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January 10, 2023

How to manage chronic pain and fibromyalgia with Dr. Jacob Teitelbaum

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Some chronic diseases are extremely hard to manage, mainly because the doctors don't have experience. On episode 572 of the 40+ Fitness, we meet with Dr. Jacob Teitelbaum and discuss his book, From Fatigued to Fantastic!: A Clinically Proven Program to Regain Vibrant Health and Overcome Chronic Fatigue and Fibromyalgia.

Transcript

Let's Say Hello

[00:02:48.470] – Allan

Welcome back, Ras.

[00:02:49.890] – Rachel

Hey, Allan, how are you today?

[00:02:51.740] – Allan

I'm doing all right.

[00:02:53.030] – Rachel

Good.

[00:02:53.540] – Allan

As we're recording this, we're getting ready for the new year, but Tammy has been gone. She managed to make it back home visiting four different countries in 24 hours. They didn't have a straight path back. So to get back, she took the hard route and she flew from Chicago to Dallas, Dallas to Cancun, Cancun to Bogota, Bogata to Panama City, and then Panama City to Bocas, and literally did most of that trip. It was about a 36 hours trip to get back here.

[00:03:27.490] – Rachel

That's like a nightmare for me. I hate flying. It's awful.

[00:03:30.830] – Allan

Yeah. And then she was bringing some of some stuff back and they confiscated a lot of the stuff she had. So she couldn't carry it, couldn't check it, couldn't have it. So she was hoping, but no, they didn't. And it wasn't that it could come into Panama. It's just it couldn't go into Mexico.

[00:03:49.270] – Allan

Yeah, they had different rules.

[00:03:50.510] – Allan

And so, yeah, she looked it up for Panama. We were okay. And then she wasn't okay for Mexico. And even though she was just connecting, that was not good enough for them. But anyway, so, yeah, it was tough work on her.

[00:04:02.300] – Allan

She's tired. I'm tired, but at least I've got a partner now. Someone spread some of the work with.

[00:04:11.070] – Rachel

Oh, good.

[00:04:11.890] – Allan

Break away and get over and record this.

[00:04:14.050] – Rachel

Oh, good.

[00:04:14.870] – Allan

How are things up there?

[00:04:16.260] – Rachel

Good. It's funny you mentioned being tired, because I'll be tired this afternoon. I got my allergy shots this morning, and I noticed that I'm high up in the build up phase. I'm almost to the end of that. By the afternoon, I'll be ready for a nap. It just sucks the life out of me. These shots are tough, but I'm hoping that it'll be good in the end that won't be as allergic to things.

[00:04:41.590] – Allan

Good. I hope that works out.

[00:04:43.320] – Rachel

Yeah.

[00:04:44.650] – Allan

All right. Well, are you ready to talk about fibromyalgia and chronic pain?

[00:04:48.730] – Rachel

Absolutely.

Interview

[00:05:36.190] – Allan

Dr. Teitelbaum, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

[00:05:39.040] – Dr. Teitelbaum

Allan, it's awesome to be with you and with your listeners and viewers today because we're seeing a human energy crisis of really unparalleled proportions, and people are just exhausted. They're exhausted, they're in pain, they have brain fog. All of that is optional. We're going to teach you simple ways to feel great.

[00:05:56.930] – Allan

Yeah. So the book we're talking about is called From Fatigue to Fantastic: A Clinically Proven Program to Regain Vibrant Health and Overcome Chronic Fatigue and Fibromyalgia. I don't know a lot about fibromyalgia, to be honest with you. I know my co-host's daughter has it, but that's as far as my knowledge base goes. But the Fatigue to Fantastic conversation really kind of piqued my interest, because in having all of these conversations with various doctors, it seems like all of the chronic diseases we face are getting worse over time. Higher and higher percentage of people are suffering from them, all of them. And fatigue seems to be one of the top symptoms that we all talk about. So it's almost like everybody is at some level fatigued and it's getting worse.

[00:06:46.300] – Dr. Teitelbaum

Well, 31% of adults have not just fatigued, but have disabling fatigue where that's severely interfering with their life. And in terms of how many people have the do, you know, have all the energy that they need? I mean, I basically have all the energy I need for what I need to do, which doesn't preclude resting when it's time to rest as well. It's not hard to optimize energy. The trick is to use good, healthy energy, not alone, short energy. We'll teach you how today.

[00:07:13.950] – Allan

Yeah, well, thank you for that. So the core of this, and one of the things that I did take out of your book, because when I heard chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia, what I did know of fibromyalgia was just pain. Okay? So I knew that was a very painful disease and I guess before this is your fourth edition of the book. So we've learned a lot in the decades that this book has been around, but you've changed it also, which I think is awesome over time because as we learn new things, there's new things in the book. And you've made it more user friendly.

[00:07:46.720] – Dr. Teitelbaum

When it first came up in 1995, it was meant to be a pamphlet.

[00:07:53.110] – Allan

I'm going to say it's slightly larger than a pamphlet right now, but very well written and easy to read because I think that was kind of your mission for this fourth edition, was to make it where someone who's suffering can understand the content and can get value from it, even if they don't have a medical degree. Let's talk a little bit about that, how fatigue and pain fibromyalgia, how they're all interrelated. Because, again, I didn't tie that together as well as I think I should have in the past.

[00:08:27.170] – Dr. Teitelbaum

Well, here's the thing. We're looking at a human energy crisis coming because half of the vitamins, minerals are lost in food processing. All the calories are still there. We used to get 9 hours sleep a night on average, or down to 63, quarter the speed of modern life. It used to be wanted to send a letter to the west from one coast to the other, pony Express. If they survived, you get it there in six months and back. Now we get hit, email, you ping, and 10 seconds later, ping right back. And our news media seems to have this feeling that their job is to scare people to death and make them hate each other. All of these things are doing a.

