LDN Video Interviews and Presentations

Bullseye - Low dose naltrexone and Lyme disease with Dutch Subtitles (LDN) from LDN Research Trust on Vimeo.

Low Dose Naltrexone (LDN) in Scotland and beyond. Documentary with Portuguese Subtitles from LDN Research Trust on Vimeo.

Dr Kirsten Singler ND - 4th September 2019 (LDN, low dose naltrexone) from LDN Research Trust on Vimeo.

Linda Elsegood: Today, my guest is Dr.  Kirsten Singler, who's a naturopathic doctor from California. Thank you for joining us today, Kirsten. 

Dr Kirsten: Thank you so much for having me, Linda. 

Linda Elsegood: So first of all, can you tell us,  what made you decide you wanted to become a naturopathic doctor? 

Dr Kirsten:  I was in my twenties going to graduate school on a completely different life path and I got really ill. And I think this is common amongst other physicians that are really passionate and have that drive for good patient care and have that personal experience.

In my twenties, I got really, really sick. I wasn't able to go to my graduate program, and I wasn't even really able to leave the house. And I went to multiple doctors and at that time I only knew really about mainstream medicine. And so I would go from doctor to doctor, and no one could figure out what was going on.

 I thought that I was so healthy because I was a raw food vegan and was so conscientious of what I put into my body, but still couldn't function properly. And a friend of mine took me to a naturopathic physician who did acupuncture as well, and it was so phenomenal. The doctor that I saw, a Dr.Brennan McCarthy in Arizona,  told me I would be better within two days, and this was after two years of really being ill. And in two days I was better and after that, I was determined that this was going to be my life path. I was so struck by it and even to remember it now I get goosebumps that something that was so grievous in my life turned out to be maybe the best gift that ever came into my life.  

Linda Elsegood: if you don't mind sharing what’s the issue that you had what? What was, did you get a diagnosis. 

Dr Kirsten:  I won't go into too much detail because it was female problems but it did have to do with hormone imbalance so severe that  I was basically very, very anaemic and that's why I wasn't able to function.  Now that I look back on it within the mainstream, none of the physicians I saw really evaluated my iron, my ferritin, those main indicators that now, of course, I run on every female patient that comes in our office, but at the time, nobody did that workup on me.  

Linda Elsegood: okay, when did you qualify as being a naturopathic doctor?

Dr Kirsten: That was in 2015. I graduated from SCNM in Tempe, Arizona. Before becoming a naturopath, I did work as a nutritionist and a herbalist and did consultations for ten years prior to that.  

Linda Elsegood: so knowing that acupuncture works so well for you, do you do acupuncture in your practice? Is that a.therapy option?

Dr Kirsten: Absolutely. Currently, our practice is so busy that just this year really, I haven't been doing acupuncture on patients directly, because it's more time consuming for each patient. So I refer to another person too. I did do the acupuncture prior to that  I absolutely did perform it, and I love it as a therapy.  

Linda Elsegood: okay. So when did you hear about LDN? How long ago was that?

Dr Kirsten: So in fact, the first time I ever heard about LDN was due to your book, the LDN book, it was my first Hashimoto's patients in the clinic. So this was when I was a student, and I had my first autoimmune case and my supervising physician,  handed me the LDN book, which I poured over. And then tentatively started my patient on it and had such good success. Then it's been part of my toolkit ever since. 

Linda Elsegood:  So what conditions would you say you have seen to date.

Dr Kirsten:  I don't mean conditions, which is broad, you know, autoimmunity covers like Hashimoto's, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus,  autoimmune, hepatitis,  dermatomyositis. That's a skin condition, a case of polymyositis. And that's—kind of a muscular, joint pain type condition. Ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s of course and fibromyalgia. I use it a lot for those cases. I've had pain conditions like trigeminal neuralgia work successfully with that. Also undiagnosed chronic fatigue.  

Linda Elsegood:  Well, I know that you said it was one of the tools you have in your toolbox. You know, if a patient came to you with let's say, Hashimoto's, what therapies would you use?

Dr Kirsten: Well, we want to primarily work them up for figuring out what's their root cause, right?  And figuring out what are the obstacles that they're facing. And then also evaluate their basic function. So we want to always pull back. 

You can look at the big picture of their health, and it's kind of zooming out from what their symptoms are, like the trees in the forest, and we want to zoom out and look at the forest and evaluate them for external environmental triggers. Which for Hashimoto's I feel is almost always the case that they have some form of, and for autoimmune in general, some form of external stressor, whether it's a psycho-emotional stressor or a toxic exposure like heavy metals or chemicals or some kind of physical trauma. Or exposure to some kind of pathogen, like a mould or a viral or a bacterial thing going on.

So we want to assess them for what's going on externally and then treat that. Say a patient comes back with high Epstein. Bart titers. Then we're also going to accompany the LDN with an antiviral protocol and an immune-boosting or calming protocol. Then we also want to look at what's going on with them intrinsically. Such things as what kind of inflammatory or immune dysfunction is maybe inherent. Or could have been going on lifelong, like how intact is their gut function, were they breastfed his children, were they put on multiple antibiotics, what's their formative nutrition were they raised on condensed milk, sugar and formula? Or were they fed a nutrient-rich diet, or is there a genetic polymorphism going on right. These are snips, changes in their DNA that affect their enzymes. And that can lead to saying, an inability to convert something like selenium in food. The active form in a Hashimoto's patient, their thyroid needs the conversion to perform adequately.

So if they have those kinds of polymorphisms and we want to be moving forward and making sure they get the right form of the vitamin and then evaluating them for other intrinsic type conditions like what's going with food intolerance. Do they have some kind of lactose intolerance or a food sensitivity that's affecting their gut that may be leading to an inflammatory cascade that's affecting their whole body or inhibiting their ability to absorb nutrition?

So it's really zooming out and figuring out what are the areas that need addressing and creating a pretty comprehensive plan for them. And then just taking baby steps with that plan wherever the patients are, you know if they're, say, a mechanic in a garage and they're getting lots of chemical exposure at their profession. And  I'm thinking, Oh boy, this guy's got to get out of that garage. Also, I'll start them on a detox plan and educate them about learning how to make better food choices. So at least he's reducing his toxic burden in his food. And then with the goal of figuring out how he can still maintain his profession without having so much exposure. 

Linda Elsegood: You mentioned heavy metals. How do you treat somebody who's been tested for having had? 

Dr Kirsten: So there are chelation protocols. And for the most part, naturopathic doctors are trained in this. We all take classes in environmental medicine and it's required, at least it was required in my program, to have an environmental medicine shift.

And the chelation can range from oral chelators (those are substances that will bind up certain metals, like bind up, lead, bind up mercury, and pull it out of the body through the alimentary canal).  There are other chelators, more aggressive, like IV solution. Now I don't do IV chelation.

If a physician is going to do IV chelation, that's all they should do because there can be so many side effects and patients have varying degrees of tolerability, especially when they're sick. But, the oral chelators are slower going and keep the body more in a state of homeostasis.

Linda Elsegood: Okay. How long does it take if you do it orally?

Dr Kirsten:  It varies on the vitality of the patient, the severity of their condition. You know, if, if they have like a severe Parkinson's and are wheelchair-bound versus mild exposure to lead that was stored when they were children. And then they don't have a current exposure and don't really have symptoms. So the vitality of the patient matters. The severity of pathology matters and then the degree of exposure. So has it been like lifelong, for example, you know, were they raised with it? Out on the dock here in California, we have a lot of dockworkers and there's a lot of pollution from the ships coming in, you know, a lot of inhalants.

Were they always there, out there on the docks, since they were kids up until adulthood and now adults, they're working on the docks or you name it. It really does vary based on the individual and their exposure. 

Linda Elsegood: Sure. Okay. So if you had a severe case, and they were on oral, would they have to be on it for a year or longer? You know, if it was a really bad thing. 

