LDN Video Interviews and Presentations

Dr Harpal Bains talks about Low Dose Naltrexone and her new clinic (LDN, low dose naltrexone) from LDN Research Trust on Vimeo.

Linda Elsegood: I'd like to welcome back Dr Harpal Banes from the Harpal clinic in London. Thank you for joining us today. Harpel. 

Harpal Bains: Thank you. Is it lovely to come back again. 

Linda Elsegood: So I know that you've been doing lots of amazing things and you're opening a new practice.

Harpal Bains: Yes, about three times the size of our current ones, so it's very exciting. 

Linda Elsegood: Wow. So what would you be doing in this new practice? 

Harpal Bains: Basically it's off the feedback that I've been getting from a lot of my patients. We get a lot of very chronically ill patients, including cancer patients and the rest of them.

And we find that a lot of them were coming asking or talking about things like hyperbaric oxygen chambers and infrared saunas for detox of a heavy metal detoxing and cryo chambers and the rest of it. And I started getting more and more interested. And then when you go to a lot of these conferences, especially within the functional medicine world, you see a lot of these all around, and the idea came to my head that what if I had a premises that were big enough to house all of these things? Because it's not really a case of one size fits all. You'll find someone saying that cryo is the best, don't even bother with the rest because that's the best.

And another person will say the same thing about the sonars. And so I don't think there's a one size fits all. However, I do believe all of them help in different ways, in some cases, and they actually help towards the same end in some cases. And so why not just have it all within the same place? The difference being is that here, I would have taken the trouble and done the homework so that I know the machines that I have are amongst the best.

Out there within what we can get in the UK and therefore they don't have to run around and try to figure out, is this inferior? Is it on the right one? Is it radiating EMS, rays?  Is that cryo cold enough or is it one of those, you know, so the idea is basically if we have someplace that is trusted and that they can use all of them at the same time, that'll be great. And so in terms of how we intend to move forward with that is once I get all these things and us, we thought that maybe one good way of going about it is to do it on a subscription basis where you could actually use any one of these machines within the same subscription, for the month or that part.

We have yet to completely identify how to do it. But I think that's really the best way forward. So, someone who decides to come in, they will be able to try each one of the machines and I suspect there'll be one machine, that they will prefer more than another, or they might find that they work in different ways and to actually have a one-stop centre I don't think any exists in the UK at the moment, so it's quite exciting. But we need big enough premises for that. And we found one.

Linda Elsegood: Wow, that's, that is truly amazing. And we interviewed your brother a few weeks ago, and he's working alongside you now. What would you say are the main conditions that you're treating. 

Harpal Bains: Within a setup that we want, initially as I would have mentioned before I started out with wellness medicine for someone who's fairly well, but feeling the signs of ageing and wants to maintain it for as long as they can.

That's how we started out. However, what we found was that we were getting people who want at home once, and we're starting to, and they were ill. And before I know it, all I'm seeing is chronic—diseases, autoimmune and the rest of it. And for me, that's of course, extremely interesting. And therefore it has been guided by my patients in a way, by what they feel they want.

The demand has been created by our patient population. So anything that's a chronic disease, it comes to the point where it doesn’t really make a difference what it is for me that they come in with, most likely that something we can do for them because most of it sort of have a similar basis and for us, because we see so many different types of cases, I can start to see patterns very easily as can my brother, which for the person and they go it, they can't. Or with someone who doesn't have that level of experience, it will be harder. So it's chronic diseases, higher type syndromes, autoimmune, anything within that area.

Linda Elsegood: and of course, it's rather like being Sherlock Holmes, isn't it? Is to try and find out what exactly is causing those symptoms rather than treating the symptoms. So if a patient comes to you with multiple complex conditions. What's the first thing you do. 

Harpal Bains: So at our clinic, basically the approach we have is very hormone and nutrition based and antioxidant based.

So the way I would do it versus some other practitioners who have a slightly different angle, I think I mentioned this the last time I spoke, is that the biggest, biggest thing I find with homework is the speed at which I get results.  In the same way, and one reason why I really love LDN is the endorphin rush.

The moment you start feeling better, you get an endorphin rush. The moment you get that endorphin, and the rest of these feel-good neurotransmitters and hormones within your body, you start to heal in ways which you could not really anticipate and a speed that you couldn't get doing it—using purely functional medicine.

This is my opinion. Of course, and when we put that together with things like nutritional interventions, once again, not outsourcing it, but at the same practitioner actually doing that, which means now this practitioner has to understand that side of things as well. Get rid of all the heavy metals, uh, the detox side of things.

We actually get quite a lot of results. And at that point, I find that it works for about 70 to 80% of my patients. And then I get the remaining, with the remaining. I'm a member of a BSCS, which is. British society of environmental medicine, that's sort of the next area start to look at. So that's when you start to look at things like mould, heavy metals, exhaust fumes and anything and everything, which could give rise to, basically, these environmental issues.

And they are quite frequently forgotten. Not many people think of them, but they're highly, highly relevant. However, the way I practice, I tend to leave that to the last, unless it's blindingly obvious that that's a problem. Someone who just moved to a new house and then finding they're facing all kinds of problems, it could be fumes from the carpets, let's say, or brand new furniture. Even the fire retardant material they use for furnishings that's an issue as well. Or in a really, or they move into a really old damp house and then the issue with mould and the rest of it, that's a huge area of study, which I would say maybe 20% there.

I've got a long way to go, but then, you know, if the issue is really that, and if I don't feel like I handle it there, there'll be other practitioners I can refer them on to. 

Linda Elsegood:  I interviewed Dr Tom O'Brien, who talks about all the effects of the toxins, not only that are in food, you know, in crops that are sprayed.

A piece of furniture, and as you said, that retardant material, but something he said, which struck me, that something that everybody can do very easily is when you're filling your car up with fuel, can you smell it? If you can smell it, move. Stand the other way so that the fumes don't blow in your face. And I thought I've never thought of that.

Harpal Bains: I've just thought, Oh, I smell this smell. They probably go closer.

I mean, that's a good thought. 

Linda Elsegood: Diet is important. I mean, there are so many children that you can just see that if they can, you know that they're overweight and they if they carry on eating as they are doing, you know they're going to be a type two diabetic before they need school. 

Harpal Bains: Yeah. 

Linda Elsegood: But how do you educate people when they come to see you, to recommend healthier eating and maybe supplements, because obviously you did blood tests and things and if you find that they are low in certain vitamins or minerals, how do you go about trying to educate them to change the way in which they're living? 

Harpal Bains: I give my patients a lot of homework. Most of them have to go home with homework. So it's one of those things, I think if they don't understand what they're doing, they can listen and do some things for maybe a month or two months, and then that's it.

They'll forget, and they won't do it. And then you lose the benefits of it. So until, and unless they understand why they're doing what they're doing, it's not really for compliance is really important here. So it’s a comprehensive consultation that works out to be two and a half hours in total of the doctor's time.

Initially, it's one and a half hours as a lot of teaching that goes on there as well. Some things are frankly, blindingly obvious to us, will immediately know what's going on in other people. It's a little bit hard because they're doing everything right and it's hard to tell where they’re going wrong, but on top of that, when they get their eventual report, that has dietary advice as well within the report, and we allow them time to read and digest it, and then they come back for their final half an hour with us. So it's, as I say, it's two and a half hours split into two sessions, really with the report sent to them in between so that they have time to read, absorb, come up with all the questions they want. We stayed then come back and see us. I really like doing it that way because, at the back of their heads, they are not having to keep paying up for every time they see us, which is not a nice thought, but it's all-encompassing. They come in once, and they know they're going to get this management further on moving forward.

Linda Elsegood: And I think engaging people into their own health, giving them responsibility, you can advise as much as you like, but if they don't take it on board, it's not going to work. Is it? So having them working with you, it's a partnership, 

Harpal Bains: Yeah. Not only that, I mean, another thing that we have recently introduced and we had going to develop further is something like a health coach, not quite the health coach, but something like that.  Someone who's actually going to pick up the phone and ask you after you've been with us for a month, how are things, because from experience, what I find is that if they come across problems, most of them just stop the medication, or they stop doing that certain thing and they forget.

And so by having someone there slightly nagging them, it's actually a really good thing. And at some point maybe in the next two or three years, I don't see it happening this year, is to come up with an app where with prompts and the rest of it. But I think that's another level up.

Linda Elsegood: We have an LDN app remember, that you can monitor patients and check and do graphs and charts and things. Perhaps you can have a look at that, 

Harpal Bains: which is on my to-do list, 

Linda Elsegood: which I'm sure is growing all the time. 

Harpal Bains: Yes. Oh, yes. So, but that's only, that's in the pipeline via creating software for the whole clinic, as we speak. So there's the number of changes, a lot of changes. A lot of the new premises is actually devoted to office space because we needed it.

Linda Elsegood: Whereabouts, are you located? 

Harpal Bains: The current clinic is in Margate, which is between Liverpool street and bank. And the new one is about two minutes walk from St Paul's Cathedral, its a stunning location, really nice. And the good thing about the new place is that we are building, uh, we have the disability access.

Linda Elsegood: Right Okay. 

Harpal Bains: So we have disabled access and the rest of it, which we can't have in our current premises. 

Linda Elsegood: Oh, I see. Okay. So both of them are accessible if people are coming into London by train.

Harpal Bains: Oh, yes. Very, very easily. Yeah. I mean, because St Paul's a tube station about a five-minute walk away. The cathedral's right there, you've got the river so you could make a whole day out of it. We have a lot of patients who come from either abroad or outside of the outside of London. I know you could make a whole day out of it. It's really beautiful. That area. 

Linda Elsegood: I'll have to come and check it out. Come and see you.

I don't go to London very often but there we are. But it's a beautiful place. And especially if you're outside of England and you haven't been before this, there's a lot to see.  

Harpal Bains: The architecture is stunning. 

Linda Elsegood: Yeah. 

Harpal Bains: It's really beautiful. Yeah. And so this is a pedestrian street as well, so there's, that's a lot of nice things about, it's one of those really, really nice streets.

Linda Elsegood: So we talked a little bit about diet and supplements. What about sleep? The people that have problems with sleep, I mean with all the iPads and smartphones and this kind of thing, if people are having difficulty sleeping, and especially children who are staying up later and later because they're being pinged by friends on all these different platforms that they use.

What is a recommended time to shut down before you go to bed, ready to go to sleep? 

Harpal Bains: I think in an ideal world, sort of like five, six o'clock, but you'll have a lot of people doing beyond that. I would say if you could do it or two hours before you're in a particular place. Ideally more, but I mean, most people did not really get an idea to it.

And on top of that, simple things like having the night mode on it. Uh, right. It's called an M flux wait, turns the screen yellow, so you don't have the blue light, which is the one that affects sleep so that's one thing you can do. There are also these glasses that you can wear, which cuts out those lights as well.

So there are quite a few things you can do to mitigate it, or despite the fact that they are still going to do a bit, children are going to be quite hard to make sure they actually listen to you. So these would be the things that you can do because you just put it into the computer and automatically switches into night mode and things like that would help. But sleep is a huge, huge problem. It's becoming increasingly big. It was actually on my list of things to do to work alongside a dentist who would be able to deal with the jaw to create these little, what do you call it? These things, which pulls the jaw forward and therefore it doesn't have the weight on your neck. You don't have sleep apnea. Oh, so yeah, it's absolutely brilliant. Once again, you have to go to the US to get trained. And initially, I was hoping that my new premise was there'll be enough of a space for a dentist, but I don't think that's going to be, but it's, it's within a few years I was thinking perhaps, you know, To do sleep studies and the rest of it because once again, what's in NHS, it's not quite, I don't really agree with the way they assess it. Like for them, if you're snoring a little bit, you have a mile, and therefore it's okay, and I don't, I disagree with that. I think any sleep apnea it's waking you up because your body can breathe and there are things that you can do, but it's not a very big area yet. Not in this country.

Linda Elsegood: I have a problem with my jaw. When I go to the dentist, open my mouth wider, it keeps dislocating. So it is so painful, opening the jaw. When they say open wide, then they're trying to get at the back, and it goes clunk, click and I grind my teeth, but I was, I bought a gum shield that I put in, but because I couldn't shut my jaw completely, that I think the thing I had at the dentist was just as bad. So I tried desperately hard not to wear it because it hurt too much and try not to grind your teeth. I mean, how do you know when you're, when you're asleep? 

Harpal Bains: I see patients like that all the time. Botox is one of the best things out there for it.

Linda Elsegood: Really, how does botox do that?

Harpal Bains: Absolutely brilliant. It relaxes the muscles. It relaxes the muscles that cause us grinding. I have patients coming in for like, in fact, wonderful that someone's face. I can usually tell if they're grinders, they have these huge hypertrophic muscles on the side of their face.

They have quite square faces because that muscle is taking out. In quite many. You find that after a series of Botox injections the shape of the face changes, it becomes more rounded, the grinding at night stops. Your headache stops. So many problems go away, and this is grinding down the enamel, which will cost you tons and tons of money further down the line.

Such an easy solution, such an easy solution. Basically, Botox, what a lot of people don't understand about Botox is a, I've got a blog on my website actually, on how to do Botox so that it's very effective. What you're basically trying to do is making the body lose its muscle memory. So I don't want my muscle to remember how to grind, so it lasts about three months, so I'm going to inject some into my jaw before all the action comes back before it comes out completely I want to go in and inject it again because after not doing it for, in my experience, 12 to 18 months of regularly doing the Botox. That's it. You don't remember to grind anymore just because you've forgotten how to do it, so if you want to grind, you can, but you just don't do it anymore. It's amazing. No headaches now, and you're going to save a lot of money long term because you don't, you won't have all the dental issues moving forward.

Teeth grinding. That's an easy one. Yeah, very easy. 

Linda Elsegood: I've never heard of that before. Do you inject similarly to a dentist if he was giving you a local anaesthetic, is that how it works? 

Harpal Bains: Oh, no, no. Much easier. Much easier. Just on the outside. Basically. The way I do it is I, Oh yeah. You don't have to go in at all.

