kmud-170317-endocrinology-part1-parkinsons
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Well there we go from the Middle East to Ireland. It's this evening's Ask Your Herb Doctor. My name's Andrew Murray. My name's Sarah Johanneson Murray. For those of you who perhaps have never listened to the shows they run every Friday, every third Friday, sorry, from 7.30 to 8 p.m. we have callers but they run from 7 to 8 o'clock on the third Friday of every month. We've been for a long time now being very pleased to have Dr. Raymond Peat joining us with various different topics. This month will be no exception. I wanted to try and do some kind of a gosh I don't know, introduction or some kind of an outline, a basis, something in which I know that people listening to these podcasts who I get emails from regularly all over the world, not just the States, who've been listening to them, have found them interesting and informative and it's led them to read research from people that Dr. Peat's mentioned on the show or they've had conditions and illnesses and they've recovered, listening to Dr. Peat's advice
etc etc. So I'm very much aware that this is a real resource with which people are being reached and there will always be those people who are looking for something different, something alternative, as well as those people who are not looking and they won't listen and they've already got their path set out but there's plenty of people who are looking for alternatives and so that's what the thrust of this show has been for the last 12 years probably. So as I said we're very pleased to have Dr. Raymond Peat to join us and I wanted to do an outline starting this month with endocrinology as the subject and I wanted to just to outline the nervous system as a whole and then we're going to get into Parkinson's disease and Parkinsonism and a few of the other little subsets that are similar as an introduction to the endocrine system and then maybe next month we'll get into the pituitary. I know we've mentioned a lot about thyroid hormones and Dr. Peat's main speciality is hormone, hormone physiology so and then the thymus and the adrenals,
pancreas, ovaries and testes as other sources of hormones and how they affect health and how everything that we do can consciously interact for good or bad with our health. We're not at the mercy of anything in particular, we make choices and so each one of us just by hearing and listening and then going ahead and reading and seeing the facts and the science people can find further information to support everything Dr. Peat's been shouting from the rooftops for for the last 30-40 years. So you there Dr. Peat? Yes. Well thanks so much for joining us. So I wanted to try to explore the endocrine system in a large topic I know but one I feel will be a useful exercise in understanding physiology from your perspective Dr. Peat and you make regular mention of pioneering scientists whose works give a better appreciation of the physiological processes occurring in the body and often provide a new direction away from the hijacked modern scientific theories we're cultured to accept a lot of which are a pandora's box of ever-increasing drug dependencies and conspiracies abound along with that train of thought. Given we are truly complex organisms
with a network of communication systems and feedback either positive or negative to that input, the pathways through which these signals travel as well as the structures which respond to the signals and the signals which ultimately affect another system all need to be cohesively organized. So any deficit however small can have far-reaching and dramatic consequences and it is true that the organism will do everything possible to correct or mitigate disease before failing sometimes resulting in disease processes that take decades to end in death and so communication systems and appropriate responses are key to good health and functioning and this is the role of the endocrine system I want to explore with you Dr. Peat. The earliest records of recognizing the role and it may be earlier than this but the earliest records that I found during my last two days or so getting material together for the show was the Chinese pulling out isolated sex and pituitary hormones from human urine in 200 BC for crying out loud. So that's true that's certainly food for thought when we think we know everything that we know now with ICP-MS and other mass spectrometry being
the kind of leading investigative machinery so and then obviously the ancient Greeks and Romans from Aristotle Hippocrates and Galen and where we get our herbal medicine background from until the emergence of the germ theory. I know you mentioned this a lot in the 19th century then and this is I think is perhaps where it's veered off of normality and and common sense and it's real true scientific endeavor that's where it kind of just veered off the rails and I think we've carried on in that vein ever since and I know that your whole philosophy has been about challenging mainstream science for science's sake because it's not very scientific and I think in that in that regard Dr. Peat would you mind giving an overview of the basis of understanding disease past the present and how this has formed our approach to its management and how your rationale differs? I see it as a deviation from from the Chinese and the Greeks who had a pretty unified picture of what an organism is.
