Colorado Springs Functional Medicine

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4 Permissions to Dramatically Change Your Health that May Make Your Doctor Hate You

Ready to make a change?  Feeling guilty about the choices you’re trying to make because it goes against everything you have heard or done the past 40 years?  Here’s 4 permissions to dramatically change your health…that May make Your Doctor Hate You.  Now go rock it.

Permission to Eat Fat

On my intake forms, I have a line of questions that ask the person if they feel better eating certain foods.  An overwhelming majority of people mark they feel better when eating higher fat foods.  But because doctors, media, and all things medical industry have villainized fat and cholesterol for 40 years, people shy away from it out of dogmatic guilt that they are harming themselves, not helping.  The reality is that we all know what has happened to diabetes, obesity, heart disease, auto-immune conditions, and dementia the last 40 years as we have removed fat.  We’re not any healthier.

If there’s something you should feel bad about eating, it should be sugar.  Sure it tastes good, gives you an instant energy boost but have you ever looked back an hour later and said, ‘I wish I just ate more cake, cookies, breakfast cereal, and whole wheat bread. I just feel so good.”  You’re chronically fatigued because you keep feeding the insulin-energy-store-overload reaction based on your high glycemic choices.

WORDS THAT MEAN SUGAR: Tango Yankee Nicole Recine RN, MSN

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Biohacking Your Biohacking

bi·o·hack·ing

/ˈbīōhakiNG/

noun
  • The activity of exploiting genetic material experimentally without regard to accepted ethical standards, or for criminal purposes.
  • Do-it-yourself biology, a social movement in which individuals and organizations pursue biology and life science with tools equivalent to those of professional labs.
  • What you get when you combine biology with hacking. It’s a way for individuals to effectively “hack” their bodies to achieve certain goals. Sometimes, this hack is as simple as taking a nootropic supplement every day to boost your cognitive ability.

Whatever fits your definition of biohacking is up to you, hopefully it isn’t the criminal end game.  But if you want amazing health and performance expression, it all comes down is the basics.  You don’t need to hack anything.  You already possess the most amazing blueprint and access to quality building materials to create sustainable longevity and a phenomenal quality of life.  You just have to follow some basic guidelines.  You need to biohack your biohacking.

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Genetic Pet Peeves

I have a number of pet peeves.  For those that know me really well, you know I can go from zero to maximum irritability in 0.2 seconds when I see random shopping carts in a major retail parking lot.  If I see you NOT put it away, even though the cart return is only 3 spaces away from your car, I’m ready to punch a hole in your car.   I’m considering creating a personality assessment and job interview process centered around your shopping cart etiquette.  If you can’t push a Costco cart without walking half bent over, leaning on the cart, you’re not even getting an interview.

For the sake of this post, your shopping cart habits are none of my business…unless you don’t put it away.  But a more pertinent pet peeve of mine are the analogies surrounding genetics.  I’m sure you’ve heard them and you thought they were clever and didn’t even question them.  Hopefully these become pet peeves of yours as well.

Functional Medicine Colorado Springs

Your DNA is NOT a Loaded Gun

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Tight Muscles Or Intelligent Feedback

I’m an avid semi-competitive-worker-outer.  At almost 38 years old, I can say I’m the fittest over all I have ever been in my life and there are is still lots of room for improvement.

One of the things I see repeatedly at the gym is people constantly stretching, smashing, and rolling the chronically tight muscles.  I’m not one to offer advice unless asked.  That’s why I write these posts.  You will come across it when you’re looking for information that pertains the post’s topic.

When someone does finally approach me, I make sure to get one point across.

The Body Never Does Stupid Stuff!

If you have a chronically tight muscle, it’s happening for a reason.  If you have high blood pressure, it’s happening for a reason.  If you have cancer, it’s happening for a reason.  The reason isn’t because the body is stupid.  It’s because the body has been trying to adapt to all the stupid stuff we put it through to keep us going.  At some point, those silent adaptations becomes a screaming alarm to stop and slow down.

Tight muscles are no different.

Context is Everything

When you walk on an icy sidewalk, you instinctively activate muscles and ‘tighten’ them to make sure you walk more carefully and avoid falling.  But have you ever walked on an icy sidewalk and when you’re inside, you stop and stretch out?  Not at all.

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Pathetic Thyroid Apathy

I am really starting to feel bad for other other doctors that work in a traditional setting.  Under the surface, over 80% of doctors in this country are disillusioned with medicine and over 60% are considering quitting in the next 2 years.  But most people in the healthcare service industry are pretty good at hiding that painful reality…until lately.

I’m seeing more and more lab results from patients that went to their doctor with a genuine concern that is affecting their life.  I can’t tell you how many people have showed me those labs,  looking at their thyroid specifically, with ONLY a TSH and maybe some metabolic markers and were told, ‘you’re fine.’

Functional Medicine Colorado SpringsThe other day, I got one with just a TSH and vitamin D and she was told her thyroid was all good. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not lazy healthcare, it’s pathetic and apathetic healthcare.  If someone is coming to me with a list of complaints asking for me to help figure out what it could be, I’m going to dig.  Running a panel of 2 values just shows me that doctor is done caring.  Time to find a new one.

