LDN Video Interviews and Presentations

 

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

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

Kara: Thank you for having me. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kara: Me too. Same. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

This was an LDN Radio Show interview in 2022.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Linda Elsegood: We wish you every success, thank you

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

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

 

 

Asher Goldstein, MD - LDN Radio Show 2022 (LDN; low dose naltrexone)

SUMMARY
Over the past 2.5 years that Dr. Goldstein has been prescribing low-dose naltrexone (LDN), he has shifted to a much lower and slower titration pack. He uses it for many applications in addition to pain, such as fibromyalgia, Crohn's, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, Hailey-Hailey, polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS). He gets referrals for LDN prescriptions from pharmacies. He is quite impressed with how LDN works against pain, and discusses prescribing for pain. Onset of action can be short, or months, depending on various factors. He is very open to help educate healthcare professionals about LDN.

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 joined pain specialist Dr Asher Goldstein from New Jersey. Thank you for joining us today.

Dr. Goldstein: Good afternoon, Linda, how are you?

Linda Elsegood: Good thank you. So, could you tell us what's been happening in your practice with LDN and pain?

Dr. Goldstein: I've been practicing now just about 15 years and only started using LDN about two and a half years ago. What's actually interesting is that I just attended a conference on Friday, two days ago, and when I last attended that conference in 2019, which was you know BC - before COVID – I had not even thought of LDN. I remember just flashing back to those three years previously. There was nothing about LDN said. I had nothing in my recollection about LDN. And interestingly enough, three years ago I went as an attendee, and this year I was invited to speak about LDN. So, they were very curious, and out of about a hundred doctors, pain specialists only about five had even heard about LDN. So, it was a very receptive audience with a lot of questions and answers during the non-technical sessions, just floating around. So, it was very good, and hopefully there'll be 95 other doctors that can help their patients as well in regards to LDN use and prescribing in the pharmacy.

It has developed and transformed dramatically over the past two and a half years that I've been using it. I've shifted in how I prescribe low-dose naltrexone.  I've gone to a much lower and slower titration pack. I start at half milligram, and I only go up by a half milligram a week. I have a compounding pharmacy that has made a Dr Goldstein titration pack, and by and large, the issues that patients had previously with side effects are 99% gone. I think I've had one or two patients stop LDN because of side effects in the last year, and that's nearly none. Everybody reports dreams at some point in time, but when they're warned about it, it's usually not an issue, and most patients will move their once-a-day medication to the morning, as opposed to the evening; and then generally, those patients move it back to the evening a few weeks later.

I really branched out and started using LDN in in many many applications, especially with patients that have come to me, not necessarily all the time with a specific diagnosis. I'll have patients come who have been in pain for 15 years 20 years. They've had a rheumatologic test here or there that sometimes shows something, sometimes doesn't. They don't have anything specific. They're feeling run down, they're feeling exhausted, and they're in pain and nothing else has worked. LDN seems to work very much for these patients even though they don't have specific diagnoses. I'm not even counting the patients that we're treating from a pain perspective, you know, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, fibromyalgia, Crohn's, you know the list is big. It's big and hopefully we'll get bigger. The list that we have has people that we can treat. I'm treating people even with non-painful conditions. I have a patient with Hailey-Hailey. My dermatologist friend was very upset with me because that's supposed to be his field. I'm like, I use LDN. He's like, hey I use LDN too. How did you know that it was very good? And then, polycystic ovary syndrome. Some patients have become referred from different pharmacies, so even patients without pain are coming just for the LDN.

I read extensively about it in the beginning, and you're like okay, I think I should use this. But then as a practitioner, once you actually see the proof in the pudding, it's amazing, just amazing. For me it has completely transformed my practice, and where some of the patients with difficult to treat pain syndromes are less difficult to treat pain syndromes now. So, it's been fantastic.

Linda Elsegood: So, the million dollar question that everybody asks is, I've been on pain medications for the last 20 years. Those pain medications aren't working. I'd like to try LDN. How can I go about starting?

Dr. Goldstein:  I tell the patient, but they'll usually say to me, the pain medications help me get around, but they don't really treat me well enough. They allow me to get out of bed. I tell them, a hammer can also put a screw into the to the wall, but a much better tool will be the screwdriver, right? And it makes less of a mess. So the opiates are the hammer, and it's hard, so you can either go the quick way, which is a little more difficult, or you can go the slower way, which is difficult in its own way. But look, if somebody's been on opiate medication 50, 20 years, they have to significantly reduce their load. Some doctors will want them to be completely off pain medication. I find that if we can reduce it to maybe 40 or 50 morphine milligram equivalents (MME) and people can look up what MMEs are online in regard to their particular medication, and how to convert it to MMEs. There are conversion calculators. But usually about 40 to 50 MMEs can still be handled with LDN as long as it's not extended-release medication. For example, oxycodone, a combination of acetaminophen, also sometimes known as Endocet, or Percocet in the United States. If somebody's taking seven and a half milligrams twice a day, three times a day, I can actually work that in together with LDN. I tell my patients as long as you're not taking the opiate medication four hours before or four hours after LDN, you should be okay. You can take it the other 16 hours of the day as long as you need, if you need to. For example, if they go to sleep at 10 pm and that's when they take their LDN, their last Percocet can be at 6 pm and the first one could be at 2 am if they wake up in the middle of the night. But between 8 pm and 2 am, this particular example, they can't take it. Now if somebody's on a higher dosage of that, they have to reduce it or eliminate it, and that could either be done over time with slow titration, or that could be done through medication withdrawal using suboxone. Both of them have their pluses and minuses. The suboxone is quicker, but it usually requires a patient to go through 24 to 36 hours of moderate discomfort. I call it going through the ring of fire, as until the suboxone kicks in. In order to help the patients, the other way is two to three months taper of lowering the opiates while not getting the LDN yet, which can also be uncomfortable, but it can be done. The bottom line is you don't have to eliminate it completely. It just has to be reduced.

