LDN Video Interviews and Presentations

Dr Patrick Callas, LDN Radio Show 2016 (LDN, low dose naltrexone) from LDN Research Trust on Vimeo.

Dr Patrick Callas shares his Low Dose Naltrexone (LDN) experience on the LDN Radio Show with Linda Elsegood.

Dr Patrick Callas has his own practice on an island on the West Coast of British Columbia and Canada, a small community of 10,000 people. He set up his own clinic only four years after graduating as a naturopathic doctor. 

Dr Callas has been prescribing Low Dose Naltrexone (LDN) for over four years and has seen great results, especially in his cancer patients ranging between 50-70 years old. Overall, he has seen many of his patients live much longer than what they were originally predicted. Not only that, their quality of life has also improved.

Likewise, in many of his autoimmune patients he has seen great recoveries with the help of LDN. Dr Callas is a vehement supporter of the use of LDN in treating cancer and autoimmune patients.

This is a summary of Dr Patrick Callas’ interview. Please listen to the rest of Dr Callas’ story by clicking on the video above.

 

Dr Kathleen MacIsaac, LDN Radio Show 2016 (LDN, low dose naltrexone) from LDN Research Trust on Vimeo.

Dr. Kathleen MacIsaac is from Florida in the United States. She first heard about LDN around 2006 while researching a different topic. It made sense biochemically, so she started using LDN in her patients, to treat fibromyalgia, chronic pain, migraine, and insomnia. She noted great response in reduction in pain and increased quality of sleep in fibromyalgia patients. More recently she is using LDN for Hashimoto’s thyroiditis; and chronic neurologic disorders including MS (multiple sclerosis), ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), and PLS (progressive lateral sclerosis). While the neurologic issues haven’t had complete resolution, the patients’ quality of life has improved, and there has been improvement in coordination, articulation, and swallowing. She has a pediatric patient on LDN for autism.

Less than 10 of her patients stopped using LDN, because they didn't notice any improvement or because they did not like a side effect, such as vivid dreams, or nausea, or some GI side effect. Those patients tended to start with milder conditions, thus less motivation to work through the side effects than ones with more debilitating conditions. There is a gap of time it takes to adapt. Most recently Dr. MacIsaac will start very low and progress upwards in dose slowly. Rather than a common titration like LDN 1.5 mg, then 3.0 mg, then 4.5 mg, she has the compounding pharmacy prepare a suspension so patients can titrate up by 0.5 mg over a longer period of time. Some patients remain on very low doses of less than a milligram, and she found it interesting that that small amount is adequate.

Linda Elsegood commented on various approaches she is aware of to lower the dropout rate for LDN, such as starting very low doses, taking LDN in the morning if there are sleep issues, and sublingual drops that are absorbed and bypass the stomach for patients with GI problems.

Dr. MacIsaac has 3 recent patients using daytime dosing of LDN for smoking and alcohol dependency issues, and it’s as if LDN doctors the brain to have less craving for nicotine or alcohol. It’s a new method of treatment for Dr. MacIsaac, and she is pursuing it further.

Linda Elsegood added that LDN is being used to treat OCD, and PMS; and Dr. Phil Boyle uses LDN in treating infertility and other gynecologic issues. Linda is aware of at least one woman whose PCOS (polycystic ovary syndrome) was improved on LDN. Linda relates that she herself had many issues with endometriosis from age 11, and a surprise added benefit when she began LDN for her MS, was her endometriosis issues cleared up. Dr. MacIsaac has found the LDN Research Trust website to be a good resource, and is learning a lot more about LDN.

Dr. MacIsaac’s practice is Healing Alternatives in Orlando Florida, and the website is http://www.healingalternativesinc.com/. The office phone is 407-682-711.

Summary from Dr. Kathleen MacIsaac, listen to the video for the show.

Keywords: LDN, low dose naltrexone, fibromyalgia, chronic pain, migraine, insomnia, Hashimoto’s, multiple sclerosis, MS, ALS, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, PLS, progressive lateral sclerosis, autism, compounding pharmacy, alcohol, smoking, nicotine, infertility, endometriosis, OCD, PMS,  PCOS, polycystic ovary syndrome

Dr David Corley, LDN Radio Show (LDN, low dose naltrexone) from LDN Research Trust on Vimeo.

