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and by phone at 707-223-1569. And we are KMUD, Redwood Community Radio. Garberville, 91.1 FM, KMUE, Eureka Arcata, 88.3 FM, KLAI Laytonville, 90.3 FM, and FM Translator K258BQ, Shelter Cove, 99.5, on the web at kmud.org. And coming right up, we have Ask Your Herb Doctor, although their nice CD is not working. It's funny because it doesn't work in my computer, and now it does not work in the most reliable of our lovely KMUD CD players. And I will try on the unreliable KMUD CD player, and if not, actually, I have a lovely song,
and we're going to have a new theme song for right this second. Here we go. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] Well, welcome to this month's Ask Your Herb Doctor. My name is Andrew Murray. My name is Sarah Johannison Murray. For those of you who perhaps have never listened to our shows, which run every third Friday of the month from 7 to 8 PM, we're both licensed medical herbalists who trained in England and graduated there with a degree in herbal medicine.
We run a clinic in Garberville where we consult with clients about a wide range of conditions and recommend herbal medicine and dietary advice. As I mentioned a few months ago, it's become increasingly obvious over the last few years that if you really want to get a point across, you cannot just mention it once or twice, but that varied topics encompassing a similar root subject will allow the emergence of a coherent view of the matter in question. Association is, after all, an excellent tool for improving the memory.
We get such a lot of positive feedback concerning Dr. Ray Peat on our shows that he's joining us again tonight and we want to explore misconceptions in medicine and marketing related to serotonin and melatonin, but with wider implications for medical drugs in general, as well as carrying on last month's topic on the Fukushima incident, which is still ongoing, unfortunately. Thank you once again for joining us, Dr. Peat. Hello? Okay, maybe he's not with us just yet. All right, well, until he comes on, you're listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor, KMUD Garberville 91.1 FM,
and from 7.30 until the end of the show at 8 o'clock, you're invited to call in with any questions, either related or unrelated, to this month's topic of the continuing Fukushima incident and the misconception in medicine surrounding serotonin and melatonin, with wider implications for medical drugs in general. Okay, so I think we've got Dr. Peat on the line, so thank you once again for joining us, Dr. Peat. Hello. Okay, thank you. I think, probably, if we start with finishing off last month's topic on... First, I'd like you to introduce Dr. Peat to our listeners.
Okay, well done. You've introduced us, and my name's Sarah, this is Andrew. We always do this, I'm so sorry. I got thrown a little bit there when he wasn't joining us, so I kind of skipped the intro, Dr. Peat. So if you would, please just describe your academic professional background for those who, perhaps, have never listened to you. Okay, after I had studied and taught literature and linguistics, I decided that to understand consciousness and language, I should study the brain. But when I started graduate school specializing in nerve biology,
I discovered that the brain scientists were just as dogmatic as the linguistic theorists, so I went into general physiology, specializing in reproductive endocrinology. And that was--one aspect of that got me interested in the biological effects of radiation, although I had been interested in the fallout from the nuclear tests for many years as a big problem. So when I saw that the biology of estrogen was very similar to the biology of radiation damage, I tried to understand just what was going on in a cell that caused identical biochemical events to occur,
either from a dose of x-rays or a dose of estrogen. Okay. All right. Well, I guess to continue on and wrap up, last week--last month's presentation on the Fukushima dilemma, what was happening there, unfortunately the power plant is still smoldering, and it doesn't look like there's going to be any real hope of having it calm down sufficiently, at least until September, I heard, as a realistic date. The cores themselves are not either approachable or too hot to deal with at this point in time, and it looks like they're going to continue smoking away.
And then the initial stages of the development of this catastrophe, several websites were revealing information. I think one of the first ones we came across was an Austrian website, and it was zamg.au. I think it was .au something. I can give that address out a little bit later on. There's also a website, RadNet, which is the EPA RadNet air concentration measurement data. They were giving out measurements right in the early days, and we could see, looking at the model of the plume fallout from Fukushima,
that it was spreading across the Pacific and was eventually going to touch land on the West Coast and/or affect northern and southern latitudes. Sarah, do you want to go cover some of what's gone on with those results to date? And just cover some more of that? Well, I've only found one PDF file on the EPA's website that lists reported uranium in Anaheim, Uranium 234 in Anaheim Riverside on March 15th, and then also in Seattle and San Francisco on March 18th. And I haven't seen an updated file of recent records of uranium.