Linda Elsegood: Okay, so what have the outcomes been, as in a time frame for LDN to actually start to work?

Dr. Goldstein: It's a huge variety of time for onset. I've seen as quick as a week. I've seen as long as six months.  The main thing is talking to the patients, realistic expectations, and setting an education, meaning patients have to understand that there are many different ways that people respond to the medication. Typically, patients with fibromyalgia go quicker; patients with things like polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) take longer. I've seen the patients with Crohn's - those go pretty quick. In general, the medication helps patients whose diseases have two things in common:  the immune system dysfunction - I don't like to say autoimmune, I like the “immune system dysfunction”; as well as an inflammatory state. In those patients that have more inflammation than immune system dysfunction, I find that the medication works quicker. And those patients that have more immune system dysfunction than inflammation, it takes longer. That's been my sort of empiric view of what I've seen.

And again, DNA is what really rules everything, so you can have the same disease in two different patients and they respond completely differently. My lowest dose to start LDN has been 0.3 milligrams, and I actually have one patient now, with polycystic ovary syndrome, at six and a half in the evening and two milligrams in the morning, so eight and a half milligrams. In the beginning I would have never even thought that a patient could respond at so low or so high, but what one thing I've learned about LDN is that don't ever put yourself in a box. You could, because LDN constantly is evolving in my mind, its use and how patients respond to it.

Linda Elsegood: You were saying there about the dosing range - have you gone higher than six and a half milligrams?

Dr. Goldstein: Not me personally. I have not had the need to. In a single dose, I haven't done higher than six and a half, but I have done the daily dose high of six and a half.

Linda Elsegood: Do you ever prescribe it more than twice a day?

Dr. Goldstein: Twice a day, okay, I'm open to it, but with those patients that I've found the need for the twice a day is usually where the second dose is having to deal with mood or energy versus pain. So those patients, once we get the second dose in the morning, that usually stabilizes them. That's typically why I'm giving a second dose. It's not necessarily for the pain, but more for the mood and energy. and as you say, everybody is individual, the dosing is individual. There are some doctors that are getting the patient stable, let's say on 4.5 milligrams, and then they will do a second dose in the morning of 4.5

Linda Elsegood: And you're doing it at a lower dose in the morning, but higher in the evening. It is so patient dependent, on what works best for that patient. How long would you say it takes to find that right dose for a patient?

Dr. Goldstein:  The right dose can work in as quick as a week. It's highly unusual - but that's the quickest. And I actually didn't believe the patient, so I sort of pushed them to go higher. Then they felt worse, and then I'm like okay, listen to your own advice, listen to the patient. We went back down to half milligram. It can take as long as six plus months. There's just a huge variety of responses. But like I said, the inflammatory-state patients respond quicker; the more immune dysfunction patients take longer. But the majority of patients that I've seen, that they're having their disease 5, 10, 15 years, so these patients have a lot of patience, typically, and as long as they perceive that the doctor is working together with them, listening to them, acknowledging, a lot of patients say to me, my family thinks I'm crazy, my doctors think I'm crazy. I'm like, you're not crazy, you have an atypical medication and an atypical issue, and atypical issues are sometimes difficult to deal with. When people don't want to deal with them, then sometimes we put names and labels on them.

Linda Elsegood: So for those patients who are on a very low dose, and LDN is working fine for them, do you try further down the road to increase that dose, or do you just…

Dr. Goldstein:  I mean, if it ain't broke, don't fix it kind of person, so usually not. I actually had a patient in this morning who said to me, and this is a person with a lot of both back issues as well as immune dysfunction issues, and basically it was fibromyalgia when he came in, and fibromyalgia is not a typical diagnosis in men, but this gentleman came in and I examined him. He was operating, he said, at 20% capacity when he started, and now he's at three milligrams and he's operating at 70% capacity, and he says, I'm happy where I am. He says, I don't want to push it any further up or further down. I'm worried that if I go up it'll be worse. He says 70% is a huge change from where he was. So again, if a patient wants me to push a little bit, I always tell them we can always move. I can write quarter milligram pills. If you can gently push it up or down, you have that ability. It's not a medication that's fixed in any which way. And then I speak to them that their need for the dose may increase or decrease with time, so they should just be aware that it's not fixed in stone. I even tell patients four and a half milligrams is just an aiming point. We have to aim somewhere.

Linda Elsegood: So, you can't see all the patients with pain around the world. What would you say to doctors who are presented with patients with pain, who don't really know anything about LDN, and don't feel confident prescribing it?

Dr. Goldstein: If I was able to spend a half an hour of educating a doctor, I get much more return on investment than half an hour educating the patient, right, because I can help one patient, but that doctor can help 100 patients a week. That's why I really want to go to the conferences that are not LDN conferences, and speak about LDN, and encourage doctors. I say, you know the upside is that it's relatively inexpensive, there are very few if any side effects, and very few if any drug-drug interactions. The downside for doctors is that you got to talk to your patients, but some doctors don't like to do that, strangely enough, as bizarre as that sounds. But that's really the downside - having sometimes to convince a doctor when they're like, I don't have the eight minutes to spend with the patient additionally, to speak with them about LDN. But I'm like, well first of all, you invest those eight minutes and they're going to wind up coming to you much less, complaining much less, taking up less of your time, because their pain is less, and if you can't do it, send me your Nurse Practitioner or your Physician Assistant. Let me educate them, and they can help the patients. It doesn't have to be you. As long as you're a doctor, there can be things that they don't quite understand, and you can help. You don't always have an exact formula on how to treat a patient. Sometimes, if the disease is not exact, then the medication doesn't have to be exact.

Linda Elsegood: So how can people get hold of you?

Dr. Goldstein: They can call my office, Asher Goldstein, 201-645-4336, and make an appointment, then we can take it from there. If there are physicians that are listening to this, and you want to spend some additional time with me, I'll spend half an hour or an hour. I'll go out to dinner, I'll have coffee; we'll figure something out, because for me to help a medical professional understand that this is about as benign of a medication as possible, and it can help all those patients, that when you see those patients on the list and you're like oh my god how am I going to help this person today?

