Osteoporosis vs Sarcopenia – what is the real threat to your health as you age? Dr. Beth Bagley and Dr. Frederick Schurger attempt to answer this question by breaking down why sarcopenia, the lesser-known "muscle-wasting disease," might be even more concerning than osteoporosis. They share practical tips you can easily try today to maintain strength and vitality, from increasing protein intake to simple movement strategies. Tune in to learn how staying active and making intentional lifestyle changes can help you age with confidence and resilience. Do not let sarcopenia sneak up on you – take control of your lifestyle now!
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Welcome folks to the show.
It is a wonderful day to be a chiropractor.
It is. Saw some really great people and just some amazing stuff. The theme for me, I don't know what prompted it, it's been osteoporosis is not the disease you want. Osteoporosis is overrated.
I agree.
I'm just going to say it. People are going to be like, “Wait osteoporosis is bad.” Like it is. The problem with osteoporosis is by the time you have it, it's too late. The real problem is something that no one has heard about. I asked every patient who should be familiar with this word. I don't think I was when I went through chiropractic school. I don't know about you, but sarcopenia is the word of the day.
No, not at all.
For those who aren't familiar with this word, it is muscle wasting as we age.
It sounds scary, the word itself. It's like you have sarcopenia and you're like, “No.” Honestly, it is.
It's very scary.
That's one of the reasons people are not doing as well as they could be doing in their older years. There are lots of reasons for this too. I think we're going to go over some.
I think we should because one of the interesting thing, I have had several discussions about this, like the one young lady who spurred on the conversation. She was having a hard time just getting down. Again, I had my patients lay face down on the table, but she was having a hard time groaning as she was getting on the table. She's doing great. Her head's on straight. She's feeling so much better, but just that little motion, and she's a farmer.
She's moving and shaking all day long.
She should be. The problem is she's not as strong as she should be. The reality is sarcopenia happens in reality, probably at the age of 35 is when it starts, because, at the age of 35, we start having a harder time building muscle in our bodies. If we're not actively doing something to stay strong, we are going to have problems. You follow that down the line to a different patient whose mother broke her other hip and needs an implant that was actually longer than the first one that they did, mom has to wait for that to heal before she can start PT.
Those PTs are itching to get someone into rehab as soon as possible but if you are physically not strong enough to handle that because of sarcopenia, now you have more problems. We've talked about in the past, you break your hip once and you have a very high likelihood of not lasting a year, especially in your older years, past 65 basically, you're in that category that it's going to be a problem.
I see Instagram posts or videos on people who are in their 80s and they're running up and down the stairs.
They're deadlifting.
They're doing jumping jacks. They're doing weightlifting. I go, “What's the difference between those people? Is it genetics? I mean, that could be a component but I think the difference is they made an effort.
You make the conscious choice early that you're not going to fall into that trap of old age. You're not going to be hunched over like this, not able to breathe. No, you've got to make these choices early in life. Maybe early in life end up being at 50 and you realize, “Wait a second, what have I been doing wrong?” Now I start setting the tone and the stage in the right direction.
The video I watched was the lady with 74 when she realized she didn't want to be what all of her friends were being was just sitting around a table talking about what was wrong with them and what doctors they saw that week. She wanted to do something different. She started going to the gym. She got a trainer. She started working out almost every day. Now that, I mean, like it was some dedication and this was like a ten-year progress and she was in her 80s and I was blown away. She's doing things that I'm doing in the gym and I'm like, “Dang girl.”
Exactly. Here's the thing we could say, “Why don't we just give old people steroids so they don't have sarcopenia like juice up and then hit the gym?”
Sounds good.
One of the things that we know about some of these bodybuilders that do juice up and do use steroids, they oftentimes will get so strong so fast, the muscle will actually grow significantly and then the bone either breaks that it's attached to or the tendon completely pulls out of the bone, what they call an avulsion fracture because the muscle outpaced the development of the bone. There's our solution to osteoporosis. We take care of the sarcopenia. We take care of making sure we're slowly making strength gains a couple of times a week. We're talking 2, 3 times a week, maybe up to an hour, but really you only need about 30 minutes of dedicated work to make these changes and make this progression. With time, the sarcopenia will stop being a problem.
I just want to define based on, I'll do the NIH definition of sarcopenia just so everyone knows, a musculoskeletal disease, I don't know if I believe that, which muscle mass strength, and performance are significantly compromised with age. Sarcopenia most commonly affects elderly and sedentary populations and patients who have comorbidities that affect the musculoskeletal system or impair physical activities. The Wikipedia, which we know is always true, it says the rate of muscle loss is dependent on exercise level, nutrition, comorbidities, and other factors. Exercise level is pretty important there.
In fact, it's probably the most important. You start looking at people who are in this space, who are training people, who are looking at the literature, your Peter Attia, your Mike Mutzel, your Thomas DeLauer, they're looking at all of this stuff. Basically, everything is saying, be active. Be physically active and lift heavy things. For the 60-year-old woman who's reading and saying, “I'm 5'4 and 110 pounds wet.” Don't worry about bulking. You never will. It's physically not possible without significant steroids.
You can, it doesn't need to be bulk. If we look at a picture, a cross-section of sarcopenia of like somebody's like a muscle, and somebody who has muscle and then there's a muscle, there's the bone and then there's fat around it and then there's skin. Somebody with sarcopenia, there is the bone in there and then the muscle is tiny and then we've got the fat around it and then the skin. What it is, is it's not like you could be tiny, what we call skinny fat and skinny fat is that you still have a high body fat percentage, but you don't look overweight. That's because a lot of times of the sarcopenia is happening.
This continues to become a problem because as they said, sedentary, is not limited to the age population, what we would consider senior citizens, it is more and more in today's population of 20s and 30-year-olds who are not getting out, they're not being active, they're not doing the things that they're supposed to be doing.
I bring it all the way back to the kids. Let me talk about the kids today. The kids today sit in front of computers. They do their work. They sit in front of computers. They play video games. They don't go outside. Maybe your kids do. Obviously, everybody's kids are different, but the vast majority of them are not going outside.
We would go outside and not come back until we either heard a bell or the streetlights came on. That's how we grew up is we were outside and getting into trouble. These kids, they don't do that and so they are not active. I mean, I was itching, I was like a latchkey kid. Once my parents got home from work, I was allowed to go play. I would be out until I was in trouble and I had to come back for dinner. In the summer times, they didn't even know where I was.
I'll be honest, I'm a mom. When my kids were little, I knew where they were at every moment but I still encouraged them to go out and play with their friends and go into the woods and get into trouble and build a fort and all those things. It still wasn't the percentage that I was. My kids do sit in front of a computer screen quite a bit. I mean, we do work out, but they could probably work out more. I'm worried about my children who are already set up for sarcopenia and they're only fifteen. It's hard. We have to get the kids moving.
It is. Actually what might be what's curious is just by being physically active is one thing. You being physically active is a good role model for them. Even if your mom decided that she was going to start working out as well, that would actually set genes in the girls, what we call epigenetics, that would actually set them so that they would be more physically active longer, healthier, and their children would also be healthy in that same direction. It is really interesting. It's a matter of setting the stage and moving in the right direction. Probably the other thing that prompted me to think about this is I went and got my in-body test for my body or for my muscle mass, my fat mass and all of that.
For the past month, I'd been running a pseudo experiment. I've added a little bit of rice to my diet and I've been adding essential amino acids to my protein shakes, which I maybe have 2 or 3 a week. I'm not like, this isn't a regular thing, but I've been up 10 pounds for the past month for my normal. I've been normally 190. I'm sitting at 200 almost every day. I'm like, oh, except my calipers say that it's staying steady 10 millimeters, maybe even nine if I really pinch hard. The interesting thing is I'm actually up two pounds of muscle and down body fat. It's definitely going in the right direction. Something is working the way it's supposed to.
Are you saying you need a little bit of carb is what you're saying?
I don't know. I just said I added a little bit of carb because I wanted some rice.
I think you need a little bit of carbs.
I'm still doing mostly keto carnivore, but every now and then.
Until you had honey, you had a whole bunch of honey the other weekend. No, it's not. It is sugar. Don't start with me.
It is made by bees.
It's a carnivore.
It's sort of carnivore, it's not a carnivore.
It's paleo, it's not a carnivore.
Big honey has me pushing honey for the carnivore diet. There are so many ingredients in honey.
Carbs are not 100% the enemy.
No.
The carbs that have been introduced into the human diet over the last 50 years are the enemy though.
Yes. The process colors, and the process grains.
Yeah, the enriched wheat, the enriched rice, the enriched crap. We talked about that last time or two times ago and how that can be affecting connective tissues, which scared the shnikes out of me. I have talked to a few of my patients with connective tissue disorders about that. They were all like, “Really?” I was like, “Yeah.” I gave them some resources so they could start doing some of their research. I love the fact that you could eat a little bit more carbs, not a lot, I know it was not a lot, a little bit, and you actually gained a little bit more muscle.
It makes sense because that probably means I'm storing more glycogen in my muscle. Workouts have been a little bit easier and stronger, more consistent between different rep schemes. I'm running a 6, 7, 8 rep scheme right now, and my 7 and my 8 rep schemes, if I'm on a good day and I feel strong are comparable to the six rep days as far as volume. Sometimes you have that in you and sometimes you don't. It's curious. You try to push for 25,000 pounds of volume in a session. It's funny how doing it with 6 reps versus 7 reps versus 8 reps, just hires you out. It doesn't sound like a lot of difference, but it is.
It is.
It really is. I don't know if the carbs are helping significantly. Like I finished up the bag that I had the other day and I haven't had it for two days.
What you're saying is it's a tiny portion of what you're eating but the vast majority of people who follow the standard American diet for years, the vast majority was the grains because that was the bottom of the pyramid. Again, we've talked about how that pyramid is completely wrong and disgusting what they did to all of us. Now let's talk about someone who has sarcopenia. This person is already in it. They can feel their muscles are wasted away. They have trouble getting up. They cannot get up out of a chair without pushing up. If you told them to get down on the floor, they'd say, “I cannot get down. I won't be able to get back up.”
The first thing they've got to do is learn how to walk again. Treat it like you are a young child relearning how to do all these activities. The weather has been pretty beautiful lately around the Midwest. Get out there and go for a walk and as long as it’s not I see on the sidewalks, bundle up and go for a walk. The more you get out there on the regular, the better off you're going to be. Just walking.
Walking in and of itself will do tons of benefits. Plus if you do it right after a meal, you get all of the benefits of building leg strength that you might not have ordinarily have done. That leg strength when we get to a point where you might have to have hip surgery or have some hip problems or a hip replacement, you can get into rehab sooner. The PTs know who's going to survive and who's not based upon how fast you get in there.
If it takes you a while to get into their rehab, they might not be able to help you at all which is really scary when you think about it because they are really good at getting people back on their feet, strong. That's their job. That's what they're aiming to do. The first thing you got to do now before there's a problem, is get up and walk. Now you're getting up and walking, it's like, “I can walk for a while.” Good. You've got a mile in, you've got two miles in, you've got three miles in, whatever it is. Now add some weight.
Question. I just bought for myself a weighted vest because when I go for a walk, because I don't run anymore. My knees don't like it. My body doesn't like the Jocelyn.
Jason caught you. Don't worry about it.
I don't run. If you see me run too because something is chasing me, but I bought a weighted vest and it's either 25 or 30. I cannot remember which one I picked. I don't recommend somebody starting with that if you haven't been working out like you don't need to do it but would you recommend somebody who is now good at walking, adding like a 5 or a 10-pound vest?
I would just start with a couple of handweights. If we're talking someone who's having problems just getting out of the chair and you're able to walk 5 to 10 pounds. Something that you can comfortably carry, do you want to carry five pounds in both hands or do you want to carry 10 pounds in one hand and then switch hands back and forth?
Why I would say that would be maybe a better option is because grip strength is an issue, which will help you if you're like a farmer carrying, which means right down by your side, a weight. The other thing is you can take that weight that you're carrying on your side, and if your fingers are getting tired, you can actually bring it up and then hold it up. You're getting that weight up. You're still carrying the weight. It's just a different way to carry it. You are not working on the grip strength.
There are three places that I would say that I focus on. There's the suitcase or farmer's carry where your hand and the fist holding the weight should be right behind your thigh, buttock area, just right behind. You're not putting it way behind your back, but you're putting it just behind your leg as you're walking because that'll help pull that shoulder back a little bit and you're in the rack position, which is up here.
Although if you're drifting on, you could do it double handed too.
You could do two hands. You could also do it overhead in the waiter's walk.
That one's hard but you could totally do it.
That one's really hard. I would start with the waiters, bring it down to the rack, bring it down to your side, switch sides, and just do that.
If someone has arthritis though and their hands are hurting. Do you think a vest might be a good investment for them? A weighted vest?
I think you need to do both. I think I would do a hand weight before I would do a vest. I'll come back to why. If the arthritis is there, as you get everything else stronger, so will the hands. Some of that arthritis will actually feel better because you're getting strength in. The strength in the movement will override the pain reception in the brain so that you say, “When I do this, I feel good.”
That's a really good point right there. Let's talk about that because where pain is felt when some people say, “It's all in your head.” Yes. Pain is in your head because that is where the receptors send signals to but lack of movement if I have a broken arm and I have my arm in a cast, and then when I take it out of the cast 4 or 6 weeks later, “It hurts so much.” Like just to bend my arm, because movement is what keeps things, first of all, mobile and all this stuff, but lack of movement in joints actually increases the likelihood of pain. It takes a long time for the pain receptors to get died down again. What are your thoughts on that whole situation?
What you’re doing is you start moving in general. Pain fibers are some of the slowest signals in the body. I cannot remember what the speed is, but it's relatively slow whereas when you start moving, if you get up and like, we're coupling this with walking. We are already experiencing movement and nerve proprioception, all the feedback mechanisms are very fast. Actually, there's a gate mechanism theory that they talk about in neuroscience that basically says they run parallel, but the motion will close out the pain gate category.
Your body can learn to ignore the pain. This is why runners get that runner high going on because they're running and running oftentimes through pain but they have all that motion that is overriding what they call the pain gate again. You're basically closing the gate, as it were, to the pain reception and overriding it with the motion perception.
One of the hardest things when you are in chronic pain is to make yourself move.
Yes.
One of the best things you can do if you treat it like even a medication is to get up and move, even if it's just going to the mailbox and back and forth.
Especially going outside because it changes your state. If you're cooped up inside all day long, your state is like, “I'm just in the same place and I'm depressed.” Just go outside. I mean, touch grass, literally touch the grass. As silly as that sounds, there's research out there that supports getting outside barefoot on the grass and grounding, which may do something. It's funny that it's something that simple.
Going outside changes your state. If you are cooped up inside all day long, you will get depressed. Go out and touch grass.
Getting sun exposure. They are now coming back around saying, “Wait a second, sun exposure is actually good for us. There are so many benefits beyond just vitamin D production that we don't haven't even fully explored yet that are important. We can go on and on about not using sunscreens because of the benzophenones and some of the chemicals.” Anything with a benzo in it, just think that's cancer-causing because it is.
What about a benzodiazepine? I don't even know about that. I'm going to look that up while we're talking.
Anything benzene maybe, not benzo. Quite honestly, I don't know how much difference chemically there are between the two. I'm not crazy about them. Benzenes. That's the one I'm looking for. I know I said Benzo.
That was why I was like, “Hmm.” When I think of Benzo's, I think of Xanax and stuff like that.
In any case, I'm not thinking those are any good either.
They're not, but I don't think there are rings in those. I'm looking at Klonopin and yep, there are benzene rings.
In any case, I would just get out of the mood. When would I introduce a vest and I'm with you? I love my vest.
I just got one. I'm so excited.
It makes the walk so much more fun. My concern with the vest comes twofold. One, you and I are both a little bit nutty and we're going to say, “Let's get the heavy vest.” I honestly wish I might pick up a couple of lighter plates just to switch out so that I can go on a longer walk because I find I'm good at about 30 minutes, which is about for me, 1.4 miles for the trip that I'm doing.
What do you typically keep in your vest when you're using the vest?
I've got about 28 pounds.
I think the reason I got the heavy vest is because sometimes I don't have time for a 45-minute walk or an hour walk. I just want to take a twenty-minute walk, but I want it to like count.
Exactly. Quite honestly, let's be honest, you've got a bigger frame than I do. That 30 pounds, percentage-wise.
I don't think you should talk about my frame.
I know. Let's back up. What I am finding is when I go on a 30-minute walk, which gets into the 2 to 3-mile range, my low back is a little bit hotter than I like.
I've noticed that too.
It's a bit of a concern. I'm thinking I'm going to keep my walk is going to be limited to that 1.4, 30-minute walk. Some days I want to go on a long walk.
I'm just going to bring my kids with me and then I switch the best of them when I'm tired of it.
That's the other thing, if you're happy with your block around your house and you can just walk around, you're doing laps.
You can drop it off if you need to.
That way and then keep walking because sometimes that's all you need to do is just keep on walking.
When you take a vest off and you've been walking all of a sudden, you're like, “I'm just floating. It feels so good.”
It feels good. It feels really good. I'm not sure for myself what I'm feeling in that low back. Again, I don't ever feel low back stuff, generally speaking, that's not self-inflicted. I don't know how much of it is the vest, which is definitely going to build muscle just fast because your body says, “Look, you're carrying this many pounds. You are now 230 pounds instead of 200 pounds.” Your metabolism is going to naturally go up.
This is the issue with people who are on The Biggest Loser when they were told to metabolically, their metabolism is higher than yours or mine at a healthy body weight. What's curious is if you just starve someone and don't give them the calories they need, what that does is actually drop their metabolism so they cannot burn body fat. It's this really ugly cycle so you need to know how to approach it, which is why we've talked about focusing on more protein in the diet.
If you starve someone and do not give them the calories they need, their metabolism will drop and cannot burn body fat.
That's the next thing I wanted to bring up. If someone is fighting sarcopenia and they're trying to avoid that muscle wasting as they're getting older, we've been taught so much about carbs, fat, and protein. Some people don't even know what a protein versus a carb is. Real quick, let's talk about what a protein is because that's what we're going to be probably focusing on.
In the simplest form, all meat that is coming from an animal is protein. That's the simplest version. your beef, your pigs, your chickens, your sheep, lamb, what else? Those are the big ones.
Dogs, cats.
I mean, if you're into that.
I'm not.
I'm not either.
Yes, animals. Fish and all of the things. As we get older, especially women will tell me, and men too, is that they're just not as hungry. They cannot eat a lot at the time, that stuff. Again, your body's trying to tell you that you might not need it but if you become more active, you actually get more hungry.
Yeah, and you will. I'm not doing a bunch of protein shakes, but there's a bunch of good proteins out there. I would definitely spend a little bit extra. Jocko Willink is more than happy to sponsor us with Jocko Molk because I really do like that. I do use now protein as well. What I found really interesting to give an extra boost to all of this was essential amino acids. I just use a straight powder from Bulk Supplements. They can also sponsor us.
We use a lot of their stuff.
We do but a straight essential amino acids, not the branch chain. There were some thoughts that the branch chains make the difference, but adding more essential amino acids to your protein shake does a bunch of things. Now, bear in mind, I am taking straight amino acids and I would consider myself hardcore when it comes to this stuff. Amino acids, I've had shoes that didn't taste as bad. Let's just put it.
Let's talk real quick. Somebody who has no idea what a protein is. Protein is animals. Protein is these strands or things that are connected. It's an amino acid, which is like a part of a protein you think about and another part of a protein comes together, two amino acids, now we've got a protein. They come together and then they fold in different ways and that becomes a protein. When we talk about protein, that's that whole folded thing.
Another name that will pop up, is because they're using it in conjunction with collagen protein, but collagen peptides are very much the same thing. It's just it's a different buzzword to get you to buy their product.
I like it.
It's good.
I'm going to tell you ever since I've been taking my collagen for the last six months, my fingernails are so wonderful. They were cracking. Am I just getting old because I am getting older? I was like, I'm just getting old. I was like, “What do I know helps?” I was like, “I've heard collagen helps. I've heard other vitamins.” I just started every morning with my tea. I put a scoop of collagen powder in and it takes a while for things to grow out, but I can tell you is like, these are the best nails of my life. They were so good.
How's your hair been?
It's great. My hair grows better.
I'm waiting for mine to grow better.
I'm waiting for yours too. They say your joints are supposed to feel better. I don't know if they do or not.
How much protein are you using volume-wise?
How much collagen?
Yes.
I can tell you how many grams of protein are in there. It's 19.
Quadruple that.
I'm not going to, it's too expensive.
Get it from Great Lakes for the eight-pound bag. It's worth it.
Really?
It's worth it.
Great Lakes.
I don't ache at all from my workouts other than I'm like, “I can feel my arms. I did a workout the other day.”
Great Lakes is the name.
Great Lakes Collagen, they can also sponsor us.
Is that on the Zon or is that on their website?
That's on their website. Great Lakes Collagen is out there. They're based out of Chicago. I am convinced Great Lakes collagen supplies a lot of collagen to all the other collagen companies.
Chicago has a big collagen thing, the vital proteins, I think. It's like there's a manufacturing plant there. Is it the Great Lakes?
Probably coming from the Great Lakes.
It might be Great Lakes.
This is why my background in engineering, I've been around the business enough that I look at things and I'm like, “What makes yours better than theirs? Like why is the standard process a better vitamin?” The standard process grows a lot of the food that then gets converted into their vitamins. They're doing that on property, not all of it, but a lot of it. Now foods has a complete laboratory.
They've probably got one of the most extensive laboratories in the world checking to make sure that everything that they are ordering that's on the label is at the same quality that they're going to put on the label. You've got certain companies that are doing the work. Great Lakes Collagen has been around forever and they have been sourcing animal hides from, I believe it's Peru or Brazil. No, it's Peru. It's on the it's on the west coast of South America. They've been making collagen. They ship it in 30 and 55-gallon drums. I thought about buying a 30-gallon drum just to have it, just to do it once. That would probably last us a year.
It looks like the Great Lakes collagen, if you buy the eight-pound bag is slightly less than I'm paying currently.
It's a good deal. It's a good bag. I transfer it to a different container because it's easier to work with when that container empties.
How many grams? They say their supplement is two tablespoons in a serving. Usually, I do four tablespoons of my collagen, which would be a preference.
I'm at eight because I use one of the scoops from my now protein that seems to just hit the nose. My brain wasn't thinking straight the other week and I was actually doing two scoops of that. I was probably doing more closer to
That's about 40 grams, 50 grams of collagen protein, I should say, the peptides.
This comes back to the stuff we've discussed in the past about glycine. Glycine being the most abundant amino acid in collagen, there is a lot of evidence to suggest that we are not consuming enough glycine, or that there are people who need significantly more glycine to be healthy. You can get glycine separately, which is great because glycine tastes like sugar. You can throw it in your smoothie for an extra sweetening boost, or you can just add more collagen.
We've talked about to avoid sarcopenia or to start recovering from it because I do think that there is some recovery possible.
Yes, and before we leave protein, you should try to eat your body weight in grams and protein a day, especially if you are over 50 because the research used to say, “You don't need as much protein as you get older.” No, in fact, it's quite the opposite. You need more protein now as we get older because what is probably happening at the age of 35, when they say you cannot build muscle as much is the mechanism to build muscle isn't working as efficiently and you need more protein to continue building muscle. This is why you should add in the collagen. This is why you should add in essential amino acids, the extra stuff that is already loose and unbound that the body is ready to make work and get you back into a stronger standpoint.
If someone has problems digesting protein, which does happen as we age. For some people because of lack of a lot of times stomach acid and years of taking stomach acid reducers, that's not great for you. this is just me thinking outside of the box there. If you took collagen and you took free amino acids, part of the breakdown has already happened. It's like, if I eat like a chicken wing like I was eating before, and there's some collagen on there, and there's protein, and there's fat, and delicious buffalo sauce.
That has it all and it's all combined. It's all part of it. My stomach has to break down some of those bonds before my body can then continue to digest in the small intestine. If we take some of those, it's possible that we could be getting even better nutrition, especially if you have trouble digesting protein.
At the very least kickstart the process better so that you can move stuff through.
If I were the person, let's say I weighed 130 pounds, and I wanted to do the 130 grams of protein, could I count some of the grams even though collagen is not a component?
I wouldn't.
You wouldn't count it.
I don't count my collagen grams towards my daily. Now I might count them to my daily calories if I'm in a cut. That's different but I really don't because I think it is different. One of the things that they have been discussing is whether or not we should be looking at protein calories as a caloric knee, as we've been counting calories for everything else, or separate that out into a different category.
I'm leaning towards, we need to separate it out into a different category and not be so uptight about calories at that point in time. For me, if I want to push at least 200 grams of protein, at the very least, I'm not counting the collagen protein, I'm focusing on my beef, I'm focusing on my eggs, I'm focusing on my bacon, that's it. Everything else, the collagen protein, that's an added bonus.
That is skin and joint health is where I think of that as. I would have that in two different categories and the collagen is extra. The amino acids or the essential amino acids are extra. In fact, some days I even say, “I'll take the protein shake.” I'm like, “This was just for fun.” I count it, but I recognize that it's probably more a fun drink than the necessary calories I needed to keep strong and stay strong.
Some studies have said that you cannot absorb more than 20, 30, 40, there are different ones, absorb protein per meal and there are lots of others that don't. What are your feelings on that?
There's actually really good evidence that it doesn't. In fact, Tim Ferriss back when he published his four-hour body years ago, found that there were women in France that would eat one meal a day, but it was a big high-protein meal, and they were not suffering from any sarcopenia at all. The thought was that you can only do that much. I think the math didn't work out. Now we see people who are doing a hundred grams in a meal at a sitting and doing that twice a day. They are not wasting that protein, the protein isn't having problems.
I used to think, I used to think that I couldn't eat that much in a meal but then I just calculated, because if I ate a steak, I typically eat my whole steak, I don't break it into two stakes or anything. I'll just eat a whole steak. I measured it last night, two nights ago, whenever it was. It was about 68 grams of protein based on my calculations. That was just the steak I ate. I ate a couple of other things too. That's a good amount of protein for a meal.
It is. I would like to see it more at 130 for myself, but I had stew meat for lunch and I think it could have been a pound, but they normally package it about a pound and a half, almost two pounds.
A lot of times a pound and a half.
I went through it.
There's some fat.
There wasn't any fat in this stew meat, but my intent was I'll eat some of it. I said, “I'll eat some more.” I was done with it. That worked out that way. When I had a chuck roast the other day, and it was probably a four-pound chuck roast, I had one piece that I just didn't get to until Wednesday or something like that. Every now and then I hold back, it was only a three-pound chuck roast. I can dream that it was a four-pound chuck roast that I ate in one sitting.
Sounds like meat sweats to me.
It was good.
I've also seen online some people utilizing egg white protein as a protein source. If there are powdered egg whites, you can actually cook with them too.
Buy good stuff. Do not buy the cheapest egg white protein or egg protein because you will have no friends.
Stinky?
You will be very stinky.
Really?
Yes. It is absolutely some of the nastiest stuff I've had out there. There are good egg protein powders out there. I'm not a big fan of pure egg-white approaches.
No, I don't either.
There's so much nutrition. There's a lot of protein in the egg white, but there are so much vitamins in the yolk that that's really where you want to get as much of that.
You might as well eat the whole egg.
Eat the whole egg.
An egg is approximately, and they're different sizes, approximately six grams of protein per egg.
It’s 6, or 7 grams, depending upon how big they are. They are fantastic. I mean, every time that I've taken a break from eggs, and every now and then I will.
You get tired of them after so long.
I don't get it.
I do. I've been like, I've had eggs for six meals in a row. I got to stop.
I cannot do them in a row. I'll do beef for lunch and then my eggs for dinner. In fact, that'll be dinner tonight. What's interesting is eggs are a complete protein. Your body can absorb them. In fact, on the protein absorbability scale, eggs are higher than a100% because they're that good. Whenever they were saying, “How much can you absorb? Eggs were better than that.”
People are better off just eating eggs. Eating eggs, even the junk, and I'm going to call it junk at the grocery stores. If that's what you can afford, if that's what you can get, it is still better nutrition, especially protein-wise than anything else. I personally separate the yolks out and I like a runny yolk I don't know where I came across this. Maybe I need to go back and do some research to see if this actually pans out but by cooking the whites and leaving the yolks runny, your body's able to digest it better because the whites cooked are easier to digest, but the yolks just warmed up and more liquidy. That's where you get the nutrition.
Cooking the egg white and leaving the yolk running will help you digest it better and get the most nutrition.
Thanks. That's how I like my eggs anyway. There you go. There was something else about protein that I want to talk about, but I think those are the big ones. You need to be making sure you're eating enough protein because so many people, who are getting into the sarcopenia state, they're not eating enough protein as it is. In fact, I was talking with one of my patients who is thinking about getting into assisted living only because she's tired of making her own meals. I'm just like this is a catch-22. Yeah, she'll have prepared meals, but how many of those prepared meals are not going to be healthy?
100%.
Think about things like the food pyramid or the plate and the advisory panels that do these things and make policy for school lunch programs, for assisted living homes, for prisons, they are putting food together based upon the food pyramid, the food plate where they're not getting enough protein and they are having problems health-wise, sometimes mentally, sometimes physical and emotional outbursts that do not serve them in the longterm. This is bad. This is problematic. We've got kids who are ADHD on school lunch programs. At least they're getting fed. Are they and to what detriment? The more you can cook for yourself, and it doesn't have to be expensive, it doesn't have to be fancy. What I didn't share with you when we came down to visit last time?
What?
I did not share with you the jerky that I made. I know.
I'm so hurt.
