Putting Young Heads on Old Shoulders

Do you know this saying but the other way round? My dad said it often enough and always with such an exasperated tone that it’s got its own dedicated lobe in my brain. Almost. Lately, however, I’ve been reflecting on how much I learn from people younger than me, both patients and practitioners and think we need to flip it!  I love the way that young people (oh lordy I just used the term, ‘young people’!!) can be incredibly solution-oriented, seemingly undaunted by the perceived barriers that tend to affect us older folk. A perfect example of this really is a young naturopath who previously worked for me, an absolute gun who seemed fearless in the face of any challenge who used to say, “my real super-power is forming the perfect Google search term” 😂 Of course this was totally under-selling her cleverness but I take the point that this is skill-set that us older peeps may be a little short on!

I really enjoy my consults with my Gen Y patients too for similar reasons.  Check out this recent exchange with a 20 something female when I asked about her supplement compliance:

“Yeah, I use an app to remind me to take all the supplements and that gives me a weekly report so I know I’m usually about 80% compliant. I’ve dropped off a lot over the holidays but I’m getting back into it now. So I’ll wait til I’m back up to 80% to do these next bloods, right, because that would be pretty representative and show us the effect of what I am actually taking”

Are you hearing this?!  How incredibly clever!  One: she found an app (Medisafe) because she knows herself and she knows apps work for her! (and by the way, she said…yeah so the government probably now has this data as well but really, they had it anyway!) Two: she knows that it’s not human nature to be consistently consistent with compliance with anything, so more importantly she aims for doable, sustainable and therefore representative!! I myself even find myself delaying the pathology sometimes, erroneously thinking, oh I wasn’t at my absolute best this week!! 🤦‍♀️Dang, I wish I was that smart in my 20s. I may have saved a lot of sun-damaged skin, some serious $ and my dad many many headaches!

And my New Grad mentees, not all of them young by the way (!), but all new to the profession, when you check out their social sites, their business models and hear the life experience/past work they’re bringing together for exciting new hybrid offerings, it’s a quick reminder that wisdom isn’t a one-way street!

Want to know how else we can get smarter regarding your patient’s pathology?

As my patient points out, we should never put off getting labs done, waiting for 100% compliance.  It may never come and if it does…it’s likely only fleeting and therefore any results in this context will be too! What are you and your patients missing in relation to their blood tests – like when to have the blood tests done in relation to food, exercise, alcohol etc  Beware of Bad Bloods! Occasionally, the fault of the pathology company but much more often the fault of the patient and the referring practitioner, who has not educated the patient correctly about what to do and not do prior to blood collection for certain tests. This recording clearly describes the 7 classic give-away patterns of ‘Bad Bloods’ which will enable you to spot them fast in the future.  In addition to this.  while we are unlikely to know the idiosyncrasies of very lab our patients will ever have done, knowing the ideal collection times and conditions for the most common ones assists you and your patients to avoid any in the future – handy clinic resource included.

You can hear all about it and download the resource when you purchase Beware of Bloods here.

New Goals & Some Good News (At Last!) in Gilbert’s Syndrome

 

Earlier this year at a Mental Health Training for IM doctors, 3 practitioners (myself, a doctor & a psychiatrist) walked into a bar…not really, but we did each present a case study of challenging patient & in whom we had some great outcomes. All 3 patients presented happened to have Gilbert’s Syndrome.  Just in case you’re wondering if there was a secret Gilbert Syndrome Conference you didn’t get an invite to, no.  Or that perhaps there was premeditation and intention on the organisers behalf for a bit of sub-theme and focus, no.  While this was purely coincidental it does speak rather loudly to a couple of things though.

Patients with Gilbert’s syndrome are likely to be over-represented in our client base especially among those presenting with psychiatric and/or gut issues (and both presentations frustratingly for them, very hard to diagnose, define, pigeon hole etc) and secondly, even though their genes underpin their biological susceptibility to such health problems, great outcomes are really possible.