I wish I found this medication years ago. Maybe I would have ripped the hair out of my head. I tell my patients this medication doesn't do anything to you, which is why there are no side effects. They're like well, why am I going to take it if it doesn't do anything to me? So, I say, this medication allows your body to start working for itself again. That's all it does. It blocks a receptor for three to four hours, that's it, nothing else. And it does that for three to four hours, then the whole magic happens - the magic of normal level of endorphins, that is. That is the secret sauce, right? Bring the endorphin levels back up to normal, and then the body has the fuel that it needs to do the myriad of chemical reactions that normal levels of endorphins allow.

Linda Elsegood: Well, thank you so much for sharing your experience with us today. I mean, it's fantastic what you've done in such a short period of time.

Dr. Goldstein: I look forward to helping more patients, and I look forward educating more medical professionals.

Linda Elsegood: Thank you, thank you. Good to see you. Hopefully next time, in real life

Dr. Goldstein:  Yes, thank you, and take care. You know, I give your story when I lecture. I say look, there was this woman who was told to park herself at the corner, and she refused to take that for an answer, and because of her, I'm here today.

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.

 

 

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.

 

 

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

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

 

Summary:

Ellen is from the United States and takes LDN for lupus, Sjogren’s, Hashimoto's and interstitial cystitis, and for pain. She is in her 70s, and began with autoimmune issues at 24. When she started LDN, she quickly had this overall feeling of feeling good, and was able to increase her activity levels greatly.

Full edited text:

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 I'd like to introduce Ellen from the United States, who uses LDN for multiple conditions. Thank you for joining us today, Ellen

Ellen: You're welcome. Thanks for interviewing me.

Linda Elsegood: Could you tell us what it is you take LDN for

Ellen: I take LDN for autoimmune diseases. I have lupus, Sjogren’s, Hashimoto's and interstitial cystitis. But, I was hoping to take it to get rid of pain

Linda Elsegood: Right. When did these conditions start? How long have you had them?

Ellen: I got Hashimoto's when I was 24 years old, and interstitial cystitis in my 30s, and I think I might have had lupus in my 40s, but I don't know, you know, people would say, why is your face… So I think it was the butterfly rash. I was tired all the time. I had pain all the time. I just thought that's what everybody lived with. Then the <rainy> started in my late 30s and early 40s, and we moved away from this small town in north-central Pennsylvania, and I moved to Savannah, Georgia, and I began to play tennis every day for hours, and I didn't use any sunblock, and all of a sudden, my head, this terrible rash itching, and then I got really tired. I was diagnosed with lupus actually at age 61. Then, in my 40s, I got ulcers on my cornea from dry eyes, but nobody picked up on that, and so recently, my eye doctor said I had Sjogren's, and I had another rheumatologist say yes, you have Sjogren's. So it's just like, everything kind of, just every decade, it’s something new.

Linda Elsegood: What did the medical professionals do to help you cope with what you were experiencing?

Ellen: Oh, nothing, because I don't think I told anybody, because they thought I was normal. This was normal. I know I had two young children 21, 20 months apart, and my husband was a lot older, so I did everything, and it was very stressful, the Hashimoto’s. I think I know that my aunt and two uncles had Hashimoto's, so that was sort of, I guess inherited. I'm not sure if you can say that. But the other things that came on, I think it was I had very high-stress in my 30s, in my 40s, and my 50s, and then when my husband died, I don't know. It was kind of a relief, but he was older, and he was kind of stressful. An interesting thing is that I moved to Savannah, Georgia, when I met my third, but I was never too sure.

So, what LDN has done for me: the very first time I took it, I just had this overall feeling of feeling good. I felt positive. I felt like I could do the laundry, I could cook dinner, I could swim, I could play tennis. Yeah, it was just wonderful, how easy was it to get a prescription. Well, I thought it was easy. Even though I was in my 60s - a lot of people aren't familiar with the internet and stuff - I just went on the internet. I looked at your webpage, and I found how to find a doctor, and I arranged an interview and paid my hundred dollars, and he prescribed it for me. It was real easy.

Linda Elsegood: And how long ago was that?

Ellen: the only time I had side effects is when I went up to six milligrams. I thought if I took a larger amount, maybe the pain would be less, but I kind of had hot flashes. I was really hot and sweat profusely, and then I would get real cold, so I went back down to three. Now three seems to be okay.

Linda Elsegood: And what are your pain levels like on three?

Ellen: Well, my pain is not too bad, but I think it's some other things that I'm taking. I am not really sure if yes, low dose naltexone is reducing the pain, but I feel good on it so I just keep taking it. Yes, I feel good. I feel good,

Linda Elsegood: If you were to rate your quality of life prior to starting LDN, what would it have been?

Ellen: My quality of life was pretty low. I didn't feel well. I was so tired and just lethargic, and I just kind of did a lot of sitting around, and all of a sudden, I took it, and it was RESULT. I feel good. I think the release of the endorphins just makes you feel better. It could be, I just don't know, but I don't have a lot of pain right now. I don't, so it's good. It's good. It could be the LDN, it could be, yeah.

Linda Elsegood: Do you have any thyroid problems, and what about the cystitis, is that under control?

Ellen: I cope with it; I don't notice it during the daytime. When I go to bed at night, I have pain; I take two muscle relaxers at night and the low dose naltexone, and it's not excruciating pain. I'm so used to it. I just sort of go okay, take a deep breath. It's just a nuisance, basically. I did have treatment for that at one time, and I'm thinking about doing that again, but for now I’m just trying to ignore it, and to be frank with you, I eat too much citrus things, and that's a real irritant. If I would cut down on that, it would be better. Coffee isn't good even for bladder, and I love my coffee. I'm just going to be 73 in August, and I just don't want to do certain things. I just want to live my life, and I'll put up with the pain. But I told you, I play golf and I play tennis, and I swim on the swim team, so to speak - I go to swim, me! So yeah, I'm doing okay lady!

