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Welcome to this month's Ask Your Ob Doctor. My name is Andrew Murray. My name is Sarah Johannison Murray. For those of you who perhaps have never listened to the show, they run from 7 to 8 p.m., third Friday of every month, and from 7.30 to 8 p.m. we invite callers to call in with any questions related or unrelated to the subject, and do encourage people to try and stay on topic wherever possible, although I know people have questions that they've probably been longing to ask, and we get them also.
So anyway, it's all good. It is an open discussion from 7.30 on, so I wanted to give the outline of this evening's show, which will be a continuation of endocrinology, so part two. Last month, as always, we are joined by Dr. Ray Peat, and last month Dr. Peat was discussing some of the Parkinsonisms, and some of the symptoms and causality. A lot of what we read, and it's part of this evening's show too, in terms of the intro to it, is subject to bad science, or no science at all, or just downright lies.
So I'll get going by introducing the intro for the show, and then we'll get Dr. Peat to join us and see where the show goes. It's a big old subject. I think when I first started thinking about doing endocrinology as a subject, what I don't want is for people to get too bored, because I know some of it's pretty dry. But we'll try and keep it lively, but wanted to give you an overview of endocrinology and the organs that secrete the hormones and the target organs that are either stimulated or inhibited by them,
just to bring out Dr. Peat's understanding of hormone physiology that is after all his specialty, and for which he has the last 35-40 years been working, studying through his PhD, and through his working life putting into practice. I think it's more like 45 years now. Okay, it's probably 45. We've been doing this show for 10 years nearly. So we've been doing this show actually for 13, but getting on close to 10 with Dr. Peat. So in a search for truth, there seems an endless variety of rabbit holes that one can travel through
in so many disciplines and probably none more so evident as riddled in medicine. Sometimes ignorance plays a part, sometimes it's plain corruption, other times it's sheer malevolence and eugenics based, and science's greatest ally is verifiable observation. And hard facts speak volumes to the truth. How we perceive the world influences our very being in the world, and our understanding shapes our response and interaction with our environment. Two ends of the spectrum being the example of learned helplessness and its counterpart, environmental enrichment, both of which have been discussed on previous shows of Dr. Peat.
All of these shows, incidentally, for people listening perhaps for the first one or two times, they're all accessible as an audio archive either from kmud.org, looking at the audio archives, look for Friday Night Talk and the third Friday of every month. They do unfortunately only keep six months of the archives. But we have got every show that we've done from 2009, 2008, yeah, there's a couple in 2008, from 2008 right up until January of 2016, and I'm busy putting the rest of 2016's
and this three months of this year on up on our website, which is www.westernbotanicalmedicine.com. So those archives there are freely downloadable and a great resource for people to want to find out more about Dr. Peat's work. So anyway, how we understand physiology, it shapes our approach to aberrations within it, and the outcome is modulated by this faithful scientific approach through verifiable observation. On the one hand, and the holistic realization that the web of life is indeed fluid and open to events so strange at this point in our evolution,
from transcendental meditation as a healing modality through to the latest theories of quark entanglement and quantum physics. And nowhere else does this multiverse exist within our very being as living organisms than the nervous system, and particularly the endocrine system, which begs the question, what do we know, how have we arrived at this knowledge, and how accurate is it? After all, hard facts are a good start. And Dr. Peat has been a long-time guest on this show, and I'm constantly reminded things are not the way I thought they were.
That is, I was taught an incomplete account of what was understood then from the scientific perspective, because often it was not scientific, but a bogus interference of the truth, a truth which has been elucidated somewhat, but buried in the past, fast moving into the new paradigm of medicine's cause and effect, a drug for a deficiency approach, as it were, a lock and key, fallibility. So to understand the interplay of glands, their hormone secretions, and distant targets affected by the secretion takes a scientific approach
which understands the fluidity of the organism and a questioning of the current paradigm to see a new way through the rabbit hole. So what is a hormone, or what model of the organism is implied? Do you need a head in order to run the body? This is not an actual question, as a head houses a brain to which all is connected and answers to, but a rhetorical question to understanding what it is we are seeking. So I had this conversation with Dr. Peat this afternoon, and wanted to ask you, Dr. Peat, first of all,
the question then, what is a hormone? Because I know you've got a very different outlook on it. That was a question I brought up with my endocrinology students at the Naturopathic College in the 1970s. And against the background of classical endocrinology, it has a different meaning than when you look at it against contemporary theory of what they're teaching medical students. So my students were sort of confused by the way I presented the question. But if you look at the standard definition, a hormone is something secreted by cells somewhere in the body
into the body fluids, and moves in those fluids and acts on cells somewhere else in the body. If that's the working definition of a hormone, then can't you say that lactic acid and carbon dioxide are just as much hormones as anything else, because they're created by various cells and move in the body fluids and definitely act on cells in other parts of the body. But what has developed over the last 30, 40, 50 years incorporates the idea of genes as the really controlling agent of any cell.
