LDN Video Interviews and Presentations

Stephanie Grutz FNP (LDN, low dose naltrexone) from LDN Research Trust on Vimeo.

Stephanie Grutz, FNP shares her Low Dose Naltrexone (LDN) experience on the LDN Radio Show with Linda Elsegood.

Stephanie Grutz is a Board Certified Family Nurse Practitioner, specializing in Integrative medicine. After practicing as a nurse for over 6 years, she went back to school to become a Family Nurse Practitioner. Her first job was in an acute rehab care setting. 

At that same time, she was also battling a chronic autoimmune disease and felt that Western Medicine wasn’t fulfilling her desires. She branched out into holistic living & Integrative Medicine. She saw great results and decided to open up her own clinic to help patients on similar journeys.

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

Dr Michael Ruscio - 20th June 2018 (LDN, low dose naltrexone) from LDN Research Trust on Vimeo.

Dr Michael Ruscio is sharing his experience with Low dose Naltrexone.

He treats people suffering from symptoms like daily bloating, constant fatigue, and unexplained weight gain, simple steps to start living a healthy, enjoyable life.

There are many different conditions that I'm sure both clinicians and patients grapple with and it's hard to sometimes determine what do I do first.

Should I have a heavy metal test, an adrenal hormone test, a female or male hormone test, a thyroid analysis, a gut workup, a test for mold or Lyme? And I think a very prudent approach is to first start with your dietary and lifestyle foundations.

And there different diets that could be an appropriate starting position.

And then if they're not improved symptomatically I take steps to optimize their gut health.

And also along with that, I take a fairly cautious progressive look into the gut and thyroid health.

Oftentimes I'll start someone with a paleo diet and sometimes the paleo diet is typified to be this very high meat, especially high red meat, high-fat diet, but it really doesn't have to be. You can have a few different derivations on the paleo diet that can range all the way from high carb, lower fat to lower fat, higher carb.

But the main tenant of the paleo diet is the removal of process foods. And also a decrease consumption, if not elimination of things like most grains and also some beans and legumes and a focus on meats, nuts and seeds, fruits, and vegetables, and healthy sources of fats. And that's a really a good starting point for the gut.

Now, if someone comes in with a high degree of digestive symptoms like the classic IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome) type symptoms, gas, bloating, loose stools, diarrhoea, constipation, or potentially oscillation between the two then we'll oftentimes start with a low FODMAP diet, which has been very well studied in the context of IBS.

We could start with the standard low FODMAP diet that cuts out things that are not compliant with the paleo diet, like grains and dairy.

I think there are many clinicians who are moving this direction and kind of seeing this for most diets two to three weeks is enough time to evaluate. And you should have a sense that clearly you are feeling better. It's not to say you should feel 100% improved. Then keep going until you reach the peak of your best improvements and shortly after that, you can start to reintroduce some of the foods that you cut out, because for most people they don't need to adhere to the low FODMAP diet or the paleo diet 100%. They usually find that there are a number of foods that they can bring back into their diet and be okay with, but there's a few foods that have to be cautious with and when they reintroduce the foods, they have a reaction. So they can experiment and adapt

to a diet to themselves so they don't feel like they're being totally overcome by it by dietary restrictions.

One of the first things to consider is how many carbohydrates you're eating in your diet.

Usually, the lower someone goes in carbohydrate, the more fat they end up bringing into their diet because they need something to replace all of the carbohydrates that they've cut out. We have a high fat, low carb. Now some people with IBS do feel better when they eat a lower-fat diet, but there are also some people with IBS who feel better when they eat a lower carb, higher fat diet, almost like a ketogenic-type diet.

As to potentially have the risk of being too low carb for your metabolism and causing things like fatigue, insomnia, which can be a problem.  One of the things that people tend to do is bring back in carbs. We have people start with or more things like potatoes or sweet potatoes or squashes.

Some people are not incorporating enough healthy fish or fatty fish like salmon, sardines into the diet.

There is interesting research about thyroid and gut. That assessed, I think it was 1,809 patients. Being hypothyroid was the number one cause for small intestinal bacterial overgrowth or SIBO, which is a quite simply an overgrowth, too much bacteria in the small intestine. They also found that people with higher colonization of the Helicobacter pylori, which is a bacterium that can reside in the stomach connects back into the thyroid.

So it seems that the gut small intestinal, bacterial overgrowth, H pylori, hypothyroidism are all connected and by improving the health of one's gut, we can certainly see an improvement in thyroid autoimmunity.

Now, this is not published. This is more so what I've seen in the clinic, I think at some point we will see this published.