[00:08:59.100] – Allan

you're doing a great job, by the way.

[00:09:00.370] – Dr. Teitelbaum

I think it's brilliant. They're all really nice people. They're all really good people. But if you believe what you're seeing, I love reading and I love books, but I like my fiction to be labeled fiction. So we'll teach us a nice Tai chi move without, if we get to that, how to get rid of the stress of watching the media. I like that. But the bottom line is that it's not just fatigue. It's not only brain fog, but the most common cause of pain in this country is from tight muscles. And when muscles don't have enough energy, they don't go loose and limp, they go tight. If you have a heavy workout, you don't come home and say, honey, my muscles are all loose and limp. They're tight. And it takes more energy to stretch a muscle than for it to contract. So low energy equals tight muscles equals pain. And as a physician, physicians are simply not trained at any reasonable level about pain in general and even less for muscle pain. We're taught about what we can give arthritis medicines for or do surgery.

[00:10:09.420] – Allan

Yeah, there's one of the things that has bothered me a bit is that we're really quick to want a quick pill. What's the pill, doc? It's this and pill or this and surgery. And the reality is the human body is a really special thing. And that if you give it what it needs, it can do a lot of healing on its own.

[00:10:36.090] – Dr. Teitelbaum

It's meant to handle most anything. They can get their own at it if you give it the tools that it needs to do so. But you have to understand, in medicine it's about the money. And I'll tell you, when you're talking to your doctor, they're not about the money, they're about taking care of you. But the people who are educating your doctor. It's basically medical education is slick advertising masquerading as science. So you know, when you have pain, this is not like an infection, it's not an outside invader. Pain is like the oil light on your body's dashboard saying that something needs attention. You can smash the oil light, you can cover it to the band aid, which is medical approach, doesn't work very well, or you can put oil in the car. So we'll talk about the different kinds of pain and what your body is saying that it needs as well. But pain is part of the human energy crisis that we're dealing with today.

[00:11:27.790] – Allan

So the tool that you give us in the book you call SHINE, that's sleep hormones and hypertension, infection and immunity, nutrition and exercise. Can you talk about how shine is a good tool for us to consider when we're dealing with pain and fatigue?

[00:11:44.840] – Dr. Teitelbaum

When you look at most of the things that build energy or that are draining energy, they fall under that overall thing of shine. And again, realizing how much sleep do you need? There's no one size fits all. Some people do take 5 hours a night. Personally, I like my 9 hours a night, take a weekend, sleep in, do that for a couple of days, see what leaves you feeling the best again. Normal average night sleep until light bulbs was 9 hours a night. So just get your sleep. You have trouble sleeping, there are numerous herbal mixes, revitalizing sleep formula, EP 120, sustained release, ten milligram melatonin, and autographic z thing going on. Getting sleep is easy. You just need to make the time for it by cutting out things you don't enjoy. The hormones. The blood tests are miserable for diagnosing, hormonal deficiencies. They miss the vast majority. Most doctors have no idea where the normal range comes from, and that's all they use. They just stay home.

[00:12:48.230] – Allan

That was something that surprised me, because there are different types of doctors now. There are doctors that want you to optimize your hormone levels, and there are doctors that will look at it and say, oh, well, for 57 year old man, you're right in range, so nothing to worry about, kiddo. But you don't feel like you're in range because that's a two standard you said there's a two standard deviation. So kind of tell us, why is it we're looking at this range and it's not necessarily right for us.

[00:13:19.710] – Dr. Teitelbaum

The normal range, and we're not talking to the med school, comes from what's called two standard deviations. You take 100 people, the 95 in the middle are defined as normal. So if I was sitting in the mall, 100 people walk by, I check the shoe sizes, and I'd get a normal range of size five to size 13. That would be the way that it's derived, income. An income of $8,100 a year is in the normal range. Poverty is $16,000. So that the test is in the normal range just means they're not in the lowest 2% of the population, which is insane. As a way to determine whether the person is optimal when they're having fluoride symptoms of low thyroid, low adrenal, low estrogen, low testosterone.

[00:14:02.150] – Allan

Okay, and so then the next one was hypotension.

[00:14:06.120] – Dr. Teitelbaum

So with the hormones and let me do one quick thing, a very common thing. Thyroid, tired, weight gain, cold tolerant. How to tell low adrenal if you get irritable when hungry, if you get angry, get Adrenal support, increase salt, cut sugar. Adrenal plex is a very nice supplement, much cheaper than marriage counselor or divorce lawyer. And it's easy to take care of the adrenals of a couple of liquorous tea each morning if you don't have high blood pressure. Can help that, especially post COVID now, but in general, what's more severe? Chronic fatigue to hypertension. If you tend to be a little lightheaded when you stand up, associated with fatigue and brain fog, you probably have orthostatic intolerance, blah, blah, blah, blah blah. Email me for the information sheet. There's two quick quizzes you can do at home. It'll tell you if you have it or not. And it's a low blood pressure. Orthostatic intolerance information sheet. It's just all laid out there. My email address is fatigue. F-A-T-I-G-U-E-D-O-C like doctor @gmail.com. And if you have chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia or long COVID, you can ask for that information sheet. If you have Pots, those of you who haven't know what it is. Those who don't, don't worry about it.

[00:15:19.480] – Allan

Okay? Infection and immunity.