Yeah. So on the outside, I will get the patient to clench and then I will draw it out because everyone's got different musculature. It's fascinating when you start having to draw, and then I will inject the Botox basically on your jaw. You're already on the outside, right below your ear around that area.

So, but I will draw it out, and I will actually inject it in the right areas. And um, yeah, if you go somewhat conservative, you get really good results, we'll still be able to eat and rest of it. It's brilliant. You, I'm not many dentists seem to know about it, but I get people coming back to me again and again and again for the same thing.

No headaches, no more grinding, nothing. They come to me for that. And the small number of people come because they want a slimmer face. And then that's fairly cultural but no, it's brilliant. Definitely consider it. I think your whole jaw is dislocating as well, it's probably due to you've got some muscles which are possibly stronger than other muscles. That's another thing you could consider. 

Linda Elsegood: All right. As soon as we're finished, I'm going to go and look in the mirror and see what shape my face is.  

Harpal Bains: basically put your hands underneath your ear and clench your jaw. You could probably feel the muscle clenching. Yeah, just it. And then have both hands on each side of your face just next to your ears, and you'll feel the muscles.

Yeah, and that's the one that we inject into.  It's easy. Go. Go on YouTube, look, look for videos on it. It's easy. I love doing it. It's such an easy procedure, and you get great results. 

Linda Elsegood: Well, I mean, I've seen some people have Botox and it looks really fake and really horrible and ends up with funny lips and things.

It doesn't have any. Adverse effects do, it doesn't change you in any way, 

Harpal Bains: This is the bit that’s really, really sad because once again, that's media. That's a media presenting Botox in such a terrible way. Do you know that? Uh, and this one that the documented evidence was out there, uh, for someone who does their frown lines, they actually become more pleasant, to be around because they cannot frown, therefore, the signals to the brain that tells them to frown and be angry. It is, does this look to them? I have because we do aesthetics as well, and I've got mothers coming to me saying that I know it’s wrong because my kids think I look angry on it. And it's pretty funny.

But if you think about how it came up, it was discovered by ophthalmologists because they used to treat ticking of the eyes and these patients that came back you know, telling the doctor that this is great. I don't have wrinkles on that side that you've been injecting, but how about the other side?

And that's how it was discovered. So it's used for things like anal fissures, a lot of urinary problems. It's useful—so many different things. But people just think of it. Migraines. Migraines is a big one. People think of it as this beauty thing, which, you know, everyone looks fake, but done properly it’s beautiful. And lots and lots of benefits, especially headaches, is a big one. And I am not looking angry. I'm telling you, that goes every aspect of your life. 

Linda Elsegood: And I suppose you would need an experienced doctor to do the procedures. 

Harpal Bains: In an ideal world, I mean, there are a lot of very good nurses out there as well, while very experienced, definitely do not go to any beauty therapist who claims that they do it.

Not at all. Then quite a few dentists have started doing it as well and it's one of those things. It really is. You know, down to the practitioner, but a good practitioner will do a really nice job and you quite frequently, you can't even tell someone has had it done, and that look is getting more and more popular. Really. People don't like that overdone, that's fake. Yeah. Not many people like that, but that's what's portrayed in the media. There'll be so many people who would have had it, and you wouldn't even know. And once again, that's endorphins. That's like LDN. You like what you see in the mirror. You're going to be a happy person. That's endorphins. 

Linda Elsegood: Well, we have five minutes left, so if you could tell us what your views are on LDN. 

Harpal Bains: It's one of the most mind-blowing things I've come across. It's like I'm trying to get everyone on it. It's wonderful. My own immunity has gone up tremendously.

It's like the amount of stress I've had at the moment is severe with two renovation projects going for the past few months. New staff, lots of rents to pay. No, I haven't fallen sick. Really so something else. And all my patients tell me the same thing. And the biggest, biggest part is the small things disappear.

And this is where I, this is why LDN will never be that well studied because everyone will come back and tell me something different that's now gone away that they've completely forgotten about. But I've reminded them because it's in my notes. It's all about the small things, and therefore that really adds quality to life. It’s wonderful. 

Linda Elsegood: And if you can hold a progressive disease, you know, even if it doesn't help with the symptom relief, which it seems to do for many people, but even if it just halted progression, how amazing is that you know? 

Harpal Bains: And the pain. Mm. 

Linda Elsegood: Yeah. So if people come to you, they can expect to be told about LDN and diets and supplements and if they grind their teeth, 

Harpal Bains: I do recommend, yeah, I do recommend Botox cause I'm telling you, it's so good for that problem. It's amazing. They keep coming back again and again and yet I'm telling them 12  to 18 months, the moment your body forgets that action. You're good. After that, you probably need just a top-up once or twice a year after that, and that's about it. It's well worth the money, I would say because if you think of it as saving against future dental work, that's not worth it.

Linda Elsegood: No, that's right. But this gum tooth guard or whatever they called, it was really, really expensive. It wasn't cheap, and I couldn't use it. So it sits in a drawer. 

Harpal Bains: Okay. Well, there you go, you’ll have to research it. You'll love it. 

Linda Elsegood: Well, thank you very much for having been on the show today, talking to us about just about everything.

Harpal Bains: Thank you for inviting me. 

Linda Elsegood: Well, we hope that people come along and see you and your website. Where would they find your details? 

Harpal Bains: It's  https://www.harpalclinic.co.uk/

Linda Elsegood: wonderful. And a question we're always asked is, do you have a waiting list? 

Harpal Bains: I personally do. My brothers is shorter.

I'm hoping to bring that number down, and we are also hoping to maybe get another doctor in as well at some point. 

Linda Elsegood: Wonderful. Well, we wish you every success with your, your new premises and your renovations on your existing one. So if anybody is in a wheelchair, they need to go to St Paul’s clinic? 

Harpal Bains: Yeah, most likely we will have that as the main centre because that's where all the buzz will be. 

Linda Elsegood: Okay. Yeah. Well, thank you very much.

Harpal Bains: Thank you.

Linda Elsegood: This show is sponsored by Dixon's Chemist, who are the experts in LDN at associated treatments in the UK. Dixon's Chemist, the most cost-effective for LDN in all forms within the UK and Europe, maintaining standard safety standards far in excess of what is required. Why would you choose to get your LDN from anywhere else? Call 01414 046545 today to speak to the LDN experts.

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

Chris shares her MS and LDN Story - 13th March 2019 (LDN, low dose naltrexone) from LDN Research Trust on Vimeo.

Today, I am joined by Chris who lives in Scotland. Thank you for joining me today, Chris.

Chris: Hello.

Linda: I've interviewed you before and you've told your MS story. For those people that don't know your story, could you tell us when you were diagnosed and what your MS was like at that time?

Chris: I was originally diagnosed shortly after returning from a holiday in Mexico. At the end of the holiday, I was very fatigued. I started to have very bad pins and needles starting from my feet, and I'd just moved home, so this was my first ever visit to the GP and he immediately seemed very, I don't know, he questioned lots of things and happened to mention that I'd had optic neuritis. He could see from my records nearly two years earlier. So he said, “come back to me in a few days and let’s see how you are.” I'm an engineer, a bit of a scientist. I went back a couple of days later and I basically said: “I'm not leaving here until you tell me what you can do to stop the pins and needles spreading up my legs.” I wasn't feeling brilliant, but I just thought I was shattered from the holiday. It'd been a great holiday, but quite tiring. I was very, very hot. He said, “You've told me you've got private health care, so I think I need to refer you. I'm going to refer you to a neurologist.” I looked at him and questioned him. It didn't take long to see the consultant and have the MRI and the number punch, etc. and said, pins and needles would kind of be fading a little bit and haven't gone, but I suppose I'd just got used to them. The specialist said, “I'm fairly certain you've got it, but I think it's early days and actually there's not much I can do anyway.”

I lived in England then. This was still quite new about 22 years ago, I think. So I went on my way. The one positive thing that did happen straight away was that I went to a local health food shop and was just looking for information and things, and they asked me what I was looking for and I was just wondering if they had any books on MS, they were actually about to give a talk and they said they would.

So that's the only thing that I did for my MS in the early days. I have to say I didn't do anything else very positive; I was working 80 hours a week. I was a very senior manager. I loved my job. I played hard as well. I had little ups and downs, but for quite a few years it wasn't anything major. I kind of ignored it really. I then moved house, moved job, started a new relationship, which led to moving house, moving jobs, et cetera. I thought I'll take things a little easier for a while because I didn't think I'd been living in the past. Then I started to develop my problems. I was very fatigued all the time. I didn't know that word. I was just tired as far as I knew. That kind of thing was going on. Then things got worse. Then I moved again, started another new job and got optic neuritis again. I was just feeling generally grotty. I went to see a neurologist because I'd moved to Scotland by then and he told me I didn't have MS. I spent eight years feeling pretty awful but managing, working less, just about dealing with the stress. I left without a diagnosis. I got tested for lots of other autoimmune conditions. His feeling was that the MRI didn't show enough. I think it was eight years of very bad optic neuritis then other things started to happen. I have no idea where I was at. Cognitive problems, I couldn't focus. I was an engineer and there I was sitting looking at a spreadsheet and it was just a load of lines and things that meant nothing to me. I couldn't even work out how to put a sentence together. Some days it was so bad that I was pulling over on the side of the motorway with fatigue and things like that.

So I got referred to yet again to a neurologist and they confirmed that I had MS within six weeks. I think I’d met the person who first told me about it, and it took a couple of weeks then to tell me, but it was good. It was lucky I'd gone to a local MS charity where they had a center and I met this person and she mentioned something. After I'd heard her mention it once, twice after that for a couple more weeks. I asked her what her medication was and she said “I haven't been able to get it prescribed. You might not be able to.” I said I’d look into it and one of the things I learned through my career was that I am very good at researching things, so I rang Linda then Jeremy put me in touch with the website, showed me all the information I could get. I took him to my GP, but he wasn't interested. So Linda pointed me towards Dickens Chemist. I'm very lucky I lived near Glasgow and I quote that they may be the European experts with LDN. I immediately started getting help from them and I was able to find from the website how to get private prescriptions etc. I've now been taking it for 10-11 years, I believe and I'm still paying for it privately, but it's very affordable. My immediate benefit, which is still a major one I get from it, was that I used to hit a brick wall of fatigue, and just completely come to a stop, hence pulling over on the sides of motorways. I don't get that anymore. I occasionally get fatigued, but I feel it coming on or I manage it because I now know that I need to rest more and do certain things, but it was just amazing almost immediately. Within a few months, I started to realize that my brain was less foggy; I could think things through better. I could analyze things. I wasn't so worried about not being able to put a sentence together. I still had the odd things, which anyone who has or had MS knows that sometimes you don't use the right word, but my friends had gotten used to me by then and work kind of made a joke about it and it was okay.

I would say that the lack of fatigue and genuinely feeling slightly better helped my mood as well. I started to be able to do more to help myself, so I was able to walk a bit more and things like that. Those have been the main things. What I didn't know was that until maybe a couple of years later when I actually stopped it for a while due to huge financial problems and lots of things going on. I suddenly discovered I had pain. I didn't know that LDN had been masking it, keeping the pain away. So it's been helping me with that as well. I recommend it all the time. I would not stop. I just think that the LDN Research Trust is fantastic and does such good work and I would say it has so little side effects for such a small number of people. It's well worth trying, whatever your, your condition.

Linda: One thing that people would probably want to ask you is that because you’ve had optic neuritis throughout the years, have you had any flare-ups of optic neuritis whilst being on LDN?

Chris: One very mildly, but I had fallen and badly smashed the top of my arm and my balance went wrong. It went on for about four weeks and that was all, that's the only time I've ever had it in between.

Linda: Apart from the other little niggles that you might have occasionally, have you had anything major, MS-related, since being on LDN?

Chris: No. I just get better and better. I manage now and I don't overheat. All my friends know that I’m always carrying a fan with me just in case. But I can’t work. I do a lot of volunteering and things but work is one thing. That's partly because MS is so unpredictable. If I did overdo it, then suddenly I'd need to take time, even if I weren't feeling too terrible. So I've learnt a lot about it, but the LDN was like it kickstarted me and has been able to manage my MS, I suppose.

Linda: MS is a progressive disease. Would you say your MS hasn't progressed in that time?

Chris: Definitely not. In fact, I stopped having MRIs. The last time I saw the consultant, he said everything's very quiet and he said you don't need to come anymore. And I said, well, I won't be seeing you, I laughed. I do still keep in contact with an MS nurse just to keep them up to date to kind of record it and things like that.

In fact, I've got one nurse who's very supportive of LDN and so they're always very keen to see how I’m doing. I've seen my consultants in the corridor and he just smiled at me.

Linda: We've come to the end of the time and thank you so much, Chris, for sharing your story with us, and maybe we'll catch up with you again in a few year’s time to see if you're still in remission.

Chris: I believe everything will be wonderful.

Linda: Okay, well thank you for having joined us today.

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

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

Dr Annette Johnson from Germany - 27th March 2019 (LDN, low dose naltrexone) from LDN Research Trust on Vimeo.

Linda: Today, my guest is Dr Annette Johnson from Germany. Thank you for joining us today. 

Annette Johnson, MD: Thank you for having me. 

Linda: Could you tell us how you got into medicine? Was it something you wanted to do as a child? 

Annette Johnson, MD: As a child, I wanted to go to Africa to help children that are not in a wonderful position as we are here in Europe, in Western countries. In the beginning, I thought it's only in Africa where they have problems and we don't really have problems in Europe, only luxury problems. Then I found out that's not true. We have lots of problems in Western countries, such as chronic diseases and the suffering that nobody cares about anymore because we tell our patients they are not curable at all. I wanted to help and change things.

Linda: When did you hear about LDN? 

Annette Johnson, MD: Actually I was so much into fibromyalgia and other patients that I was searching all over the world to find solutions for my patients. I am caring for about 700 fibromyalgia and around 600 Borrelioses patients and around 500 Hashimoto patients. 