And so if a substance is going to act on a cell in a different part of the body, it must be somehow activating on its genes. And so the idea of a receptor is something that picks up something from a cell's environment to activate the genes within that cell. That has come to the center of the textbook type of medical endocrinology. But the way I see the subject really is an extension of the very beginnings around the middle of the 19th century.
Charles Edward Brown Seckard, for example, he took over as a professor following the glycogen researcher whose name I can't get right now, but he was a major physiology figure throughout France and pretty much around the world. He became famous when he, in his old age, claimed that squashing testicles in a watery solution and injecting the solution would rejuvenate a man's virility. He described the changes that he saw in himself and it took off around the world. But for various reasons in the 20th century, almost every textbook of endocrinology
and every course of endocrinology starts out by ridiculing that as a complete mistake, that it was nothing but a placebo because they say testosterone isn't water soluble. But he wasn't saying that he was injecting testosterone. He was making a squash solution of testicles. And the testicle is full of hormones, many of which are fairly insoluble in water, but it's also full of lipids which solubilize and emulsify any of the more or less insoluble. Hasn't that been a part of ancient medicine, the ingestion of ovaries and testicles?
Yes, you can eat them and get the same hormones out of them. But if you do squash them and make a watery extract, you're getting emulsified a whole range of, not just testosterone, but many other steroids closely related to testosterone. So it's a very ideological thing that these textbooks and professors have to put down Brown and Thacker before they can get on with their business. So they wanted to put him down for this theory and discard it as a rational thought and then...
He was saying that the gland itself is producing substances that are vitally important and that can simply bypass many medical problems and reverse degenerative processes. So it's really a subject that's right at the leading edge of research now, how to stop the degenerative processes. For example, in Parkinson's disease, simply giving testosterone has a very powerful therapeutic effect. But it's outside of the main line of thinking with the dopamine deficiency as the core of theorizing. But when you start working from the classical observations of people like Brown-Thacker
and look at the reasons that the whole field changed, I think it happened around the time of August Weissmann, who is famous for supposedly disproving Lamarckism, cutting off the tails of over 1,300 mice and saying the offspring still had tails. He was pretty much an idiot, but his idea was that an animal differentiating the various types of tissue from an ovum, fertilized ovum, involved the progressive loss of genetic information from each tissue as it became specialized, sort of analogous to the idea that was popular in brain research
that memory is formed by the destruction of neurons, a negative way of looking at what an organism is. He believed that the brain and the skin and the eyes and such, each one had its own genetic composition. The egg had them all, but each of the adult tissues had only a fraction of them. And so for the whole organism to work, to function as a unit, these genetically discrete parts had to have some way to communicate. And so that theory, that ideology, which related to a whole political, biological, medical... Yeah, construct, huh? Yeah, a culture.
It was designed for religious, political purposes to explain that an organism is basically mortal, that there's nothing more that you can do. You can't cure the incurable diseases and so on because they're predetermined. And that genetic idea took over and totally displaced and attacked the potential-filled way of looking at biology of people like Brown-Seckard. Interesting. Brown-Seckard, okay. Brown and his last name? Hyphenated Brown-Seckard, S-E-Q-U-A-R-D. Q-A-R-D. I always spell it differently than I was expecting. Anyway, getting back to what you mentioned about the structural organization,
the way that you would look at it and the way that I think I can see it being logical is that the brain's structural organization of neurons leads to a better genetic pattern or blueprint in terms of, it's like an enrichment. It's not the same thing, of course, I'm sure, but it's like an environmental enrichment scenario where if the structure of the brain is being organized in a confluent way, then the neurons make better connections and therefore that can improve the outcome in terms of...
