What Uncommon Skin Diseases Have You Treated? ~ Holistic Dermatology

What Uncommon Skin Diseases Have You Treated?

Interviewer:   So what are some of the common uncommon conditions you treated successfully with Holistic Dermatology?

Dr. Dattner:   Well, anything that involves inflammation and most skin disorders do, I have had success. Some people say, “well, did you ever treat this before?” And I say, “no, but I think I can help you.”  And they want to know I have treated 100 cases, but the truth is that the methodology when you are dealing with inflammation is really very much the same. So, I had a patient call me with a condition, they had a child with Lymphomatoid Papulosis.

Interviewer:   Okay

Dr. Dattner:   Which when you hear that word Lymphomatoid, you know that there is about 10% that converts to Lymphomas and there is some concern. There are hundreds of lumps all over the body and I wound up hearing the story. I did a few things and made some improvement and then I heard the story again, and actually this was I need to get to see them in person. And then I heard the story more carefully, listed in some information and found out it was by the holidays and [1:02][inaudible] came under the sugar and I changed the diet dramatically, used some supplements, the next phone call, 95% better. They were recommended to go on Methotrexate which is a…. you know….

Interviewer:   Yes, sure

Dr. Dattner:   Cytotoxic drug for two years.

Interviewer:   Wow, you saved that person.

Dr. Dattner:   So, I really feel that’s the kind of thing that warms my heart. I can save this poor kid for two years of Methotrexate, she would have spend the rest of her life dealing with this. You can have the possibility of side effects from that.


Are You Tired All the Time? Get help naturally with Functional Medicine

ARE YOU TIRED ALL THE TIME?

Here’s a Natural, Functional Medicine Perspective on tiredness…

Are you tired all the time? I think I understand that feeling. Of course, the biggest cause of feeling tired all the time is not getting enough sleep and that can either be because you have trouble sleeping, or because you’ve got too much to do, or you want to do too much. Of course, those are problems that need to be corrected by doing what ever it takes to manage to get more sleep.

Sometimes, even taking catnaps can be very helpful in restoring your energy when you haven’t had enough asleep at night. Because to push straight through really puts a strain on your adrenals and a strain on the rest of your body.

There are other reasons why people are tired all the time and one of them is chronic fatigue. Chronic fatigue can be caused by chronic infections, by food allergies and by inflammation going on in your system. It drains your system of its energy because it’s so busy fighting the various targets that it thinks needs to be dealt with. If that’s the case, you really need to take care of improving your digestion, getting the inflammation calmed down and dealing with the underlying causes such as leaky gut and often dealing with the various hormonal issues that have arisen to compensate for the problems that have been going on such as supporting the adrenals or even the thyroid gland. In that way, you can begin to restore yourself and your energy.

I’ve seen people with everything from thyroid disease to just food allergy and inflammatory conditions that lead to tiredness and fatigue all the time, completely change their lives to the point where they just thought before, that tiredness was natural, a natural statement. They were amazed to get the amount of energy that they regained. That can be a really wonderful thing, because it can allow you to live more your life more joyously, so you are not dragging yourself from one place to another.

You can translate that into becoming more productive as well, having more time for you and more time to earn your living. Making the investment, working with somebody who does holistic and integrative medicine could be a big benefit, getting you back to your normal god given energy and back to actually enjoy your day.


What’s Your Spirituality Have to Do with Your Skin? Holistic Skincare

What’s Your Spirituality Have to Do with Your Skin?

I’d like to talk about spirituality and skin disease from a holistic dermatology perspective. What does spirituality have to do with skin disease? We know skin disease is related to your skin, it might be related to allergies, it might even be related to the food you eat and what you absorb. So what does spirituality have to do with that?

Let me start with the process of digestion. Digestion breaks down your foods so that they get absorbed as single amino acids or small peptides. Molecules that are so small that they don’t set off a reaction; they don’t cause an allergy. But if you don’t break your food down into small molecules, big pieces get through; molecules big enough to set off an immune response. The receptor in the lymphocyte sees a big peptide in, say 8 amino acids, and it reacts. So we want to avoid having big peptides getting into your bloodstream and your lymphatics. And the way we do this is by enhancing digestion.