I feel bad about that because it's really good. I made the jerky out of round and round roasts are just not fun to chew on but round roast jerky is amazing. I figured out how to cut it right so that it falls apart as you're chewing on it. Again, that's a very inexpensive cut. Is it hard to make it turn into jerky? Not really. You could do it if you've got an oven.
I make jerky in my oven. I'm going to do that this weekend. Thanks for reminding me.
Good job. There are so many things that you can with cheaper cuts of meat that you can get the protein that you need.
Let's wrap it up. Sarcopenia, muscle wasting. We don't want that as we age. We want to keep our muscles or as much as we possibly can. You can recover from it.
If we let sarcopenia go down its natural route, osteoporosis, broken hips, and early death are right there.
When we talk about as chiropractors about getting to the root cause of things, we're talking about this being the root cause versus osteoporosis being the problem. That's a symptom of this already being a problem. Eating more protein, your body weight in grams. Protein is an animal source of things most of the time. You can get it in other places, but it's animal meat and eggs and some dairy stuff.
Movement. Go for a walk.
Once you're good at movement, add weight to that movement.
As soon as you can. You might be like I've been walking around this block for three days. Feel good about that. Add the weight. Here's the nice thing. Take one weight. Doesn't have to be too heavy.
It could be a big water bottle or two big water bottles. If you're like, “I don't have a weight.” You have plenty of things that weigh things in your house.
Even just carrying that bottle will be, and you drink the whole thing on the walk, now you've utilized it, you put it into your body, which will metabolize the water, and you've made your walk lighter as you went down for your path. You can add a weight. You can do laps around your house. You can do go to a point, come back, drop the weights off, and walk some more if the weight gets too heavy.
Pick the weights back up. You can cycle through it.
Do it after a meal.
When you said that, that was not just what you were talking about building the muscles, but if you did have carbohydrates in your meal, you would reduce your spike of your blood sugar and that is so much healthier. People who work out or do some movement after they eat live longer.
People who work out or do some sort of movement after they eat live longer.
Again, we're talking about going for a walk for five minutes, one direction, turning around. It can be that simple after a meal. If you did that after three meals a day, that's 30 minutes of walking. If you could find another 20, 30 throughout the day. Again, it doesn't have to be complicated and doesn't have to be all in a row, just do it. You'll be so much better in no time flat.
Yes. do it through the pain. It's not going to feel good when you first start doing it. No pain, no gain.
Let's talk about some of the drugs that they use for osteoporosis real quick. The patient's mother that broke her hip was on Fosamax.
That's the most common one right now.
A problem with Fosamax is it will sometimes put down bone and cause a little bit of a spike apparently. She broke her hip at that spot.
There are some studies that are showing that taking those drugs will actually cause you to be more likely to break a hip when you fall which is the opposite effect that you actually want because it puts down low-quality bone.
The way the bone is laid down is what they call a matrix. It's not just one solid piece. It's a bunch of interlocking pieces inside. If you've been watching any of these videos about 3D printing, especially when they do something solid or as they're building something that will be solid, not necessarily solid, but it needs extra support structures. They add little matrix pieces in there to give it strength before it gets to the point that it has the intrinsic strength that it needs. Again, go watch a 3D printing video.
Those are fun to watch.
They really are. One of the things that when you're thinking about that if you're doing 3D printing, and this is actually a really good example in relative and probably what Fosamax is doing, is it's laying down a structure that is very straight. It's not allowing for this matrix to build properly. When you do this with a 3D printed material, it's very easy to break that material because it doesn't have the intrinsic strength to other than the plastic melting to itself. It can break along seams a little bit easier. It's not a complete analogy, it's not exactly what Fosamax is doing.
It's not the same exact thing, but it makes the bones more brittle, even though if we did a scan on them, they would look like they were more solid, they're more brittle, and they're easier to break.
That does no good for anybody with the intent of trying to get stronger bones. Again, what makes bones stronger, what makes hips stronger, get up and move. Get up and walk, and we are designed as human beings to walk as much as possible. If you cannot get up and walk, if you're in a wheelchair, grab some weights and start lifting them overhead. Just a little bit. Again, 5, 10 pounds, work your way up. It takes time.
I was convinced that I could lift 62 pounds, 63 pound weights. I think there's 63. Either way, overhead for reps and I had to actually back off to 24, to 55 and 53 kilograms, 53 pounds, 24 kilograms, bells, because I didn't have the strength or the endurance for the volume that I wanted to do. I'm just running this program until I hit the end of it. I'm going to start over with the heavier weights and say, “How, let's see how far I can go with this now.”
Just don't blow out your shoulder because you need it for practice.
I do.
If you don't use it, you lose it.
That's very much. That's exactly what it is.
We all need to start using it more and I will continue to help support my patients in that. Speaking of patients, where can they find you, Dr. Schurger?
I am at Keystone Chiropractic in Springfield, Illinois, KeystoneChiroSPI.com.
I'm in St. Louis, Missouri. I am on the West side at precisionchiropracticstl.com/ and you can find me on all socials. If you have a chance, like, subscribe, share this show because this information is so important to share with your friends. We would love a little five-star review, don't you think?
I'd be happy with a four-star review telling us that, “Doc, you're wrong about this.” I mean, they're going to give you five stars.
That's true.
They'll give you four stars and I get one.
That sounds good.
That sounds right. That seems about right.
Adds to five. We will catch you next time on the show. Take care.
Have a great evening, folks.
Beekeeping adventures, breast thermography insights, and some unexpected laughs – this episode has it all! Dr. Frederick Schurger and Dr. Beth Bagley dive into the world of bees by exploring the challenges of harvesting honey (and avoiding stings). They discuss how “no pancakes” isn’t just a quirky title, but a nod to lighthearted distractions and deep conversations. Dr. Bagley opens up about her experiences with breast thermography as an alternative to mammograms, while the duo tackles realistic healing expectations for those with degenerative spine conditions. It is a mix of humor, health, and community stories that will leave you buzzing!
Listen and read the full blog post here
The health state of America is at a crossroads, and this episode dives into critical issues shaping our well-being today. Dr. Frederick Schurger and Dr. Beth Bagley tackle the influence of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s stance on chronic illness, censorship, and the broken relationship between public health and food industry. This conversation is not about politics – it is about solutions. From the staggering rise in childhood diseases to the challenges of modern medicine, Drs. Frederick and Beth uncover the things holding us back from achieving progress and what it takes to move forward. Tune in for a candid conversation on reshaping health in a world that desperately needs change.
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Folks, to start off with, we are not getting political. This is not a political show.
There are some political things that are going to be said in this episode.
They can come off as political but they're not and they shouldn't be political.
They shouldn't be. This is for every person. This is for every American and the stuff that's affecting the world, every person in the world.
That’s why we're going to discuss this because it's topical. By the time this episode comes out, the cycle will have probably run and this will be a little bit old hat but if you have not gone and read both of the two episode and a speech then you're missing out.
You can read this speech because it is sometimes hard to understand.
True, but let's put it in perspective. By this point in time, RFK has dropped out of the swing state races and throwing his support behind President Trump. Again, not political. Only stating facts, but you hadn't noted just some of the things he was saying during his speech. I listened to it afterwards and I thought it was a good speech. His point was he got into this race because he sees the pharmaceuticals and medical industrial complex.
Also, big food and big Ag.
Are destroying the health of our country. He cited a number. It was the wrong number. He said 50% of Americans have a chronic disease.
I think he said that was more than. It was 2 out of 3. I wrote it down.
There was this 50% number he threw out.
He was saying that was wrong.
He was fact checked because it was funding for pharmaceutical research. He said 50% of the funding for pharmaceutical and FDA stuff comes from the food industry as the dollars come in and the number is 47%. Folks, F. Kennedy. Is that right?
Yes, Bobby.
I got to remember where we're at on these guys because JFK's and RFK’s and Junior's. Anyways, but he was wrong by 3%.
Let's cancel it. Speaking of canceling, the first thing he was going over in this speech were about censorship and not just censorship from big media, which is a huge problem. Even during his speech, he was censored. How that happened is CNN cut in when he started talking about some of the stuff that's a little uncomfortable. Some truth that they didn't want to hear. They cut in and said, “We’ll go back to this and give you the synopsis. Let's talk about something else. Look over here.” I was like, “You jerks.”
Fortunately, you can find it. I just typed in RFK Jr. address and the date. I wanted a transcript and there's many transcripts of it online, so you can read it. He was censored. Himself was censored in the media and by the DNC. Fortunately, he did say the RNC was not censoring him that much. They weren't working against him to try to get him out. I’m not saying the Republicans are better or anything.
Censoring has two sides to it. One is the DNC/RNC censorship that you're describing is law fair to keep him off the ballot in certain States. There is the other side of it where you've got censorship where they wouldn't let him speak on any of the major newscasts for months.
At some points, he had 20% of some of the vote. He was a contender. “In 1992, Ross Perot gave 34 in interviews on mainstream networks in contrast during the sixteen months since I've declared all the majors. ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, and CNN combined gave only two live interviews for me.” They ran a continuous deluge of hit pieces inaccurate and vile terrible things to say about him. Here's where it gets into the censorship there. As healthcare practitioners, we have to go out of our way to find information.
The reason is because much of the information is censored that we need to make good healthcare decisions and help our patients make good healthcare decisions. What he's feeling is all the stuff that we feel all day long trying to get the information we need. Now, he was getting it directly where we see that we can't get information.
We can't share our information as readily as we would like.
I'm afraid to share sometimes.
When we start saying, “We could get canceled.” We are describing a situation where our state boards decide what we're saying isn't the way they want it presented.
Maybe social media platform that we've worked with for a long time says, “You can't post here anymore because you said something angry about some company that is trying to kill people and poison people.” You're not allowed to say that.
The other thing that's interesting that's going on, again, this is August 29th that this is happening. Not only is the CEO of Telegram being held in France for not turning over effectively, Telegram a backdoor for the government to get into Telegram. Telegram is one of the few end-to-end encryption services that is not, as far as we can tell, compromised by any of the governments at this point in time because they are trying to get him. Effectively, they have charged the CEO. I'm not even exactly sure what they've charged him but he's not allowed to leave the country.
France?
He is also a dual citizen. He might be Russian but I think his current citizenship is France and UAE. One of the Princes’ down there is a good friend of his. There's some real question marks going on there. That's happening in France and Brazil. Twitter or X is effectively being shut down because Elon Musk will not comply with their demands for censorship. What we don't realize is how bad censorship is until the news is around our neck.
What about hate speech, Dr.? I don't want to see hate speech on my platforms. I don't want to be offended.
How do you know what is one person's hate versus another's?
When is hate legitimate? At some point, we should be able to say, “This politician is awful and they should not be in power.” We should be able to say stuff like that.
That is the founding intent of the first amendment in the US, but not all countries have a first amendment like what we do. We barely have it when we look at what the news, media, and the social media companies are trying to dial back. There is now evidence coming out that they should not have said ivermectin.
When looking at what news and social media are doing, we can see that they are trying to dial back the First Amendment.
That's all over the press.
The lawyers are saying, “We had to do it just to bend the narrative to what was going on in the world at the time.” Again, be mindful as you're reading and you're watching your stuff and consuming news. The censorship exists and sometimes, the censorship is self-imposed on people because they don't feel comfortable enough to say the truth.
That’s so true. We were self-centered. We should have some filters. We shouldn't say every single thing that comes to our brains, but when it's during all the COVID stuff, there were things I wanted to say and things that I wanted to scream but I didn’t. Maybe when I cross over and meet God, he'll be like, “You should have done that.” I’ll be like, “Yes, I probably should have.”
Oddly enough, that's a conversation that I've been having with a couple of people. One gentleman who realized, “Doc, when I'm out of adjustment it's back. It's bad. It's fast. We need to get this cleaned up.” He realized he needed to start care, opposed to, “I'll get a visit here and there.” For him, he needed the full thing. I had another buddy.
We both talked and he's like hammering at home that his friend who started care with me needed to get in here. We both made the comment. We both know people who died because we didn't get them the care they needed. They had an accident or something like that. Sometimes, we have to be a little bit harder but sometimes we also have to realize we have to be able to fight another day.
That self-preservation is good and can be bad.
Maybe we let someone like Eric Nepute. He went hard and he's coming out on the other end okay.
He might have won a couple of lawsuits. I hope he did because he did.
He was he was citing literature.
We've talked a lot on the show about chronic diseases and different ones in particular but RFK did at the end of his speech was talked about how he wanted to saved kids. What was he say? We need to love our kids more than we hate each other, which was like shocking. It was incredible.
I've got people who are lifelong Democrats who were like, “I can get behind that sentiment.”
People just don't realize how sick kids are and they know a lot of sick kids, but they don't realize how many kids are sick. Many kids are on chronic illness diseases, diabetes, and pre-diabetes and just tons of autoimmune issues. He said, “A typical pediatrician would see one case of diabetes on kids during his entire 40 to 50-year career. One out of every three kids who walks into his office is diabetic or pre-diabetic and the mitochondrial disorders that cause diabetes all so called Alzheimer's, which is now classified as diabetes.
He's talking about type-3 diabetes, which is interesting as we've talked about that. It's costing this country more than our military budget every year. This has been an explosion of neurological illnesses that I never saw as a kid, ADHD, speech delay, language delay, Tourette syndrome, narcolepsy, FCA, Aspergers, and autism. In the year 2000, the autism rate was 1 in 1,500. Now autism rates, 1 in 36, according to the CDC, nobody's talking about how 1 in every 22 kids in California has autism. Seventy-seven percent of our kids are too disabled to serve in the United States military. They couldn't even pass the exams or get in the test. He's citing facts. Nobody once did that. CNN turns it off. Nobody wants to hear this.
Autism rates today in kids are at one in 36 according to CDC. Nobody’s talking about how one in every 22 kids in California has autism.
It's because they can't argue it. They can't spin it.
I like how we turned it around. It's like what is happening. We could list many things under there but he cites two things that he thinks are causing this. He goes, “70% of American child's diet is ultra-processed, which means industrial manufactured food.” Food that used to be like eggs, butter, milk, and fresh bread. Even bread can be part of it but you made it or your grandma made it or somebody made it. You would have food that was made. It would mold, so things that don't last forever. They're not in wrappers.
Speaking of a wrapper thing, I was joking with somebody. She had to pick up her four-year-old. She was babysitting and she says, “I got to go.” This is a 80-year-old woman babysitting her four-year-old grandbaby and she just got back from out of town. She needs to go shopping, but was informed at 6:00 AM she's babysitting. I'm like, “What is Grandma buying?” I know what my grandparents bought for me when I would go over and visit them and that freezer was full of HoHos and twinkies.
The freezer, that was the best way to have a hoe back in the day but that HoHos is still sticking with me and I'm trying to get rid of it. The one that my nieces and nephews that my brother complains about that they do is they will get the drumsticks out. Have you seen the videos about melted drumsticks yet?
I don't want to because I think they're delicious but they don't melt in the day. No.
They would take one out. They'd put it in a bowl or some dish and they've let it melt overnight. When they broke over the chocolate topper or whatever it was. No, it was solid. It's like some weird texture marshmallow substance. It's chemical. If you have ice cream in a cone and you leave it out, even the soft serve stuff, which we both know.
It will melt.
It’s horrible. That stuff will melt.
It’s because it is real food to an extent.
It's more real, but whatever they're doing with this stuff now is so bad and so mixed up that it does not turn into a puddle like you would expect it to. It's not real ice cream.
I can imagine why manufacturers want to do this. It’s because you're taking it from the store where it's in the freezer. Transporting it in your cart and then in a bag in your car and all the way home.
You’re even getting it to the store and onto the shelves.
What that does is, it can freeze and unfreeze without losing its texture and that's disgusting. He said, “These foods consists primarily of alter processed sugars, ultra-processed grains and seed oils.” Things that we've been talking about. Whenever he was talking, I was like, “I could hear it.” Many of laboratory scientists formerly work for the cigarette industry, which purchased all of big food companies.
In 1870s and ‘80s, deployed thousands of scientists invent new chemicals to make the food more addictive and these ingredients didn't exist 100 years ago. They didn't learn this 30 years ago. Humans biologically are not able to adapt to eat them. Hundreds of chemicals are now banned in Europe, but they're all in our food. American food is the most toxic and disgusting. I'm going to put food. Its food-like substances. It’s not food.
I saw something interesting, German Fanta. If you see a bottle of German Fanta, it is more this yellowy drink because it cannot have all the extra food coloring.
We just did an episode on that.
That brings all those oranges because of those reds. The red food dies and the yellow food dies to make that super bright orange. They don't have that in Europe, so it's a problem.
He said, “The second culprit is toxic chemicals in our medicine, our environment, pesticides, food additives, pharmaceutical drugs, and toxic waste. We've talked about the roundup that’s in everybody's blood. It's an assault our children and ourselves. He was talking about children. It's on all of us, but the children he knows he can help. We’re doomed we’re going to get fixed.
As adults, we have done most of our stuff. We'll keep on putting heads on straight but we had good childhoods. We had these good years coming up where we didn't have to worry about going to the doctor once a quarter to figure out, “Johnny’s infection is back again. What do we do about that?”
He’s got the eczema and asthma. It's fine because there's pills for all that. It's great. Guess who makes the money when there's pills for that?
Big pharma.
It's this revolving door and that's what he went into later of the revolving door, the FDA, the CDC, the government and then the big companies. They just go around and around. One person scratches the next person's back, then they get this. It's disgusting and it's got to stop. I do believe that he can help. I'm so excited that he is going to join our next president, I hope, in the fight for this.
The thing about it is, so many of us are on board with what he's saying that I don't think he could get backstabbed at this point because he would just go and say, “This is what's happening,” and we would be like, “We're going to start our start protesting,” because this has to change. I think RFK Jr is highly intelligent. Do I agree with all his politics? No. I don't agree with all the Trump politics. I don't agree with. I don't agree with your politics. I have my own political beliefs and I just need to find somebody in groups that are doing things that I know could make the world better.
Directionally, that's what he is trying to do and he recognizes that of the two campaigns, there's one that is more entertaining to what he has. That's what become a big of different ideas that are all American ideals to get us healthy again.
Here’s one thing you just said. I'll just say FDA is USDA. That's the other letters that I can't remember. Seventy-five percent of the FDA funding doesn't come from taxpayers. It comes from pharma. Pharma Executives, consultants, and lobbyists cycle in and out of these agencies with President Trump's backing and going to change that. We're going to staff these agencies with honest scientists and doctors who are free from industry funding. We're going to make sure the decisions of consumers, doctors, and patients are informed by unbiased science.
A sick child is the best thing for the pharmaceutical industry because it's a lifelong client. I added the lifelong client part. When American children and adults are sick with chronic condition, they're put on medication for their entire life. All of a sudden I was like, “He's a chiropractor. He's speaking our language.”
A sick child is the best thing for the pharmaceutical industry because it is a lifelong client.
The big thing that is going on, we've talked a little bit about Ozempic. These this classification of drugs that helps you lose a bunch of body weight fast. That's great. It's a $1,000 a month for the insurance companies to pay because you're not going to afford that out of pocket and people are getting sick. I heard one person was vomiting, I want to say.
Some people’s digestive tract just shuts down and then removed.
The worst part is, it is not a fix. It is literally abandoned. Yes, you lose the weight but as soon as you come off, the weight comes back on.
It’s because all the gross food. You could make some changes. I'm not saying that there aren't people that are making changes. They can, but a lot of them it's just an instant fix type thing. Over the course of six months, they get into their ideal body weight, they're excited and then they're like, “I’m now back to normal.” Normal is gaining a whole bunch of fat facts.
The crazy thing is the mass loss includes muscle mass and if you did it through normal natural means of exercising, walking and calorie cutting. We're only talking maybe a couple of hundred calories a day. We're not talking massive famine here. You get the same results. It's not significantly better and it doesn't keep the weight off at the end. It's a major problem. We've talked about that in the past before. What else do you got on RFK?
I wanted a good transition here. It’s what he was talking about. He named a few people and it was Casey and Calley. He named them in his speech.
Calley has been on his team for a while.
Calley has been on his campaign. It's because he’s so knowledgeable about this stuff. He mentioned to read this show.
Honestly, Tucker Carlson has been hitting it out of the park with his show lately. This one is great.
You sent it to me. What's the name of the show?
It's just the Tucker Carlson Show.
The name so that people can look up.
Calley and Casey Means.
The truth about Ozempic, the pill.
Calley and Casey are siblings. They were raised to be critical of things. They raced to ask questions. It's a good show. The clips on the internet that I came across early on seemed weird. I think they cut them weird. As if the two siblings were talking over each other. They were not. They were both going at it. Casey is the one with the better understanding of not academics as much as she understood the science is better. She's the doctor.
She's the medical doctor and Calley has been political. What else does he do?
I think he's got an MBA. I think Casey went to Stanford and then I want to say he went to Harvard or something like that. Anyways, he's got a business degree and MBA. He was working for Coca-Cola. He's worked for some of these big food companies. I can't remember her specialty off top my head, but as she's going down, she realized a couple of things. One that medicine is so fractured across all these specializations.
They don't see that when one doctor sees a problem, it doesn't get communicated to the other doctors. There seems to be a disconnect between someone saying, “Your kidney is over here and your heart is over here. They have nothing to do with each other. Except for we know that they do.” There are only a handful of doctors who are cardiac and nephrology. It's crazy that those disconnects exist, but they do because people have become more specialized. Thank God for specializations because there are some people.
I was talking with the patient of mine who's their soon to be child is having all sorts of weird stuff and Saint Louis has one of the top two people in the country that know how to deal with this situation. The doctor told him and his wife, “The next three months are going to be hell and then the baby's born, the next three months after that are going to be held because the child's going to be in the NICU. There's going to be like three surgeries right off the bat or within the first couple of weeks to fix the problem.” Not a genetic thing. Only one of these weird things that sometimes happens.
There’s a lot of weird things that are sometimes happening, by the way, but we won’t go into that in this episode.
We talked enough.
Before all the crazy shots that we all got, there were bad things that happened. I'm not saying that every single bad thing that happened is because of that, but there sure is a lot more now.
Anyways, getting back to it. There's so many specializations that make the body look like it's individual little pieces and it's not. It's one whole thing with individual structures that are interacting with each other in ways that we still don't appreciate. I saw our good friend Keith, published a song. That some brain gut connection that we've known has been there finally got published and says, “This is how it's working and it's been obvious for years.” Yet it just gets published in 2023.
There is so much going on with the way the body is supposed to work together. Unfortunately, as Casey realized in the system as she was going through her residency, she had gotten to a point where you can't spend the time with patient like you're supposed to. You have fifteen minutes tops to get through with a patient because you've got another one waiting in the next room. In order for, not you as a doctor, but your hospital system to be profitable. You've got to get to the next person. The way they become profitable is not only by certain codes that they bill, but also some medications that sometimes come through their system or get kicked back from the pharmacy to the doctors.
That's got to stop.
It has to.
Also, there's kickbacks from the insurance companies to the doctors for percentage of vaccines given to the kids. On the COVID vaccine, there were there were very lucrative kickbacks given to medical providers for how many people they got vaccinated.
You mentioned it but I want to reiterate it, pediatric offices pushed the childhood vaccines because a percentage of their income is coming from the vaccines. If they hit certain thresholds for the number of patients that they gave vaccines to, they get a bonus.
Which is why if you refuse vaccines in the office, they will kick you out and I can tell you firsthand that happens.
You can say, “Why does my child that has never seen a needle need a Hep V vaccine?” The hepatitis.
It’s transmitted disease for drug user disease.
For drug users and prostitutes, which they sometimes they cross over but if they never have that and if Mom's not a prostitute or a drug user.
Try not to. On this interview with Tucker, how did Casey and Calley come together to have these conversations? Other than being siblings, what is their relationship?
They’re siblings, and they were always close. They're the only two kids, I believe and as I understand it. Parents were very supportive of them. They were less concerned about the grades as much as they were about exploring ideas. In fact, that was one of the things. I believe that's the way she phrased it. They kept on exploring ideas and Casey’s almost done. When her parents found out that she was going to be dropping back, they were more interested in them finding the truth than they were in them achieving accolades.
They certainly come from the side of, I want to say Washington DC or Virginia. That entire area. I can't remember where they grew up, but the parents were generally are like, “My child went to Stanford. Mine went to Harvard. Mine is a doctor. Mine is a pediatrician.” It's a lot of that. The parents are like, “You find the truth and you set your path. You do your thing.” She's about $500,000 in debt for education and she realizes that entire path is going to drive her to working for a hospital system that will effectively pay for her. All her student loans off will give her a nice income, bonuses, etc.
She realized that she was not going to be able to help people, and this is not something new. I've heard several medical doctors going through this. Shawn Baker who is one of the leaders in the carnivore group. His company is Revero where he's trying to do research showing that people on a carnivore diet reversed a lot of their chronic diseases very quickly.
Only because you're eating zero processed food at that.
He was an orthopedic surgeon. He was having these patients come in before they needed a surgery but clearly, they were going that direction. He he's like, “What's your diet? How do we fix your diet so that your diabetes isn't such a problem so that your weight goes away?” We've talked about my weight best, haven't we?
I don’t listen to most of the things you say.
I know. I get a weight vest months ago. I love wearing it for a walk. Half of the reason I need to get have you checked me when we visit is because I've been walking in my low back is just like, “I don't like that. Something is not as balanced as it should be,” which suggests I'm out of balance. I'm only adding an extra 30 pounds to my frame. I’m sitting at 195. I jump up. Let's call it 230 easy math. That's a lot of weight on a frame that's not used to that. The reality is, only because you are bigger around doesn't mean your skeleton got bigger. It's still the same size as a normal adult. They don't get whiter.
You're not just big boned. You’re saying that whole thing when people say they're big boned, it's not true.
They're not. Sorry.
I've seen the MRIs. You could be tall but you're not big boned.
They come in and see Dr. Baker. He'd be like, “You're going to have this problem. If we fix this hip, that knee is going then that hip and that one. You've got to make the lifestyle changes.” He was basically run out and almost lost his license. He was brought before the board because he was trying to fix them through diet and exercise opposed to, “You're here and the insurance will pay for a new knee.”
Other doctors have gone and before that, I'm excited to hear the means are trying to be a little bit more vocal and a little bit more in mainstream at this point. It is curious because she's going through all the stuff. They were talking about seed oils and the food pyramid, which we've talked about in the past. At one point in time, he points out, “I know it's a food plate but doesn't matter.”
They would emphasize all these carbs, grains, and starches. All of which commits can convert immediately to sugar in the body. If you prioritize from the bottom of the pyramid up because a pyramid builds upon itself, before you even got to a protein you would have twelve servings of carbohydrates. That’s fills you up.
That's what we learned. It was the correct way when we were a kid. The food pyramid was all over the walls at public schools talking about how you eat your whole grains, cereals, rice, and your breads. That's how you become healthy and everyone got sick.
Americans followed the food pyramid and ate whole-grain cereals, rice, and bread. But everyone still got sick.
In fact, I was checking with the young lady. I told her that she was going to talk to a nutritionist about something and I'm like, “Remember, the first thing you should do is prioritize your protein and get at least 100 grams a day and that's not enough.”
You never know when you're walking into a nutritionist office if they're going to be an actual nutritionist or a medical minded one. If their medical minded and if you're a diabetic, they're going to be like, “You got to have your whole grains.” I'm like, “If you're diabetic, you could live without ever eating a whole grain again and you can be fine. Maybe not even have to take pills anymore.”
I don't know if you're aware of this, but my wife Jean was thinking hard. As we were running the practice, she was getting into all the nutrition stuff and she wanted to do a nutrition style thing. She's like, “I'll go get the certification.” She found a couple things that were on line but all of them, in order for you to be certified and to go through the entire program, you have to do what is currently the government standards which are complete garbage. They're crap, so she opted not to bother.
It's not worth it. It's silly. A friend of mine, her husband was diagnosed with diabetes. They went to the nutritionist through medical things hoping that it would help. Honestly, he has dropped some weight. Not using Ozempic, and he's done some amazing things cutting carbs down. He knew that himself, but one thing she asked because he tends to drink too much beer. She’s like, “What about beer?” She goes, “Alcohol will lower your blood sugar.” She said, “What?”
I looked it up and as you're drinking alcohol, there is a drop that happens but it doesn't last. It's a pork chop in every can of beer. All of the sudden, it opened up his brain like, “I can still have my beer.” He still drinks too much beer. It's the little things that come out of people's mouths like that because she's in a place of authority that she's telling them how to solve the diabetes problem.
Which is only going to make it worse.
It's going to make it so much worse. They still joke about it. We’re like, “Drink a beer and keep your blood sugar low.”
Any case, we could go on and on but that's not the direction to go. I'm going to hit some other stuff that they were talking about. We talked about the co-optation of the big pharma and how the food industry, big pharma and all the regulation agencies are basically surfling the wagons and they run around.
They’re probably going back. I t's just a giant orgy. It's disgusting.
It is and it's the worst kind. It's ball of snakes. This was interesting because Tucker pointed out, “You can't address this topic at all because if you even bring it up, you are wrong.” They brought up the birth control pill as having issues and side effects. We've talked about this in the past. There are links to the birth control pill to dementia and other health issues. There are also some questions. I had the same couple that I was talking about earlier that have the real major problem with their baby. He said to me because they've been together for over a decade longer than that.
They're 39 and 40 trying to have a baby for the first time. If he had to do it over again, he said he would have done it back when we were 26-27 because we are pretending that taking this birth control is maybe a short-term thing for some people. Maybe they need a little bit of it to help figure out stuff, but when you use it as a means to say, “I'm going to get ahead in this world. I'm going to do my thing,” when there was a short window in the first place to be able to produce a child then we need to start asking different questions.