Dr Kirsten: If it was a really bad case. Okay. Say, somebody came back, and they had a severe pathology plus very high levels of heavy metals in their system. We would want to start figuring out where's the exposure coming in and remove that access. And second to that, take it really,  really slowly because it takes energy to detox. So when a patient's really sick, and they don't even have the energy to get up and walk around, perform daily activities, you want to drive up their vitality. So that could be starting with doing IV therapy, like IV vitamin C so that you're boosting up their immune system, boosting up their vitality, and then  build them up while you are slowly, intermittently, chelating them. So for a severe case, I guess the rule of thumb is for every disease a patient has, you're spending a month of active therapy. So if somebody has been ill for 20 years, you want to anticipate 20 months of active therapy. 

Linda Elsegood: Wow. 

Dr Kirsten: Okay. 

Linda Elsegood: Yeah. I'm just thinking of the age that I am. If you went back it would take 

Dr Kirsten: forever. It depends on vitality too. So some people inherently have phenomenal vitality. I had a Parkinson's patient, and she was wheelchair-bound and she had a full manifestation of Parkinson's and her medications were not adequately treating it. That's why she ended up on my doorstep. She was looking for something else. Actually, her children were looking for something else for her. She just inherently had such good vitality that as we started doing the IVs, it was really within three months that she was up out of her wheelchair. And walking around and could smile and could talk. And, you know, the first day I met her, she was mute, she couldn't smile or talk to me. So it does vary from patient to patient. Absolutely.  

Linda Elsegood: It's interesting that you said about Parkinson's patients. I have a friend who I went to college with who has Parkinson's and she came last week, and it's very difficult for her to get up.She's still walking, but when she goes to go through, or whether it's the stress of going through the door, I don't know, but she starts to do what she calls a dance, and she's popping up and down, and she can't get her legs to move. And it's every door that she goes through. Where would you start with somebody like that? Do you think maybe she has some of these conditions cause it's not that easy in England to see a naturopathic doctor. So that is a challenge in itself. 

Dr Kirsten: In England, do you all have evaluations? Do they evaluate for heavy metals and chemicals? Do they have tests like that? 

Linda Elsegood: I wouldn't know. I've never had a test. I have multiple sclerosis, but as far as I know, I've never been tested 

Dr Kirsten: There is a lab company that we use a lot. It's called great Plains labs and, I think that they are available internationally and their evaluation is through either urine,  stool, and saliva evaluations.And I think that that might be a place to start. She could look into that lab company and see if one of her physicians would be willing to run that lab and find out what kind of chemicals are going on. If there's heavy metal exposure, usually heavy metal testing is within the mainstream, you know, it's like a urine evaluation. I could look into it further and find out resources in your area. I can always email you. 

Linda Elsegood: Okay. That would be really interesting. That's good. We will have to have a look at that. She certainly could use some help. So have you found that your patients that take LDN and thyroid medication that they have to be very careful and reduce their thyroid medications?

Dr Kirsten: Well, yeah. Thyroid in my experience is ever-changing.  I've had patients that reduce their thyroid script just based on removing inflammatory foods from their diet.  So the better the gut functions, obviously the amount of inflammation is going to go down, which calms the autoimmune response. Number two, they absorb their medications more efficiently. So, a good rule of thumb that I always follow is I  run my labs every six months on the patients, and I'm always expecting them to change. Every once in awhile patients will come back stable. You know, these are people that have already seen naturopaths for years. They know their body. They're on a really good health program. But when people are first starting out, I am expecting to modify their scripts.  

Linda Elsegood: now you talk about the guts, and you did say at the beginning that you used to be on a raw vegan diet.  Is that the diet you're still on. 

Dr Kirsten: I'm not, but I do really subscribe to a philosophy of eating a lot of vegetables.

I get most of my nutrition and most of my food from vegetables. But they're going to be cooked and varied. And I'd say I'm definitely omnivore.  I think everybody should get most of their nutrition primarily from a vegetable source. 

Linda Elsegood: Now looking in supermarkets, and especially people that have several children to eat healthily,  it's very expensive.  I would think it's out of the reach of a lot of families where they have several children, you know, do you think in years to come, we're going to get rid of this high sugar, high salt, snacky type food? Do you think we will be able to educate people? You know what you eat, you know what goes in the gut really does affect your health.

Do you think that is likely to happen or is that just me being in cloud cuckoo land and you know, cheap food is going to always be there, and it's going to be full of sugar and salt, and people are going to continue to become type two diabetics because they are upsetting their immune system and having autoimmune diseases and thyroid problems and the like, you know, what's your opinion?.

Dr Kirsten: You're right. Similarly, I might be too idealistic, but I think that as they're teaching in the schools, and they're teaching children how to grow vegetables and cook,  that it all comes down to being able to cook for yourself. So I'm going through school. You know, when I was too broke to even buy toothpaste, right? I put myself through medical school and worked full time during that time and definitely knew financial pressures. Even during that time, I still cooked for myself. And you know, what I cooked was a lot of beans. I cook rice, and I cook a whole grain and actually did grow vegetables in my little garden in Arizona.I was successful in that way, but that all comes down to education. You know, cause I was raised in a family, that taught me how to grow vegetables and taught me how to cook beans and sprout seeds and like that. So for me, it comes as like second nature. I know it very well, but I think that with education, that will change.

And that's what I'm really hopeful for and excited about out here in California. There are lots of programs,  to educate kids on how to grow food and cook and changing the food systems within the school districts. And I hope that it just spreads throughout the United States, everywhere.

Linda Elsegood: Yes. And you know, if you went to buy, if you've got four children and you went to buy four apples, you know, the mother might go for the cost of the four apples of buying what we would call biscuits. You call them cookies and crisps, which you call chips and could end up with a basket full of snacky foods for the same price as for apples.

Which would be gone in minutes, you know? And that's what I find really hard. You know children are being given the wrong foods when money is a problem, which then causes lots of other issues further down the line.  I don't know if we can get healthier food at a more reasonable price. Yes, that might be an answer, but of course, it all costs money too for the farmers and things to supply the supermarket chains that also have to make a profit. And so it goes on. But it would be nice if all the snacky foods became slightly healthier as we go on, we have the sugar tax here. I don't know whether you have that yet, and they're trying to reduce the amount of salt that's being put in pre-packed food. So that's the style. But I think things have got to go a lot further. I mean, we were far healthier. I'm 62. My mother, when she was growing up, she grew up post-war, and they were very limited to what they had.  I think she was quite old when she had her first banana. She'd not seen a banana or an orange.But they lived on a farm. Had a pig, and a cow, and then when they slaughtered one of them, all the neighbours had bits and pieces, and then when they slaughtered something else, everyone got some of those, it was all similar to a barter type system. And they grew vegetables, so she only grew up with fresh meat, fresh fish, and vegetables. And  I think they as a generation were far healthier than my generation where, you know, fast food came in, you know, all of these prepacked foods, which I mean, in my mother's day, they didn't have, 

 I think we need to, instead of carrying on the path we're doing is to revert. Act how it was years ago in that eating your own vegetables. But for some people, that's still not an option if you live in a flat.  And you've got no way you could, you could grow things, but that's really interesting, What do you say about, if you had to give me the names of four top supplements that you mostly use. What would they be? 

Dr Kirsten: Oh, that's a great question. The pharmacist that I talk to the most, I send a lot of the patients to our compounding pharmacy and he was teasing me that I use magnesium for every single patient, which I have. I would say, okay. Magnesium is definitely on the list. I do think that people benefit from magnesium and commonly vitamin D. I've run a vitamin D lab on every patient, and they almost always come back in the deficient category. You know, I don't think it has to do with sun exposure. Everybody's either using sunblocks or staying out of the sun, and not eating vitamin D rich foods.  I almost always prescribe vitamin D3.  I would probably put some B vitamins in that cluster of supplements too,  so many of our patients, again, are compromised with their absorption. So either they're having issues, they're on like a. Proton pump inhibitor or there's something going on in the gastro system, and their B vitamins are deficient. Whether it's a B6 or a B12.  So I'd maybe put a B complex for those. And, getting back to the gut, I put almost every patient on a probiotic eventually. So it might not be the first go-round that we meet. But most people I think are gonna benefit from a good pharmaceutical grade probiotic.  And then. I will eventually put most patients on a detox.