If you’re eating and you are on the telephone and you are buying something on the internet or you are worrying about your classes, or your career, or your income taxes, or what your friend said on Facebook, or any number of things, you’re interrupting your digestion. If your mind is in that place, you are in a reaction mode, or stress mode, which we call a flight or fight response. That’s known technically as Sympathetic Response. And if you are in Sympathetic Response mode, you shut off your digestion. Because evolutionarily, thousands of years ago, you didn’t need good digestion if you were being chased by a tiger. You needed to get away and use your muscles and shut off your digestion–or you’d get digested yourself.

But if you are in stress mode when you are eating or you are watching a TV program that has some horrendous scary thing going on, you are back in stress mode, and you are not going to digest your food optimally. And if you don’t break down your food adequately, then you are going to absorb bigger pieces, molecules, food substances that are big enough to set off an allergic response where they hit in the skin. Or these molecules might put you to sleep and make you drowsy or other kinds of things.

So, the old-fashioned method of taking a moment before you eat is good. Relax and let go of your thoughts, your worries and cares, and then take an additional moment and become thankful for the universe providing this and filling your whole body with that thankfulness. And then fill your body with the joy of the food you are about to eat. That gets the digestive juices flowing, and that’s very important for breaking down allergens and for preventing allergic disorders of all kinds especially skin diseases.


The Danger in Making the Internet Your Doctor ~ Best Natural Skincare

THE DANGER IN MAKING THE INTERNET YOUR DOCTOR

Looking for the best natural skincare? First, let me say there may be a lot of information out there that is true and good. I don’t want to dismiss that, but the big problem is when a person relates their story about healing a skin condition, yet they do not give you enough information on why that particular product made a difference.

Often, even if they are telling the truth, you do not know that they are leaving something important out. Even if they are telling the truth and are not leaving anything out, they may still not be giving you enough background to understand what made their condition made better. You don’t know that the particular thing that they said helped, is really going to help you as well.

Sometimes you can go off on a tangent with self-help medicine for long enough to do other kinds of damage. You may have avoided treatment that would be helpful. When you are reading health blogs, read them with a little bit of extra care. Be sure you do not take that information as the absolute knowledge of what  will make your skin better. See a doctor for signs of anything serious or chronic.


Who are the Best Candidates for Using Holistic Skincare?

Who are the Best Candidates for Using Holistic Skincare?

Interviewer:   Describe the kind of patient who is most likely to have successful outcome with your treatment, what might they have to do that is a challenge.

Dr. Dattner:   Well, the people who have the best results with me are first of all really motivated. There is not a question about whether this is a yes or no, or what the priority is. And unfortunately, a lot of people are not so clear about their priorities and they are also not so clear about…. The important thing I just want to mention is that I see skin disease as a symptom more that I see it as a condition. So my perspective is what is this telling us, what can we change and how can this impact a person’s life, so I love to have positive side effects.

Interviewer:   Right

Dr. Dattner:   Persons gets more energy they run faster they…. you know.  Instead of having negative…

Interviewer:   Yes

Dr. Dattner:   Exactly, leg swelling goes away. I thought at least things that they didn’t even mention get better and to me that’s really what it’s about. So the kinds of….

Interviewer:   So the kinds of patients who might most likely respond.

Dr. Dattner:   So the kinds of patients then are ones who are first of all committed. Second of all, can actually afford the supplements and seeing me, you know if they can…. Unfortunately the government and the insurance will pay huge sums of money for certain medications.

Interviewer:   Right

Dr. Dattner:   They always have being receiving tens of thousands of dollars even more for certain medications, but they don’t pay now for cognitive work. So spending an hour or more with a patient and being versed in two or three different fields and up to date in those things, they don’t care about that and so it’s impossible to do this on insurance, unless somebody is feeding you money in the back. So unfortunately, it’s too big. I think there is going to be a day when this becomes recognized, when it becomes clear that there is some people who I can fix for much less money in a conventional way. And it’s a small group and it’s a definite group and there are people to be paid for. But at this particular time, people have to be able to afford to do this and they have to be willing to give up favorite foods. Often it’s, the drink at work or afterwards, things that they would crave, that’s sometime the biggest challenge.

