliminated sugar from my diet a while back.  Yeah I would say I eat a very healthy diet. A lot of a lot of vegetables.  I don't have processed food. We don't ever use pre-cooked pre-prepared food at all.  It is all whole foods if you will.

Linda: Well that is absolutely amazing.  We've come to the end. I wish you well, and it would be really good if next year you could come back and give us an update so we can see how those markers are.  

Paul: Yeah that would be interesting. I'm very curious about it because I feel so much better.  I think they'll be better, but until you get the measurements, you don't know.  I'm keeping my fingers crossed they are.   

Linda: Well thank you.  

Paul: I just want to share this, that I  go on these Facebook groups, and it's shocking to me, I guess it shouldn't be shocking, but probably so many people only post when they have problems or bad experience, but because I don't post too much about doing well. You don't bother to write because you feel good.  You don't even want to you go and look at that, but I just want to reach out to someone to say this thing.  This stuff really works, and as I said, I read a lot of the PubMed papers about LDN, and it convinced me that it really is.  So maybe it's a placebo, but I think it's a real effect, and you know as I said, my pain level is down, my sleep is better and I can enjoy things a lot better than I ever did. 

Linda: Any questions or comments you may have please email me Linda l-i-n-d-a at ldnrt.org I look forward to hearing from you.  Thank you for joining us today. We really appreciated your company.  Until next time stay safe and keep well.

 

 

Yusuf (YP) Saleeby, MD - Update on COVID, Long COVID and LDN (LDN; low dose naltrexone)

 

 

Kristen Burris LAc, MSTOM - Acupuncture and Chinese Herbal Medicine(LDN; low dose naltrexone)

 

 

Natasha - Australia: Chronic Pain and Cancer (LDN; low dose naltrexone)

 

 

The LDN 3: To Purchase with discounts before 1st September 2022 Go to ldnresearchtrust.org/ldn-book-3 for full details

 

 

Linda Elsegood: Welcome to the LDN radio show brought to you by the LDN Research Trust I'm your host, Linda Elsegood. I have an exciting lineup of guest speakers who are LDN experts in their field. We will be discussing low-dose naltrexone and its many uses in autoimmune diseases, cancers, etc. Thank you for joining us.

Today we're joined by Kara from the United States who uses LDN for Multiple Sclerosis. Thank you for joining us today, Kara. 

Kara: Thank you for having me. 

Linda Elsegood: Can you tell us how far back was it when you first noticed an MS symptom, even if you didn't know it was a symptom? 

Kara: Oh my goodness, probably when I was first at university, my first little episodes began. I had UTIs that no one could explain why I kept getting them, and couldn't really get rid of them ever. And I had some issues with some muscle spasms, but very minor things. And then 11 years ago this month I had an episode of trigeminal neuralgia. I was driving; I had a brand-new car. It was my first day driving my brand-new car and I had taken my children to school and I was on my way to work, and I had to pull off on the side of the road because I almost passed out from the pain. I don't even know what I thought. I thought I had a tooth abscess or I thought maybe it was like a heart attack because I feel like women don't pay attention to those things and it can be jaw pain. So all this is going through my head, and I went to the ER, and they said there's nothing. It's not a cardiac issue. It's not this. It's not that. We don't know what it is. I saw a dentist the next day who thought it's neurologic, and that was the first time that this was even on my radar. I was just so stunned that that specific ridiculously bad pain was something related to a neurologic condition. I just didn't have any idea that that could happen. At that time I ended up having an MRI for diagnosis of my MS. When I had that MRI it actually showed that I had thyroid cancer at the same time. So in a very strange way MS has saved me from having a much worse cancer diagnosis because it was caught so early on that MRI. While I was dealing with that I had surgery, and went through some stuff. I began the LDN. 