So that could be mild. I could be taking botanical teas that helped move their liver and get their liver to function better. Or it could be more aggressive, like a box kit,  like something like the Standard Process detox kits cleanse that takes them through a list of foods that they can eat, have a list of foods that they can't eat, and then supplements that are really going to be pushing their liver through the phases of detoxification. I think that that would be my general toolkit for most patients. 

Linda Elsegood: So with the box detox kit, how long would you have to eat certain foods and restrict. 

Dr Kirsten: Well, there's a low intervention kit, by a company called Metagenics. That's a ten-day cleanse. And I like that when patients that have never done a detox before in their life, it helps them get confidence, know what to expect and get results. So usually, it's a one week cleanse and usually they're gonna feel more clear-minded, have good energy, and almost always lose weight because that's another component. Patients are always tracking their weight. Usually. And, it bolsters them. So after they've done a ten-day detox, then they could graduate to, you know, the next time they need to do a detox. they could do a month-long,  a 28 day cleanse.  I like to start patients where they're at. You know, sometimes I get a patient that has done multiple detoxes and then we can go straight into month-long cleansing. But I usually am going to start where they are. 

Linda Elsegood: Well, it's been amazing talking to you. I'd love to have you back another day and find out more from you. 

Dr Kirsten:  I would love that. 

Linda Elsegood:  Well, thank you, Kirsten. Absolutely amazing talking to you, and thank you. 

Dr Kirsten: Oh, absolutely. It is so nice to get to talk with you, Linda. It really means a lot to me. I've admired everything that you've been doing for a long time. 

Linda Elsegood: Thank you very much. This show is sponsored by Mark Drugs who specialize in the custom compounding of medications, assuring that the client gets the proper prescriptions for their unique needs and conditions. They work with practitioners integrating knowledge and treatment of experts to create comprehensive health plans. Visit Markdrugs.com or call Roselle (630) 529-3400 or Deerfield (847) 419-9898.

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 appreciate it. Until next time, stay safe 

Brooke Hutchison, PharmD - 28th August 2019 (LDN, low dose naltrexone) from LDN Research Trust on Vimeo.

Pharmacist Brooke Hutchinson is the pharmacy manager from Skip's pharmacy in Florida.

There is some changings since we start with LDN 25 years ago. We realize that not all people need to be on the 4,5mg of Low Dose Naltrexone and that's not wrong or the patient doesn't need to worry if he doesn't reach 4.5 mg. That's absolutely fine. And we've seen with a lot of patients chemical sensitivity where they're not able to tolerate the standard dose, specifically Lyme disease and Fibromyalgia's patients.

So I do in fact have patients starting off on a quarter milligram, some less. And they never achieve the three milligram. But the benefits are still there.

It truly does decrease inflammation in the body. We're seeing it used in micro dosing, Ultra Low Dose Naltrexone for pain management when patients are on opioid therapy to help them get on lower doses or actually get off of the opioid pain management and move over to the Low Dose Naltrexone.

When a patient does want to taper off of opioid based pain medication, we are using anywhere from 20 to 50 micrograms a few times a day, and it really helps patients decrease the opioid and avoid the withdrawal side effects of getting off of the opiod based pain medication. So everybody again presents a little differently, but it could be nausea, vomiting, flu like symptoms like your bones ache constipation, diarrhea.

Patients are avoiding having to go through this type of transition, trying to get off of their pain medication. And I can say it's been very beneficial.

So this process of transition from opiods to ULDN allows the brain to reset and help our body recreate our own natural endorphins to help with the pain.

I would like to say about Hashimoto's patients out there, if you have true Hashimoto's and you initiate Naltrexone. I have had patients within three days responding where they need to start backing off of their thyroid medication.

So patients present with heart palpitation, cold tolerance, irritability, anxiety. This can happen literally within the first week of initiating the Naltrexone where the patient has to start backing off of their thyroid medication.

Do not be afraid to do that. It will cause problems if the patient doesn't start backing off of their thyroid medication.

Lab values is a very helpful tool, but it's a snapshot of that day of that time. There is a fluctuation with

the TSH, FT3 but I'd say after three months of a patient going through the titration, majority of my Hashimoto's patients are completely off of their thyroid medication or there is combination.

Naltrexone takes time. When somebody has been suffering from something for such a long period of time, the healing process takes time. And that's what I always try to convey to my patients.

For my patients, for GI issues, Ulcerative colitis, Celiacs,  we also offer an oral liquid that gets absorbed through the membrane and the mouth, and it kind of avoids any kind of GI upset.

In addition to that, we also offer transdermal cream, which I use a lot in my pediatrics and adolescents, or again, patients that have sensitive GI tracks where it's applied topically to the skin and it's absorbed into the systemic circulation, bypassing the gut.

I compound anywhere from a quarter of a milligram up to nine milligrams if needed.

We have seen in different areas like autism and pandas we are using dosing twice a day. So these patients might be taking four and a half milligrams twice a day or nine milligrams twice a day.

I'm capable of compounding any milligram you could possibly think.

As LDN is a long term therapy, I usually ask my patients to be on LDN for at least six to eight months before they discontinue therapy.

Now, patients usually see change when they've gotten up to typically three milligrams,  within a few months. Healing process takes time. It doesn't prevent you from getting sick, but it does optimize immune system functioning and patients that would usually get sick five times a year, they only got sick once that year, and that's a big deal.

 We're trying to get the body to function as optimally as possible. And we're trying to decrease inflammation.  I wouldn't believe it unless I talked to so many patients all of my years of being with skips pharmacy. It was incredible.

Summary from pharmacist Dr. Brooke Hutchinson's interview. Listen to the video for the full interview.

Astrid from Norway, MS and Low Dose Naltrexone (LDN) from LDN Research Trust on Vimeo.

Linda Elsegood: Today, I'd like to introduce Astrid from Norway who uses LDN for MS. Thank you for joining us today, Astrid. 

Astrid: You're welcome. My pleasure. 

Linda Elsegood: Can you tell us how long ago was it when you first noticed your MS symptoms? 

Astrid: That's a good question. I was diagnosed in 1996 at 29 years old, and I was diagnosed during a period where our boss was getting sick too and the diagnosis was three weeks.

I have all kinds of strange methods for this because normally people are kind of sick for a long time and don't figure out what's wrong with them. But my MS was like a big surprise for me when I got this, I was kind of shocked. But I had a friend who I had grown up with, who had played with us.

Both these ladies were real role models. I can say they were very happy, had a good life, even though they were using a wheelchair and you can really see they were sick, but they have a very good life and are very happy. I was like, not so scared, but of course, very surprised when I got the diagnosis.

But when I look back, from a research perspective, I can find episodes and also some issues that had been bothering me. During the year before I got MS but I didn't recognize it as something. The doctor would. I got to the Agnos and at the moment I was kind of … didn't manage to put the buttons on my blouse and had the talk that I needed to use the wheelchair for a while, but kind of recovered, kind of. I felt like it was nothing to worry about, so kept ongoing, as I did before, and didn't want to recognise that I was sick really. This went on, for almost two years.

Then I had to have surgery for my back and a couple of weeks after that surgery, I got another attack which kind of put my feet away. Then the doctor explained the reason for this attack was the... what do you call it? I was completely awake during the procedure and they explained that it was you that triggered this attack, they explained. 