Interviewer:   Yeah, habits breaking them.

Dr. Dattner:   Breaking habits, breaking the expectations of their friends and their husband and their family who says come on….

Interviewer:   Right

Dr. Dattner:   So those people who can make those changes and the last one is, since I haven’t found the magic way to do this, they have to take supplements and that means taking a bunch of pills.

Interviewer:   Right, great, great answer.


Dangers of Self-Diagnosing Your Skin Problem ~ Integrative Dermatology

Dangers of Self-Diagnosing Your Skin Problem

What are the dangers of diagnosing your own skin problem?

Well, the first one is you may get the wrong diagnosis. You might be trying to link it up to some picture on the Internet or something you saw in a book.  And just be off a bit and you might as a result have some condition that gets worse before it has its chance to be taken care of properly.

The second one is that when a dermatologist looks at the skin condition, they think there are a number of different possibilities and it may be one of the possibilities that is lower on the list that you might miss when you’re looking online.

There’s always the possibility that this skin condition might partake of more than one actual diagnosis and may have something in between.  Finally, it’s possible that there are underlying problems that are involved that you will miss when you just come across the name of a condition.  This is something where somebody who takes a more integrative dermatology or holistic viewpoint can be very helpful.


What Common Skin Problems Do People Have Today? ~ Holistic Dermatology

What Common Skin Problems Do People Have Today?

Interviewer: What common problems in your holistic dermatology practice that affect people’s health the most and where do you think these were coming from?

Dr. Dattner: It’s interesting, there are a lot of things I call the social disease. We are eating 140 pounds of sugar per person per year in this country. That wasn’t always. We’re exposed to a tremendous number of pesticides of hormone disrupter in the plastics, and chemicals in the things that we put on our face. We are exposed to maybe different ultraviolet light than I was as a boy because of the breaking down of the ozone. There are so many things that are societal. A lot of us watch television on a regular basis so we get less exercise. Our whole way of living has shifted and it’s very different than it was 50 or a100 years ago. And these things all have their cost, and so a lot of what I am doing is just working against those damages. And it’s a social thing, at some point I hope that we begin to look a little bit more carefully at some of these things and say, is there a better way to do these things? Can we make our population healthier, more vibrant, more able to enjoy life more, produce more.

Interviewer: Yeah for sure, I’m on board for that. I mean the introductions of cell phones and computers, we are going in one direction and we are trying to pull in the other direction, where the world is thinking wellness, and the world is thinking, let’s prevent everything. And we come out with all of these things, it’s such a crazy world.

Dr. Dattner: Well it’s true, and we have to constantly be looking to figure out how to do that better.

Interviewer:  Yeah, got to get a balance there.

Dr. Dattner: Exactly

Interviewer: Okay doctor, do you have any last comment before we wind up here?

Dr. Dattner: Well I just wanted to remind people about radiant skin from inside out, because even when I see somebody for an hour, it’s hard to tell them everything that I have in a 300 page book. I think this would be very helpful for anybody who is interested in skin problems or inflammation in general. And I hope people will begin to find ways to really lead a healthier lifestyle and be more vibrant. And I think a lot of aging is just accumulation of damage that can be reversed. So change your attitude and take your life in your hands and improve it.

Interviewer:  Take charge, that was wonderful, thank you for being on the show.

Dr. Dattner: Thank you.


3 Things You Need to Know about Summer Skin Care and Cancer ~ Holistic Dermatology

3 Things You Need to Know about Summer Skin Care

Curious how we use holistic dermatology for summer skin care? We know that sun exposure is the biggest cause of skin cancer. Now there are several different kinds. There are pre-cancers that are very common as people reach their sixties and seventies.

There are other types of cancers like basal cell and squamous cell cancers that are problematic, but are usually not fatal. There is another kind of skin cancer called melanoma which involves a dark mole that is irregular in its appearance, its color, shape and the way it behaves. Those kinds of cancer are the ones that can be fatal in many instances.

It seems that the incidence of melanoma is increasing rapidly. There might be other causes apart from sun exposure which includes the loss of the normal ozone layer which protects us, because of all fluorocarbons in sprays. It is important to do sun protection in order to prevent both aging and skin cancers.