Linda Elsegood: What about the dry eyes? How are you coping with that?

Ellen: That is really amazing. I have been doing my drops twice a day now, and if I do that, I seem to be doing well. I also have a prescription in the refrigerator from my eye doctor, with the prednisone drop, so if my eyes flare up, I'll use the drops, and the eye doctor is okay with that. She will check the pressure in my eyes to make sure it's okay, but the dry eye can be really bad. And then the dry mouth is a nightmare, which is… So, I have a lot of things that could make people depressed ,but I guess I've just sort of gotten used to it, and I just get up every day, and I try to do everything I can do and try not to overdo it.

But today, I did. I went to my garden, and I stayed too long. I am in bed.

Linda Elsegood: I hope you recuperate quickly. I mean, we, it's something I think we all tend to do when you feel good. You want to do as much as you can while you feel good, and then you have to pay it back with interest. Do you manage to bounce back quickly? I mean, would the next day, like tomorrow, be okay or would you still be really fatigued?

Ellen: Well, I was so bad when I got home. We decided to take another five milligrams of low dose naltrexone in the hopes of keeping a square away, so I did that. And I won't be on that one, but I take five milligrams, I took an extra one.

Linda Elsegood: Thank you for sharing your story with us today. I hope you get enough rest today to feel fighting fit tomorrow.

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.

Ellen takes LDN for Lupus, Sjogren’s, Hashimoto's and interstitial cystitis, and for pain. She is in her 70s, and began with autoimmune issues at 24. When she started LDN, she quickly had this overall feeling of feeling good, and was able to increase her activity levels greatly.

 

Liz - Scotland: Multiple Sclerosis (MS) (LDN; low dose naltrexone)

Liz considers she has MS since childhood, but didn’t get the formal diagnosis until she was 52, after several relapses and remitting remissions. She has the secondary progressive form of MS. About 8 years ago she started LDN, slowly at first because she also has restless leg syndrome. She quickly regained control of her bladder, which eliminated her recurring bladder infections, the leg spasms and pain diminished. Her max dose is 3.5, over which some spasticity returns. She remarks her partner takes LDN for arthritis, and she notes LDN also improves mood. She states her quality of life has improved from a 4 to about 8. In order to obtain LDN initially, she used Dickson’s Chemist in Glasgow, but when her doctor saw how much good it was doing, she now prescribes it.

 

Yusuf (JP) Saleeby, MD - LDN to help Long Covid patients; March 2022 (LDN, low dose naltrexone)

A high percentage of Covid patients continue to suffer debilitating symptoms well after the initial infection. This is because of the increased inflammation and reduced autoimmunity. Low Dose Naltrexone (LDN) bolsters and regulates our systems quite effectively. Dr. Saleeby observes many conventional doctors are finally recognizing LDN as a primary treatment for Covid long-haulers, as well as other autoimmune conditions. He cited the Ldnresearchtrust.org site as an invaluable source of information on LDN. He looks forward to Linda Elsegood’s 3rd LDN  Book coming out soon.

Review by Ken Bruce

How LDN is helping Long Covid patients - Dr Yusuf (JP) Saleeby (Trascript)

Linda Elsegood: Today we're joined by Dr Yusuf Saleeby, also known as JP. Thank you for joining us today.

Dr. Saleeby: Hey Linda, it's always a pleasure.

Linda Elsegood: Now, you're going to talk to us today about Covid and Covid long-haulers, so I'll hand it over to you. Thank you.

Dr. Saleeby: Sure. So you know, two years into the pandemic we're seeing still a few cases of acute Covid infections but as of today, and this is the first of March 2022, we are not seeing too many acute cases. But what we are seeing is quite a number of long haulers or long Covid and also post Covid syndrome. It's also referred to as the syndrome of post-acute Covid infection, and the sequelae involved. And we're seeing also some issues with folks who have been vaccinated, some post-vaccine injury, but essentially what's happening is we're seeing a good bit of folks who had can't shake the initial Covid infections. And we've seen cases where a person has been infected two or even three times with different variants.

But the focus in general right now, moving forward, is a large number of folks coming in with the post-Covid infection, and some still suffering from long-haulers. There's a protocol we follow. The FLCCC has a very relevant protocol that's fairly frequently updated based on this new science coming in, and peer-reviewed articles. And that's kind of what we adhere to, with a few modifications. We're a little bit more aggressive with some of the dietary supplements that we prescribe. But essentially, low-dose naltrexone, which was offered as a second or third line agent, has now, in the recent month, been moved up to a primary intervention. So along with things like ivermectin and prednisone and omega-3 fatty acids, which is essentially what's derived from fish oil, and high doses of Vitamin D. The other agent is naltrexone, as in low-dose naltrexone. They're asking folks to begin at one milligram daily and increase to four and a half milligrams in a very short period of time. They are also stating that it's best to have people on this for two to three months to see full effect. So as with some of the other interventions, like they're recommending ivermectin, weight dose dosing, which is 0.2 milligrams per kilogram body weight, until symptoms resolve. Not necessarily for 14 days or one month, but until symptoms resolve.

And the same thing can be said for the use of low-dose naltrexone in my patient base. A lot of my patients actually are on it for a number of reasons, whether they're suffering from Lyme disease or autoimmune disease. So my patients actually have a benefit of being on LDN at the therapeutic dose, whether it's three and a half to four and a half milligrams a day. So they have the benefit of that. And then if they do get Covid, their symptoms are usually quite less. We've not really had but one or two hospitalizations. The stays are usually very short, maybe two to four days, just for high flow oxygen, and then they're discharged home. To my knowledge we've only had one or two patients ventilated during this whole pandemic. So adherence to early treatment, and the implementation of naltrexone as part of that regimen, has been very successful for us. Now our attention is focusing on folks that have long haulers still - brain fog, fatigue, loss of smell and taste, are the predominant ones; hair loss - we're seeing that as part of the syndrome. But it's mostly the fatigue. And so naltrexone is becoming a big part of our protocol for them,

Linda Elsegood: And how open-minded are other physicians to prescribing LDN.