One of the challenges comes from the medical dismissiveness of this genetic issue as simply ‘benign hyperbilirubinemia’.  This has lead to a lack of diagnosis in patients affected and when it is incidentally picked up on routine bloods, a lack of follow up education about what having approx. 30% less phase 2 glucuronidation activity, in their gut and their liver, is really likely to mean, not to mention radically altered bile composition and digestion (!) and how they can make better choices in light of this. Similarly this year in our Mental Health Specialist Mentoring Group, the issue of reduced efficacy and tolerance of  psychiatric medications, in those with Gilbert’s, raised its head over and over again.  Given that so many drugs within the psychiatric class add at the very least to the ‘substrate load’ of the UGT system, if not frankly inhibit some members of this enzyme family,  as this paper (check out Table 2…superb!) shared by my colleague, Kate Worsfold, points out, it actually shouldn’t come as a surprise.

But there is a change a’coming with an influx of research leading to improved understanding of this seemingly mercurial malady, resolving many riddles, identifying new key ways to help these patients and at last….some exceptionally good news for those with Gilbert’s.

For example, when I started this conversation back in 2013 with the Update in Under 30 Gilbert’s Girls, that was in response to seeing so many women at the time presenting with significant imbalances in both their sex hormones and their neurobiology as a result of their UGT impairment.  But of course it was never meant to imply GS is just a girl thing!  In fact there is a 3:1 dominance of men with this condition and some very good reasons as to why: more red blood cells and more testosterone…the former being the primary source of bilirubin and the later a terrifically powerful UGT inhibitor. The news from the research frontier is nothing short of thrilling, rewriting our thoughts on what medications and supplements (!!) are the most problematic, improved dietary management, how to track their progress more accurately and why completely normalising their bilirubin is not the goal…hey did someone say…longer telomeres?! 😉

The latest Update in Under 30 has landed: Gilbert’s – New Goals and Good News and my team has gone all out in producing a brilliant desktop reference to go with this recording that aids better understanding and clear treatment aims for your GS patients.

You can purchase Gilbert’s: New Goals & Good News here.
If you are an Update in Under 30 Subscriber, you will find it waiting for you in your online account.
**But if you’re just joining us & this important conversation now,
ideally get the basics and backstory first and purchase all 3 key episodes in
‘A Guide to Gilbert’s Package’
-Your RAN Online Account has a NEW LOOK!!-
Next time your log in, you will experience a more user friendly way to search, view, listen and download your resources. Find out what’s new here.

 

I Was Wrong

I take my job to heart.  When someone asked me recently to choose the single value that spoke most to me personally I couldn’t seem to go past, ‘Purpose’.  I feel very honoured to have contributed to the learning of so many health professionals in their undergraduate and so many more in their professional careers following graduation and I know that with this comes huge responsibility. Second on my values list  (again, possibly unsurprising) is Empowerment & coming in with a photo finish at 3rd: Integrity.  Discernment and critical thinking (about information, about research, about reflective practice) are perhaps the eggs in this souffle, helping us all to rise up. 

As part of our critical thinking we need to accept a few truisms:

Research changes     Experience changes    Knowledge changes

Information is not static. So we need to ask ourselves, how long ago did I learn this? How long since I’ve checked it is still correct? And just because perhaps this information came out of the mouth of our mentors or teachers, makes it no less up for regular review.  I’m trying to undertake these internal audits on a regular basis. Typically they’re prompted by bloody good questions my mentees have asked me. A question I can’t answer or, more to the point, I can’t answer with full confidence I’ve double-checked my old beliefs and understandings against new evidence recently…these almost always provoke a lost night of sleep for me.  Not from sleeplessness per se but due to immersing myself in the latest research and performing a mini informal lit review, bringing out all my old beliefs/evidence etc. Marie Kondo style and asking do they still spark joy✨  (in light of the latest evidence)?!   And yes sometimes there’s a little bit of heartache when you have to let your old tightly held beliefs and understandings go 😢

The 1st  update is about N-acetyl cysteine.  Some of you may have heard me previously question the efficacy of the vegan form. Now that all but 1 Australian product is vegan, produced from bacterial fermentation or purely synthetic, I was wayyyyyyyy overdue to check the validity of my old ideas.  Let the record show, I was wrong.  Unlike some other nutraceuticals like chondroitin sulphate, wherein the source radically changes the overall structure of the molecule and therefore its uptake and actions – the same is simply not true for NAC.

