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All right guys. The next one I want to talk about, I love this. I use a lot of this, have really good luck with my patients with this herb. I use it in a form called black cumin seed. The actual product name is black cumin Seed Forte. You can get it as an oil, you can get it as a dry herb, which is the one that I use. But if you've ever heard of black seeded oil and all of the amazing things that it does, black cumin seed or black cumin seed forte that I'm using is the whole herb. It includes the oil, it includes all the other co-factors that are in there, and it has been used for well over 2000 years. You can find documents about it being used. Ngel Satia is the kind of Latin name of the plant for black coen seed.

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It's rich, it's active ingredient, it's rich in something called quinone that has nothing to do with your thyroid, but quinone. Sometimes you'll see it abbreviated as tq, but quinone is what it's called. So if you've seen my blog post on berbe...

We've got lots of people taking statin drugs these days. Arguably one of the most frequently prescribed classes of medications out there. I know they're right up there with acid blockers. You've got statin drugs, like it's millions of doses or millions of prescriptions every year without a doubt, at least here in the us. So one of the things you need to understand is that sometimes the statin drugs you're taking are just draining your energy and you take 'em, you're on 'em for a while, everything's fine, and then you just start getting more lethargic. You're crashing in the afternoon, you're not making energy like you normally do. Eating doesn't fix it. It's not low blood sugar. It just doesn't seem to make much sense. Sometimes it's because of your statin drug. Now, that doesn't mean you have to go stop your statin drug. That's not what I'm trying to say.

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But one of the things that statin drugs do is they drain your energy, but they do it for a specific ...

Hey there. Alright, I'm going to start by saying something in life, right? I like to have a multi-tool with me. You can get a leatherman, Gerber, whatever. It's like a pair of pliers. It's got three or four knife blades, a file wire cutter, bottle opener. It's got things like that on it, like a modern version of a Swiss Army knife. So I keep one in the truck, I keep one in my backpack. If I go hunting, I have one with me. It's just a really compact way or efficient way to get a lot of different things done if you need to. Well, we also have those in functional medicine, a multi-tool of sorts. We have several of them, but absolutely without a doubt one of them, one of the best and probably one of the better well-known ones, at least as far as functional medicine practitioners go, is berberine.

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So berberine isn't extract of certain plants. You can get it from several different species, but it's an extract of those plants. I would consider it a very effectiv...

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'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...