I'm actually a lawyer who typically has represented doctors and hospitals and those sorts of things, so I have a lot of resources; and my husband is actually a physician as well. I started trying to educate myself as much as I could about the inflammatory process and what that actually can mean, and how that affects everything, from depression, to cancer, to MS, to I don't know… your mood. And with the LDN, I've actually not started a disease modifying therapy. It ended up that I had cancer three more times after that initial bout. Not with the thyroid because it was gone. And it just started this huge health journey for me. I never really had any health issues. I was never really super heavy. I was never really super troubled by anything. And I feel as though, looking back, what a gift that was. But being on the LDN has just made me sort of born again. I think everybody should be on it. I think it's wonderful. It has done so many good things for me. It has lowered my inflammatory markers. Our prior home was just filled with stairs and maybe three months after I started the LDN, maybe four months, I was at the top of my stairs and I realized I had just run up the stairs, which I had not physically been able to do in I don't even know how long. It was like I was a child and just forgot myself and did it. And it was in that moment that I realized that my balance was so much better. 

For me, my biggest things besides my inflammatory markers being somewhat beaten down from the LDN, my biggest two biggest things were fatigue and balance that I was helped most with the LDN. 

Linda Elsegood: If we go back to prior to your MS diagnosis, what kind of things were happening transiently at that time? 

Kara: That was when I was probably my most clueless about myself. I was litigating, so I had trials, and my work was incredibly consuming. And I had two children, and I was just fatigued beyond fatigued, and I couldn't understand what was wrong, because I've always slept well. I've always had good bedtime habits and that sort of stuff. I would get home from work and it would be 6:30 and I would put my pajamas on, and just be preoccupied with how soon can I get to bed. That's just bone tired fatigue that I liken it to jet lag. I felt like I was jet lagged, and I had just gotten off a red eye, and I had slept a solid eight, nine hours. There wasn't anything to explain that. The other thing was it was falling. I had a couple of falls. I broke my ankle very very badly. I fell down stairs, ironically. And it became apparent that I was having some sort of balance issue. I had my eyes checked because I thought maybe, maybe I'm just clumsy because I'm not seeing well or something, and everything checked out. It just really was something that I kept pushing to the side until I no longer could, and I had to really look in the mirror and say this isn't a normal thing to have happen. 

Linda Elsegood: And how long from having the problems with your UTIs to actually being diagnosed, how long did that take? 

Kara: I'm embarrassed to say 20 years. Really. It was a long journey, probably lengthened by the fact that I'm very stubborn, and I'm a bit of a control freak, and so for me to have something that I couldn't control, that I couldn't fix, that wasn't making any sense logically, it was very difficult to digest, and realize that I actually truly needed help. I figured that part out and I went to my neurologist, and I had looked up LDN, and I asked him to prescribe it. He was an older gentleman, but also vegan and into all the ancillary things we can do to be better, and he completely scoffed at me and he said, “You're already gluten-free, you're already eating this, you're already eating that, I guess you'll be completely cured if you begin this”. So I left without my LDN, and I went to my primary care physician and I printed up all these papers about LDN, and I walked in and I was ready to plead my case as to why I would like to start this, and he laughed and said he’s been prescribing that for 10 years. I was like, oh why didn't I come to you first. He was very knowledgeable and I feel incredibly lucky that not only did I find out about LDN, that I found a provider that was willing to work with me and educate me about titrating up, and working through that part of it. It has just been utterly a game changer for me truly. 

Linda Elsegood: So how long have you been taking LDN now?

Kara: Almost 11 years. Wow. Yeah a solid 10 and a half years. 

Linda Elsegood: So what was your fatigue like once you've been on LDN a while? 