Yeah, each cell and each part of a cell is adapting and adjusting itself to the other parts. And it doesn't have anything to do with that model, but you have to send a signal from a cell that has one group of genes to other cells that have other groups of genes by way of receptors and so on. The implication, when you look at the fact that a skin cell contains all the genes needed to make a brain cell and so on,
the idea of cloning an organism from a single cell means that every cell is full of potential. So it's just the environment that it's exposed to that determines its... And the way the organism comes into being is by each cell confronting its environment. And when it divides, the new cell becomes part of its environment. So each time cells divide, they experience themselves in a new environment, which at the beginning includes the uterine fluids and so on.
And so the whole development of the organism is a process of perceiving its environment and adapting to what it perceives. So the perceived world for any cell is always complex and always includes every byproduct of all of its other cells. So the things such as carbon dioxide and glucose are very central to the function, development, and possibilities of each cell and of the whole. So hormones, as we currently talk about them, are just one of thousands of components of substances produced by cells and acting on other cells.
One of the meanings of this is that we're all in slightly imperfect environments. Our history is continuously a matter of overcoming environmental limitations. And that process is going on in the uterus as we develop and determining how the parts relate to each other. That brings me back to a... I don't mean to cut you short, but that brings me back to the point of in utero nutrition and how pivotal that is in terms of what the mother is exposing the fetus to, in terms of the outcome of the fetus,
and the growth and longevity and potential and possibility and all the rest of it that can be affected at a cellular level just from maternal nutrition. Yeah, the ratio of the person's brain to body and their longevity, life expectancy, and the amount of energy they have at any stage of life. This is pretty much set by the intrauterine condition. Let me hold you again there Dr. Peat. Unexpectedly we have a caller who's called in early. So let's go and take this caller and see where it's coming from and then we'll carry on with the show.
Caller, you're on the air. Where are you from? Australia. Australia. Cool. All right. Well, it's always good to get people from all over the world. We don't want them just from Humboldt County or the West Coast. We appreciate callers from everywhere. We do, of course. Especially our local ones. Yeah. What's your question, caller? I have a question for Dr. Peat. It's a bit off topic. I'm hypothyroid. I have Hashimoto's. I've been obviously fighting it for many years.
My pulse in the morning is around 56 and at night it's around 75. I've got low temperatures in the morning as well. So all of those are using Dr. Peat's information points to inactive thyroid. Obviously I'm in the subtropics. We've just had long, hot summer sweating for six months. And the sun is too intense to get out into. It's really too hot to sit too long. So sometimes I'll put my legs in it. Are you getting enough vitamin D with just a small exposure?
And how does that work? My main question is, I haven't had PUFA for about five years. And with having -- with trying to increase sugar and having milk and orange juice and reducing cruciferous vegetables and things like that, I've ended up being 30 kilos overweight. And I'm really desperate to try and find a way to lose that weight without having to go on a starvation routine. Any ideas? And I take pretty much primarily only T3.
Okay. All right. Well, Dr. Peat, we could go for this, but I know you could -- and I'm sure the lady would like to hear from you. So in terms of, I guess, three questions here, one was a vitamin D exposure in terms of what kind of area or surface of skin would have to be exposed given that it's such an intense heat. But I would also suspect that using a vitamin D liquid supplement would be -- would get around that.
But -- so there was a question about the skin and vitamin D absorption, how much -- Well, you could test your vitamin D with a blood test and then you'd know where you're at and then supplement accordingly with sun and/or supplement. And then the weight gain, how old are you, out of interest? 50. 50. Okay. And how much did you say you'd gained? 30 kilos. 30 kilos. Wow. In five years. 66 pounds. Wow. Okay. So, Dr. Peat, potentially in terms of sluggish thyroid, that could be some of the reason for it.