I still didn't get any offer for any medicine for MS. Only for pain. I use all this bad stuff for this medicine for epileptic normally and I was kind of more and more affected by the fatigue, the new neural pain, because of MS more and more. 

Then the doctor couldn't really help me. I wasn't qualified to get the medicine to slow down the MS because I was still considered different. Or whatever you can call it in a different category at the time, considered to give medicine to slow down their progress.

Today, I know the Norwegian doctors are starting to give this right away, but in 96 and 98 when I had these two big episodes, it was not common yet. Then I had my daughter in 2002 and I had a really good pregnancy and I was feeling very sick. MS unusually got better during pregnancy.

Of course, I was concerned that the birth could trigger another attack. I was right because this is what I did during the birth. I did use only the needles for pain relief and I didn't get any help to do it all or things like that.

They were careful with what they gave me when my daughters started to grow, I had more fatigue and more pain. Whatever the doctor was giving me didn’t help with the pain or fatigue. There wasn’t really any medicine which was working. I was trying it and it's something called for a while, but… What do you call it? A tree gets it. It was like more fatigue. Then I met this lady, I don't know if you know about this program that we had in Norway in 2013, it was the program in general. The lady with MS who was telling her story in that program, I met her in a training camp for MS and she told me about LDN, and then I figured out that this is something I want to try because she was like all over the place, the allergy and I find out I would give it a try. I ask the doctors, they said this is not proven, so we can't give it to you.

But they told me how to get it. They said if I go to a primary doctor and the primary doctor was given the risk perception... But prescription, it's okay, and we can't really say that you shouldn't take it, because of policy and blah, blah, blah, they have decided that all of the Norwegian neuro doctors will not write this prescription.

In May 2012 I started using LDN, and I have been reading a lot on Facebook because it started to pop up groups in Norway and in Denmark. Sharing stories and also a special group only MS and LDN and I read and concluded that if I start, I need to start with the low dose, very low dose and increase very slowly.

And I did. So I started in May and at the end of July, I was able to go on holiday with my family for 10 days. We started at a wedding which normally was so exhausting that I would be on the couch for the rest of the week after just one night. We went on to a park for my daughter who was 10.

I was for the first time able to spend the whole day walking around in the park together with her. Then we went on for a long ride with the car and we were away for 10 days and when I came back I was exhausted.  It was like, wow, something has changed.

Some radicalized change. I still was taking some pain medicine but I started reducing it. By February 2013, my doctors stopped prescribing the drugs with the opioids for me.

I went back to work, not full time, but I have been 100% since then. Like you call it auto work since 2001. I have been more or less, sometimes also in more than a hundred percent in hours working in pay and stuff today, no pain at all. I very often had this problem with my bladder, so I had to... what is the name of it in English? I didn't really manage to consolidate. So I had a lot of accidents, of course, but I also got a lot of infections. 

Linda Elsegood: In your bladder? 

Astrid: Yeah, yeah. In my bladder. Yeah. It was constantly infected and two times it almost cost me my life more or less because I got this sepsis, what they call it in Norway, the blood then got infected. So two times I went to the hospital and was really, really critical. After I started on LDN I have never any cold or any flu or things like that. My allergy has gotten better. I also use the catheter to help to empty the bladder because it didn't empty completely itself. That's the reason. 

Linda Elsegood: So you're self catheterizing?

Astrid: Yes, I did for several years. Of course, that was a nope. Done that. I haven't done that since I started on that. All-day I can feel like I need to go to the bathroom for an hour and I don't have the accidents anymore either. So definitely affected my bladder in a very good way. Who is really saying that you can't?

You are, so you can't see it. I feel like I'm more or less without any diagnosis really at the time. It's the combination with the LDN and I also take something called… natural medicine based on D mannose. Take it to flush out your bladder. I think it's like a drink. I drank it and the oils from seeds with black cumin seed in it. It's like the respiratory seed and it's shadow make rapeseed.

Then this is also very good for them. For infections, prevent the faction infections and so this should combination with the LDN. So it's been like life-changing. 

Linda Elsegood: If you were to say, what's your quality of life was like before you started on LDN and 10 being the best, what would it have been?

Astrid: I would say between three and four, maybe. 

Linda Elsegood: What would you say it is today? 

Astrid: Wow. Wow. Yeah. Amazing. Oh, I can do whatever I like to do. I can say yes to what I like to do and I don't need to say no. I'm measuring. If anything was supposed to happen, I needed to value, is this going to cost me too much or is it gonna give me any value? Everything was like that. Of course, since I have a little daughter, everything was focused to give her the best possible life. So when she went to kindergarten and school, I was residing on the sofa, doing nothing so that I can play with her. When she came back from her with school so that she could have friends over and so on.

So everything was kind of focusing on giving her the best what I really wanted. I'm the kind of person who is used to, I went to school and I went to college and high school and university, I was working. Besides, I have also been always using use to have a very high capacity of what I thought something used to work a lot and to enjoy working and always kind of this.

Suddenly I had to be this no person in many aspects. Even though I wanted, I knew that this is gonna cost me, so it wouldn't be worth it. Everything is back to where it was, I'm the person I am. I can say yes to what I like to do. It works.

Linda Elsegood: Oh, that's fantastic. You don't get the pain anymore? 

Astrid: I said, that's gone. No. That was really the big difference. The biggest, I think because the pain gave me a sleep disorder because I was having very bad sleep, even though I was always tired and being on the couch, I didn't really like... if I was lying on the couch and I felt like going to the bathroom because I needed to, it was like, I wait a minute, did two, I wait the five minutes. It was exhausting just to go to the toilet. So everything was so hard. It was like constantly like something was going on. I felt like my whole body is like when you take your muscles on you, you squeeze them as hard as you can and you feel like how the body's anxious and in a strain, it felt like this all the time, even though I was lying in bed.

The body was relaxed, but it didn't feel like it. This pain is all gone. When I lay down now it feels like I'm relaxed and I don't have any pain or neuro pains. They’re gone. Also, it's more like pain in the ears, eyes, and mouth.

It's like lightning balls coming and give you pain for just a few seconds to a minute. I had a lot of these neuro pains and they are also all gone. It's very good. It's so many things that disappeared. I don't remember all the pain though, because it's since 2013 I felt like my life, we started again.

I'm talking a lot about it and gave everybody's psyche, you have to try. So they are always asking me all, you're selling this or what? I say you have to go to the doctor and ask for it. So when I started, I had to order a box with a special delivery to my pharmacy in my city. So in the beginning that was like a special order. Out of curiosity, asking if I go to a new pharmacy and if the people know about them, ask them if they have a lot of customers and a lot of them say that it's been common and there are more and more people using it for more and more sickness. They recognize that this is something that is working. It’s good for so many people for so many reasons and different reasons to use it. They recognize it in the pharmacy too.

Linda Elsegood: We've come to the end of the show and we're so pleased to have heard your story today, Astrid. Thank you so much for sharing it with us. 

Astrid: My pleasure and I hope everybody is able to try it, LDN, because I think it's worth a try. Anyway, thank you very much. 

Linda Elsegood: My pleasure. 

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 the radio station software, bandwidth, phone lines, and phone calls to be able to continue with the radio show and thank you for listening.

Any questions or comments you may have, please email 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.

Dr. Michael Ruscio, DC - 14th August 2019 (LDN, low dose naltrexone) from LDN Research Trust on Vimeo.

Linda Elsegood: Today, I'd like to welcome back my guest, Dr Michael Ruscio. Thank you for joining us today, Michael. 

Dr  Michael Ruscio: Thanks for having me. 

Linda Elsegood: Now you're a speaker at the LDN 2019 conference in June in Portland, Oregon. This is a prerecorded radio show, so we've actually had the conference. Could you tell us about the presentation you're going to be giving at the conference?