The fact that, we, as Americans can't afford to have children in our twenties because everything is so expensive.
It's worse than now.
Healthcare is ridiculous. It's very frustrating because I get why people are waiting until they're 30s or 40s to have kids but it's too late.
Americans cannot afford children in their 20s because everything is so expensive. Many people wait until their 30s or 40s to have kids but it is too late.
It’s only gotten worse now because of the way the inflation has been going where you can't even afford groceries for the month because the money runs out before the month does. A second thing that was interesting that Casey mentioned. She's a young lady who’s got her career head of her. I commend her for choosing that path, but it was so bad that she doesn't even know how to cook for herself much less somebody else.
She felt that was beneath her to learn how to cook because she's going to be a doctor. She realized how stupid that idea was because all of us need to eat and we should all know how to make a meal. I don't care if you're male or female. You should be able to figure out how to cook something up. Even if you don't have a fancy Grill and a brisket.
Don't say brisket. I'm hungry. I am angry at you for saying that.
I had to.
The fact that people don't know how to cook. They don't know how to make it egg. They don’t how to cook an egg.
Let's back up. Cooking eggs are difficult. When you get right down to it, you will screw up more eggs cooking them than you think.
You can also eat everything you destroy.
I suppose that is true, but no. In all fairness, you should know how to cook something and eggs are easy because they shouldn't be cheap.
It should be.
You can play around with some cheap eggs to figure out what you like. Throw away the stuff you don't and then go buy some good eggs and make that all the time. That's what I do.
When we complain about the cost of food, one of the things we need to realize is if we focus on real food, which is expensive but you don't need so much of it. We don't need all the crap. You don't need all the stuff in the center aisles. You could focus on eggs, fish, and meat. If you're cooking it yourself and not going to a restaurant and eating it, it is a lot more affordable.
I'm just trying to do some math in my head but my 6 eggs and bacon, a medical’s life.
I'm hungry.
I know, but my six eggs and bacon.
A half a dozen eggs and bacon. That's usually your dinner or breakfast?
That's dinner, but I could do that for meals a day. That would fill me up for a day. Let's say that your carton of eggs is $4, so half a dozen is $2.
If you’re buying the cheap eggs.
I'm not.
I know, but you're saying it’s for people.
You could buy cheaper eggs but I'm just using this as an example.
I'm just saying. In Saint Louis, for the good eggs, it's more like $7.
Find a farmer who's got chickens.
I got eggs from one of my patients.
Let's say $2 to $3 for your eggs then I'm getting good bacon but it's bacon ends. I've got a good price point on that, but let's say you're getting the higher end bacon. Let's just call it $10 a pound and a quarter of that which is four ounces, which is normally what I dice up and throw in there. We're at $2.50 and $3.50 for your $7 eggs. We're right there at $6.
For one meal. That's full of nutrients and all of the fat and protein you would need for that meal.
Exactly, and vitamins. I was chatting on a group of guys asking, “What helps you give you a lift when you're feeling down? What supplements are you using?” I'm like, “Use eggs,” because if you eat 4 to 6 eggs, you will feel amazing.
Stay hydrated, too.
They're like, “What supplements do you need? What do you guys like?” They threw out a bunch of stuff. All the male hormone enhancing stuff that give you that pump and make you feel better, but nothing like an egg. In fact, I still remember Tim Ferriss's 4-Hour Body. When that book came out, he had a recipe in there that was called the salmonella shake. That was four eggs raw. The whole thing was raw. You'd use raw milk, almond butter and chia seeds. You drink one of those and the amount of energy you would have. It was like taking steroids, is what he described it as. Sure enough, I did a double one day and I was 10 pounds heavier than the next day. It’s like steroids and retaining water. No.
Food does not have to be expensive.
That's $6 meal that I just described, if you needed chips, your bag of chips is at least $6 or if not $4. That's money that you're not going to get any good calories and nutrition out of. I'm sorry. You're just not.
Even if you bought the organic chips. Less trash. It’s less trash but it’s still trash. It's not something that your body needs. I'm not saying I never eaten chips. I'm not going to be like that person that says, “I never eat.” I can eat a chip but that's not part of my everyday meal planning. I don't typically buy it a very often.
We need to figure out how to do this because unfortunately, we're slowly seeing an erosion of our food supply pushing us to say, “Let's make fake meat because that's better for the environment.” Yet there's no evidence that it's worse for the environment. In fact, any factory plant is probably worse for the environment. They're just buying all the carbon credits that you haven't realized. You will eventually need just to survive in the world.
We got to stop this. If you have it, we both recommend that you guys look up the full interview with Tucker Carlson and also look up the total speech from RFK Jr.
On top of that, RFK was on Tucker's show and that one's a very good episode too because it’s straightforward and they're having fun.
It was an interesting one to listen to just because it was interesting for you and I to talk about.
Tucker is hitting it out of the park on his interviews. They're two-hour interviews. They’re 1 to 2 hour interviews. They're in-depth and having fun. There are people that you have not heard elsewhere. I would highly recommend listening to them. My favorite part of the RFK interview with Tucker was if he lets you be the CIA, would you run the CIA? He's like, “I would love to but the Senate wouldn't let me through because there's enough people in the CIA who have people on the committees that would shut down.”
Never confirm it, which is a whole other problem that they need to work on. It's going to be an uphill battle, but I'm excited to see what's going to happen.
It's going to be curious. The other funny thing in that interview was especially when they were talking about getting back to some of the law fair. When New York was giving him grief about not having a New York resident that he's spending too much time in California where his wife lives. He went down the list of the licenses and stuff that he maintains in New York City, along with the home and everything else and he's going down. He’s law license is from New York. He's only had a law license in New York. His driver's licenses there. He pays property taxes and income tax there. He has his hunting and fishing license there. That's when Tucker interrupted and said, “Those are the important ones.”
Tucker loves to fish.
I don't blame him because I'm looking forward to hunting season. This will come out right before hunting season starts up, so I'm looking forward to that.
Do we want to go over anything else or do you think we can wrap it?
Those are the big ones, folks. I highly encourage you to listen to these two shows. If you're like, “I don't want to get political.” Great. Both of these are not political. They are saying, “What will drive the country into a better place?” That's why I like these. It’s asking the questions who can solve these problems and quite honestly, they're not going to get sold otherwise. It's just that simple.
At least, there's a plan. They don't know exactly how it's going to go but there's a plan to move forward with some of these problems. I hate to say, the other side is perpetuating the problems.
I don't want to say bread lines but I'm I said bread lines.
I don't want to eat bread like that. Can we have bacon lines?
Wouldn't that mean that grand? Any case, Dr. Bagley, where can they find you?
I'm in St. Louis, Missouri. I'm on the West side. You can find me at precisionchiropracticstl.com/.
I'm in Springfield, Illinois. KeystoneChiroSPI.com and find us on all the socials. Make sure you like and subscribe. Especially give us a five-star review. Heck, give us a one-star review if you hate that were on the bubble of being political. We're trying not to be, but we like freedom. We come from a profession that has been oppressed and we've seen the bad stuff.
We’re victims.
No, we're not victims.
You’ve seen what's happened and we still, people will say, “You're a quack.” I’m like, “Yes, that’s what I am.”
Quite honestly, we helped people day in and day out. Again, we don't want to be thrown in jail for just having a conversation and having an idea. If you have a bad idea, air it and have somebody discuss it so we can have better ideas and make the bad ideas, just like, “That was dumb. Let's move on to something smart.”
That's what conversations are about the alternative media, which is quite amazing, including podcasts are amazing because now we can get this information to more people and there's less censorship with alternative media. The problem is you can't get it unless you look for it and if you share it.
Share it, wide and far. Even if it's not this episode. Find another episode that you're like, “This is my favorite episode. I'm going to share it.” Alright, folks, we will be back with another episode.
Dr. Schurger and Dr. Bagley discuss Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS), a loose ligament syndrome that prevents proper collagen formation in joints and soft tissues. If you or someone you know has joints that pop and frequently feel out of place, it could be a sign of EDS. There is help available.
Join us as we explore how we've been helping EDS cases and how it parallels the rise of fibromyalgia 20 years ago.
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How are you doing, Doctor Schurger?
I'm good. It's been a very nice week. We must have a bigger show with Doctor Brooks and Doctor Shiloh. All of us at one time.
It's going to be mayhem.
That would be fun.
We should get Drew on too.
That would be pure chaos. If I buy a bunch of equipment, I will bring it down to Florida for the Blair conference, which we were talking about in October 2024, and we'll spend the day recording when we're not at the pool.
I had a good week. I know you had a good week too. I had an awesome win with one of my brand-new patients. She's been dealing with two years of radiculopathy and weird sensations in her body. She has not felt good. There was no cause. She didn't have an accident or injury that she remembers and she's young. She's in her 30s.
Her medical team had put her on gabapentin and all the pills that you put them on for some neuropathy. I don't even remember what she was diagnosed with. Probably something similar to what we're going to talk about. She's got one adjustment. This day was her second adjustment. After her first adjustment, she had zero radiculopathy and her sinuses immediately opened up so that she could breathe better.
She was thinking better and clearer, and she almost made me cry because she was excited about how many changes were happening rapidly in her body. I warned her, “Great, but don't go crazy right now because your body is going to fluctuate, and it's going to go up and down right now.” I adjusted three different things on her the first day she came in. I only had one now, which is great.
It's when you look at somebody and she's all put together, she's gorgeous, this young mother looking beautiful, but she was suffering. You’ll never know how they feel by how somebody looks. What's cool is one of our patients who is a nurse. She was talking to her other nurse friends at her work, and this nurse friend was one of those who figured, “I'm not a very big skeptic or whatever.”
This nurse friend told this lady who doesn't even know my patient that she had to come in to see us because the other nurse had been helped a lot. It was a secondhand referral and a life was changed. All I can tell is that people out there tell people about this upper cervical chiropractic because you don't know how far out it could go. The ripples on this were two ripples away and this young woman's life was on track again. It makes my heart happy. Chiropractic is the best. I'm off my soapbox.
I've got one as well because, in one of my TN cases that we've been discussing a little bit, he was on four gabapentin a day I think for the TN pain.
TN is Trigeminal Neuralgia. It is a nerve that comes out into our face, and it can cause excruciating pain in the face to the point where people call it the Suicide Disease, unfortunately. Keep going.
Trigeminal Neuralgia, aka the 'suicide disease,' causes excruciating facial pain. Chiropractic care offers hope for those suffering in silence.
In any case, he was taking four gabapentin throughout the day to manage the pain. I mentioned to him, “I'm not going to tell you not to take it but if you can delay.” He said, “Normally, I take it about now, but I'm running a little bit behind when I would normally take it.” I told him, “If you can stretch it out as opposed to taking it as you had been.” For a lot of people, gabapentin has a life cycle of 3 or 4 hours, depending upon what's going on with the individual. I told him, “See if you can stretch it to 5 or 6 hours.” He said that he didn't need the one at noon in the past couple of days.
It's a matter of understanding if we can get the body working the way it's supposed to. Pain meds are great when you cannot handle the problem anymore and there are no other options, but nobody talks about the downside to pain meds. We could probably do another episode. We've talked about some of the pain meds having side effects, but the simple fact that he's able to back off on that does two things.
One, it means he doesn't have to refill that prescription as often, which is good because sometimes some of these pain stuff you can't get as often as you need it. It's there in case he's having a bad day, but his body can function better without it. He and his wife are both ecstatic about their results to this point, and we're only about two weeks in for both of them. Pretty exciting stuff.
We're going to get into our topic. If you look at the headline that we're going to put on top, it's going to be Ehlers-Danlos, and you're going to ask, “What is that?” We're going to get into a high-level overview because we can go deep dives potentially into this, but I want to hit the top level. Anyway, I had a new patient who happened to be in an Ehlers-Danlos case. She's been having bad migraines, and she had a bad migraine after her massage.
Who gets a migraine after their massage? That's supposed to relax her. She's got the day off. Her kid is at camp until later this evening. She's got time to relax, but no, she can't. She said that normally, what she would do is she would take an edible to calm that down. Instead, she said, “Let's see if this is going to take care of the headache.”
She comes in. We get her adjusted, and within 30 minutes, the headache is down significantly to something more manageable for her. That's exciting but the reason she came in to see me wasn't so much about the headache because she'd been seeing another chiropractor. It was because of Ehlers-Danlos.
Let's talk a little bit about that. Let's start with what it is. At the basic level, it is a loose ligament syndrome. I don't remember why it's called Ehlers-Danlos. I hate that name. That couple of guys or gals said, “I'm going to stick my name to the thing. Everyone in the medical community has to memorize my name.” I'm just, “No.”
Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS) is more common than we think. It’s a loose ligament syndrome that affects collagen production, leading to joint issues. There is help!
If we name something the Bagley-Schurger Disease or Schurger-Bagley Disease, it should have to do something with the butt.
I was told that I should name something for the thermography that we do because of some way that I'm describing it. My response was, “I'm going to call it the Schurger Heuristic Integrative Technique. Do the math on that. Put the letters out there to figure out what I said.
I did. I can spell.
You'll have fun with that. If we're going to go that direction, I'm going to have fun with it but. Ehlers-Danlos is a loose ligament condition. The question is, what's driving it? There seem to be some genetic components that we're finding. It's become much more prevalent in practice recently.
I never had any of this when I first started practicing ten years ago.
It's interesting because when we started practicing, fibromyalgia was all the rage.
That was everybody and their sister. I say sister because it's mostly women who have that. I feel EDS is more women than men too. Do you see that?
I do see that. I can't say that I've seen a whole lot of men even come in with EDS, but I also contend that if it's not falling off and we all know what it is with men, they won't come in.
I'm on the Ehlers-Danlos Society page. I'm going to read what they say, “EDS is a group of thirteen heritable connective tissue disorders. The conditions are caused by genetic changes that affect connective tissue. Each type of EDS has its own set of features with distinct diagnostic criteria. Some features are seen across all types of EDS including joint hypermobility, skin hyper extensibility, and tissue fragility. The other thing I saw on the next thing was easy bruising. It looks like it's part of a lot of them too. Not all of them.
One of the reasons that we're bringing up fibromyalgia with the thought of EDS is that 20 to 30 years ago when Fibromyalgia came on the scene, it ended up being a garbage diagnosis. The reason we call it a garbage diagnosis is because if you don't know what it is and you can't figure out what it was, and there's still not a blood test for fibro, you end up saying, “You fall into this category. I am going to put you over here because we don't know what to call it.”
I don't know if the rheumatologist has fibromyalgia in their bag of tricks. I don't know if they ever figured out what they could do with these people other than help them manage some pain. Chiropractic helped a lot of these people at least to make it more manageable. With EDS, I feel it's similar. There are several things that we can probably point to that could be driving this. We've got certainly genetic components that are going on. Why won't we see this a little bit more frequently fifteen years ago?
That's such a good question because we know from our research not just on this, but genetics only plays a part. You can have a gene, but it doesn't express itself or stop expressing itself all the time. Just because you have that gene doesn't mean you're going to get something. You could have the breast cancer gene and you're not necessarily going to get breast cancer.
Your percentage is higher but what can you do to stop that? Many people are cutting their breasts off because they have this gene, which doesn't always mean you're going to get breast cancer. I look at this stuff too, and I think of it the same way. What are we doing to ourselves that is causing these genes to express or not express?
One of the interesting things when we get right down to it is they said there are thirteen different diseases, but if I'm not mistaken, I thought it was only four types.
It's a spectrum. Each type of EDS has its combination of signs and symptoms. Some signs and symptoms are common in multiple types of EDS, while others are only associated with one specific type. There are three. There are cEDS, vEDS and kEDS. Also, my favorite type of shoe is Keds.
Let's not go into those three because I feel that's the longer, deeper thing.
I know but if somebody has it, at least you go on the EDS and it lists out on their front page what types of collagen and all that stuff.
To my point, I think one or two of those have identified the genetic marker directly, not all three of them. I thought there was a fourth.
There might be. Hold on. I'm looking at it here. That may have been a very basic thing because hEDS is Hypermobile, cEDS is Classical, v is Vascular, and p is Periodontal. Here's one I've never heard of. Kyphoscoliotic EDS. That's what the KEDS was. Congenital hypotonia, congenital early onset Kyphoscoliosis.
There are all sorts of interesting stuff going on there for sure. It makes sense because the underlying tissue that is being affected more than anything else is collagen. It is your connective tissue throughout your body. There are some genetic components to this. This is why four types stick in my brain from what I've done.
They say that the most common, which accounts for 90% of EDS cases, is hypermobile EDS.
In general, with these, some of them can be characterized as a genetic component directly and some of them can't. The hypermobile one does not require a genetic component.
I know a lot of people are getting diagnosed with this without any genetic testing being done.
Even when they get genetic testing done, they're not getting an answer, but this is where the hypermobile one comes in especially. I'd be more concerned about a genetic component than the vascular component. That component certainly is a problem, but all of it comes down to you not laying down good collagen.
The strongest collagen in our body is the type 1 collagen, which are super strong structures. This is something we discuss all the time when we're looking at joint biomechanics. Any slip, fall, bump, bruise, or injury can cause a tear in our joints. Maybe not a severe tear. Maybe it's a grade 1 tear and it's discombobulated as it were, but it's going to be replaced by grade 3 collagen, which has a problem.
It's not strong. It's the weakest in the body. It's putting OSB up when you had plywood and you had good plywood. It takes time to re-fix that and it's effectively a scar tissue to some degree or it's not the right material to be strong. The question is why is it lying down and why without necessarily any new trauma, is it breaking down?
A lot of people, if you've not heard of collagen proteins and you are listening to a health-related podcast, I am surprised. If this is the first time, welcome. Collagen proteins exist and they are wonderful but one of the problems that they've found is collagen proteins, like good healthy collagen, do not help these people build stronger connective tissue.
This is where other components fall into the mix because when we start looking at things that might be affecting people to this nth degree that has created this boom of EDS, we as a society do not eat the soups that we would have eaten or the whole animal that we would have eaten that might have components of that connective tissue as part of our normal dietary consumption.
That's a big problem right off the bat. The other thing that might be a problem is the main component of collagen is something called glycine. This is a very interesting amino acid. If you want to use it, I think we've talked about this in the past, it is a one-to-one replacement for sugar. It's very expensive. It is insulin-reducing. All sorts of benefits if you use glycine in place of sugar. When you're eating a piece of meat, all that tastiness and sweetness in the meat is the glycine that you are tasting.
This is why brisket is made by low and slow cooking it until all of that collagen turns into effectively meat Jell-O and it's tasty. The question comes down to, what is breaking down? Glycine is the most abundant amino acid in collagen and there is a very close chemical neighbor to glycine. Guess what it is? I know that you know. You can say it because I've talked too much here.
It's Roundup, also called glyphosate. We're seeing so many ugly words. I'm going to forget it. That is a chemical they use to kill off weeds or unwanted plants. Monsanto was a company that I used to work for. They promoted it for many years and said that it was inert. It breaks down in the soil and it doesn't hurt anyone. We come to find out that when you put it on food and you're eating the food, it's in the food.
If you're spraying it all over the place, it's getting into groundwater. It's getting everywhere and we did not have as many of these diseases. Many people have celiac disease and many autoimmune diseases until this stuff became rampant in our food supply. It is getting better though. We have more places to go and to get food that doesn't have it in there but right now, pretty much all of us have it in our bloodstream.
It is rampant. I'd like to know when they started because what they do with wheat is they spray it with a second round to help dry it out and keep it. Glyphosate is not just a weed killer, but it is an antimicrobial. It'll kill mold. It'll kill bacteria.
It'll kill humans.
If they spray it on the plant early on, then the plant grows, and they do nothing more, it's probably okay because it has probably gotten off the plant. We won't talk about how it binds up magnesium in the soil. We've covered that but I think it's the latter because what's curious about many people with celiac, when they go overseas, they can have all the bread they want overseas because of whatever European standards are, they are not allowing glyphosate to be used.
It's also possible that the wheat is different there because they might have more traditional wheat, and we have the highest starch sugar wheat that can be grown.
We also have Roundup-ready wheat, which is supposedly that doesn't have any Roundup in it.
It's resistant to Roundup. You spray it with all the Roundup you want, and it's not going to die. That's what any Roundup-resistant crop would be is that it can get sprayed with that chemical, and it doesn't die, but everything around it dies which is good. Farmers love that because then their crop is pure corn or pure soybean. It's pretty much that's what's in there but the big problem is what is it doing to that food?
Downstream, it will be food for something. It's a cow or us. There are many questions. If you're spraying your weeds, that can be enough exposure. To kill the weeds around my house, I said that I was going to get some high-octane vinegar at 45% purity and that stuff worked.
They sell that at Lowe's or Home Depot. I can't remember where I bought it. You can get it in a mainstream thing. It makes your eyes water a little bit when you're spraying it because it smells like vinegar.
It is very strong vinegar. I said, “I need to be downwind from this.”
It does work though. You could drink it but it will burn your esophagus because it's 24% or whatever percent it is but it works. Within an hour, the plants are droopy, and then two days later, they've turned brown. You wouldn't want to spray it on something you're about to eat because it's vinegar unless it's a salad. Throw a little oil or vinegar.
You dilute it a lot if it's 25% or 45%.
It will probably burn your mouth a little bit.
There are alternatives to it. What I’m curious is what is the safety recommendations for spraying that stuff. Ultimately, most people are not wearing that. I have seen stuff that suggests that it's a full hazmat suit.
You see the people who are even still to this day using it in like lawn maintenance companies and things. They're not wearing respirators. They're spraying it around, and there's all these lawsuits right now.
Some people are winning against Monsanto and Bayer for those lawsuits.
I don't think of these companies as inherently evil. Their goal is profits. I don't think of the people who work for those companies as inherently evil. Some of them are still my very good friends. It's this plausible deniability where it’s like, “I'm not going to tell this hand what this hand is doing. This came out, but let's not say that you don't know what you don't know.” Now, it's coming out because, during discovery and these lawsuits, it comes out that lots of things were known.
The question will come down to how much is glyphosate. Is glycerin part of that molecule interfering with collagen protein and collagen production, and how is it breaking down?
The other issue is this is probably happening to a lot of these people in childhood and or even in the womb as they're being grown by their Mamas because the collagen is being laid down incorrectly. There's maybe a genetic component, but I think there's an environmental component and it might not just be Roundup. It might be other things too because all sorts of things have been injected and done in the last few years that could be changing the way people's bodies are working and the way mom's bodies are working when they're building their children.
EDS might have a genetic component, but environmental factors like diet play a huge role in its development and management. Start with what you eat.
As to things that people can do with EDS that are going to be a step in the right direction. Collagen protein by itself might not be enough. If you read most of the collagen proteins, “Two tablespoons.” That's probably a good start. I will throw probably about a not quite a half cup of collagen protein into my coffee at lunch to have a little bit of an extra boost.
Collagen protein, for rule aside, if you're looking at it, it'll say that there's 0% protein in it. The reason is that it's an incomplete protein. It's missing tryptophan. An egg protein is complete, but it's still a protein. It still has calories, and it's still going to help you build your body, but you can't live on collagen alone. That's what I want everybody to know when they say, “It's 0% protein.” No. It's 20 grams of protein.
If I'm tracking my macros for protein, collagen is not on my radar. You can track it, but I don't include it because I'm going to throw that in there and I'm more worried about my complete proteins than anything else. This is something James DiNicolantonio and Siim Land wrote in their book, The Collagen Cure, that it's not just the collagen that you need, but you need the glycine.
To most people, glycine is not considered an essential amino acid because we make about 3 grams of it a day in our body. The problem is is we need 15 and this is where it keeps coming back around to saying that we need more. Here's the kicker. It might not be 15. For you and me, we're doing fine. Our connective tissues are fine. We don't have EDS. We're strong. We can go to the gym. We don't cry too much three days after with Dom's. Maybe this is where you may need to add some glycine to them.
I have it, and I haven't been adding it to my tea. What I could do is what you're saying is I could throw my collagen powder in my tea and then instead of using Stevia because I do use that in my tea because I like some sweet tea, I put in a tablespoon of glycine. Do you know how many grams or how many milligram grams would be around a tablespoon?
I think a half. That's going to be close to 6 grams.
That will at least give me quite a boost in what I would normally have.
What I find curious both with my workout routines and wanting to push an envelope that I probably shouldn't all the time is if I'm starting to feel achy, I push the collagen. If I'm starting to feel lethargic, I push more eggs. What's curious is what Siim Land and James DiNicolantonio have figured out. Siim is a genius in the longevity space, and he's been diving down to this for the better part of a decade now. I've got some of his first books. The Collagen Cure was one of his newer books.
James DiNicolantonio is a research PhD who has been looking at all of these things as far as what to eat, what is healthy, and good science if you want references. What they're suggesting is some people need 6 grams extra straight glycine to get all the processes to work the way they're supposed to, but some people might need up to 50 grams of glycine to get those processes to work, which is a lot. If I throw a half tablespoon of glycine in my coffee, I can taste it. It’s maybe sweeter than I want.
It is. I feel like I need to take it to separate a little bit or something.
You might need to work up to it. There is another combination of two products that are good for helping your inflammation and your overall body process. It's something called, GlyNac. What that is a ratio of glycine and NAC. The more that I ran the numbers, the more I'm going to tell you to go with a one-to-one ratio of both. For the average 180 to 200-pound individual, 6 grams of both of those is where you want to be. If you mix glycine with NAC, which is what it is. I've got an NAC powder and a glycine powder at home, it tempers it.
It's not NAD. You're saying NAC.
NAC is a precursor to glutathione. Which you're going to need if you have EDS because you need something to help clean up the junk. It is your equivalent to your natural vitamin C. It's your nano-natural antioxidant. The best way to boost that is glycine and NAC. A one-to-one ratio is going to be the sweet spot for most people. I believe it's in their book Collagen Cure.
It's been a while since I figured out the math and ran the numbers. A couple of other people have talked about this. As far as how you use those two pieces together, that's the way to do it and that's the most research. The two together in a glass of water go down pretty easily because the glycine acts as a spoonful of sugar for the medicine to go down.
I had a thought process while you were talking, and I half-listened to you. My father had a propensity for stretch marks on his skin very much so. I also get stretch marks very easily and so do my twins. I know that's a collagen problem. I don't think it's EDS necessarily because we don't have hypermobile joints to an extent. I don't have hyperelastic skin. I don't think so. There is a collagen issue there because you shouldn't get stretch marks as normal growth happens. With babies and stuff, almost everyone does but some people don't. Some people have elasticity.
There's a vitamin E component that you'd have to take a look at. That might be a vitamin E deficiency but certainly, adding the collagen in is going to be a good start.
That's what I'm thinking. I never took that. Collagen wasn't a thing even ten years ago.
It wasn't. Collagen has been around for 30 or 40 years and they've been around ahead of this because they were using collagen and other stuff, but we weren't realizing we should be taking it directly. What we've done in our society is we've moved away from using the whole animal. When you make a bone broth, you take all the bones. You throw the animal you process and you throw them in with all the meat scraps that were on top of it that you can't get to. They were too tough or who knows what it was, you created this broth and you would boil it. You bring it up to a light simmer, then, you keep it there for an extended period.
You put it in your Instant Pot and it's done in 90 minutes.
There is that. There are the recipes that I go with are from a book called Brodo. This is where I was introduced to bone broth by a gentleman who owned a restaurant in New York City. He had one small door that opened directly to Times Square or something like that. It wasn't a usable door for anything else. It was access to the kitchen, but what they figured out was that he started making bone broth. He did some stuff because he was 350 pounds and he started drinking pure bone broth and that helped him lose 150-plus pounds as well as getting him healthy.
That changed his life significantly because you've got all that collagen, you've got that glycine, probably some more whole proteins from the meat that and the meat broth that would come out of that. That changed his life, and he started selling all his bone broths in a little cup to go, so you could have something hot and warm to drink that wasn't coffee and that wasn't tea.
That also had a whole bunch of nutrients in it.
It was very healthy for you. I don't know if that place is still around. Restaurants turn over a lot, but Brodo is the book and it's a beautiful little book. It's a coffee table book that you want and it's got simple recipes to make it. What they would do is they'd have the thing running all night long. They'd be selling it and they'd be running through it fast. That's what you have to do. You take about a day, maybe two to get all of that stuff, and then if you're not drinking it, you can store it. Several different ways to do that.
I typically freeze my bone broth so that I can use it for recipes. Here's my trick. It's not the healthiest trick, but for those who are starting their journey, something you can do because ideally, in the perfect world, you want to use grass-fed or pastured animals to make your bone broth. 100%.
I am not in a position in my life where I am going to go kill chickens on my farm, and I don't have a farm. Could I go out and find the chick? I could but this is what I do in case you're asking, “How do I even get a bone broth?” At Costco or Sam's Club, I get rotisserie chickens occasionally. It's quick easy protein.
It's maybe not the healthiest protein. You can fight me. I get it. I use my chicken off there and then I take the carcass and put it in a ziplock bag and then throw it in the freezer. When I get 2 or 3 of those, depending on how big they are, that's when I make my bone broth. I add some vegetables. I usually don't do the seasonings till afterward.
I'll do some celery stalks that were the inside part and some scraps. Some vegetables for some flavoring in there. I throw it all in my Instapot, fill it up with water, and put it on for 90 minutes. It makes the most beautiful collagen-rich, gelatin-rich bone broth. The difference between a bone broth and a chicken stock is when it's cold, the bone broth turns into gelatin. It's amazing.
It is lovely and tasty.
When you add salt. It's not tasty until you add salt.
You do need to add some salt to it. My dogs look at me when I give them the stuff from the store, and they're like, “This isn't the good stuff.” I'm like, “I know.” I might have to make a small batch up because I probably got a couple of bags of bones from all my steaks and whatnot.