I would like to talk about the brain and gut health. I suffered from when I had gastrointestinal issues years and years ago. I was brain fog and brain fog is a terrible symptom. You feel like you can't hold a conversation because you can't remember things you feel kind of out of it. It's really an unpleasant symptom and there's research now being published showing the gut-brain connection.

The clinical literature says has found that for both anxiety and depression, probiotics have a favourable impact on both of these conditions.

And of course, probiotics can heal the gut in a number of ways. It can be anti-inflammatory, antibacterial and antifungal. So if someone has bacterial or fungal overgrowth, probiotics can help with those.

Diabetes is also amenable to dietary change. Type two diabetes that is typically one is a little bit more of a different story, but absolutely by improving one's diet, you can absolutely see fairly remarkable improvements in a lot of things.

I wrote a book "Healthy gut healthy. you". It's available on Amazon. You can also go to www.healthyguthealthyyoubook.com to learn more about the book.

But essentially this book was me trying to give people a very reasonable and responsible education on their gut health, why it's so important, all the things that they can benefit and then taking all that information.

Also, people can head over to my website, which is www.drrusso.com to book an appointment.

And I do see patients physically in my office in Northern California, outside of San Francisco, and also via telemedicine via Skype or what have you, if they're not in our area.

Summary of Dr Michael Ruscio interview. Watch the video for the full interview.

Dr NicolaMcFadzean – 6th June 2018 from LDN Research Trust on Vimeo.

Dr Nicola McFadzean who's actually English and she grew up in Australia. She's now in San Diego and is sharing her experience with Low dose Naltrexone.

In America, you can actually be a naturopathic doctor but that qualification just doesn't exist in Australia and I think not in England either so I went to Seattle and I studied for four years and got my doctorate of naturopathic medicine and then moved to San Diego in 2003.

I was invited to work in a clinic where the medical director was a fairly well-known autism doctor and so I was introduced to Low dose Naltrexone around that time through him.

I started LDN  mostly autism then I started seeing Lyme patients. And today, the majority of my practice is Lyme, probably 95% is chronic Lyme.

I experienced pretty good success with LDN in autism patients.

I did the treatment in conjunction with dietary changes, addressing candida and all those kinds of things. I think with any of these sorts of chronic health issues, there's not one thing that's going to be like the be-all and end-all there.

There's just no one thing out there on the planet like that.

With Lyme disease, there is a chronic infection and it is complex because the immune system is suppressed.

I see a lot of Hashimoto's thyroiditis patients with Lyme which is another area LDN helps and then mold toxicity, heavy metals etc.

So it's a question of trying to gather as much information from the patient to do as much functional diagnostic testing as possible.

Sometimes testing for Lyme can be a little bit unreliable. So we have to just kind of put all the pieces together and figure out what makes sense.

 I typically will start people on natural therapies. First I do prescribe antibiotics and some patients I'll actually prescribe LDN right out the gate in the first visit.

I do have some patients that I put them on some herb and they come back six weeks later, like pretty much symptom-free. That's the exception, unfortunately, so I usually tell them anticipated boots two years or more of treatment. But it's not actually taking that long to get them on the road to recovery but to really get to that point that we can confidently say they're in remission.

We never say we cure Lyme once it's chronic, but if someone's just being bitten by ticks, they get antibiotics and we can potentially eradicate Lyme at that point when it's a very young new infection. In chronic Lyme, we do use the words remission. I do have some patients that are sort of 90% of where they were before. I do have some people that just do have flares along the way, and we need to go in and do a month or so of treatment just to knock it down and then they're okay again.

And I've seen that a few times with people have come back feeling like they're having symptoms, but once we did adrenal work, then those symptoms went away.

Sometimes patients do not follow all the treatment because they start feeling better and want to do all things that they haven't done for a while and they get adrenal fatigue in the gut health. The first thing to do is to remove anything that's causing inflammation in the gut. So I get people off gluten, dairy, whatever food intolerances they might have. So I do a lot of IgG food sensitivity testing, just to see if there are any foods that are inflaming a person's gut, that they might not be aware of. Some people are sensitive to garlic or bananas or pineapple and they wouldn't necessarily know that. So I do check and sort of work on the diet first and then I'll usually do a combination of stool testing. And I like a test called a microbial organic acid so I do stool testing to check bacterial imbalance, make sure there are no intestinal parasites showing up, do the microbial organic acid to look at candida and work on getting the microbiome back in balance.

Then at the same time, we want to work on healing the gut. So I've use Colostrum liposomal claustrum, L-glutamine to calm the gut and heal the leaky gut. Usually between gut bacterial imbalance, parasites, yeast, getting inflammatory foods out then, that starts to put things in the right direction.