[00:15:22.950] – Dr. Teitelbaum

The most common chronic infection overseen that most doctors don't even know exist is Candida overgrowth. And what you'll see there's no test for it. That's worth a nickel. There's plenty of tests, but then that I bother with. If you have chronic sinusitis, chronic nasal congestion, post nasal drip, or irritable bowel syndrome, gas bloating, diarrhea, constipation, those are symptoms of Candida over. 90% of chronic sinusitis that's not seasonal comes from immune reactivity to fungal elements. It's a Mayo Clinic Journal study ignored by medicine, and the book will talk about how to get rid of both the irritable bowel syndrome and how to get rid of the chronic sinusitis by getting rid of the candida. And not only those two symptoms, but then the energy goes up, the pain goes down, the cognition improves.

[00:16:13.040] – Allan

Okay, well, nutrition, you got me there. I agree 100%.

[00:16:22.650] – Allan

In a standard American diet, it ought to be criminal, but it's not. Just again, if someone is really low energy or in pain, what are some things they can do to tweak their nutrition to get themselves in better shape?

[00:16:36.770] – Dr. Teitelbaum

There's no one diet that's best for everybody. And there's times I've been vegetarian, and there's other times the work I'm doing that will be exhausted. For those vegetarian, I'm doing every work, I need a more meat based diet. So there's not what's the right diet. The question is what diet works for you? What leaves you feeling the best? Without being an energy loan shark kind of a thing. Sugar not good for you. Now, again, I'm not saying you can't have chocolate. Chocolate is a health food in moderation. Go for quality, not quantity. There are sugar free chocolates. Ernd is a very good one. These are both many other ones that taste really good. Most people, unless they have heart failure, want to increase salt. Salt, you don't eat cup of salt soup, but basically use the salt shaker and let your body tell you how much salt wants. This whole thing of salt restriction is a myth. Sorry, it's just not supported by the literature. If you have high blood pressure and you salt restrict from the most high salt diet you can tolerate to the low salt diet, you can tolerate it to lower blood pressure.

[00:17:45.660] – Dr. Teitelbaum

And white is about 1 in black is about three millimeter. The effect is negligible, increasing potassium and magnesium and vitamin D. That helps lower blood pressure. So again, equally, it leaves you feeling the best, use common sense. If the food has been stepped down and basically processed and processed. Usually if I make a shirt I'm in Hawaii, my Hawaii shirt. Each step of processing increases the value of the shirt. When you're looking at food processing, the more processed it is, the cheaper it is. Why? It's because they're loading it with junk. So if you can't recognize I used to lecture to third graders every year on nutrition. And the simple thing is, when you look at the ingredients, if you can't read it, don't eat it. If it looks like a chemical soup or if it has a lot of sugar, again, they look at grams of sugar, divide by four, that's how many teaspoons of sugar if you look at that. And this is 18 teaspoons. Just put that thing back on the shelf. Use common sense.

[00:18:49.130] – Allan

I go by a standard where I say if it's in a box, bag, jar, or can question it heavily. Real food actually doesn't have labels

[00:18:57.850] – Dr. Teitelbaum

actually and everything on the label is an advertisement, which is another way of saying it's a lie. They're just making it up. With the exception of the ingredients and what's in the little nutrition box, everything else is.

[00:19:11.950] – Allan

You got me there. Okay. Now, for a lot of people that are in pain and fatigued, and then you say exercise, they're just going to look at you and just kind of lower their shoulders and say, how. So let's talk about exercise.

[00:19:27.110] – Dr. Teitelbaum

Especially if the chronic fatigue syndrome or Fibromyalgia, where they get what's called post exertional malaise. They exercise in a bedroom for three days, and that's why it's exercise as able. So for those of you with day to day fatigue, just go for a walk. You're going to find if you're too tired to exercise to go for a brief walk, you got issues. And then do the nutritional stuff. There are simple things, I'll give you three simple supplements that we finished four studies in the last two years on post viral fatigue and fatigue in general. You can double your energy in 1 minute a day. With three supplements you can go for your walk. There's a vitamin powder called the Energy Revitalization system. There's a form of ginseng. The only one I would use is HRG 80 red ginseng, and there's called a smart energy system. Those three together in the research, again, more than doubled energy. So you can get the energy to go walking. But the key thing is, if you're going to do exercise, find something to enjoy. Sex is exercise. Going for shopping is exercise. Do something to enjoy usual power to get out of the house.

[00:20:39.710] – Dr. Teitelbaum

And then if you want to sit and play with the stage that you find in the field, just relax. Don't worry how much you do, just get out of the house.

[00:20:47.790] – Allan

Cool. Now, you said something in the book that I thought was really important because we're sort of becoming this sandwich generation where our kids have graduated. Actually, I have one that just got married, another one that's going to able be to get married in a few months. So we're kind of saying, okay, we're going to be an empty nesters. And before you'd be an empty Nester for a decade or two or so, before you had to worry about your parents. But because kids are getting married later and parents are living longer and so that whole gap in what's happening is we end up with parents. Now we're looking at we're finishing the first that generation. Now we got to turn our attention in many cases to taking care of our parents. There's going to be some needs there. And so a lot of us get this weight on our shoulder of we've got to save the world and we've got to take care of the world. And the way you put it on there is you call it shooting on yourself. I love that concept because it's like when you put that in your head, you're like, I really shouldn't be doing that.

[00:21:51.330] – Allan

But can you kind of talk about where we are with that and how we can set priorities in the right way that allows us to have the energy to do what's really important?