That's a great idea too when you're eating bone in steaks. Keep the bones, throw them in the freezer, and then when you have enough, you can make a bone broth out of it.
I noticed that half of my cows are going to get butchered. That's another thing you can do. You can call local butchers and say, “I would like 10 pounds of bones.” You want soup bones and you want marrow bones. Oftentimes, unless you have somebody who knows what to do with marrow bones, most people don't, they will get sold for something else.
You can get them relatively inexpensive. They don't have to be organic grass-finished. Beef, we've talked about this in the past. Cows in general still have to be on silage through their entire life cycle. They'll get some corn at the end in conventional feedlots, but it's not a lot of corn. It's not more than not and you're still going to get a lot of good nutrition out of conventional beef.
This is something easy. I've heard many people. Once you start getting them on a bone broth, you can do that. You go to the Chinese, not a buffet, the Chinese grocery store if you want to make a chicken broth. One of the things that is super available are chicken feet, and they're loaded with collagen. It looks weird in the pot.
It sure does. It's freaky.
It's your magical spell for your health.
We're talking about EDS and how we can support people with EDS, but bone broth is also super supported by people who have digestive issues. People with leaky gut and damage to their gut. Honestly, anyone with digestion issues should start drinking bone broth regularly. It doesn't sound easy, but it is easy. We're used to not making the things that we don't but bone broth is easy.
As you said, Instapots are readily available.
It makes it faster. If you don't have an Instapot, you can put it overnight on carefully.
If you've got electric stoves, overnight. I broke down and got a fancy setup where I've got an induction heater and I went ahead and bought a new pot for the induction heater, but that works great because there is no flame, and doesn't even get hot except for the pot itself.
I typically use my Instantpot outside, not because I'm afraid of it, but because I don't how my house smells soup for four days after I let all the steam out. I use it on my porch and set it up and mix the outlet, and it's outside for a couple of hours because it takes time for it to come up to heat.
Let's end up because we could go on and on about that, but I think that's enough.
I think everybody likes our recipes.
They do but let's talk about chiropractic care for EDS cases. One of the reasons this young lady came in is because she's having all these neck problems. She didn't feel comfortable with the chiropractor she was seeing who was a regular guy and he's a good guy from everything I can hear, but she wasn't comfortable with a traditional chiropractic adjustment for the neck.
There are some cases, especially when we were talking about vascular EDS problems, where about once a year they have a problem. I want to back up. I don't know if that's the case or not truly because we're dealing with an interesting population that has EDS. The EDS cases, generally, we're seeing them in the mid to late childbearing years.
Anywhere from about 25 to let's call it early 40s. There are two problems with this group. Women in that age group already have some other problems with what they call dissecting arteries because of birth control, and because if they've had a child or they're carrying a little bit of extra weight, that automatically puts them at risk. We're not talking about women who are vastly overweight.
We are talking about some of these more petite young ladies, but they're carrying a little bit of extra belly fat. That is enough to cause some problems where these dissecting aneurysms can present without chiropractic care, without any other presentation, and it might be a very bad migraine that you're experiencing.
If you go into the ER and they look at you and they say, “There's nothing wrong with you. You're not having a stroke. You're not having this or that. It behooves you to find a good upper cervical chiropractor, and I'd be more than happy to review cases that fall into this if you hear this and you'll say, “That's me.” I had one of these cases.
She couldn't come in because she was having some of the worst headaches she's ever had. Her friend said, “Go see Schurger because he deals with this stuff all the time.” She comes in to see me. I got all the stuff back and this was within three days. Saturday or Sunday, she'd gotten a CAT scan of her neck to see if there were any problems with some of the arteries. I think it was a head and neck.
I get the results Tuesday right before I run over to Arthur. That's a 90-minute drive for me. We're running around. I read what it was and I called up the radiologist who I've got a decent relationship with and we chatted a couple of times. I asked him the question, “Will this show this dissecting aneurysm based upon what they did?” He said, “No. That would not show up.”
Once I saw what was going on, they were missing something. She needed an MRA or some CT angiogram where they're looking at the arteries. I was trying to get her because I know how the ERs are and you'd go in and you're saying, “I think I've got a problem. I need this.” It's a four-hour wait. The good news is at her ER, it was not a four-hour wait. I called her. I'm supposed to adjust her on Wednesday.
I'm trying to make sure I've got a green light from all of her medical background that I'm not going to cause something worse for her. This is not an EDS case. This is a case of a migraine that ended up being a dissecting aneurysm. She ends up going to the ER. Her doctor said that her primary said, “Go to the ER. They can order that for you.”
She gets the right test. She was like, “They're giving me the runaround.” About 5:00 to 5:30, she gave me a call, and I remember I had a chance to pick it up because I had a free moment. She is in tears as they are taking her over to Springfield to the hospital because they did find something. Tears of gratitude because everything turned out okay.
She was fine, but they did find a small aneurysm. They didn't have to do any surgery. It was a watch-and-wait type situation, but they needed to keep her for a couple of days. This group of women, we're talking about 25 to about 45 or somewhere in there in childbearing years, you might be on birth control and now you have this potentially and carrying a little bit of extra weight. This is where you might have these problems. Who else falls into this category? The EDS cases.
Here's a question. If they would have gone to a conventional chiropractor and gotten a rotary adjustment, which is ahead to the side and we've all seen them online. This could have been an extreme tear, possibly. We don't know, but it could have been.
This was a mother of two young children. It could have been bad.
That's scary.
We do our due diligence to ask the question, “Could this be a bigger problem?” We also do an adjusting technique that does not involve taking a person into their end range of motion.
There is no twisting or bending.
That chiropractic is very safe. This is the good news but as I've stated before with my made-up statistic, the general chiropractic works for 80% of the population but 20% of us need something a little bit more specific and gentle. That's what we do here in our offices. That's why you guys came up this past weekend for a seminar. Technically, I'd had people from as far as Northern Canada in that seminar. I had brisket and we had collagen.
I’m going to have to say one thing about the show. He's been hyping up this brisket that his smoked brisket is good, and I didn't believe him but I'm going to let you guys know it was the best brisket I've ever had in my entire life.
Now she's going to buy a smoker.
I'm going to. I'm speaking about it, and my mouth is watering thinking about it again.
The crazy thing is you've got Dally’s right across the street from you.
It's not as good. Yours is way better and it was good. Anyway, that was the best brisket I've ever had in my entire life.
I'm very surprised with how it keeps on coming out well. In any case, if that is concerned back to the chiropractic side of things.
Let's talk about brisket again. You're right. The type of adjusting we do when people say, “I'm worried about stroke.” I said, “I'm also concerned about that.” I am and that's one of the reasons we do this technique. This technique does not involve stretching the vertebral artery because by turning my head right now, I'm stretching the vertebral artery. It is stretching.
It's designed to be stretched. It's designed when we turn our head left or right, it has extra material to allow that but there are conditions and there are circumstances. Who knows what it is? Is it the food we're eating? Is it a lifestyle? Is it the extra weight that's causing inflammation? Who knows? There are many factors to say, is it one thing?
If we can create an intervention that is easier on the patient and does not require pushing things to a limit, I think that's better for those cases that especially are concerned about it. With an EDS case, the beautiful thing about how we adjust is we don't push the ligaments. We're trying to guide the joint back into its proper position so that the ligaments can start healing the way they're supposed to. We don't want to over-adjust and that's the other nice thing is we don't adjust every visit for these cases. Only when you need it.
Chiropractic care for EDS focuses on guiding joints back into position gently, allowing ligaments to heal without stress. It’s all about precision.
EDS cases do fabulous under Blair Care. It's always women. I know there's going to be a man saying, “What about me?” I know you exist. I have not had you as a patient yet.
Over the years, I've met one man with fibromyalgia.
Me too.
Maybe it’s the same guy.
It could be.
Do we have two or do we have one? In reality, more women have had this. For guys, it's not falling off so they're not having a problem with it. I'm starting to see more of my 50s and 60s folks coming in because they're saying, “Doc, I can't push myself in the gym anymore.” I replied, “That's because you've been broken for twenty years and we got to fix you now and back you up.”
I think for people with EDS, I would take a hard look down the collagen rabbit hole. I can guarantee that three of my EDS cases, my big three, the ones that I've been dealing with for the better part of a decade or more now, don't do enough protein and they are not getting enough collagen in this form.
It begs the question, they'll say, “I'm more on this pescatarian diet. I don't have an appetite.” Do bone broth. I don't care if it's chicken bone broth. I don't care if it's beef bone broth. Find a bone broth you like and make it. Mary Ann Rudick. I don't know if we've talked about her in the past. She's been on many podcasts. You could look her up.
In her early college years, she was so sick. She goes to college and then she can't go to college. She's got to live in her mother's house upstairs and the only thing that she could tolerate for a year was chicken broth. That's all she had, but that's all she would eat because once she started noticing that chicken broth was helping her, she would do one, maybe two.
She wouldn't want anything else but chicken broth. It took her a year before she said, “Let's try beef broth.” All of a sudden, everything blew up for her as far as being better, being stronger. You listen to her on her podcast without seeing her picture. This is a powerful young woman who has a goal to tell people that animal-based proteins are not the devil that we were taught they were, as well as how to revitalize your health.
I don't know if she had EDS, but certainly, she was not healing and not functioning the way she was supposed to. In any case, a couple of ideas. If you've got EDS and you feel like you have something stuck in your skull, it would be a good idea to give one of us a call or find out where we've got a Blair chiropractor near you to help you out. Doctor Bagley, where are they going to find you?
I am in Saint Louis, Missouri. We're on the west side. You can find me at precisionchiropracticstl.com/. I'm on all the socials @DoctorBethBagley.
I'm at KeystoneChiroSPI.com and on all the socials. Like, subscribe, tell people about this, and share this episode with a friend because you never know how that secondhand person is going to say, “I know somebody who needs some help.” As we do this, we help people get better. In any case, folks, thank you for tuning in. We'll be back next week with another episode of The Blonde and The Bald.
What's a nap worth? What's the ideal nap time to recover from your day? Why do we have you rest after an adjustment? These questions were examined and answered today! We also dive into the intricacies of Blair Upper Cervical Work and why more doctors don't do it.
Listen and read the full blog post here
We sit down with Dr. Craig Backs of The CureCenter here in Springfield, IL to go over his approach to cardiovascular health and how his journey helped him change the way he approaches medicine. After practicing mainstream internal medicine for three decades, Dr. Craig discovered the profound reversibility of arterial disease and shifted his focus to prevention and reversal, particularly targeting arterial disease and type 2 diabetes. This is a really fun discussion between the three of us, and we hope to have him back on soon!!
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Welcome to the show. I’m Dr. Frederick Schurger. We’ve got Dr. Beth Bagley here and most importantly, we have Dr. Craig Backs with us to share some of his expertise in the medical side of things for heart health and general health. I’m excited to have him on. Doc, I’m going to let you go ahead and tell us a little bit about yourself and what your practice is like, and then we’ll ask any questions.
Thanks. It’s great to be here. I appreciate the opportunity to interact with your audience. I’m a 67-year-old general internist. I’ve been practicing for about 40 years with no plans for retirement. For the first 30 years or so of my career, I practice mainstream general internal medicine dealing with the consequences of chronic disease. At that time, it was a problem but it’s not the same epidemic problem that it is now.
About ten years ago, I discovered that arterial disease is far more reversible and preventable than I ever thought. It blew my mind but it puts me in a position where I either had to change everything or ignore the evidence. I changed everything in my practice and decided to focus on reversing arterial disease as opposed to just managing against decline and watching its consequences. Not going into a lot of the details, I learned that arterial disease is the most common cause of disability, death, stroke, heart attack, type 2 diabetes, or chronic inflammatory conditions that are driven by things that we do to ourselves, the food we eat, the way we live our lives, and the toxins that we encounter more so than anything.
Let me put it this way. It’s not a medication deficiency disease. I learned the science and the medicine of it. I spent the last ten years, hopefully, improving the accessibility to it. The basis of it is called the build-a-name method. If anybody is interested in reading a book about it, you can pick up Healthy Heart, Healthy Brain. I haven’t written a book, but I would cite that as probably the best authority that I can mention.
Much of my website is also based on the principles in that book, TheCureCenter.life, for those who are interested in more background. For the last ten years, I’ve been focusing on reversing arterial disease and type 2 diabetes. I’m happy to report that I had my first patient suffering from an acute coronary syndrome that led to a stent. The first patient that suffered TIA. Other than that, none of our patients have suffered these extremely common events. I’m very proud of them with that track record. Now, I see the need to go over my fear of bragging, tell the truth, and let people know that it is possible.
That has been one of the foundations of health. I believe it goes back to Voltaire who established it for many doctors at least in that day and age fooling the patients until they got well. Now, we have been fooled by our food supplies that it’s hard to get well until we start realizing, “We just need to eat real food.”
You’re right, we’ve been interacting in Springfield on and off for the past decade or so since you opened your practice. One of the things that is common I hear about is how often someone needs to go in for a stent. If you’ve got ten years with your first cases, which invariably you’re going to have some of those from time to time. That’s fantastic. That’s great to hear. Before that, you were at St. John’s in town. Is that correct?
I practiced for about 30 years as a general internist with a group practice. It’s a number of different iterations. Not Springfield Clinic. Not SIU School of Medicine. We were an independent group so to speak. I spent three years as Chief Medical Officer at St. John’s Hospital. It was more of an administrative role trying to herd the doctor cats and keep the troublemakers in line.
What changed your mind from what is unfortunately the traditional medical practice to what you’re doing? What was the mindset that got you there?
My own personal need. I came across an opportunity to get my carotid arteries scanned with ultrasound and it showed that I have the same problem that my father, my uncle, and my grandfather all had, which is atherosclerosis. Unfortunately, I found out before I had an event. I thought, “What else should I be doing?” I was taking medications. I didn’t have high blood pressure. I was beyond overweight. I was obese. I was about 235.
I went investigating. I further asked the company that did the sonogram, “What more should I do?” They said, “You want to go to this preceptorship. They know the need method.” I went thinking I was going to be scammed because the leaders said they offered a money-back guarantee if anybody had a heart attack or a stroke under their care. They would refund their significant annual concierge medicine fee several thousand dollars and they’d only written one check in the last eight years.
When they presented the information, the data, the medical, and the studies that showed how foundational lifestyle is and how effective it is. I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I still prescribe medications. I recommend a supplement for targeted or identified deficiencies, but it was convincing. When I returned home, I remember I told my wife, “You have to drive because I have to go through all this information and outline and come up with a plan for implementing it in my practice.”
It has only taken about ten years to get there but I figured out most of it. It’s always wanting to do things every day but the struggle is trying to overcome the mainstream school of thought that this is inevitably a progressive condition. It’s so common, therefore, it’s inevitable. It’s normal but it’s certainly not optimal as it is optional.
I’ve heard it so many times. You said you’ve been helping not only with arterial disease but type 2 diabetes. Many people I hear, “I’ve got type 2 diabetes,” and they’re going to take insulin or something else as opposed to saying, “You can manage it and you can reverse it.” Many doctors are also told, “You can’t do anything about it yet. They can’t change their diet.” I’d like to know a little bit about the dietary protocols that you work with on people to help make those changes.
First of all, the fatalistic nihilistic attitude that patients won’t change, as Henry Ford said, “Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.” There are patients. It is difficult mostly because of our culture to overcome the influences that cause people to eat. By the way, I spell it phood for food. You use the word phool for the patient to be followed by Pharma. Phood, phool and into the pharma. It’s a business model. It’s been very successful and it’s getting more successful over time.
I tell patients, “You can choose whether to participate in that or not. It’s your choice.” This is simple but it’s not necessarily easy and needs support. I try to keep it simple. I don’t employ a nutritional counselor. First of all, if they’re certified, they’re doomed or deemed to give the wrong advice. I had a conversation with a certified dietitian in CrossFit gym one Saturday morning 7 or 8 years ago. I asked her how she ate. She said Paleo. I said, “Is that how you teach your patients?” She said, “No, I would lose my license.” They’re held in the food permit.
That was like this is not about the patient as a customer or as a beneficiary of our care. They are the product. If you look at the recommendations from the American Diabetes Association and the food pyramid, you can only conclude that the purpose of the clientele or the constituency of the American Diabetes Association is not people with diabetes but the disease of diabetes. The more diabetes we have, the bigger their influence, the bigger their budgets, and the bigger everything. Everybody loves growth when it comes to their own business.
I tell my patients, I call them the badasses, it comes to the nutritionists, the sweets, the starches, and the snacks. By that, I mean they are processed. Snacks are the processed foods that you’re eating all the time. We try to get our patients to try to eat within, I call it window feeding and intermittent fasting. Try to eat within a 6 to 8-hour window every day. The shorter the better. Some days are easier than others.
You have to get into social situations where you have to make adjustments, but for the most part, don’t eat all the time. We weren’t programmed or evolved to grades. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors gave us their genes that we perfectly adapted to their environment. They stopped eating, fasting for a famine. We had to hack that software back by our behavior. We can’t go with the flow of the three meals a day and free snacking with sugary processed food.
Sugar is enemy number one. Starch turns into sugar. Don’t eat any white foods other than cauliflower, which is a pretty good substitute for potatoes and rice. I have nine S’s, sweet, starches, snack, sitting, seed oils, sleep is important. and salt. I’m a little less striking about salt because salt is going to take the hit while sugar has been doing the damage. Also, smoking.
We can't simply go with the flow of three meals a day, unrestricted snacking, and sugary processed foods. Sugar is enemy number one.
People seem to be able to remember that, even though it’s not particular. One of the things that I find too often when I’m dealing with my colleagues is that we try to impart information. We say it’s for the patient’s benefit but it’s to prove how smart we are. We talk about data, studies, this, that, and the other. The role of a teacher or a coach, as I see my role is more of, “Here’s where you suck. Here’s where you need to improve.” I shouldn’t say it that way but I’m going back to my high school basketball coach, who used to tell me I stink all the time.
The point is, “Here’s where you can improve. Here’s how you improve. Here’s how we measure your improvement.” Repeat. One of the key things is to be very visual and data-driven in our approach. You’re very familiar with our in-body, which we call the judge, the body composition analysis. We can talk about whether are you too fat or too thin. The machine gives you a number. What do we want to do with that number? Make it better.
One thing on the in-body that is probably, certainly for myself, as someone who’s trying to be strong and trying to get stronger. I could get on a body fat scale to see what the body fat percentage is, but what I didn’t appreciate until I started, and the reason I use the in-body so frequently is that I’m focusing on that muscle mass component. You’ve got seventeen years on me, but that doesn’t mean a whole lot because I’m already past 35 by several. The problem ends up being is it is so hard to build body mass as you get older, as you’re well aware. Are you still at the CrossFit gym?
No, I’m a little embarrassed to say my physical exercise has been a little bit put off. Both of my history play some back surgery and neck surgery in the last three years. It’s a poor excuse. I could do better.
You’re also aware that if you don’t keep that muscle mass as you age, it’s going to deteriorate faster. Ultimately, that’s going to lead to more mortality and morbidity. That number there alone, when I see that number, even if my scale goes up and my fat percentage goes up and the muscle mass goes up. I’m like, “I’m not going to complain about that too much.” When that number goes down and the fat percentage goes up like it did when I stopped by, then I’m just like, “I need to fast.”
I have a question. When you discovered that, I know we already knew you were in an unhealthy state then got that information that made you, “This is the time to change.” How long did it take you to turn that around? Do you use that to help your patients? Do you use that experience?
I’m trying to remember the sequence. My own fitness journey started before I realized the arterial disease and that was Mike Suhadolnik, who was a CrossFit coach. He saw my picture and he said he was offended by my fatness. He came to my office one day and he said, “Why is it you doctors take better care of yourselves?”
Long story short, he had an idea. He was my coach and he taught me. He’s like, “You need to be a better example. You can’t expect people to follow advice from a fat doctor, fat nutritionist, fat nurses, and certified doctors as well.” The point is people spot hypocrisy and they aren’t inspired by it. I lost 70 pounds in probably less than six months but that was rather intense. I do remember the one thing he said. He lied to me the first day. He said, “80% of your weight reduction is not going to be exercised. It’s going to be what you eat.”
The lie was it’s more like 90% or more of what you eat. Not the exercise. That six packs are made in the kitchen. Not in the gym. That’s true, but it’s more true than not, I should say. That’s been born out in my practice as I follow patients. Besides their body composition, we also follow a number of laboratory tests, focusing a lot on chronic inflammation, but more visually, the carotid ultrasound shows what I call the thickness and sickness of the artery wall.
When we follow those things, we can show people their results and the benefits of what they’re doing in a cyclical way. I got a little bit off track there, but one of the key things to behavior modification is to identify the behavior and set a realistic goal. I’m not a believer in saying, “You need to lose 10 pounds.” I believe the only thing that makes any sense to me is a week from now, you need to be less fat than you are today.
For some people, that might be a half or 3 pounds, but it’s just how much less fat, how much exercise more. It’s not about a specific target because eventually and incrementally, you’ll get there. The other thing from a behavior modification point of view, I’ve discovered that very few people are going to do this. I would almost force them to do it, embarrassed and shamed into doing it, frankly, to change things almost like 180 degrees. It’s going to be a series of nudges. Can we make this change? What can you do? You can’t do that. Can you do this? That’s been far more successful for most patients.
This goes back to the situation with people like us. We see the data. We understand the data, and maybe that makes us more highly motivated to make those changes. We’ll do the hard things because we know on the other end of it, it’s going to be there. Whereas, the average patient hasn’t been challenged to do those hard things. The reason that they’re in their situation is because they haven’t been doing the hard things.
They haven’t been making the meal choices that are a little bit harder. Waiting to get home to make dinner as opposed to picking up something along the way, buying fast food, or the fast and processed food at the grocery store as opposed to something that you can cook at home or for that matter, getting out and going to the gym. We have to help. As you said, a lot of it is coaching to help them understand how we are making the change and helping them along the right direction because they’ve never experienced that or it’s been several decades since they’ve experienced that.
One of the things that I try to counter all the time is the bigotry of low expectations and seeing somebody who’s 40 pounds or 50 pounds or maybe 100 pounds and say, “You can’t change.” Maybe we need to give everybody a chance. Some people are better off continuing to disappoint themselves and us. At the same time, the set point should be that this can get better.
People need to be hopeful, but at the same time, be held accountable. That’s why I never let a patient leave my office without having set their next follow-up appointment where we’re going to see what the results of these changes will be made. Sometimes, it’s a one or two-week follow-up appointment. I call it to come to see the judge, get on the in-body, or three months to do their labs. I do operate within an insurance model to make this accessible to more people, but unfortunately, that drives some of the intervals by which we can do laboratory tests.
People need to be hopeful but, at the same time, be held accountable.
It gives them a target to at least know when they need to start cramming for finals, following the nutrition advice and exercising. The other beauty about things like the in-body is that I don’t have to get into debates with patients about what are they doing. I would just show the numbers and say, “Is this what you expected?”
For the audience who aren’t familiar, can you explain the in-body?
The in-body is a body composition analyzer. It uses bioimpedance absorption to do essentially what a CT scanner does with radiation absorption. The in-body measures the absorption of electrical energy in multiple vectors and creates an electrical picture of the body that is correlated with things like DEXA or other measurements of body composition. It gives you a report.
These are newer but the in-body 570 looks something like this. You stand on the platform. These electrodes and these electrodes in the hands transmit the energy and you get a report. I don’t know if they’ll show the report. You get a report that enables us to show the skeletal muscle mass. This is unfortunately a C pattern where there’s more fat and less muscle, where our strife or everything lining up. We can then follow that information over time. I have one in my office. It’s not an expensive investment, but I viewed it as I bought a robot that does what an employee does in terms of nutrition counseling for less than $10,000 seven years ago. I’ve considered it a pretty good ROI.
I like it because it is unlike a DEXA, where it is a radiation dose. Is it every three months or every six months before they want to let you do another DEXA?
I’m not familiar with DEXA. I had one that was my first body composition analysis then I discovered the in-body. A DEXA is $100,000. You use half a ton. In the in-body, it’s not extremely portable but you can move it and take it to other places and do events with it. There’s no harm. There are only two contraindications. One is implanted defibrillators or pacemakers or spine stimulators and pregnancy. Frankly, those are mostly driven by the lawyers wanting to avoid all stress. We may have had an accidental patient or two who get on it without any consequences but we do try to follow those restrictions. It still leaves a lot of people who can benefit from it.
As you were saying, especially with the insurance model. You would like to test more often to see the changes that they made within the month. Often within a month, you can make significant changes in diet to affect those things. With the in-body, you can do that on a regular basis with no impact.
We’ve had a couple of podcasts where we’ve talked about ways that people can stabilize their blood sugars. I want to know your opinion on people using continuous blood or blood glucose monitors. Do you think it’s a good thing? Do you think it’s too much information? What do you what do you think?
It’s an awesome tool. It’s underutilized. Unfortunately, insurance payment doesn’t kick in until somebody’s type 1 or type 2 diabetic on the insulin. Once the horse is out of the barn but into the next state, now we’ll pay for this. It’s a relatively small investment in patients. You need a prescription for it. It still costs maybe $70 for a month. What better information to find out, “I eat this and my glucose skyrocket. If I fast my sugar, my glucose doesn’t tank out.”
The feedback is valuable. The faster they can get that feedback, the better, and the more repetitive. It’s very helpful. Quite frankly, certainly anybody with arterial disease and you’ve reminded me that I probably need to recommend it more often. It should have that information because long before people have elevated blood glucose, they have insulin resistance. I always tell patients, “There’s very few of us that don’t have insulin resistance. It’s a feature. Not a bug in our software.” Going back to our hunter-gatherer existence, it’s a system that works well to intermittently have energy sources and store that energy for later use and expenditure.
It’s not a good system for constant energy intake, especially in the form of highly processed sugary food. It’s productive to store all that. All of that energy is fat or liver around our internal organs, which we know is inflammatory fat. Forget cholesterol and high blood pressure. The number one cause of chronic inflammation is insulin resistance combined with a culture that tells us to eat all this junk, do it all the time, and indulge your dopamine receptors in the brain and feel good until you don’t feel good.
It is a drug. We need an addiction model to overcome it for the most part. I don’t know if that answers your question going back to the CGM. It’s always instructional. Now, it’s ignored. That’s one thing. Sooner somebody is aware of how this food impacts our blood glucose, but more importantly, how it impacts insulin levels because it’s hyperinsulinemia that is the inflammatory driver and not the elevated glucose.
Glucose happens to be the thing we can measure easily. Insulin is not so easily measured and standardization is not so easy. We need to compare it to how it is relative to the glucose. It’s a little bit more complicated. You have the glaucoma IR testing that can be done as a surrogate for insulin resistance.
Frankly, I look at it this way, the higher your percentage of body fat compared to your muscle mass, the more insulin-resistant you are. What should you want? You should want to be less insulin-resistant. How do you get there? You become leaner, more muscular, more cardiometabolic in balance, and less inflamed. It works pretty much every time it’s successfully tried.
The higher the percentage of body fat you have compared to muscle mass, the more insulin-resistant you become.
How much of that diet ends up being keto-ish or is it keto or carnivore? Where do keto and carnivores fall into the diet stuff that you’re looking at?
Experts do this all day long and talk about it on shows all day long. Haters would say it’s not that simple. In my mind, it’s anything that limits the intake of sugar. By the way, artificial sweeteners don’t have much the same metabolic effect. You wouldn’t say to somebody who had a problem with alcohol, “Drink low-alcohol beer until you’ll be fine.” It’s a gateway drug to the real thing.
It stimulates the sweet tooth. It keeps it strong. It leads to relapse. The key thing, between carnivores, keto is carnivores with plants. Both rely on or shift our metabolism more toward ketosis and away from metabolizing glucose. The problem is we can’t possibly metabolize all the glucose and use it for energy that we ingestive for eating. The standard macadamide has to be stored as that. It becomes a toxin. Nobody has shown that there’s any downside to ketosis or being closer to it in my mind. Tell me if you think there is. If there is harm, the thing that protects us is it’s difficult to stay on it consistently.
Especially in our Western culture. It’s like, “I’ll just have a small piece of cheesecake, a chunk, a quarter. That’s a small piece.”
You can make that somewhat keto, at least, the cheesecake. I agree that then triggers the sweet tooth then someone’s like, “Maybe a bag of chips, but yesterday I did that.” It becomes a downfall.
It’s too easy. It’s everywhere. It’s on our site all the time. It’s on the media all the time. One of the best things, I have a lot less exposure to television and more to your show. That’s had a lot to do with making it. I’m in a friend’s house and I’m seeing cable TV and all the crap. All the memories come flooding back. It’s like taking an alcoholic into a bar or a kegger. It’s dangerous.
The other thing I’ll mention is I always tell patients, “It won’t be your worst enemy that’s going to remind you. It will be your closest friend. Maybe your spouse or your family members. “I made this just for you. This is your favorite.” A purchase of some comfort food. I call it the cram bucket syndrome or the tall poppy syndrome.
One of the things that I try to engage besides the fact that it’s generally a good patient recruiting tool is if I’m taking care of a husband. I want to get their partner too because they’ll either mutually reinforce each other, or they’ll undermine each other. I assume pretty well I end up with which is which. Does that fit with your experience?
For sure. I was going to say, for all three of us if we ever need comfort food, it should be a comfort brisket.
I love some brisket.
No sauce. We can do sauce later. We can figure that out.
You guys live in the same town, correct?
Yes.
Dr. Schurger makes a mean brisket. If he hasn’t brought you any, you should guilt him into bringing you some.
I’ll hold you to that.
I’m bringing you a brisket next time I’m coming in for an in-body.
I love brisket.
