048-Ask Dr Soram-Predictive Antibodies with Dr Tom O’Bryan, Medical Costs and Staying Healthy

03/04/13 • -1 min

The cover story of time magazine this week is entitled Why Medical Bills are Killing Us by Steven Brill. I really encourage all of you to read this article because it shows what’s going on with our medical system.

The subtitle of the article is “One SN a minute then tablet cause 1.5 cents. Your hospital marks it up 10,000%.

For me this is just a further message that all of us need to be proactive about our health. It is not good enough to just sit around and wait for a disease to strike. Conscious living in the use of enlightened medicine can help us stay healthy.

And a video with the author is here

Before I start talking about my update for Integrative medicine, I want to share with all my listeners my wife and my recent discovery of guaranteed lead and cadmium free dishware! I talk about this on the podcast. It is called “Fiesta Dishes” and here is the link.

Speaking of being sure to find dishes without lead I open this podcast within article that just appeared showing that decreasingly small amounts of lead can affect children’s IQ performance. This study was done in the Detroit Public Schools System. Levels as low as 2 mcg/dL in the blood affected children’s educational performance.

http://www.freep.com/article/20130225/NEWS06/302250140/High-lead-poisoning-linked-to-lower-test-scores-in-DPS?odyssey=nav|head

One of the biggest pieces of news this week is that the incidence of metastatic breast cancer is increased in women at the young age of 25 to 39. I’ve begun to see this in my own practice, and now this article from the JAMA confirms it.

and also the New York Times covered this with this article.

I’ve talked to my podcast before and all of you have heard of the increasing amount of phthalates that women are being exposed to and the increasing problem with vitamin D deficiency. Both of these predisposed to – note I’m not saying cause – breast cancer.

We then go on to talk about BPA exposure and childhood asthma. The study tested 568 children and their mothers in New York City. It is the first to link early childhood exposure to bisphenol A (BPA) where the asthma. However studies with lab mice have found a similar link.

One out of every 10 children in our country has been diagnosed with asthma. In my opinion between the study that shows BPA exposure in the known low levels of vitamin D in newborns, we are building a perfect storm towards the development of more asthma in our children.

In this article the author , Kathleen Donohue, is quoted as saying “We saw increase risk of asthma at fairly routine, low doses of BPA”.

Links for these two articles are here:

http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org/ehs/news/2013/asthma-and-bpa

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/257110.php

And here is one from Time Magazine

The New England Journal of Medicine had a lead article this week showing the benefits of the Mediterranean diet in protecting against heart disease. Although this diet is significantly better than the traditional American diet, I still think studies will show that a Vegan diet is even better at protecting against heart disease.

The next article I discuss shows that C-section babies are five times more likely to develop allergies. This finding goes along with previous research that showed the babies born by C-section are more likely to have asthma then babies who were delivered naturally.

The most likely mechanism of this is that the baby is not being exposed to friendly bacteria in the birth canal and this is a...

The subtitle of the article is “One SN a minute then tablet cause 1.5 cents. Your hospital marks it up 10,000%.

And a video with the author is here

http://www.freep.com/article/20130225/NEWS06/302250140/High-lead-poisoning-linked-to-lower-test-scores-in-DPS?odyssey=nav|head

and also the New York Times covered this with this article.

In this article the author , Kathleen Donohue, is quoted as saying “We saw increase risk of asthma at fairly routine, low doses of BPA”.

Links for these two articles are here:

http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org/ehs/news/2013/asthma-and-bpa

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/257110.php

And here is one from Time Magazine

The most likely mechanism of this is that the baby is not being exposed to friendly bacteria in the birth canal and this is a...

Previous Episode

047-Ask Dr Soram- Part 3 of My Gluten Interview with Dr. Tom O’Bryan- Allergies on the Rise and Breast Cancer Prevention in the News!

I open the show talking about the rise in allergies secondary to global warming. My patients have been coming in with allergies and in February, the pollen count in Los Angeles is higher than I’ve ever seen at this time of the year. Global warming is directly linked to this.

In the show I give some suggestions for managing allergies using a natural approach.

Here are the links mentioned in the podcast to the allergy epidemic we are having now.

Seasonal Allergies Getting Worse From Climate Change

Pollen Allergy Forecast

The allergy video I mention is here

The PDF article on extreme allergy and global warming is here

Yoga is coming to its own and finally being proved to be helpful for human disease! As my readers know I’ve been practicing kundalini yoga for over 40 years and I’m so gratified to see articles about yoga appearing in the most conventional of all medical journals, such as American Journal of Cardiology.

Here it is showing that yoga can significantly reduce the frequency of atrial fibrillation a very common heart condition. If your relatives or friends live with this condition, please refer them to this article.

I’ve discussed with you, my readers and listeners, for a long time the relationship between vitamin D and breast cancer. Dr. Garland is my friend and colleague who wrote the original epidemiologic article that I have quoted in my book and on my recent appearance on Dr. Oz.