[00:22:01.990] – Dr. Teitelbaum

Well, you know how your mind goes through all of the things and the reasons why you should and the reason why you shouldn't. And while this is a final two, this is going to turn your brain off. I find tequila a good way to do that. But whatever your approach is to turn the brain off for a little bit, see how things feel, your brain is going to tell you it's a product of programming that you've had as a child. Virtually everything that comes out of your brain was put there by parents, church, synagogue, news media, teachers, basically everybody else programming you to do what they want you to do to make them happy. But it doesn't know who you are. Your brain really doesn't your feelings know what's authentic to you. It will take into account because authentically, most of us really care about people. We care about our parents, we care about our kids, we care about the neighbors. So you don't have to worry that just seeing how things feel and going with that to kind of set your direction is going to be selfish. And selfish is okay. It's called personally responsible.

[00:23:08.650] – Dr. Teitelbaum

See how things feel. If something feels good, to go with it. And if it doesn't feel good, say no. And then as a check and balance, don't hurt anybody and see how does that work out for you. I can shoot up heroin. It feels really good, but for a day it's going to feel like crap. So what feels good? How does that work out for you? Use that and you're going to say, well, who's going to take care of my parents? Well, if you burn yourself out, you're going to be useless to your parents. You take care of them to the degree that it feels good to do so. And otherwise you say no. In general, in life, whether you're in the Sanders generation or whether you're 30 or whether you're 80, there's nothing doesn't feel good to you. It's not authentic.

[00:23:54.330] – Allan

you had a tool in the book that I really liked where you said, get a piece of paper, turn it sideways, you know, landscape, basically draw three columns, and on the left column, list out all the things that you think you have to do now. And just so you're going to fill up that left side pretty quickly. And then you take those and you say, okay, which ones of these are really if I looked at it, if I didn't do this like you said, somebody's going to die basically. These are actually legitimately important things, and this is what I need to do about it. And then you write your little to do list and then said so on the left, then what are the things you could do or might do or not do about these other things? That in many cases you can just stop writing that list because you're going to realize that they're really not all that important you thought they were. And then you just do the things in that middle list. And when you finish those, then you can go back and look on that left column and see if there's anything in the right column and see if there's anything you really need to do next.

[00:24:52.530] – Allan

And it's your experience, what you've said is that the universe or God or whatever seems to have a way of taking care of those things.

[00:25:02.110] – Dr. Teitelbaum

Let me reframe that just a little bit to simplify for people and make a list of the things you do during the day. On one side, have the column be things that feel good, things that don't feel good. So the things that don't feel good, you can put on the left side. Things that feel good, you can put in the middle. And then if the things that don't feel good, put a little star by the things. You're going to be arrested or homeless if you don't do because you can sort of go later. So you have the list of things to do, things that feel good that you want to keep. You just withdraw your energy from things that don't feel good. Let them drift away. Here are the things that feel good. Then which thing do I want to do today? Which one or two things need to get done today? And you just put a little arrow into the far right column for those two. That's what you do because you have more than three things in your head. It just can be spun out and do nothing. You do the one or two things.

[00:25:52.160] – Dr. Teitelbaum

And what I do is I give it to the universe to do all those other things, but they call it god, universe, life, love, whatever you want to call it. And the funny thing is, those things in the universe column seem to get done a lot quicker than things and more effectively than the stuff in my column. Just an observation I've made. But if you just have the one or two things that need to be done that you're going to do today, then you can focus on that and get that done. But when you have the whole list for the rest of my life to do and it just can be spun out, it ain't going to work.

[00:26:21.370] – Allan

Yes, I like that focus because it gets you focused on, like you said, one or two things and it kind of gets you to just put that other stuff and say, okay, I've got it on the list so I'm not going to forget about it, but I'm not going to think about it right now.

[00:26:34.910] – Dr. Teitelbaum

And you can cut loose to things that don't feel good that you don't have to stay out of jail or in your home.

[00:26:41.260] – Allan

Yeah, that's kind of important. Okay, so another thing that kind of came up in the book that I thought was really interesting was that you identified several different types of pain and it didn't really occur to me that that was important until you started getting into what to do about those types of pain. And I was thinking, wow, we have this tendency to want to do the same thing for every pain. And it's kind of weird that we'll throw everything and that's not necessarily the best answer.

[00:27:23.550] – Dr. Teitelbaum

It's as if you have your car dashboard and you have all these different warning lights on the dashboard. You have the oil light, the overheating light, you got all these different things. And with the doctors who say, well, the warning light came on, they don't even bother to ask which one. Well, no problem, we're going to take a band aid and put it over that morning plate. So you don't see it solved. But we see, I mean, most people don't know and they're major Advertisers, so they're not going to hear it in any place where they Advertise. But the arthritis medications, which is the usual ibuprofen, naproxen, these kind of things, so we see both prescription over the counter associated with, by my looking at research about 50,000 excess US deaths a year. You've got a 35% less conservative increased risk and heart attack and stroke. This is two massive studies of about a million people in the British Medical Journal. This is not maybe. And then you're looking at 4000 to 16,000 excess bleeding ulcer deaths a year. That's 50,000 deaths that are preventable basically. By using that, their research shows that there are natural remedies such my favorite is a mix called Curamin. Not curcumin, but C-U-R-A-M-I-N. It's been a pain relief miracle for.

[00:28:46.070] – Allan

Right now that's actually sitting in my Amazon shopping cart. My wife has some knee pain, and we've been trying a few different things to avoid surgery and see how she can get through this, because one doctor tells her it's a torn meniscus, another doctor tells her it's tendinitis it's anybody's guess yeah.