So those ducks, & their NAC rich feathers, can all sleep a little easier at last…phew!  Now the 2nd internal audit well that did cause some tears for me…

Setting the record straight: The ABC of CDG

We often identify patients who could do with a little glucuronidation first aid: marked dysbiosis, Gilbert’s syndrome, oestrogen excess, cancer risk (especially bowel, breast & prostate) and one of our nutritional go-to’s has typically been Calcium D Glucurate. While there is ample evidence that one of CDG’s metabolites: 1,4 GL – inhibits beta-glucuronidase, is an antioxidant, platelet activation inhibitor and generally all-round good guy to have onboard, new research strongly challenges that oral CDG will convert to this at levels sufficient to support this detoxification pathway.  Sounds like we’re overdue for an update on this supplement and when and where it might be useful in addition to how to find the real deal in real food!

 

Iron – Another Important Discovery

Yet another super-helpful part of Iron-Land has been mapped!!  Ever struggled to correct chronic iron deficiency in athletes or even just weekend warriors?  Yep, me too. One of the key barriers being the 2-3 fold rise in hepcidin in response to exercise. Hepcidin whose day job is an inflammatory signal that two-times as an iron uptake blocking agent at the small intestine.  In addition to other exercise-induced factors that either reduce Fe uptake or increase losses, it really is no surprise that these cases can be hard to treat. However, a recently published small Australian study has brought to light some constructive new information. Similar to the often talked about ‘anabolic window of opportunity’ whereby we encourage people to consume protein +/- CHOs within a short time-frame post-exercise to optimise exercise outcomes and negate negatives, these new findings imply the same might be true for optimal Iron uptake. But only in relation to exercise done in the morning! 

The key finding was when individuals consumed iron after 90mins of exercise in the morning they exhibited higher uptake than both when they took the iron at the same time but didn’t exercise beforehand or took it after exercising at night.

This is a game-changer for potentially ALL our patients who struggle with iron absorption.  With the key take-home being…not just take your iron preferably in the morning which we already know (when hepcidin is naturally lower as part of its diurnal rhythm) but before you pop that pill, pop on your sneakers and get busy sweating! How on earth might this be working?  Well this study demonstrated that while hepcidin rises after exercise typically for up to 6hrs…it is not yet ‘up’ and blocking within the first hour – gotcha! But why would this mean an even greater uptake compared with the same iron at the same time in the same individual…but a resting version of themselves?  Because exercise may in fact cause a transient leaky gut post exercise & enhanced nutrient uptake may be its silver lining!  A small study that actually punches above its weight, this one is worth the read – via a great comprehensive summary on Medscape if you have it or you can check out the abstract.

Our ever-expanding Iron knowledge gives us great hope for the improved understanding we are likely to reach with all nutrients in the future.  Let’s not forget Iron has about a 70 year head-start on other microminerals such as Zinc and almost a century on Selenium, which was identified to be essential in just 1979! 

And the contrast is apparent anywhere you care to compare and contrast the ‘older’ with the ‘younger’ nutrients. Just look at iron studies. A personalised detailed account of each individual’s iron story: how much you’re consuming, how effective you are at absorbing what you’ve been offered, how hungry that makes you for more and what good stores mean to you (not some fictitious average male or female)!  All told through 4 distinct but inter-related markers: serum iron, transferrin, transferrin saturation and ferritin.  What can we glean from our current routine assessment of Selenium in contrast?  Their short-term Se intake…yep. Looking forward to the multi-parameter markers of each individual nutrient we just might have at our fingertips in the future, thanks to iron nutrition which continues to teach us how sophisticated nutritional physiology really is 🙂

We know the most about iron and yet we know there is always more to learn.  And who better to teach us this than our clients with iron deficiency or iron excess?  Need some help getting across the most important aspects of recognising and correcting each iron issue in clinic?  We released an Iron Package earlier this year for this very reason. It covers how to really read iron studies (with a great cheat sheet), how not to fall for a fake (deficiency) and what the best supplements and dosing regimes look like and how that differs in pregnancy, athletes, those with marked gut issues and other key groups. It’s your 1 stop iron shop.