Dr. Saleeby: As you know, it's like a certain segment of the physician population, at least in the United States, I don't know how it is worldwide, but there seems to be a better embracing of the use of low-dose naltrexone than other interventions like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, because those two other agents have been politicized a bit, whereas naltrexone has not. But there are certainly other interventions that are embraced by folks that are open-minded to integrative, more holistic, and what we call functional medicine, than the standard mainstream medical doctors, although the FLCCC in truth is actually established by conventional doctors who are open to using early treatment with ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, Alinia/nitrazoxanide, along with their traditional medications like prednisone, Singulair, some antihistamines Pepcid, things like that that are used in the protocol. But what they've also introduced are things like curcumin, Nigella sativa - which is the extract of black cumin seed oil, a very potent anti-inflammatory; higher doses of Vitamin C, melatonin, probiotics, and H2 and H1 receptor blockers. H1 would be your traditional antihistamines like Benadryl or Zyrtec or Claritin, and your H2 would be things like Pepcid/famotidine.

Some of those other agents - montelukast, which is Singulair, is also prescribed for those with MCAS - that's Mast Cell Activation Syndrome, which is part of the long haulers syndrome. It's where mast cells become destabilized and release a lot of histamine, so you have things like hives and rashes that appear, and some other complications. That's why the antihistamines and the leukotriene inhibitor Singular are used. There are some that will use anti-androgen therapies. There are some studies out of Brazil that showed that that was effective. And statins. I'm not a big fan of either of those two last agents, so I don't prescribe them in protocols for my patients. There's another SSRI (serotonin reuptake inhibitor) called fluvoxamine or brand name Luvox, which has been used, but it's not very well tolerated, so that's one that we have to be super careful with, because a lot of folks don't tolerate it. They have a lot of nausea or psychiatric kind of manifestations.

But LDN obviously is a great agent to use, because number one, it is very well tolerated; number two, it's very inexpensive. And it seems to be working very well. I mean, it was moved up from second and third tier to primary tier or primary agent to use by the FLCCC. And they're heavily research oriented. In other words, they don't make a move in that direction unless it's substantiated by large observational encounters with patients, or peer-reviewed journals.

Linda Elsegood: So, the million dollar question; put you on the hot spot here. What do you think that has done for LDN? Has it leapfrogged it forward far quicker than it would have done previously? And the second part of the question is, what do you think of everything that's been happening with using LDN for the symptoms of fatigue? What's it going to do to people with chronic fatigue syndrome?

Dr. Saleeby: Right. So yeah, I certainly think that the pandemic has elevated LDN to the top of mind for a lot of clinicians, both those that have been using it and were familiar with it to some degree in the realms of integrative and functional medicine, but also to the mainstream doctors who were unaware of LDN previous to the pandemic. Now it's front and center. I mean, it's one of four or five interventions that are considered top tier to use for people recovering from long haulers or post-Covid syndrome. So I think it did leapfrog it, I mean, in the minds of many doctors. To be put top of mind, that's a fantastic thing. That's kind of a good thing that came out of this horrible pandemic, if you will.

And the second question you had was, what about its effects on chronic fatigue. Well I've been using that in chronic fatigue and autoimmune patients and people with MSIDS (Multiple Systemic Infectious Disease Syndrome) or CIRS (Chronic Inflammatory Response Syndrome). Those are all different acronyms for almost the same essential issue. It's a syndrome that involves the immune system and inflammation, and we know that LDN and naltrexone in research is an anti-inflammatory from several different mechanisms. It helps suppress inflammation, and the post-Covid syndrome, and certainly the long haulers, is a problem mostly with inflammation. The virus is long gone. It's already out of our system. Usually 9 to 14 days after you first get infected, the virus has done its bad thing, and it's sort of kind of gone away, and what's left is the sequelae of that, which is lots of inflammation. And that's what actually hurts people. It destroys their lungs and other organs: liver, kidneys, things like that; and affects brain and cognitive issues, and things like that. So one of the interventions used is high doses of curcumin and black cumin seed oil. Those are potent anti-inflammatories. Even those that decide to use statins, they're using it for the anti-inflammatory nature of the statin, like atorvastatin. But then LDN comes in, which has a very safe and effective mechanism of lowering inflammation. I think that's why it's important.

Linda Elsegood: Well let's just hope that, as you say a good thing has come out of this. If we can get more doctors prescribing LDN and finding the benefits that patients have, hopefully they will prescribe it for more conditions. Mental health, autoimmune, cancer, pain, the list goes on. But I think it does make a big difference, the first time a doctor actually can see that LDN has done amazing things for a patient. It gives them the encouragement and the confidence to prescribe it for further patients.

Dr. Saleeby: Right, I think I definitely. And Linda, your website does a phenomenal job in helping me put together a PowerPoint presentation for your organization as well as for upcoming symposium I have. I've gone to your website, which is a great resource, and it lists all the different conditions that LDN is being used for, or would be useful. There’s this long list of conditions, categorized. Pulmonary, neuropsychiatric, cardiovascular. You've done a great job in enumerating all these conditions, and I think it's just a matter of time now for doctors to start embracing that, looking at the literature, looking at the peer-reviewed literature that backs up the use of this agent, a very unusual drug. It's one of my probably top five of my safe and effective drugs that I prescribe, and that's what I would grab. I tell my patients if I had to grab an agent to take with me on a deserted island, one of the top three would be naltrexone for the LDN. It's a powerful drug with a lot of uses, and it's backed up by research. That's the important thing.

Linda Elsegood: Talking about the website, we do update it monthly, so any doctor that tells us of a condition that they treated a patient for with LDN and had good results that's not on our list, we add it. We also add the latest clinical trials and peer-reviewed papers, and LDN in the news, things that have been happening. So we try and make it a one-stop, where a doctor, a researcher, a pharmacist who's looking to do a presentation, just like you were saying, that they can find the information quickly and easily. It's a never-ending job.