I was very happy to hear about your radio show and your book. To start with, some other doctors in the area are pain specialists and who were experienced in this therapy.  

Linda: How long ago was that? 

Annette Johnson, MD: I think this is three years going by now but already I would say I can see success after some weeks, sometimes after the first week also. I also found a good psychological effect on the mood of my patients. So I'm really very positive about using this on patients who are so chronic. Sometimes I find them to improve very fast.

Linda: All right. You said that you have 700 patients with fibromyalgia. How many of those have you now got on LDN? 

Annette Johnson, MD: I don't want to disappoint anyone but I would say around 50 patients on LDN. Some patients do well only with diet changes with meditation techniques, plus therapy and private practical interventions. So I'm sort of doing my worst cases and that is why it's only around 50 from 700 because it's such a good help in the hard cases, in the difficult cases. 

Linda: Okay, so from those 50 patients, what have the outcomes been in the percentage?

Annette Johnson, MD: I did some research before our interview. I think it would be a 90% success. I'm separating my patients to those who best fit the criteria, which may be why my success rate is higher.

Linda: How do you prescribe LDN? Are you using capsules, or sublingual or cream? And how do you titrate the dose up? What is the starting dose? 

Annette Johnson, MD: Yes. I use a compound pharmacy that you recommended in Ireland off into South of Germany, and my first recipe is a 0.5 milligram, one milligram and two-milligram capsule on one recipe.

That means that the patients only have to come to me twice and then can proceed through. After they ask all their questions after they have understood the system, after they have read your book and then we keep in contact every two weeks by telephone or personally and then they increase.

The dosage until the four or 5.5 milligrams, if they use it if they need it, or they can stop if they don't need such high doses. Many of the myalgia patients only need very low doses to get a quick improvement. I have found with speaking to fibromyalgia patients and LDN prescribers that people with fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome, are very sensitive to all medication and LDN, even though it's a very low dose, is still a prescription drug.

Linda: Do you find you have to start very low and do you find they react to it negatively initially?

Annette Johnson, MD: I think they react very well if we start with 0.5 milligrams and I remember two cases who couldn't even tolerate that. So we made them buy empty capsules and divided into two pieces so they could start with 0.25 milligrams. This worked out very well. In the end, when they started it and then they increased the dosage over four weeks instead of two weeks, they could in the end or come to two around two milligrams. That's really interesting because we have some patients who want to give up, saying the side effects are a problem. Pharmacists and prescribers who say that they can get success with all patients, providing you use a very low dose and increase it very slowly. Some people need a longer gap to let the body get used to that dose before you increase it further.

Linda: Some people never have a higher dose than say, two milligrams. It's really individual to each patient, don't you think? 

Annette Johnson, MD: Yes. 

That's so wonderful, isn't it? We can give them the confirmation that in the end they'll find their individual doses and they can increase it if they just take their time. Also,  I tell about 10% say it didn't work well, then later say it did work and I didn't notice because  I did so many other things.  I didn't notice that I was so well, and this is a new effect and we want to go back on the medication. Isn't that interesting?

Linda:  It is very interesting. When I was really ill and every week I had a new symptom, I knew I had a new symptom. The numbness went from my toes to my ankle, to my hip, to my shoulder, and you noticed every single thing that was going wrong. But when things start to improve, it's certainly a case of, oh, my left side isn't as numb as it was before. The pins and needles aren't this bad, but you don't remember it daily like you do when things go wrong, and I think you probably think I'm okay now and you don't think about it.

Annette Johnson, MD: It’s just something that happens. It's only when you stop, as you say, and all these things come back that you remember. That's why I encourage them to have a little book, where they write down their everyday symptoms in a good way. We don't call this a pain book, but we call these recurrent feelings.

We'll see. Then they can go and read how bad they were years before or months, or even weeks before. Because patients with fibromyalgia and fatigue syndrome are often not very good at remembering things. So it's really necessary to write things down and then to go back and look at how many symptoms have already resolved.

Linda: We do have an LDN app for those people who are English speaking. You can have a journal, but you can also record sleep, mood, diets, supplements, exercise, set alarms, do graphs and charts and printouts. It's amazing, but it's in English. So if you have any members who are English speaking, they might find that as a value and help. It's on our website so they could look into that. 

Annette Johnson, MD: These days, they want to take their health in their own hands and they come with ideas.  I just had a patient who was suffering from fibromyalgia for 30 years. She had to do the suggestions to her doctors, what they could do to help her. This is so wonderful that we now understand pain and psychology effects much better than we used to.

As a doctor, you always need some patients that bring you on the way. You need nice colleagues that support you and give the support that you will manage and they will happen. There will be nothing difficult or illegal behind it and the doctors are very busy.

They don't have the time to look at everything themselves and to find out. If you have a doctor who's willing to listen to the patient, giving them new information, that is the way to educate them, isn't it? The busy doctors, when they don't have to search for it to be given the information is a big help.

This is so wonderful and I'm always asking the patients once they'll be better if it's allowed to then call their old doctors. That's what I do once they are better.

I go and call very nicely. They're all doctors and just tell them in a very collegial way how we managed to bring the patients back. It's the insurances that send me patients because they notice they don't have to pay for them anymore because they're going back to work after months or weeks.

So this is wonderful to see that in Germany. That government insurance ascends patients to my office because they know they'll be helped with LDN or other methods. I'm in close contact to Amin who also did lectures at the conferences for Augsburg for calming labs, and it's around 80% of my fibromyalgia patients who actually are triggered.

Borrelioses is a tick-associated diseases. So astonishing if isn't that bad that we are not finding the Berlioz if we don't use the right tests.

Linda: So would you say the Barrios SIS is Lyme disease itself, or would you just say that's a co-infection.

Annette Johnson, MD: I would say it's, it's triggering to see if you have the genetics that for example, you cannot get rid of, phosphates, which professor Paws and Amanda in Los Angeles found. And then you have a tick infection, then everything will compensate and everything will be bad. And you'll start to get autoimmune. And bad reactions. And that's where the LDN comes in. It doesn't replace the antibiotics or the plants that we use or the therapies that we use but it's keeping us from getting all these other diseases like Hashimoto or like other autoimmune diseases from infections.

And I find it very useful. I've had lots of prognosis patients. The Borrelioses and fibromyalgia are really so common in South  Germany. We have a lot of patients who have Lyme disease who have been told by their medical professionals that it's all in their head.

Linda:  They're just depressed. There's nothing really wrong with them. So that automatically makes them very depressed, not being believed when they can't get out of bed, they can't function. Do you have patients who have chronic Lyme disease that you treat because they are getting fibromyalgia from borreliosis?

Annette Johnson, MD: They're coming with fibromyalgia symptoms. And then I find very high numbers.  Actually, I had very bad Borrelioses last year.

It was 16. Unbelievable. And then I could just help myself with some physical therapies,  some foot photons to appease and some electric therapies. And I took LDN in the end after that, I just wanted to try it on my own. And I found that it was very useful and that I'm not having nightmares or something, but I have very nice dreams. it's really interesting and it's nothing scary about it, but it's wonderful to dream. And also it helps with my Parkinson patients who are not dreaming anymore. It helps with my dementia patients if they're not dreaming anymore because a deep sleep would DRI with dreams is so important to heal your disease.

Annette Johnson, MD: people talk about the vivid dreams with LDN., I feel robbed. I never had any vivid dreams, but I've heard so many people tell me about their dreams. I had vivid dreams, I wasn't scared. It was just interesting. It was like watching a video. It was not scary at all and I never felt that I should stop it or something. I think it's a wonderful thing and I want to take it one and a half years just to find out what it does with my body. I'm so convinced about this therapy I just wanted to take it. Just getting back to the Lyme disease patients, how long it takes to get better.

Linda: How long would you say that would take with using all your different therapies as well as LDN and the earlier they come, the faster they are healed, but already if they have it for a long time, we can help within half a year. Wow. Yeah, it is because it takes so long to initiate all the things and to get your vitamins on the internet and things.

Annette Johnson, MD: If people come from somewhere else very far away, you have patients from Egypt and from Portugal and from Scandinavia. So if, if they come from far away, I have to be very fast and I'm starting all things parallel because I don't care which of the things heals in the end. I just want to hear and. Then I'm faster.

Sure. The more they can do, in parallel, the shorter time they are here.

Linda:  Now, how do people get hold of you? What's your website?  And do you have a waiting list?

Annette Johnson, MD: Sure. https://www.annette-johnson.de/ But this is only three months, I think. Okay. So if anybody would like to come and see you, the sooner they can make that appointment, the better. If you have to wait three months. But if they come in the beginning of the week and they have had their massage already, then we could start, take the early spot LTT um, and know if it's Borrelioses triggered that why they are so fatigued or while they are so painful for, and then it would be just faster.

So we can take blood in the morning about vitamins and Borrelioses if it had their massage in the week before. And then. They don't need to come so often, but maybe three times or so. 

Linda: Well, thank you very much for being our guest today and sharing with us your experience. I appreciate it so much and thank you for your work.

Annette Johnson, MD: Take care. All the best. Thank you.

This show is sponsored by Dixon's Chemist, who are experts in LDN at associated treatments in the UK. Dixon's Chemist is the most cost-effective for LDN in all forms within the UK and Europe, maintaining safety standards far in excess of what is required. Why would you choose to get your LDN from anywhere else? Call 0141404654 five today to speak to LDN experts. 

Doctor Annette Johnson asked me to add, I may not have pointed out enough how important it is to start the titration with a compounded product instead of diluting tablets. Local pharmacies, unfortunately, suggest this in order to avoid the high costs of the raw material.

And the extra effort. Patients nightly believe that diluting a 50-milligram tablet is accurate doses of no 0.5 milligrams, which it isn't. I found incorrect fillers and self dilution. The reason why I initially didn't receive the results I do now, some colleagues are still not aware of this.

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.

Cory Rice, DO (LDN, low dose naltrexone) from LDN Research Trust on Vimeo.

Linda Elsegood: Today I'm joined by Dr. Cory Rice, who is a D O.

Thank you for joining me today, Cory. 

Dr Cory Rice: Thank you for having me. 

Linda Elsegood: Now I have been looking at your website and we had the introduction there, and it's a very comprehensive website. In fact, it's one of the best I've seen. It tells the patient absolutely everything. And I do like the fact that you have patient reviews and that's always taking life into your own hands.

Cause some people can just say nasty things when it's not facing to face and they're not happy. But you have some amazing reviews on there. Um, you have one review which says, uh, Dr. Rice, Ashley and Shannon have given me my life back. I feel better than I have in years and maybe ever. And thank you from the bottom of my heart, Dr.Rice, for your compassion and commitment to quality. And to me, reviews like that are just amazing, aren't they? 

Dr Cory Rice: They are. They are. And we're very fortunate to have a great patient base that's really committed to themselves and you know, joined with us to partner with them on, on their journey to health.

Linda Elsegood: You specialize in functional and lifestyle medicine. Now we know traditionally many doctors treat the symptoms. So whatever symptom you have, and you go to the doctors and it's a case of, okay, let's give you something to combat insomnia or, uh, spasms or whatever it may be. Rather than looking at, let's see. Find out why you're having these symptoms. Now, this is what functional medicine is all about, isn't it? 

Cory Rice: It is. It is. And I think it's an important thing to know as, as the listener of this, um, to just give me a minute to explain kind of how I got here. I think we all have our story and I think it's important, certainly when I'm doing talks to physicians and to patients, uh, and just to groups so that they know who's speaking to them.

 And so yes, you can find out on our website, uh, some information, but just. Just hearing it straight from me, um, I think is important as well. So if you'll indulge me for one minute, um, you said I was a DO and I absolutely am a DO. I went to, uh, an MD allopathic residency and, and, uh, I joke, but I'm serious.

When I say I sort of had some of my humanity washed down with me, um, over the course of, of those three to four years, um, I finished my, my, my chief resident year in internal medicine and really came out with a prescription pad blazing and, and could tackle any disease with any drug. And. Felt like I knew what I was doing at the exact same time, I was staring in the mirror every day at a patient.

So I myself was a patient. I was on six prescription pills. I was not healthy. And I, um, ultimately, uh, needed to change my direction. And so personally, I did some advanced testing, uh, both from a cardiovascular standpoint, genetic standpoint, and started learning other things about health and disease that I hadn't learned in formal training.

And, and Oh, ultimately. Uh, I was able to, you know, reverse a lot of my issues from a cardiovascular standpoint, an insulin perspective, uh, certainly my waistline and, and all of these risk factors. And, you know, um, one by one I was able to come off of medication and I've been off medication for probably seven, eight years now.

And. Um, that particular journey that I took for took me about six months to go through everything I did from diet, lifestyle, and just changing the way I looked at things. Um, I really brought that back to our practice, um, at that time and tried to apply what I learned myself to patient care and that led me to functional medicine.

Um, and really the idea of going after the root cause of, of disease and, and when you learn as a physician, that sounds very, um, crazy to say that, but when you learn as a physician that patients are not deficient and statin therapy or antidepressant therapy, or proton pump inhibitors or stomach medicines, right?

And they're actually deficient and other things, and, and including, right. Nutrient-dense food and supplements and hormones and thyroid and all the things that I do now, um, it becomes very, very clear that. You know, a lot of our disease is completely reversible and curable if you take these little steps and these little layers to, to create, you know, effective, sustainable change in these patients.

And that's exactly what I did. And so we converted our practice over time from a traditional insurance practice and to now two practices that focus solely on lifestyle, hormone management, as well as functional medicine. Um, which has been just an enormous, uh, a blessing. For me personally, and then now our team of providers.

Linda Elsegood: So when a patient comes to you with a multitude of, um, different symptoms saying, you know, I don't feel well, I'm very tired, I'm not sleeping properly, et cetera, et cetera. Where do you start? How do you, um, what's the starting point with a typical patient who doesn't really know what's wrong with them.