We’ve also done an episode on stat medications. I don’t want to get you in trouble, but we have mixed reviews and thoughts about statins. We’ve talked a lot about how a pro-inflammatory diet causes an increase in cholesterol numbers and that statin medications might not be the good first line of defense to reduce those numbers. What are your thoughts on that?
I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I use it as a backstop as a safe precaution. I’m always emphasizing less inflammatory diet exercise. I talked about the nine S’s, but let’s be realistic. Very few people are going to be that compulsive, compliant, and fastidious. The problem with statins as I see it, and as I used to prescribe it, as I used to prescribe them, is too two high doses of the wrong statin for the wrong reason.
If somebody comes to me with an atorvastatin 80 milligrams because their LDL cholesterol was too high. That sums up all three. High-prescribed low doses like 5 milligrams three times a week. A rosuvastatin for the purpose of reducing inflammation and following the markers that we look at for inflammation in the blood like LBPLA2 and C-Rac protein, micro ambient, and creatinine ratio. Also, intima-media thickness on the carotid artery scan. Hopefully, you do have a moment or two to talk about that.
The point is I have seen what happens when people don’t take the statins in terms of those inflammatory markers. I’ve seen what happens when they do. I strongly believe in these multiple end-of-one experiments, which is the one that matters and one that doesn’t in this person. I’ve seen improvement in arterial age and intima-media thickness with the statins. When they stop taking it, I can tell.
I’ve done it myself because one time I was heavily involved in CrossFit, culture, and working out all the time. These muscle aches aren’t CrossFit. They’re suicide. No, it was the CrossFit in my arterial age. It went up by ten years and six months. I went back on and went back down. Now, is that anecdotal? Sort of, but it’s my anecdotes, so it counts.
The key thing though is not to rely on them to say, “This is going to fix all your problems.” For instance, the whole issue with statins causing diet type 2 diabetes. I do believe that high-dose statins prescribed to somebody who doesn’t do anything about their diet and keeps the same starchy sweet diet. They’re going to get type 2 diabetes with the passage of time. Somebody who, at the same time, modifies their diet and sees a reduction in their body fat and their visceral fat, where the judge gives them good reports on the in-body.
I don’t think I’ve seen a single case of progression. In fact, I see regression in hemoglobin A1C as a surrogate marker for insulin resistance, which by the way, one of the things that the in-body also reports is your visceral fat levels. There is a downward trend in visceral fat. It’s this reliable indicator of improving insulin resistance or improved insulin sensitivity.
Anyway, going back. First of all, I ask the patient, “If I say the word statin, what is that? What’s the cause?” In a fairly health-conscious patient population, which tends to be the people who gravitate toward me or more and so on. Probably to you guys as well. There is a lot of statin phobia. Some of it is justified. I always try to classify our US statin intolerant. In other words, you’ve taken them and you don’t tolerate them. You’ve tried several. That’s one thing.
How high was the dose? At a lower dose, we may get the benefit without the downside. There are some people who are convinced and they are not open to it. There are alternatives. One of my favorite supplements is bergamot or berberine. It has favorable effects on inflammation and insulin sensitivity, which is the same thing as inflammation. Some improvement in the LDL, HDL, and triglycerides.
That’s a good alternative, but the reality is that sometimes compliance is an issue because these supplements can become expensive. Maybe especially when the budgets get tighter, inflation, food, and everything else is a problem. It doesn’t do any good if it’s a great program in theory. In practice, they aren’t doing it.
Niacin is underutilized as an anti-inflammatory and a lipid-modifying agent. The flushing is annoying but it’s not dangerous. There are other tricks like radius rise. I’ve seen that it’d be effective in some folks. However, the truth of the matter is that radius rise is molecularly still a statin. If you take a high enough dose, you can still get the statin side effect. Sometimes, what you call it matters. People will get the nocebo effect and the placebo effect. We have to keep those things in mind. I don’t care how long I continue to practice this. It will always be challenging because, at the end of the day, we’re dealing with people.
Which makes it half the fun because they’re on this journey as much as we are. You mentioned carotid dopplers and carotid health. You had some slides you wanted to share on that as well. We can measure that easily because it’s right here in the neck but how does that relate to the rest of the body?
Our arteries are the blood supply to every one of our organs. If you have a plug artery to an organ, that organ is going to suffer damage. Your heart is going to have a heart attack. Your brain is going to have a stroke, a neurological deficit. You’re going to lose kidney function. You are dialysis ultimately. In my mind, there’s no single place to focus that has more bang for the buck than to improve the health of your arteries.
If you are improving and reducing inflammation in the arterial wall, you’re going to see a reduction in generalized body inflammation. Why? It’s because all the things you’re doing to improve the arteries are going to have a favorable effect on everything else, better diet, more exercise, and avoiding toxins. The beauty of it is so measurable, especially now. This is a tool. I looked it up to a company that was founded in 2017. It’s called Butterfly IQ. For less than $4,000, you can own this. It’s extremely durable. It plugs into a smartphone or other tablet device.
I have adopted the approach to scan first and ask questions later. What I’ll tell you, for those who they’re interested. The images are on my website, TheCureCenter.life/images. Arterial disease is an inflammatory condition inside the artery wall. One of the things we were talking about and this illustrates. I’ve got a bad picture on here. It’s not that bad. This still shows that the endothelium is here. The disease process is inside the wall of the artery. It’s like chewing gum globed inside the artery.
The lumen only becomes compromised in very late-stage disease. Forget about the blood clot for the moment, but that’s where you get to fail a stress test or get chest pain or some similar symptoms. The disease process begins with inflammation and the wall of the artery and forms plaque. I use the analogy of acne. Acne is an inflammatory condition of the skin.
You get pimples. Pimples rupture and they tend to rupture. Plaque is true also when they first form. Plaque goes through a healing process. That’s shown ultrasonographically. This is an atherosclerotic plaque with areas of essentially, it’s like a little abscess. If that abscess breaks through this thin fibrous cap, it triggers a blood clot forming. That’s how you get the inclusion of the lumen of the artery down the stream. In this case, the carotid arteries.
Over time, if we manage the lifestyle, supplements, and medications properly, instead of a fresh pimple. It becomes a scar. People ask me, “Can I get rid of the plaque?” No, but you can heal it. Will my plaque break off? No, but it can break and lead to a blood clot. That’s the problem. With this ultrasound device, we can measure. We can visualize the intermedia layer. This is some very early plaque. I’ll show you an example. I did this scan on a young man age 40 and we were doing a family. It was a father and three brothers. It was like my three sons. You guys may not be old enough to remember my three sons.
I do remember that.
Anyway, the father is in his 70s. It looked pretty good. The oldest son at age 50, a type 1 diabetes, looked pretty good. The youngest son at 40, was very health-conscious and looked pretty good. Here’s a 43-year-old and he’s got this thickening on the artery wall. I’m looking at the artery and cross-section. He’s got this atherosclerotic plaque in his carotid bulb.
What caused that? We went through the process of evaluating it. He’s suffering also from symptoms of COVID. That has something to do with it. By the way, the vaccines and spike protein, whether you got it by infection or injection are pro-inflammatory. There’s a logical mechanism by which this has been happening. We can look at his artery wall. The artery wall thickness is here. This takes about five minutes to do. I can teach it to anybody who has one of these.
I could have somebody doing at least that initial view, the short axis view, within a matter of minutes. After you’ve done about twenty of them, you’d be pretty good at getting this image as well. I’m on a mission to make this scanning, this identification of this disease more ubiquitous, more widespread. It’s like cancer screening, the earlier you find it, the better your chances of avoiding the consequences.
To follow up on this, we can measure the carotid easily. This wasn’t uniformly diseased along the artery. The other thing is the carotid is super important because it goes to your brain. If a clot breaks off, your brain is going to have problems almost immediately. How much does this translate to something in the leg or something viscerally? Is it giving us a picture that says, “If it’s here, it’s a little bit of everywhere?”
What you just said the last. If you see it in the carotid arteries, it’s safe to presume or you should presume it’s also present in the cornea arteries. It continuous everywhere. If you don’t see it in the carotids, you may want to take another look. You can look at the aorta and the femoral arteries. In cornea arteries, we can’t get to with ultrasound, but you can do a cornea artery calcium score.
The point is to find out, do you have this disease. That’s got your attention. Here’s the key, if we can measure the artery wall thickness. For instance, this is an example of a gentleman aged 60, a fit and long-distance bicycle enthusiast. If you looked at him, he looked healthier or healthier than any of us in this room. This is a more complete examination of a very significant plaque in his throat arteries.
We said, “Let’s look at your diet.” One of the things that a lot of long-distance athletes do is carbohydrate load. If you have insulin resistance and he does. We got him to address that, I finally convinced him to try low-dose statin. This was changing his carbohydrate loading, then we added a statin. His arterial wall got thinner. We came up with this construct called the vascular age.
This is at what age would this number be at the 50th percentile? In the population, on average, artery wall thickness increases. That population grows older. Men are thicker than women, but the goal is to see this come down over time. The key concept is that if his artery wall is getting thinner in his blood, what do you think is happening in his other arteries?
There’s going to be problems everywhere.
It’s such an easy, non-invasive, and relatively economical way to monitor arterial disease. It’s very visual and very compelling. It’s great to be able to sit down with a patient and say, “Look what happened. You’re artery age dropped by sixteen years in less than a year.” That’s what we’re doing. He said, “Yes.” It gamifies their care.
Between December and July, his went back up. Now, he can come back and say, “What did I do differently that I need to go back to?”
Going back to our statin story, this is before he accepted taking a low-dose statin and this is after. This is when he thought he didn’t need the statin anymore.
When my dad had his heart attack more than a decade ago now, mild. He lost less than 10% of his heart. They put I’m on a statin. They did a stent. He’s got to take the blood thinner for the stent forever, but the statin was something he would have to take a couple of times a day. Your approach sounds like, “Take it as much as you need it,” and you have data to show why you need it. Whereas, unfortunately, I see too many people come in and they’re like, “My doctor prescribed this to me.” I was like, “What are they measuring to know that it’s helping you?” It’s fantastic there.
I always say when I hear that, they’re like children running around with a hammer. Every problem looks like a nail. That’s the tool that they have. Unfortunately, it’s institutionalized into guidelines. It’s how they’re measured for their effectiveness and their adherence to these guidelines. I’ve been around long enough to know evidence-based medicine. It’s just starting. Like every good thing, it seemed like a good idea, but there were unintended consequences. Now everything has come to the point where it’s like, how did each individual patient do this? How did you manage the population as a whole? It’s a one-size-fits-nobody approach. That’s the mainstream medicine now.
That’s just a pendulum swing as things go back and forth. Especially after everything that we went through in COVID, I feel like that institutional capture was largely responsible for why COVID was so bad as far as taking care of people and making approaches to say, “What established drugs do we have that might be able to treat this like we would treat anything else off label until we have something firm?” We’re seeing the end of that pendulum shift back towards something that makes better sense. At least I hope so.
For those of us, I suspect the three of us, we’re ahead of the curve in terms of our spidey sense or our common sense. Whatever you might want to call it or a BS maybe if you’re saying, “No vaccine is considered safe and effective until it’s been studied for twenties years. All of a sudden, six months out, this is a declaration as opposed to trusting us.” With the truth that says, “If you’re older than life expectancy with morbidity is a high risk of dying. Maybe it’s worth taking the risk of this new and novel agent.”
For everybody else down the road to pregnant women and toddlers, let’s wait and see. That told me volume is like, “You guys are completely full of it. You’re not to be trusted. There’s something else going on here.” The whole vitamin D story was amazing to me. In three months, we knew that very low vitamin D levels were the ultimate comorbidity for death and cold. That’s why our powers have made sure that everybody got a 90-day supply of vitamin D sent to them in the mail. I’m sorry, that didn’t happen.
Speaking of which, did you see the Medscape article that came up about a couple of days of the endo society? Some endocrine societies said, “Stop testing vitamin D altogether because we don’t know what levels are good. Maybe you’re taking too much.”
They’re trying to scare people.
The Risky Business, the movie. The pimp is played by one of my favorite actors, Joe Pantoliano. Standing next to Joe, he says, “Joe, you’re messing with my business plan.” I’m paraphrasing.
Very much so.
They don’t want anybody messing with the business plan. That sounds crass and accusatory, but if they don’t want us to be accusing them of bad behavior, why do they keep behaving so badly? I’m a walking cliché. Upton Sinclair said, “The surest way to make a man understand something is to make a salary dependent upon understanding it.”
There are many allying forces that establish that if you have a very inexpensive dietary supplement that we all know we should have based on our human history that can eliminate the need for all the pharmaceutical solutions to many of the chronic diseases that were afflicted by, is that good for business? Is reversible arterial disease good for cardiovascular programs, what stands in surgery, cardiac rehab, and stroke rehab? No. It’s terrible.
I’ll also add, by the way, the insurance. The payers are part of the problem too. One of the things that many people don’t realize and maybe you figured this out. With the Affordable Care Act, the mandatory medical loss ratio is the terminology for it. They said, “Ensure you have to pay out at least 85% of what you take in. In medical claims, you can’t take in the dollar. Pay out only $60 and keep $0.40.”
How do you grow that 15% for administration? You become a credit card company, a casino, and a bank. You have to pay more to justify charging more. That’s why you see these double-digit increases in health insurance costs every year and nobody’s talking about the benefit curve because everybody said, “The insurance tended to want to control costs.” No more. Growth is good for everybody.
I know Dr. Bagley and myself are both out of network for everything except Medicare. Getting back to credit card companies is an interesting thought. I don’t know how much Medicare you deal with, but when we get payments, sometimes it’s for $5 or maybe $10. They’ll send a fax with a credit card that could be forgotten.
They could have sent a fax with an eCheck that you could do direct deposit, but they did it with a credit card on purpose so that you might forget about it, and then they’ll keep their $5 or $10. That’ll add up over time. The whole system is broken. As I said, I hope we’re coming around to the end of the pendulum for those things to change. Since we’re talking weight loss and health, I wanted to get your take on Ozempic.
I’m not going to prescribe it. I’m not going to judge anybody who decides to do it, but they need to know this whole story. It’s not magic. In fact, I was watching. It’s interesting how this is getting into my version of popular media. Pierce Morgan did an interview including Dr. Jason Fung in his panel. I was shocked. Jason Fung was well-known for the obesity code. He’s the father of intermittent fasting. He said he’s been prescribing Ozempic for his patients for weight loss for five years as part of the program. His attitude about them is like my attitude about statins. It has a role, but it shouldn’t be the centerpiece.
In reality, it’s dangerous. Not just in terms of side effects. We all talk about gastroparesis, severe constipation, and patients showing up for surgery with a stomach full of food despite the fact they’ve been MPO for 24 hours. That’s how part of how it works is gastroparesis. It does give you a society, but it’s like everything else. It’s a real fad. Any substance can be used or it can be abused. It’s something that’s very prone to abuse.
I don’t think I can be credible with somebody and say, “The linchpin should be eating a healthier and less inflammatory diet.” If your obesity is bad, that’s the thing, then you go see somebody who will offer it to you. If it’s successful, fine. I won’t judge you for it. I haven’t seen a lot of data on this, one thing that people need to be aware of is a significant part of our goal is to lose fat and retain muscle whereas with Ozempic, I would say if you can lose 5 pounds of fat and only lose 1 pound of muscle at the same time, that’s pretty good. With Ozempic, there is a significant amount of muscle and that can’t be good. Again, obesity is not an Ozempic deficiency.
One of the things and this was the one more striking than the muscle loss, which as I’ve stated already, is probably the worst thing you can do after certainly the age of 35 and after the age of 25 because it’s just hard. You don’t have the metabolism. You don’t have the hormone factors running when you’re older as you are when you’re younger to build muscle.
The other thing that is just as staggering is the price alone to do your program and lose probably the same amount of mass as it is on Ozempic. If you compare apples to apples as far as the straight weight loss, they’re basically saying, “In six months, if you change your diet or six months of Ozempic, you lose about the same amount of weight.” Probably more muscle mass on that program. I’ve heard the price tag on that thing and I suspect you are still cheaper than that.
You made me think of a potentially and probably unethical way of going about this. I’ll give you Ozempic but it’ll be a saline injection every week. You have to come in and see the judge to prove that it’s working. By the way, you might want to try eating less sweets and starches. One of the things I’ll mention and keep talking about muscle mass, and you can check me on this, but I believe that two things happen during fasting endocrinologically that are beneficial.
The testosterone levels rise and it’s logarithmic. The longer you fast, the more dramatic it rises. The same thing is true of growth. Both are the opposite of catabolic. They build muscle mass. If nothing else, if I’m a bad boy, otherwise. If I don’t eat until 11:00 in the morning and I stop eating at 6:00. I’d say that’s a significant benefit or I get sick or less fast but everybody can do that.
I agree and that’s the easy one. I’m torn because I’m going back and forth on it, on that same concept but not so much waiting till 11:00, but breaking the fast early in the morning and eating lunch, and then not eating something at dinnertime. Except for we have our Western society. We are socialized to have dinner together. In my brain, I can’t do it. I’ve tried. I’m still trying to make the switch, but there’s something to eating breakfast when you wake up, then lunch, and then skipping dinner.
That’s the hardest one for me. I can skip breakfast all the time but skipping dinner is harder for me but I’m going to get a continuous blood glucose monitor and see which one works better for me. It’s the information.
The number one concept is that our bodies do better when we’re stressed. Physically stressing it. We’re too easy on ourselves and trick the body into adjusting to changes in the environment. That’s the way we were made or evolved. That’s how we do our best. That’s why I think things like cold water or ice plunges or cold showers. It’s like our society has made it so lacking in resiliency because we are no longer seemingly resilient.
The same thing is true. If two days out of the week, you can eat the last meal. If nothing else, eat it early like 3:00 or 4:00 earlier than you normally would. You have that longer period of house cleaning that happens during fasting because of those insulin levels. The key thing is not how low the blood glucose goes. It’s how low the insulin levels stay. That’s the dirty little secret in this. When you put somebody with type 2 diabetes on insulin, it’s just so crazy.
One of the patients I love to show is this is a little different case. This was a 75-year-old type 2 diabetes on three blood pressure medicines, and three diabetes medicines plus insulin. In three years, we dropped his arterial age from 68 to 44. All we have to do is say, “Tom, after all these years, do you think you can cut out sugar?” He did. He was able to get off six medications and insulin.
This is somebody who had had bypass surgery 8 or 9 years earlier. It’s never too late to change and leverage these things. Full disclosure, sad to say about a year later, he was diagnosed with acute leukemia. That’s one of those active God things. I certainly don’t think that his life was worse off for having done these things before he developed leukemia and died. None of us are getting out alive but we can certainly make it more like this as opposed to this steady downhill.
One of the things I wanted to ask because this is something we’re seeing more. I remember one lecture talking about the things that would have got that get us now as medicine becomes more modernized and quicker to take care of some of these acute problems like a heart attack or cancer. We’re living longer and now we’re getting into more neurodegenerative diseases getting us. How do you view the arterial side of things leading to neurodegenerative problems? Your nine S’s are right there and I agree with that. What else do you see along those lines?
A lot of what is diagnosed as Alzheimer’s disease is a vascular dimension. In other words, you don’t get one sizeable blood clot clotting off a branch vessel to your motor cortex and develop paralysis. You might get a tiny little microthrombus that travels downstream from a micro rupture and over a period of time, you get a Swiss cheese effect. There’s that. Let’s put it this way. Every lifestyle modification that improves arterial health certainly doesn’t cause more Parkinson’s disease or more Alzheimer’s disease.
For instance, if you want to do a comparison to Healthy Heart, Healthy Brain, and Dale Bredesen’s book, The End of Alzheimer’s, there’s so much overlap if you do the Venn diagram. The things that are recommended are very similar. What you’re saying is they imply with these things that although they’re more common as we get older, are they part of normal aging? No, they’re just more common because of the cumulative effect of these bad habits, the lifestyle choices that our culture enforces, and the toxins we encounter. We haven’t talked about air pollution. Unfortunately, in Springfield, we have less of a problem with air pollution in the same city as St. Louis or Chicago.
We’ve got all the life phosphate spray and all the stuff coming from the field. I don’t know which one is worse, quite honestly.
One of my moral dilemmas is one of my patients is a crop duster. I don’t even want to ask what he’s spraying but he’s very health conscious for himself. I thought how much of life is safe. One of the most eye-opening lectures I ever listened to was from an emeritus plant botanist, a plant biologist in Purdue, explaining how glyphosate works.
It is the accumulating agent and it depletes the plant of nitrogen and other micronutrients. That’s how it kills the weed. The GMOs that are planted in plants are engineered to where that has less of an impact, but glyphosate is not supposed to accumulate in the plants. It’s not supposed to accumulate in the soil. It’s all BS. It’s all there.
On top of that, along those lines of the chelating agent, it also binds up all the magnesium in the soil. Now we don’t have magnesium with food.
Everyone is magnesium deficient.
That’s probably one that I need to be paying more attention to. Thank you for reminding me of that. Anyway, in my point of view that I try to tell people, you can see the threat but you can, I wouldn’t say eliminate it, but you can largely eliminate the threat. You can see it reverse and it’s not as difficult as one might believe. Make that series of nudged movements to better outcomes.
My thought on that is what are your top three supplements that you almost always recommend to people?
Vitamin D with K2. I won’t mention the proprietary names but of high quality and reliable manufacturers.
We use Ortho Biotic too. I know you guys like that one.
I can’t always, but I can often tell when they substitute it. Bergamot BPF for the reasons I mentioned earlier. Niacin, particularly for people with elevated lipoprotein A, which by the way, is a genetically determined lipid abnormality affects about 30% of the population. They can have a meaningful impact, especially if you have a family history and folic acid. A chiropractor years ago said, “Are you checking home assisting?” A lot more types of home assisting are a lot more common than you think. I could check the MTHFR gene variant, but my preferences just deal with if their home assisting level is high, the supplement with folic acid.
You do the methylated folic.
My preference is methyl B12. It’s the Ortho Molecular version. I’m sure there are others. I’m not an expert. I go like, “What’s the recommendation?” It’s problem, solution, and measure. It’s amazing how, again, the changes aren’t happening. It’s like, “I don’t understand. Can you help me understand why this isn’t moving?” It’s like, “I ran out of it. I forgot to get it.” I hook everybody up with an account on an online dispensary and it helps us. Sometimes, it doesn’t work with people and what’s the most important one or two because they can’t afford all three or whatever. That’s what keeps it interesting.
It does.
There are so many things that I’ve got a bunch back here. I would do magnesium, fish oils, and D-3 as well with the K subs supplement because those are also driving a lot of that same anti-inflammatory process, especially when we’re deficient in something like magnesium.
Low vitamin D is with insulin resistance and Vitamin K2 also reduces insulin resistance. Since it’s so ubiquitous and almost universal. To me, everybody ought to be doing that.
Especially if you’re up North of a certain parallel. We have to have it in the winter for sure.
Thirty milligrams or micrograms per deciliter is the low end. That’s the definite problem zone. Do you have a higher number that you like to get your patients to or a higher minimum that you like to get your patients to?
I shoot for 60 to 90. A safe range, both from an effectiveness. The whole toxicity with vitamin D is so overblown by the fear of mongers. Stay away from the thing. That might save you. They’re a 1% possibility of making kidney stones if your vitamin D level. We measure vitamin D levels at least once a year or twice a year.
Frankly, most insurance is occurring. One of the things is we look at how things are organized and incentivized. Maybe you know this already but the cost of a vitamin D level in the lab that I use, if you walk in and say, “I want a vitamin D level without insurance paying for over $200.” The same is true for home assisting. What does that tell us about what they want us to know? They don’t want you to know about your home assisting levels or your vitamin D levels because there’s a distant center. Yet, if it’s billed to me, both of them are in the $10 to $15 range.
I got an all-cash rate through Quest as well. It’s like $10 to $15 for both of those. Those are the expensive ones on my list. I can get a whole CBC for $5 and I’m like, “Really?” It comes back to all the way the insurance games are getting played to who is getting their pockets lined and such like that.
It’s like the things that would hurt the business bottle to be known are extremely expensive. This is one of the areas where I am a little bit leery about like testing for early cancers. Total body MRI, blood tests, and 90 cancer markers. That’s good for the oncology treatment business. The hell with the toxicity to the patient and how many of those minimal cancers are self-limited. We can go with that. That could be a whole other discussion.
Honestly, I would love to have you back on and offer another episode if you would be willing because this has been so incredible.
I’m shy and I don’t like to say too much.
It’s fantastic. For our audience, where can they find you?
I’d say the best thing would be to go to my website, TheCureCenter.life. I’m located in Springfield, Illinois, but for the majority of my encounters now, my consultations are done on telemedicine. Most communities have a Quest lab facility and the number of locations where we can get their credit ultrasound done is growing. Go to TheCureCenter.life. If you go to TheCureCenter.life/discovery-call, they can register for no cost and no obligation discovery call. Regardless of what their interest is, we can figure out, “This is a good fit for you. We can do this or maybe this isn’t the right thing for you.”
When we post the episode, we’ll make sure that those links are available.
Dr. Schurger, where can they find you if they need an upper cervical chiropractor?
I’m at Keystone Chiropractic, KeystoneChiroSPI.com, Springfield, Illinois. Find us on all the socials.
I’m Dr. Beth Bagley. I’m in St. Louis PrecisionChiropracticsSTL.com and socials.
Folks, make sure you like and subscribe to the show. We appreciate you’re joining us for this one. As I said, we’ll see about having Dr. Backs back another time for more fun and discussions on things. Folks, thank you so much for tuning in and we’ll see you next time.
Craig Backs, MD, is an experienced specialist in Internal Medicine, caring for adults through diagnostic skills and management of acute and chronic disease. These diseases include diabetes, hypertension, atherosclerosis, and other conditions that respond to better lifestyle choices, supplements and medications. Left to progress, they can dramatically shorten or ruin an individual’s life. He is best described as an “open minded allopath” now focused on root cause elimination, correction of nutrient deficiencies with targeted supplements and medication when the benefit outweighs the risk.
Dr. Backs was educated at Valparaiso University and Southern Illinois University School of Medicine. His Internal Medicine residency was completed at SIU School of Medicine in Springfield, IL. It was there he practiced with a group of other internists and primary care doctors. He served as President of the Illinois State Medical Society among other leadership roles. After three years as Chief Medical Officer at St. John’s Hospital in Springfield, IL, he opened The Center for Prevention Heart Attack and Stroke, which later became The CureCenter for Chronic Disease. Dr. Backs has made it his mission to cure Chronic Disease by digging out its root causes.
His personal journey to cure Chronic Disease began in May of 2012. “My own personal health went through a dramatic makeover,” says Dr. Backs. “I now know better and provide a more credible example for my patients. I understand the challenges they face as they pursue a healthier lifestyle. I know how to motivate and coach success.”
Dr. Backs uses his personal and professional experience to develop and coach your Personalized CurePlan to prevent and reverse chronic disease into remission and live a long optimally healthy life.
There's been weird discussions about biohacking lately, and a lot of people in the Chiropractic community don't realize that Chiropractic IS the best biohack out there. Drs. Beth Bagley and Frederick Schurger cover what is going on that actually supports how Chiropractic completes a lot of what most Biohackers would say are the top 8-10 items that qualify as biohacking. Whether or not you consider yourself a biohacker, see how you can benefit from chiropractic care from longevity to strength & from improved immune function to overall well-being.
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Dr. Bagley, how are you?
I am well. How are you doing, Dr. Schurger?
I am doing excellent. I have had a good week.
I heard you ate 300 grams of protein.
I did.
I ate 400 grams of protein. I'm better. It was closer to 40.
That's the problem.
It was not a good protein day for me, but I'm glad it was a good protein day for you.
When I stepped on the scale, it was only one pound up. I'm not unhappy with that change.
The increase in protein leads us to what we're going to talk about, which is something called biohacking.
Dr. Bagley, the question, and this is going to be the title of the episode because people will already have seen it, but the question is, what is the best biohacking? Why is it chiropractic? I sat down, and I've had a couple of people talking about this. What's this big deal that people don't think chiropractic is biohacking? Chiropractic was probably one of the first bio hacks that was properly introduced.
BJ Palmer was the original biohacker. He was such an innovator in our profession but in awesome things.
Our chiropractic in radio and printing. He was printing X-ray. The list goes on. That's one example of somebody who has gone through and, because of what he was doing for his health, was able to take that to a new level for many people. It's been this weird back and forth. People are like, “Isn't chiropractic biohacking?” It is.
I love the Brave browser. For those of you who haven't been paying attention, the Brave browser is one of the cleaner browsers out there. None of the browsers is great for hiding all your information and making sure you don't get messed up. I asked it and did a search. What are the best reasons to biohack? The AI-generated list is eight items that I would generally agree with. These are the benefits of biohacking. I'm going to hit down the list, go back, and hit each one of these individually.
I have an aside that has nothing to do with what we're talking about. I'm the color commentator for the night. My mom bought a new computer. She, who is not great at computers, said, “I want to put the Brave browser on.” I was like, “My mom knows some stuff.” It’s a new computer, Windows. I was helping her do it. I downloaded it from Brave.com and tried to install it.
We love Windows and Bill Gates because he is the ultimate biohacker or biokiller. It's fine. I know it's not him, but the company has made it hard to install applications that are not Windows-approved. I looked up three different ways to change the settings, and I had to go back to work at that point, but I still couldn't figure it out. I was working on it for twenty minutes and still could not install it. I could download the app, but I couldn’t install it on her computer.
This is a several-year problem that I thought was solved because Bill Gates, with his Internet Explorer, killed the Netscape browser, which was a superior browser to the Internet Explorer. He made it almost near impossible. They're revisiting that.