On that same PDF, it did list plutonium. It had a column for plutonium, but it didn't list that it had detected any. Right. It seems to have shut down. Well, I'm not sure if that's just because they haven't detected any or they haven't reported what they have detected. It seems that there's iodine being detected in the rainwater and the air all over the country. And I don't know if that's--we can presume that's from Japan or whether that was being detected there before the accident and we only see it after the accident.
Dr. Peat, I wonder, I had a look on-- there's an interesting website which is called the Modern Survival Blog which covers many different topics relating to preparedness, etc. And when this incident happened, the person who runs Modern Survival Blog got straight on it and was posting a day-by-day scenario of what was happening. There was a retired nuclear scientist-- I think that was his title, nuclear scientist--called Arne Gunderson who I think he's been on several radio and television interviews with various people detailing what's happening. And from the very outset of the incident, he was saying that
rather than being a level 5 accident, it was already a 7 about a month ago. And in fact, they've raised it from a 5 to a 7 now. So in terms of what's potentially happening here, what do you think is some of the best advice people could take? I think the basic thing is to eat old food, canned or dried food, and avoid fresh vegetables as far as you can do that. And for example, cheese, aged cheese is going to be completely safe for a long time. And avoiding the iodine damage to the thyroid gland,
you can pretty well protect yourself by saturating yourself with iodine from kelp and eating canned oysters and other shellfish. And maybe even taking--if you paint a tincture of iodine on your skin, you absorb quite a bit of it. So you can saturate yourself with iodine to protect the thyroid gland during the time that iodine is still active, but it stays harmful for roughly six weeks after its creation. So if they're still making new radioactive iodine and emitting it, there's no telling how long that might continue to be a problem.
What's your impression of potassium iodide as a supplement? Well, it has its own long-range potentially harmful effects. Even one milligram a day in a chronic diet is known to be associated with thyroiditis, hypothyroidism, and probably increased rate of thyroid cancer. You don't want to take any thyroid supplement beyond a normal dietary sufficiency, except in the presence of serious radioactive iodine exposure. But considering the risk from the radioactive iodine, I think a few milligrams of potassium iodide per day is a reasonable balance. Okay, but you would probably--I think in a lot of ways with most things,
you would rather see these things come from nutrition. Yeah, it's a safer balanced amount. Even iodized salt is now seen to correlate with increased thyroiditis. So just what they're putting--they're putting iodine in our salt to try to protect us from thyroid problems, and in fact, it's now been associated with causing thyroid problems. So a half a teaspoon of kelp powder a couple times a week or a couple milligrams of potassium iodide if you're in an area that has iodine coming, or even if you're not in an area with radioactive iodine,
the fact that that low dose shouldn't be too harmful for several weeks. For most people, not. A few people have some strange hypersensitivity to iodine, so you want to test the first dose at a very small amount because some people get an asthma attack or other very violent symptoms from even a small dose of iodine. Okay. And then the other site I wanted to mention was the beta count on the RadNet data, the EPA's website. It's showing that there's been up to 50 counts per minute.
Well, 50 per second is where I would be seriously concerned, but 50 per minute wouldn't be bad. So that was showing--like in Eureka, California, they have a beta count monitor, and it's showing it was up to 50 counts per minute before the Japanese catastrophe, and it continues sometimes reaching up to that level. So locally, if this information is correct, there's another website that's called Radiation Network, and it's a bunch of individuals with their Geiger counters, and they've hooked up to a database that's on real time.
So every minute, this website updates with the counts, the beta counts per minute. And so that's another place people might want to go if they're interested to look at real time around the country, and it's called RadiationNetwork.com. The government website is the EPA.gov, and you click on Japanese nuclear emergency. Okay, and then lastly, the other one I mentioned at the beginning was ModernSurvivalBlog.com, and the nuclear scientific engineer, Arne Gundersen, he's got a couple of posts on the site, and he's basically giving a day by day breakdown of what's been happening.