Kara: Normal; it was a normal logical thing that if I were up late I would be tired, but if I were going to bed when I typically do and sleeping well, I felt great in the morning, and I didn't crash during the day. I don't really use caffeine, so for me it was just incredibly noticeable when I was dragging, that I was literally coming in the door, can't wait to get on my jammies and go to sleep. It was night and day difference. It literally was as though I had been sleep deprived for so long even though I wasn't. But that's how it felt. It felt as though I had been sleep deprived, walking around in a haze, and then the clouds lifted. I think the other thing is I think cognitively that contributes to brain fog. Just that sense of - I don't know when I was fatigued, I was preoccupied with it. I was thinking about it. I was thinking can I put my head down on my desk for 10 minutes nobody will know. Just things that are kooky when I look back. And I thought good lord, why didn't I say something before. Again, I think that's probably part of my personality, but boy it really, really, really helped me a lot. 

Linda Elsegood: What about UTIs? Are they still an issue?

Kara: Nope, zero. When I was having the UTIs, it wasn't as though I had poor personal hygiene, or I didn't understand the mechanisms through which those terribly unpleasant infections occur. I knew all of that, and what's ironic is that even before my diagnosis - my oldest is about to turn 24, and when I was pregnant with him I had UTIs so badly that I had to be on an antibiotic my entire pregnancy, and then six weeks postpartum. Looking back, it was the MS. But I didn't know where to put that. I just thought, oh how odd that unfortunately, I've now started getting UTIs again, and I'm pregnant. And I don't know why.

Linda Elsegood: It's funny you should say that. I had Epstein-Barr - we call it glandular fever - when I was 13, and I had like a year of school, I was really really ill. But when I was 17 I started to get UTIs. One after the other after the other, and I became very aware of my bladder, and I could feel if I was dehydrated. I needed to drink more to flush it out, but it was just awful. I mean one load of antibiotics after another after another. And so I understand where you're coming from. 

Kara: Well, I literally have water with me at all times, only because I think I have PTSD from having had so many UTI. I guzzle water constantly still.

Linda Elsegood: Yes. It's quite funny, I saw a nurse and she said, I always have beside me a pint glass. If you do pints. But I've always got this glass, and she wanted to know if I was drinking three pints a day. I probably drink five; I don't drink just three. I know that some people struggle, and she was saying tea and coffee don't count, it has to be water. 

Kara: You're the only other person on the planet that does drink enough water the same way. I feel almost defensive when I'm questioned about my water intake by a new healthcare provider or something and same thing, really, I drink way more than that and I'm very good. 

Linda Elsegood: The only thing is as I've got older I pay for it in the night. 

Kara: Me too. Same. 

Linda Elsegood: There isn't a magic cut-off time where you can drink all day, and then you can go all night, and I quite often wake up twice. 

Kara: I know I'm like a puppy, that you have to put my water away at a certain time. 

Linda Elsegood: But it's preferable to have in UTIs. 

Kara: Oh my gosh yeah. Because you're still peeing in the middle of the night with the UTI. 

Linda Elsegood: Exactly exactly. So when you started LDN way back, what dose did you start off with? Can you remember? 

Kara: Yes I started at 1.5mg. I was on that dose probably about two months. My only side effect that I've ever had from LDN, I had called them pregnancy dreams, just like very vivid dreams that I get if I'm pregnant, or if I take Benadryl. So not anything terrifying, just very vivid compared to normal dreaming. That lasted maybe three weeks; I don't even think a month. Then I titrated up to 3.0mg, and I was experimenting with different methods of getting the LDN. I had troches at one point. They're like the little gummy things. I then ended up just on the capsules, and I went to 4.5mg, and for me the 4.5mg has been an optimal dose, and I've had good luck with it, and great success. 

I ended up having colon cancer twice, and a couple other little things, and one surgery, and I came off of it briefly. I was so anxious to get back on it because I didn't know if I would start feeling poorly again, or how it would work, but I have to say that even having surgeries, in that post-operative time, that can be unpleasant. I haven't taken a narcotic this entire time, and to me, that's amazing. I don't know what my little pain receptors are doing. I do have pain, but I've been able to navigate around that, and I'm very, very grateful for that because I've not had to take a big break from the LDN due to any of other ancillary stuff going on. It's been such a pleasant thing, and as I said, I when I speak about it to others, I'm sure I look a little nutty because I'm like, "Oh my god it's just so good, you should try it, it's cheap, there's no side effects and who knows, it might work for you" I could be on a billboard. 