There's a number of different ways to test for candida. Just looking at symptoms in the body of somebody who's got gas bloating, white coating on the tongue, foggy brain fatigue. They're all kind of indicators of candida. From a testing standpoint, you can do blood antibody testing. So IgG, IGA, and IgM markers to candida. You can do a stool test. It's like a comprehensive stool analysis and it will often show up there but my favorite is this microbial organic acid test.

If the results are high I do antifungal therapy and then you check it again and it's down.  You're on the right track, not finished yet, but you're on the right track.

Whereas to me, you don't get that clear cut feedback through the stool testing or the blood test

The treatment for candida. I use a lot of herbs like grapefruit and Pau d'arco.  We all have candida, but where is the overgrowth coming I do use some prescription antifungals in my practice, especially if I do have patients on longterm antibiotics. I put them in antifungals that don't cause a lot of side effects. Some patients with Fibromyalgia are very sensitive to medications and I think that probably comes down a lot to genetic issues with methylation.

But the trick is always just to start with very low doses of things and work people up gradually because especially with candida they can be that die off kind of effect.

And I'll use a lot of binders too, with my patients, activated charcoal to help draw toxins out of the body, especially if we are doing any kind of therapy, that's killing bugs, whether they are bacteria or candida. So doing binders can help to get them out and then obviously replenishing with probiotics.

I have also patients with depression and it's based on looking at depression from a couple of different angles. So I see this sort of two elements of depression in my patients.

One is depression is a very natural response to being in pain, chronically to being homebound, bedbound, not being able to be out in the world and in life and enjoying friends and family and children. And then as a reaction to two circumstances, depression and anxiety, a fairly understandable emotion.

Then we have the other half that the infections themselves, cause depression and anxiety just as realist symptom as knee pain or fatigue.

These infections through inflammation in the brain miss neurotransmitters working on their central nervous system and kind of creating depression and anxiety as well. To some extent, it's just a matter of treating the infections to help the depression.

I do have some patients who do antidepressants while waiting to treat the underlying causes. I strongly encourage my patients to get counselling, something to help them deal with navigating their illness and just the sense of loss and sense of grief and the fears that come up.

And I'm a strong believer that a lot of Lyme patients have PTSD because of what they've been through in the medical system so far on their way to getting to the right doctor. I also use amino acid therapy and natural agents to help take the edge off depression and anxiety as well.

Another one that my patients talk about a lot because Lyme is kind of an invisible illness and they look fine, you don't look sick by close family and friends too.

Some of my patients come into the office and they look like a million dollars, she's done the nails but if I really sat down and asked them about it, they could be in bed for days, just recovering from the effort it took to do that.

If people want to find me I do give telephone or Skype consultations

The biggest restriction on doing that is I can't prescribe anything for a patient I've not met in my office at least one time but a lot of people if they have a local doctor to do the prescribing, I can still give recommendations.

Summary of Dr. Nicola McFadzean interview. Please watch the video for the full interview.

Sunjya Schweig (LDN, low dose naltrexone) from LDN Research Trust on Vimeo.

Kat Toups (LDN, low dose naltrexone) from LDN Research Trust on Vimeo.

Pol De Saedeleer, PharmD (LDN, low dose naltrexone) from LDN Research Trust on Vimeo.

Kent Holtorf (LDN, low dose naltrexone) from LDN Research Trust on Vimeo.

Richard Horowitz (LDN, low dose naltrexone) from LDN Research Trust on Vimeo.

Armin Scwarzbach (LDN, low dose naltrexone) from LDN Research Trust on Vimeo.

Jill Brook MA - 16th May 2018 (LDN, low dose naltrexone) from LDN Research Trust on Vimeo.

Jill Brook, MA shares her Low Dose Naltrexone (LDN) experience on the LDN Radio Show with Linda Elsegood.

ill Brook, M.A. ran a thriving nutrition practice in Southern California for 12 years, until severe POTS and related disorders left her unable to stand up, eat, sleep, or get around without fainting. For years she was homebound, searching for answers. After trying everything recommended by 19 specialists, Jill found the LDN 2016 conference, which changed her life. 

She is now back to enjoying her old activities, working as a Nutrition Consultant to the Dysautonomia Clinic, serving on the Boards of patient advocacy groups, and assisting several POTS specialists with their research. Most recently she was the subject of a published case study describing her unusually successful recovery, and the role that LDN may have played.

Jill Brook suffered for over 17 years with dysautonomia and was on her “last legs” before discovering Low Dose Naltrexone. She shares her story, describing her worsening symptoms and various treatments on her road back to health. As a dietitian she also shares with us, how diet affects the immune system and overall health. This interview will benefit anyone with an illness caused by a low autoimmune system, and autonomic dysfunction.

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