Otherwise, in terms of increasing metabolic rate to help this person lose weight and the fact that they're only using T3 and not a supplement of T3, T4, or T4. The important thing is to keep your body temperature up. It should be in the range of 98 to 99 and a half or so during the daytime, around 37 Celsius. A little higher is fine because it promotes the healthy oxidation of the fat. But keeping your liver well nourished with protein and B vitamins especially, the liver is able to throw off the polyunsaturated fats,
recognizing them as toxic material that it would be better not to oxidize. So your liver can get rid of quite a bit of stored fat largely during the night. Your free fatty acids tend to increase during the night. In the morning, that shows up as foamy urine, a soapy effect from the free fatty acids. Keeping your body temperature up fairly well during the night by a good amount of protein, calcium, and all of the trace nutrients in your diet. And if necessary, supplementing T3, progesterone, and either pregnenolone or DHEA.
DHEA is anabolic for the muscles, but it activates heat production. It causes you to waste heat, so to speak. It isn't really wasted because it's keeping your nerve function up and your inflammation down. So making sure that you're not deficient in progesterone and DHEA is important. So how's that, Carla? Well, I do a lot of those things. Most of the time in Brisbane here, it's 30. We've just come from months of over 30 degrees every day. So I'm sweating all of the time, but how do you keep your temperature up?
How do you make your body increase its temperature? How many grams of protein do you think you're getting a day? I have about two liters of milk and a liter of orange juice. Right, so that's a quart of orange juice. And maybe a bit of lamb or steak or something, if you like it, but not always. A hundred grams of protein, if you're at all active, just moving around normally, you pretty much need a hundred grams of protein to keep your metabolic rate up. And the calcium in two liters of milk is probably enough.
Calcium promotes heat production. And getting a normal amount of sodium and magnesium in your diet is important. Sodium works with the calcium to produce heat. And progesterone helps to set your temperature so that your body temperature stays up during the day towards 37 degrees, but not dropping extremely during the night. It's okay to cool down maybe as much as one degree Fahrenheit during the night, but it shouldn't go much below 97.7 or 98. I want to just discuss the calories because with two liters of milk, that's anywhere from 800 to 1,200 calories there.
You do have 400 calories in 400 to 600, depending on what, well, I guess a liter, so that's a little bit more than a quart. And depending on what your metabolic rate is, if you're not getting, if your morning pulse is in the 50s, and you're never getting above 75, your metabolic rate probably isn't even burning that amount of calories, plus anything else you might eat during the day besides two liters of milk and a quart of orange juice. I mean, don't you think for a 50-year-old woman this might be an issue, Dr. Peat?
Yeah, that's where the DHEA comes in and adjusting your T3 or thyroid. And the progesterone setting your temperature is important. Estrogen tends to lower your temperature, so you want to keep the ratio of progesterone to estrogen pretty high, 100 to 1 is good. Out of curiosity, I think I heard you correctly say that you've been poo-free for five years? Yeah. And have you gained these 30 kilos over those five years, is that what you're saying? Pretty much. Okay. Do you take your temperature in pulses? I mean, do you know pretty reliably what your temperature is?
Pretty reliably, yeah. It used to be around 63, and it's recently gone lower down to 56, 50. How about your temperature? What are your morning temperatures? My temperature is around 35.8, 36 in the morning, and it does raise. And I do feel heat sometimes after I eat certain things, but I think I'm just taking--in order to put the amount of protein in for my liver to work, I'm gaining weight at a rapid rate. And just with the progesterone, I take a squeeze of progesterone pretty much every night when I wake up.
In the middle of the night, I have a squeeze of that and go back to bed. And how much T3 are you using? I take about between 20 and 40 micrograms a day. 20 to 40, okay. One of the things that can cause you to produce nitric oxide, which lowers your temperature working with estrogen, reversing the effects of thyroid, progesterone, and DHEA, is intestinal inflammation produced by bacteria eating some kind of food that isn't fully digested. Avoiding anything that's hard to digest, such as maybe potatoes or undercooked vegetables,
can reduce the nitric oxide, reduce the estrogen, and help you to raise your temperature. Sometimes just having a raw carrot every day or a good portion of cooked mushrooms can reduce the endotoxin and nitric oxide production enough to switch your progesterone-estrogen ratio in a favorable direction and raise your temperature over a period of just a few days. Did you have any history as a menstruating female of estrogen dominance? Do you know? Yes, absolutely. You did? Yes, I went through menopause at 43.