Linda Elsegood: That's fantastic. So, what would you say to other people who've got MS, who are a bit skeptical about taking LDN because they don't like drugs, any drugs? 

Kara: Yeah, I don't either. I am vaccinated and all that good stuff, but I definitely try to avoid taking unnecessary things, and for me, this is an immunomodulating therapy that - I don't care how healthy you are, everybody's immune system could use a little bit of fine tuning, I think, and I can't imagine not choosing to do everything I can to be as well as I can, and for me LDN fits in that category. Because it's an easy to use, effective drug that doesn't affect - I don't even know how to say this clearly - I feel like a lot of the drugs that people take, whether it's like a valium or something like that for muscle spasms, or stuff for fatigue or the rest of it, they all have a lot of side effects, and I feel like there's a lot of people that don't like to take drugs, that don't even count those as drugs, and they are. For me, LDN has made me way more cognizant of my immune system and what I can do to keep it healthy, and eating well. Actively chasing that goal of health every day is what I do, and I think it's silly to not have an open mind and give it a try. 

Linda Elsegood: Thank you very much for having shared your experience with us today. 

Kara: You're welcome. Thank you again for having me. 

Linda Elsegood: Any questions or comments you may have please email me at Contact@ldnresearchtrust.org I look forward to hearing from you. Thank you for joining us today. We really appreciated your company. Until next time, stay safe and keep well. 
 

 

 

This was an LDN Radio Show interview in 2022.

Linda Elsegood: Welcome to the LDN Radio Show, brought to you by the LDN Research Trust I'm your host, Linda Elsegood. I have an exciting lineup of guest speakers who are LDN experts in their field. We will be discussing low-dose naltrexone and its many uses in autoimmune diseases, cancers, etc. Thank you for joining us.

Today we're joined by Dr Nasha Winters, who's also one of the LDN Research Trust Medical Advisors. Thank you for joining us today, Nasha.

Dr. Winters: Linda, it's so good to see you, and so good to be here with everybody else. I always enjoy these conversations.

Linda Elsegood: So, you're going to tell us about LDN and the future of healthcare.

Dr. Winters:  Yeah, you know, it's funny, because you and I, we've talked about a lot of different topics over our years together, though I’m going to spend the majority of our time today talking about where health care needs to go, and where LDN falls into that. I was actually looking back at my notes, I think this was back in 2016 or 2017 when I was at an LDN conference with you, where we were talking about why is this not part of just standard of care, this low-cost, highly-effective, very low if any adverse events, very multi-targeted in a lot of different disease conditions? It just still is a crazy thing for me to believe that this is still not included in standard of care, and that there are still so many naysayers out there in the medical environment. That is keeping people from having easy access to this very very supportive therapeutic intervention. So that being said, I think that is also just sort of an example of just how inherently flawed our medical systems are. And I think, depending on which side of the pond you live, that some people here in the United States think, “Oh wouldn't it be great to have a national healthcare system?” And then folks over in the UK look at us and say, “Wouldn't it be great to have access to more integrative functional medicine pieces?” And really, all of the systems globally are inherently flawed at this time, in the world around us.