Dr David Corley shares his Low Dose Naltrexone (LDN) experience on the LDN Radio Show with Linda Elsegood.

Dr David Corley is an infertility specialist from the United States who practises in New York. He has found that Low Dose Naltrexone (LDN) can be very effective in reducing inflammation, which is not only a primary cause of infertility but also many autoimmune diseases.

He also uses a variety of new cutting edge methods in order to aid couples with conception which have had major success in his practice. Although he has only started to use LDN recently in recent months, he has seen a 10-15% increase in conception rates.

This interview provides an interesting insight into how LDN can be used outside treating autoimmune diseases and the happiness it can bring to many people.

This is a summary of Dr David Corley’s interview. Please listen to the rest of Dr David Corley’s story by clicking on the video above.

Autoimmunity, The Thyroid, Low-dose Naltrexone (LDN) & Beyond (LDN) from LDN Research Trust on Vimeo.

Dr. Yousuf Siddiqui, B.Arch.Sci., N.D

Autoimmunity, The Thyroid, Low-dose Naltrexone (LDN) & Beyond

Dr. Yousuf offers a non-judgemental and compassionate approach to resolve complex imbalances in the body. Initially trained in architectural science, Dr. Yousuf has spent the last 20 years studying traditional medicine.

He believes that the foundation of health is digestion. Healing the microbiome, addressing SIBO, eliminating parasites, and improving nutritional absorption can have a cascade effect towards restoring health. His clinical focus extends to men and women’s reproductive health, thyroid health, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, and metabolic syndromes.

Charis on the LDN Radio Show 1st July 2020 (LDN, low dose naltrexone) from LDN Research Trust on Vimeo.

Charis from the United States shares her Lyme Disease and Hashimoto’s and Low Dose Naltrexone (LDN) story on the LDN Radio Show with Linda Elsegood.

Charis was diagnosed with Lyme Disease when she was only 16 years old, four years after she had a tick bite from a family trip to Minnesota. Ever since she searched for many treatments in order to remedy the disease, yet none had any success.

Only five years ago she was also diagnosed with Hashimoto’s and was struggling to conceive a child with her husband. Following her visit to a local nurse who recommended Low Dose Naltrexone (LDN), Charis’ life changed.

Within two weeks Charis was pregnant with her first child, and the symptoms of Lyme Disease and Hashimoto’s were reduced to the point where some days she forgot she even was diagnosed with them.

This is a summary of Charis’ interview. Please listen to the rest of Charis’ story by clicking on the video above.

Dr Phil Boyle - Women's Health and Low Dose Naltrexone Part 1 - 04 Feb 2020 (LDN, low dose naltrexone) from LDN Research Trust on Vimeo.

Dr Phil Boyle shares his Low Dose Naltrexone (LDN) story on the LDN Radio Show with Linda Elsegood.

The interview will be about women's health and will be in two parts. The first part discusses menstruation, painful and heavy periods, premenstrual syndrome (PMS), premenstrual tension (PMT), and endometriosis.

Dr Phil Boyle is a General Practitioner with a special interest in infertility, miscarriage and women ’s health. He is the founder and Director of NeoFertility Clinic, Dublin Ireland. He is currently president of The International Institute for Restorative Reproductive Medicine, a doctors' group that aims to publish and scientifically validate Restorative reproduction.

He has helped over 3,500 couples achieve successful pregnancies since commencing practice in 1998. Dr Boyle has published papers in peer reviewed medical journals on restorative reproduction to treat couples with infertility, previous failed IVF and recurrent miscarriage.

Dr Boyle has prescribed LDN for infertility patients since 2004, safely treated over 500 women with LDN during pregnancy.

This is a summary of Dr Phil Boyle’s interview. Please listen to the rest of Dr Boyle’s story by clicking on the video above.

Shauna - Endometriosis and infertility - 25th March 2020 (LDN, low dose naltrexone) from LDN Research Trust on Vimeo.