Prior to that, my estrogen level was about 1,000 times what it was supposed to be. Right. Have you ever noticed an antibiotic having a good effect? Yes. Yes, but of course I'm afraid to take the antibiotic for the yeast overgrowth and things like that. For yeast overgrowth, the mushrooms and carrot sometimes is enough, but flowers of sulfur, just a pinch of it will clear up a yeast infection pretty quickly usually. Is that just once? Just two or three days will usually eliminate a yeast infection. In a fertility clinic about 30 years ago,
they were giving antibiotics to see if it improved fertility, which it did, but a lot of the women noticed they were having drastic improvements in their general health, stopping migraines and other estrogen-related symptoms. It turned out that the antibiotics were very quickly lowering the stress hormones and estrogen and raising progesterone, and that's been done on animals as well as people. It is apparently eliminating the endotoxin to the extent that it stops producing nitric oxide and lets your cells begin oxidizing intensely. Okay.
But really, I think if I compared your body to my body, Collar, I'm 39, and in order to lose a pound a week, I had to eat 1,500 calories a day, and I'm active riding my bike and walking and still menstruating, obviously, at 39. But as you get older, your metabolism slows, and so what I found helpful for some clients is that you use eggshell powder so you don't have to drink that same quantity of milk, although, like Dr. Peat said, you can live for several months with no nutritional deficiencies
on two quarts of milk or two liters of milk and a liter of orange juice. So it depends where you want to get it, but basically I don't know how someone at the age of 50 who hasn't been menstruating since 43 is going to lose weight very fast on just the two liters of milk and the liter of orange juice, and maybe some other food. Well, the other thing is that pulses definitely seem very low in terms of the mid-50s. I would probably call that a sub-metabolic rate for pulse.
I know Dr. Peat, he always recommends from a healthy perspective that your pulse is around about 75, between 75 and 85 is actually pretty good, as a good indicator of metabolic rate for somebody who's actively burning glucose oxidatively and his thyroid is working properly in order to typically generate the heat that we would expect to reach 98.6 on a kind of daily, midday from there on and/or above basis every day. Well, yeah, and if you're not even reaching those normal temperatures, then your metabolism is even slower than normal,
because with my metabolism of 1,500 calories a day and one pound weight loss a week after my pregnancies, my pulse was up to 90, 92, and my temperature was up to 98.6, 99 after 8. Sometimes a little bit of coconut oil can increase your heat production. Yep, I use coconut oil for cooking. But it sounds like that it's pointing to endotoxin in the gut. Well, that and the suboptimal metabolic rate, you don't sound metabolic from a thyroid temperature and pulse perspective, regardless of using 20 or 40 micrograms of T3.
I know that's a fair amount of thyroid really, but it's very different from person to person. I've known quite a few people who use significantly more than that are still not getting rapid pulse. They're still round about the temperature they want to be, but especially in people -- and here's the other thing, and Dr. Peel can come with this -- people that are overweight definitely have more of an uphill struggle using thyroid in order to generate metabolic rate to help shed weight,
because the very weight itself makes it kind of resistant for thyroid hormone to be absorbed by the cells. And keeping your serum vitamin D around the middle of the range, 50 to 55 or 60 nanograms per milliliter, middle of the range, is helpful for keeping your temperature metabolic rate up. And the carrots will also help absorb the fat in the food too. Can you have the carrot at the same time as other food? I thought that sort of stopped the digestion or slowed down the digestion of other things.
It slows it down, but it's helpful for losing weight because it binds some of the fat you've eaten and carries it out of your body too. And some of the material that your liver is excreting in the bile is carried out, especially estrogen, which is excreted in the bile. It'll be reabsorbed if you don't have a constant flow of material, such as carrots or mushrooms through your intestine. Okay. I think the other perspective, just to wrap this up, in terms of liver support,
I think that would be a pretty good direction to be going in making sure that you've got, obviously you're getting enough sugars in terms of glycogen storage from the fructose. But I'm thinking about liver stimulants, liver bitters, or even things like milk thistle that would support hepatic function. That hepatic function in its own right would go to remove waste. And given that you have an estrogen dominance picture in your life, that the estrogen itself would be totally responsible for increased water gain and weight gain through that estrogenizing effect.