Aristotle actually was pretty much an organicist in his understanding of the organism and it was really around the time of Descartes middle of the early part of the 17th century when the things really got formalized on the wrong track. Descartes described the organism as a machine completely separate from consciousness. Consciousness was guiding the machine possibly from some contact point in the brain but under the ground mostly of people who were persecuted by the monarchies and such they continued to think along the organic unified understanding of what an animal or a person is but following Descartes the organism was seen as made up of parts just like a steam engine or a clock. Each part could be defined and understood and mechanically interlocked with the other parts and the consciousness or the soul was seen as something completely separate from this machine and could somehow sometimes interfere with its operation but mostly it was out of our control simply running according to causal determinism and when the idea of infection something from the environment causing a disease came in it happened that the use of the microscope had developed to the point that people had
seen the compartments in plants and they called the compartments cells when the plant dried up and left the cellulose framework empty little chambers which they called cells and well a more underground approach looked at particles like red blood cells and called the units corpuscles little bodies rather than empty compartments and this idea of breaking the organism down into cells and seeing those as parts of a machine made up of material without consciousness or spirit this became the background for seeing a disease as a particular mechanical interference with the operation of the machine. And this is where the term reductionism came from right or reductionist medicine? Yeah and the disease one line of thinking was that it was a particular little particle of evil material a germ cell analogous to the cells that make up the machine so it was a material particle interfering with our material particles that became identified as a disease a very concrete specific interference with the machine and as people look more closely at tumors they saw really it was a matter of organization rather than some particular concrete change or substance but this idea of organization took about
a hundred and fifty years to finally catch on right up until the beginning of this century people were still stuck on Descartes picture of a mechanical organism being interrupted by something right down on the cellular level or even smaller the molecular level so that cancer was defined as an evil cell a mutant cell containing bad genetic material defective DNA and so all you had to do in the case of a germ-caused disease all you had to do was kill the germ and you were cured in the case of the cancer interpreted as a mutant cell all you had to do was eliminate every single individual mutant cell and the disease would be cured. I mean that's still how they treat cancer now isn't it?
I mean to some degree. Almost everyone is still stuck in this 17th century idea of what an organism is and what a disease is and Parkinson's disease even though in the 19th century people recognized all the symptoms of the disease stiffness generally the older a person is the more Parkinson's traits they have stiffness wobbly tremor and slowness of movement all of the extreme old age symptoms are simply coming on stronger and earlier when they call it Parkinson's disease but in by the latter part of the 19th century people had noticed that people suffering from this so-called disease if they took a long train ride to get to the doctor their symptoms might disappear or if they came on a carriage or rode a horse their symptoms were greatly alleviated by just moving around through space and so some people proposed a vibration therapy about 40 years ago someone noticed that swimming alleviated the symptoms so simply a different kind of stimulation could reverse the symptoms and it turns out that in animals that you can create the disease by poisoning them and by giving them an enriched environment you can reverse the actual
anatomical chemical changes of their nervous system. So in the poisoned animals if you place them in an enriched environment you're saying that they no longer display the... yeah similar to what they noticed in people who took a long train ride. All right you're listening to AskUrob Dr. K. A. D. Garboville 91.1 FM at 715 now so from 730 to the end of the show at 8 o'clock you're invited to call in with questions either related hopefully related to the question subject matter of the endocrine system and Parkinson's if you have any other endocrine based questions that would be fine too. If you're in the area seems like there's still a temporary call-in number which is 707 383 9007 so 383 9007 the toll-free numbers should still be the same here 1-800-KMUD-RAD that's 800-568-3723 and the engineer I think you're gonna read some things out.