It made me mad. I was like, “There is going to be a way that I can do it.” For someone her age who's not computer savvy, this is going to be another half an hour of me trying to find the setting because everywhere that the internet says it is, they've moved it.
That's the best way to use Internet Explorer to download any other browser.
It's not even the Internet. It's called Microsoft Edge.
That's what it is now, along with all the problems with Microsoft. Back to biohacking, we've got eight bullet points we're going to go through and explain why each one of these and some of this crossover. It’s only six items in reality.
I'm going to read the disclaimer here. First of all, because we're talking about it, it doesn't mean you should do it. Talk to your doctor about this.
If AI generates an answer, check it.
It could be right or wrong.
It could be completely fabricated.
The first thing it says is that biohacking is a practice that involves using various techniques and methods to optimize one's physical and mental well-being. Some of the best reasons to biohack include, and here we start with our list.
Improving health is number one.
That's why going to biohack to not. That's the point of it.
Number two is enhancing cognitive function. Number three is increasing energy and vitality. Number four is reducing stress and anxiety. Number five is extending lifespan.
That’s a big one. A lot of people talk about that.
That's becoming more popular for various reasons.
I'm going to download my consciousness into the internet and live forever.
Number six is optimizing physical performance. Seven is improving mental clarity and focus. The final one is enhancing creativity and innovation. I can see how enhancing creativity and innovation will fall under cognitive function. That mental clarity and focus also fall under cognitive function. You can see where these overlap.
Improving health right off the bat, we do this day in, day out, in chiropractic. This doesn't necessarily directly impact those of us who do something like blare up or cervical. Eliminating aches and pains is improving one's health. As you have more pain, you have a problem where nerves that fire and wire together. Those pain receptors are overwhelming your nervous system. That's a major problem.
Improving health is a win for the weak. It wasn't even my patient. It is Dr. Thomas's patient, but I got to see her. She's on her second or third visit. She goes, “I am feeling so much better.” I was like, “That's great.” She was excited and bubbly about it.” She goes, “I've also noticed at this time of night, my tinnitus would be terrible. I don't have it at all.” I said, “That is exciting.”
I told her out loud that there are different types of tinnitus. Some respond well to this type of care, and some don't. I said, “I'm excited that yours seems to be responding.” I can't imagine it because I have some form of tinnitus from the injury. Having that high-pitched squealing is when it's that loud. That's a biohack. It’s like, “How do I get rid of tinnitus?” One of them is chiropractic. I love that. Do you have any wins that you had?
I do, but I'm going to bring it in at a different point here on the list.
I'll allow it.
Other things that improve your health is improving your immune function. I'm looking at neuroimmune function. They found that eighteen found a significant effect on immune markers out of 21. It’s 86% of the pieces and parts of the studies that they looked at that found a significant effect on your immune function when you're under chiropractic care. It’s not necessarily talking about what we do directly because what we do directly shows a direct impact on our secretory IgA. It’s a significant improvement and increase in that immediate time after an adjustment within 30 minutes.
Let's break that down for someone who doesn't know what any of that is. IgA is an immunoglobulin, which is a clump of proteins.
Secretory IgA is your frontline defense for your immune system.
It's going to find bad guys.
We have two immune systems technically running in our body. It's more than that. There's some back-and-forth playing with it. We have the innate immune system, which is all our mucus membranes and our gut. If someone sneezes in your face, your innate immune system is what's going to fight off those bugs if they are toxic or a problem.
That's the first line of defense. Secretory means you're secreting it and how you guys tested it with saliva.
Secretory IgA is the most abundant immunoglobulin in the body. This is significant and impactful. It tells us that this study here was looking at other immune markers. I don't believe they looked at secretory IgA. They published this study at about the same time we did. Secretory IgA has a spike right off the bat. It goes up as soon as you get exposed to something that is toxic or noxious to your body. Within a couple of days, it drops back down. It's the one that learns. The other immune system is the adaptive one.
I had to google it, sorry.
No, that's fine. Sometimes, every word doesn't sit in our brains, especially after a long day of work. The adaptive immune system learns from what the innate immune system is finding. They talk back and forth. From this, we are able to develop long-term immunity to things. This is why there was this back and forth about, unlike every disease we've ever come into in mankind. COVID, having it once, does not show immunity to it in the future. There were some lesser degrees, but that's a Coronavirus problem that is less a COVID problem. Coronaviruses are changing rapidly.
This is why it is impossible to get a vaccine for Coronavirus.
That's neither here nor there. We're talking about improving health. When you get adjusted right off the bat, your secretory IgA and your innate immune system increase their function to levels to deal with whatever's going on in your body. If you have an infection, a cut, a bruise, or anything where the body would be numbly coming in to work on, it's going to make an improvement to that. It's going to fight off the baddies and communicate to that adaptive immune system.
This was a study done with upper cervical chiropractors.
The secretory IgA was done solely with upper cervical chiropractors. I was one of those doctors. I can definitively say that when I adjust someone, the odds are good that their secretory IgA increases because all ten of my patients showed an increase.
The aside is we also hear that from our patients. Teachers start coming in, and they don't get sick the whole year, whereas they get sick left and right. When that kid coughs in their face, IgA is working to be the frontline of defense so that they no longer have the baddies in them as much, and they can fight it off faster or completely. Reason number one chiropractic is the ultimate biohack is it increases health with immune system function.
The next point was enhancing cognitive function. For all of these points, we could probably go on. I will drone on and on.
I'm going to try to stop you.
The second one is enhancing cognitive function and improving their ability to function and do other things. The one study that I pulled up because I remembered it was improving in signs and symptoms of ADHD and functional outcomes in four children receiving torque release chiropractic. It wasn't a lot of kids. We had a handful of children in this group. Their symptoms improved by an average of 17%. For functional status improved, on average, by 23%. General well-being improved on average by 21%. We see ADHD kids all the time. All of a sudden, they were having problems in school, and their grades went up.
It's cool to see that. One thing I tell parents is, “Adults tend to feel pain when they misline.” Not everybody will feel pain, but we tend to. Kids exhibit more. Some of them will have pain. I'm not saying they don't. A lot of them will exhibit behavior changes rather than pain. That could be anything from concentration issues to insomnia. Kids sleep and concentrate better. They also have fewer outbursts, like anger issues. We can see a ton of stuff like that. It's amazing.
I had one young man. His grandfather brought him in because he was doing poorly in school, but yet, you are talking with the kid. You knew he was smart. Both he and his brother, who had bad asthma, were sharp as tacks. The older one was having a hard time in school. His cervical curve was in the wrong direction.
It should be a banana shape. If it's not a banana shape, it is in the wrong direction.
He was one of my first patients to have that curve turn around almost immediately, which was exciting. e started doing better in school. Talking about wins, I've got a concussion case. She's been on disability for a year now. We've met Kelly. We've talked to Kelly in the past, but she's had trouble being functionally present when she's sharing her story or trying to make it into the office. She was having a rough week. She's been doing better.
I'm hoping we broke through on something with upper cervical work and the NRT. It’s the nasal release work that I'm doing now. She was more clear and responsive. She understood. The room was physically brighter to her because she could perceive things better. I was excited to see that change in her after working on her. I'm hoping that continues on. I had another case. She was the one who prompted how we worked on Kelly. She was having some trouble. We unlock some stuff for her. I'm hoping that's going to help her hold her adjustment better. That's enhancing cognitive function.
One more thing for my own personal cognitive function. When I am in need of a chiropractic adjustment, I know it before pain comes on because of my cognitive function decline. It's not that I can't talk to people, but it'll take me longer to come up with the words. Everyone forgets a word here and there. We forgot adaptive, but it's different than that. It's easy words. My brain goes past the word. I have to run around and find it again. When I read, I will read a paragraph and forget what I read. I'll have to read it again.
I remember as a kid, that's what I had to do a lot. I was a smart kid. I got all A's. It took me forever to read. I would learn more by people talking to me and writing down notes. To this day, I don't learn by reading well without taking notes with it. If I'm making an adjustment, I can read a paragraph and understand it immediately unless it's something you wrote.
That's fair because sometimes I have to reread what I write to see if I wrote it right. I'm with you on that. I always use the analogy of Charlie from Flowers from Algernon after he got his big smart brain medication and how it slowly went into that cognitive decline down the line. We've talked about that with a couple of different movies that have come out. The most disturbing one is Lawnmower Man. Don't watch number two. If you have not seen Lawnmower Man, it is worth watching.
I introduced my kids to Idiocracy. There are a lot of like things we say. It's like one of those pop culture references. I was like, “Now you understand why we say that.” It doesn't hold up great because it's hokey. Are we living in idiocracy now?
The funny thing is they didn't think Crocs were going to last. That's why they chose Crocs. They hadn't taken over the market.
The next biohack I see is increasing energy and vitality.
I've got a list of things that are going to help with that. It’s diet and exercise, but sleep patterns are a big part of this because most people don't consider how much better life is when you get 6 to 8, but more like 7 to 9 hours of sleep every night. If you are in pain, you don't get sleep. It doesn't happen. I have many patients that are coming in. They're telling me, “If I get any straight sleep, it's 3 to 4 hours tops.
Most people don't consider how much better life is when you get six to nine hours of sleep every night.
Sometimes, you have a physical problem that is preventing you from getting a good night's sleep. People wake up in the middle of the night to use the restroom, especially as we get older. That's one problem. The bigger problem is if that's not the main issue and other things are waking you up, you are not getting restorative, recuperative functional sleep that is keeping you healthy and vital.
I always bring things back to me.
It’s all about you.
Most things are about me. As a child, I had chronic insomnia. I would lay next to my sister's bed, poke her, and say, “Sarah, how do you fall asleep?” She could fall asleep like that. I had that continuing since I was in my early twenties. I found the upper cervical got adjusted. It was not long until I realized I was sleeping. It took me 10 to 15 minutes to fall asleep. Not two hours to fall asleep. That affects all things when you sleep well. If you can biohack your sleep, you're right. Why is chiropractic the ultimate biohack? It affects sleep. Most of our patients will say, “After I got that adjustment, I had the best night of sleep in my life. I was like, “Yeah. That's awesome.”
It's not uncommon. Last time, I was down, and you adjusted me. It's not uncommon for people to rest for 20 to 30 minutes after their adjustment in nice recliners or on a comfortable little bench-style bed. It's not uncommon to have people snoring away after they get adjusted. It's fantastic when it happens. This is why I tell people, “Snoring is optional. That might be a little bit of a warning.” Sometimes, they complain when I come to get them up after twenty minutes. They’re like, “Doc, can I stay?” I've had some people who I've let rest for about an hour and a half because I was able to work it into my schedule that I didn't need that extra resting chair.
It's one of the better benefits of chiropractic. As you start sleeping, you have a better recovery. All of these biohacking devices that Oura ring, Apple Watch, the Garmin, and all these things that track sleep oftentimes start showing improvements, and they tell you how hard you can push your day based upon how well you slept. Let's go on to reducing stress and anxiety. How about you sleep better through the night? There is a lot of overlap on these items.
One of the better benefits of chiropractic is as you start to sleep, you have better recovery.
One of the reasons people don't sleep a lot of time is there are circular thought processes happening because of anxiety and stress. They keep thinking, “I've got this. I've got that.” One of my hacks is I keep a pad and paper next to my bed. If something comes to my mind, which it often does, I write it down and let that one go because I know I can pick that up in the morning. That's something you guys can use. I’m bringing it back to me. I had panic attacks before chiropractic care. I do not have panic attacks anymore.
We've talked about the mood bone and the C3 involved. C3 can influence your diaphragm's function. The atlas and the vagus nerve have an intimate connection there. Because of that intimate connection, the vagus controls your breathing and your heart rate. If your heart rate is way high, you cannot control your breath. One of the common things to help reduce stress and anxiety is meditation and deep breathing, which all tie into that autonomic function.
One of the autonomic markers that they're using now to measure how that is balanced is something called HRV or heart rate variability. It's not a heart thing. It's not a heart rate thing. It's a variability that is controlled by the nervous system. The more variability you have, the better off you are. You start talking to the biohackers because everyone's got some HRV metric that they're looking at. Deep sleep, meditation, and deep breathing help you with that marker.
When people are stuck in that fight or flight or that sympathetic dominance and chiropractic, what would I tell patients, and I’m bringing it back to, is simplicity is when we're out of balance, and our parasympathetic and sympathetic are not balancing like they should balance each other. Chiropractic adjustment helps that balance. I see it in patients.
I have this one new patient who is stressed and anxious. After her adjustments, she's able to breathe better and talk clearer. They're not perfect yet, but they go down. I'm excited to meet her again in a month when she's been under care longer. That anxiety is real and horrendous when you have that anxiety or constant fear struggle happening in your brain. There's no reason for it. If you're getting chased by a bear, you're supposed to have anxiety. It's supposed to make your heart rate speed up so you can run or fight because you would fight.
I would fight.
I know you would. I'd let you fight, and I would run.
This is what happens in the world.
I'll accept you as the champion and fight the bear for us. When you constantly feel like you're being chased by a bear, that is not a way to live. That is a way to have your heart feel like it's going to beat out of your chest and not be able to sleep at night. Chiropractic, being the ultimate biohack, we see it daily that anxiety and stress. We can't get rid of stress. We can't make that go away. We can help your body handle stress better with the chiropractic adjustment.
Getting to the bears chasing you in the woods is the ultimate sympathetic dominance type of situation. What we understand about our lifestyles in modern Western society is that we live in a sympathetic, dominant state. We never have the ability to properly relax into that parasympathetic state, which is to rest, digest, and heal. We have two states in our body. We have healing, growing, and adapting, which is that parasympathetic state. We have breaking down and dying, which is the sympathetic state.
We need a sympathetic state for survival.
It wakes us up. It's what makes our workouts beneficial for building muscle because we're breaking down and dying in that shortened period to make us stronger afterward. This is why when you start looking at the research, talking about long workouts, you're losing your benefit after about 35 to 40 minutes tops, maybe an hour for some people. Thirty minutes is all you need to stress the body and say, “All right.” I can walk away and won't be completely wiped out. If you've ever done a workout that took you an hour and you couldn't move it for a day, you overdid it. It is the same concept going on.
Let's skip down to optimizing physical performance, and we'll come back to the next one.
Let's do that one next.
We all put strength training and cardio flexibility into optimizing physical performance. When people biohack, like hiring a personal trainer, it’s awesome. What can make your personal training and kettlebell swings more effective is having your body in balance. If it's not in balance, you can hurt yourself. You will not get an effective workout because you are not utilizing your muscles in a balanced way. There's bringing back to chiropractic. Everything comes back to chiropractic.
What's the website that we show to patients?
That full-body picture is going to be a good picture to examine because that's going to be the one we want to take a look at. You should be able to share now. This imbalance that we start to see is because when the atlas goes out of place, the brain has to keep the head level.
Our eyes and ears are responding to the horizon and gravity because of how things are pulling. If our head and that atlas are shifted out of place, we can bang on the lower back here all day long for that lower back pain that you have. Oftentimes, those are hot low backs. We go to the top, adjust the atlas, and everything balances out. Everything starts to come back to where it's supposed to be. If it's in that out-of-balance state, you've got some muscles that are going to be more tight and contracted on one side.
I see this regularly. I would love to see this taking a little bit more study with gym goers. How well is their bench press staying balanced in alignment versus out of alignment? I started watching people in the gym. This was before COVID. I noticed how off-balance the bar was. It’s always something that I felt with my CDO brain. The bar should be balanced because I want to get both sides of the muscles to hypertrophy ideally and strengthen together. People are out of balance. You can't figure out why one side is growing bigger, and the other side is taking its time. Will it ever be perfect? No, but it'll be better. You won't injure yourself as easily.
You can still injure yourself.
I've done it. I was out of adjustment. That's how that works. We get you functioning better by getting everything balanced. After my first chiropractic adjustment, I took several months to get good at kung fu.
I warn my golfers because that's such a precise thing that they do. If you're a good golfer, your swing got it lined in. You've got it perfect for you, but if you have back pain or you’re having a problem, you know you need chiropractic care. It can sometimes change your golf swing in the long run. It will change it for the better. In the short term, you can have some bad games.
You need to learn how to practice how you're going to hit the ball. This goes for any sport when you're in alignment versus out of alignment. A lot of people who are athletic start to notice when they're out of adjustment faster than anybody else would because they are highly tuned to their bodies already. I saw Dr. Shiloh. She's like, “Yeah, it's not right.” She knows because she's athletic and in tune with her body. She knew it was off.
We have patients like that. I've got one who is in tune with her body. She can tell me which bones are out of place. She's right.
Some people are sensitive. Everyone, no.
I'm not good at telling you which side or what bone. Sometimes, I can tell something's not right, but I can't tell you exactly what's wrong. That's why I trust my doctors.
This is why when Dr. Schuler checked me, we joked about it because my C4 was out. That's the one that she adjusted when I told her the listing that I wanted to be adjusted. I told her the wrong listing. That's on me. She adjusted it perfectly right. This screwed me up for about a month. This is why it's important to have the right listing. This is why it's important that we take new pictures periodically to make sure something hasn't changed.
The next one that we have is extending lifespan.
This one is interesting. They believe that certain techniques and methods can help extend their lifespan by optimizing their health, reducing oxidative stress, and promoting cellular regeneration. I want to talk about this interesting concept of telomeres. In our DNA, we have these strands of nucleic acids.
It's the end of the DNA.
The telomere is the end of the DNA, which is an odd little repeating string at the end. Back in 1953, Leonard Hayflick, a PhD anatomy professor at the University of California in San Francisco, discovered that human cells divided about 50 times and died. This is what he called the Hayflick limit. He continued to research. Several years ago, scientists discovered the reason for the Hayflick limit was something called a telomere. These are short caps of DNA at the end of a chromosome. Each time the cell divides, the telomere shortens a little bit.
What that does is that it allows the way the cell division happens. Something has to give, and they do it at the end of the chain. You have all these telomeres, which are the same thing over again. The telomeres shorten over time, and they become potentially these scent cells that are all the rage. This is why people talk about fasting to have the body gobble up these scent cells that are not healing, growing, and contributing. Ideally, they could be cleaned out. They said that the telomere link has been proposed as a marker of biological aging. Psychological stress could affect cell aging through at least three non-mutually exclusive pathways: Immune cell function or distribution, oxidative stress, and telomere activity.
If you guys ever look up a president on his first day in office and his president on his last day of office, there have been 4 or 8 years in between. That person has aged so much.
You see a lot of gray hair in those individuals as long as they don't color it. Here's the funny thing. I realize that my siblings aren't living their best lives by being fully under chiropractic care because I'm the oldest of them, and I don't have gray hair on my body. An interesting study was conducted by Christopher Fedor, who is part of the chiropractic biophysics group. Matt McCoy was on this paper. What they did is they looked at a telomere sequence of DNA nucleotides. It's TTAGGG. That's the repeating sequence at the end.
They did a blood test. You can get these telomere tests to see what your biological age is because you can do all of these biohacking things to extend your telomere length. They did one of the tests for this young lady. She had five months of care. It’s a different chiropractic technique than what we practiced, but it's similar.
Five months of care encompassing 36 visits. The patient reported being virtually pain-free and had been able to sleep through the night without having to go to the bathroom to urinate. This report documents the successful outcome of a 35-year-old with neck and mid-back pain and nocturnal polyuria, as well as unhealthy spinal alignment, posture, and autonomic dysfunction.
She's not sleeping well through the night. She has to go to the bathroom multiple times throughout the night. They measured pre and post-telomere length. What they found at the end is they had an 8.23% increase in telomere length over a five-month period under chiropractic care. This is one case. This is not definitive, but this is big stuff.
The case suggests that for the first time, cervical spinal alignment and posture may be directly related to telomere length, which is health longevity. That correction thereof may have a directly related effect on health longevity, as represented by telomere length. It is cool. There's no control group. There's no long-term follow-up. There are problems with this, but this was an interesting study that examined the meat and potatoes of canned chiropractic adjustments in care benefit assembly liver markers, which has not been studied and has not been compared to chiropractic. The short answer is yes, which is exciting.
Cervical spinal alignment and posture may be directly related to telomere length, which is health longevity.
I would love for our profession to do a large study on that.
I would love to see even a small study with a case series or do 50 patients to see what that looks like under upper cervical care because we've got the secretory IgA study. We need something similar to that to look at in that vein. The next one is improving mental clarity and focus.
I feel like we've already gone over that one.
This is why I look at that one.
One thing we haven't talked about is the no tropic and the brain enhancement, like supplements. Some people take mushrooms.
There's chaga and lion's mane. There are all sorts of different things out there that we could argue we have forgotten about for the past 100 years since the inception of modern medicine came along. In fact, because of the inception of modern medicine, a lot of things were herbal homeopathic. I saw something on homeopathic that said, “There is a validation for them reducing to what apparently looks like water of a toxic substance.”
There's something to that. Some days, research is like that. You find something that's interesting, and it's like, “I got to go get back to that.” Life gets busy. Neotropics is an interesting word that might simply mean magnesium. It's a mineral that should be in our soil that we should be getting from our food. Because of things like diphosphate that bind magnesium well in the soil, we don't get the amount of magnesium we should be having.
That is all over the radio here in Missouri. There's something that's going through our state to ban glyphosate because it started here.
Bayer Monsanto is still majorly headquartered there.
I don't know if it's called headquarters anymore, but there's a lot. I’m not saying anything bad to my patients that work for them. I used to work for them back in the day. I hope it does get passed. I don't think that that chemical should be sprayed anywhere near anything that we eat or drink.
What's the one about atrazine that I came across?
That gay frog.
If you have an Alex Jones Was Right jar, you might have a lot of money in that jar. Atrazine is owned by a company whose parent company apparently is Chinese. I'm going to leave that there. With all this brain training, meditation, and neurotrophic for clarity and focus, I think the world of meditation. I need to do it more. I've been out of practice. When I do it, everything gets better.
Neotropics might be as simple as something like magnesium that I've got behind me here that I take every night to get better sleep. I'm tracking that heart rate variability, that autonomic function based on what the Oura ring tells me. When I've missed my magnesium at dinner, it's at least 2 or 3 points lower than it could be or should be.
If you're going to bed at 10:00 or 11:00, take it with your dinner.
I take it with dinner. I'll finish dinner. There's a wind down with the dogs. I’m getting them fed and getting them their treat. They'll go outside after I feed them. I'll get up, fill up my water glass, and grab it. I've got it sitting next to the water to take it.
I tend to take it about half an hour before I go to bed.
I've taken it right before bed. I would take it with dinner or right thereabouts because I have found that I will get to bed more easily and quickly. I won't pull the temper tantrum.
You're like, “I'm not tired. I can read for a little bit. I've got some research to do.” You're like, “No, I'm going to bed.”
The NeuroMag that I take helps you say, “I'm done. I’ll go to bed.” Opposed to, “I'm going to lay back here. I'm going to close my eyes.”
I’m going to give it to Jason. I don't know if he's been taking it because he is terrible about that. Jason is my husband, for those who are reading who don't know. He is that person. He will read, and he's fine. He'll halfway fall asleep. I'm like, “Go to bed.”
It's horrible. My dad is the same way. We'll visit with him. He'll have Dr. Paul. That's the one he likes. He's a vet up in Michigan. The guy is wild. He's fantastic. Dad will fall asleep watching, and he's watched all the episodes. He's watching them again for background noise. He'll be working on a Sudoku puzzle, and the next thing you know, his head will fall forward.
This is terrible for your neck.
I had adjusted him that day. He's usually a little bit better afterward. We wonder why he's out of adjustment. It's beneficial. Does magnesium glyconate work? Probably.
That's what I use.
There's some back and forth in the research, but I double up because I find the benefit of both. One is quick across the blood-brain barrier, the NeuroMag, whereas the Glyconate might be a slower crossing. In fact, when we were joking about 300 grams of protein, the one guy that I was watching prompted me to say, “Let's try it.” It is Thomas Lauer, who's a great biohacker. He's got fantastic information on YouTube, but he was pointing out this.
He was pointing out an interesting idea that maybe mixing 300 grams of whey protein is a bad idea. Whey protein right after your workout, you get that quick uptake of protein might be a good idea, and back it with some meat protein later on so that you have that slower burn down the way. It’s the same thing with magnesium. I'm going to guess when they start figuring out how that's working. They'll say the mag team crosses fast, and the Glyconate crosses a little bit slower. A slow burn gets you better sleep throughout the night.
The last one, we're skipping it because it's enhancing creativity and innovation. That has to do with all of the mental clarity, focus, and meditation.
It was talking about heart rate variability and using auricular vagal nerve stimulation. There are three different things going on here. One of the things that is happening is that as you improve your vagal tone, your cerebral blood flow improves. As you improve your cervical curve and have your head better over your shoulders, you increase that cerebral blood flow coming up through the carotids. As you start moving forward, the jugulars are having a harder time draining the blood flow out of the brain and getting rid of all the waste.
I would suspect there is a limit to how well between having your head over your shoulders and stretching forward that even though it won't collapse the carotids, it will start to cause them to be stretched and elongated across the artery so that you don't get a normal flow of blood going to the brain. Those are a couple of things that stand out.
If you're in fight or flight, there's no chance you can be creative. If you're being chased by a bear, it is not a good time to write a song about love. It doesn't happen. Helping people balance their nervous system will increase the person's ability to be creative. We see that in our office where someone who's an artist gets depressed because they're no longer creating art. They start getting adjusted. They can start creating again, and depression goes away, which is amazing. It makes my chiropractor's heart happy.
Helping people balance their nervous system will increase the person's ability to be creative.
This reminds me of a story that I was sharing with another patient when I was out in Dr. Hall's office in Los Angeles. He had a young lady as a patient. You could tell she was a good salesperson. She was happy when she was in alignment, but she had gone out to California to find her dream of music and songwriting. Unfortunately, the community she would've gone into is sex, drugs, and rock and roll. She got caught up in that. She was a little depressive. That ended up pushing her down into a dark place.
He took her on as a patient. Within several years of me leaving that office, she was recording. Her music career was doing something more than where she had been. She was married and had a young child at that point in time. By doing that much, she was able to turn her life around so that she could properly say, “I don't need the drugs and alcohol. I can do this without this crutch.” A lot of people are depressed.
On that note, the ultimate biohack is chiropractic. Where can they find you, Dr. Schurger?
I'm in Springfield, Illinois. KeystoneChiroSPI.com and Keystone Chiro in a lot of the socials. Find us.
I am in the West part of St. Louis. We're at PrecisionChiropraticSTL.com. You can find me on TikTok. One of my videos went viral. I got 19,000 views. That's the most I've ever had. Find me on TikTok, @DrBethBagley. Find us on all the socials, like, and subscribe. We will see you next time.
Bye, folks. Have a good one.
Chiropractic care can be a controversial topic, and some online communities have strong opinions about it. Let's take a look and see what kind of discussions are happening on Reddit on Chiropractic Care. In today's conversation, Dr. Frederick Schurger and Dr. Beth Bagley sifted through the threads to find the truth about chiropractic care. Both doctors agreed that chiropractors need to be mindful of potential risks and refer patients to other specialists when necessary. There's a generally positive attitude towards chiropractic care within the Reddit community. We found the discussions to be interesting and perhaps even surprising. Join Dr. Beth Bagley and Dr. Frederick Schurger to sip more hot tea on chiropractic care.
Listen and read the full blog post here
There are some cases that walk into our offices, and we know they’re going to do great. And not just great, but we can almost see how fast they’re going to get better in the consult. It may look like magic when we do it, but the reality is just that we’ve seen amazing transformations happen like this all the time. Because what we do simply works! We also cover what is called the 3 T’s that lead to neurostructural shifts: thoughts, traumas, and toxins. While trauma may have started the loss of health process, we cover how your mental attitude and chemical situations (often “food”) can just as plainly affect your health.
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Welcome, everyone, to the show.
How are you doing, Dr. Schurger?
I'm doing excellent. I had a great idea for the show and we're going to do it. We're going to talk about cases that always respond well to care. Some people do not respond well, but generally, they almost always respond well. You're sort of excited to see it because you know it's going to happen.
I'm sorry I'm excited about you not feeling well because of whatever is happening, but I know that you walked in the right door. Usually, they understand. Sometimes they think I'm still a weirdo and that's okay because I am.
We qualify as that because we keep on saying, “There's a little bone underneath your head, and if we fix that everything is going to get better.” Case in point, I had a crane operator come in. He's been operating cranes all his life. He called me on Monday. He was like, “Doc, I hurt my back.” He chopped wood and split wood on his weekends and did something, twisted wrong. Three weeks before, the twisting wrong got his lower back.
Three weeks before, he wakes up with a crick in his neck. Professionally, he needs to look up all day long. As we went through it, he had other injuries and accidents throughout his years. A motorcycle accident when he was very young. I'm like, “I think we're going to get you better.” We got him adjusted immediately because it was his atlas. This might be one of those qualifiers that's because when it's one level, it was a simple misalignment, at least simple by our standards.
By our standards because we see some stuff.
It was his atlas. We get him adjusted and I have him walk around a little bit. He looked at me and was like, “This is real?” He questioned his own senses. After I had done my paperwork check, I watched him stand up to get up out of the front chair with the armrest and his low back caught him. I'd been there. Afterward, he's like, “Doc, this feels awesome. Thank you so much.” On top of all of that, he comes in for his follow-up checkup and he says he slept awesome.
That is such a common thing after getting an upper cervical adjustment. It is some amazing sleep. You wake up almost in the same position you fell asleep in and you wake up refreshed. When you haven't been sleeping well and you get that night, it's amazing.
The last time that you adjusted me, that hour nap or whatever it was, at least it felt long to me. I was like, “We're three-quarters of the way there.”