And what Dr. Peat is talking about with the ratio of progesterone to estrogen, it would be quite useful to get your estradiol and your progesterone tested so you see what your ratio is because-- Although in menopausal women, didn't you say, Dr. Peat, that it can just be mostly stored in the cells and not in the blood? Oh, if you're using progesterone, that will bring the-- It knocks out the estrogen-binding protein, liberating the estrogen into the bloodstream. Okay. So it would be-- Yeah, you can measure it. If you're using progesterone, the measurement is meaningful.
Okay. That's what I meant to say. It would be a meaningful measurement then. So that would also be another useful piece of data to corroborate. Either a continual estrogen dominance that is predisposing you to water weight gain and that raising your progesterone to estradiol ratio would help that. You definitely would need to get your temperature and pulses up beyond where you're currently at. And that would probably mean increasing slowly your dose of T3 in order to achieve that and taking note of your temperature and pulses.
And then liver stimulants, even things like milthistle to be liver supportive and also help excretion of waste products in terms of the fiber from raw carrot in the bowel would also help to reduce excess estrogen that way. That would lower your overall toxic burden. And like Dr. Peat was saying, the mushrooms because they're a good fiber and then they're also anti-estrogen. And bread-button mushrooms. Yeah. Just make sure they're really well cooked. And two drugs that help the liver maintain its high activity are cascara sagrada, which-- Yeah, I take that.
It's anti-inflammatory and sort of a liver tonic and aspirin. Yep. Excellent. I will thank you very, very much and I will put your advice into work. So it's detrimental to actually reduce my caloric intake. Is that right? No. Well, not too low. Yeah, you wouldn't want to get--you want to keep your protein up as 75 to 100 grams like Dr. Peat mentioned and your sugars. I think I was getting one pound a week weight loss. I think I was getting 150 grams of non-starchy carbohydrates from juice and milk.
So you don't want to go too low on the sugars because then you'll run on stress hormones. So really in order to lose weight, you just have to really calorie count but make sure you're getting the right nutrients--getting the calories from the right nutrients like proteins and sugars rather than from very calorific sources like fat because you can make your own fat from the good sugars. And doing a little muscle building exercise such as a dumbbell lift just two or three minutes at a time helps to shift the hormone ratio. How much did you say?
Sorry, the phone cut out. He said some gentle weight-bearing exercises with dumbbells because that will stimulate muscle production and muscles are very effective means for burning sugars and burning calories. Okay. All right. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you for your call, Carla. If you ever need to get in contact with us, you can email me, [email protected]. Okay, let's take this next caller. See where you're from, Carla. Hi, Carla. You're on the air. Where are you from? What's your question? I'm from Garboville. My question is about poison oak.
I got my first case ever and I wanted to know what kind of botanical aid I could get. Well, we produce a product called Allergy Ease and it's sold at Chautauqua and it's a whole bunch of different antihistamine herbs. Allergy Ease. Allergy Ease and I've had lots of good reports from people. They start that as soon as they start itching before it gets too out of hand, before the histamine gets too out of control. Otherwise, a clean diphenhydramine product or Benadryl if the herbs are not effective enough.
Yeah, I did that right away and that did help a little, but as a first timer, I just kept coming back. Are you breaking out and kind of weeping? No, not that badly. Not that badly, but swelling. You know, it corners one side of my mouth. It might not be too late. It all depends. It's a rash. It all depends how far along you are. If you can get it early enough, the Allergy Ease could be quite useful.
Yeah, you want to try to get on it as soon as possible because you don't want to end up having to take cortisol or something like that. But keeping your sugars up, your good sugars, your fructose, fruit sugars and honey and sugars. I'm so good. I'm glad I'm doing that because I'm really craving them in the evening. Well, yeah, it will help to keep histamine from being released. I have one other question. It turned out I had my first ever wart on the bottom of my foot. I was wondering, I think it's a plantar wart.