Dr  Michael Ruscio: Sure I'd love to. There is a growing problem in progressive thyroid care that I'm seeing at an alarmingly increasing rate. And I think it would really benefit providers of all stripes to better understand this: essentially there are maybe two or three big misses that are occurring in thyroid care. One is over-diagnosis of hypothyroidism, or you could turn this another way - when someone isn't truly hypothyroid, but they're being offered thyroid medication as support. What often happens is the patient doesn't realize that this is being used as a temporary support. The provider doesn't make that clear delineation that they're not truly hypothyroid. Some of your levels look a little bit low, so we're going to give you this medication to try to improve your symptoms. They don't make that delineation. The patients stopped seeing that provider, but they kept taking the medication. And now, there are a fair number of patients who've been on medication for years that they don't really need to be on. And so without getting too far into details of that, that's one key component, and we can fill in some of the rationale and the facts there in a moment. But over-diagnosis of hypothyroidism in cases that are not truly hypothyroidism is becoming fairly endemic in functional medicine. 

Linda Elsegood: And where is the source of the problem coming from, because of course, clinicians are trying to help these patients?

Dr  Michael Ruscio: I don't think anyone is over-diagnosing hypothyroidism with malicious intent. I think we're all saying, well, here's the patient presenting with fatigue, depression, brain fog, constipation, dry hair, skin, nails, whatever it is. What can we do to help this patient? 

And I think what we can do to help these patients in part is better to understand the importance of gut health. There is documentation to show that various maladies in the gut can contribute to thyroid function. Autoimmunity can contribute to non-responsiveness and malabsorption of thyroid medication. And by addressing these things, we can finally see these patients respond who had otherwise been unresponsive. And sometimes it involves using no medication, or even a reduction of the thyroid medication. So that's kind of the 30,000-foot view. And I’m happy to go into more detail on any of those points. 

Linda Elsegood: It's really interesting. I've met over the last few years, many people with thyroid conditions, and they don't generally tend to reduce their medication until they're on LDN and find that it's more effective than it was before. But that was interesting you saying, and I took it to be less, was more in some cases that you don't need such a high level over time. How, how does that correlate to the gut. I know that a lot of people with thyroid conditions say that they improve greatly if they don't take gluten. What else should they be doing? Say, if you've got a patient who's got thyroid conditions, what do they need to do to try and get that gut health in the right place? 

Dr  Michael Ruscio: You make a great point, which is therapy like LDN, through its ability to positively modulate the immune system, can positively modulate the gut. And that could help with malabsorption that could be occurring because of a problem in the gut. So that's one area that is sometimes overlooked, where someone may have various digestive symptoms, and the clinician may not fully connect that. Those digestive symptoms indicate that the person is not adequately absorbing their thyroid medication. And this may account for some of the instability seen when tracking someone's thyroid levels. And there are some papers that are documenting this now, most namely in either H pylori infection or those who have ulcers, showing that the treatment of H pylori specifically can actually lead to a reduction of thyroid medication.

And of course, as you noted, there are papers published on those who have celiac disease, who when they follow a gluten-free diet, can reduce their thyroid medication. Most clinicians are probably having their patients experiment with a gluten-free diet, so that is a great recommendation. It's probably not offering the clinician anything new that they haven't heard before, but looking into something like small intestinal bacterial overgrowth or H pylori, that may offer benefit. And again, sometimes we attribute this to healing the thyroid.  This hasn’t been fully borne out by the research yet, but my thinking is when you see a change in the need for thyroid medication where someone actually needs less medication that occurs over the course of a few months, that is almost for certain not going to be due to healing the thyroid gland, but more so due to improved absorption of the thyroid medication. We see this in some of the H pylori studies where patients were able to decrease their dose of medication. And we've published on our website a handful of case studies where we've been able to reduce, in some cases as much as half someone's thyroid medication dose.

At the same time, the patient is losing weight in a positive direction, meaning they were a bit overweight, and now they're at a healthier weight. They have better energy, better skin, less joint pain. 

And there's another parallel here that reinforces the same finding, which is using the liquid gel tab form of thyroid hormone known as Thyroxine. And also some research has been performed showing that in patients who have been unable to obtain stability in TSH and T4 and/or the resolution of symptoms use Thyroxine and actually are able to get many patients to a more stable TSH and T4 and improve their symptoms. And this is almost again for certain because Thyroxine being in a liquid gel tab is much more easily absorbed than some of your more traditional tablet forms. That's just a couple of ways in which the gut can directly impact the absorption of thyroid medication, which again, I don't think is being given the amount of attention that it deserves. And I can say in clinical practice. That can be the difference between success and failure in some of these cases.

And I'll just juxtapose that with - sometimes the clinician is really floundering with a patient on Levothyroxine and maybe they need to add in some T3 Cytomel, or maybe they need to switch them into a desiccated form something like Armour Thyroid or even WP Thyroid or Nature-Thyroid, or anyone of these medications that's a T4-T3 combination. 

And that's not really what the cause of the problem is. The cause of the problem is inconsistent absorption, and that is oftentimes addressed by improving the diet. As you noted, with something like gluten-free or if someone's already gluten-free, then considering some type of dysbiotic or infectious issue in the gut can then be what improves the gut health and allows the patient to more consistently absorb the medication, and then their blood levels look better and then their symptoms also look better.

Linda Elsegood: So how do people know what their gut health is? Like? How, what are the symptoms?

Dr  Michael Ruscio: That can be one of the biggest challenges because we're starting to learn that you can have - and actually, some of the older celiac research has shown this for a while - that you can have an active inflammatory issue in the gut that only manifests extra-intestinally. Meaning you have no digestive symptoms, but you may have something like atopic dermatitis or depression or fatigue or joint pain.

So one of the challenging things can be figuring out whether the gut is the root cause of this problem. Because you may have no gut symptoms, testing is oftentimes offered as a solution here, which it can be; but the testing is really imperfect, in my opinion. There are a number of things that we can test for, but there's also a number of things where the testing still hasn't been fully mapped out yet. And just as one example, we know that small intestinal fungal overgrowth does exist. Dr Satish Rao has published some research on this. But because doing a sample directly from the small intestine is impractical, then that's not something that we can really readily assess in clinical practice. So if someone could do a breath test for SIBO and a stool test for other types of bacterial and fungal dysbiosis, that's a great start. But we still might be missing something like small intestinal fungal overgrowth. 

So, in answer to your question, what can be used to help assess the health of someone's gut? Testing gives us a slice of information that can be helpful, but it doesn't give us all the information and the way I look at this is to consider taking steps to optimize your gut health kind of proactively. Even if you don't have a diagnosis of H pylori or small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, consider taking those steps to proactively improve your gut health.

If you've improved your diet, if you have a healthy lifestyle, but you're still not following optimally, well, so you're still not feeling optimal. Well, then. I think it's a good idea at that point to just, again, proactively and almost more so - empirically take steps to improve your gut health, because it can be challenging to get that definitive diagnosis on a lab test of various sorts.

Linda Elsegood: I've had people with thyroid conditions ask me questions about gut health, and they say, how do I know if I've got leaky gut? I've read that there are people that have leaky gut, and I seem to have the same kind of problems. What tests do you do for leaky gut? You mentioned that.

Dr  Michael Ruscio: Great question. And this is another area where the testing is really imperfect. We just performed a comprehensive review of the literature, literally looking at every test in humans on the markers, serum zonulin, which may be one of the better markers for assessing leaky gut. No marker really is perfect. Zonulin, that may be the best test now. Zonulin is a marker essentially of tight junction proteins in the gut and can be assessed via blood or stool, and it does correlate with various diseases like diabetes, metabolic syndrome; and in some cases, inflammatory bowel disease and IBS.

So it does seem to correlate with diseases or symptoms, but not in every case. But where the argument falls apart a little bit more, unfortunately, is when we look at what happens when we treat people, we put people on a healthy diet or on a probiotic or what have you, and this is where there are much more inconsistent findings with zonulin.