Dr. Saleeby: I know it is it's a great thing you offer, and I do send patients to that website in particular when we have a discussion in my office about LDN. I have some material I hand out to them, but I also direct them to the LDN Research Trust website so they can glean a lot of information. It's great resource for them.

And I understand there's a new book coming out, Linda?

Linda Elsegood: Yes, we've got the third LDN Book, which should be coming out in the fall. And we're covering different conditions. Many people have asked if it is the first book updated the third time. No, it's a series of books. So we've got Volume One and Two, now we've got Volume Three. And you put me on the spot to try and think what's in Volume Three. But it's really exciting, and you've written a chapter as well. So I think watch this space, and it will be available in a few months.

Dr. Saleeby: I mean reading Volume One and Volume Two I thought well, maybe that would be just an update, like a second edition. But it wasn't. Some novel things were discussed in Volume Two, and I'm assuming that like you say, Volume Three will be more novel stuff.

Linda Elsegood: The whole idea is to have every volume cover conditions that haven't been covered in the previous books, where we have the latest research, and we will have a section so the latest papers will be referenced at the back. I mean, we have every book, hundreds of references, and of course as time goes on, every year there are more papers coming out, which is fantastic.

The LDN Research Trust has been going over 18 years now, and initially, published papers were slow coming through. But every month there is something somewhere in the world. Somebody's done something, had something published. So it is gathering momentum

Dr. Saleeby: And Linda, I think really, with the last two years of us being in a pandemic, where a lot of focus has been on Covid 19 and what we can do for it with, let's say, off-label use of certain medications, and LDN. That's going to even push more research money towards researching LDN. I'm sure. Now that it's on the protocol,and it's like in the number one section of early interventions for long haulers, I think you'll see probably more and more papers. Actually, it should be exponential, in the number of researchers wanting to take this on and do more research, for sure.

Linda Elsegood: Fingers crossed!

Dr. Saleeby: So Linda, I've got a very interesting case that I saw in my office a few months ago, and this is actually a post-Covid vaccine injury type case. This lady, unbeknownst to her, had an underlying tick-borne infection. She actually had Lyme disease that was activated by the first dose of a Covid vaccine. I'm not going to mention which one it was, but it was a first in a series of two that she received. And within 48 hours of receiving the first dose, and then for the subsequent weekend, to two weeks thereafter, she suffered some neurological conditions that put her in a wheelchair. So this is a woman, and she was in her late 40s, and she was very ambulatory; didn't really claim any health issues. Next thing you know, within a very short period after her first vaccination, she was wheelchair-bound, couldn't walk, and had a very staggering kind of staccato that almost looked like a Parkinsonian kind of gate. It took her literally three minutes to get up out of the wheelchair and walk a few steps across the room to the doorway of my office. Now, we put her on a pretty heavy-duty protocol involving a few off-labeled drugs, but also I rapidly escalated her dose - she was never on LDN - but I placed her on low-dose naltrexone and escalated her dose pretty quickly, because I knew time is of the essence here, and I didn't want her neurological problem to progress. And during that time, it was when we discovered that she had Lyme disease as an underlying etiology, and it was just exacerbated by probably the spike proteins in the MRNA vaccine. We were able to get her rapidly up to 4.5 milligrams, which she tolerated very well. And the second time I saw her, she had transitioned from a wheelchair to a walker. On the third visit, which was a month later, she was using a cane. Now she was able to ambulate without the use of any help like a cane or even family members, but again it was extremely slow with her ambulation, and it looked kind of almost Parkinsonian in nature. Kind of like this leaning forward, kind of unsure, took her a long time to actually turn. But once she initiated the walk, she could carry on her day, and it was a little bit slow. But now I have not seen her back in about a month or two. She should have an appointment with me again soon, but I thought that was a pretty interesting case, where I think I'm pretty sure that the naltrexone had a big part to play.

Linda Elsegood: Well, thank you very much for having shared your experience with us today.

Dr. Saleeby:  Well Linda, it's always a pleasure. Have me back anytime. It's always good seeing you.

Linda Elsegood: Thank you. 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.

 

 

Pharmacist Michelle Moser, LDN Key to Success (LDN, low dose naltrexone)

Review: Michelle Moser has 35 years experience as a Pharmacist and is very experienced with the utilization of LDN (Low one Naltrexone). She volunteers her knowledge as an a LDN specialist with the LDNresearchtrust.org. Her 21 minute presentation covers how they supply a thorough service to their customers, with advice and council on dosing and related help for a variety of conditions. She explains how LDN can be used along with most other drugs, even opioids if the LDN is micro dosed and immediate release. All autoimmune conditions can benefit from LDN.

Review by Ken Bruce

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.

Linda Elsegood: Today I'd like to welcome back our guest pharmacist, Michelle Moser who's also one of our LDN Specialists. Thank you for joining us today, Michelle.

Michelle Moser: Oh, thank you so much for having me. It's certainly my pleasure.

Linda Elsegood: So we're all keen and eager, and as people can see, you've put “Keys To Success” up there, so take it away.

Michelle Moser: Thank you, thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity to share some information with everybody today that really goes over not only how patients can find their success, but how providers can also enhance patient outcomes. So here we go. The first thing I want wanted to address is that low dose naltrexone plays really well with other therapies. It's not necessarily medication that is used all by itself all the time, and that is a question that comes up from not only patients, but from providers as well, wanting to know, well, the patient is taking this this and this. Can I use LDN? And the answer almost always is yes, and the main reason is that even if we are using or prescribing opiates for patients with chronic pain, depending on how those opiates are being utilized throughout the day, LDN might still be an option. Very few times is it that LDN is not something you can start. It doesn't have very many drug interactions, so LDN is brilliant for a wide variety of indications. And as we know, as so many more autoimmune diagnoses are being found every year, I think now there's something like 100, 120 some, maybe even 140 autoimmune disorders, low dose naltrexone is a wonderful fit for most of those patients.