Linda Elsegood: I'd like to introduce my guest today, who is Shauna from Canada, and Shauna, you use LDN for endometriosis and infertility. Thanks for joining us today, Shana. 

Shauna: Thank you for having me. 

Linda Elsegood: So, in your words, how about telling us your story? 

Shauna: I first heard about LDN from my mom, who has been taking it for a few different reasons: fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue and pain and things like that. And she had kind of read up about it through the LDN Research Trust website. And she kept on trying to push me towards taking it to see if it could help with our infertility problems. I kind of pushed back against her because the drug is just not well researched. There's just not a lot of studies that have been done. I asked my fertility specialist, and I asked my GP, and they were firmly against that. So I kind of continued to say no to my mom over a year or so. 

And then we kind of hit a roadblock for fertility treatments. I had tried other types of fertility drugs and treatments over the last three years, and nothing was working, and we couldn't afford IVF. We couldn't afford IUI. There was just no other option. So I went again to my fertility specialist, and I begged him to let me try LDN, just to see if maybe it could alleviate some of my endometriosis and then maybe potentially help with getting pregnant. He firmly said no again. So then I went to my GP, and it took quite a bit of arm twisting. 

I came at it from the point of helping with my endometriosis. I didn't really touch too much on it helping me to get pregnant.  I asked if he believes that LDN helps with inflammatory diseases, and he said, yes. And I said, well, endometriosis and PCOS, I also have PCOS, those diseases are inflammatory, so don't you think that this drug would potentially help me feel better? And he kind of crumbled: we can try it, he said, but I'm putting this all on you, and you're taking responsibility for anything that happens on this drug. So I said, okay, that's fine. And he wanted to prescribe me four and a half milligrams at first, and I tried to tell him that the pharmacy I go to is a compounding pharmacy, they can make lower doses. And he said this is as low as he’d go. The pharmacist said they can make it as low as wanted, so they called the doctor and he took it down to two and a half. I said we need to go down lower, to start like really low. But he ended up not going down any further than two and a half. My mom helped split the two and a half to even lower.

So I ended up starting at 0.5 and then working my way up to five milligrams. And the first thing I noticed back on the drug was that my immune system became like a hundred per cent better. I was getting colds every other week before starting the drug, and I haven't had one single cold since starting it in November. And the only side effect I felt was that when I increased my dose, I got migraines for a couple of days, and I got some nausea. But I was also on other fertility drugs, so really I have no idea whether it was the LDN or not. 

But when I got to five milligrams I found that I wasn't quite adjusting to the dosage and I was feeling quite nauseous, so in December I went down to two and a half milligrams, and I've stayed at two and a half. And then a few weeks after Christmas, I found out I was pregnant. So I had only been on the drug.

Linda Elsegood: Oh, congratulations!

Shauna: Thank you. So I'm six weeks pregnant, and it was the combination of the fertility drugs that stimulate ovulation - that's a separate problem, endometriosis that I have. I don't know if maybe I stayed on LDN for longer without the fertility drugs, it would potentially help me ovulate naturally on my own. I don't know. But for me, I needed the fertility drugs to help me populate and then used the LDN to decrease the inflammation and calm my immune system. Cause I think those were the two things that were getting in the way of the fertility drugs actually working and pregnancy to actually stick, because I had been on them for nine months, and the ovulation was happening, just no pregnancy. 

I did feel that there was a decrease in inflammation in my pelvic area, and I was able to do activities that used to completely wipe me out physically, where I would come home and just have to go lay down because I would be just exhausted and in so much pain. I'm a photographer, so sometimes my newborn photo sessions are three or four hours long, and after those sessions, typically, I come home, and I'm a wreck physically. But when I was on LDN or while I'm on LDN, I found that I could do new sessions and not come home completely in pain, which was really nice.

Linda Elsegood: Oh, wow. That's awesome. That's something. So are you still taking LDN? 

Shauna: Yes, I'm still taking two and a half milligrams, and I'll stay on it until the end of my pregnancy, and then probably continue on it afterwards. It's the only drug that I've been able to find so far that successfully alleviates some of the endometriosis symptoms, without having a crazy list of side effects, which is really wonderful.

