DrKrupka.com

Today I am going to discuss something called a meet and greet, and it's something I started at my office years ago almost when I really first started in practice. I started doing meet and greets for prospective patients. There's a reason I'm telling you all this, and so I had one recently that took a turn that was interesting enough that I thought I'd share it. I'm not going to go into details about this particular prospective patient, but I think I'll still be able to give you the gist of what went on and why. It's interesting. I'm not sure if this video is more for the practitioners that follow me or more for the patients that follow me, but maybe it'll be of use to everybody. So let me share this. So anyway, meet and greet. It's about a 10 minute phone call that patients can have directly with me.

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There's no charge for it. When I say patients perspective, patients can have with me, there's no charge for it, and they get a chance to tell me what their s...

I want to share with you a couple of strategies for respiratory illness. These were things that were kind of battered around during covid, and of all the things going on during covid, these were a couple that I thought were pretty helpful for people, and I think that they still have some utility moving forward. So I want to share them with you. The first one I'm going to give you is a recipe for nebulizing. Now, if you don't have a nebulizer, this isn't going to help you. You can get a nebulizer on Amazon relatively inexpensively. I think it's like 50 bucks at this point. I would say every family probably ought to have a nebulizer in the house and know how to use it. You may never need it, but for the expense and the peace of mind, I think it probably makes sense to have one around.

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I will also say, in my opinion, respiratory illnesses post covid are not behaving like they did before. Covid, I don't know if we're different or if the illnesses are differen...

I have a list of things that I wish most of my patients had at home, and I would imagine most doctors feel the same way. So I'm going to share that list with you and see if there are gaps in this or someplace where you could kind of fill in and make sure that you have a full compliment of these things at home. Now, this is more about assessment or diagnostics. This is not for treatment. That's a different discussion. But if you were to call me after hours or on the weekend and say, Hey, I've got this situation, I'm not sure what to do, being able to get some information from these few things would likely help me make a decision. So let's run through the list real quick. This is not in any particular order. The first three or four of these could probably all arguably be in the most important spot, but the first thing I put on the list was a blood pressure cuff.

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Being able to know if you're dealing with either a high blood pressure or low blood pressure sit...

I'm starting to get more questions about measles, so I figured I'm a glutton for punishment. I'll go ahead and do a blog post on measles and see who complains about it, see what we hear. But let me give you the facts as I know them and what I would recommend, I'm not going to get into where we are in this outbreak and where it is because depending on when you're watching this video, that's all going to change. So that's not what this is about. But if you have a child and you want to make sure that that child is best prepared to encounter measles successfully or get through it smoothly or maybe without even knowing, I'm going to give you the advice that I'm giving my patients, right? I'm getting lots of phone calls on this. People are concerned, some people's kids are vaccinated or partially vaccinated and are not vaccinated for measles.

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It's fine. T...

An article crossed my desk yesterday that I want to summarize and explain to you. It's about the antiviral properties of an herb called artemisinin. Common name would be sweet wormwood, but you see it as artemisinin quite a bit when you're looking at it in its herbal form. How does it have antiviral properties? Why do we care?

Artemisinin has been used for decades as an antiviral treatment, anti-malaria treatment in other parts of the world. We know it works. It has a good history, good reputation. Lots of people use it. It's very safe. But mechanistically, how does it do that? That's more what this article is dealing with. We know it works. Now we have a better idea how, but let me give you a real quick virology 101.

The way a virus works. First of all, it's not alive. You can't kill it like a bacteria. Antibiotics don't do anything for it. It doesn't work that way. It is a box that delivers genetic material. It lands on the outside of a cell, injects its genetic mate...

So I know you guys are tired of hearing me go on about pills and shakes every morning while we're going through this cleanse protocol, so I'm going to do something a little different this morning.

I had a patient in for, a new patient, for autoimmune issues yesterday, and she suggested, she had been watching some of these, and she suggested that I talk a little bit about what I explained to her yesterday, so I'm going to do that now.

When we have patients come in with autoimmune issues or inflammatory problems, there's a protocol I have. It's called a fix anything protocol, and it's just an acronym that gives us about 11 different areas of concern that we have to deal with if we're going to get the inflammation and the autoimmune issues under control. I'm not going to go through all 11, but I'm going to go through the heaviest hitters, the ones that we see over and over again, the ones that are highest on th...

I had a patient come in a couple of weeks ago with an interesting situation on his blood work that I wanted to share. And this is all surrounding blood sugar, type two diabetes, A1C, that kind of stuff.

So he had had blood done at his previous doctor's office and came in for some general wellness work. And in going through reviewing his labs I noticed that there were some tests that I normally like to see that were not included in his labs. And he was told by his previous doctor that he was pre-diabetic and they had put him on metformin. So in looking through his labs and getting the new ones to fill in the blanks he had already shown up with a fasting blood sugar of about 106 and his hemoglobin A1C was sitting at 6.0. That's why he was told he was pre-diabetic.

So in doing our labs I looked at a few other things. His triglycerides were 165, which indicates that there's probably some problem with blood sugar and we already knew that, but we looked at his fasting insuli...

I had a patient mention to me, she had spoken to her family doctor about doing the cleanse. And, her doctor told her, "That's ridiculous. We have a liver and some kidneys and their job is to detoxify us, and you don't need to take a bunch of pills for them to do their job. It's what they do."

I've heard that before. It's a common discussion that happens. Generally... I have a truck that's designed to drive around and get me to work and back, but if I don't put gas in it, it can't do that. If I don't have oil in it, if it doesn't have transmission fluid or coolant in it, if the battery's not charged. There are a lot of things that need to be in place for that vehicle to do its job the way it was intended.

So, our liver and our kidneys are not all that different. They need certain nutrients, they need certain processes to work the way they're supposed to and to be supplied with lots of things.

Now, if we don't have, like magnesium, for example. Magnesium binds to certai...

So I had another patient I wanted to talk about, another interesting case. This one also has to do with blood sugar management, type 2 diabetes, that kind of stuff. So I just posted another one kind of in that genre. I figured I'd stick with the trend and throw another one of these up here.

This is an older gentleman. We've been working with him for a while. He does have a cancer history, and blood sugar is not well managed. We're running fasting blood sugars in the 150s, 140s most of the time, and that's pretty much with diet. Triglycerides tend to run in the 165, kind of 170 range. I like it below 100, so definitely not saying this is good blood sugar management. But we had seen worse on him. Hemoglobin A1C had been running in the upper sevens. Again, not where I'd like to see it, but better than it's been. We didn't have a fasting insulin, partly because I wasn't the one that ran the previous blood work, but that's kind of where we were.

Now, he had gone in for a su...

I want you to understand when you were born, you were little bitty. I don't know. Your mom will tell you. Five, six, seven, eight, nine pounds, something like that. Now you weigh considerably more. Let's say, I'm guessing, let's say you're 115, 120 pounds, something like that. That's a difference of over 110 pounds from when you were born. That 110 pounds did not come out of thin air. You didn't photosynthesize it. It's not sunlight. That 100 plus pounds is from what you ate. Those were the building blocks to build who you are today.

Moving forward, you need to understand and ask yourself regularly when you see your food on the plate, "Do I want to build my body out of what's on that plate? Do I want to build my body out of steak and vegetables, or do I want to build my body out of mac and cheese and some crackers? Do I want to build my body out of McDonald's or Wendy's or Taco Bell, or do I want to build my body out of chicken and vegetables?" Those are questions we al...