Carol Petersen, RPh, CNP - Discussing Healthcare, LDN Radio Show 13 July 2022 (LDN; low dose naltrexone)
SUMMARY
Pharmacist Carol Peterson is most interested in successful aging, working with bioidentical hormones. Along with a manufacturer of advanced nutritional systems, they developed a carrier solution with phospholipids for topical medications, that greatly enhances absorption. Another focus on aging is Beta 1,3 Glucan, which has a very positive effect on the immune system, important in autoimmune disease. She also discusses hormones and hormone testing. Her website is www.thewellnessbydesignproject.com, and she offers a free 15 minute get acquainted conversation to see if people are interested in what she can offer.
TRANSCRIPT
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 pharmacist Carol Peterson, who's going to explain the new exciting things she is embarking on in her life. Thank you for joining us, Carol.
Carol Peterson: Thank you so much Linda. I'm not so directly involved with compounding LDN anymore, but I do follow this. I'm really interested in the most successful aging we can have, and so I spent many years directly with bioidentical hormones, which I think are a huge piece for people. And I'm continuing that work. You might find this interesting: I'm working with Quicksilver Scientific, and they've developed a dosage form that has phospholipids in it. Depending on whether the substance is water soluble or fat soluble, you can do a nano emulsion or a nano liposome, depending on your substance. And we're about to reach out to pharmacies to compound with this for hormones. One of the first pharmacists I talked to about this does a lot of compounding with LDN, so his question to me was, wouldn’t this be adaptable to LDN? Probably yes! We haven't done that yet, but it would be a phospholipid dosage form that you could use under the tongue. And in this case, it's going to be extremely well absorbed. We have really excellent data that using only tiny amounts of hormones will give you good blood levels and good function. So this could open up a whole wide area for a new dosage form for LDN, and maybe if we talk in a year, it'll be out there everywhere, I hope. Another potential would be to use it on the skin, because phospholipid dosage forms go through the skin very well, so it may be that tinier and tinier doses of LDN would be appropriate. It was kind of exciting for me. I'm also working with another two companies joined together, and they are US Enzymes and Master Supplements.
All my years of working with hormones is such a big pillar of having a successful aging process. I've added another two pillars. I think this is so important. A column of what's going to hold you up for your aging, and I think this is quite phenomenal, and just yesterday we've introduced, with Master Supplements/US Enzyme, a beta glucan. Why this should be interesting to anybody who uses LDN is, it's such a major stimulator of your immune system. This company has gotten Beta 1,3 Glucan, which has a linear, and they say has the most positive effect on your immune system, and should be applicable to any autoimmune disease. So that's kind of exciting for me. There's all these bridges from one place to another, and what else can I say. I'm doing some consulting online, I have a Facebook page and I've named it the Wellness by Design Project. I have a website, and I do individual consultations. If people want to work with me, they can. And this is not a big part of what I'm doing. I'm more interested in getting information out there. I have a blog I've been writing for the A4M website, worldhealth.net, and this gives me a huge voice that I was actually missing before. And I really am interested in helping a huge amount of people, and really Linda, that's exactly what you've done. I am just in awe of what a person can do when they're determined and what they can build. You are such an inspiring person to follow. So that's where I am right now.
Linda Elsegood: Wow, it's really exciting, isn't it? You've got your platform, and now you're going to go for it, which is amazing. Tell me a bit more about the carrier that you can put on the skin for LDN. Not being medical or having any pharmacy background. What is the difference between what you're talking about, and liquid or topical lotion?
Carol Peterson: Whether it's your mucous membrane in your mouth which, except for the mucus, it's skin too. And your whole esophagus is skin too, if you turn it inside out. But what happens is that you get an enhanced absorption with the phospholipids, and these are actually good for you too. Your skin, every cell in your body needs those lipids, the phospholipids, to put in their cell membrane. It actually could be used as a supplement all on its own. Therefore, I'm really excited about this, because you're feeding the body also, with the dosage form, instead of introducing chemicals, which I'm really against. I think there's a danger in the compounding world, and I think people should pay attention what their stuff is put into. I had a call from a woman, had a nice conference with her, and she called me because that was her number-one concern with a bioidentical hormone product, and she finally looked at all the ingredients in the cream base that she was getting, and she was horrified as she looked up every single one, one by one. That's 100% of what I'm concerned about. If you're using something that you're going to be using all the time, you shouldn’t be introducing things that could be potentially harmful or accumulate. We've got to consider our poor livers, because we're asking a lot of our livers in this toxic world, so there's no sense in adding to that toxicity. I guess we want to be using some things to help us, but don't introduce unhelpful things along with it.