Yeah thanks Andrew I actually should have done this at the top of the hour we would not have this show without the support of Chautauqua Natural Foods in Garboville locally owned for 34 years they specialize in local and organic produce natural groceries nutritional supplements and body care products now announcing every day is senior day Chautauqua Natural Foods open Monday through Saturday 9 till 7 Sundays 10 till 5 just off the town square more information online at facebook.com/chautauquanaturals support for our community radio station is coming as well from Emerald Kingdom greenhouse dot-com they've got information and products for all aspects of greenhouse growing specializing in timer run auto block out light depo greenhouses Emerald Kingdom greenhouse also carries light depth for existing structure modification kits and good old-fashioned greenhouses accessories include plastic coverings light traps cooling pads exhaust and ventilation systems Emerald Kingdom grow your future the views and opinions expressed throughout the broadcast day are those of the speakers and not necessarily those of this station its staff or its underwriters time will be made available for other viewpoints thank you so much for joining us. Okay so to continue Dr. Peat I wanted to
explore Parkinson's disease and Parkinsonism as there's several different similar related type situations that may not necessarily be Parkinson's per se but it does actually seem to be a fairly woolly kind of construct in terms of the multitude of various symptoms that can be expressed some of which may start early some of which may just be late onset but basically they go over the mechanism that's discussed today about the disease and its treatment and highlight your approach to this condition later on to understand it the way you do so the terms used to describe long-term degenerative disorder of the central nervous system affecting mainly the motor system but which can involve the sensory system with cognitive and sleep and mood disturbances also noted as part of the picture there's a compound here and I know we talked about this the other day alpha-synuclein a compound present in these so-called Lewy bodies that are present under microscopic examination found within the substantia nigra in the brain yeah as well as several other brain regions and they are diagnostic for Parkinson's disease okay so several Parkinson's genes are involved and they've been high been
highlighted here I'd like to pick your brains about some of those as we go on through this but so far as the functioning of waste product digesting lysosomes that may be linked to the inability to break down alpha-synuclein there's a protein also called Dardarin now the primary symptoms of Parkinson's result from the loss of dopamine secreting cells within the substantia nigra and there are five major pathways in the brain that we know now there may be more but there were five when I was studying connecting other brain areas with the basal ganglia these are the motor so this is a movement ocular motor where the eyes will track the hands or the eyes the eye movement will track the movement externally the associative the limbic and the orbitofrontal circuits now all of them are disrupted essentially and this disruption explains the many varied presentations of the disease so in terms of how you understand the nervous system and physiology just to start with the motor circuit and how higher brain stem functions interact through nerves to elicit muscular contraction for example because we will talk about the tremor of
Parkinson's disease and we'll go on later to describe some of the drugs and treatments that can be used but they are also responsible chronically for the same symptoms such that it's almost a worse outcome than the initial outcome so it's not a particularly successful treatment but in terms of the motor system of the nervous system and the various drugs second messengers etc that exert those controls how did how do you see this motor circuit working in the body and how would you perhaps be able to rationalize an alternative approach to the treatment of Parkinson's disease given given how you know my orientation is very similar to Pavlov's who saw the motor system as subordinate to the sensory system he saw the cortex of the brain as primarily an extension of the sense organs and that this formed the environment for the motor reflexes and the idea of a reflex is another thing that originated with Descartes and the simply wrong that the the cells aren't mechanically connected in in reflex patterns one of the first people in the West to analyze this carefully was the French existentialist so-called philosopher Merleau-Ponty Maurice
Merleau-Ponty who analyzed the meaning of reflexes and he clearly shows that there are no reflexes in the Cartesian sense and if you attend a neurology course you'll probably find people still arguing that there are simple innate mechanical reflexes in the Descartes sense and for example the linguistics system of Noam Chomsky is based entirely on this primitive false idea of the brain function based on mechanical reflexes and it simply doesn't work Merleau-Ponty is probably the person who most clearly explains the problems with it but in the Pavlovian picture as especially developed through the 1950s and 60s by his student P.K. Anokin the sensory system is fluid and continuously being revised as the organism explores its environment and so the sense of exploring and being stimulated by newness the idea of traveling through time and space is in charge over overriding defects in the motor system that's a relevant picture I think for seeing disease especially Parkinson's disease in a non-mechanical way the protein you mentioned dargarin yeah the interesting thing about it is that it shows up as a defect in Crohn's disease in the intestine as well as in Parkinson's