[00:29:04.130] – Dr. Teitelbaum

So here's the thing. Do the Curamin. But if it's a tendonitis, there are double blind studies looking at the curcumin, the Curamin, and it was more effective than the ibuprofen mouth celebrex type medications. There's other research looking at topical comfrey if you're looking at a tendonitis and there was actually for knee pain, was the study. The topical comfrey it's available as a brand called Trauma Plant. Rub it over the affected area of the knee three times a day. Use them both together. Give it six weeks. Because it takes natural things tend to heal systems. It's like putting up a house where medicines tend to poison systems. You can tear down a house in one day. But bolding, it takes six weeks. Give it to six weeks and the effect can be quite traumatic. It can be taken with the medications. So for general pain, those are my go to. Curamin C-U-R-A-M-I-N. Then I may add topical comfort. And certainly we'll talk about the different kinds of pain and how to approach each one. But if I had to say a general thing for pain, start with the Curamin.

[00:30:16.440] – Allan

So let's go through a few of these.

[00:30:19.010] – Dr. Teitelbaum

So the number one most common type of pain and the one that doctors know virtually nothing about, we know about it as a concept, but most doctors have no idea how to do a muscle exam for pain. That's like trying to diagnose appendicitis and not knowing that there's a thing called an abdominal exam you can't do it. Doesn't work. Muscle pain comes from low energy. If you have widespread low energy in the body, then you're going to have widespread pain fibromyalgia. But if you have, say, just localized things, you have poor ergonomics by your computer and you don't have a wrist support, you don't have your elbows supported, and you're holding your hands up in the air while you're typing like this, it's going to hurt. Those muscles are going to have neck and shoulder pain. There's different structural things. If you have a localized pain, does your wife have an uneven hip height? Does she have is her foot torqued out to the side? Seeing somebody who knows how to look for gait, looking for different localized triggers with muscle pain or is a good place to begin. But if you give shine, if you do what I mentioned, the multivitamin with magnesium and B vitamins.

[00:31:30.160] – Dr. Teitelbaum

So the energy revitalization system, vitamin power, very good. And one drink replaces 50 pills. Now, I had one guy who used to live on the Chesapeake Bay, walking by the harbor one day, and this guy eyes me from across the street and he suddenly he starts weaving through traffic and he runs up to me and he says, you're not the title by Marinco. And I said, yeah. And he lifted me up in this big bear hug and I just like, we have not had a first date yet, please put me down. And he said, sorry, but I had horrible back pain. Most back pain is muscle pain no matter what the x rays show. Horrible. And I took the vitamin powder, I designed that most of the things I talk about, I have no financial tattoo, but I did design the vitamin powder to my foundation gets royalties for that. And he said my back pain went away and over that just giving the muscles the magnesium, the B vitamins and the things needed in multivitamin. So feed the muscles so that they can make energy and that will often help the muscle pain go away.

[00:32:33.550] – Allan

Another one I know that I think it's big is called it's inflammation. Can you talk a little bit about that one?

[00:32:38.610] – Dr. Teitelbaum

So we're looking at anything that ensemitis, which would be like arthritis and then there's appendicitis and everything else too is when the inflammatory system is out of balance. Inflammation is not bad. It's part of our natural system for maintaining health and treating injuries and things like that and preventing infections, invasion. It's when it's out of balance. Why? We've dropped our fish oil intake dramatically. The Omega sweets I'll use, I personally take vitamin multivitamin out of vector omega each day because one of those vector mega replaces eight fish oil pills. So it balances inflammation. Cutting down white flour, whole grains are okay. Grass fed meat is less inflammatory than grain fed meat. Sugar very inflammatory. So simple dietary changes can settle down inflammation quite a bit. But where the curamin? The mix of the curcumin boswellia DLPA and natokinase shines. It's just awesome is the curcumin and Boswellia, these are highly absorbed forms balance and settle down excess inflammation, but they put them in balance and instead of side effects, you get side benefits of ill curcumin associated with 70%, lower Alzheimer risk, for example, dramatically lower cancer risks. And there's now over 100 studies looking at it, usually using this form, the Highly absorbed curcumin for Cancer Prevention and Treatment.

[00:34:09.780] – Dr. Teitelbaum

It's just the thing about these natural things is like say side benefits instead of side effects and they're as more effective.

[00:34:17.590] – Allan

Now, one of the ones I know that's really hard for doctors to deal with is the neuropathic pain. Can you talk about that one?

[00:34:26.550] – Dr. Teitelbaum

Yes. So just like the low energy causes muscles to get locked in the shortened position, nerves have a pacemaker that fires and triggers the nerve signal. And when you don't have enough energy in the nerves that pacemaker, the pacemaker actually will automatically fire unless you kind of hold it in check. And it takes energy to do that. The energy in the nerve drops to a certain point and that nerve keeps firing and suddenly it starts to hurt again. So the general things we talked about for B vitamins, magnesium, things to feed the nerves, but then lipoic acid and acetyl L carnitine, both very helpful for nerve pain. So what they do is they settle and soothe the nerves, and lipoic acid helps to heal it's 200 milligrams three times a day or 300 twice a day. For lipoic acid, acetyl carnitine, they use it and studies for chemo induced nerve pain. For example, or number there, it's 1 gram twice a day. I know I'm grabbing off a lot of stuff. My phone app, there's a free phone app called Cures, C-U-R-E-S capital A-C. You look up each of these kind of pains and it will lay out.

[00:35:37.850] – Dr. Teitelbaum

Look up arthritis, look up muscle pain, look up nerve pain. It'll have the recipe and just short and sweet. Here's what you do, here's how you do it.