So it's just phosphatidylcholine and different assorted similar molecules, and there's I think there's a little MCT oil in that. Lecithin has a phosphatidyl choline and associated molecules, so it's kind of an interesting thing, and I'm certainly going to going to plant that bug into your compounders’ ears when we get it out there. I think this dosage form has much more applications than just hormones.
Linda Elsegood: Would it be a case of using less LDN, which would make it more effective in that way, or would the dosing remain the same?
Carol Peterson: Probably the first thing to do would be to try equal dosing and see what happens, but potentially you need less. I'll use a hormone analogy like progesterone. I'm really against using the low-dose progesterone over-the-counter creams where they deliver 20-30 milligrams of progesterone, and women actually do have a hard time with this. They stimulate estrogen, and yet can't fill in all the things that progesterone needs to do with that little amount. They're miserable and they hate progesterone, that woman who is so anxious and can't sleep and irritable, has water retention, breast soreness. She needs like 200-300 milligrams, maybe in a cream. Then when you think about the rate of absorption through the array of creams available in compounding, you may have only 10% to maybe a maximum of 80% absorption. That's a thing that people don't understand. But with the phospholipid progesterone, Dr Shade, who is the owner of Quicksilver Scientific, said that he was able to get a luteal phase of 20 nanograms per deciliter. This is high-level phase level with only 20 milligrams of progesterone, whereas I just said it might take 200-300 milligrams to do that adequately. For a woman a lot of the times in conventional medicine, those low-dose progesterones are poo poo because you can't see it in the in the blood, and of course you can't see it because it's so tiny. It's just too weird, so I'm a real advocate of making sure there's enough. Probably there'd have to be some adjustment with people, and what's working, what's not; or maybe something's not working so well. Maybe it really is an absorption problem with some people who are not getting the results they could be from LDN. Changing the dosage form might be just the key.
Linda Elsegood: That's interesting. For people listening who think that you'd be able to help them with their issues with hormones and so on, how do they get hold of you? Could you give us your website address?
Carol Peterson: It's www.thewellnessbydesignproject.com. I chose it. It's rather long, but this was my web designer's idea. “Project”, because I used to be more black-and-white and think people should be able to be on a path and be an advocate for what they they're talking about. I was pretty judgmental. Now I realize that we're all in a path to make our health better, to make our whole lives more vital, and we're not going to get to perfection. But we can be on the path and get there, and that's why I said I want to help people with the project of themselves, and help them get better, get as much better as they can. As far as that's concerned, unless you're dead, I think you can improve, would you agree?
Linda Elsegood: Absolutely! So once people contact you for a consultation, how long is the consultation?
Carol Peterson: I'm offering a free 15 minutes so we can get acquainted and see if people are interested in that interaction. Why I think that's important is, whenever you're offering the gift of information, or you're the messenger, it might not be the right person at the right time, and I don't take that personally. I just feel that I've put a piece in the puzzle, and maybe it's going to help later on with somebody else. But if that person is ready to work with me, we can figure that out in 15 minutes. Then I offer our consultations, and then I offer a more extended program that would last over six months with more intense coaching.
Linda Elsegood: And does that involve any testing?
Carol Peterson: I like to see some testing. So much of the results, it's always clinical, whether it's LDN or whatever, you can't measure specifically very well. What your outcomes are, if you don't have the clinical outcomes, if you're not getting the results you want, testing makes no difference at all. What are you testing for? You can't measure what the person tells you about how they feel, how they're able to operate in the world. That's like 99% of what you're doing. But if I have somebody who's really rather complicated, I do a life extension panel. I like the elite panels for men and women. They measure the pituitary or growth hormones, thyroid hormones, adrenal hormones, sex hormones, Vitamin D. You have this whole measure, plus the blood chemistry, plus the blood differential, plus all the lipid stuff. It takes a lot of vitals of blood, and patients can order this themselves, unless they're from New York. It's self-directed. You can get your own test. I love it because you get a bigger picture. If you just go in and have your sex hormones measured, like people will do, it doesn't place it in the whole realm of all the endocrine system.