It's not huge, but I was wondering what besides these band-aids with salicylic acid on them can you recommend or just nutritionally how to fight it? I'll give you a botanical perspective of a plant that's actually excellent for the treatment of warts. And that's Caledonia magus, the greater selendine. And right now, spring is a good time to find it because it's actually growing right now. And it hasn't flowered yet, which is ideally when you should pick it. You'll know greater selendine from its yellow flowers and it's in the poppy family.
And when you break the stem of it, it exudes a yellow latex. It's actually not a latex, but it's an exudate. It's a bit like a latex, but it's bright orange-yellow. And if you dab that all over the plantar wart and you do that for probably a week, you'll find that the wart will just go black, the skin will start to peel off, and you'll effectively have gotten rid of it. That sounds wonderful. It's a woodland plant, so you need to-- Yeah, but it's not native here. It is in England. Well, yeah, we have it.
Where can you find it around here? Because I do live in the woods. Well, it's not native around here. And the other thing that is what you could find is dandelion sap. It's not as effective as the greater selendine, but it can also help with warts. And you just pick the stem of the dandelion, of the leaf or the flower, and a white exudate comes out and you dab that on the wart. So you could try that if you have dandelions. Yeah, I'm sure I have those, but I'd really love to get the greater selendine.
If you know anybody who can find it around here. Well, I'm sure people are growing it in their garden. It's a weed, essentially. It's a kind of woodland weed. It's become a weed in our garden, but it's not really a weed in Northern California here. But, Dr. Peat, what do you recommend for warts? That sounds as good as anything I know. Okay. All right, go on. And salicylic acid, that's a pretty safe treatment as well. I think it's good. What about formic acid? I think salicylic is best. Okay. Thank you very much. You're welcome.
I'll try to find the selendine. Thank you. Thank you for your call. Okay, well, Dr. Peat, gosh, it's 10 to 8 and we haven't done anything. I haven't even given the number out. I guess we'll just take the next 10 minutes as they come and let me just tell people what the call-in number is, if they'd like to call. Local number, 707 area code, 923-3911. Or if you're outside the area or in Brisbane, Australia, it's 1-800-568-3723. So we'd love to hear you. Well, from Australia or any other international, they'll have to dial 707-923-3911 because
800 numbers don't work outside of the country. That's correct. But, Dr. Peat, getting back to what you were saying about the environment on the developing fetus, and then, doesn't that -- haven't there been studies to show, like, babies that are left to cry themselves to sleep raises the cortisol in the brain and that affects the structure and function of the brain cells? Yeah. Everything is a stress to different extents. And you want to minimize all of the stresses. And I think the earlier you begin prenatally or in newborns, minimizing the stress is going
to maximize the life potential. So crying is a sign of stress. And so finding out what the cause is is important. Okay. Well, getting back to the topic of this month's show, in terms of the endocrine system, I was going to go next to the hypothalamus as being the next structure to open up and look into. And I think really what I wanted to try and generate in people is an amazing fascination of something so complex and so intricate and such a miracle that is still very hard to
grasp even when you read hardcore scientific texts elucidating every known fact, as it were, in terms of the quest for knowing all about it. And the hypothalamus is just one of those organs that is classed as an endocrine organ. So I think I probably just wanted to just run through, and that was the hope. And obviously, I think we're going to have to carry this on next week. It was going to be a several... Next month. Sorry, next month. It was going to be a several-month topic, the endocrine system, because it's not a small subject.
But I obviously wanted to pull out many different perspectives from each organ secretion and how they interplay, because I know there's all sorts of hormones involved. And thyroid hormone is one of them. And then there's things like luteinizing hormone. You've got all the sex hormones. And then all those hormones that control even mood. I mean, there's fairly new research out now that's showing a lot of interference between mood and people's aggression, male behavior in terms of aggressiveness, and the hormones,
how they interplay, and how an organ secretion is either turned down or turned up by the target that it's reaching, and how the target, when it's sufficiently stimulated or inhibited, has a feedback back to the point of origin to tell it to calm down again. So the whole thing is really quite an amazing engine. But I guess starting with the hypothalamus, looking at, I guess, thyrotropin releasing hormone. And again, the hypothalamus seems to direct a lot of its attention towards the anterior pituitary.