And so, I just wanted to give maybe a little lay in the land to help people understand a few key things that have just happened in the last 50 years, to sort of highlight and stamp where we got off the tracks, and what it's going to take to bring us onto an entirely new path. This idea of health care, which I think is such a misnomer - it really is disease care, disease management - nothing about it is healthy or health-inducing or health-inspiring or health-creating. But we made a big shift after World War II. The whole planet had a collective experience with World War II, and as such, a lot of our resources got shifted of what we had access to and what we needed to sort of patch ourselves together. So you can appreciate why it came to be, but you can't appreciate that we're still staying in that mindset 50 years later. We moved into much more grain production post-World War II, just in order to keep up with the demand for more bread, which was deeply rationed during the world wars. Feed for animals, thanks to an increase in our concentrated animal feeding facilities, known as CAFOs here in the United States, to help feed the livestock like beef and pork. Specifically, we had the war on cancer which was waged in the United States in 1971, an act signed into life by President Nixon. It really was the first time we claimed the war on cancer, and 50 years later we're no further down the road with that. We started bringing glyphosate more out of a lab and into our world around us. Cigarette ads were only banned from TV 50 years. We finally banned them from TV, and yet they're still highly available to everybody, and a couple little warning labels on the packages has not changed our smoking rates much throughout the world. Berkeley Chemists in Berkeley California announced the first growth hormones that were later added to our food supply in 1971. We started using our first CT scans in London in 1971. We gave a Nobel prize to Earl Wilbur Sutherland Jr for discovering the mechanism of action of hormones, namely epinephrine, which started to really elucidate our stress response patterns. Yet we've not really incorporated that into medical practice. We started monocropping the world and therefore monocropping our microbiotic internal soil as well, which left us really with poor resilience to how we deal with disease management and disease prevention. And in the last five or six years we've even awarded Nobel prizes, very very high level Nobel prizes, to things like circadian rhythm biology, fasting and autophagy, and the microbiota and areas around the immune system, and yet ironically none of these amazing Nobel prize awarded individuals have their work adopted in the general standards of care.

So I give you that example that yeah, we're talking about it, but we're not doing anything about it, and it feels like I’m having the same conversation around things like low-dose naltrexone. So that's a piece I wanted just to kind of lay that framework to go wow, the problem. Right. What's the problem? So a little bit more before we talk about the solution. Take a breath Linda, and see if there's anything you want to add or further clarify from that whole soliloquy.

Linda Elsegood: I just found that really interesting about the facts that I didn't know.

Dr. Winters: Well, good, because I’m a little bit of a history buff, and so I really like to understand where we've come from so we can understand why we got to this place. But it also helps us create a new path forward. It's like we don't want to repeat history over and over again, so let's come up with something new. But just as I said in the beginning of our conversation, there's really nothing healthy about our current healthcare system, no matter where you live on the planet. It's a model based on disease management with no interest in prevention of the disease or creation of health and wellness. In fact, in the United States there's an organization called the CDC. Everyone's heard of it, the Center for Disease Control. And a few years ago, there was a secondary part of that title. It was the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. That last bit has conveniently fallen off their website, and you don't see that anymore, which is also very interesting and telling. And because I only know the stats from the United States off the top of my head, we're not too far behind any industrialized westernized country, or kind of neck and neck with regards to these numbers, so if you live in the UK or other parts of the EU, these probably apply to you as well. The United States is ranked 27th worldwide in terms of healthcare, and yet we have the most expensive healthcare system in the world, and we're also the country losing longevity while other countries are staying the same or improving their longevity. And a lot of our scientists and researchers out there are calling that loss of longevity “an era of despair”. The longevity is coming down because of people taking their own lives, so suicide, and opiate overdose, which starts to show you kind of this trend of just sort of a dissatisfaction of life, hiding or medicating the pain. And yet we don't have anything in our medical systems to really address those head-on.

The United States spends over 20 percent of its gross domestic product on healthcare, whereas back in 1971, seven percent. That is a giant jump. The average cost of a meal in a hospital, which is where we're trying to nourish the most vulnerable people, is a $1.37. Right now, the euro and the dollar are almost next to next, so it's about $1.50 maybe for the euro, but $1.37 is what we're trying to nourish people with. Back to health. And so the cardboard and distilled water that you could take would probably be healthier than what's being offered in most hospital systems, which is really unfortunate. These are just some things to keep in mind.