disease and Parkinson's typically starts with constipation and in 19th century medicine people remembered the intestine as well as the brain in treating disease it was very common to diagnose death as a result of inflammation of the bowel which a pathologist typically overlook as just a side issue but the intestine was recognized as very important and the brain as the other end of the organism that sort of the two dimensions and now doctors are taught that if you have a bowel movement three times a day or once every three days it's all normal yeah and when you trace out the the chemical links between what's going wrong with in the intestine and in the the rest of the motor system the behavioral system and so on you can see links but they're they're always contextually working there is no simple pathogenic chemical in the intestine but the the bacteria living in the intestine the food you eat and the way your intestine responds to it and the stress you're exposed to yeah these act in in the the activating part of the brain around 1950 a part of the brain called the reticular activating
system was identified and this includes the region where the substantia nigra and the basal ganglia are and this is where sensory input is dished out to activate the upper parts of the brain and when that's happening it tends to go with an inhibitory effect on the body so the stronger your mentality is dreaming for example the more relaxed your body tends to be and in Parkinson's the system it really tends to be over activated unable to relax properly and so a characteristic thing is that during sleep and dreams the person who is developing Parkinson's disease doesn't relax properly the body if they have a dream they might scream and thrash around and hit people so there's a failure of consciousness to override and relax the body. Can I take you back to what you said a moment ago about reminds me of inescapable stress and the rat experiments and that being countered by the environmental enrichment that you said could totally restore a Parkinson's created or induced effect in a mouse that was put into a environmental enrichment situation naturally lost the symptoms. I know that one does not directly causatively cure the other
but you were saying here that there's a link between environmental enrichment and the progressive replacement of gosh what can we call it something substantially good that offsets the negative effects of the inflammation the degradation the slowing of the bowel endotoxin release etc etc reabsorption and and that this is this is a definite key feature if you think that you think it could be all definitely as part of a holistic program sure I can understand that would be very plausible to suggest something like that but is that where you were going to? Yes, P.K. Anokin and all of the people in the Pavlovian tradition see a global evander process in the brain that they called the acceptor of action it's our intention and expectation in the world and this is what is integrating not only the motor system and dominating the so-called reflexes but this process which is like a model of everything we know and intend to do in the world this is supported in the organism not just in the brain but it's a process involving sensory nerves from the whole body and this process in
the brain it's sort of during during daytime at least it's based on our inner ear balance system the vestibular system and this it's a unified picture of the world and the organism and this process itself of being conscious is involved in the activation of not only the endocrine glands throughout the body but in the nerves themselves as they are supporting this model of the world or acceptor of action in the process of metabolizing to be conscious they are making changes internally that involves for example synthesizing turning energy substances sugar for example into cholesterol and turning cholesterol into pregnenolone right in the nerves for example of the substantia nigra this process is going on energy sugar cholesterol pregnenolone progesterone and the endocrine process which is then stabilizing the structure and the consciousness so that the flavor of your consciousness when it's successful is modified by the balance you have between your progesterone the ATA and other steroids and the energy processes so can you try to explain like the personality that you're saying in people that develop Parkinson's they're not and you know they're experiencing learned helplessness I think the way they live
they have incorporated duties obligations and and such that they they can manage very well but they aren't overcoming the stress adequately because they're not exploring new things or they're not they don't have new input to their brain it's just the same old like a treadmill they're on or yeah they're stuck in a way so that they aren't getting enough stimulation that's so interesting because I think when you read the regular texts medical texts about Parkinson's and they go through the plethora of symptoms one of them was symptom most characteristic I think is fairly emotionless expressions on the patients with Parkinson's not infused difficult to engage don't don't have any kind of what can I say any kind of joy de vivre I don't know how to say it apart from the French way you know kind of joy of life but that's very much part of a learned helplessness type construct that would cause an organism then to just see things just within the boundaries of what they have and then not be anything new and stimulating them and that stimulation you're saying is
very much part of switching on what is a totally holistic approach to Parkinson's outside of the mechanistic view that the regular science has and we'll go through the drugs because the drugs are really not effective at all and they work very mechanistically and actually cause typically more problems than they're seeking to address so you're saying new sensory output will for example I mean sorry new sensory input will for example increase the dopamine output from the substantia nigra in the brain or the protective progesterone pregnenolone or the hormones that protect against those cells degrading not producing dopamine yeah the dopamine theory it's really part you have to look at it in in the history of at the beginning of the 20th century with the mechanistic view they were seeing the brain as a mechanical thing which was having defects causing the tremor and they actually started cutting out parts of the brain to remove the tremor oh yeah sounds like a good idea doesn't it the man who invented the word cybernetics Norbert Wiener uh-huh yeah he proposed the best surgery up to that time instead of cutting out parts