Dr Cory Rice: Okay, sure. Great question. So would, the most important thing to me, or any provider that works with me at our practice is what's important to the patient. So the high-level testing we do both from a CRM perspective or a gut analysis perspective or saliva perspective, the data is really there to confirm our clinical hypothesis based upon our interview with the patient.

Right. So literally every single person I ever sit down with, I asked them, what is important to you. Because I don't have a clinical agenda, though I'm going to get all this data. I don't care about the data if it's not what's important to you and what your health goals are. And so when they sit down with me and they tell me my goals are to be around for my grandkids, my goals are to be more engaged in my life.

My goals are to not take medication. Like, you know, I like to hear that because that's the framework around everything that we do moving forward. Because if I just focus on advanced testing and you know, looking at stool analysis and get lost in the minutia of the clinical data, you lose the patient.

And so as long as I and our team of providers keep their eyes on what the patient wants, and we marry that with the diagnostics we do, then it went, we went every single time. And so, to answer your question more directly, when they come in, we ask them what their goals are. We go through their entire history.

From early to old. And then we find out, you know, what, what have they dealt with and where are they now? And ultimately there's, everyone comes in on a different health continuum and a different level of disease or not disease. A lot of people are healthy that come here. A lot of people are sick that come here.

And so we like to joke that for a lot of patients, we're a resort practice because we're the last resort. And so depending on what it is they're wanting, we'll decide on the diagnostics we do. And the rubber meets the road, at least at our clinic or network of clinics when they come in for their second, what I call their second date with us because we have all the clinical data, we have their goals, and now we're ready to put action steps in place.

And so depending on where they are and what they want, um, they'll have a myriad of options. But I can tell you there's not one patient who has left our practice that hasn't felt better, and that's on less medicine or sometimes no medicine. And so depending on where we are, um, we see every autoimmune disease you can possibly imagine.

Um, we certainly see cardiometabolic disease, which is what every physician sees in outpatient medicine. Um, and so depending on where they are, um, that all starts with their goals. And then we align the diagnostics with those and we move forward.

Linda Elsegood: just a question that has suddenly occurred to me when we are born, are we more prone to get, um, conditions that our ancestors had. I mean, is it laid out for us right from word go? Some of the things that might trip us up later in life, or does everybody have a clean slate and circumstances? Um.

Dr Cory Rice: Throughout your life map where you're going to go. Do you understand what I'm trying to say? I do. Also a very good question. So ultimately the answer to your question is yes, we all are given a unique set of genetics and, and what I would call, you know, when I look at this, I conceptually, I look at every person internally sort of having this, I'll just use that for lack of a better word.

Since I don't have a better illustration, a gun, and if you put in that gun, certain genetic predisposition or genetic markers, let's use, for example, if you're positive for something called APO lipoproteins II or MTHFR or all of these sort of genetic sort of polymorphisms that we test, then absolutely that gun becomes more loaded. However, what pulls the trigger of that gun to create havoc is the environment and your choices throughout your life. And so yes, your gun may be more loaded, more destructive than someone else's gun. However. The trigger that's pulled is your choices every single day with your fork and knife, with your stress, with the people that surround you with how you sleep, how you sweat. All of those modifiable, controllable parameters are the things that lead to whether that trigger is pulled or not. So I do believe that we all have this sort of. Preset risk pattern, but we can absolutely mitigate that 100000% because I'm a living, breathing example of that.

I have horrible, horrible genetics, um, and, and cardiovascular disease all throughout my family, and I can modify those risk factors, um, aggressively through my choices every day. 

Linda Elsegood: Oh, that sounds like my question. That was exactly what I was asking, but it's amazing, isn't it? If we were aware. When we were younger of the pitfalls that may happen later in life and take action before it happens.

Dr. Cory Rice: It is so much better than trying to rectify it once that trigger is already been pulled. You're so, you're so right. And this is something I discuss every day with patients. The unfortunate reality and physicians, I'm sure I have some like-minded people that may hear this, and certainly, you interview like-minded people like me, but they understand this comment when I make it, you know, oftentimes preventive medicine and the type of medicine we do is not the most sexy of medicines because really, and certainly in the United States or in Western healthcare, you know, when a cardiologist comes in and throws a stent in and saves your life, you know, they're sort of hailed as this hero. Rightfully so. They saved their life. 

But at the end of the day, if you can have a provider that is giving you incremental advice, right? So I'll give you a great example. If I've got an autoimmune patient and I say, you know what? Your immune system, dysfunction, dysfunction, if there's no function to your immune system, how do we repair that function? Well, let's look at your gut. So we do a stool analysis. Let me see.

There's all sorts of dysbiosis or at least disruption in the environment of their gut. And I say, okay, so we're going to fix that. But also your D three right. Your vitamin D three-level is low. Let's fix that. Oh, and you have this condition. Let's say lupus, let's say rheumatoid arthritis. Let's talk about a medication called low dose naltrexone.

Oh wait, let's see. Your hormones are off. Well, when you don't have hormones, we can't lubricate the joints and you're going to hurt all the time. Your thyroid's off. And so when I like to tell people now. We're creating kind of these Oh, pockets of troops, right? So like these foot soldiers where they're trying to fend off this immune on slot that we're seeing every day from bad air, bad food, bad water, bad toxic people.

I mean, you name it, it's out there. And so when you're constantly on the onslaught with these, with these, um, you know. I guess you'd say these, these bad guys, and you're constantly trying to prevent that. We as physicians have several layers or several ways that we can set up our ground forces, so to speak, to prevent, you know that from becoming a full out disease process or in this sort of characterization, I guess, war and we do that, not each, each one of those.

Is very important. And there is this additive cumulative effect that just by doing one of those things, you're not going to see much progress. But by adding them together, that's where you really resolve disease and you prevent cancer and you get rid of autoimmunity and all of those things as you have to incrementally add different levels of protection so that patients don't feel those.

And so, you know, the unfortunate thing is, is we don't have. You know, throughout our life trajectory as humans, you know, on our left shoulder. And our right shoulder. We don't have an angel, and then you know, a devil, I guess on the other. On the other side, we don't have these to show us where we're going in the event.

We don't take this preventive or this functional doctor's advice because we just don't have that. So you have to put your faith as a patient and a consumer and who you're partnering with and just trust that what they're doing is going to effectively do what they're claiming it will. Wouldn't it be amazing to take young adults and give them all the tests when they say 20 and say, okay, this is what could potentially happen if you carry on as you are?

You need to tweak this, this, and this. It would save a fortune and save people feeling so bad. Absolutely. No, it'd be wonderful. And it's the same idea. I mean, I'm a younger physician. I'm not, I'm not seasoned as I would call that. I've been, I've seen a number of patients over the last 10 years, and, and there are certain patterns to certain, uh, medical conditions or disease processes that now it's a, it's a pretty cool thing because I can see the early signs in certain younger patients of things that they're headed for and the more seasoned patients that I've seen, and I can tell them, you know what? I've seen your version 15 years from now, I'm treating your version and room to, I promise you, they have the same set of genetic circumstances.

They have the same set of inflammatory markers. They have the same set of this, this, and this, and I can see where you're headed. So it's your choice to change that trajectory or not. So that's kind of a cool deal nowadays. Well, yes. I mean, I find it really upsetting. I do hear nice stories the same as you had the patient reviews.

Linda Elsegood: You know, LDN has given my life back. You know, I feel I've been given a second chance, all this kind of thing. But I also hear from people who say, I woke up this morning. I prayed I wasn't going to wake up. I feel so ill. and that is just heartbreaking. You know, if we could prevent people from ever feeling that ill, um, that would just be amazing.

But I can't see how. That would ever come about, but it would be a nice dream, wouldn't it? Oh, it certainly would. It's certainly one. I think our population is lacking the will to really want to do a lot, and we hear time and time again, these words, these aren't Dr. Rice's words. These are the patient's words, but they're, they're telling me consistently, I want to feel more engaged in my life. I feel like I'm just going through life, not living my life. Right. And you know, our country has done an okay job, I guess, of keeping people alive longer. However, we're just not feeling good. So when disability that's in at 45 or 50 that life, that lifeline of 30 to 40 years of disability, towards the end of life, it's just, that's just not acceptable.

But if we can slowly, gradually reverse some of these conditions. And give people a better quality of life. I mean, I was absolutely amazed. Um, I became a type two diabetic. I have MS and I'd been given three courses of intravenous steroids and I blew up like a balloon. I was huge. I'd gained a six stone, six times 14 that's how many pounds it’s scary.

I was just huge. I had to send my husband out to buy. Like a dress like a tent, cause none of my clothes by about six inches. So I could go out to buy some clothes cause I didn't know what size I was just any way, I became a type two diabetic, which horrifies me and. My grandmother died of diabetes back in 1968-ish.

When they didn't really know that much about diabetes. She went into a diabetic coma and there was all this sort of diabetes thing in the background, and it's just like, oh, I really don't need this. Both my parents were diabetics too, but I have changed my diet. I lost the weight I put on, not all of it honestly, but I have lost most of it.

And look after myself better than I did, and I'm now classed as a diabetic in remission. So I'm really pleased. So thank you. I was really, I was really pleased with that box. I could, you know, tick, uh, best I can. I mean, it's still shows on prediabetic, but Hey, that's absolutely fine with me. That's better.

It tastes a lot better. Yeah. And I can remember. Uh, when I was 32, I had, um, cervical cancer. I was diagnosed with MS when I was 44. Um, I was diagnosed after my mother had a massive heart attack with hereditary high cholesterol. Um, and then this diabetes and my 15-year-old at that time said, you do realize mum, I could have all of these things as well.

You know, what does life hold for me? And it was. I didn't know about functional medicine, everything at the time, and I was thinking, well, I don't know. You don't say that, but it's like, Oh, really? I hadn't thought. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I did want to try and stop taking my statin and it just kept going so ridiculously high.

I was. The risk of having a heart attack or a stroke. It was that high the consultat I saw. she said to me that if I lived on a lettuce leaf and a glass of water, and if that's all I ate, I would still have high cholesterol. So I've got to take the pills.

She said it's hereditary, you know, and I got it from my mother and my grandfather had it apparently. Um, so I've had to accept, because. I don't like taking medicine either. I would rather do it naturally, but I think sometimes you just have to. Yeah, there is some medication, certainly without medication.

Dr Cory Rice: And I don't want the listener to think I'm anti-medicine--without certain medicines, we wouldn't be alive today, but I don't think it's a far stretch for me to tell anyone really that, um, certainly our world and certainly in the United States, um, we are run on pharmaceuticals and, um, there's just, there's just too much of that going on.

And, and. So there's a huge need that needs to be fulfilled, to help people get off of these. You know, that therapy is one of those, um, that is pretty controversial anywhere you look really, um, you know, everybody's got an opinion. And so my, my particular opinion, because I speak on statins and advanced lipids and all of that, um, uh, you know, I'm not a large proponent or advocate of females being on statins, I think if, if you are on a statin as a woman, um, I still only want it, it's really more for inflammation protection, but it's, I'll put them on there intermittently, so like three days a week, and then obviously give them high dose CoQ10. And there was a cardiologist that I learned a lot from as far as primary prevention of heart disease, and he was the one that told me, you know, anytime you've got a woman and she's on a statin, make her take it Monday, Wednesday, Friday cause she gets the same benefit as daily. And he said, you know, no drug company will design a study to show that you need to take their medicine less. It's always going to be to take it daily and more so. But he said, based upon all of his years of treating heart disease, he says, no, no change.

And someone who takes it every other day versus daily. Um. There was a wonderful, wonderful, integrative, uh, uh, interventional cardiologist. Uh, Mimi Guarneri, um, very well known. Uh, she's the president of the American Board of Holistic Medicine, and, and as I said, she's a conventional interventional cardiologist and there's a lot of good videos on her, uh, discussing statin therapy and ladies.

And, uh, really there is, there is no, um, study or clinical design that's ever been done, that's shown statins help to do anything, to primarily prevent heart disease, strokes or anything in a female. Um, I get the idea of doing it for an anti-inflammatory, but you just have to be very careful of what it's doing to the mitochondria long-term.

And so, you know, that's just my anecdote and, and, and kind of my opinion. But, um, and I manage a lot of these similar things, but, but you know. I would just proceed with caution. I think as a woman, I've been taking it for 18 years, so maybe I will try taking it Monday, Wednesday, Friday. That would be good.

Linda Elsegood: Also, I used to take uh, an antacid cause I have acid reflux, but I managed to cut that out as well with changing my diet. I don't get an acid stomach and it's because of the gluten. If I have something if I go into a restaurant and I say whatever dish it is, could you check that there is no gluten in there? And they'll say, come back and say yes. The chef said there's no gluten. Once I get to bed and I get the pains in my stomach and the burning in the back of my throat. And I know that there was gluten in it. Cause that's the only reason. Yes, exactly. So that's annoying when that happens. But if I do manage to cut gluten out completely, the acid problem is gone.

It's been a challenge. It is, isn't it? And it's listening to your body. And that is difficult. I mean, I've stopped taking the Metformin for diabetes. I've stopped taking this antacid tablet. I take LDN and the statin, which I'm now going to try taking three times a week, but I'm not taking anything else. And I don't ever take painkillers.

Uh, when I was in a lot of pain, it was a trade-off. I could either take the pain medication, which then created such bad nausea that it just felt I was going to vomit just by lifting my head up, turning my head. But sometimes it was a case of I can't stand the pain. I'll take the tablets. And then after taking the tablets, I wished I hadn't because the nausea was so bad.

So I just, I just gave up with tablets, but that was before LDN and touch wood. I don't have those pains. Any more. So that's really good. Yeah. So what would you say, um, I know everybody's different and you can't put everybody in the same pigeonhole, but your patients that take LDN, do they still take, you know, a vast array of medications, or have they managed to decrease the number?