That's all sorts of stuff going on. You're not one of them, and I'm not either one of those people that doesn't have an uncomplicated misalignment. We've both been complicated.
I used to be and then I decided to get into a couple of car accidents. I like to train and sometimes push myself. I don't push myself through the stupid anymore.
That's smart. I think one of the ones recently that I've had come in, it's a couple of different patients, but one in particular I'm thinking of, has what I call the spot. The spot is not as much the trap but is part of the trap, but a little bit behind the top. It’s this knot that comes on and it's this searing, unrelenting pressure pain that happens.
No matter what they do, they put a tennis ball, hold it, and have people dig in it. It keeps coming back over and over. It feels good when you're pushing on it, but you stop and it hurts again. When I see that, immediately I always look at C2. That doesn't mean it's always C2 because sometimes it's C1, but there's an upper cervical connection between what's happening in the trapezius muscle and the spinal accessory nerves.
That's one of the nerves that comes out of the cranial area and it is affected by the upper cervical spine. When I hear that someone has the spot, I get a little like, “Yee,” because typically, they don't feel better right after the adjustment. About a day later, it starts melting away. I do warn them that it doesn't instantly fix it because it doesn't.
There are some things where we get excited as upper-cervical chiropractors because we see some changes immediately. Some changes take time, some changes take weeks, and some patient changes take months, but for certain things, we typically see changes like this one isn’t about a 24-hour period where they can see a change in that. I pretty much know right away when someone has that, “We got this.” A lot of times they have other things going on too. That's one that I can think of as the trap spot.
Some changes take time. Some changes take weeks or even months. But for certain things, we typically see changes within 24 hours.
A lot of it's that and a lot of it almost feels like it's right between the shoulder blades. They've gone to other chiropractors who say, “Doc, it's here. Work on it down here.”
That's what they want us to adjust low.
Quite honestly, sometimes that's chasing tails.
Just like putting pressure on it. If I massage that muscle, it does feel better but I'm not going to keep massaging that muscle over and over and not get to the root cause. We have to get to the root cause of why that muscle has this giant trigger point in it.
I've got another patient who is not an easy case. She doesn't fall into this category. I will hold her head and move her where she says, "Doc, it's right here.” I'll get right in there and maneuver her atlas into a position where she needs to go. Her head goes up straight in complete relief. I tell her and then she says, "Doc, follow me around for the rest of the day like this.” There are days I've been tempted because she is that tricky of a case to try to figure out like, “How do I get that adjusted so it unlocks.” Knock on wood, there's some wood right there, she hasn't been in a while. Unfortunately, we talked about her so she'll be calling.
That's so true too. I had that experience. It was a patient I hadn't seen in a while and I thought, "I wonder how she's doing?" I was like, "I haven't seen her. I hope she's okay." She was on my schedule in the afternoon and I had no idea. It was one of those things that we can psychically pull them in.
Talking about cases, this one I would consider a complex case until she filled me in on what she's been doing for the past year. She showed up a year and a day ago. It was the last time she was in. That was 362 days because it was a leap year. In any case, she says she's been doing well, but what did she do? She took a medical leave from work. She's been doing all sorts of fun stuff she's been looking for.
She's gotten a couple of medical procedures, including getting her iron level up to where it's supposed to be. I looked at her and I was like, "You've got great vitality. What have you been doing?" Sure enough, aside from getting a couple of proper medical diagnoses and treatments, the biggest thing for her was getting away from work and all the drama and stress that she had at work.
Unfortunately, she's going back here for a couple of weeks. Folks, if you've been going to your chiropractor time and again and they're helping you but not enough, you might need to take a step back and take a look at the rest of your life to see what else is going on because that might be the extra little oomph you need.
If you've been going to your chiropractor time and again and they're helping you but not enough, you might need to take a step back and take a look at the rest of your life to see what else is going on because that might be the extra little oomph you need.
In chiropractic philosophy, we talk about the three T's. What you were talking about is the T is thoughts. What is the emotional stress? What's emotionally draining in your body and all three of these T's that we're going to talk about is what causes your body to go out of normal function and misalignment. What can cause a structural shift in your body?
If I met someone who is going through emotional trauma, one of the things they'll do is they'll hunch forward and protect their body. You'll see that like an emo kid. An emo kid has the hair in their face and then they hunch forward and they're like, “I hate everybody.” They're in a protection posture. That protection posture is an emotional trauma. There is emotional stress that's happening in their body. Emotional stress causes structural stress and misalignments.
The second T is the actual trauma. If you got hit or rear-ended by a car or if I take my phone and I hold it like this over and over again, that's a repetitive trauma. If you put your phone between your shoulder and your ear, and you hold it up with your shoulder, those repetitive traumas can cause misalignments. That's something that patients don't realize they're doing. They could be doing something every day at work, or their computer monitor is too low, or they're using a laptop and they're hunched forward over it and typing on a keyboard attached to the laptop.
I don't mind if you're out and about and you need to use your laptops temporarily, but if you're using a laptop on your actual desk, you need to have a detached keyboard, a detached mouse, and you need to have your laptop up on a stand so that your screen is even with your eyes. That's what we do at our office or at least we do now because we're hurting ourselves leaning forward over a laptop. The third T is toxic stress and that's the stuff that we are in and around and consume. If I drink Pepsi every day or a diet Pepsi, either way, that's a toxic stress whether it's a sugar overload or it's a chemical SHIT storm.
Also, if you decided like you did a couple of weeks ago right after Easter to eat all the stuff, and then realized, “I ate all the stuff. I feel horrible,” switch back to keto, and all of a sudden, everything cleans up immediately. I had one young lady saying, “Doc, I know the storm is coming through today. I can feel it in my joints and my arthritis.” She's a massage therapist and I told her, "If you want to get it better fast within a week, cut out the wheat. You cut out the sugar. You cut out the seed oils. Even if you cut out one of those three, you'll notice a difference almost immediately.”
If you want to get better fast within a week, cut out the wheat, sugar, and seed oils. You'll notice a difference almost immediately.
I was talking about water to a couple of patients and I did a health talk to a bunch of teachers. We talked about water, and I know everyone is tired of hearing about water, but one of the ways that if you're increasing your water is I take a big bottle. I'm holding a 32-ounce bottle. I try to drink three of those a day. Four is good for me, but three, I feel like I've done a good job. If you put a full bottle of water next to your bed, if it’s a big bottle, you drink half of it when you first wake up, do your business, brush your teeth, all the stuff. Before you get into your car, drink the second half of the bottle.
That's a good idea.
Fill it back up with your filtered water, so then you have the second bottle that you're supposed to drink during the day. If you feel like, “I pee too much,” get over it. I said to people saying, “I have to pee too much,” I was like, "It takes 45 seconds. Go pee. It's fine." Some people like if you're a surgeon, you cannot de-scrub and pee all the time. I get it. If you're an elementary school teacher, you cannot leave kids unattended.
Let's be honest with the surgeons. If they're in a pinch, they will do things that we would not do to do ten hours. Let's put it that way.
They scrub out and scrub back in. I don't want to hear about the other stuff.
I don't either.
They have the tools to put a catheter in.
That's what I'm saying.
Now I want to know. If you are a surgeon tuning in to this, please post and tell us if you put a catheter in for 10-hour, 15-hour, or 20-hour surgeries. I want to know. I want to know if that's what you guys do because that's brilliant but gross.
I'm certain somebody does it. I'm certain at least there's a surgeon or surgeons know of somebody who does that more regularly than not.
You can stay hydrated. You drink all you want.
They're doing a 12-hour to 15-hour marathon sometimes with these things so they have to.
First of all, I give it to the surgeons. They are amazing. You can open up the human body, know what everything looks like, take it apart, and put it back together. You guys are crazy awesome. I love it. Second of all, we want to know how you pee.
In any case, let's get back to talking about these cases that we know are going to knock it out of the park.
What have you had recently that’s migraine-related?
That was where I was going. I had a young lady come in on Monday who has been having horrible migraines. I know I'm confusing her with another young lady who came in the previous week with horrible migraines but this one here is an autotech and loves her job. She did it for seven years, but all of a sudden. these migraines got so bad. She had to take a leave of absence. There wasn't a thing that stood out except she was a twin, she was on the bottom, and she was the one who had to do extra work to resuscitate because of where she was positioned.
She's telling me everything and I'm like, “This, that, and the other.” The other one had all brothers for siblings of like a sixth family thing. She's got those tomboy mentalities on the petite side, but everything she has talked about. I'm like, “You’re in good hands. You're in the right place.” She’s been to 2 or 3 chiropractors from Indiana. The third one and the most recent chiropractor is a good friend of Dr. Liz Hafer, who's one of our Blair Docs.
We love Liz. We should have her on the show sometime.
We should. In any case, Liz says, "I'm close. She sends her over there. All these other chiropractors are saying, "I don't know what to do with you. We've done everything we can, but I cannot get you to that next level." Sure enough, she comes on in. She's never been in an actual car accident, but she's had whiplash-style injuries throughout the years.
Her neck is mostly straight, but a little curved at the top. The kicker is her den, so this is a part of C2. Your head and your atlas pivot around what is called the odontoid or the dens of the axis, which if you can imagine, a finger coming up from a vertebra, that's the pivot point. Hers is bent, not quite 45 degrees, but that's how she was describing it when I was looking at it, or at least when she was looking at it. It bent back towards her spinal cord.
Take a screenshot of that. I want to see it.
I will. We might need an MRI if she's not responding well, but I see this and I'm like, "This is exactly why no one has figured this out for you because you have abnormal structure, very well possible from early birth or early childhood because of being a twin.” Now she's got that pushing against her cord. I told her that she should have a banana-shaped curve, but maybe not because of where that's sitting.
We're not going to be so concerned about the curve as much as making sure things are where they're supposed to be. Her head is on straight. We don't need to adjust her and the symptoms start reducing. If we need to take an MRI, we'll see how bad that looks. She's already doing better. She reported back to me. She did have a migraine on Wednesday. It was bad but normally, her migraines take her out for a day and she was able to work through it.
We're not so concerned about the curve as much as making sure things are where they're supposed to be and your head is on straight.
In itself, it is a feat being able to work through a migraine.
There tend to be about three different things that go on with a migraine. There might be a fourth, but the big things are certainly the intensity of the headache, duration, how long it lasts or how you can get it to reduce, and frequency. Those would be the big three that I think are the ones that stand out. If I can get any one of those starting to reduce, we know we're going in the right direction.
Her duration is already down, her intensity is down. She was getting two of these a week. Now we'll find out next week when I see her next because as much as I would have liked to have seen her today, it's a drive. She's coming from Indiana. Still, we're going to get her better. Sure enough, I was very confident. I adjusted her.
Her friend who helped drive her over saw how it balanced. It's funny at the end, her friend is like, “You take care of all of these conditions just by getting that first bone in place? I might have to sign up too.” It's funny to hear that from somebody. I'm not selling other people to what's going on. I'm saying, "You're here as a witness to make sure they feel comfortable that what we're doing here is getting them in the right direction." That was the migraine case. Since last week, I haven't chatted with her to see how she's doing and I get to see both of them on Tuesday. All sorts of fun.
If we can go back from migraines and go, “It’s just.” It's so funny that I put that word in front of it because we see so many complex cases sometimes when it's just one thing.
“It's just a migraine.”
It's headaches. Somebody has tension headaches. It doesn't go full migraine. They're not in bed in a dark room, but there's intense pain in their head. Their eye is halfway closed because it hurts, yet they can work, they can drive, they're not puking, all that stuff but it keeps coming on over and over again, sometimes daily for these people. That was one of my chiropractic stories that I had. I called them an eleven-year headache. I had a headache every day for eleven years of my life. Sometimes it was more intense like a migraine, some days it was a headache and I lived on Advil.
If you find yourself taking Advil, Tylenol, or Aleve multiple times a month, most people with that stuff are taking it daily or multiple times a week, that's not right. Something is not right. Your body is telling you, “Help.” The help that you need is not in a bottle. It's not in a pill. It is in chiropractic care. What we see recently with headaches is normal headaches. It’s still funny that I say words like that, but we know that there's no normal headache, but there would be typical headaches that happen to people. It is that tension headaches.
Some people are like, “I just have sinus headaches or tension headaches.” None of those are normal. An upper cervical alignment can help tension headaches, but it can help sinus headaches too because of the changes in the structures of the face. You've been doing some cool work with the sinuses lately.
There are no normal headaches, but there are these typical headaches like tension and sinus headaches. None of those are normal, but upper cervical alignment can help.
I've been doing a nasal release. This is not upper cervical, butit is in the same vein as the neural disconnect that people are having. If the bones in the skull do not move the way they're supposed to, they will not pump cerebral spinal fluid the way it's supposed to. Things will get stuck or things will get hung up. In the case of the sinuses, things get stuck in that mucus membrane layer that doesn't work.
Funny story. There’s one young lady that I've been taking care of for a little bit now. Every time we do eight passes, the one pass that we get to is way high up towards the sphenoid. Every time we do that one, she's like, “There's a nasty smell up there. I don't know what it is.” As it breaks up and it starts to come out, she's waiting to blow her nose and see like a big old seed. I feel like she's expecting some grapefruit seed to fall out and I'm like, “Probably not.”
Maybe it'll never be anything. A lot of times, those sinuses drain down your throat, not out of your nose.
That would be the case once it finally starts working better. The interesting thing is I do an eye test in the process of figuring that out. I got her looking simply down to the right, so looking over this direction. She gets a moderate pain response setting her eyeballs in that direction. When they happened, that was the worst one today. Sure enough, we did the procedure while she was looking in that direction. It opened up the sinuses and decreased the pain level and intensity as we did that. I would have horrible chronic sinusitis when I go out of adjustment if we let it go that long, and that turns me into misery. Even after getting adjusted, the drainage will stop, but all of the sinuses in my head are inflamed. It takes me at least a day for that to settle out.
How exciting it is that it takes a day for something in your past that was chronic. Now when you get an adjustment, it's like, “I know in a day or two, I'm going to be feeling a lot better." That's incredible. Your body is incredible that it can heal like that.
I'll lose a day. That is the biggest problem I see with it because I lose that time. I'm not productive either with the problem before I get adjusted or after I get adjusted until I feel better. A lot of things fall off the radar. I apologize to people for that as much as I can, but when you feel like crap, you feel like crap.
Dr. Thomas and I both lose words when we're out of alignment. We forget how to say things. I think that's another one that I get excited about when a patient comes in with maybe not a chronic. If it's chronic, we know it's been there a long time, but they've noticed recently that they live in a foggy feeling or a cognitive. They have trouble coming up with words or they have trouble reading and then understanding like comprehension.
If it's a newer thing for them. I love it when I hear that because that's one of the things that people can see the biggest difference quickly. You can have neck pain and we see that it gets well relatively quickly for a lot of people. That's a big deal as doctors look at some very atypical presentation of pain patterns when someone has simple neck pain. it's not simple to them, but it's simple to us.
It hurts when they turn away. They cannot look up as it hurts. We can see some incredible changes but when somebody is cognitively impaired, like what's the reaction time when they're driving, some things can be scary with that. Seeing that change sometimes immediately after the adjustment is cool. You probably have a test for that.
What's curious is I don't and I don't have anything that I like.
I feel like a reaction time test.
Quite honestly, there's a lot more work.
That would be like a study we would have to do.
Dr. John Chung down in Miami has been doing a lot of that with some of the work that he's been doing with patients and such. I think that's going to be a research project he's going to do showing the efficacy of these things.
Probably, we can make a computer model of a click where you could do a 30-second or a two-minute test beforehand or whatever. and then do it after and then see maybe two days later.
They exist. We could do the research study. That stuff exists. What I get excited about is when the patient who has had two car accidents and concussions and had to get on Medicare because she cannot take care of herself. She cannot work. I either get her atlas adjusted, sometimes her C2, and sometimes do the cranial work. I'm giving her direction and she cannot take direction. She's like, “All right, I got to think about this.”
I'm saying, “Push your legs together, push your legs apart.” It takes them a second and they're like, “What did you say?”
You get them adjusted and it's like, “Doc, I have no problems here. Everything is working fine.” This is the problem. Those cases don't hold well. They need a lot of extra support. I lose a day and this one young lady is losing a couple of years. I've joked with her that I would hire her for my front desk in a heartbeat if she was able to be consistent. It's not that it’s not her personal desire that she can be consistent. She cannot be physically consistent because of everything else that is going on when she goes out of adjustment. Life doesn’t work for her.
Life is hard when you're not in alignment. For some people, that is devastating. We went from things that easily get helped with chiropractic. They are hard, but that's just us. Let's think of a lot of people with lower back pain who don't realize the effect that an upper cervical adjustment can have on the lower back.
One of the tests in the Blair technique is something we call a leg length check where someone lays down and we see if their feet line up with each other or they don't line up. If they don't line up with each other, meaning one leg is what we call a “short leg.” I put quotations around the “short leg” when I was saying it because it doesn't mean the leg is short. It means that the hips are pulled up and twisted a little bit.
When you hear the hip complex and back have pulled up and twisted a little bit, that's back pain right there. We're testing for something that causes back pain with the leg length checks. When we do an upper cervical adjustment, the leg lengths become even and people are like, “Why does it help low back pain?”
If the legs have become even, the torquing and the twisting into the hips and lower back have stopped. That's one of the reasons if you don't have low back pain and you get adjusted upper cervical, your back can get sore. It's because those muscles are now working in a different way and it can hurt for a day or two. I do warn people who don't have low back pain that it can hurt a little bit after you get an adjustment and that's normal.
The muscles are shifting. You've got muscles that hadn't been engaged, hadn't needed to work, switched over to needing to work, and vice versa. Other muscles that have been tightened and shortened are trying to lengthen back to where they're supposed to be. You've got a lot of stuff that's shifting in motion almost immediately.
Especially in the first 48 hours to 72 hours, some symptoms can get worse before they get better. It's not unlike going to the gym and working out. After my two-week hiatus from working out regularly, I'm getting back into the swing of things. I think I was exhausted on Sunday when I got back. I skipped my workout on Sunday and I got back to my workout on Tuesday. It felt good. I pushed 38 sets in 30 minutes, so I was pushing. At the end of it, I didn't feel exhausted and did my stuff. Yesterday, I felt fine. Today I wake up and my shoulders and my upper back feel like, "What the heck did I do yesterday?"
Sometimes it takes a little bit of time for that delayed onset muscle shortness to kick in. It's the same principle in working out as it is in healing. Just because I worked out versus I got adjusted or somebody got adjusted for the first time doesn't mean the principles aren't identical, and they are. That's where we have to recognize that if we do something new, it's going to ache a little bit.
One thing popped into my brain in chiropractic that I don't even want to call philosophy. To me, it's not even very scientific because there are not a lot of studies on it. It’s this thing called retracing. I like to call it the healing cycle because our body will ramp up healing, and things are getting good and feeling good, and then something is healing that doesn't feel so good, and we go into what we call a dip. It's like a symptom dip.
When someone is in that certain part of the healing cycle, we can have, “I've had three good days. It's awesome. I've never thought I could feel like this again. Thank you so much, Doc,” and then 2 days or 3 days later they come in and they're like, “I don't know what happened. This is the worst I've ever felt. I don't know if this is working and I'm never going to get well.” I get it because I've been there.
When you know what it feels like to feel good again and then it gets taken away from you, it is devastating. The good news is that if you know what it feels like to feel good again, you can get back there. That’s what the healing cycle is. I call it a roller coaster, and it is an up-and-down. Some occasional patients get all the way better and they’ll be perfect. That is a tiny percentage. Most of us go through ups and downs and that is normal. It's not what we expect.
We do not expect it to be the patient who holds their adjustments right away and everything is perfect. It's going to take time, the healing cycles and these dips as I call them. When people come in, I would warn them or hopefully, I remember to warn them, “Are you in a dip right now? This is what we talked about.” If you are an upper cervical patient and you notice that you are experiencing a dip, tell your doctor about it first of all. Second of all. know that that is so on par with how your body works.
We do not expect everything will be perfect right away when patients have their adjustments. It will take time, healing cycles, and dips.
It's life. Any other cases that we want to share? Those were the big ones for me.
In general, I wanted to bring those up. When we've been talking about this with some of the doctors who are doing some TikToks lately, there has been a complex of cases and these are very complicated ones. Some people are experiencing chronic fatigue. They can have dizziness. They can have headaches, like all the things, but they also have some digestive tract stuff. We're noticing if we look at how the vagus nerve works, it could be a vagus nerve issue on that too. They may or may not have gotten jabbed with something.
We talked about the three T's. We've got toxins as one of them. If we put a toxin in our body, the reaction can be a structural shift. Lots of other reactions can occur as we've discussed, but a structural shift can be the reaction. What we're noticing is that some people are coming in 2 years or 3 years post toxin injection and are having these symptoms that are coming on and it's a lot all at once. The upper cervical is helping with that. We cannot take things out of your body, but what we can do is help your body adapt to the current state that it's in.
We can't take things out of your body, but we can help your body adapt to the current state that it's in.
Adapt to heal past the problems that are there. Dr. Phillip Shallow and I were sharing that a lot of his patients who got the jab ended up needing to get adjusted almost immediately. I didn't put those two pieces together but that often wasn't shared during that time either. In any case, it is what it is and now we know better as we learn more and more. There's more evidence coming out that that was a bad choice.
That was not the best thing that we had done for our health. If you are a person out there who is suffering from some of the easy things we talked about or maybe a complex of things, I want you to know that there is light at the end of the tunnel. There is hope for you. All you have to do is pick up the phone and call one of our offices. You can also text our offices. I don't know if you do text. Do you text at your office?
I do text about three different ways now.
You can text, you can call, and you can shoot us an email. You can comment on one of these and we may see it. You might want to text your email list.
Come out to us directly. It's a little bit better than some of our social shares. Sometimes we're not on those as often.
We'd be busy at the office. We are here to talk, chat about it, and find out if this upper cervical care can help you. If you have a family member that you're thinking about when we're talking about these things, get them this information so that they can do the research, or make them make the appointment if they're close enough to you. We're in St. Louis, Missouri on the west side. Our office is Precision Chiropractic. If you go to our website at PrecisionChiroSTL.com, you can find information about our office and how to get ahold of us.
I sent you a referral because she was having all sorts of sinus problems as I got off the airplane and said, “You need to go see Dr. Bagley.”
I love that, thank you.
I'm at KeystoneChiroSPI.com here at Keystone Chiropractic in Springfield, Illinois. It is a long day and I'm ready to go home and eat some dinner.
We're going to see in St. Louis.
We've got a St. Louis seminar with a bunch of students coming down from Palmer. That's going to be a blast. In any case, folks, thank you so much for tuning in. Make sure you like, subscribe, and leave a five-star review. That's what helps get these episodes shared with people in the public so that they can hear about this. They know that there is a ray of hope in that dark tunnel where they have been suffering for way too long. Unfortunately, as cliche as that sounds, it's the truth when you start meeting these people who have been suffering for as long as they have been. All right, folks. You have a great evening. Dr. Bagley, we will see you tomorrow.
See you.
LDL is bad and statins should be in the water supply!!” That’s been the mantra for close to 60 years, and heart disease has only gotten worse as it's still the number one cause of death in the USA and around the world. What if the prevailing wisdom was wrong? That’s what Drs. Frederick Schurger & Beth Bagley are discussing today. One of the many side effects of statin therapy is muscle soreness and weakness, which are common complaints in a chiropractic office. Join us as we discuss the research, some history of cholesterol, and what you may want to do to improve your health!
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Welcome to the show. I'm Dr. Schurger.
I'm Dr. Beth Bagley. How are you guys doing?
I'm doing excellent.
It's been a heck of a day here at the office.
You were telling me about that. Why don't you share the craziness?
I didn't see it happen. One of my patients told me about it before the front desk did. My front desk was sitting there and a guy walked in. We have a sign that says, "Come on in, we're open." A guy walks in and he has two rocks in his hands and he's trying to sell my front desk the rocks for $10. He kept talking to him and he asked my front desk her name. Her name was on the shirt and he goes, "That's you,” and he goes, “What's your last name?” She goes, “I'm not going to tell you.” “When do you get off work?” We're like, “Okay.”
Rocks are interesting pickup lines.
I think he was on the crazy train. She had to ask him to leave. Later on the day, not that long afterward, there was a giant car accident out front of my office and a car caught on fire. I do not think anybody was hurt. We know that they are going to need care from that, but I don't think anybody had to go to the hospital.
I remember seeing a bad accident several years ago. We were teaching a seminar at your office and I saw the whole thing happening.
It's a bad intersection there.
There's stuff. Folks, if you're going to go see Dr. Bagley, take your time. I recommend going back and turning on the Big Bend Road.
do not turn left onto Dorothy Ferry from my office. That is a bad idea.
I've done it.
I have too.
You're better off driving around.
There's a safer way. It might take a minute extra, but it's a safer way and it's worth it because as we know, lives can change in an instant in a car accident like that. The ligament is damaged by a whiplash or a collision like that. The problem that people have is they don't realize that it impacts the entirety of the rest of your life if that ligament is damaged. That's why we have jobs.
It is job security. I was thinking about this. I have another patient. I met her through a networking group and she was in today to get checked. They own, not a body shop, but they own a mechanic shop and we joked because we've got another friend who has the body shop. I thought about that in the back of my head. The job of the body shop is to fix the problems from the accident you wish you didn't have.
Unfortunately, a lot of our job also mirrors that because you had the accident. Sometimes you have a little bit of damage to your car that you're like, “I don't need to get that fixed. It's going to be $1, 000 for something that I barely see. It's a minor scratch.” The only downside to what it's going to cost to get your spine corrected and back in alignment, you don't even see that. You might feel it and you might not feel it for years. If you're in a minor fender bender, go get checked. There is no such thing as a small minor accident.
If you guys get a chance, go on YouTube and look up 5-mile-per-hour highway patrol accidents or simulated crashes, this highway patrol has this mini car that they put out. I don't know what state it's in and they take it to teach people to wear their seatbelts and they drop people down and it's a slight incline but it goes up to 5 miles per hour. It stops short but I don't recommend doing the demonstration either because watching the people's heads flip forward in that impact of 5 miles per hour. It's a nice training tool but I don't recommend testing that out. That's not good for your neck.
There have been people who have died in sub-10-mile-per-hour accidents. Bear that in mind. There's a whole study where they were finding low-speed impacts have people who died. Don't be part of that group. Let's get on to tonight's topic.
I'm excited for it.
I've been working on this. I've got so many notes around because it's one of those topics where there is so much information. I think we're going to split this into two parts, ultimately. What we're going to talk about tonight is statins.
What I often see is when people are in an intake in the office, I have them list their medications. If the person is over 50, almost all of them have been put on medication. It happens to be one of these drugs. There are multiple names for the drugs and stuff. I'm excited about the research that you've done. I've done research for years on these, and I cannot wait to get into this.
The interesting thing is statins have been out forever. Let's take it from the medical perspective. Maybe the question is why are two chiropractors talking about statins? How does that affect our patient base? Why is that a concern for us? For a couple of reasons. One argument about what statins do is statins lower your cholesterol, in particular, your LDL cholesterol and that protects you from heart disease.
They do lower your LDL cholesterol. We do see that.
I'm going to get into some of these details.
It does, but we're going to talk about what that means. It looks like it was in November of 1987 that the FDA approved Merck. It is when the first commercial statin came out.
I thought they were doing it long before that because at least long before that, they were demonizing cholesterol as being a problem causing heart disease.
In ‘87 was the first actual statin. There was another drug before that, lovastatin. It was the first statin to be approved.
In any case, this has been what we've been told forever that you absolutely must have sugar in your diet to have energy. If you don't have sugar, you're not going to have energy.
Start your day off with a nice bowl of Cheerios, and that will also lower your cholesterol. That's another thing we get told.
I'm pretty sure that they had to take that off.
Did they?
They did.
I don't know if that's true. It must have not been long ago.
I think it's been a decade or more. Honeynut Cheerios got taken to court by the FDA because they were saying it lowers your cholesterol instead of being a heart-healthy part of your breakfast. None of this has been proven, which is the crazy part about all of this stuff.
Here's a current picture of the box and it says, "Can help lower cholesterol as part of a heart-healthy diet." Still says it.
Yes, but it's not claiming that it's the thing that's lower.
Got it. They had to change the sentence, but it's still on there and people have still told me, “I eat my Cheerios every day.”
I went over to get my in-body composition test today. The doc was in the back with, I presume, a new patient. I don't know who this person was. I happened over hear them talking about stuff and she's like, “Whole grains are good aren't they?” I've known this doctor for a while. We should have Dr. Bax on for the cholesterol and heart side of this discussion at some point. He's like, “No.” He as a medical doctor has come around to understand that the answers are much about what we've been talking about. In any case, LDL is bad and statins are so good that we should be putting them in the water supply. That is what medical doctors have been trying to do. Just like fluoride.
How did this all start? Who made the push to say cholesterol is bad and sugar is not a problem? It goes back to the 1950s when we started seeing more and more coronary heart disease. It used to be angina and this was a disease of the wealthy. There's another phrase, but a disease of the city folk, whereas the farm folk you didn't see angina and then later heart attacks. In the 1950s and 1960s in particular, two prominent physiologists were figuring out what was causing heart disease.
You have one guy by the name of John Yudkin, who identified added sugars as the primary agent. The other person is Ancel Keys. Ancel Keys identified total fat, saturated fat, and dietary cholesterol that was the problem. Here's the thing, you had two things going on. You had big sugar, you had ag businesses that were promoting their products and they already had deep pockets. They were the ones that funded the research to show, “Sugar is not causing cholesterol problems. It's all of these added fats in our diet. It's the beef towel. It's the lard. It's the eggs.”