But we also have other dosing, such as very-low-dose, which is 50 to maybe 250 micrograms. And then we have ultra-low dosing, which stems from the oxytrial study where we were using only microgram dosing, one, two, three, four micrograms, alongside short-acting opiate medications to help reduce the need for those opiates and replace it with low dose naltrexone. Because we know that low dose naltrexone not only helps to intermittently block those pain receptors, but also helps to reduce not only inflammation and those pro-inflammatory cytokines, but we can also see that low dose naltrexone helps to modulate the immune system. And there's a wide variety of studies that have been published to emphasize exactly those parameters. So if you're needing those, either reach out to the LDN Research Trust or your local compounding pharmacist. Sometimes we have those available, as well some of the other things that we use in our compounding lab and compound on literally a daily basis, because low dose naltrexone is used for a lot of inflammation issues, autoimmune, chronic pain.

We can also use low dose naltrexone for some of those other nuanced areas such as traumatic brain injury PTSD, depression, and anxiety; and we've heard from a wide variety of wonderful practitioners during the LDN Research Trust conferences on those specific areas. But when we're able to use other medications in combination with LDN; I don't mean like in the same capsule or in the same liquid, I just mean side-by-side dosing; we can see that oxytocin, especially in a nasal spray, is incredibly helpful to help build that sense of connection, to help alleviate depression and grief, as well as go after some of those imposed pain areas. And oxytocin is one of those medications that is very easy to administer in a nasal spray, even in sublingual drops. But it is very sensitive to heat, so we have to be very careful about what dosage forms we're using. We don't use oral capsules with oxytocin. The stomach acid kind of wipes out its activity. So we need to find alternative forms for that.

But also if you're needing low dose naltrexone for dermatology issues then we can combine it with mast cell stabilizers like ketotin or either other anti-inflammatories, even tranexamic acid, to help decrease some of the redness, in that dermatology issue. And even the autoimmune dermatology products, we're very careful about the bases that we put low dose naltrexone in so that we can control exactly how deep we want that therapy to go. So not every base is going to work, because we really need to individualize that therapy for that condition.
Of course we use low dose naltrexone in a situation with ketamine, which is a non-opiate pain medication as well. And because ketamine works on different receptors than low dose naltrexone we don't see the withdrawal. We actually see the enhancement of that pain control. So there's a a lot of options here.

And lastly, I wanted to address synapsin, which is this wonderful combination of medications. It's a ginseng derivative along with an NAD that again helps to reduce the central inflammation in the brain. And when we use it in a nasal spray, of course that helps with the neural transmission directly to the brain.

As a pharmacist, when a patient is new to low dose naltrexone, or even comes to us because a provider would prefer to use our pharmacy, we emphasize that low dose naltrexone is not a cure-all drug. It actually doesn't really cure anything, but what it does do is it helps to trick the body to work on its own pathways, and much more effectively, and much more efficiently.

So when we set up the expectations, we want patients to know that this isn't like taking something like an aspirin or a Tylenol. It's going to take a little while for this medication to provide full benefit. And we also know that low dose naltrexone isn't for everybody. But when we start low with the dosing and slowly increase, that we can actually see patient outcomes in greater than 50, actually approaching 80 to 90 percent of the time, which as a pharmacist, I've been a pharmacist for over 35 years, I don't recall any other medication providing that high of patient outcome, and that high patient benefit. So we also let patients know that this is a therapy that we're going to start with a low dose, slowly increase over time, and when we find their happy dose, which may be 4.5 milligrams, might be less than that; in some situations we might actually split the dose and take some in the morning and some at night; again completely individualized therapies. We let them know that most respond in about 60 days, so you got to give it some time. And with that I try to emphasize that most of the time, by the time patients are finding low dose naltrexone either through their provider or through the suggestion of their pharmacists or other chat groups, that they have been years into their therapy without great outcomes, without great success. They've used maybe even a wide variety of providers, a wide variety of alternative therapies, and now they're going to give low dose naltrexone a shot. So don't expect everything to just magically go away in a week. That's not going to happen. And in some situations, even when we're dealing with the same disease state - so let's say we're talking about fibromyalgia patients - some respond very quickly, others do take about four to six months to respond. Even with Crohn's disease, we've heard from Dr Leonard Weinstock during the LDN Research Trust conferences, that most of his patients really respond somewhere around the four-month mark. So that is very important, so that we make sure that patients are compliant on their therapies, and that they understand that the pharmacy and the provider will be checking in with them to make sure that they're still doing well, and then if there are any questions, that come up, we can answer those right then and there rather than answering them after they've stopped their therapy.

One thing we've also learned over the years with low dose naltrexone is that often less is more. So increasing the dose frequency beyond twice a day is not necessarily very helpful, and certainly going above maybe even six milligrams isn't usually as effective as lower doses, especially when we're dealing with autoimmune conditions. Now if we're dealing with weight loss, then we then we move into a little bit different realm. But again that therapy is taken once or twice a day, so again it's about treating that individual and making sure that that individual is heard, is listened to, and is able to express their goals so that we can effectively meet those.

And I wanted to throw this in there too, that we had a gal who slowly increased her dose, and when she was at 3 milligrams she felt great. She got up to 3.5, she wasn't feeling as good, and she went up to 4 and she still wasn't feeling very good. So we bumped her back down to 3 and then we slowly increased with 0.1 milligram dosing, which is itty-bitty, but sometimes even that 0.1 milligram makes all the difference in the world. And her happy dose was 3.1 milligrams. So it was great, and that's where she stayed, and she's been at that dose now for a couple of years. We also let patients know that yes, the pharmacy will check in with you periodically, usually around week 3 or 4, but don't wait for us. If something comes up, please get a hold of us, please let us know how we can help you, because we'd much rather answer those questions sooner than later, or have them stop therapy altogether, and really have to start all back at square one. So when we're slowly increasing these doses, we try to make it as easy as possible for the patient to understand. So whether we're dealing with capsules or liquids, we've built these great handouts so that patients understand how to slowly increase their dose without taking literally a handful of capsules at a time. That isn't necessarily the best way to go about it, because then they have to wash it down with a lot of water, and if dosing is at bedtime, that could very much disrupt their sleep because they've got to get up in the middle of the night to use the restroom. So we provide these handouts, and we color code them, because we provide two different strengths in two different colored bottles, and we emphasize that as we are reading from left to right rather than using the columns top to bottom. Then we're going to be able to use a little bit of out of one bottle or the other bottle concurrently as we slowly increase that dose. But we also have liquids that we use, and this liquid starter kit includes a lot more color, mainly because we slowly associate the color with the gradation, and this is actually a twice a day dosing starter kit that we use with a liquid base, because liquids are a lot easier to manipulate and find those doses that are going to be specific to them. Not everybody uses doses that are the same in the morning or at night. Sometimes one end is higher than the other.