Now Dr. Garland has published a PROSPECTIVE study showing that there is a link between low vitamin D and breast cancer.

Here’s the article.

Finally, I talk about the landmark event of an agency of the National Institute Of Health confirming what I’ve talked about on my podcast for so long – the link between the environment and breast cancer. In addition they are changing the focus of breast cancer to be more towards prevention rather than only diagnosis and treatment. This is a glorious day for the women of the world!

Jeanne Rizzo has written our article for the Huffington Post entitled Welcome to the Breast Cancer Prevention Era.

You can read it here

and you can read the official document from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences at this link. The title of the article is Breast Cancer and Environment – Prioritizing Prevention

The Interview on Gluten

We then finalize my three-part interview with Dr. Tom O’Bryan on gluten sensitivity.

In this section we talk about the accuracy of Celiac tests, and its 6 to 1 ratio of gluten sensitivity to celiac disease diagnosis. Dr. O’Bryan calls this gluten sensitivity epidemic “Foundational Problem”. You can find a list of practitioners who have been qualified from Dr. O’Bryan’s training on his website here.

Dr. Tom’s main website is here

Then in this show I answer the following questions:

1. An integrative medicine doctor’s answer to weight loss.

2. A few words about Parkinson’s disease.

3. Vitamin D and pregnancy – a very important issue.

4. An integrative approach to allergy management.

5. Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, vitamin D, and a comment from a listener about
the clarity of my skin!

I also announced in this podcast that many listeners are asking me to guide them to physician-quality products that can help their health. I’m...

Next Episode

049-Ask Dr Soram-Predictive Antibodies Part 2-CNN Special on Integrative Medicine-New Smart Phone App and Your Questions Answered

Our whole country is moving in the direction of Integrative Medicine! CNN had a special this past weekend entitled Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Health Care. If you missed it on CNN you can see it on iTunes or Amazon.com.

Here’s a link to the trailer for the movie

In the movie they show the need to reorient ourselves towards preventive medicine and positive well-being, rather than being reactive and waiting for a disease to strike.
Andrew Weil states “We don’t have a healthcare system...we have a disease care system” and I could not agree more!

A direct quote from a corporate executive interviewed in the movie is “70% of health care costs are driven by people behaviors.” Our system will be bankrupt if we do not fix it and reorient to healthy lifestyles.

You can find out more about the movie here and here.

Keeping with the theme that everybody is focusing on staying or getting healthy, a new app for both the iPhone and android has come out. It is called Fooducate. With the App on your phone at the grocery store or health store you can scan a barcode and the App will give you information on how healthy that product is. If it is not healthy, it will make recommendations of similar products that are much healthier for you and your family.

Here is a link to the website where you can get the app.

Along the lines of my logo -Enlightened Medicine, and Conscious Living a new article has come out entitled “Ruminating about stressful events may increase inflammation in the body”:

This is really where the tire meets the road for many diseases. It is so good that it is finally being documented scientifically.

We all know that heart attacks are related to stress and studies are also showing now that cancers related to stress. How does the mind affect the body in these cases? This landmark study shows that just the act of worrying about something and ruminnating on it, can raise inflammation in the human body. Specifically a marker called HS – CRP gets elevated when a person dwells on negative and/or stressful events.

Previous studies have correlated stress with these health problems but this is the first study to prove that inflammation markers in the blood go up when a person ruminates on something negative. Integrative medicine doctors think that inflammation as represented by the HS – CRP is the primary cause of coronary artery disease, the major cause of death in the United States. Many integrative doctors feel that cholesterol is an innocent bystander.

Here’s a link to the article.

In other news about integrative medicine, a new study has just shown that acupuncture improves memory, test performance and reduces anxiety.

This too is a major study showing what many of us have observed for a long time. Dr. Jason Bucell, PhD did the research with 90 undergraduate students. Half the students received acupuncture and half did not, and the placebo effect was controlled for. Then the students took a computerized test of working memory. These tests are associated with predicting performance with such diverse abilities as reading comprehension, arithmetic calculation, notetaking, language comprehension, learning to spell, building vocabulary, writing and many other performance measurements.

Previous research has shown that a series of acupuncture treatments can help individuals with impaired memory. This research was unique in that it is the first study to show the just ONE acupuncture treatment can improve performance in healthy individuals.

It will be exciting to see if this has any benefit for patients with Alzheimer’s or other less severe memory problems that people over age 50 often complain of.

You can read the article here.

Another study, just recently been published, shows that mindfulness contributes to more stable emotions and people who perceive themselves to have better control over their mood and behavior throughout the day. Higher mindful people also described less cognitive and physiological activation before bedtime. This suggests a greater emotional stability during the day might even translate into better sleep.

These results will be presented later this month at the ann...