There had been a few studies showing that in people with symptoms and with high zonulin, meaning leaky gut, they then improve their diet and see a drastic improvement in their symptoms. Yet their zonulin gets either worse or stays the same. Now to be fair, there are also studies showing that zonulin can improve after using something like a probiotic, but there are also studies showing that people will see no improvement in zonulin after taking a probiotic, even though their symptoms have improved. I know this may be a little bit unpopular for me to say, uh, that zonulin may not be quite fully ready for the routine clinical application, as there are some inconsistencies with testing for leaky gut.

So this is why I say testing gives us a slice and it can be helpful, but we really cannot fully hang our hat on test results alone. Because when you look at the data behind these tests, in many cases, what you see is the tests do not perform perfectly. They're only partially informative, and so the best test, arguably, for leaky gut would be zonulin, but it certainly is not something that I think is highly reliable. So it's one slice. But we also want to take the patient's symptoms into account. And so maybe to just paint a scenario here, if someone came in with rheumatoid arthritis and they wanted to know if their gut was contributing to that rheumatoid arthritis, or even their thyroid condition, what we could do is perform some testing, and that would be maybe one-third of the data that informs how we're going to proceed. And if we find something on testing like small intestinal bacterial overgrowth or H pylori, we can treat those. However, if the testing comes up negative, one still may want you to consider a round of treatment. And this is where using things as herbal medicines and probiotics make a much more of a tenable approach, because these things I don't think, require the same rationale as using something like an antibiotic or what have you. But treat the patient for a presumed imbalance in the gut and then monitor their symptoms. If their symptoms are improving or if the dose required for the third medication becomes more stable, or even they start to appear hyperthyroid like they need less medication, then that tells you that you're on the right track.

And again, I know it's easier if I were just to proclaim one or two tests to be the best and one or two markers, and that's the easy message I think we all want. But unfortunately, when you take that easy message into clinical practice, you get really confused. And if you take my message, which is a little bit more nuanced, albeit being a little bit more complicated, I think you'll see, it really interfaces into the clinical practice more consistently and delivers better results.

Linda Elsegood: Well, I mean, unfortunately, your stomach and your bowels, you can't see, can you? It's not like psoriasis on your hands or something that you can see what's going on there. When I have spoken to doctors and asked what they think are the top four supplements that people should be taking, probiotics are always number one that people should take. What kind of a probiotic would you suggest to patients who wanted to take that to improve their gut health? 

Dr  Michael Ruscio: That's a great question, and I would certainly agree that especially for someone who's trying to improve their gut health, then a probiotic is a fairly inexpensive intervention and very safe, or even now showing some secondary health benefits. For example, one analysis has documented improvement of mood. Other research has shown a small but significant ability to improve cholesterol, blood sugar, and even blood pressure. Again, the effects there are small, and I would say not clinically significant, but at least you're getting a small movement in a healthy direction.

So I'm just trying to showcase here the neutrality, or at least small side benefit, of probiotics rather than there being some downside. We know that probiotics can improve things like H pylori and, and be synergistic with H pylori antibiotics. And in my opinion, may help to kind of re-establish a healthier balance of H pylori colonization. And they can help to eradicate things like SIBO, and intestinal fungal overgrowth. So certainly the end reduces leaky gut and there's a lot of benefits that we can attribute to probiotics. 

It's your question that’s a more challenging thing: what probiotic do I use? And this is where I think both the clinician and the consumer are confronted with just a dizzying array of options in terms of the probiotic formulas out there. One of the things I write about in my book is organizing probiotics into three different categories. And this greatly simplifies the landscape in probiotics. And when, when you read enough of the research on probiotics, and you sift through enough of these meta-analyses that summarize the high-quality clinical trials, you start to see that we can break probiotics down really into technically four categories. But one category is hard to obtain, especially in the US, so I typically focus the conversation on the three categories. 

Category one is a blend of lactobacillus and bifidobacterium strains. The exact formulas differ slightly from product to product, but then, the underlying and unifying theme is you will see the strains in the formula are predominated by various strains of lactobacillus and bifidobacterium. Your category two is just one strength, typically, which is the healthy fungus, Saccharomyces boulardii. And then your category three - you have typically anywhere from one to maybe five or six strains that are often known as soil-based or spore-forming probiotics. What I like to do with patients is have them use a moderate dose of all three of these; or in more sensitive cases, they will likely have reported some reactions to probiotics in the past.

And what you want to identify as a clinician is what category do they seem to be reacting to? Because oftentimes people are taking a category one probiotic that's the most popular and common probiotic out there. They may have tried two or three or even four different probiotics, not realizing that each one was a category one, a category one, a category one, a category one. And so they come in and say they just can't do probiotics, they react really negatively. And that's where taking a quick history and seeing if they know the names of the probiotics, quickly looking them up and determining, okay, all of these were in fact category ones. So then you can have them start with category two and category three. There are some patients by just going through that exercise of having them try a probiotic category one at a time, you can pinpoint that that is a category that you react negatively to. Now we can use the other category or categories that you do tolerate, and then you can obtain that fairly impressive benefit that can be vectored by probiotics and help the patient navigate around that reaction that had been kind of slowing their progress previously. 

Linda Elsegood: Well, the first time I wanted to buy some, I went into a whole food shop, and they had rows and rows of probiotics, and some started at 10 pounds, and some went up to 50 pounds. And I was trying to read on the bottle what was in the 10-pound one, what was in the 50, and what everything in between was. And I was just so bewildered by the end of it I asked for some help, and the young man didn't know either, really. So I just went for a middle-priced one to try it to see what it was like. But you have to do your research. It's not easy to find out. It's a minefield because there are so many things on the market and some that are similar like you're saying category one, but they're still not the same price. You know, the convenience. Sometimes if it's a really well-known brand, I think you may pay more for the name as well. 

Dr  Michael Ruscio: So thank you so much for making that comment, and you're absolutely right, which is the quality of a probiotic does matter. We want to be careful not to think that more expensive automatically equates to better. And we also want to be careful that if something is drastically cheaper than others, then there may be some corner-cutting that is occurring.

So there are things that you can look for. These can be, I think, challenging for consumers, and also probably challenging for clinicians if you're not used to fact-checking these types of things. But you can look whether a company is following good manufacturing practices and is also having third party testing to ensure that their probiotic meets its label claims. And then also looking for companies that aren't using fillers. That can be irritating, especially when we're talking about people who have sensitive guts. Some probiotics, this more so happens with cheaper probiotics, they're not very potent, and they're kind of watered down with other fillers or things like prebiotics, which are significantly less expensive.

Another way around this is just finding a couple of companies that are fairly reputable and just try to use the probiotics that fall into the category system. Find those reputable companies - that's quite a bit easier than just going into a health food store and trying to figure out their 15 different probiotics. Which ones can I trust? Which ones can I not? 

Linda Elsegood: And of course, it's the same in America as it is over here. I mean, supplements aren't regulated, so you can have labels that make claims of what's inside it, but they don't have to put a percentage, so if it's not like pharmaceutical grade, where they can prove, as you were saying, what is actually in there is on the label. It is reassuring to know that you have done the best you can to try and find out what is in the probiotic or supplements of any kind, because the layperson just wouldn't know - so trying to get a good manufacturer, that's what I'm trying to say, is really the starting point, in my opinion, as a consumer. Someone that you can trust, because you can spend a fortune on the cheaper brands that, as you said before, might have fillers and all of this kind of thing. And actually not have that many ingredients that are actually going to help you. But you know, if something is a quarter of the price, it's a waste of money if it's not going to work, isn't it? So sometimes you have to pay that bit more to make sure that you've got a product that is going to do what it says it's going to do. 