of the cortex which they had been doing in the 1930s they were focusing on the brainstem and he designed the the radar searching self-control systems that would focus on an airplane and aim a gun this feedback system he saw the brain having tremors his radar gun aiming system if it was poorly aligned would have a tremor of a searching movement back and forth so he saw the tremor as a feedback searching process and so he suggested what you would do to his radar apparatus was to knock out part of the sensitivity so he suggested the surgery to cut out as part of the searching feedback apparatus and it actually worked better than the grocer surgeries and that it's been done right down to the 70s and 80s they were still simply ablating or destroying part of the brain then they got a little more refined and started stimulating it but sometimes that didn't work like Michael Fox yeah he wasn't going to have any more surgical treatments because instead of stopping the tremor of his left side it started the tremor in the right side yeah well that's that that's the issue
isn't it well I guess we'll get into some of the medications now just to bring them out and to explain the mechanistic view that was constructed to support the use of these drugs but okay so the substantia nigra is part of the brain here that we're focusing on in Parkinson's that is the site of dopamine production now dopamine excuse me dopamine is I think I understand this right but I think the nervous system is pretty much wanting to be firing fairly constantly and dopamine actually controls that from happening ad hoc so that you don't get these sudden jerks etc and that dopamine allows through this inhibition the ordered movement of muscles in coordinated patterns it's not a stimulant per se and it's it's integrated with the inhibiting systems so much more of a relaxant yeah in itself it is an activator but it runs into nerves that feedback with an inhibition right so when when somebody for example I think L-DOPA is supposedly the gold standard for want of a better word of treatment and that within five years most patients using L-DOPA as the replacement for dopamine because L-DOPA dopamine doesn't cross the blood-brain
barrier as far as I know but L-DOPA does and within the brain L-DOPA is converted into dopamine and then has an action directly but the long-term effects of L-DOPA are a condition called bradykinesia where there's involuntary movements like there is in a fine tremor a resting tremor because again there's a differentiation I guess without getting too medical there's a difference between intention tremors and resting tremors so resting tremors typically something you could see in the Parkinson's patients with either leg tremoring or the hand tremoring in the pill rolling fashion I always remember this from studying but they they talk about pill rolling tremor as one of the hallmark signs of classical Parkinson's so supplying somebody with L-DOPA to treat that tremor does initially have a positive beneficial effect but how is it I wonder that the administration of dopamine over a chronic period of three four five years actually causes worse symptoms than the tremor for which it was prescribed and most patients that use L-DOPA are in worse shape five years down the road than they are if they weren't treated I think the problem is that the whole
theory of what L-DOPA and dopamine are doing is mechanistic and mistaken it's so they're just patching that is putting a little band-aid on it they're not treating the sensory input drug that is approved for use in Parkinson's is amandadine or memantine more recently and in the 19th century they were already using belladonna and hyocyamine and I call it nerd chicks to treat the tremors and they were pretty effective and didn't have bad side effects of increasing rigidity and so on that L-DOPA does and the it turns out that these amandadine and memantine have the anti cholinergic anti excitatory effects but they are also anti excitatory in the glutamate ergic system the glutamate and cholinergic systems are both very powerful excitatory and the glutamate system ends up producing nitric oxide and the amandadine and the cholinergic memantine are not only stopping the the excitation that is part of the tremor but they end up lowering the exposure to nitric oxide and nitric oxide is a chronic stress-induced factor in suppressing mitochondrial respiration and energy production and accelerating aging of the brain so using these
approved drugs is it actually is giving insight into what's going on it to a much more global organismic process rather than just restoring the lost so called dopamine regulatory system it's restoring energy processes reducing the effects of stress in a systematic way okay you're listening to ask your doctor K. Medegaard with 91.1 FM from now until the end of the show you're invited to call in for any questions about this subject of endocrinology and Parkinson's disease if you live in the area the temporary number for the 707 region is 383 9007 and the 800 number is 800 568 3723 so I see the lights flashing here so let's let's take the first call and see where we're going caller you're on the air and what's your question hi I'm from the San Francisco Bay Area and I was wondering are there simple things that someone can do like a stepping stone to get out of learned helplessness for you know for people that are overcoming hypothyroidism and still find it overwhelming to do big tasks or big things what was the very first thing you