Linda Elsegood: Dr Phil Boydell uses LDN in his infertility clinic, and you can see on our Vimeo channel, some of the videos we have of him where he uses it to help ladies get pregnant, during pregnancy, after pregnancy, during breastfeeding; and I interviewed him the other day, and he was saying how the babies are a good weight, they are less likely to need antibiotics on follow-ups. The moms say they're very happy, contented babies. I mean, it just sounds too good to be true. 

Shauna: There was an article I read about LDN, about they're looking into whether or not LDN can potentially help stop endometriosis happening when you're pregnant with a girl, because of the speculation about endometriosis and how it develops, right? Like, does it happen when your baby is growing in utero and you just always have it, like for some people endometriosis doesn't come out of the woodwork until their forties; or for me, it got way worse after I became sexually active.

You know, there's, there are lots of different theories about endometriosis and where does it begin, so I'm hoping that this pregnancy is a girl, and it would be wonderful if I stay on the LDN during pregnancy, if there's a potential of me not passing on endometriosis. There's just not very much good understanding of endometriosis and whether it's genetic or not. And why does it start? How does it start? And so anyway, I mean, that's all speculation. It's all theory, but it just kind of would be nice if I could spare my future baby girls if they did not have to deal with this disease because there's no cure for it. And there are not very many well-known treatments for them.

Linda Elsegood: With your polycystic ovaries, did you find it painful? 

Shauna: Yes. My cycles naturally are 50 days apart. It's like my body just tries and tries and tries to ovulate, and then it just finally gives up, and I sporadically ovulate naturally. And so the months that I do are really, really painful. But then, even the months that I don't ovulate it's very painful because I think my body's just trying its hardest to ovulate and then it just doesn't happen. I've been on fertility drugs for the last two years, so, um, I haven't had those super long cycles as often because the drugs have been regulating my cycles.

Linda Elsegood: Well, it's just amazing that you got pregnant so quickly.

Shauna: I took the pregnancy test because some months I just wanted to get it over with the fact that I'm not pregnant that month, and just kind of. move on. So I ended up taking the pregnancy test at day 30 thinking it's just going to be negative. And I'm just going to be waiting for my period to start and then I can just be depressed and eat some ice cream and then move on.  But it came out positive and I just started freaking out and hyperventilating. The first person I called was my midwife because the midwives’ schedules fill up very fast here. Trying to get under their care is pretty hard. And she's asking me to calm down, that we don't know if this is real, and we’ll recheck the pregnancy test, to be sure it's actually correct. 

Linda Elsegood: How many times did you take it. 

Shauna: I ended up taking two pregnancy tests, and then I went to the doctor the next day, who ordered blood work to check, and then they've been checking me every few days to make sure that my HCG level is going up. And it's more than doubling. So that's really good. Um. Yeah. 

I was blessed with a son, he's three and a half. He'll be four in April. And when I was trying to conceive him, it took a year and eight months of trying to get pregnant with him. And I felt like I had endometriosis back then, but I hadn't been diagnosed yet. Doctors were still kind of just telling me I was crazy. I ended up going on hormone cream, a bioidentical hormone cream from my naturopath and got pregnant within two cycles. I tried those creams again two years ago trying to get pregnant. This time around and it didn't work the same way. So my problems changed after I had my son. My endometriosis I think got worse after pregnancy. I had until about ten months postpartum that my symptoms were pretty well controlled and my cycles were regular, which has never happened in my entire life. And then once I hit ten months postpartum, things just went crazy. Again. I think my uterus settled back into a very tilted position towards my sacrum. And then all the endometriosis came back, like way worse. And my cycles went back to 50-55 days apart. It was a lot worse. I definitely needed the LDN this time to calm all that inflammation down.

Linda Elsegood: So, what did your mom have to say?

Shauna: When I called my mom to tell her that I was pregnant, she was over the moon and I think she was trying to hold back the, “I told you so”.

Linda Elsegood: Yes, that's why I asked that question.