Dr Cory Rice: Yeah. So, um, I can't say there's a, there's a pattern there across the board. I, I'd say more so than not, they're on, they're certainly on less medication. Um, LDN has been just a fabulous, uh, introduction to, to what we do and, and I just can't say it enough. Um, our best cases of complete remission. Whether that's multiple sclerosis, as you said, whether that's colitis of, of any variety, um, certain skin conditions or Hashimoto's, I mean, all of it, um, complete remission of those conditions across the board happens when the patient is yes, taking LDN.

However, when they're, when they're. Looking at the different other segments of their life and quite frankly, their immune function. Um, and, and, you know, committing themselves to a healthier way in a healthier decision process. Those are the ones that do very, very well. And so, um, if I've got someone who comes in with whatever, cardiometabolic disease depressed. On an antacid or proton pump inhibitor, and you know, we end up making some lifestyle decisions and showing them their genetics and immune function and dah, dah, dah, and they end up no longer having those issues. Certainly, they come off the medications associated with that issue, but oftentimes, if you can just heal someone's gut you know, you can, you can help kind of their whole situation. 

And so, you know, I treat a lot of thyroid disease, lots of thyroid disease. That's a big one for me. Um, it's a personal professional passion because it's just so mismanaged and misunderstood in this country and in the world, I think. And so, um, the thyroid is, is the perfect example that, that gland, uh, you know, controls so many different functions in the body.

And if you're not optimizing it. Not optimizing the levels of thyroid in the body. Uh, then you, then you really are missing the boat on several things. And there's, there are very clearly defined reasons now why our thyroid gets dysfunctional. And, uh, it just, it just, you know, from a diagnostics perspective and a treatment perspective, 95% of formal physicians on the planet are just not.

They're kind of going with what I used to do, which is through what I was taught in training. And they're not really looking at how it functions, but when you repair immune function, um, you know, the LDN is wonderful at helping clear out some of those antibodies so that their thyroid functions better.

And so I don't think I ever take anyone off LDN. Um, I kind of make my exception with low dose naltrexone because I tell patients every day, you're not deficient in this. You're not deficient in that. You're not deficient in statins. You're not deficient in, you know, Metformin. You're not deficient in this.

So let's fix those. Let's show you what you are deficient in. But it also goes against my mantra. You know, I do want you to think about taking this medication because we just live in a very toxic planet, and it's giving you a little more protection to deal with the onslaught of those toxins. But you're not deficient in LDN.

So that's kind of my whole thing with that. Our food isn't the quality it used to be years ago either. Is it? Hmm. No, it isn't. Our soil isn't certainly our water. Our people aren't. I mean, I feel like you can talk about anything and there are just toxins every single place. Right? So you combine that with the inability to detox through the liver, and you have genetic predispositions for that, and it's just a, it's just a perfect storm to develop an autoimmune disease.

Or. You know, or cardiovascular disease or cancer. I mean, you name it, it's just a, it's, it's a war out there. And physicians, I feel like as a, as a physician, and we just have to be smarter than what we learned in formal training, we have to, you know, there's just more to it than that.

Linda Elsegood: What kinds of diet would you say is a healthy diet? What should we be looking to eliminate? Yeah. So broad question. Um, so yeah, diet, you know, I'll, I'll, I'll use the term menu plan. So what type of way of life or menu? 

Dr Cory Rice: Um, the diet has such a negative connotation to it. Um, unfortunately, because the Torborg diet was not meant to be a negative thing.

However, um, from a menu perspective, it really depends on you as a patient, right? So I don't think there's any one size that fits everyone. Um, there is a rage now among some of our patients that get fantastic results from eating ketogenic and living that life. Um, there are patients that can't tolerate chemo.

There are patients that are strictly paleo. There are patients that are pescatarian, vegetarian, vegan, you name it. And so I am here. There is no one size fits all. I mean, I know how I eat and what I do, but that's. Based upon my genetics and what's worked for me to fix some of my biomarkers and just helped me get off medicines and feel great, but what works for me doesn't always work for everyone else.

And so the best way to answer that question is for patients to have a concrete idea of what their biomarkers look like and their genetics look like. What does your risk pattern look like? I want to know all of it. From the genetics to, you know, what is your blood type, right. What, what, what, because I've seen patterns among different populations of patients on how they can eat and what they tolerate and what they don't.

For example, I try Keto. I don't do well with Keto at all, but Keto has been a wonderful, uh, addition for some patients, certain particularly women that have, that can't lose weight and doing anything. Um, they go on to the ketogenic, pure ketogenic diet, and they're in there. Measuring their ketones and such, and they are finally losing fat.

And I think it's breaking that leptin resistance cycle they have. But, um, you know, there's just no perfect answer for our diabetics or cardiometabolic disease. I'm still very, very hardcore about the Mediterranean food plan. So eating a Mediterranean diet modified down to reduce the gluten and dairy content, um, is still highly, highly successful and studied and published on reversing and cardiometabolic disease and diabetes specifically.

Um, so it really does depend on that risk pattern. If you have an autoimmune patient right. There's an autoimmune protocol that we follow. Um, that works very nicely. And that's just removing all the inflammatory foods and just increasing the nutrient density of what you're eating. And it's really not that complicated.

Um, I think from the provider perspective, because it's very much similar to some of these other things we do, but if you've got someone with gut dysfunction and intestinal candidiasis or small intestinal bowel overgrowth, I mean, we've got different. You know, ways of eating to kind of fix those conditions.

Um, so it truly is individualized. That's just, that's just, I think that's just good medicine to look at it that way.  

Linda Elsegood: Okay. So for patients out there who are listening, you’re in Texas, you have two, um, offices. Could you tell people how they could contact you? Where do they have to go? 

Dr Cory Rice: Absolutely. Um, so the first thing is if you want to hear more about what we're about, go to our website. It's www.mymodernmedicine.com. Uh, there are two locations, one in the centre of Dallas, uh, and Addison. And on our website, there's a phone number and address for that. And then we've got another location about 20 to 25 miles East of that location. Um. That they can also sort of search for and find. Um, I'll also be starting, I hope soon to be publishing more podcasts, YouTube stuff because I've had a lot of requests for that.

I've just got a lot of information I'd like to disseminate to my patient base and just the people that want to follow, whether they're patients or not. And so I'm hopeful that I can get that going as soon as well. But there's enough, I think, content on the web that they should be able to at least locate us and find out more about us.

Linda Elsegood: And what about waiting lists? How long would a patient have to wait to see you or one of your partners?

Dr Cory Rice: You know, um, it's not as bad as, as I think some other clinics. And so, you know. Right. You know, and this is, I think why that is our whole model. This sounds kinda crazy, but our whole model is predicated on getting you well.

Um, the disease model in, in America certainly is not predicated on wellness. It's predicated on keeping you to pay in and buy into it. And so the only way a doctor like me thrives and our business thrives and we're able to grow other clinics is to get new. An influx of patients and well, how do we do that?

You just build that through word of mouth. Like we literally have not spent $1 in marketing ever since I've found this. And it's all word of mouth. That's how we've been able to build another office. And so, um, the waitlist with that sort of foundation said isn't bad. I mean, it's probably, I don't know, four weeks or so may be to get in to see me as a new patient and then one of our providers can maybe see you a little sooner, but it's not, it's not too terrible. Um, there's a lot that goes into the first two visits. Like anything else in the functional medicine world, you just have a lot of, it's just an overwhelming experience, I think. Um, but there's a lot that you learn. Um, and you're, you're ready. I think you're, you're empowered with knowledge once you leave after that second visit.

So, um, the wait, I wouldn't let that be a bother, but I think I would, you know, whoever the, whoever may be listening to this, if they're even remotely close to where we are, they could call one of the offices and get a pretty good idea, but it's not bad. And what about telephone consultations? Would you do that?

Do set the tone. Okay. I do. That's been something new for the last new as in the last one to two years. This whole idea, because patients move, um, people learn about you. Um, I speak for a number of organizations and it's just by doing this, you travel all over and you meet all sorts of people and they want you to help them.

And so, um. They don't have to be, you know, right down the street from you. And so, yes, I absolutely do that. Um, and we do have means at times to set up like mobile phlebotomy work so that you can, we can actually, through our vendors who'd get our lab testing, can go and meet you at your work or home to draw the lab.

So there's no like, additional cost there. Um, and so there are ways of. Doing that. Um, I'm no longer an insurance physician. I used to be, but I'm no longer now. Um, and there's a lot of political reasons as to why that it just wasn't a sustainable model. And I'm sure people probably understand that the insurance system is not built on getting you well, it's on getting your money.

So, um, they just did not want to compensate or pay for someone like me. They didn't want me out there conquering all this disease. But. Hold on. I'm sorry. But as you said at the beginning, it's a partnership, isn't it, between the patient and the doctor, and it's that trust, isn't it? You know, if you really gel with that doctor, you would wait the four weeks willingly, you know.

Who wants to be part of a dictatorship. Right? I mean, it just doesn't, especially when you're dealing with a vulnerable set of circumstances as far as disease and health care. So, well, we've come to the end of the show and thank you so much for being with us today. I love being here. This was awesome. So I'm available anytime you need me.

Linda Elsegood: This was great. Thank you.

Dr Cory Rice and his team of providers treat all forms of autoimmune disease, thyroid hormone issues, diabetes, cardiometabolic syndrome, and cancers with LDN. He is a practising internist whose practice emphasis is on functional and lifestyle medicine. Visit www.mymodernmedicine.com.

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

 

Sabastian Denison, Pharm (LDN, low dose naltrexone) from LDN Research Trust on Vimeo.

Linda Elsegood: Today we're joined by pharmacist Sebastian Denison from Canada, and he's going to talk to us about the PCCA in his view as a compounding pharmacist. Thank you for joining us today, Sebastian.

Sabastian Denison, PCCA: Thank you for having me today.

Linda Elsegood: So could you explain to us who the PCCA are and what they do?

Sabastian Denison, PCCA: Well, PCCA is a first and foremost a high-quality chemical supplier, two independent pharmacies across the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and into the UK. PCCA is an acronym, and it stands for Professional Compounding Centres of America, and they started back in 1981, and they've expanded globally. That's the best way to explain it. We've been delivering the highest quality chemicals to our partners in the community since 1981. That's only one aspect of our business. We are also an umbrella organization where we actually do physical and technical training. We do clinical consulting services for independent pharmacies as well as, education components for improving clinical knowledge in different segments of healthcare. And we've generally partnered with our independent pharmacy members as well as other healthcare professional teams worldwide. So we're working with companies like American Academy of Anti-ageing Medicine, Tarsus. We're working with some new groups in the United Kingdom, certainly in Australia, New Zealand, Canada.

That's our kind of our big piece, but we provide the raw ingredients to the independent pharmacies for them to actually make customized medication for individual patients. And that means effectively is we look at a single individual patient, and we treat them as an individual need as opposed to general manufacturing where they will make one product. They may make three different strengths and hope that you fit into their dosing guidelines. We actually turn around and say, "What does the patient need based upon their specific disease state, their particular needs in that level of a disease state?" So, for example, and since we're on this particular topic, Naltrexone, we actually source the raw API, so the bulk chemical, and we will find it from the best sources in the world.

And we only source it from the companies that will qualify as FDA registered facilities or GMP, which is Good Manufacturing Practice manufacturers of these raw ingredients. And we bring them in the house. We will then take the large drum of chemical and pack it into smaller sizes and then sell it to these independent pharmacies.

Independent pharmacies have a much lower volume needs than say a manufacturing company like Pfizer. And since Pfizer is servicing a huge group of patients with one strength, they can buy it in that way. Our independent pharmacy is needed in smaller amounts because they're servicing fewer patients and usually with discrete dosing needs. When I'm talking about this, that's one example of how we take care of our independent pharmacies. Now, on the other side of the table is our compounding pharmacist and their compounding teams. So it'll be made up of technicians as well as other pharmacists. And then they take the products that we send to them, and they assemble them into personalized medical dosing and we call it compounding personalized medicine only. We talked about compounding medication. And so again, with the Naltrexone, we can do things like capsules or liquids or sublingual tablets or even topicals, or in some cases, transdermal options for the patients, depending upon their specific need. And so a perfect example is: I know many of your patients will be taking Low Dose Naltrexone tablets or capsules. And what they do is take the 50 milligrams. We're a branded product that's the one in Canada. And they will try and break up the tablet. And if you've ever tried to break a tablet and you know how difficult that can be, you crush it, you're not getting an accurate dose. How do you divide a 50-milligram tablet into 3mg aliquots accurately? In some cases, we've got patients starting at 0,5 of a milligram and dosing up 100 on the tablet. You can't lick a tablet and hope for the best.

And so what we do is we've gotten the ingredients, and we can say, "what is the dose?" We're going to start at 0.5 milligrams. Well, we can do that in an accurate, consistent manner and give that to a patient for two to four weeks and slowly titrate the patient up until we hit their 3-milligram dose, 4,5-milligram dose, 5-milligram dose.

In some cases, we've seen patients on 6 milligrams even twice a day. So that's how we can do it. Then the next part is our biggest part, and this is where I fit into our companies. I work as a clinical compounding pharmacist, and I will talk to up to 40 pharmacists a day as do 18 of my colleagues, and we will give clinical consultant services and formulation advice to help the compounding pharmacist side and the community achieve the goals and needs of the patient.

And so we will do short education services on the phone, clinical consultations on the fly. And so, for example, we might have a patient that calls, and they say, "I have Haley's Haley disease.  Is Low Dose Naltrexone an option for me, and how would I give it? Or how would I take it?" And so we've made topical products. So Naltrexone at a 1% concentration and a topical for these patients who need help with their autoimmune disorder of Haley's Haley disease and allowing them to heal in a more normal fashion without this necessarily nasty scar tissue or really fragile tissue coming over. So that's pretty much how we do it.

But our vision is actually to improve patient lives by bringing more innovative approaches to the healthcare system. And what that means is we don't just follow what everyone else is doing. We look at individuals, and we bring every part of our experience as a company to bear on the problem of the single patient.