Okay, I think as time goes on, these things will become more apparent. But unfortunately, I think what Arne Gundersen was bringing out was the striking similarities in the cover-up of information between Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and this incident, and that it's unfortunate, but the pathways of which the information comes is restricted in many ways at many times. The same thing holds true, and that'll be the focus of the rest of the show, of a lot of pharmaceutical drugs. Unfortunately, pharmaceutical drugs and drugs in general are manufactured for profit
with supposed pathologies to treat, and not always does the truth emerge, until much later perhaps when they're withdrawn. Unfortunately, the motive behind their production is not always too white. So, I just wanted to let people know that you're listening to Ask Europe Doctor on KMED Galbafield 91.1 FM, and from now really until the end of the show at 8 o'clock, you're invited to call in with any questions either related to the nuclear incident and what can be done, or surrounding the rest of this month's show, which is going to be serotonin uptake inhibitors and melatonin.
Both of these are, I think, widely known by people, and people have heard of the SSRIs, and they've heard of some of the controversies surrounding them, but it seems that people generally believe that serotonin is a good, happy drug. If you look for it, or you search for it on the web, everyone talking about it says it's a feel-good hormone. Dr. Peat, what do you have to say about serotonin in terms of your knowledge and information on it? The body has many responses to injury,
and serotonin and estrogen are two of the most basic primitive responses to any kind of generalized injury. And, for example, if you get sunburned, in the next few hours you can measure a large amount of serotonin in the urine, and the same thing happens for any kind of injury, including ionizing radiation. Dental x-rays are enough to activate the production of serotonin, and it's one of the basic defense mechanisms. What it does is activate simple things like shifting away from oxidative metabolism to glycolytic or even a kind of hibernating shutdown of systems.
At an extreme overproduction of serotonin, you tend to go into a hibernating state. Animals, according to the diet and weather stress and so on, before they go into hibernation for the winter, will be producing more and more serotonin. And that's its basic purpose, is to keep the machinery running while shutting down the expensive biological processes. Actually, Dr. Peat, could I ask you to hold that thought for a second? Okay. There's actually a caller on the line, so I just wanted to make sure the person gets on. You're on the air? Hi. Hi.
Yeah, I had a couple of questions. One, does anybody know how long it takes for the ocean currents from Japan to come over to the West Coast? I was looking at an old atlas, and the current goes north up Japan and south down the West Coast, and my fisherman friend says that it's actually seasonal. It does that in the summertime, and it's something different in the winter or something. And the other question I had is, is anybody monitoring the ocean contamination from the plan?
And, of course, everything that's not coming over to us is ending up, you know, most of it's probably going into the ocean. So I was wondering if anybody would know, maybe some callers would know on that. Anyway, thank you very much. Okay. Yeah, I think we'll leave that open to other callers, as I don't have that information in front of me, and it would only be a rough guess. I think some of it, so something like 80 to 100 miles a day, maybe. Right. Okay, there you go. And it's 4,000 miles, is it?
Okay, all right. I think more than that. I think it's 6,000, isn't it? Somewhere around there. Okay. Maybe even 8. It takes 12 hours flying, or 11. Right, so that's-- Okay, well, let's carry on. We'll leave that thought open, then, for any other callers, perhaps, who've got that specific information to hand. And then, Dr. Peat, if you'd carry on, you were talking about hibernation and a protective mechanism for expensive cellular machinery. Yeah, in the 1950s and '60s, when the Soviets were worried about getting hydrogen bombed,
they were doing a lot of research on ways to defend against very intense radiation doses, and serotonin was one of the things that they were studying and looking for safe analogs to use defensively, because a big dose of radiation puts the organism in a state where it can tolerate maybe reducing mortality for a given dose by maybe 50%, in some cases, for a dose of maybe 1,000 rads. And unfortunately, for the kind of dose that we're more likely to be exposed to, serotonin is really what's causing the bulk of the damage.