Nutritional Medicine: A Place For Science Not Wishful Thinking

Show me a nutrient that doesn’t demonstrate a U shaped curve with our health (too little produces negative effects – too much produces negative effects)  and I’ll go ‘HE!’ Go on…try it now… But the way many have been taught nutrition has lead to some erroneous thinking, it would seem, about the inherent ‘safety’ of all micronutrient prescriptions.  To know these vitamins and minerals well is to respect their potency in every sense – from their incredibly positive application at both physiological doses, correcting deficiencies,  and in a small number of scenarios almost pharmacological benefits, when used at doses that are intended to exceed the natural physiological state (think IV vitamin C, or high dose B3 for lipid-lowering as two famous examples), to their potential for fallout when healthy levels are unwittingly exceeded, especially long-term.

Our risks of over-supplying individual micronutrients have arguably been amplified by the industry’s increasing promotion of nutritional formulas or complexes over the use of single nutrients.  How often do you go through and studiously add up all your cumulative totals for individual nutrients for each prescription? 

Especially those that tend to find their way into such a large number of formulas and have clear upper limits, such as Vitamin B6, Folate, Selenium and Manganese…to name a few of my (not so) favourites.

Many of you will know I am a fan of staying single 😉  I mean using single nutrients rather than all the ‘bells-&-whistles-formulas’ we’ve come to rely on so heavily.  This is one key reason.  But the other is that many of these formulas are someone else’s, perhaps a whole tech team’s, idea of what a ‘generic’ low thyroid patient, or an ‘average’  immune challenged patient needs. Not sure about you, but I don’t subscribe to ‘average’ and ‘generic’ when it comes to nutrition…that’s one of naturopathic nutrition’s key criticisms of conventional dietetics, right?  So where does this reliance on generic nutritional complexes comes from? Is it purely convenience -yours and the patients?

Or are we insecure in our confidence in creating our own crafted formulas? Is it a need to know our tools of trade better..because if we did, might we better realise the power and potency (positive or negative) of our own prescriptions? Especially in the realm of accurate assessment and individualised requirements.

The latter is my call to action on this, predictably! 😉

I am often asked about where my ‘nutritional nous’ comes from. Which magic journals do I subscribe to that fill my head so full? What non-existent-far-superior-course did I undertake?  The answer I give is the same every time. I had one solid nutrition teacher in my under-graduate across my 4 years of naturopathic nutrition at SSNT.  What made her so good and why has so much she taught stayed with me?  She simply taught me every single nutrient literally from the ground (soil) all the way up (human nutritional physiology) and everything in between.  Once you know each nutrient that well and the big concepts that are a truism in nutritional science…you can never go back and you will practice nutritional medicine at its best. My wishful thinking? I wish that for us all 😉

Mastering Micronutrients – 4 hours & clinical tools that will seriously change the way you work in Nutrition

Let’s make sense of the over-arching nutrition principles, that will profoundly change your understanding and application of this modality  Truly understanding the ‘big’ concepts, so often overlooked, or incorrectly taught, ensures you get the critical ‘small’ detail in your nutritional prescriptions right. In this 4 hour recording, together with key clinical tools, we talk about the tough stuff: dose-response curves, active versus passive stores and excretory pathways and ooh lah lah…the myth of taking ‘activated vitamins’.  Even those who feel satisfied with their original training – will find a lot in this critical review that is new, insightful and truly practise-changing!

 

 

 

 

You Might Want to Write This Number Down

No you’re right, it’s not long enough to be a Hemsworth’s mobile number but actually it’s more sought after 😉 If you’re up to date with reading & recognising all the different patterns of Iron Studies & the stories they tell, which is a daily business for most of us, then you will know by heart the striking pattern we call, ‘Pseudo Iron Deficiency’. You know the one where your patient’s serum iron & transferrin saturation are mischievously trying to trick you into thinking you need to give this patient iron…when in fact this is absolutely not what they need! 

This is of course the result of the redistribution of iron during inflammation – iron is actively removed from the blood and  sequestered in the liver instead.  It’s designed to protect us from bacterial bogeymen, which is how our stone-age bodies interpret all inflammation of course. 

Doesn’t sound familiar? Ok you need to start here or even embrace a full overhaul of all things iron here.