Also, using an oil suspension is going to give a longer dating for the patient. Their bottle is going to last longer than 30 days, and that's also very pleasing to the patient, because they're very cost conscious, as they should be, because the majority of the time these medications are out of pocket expenditures. We offer an almond oil base, an olive oil base, or an MCT oil base which is derived from coconut oil. We can splash it with a natural flavor like tangerine, lemon, mint, cinnamon; and then in some situations we might actually add a little natural sweetener like a Stevia. W at this pharmacy really steer away from artificial sweeteners because we find that sometimes that actually increases inflammation, and we're also really careful about the oils that we are using. These are not cosmetic or traditional food-grade, these are bases that are backed by the United States Pharmacopoeia with a national monograph behind those.

We also are really careful about the fillers that we put in our capsules, and we work again with that individual to ensure that we're using a filler that is going to best meet their needs. All of the capsules are immediately released. We do not use any extended-release product, because that does slow down the absorption. A lot of times there's absorption issues to begin with, and certainly if we do extend the release of the naltrexone, we are actually bypassing and negating the science behind how naltrexone actually works at that receptor site. Most of the time we're using a microcrystalline cellulose, but we do have other fillers as well, so again we let them know we try to make this as easy as possible. But if it is at all confusing when the patient goes over their medication, we ask that they call the pharmacy. Let's go over those questions right away to make sure that they are getting the best information for the greatest success possible

So with our patient follow-up programs, we identify those individuals who have recently received their medications, and we kind of look at where they're at in their in their dosing schedule. We give them a call or we send them a text, “Hey we'd like to check in with you. We want to make sure everything is going well”. And we also realize that not all patients are available 9 to 5 when the pharmacy is open. Sometimes we need to schedule conversations outside of business hours, and so we make sure that that is available to a patient so that all of their needs are being met. We check in with them at least once during their first month, but we always reiterate to the patient if something comes up, get a hold of us, and this is how. We have an email option, we have a texting option, and we have a phone call option as well.

We also let them know that as dosing adjustments are being made. sometimes side effects might crop up. and so we let them know exactly what those are. Sometimes it is vivid dreams, but often when we have vivid dreams we know LDN is working, because it's helping us get into that REM sleep cycle. But if those vivid dreams become disturbing or change our sleep patterns, then we want to move the dosing schedule. We also let them know that if there's a little bit of a headache, how to alleviate that, and how long that those side effects might persist, and when they should expect those to go away. And if they're having issues with perhaps constipation, we explain that as well, because sometimes even these very small side effects can allow a patient or cause a patient to back off of their therapy and abruptly stop.

Answering the questions as they come up again are keys to success. This is how we allow our patients to communicate so that we are acknowledging what is going on with them, and they feel heard and understood. Anytime that we can alleviate side effects only allows for a better health program and for greater success, and this is when really their prescriber or their provider becomes the hero in all of this, because they suggested a therapy that is finally working for them, maybe even after years or decades of them searching for a really good way to feel better, perhaps even feel normal.

When we enhance compliance, of course we see better outcomes. When a patient is heard, when they are allowed the time to explain what's going on with them, they take ownership of their own care, and in our experience at our pharmacy, we find that when a patient takes ownership over their care, they're more likely to then be fully engaged and follow other processes or programs that may be in place by the provider. Often that leads to less phone calls to the provider office, less insignificant or issues that could be dealt with over a simple phone call, maybe even less visits to the emergency room mental health, which is always a concern, and especially in the last couple of years with stress and anxiety and depression, we see that even using low dose naltrexone can be beneficial in helping some of those areas where patients may not have been using low dose naltrexone as a primary concern, but they realize that oh my gosh, these other symptoms have disappeared too. And that's always a great benefit. We see increased patient compliance, and always better patient outcomes.

But truly, because low dose naltrexone is such a low-risk, low-side-effect, it's a low dose and honestly, it's a very low cost medication. That safety margin is much better than most commercially available prescription medications. The minimal drug interactions make it a prime candidate for the use of low dose naltrexone in the majority of health concerns and diagnoses, and quite honestly, we have over 30 years of research behind low dose naltrexone. So if you're looking for great science in using a medication that is beneficial for many many people not just in the short term but over decades. This is where we really say, “Why not try low dose naltrexone. It's a fabulous way to really get after some of those chronic issues that maybe will enhance a lifestyle, and be able to allow somebody to cross things off of their bucket list.

So here we are. I want to thank Linda for the opportunity to chat with everyone today and certainly, if there's any questions that I can help with, please let me know. This is my personal email, and these are questions, and my cell, as well as my store phone number. So I'm happy to help. Thanks so much Linda.

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

 

 

Dr Sajad Zalzala, LDN Radio Show February 2022 (LDN, low dose naltrexone)

Dr. Sajad Zalzala is conducting very interesting trials on his patients utilizing Low Dose Naltrexone (LDN). He is collecting data on the various conditions LDN is helpful for, and what various dosages can be best in each case. His main area of interest is aging and longevity, and he feels LDN can be a big player in dealing with the many autoimmune conditions that shorten our life span. He is measuring the success of LDN on each condition and the expected duration to see results. He is excited with his results to date and will publish his findings in the future.

Review by Ken Bruce