For example, if you give cells in a culture dish the amount of X-ray exposure that you get with a set of dental X-rays, these cells will-- if you put them in a photon detector, they'll be emitting photons, light produced by the cellular damage and excitation, for over an hour after the exposure. And if you put unexposed cells in the water that those cells are in, even without being exposed to radiation, just to the emissions such as serotonin into the water, the second batch of cells will begin mutating hours later,
and people have cultured these unexposed cells, exposed only to the chemical products produced by the injured cells, and for 30 generations mutations keep occurring. And to form a human being, you only need about 30 multiplications of the original fertilized ovum. So that one small exposure has tremendous repercussions. And, for example, a man with an X-ray treatment to a brain tumor, for example, is much more likely to have children with major malformations. The injury is circulated through the body, even affecting the health of the sperms,
and probably animal studies suggest that these genetic instabilities can go on for many generations of whole cycling organisms passing on their unstable genes. So do you think the amount of radiation we might be exposed to, however small it might be, right in this area in Humboldt County or even up to Oregon or along the West Coast, you're saying that's not a lot of radiation, but it could be causing our cells to express more serotonin and be exposed to more serotonin that then could have long-term negative effects?
Yes, probably one single atom fissioning in your body, it will cause that cell or a few cells to produce those toxic communicating substances. And the rest of the body, if the person is healthy, the rest of the body will shut down those excited signals. So it's a matter of balancing the vitality of the whole organism against the number of these injured cells. Okay, good. Well, we're going to talk about how we can balance that serotonin, but we do have a couple callers on the line.
Actually, first a caller just wanted to interject that they had heard that it's going to take three years for the parts of houses that were washed out from the tsunami to start washing up on our beaches here. Three years? Three years, according to one source. And we have another caller coming right on now. You're on the air. Oh, sorry. That was me. I did say that. It was on the BBC. Thanks a million for the program. It's terrifyingly wonderful. Thanks. What was the name of that program? I didn't quite hear that.
Was that the name Terrifyingly Wonderful? I'm not sure. It was on the BBC, whatever it was. I didn't hear the name of the program. Okay, so that was the caller who said it would take three years. She heard on the BBC it would take three years. Okay, well, let's get back to what we were doing here a minute ago. Okay, so Dr. Peat, so if our cells are being exposed to a minute amount of radiation or more, if they're not telling us the whole picture, the full story,
and our cells are starting to express more serotonin and the vitality of our organism is trying to quell that cascade of inflammation, what can we do to keep our cells in a vital state? If you think of the old studies of the radiation causing DNA breaks, they found about 40 years ago that high thyroid function and the magnesium taken up into the cells under the influence of thyroid was the best way to accelerate the repair process so that you didn't have the lingering mutations from breaking the chromosomes in the DNA.
But that was the repair activation for fairly high doses. But there are processes that apply to even the lowest exposure. For example, a study in Seattle two or three years ago found that a full set of dental X-rays to a woman who was pregnant but wearing a lead apron and so on, the exposure to her face would cause systemic influences that would cause the babies to be underweight and underdeveloped, just as if she had taken an estrogenic substance that was stressing the system.
And animal studies found that those estrogenic effects coming from the exposure of any part of the body to ionizing radiation could be antagonized just like normal estrogen is by a good dose of progesterone or even testosterone and the usual nutritional things that help the body constantly control the estrogen that it's being exposed to. So just average everyday stress has a great overlap with radiation injury and estrogen and serotonin happen to be the things that we have the best handle on for protecting ourselves from the long-range effects.