[00:35:46.030] – Allan

And the book has all of this as well, and you can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/572. And we have a full set of show notes, though, that's literally a transcript of everything you're saying. So they can go out there and they'll have all of that spelled out for him. So don't worry. Don't be trying to jot all this stuff down and spell, because I started trying, I'm going to have to ask him how to spell it later. But you'll have it. And then the book has literally line per line. What he's saying right now is from the book, and it's in a very simple way to read. And then again, if you've really, really suffering and you're going through chronic pain or really bad fibromyalgia symptoms, he has his deep dive cure, which call it I forget it, Intensive Care. And so it takes that shine and it ramps it up tenfold or better to give you all the protocol in a very deep and meaningful way that you can follow step by step to make sure that you're doing everything you possibly can to do this in the right way. Now, Doctor, before we move away from the pain part, there's another one that I'm kind of familiar with.

[00:36:59.270] – Allan

When you start talking about back pain, I went back and said, well, every time I've talked to any doctor about pain in the back, they always talk about nerve compression. I said, well, a disc is slipped and it's compressing on a nerve, and you're saying that's not it. But there is nerve compression as a pain source. Can we talk about that a little bit?

[00:37:21.550] – Dr. Teitelbaum

Absolutely. So let me start with the back pain, because the majority of pain is coming from structural issues with weak muscles. And again, this is what the research has shown that was funny. There are some doctors who are troublemakers and they realize that every time they send somebody from X rays or MRIs, they all came back. Oh my God, horrible, this disease amazed person can walk. And so they took a bunch of people who are totally healthy and they sent them in and said back pain to the x rays. And then the MRIs, they came back with the same readings and then they put up all the films with a bunch of radiologists that they're good radiologists. They couldn't tell the people from pain, from the ones without pain, anybody can chance. We are an upgrade species. Walk on four legs, we walk on two. We're going to have normal wear and tear on our back and same on the hip joints and on the other joints. And what the research has shown, same with TMJ, where they did another study, the changes in the x ray do not correlate with the pain. They are not the source of the pain.

[00:38:21.920] – Dr. Teitelbaum

And you see all these journal things saying you don't operate out of pain unless there is a neurologic deficit that correlates with that line of pain in that one area. But people do. Why? Because and they're not bad people, they think they're doing the right thing. There are some people who have real disease and they need surgery and those are the ones who do well. You have a specific pain in the area, you see the defects specific to that. There's a neurologic deficit, the reflexes are gone there or hyperreflexic, you have that triad. Now you have this pain. But for all the other ones they're not. And doing the conservative management with some of the things we talked about, for example, nutritional support, Curamin, there's one called Curamin, low back pain, things like that will often heal it up. First doing the structural things, simple heel lift, if one hip is higher than the other, can make all the difference. So simple measures. But again, the x rays, they will scare you to death. But research shows you'll see people there's, oh my God, my hip. It's bone on bone. Yeah, so is that guy jogging down the street with no pain doesn't mean that that's the source of your pain, but it does mean you're likely to get recommended for something very expensive with a knife.

[00:39:49.940] – Dr. Teitelbaum

On the other hand, by very good doctors who mean well,

[00:39:54.100] – Allan

yeah, well, they go to school with all the good intentions and then they're taught this is what you see, this is what you do. If this, then that, if this, then that.

[00:40:03.590] – Dr. Teitelbaum

We're taught about where the money is.

[00:40:05.460] – Allan

Well, that's coming through the medical school because that's who's funding the medical schools.

[00:40:11.260] – Dr. Teitelbaum

But they're paying for education and our medical education. And this is paraphrasing from a past editor of New England Journal of Medicine, which is a Harvard journal, that most continuing medical education is simply slick advertising, mass grading of science.

[00:40:29.440] – Allan

And it's sad. So ask questions, advocate. That's why I like books like yours because they kind of give us some tools to advocate for ourselves, to do some things that are non invasive that are generally safe and say, okay, I'm going to try these particular supplements and see how they go. Give it the time necessary, and then you can consider the medications and potentially the surgeries.

[00:40:56.690] – Dr. Teitelbaum

I'm an MD. I'm not against medications. I'm not against surgery. I'm just against the way they're being used, which is based on profit rather than science insanity. When used based on the science insanity. These are amazing and incredibly wonderful tools.

[00:41:12.510] – Allan

Yeah, because I tore my rotator cuff, and I knew the instant I did it exactly what I did, I know how bad it was. I mean, I knew without a shadow of a doubt it was off the bone, felt the tore, knew exactly what it was. And so I didn't go to the doctor straight away because I had something else I wanted to do first. And I'm like, I can't tear it more than it's tore. And then I did go into him, and he's like, when did you do this? I said, about a month and a half ago. He's like, that must have hurt. And I listed, yeah, we got to talking about it. He was a good old fellow. He'd been doing this for forever. And he said, yeah, most people are going to do this, and most people are going to tear their shoulders. It's just going to happen. And then he said, So let's do this review. And then he did the X ray, and he said, I'm going to send him for an MRI. He said, A lot of times they push back, and once you do therapy, but you know, it's tore, I know it's tore, so maybe the insurance company will be cool and let us just do the MRI, does the MRI, and says, yeah, we both knew it was tore.

[00:42:05.290] – Allan

And so he says, I got to do surgery. I'm like, of course it's not going to reattach itself to the bone. That's medicine. That's science. It's just not going to happen. So if I thought taking a pain medication and doing physical therapy was something that was going to fix it, then by all means, I would have tried that long before I ever went into surgery. But I knew where I was, and I was like, okay, I can use common sense. I can have a reasonable conversation with a doctor. And if the doctor can't have that conversation, then I'll go have the conversation with a different doctor.

[00:42:40.050] – Dr. Teitelbaum

And endoscopic repair of a tear is a common sense kind of a thing. It's low. It's not hard on the body. You don't have a lot of complications where when you're going into doing disc reconstruction on the back, failed back surgery is nasty. But like I say, what I find is when surgery is done for the right reason, people usually do real well. And when it's done for the wrong reason, for some reason, they don't.