Everything from: "Can we do it? Yes. How do we achieve that?" And so there are so many examples where I can talk about patients in the Low Dose Naltrexone world. We had one patient who had ankle pain for years and years and tried everything under the sun. He’d seen chronic pain management specialists, seen osteo or rheumatologists and internal medicine physicians, tried everything.

We actually made a 3% Naltrexone transdermal product and applied it right over the sight of pain, and within days he started getting relief, and within weeks, most of the pain was gone. So we can tweak to the need of the patient, which is probably the bigger part for us.

Linda Elsegood: We always have people think that they could obtain a prescription for the 50-milligram tablets and make the LDN themselves.

It's something we don't recommend. What is the stance of the PCCA?

Sabastian Denison, PCCA: It's not just PCCA. If you talk to any pharmacy, healthcare professional, so this is not only the pharmacist, but this is anyone who works in a pharmacy. We always talk about accuracy and precision and this goes all the way up to manufacturing and all the way down to, "Hey, I'm going to give a patient to take home a dose and to do it to the best of their ability."

When you give someone a tablet, and you say crushing and sprinkle it over some applesauce and eat the whole thing, they're getting the whole dose. But when you're given a 15-milligram tablet to take home, immediately we start talking about accuracy and precision. Now accuracy is the target and precision is how often do you can replicate it. So the problem with breaking up a tablet is, "Are you getting the right dose each time?" And depending upon the dose, and I know that we're all on the same page within the Low Dose Naltrexone world oral dosing is: can start at anywhere from 0,5 milligram and titrate up to usually 4,5 sometimes by maybe sometimes 6, but we can't divide a 50-milligram tablet accurately, consistently at home.

And so that's number one. Number two is if we do decide to try and make it into a liquid, again, we've been doing this for 30 plus years, and we train people how to do it consistently with very good stability characteristics. There's a lot of issues just with pH of different products. So let's say someone says, "I don't really like the taste of this product." so I'm going to put it in, say, orange juice.

Well, it's got a low pH, and that can have an impact on the drug. It can have an impact on stability. Is it going to be suspended, or is it going to be too high or low solubility? And you're going to get all these products, all the products settling out and kicking on the bottom of the product. There's a lot of actual chemistry that has to be taken into account. Stability, characteristics, pH values.

There's a lot more to it than just crushing out the tablet, throwing it into some apple juice and drinking it and saying, I'm going to take a small amount. Most people don't have the necessary tools in our kitchen to compound anything. We really stress this from the position of PCCA. Accuracy, precision starts with the highest quality ingredients and the best possible training with the right tools. And it sounds really fundamentally. Of course, we want to do that but taking home the 50-milligram tablet, you may not be getting the best clinical outcomes if you're not consistent on your dosing.

That's number one. Clinical outcomes rely on the accuracy and precision that's obtained within the pharmacy level.

Linda Elsegood: And it's always a worry as well when people explain how they make their own LDN at home and they generally do it with water. They don't do it with the juice, but anyway, they take the tablet, they dissolve it, whatever, and they've got it in water.

They keep it in their fridge, and they will say that" Oh, I'm on such a low dose, it's going to last me say a month. Pharmacists have told me that you should treat it as fresh milk and taking it out, taking the lead, measuring it. It could have bacteria, anything in it, putting it in and out of the fridge, opening it, you know?

And that would be the biggest worry for me. It's that it's contaminated and you can actually make yourself ill if it isn't fresh.

Sabastian Denison, PCCA:  That's where it really tends to change. And I've said this to people, within the pharmacy world as well as to patients, people who are not in the pharmacy world, how long would you put something in the fridge that you've made? So, for example, let's just talk about, let's make a soup from scratch.

How long would you leave that soup in the fridge before you would say, eh? I'm not going to eat it, and I've left it in the fridge. Even though you've made it on your stove and everything's great, and you've taken the greatest care, at what point do you say, I need to freeze that or I need to throw it away?

And so freezing medications like this, this is not going to be, you can't freeze and do it in a consistent manner, but how long would you leave the soup in the fridge and continually take it? Most people top out somewhere between five and seven days. After that it's leftover there and done.

Some people say, "Well, freeze it right away." But that's not a viable option for people who are making their Low Dose Naltrexone at home. And so not yo a month there are cases of people they're got bacterial contamination, finding fungus and moulds will grow in just straight water. Just take a glass of water and put it in the fridge.

And how long would it be before you would stop drinking that glass of water? So what's the difference? Well, now you've added contaminants. You've added contaminants from even handling the water in a glass that hasn't been sterilized, etc. So it's nothing we would suggest we've all, most of our compounding pharmacies will always add a preservative within their suspension or solution system to prevent that microbial overgrowth.

And that's one of the keys, again, access to these products. Most people don't have parabens water at home or a preservative system that they can add to prevent that overgrowth. People who are taking a Low Dose Naltrexone, in my clinical experience already had a lot of inflammatory disorders and usually have concomitant illnesses, generally fairly fragile, adding more bacteria or yeast or mould into their gut generally can be very distressing. So why would we do that? Why would we take that risk as a healthcare professional, but more importantly, as a patient, why would you do that to yourself? Why would you drink contaminated water?

Linda Elsegood:  And the other thing that always is an absolute red flag, which I wouldn't do it.

People say, Oh, I found somewhere on the internet, I can buy LDN without a prescription. " I mean, as soon as you are buying something, especially a drug, you've bypassed all the quality checks, the stability of on what's in it. People can say it's Low Dose Naltrexone because there haven't been any checks or regulations or anything.

It needn't necessarily be LDN  and the MHR, which is the medicines regulatory body in the UK, it was ridiculously high. Something like 85%. I think I can't remember, so I can't be quoted on that. But it was a really high number said that the of drugs that were imported into the UK without a prescription were counterfeit.

Mostly they were just like fillers, the way there weren't any active ingredients, but sometimes the ingredients in the products were harmful. Why would anybody want to buy a prescription-only drug without a prescription? That, to me, is very scary, scarier than making your LDN, and that's scary enough.

Sabastian Denison, PCCA: As a pharmacist. There's just this thought of it makes me shudder, and I understand why people will do it. You look at the cost of the 50-milligram tablet that they're being dispensed, and they're like," okay, this isn't going to last me about a month is going to be great, and they think, Oh, this is expensive and now what I'm going to do is I'm going to go, and I'm going to do an internet search.

Oh, I can find it, and this guy is going to sell it to me, and I don't even need a prescription, and I'm going to save money." I understand how people are thinking about. But now I'm going to go back to what PCCA stands for, and I'm going to talk about what every single pharmacy and health care professional would say, as well as every regulatory authority anywhere in the UK, Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Mexico.

Number one must be GMP compliant to sell into these countries. Number two, it is a prescription medication which requires a prescription because it has to come through these proper channels to ensure the quality, purity, and identity of those products for sale within that country. This is possibly one of the biggest concerns that we have in the evolving internet commerce is that people can go on the internet and buy anything and there are all sorts of nefarious things but this is probably the second biggest one within our healthcare world is, "Well, I can buy it online." And what happens is you have incredibly unscrupulous people who are like, "Hey, this is a big hot thing. I'm going to sell the powder and they don't even know what it is." This has actually led to a significant opioid crisis within the US and Canada.

And I don't know if it actually hits the UK in the same way. People selling one drug and actually tainting it with other drugs and they have tilt presses.  You can buy tilt presses, they can be stolen and you can counterfeit tablets quite, unfortunately, easily. And so you can actually have people selling these things that they say this is what it is.

And they're just doing a bad copy of these tablets, but you're right, they're putting in a whole host of nasty ingredients that could be incredibly harmful. As I said, these patients are already fragile, and you put something in there that they shouldn't be getting or that is actually a contraindicated medication to other medications that they're taking and now we don't even know what it is or how they are becoming so ill.

PCCA as a company, we are an FDA, so this is a food and drug administration inspected facility. We would comply with all of their requirements.  In Canada, we are a drug establish. It's licensed, repackager and importer in an Australian fed. Our head office there. They fall into the same regulatory authorities ended there, equivalent healthcare facilities.

In Canada, we can only actually source through GMP qualified vendors, which means unless they'd been inspected and have all of the appropriate documentation that proves what they're selling along with what we independently test again.

So once we get it, we not only do the independent a required test, but we'll actually do, it's called an IRS spec scan. So it's like an individualized fingerprint and the drug based upon really cool organic chemistry, which we'll go and do. We can identify the drug, so we know the identity, the purity and the quality of these products that we buy, and we only buy the highest quality. We reject vendors left to right and centre so that we can deliver the highest quality product to our patients who then at the end of the day, get the best clinical outcomes. But you're right, dying off the internet—10 times scarier than making it at home.

Like at home, you're still getting a prescription drug that's come through a reliable source. It may not work as well because you're kind of not doing it quite right, but you know at least you're not going to come to serious harm where it's getting something off the internet is like... In Canada we have people spike drugs with things like Fentanyl and Carfentanil, where 1mg dosing can actually cause people to die. I've heard of things where people are mixing all sorts of nasty drugs just to give people a feeling of effect without actually having an intent of effect. People who are selling stuff on the internet, and they're selling cheaper, and without a prescription, that should be not even a red flag. That should be a stop backup and understand you are putting your own health serious risks and then not to mention if you aren't actually getting the drug and you're importing a legal drug from a supplier avoiding the normal channels, your regulatory authority, channels, whichever country you're in, you can be in a lot of legal troubles. So it's a bad situation. So please don't go and do that. Contact the pharmacy and ask them if they can compound it.

Linda Elsegood: And the most important thing is with the prescription drug, you do need the prescription, and you need that prescription filled by a reputable pharmacy. I mean, once you've done those two things, hopefully, the product, in this case, LDN is going to give you the best outcomes possible.

Sabastian Denison, PCCA: Well that's what we find over and over yet.  Every pharmacy can compound. We'll start with that. Most pharmacies don't. When they jump in, and they're like, oh," I can just make this up," they, they're overconfident in their abilities. What happens is the patients aren't getting the outcomes that they're looking for, so they abandoned the treatment option.

That's pretty much the worst-case scenario. If they do get it from the pharmacy that isn't specializing in compounding. If they are specializing in compounding, they find that number one, they're getting better clinical outcomes, number two, because they're getting PCCA products and PCCA training there, they know they're getting a good quality product that isn't going to bring anything else along for the ride that could be causing them as, again, fragile patients. We don't want them to be in a harmed by anything else that comes along. I'll give you a perfect example. In our compounding pharmacy, very quickly, we learned that lactose is not a good excipient to be used for patients getting any Low Dose Naltrexone product, be it Ms, Fibromyalgia, any of the autoimmune disorders, migraine or pain patients and the reason why is because Naltrexone was actually causing other GI issues for them. And this patient, in particular, they would come in and be like," did you meet with no,  the lactose because I'm getting a bad gut reaction."

And so we learned very quickly from our clinical experience not to do that. This is how we counsel all of our memories, all 4,000 and anyone who's working with us to be careful with this if it's being used. And so you've seen this shift in that true compounders and delivering the highest quality product, the accurate dose consistently without any other bad stuff come along with that.

We talked about someone in Wisconsin. Every time we talked to him, he's got a new story for me about how well the patient has done and coming from another pharmacy, and" I was getting it at the chain pharmacy down the street, and it just wasn't working.

And I thought about giving up, but I was told by my doctor to come and see you. What are you doing so differently?" And that's the key is we specialized in this.

Linda Elsegood: What is the filler of choice that you recommend your pharmacists to use?

Sabastian Denison, PCCA: My personal favourite is a product called magnesium glycinate. It is a magnesium salt form that we know is better absorbed than other magnesium salts. It comes with about 15% magnesium, and so I've suggested a certain sized capsule that would deliver roughly 400 milligrams of magnesium glycinate along with your specific Naltrexone dose. And they're like, "why would you do that?

Why would you suggest this? Why don't you just use the cheapest stuff possible?" Number one, magnesium is a really good supplement for every patient. A lot of the oxide versions of magnesium caused diarrhoea, even at 400 and 500 milligrams for these patients, but the glycinate is very well tolerated for the GI.

So we can deliver magnesium, which has over 350 functions in the body metabolically for patients. It's actually an anti-inflammatory. It can actually help with patients with pain. It can help regulate hormones. It can actually help with sleep patterns as well. So that's my favourite, magnesium glycinate, along with the Naltrexone.

This is a particular product that we make. It's inert. Non-reactive. We call it excipients. That's the name. And it's actually a really effective well-tolerated product that goes along with the Naltrexone. I've seen people also use things that are specific to a patient, ginger root powder,  rice flour.

I've seen people even add it and say, "well,  what else have you got? " Because they can't tolerate anything. What I like to use it is my first option is what the patient needs. Will be my first choice if the patient needs something different. But we generally, stay away from lactose.

We stay away from anything that will cause the patient any sort of sensitivity or harm, magnesium steroids, Sodium lauryl sulfate, these are really highly sensitizing to these patients. They'll get a lot of GI upset or inflammation.

Linda Elsegood:  So well, we have run out of time, but thank you so much. You've been our guest today. This was Sebastian Dennison, who's a pharmacist, and he was talking about the PCCA and how LDN is made. So we've learnt a lot from you today.

Thank you very!

Sabastian Denison, PCCA: You're welcome!

Linda Elsegood: PCCA helps pharmacists and prescribers create personalized medicine that makes a difference in patient's lives. That's why they provide the highest quality products, education, and support above any other compounding organization.

Subscribe to their blog and podcast today at www.pccarx.com

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

Radio Show with Jeannette 13th Feb 2019 (LDN, low dose naltrexone) from LDN Research Trust on Vimeo.

Linda Elsegood: Today I'm joined by Jeanette from New Zealand who's been taking LDN for Myasthenia Gravis for quite a few years now, haven’t you Jeanette, 

Jeannette: Yes that's correct. Just nearly three years now. 

Linda Elsegood: Wow. And we have interviewed you before, so it's really good to catch up with you. So when were you diagnosed? 

Jeannette: 20 years ago.

Linda Elsegood: and just to refresh everybody, if they haven't heard your last interview, what was your condition like before you started LDN? What was an average day for you like? 