Okay, well, how about the, gosh, all the serotonin, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors that have come out, some of which have been discontinued, some of which have been modified. What's your opinion on this class of drugs in terms of their negative effects, knowing what they do energetically within the body? Well, to the extent that they really are acting largely on the serotonin, I think it's good to look for alternatives, but much of that is just advertising invented things for going with the TV commercials,
the idea that they're a happy pill for raising your happy hormone and that sort of thing, but actually they're acting on many different processes, increasing adrenaline and dopamine and activating enzymes and inactivating other enzymes all through the body, so no one really knows the full extent of what they're doing, and some of what they're doing is beneficial, some of it isn't, so it goes pill by pill. There are a few very effective antidepressants that are the opposite. They're the serotonin uptake promoters, just exactly the opposite, but they even work better,
so what are the drug names for those serotonin reuptake promoters? The best studied is tianeptine. The brand name is Stablon, and some people get it over the Internet, but it isn't legal in the U.S. But it's basically, it promotes, you're saying it-- It promotes the uptake of serotonin, so it's less active, and it turns out to have lots of beneficial effects on bodily health for arthritis and diabetes and lots of inflammatory things that relate to overexposure to serotonin. So with people that have diabetes and arthritis,
maybe for them to take something that would block their serotonin like Stablon, is that how you say it? Then that would help their symptoms in arthritis? Yeah, I've talked to quite a few people who were taking it as an antidepressant who had very dramatic physical improvements at the same time. And the physical conditions are all things that are known to be associated with high serotonin. And there's a whole class of antiserotonin drugs that are becoming popular for more uses. For example, some of their uses are to prevent nausea or diarrhea from radiation exposure.
What they're doing is protecting you from the serotonin, which is a byproduct of the radiation exposure. And you can even prevent sunburn with an antiserotonin drug. So I wonder if the Japanese medical system is giving the people that have been exposed to high levels of radiation, I wonder if they're giving them these antiserotonin drugs. I suspect that they're just as hypnotized by the pharmaceutical industry as Americans are. So what are some of the names of these antiserotonin drugs that are used for nausea, diarrhea, and radiation exposure? Ondansetron is the most popular antinausea, antiserotonin drug,
but I think one of the best is called Lisuride, L-I-S-U-R-I-D-E. And all of these are based on the same indole molecular structure that serotonin is, but they are tuned in a different way by additives. For example, adding bromine, bromocriptine, is one that's used to treat pituitary tumors because prolactin is promoted by stress or by serotonin or by radiation. And by modifying the indole molecule from the ergot fungus, that's the basic molecule that is used for these antiserotonin drugs. By modifying it slightly, it blocks the effect of serotonin
and shrinks the pituitary tumor by preventing the stimulating effects of the serotonin. Wow. Okay, you're listening to Ask Your Own Doctor on KMED Galbraith 91.1 FM and from 7.30, and it's gone, it's 7.35, until the end of the show here at 8 o'clock. You're invited to call in any questions either related or unrelated to this month's topic of serotonin, melatonin and misconceptions in medical drugs. And we have with us special guest speaker, Dr. Raymond Peat, who's able to answer any questions that you may have about that subject
and/or the ongoing Fukushima accident and what can be done safely to help yourself avoid any unnecessary harm. Okay, so serotonin, it's so strange, it's come full circle that serotonin is supposed to be the happy pill and yet, slowly but surely, through one mistake or another, they're now bringing around antiserotonin drugs. Well, our tax dollars are paying for research in medical universities. Well, I think, I don't know exactly if it's tax dollars or not, but all these professors and people doing their PhDs are doing this research on these things
and yet, the general public, when they go to see their doctor and they ask for this drug or that drug, well, that's not what they get prescribed. It doesn't matter what the research shows, it has to go through how many... Oh, it's just very frustrating. Well, how about melatonin, Dr. Peat? Oh, well, the body has enzymes that are activated by stress, for example, in the pineal gland, adrenaline is the signal. Adrenaline rises in the darkness because ordinary light is preventing some of the free radical activity that rises in the darkness.
That activates adrenaline and the adrenaline is the immediate activator of the enzyme which converts serotonin into melatonin. But the same enzyme system can be found in an inflamed breast or a rheumatic knee joint, for example. And in these situations of inflammation, melatonin is... Some people have believed that melatonin was at fault for causing rheumatoid arthritis, but actually, it seems to be performing the same function that it does in the brain, a way of eliminating serotonin which is the actual pro-inflammatory substance. And since serotonin stimulates cell division and inflammation,
the presence of this enzyme in the breast is being considered one of the approaches for preventing or treating breast cancer to accelerate the removal of serotonin. And into the breakdown of serotonin into melatonin. Yeah. We have a caller on the line. Hey, Cooley, you're on the air? Hi, yeah. A couple of questions and you've gotten actually to where my question was going to go, how serotonin relates to melatonin. I'm understanding that serotonin is converted by adrenaline into melatonin and is that part of, as a body has maybe done a lot of work,
that sort of downshifts them into a sleep mode, because I understand, and it's available as a supplement, melatonin is, to help people relax and get to a sleep state sooner. Yeah, probably melatonin has a fairly direct anti-serotonin effect. It hasn't been studied very much, but besides eliminating the serotonin by combining it chemically, turning it into melatonin, I suspect that the melatonin is actually a defense as an antagonist to some extent against the serotonin. And when you say antagonist, I want to make sure I understand the term.
