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

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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.

Chronic Fatigue is… Exhausting! Treat it Naturally with Holistic Medicine?

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Chronic Fatigue is Exhausting!

Are you ready to treat it naturally with holistic medicine? People who have chronic fatigue often drag themselves through their lives and sometimes have such low energy to get to work everyday. When it gets really bad, they often have to drop out of school, drop out of work, or their lives are miserable pushing themselves to keep awake and keep doing what they need to do.

Chronic fatigue doesn’t have to be all the time. It can be cured. It can be helped. I’ve had patients who have had such severe chronic fatigue they couldn’t work, go on to complete school while working full-time and join the Marines. It really can change if you change the problems that are underlying. This was not by giving stimulants. This was by fixing their digestive system, getting their autoimmune conditions under control, getting their digestive inflammation under control, changing the way they were able to process foods, taking the stress off of their immune systems, off their adrenals and turning them around.

Chronic fatigue can be very exhausting, but it can also be an opportunity to restore the body to normal function by following all the leads that are causing it and getting to the base of it, which is something that a holistic and integrative physician can do.

3 Possible Signs Your Body is Attacking Itself ~ Autoimmune Disease

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3 Possible Signs Your Body is Attacking Itself

There are a number of conditions that are known as autoimmune conditions. That is you attacking yourself with your own immune system that have very obvious rashes associated. The typical butterfly rash from sun exposure, Lupus is one of the foremost ones.

People who have patchy hair loss, known as alopecia areata also have an autoimmune disorder as do people who have vitiligo. In many of the cases, they have an attack on the pigment cells in their skin.  Any type of information can be a kind of an autoimmune disorder. If you have redness or any of the things that I’ve mentioned before, they are possible signs that you have some autoimmune condition.

It’s important to get to the basis of this, not just to try to treat the local area, so that your body stops attacking itself and causing destruction through autoimmune disease.

Are there AutoImmune Drug Alternatives? ~ Natural Treatments Require Commitment

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Are there Autoimmune Drug Alternatives?

Consider the cost of treatments that are currently available for autoimmune disorders. They have been developed using a large amount of technology that’s evolved over a number of years. Some of those drugs cost $6,000 a month in order to gain control of your autoimmune condition. These diseases are powerful. Imagine a natural treatment that does something similar for you, and you can get an idea of how much commitment it would require to get a handle on something that challenges your body this much.

Let this give you an idea how much energy is required from you and how much holistic medicine commitment is required in changing your lifestyle and in delving into the various causes in order to get a handle on it and to reverse the condition.

So if you want to avoid the $6,000 a month costs, and the potential dangers that go along with these powerful drugs, you have to make serious long-term commitments to dietary and lifestyle changes. And to the medical expenses related to testing and holistic treatments.

Keep digging until you get to the bottom of the causes that are going on for your system, so that you can get control of your own condition naturally. There are alternatives to autoimmune pharmaceuticals, but they’re not for everyone.

Why Does the Body Attack Itself? ~ Holistic Medicine and Autoimmune Disease

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Why Does the Body Attack Itself?

Your body ought to know who’s you and who’s not you, right? This is what whole immune system is set up to figure out: who is you and who is not. This is an extremely important task, and this task is done by a whole network of different cells. Indeed, when you’re born, your body determines who is you and who is not. The immune system becomes tolerant of cells that are you. When there is an external attacker, like a bacteria, your body produces antibodies to destroy it.

But, when there is a subtle threat, such as one of your own cells transforming into a tumor (or virus or a fungus) living inside your cells, altering your cells, then it takes a very subtle immune system to detect that there is a difference and to recognize and attack those altered cells.

When your immune system becomes confused, perhaps because of various issues, you can become sensitized to that cell or foreign agent that looks a little bit like your own cell. With the confusion from something else going on, you can attack your own self by mistake, and that’s what we call autoimmune inflammation. The following can sensitize or confuse your immune system, especially if more than one of these things is present in your body at once:

  • stress
  • a virus
  • infections
  • vaccinations
  • medications
  • exposure to something that looks like some particular cell or cell component

Just the wrong set of circumstances can cause this “confusion” so that perhaps a bacteria or virus entering your body looks a little like some particular cell in your body. Your body attacks that bacteria and then begins to attack that cell in your body.

For example, certain viruses can cause an attack on the cells in the pancreas that make the insulin, which can cause Type One Diabetes. There are whole number of examples that are known and there are probably thousands or even millions more that have not been recognized.

These are some of the ways that autoimmune conditions can arise in your body and that your body might even attack itself. You can treat autoimmune disease with holistic medicine, but it requires real commitment.

Inflammation & Autoimmune Disease ~ Holistic Dermatology

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Inflammation & Autoimmune Disease

Interviewer:   Good, so what got you interested in inflammation, inflammatory conditions, and autoimmune disease before you were doing holistic dermatology?

Dr. Dattner:   Well, when I was in college, I was volunteering at a little place up in Rye called Sloan Kettering.

Interviewer:   Little place?

Dr. Dattner:   It was. It’s now a big village, the place where that was. It was a laboratory where they were testing all kinds of stuff that they could find and seeing if it could kill tumors. But there was one little laboratory in there that was doing tumor immunology. I went and started volunteering there and that was where I first learned about lymphocytes and cellular-immune reactivity and tumor immunology.

Interviewer:   Right..

Dr. Dattner:   From there I went to a series of different laboratories where I was studying cellular-immunology and winding up at the National Cancer Institute. I had a long interest in the basic science behind this. In fact, I translated into my clinical understanding of how these things work and it helps me see somebody’s picture and pull it together in a way that I wouldn’t have otherwise.