The other thing is cheap food leads to poor health, and there are food deserts all over the world that exist, that are keeping people in really underserved and disenfranchised communities even more oppressed in so many ways. And we have a terrible deficit of our nutrition education, and wellness education, in our medical schools, where less than 25 percent of normal medical schools are even offered an elective course in nutrition. We're out there trying to tell people how to nourish themselves, and yet we've had no training in the medical field to do as such.

So, a wellness ecosystem, that's what we have to start to think about. That's where we start to move into a solution. It goes above and beyond food, it goes above and beyond access to inexpensive highly effective therapies such as low dose naltrexone. And it needs to break away from this disease management model and move us away from sort of the three big drivers of this model, which are big pharma, big agriculture, and insurance. And that means even the insurance model we have here in the United States, or even the national health care systems in other parts of the world, the only way we're going to break these habits and change this trajectory, is by leaving those systems in the dust by completely getting out of them. There's a quote, I don't know if you, Linda, or any of your listeners know the British Indian philosopher and activist Satish Kumar. He's a really interesting voice, sort of like a hopeful future, with regards to health and well-being. And so I love this quote:

"Holistic thinking brings soil, soul ,and society together as three aspects of one big picture. This is the new trinity of our time. When we become single issue oriented, we believe that if only the world could achieve environmental sustainability, or if only everyone could practice spirituality, or if only we could establish social justice in the world, then everything would be sorted. But this kind of single issue obsession doesn't take us very far, because it's too narrow. All of these issues. all of these disparities. are interrelated.”

I really love that piece because it's going to take us moving out of the current trinity as a collective, to make a hopeful future for all of us. We need to reclaim our health. We need to reclaim our ecosystem. And we need to set a new structure.

One of the things I love to think about here is, wouldn't it be amazing, Linda, if we could all have basically insurance coverage or health care coverage; a community supported agriculture - we call them CAFOs here in the United States - wouldn't it be amazing if you basically were given a stipend for your food that comes from a local regional organic farmer and rancher orchardists, to nourish yourself and to nourish your family, instead of having to depend on some of those deserts -  food desert environments or fast food environments, or highly processed chemicalized food options, to feed the less financially stable of our communities. Wouldn't it just be amazing if that was just a standard of care, to have access to good quality food, which doesn't take that much to create. It just takes leaving the current system and the dependence on that current system.

For me, these ideas started to spread about 29 years ago, after my own terminal diagnosis, growing up impoverished, growing up in extreme trauma, growing up in an environment where I would have been considered one of those people that could never leave the system in which I was created, never leaving this sort of cycle of abuse and poverty and trauma and lack of education. Yet I managed to pull up my own bootstraps and do something different for myself. But not everybody can do that, or has the resources or the wherewithal to do that. This vision started percolating for me all those years ago because I was sick, because I was uninsured, because I was literally on my own, and on every level you could imagine, I started dreaming about, envisioning sketching about, making lists, exploring the world for almost the past three decades, to build a non-profit residential hospital and research institute For me, obviously the special focus is on oncology care, but also in prevention and wellness. So this Metabolic Terrain Institute of Health, that's the first of its kind, will be the template. The sort of pilot is being built in southeast Arizona in the United States, against all of the goliaths of big pharma, big ag, of insurance, because we're leaving all of those models behind, and we're literally changing the standard to cancer care and prevention, from the soil to the soul, and recasting cancer from a death sentence as it's seen today, into more of a manageable disease process. And you could put other diseases in the place of cancer. That could be diabetes, that could be Alzheimer's, that could be cardiovascular disease, whatever chronic disease du jour you want to put in that, that's what this campus is hoping to support. And so that trinity that Kumar talked about here is about bringing a convergence of talented like-minded individuals to the table, and systemizing a methodology that enhances patient outcomes, and prevents physician burnout. And scaling it by training physicians and patient advocates globally to get into a new narrative around health creation versus disease management. We've been spending the last couple of years making this come to fruition. Our physician reaches now over 88 positions globally, over 200 patient advocates globally, growing twice a year. We do courses ongoing, so that we can start to educate a new way of thinking around the world. Our goal before the doors of the hospital open is to have 500 physicians and a thousand patient advocates, and we're well on our way to meeting that piece here, because we know it's just the start we need right now. For instance, there are only 12 million oncologists in the world, and we have too many patients needing them. There's not enough. We have to get folks trained, and more and more doctors are leaving general family practice now, and going into specialties, which is kind of leaving the general public in trouble. We're trying to change that need, and then we're also simultaneously building and launching a data platform that collects our information to show that this new methodology, this new systems thinking, this new collective networking global environment, is in fact lowering healthcare costs and improving patient outcomes. To show that, because we hear well, there's no research in this well, there's no research because there's not a model to research. All right, we all have our n of ones and our little integrated practices, but when you put a bunch of us together and that data comes into a really robust platform, we can show in real time the dents we're making.