It means basically that it counters or converts whatever that material that it's an antagonist to into something else or neutralizes its effect? Neutralizes the effect, I think. The presence of the enzyme that changes serotonin to melatonin, it's present in inflamed situations, and I think that's a way of getting down the level of serotonin. But I think the presence of melatonin itself blocks some of the effects, such as free radical production activated by serotonin. So melatonin in and of itself would be an anti-serotonin in effect, I would understand.
Yeah. I don't know how great that effect is, but I think there's evidence that it has some of that effect. Now, you mentioned something a little bit ago that piqued my curiosity. We've got this huge problem with diabetes, and I think that a lot of it is related to high fructose corn syrup, if I can say that obscenity on the air. And the other thing is, since you brought this up, I'm curious as to whether the huge influx of SSRIs such as Prozac, et cetera,
may also have contributed to the rise in diabetes and obesity amongst very young kids that seem to be the lab rats for the pharmaceutical industry when it comes to giving them these new, allegedly wonderful antidepressants. A study at UCLA that came out last summer analyzed the corn syrup sweetener that's used in soft drinks, and they chemically tested it and found that it contained just the amount of fructose and glucose that it was claimed to have, but then they hydrolyzed it and found that it contained polysaccharides,
starch-like material containing four to five times the amount of calories that the original sugar had. So it's basically a syrup or a starch-like material with four or five times as many calories as you think you're getting from the sugars. And then if somebody were taking a lot of those types of foods and was given an antidepressant that was a serotonin reuptake inhibitor, that might even further compound the problem. Well, these polysaccharides that aren't easily digested by our human enzymes are likely to feed bacteria lower in the intestine that produce fermentation products including lactic acid,
which are responsible for causing the intestine to increase its already great production of serotonin and to cause it to be absorbed into the circulation in quantities enough to affect behavior. Anxiety, for example, is increased in animals in proportion to the fermentation of these starch-like molecules. So I suspect that the starchy materials in the corn sweetener are pretty directly increasing exposure to serotonin. Well, I wonder if anyone has done a study on someone taking Prozac or a related SSRI who's also obese, would expose the real cause of this whole thing spinning out of control
and causing all this obesity. It's really an interesting point that you brought up and it made me think along those lines. And before I go, I did want to mention to previous callers, there are some websites that should have the information as to how long those radionuclides and weather in general coming across the Pacific from Japan and the whole Asian continent over here to the Pacific coast. And that would be the NOAA website, the USGS website, Helen Caldicott, and Physicians for Social Responsibility will have all kinds of information on radiation
and radionuclides and its after effects, and probably will have some links to other websites that might have good information on that. And there should be a UC Berkeley site that has specific transmission across the Pacific. I saw on a newscast specifically what that caller was asking about, and it was just a few days because of the jet stream. So if it gets up into the jet stream, that's why we here in the Cape Mendocino area, both in Humboldt and Mendocino County, we were the first landfall that detected radionuclides a few days after that occurred.
Thank you very much for the program, and I always enjoy listening to the information that you bring to the air. Thank you for your call. Thank you for calling. We do have one or two more calls on the line, so let's take the next caller. Actually, your engineer has a question about inflammation. I keep honeybees and get stung a lot, and I've heard it's good to stop inflammation, yet I get inflamed when I get stung. So what's going on? Probably developing some kind of hypersensitivity to it. Did you get the same inflammation? Oh, no, no.