Jeannette: Well, I'd get up, I'd usually wake up about nine o'clock feeling very, you know, feeling like I hadn't had a great sleep. Um, so I sort of got up and did a few hours work in by probably half-past eleven I'd feel quite tired. And, uh, my ability to think and in, uh, my cognitive functions were certainly, as I can say, confused, you know, it wasn't clear. And, and usually, um, in the afternoon, I would have a sleep or I, because I'd start to feel very fatigued some days, not every day, but I'd certainly was feeling fatigued, and I'd normally have a sleep, uh, in the afternoon from about one o'clock till three.

And then I'd get up and do a few more hours work, and then, uh, by half-past nine, I would start to be able to feel very, very fatigued again. So I would probably be in bed by half-past 10. And it would take me a long time to try and fall asleep. So that was my average day. It was just a cycle of fatigue catching up.

Um, very bad brain fog all the time, my clarity of thinking was probably about 50% and, and you know, any virus I got prior to the LDN, it would take me longer to recover. All right? So normally you get a cold that lasts seven days. People with Myasthenia Gravis take a lot longer, right, to recover from a virus. And I would usually have to be bedridden with it, if I got a small cold because the biggest thing was with my Myasthenia Gravis as fatigue, you know, the fatigability. Yeah. And prior to taking LDN, I couldn't actually exercise. So if I did, if I used to go for a walk, it would take me two or three days to recover.

Um. And, and that, that was a struggle because I used, prior to my diagnosis, I was very active. I love getting out walking and you know, swimming and things like that and I just couldn't do it, you know, with, with the Myasthenia Gravis and work at the same time from taking LDN three years ago, that has all changed, probably about six months into taking the LDN I started exercising again.  And I can go to the gym virtually every day and do 40 minutes a day. There is no downtime. It's just normal. All right. For people. I can take a 10K walk now, which I couldn't before, and I don't have any downtime. Something like that would virtually kill me before the LDN, it would take me days to recover from it, and I don't do that anymore.

Linda Elsegood: How easy was it to get a prescription for LDN?

Jeannette: Well, I'm very lucky cause I've got a doctor who's into alternative medicine, so he's a very holistic physician, so he had no trouble prescribing the medication for me, and he's just absolutely delighted with my results. Uh, because it's just, you know, it's, it's from being very limited to what I could do now I'm working since taking LDN three years ago. I'm working 40 to 50 hours a week. I don't all the time. Um, I exercise three to four times a week. Um, if I don't exercise, I have a, uh, a gym program. Um, I, I walk once or twice a week and there is no fatigue with it. I'm awake at seven o'clock, and I can stay awake till half past 11 at night without feeling tired.

But I think the biggest benefit I've got from the LDN is my clarity of thinking is just so improved because, my role -  I'm an ACC advisor, and I actually have to go to review hearings. Legal review hearings, which can take up to an hour. Alright. Or I take matters to the district court. So again, sometimes, particularly at the district court, I would have three or four hearings a day.

Now, prior to LDN that was a real struggle for me to do that. To remember, particularly in the afternoon, to try and remember what I was going to say, because you're standing there, in a courtroom, some of the judges would sit there and look at me and think, well, what's she on? Or is she drunk or whatever because I'd start slurring my words and I'd start to get very tired, and I would stumble. Whereas now, taking the LDN that is not an issue anymore. My clarity of thinking is very, very sharp. And because when you and the district court or at a review hearing, you've got, you know, a judge or adjudicator sitting there asking you questions, you've got to have very, very clear in your thinking and be able to respond in a legal manner. So prior to LDN three years ago, I really struggled with it, and I couldn't do more than two hearings in a day. Whereas now where I can, I've done three to five hearings in a day with no trouble. No, I'm certainly resting the next day cause my throat would be a bit sore.

But other than that, it was just fantastic. That's it. Is this, you know, I consider myself probably 95% normal. 

Linda Elsegood: Wow that's amazing, isn't it? Did you have any introductory side effects when you first started? 

Jeannette: Well, I think I've got a little fluttery, I struggled to sleep a little bit. I know it was the first six weeks.

I did really struggle with feeling, um, hyped up. Um, I did struggle to sleep a bit. So what I did, I changed my regime. Then I started taking them in the morning and then slowly over time as my body got used to the LDN, and I shifted it over the day. So I started taking it lunchtime, afternoon and then tea time and then, uh, you know, just before I get into bed now.

Linda Elsegood: And do you take capsules?

Jeannette: No, I, I compound my own because it's the cheapest way to do it in New Zealand. So my doctor prescribed that, uh, 30 tablets. It's, um, 30, uh, I think it's 50ml. And then I cut   ...

Linda Elsegood: Can I, can I stop you there? Because we're not going to be able to use this bit because it's not best practice. So that's not something that we can promote, so we'll have to cut that bit out.

Um, 

Jeannette: okay. 

Linda Elsegood: So just carry on with your story.

Jeannette: Yeah. So it's been very, it's been fantastic. And, um, you know, from being very, very limited in what I can do. Like, you know, I, I'm thinking of, you know, going over, I've received next year and, um, which is a lot of travelling and usually a lot of walking and that would have been an absolute, um, I just wouldn't be able to do it previously without the LDN.

Because you just don't, you don't have the fatigue. Um, and, and what people don't realize, particularly with any autoimmune disorder, there's fatigue and just even talking to people, um, socializing, you know, with MS or the Myasthenia Gravis or any autoimmune disorder, try to just talk to people, It's just very tiring.

And, and I don't, I don't have that problem anymore. And it's just fitting, you know, I can't say, um, that, uh, you know, I could sit there and talk to him for hours now without getting tired and, and without the sort of feeling, Oh, you know, before they, I used to have to say to my friends or family, look, I'm sorry I can't talk anymore. I'm too tired, and I can't think, so I'm going to have to go home. And cause people are very understanding. It's like you're rude. 

Linda Elsegood: Let me say. Well, and you have done so remarkably well. I mean, so, well, I should think people find it hard to believe you've actually got something wrong with you, don't they?

Jeannette: Well, they do now. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Because it's just, you know, I know if I've got a virus, a really bad virus, it would still knock me, but my recovery time would be so much better, and I wouldn't get it as bad as what I used to. You know, I, you know, I remember once that I got, um, a bladder infection and I, at that stage, my doctor because it would knock it on the head, he gave me, um, antibiotics that they give for people who've got gonorrhoea, and because they had to give me such a strong medication because of my autoimmune disorder. Now, from the time that I've started taking LDN, I've had no bladder infections whatsoever.

Linda Elsegood: Yeah. 

Jeannette: They've just disappeared. I used to get them regularly because you know, everything in your system is compromised. Um, so I, I don't have, you know, I, I can't remember the last time I took any antibiotics, but I used to be regularly on them. You know, it would be for taking LDN. And so, you know, and I feel that I can reduce my tablets as well, so I don't need as much.

Um, I was taking Tegretol for pain cause I had a whiplash injury as well—six weeks into taking the LDN my pain just disappeared. And I haven't really had the neck pain that I suffered at that time, which I suffered seven years previously. So it just, I woke up one morning and I thought, Oh, I haven't got a sore neck, you know, this is, this was so strange, and it wasn't there anymore, and I haven't really taken any strong painkillers either for the last three years because of the LDN. And there's been a few times that I've forgotten cause I've gone away for five days.

And you know, people say, Oh, it's probably just a placebo effect, but you know, there have been a few days that I've gone away and I’ve forgotten to take my LDN with me. And by the third day, I can tell you I was starting to struggle with pain and everything was starting to come back, you know? So it shows it's not just a placebo effect, it works very well.  I think it works really, really well with autoimmune disorders. 

Linda Elsegood: Well, thank you very much, thank you so much for sharing your story with us today, and we'll try and catch up with you again another time. 

Jeannette: Okay. Thank you, Linda. 

Linda Elsegood: Okay, thank you.

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

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.

Michelle, Fibromyalga and ME - 9th Jan 2019 (LDN, low dose naltrexone) from LDN Research Trust on Vimeo.

Michelle shares her Fibromyalgia (CFS/ME) and Low Dose Naltrexone (LDN) experience on the LDN Radio Show with Linda Elsegood.

Michelle first started having problems at the age of 12 or 14.  Her low energy, chronic migraines and pain were put down to puberty by her doctors. Later, in her twenties, the doctors blamed her problems on stress although she never felt that she was stressed.  Eventually in her thirties she was diagnosed with ME (myalgic encephalomyelitis) and Fibromyalgia. 

She is now 52 and has spent a number of years being bed bound. She felt she had a very limited life. In 2017 she was in bed from the end of September until march 2018 and felt her life was being wasted.

While researching the latest research on ME she found references to Low Dose Naltrexone (LDN). Michelle printed off the information she had found and took it to her Doctor. Michelle started to ask people on facebook where she could get LDN and was advised to contact Dicksons chemist in Glasgow. Since then she has had a miraculous recovery.

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

Pamela - Hashimoto’s - 9th Jan 2019 (LDN, low dose naltrexone) from LDN Research Trust on Vimeo.

Linda Elsegood: Today. I'm joined by Pamela from the United States. You take LDN for Hashimoto's. Thank you for joining us the day, Pamela.

Pamela: Thank you for having me.

Linda Elsegood: So first of all, could you tell us your journey to getting that ultimate diagnosis of Hashimoto's?

Pamela: Absolutely. Um, I had spent probably a good portion of the previous 20 years just not feeling well.

Various chronic infections, poor gut health, um, just being unusually tired. And so after lots of research, I ended up going to a natural pathic doctor here, um, that I discovered and was diagnosed with Hashimoto's and began taking, um, desiccated thyroid medication for that. And I saw some, um, improvements, but I knew, you know, it still just wasn't doing the trick.

To get me to my optimal health and through my research and my support groups that I was a member of on Facebook. Um, I. Came into the information about LDN and started doing my own research and asked my doctor if that, you know, what his views were on it. And he was very surprised, but I had found it and said that he had used it in the past for many years with fantastic results and, um, prescribed it to me.

And that was probably about six or nine months ago.

Linda Elsegood: Well, you had quite a journey, didn't you, uh, being ill for so long without a diagnosis? I mean, how did that make you feel?

Pamela: Oh, it was extremely frustrating. You know, I, I felt like every doctor that I had ever been too kind of dismissed me as a hypochondriac or that I was making a bigger deal. Um. Or that I was exaggerating or it was all in my head, and it was very depressing.

It was, um, you know, it was, it was hard to fight up against that. And especially when you don't have unlimited resources to spend on all of these medical tests. And after going to various, um. Specialist and just racking up thousands of dollars and in the laboratory test and still have no answers. You know, it was just very frustrating and depressing and which I think compounded the problem even more 

Linda Elsegood: Oh, definitely.

So what was your next step after you done your own investigation?

Pamela: Well, I took the information that I found back to this natural doctor and, um, he ended up prescribing LPN to see if in conjunction with the natural thyroid medicine if I would have better results. And it was pretty amazing. It was, um, I would say within a week my sleep improved dramatically because I've had.

Insomnia since I was probably about 25 years old and I've taken Ambien for it, which I really wanted to get off of. So my eye, just the dramatic difference in my sleep and my joint pain. Um, my gut health. Things had been returned, um, almost to normal, you know, with little bouts here and there, but dramatically different than it had been an over the past 20 years.

Linda Elsegood: And did you find that you could reduce the amount of, um, natural thyroid you were

Pamela: taking. Um, you know what, actually, yes. Just recently, um, due to insurance I went to, I have a new doctor who strongly believes in LDN, and she couldn't believe I had found a doctor and had been taking it already.

And after my first blood tests, this was just about a month and a half ago, um, she lowered. Um, I went from three greens of fibroid of that nature. Three today down to one and a half.

Linda Elsegood: Oh

Pamela: Yeah. Yeah. And I'm waiting to go back for return file, you know, after labs, after making that adjustment. And I may be able to lower even more, which is awesome.

Linda Elsegood:  Amazing. So how do you feel now? What's your quality of life as compared with before?

Pamela: Um, you know what, actually, no comparison to the way that I felt two years ago before discovering what I, you know, that I had Hashimoto's and still even after taking this high ride way better with the LDN, just huge improvements.

I, you know, I tell everybody I know because there are so many people suffering from chronic. Um, autoimmune issues. Again, you know, I think people are in the same boat that I was in. Just lost, not able to find the right doctors who take you seriously. Um, not knowing the doctors, just not knowing what tests to do or what to look for or about LDN at all.

Linda Elsegood: and don't you think, even if you. Or a person who's never suffered from depression and you're a bright, bubbly person when you have to live with a chronic condition, and people don't believe you or understand or know how to treat it. That in itself is very depressing, isn't it? Do you know what I mean?

Pamela: I've always been a very positive, um, very positive person. You know, my sister suffered from depression, so I've, you know, I know what that's like to have chronic depression and that wasn't me. But after 20 years of having a sinus infection and joint pain and stomach problems, and, you know, just not finding the right support that even really.

Where do you feel like they don't even believe you? Um, it's very, it's discouraging, and it compounds when you already aren't feeling good, and you don't have to, like, you know where to go to find answers, you know, when you know something is off in your body, but you don't know where to go with it.

Linda Elsegood: Mm. So if you had to rate your quality of life on a score of one to 10.

Before you started the LDN, what would it have been?

Pamela: I would say maybe about a four. Um, and, well,

Linda Elsegood: yes. And what it is now?

Pamela: Now, now I would say an eight or a nine. You know, I still have minor joint pain and, um, a little bit of. Um, stomach issues, but I'm hoping that the longer that I'm on this, you know, that it's just going to keep getting better and better, which I feel like it is.

And I feel like my mental, um, state has greatly improved now that I finally feel like I have doctors who are hearing me. And no, you don't. Not that you want to be diagnosed with anything, but that was a huge relief, just like, okay, I, you know, I know it wasn't in my head. And now. At least my doctors know that.