Shauna: The thing is, I could tell over the phone that she is holding it back. She wants to tell me I could have gotten pregnant way sooner. Thankfully my mom has learned a lot of grace. She has seven children, so she's used to asking kids pushing against her. You’d think by now after how many times that she's been right and we've been wrong, we would just trust her.

Linda Elsegood: You'll learn soon enough what that's all about, 

Shauna: Yeah. It's a circle of life. Exactly. 

Linda Elsegood: Exactly. Well, we wish you every success, and maybe you can come back and tell us how the pregnancy went and how the baby's doing and everything afterwards. Yeah. So it is your little boy looking forward to having a baby brother or sister.

Shauna: He likes the idea - he's been talking about wanting a sibling for the last couple of years, but I think he's actually forgotten and I haven't brought it up again with him. Mostly just 'cause I'm a little bit scared  - there's still a chance of miscarriage - so I don't really want to bring it up again with him until I'm a little bit further along. But I think he's really hoping for a little sister because anytime he talks about wanting one, he talks about having a little sister. So we're hoping for a girl too.

Linda Elsegood: Okay. Thank you. Bye 

Shauna: Bye.

Linda Elsegood: This show is sponsored by our members who made donations. We'd like to give them a very big thank you. We have to cover the monthly costs of radio station software, and with phone lines and phone calls, to be able to continue with our idea of sharing. And thank you for listening.

Any questions or comments you may have? Please Contact Us 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.

Dr Phil Boyle - Women's Health and Low Dose Naltrexone Part 2 - 26 Feb 2020 from LDN Research Trust on Vimeo.

Dr Leslie DeGasparis - 15th April 2018 (LDN, low dose naltrexone) from LDN Research Trust on Vimeo.

Dr Leslie DeGasparis from Seattle in Washington is sharing her experience with Low dose Naltrexone.

I'm an NDA naturopathic doctor. I went to the University of Washington for my undergraduate bachelor's degree. And then from there, I attended the Bastyr university for my doctorate in naturopathic medicine. And since then I've been practising for about 15 years. The first 10 were mostly primary care.

And then the last five I've concentrated on endocrinology with thyroid disorders and hormone balance.

Mostly, I attend women and I'm pretty happy with the outcomes of the infertility cases, especially when, on their last stop using LDN. They've usually already seen fertility doctors. And what I do notice is that something like LDN and really focusing on thyroid as well are often overlooked. So when we add those components to the fertility treatment, that pregnancy can happen.

Regarding LDN dosing times, historically over all these years, I've used it at night because originally that's what was said to work and it has worked. I'm a little wary dosing in the morning, but that being said for compliance reasons, in a few cases, I find that morning needs to be the time.

I'm watching these people to see if they do, as well as the models.

I have some people on doses between two and three milligrams longterm. We can watch their antibodies and we do know they're doing well. So I was very intrigued about the lower dosing and the intermittent dosing discussion in the conference this year.

I've had some pretty phenomenal results with some of the cases I have with children.

Children with autism in the practice where they really didn't know where to turn. And we use nutrition and LDN. 

I treat mostly men with Hashimoto.

I just recently got someone with renal failure. I put them on LDN and he's actually no longer headed for dialysis. He had told him he was going to pass away in the next year or two and he's actually doing very well. And I think LDN was a big part of that.

Regarding gut issues, 'll do a breath test for SIBO and H pylori. Those are best detected by a breath test and then still test them. Or I like to look for overgrowth of fungus, parasites, inflammatory markers, food allergies, that kind of thing. There are blood tests too for food allergies.

I feel like they're a little bit less accurate than the stool test, but I'll use a combo of those things to get to the bottom of the case and get it figured out. If necessary I also put them on an anti-inflammatory, gluten, dairy, and sugar-free diet. I called them kryptonite when I talked to my patients and I feel that they are inflammatory.

Our clinic is in North gate, which is in Seattle, just north of downtown. Our phone number is (206) 925-3525. And our website is www.seattleadvancedthyroid.com.

Summary of Dr Leslie DeGasparis interview. Watch the video for the full interview.