I mean, at the site of the sting, it's inflamed, but I hear it's good for you and anti-inflammatory in the long run, so I was wondering if you knew anything about that. And it seems to be good. Okay, yeah. I heard a little bit about the treatment of arthritis with bee stings. I know that I've heard about the nettles, the Romans thrashing themselves with nettles to relieve joint pains, and that seems a little bit--I don't know. In terms of the histamine, Dr. Peat, what would you think about the histamine reaction from that?
I've heard that it's the high cortisol production from the pain as well as the histamine and serotonin from the venom itself. Serotonin has some very direct actions on the cortisol-producing system, and I think it's maybe analogous to the way surgery can cure things. In animal research, they have to do a control, false surgery on one group of animals because it's so common for the trauma of just being cut to cure whatever it was that they were thinking a surgery was curing.
And a very painful bee sting will activate your adrenals to the point that it can relieve a swollen knee, for example. Right, from the cortisol. Counter irritation that doctors used to practice. Okay, we do actually have two more callers on the line, so let's take the next caller. Hello. The pharmaceutical industry makes a claim that these SSRIs increase the receptors for serotonin, accounting for long-term effects even after the drugs are stopped. I wonder if you could comment about that. If you block a transmitter, the body adaptively increases the so-called receptors.
So increasing the exposure to something usually decreases the receptors for that substance in an adaptive process so everything ends up more or less the way it started. The whole idea of the receptor, I think, is just another ploy of the industry to make things simple for television advertising and for medical school. When you look carefully at the long-range arguments behind the whole receptor idea, people for 60 years or more have been pointing out that the state of the organism and of the cell absolutely determines how a given substance is going to affect the cell,
exciting it or inhibiting it, for example. It isn't necessarily that you make more of the so-called receptor protein, but that the whole state of the cell, the energy charge, for example, of the cell, governs what activation of that receptor protein is going to do to the whole cell. So I think the only way to think of a receptor is that the organism is the receptor or the cell is the receptor because the state of the brain affects the way the gonad or the adrenal, for example, is going to respond to a given chemical
because everything is constantly being subjected to nervous chemical and energy inputs. Caller, is your phone on? Oh, sorry about that. Yeah, sorry, we're having a really hard time here. Callers, always turn your phone off, please. Okay, next question. No, I didn't mean you to hang up. Okay, well, we do have another caller. Let's take the next caller. Callers always turn their radios off before you talk on the phone, right? Yeah. I said phone off. Whoops, sorry. That's okay. I think the next caller should be there. Are you there, caller? Yeah, I'm here.
I can't hear you too well, but let me get my question. This show is just fascinating, I must say, and the expertise is well appreciated that you're sharing it with us on the air. I want to find out, because I'm currently taking Lexapro, and also sometimes I get migraines and I take Imatrex, and I know that Imatrex sure works well on those migraines. And I've got a thyroid condition, so I'm hypothyroid, so I take Synthroid, and I just kind of wondered if the serotonin uptake inhibitors are any kind of a problem for the thyroid situation.
Yeah, they're very closely connected. For a long time it's been clear that hypothyroid people often have extremely high serotonin levels, and so the active part of the thyroid hormone, T3, Synthroid is just T4, which requires the liver to activate it. The active thyroid hormone increasing will decrease the production and retention of serotonin, and serotonin being inflammation-promoting and affecting constriction and leakiness of blood vessels is a major factor in migraines, which are mostly associated with hypothyroidism. Well, you know, I also take Cytomel. Yeah, Cytomel is a good antiserotonin thing, and with the right amount of it,
it's pretty effective against migraines. That was one of my first interests in endocrinology was my own migraines. I found that it was largely an interaction between intestinal inflammation, which 95% of our serotonin is made in the intestine, and any kind of irritation in the intestine increases our exposure to serotonin, but especially if your thyroid function is low, causing inefficient sugar metabolism, hypothyroidism plus a sensitive intestine will cause periodic flooding of the system with serotonin, which can be measured in migraine attacks during an attack or just before an attack. The serotonin rises tremendously.