Dr  Michael Ruscio: The way that I learned was with protein powders, where I was using the most expensive protein powder and I noticed it. You make your shake, and sometimes you put it in one scoop, maybe sometimes you're a little more hungry, you want a thicker shake, so you put it in maybe two or three scoops. And if I ever had more than one scoop, I would get bloated. And I later learned from one of my friends who owns his own manufacturing company, that you have to really watch out for companies putting in excipients, which are powders that help the machines run more quickly. And he explained to me that because the machines run more slowly when making his protein powder, he had to pay extra to have them not put the excipients in. So it is a legitimate thing, and especially if you have a sensitive gut, just making sure that who you're getting your product from cares about these things. And it may not be that a manufacturer is trying to do you harm, but they may be saying, well, we're trying to cater to a market that is very price sensitive. So we're gonna use excipients to cut down our costs. 

We're trying to provide these items that are most gut-friendly and maybe a little bit more expensive. But I think the customers that we're trying to appeal to understand that. A slight increase in expense, the quality would be worth that. So, yeah, it is important to find a company who is going to be attentive to these things and, and make those tough decisions of making the product more expensive when it's really in the best interest of the consumer.

Linda Elsegood: Let me ask you, what's your diet like, Michael?

Dr  Michael Ruscio: I loosely eat a paleo diet. I do eat quite a bit of dairy, and thankfully I have no problem with dairy; most meat, vegetables, fish; and I don't eat much in the way of grains. I do have some rice. I do generally avoid gluten. I do notice if I eat too much gluten, I do have a problem. Even though the healthcare consumer is told that everyone should avoid gluten, I think it is incorrect. And that's not borne out by what the best research on this topic has found. But essentially - lots of vegetables, meats, healthy fats, fish, moderate to kind of lower-carb diet. So some gluten-free grains, but not a high amount. Some kind of a moderate lower carb, paleo diet with some dairy would maybe be the best label that we could put on it. 

Linda Elsegood: Some people say that they find diets for eliminating food really restrictive. And they will ask if once they’ve started down that road of eliminating these foods, will they ever be allowed to eat them again? So you were saying that sometimes you still have gluten and you know when you've had it, so obviously you don't exclude it completely. 

Dr  Michael Ruscio: Right, and you make a great point, which is we want to be careful with diets. Not to think that an elimination diet means you eliminate forever. Most elimination diets follow the pattern of cutout foods that could be a problem for maybe a month, maybe two months. And then once you feel you've improved, then bring the foods that you can back in a kind of systematic manner, where you're bringing maybe one or two in at a time, so you can identify what foods sit well with you and if any foods are triggers.

And then it's not to say that because a food is a trigger you can never have any, but you want to be a bit more judicious with how you use it. That is really, in my opinion, a key distinction to draw because what I see happening with patients is they become so scared of food, and they may have little to no reactivity, let's say, to gluten. So they can get away with having some on some occasions. Now, if you're noticing some reactions to gluten, would I recommend making a dietary staple? Absolutely not. Right? There's also this ability to live in the world without being afraid. 

And this is where I think some of the hard-line messaging on gluten is really damaging people from a psychological perspective, because now these people are at a restaurant with their friends and should be enjoying themselves, and they're worried. They're sitting there frantically worrying internally, trying to hide it behind a smile on their face, about is there gluten in the sauce here? And now again, there are some people who are exquisitely gluten sensitive, and they have to operate like that, but I don't think that they would wish that on somebody else who at worst may feel bloated in forty-five minutes if they have some gluten. So, your level of avoidance should be required with your level of intolerance. I know that the gluten-free staunch advocates will take issue with that, but you have to weigh that against the psychological damage we do to people who don't have much of a physiological reaction but are inculcated and feared into thinking that they will have massive damage if they have gluten. And now every day in their life, they have this baseline level of fear that is damaging their health. And so when you weigh these all out, I think it's clear to see that, yes, we want to identify gluten as being a problem in those that it is and help them avoid it as best they can. But people that have little to no reactivity, they have some leeway, and we don't want to fear them into thinking that they have to eat like they have celiac disease. 

Linda Elsegood: Wonderful. Well, we've come to an end and where's the time gone? It's been amazing. Thank you so much.

Dr  Michael Ruscio: Yeah. It's been a pleasure chatting. Time always flies when you're having fun, right? 

Linda Elsegood: Well, we'll have to have you back again, so thank you very much for having been my guest today. 

Dr  Michael Ruscio: Thank you again. It's been a pleasure.

Linda Elsegood: Healthy Gut Healthy You by Dr Michael Ruscio is a long-anticipated and comprehensive guide to completely resetting and healing the gut. Arm yourself with the education tools to heal yourself from the inside out today. Visit drruscio.com for details.

Any questions or comments you may have, please email us 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 healthy.

Laurie - 7th August (LDN, low dose naltrexone) from LDN Research Trust on Vimeo.

Laurie is from the United States, and uses LDN for complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS). In 2005 she suffered a stress fracture in one foot that healed slowly, during which time she was in a cast and immobilized. Toward the end of the time for the cast she started feeling burning in her foot, like fireworks going off. When the cast came off her foot was bright red, shiny, and hot to touch, and her doctor recognized her symptoms as CRPS. Drugs normally prescribed were ones she did not want to take because of side effects. She researched and found a study on CRPS at Stanford using LDN, and took information on LDN to her doctor, who researched it and was eager to prescribe it. She ramped to her current dose of LDN 4.5 mg daily, but does note short-term side effects as the dose increased, such as difficulty sleeping, or a headache.

Laurie’s pain stopped after about 3 weeks on LDN; after 4 weeks on LDN the swelling and redness were decreased, and at 2 months the color was normal and there was no swelling. Before, she couldn’t tolerate wearing anything on her foot; and now wears normal shoes and has hiked and traveled extensively, without symptoms. She did have to give up running because of arthritis and several surgeries.

Laurie relates that while the CRPS developed in the foot she broke, as common with CRPS, the other foot became involved. Similarly, one time she hurt an elbow nerve, and the CRPS symptoms jumped to her elbow.

Her first surgery was a joint replacement in her foot. Because she might have needed narcotics for post-operative pain, her doctor took her off LDN a week before surgery. In that week her CRPS flared so badly that her feet and elbow were untouchable. Post-op, when she restarted LDN, it took a month of gradual improvements before she got full effect. During that time the redness and swelling from CRPS had increased, in response to the surgery.

She learned that for subsequent surgeries, if narcotics might be needed, to stop LDN only 2 to 3 days before surgery; however the trade-off seems to be less effectiveness from the narcotics. The solution that works for her is to take Tylenol or ibuprofen before surgery; and ibuprofen normally is all she needs after surgery. In total she has had 5 or 6 surgeries, and this routine has been successful.

Laurie tried to follow an autoimmune diet, but found it pretty difficult to be true to it. She eats a lot of vegetables, and stays away from foods known as being very inflammatory – meat, dairy, sugar. She works out at a gym 5 days a week, and swims.

Laurie is so grateful for the valuable information from the LDN Research Trust (LDNRT), and became a volunteer who has contributed greatly to the Trust. Through the website she has been able to not only find information, but to connect with compounding pharmacies truly knowledgeable about LDN and options for it. She appreciates that with LDN there is hope other than some of the drugs that have difficult side effects.

Summary of Laurie’s interview, please listen to the video for the full story.

Keywords: LDN, low dose naltrexone, complex regional pain syndrome, CRPS, LDN Research Trust, LDNRT, pain, opioids, autoimmune

Shonna - 7th August 2019 (LDN, low dose naltrexone) from LDN Research Trust on Vimeo.

Linda Elsegood. Today I'm joined by Shonna from the United States who uses LDN for chronic fatigue syndrome, Sjogren's, and she has had other conditions that we will learn about.

Thank you for joining us today. Shona. 