I have a hierarchy of hormones. The insulin - glucose is the most important, the most primitive of our hormones, and that makes so much difference. What we are going back to: we're going back to our nourishment, what we eat, how we eat. If that step isn't taken, you could be messing around with sex hormones all day long and not get whatever you want. Then adrenal hormones: if you don't have good adrenal activity, this is like life or death. This is quality of your life. Plus, if you need thyroid, thyroid becomes impossible to take if your adrenals aren't supporting that thyroid activity. Then finally, sex hormones. A lot of people know they have a hormone problem, but they'll think I know it's my sex hormones because I'm menopausal, but you really need the whole picture to do that justice. So, I like that more comprehensive test. If somebody is really not understanding what's going on with their body, and there's a lot you can get there, a test is no good if it doesn't give you direction. I was really happy: I arranged for a test for a young woman with difficult periods, a lot of pain, and putting on weight and acne, and I chose a panel. I was so happy, because a lot of the things were abnormal, and if you don't have a test that shows you where the abnormalities are, you can't do anything about it. You have no direction. How many people go to the doctor and have a test and they say oh, everything's normal. No, you haven't looked at the test results well enough, or you haven't picked the right test to use for that patient. So that's another piece of things that are going on.
So many people are told, especially with the thyroid, that it's fine, your levels are great, there's nothing wrong, when people are feeling really ill. You know yes, there is something wrong. I myself have secondary hypothyroidism, and that is my pituitary TSH, which is what they measure all the time, is simply always low. It's low if I use thyroid, it's low if I don't. I think my pituitary was poisoned. It came from an area of a country with the biggest amount of atrazine in the ground water, and atrazine is a pituitary poison. I've been working on that. But what do you do when your TSH is so low, and your other pituitary hormones are low? You treat what follows. You treat the thyroid, you treat the adrenals, you treat the sex hormone function. That's how I've been managing myself. But interesting enough, a doctor can look at you, and you have every symptom of hypothyroidism, and they would take a look at a very low TSH, and say you're hyper, and that's that, because they haven't even thought about the pituitary actually producing that hormone, and being unable to. It's shocking to me how many times they see this.
I follow a lot of Facebook pages. I do follow one on LDN, and I follow menopause and osteoporosis, and <perry>. There are so many people out there that are suffering needlessly, and sometimes they write about their pharma experience. One drug after another. And their lives are devastated. I want people to know I'm a pharmacist, and I would say renegade pharmacist. Drugs do not return you to health, never ever. To go down that pathway, as soon as you start it, the drug is going to cause damage, and create more symptoms of discomfort. You're going to add another drug, and another drug, and you are doomed to a marginal existence, and none of this is necessary.
Linda Elsegood: Well, that's amazing.
Carol Peterson: Everybody is aiming for their optimal health, right, and it's achievable. Always, the people with the most trouble have the greatest gains to be made. I'm reading an old book by Andrew Saul called Doctor Yourself. I love the philosophy, but he is really making a point, over and over and over again: things that we consider illnesses are most often deficiencies in something, and we know enough about biochemistry now, and in physiology we're able to target certain nutrients for certain things. The more you know about that, the more tools you have to help yourself. That's what you have to do in the end, when you go to a doctor with whatever you have, you should be in charge. You are the person who is the buyer, and the seller is trying to sell you information, or a protocol, or something to do. You have to keep that in mind. You would spend a lot more time comparing cars than you do comparing what that doctor is able to offer you. And doctors have forgotten that they are a seller, partially because they offer you a pathway, and they're not allowed to deviate from that pathway they're offering. We've got our medical system so entrenched in, like, flow chart medicine, that doctors can no longer develop a patient-doctor relationship, where they're interested in the patient, and go right along with the patient, and examine the information out there. When you think about it, we have a whole world of smart people in country after country after country. We have no database that we could really touch into for finding that person, say in South Africa, who's gotten wonderful results doing a certain thing. We have no way of knowing that. In this age of information, not having access to the world's information on how to keep healthy and at optimal health, it's sad really, We should be able to do that.
Linda Elsegood: Well fingers crossed that you're laying the foundations for that.
Carol Peterson: Okay!
Linda Elsegood: Any questions or comments you may have, please email me, Linda, 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.