It's all the stuff that has been part of our human nutritional program. Our entire time on this planet, whatever that is, those things have been around. It's not the added sugars that have become more and more readily available in our diet in 60 years. It was turned to the century when we started seeing that come up.
There were several groups with the Sugar Research Foundation and you've got Dr. Mark Hegsted, who was a professor of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health. You have the National National Academy of U.S. Public Health Service, the American Heart Association, and the American Medical Association all on board for treating heart disease by lowering cholesterol.
Lowering fat, triglycerides, cholesterol. Get all the fat. What I’m remembering from the ‘90s is the SnackWell and low-fat craze in all the food. Everything said low fat.
It’s still low fat because it’s cheaper. I was looking for some cottage cheese and there’s a brand called Good Cultures that you could pick up. It is phenomenal.
I've never bought it.
I'm trying not to eat the whole thing in a sitting because it's good. I don't know how much it's good for me as far as. Dairy and I sometimes decide to put on weight together. It's good. As protein goes, it's a clean protein. They have all the right ingredients in there that a lot of these cottage cheeses don't.
It says low fat on there.
There's that and they also have something called kerogen, which is the thickener, which sounds great and is generally considered safe but if kerogen gets into your gut, it screws up your GI and your happy bacteria.
I did not know that.
Kerogen is regularly used as a thickener in a lot of dairies. If you get heavy cream, a lot of the heavy cream will have kerogen as a thickening agent, whereas half and half do not. If you had to choose for your coffee or in general, go for the half and half because it's a little bit better for you. Back in the late ‘50s, and early ‘60s, Yudkin is trying to show that it's the sugar that is causing problems. He's got a bunch of different studies that were published in that era. This was right before PubMed.
PubMed has become a thing, but rigorous study design like it's supposed to be done today, key words supposed to be, wasn't there. This is where Yudkin is trying to show that dietary fat and dietary sugar are in relationship to ischemic heart disease and diabetes. He's trying to show studies like that and then you've got this big sugar industry that is pumping money and studies out. They do so much. Here's the thing. They decided that cholesterol was the problem. When was that? There was a big consensus conference.
Use the word consensus when you think about how do we agree on things. Generally speaking, we agree when there's a preponderance of evidence showing that something is real, and then if there's enough of it, we say, "Therefore, there's more evidence showing this and there is that.” There was more evidence showing sugar is safe and it's the dietary fat that's the problem. The dietary fat was safe and sugar was the problem.
Sugar is safe. The sugar industry has deep pockets. They put something like $5 million in today's dollars into research studies, and they created a bunch of studies that say, "It's the cholesterol that's causing problems," because honestly, you can make a study say anything you want.
Follow the money too. I know we talked about this in previous episodes, but when high-fructose corn syrup, sugar made from corn, which is industrial waste practically, was first marketed in the early 1970s, and then in the ‘80s, they started putting it in the sodas. We're seeing this correlation. The big sugar also includes big ag, which is corn syrup companies.
That is close to big pharma because all of these companies are working together.
That's part of this whole story. They introduced this fake sugar, this sugar that's not found in nature in that quantity into our bodies, and then we're like, “Why is everybody having heart attacks?” Instead of blaming this cash cow, high-fructose corn syrup, they start blaming butter.
Here's the other thing to remember. Why did Ancel Keys even think that it was the fat that was the problem? He did a study called the Seven Nations Study. This was a study that he went and looked at all the European nations, including France. This is important, we'll come back to France. He looked at all these seven countries shortly after World War II and looked at the incidents of heart disease in these populations and what they were eating.
This is important. We are at the end of Lent. Easter is coming up this weekend for us. It will have passed by the time this airs, but Ancel Keys did his study and research findings during the winter, during Lent in European nations, highly Christian and Catholic. What were they doing? They were already fasting, they were eating less, they had cut out red meat on Fridays at this point in time, and they were looking to be better. They’re eating this higher carb, lower fat diet, and all of a sudden everything looks right except France. France was still eating all the high fat and the heart disease stayed low. You over to French culture, they don’t have a lot of sugar. I don’t know if they did it that time. I don’t know where they at now.
They’re always about the quality of the food not quantity.
They’re very much about the quality of the food. Yes, exactly.
Quality ingredients and lots of healthy oils. That kind of thing and butter.
France broke the mold even though they have low heart disease, they have high fat. He called that the French paradox.
They’re not going to count. Don’t look at those guys.
Again, it is consensus data. Seven nations show we did this and this happened except for that one as opposed to saying, “Wait a second. We should understand why the one was an outlier more than understanding that everything else was a consensus. There’s a lot of evidence that says one thing, but that does not necessarily mean that that thing is true.
We should understand why a data point deviates from the consensus. Just because there's a lot of evidence for one view doesn't guarantee its truth.
Correlation and causation.
This ends up being the problem. In any case, they get approved. Statins become very popular. They are more frequently looking at LDL as being the bad cholesterol. That’s one of the big things. Let me go to side effects because I think that’s the more interesting thing. Let’s talk about how well statins work. In 2004, statins were about $19 billion a year and growing quickly to the point they wanted to put it in the water supply.
I have two problems. 1) There are short-term studies. They never looked at the long term. Two to three years doesn’t sound like a long-term issue, but that is already a long-term use of a drug. I’ll come back to that when I start talking about neuropathies. This is out of the journal of The Royal Society of Medicine from 2004, Andrew Thompson, the case for statins has it been made. Drug therapy lowers cholesterol and lowers heart disease, as opposed to saying, “What else can we do?”
What they never looked at in that early study that got us in there was all-cause mortality. How many people are dying of heart disease and heart attacks, and how many people are being saved? In this study or this review, they make a couple of interesting points with respect to data on deaths, the most important endpoint is all-cause mortality. This can be manipulated only by fraud and is the one primary concern of the recipients of the treatment. Are they less likely to die soon, whatever the reason, if they take the drug?
If a drug or other intervention neither extends life nor improves its overall quality then it is of no value. We're already right there saying, does your intervention improve the quality of life? You might have great health and you might lose five years. That's not a bad trade-off if that's a real thing. Here's the crazy thing, there is no rigorous reporting of all-cause morbidity nor the measurement of changes in overall quality of life in any of the statin drug trials. We've talked about absolute differences and relative differences when it comes to statistics.
The statin drug trials show absolute differences of less than 1% to a maximum of 3.3%. What does that mean? That means that's not great when we're doing that but how does that translate to what you've heard about statins? Statins are supposed to be something like 33 % protective against dying from heart disease. Here's where they get tricky. I've got two different studies that we're going to go through.
The first one, drug companies play a little bit of a game taking a look at the group. In one study, the placebo group and the statin group were looked at. How many people died in each group? In this study, 3.1% of people died, flat out, 14% were in the placebo group, 14% of the placebo group died, and 11% of the statin group. Instead of saying it was a 3.1 % saving grace, they manipulated the number and said, “Well, you've got 11% in one group and 14% in another group, you divide 11 by 14 and you get 22%.” Therefore, the statin drug lowered the risk of death between the two groups by 22%. That's not science.
It’s not even statistics.
That's problem number one. The difference in deaths was between the statin group and the absolute value of death differences was 3.1%. They play these relative games to make it sound like it was better.
If I hear 22%, I think out of 100 people 22 don't die because when they say 22% reduction, that's what I'm thinking, and out of 100 people, 3 people.
This gets to something else that they use called the Number Needed to Treat. Out of 100 people, how many people do you need to treat to improve health? In a study, 100 patients took two statin drugs, and two had a fatal heart attack. In the placebo group, you got another 100, and 3 will have a fatal heart attack.
That's 33%.
You're exactly right because that's only a 1% difference between the two groups. What they do is they divide 2 by 3 as the publish, the relative risk, which is a 33% reduction.
That's not statistics.
It's relative to statistics.
It's 1%.
It's bad marketing.
It's great marketing. I have a 33% chance of less heart attack. I want that drug.
It is borderline fraud. It's 1% because the absolute numbers are always the things we need to understand and we need to understand that two things. When anybody gives us a percentage, we need to know what the absolute numbers are. If I said it was 2% and it was out of 10, 000, that's a different number than 2% out of 100 because you need to have both the percentage and the number that that's from. Otherwise, people are trying to manipulate the statistics in their favor. If you only have one or the other, you don't have the whole picture.
This happens all the time, In the last four years, all of these statistics were manipulated so that they make sense. Lots of people don't like math and they trust the experts, but the experts are being paid by the people who want the numbers to be 33%. They want the numbers to be a 20% reduction. If they can manipulate it in a way, even if it's a fraud, that the numbers sort of make sense, they're going to do it.
Here's the big thing that I think is a disservice to our school systems across the board. As I was going through my high school time. I was looking like, “What classes can I take that is pre-rex for college so that I can get some stuff out of the way,” with the theory being I'm going to get myself ahead so that I'm going to get through college faster. We had calculus, but I would have been better served, in fact, everyone is better served by doing statistics because then it's harder for them to lie to you. Calculus in high school is often given to the smart kids because they're going to go on to something else, some higher math.
Engineering of some sort of degree that they need calculus possibly for.
Engineering, maybe accounting, a couple of other things but a lot of people will grab the calculus class automatically. The kids who aren't as smart, they're smart. I've got some good friends who I would put in this category. One of the things that they were maybe more interested in was sports. Do you know what sports do day in out? Statistics.
If you could make it into a sports talk, you could catch a whole bunch of these people.
If you start understanding the statistics of things, now you understand the game. This is where we will get all sorts of stuff to bamboozle us so that way we don't know what's going on. That's where statins started. The evidence isn't great that it's protecting people. In fact, where was the study that I was looking at here? We'll talk a little bit about what it's doing as far as side effects. I'm going to back up. The question is has statins helped anybody? The answer is sort of yes, but it's a small group.
There are two big studies that I want to focus on. The first one is the Framingham Heart Study. The Framingham Heart Study has been going on since 1948. I think it's out of Boston. There have been over 15,000 participants for over three generations. We're talking about families time and again and again. In 2009, they'd already written 1,200 research articles and there's so much much research and so much data that a lot of people want to data mine this information. One of the study directors is a guy by the name of William Costelli. He said that serum cholesterol is not a strong risk factor for coronary heart disease. It doesn't exist.
There is no correlation between dietary cholesterol intake and blood cholesterol levels, and the Framingham residents who ate the most cholesterol saturated fat, total calories weighed the least and were the most physically active. Right off the bat, we've got a huge study with a lot of data that is probably one of the best pieces of data on the planet right now that says it's not a thing. Some of these are out of Mark Sisson’s The Primal Blueprint Print, but reference that statins do not affect triglycerides which are blood fat levels, or LDL, the so-called bad cholesterol. Statins, do not decrease the risk of death in any woman and men over 65, or in men under 65 who have not had a heart attack.
No women. It doesn't help.
It doesn't help women. It's not helping men over 65, heart attack or otherwise, and men under 65 who have never had a heart attack. It is not helping them. The group that it might be helping are people who have had a heart attack and men who had a heart attack under 65, it might help them short term, but what it is doing is depleting our natural anti-oxidants that we've been making ourselves, CoQ10.
Ubiquinol.
Thank you, because I cannot say it. You don't see it, but you do see CoQ10 a lot.
Let me tell people the difference of the two things. Ubiquinol is the kind of reduced form of CoQ10. If you're over the age of 30, 35, or something, you need the ubiquinol form. If you look at the back of a bottle of a supplement, it might say CoQ10 and still be ubiquinol, but it might be CoQ10. You want to take the one that is called ubiquinol. It's going to be better. It's a form that your body can use better than CoQ10. Let's talk about what CoQ10 does because I think that's interesting. The reason that there are a lot of side effects from these statin drugs is because of the depletion of CoQ10. Go into that. I know you got stuff on it.
It is a critical micronutrient is CoQ10 and it's called coenzyme Q10. It does a couple of important things. Let's go down the list. Dr. Bagley, what does the mitochondria do?
It's the powerhouse of the cell. That's the first thing you learn in science class when you're in middle school.
CoQ10 is essential to healthy mitochondrial function and defending ourselves against free radical damage. Right there we've got that.
What I know at least in my little bit of knowledge of this is people will get some massive muscle aches and body pain when they're on statin drugs. Different ones will cause different problems for different people. A lot of times they'll switch from one to another to another and sometimes they'll find the one that doesn't have the side effects as much. I honestly don't know why one would have side effects more than another. I do know that depletion of CoQ10 can cause your muscles not to work right.
I found this one out of oxidative stress disease in cancer which was from the Roswell Park Cancer Institute out of New York and this is Imperial College Press here. CoQ10 controls these functions. It's participation as an electron carrier in the mitochondrial respiratory chain. That is the Krebs cycle.
It's energy production.
It's also called the vitamin C cycle. That's the other thing.
Why that's important, and we don't need you to memorize the Krebs cycle like we had to memorize in Chiropractic School, which was so important for us. We need to know this because if you look at a muscle cell, it has a lot of mitochondria in it. It's got a lot of these processes that are making energy because what is something that needs a lot of energy is your muscles to work. Every time they're working, they're sucking up energy. We need to feed the energy. Now, we're putting a substance into our body that depletes one of the chemical parts of the reaction that creates energy. You are like, “My bicep doesn't work so well.” What else is made of muscles?
The heart.
The heart and that's what we're trying to solve. The cardiac muscle is in the heart. We have smooth muscle in the gut. We have smooth muscle around our bladder. We have three different types of muscles, skeletal, heart, and smooth. This could affect any of them or all of them.
Here's the thing. You're making to some degree some CoQ10, but statins are believed to lower CoQ10 levels by up to 50%.
That's a lot.
Let's go through the list of other things. It's an electron carrier inside the cell. That's again the Krebs cycle. It is also an electron transport outside of the mitochondria. It's an antioxidant made by your body again. Regulation of mitochondrial permeability transition is poor. You have to get things in and out of those mitochondria to get the energy.
You need the energy outside of the mitochondria so that your muscles can work in other cells too. We're talking muscles a lot here.
Uncoupling of proteins in the mitochondria. Regulation of the physiochemical properties of membranes. We were talking about calcium channels here not too long ago. That is a membrane potential. Things have to get in and out of the cells and CoQ10 is a big part of that. How about this one? Improvement of endothelial dysfunction.
That's interesting because that's what they're trying to solve with statin drugs. Let's talk about what those words mean.
Endothelial is all your smooth muscle tissue. That is the inside of your blood vessels that are now being damaged. One of the theories about all these plaques in the arteries that statins are supposed to be helping with, one of the theories is that plaque is building up because there is endothelial damage to the arteries in your body. There is a theory and there's some significant evidence to support that the blood is not getting sticky and sticking to the walls, but rather the cholesterol plaques are coming from the outside of the blood vessel and into the inside the way anything else would work in a cell. The body says, "I got to maintain this super highway of a blood vessel, I'm going to bring stuff from outside to do the repair work that I need to do."
What I want people to realize is because so many people think that a blood vessel, this tube is here then there's cholesterol stuck to the inside of the tube, like a drain that's clogged up with gross hair and nastiness. That's not what it is. The endothelium is still around the tube. It's behind that. It's on the other side of the membrane of the endothelium, the double membrane. I know why they call it a clogged artery. I understand. It's not the way you think it is. It's in between the arteries.
The arteries have layers and we're dealing with the tissue layer that is trying to heal and repair.
What do you think could be causing an artery to need to be repaired? What is causing the insult?
In general, the question is what's going on in the body? The body is always repairing. Sometimes you have the wrong materials being laid down. One of the contentions I have with some of these Ehlers-Danlos folks is now that we understand that glyphosate looks very similar to glycogen, our most abundant protein in collagen that you might see. A lot of these people with loose ligaments and things are dealing with bad materials coming in that make bad collagen.
What could be a bad material that we're putting in our bodies that is causing this constant insult?
This is where we start getting into sugars.
It's sugar, but I heard sugar was good. That's what they like to say. That's where we're coming to this full-circle movement. When people have these huge giant spikes constantly with sugar and every time you get hungry, you eat more sugar. It will start injuring the endothelium of your blood vessels. What also injures the endothelium, that's why we were both like, “Ah,” is statin drugs. What we're saying is statin drugs could possibly make artery disease worse.
It might be doing that. There's another study here in 2013. The Ugly Side of Statin: Systemic Appraisal of the Contemporary Un-known Unknowns. They looked at everything that was going on and they said, “Specifically reviewed studies that show statins do not work for the primary prevention of coronary heart disease.” That was the first thing they came up with. They reviewed studies that show statins cause an increased risk of myopathy, which is the muscle weakness that we were talking about.
Increased risk of lung disease can cause or increase the risk of diabetes, which can only be made with insulin. We do know that statins raise insulin and blood sugars. That shows that studies cause or can increase the risk of intracerebral hemorrhage. You don't want to bleed in the brain, can increase the risk of Parkinson's, can increase the risk of cancer, can increase the risk of cataracts, and arterial calcification.
I know we've talked personally about statin drugs, but hearing all of that right now, I have a buildup of anger because there are so many people even in my practice who are taking this drug. There are lots of statin drugs, but taking a statin drug. Once you start taking it, it's not like taking a steroid like, “I've got Poison Ivy. I'm going to take a round of that and get better faster.” This is a drug that they put you on and you never, ever go off. It's a drug that you stay on for the rest of your life.
They want you to be on it for your entire life because it's going to save you. There is this myth that zero cholesterol would make everybody healthier. That is patently false. That's the short of it right there.
My mind is a little bit blown right now because I have a very close family member who's been diagnosed with an interstitial lung disease, which is awful. Lungs no longer move much and you cannot catch your breath, so you're on oxygen 24/7 and I'm betting she's on a statin drug.
We've talked about oxidative stress, we've talked about COQ10, we've talked about the potential risks. We talked about myopathy, I want to talk about this other side effect that they think is going on, polyneuropathy. I had to look this up. We hear about neuropathy and it's pain in the extremities. Where's the poly? Here it is. What is polyneuropathy? Polyneuropathy is characterized by extremity weakness, tingling, difficulty walking, and general weakness. Statin drugs raise a person's risk of polyneuropathy nerve damage by about 16%.
Is that 16% or is it 60%, but they mess with the number?
It may have an increased risk of up to 45%. Who's taking it? It's all the Baby Boomers right now. How many people do you have in your office that you're seeing regularly that have some sort of neuropathy? They consider this long-term exposure of 2 to 3 years. We're not talking 10 years.
I'm looking this up too. Affected nerves, autonomic nerves, blood pressure, and digestion, then sensory nerves are responsible for touch and sensation, and then motor nerves. It affects all types of nerves, the autonomic and the sensory.
I got one last side effect that we haven't covered yet. Can you guess what it is? Let's have some fun and then we'll talk a little bit about what cholesterol is and why it's important. The two biggest killers in modern life are heart disease and cancer. Guess what statins also have? Carcinogenicity. They are cancer-causing. This was an interesting study from back in 1996 as I was getting out of my undergrad program.
This is about ten years after they've been introduced widely to the public.
This was an interesting study. They looked at two different groups of drugs because the two different things that they're concerned about with heart disease certainly, cholesterol is one of them. The other one is hypertension. Hypertension is a problem and getting that under control is important. They looked at whether or not statins or hypertensives would cause cancer in rats. What they found is that hypertensive drugs did not cause cancer in rats.
Tons of people are on them, and some of them are on Lisinopril. When I have a patient on one of those, I'm not like worried about them. If you do have truly some bad high blood pressure and not doing anything to try to solve it, you don't start, stop taking your high blood pressure supplements. You need to take it. What they're saying is that things like Lisinopril, the hypertensives are not necessarily causing cancer, but the statins were. Do they have a type of cancer or in general an increase of cancer?
It was an increase. This was a rodent study. This was not a human study but the amount observed with that they were giving the rodents was equivocal to the maximum dose recommended for humans. We're already at a spot where it's a problem. Let me pull this other study out or this last one. Go ahead.
The amount of cancer, I mean, like there's lots of reasons cancers are increasing right now, not just statin drugs, but we have seen more cancers, Cancer is on the rise, they keep saying and all those things, but it's interesting that cancer has been on the rise when we decreased the fat in our diet, and increased the sugar, which cancer thrives on sugar and then also put a ton of people on a long-term medication. Quite a moneymaker there, because then the more people that get cancer, the more money they make. I hope you all can see that the big pharma conundrum is not trying to cure anything. They're trying to create more customers and it's disgusting.
Let me show this last bit. We haven't talked about cholesterol. I think we're going to need a whole other.
Cholesterol shouldn't be demonized. I think we should have a whole podcast on cholesterol, but the real quick thing I will say is cholesterol is healing to your body. It is part of every single cell of your body. It is part of the membrane of every cell of your body.
It's most of your brain.
You need cholesterol. Low-cholesterol diet is silly like no cholesterol is good. Cholesterol is wonderful.
You can see what I've got here. This is a very simple metabolism at a glance of what cholesterol is. We start with something called acetyl-CoA, which turns into this hydroxymethyl glutaric acid CoA as it goes through things. Statins come in right about this point and shut down that process.
I wonder why everyone's deficient in vitamin D. Because cholesterol and vitamin D start as the same thing.
You don't get to vitamin D until step 30 of this process.
Now we've inhibited the ability to make one of these steps that creates vitamin D.
Here's CoQ10. How many people do you know who come into your office, “Doc, I am so tired.” “Are you on a statin?”
As chiropractors, we cannot be like, "Get off that statin." That's not what we do. That's not what I’m telling anyone on this show to do, but these are questions you should be asking your medical doctor and saying, "I know I'm tired all the time. Could it be the statin?" or "My vitamin D levels won't go above 30. Could it be the statin?"
This is just the body making cholesterol. Dietary cholesterol does not impact this. Eat the good stuff, and that is the fats, butter, egg yolks, and all because that's where the nutrition is. This is all the body making cholesterol directly. Once you make cholesterol, your body has seven more steps to make bile acids so it can digest the fats that you're consuming. For women, it's got eight more steps to produce estrogen.
For men, it has seven more steps to produce testosterone, both of which the sex hormones are way out of balance in our society for so many people that you don't know up or down. You don't feel good, and so many men are going right to TRT to increase their testosterone when all they need to do is clean up their diet a little bit.
Maybe not take a statin.
For women, the same thing. How many women are having all sorts of problems between PCOS, menstrual cramps, and all the ups and downs we've talked about otherwise? All of these things are going on. When you hit menopause, now your body is shutting down. You're not able to make the estrogen you need which is your feel-good hormone, and then we have aldosterone which is a kidney, and blood pressure mix there. We've got cortisol. Cortisol is good. There's bad cortisol when you're all stressed out being chased by a lion at 3:00 in the afternoon.
I don't want to get chased by a lion.
I know especially not at 3:00 in the afternoon. Better to do it at 7:00 AM when you're waking up. In any case, these are necessary products in your system and if you don't have these working, your life is going to be a living hell. We don't tell people to get on or off cholesterol meds or any meds. We will tell you to get ubiquinol. You might need some vitamin D.
I'm glad you showed me this because I talk about vitamin D a lot to my patients, not just the ubiquinol. I'm going to tell people who are on statins that they need to also supplement their vitamin D.
If you're having problems digesting fats, you might need some bile salts to help re-kick and start your gallbladder so that you can do that. That's one of the things I've got my brother on because who knows what kind of problems he had. It wasn't a statin problem, but he needs bile salts, otherwise he cannot digest fats. He has an avocado and he's paying for it for days.
Let's refresh what we're saying. There's a possibility, a very high probability, that statin drugs increase your risk of coronary artery disease. They decrease your body's ability to process energy correctly, which then affects your muscles and can cause weakness and pain. It causes neuropathy or polyneuropathy. It can cause vitamin D levels to decrease, which then can affect the immune system in itself. It causes digestive problems because the bile salts or bile acids will be reduced. It causes hormonal shifts because you've now decreased some of the steps to get hormones made.
If you're already diabetic, it's going to make things worse. Your diabetes is going to be a nightmare.
It gets frustrating. In chiropractic, we talk a lot about this thing called above down inside out, and where health comes from is from inside of us. If you believe in a higher power God has granted us this beautiful body and soul that we can create a healthy environment and express life through our body, which is amazing. If we look at it as outside in, it means I need to take all of these things for me to survive. Where I get into this whole conundrum is a supplement isn't that much different like I need a supplement to survive the type of thing. The job of a supplement is to increase your body's ability to function.
Supplement is not meant to replace. I was chatting with a patient today and she's like, “I'm so tired of taking all these pills.” Wouldn't it be nice if we could get it all in our food? That should be your first goal is to eat as much healthy food as possible as opposed to depleted crap that unfortunately exists in the food supply. Read the label, if it has more than five ingredients, it is not healthy.
Your first goal is to eat as much healthy food as possible. If you have read the label and it has more than five ingredients, it is not healthy.
That's processed food. In general, the long and short of it that I want people to know is you can lower your cholesterol if your inflammation levels are lower. Inflammation is what causes your cholesterol to go up. If your cholesterol is up, your cholesterol is trying to solve the problem that inflammation has created. Cholesterol is not the enemy. Inflammation is the enemy, chronic inflammation. One of the things that causes chronic inflammation is high sugar and processed foods. Also, inflammation is caused by spinal subluxation. Misalignments in the spine cause problems and inflammation. Why chiropractors care about any of this is because we want our patients to have less inflammation.
Inflammation has a time and a place. If I twist my ankle, the inflammation is bringing the healing to my ankle. It's great. I want the inflammation to an extent. It's the chronic overall inflammation that's causing people to get very sick and die. We're not going to solve it by decreasing the chemical that our body makes or we eat called cholesterol. That correlation that caught in causation. Just because cholesterol levels are high in someone does not mean that the cholesterol is the enemy. Cholesterol is high in someone because inflammation is causing it to be high and the cholesterol is trying to solve the problem. Frustration.
Just because cholesterol levels are high in someone does not mean that it’s the enemy. Cholesterol is high in someone because inflammation is causing it to be high, and it is trained to solve the problem.
There is some interesting stuff. This is going to require another long deep dive into cholesterol. There are some theories that when you start looking at cholesterol as an energy delivery system, we are now thinking that instead of thinking of these particles as being good, bad, or ugly, think of them as boats. When you have a full boat, that's got all that energy that is trying to deliver, and then when you have an empty boat, an LDL, a low-density, high-density, HDL, has stuff on it.
You've got the triglycerides, which is an interesting thing in and of itself. If you're eating a high-sugar diet, you will kick up those triglycerides. If you want to take a look at one of the numbers in that cholesterol panel that you have sitting at home, take a look at that triglyceride number. Your triglycerides divided by your HDL should range somewhere between 1 and 3. This is a newer hypothesis and a newer number. It is not on your list. You have to do the math yourself. You can do this division and it will be right.
It's not 1%.
It is not a crazy percentage play, but it should be between 1 and 3 because you should have a higher HDL and lower triglycerides, or at least relatively, but if you have high triglycerides, they're sugar problems. That's what's driving a lot of this inflammation. Triglycerides are an inflammation marker.
That's what you see your triglycerides and you're like, I need to lower my fat. No. You do not need to lower your fat. You need to lower your sugar.
Because in the absence of inflammation, in what we would consider a lean individual, we are seeing a situation called lean mass hyper responder, where their cholesterol levels are very high, like 300, 400, 500 and yet they are low in inflammation as a result of everything else. They do not show inflammation problems and they also do not show the coronary heart disease or calcification of plaques that would be normally associated with very high cholesterol in an otherwise obese individual.
The cholesterol science is certainly not closed science, it's not done and we may see in our lifetime a change in this approach as long as we can get real science done and real approaches to say, "What is going to help you lower your heart disease risk? What is it going to make sure that you aren't having aches and pains from a medication you're taking that doesn't show any benefit for its primary purpose?"
The studies are already there.
The evidence is there, but nobody is looking at it.
I cannot imagine being a medical doctor and still prescribing this whole statin deception. There's even a book called The Statin Deception.
I don't envy them because they know the system. Many of them understand it and they're like, “Let's try it with diet for a little bit,” because of the system they are in and the requirements of their malpractice. What is the standard of care? The standard of care for high cholesterol is to prescribe a statin as opposed to changing the diet and getting them healthy.
Let's say I come in and I have high cholesterol and then I go to the medical doctor and I'm like, "I have high cholesterol." He was like, "Stop eating so much sugar and the cholesterol go down." That's not the standard of care, and then I have a heart attack. I can sue him because he didn't follow the standard care and gave me a statin drug. That is not cool. I would win that because he did not follow the standard of care. I don't know if they're afraid. This happened during COVID too. There was a standard of care that they had to go on some of these IV drugs that were causing more harm than good.
They were known to cause kidney disease and death.
That was the standard of care and the hospitals wouldn't let the doctors make these decisions. I don't envy the doctors who are in these giant healthcare conglomerates and cannot make real decisions for their patients. It's going to take a lot of brave individuals to break this open.
I think I need to talk to Dr. Bax and have him come on the show.
I would love to have him on. I'd love to pick his brain.
I think he'd enjoy it too. I think we need to wrap because it's late and my eggs and bacon are waiting for me.
That has a lot of cholesterol in it. You should probably not eat it.
I will eat all of it.
Eat all of it. It's healthy. Where can they find you, Dr. Schurger?
I am at KeystoneChiroSPI.com in Keystone Chiropractic here in Springfield, Illinois.
I'm in St. Louis, Missouri at precisionchiropracticstl.com/. I'm on the west side of the city and watch out for my parking lot because there are car crashes in it all the time.
Dougherty Ferry? No. Turn on Big Bend. It is always safe and sometimes you might find yourself stopping at JJ Twigs to get yourself a pizza.
Get yourself a pizza. That has no cholesterol either. It was good talking to you. We see you all next time on the show.
Bye, everyone