[00:43:08.350] – Allan

Okay, let's pivot to something a little bit more positive. We talked about a little bit earlier how special the body is, but in the book you kind of got into a concept of self and healing and how there's a little bit more to just resting or eating or exercise. There's an internal something that drives healing better.

[00:43:39.110] – Dr. Teitelbaum

Well, here's the thing. You just don't get in the way of it. Give your body what it needs and let it do its thing. So the body is amazing at healing things. Sometimes things get out of balance, like heart failure, where its mechanism for healing the problem actually makes it worse. But most often that's not. So if you're giving body what it needs nutritionally, again, the Energy Revitalization System vitamin powder to me is the best multivitamin because it replaces 50 pills from one drink. Easy. You give it to stuff for inflammation. So you go ahead and curamin. Nice easy way to do that. Then you just tailor it to the lights. You stop doing things that hurt it. It's like the doctor, the joke man goes to doctor and if it's dark when I keep doing this, it hurts. Doctors don't do that. So use some common sense with it. Your body pain is your body's way of saying something needs attention. Or maybe it's saying don't do that. But also, it's a funny thing. A good amount of pain, especially back pain, is associated with depressed feelings. The body, the psyche is actually distracting you from an uncomfortable feeling with the pain.

[00:44:52.120] – Dr. Teitelbaum

And it's not a rational process, so it's not proportional. It's not like this is a little thing. So I have a little pain and this is a major trauma that I was raped as a child. Never big pain. It's not like that at all. It's an uncomfortable feeling. The body will create pains, distract it distract you. And simply going in and seeing how you feel. For the gals out there, it's easier. Although sometimes it gets more complex. For guys, it's like feelings, what do they sometimes you do that, go in, find that things are feeling no judgments are not broken. You don't have to fix them. All you have to do with the feelings is feel them. And then when you're done feeling them and you'll know you're done because they'll stop feeling good, be amazed how good it can feel to grieve or their anger. I mean, ask my wife, I love a good self righteousnessy fit. I get on my hands down on the whole thing. But when it stops feeling good, that feeling is done. Then let it go. Now, the book talks about how to feel the feelings, how to let go of the feelings, and you'll find that a lot of the pain will go and go.

[00:45:56.210] – Dr. Teitelbaum

You mean I've been suffering for 30 years because I was upset that little Johnny took my girlfriend or something when I was seven? There's sometimes nothing

[00:46:05.570] – Allan

well, they were something. They were something, they were traumatic, and they were important enough at the moment for your body to store that and decide it needed to react in some way and it's manifesting his pain.

[00:46:18.710] – Dr. Teitelbaum

Yeah, little johnny when we were seven, it was something.

[00:46:25.130] – Allan

She was gorgeous

[00:46:26.450] – Dr. Teitelbaum

she was amazing.

[00:46:29.630] – Dr. Teitelbaum

But at 40, maybe kind of over that. There's a lot of different things to the pain. So the book will talk about nutritionally and herbally and then when to use medications, which medications to use, when to consider surgery. Again, this stuff is not rocket science. It's basically science. How it's used is not science. It's Advertising.

[00:46:56.030] – Allan

I agree. Dr. Titlebaum. I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest, and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

[00:47:05.990] – Dr. Teitelbaum

So, number one, want to double your energy in 1 minute of the day? Take a piece of paper, write this one down, get the Energy Revitalization System vitamin powder, get the Smart Energy System, which is a mix of Ribos and five herbs, and get HRG 80, HRG 80 red ginseng, and get the chewable tablets. And you take one drink a day, two capsules into one tablet, it'll take you less than a minute. It's not expensive. You do that each morning. And again, most people find that they as much as more than double their energy. And again, in the studies for the Smart Energy, the average increase in Stamina, I think was 70%. The HRG 80 red ginseng was like 60%. Now, there's not a study looking just at the vitamin powder to combine those data is what I do each day. And you'll find that nutritionally you're going to have an amazing amount of healthy energy and it's just easy. Then. Number two, equally important is to follow your bliss. You know how you have a GPS in your life? If you went to your car's GPS and said, take me where I want to go, it has no idea where you want to go.

[00:48:17.070] – Dr. Teitelbaum

If you go to your brain and say, take me where I want to go, it has no idea who you are. Your brain is the programming that everybody did to tell you how to make them happy. It has no idea who you are. Your feelings know who you are. Start to steer and plan your life by what feels good to you as long again, don't hurt other people and how does it work out for you. But follow your bliss, see what feels good. Step number three, go for walks. A little bit of exercise doesn't have to be left. And do it outside in the sunshine and pick something that's fun and do it to the friends who actually show up. And you do those things and your life is going to be fantastic.

[00:49:02.510] – Allan

Thank you. If someone wanted to learn more about you and learn more about your book, From Fatigue to Fantastic, where would you like for me to send them?

[00:49:10.910] – Dr. Teitelbaum

Well, vitality101.com has information especially for people with CFS and Fibromyalgia. For those who are interested in the supplements, the website is endfatigue.com and Amazon has book. So simple things. But again, for Day to Day, if you'd like to know, I wonder what Doctor T would say about this problem. You look up acne or acid or whatever it is, the free phone app cures a-c. We have over a million downloads for the app. It's like having my brain in your pocket. It's just a lot less messy and it's just short and sweet. It's just each topic, hypertension, arthritis, whatever it is, just look it up. And here's what's going on. Here's how you take care of it. Here the best supplements, here's the best, here's what you use medications, how I just laid out for you.

[00:50:05.490] – Allan

You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/572 and I'll be sure to have the links there. Thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

[00:50:14.330] – Dr. Teitelbaum

Allan, always a pleasure. Be well.