Linda Elsegood: Mm-hmm. So you'll sleep. You said that you have a better quality of sleep. How many hours would you say you're sleeping a day?

Pamela: You know, the past few months, it released eight hours a night, which has never ever happened. Normally I would go to sleep and sleep for about two to three hours. Even taking the strongest dose, the Ambien, I would still wake up and be up the majority of the rest of the night, you know?

So I really only could look forward to two or three hours of sleep at night.

Linda Elsegood: And that doesn't make you feel too good the next day, either does it?

Pamela: Oh, absolutely not. No. You'd feel like you'd been out drinking for two. You can't think straight, and you have no energy. 

That's my biggest. The satisfaction that I get an LDN and I absolutely know that that's what it is. Because, um, I had run out for about a month and me, you know, with getting compounded, you know, I waited, and sure enough, everything crept back up, all my symptoms, my sleep, and so I will never run out of LDN. In the future.

That's for sure that that is my priority now. Well,

Linda Elsegood: I continued to improve in for 18 months, so I think you hopefully will see even further

Pamela: benefits. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. I, you know what? I really, I really feel like that. I feel like this has just been a, a miracle. Do you know? I'm like, how? I don't understand how it's not.

More known even by medical professionals. So I spread the word everywhere I go,

Linda Elsegood: Oh, that's fantastic. Well, long may your success with LDN continue and hopefully your still keep improving. And thank you so much for sharing your experience with us. Pamela. Oh,

Pamela: thank you for taking the time to talk to me. I really appreciate it.

Appreciate being able to get the word out.

Linda Elsegood: Thank you.

Pamela: All right. You have a good day.

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

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

Dr Baldeep Bains MD - 23rd Jan 2019 (LDN, low dose naltrexone) from LDN Research Trust on Vimeo.

Linda Elsegood: Today, my guest is Dr Bains, and he is the younger brother of Dr Harpal Bains, who you may have remembered we had on the show a few months ago now. Thank you for joining us, Dr Bains. First of all, can you tell us your background and about you and all the wonderful things that you've done to date. 

Dr Baldeep Bains: I grew up in Malaysia as my sister did, but then I was educated in the UK. I then went to university in Scotland and went to med school in Scotland. While I was in medical school, I had this mad idea that I wanted to join the military and before I knew it I’d signed on the dotted line and probably half of my life to the military. Upon finishing university, I'd spent a bit of time in Virginia. I joined the Navy, the general Navy. Upon finishing the officer's training, I spent about three years getting deployed in nice places, some not very nice places. As a Navy doctor, I’d look after old Marine commanders.

For the first five years after graduation, I spent most of my time doing the two operations. Upon completing them, we have to decide what you're going to do. I initially thought of a surgeon. I started off training to be an orthopaedic surgeon. I spent about four years doing orthopaedic surgery. I enjoyed it up to a certain extent. Then I realized that I was reaching a point where I wasn't passionate about surgery. I think I was passionate about something a bit more so I decided to quit surgery and joined general practice. I did my GP training and I qualified as a GP in 2009. 

My wife got pregnant in 2014 and when I was deployed for six months and I got back just in time before she gave birth. I think reality struck me that I can't continue with military life, I was having a family.

So I left the military in 2015 and then worked as a GP for a short while before my sister suggested that I should join her practice which is where I am now. So I've been at my sister's coming close to a year and a half now and working alongside her is where I heard about LDN. 

I've got to say it was quite a paradigm shift for me because when she first spoke to me about what she was going to do, I thought she was absolutely bonkers. I'm not going to lie to you all. We use nice guidelines and when she was talking to me about functional medicine... we had many arguments about how she was practising medicine and I was like, what are you doing? Are you crazy? Are you mad? Are you dead? I've got to say that we didn't see eye to eye initially with what she's doing. I think fortunately she persevered and she agreed. Even if I could see the way she does things and the way functional medicine works. I’m by no means trying to criticize the general practice. She’s done a fantastic job and I actually appreciate what my colleagues do but there's a certain extent to which we can actually help them and they're quite stuck with the reason I didn't blame them because they are guided by guidelines. A lot of the people who sit in the committees of guidelines are people who've got some vested interests elsewhere. I'm not gonna mention names, but I can understand the restrictions they have and why they can't. 

Yeah. It's quite hard for them to go explore other avenues. That's another way of doing things. I'm really glad I can introduce it as well because had I not been introduced, I think I would have been missing out on a lot, I love my patients. So I'm actually finding it harder and harder to be a GP now because of what I do know.

Linda Elsegood: What would you say are the main conditions that you are treating in the clinic?

Dr Baldeep Bains: I see the lion's share of the male patients. A lot of the male patients that we come across do come in with quite prominent symptoms of testosterone deficiency. That's one of the things, but I'm seeing a lot of patients with some degree of autoimmunity as well. I've seen patients with Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, chronic fatigue, Crohn's disease, bowel issues, etc. Increasingly I'm seeing more patients with autoimmune and bowel type issues. 

Linda Elsegood: When a patient first comes in to see you, how long is the initial consultation? Do you do lots of form-filling, questionnaire-answering with all of them? What's the procedure?

Dr Baldeep Bains: Most of the patients, we're looking to get one of their main symptoms, what their diet’s like, how their condition is affecting their activities of daily living. We can be asking quite a lot of questions. We spend anywhere between 1-2 hours with the patients. We try to read the evidence in order to find the root cause. Again, we will see a patient and we will treat the symptoms and the majority of the time that's what we do. But they keep pulling back the same issues again and again. If you don't look into food it takes time to look into a root cause, you can't just expect to spend five minutes with a patient talking about their history and find the root cause. You need to go into a lot more detail, which is what we try to aspire to do; just get into the nitty-gritty and hope to find what might be the root cause for a lot of these symptoms. 

Linda Elsegood: What other testing do you use? 

Dr Baldeep Bains: The majority of the time we will carry out a comprehensive blood panel. It’s one of the baseline things we do. So in a certain comprehensive blood panel, it would include the likes of a full blood count. You carry out a comprehensive biochemistry analysis looking into things like your liver function, kidney function. In our practice we do quite an in-depth hormonal evaluation, looking into quite a few different hormone levels and trying to see if anything that needs to be addressed. Beyond that, if a person does have a lot of bowel type symptoms, we will potentially do something along the lines of a comprehensive, thorough analysis, which is not a simple as microscopy. It gives you a lot more information. We would offer that if your bowel symptoms are quite prominent. I think we might do as well if something known as SIBO testing, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, complaints of quite significant gut symptoms. We'll do something along those lines. We do allergy testing as well, and we use Cyrex. Personally, I feel it's one of the best kits out. I think it has been extremely comprehensive and they will probably them give us an overview as to what is going on, to keep eating the same foods and which is stimulating an inflammatory response. I think that that's the first few stages. Plus, I would normally offer a test when I first see a patient.

Linda Elsegood: When you ask patients about diet, are they honest with you as to what they eat or drink or do they tell you what they think you would like to hear?

Dr Baldeep Bains: That's a tricky one. I like to think my patients are honest with me. I think the majority of the patients we have are quite honest because by the time they come to see us, they're quite desperate. They've tried everything. I think they like to be as open and honest as they can with me. I think they are honest because of how they're feeling and their determination to get better.

Linda Elsegood: I was only asking because my mother lived with us for a few years. Unfortunately she, she got cancer and died. Before that, we would go and see the doctor and the doctor would say, “have you taken salt out of your diet?” I used to hide the salt because she was at the age where she used to use lots of lots of salt. I would sit there and I'd say, “you put so much salt on it, mom. It looks like snow, doesn't it?” And butter. “Have you cut down on the butter?”, “Oh yes. I don't use it as much.” “Mom, you use as much butter. It looks like cheese because it's so thick” but she didn't want to upset them. She wanted to please the doctor by letting them think she had done what she was told, but she didn't use, to tell the truth. I now have to hope that when I get older, my daughter doesn't come with me,

If we just continue treating symptoms and not the root cause, that root cause could be creating a lot of damage. It's vital to find out what that is. That is what's so good with functional medicine.

Dr Baldeep Bains: I completely agree with her. I think we actually have the luxury of time, which is what a GP doesn't have. I've got 10 minutes per patient, and in that time I've got to get a history from the patient, I’ve got to sort dates, I've got to get ready for my next patient. It’s especially complex with complex patients and complex patients are increasing in numbers. I've seen more and more patients with more and more complex problems coming in. I don't think treating symptoms is the answer to that. 

Linda Elsegood: You're seeing more and more people who have chronic conditions. What would you say is the difference between now and 40 years ago? Is it because we're eating different, or due to the fact that food is treated differently? When I was a child, everything was cooked from scratch. There were no additives. I hardly know how to pronounce some of them, let alone know what they are. What do you think is the cause? 

Dr Baldeep Bains: Reverse back 40-50 years ago, you're not seeing the problems that we had in those days. Compared to the number of solid issues we have nowadays it is just phenomenal. I've got no doubt it's to do with our diet. It's all about the fast food, and then you can get your hands on processed food, anything that's microwaveable, low phosphate and nothing else. No one has time to do things, you want everything in an instant. The busy lifestyle, the stress... life is a lot more stressful now because we've got a lot more demands and you've got everything in your face due to social media. I think stress has got a much more significant influence and the fact that we are actually doing less as well. Spending huge amounts of time in front of computer screens and TVs. Get yourself out, playing, get some sunlight, get exposed to sunlight. I can say my childhood is very different from the childhood experience now. 

Linda Elsegood: You were talking before we started and I'm sure you're quite an outdoorsy person, but what is your diet like? I mean, are you gluten-free, dairy-free? Are you a vegan? What is your diet? 

Dr Baldeep Bains: I am none of those, but I am quite careful about what I eat. I limit the amount of processed food I have. My kids have significantly reduced their intake of sugar. I use just for taste, such as half a spoon in my tea or in my coffee. I don't have any fizzy drinks. I drink water or milk. I'm quite fortunate in the sense that I don't really have many intolerances so I can actually cope with gluten. I've got a very narrow relationship to gluten. If I'm going to define myself, I've significantly reduced them on process over refined carbs. If I do have carbs, it traditionally would be half a plate or a quarter. I do love exercise and I need energy. So I still have carbs. Probably half my plate is protein. But I'm currently 43 and I feel fantastic. I train hard and I can sustain my mind. A craving I've got no real issues. I don’t have any fatigue issues, I'm not obese. I’d like to say that I'm in quite a decent shape, I think it's working for me. I don't eat junk. I've read a lot about intermittent fasting and I probably do that about two or three times a week. I try to fast for 16 hours and then tried to eat in the daylight hours which has been shown to be quite effective. I suppose if you say any dietary routine, but that's been quite recent, probably 2-3 weeks ago. I don't find it too hard to do.

Linda Elsegood: We’ve nearly run out of time, but very briefly, for parents who want to make sure that their children grow up as healthy as possible, what would you recommend to do diet-wise with children? Because it's very difficult with all the crisps and sweets and biscuits and advertising on television, how do you go about trying to establish healthy habits?

Dr Baldeep Bains:I think you get a vibe from them whilst they’re a baby. You've got to introduce them to good food and fruit and vegetables. We try to make everything from scratch, making home-cooked fruit. 

Linda Elsegood: You don't buy Robinsons or anything along those lines?

Dr Baldeep Bains: Nothing whatsoever. They drink water. That's the only thing they seem to pick. Once in a while, my daughter has fresh fruit juice, but apart from that, it's water and milk. That's all they have. I think trying to develop habits from the start and you're trying to give them a good breakfast. I try to avoid sugary cereals. I think even a traditional English breakfast as well, they'll have sausage, which I do try to get good quality sausage just for kids. Try to make a lot more home meals and try to get them less processed food. It's not easy on junior kids, even seven done. Life's extremely busy at that time. Everyone's quite time poor. It doesn't take a lot to make a decent kitchen. We know what we need to be doing and we should practice it. 

Linda Elsegood: We've come to the end very quickly. If patients would like to come and see you, how do they get in touch with you?

Dr Baldeep Bains: They can visit our website, www.harpalclinic.co.uk We have two practitioners there: my sister and I. I have a lot of patients with her too. You get the benefits of two practitioners and hopefully, when you come and see me, you can appreciate the frustrations and a lot of patients as well. I can understand what's going on and I can sense the limitations that they face and be able to give them a bit more of a balanced view. I think one thing we pride ourselves on is ongoing support. Most of my patients have an open email conversation. They can email me anytime and I will get back to them and I would advise them. I think on a lot of occasions patients find that quite reassuring. At the end of the day, I do things which are not very conventional. They didn't think their potentially own GP should be asking them, why are you doing such a thing? A good example is I prescribed LDN to one of my patients and I had a bit of a nasty email from a Polish GP asking me, what am I doing now? I think once the people are educated, once the GPs are educated, then you can get a GP alongside the patient and the GPs can work together with a patient and ultimately what we're doing, what we're looking for is to make the patient feel better. That's the aim. 

Linda Elsegood: That's fantastic. We'll have to have you back another day and thank you very much, Dr Baldeep for being our guest today. 

Dr Baldeep Bains: Thank you, Linda.

This show is sponsored by Dixon Chemist, who are experts in LDN at associated treatments in the UK. Dixon Chemist is the most cost-effective for LDN in all forms within the UK and Europe, maintaining safety standards far in excess of what is required. Why would you choose to get your LDN from anywhere else? Call 01414046545 today to speak to LDN experts. 

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.

Dr Elliot Udell, DPM - 2nd Jan 2019 (LDN, low dose naltrexone) from LDN Research Trust on Vimeo.

Elliot Udell, DPM shares his Low Dose Naltrexone (LDN) experience on the LDN Radio Show with Linda Elsegood.

Dr Elliot Udell has 30 years experience as a Podiatrist but learned about LDN (Low Dose Naltrexone) only a few years ago. He has developed a keen interest in pain control, and is amazed at how effective LDN is for pain. 

In this interview Dr Udell describes the various foot problems and how he treats each of them with Low Dose Naltrexone.

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