Let’s dive into what a full assessment might look like for your thyroid.

There’s a host of symptoms that can arise with a thyroid imbalance: fatigue, cold sensitivity, constipation, dry skin, unexplained weight gain, difficulty losing weight, brittle nails, constipation, enlarged thyroid, high cholesterol, irritability, sensitivity to cold, sexual dysfunction, slow heart rate, sluggishness, or irregular uterine bleeding.  But guess what?  There’s a host of other issues that can cause these as well.

How do you know if your doctor is apathetic?  They run tests, deem them ‘normal’ and end the discussion, even though you are struggling.  If you persist, they hand you off to a ‘specialist’ or suggest you take an antidepressant to numb you to what you’re feeling.   If my wife had these symptoms, was told that her labs were fine, and there was no plan to look at potential other causes, we would find another doctor.

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Increasing Premiums are NOT the Problem

As we near the end of 2016, there are multiple reports that health care premiums are going to spike 25% and people are outraged…except for the ones that made the policy and these people below.

If you’re upset and frustrated about your premiums going up, stop.  You should be exponentially more pissed off over the products and services your premiums are providing.  But I’ve never met an insurance broker that goes over the unfeatures of your insurance coverage.

The part that baffles me the most is that people seem to ignore that they are paying a higher premium to access a system that is great in emergencies but has failed miserable in health promotion.  In other words, you keep paying more for access to a system that will NEVER get you better.  It’s about as effective as paying your monthly minimum balance on a 12% interest credit card and expecting to get out of debt.

Our traditional healthcare system provides 2 options.  Drugs and surgery.  The companies that create and supply the products for your doctor to perform a service are publicly traded companies.  Regardless of the industry, a publicly traded company has one goal and that is to create profits for the shareholders.  When a company engages in activities that purposely lower the profits to shareholders, this is called fraud.  This is illegal.

If a pharmaceutical company were to create something that made you healthy and therefore created less need of their product, this would lower profits.  In other words, they would be actively lowering the profits of the shareholders, which is illegal.  Providing a cure would be fraud.

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Silent Starvation

If you were to ask my wife, current and past co-workers, and kids what I really suck at, I’m sure it would take them about a microseconds to spit out EMPATHY.  It’s enormously difficult for me to relate emotionally with someone else’s struggles.  It doesn’t mean I don’t care.  I just hard for me to shed a tear…except for the movie Rudy.

But the more I dive into looking at the disruptions at the cell level and even genetic level, my view of individual’s health struggles is starting to change, especially when it comes to people that struggle with obesity.  The empathy really grows when I see them do so much that is right but can’t seem to have a break through.

One of the biochemical factors that keep the person unsatisfied is because often times they are starving.  Really.  In other words, what they are eating isn’t being shuttled into the cell to produce that universal energy currency we all learned about in high school biology called ATP.  One of those main reasons for an overfed but under nourished state is due to inefficiencies of the Kreb’s cycle. As a result, the person is going to crave more and more energy substrates (usually carb type foods) to flood the system to ultimately produce ATP.

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Heart Smart…Really?

It’s February and with no surprise, the media is all over ‘heart disease’ awareness campaigns.  But if you keep following what the media (and your doctor) push, you will probably get what most of Americans are going to get.

What are Americans going to get?

How about 1 in 3 will die of CardioVascular Disease (CVD)? How about a death from CVD every 40 seconds?

How about every 40 seconds someone has a stroke and about every 4 minutes someone dies from a stroke?

They like to say deaths have decreased from CVD by 31% from 2000 – 2010.  How about an almost 30% increase in heart related surgeries from 2000 to 2010?  I’ll give it to modern medicine for saving your life in the immediate danger but if our healthcare system was truly about health, you shouldn’t be laying on the OR table in the first place.

How about 920,000 Americans having a heart attack this year?  How about 1/2 of those will show no prior symptom?  How about 1/2 of those silent heart attacks have a first symptom of death?

And if you don’t think your health is at risk, how about your wallet?  Since we are shifting to a universal health care system, your taxes go to paying $315 Billion dollars every year.  Don’t think your tax dollars are paying for it?  In 2010, it was estimated that over 2150 Americans died every day of CVD.  That equates to about 785,000 deaths/year in 2010 (today it’s estimated closer to 1 million).  ONLY 150,000 came from people younger than 65.

What rite of passage does a 65 year old have in this country?  They qualify for Medicare, the government funded health plan.  How does the government fund a health plan?  Through your tax dollars.

One of the ways that the media via the government and heart association try to change your behavior is to drill into your head that cholesterol is the enemy and is an early warning sign of CVD and should be controlled…or you will die.

A UCLA study analyzing heart attack patients nationwide found that 75% of the heart attack victims had LDL (supposed bad cholesterol) within the safe limit.  The researchers analyzed data from 136,905 patients whose lipid levels upon hospital admission were documented in the AHA data base. This accounted for 59 percent of total hospital admissions for heart attack at participating hospitals between 2000 and 2006.

UCLA

The deadly irony is that the researchers conclude that maybe cholesterol isn’t low enough?  How about opening your mind to the possibility that the cholesterol – heart disease connection is about as solid as the Iraq War – Weapons of Mass destruction connection?

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