said the stepping stone stepping stone to get out of the learned helplessness Dr. Peat do you think there is a progressive course that can be followed to get out what do you what do you suggest to increase sensory input to the brain oh and and to help get out of the learned helplessness painting behavioral things like going new places meeting new people doing very different things that you've never done before but thought you might enjoy doing at the same time as you try to correct your your energy processes that are suppressed having more enjoyable more varied meals for example and making sure that your thyroid function is good I know you when I asked you what was it one of the best things I could teach our daughter or what's a good education for our daughter and you said introduce her to new people and she loves to meet new people and she gets so fired up okay so Dr. Peat I think just on the on the basis of that last call in terms of gosh new things I mean I think everybody I think arguably
everybody would most people let's not say everybody that's too all-inclusive you know people I think have a bucket list of 20 things they'd like to do you know whether it's jumping out of an aircraft and with a parachute and I noticed just fast things or exciting things or going to new places I think outside of the scope of that because most people probably think they can't afford it or they have a time for it how do you think about creative outlets like painting and or constructing poetry or as long as that's not something you do every day anyway I'm just thinking of it as a construct that would be maybe more more easily attained rather than dr. Peat doesn't want to give a prescription here I can tell that I'm doing something unexpected out of the routine and some people actually quit their job and learn a new profession or trade okay let's get into some of the some of the things that I'd spoken with you about earlier that were things that are in keeping with the whole anti-inflammatory process that you're saying is all part and parcel of
this breakdown so I guess mitochondrial function I'm getting pretty pretty interested about the whole approach to supporting mitochondria and whether it's coenzyme q10 or other kind of new nootropics and things like that I know you're not particularly keen on nootropics and drugs that supposedly enhance mental perfunction and or mitochondrial function because you you don't you don't really put a lot of value to it but in terms of mitochondria and and their obvious role in energy production and how energy in the body is at the root of paying for all the transactions how do you feel about mitochondrial support in the approach to a Parkinson's patient? Getting getting good rest is part of the support stopping unnecessary excitatory stimulation good stimulation should be fun rather than stressful and so not jumping out of an aircraft. Well unless you find that fun. That's stressful probably. Riding a roller coaster I mean that might be a little bit stressful it's fun right? Yeah everything that is anti-inflammatory can be relaxing as well as stimulating. Caffeine is extremely protective against all of the defects in Parkinson's disease and it activates while protecting the
mitochondria. Gamma-hydroxybutyrate which is in some plants like the passionflower yeah the tropical fruit what's it called? He was thinking you meant GABA. Oh well it's an activator gamma-hydroxybutyrate. Okay well the passion fruit or the liliquoi or what else? Passion fruit. The other name is grenadilla I think it's another name for it. Yeah it's something we make along with GABA which which helps to eliminate stressful over excitation. The synuclein which is one of the things that goes wrong and is damaged in Parkinson's disease it happens to have the same effect as rotenone. Wow. The toxic thing that has been seen to cause something exactly like Parkinson's disease by blocking the complex one of the mitochondrion. So then all of the herbs that act on the GABA would be useful you're saying? Yeah and even cannabis has been because of its sedative effect it can be protective against the toxic types of overstimulation. And what about alcohol? Yeah I think it's an antioxidant can be anti-inflammatory and can be in the right circumstance it can be anti-inflammatory, anti-Parkinson's. Now how about this and the nicotine I think a fair amount of research showing that nicotine is
actually protective significantly protective against Parkinson's in a in a big study that's been done. Yeah I think the population effect where they see that smokers have somewhat protection against Parkinson's I think part of that effect is that it relieves constipation it activates the intestine and that in the self has an anti-inflammatory and a toxic effect. Interesting. So what do you think is the best method for delivery of nicotine like making a tea? I think either absorbing it through the skin as in the form of an ointment or ingesting very small amounts of the leaf, the tobacco leaf. Very quickly I think while we're talking about tobacco I read an article today that's now saying that the vaping craze that's really starting to take off and reintroduce smoking to a younger generation is actually showing up with some fairly disturbing health effects kind of early days yet for the research to come through but they're actually saying that even could be even some even worse side effects to vaping than there would have been to smoking obtaining nicotine that way. So nicotine
in its own right is not well I mean it's a neurotoxin for sure but it's not a good molecule but it's not the poisonous component in tobacco smoke is mainly the carcinogens correct and the tar but but nicotine can have some therapeutic effects. Yeah and keeping the intestine healthy because of the when endotoxin in itself reaches the nervous system it locally as well as systemically activates processes that lead to the the same blockage of mitochondrial respiration that rotenone does or that ionizing radiation does in the chronic sense having cat scans of the head I think is probably part of the reason that Parkinson's prevalence has increased so greatly over the last 20 or 30 years. Because they're pretty keen to give you cat scans for anything. Yeah.