Are Toxins Making You Fat? Time for a natural cleanse or detoxification.

Are Toxins Making You Fat? Time for a natural cleanse or detoxification.

Could toxins be contributing to your weight gain and to your difficulty in losing weight? Well, I think they are very likely. Let’s just talk about a few different ways in which they can.

First of all, we use a lot of different pesticides and preservatives in your food supply. And unless you are eating 100% pure foods that have been grown away from civilization, you probably have accumulated a lot of those.

Also from automobile exhaust, from various kinds of paints and chemicals that are used around the home and at work for spraying, for insecticides, and all sorts of industrial locations, even if you don’t spray at home.

All of these are sources of toxins that get into your environment, and into your body. And many of them are fat soluble. So that means they are stored in the compartment of your body. So when you start losing weight and fat cells break down and release the fat, what happens to the toxins that dissolve there?

Well, in the old days, fat reduction programs usually consisted of taking diet pills and drinking diet Tab. And smoking. And were accompanied by headaches and feeling bad. And why is that? It’s because you are concentrating those toxins and body has to deal with them and some of them are going to the brain and causing you to feel lousy.

Many of the weight loss programs today involve detoxification preparations that enhance the removal of fat toxins from the body. They support the livers and the kidneys, there are herbs that are used traditionally for that purpose for centuries, and those are incorporated in some of those diet systems.

Other sources of toxins include the bacteria that live in our large intestine, especially in abnormal bacteria that can back up into the small intestine, and get out through a leaky gut. Those kinds of toxins often cause some persons to have fatigue and not to feel good. And they may also be part of bloating and other disorders. So there are a number of totally different sources of toxins that are involved in the body.

Finally, there are heavy metals that are involved in our home environment including arsenic and cadmium and other metal toxins that have the ability to compete with the normal methods that are present in our enzyme systems which break down various substances and are part of our entire metabolic cycle. So if those enzymes get gummed up with toxic minerals, they just don’t work right. And then we begin to build up all the by-products that should have been converted and disposed of by our system. Still another way in which toxins can really mess up our system.

It is important to identify the issue so that we can use the proper means for removal. In any case, it’s really helpful to have somebody who knows what they are doing, both in taking your history, looking at you and  in doing testing in order to identify and help you get rid of the toxins that are in your body that are causing you to have difficulty losing weight and to not feel your normal self.


Uncommon Skin Diseases that are Hard to Treat ~ Integrative Dermatology

Uncommon Skin Diseases that are Hard to Treat

Interviewer:   So, tell us about some of the most difficult cases you have solved–uncommon skin diseases and unexplained rashes–with integrative dermatology.

Dr. Dattner:   Well, I remember once having a farmer whose scalp is always breaking out with pustuals and inflammations. I had to treat him with steroids and antibiotics just to get him under control repeatedly and then I found out that he was getting sprayed with the pesticides.  I started thinking now why would the scalp break out with pustuals and all these and I was thinking maybe the body as a response of trying to get rid of these neurotoxic substances so they don’t go into that other fat containing organ in the brain.

Interviewer:   Yeah!

Dr. Dattner:   So, I got him away from the pesticides and I used a cleansing tea. You came and you made a gallon of this stuff, it was really a potent cleansing tea and it cleared it up.

Interviewer:   Amazing, I mean it’s amazing, but it happens. I know you see even more than that one case you see one….

Dr. Dattner:   Yeah, and unfortunately he confirmed that this was the case by his son who had to do something for the neighbor. His son, I think, sprayed it again and he got the spray on him and he broke out again and he cleared again with it. So the P value, the likelihood that this was really doing it, increased tremendously. I wouldn’t have done that experiment myself, but he did it accidentally.

Interviewer:   Accidentally, sure.

Dr. Dattner:   So that’s an example of the kind of things I treat…

Interviewer:   Yeah, again inside out, always.

Dr. Dattner:   Recently I had a patient who came in, now sometimes it takes a long time to get acne under control, but I had a patient who came in, who had been having a lot of sugar and whatnot and she had cystic acne all over her face. In a month she came back. She was dramatically better.