[00:50:16.200] – Allan

You too.


Post Show/Recap

[00:50:17.650] – Allan

Welcome back, Ras.

[00:50:19.100] – Rachel

Hey, Allan. That was really a wonderful interview and another book that I got to add to my list that I need to buy, but very helpful information. Right off the bat, I'll tell you and the listeners that my daughter suffers from both fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome, which I often just simply call CFS. I have another loved one that also has fibro. So these are things that I'm pretty familiar with. And so as I was listening to you discuss these different points, I'm like, yup, that makes sense. Yes, we've experienced that. It's all good information.

[00:50:57.970] – Allan

Yeah, I wanted to have Dr. Teitelbaum on when I saw the topic of the book. I was like, okay, I want to talk about this because it's something we haven't really gotten into. And again, and I said it in the interview, so many diseases that are out there, that's what you're complaining about and that's what your symptom is. And they're like, okay, well, are you just not sleeping well?

[00:51:21.120] – Allan

Is it stress? Is it this? Is it that? And there's so much to rule out that I think it has to be a frustrating thing to go through because the diagnosis is just not going to be easy. And I can just see a situation where you walk into the doctor's office and they seem almost rude about it.

[00:51:41.390] – Allan

Fatigue, check. Okay, what else? You're like, Well, I'm in pain. Okay, check. What else? Because what they really just want is six minutes and a prescription. And that six minute includes in time to write the prescription. But you're not making it easy on them because you don't have any outward symptoms of anything major going on. They're looking at your thyroid, they're looking at some of these other things, and they're saying you're a perfectly healthy human being. And yet you say you're tired all the time.

[00:52:12.650] – Rachel

Yeah, that's exactly what we experienced. My daughter started having symptoms, probably she might have been close to 13, actually, when she started having some symptoms. And again, when you look at my daughter, she looks like now she's in her 20s, she looks like a young, healthy person. You would never imagine that she would have both fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue. And it was very difficult to diagnose, because when you think of your 13 year olds remember when you had 13 year olds?

[00:52:43.390] – Allan

Yeah, I'm just going to lay around and sleep all day

[00:52:45.800] – Rachel

lazy, moody. And so it is it's hard. And the thing with fibro and CFS and some of these other very similar diseases is there is no one blood test. And not only is there no one blood test, they first want to rule out things. So we spent ridiculous times in the doctor's office. It's not lime disease from a tick. It's not a thyroid problem. It's not a hormone problem. It's not a gluten IBS problem to get to all of these, it's not this, it's not that, still kind of leads us to it's just a rabbit hole of trying to get diagnosed. And you put together symptoms, and not all the symptoms make sense either. So it's this type of pain and this type of fatigue and all these different things. And the best advice that I have, someone who's dealing with some level of fatigue, is to get to know your doctor really well, go through the rabbit hole of test after test, diagnosis after not diagnosis, and see what you can get to. But when you talk about fatigue for, I guess, healthier people like you and I, we can pinpoint things like, you just had a whole week of craziness at your bed and breakfast.

[00:54:04.190] – Rachel

I just had a whole craziness of fatigue over the holidays, family parties, not sleeping in my bed, not eating the right foods. And so there's certain things that we can look at and say, this is why we're exhausted, and we know if we get some good sleep that we can recover from that. But if you're continuously struggling with fatigue, then there might be something else behind it. And the doctor has some really good things, really good advice. You got to look at your sleep. You got to look at your nutrition and stress and all these types of things. So it's a good place to start.

[00:54:41.440] – Allan

Yeah. He took the book it was originally a pamphlet that he wrote for doctors, because doctors didn't know how to diagnose this properly,

[00:54:49.560] – Rachel

and they still don't.

[00:54:50.730] – Allan

Okay, well, saying, get a copy of the book and send it to a doctor if you have questions. But he probably won't read it, or she won't read it because it's 400 pages.

[00:55:03.230] – Allan

But he originally started it as that, and then he worked his way up to really documenting and getting the evidence and looking at protocols. And then this one he wanted to make sure was good for the patient or someone who thinks they might be struggling with something like this because fatigue or pain is just a big part of their lives and their doctor hasn't been able to figure this stuff out yet. The protocols that he has in the book, a lot of them are just normal stuff that you should be doing for your general health and fitness anyway.

[00:55:36.560] – Rachel

That is true.

[00:55:38.350] – Allan

Eating right, getting exercise where you can, sleeping well, managing stress, all those things are things you should be doing. And he approaches it from a food first perspective, then supplements, and then, if necessary, he talks about medications. So it's pretty thorough book. It's up to date. It came out in 2021. So it's an up to date reference for you to get in there. And he makes it easy to follow, easy to know if that applies to you pretty early in the book because he writes those little subsection summaries at the beginning where he says, okay, this is the brain fog conversation that I could have with you, so you don't have to read all of this other stuff. You can read this and know at least, okay, is this the chapter I need to focus on now, or can I move on? So he makes it really easy. It's a good book.

[00:56:33.260] – Rachel

That sounds really great, especially how he broke it down for the people that are suffering. People with fibro and chronic fatigue syndrome do have a level of brain fog. This is partly a brain disease, and so it's hard to concentrate, it's hard to keep focused on tasks. It's important. So it sounds like a very helpful book.

[00:56:57.110] – Allan

Good.

[00:56:58.020] – Rachel

Yeah.

[00:56:58.780] – Allan

I'll talk to you next week then.

[00:57:00.280] – Rachel

Thanks for bringing on Allan. I appreciate it. Thank you.

[00:57:03.670] – Allan

You're welcome. Bye.

[00:57:05.450] – Rachel

Bye.

Music by Dave Gerhart

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