Shonna: Hi, Linda. It's my pleasure. I join you from Alberta, Canada. Oh, 

Linda Elsegood: Oh sorry. 

Shonna: Yeah, a proud Canadian. Thank you for having me on. 

Linda Elsegood: wonderful and sorry for calling you an American. Anyway, could you tell us, your story up until finding LDN? What was your story?

Shonna: Well as a young girl I had always been a Stickley as a toddler, I had been bitten by a rabid dog. And at that time I was given antibiotics for that with seven injections of live virus. And, in the same time period, I had untreated strep and developed a traumatic fever. So I was a Stickley wimpy young gal, I struggled through my teen years, tried to be like the other people that I knew and have lots of energy. And I mean I just always struggled. And then in 1988, I finished my nurse's training, my first job as an RN out in rural Alberta, and within two weeks, I caught mononucleosis.

Part of my job was paediatrics, and I  was very, very sick with that. I actually was hospitalized for a few days for dehydration and weakness, and I never fully recovered from that I was up and down for decades. That was 30 years ago, and I raised four kids in 1996. I had an acute episode of fatigue and weakness. I was a single mom raising four kids. I was working and all of a sudden I I had to be off work for four months. I couldn't even go downstairs and change laundry loads and carry up my dry load in one go I had to lay down, but in four months it kind of resolved and I went on up and down, up and down. 

In 2020 in the fall, I was working as an emergency nurse in our rural hospital here just outside of Edmonton, Alberta, and I caught a virus. I gain a viral load. And in a few months, it started taking me down within a year and a half, I could no longer get out of bed. And my cognitive abilities had declined drastically, and I was wasting away.

I was bed-bound, I was isolated. I would say things and have no recollection that I had said to them. I would do things and have no recollection that I had done them. My doctor had nothing to offer me. He looked at me with such, sorry, eyes over at the top of his glasses and he had seen me go through many of my episodes before and reassured me that you'd rally through this.

He sent me to a rheumatologist who had nothing to offer me. And that went on for months, Linda, I had no socialization. I couldn't go down the back deck stairs to go outside, and I was quite certain that my life was over, that this was me dying. And my kids went into fear mode. Their fears were shocking I was the strong person. I was the matriarch of the family. They depended on me and. And they literally were supporting me financially and physically. And we're talking about maybe mom needs to go into a home. And so in that process, I was diagnosed with Sjogren's, which greatly affected my eyesight.

I had stopped crafting, I had stopped reading. I couldn't read anymore. I had stopped driving, I didn't have the energy, I couldn't see, and I was really happy when I found some treatments for that and my eyesight came back. I had difficulty holding conversations. I was absent.

In the conversation's only partly there. And I had such great difficulty finding the words and expressing myself that I stopped speaking because I was afraid of what would or wouldn't come out of my mouth. And so as my eyesight cleared, I realized that the reason that I couldn't read was that I couldn't discern the words on the page. I couldn't comprehend the text. I realized that that went along with not comprehending the conversations with. When I went to smile, my face wouldn't really smile. I couldn't feel a smile. So I went into my doctor, and he gave me another wild look over his glasses and sent me for a brain MRI, which came back negative.

And he sent me to a neurologist and the neurologist was right on the money, young man, and he said I had Sjogren's. And in the meantime, I had been diagnosed with myalgic encephalomyelitis ME the new word for chronic fatigue syndrome. He said that the issue with those conditions, it's not neurological as an anatomical, it's an energy issue, a cellular energy issue.

Oh, okay. So. I began my journey with LDN. I went to my doctor and I said, I want to try this. And my doctor agreed as he had a patient on LDN and in a short time, within a week, he started to see results.

I came in a year later. This man had been stable on LDN. I came in with my beginnings of research from your Facebook group and presented it, and he said, well, I don't know if it'll work, but I have nothing to offer you, so let's give it a try. And I, what I found initially, Linda, was that I had weekly victories at the end of the first week, I found that my reading comprehension tension came back at the end of the second week. People around me were commenting that they noticed I wasn't word searching as much anymore, that my sentences actually were not fragmented anymore and that I was making sense. By the end of the third week, I went in and had a full-blown discussion with my doctor about it.

What I had experienced and what is next for me in my recovery. And within four weeks I could comprehend my writing. I had lost my ability to write. I looked like my writing looked like a dementia patient rating, although I had passed the clock test at the neurologist. And my writing was now legible.

So with that, I took other treatment requests to my doctor, and he monitored my LDN I started at 1.5 milligrams and uh, kind of broke the norm. I couldn't wait a month to go up. I really was desperate for results. So within two weeks, I went to three milligrams, and then within another three weeks, And that did not work for me. I have had wonderful success on the three milligrams and have added other treatments to this in, in that time period, because I was bed-bound, I had kind of forgotten how to walk. My body couldn't support itself. I had difficulty holding my head up even though I had more energy. I had muscle wasting in my joints and tendon and muscular, so I took five solid months of intense treatment and had lots of love and attention poured into my recovery by many people. And, um, in the fall time I was cleared to go back to work. Uh, I am, although not to act active bedside duty.

My doctor, the rheumatologist, my neurologist and those that no one loves me are just simply amazed by my recovery. As time went by and more unfolded about other aspects of my poor health. And I talked to my doctor, and I asked, are there any other specialists that I should see?

These things are unfolding and Linda, he's a very brave man. A very well seasoned, very knowledgeable, and he actually took off his glasses and set them down, and he said to me, the help and the knowledge and the direction that you have received from your Facebook support groups have undoubtedly helped you more than an unknowledgeable or not up to date specialist. Wow, those were such brave words. I have such respect for him to speak to them. I had at the very beginning, not at the very beginning after actually, I was on LDN. I was able to get the LDN book and bring it in, and I gave it to my doctor. And he keeps it in his office. He, uh, every once in a while when I go in now, he'll say, you know, I shared this with my colleague about this and that, and this and that. I'm just really happy to be sharing my journey—It’s kind of not quite short of miraculous.

Linda Elsegood: I have to say it's such an amazing story. And if you've listened to my story, there's a lot of similarities there. So I know exactly how you feel. And I have to thank you for point out to everybody that you also had help with our Facebook group and to give something back, I think it is amazing. So I'd like to thank you very much for your time that you donate to spread the word and to help others.

Shonna: Thank you, Linda. It is. It's my pleasure. I am so thankful to be in a position of renewed health. Now. That I'm able to do that. I'm, I'm just, uh, eternally thankful for the research that has been coordinated and the answers that have been brought to my life through this medication, this application of the medication.

Linda Elsegood: as I say, once again, thank you very much for sharing your experience with us today. 

Shonna: Thank you for calling. Take care, Linda. Thank you. 

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 the radio station software and with phone lines and phone calls to be able to continue with the right year of the show.

And thank you for listening.

Linda Elsegood: Any questions or comments you may have, 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.

Michelle Moser, Pharm - 31st July 2019 (LDN, low dose naltrexone) from LDN Research Trust on Vimeo.

Christian Stella PharmD RPh - 24th July 2019 (LDN, low dose naltrexone) from LDN Research Trust on Vimeo.

Christian Stella, PharmD RPh shares his LDN experience on the LDN Radio Show with Linda Elsegood.

Christian Stella PharmD RPh is a 4th generation pharmacist and has been the Pharmacist in Charge for Precision Compounding Pharmacy since its inception. He oversees and is responsible for all aspects of clinical operations.

Through PCCA, Christian is also a registered Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) specialist.  Throughout his extensive training at PCCA, Christian has also become knowledgeable in Low Dose Naltrexone (LDN) that treats a variety of health conditions.

Through his practice, Christian has witnessed how LDN truly benefits his patient’s quality of life.

On a daily basis, Christian routinely interacts with doctors and their patients creating a triad of care between the patient, the doctor and the pharmacist.  He consults and subsequently customizes a complete pharmaceutical regimen for the patient.

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