That vision of this hospital where folks can come and immerse themselves, and show themselves again how to live healthy on an unhealthy planet, cost share their supplements, cost share their imaging, costs share their off-label drugs costs, share their pharmaceuticals, their other interventions, that they need for their health to thrive. That makes a huge difference. I don't know what it what it is for you guys in the UK, but in the United States the average American spends $20,000 each year on healthcare. That's just their insurance premiums, their deductibles and the out of pockets that aren't covered by insurance. That's the average, which means there's a lot more people paying a lot more than that. And if you want a truly integrative innovative approach, you're going to be paying a heck of a lot more than that. So, we were imagining, can you imagine taking that 20 grand and putting it into something that's actually health creating versus disease mitigating? What a difference that could make in a very short period of time. And then also, this move that many people are hearing about, to sort of a decentralized financial structure where you're looking more at sort of tokens, and sort of the cyber or the crypto currencies and whatnot. There are massive moves happening right now that within five years, this decentralized financial model that shows extreme transparency, so you really do know the true cost of your health care. And where those funds are really going will reflect that probably 90% of all the money spent on health care today is actually a huge failure, and not doing anything to change people's healthcare status. The overhead to maintain the monster model that we have that is clearly ineffective, is needing to be deconstructed and put into a whole other financial structure. So that's happening.

Then, those folks saying that there's no research in this, well no one wants to fund trials like this, and this type of health care does not put everybody in the same room and give them all the same treatment and expect a miracle for each individual, just like Linda. You and I have seen patient after patient after patient for just LDN alone. Look at the variability of who needs to have their dose in the morning, who needs to start at a micro dose versus the 1.5 milligram, who does better, who only needs 1.5 milligrams to derive all the benefit, who has results within a few days, who takes a few months to get the results. That alone for that single agent shows the incredible diversity of our health population, that is not given any credence in our standard of care models of health today.

So this is what's so fun to me, of like re-envisioning what we're building outside of this, and what needs to happen to make this vision come alive. A lot of that as well means we have to build it from scratch. We have to build it from scratch so this non-profit, we're taking philanthropic monies, we're taking grants, we're taking research dollars to build this model. Because of the cost share, we're even able to keep those that have the means into a lower cost cash pay model. We won't be accepting insurance of any kind from anywhere. If people want to submit it to their insurance, if they still have standard of care, they're welcome to do that. But we're very confident that what we could offer would be far less expensive and far more valuable and far more impactful than anything they're currently experiencing. You probably hear this all the time, and experience it. Especially my folks, who are in national healthcare systems, when patients say to me, “Well, I can't afford that, that's out of pocket” and I’m thinking “Well what are you spending your money on, like where are your priorities.” Health is our wealth. Without health we have nothing, and for people like you and I, who've experienced the side of the pendulum where health was elusive to us, we really value the importance of turning over every stone and recognizing that to actually survive, we're going to have to leave the system and do a little bit more on our own. You and I are the weird unicorns, in that most people don't even know that's available to them, or are truly poorly resourced in a way that they can't get access to that. We know that this future healthcare model needs to create a new standard of care.