Oh well it's a shame but I'm hopeful that in time things far less damaging will become more commonplace a little bit like the switching attitudes towards saturated fats from the long protected polyunsaturated have been shown to do so much damage. Now how about aspirin is another thing mentioning the polyunsaturated fats one of the prostaglandins produced in substantia nigra is very toxic to the brain and simply having a regular use of aspirin will protect against that prostaglandin made from the polyunsaturated fats and the breakdown of the polyunsaturated fats acrolein is a very toxic material that we produce internally from the polyunsaturated and that is one of the things that turns synuclein into a toxic fibrous material sort of like the prions in mad cow disease. Interesting because now what do you think about this this concept that the I think I think I was reading that they haven't actually proved beyond a doubt that these Lewy bodies which do show up in a substantia on micro you know microscopical evaluation they may be or they may have a protective role I mean I think they've made them
pathognomic and kind of diagnostic for the confirming Parkinson's but they they might actually have a kind of a protective role and I think somebody might be parking to get out of the way some of these synuclein fibrils and packing them up in little compartments that are relatively safe but some of the toxic fibrils of synuclein are known to be passed from one cell to another causing a damage to the cell that receives it. Well I wanted to ask you Dr. Peat when you were talking about this rapid movement and dream state you know for people who are developing Parkinson's or what about people who've had that for years and years and years is that not also a symptom of low thyroid because their their muscles just can't relax or is it the brain that can't relax so I'm trying to understand that a little bit better. It's the same thing nothing in the body can relax fully when your thyroid function is low that's one of the funny things that came out of the idea of the cell as a compartment enclosed in a membrane that the if you think of it as a corpuscle
that has to be in a state ready to work when it's rested the state where it's ready to perform its job is a high energy state and that's the well-rested state full of energy ready to go. If you don't have enough of the thyroid and glucose and oxygen whatever to produce the energy you stay in a semi-contracted excited state so what happens in Parkinson's is this reaches a chronically deadly cell killing condition in chronic hypothyroidism it's simply a nuisance that your sleep isn't as restful as it should be you can't get into the deep relaxing restorative sleep because you don't have enough energy so the cells are not ready to work they haven't accumulated the energy and structure needed to do a proper job and so they keep churning through the energy producing process without relaxing and storing up the energy as glycogen ATP creatinine phosphate and so on. Okay well I know there was more questions surrounding things like the monoamine oxidase inhibitors the the A and B inhibitors and how they have been used with varying degrees but ultimately this
condition doesn't have any real course of action for it other than trying to offset the symptoms as long as possible followed by palliative care. I would very much like to carry on this subject next month just to break down some of the things that are definitely shown like lack of testosterone is definitely shown and ameliorates makes better the symptoms of Parkinson's reducing estrogen because estrogens are kind of very inflammatory and kind of anti anti restful type organism molecule I know there were plenty of other things and as usual I'm sorry we only got one call I didn't really plug too much for people to come on the air but I kind of been a bit a little bit selfish this month maybe next month if you're able would you be willing to carry on with this? Oh yeah. Great I really appreciate that well for those people who've listened to the show thanks so much for your time Dr. Peat. Okay thank you. For those people who've listened to the show thanks so much for either calling in
like you have and or listening we know that I get a such a lot of feedback from people I get it every week from people they just write me and they come from all over not just a guy from Norway or you know Finland yeah they come from all over so I get emails from people from the UK I get them from South America I get them from from Asia even you know so they listen all over the world and I think it's very important that it's a resource that we freely make available KMUD makes it available for you to download this podcast after that show hours on the audio archive and on our website I'm compiling what's turning out to be a pretty big compendium of Dr. Peat shows so until the third Friday of next month we'll carry on with endocrinology as a bigger section anyway going over all the rest of it in the months to come but we'll try and wrap up the Parkinson's debate next month and then Dr. Peat has other suggestions that we didn't even get into. My name is Andrew Murray. My name is Sarah Johanna
Murray and do you want to give out contact details? Yeah sure well we can be reached Monday through Friday 9 to 5 I have a toll-free number would you like to know I wanted to give out Dr. Peat's website you forgot to do that I did I don't have my crib in front of me Mike my crib sheet anyway so Dr. Peat is obviously he's reachable www.raypeat.com it's got plenty of articles there fully referenced he's written several books - he's not selling anything he's just giving you information folks so take him up on it while he's still around he's still willing to do this. And our phone number is 888 WBM ERB for Western Botanical Medicine ERB. Okay thanks for joining us. Thanks for listening good night.
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