So Dr. Peat, in terms of structure function, I wondered, I was reading this when I was putting this material together, that the hypothalamus itself, TRH, thyrotropin releasing hormone, stimulates TSH release, which is a thyroid stimulating hormone, which is something we talk about a lot in terms of moving into action the production of thyroid hormone. And this comes from the pituitary, as well as thyrotropin releasing hormone stimulating prolactin from the anterior pituitary. And I was wondering, it might be a stupid question, but I thought I'd have to ask you,
because you probably know the reason, and hopefully it's not too simple, but the fact that prolactin is released as well as thyroid stimulating hormone from thyrotropin's action, how come it doesn't generate any kind of milk production in non-lactating females? It very often does. For many, many years I've noticed that when a woman complains of menorrhagia or a prolonged excessive menstruation, they're often secreting milk. Even if they've never been pregnant, or especially if they've had a couple of kids, the hormone changes that lead to the excessive menstruation also are causing prolactin excess, probably
growth hormone excess too. Too much growth hormone causes lactation. But it's really not uncommon for a middle-aged woman to have chronic milk formation associated with the overactivity of the thyroid system because their thyroid gland itself isn't able to produce the active hormones and the feedback process to turn off the pituitary. Almost everything the pituitary does, it has its constructive adaptive effect overcoming whatever is causing stress to the whole organism in response to the changed feedback system. But in itself, the substances produced in the pituitary are all harmful if they are continued.
So what you want to do is have such a responsive, high metabolic system that the tissue can respond fully to a little bit of pituitary hormone and turn it off quickly. Animals that have their pituitaries removed, that are given a supplement of cortisol and thyroid, will often live two or three times longer than animals that are normal with a normal pituitary function, showing that the pituitary, to the extent that it's overactive, is shortening your life and shrinking your potential.
So this is why you recommend TSH being as low as possible and ACTH being as low as possible? Yeah, all of the pituitary hormones I think should be kept minimal. Interesting. Because if your body is producing enough thyroid and enough cortisol and enough estrogen and progesterone and testosterone, then your pituitary hormones will be minimal. Yeah, and your skin, if you get sunburned or have an inflammation, poison oak or anything that's hurting your skin, your skin can produce the pituitary hormones as well as stress hormones of various types. Wow.
So every simple little tissue, your tonsils, any simple looking tissue, if it's stressed, will produce pituitary hormones, estrogen. You see, this is really what I wanted to get into, the meat and potatoes of what you understand in terms of the physiological effects, because when we're at med school or other schools that study physiology and other types of disciplines surrounding medicine, it's not what you get taught. Anyway, it's three minutes to eight, so... Well, we did get taught that hormones can be stored in the fat cells and released.
Well, yeah, okay, but I wanted to bring out a little more. But anyway, thank you so much for your time, Dr. Peat. I really appreciate your spending your time here. Okay, well, thank you. Thanks for joining the show, Dr. Peat, and thank you, callers. Okay, so we are going to run through this next month. So we'll carry on endocrinology part three and we'll get into the rest of these hormones and things like corticotropin releasing hormone, dopamine, you've heard of growth hormone releasing hormone, somatostatin, gonadotropin, oxytocin, and how these exert their effects, the mechanisms
by which they exert their effects, how they can be disrupted, how they can become aberrant and cause disease. But in the basis of the understanding of metabolic energy, concerned with the ordered structure function arrangement in the body, there'll be lots of examples of how things can be pulled back into a normal pattern. But anyway, for those people who've listened to Dr. Peat this evening and for the callers, if anybody wants to find out more about Dr. Peat and his fully referenced scientific articles
that he has on his website freely for downloading or reading or printing or whatever, it's raypeat.com. So www.raypeat.com. Similarly, like I said at the beginning of the show, we archive all of the shows that we've done with Dr. Peat over these last nine or ten years. I'm in the process of getting all the 2016s and the few months of 2017s uploaded to the server, but all the other years are there. So for those people who've called in, thanks for your questions.
For those people who've heard a little bit about Dr. Peat, there's plenty more to be found out from his website. And we can also be reached Monday through Friday, 1-888-WBM-ERB. And our website is westernbotanicalmedicine.com. Thanks so much for your time. See you next month. Thank you. Good night.