I know I covered a lot here, but I just want to start to paint a picture of what is being built. I’ve been told for 29 years this could never happen, and what I’ve seen happen in the last 10 years, and in particular in the last two, it's happening. And now that more and more people are coming together collectively into our network, and other little islands and pods and silos of this happening all over the planet, we're all finding coherence and resonance with knowing that we can't fix it, as I tried doing in the first 20 years of my practice. I can't fix the broken system. It exhausted me, it burned me, out it broke my heart, it made me physically ill, going in time and time and time again trying to fix a broken system. So I realized about a decade ago, I have to completely get out of it and build a new one. Luckily I keep finding sort of tribal members all over the planet, that are interested and curious enough and willing enough to do the work to do the same.

I was excited that we got to have this conversation today, because I feel like what you offer. and what the Trust offers, are opportunities, resources, awarenesses, that there are so much more than we're just being spoon-fed. These are the conversations that I hope are just the beginning for you and your listeners, to help us create collectively a new and hopeful healthcare future.

Linda Elsegood: If there are any medical professionals or patients out there who really want to back and support you, what can they do? How can they start the journey with you?

Dr. Winters: Well, definitely start by going over to https://mtih.org which is our non-profit hospital and education platform. That stands for Metabolic Terrain Institute of Health, mtih.org. You can get a ton of information there. There's even a little ‘how can I help’ button that shows like, you can help in donations, you can help in volunteering your expertise. We have a CEO who was the head of a billion dollar revenue non-profit hospital who's come to the table because he did that work for 26 years, and saw what a dead end it was. So he's jumping on board to help us with his expertise of how to build the new hospital system. For things like the regenerative agriculture environment, we have farmers and ranchers coming too, because our hospital is on a massive campus where 75 percent of the campus is a food forest. So we're able to nourish people. Our patients that come to this environment will be in the fields with the farmers, as well as in the kitchen with the chefs. But they're also going to be in the fields, in the kitchens, with the doctors and the nurses and the adjunct. The healing community folks are realizing what it takes to create health and prevent disease, and so those types of options are coming up. Then, if you are a physician who wants to learn more about this truly innovative methodology and systemic thinking model, of how you want to apply it your own patient practice, whether you work with cancer patients or not, it applies across the board. We offer courses twice a year. Our next one is September 2022 - we offer it in September and February of every year, and then we have the same thing for our patient advocates. If you don't have a medical degree but you also want to be part of this movement, we offer a patient advocacy training as well, which we're also bringing in ways to help you monetize it and create a self-care program for yourself, but also create a career path, because we need a lot of bodies, a lot of like-minded souls to make this mission come alive.

That's really amazing, absolutely fantastic, and so needed literally across the globe. I used to think it was just a problem in my own town in Colorado, and then I realized oh no, in the US; oh, and then I realized oh Canada, and then oh the UK. It's like it expands beyond that of all my world travels and all the conferences, and all the patients I consult with globally, and their health care providers globally, this is a global issue and it's going to take a global shift, and we need to do it together.

Linda Elsegood: We wish you every success, thank you

Dr. Winters: Thank you Linda, thank you for the opportunity to talk about my passion and purpose.

Any questions or comments you may have please email me at Contact@ldnresearchtrust.org I look forward to hearing from you. Thank you for joining us today. We really appreciated your company. Until next time, stay safe and keep well.
 

 

 

Tim - England: Eye cancer (2022) (LDN; low dose naltrexone)

Approximately 12 years ago, Tim started to lose the vision in his left eye and was told he had an ocular tumor. He had 2-3 years of treatment, but had to undergo removal of the eye. Eight or nine years later he developed a cancerous lump on his thigh that required several surgeries. His cancers spread, and he had more surgeries. Then he discovered LDN and he started feeling better quickly, and after five scans and 15 months, the tumors are actually reduced in size. His daughter is on LDN successfully for Lyme disease, another friend is on LDN for cancer and doing well.