So I can't hear everything you're saying, but the upshot is, is there a problem to combine the Lexapro and the Imatrex and the Synthroid and the Cytomel and all that crap they got me on? There is a blood test for serotonin that I think more people should be checking on. It's much more meaningful than the urine test and so on. And the long-range effects of excess serotonin exposure are very similar to the long-range effects of chronic radiation or chronic estrogen exposure.
They acutely can produce inflammation, but if you keep up the exposure in the long run, you increase your tendency to have fibrosis of various tissues. Okay, one last question for the host there. Are you guys the ones that own the Western Botanical Medicine Company? Yeah. I've tried it. I initially had real good luck with your headache relief medicine or whatever you call it, the Tinkster. But I thought I bought it again recently and I hadn't bought it for a while. But did you change the dosage amount for migraine?
Because I thought I used to use more of it for migraine. And it seems now like the migraine and the other kind of headaches have the same kind of dosage. Was there some change? Yes, there was a label change. Okay. And it was also a dosage recommendation change on that. Right. I just recommended the same type of dose whether you were -- you can still take up to the 20 milliliters per day, but I changed the dosage because if you were having a stress or tension headache,
I'm not allowed to put that on the label, and I can't put migraine on the label either. So I have to just put for occasional headaches. I see. Yeah, because that helps explain it because when I took the lower dosage that you talk about now, it didn't seem to have the same effect as the dose that I had previously been recommended to. So I guess I'll just try to go back to that. Okay. Thanks. That's a good product. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you for your call. Bye-bye. Well, there's one more call on the line.
We better not take it because -- Because I still have to give some recommendations for nutritional advice before we get off the air tonight. So, hello? We've only got three and a half minutes. Hello, you're on the air. Are they all taking me? Okay, yeah, hello? Yes, my name is Louise, and I live on Spyrock Mountain, and I have a thyroid condition, and I take levothyroxine prescribed by my doctor every month, but I also -- I'm 60 years old, and I also take a Tyrenol for high blood pressure.
And I've recently been having some migraine headaches, and I was wondering, does my thyroid have something to do with that? Well, there's lots of different things that could cause migraine headaches, but it would be good if you came for a consultation and we could look at your nutritional status. That's always a good place to start. And if you -- Okay. Are you going to be in at Cave Mud or Midway or -- I'll give you my number at the end of the show. If you'll just listen, in a couple more minutes,
I'm going to give our phone number and Dr. Peat's website, and you can contact him, and you can also contact us, and we'd be more than happy to discuss nutritional advice with you. Okay, because I am overweight, and I'm very, very saddened and concerned about this. I've never been overweight before in my whole life, and I've never -- and my thyroid condition, I have real bad migraines also. I mean, the cough will weigh both of those things. Well, we'd be happy to talk with you, and we'll give you that information in a little bit.
I'm sorry, we have to end the callers, and I wanted to briefly mention before the end of the show that Dr. Peat's talked about starches, as in the form of the corn syrup, irritating the intestine and increasing serotonin. So one way we can protect ourselves from this radiation and the increased serotonin effects of inflammation is to replace our starches, which are grains and beans and starchy vegetables like cooked potatoes and carrots and beets, replace those with soft, ripe, juicy fruits,
and also by keeping our thyroid function high with lots of coconut oil, up to three tablespoons a day, plenty of foods with calcium, local dairy, if it's still okay around here. It seems to be that Eureka's level hasn't changed, and also plenty of good fruit sugars. And Dr. Peat, did you have any final comments? No, I think that covers it. Okay, well, for those that are listening, Dr. Raymond Peat, endocrinologist and research biochemist. His website is www.raypeat.com, and my name's Andrew. My name's Sarah, and our phone number is 888-926-4372,
which is WBM for Western Botanical Medicine, HERB, H-E-R-B. Thank you to all of you who listen regularly and those who tuned in this evening. To those who have ears, let them hear. And support for KMED comes in part from Golden Dragon Medicinal Syrup, an anti-inflammatory, anti-fungal, antibacterial, antioxidant medicine made without heat or ice. Golden Dragon Medicinal Syrup is organic, edible, topical, cosmetic, and water-soluble. Information available at [email protected] and by phone at 707-223-1569. And support for KMED comes in part from the Los-- sorry, the North Coast.
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