Interviewer:   Yes, so refreshing. I have to tell you with your background as a medical doctor to be engaged in all these alternative methods you use in holistic dermatology and integrative medicine, and seeing them work so well, you love it.

Dr. Dattner:   Well, it’s only because I had heard about them and I sort of believed it. But, when I did my work on immune recognition and saw how the equations could be so different than one could have imagined otherwise in terms of one thing stimulating another thing as a response, I started to understand why those things make sense and knew that there was truly a science behind it. That science didn’t become understood generally until almost 20 some odd years later when people started talking about this in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Interviewer:   That’s amazing, it’s great.

Melanoma, Melatonin, and Vitamin D

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happy young couple making heart shape with hands at sunsetTurns out Melatonin and Vitamin D may be useful in preventing recurrent melanoma formation, and may even have a preventative effect.

This might be most helpful in patients with Parkinson’s disease, who have an increased risk of melanoma, and also in those with a history of excessive sun exposure, other skin cancers, a family history of melanoma, or use of Viagra, which now is suspicious for increasing the incidence of melanoma.

Sunlight is a good source of Vitamin D.

To your health,

Dr. Alan M. Dattner MD

Holistic Dermatology & Integrative Medicine

____________

CITATIONS

See comment David L. Keller, MD,MS2014 Apr 09 09:09 a.m.

See:Sildenafil Use and Increased Risk of Incident Melanoma in US Men: A Prospective Cohort Study.[JAMA Intern Med. 2014.]

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Got Viagra? Check. Got melanoma? Maybe.

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6a00e55255b462883401a3fd227564970b-300wiA prospective study published in the June 5th 2014 edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), had some ominous correlations. It was carried out with matched controls from the years 2000 to 2010, on 25,848 men, who had no previous history of skin cancer.

The study showed an increase in melanoma in me who used sildenafil, the chemical in Viagra. There was not an increase in the incidence of the two other major skin cancers, basal cell carcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma, suggesting that this was not caused by other factors. Factors such as increased sun exposure, in those who took sildenafil. Those who used Sidenafil had roughly twice the liklihood of developing melanoma compared to those who did not. 

Mechanisms of activity of suggest that sildenafil by the nature of its activity as a phosphodiesterase activity inhibitor, may act like the gene activation (BRAF) that is known to be related to increased invasiveness of melanoma.

This study suggests possible association with the use of Viagra regarding risk of developing melanoma, but is too limited to absolutely prove this association. (Even after studying 25,000 men.) It is, however, a caution that use of Viagra, even once, may cause serious side effects that last more than 4 hours.

To your health,

Dr. Alan M Dattner, MD
Holistic Dermatology & Integrative Medicine

_______________

Citations 

JAMA Intern Med. 2014 Jun 1;174(6):964-70. doi: 10.1001/jamainternmed.2014.594.

Sildenafil Use and Increased Risk of Incident Melanoma in US Men: A Prospective Cohort Study.

Li WQ1, Qureshi AA2, Robinson KC3, Han J4.

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Researchers stunned at the success of an “alternative” treatment.

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6a00e55255b462883401a3fd227021970b-300wiConventional physicians have a default expectation about alternative medical therapies: that they’re bogus and don’t work. 

This often runs contrary to my observations, and what I hear from patients and fellow physicians.

For years, I have heard about the benefits of chelation therapy in cardiovascular disease. This method of reducing heart attacks and other cardiac issues was categorically frowned upon as fraud by the more conventional physicians. 

So, it interesting to read that analysis of the results of a recent study on the effects of chelation, called the TACT study, showed that chelation has positive benefits in protecting heart disease patients from further damage, compared to those who got control treatment only. Click here to read the study.

This makes me think of all the people who cannot get alternative treatments because no-one has invested in proving their benefits. Like for chelation, many other alternative treatments are not considered scientific until the proper science is done. Perhaps it’s time to do more research.

Alan M Dattner, MD

Holistic Dermatology & Integrative Medicine

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Maximizing your energy, slowing aging, losing weight, and preventing diabetes.

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6a00e55255b462883401a511af6c64970c-200wiI just spent a weekend day at a seminar on mitochondria. Mito… what?  You may remember vaguely from biology, those little oval energy generators inside cells. So what do they have to do with the skin and the environment, and why bother to read about them?

The answer is that are the key producers of the energy currency of the cells, known as ATP, and they have a number of roles in signaling and affecting the fate and function of other organs of the body.  Good energy, control of obesity, avoidance of diabetes, all require good mitochondrial function.

Mitochondrial function decreases with aging, and DNA mutations, that we have limited control over. But we do have some control over our exposure to persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) and other environmental toxins and medications that harm the mitochondria and reduce their function. Toxins include the ever-present BPA, and plasticizers in vinyl. Caloric excess, alcohol, and fructose are also toxins to mitochondria. Drugs that poison mitochondria include aspirin, acetaminophen, Metformin, and Statins.

We can increase the activity of mitochondria by fasting, moderate exercise, cold exposure. Green tea, tumeric, resveratrol from grapes, and quercetin from capers, onions and apples are all natural food substances that support the mitochondria. Magnesium, Co Q 10, and alpha lipoic acid are supplements that help mitochondria.

So if you are interested in maximizing your energy, slowing aging, losing weight, and preventing or controlling diabetes, some do’s and don’ts are listed here as a starting point. You have an opportunity to take control of the chief energy source in your cells.

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