But for those of you nodding so hard you’re at risk of doing yourself an injury, this number is for you.   We’ve often talked about the redistributional increase in patients’ ferritin levels in non-specific terms: it goes up..but by how much?  Of course we would like to know because no one is fooling us with this transiently inflated value…but can we make an estimation as to what this person’s ferritin will drop to once this inflammation is resolved? Yes.

X 0.67

Write it down. Consider a tattoo, perhaps?

This glorious magic number comes from Thurnham et al paper in 2010 who did the number crunching on over 30 studies involving almost 9,000 individuals to determine the mathematical relationship between inflammatory states & markers and the reciprocal increases in ferritin.  Their work is exceptional in that it also differentiates between incubation (pre-symptoms), early and late coalescence periods (if you want to differentiate your patients in this way and get even more specific then you need to read the paper), however, overall when we see a patient who has a CRP ≥5 mg /dL , we can multiply their ferritin by 0.67 and get a lot closer to the truth of their iron stores. Oh and another important detail they revealed, this magnitude of ferritin increase is more likely seen in women or those with baseline (non-inflamed) values < 100 ug/L..so generally more applicable to women than men. Thanks Thurnham and colleagues and the lovely Cheryl, my previous intern who brought this paper to my attention…you just took the guessing out of this extremely common clinical scenario 🙂 

We’re not deaf…we heard that stampede of Iron-Inundated Practitioners! The Iron Package is for you!

Our recordings and clinical resources for improving your skill-set in all things iron including, your accuracy of diagnosing deficiencies, pseudo-deficiencies & excesses, plus radically rethinking the best treatment approaches for each scenario…have been some of our most popular. Because nailing iron (pardon the pun) is harder than we were all lead to believe and at least 1 ‘iron maiden’ or ‘iron man’ walks into our practice every day, right? So we’ve brought together 5 extremely popular UU30’s on Iron into one bundle for the price of 4! So if you’re more than ready to graduate from ‘iron school’, now’s your best chance!

 

 

 

Where Do All The Nutrients Go?

Those ‘still-believers’ look away now.  One of the great myths, misconceptions and misunderstandings in nutritional medicine is that supplementation with specific nutrients will produce change specifically in one system, or pathway, which just happens to be the one that the practitioner has determined would benefit most/is targeting.   Let me explain myself a bit better. When we give patients any nutrient, in the cases where it’s not simply to correct a global deficiency & therefore improve levels all round, it’s typically on the basis of a specific desirable therapeutic benefit, e.g. some magnesium to help their GABA production…, additional B3 would improve their mitochondria.  Beautiful on paper…but like sending a letter to Santa in reality (I did warn you!)

Truth Bomb No.1: There are nutrient distribution pecking orders that have nothing to do with who you ‘addressed’ it to

This dictates that when something is given orally, for most nutrients, the gut itself has first dibs.  So the cells of your digestive tract meet their needs before any other part of your body gets a look in. Sometimes the digestive system’s needs can be quite substantial and leave little for any other part of the body…not mentioning any names (ahem) Glutamine!

Truth Bomb No.2: En route to the ‘target’, these nutrients get delivered and distributed to many other tissues – with possibly not so desirable or intended effects!

You may determine that a patient needs iron because their ferritin hasn’t got a pulse…so you keep giving them daily high dose oral iron to ‘fix’ this…not realising you’re making their GIT dysbiosis and gut inflammation worse in the process.  Or you feel their mysterious ‘methylation cycle’, happening predominantly in the liver and kidneys, could do with a folate delivery…perhaps ignoring the very worrying fact that their colon may have already had a ‘gut full’. Literally.  Hence the concerns and caution against supplementing with folate in patients with established colorectal cancer.  So is bypassing the gut via IM or IV nutrients the answer…well yes and no…but mostly no. Read on…

Truth Bomb No.3: Those pathways that use the nutrient you’re supplementing, that are most active in the patient’s body currently – which is determined by many factors  (genes, physiology, feedback circuits, pathophysiology) and rarely simply by the availability of nutrients – will take take the next lion’s share of that nutrient

Wanting to nutritionally support someone’s thyroid, you know tyrosine is the backbone of the thyroid hormones, so you include this in the hypothyroid prescription. Will it help?  Who knows? Being a non-essential amino acid the body exhibits very complex regulation of its distribution and use – with thyroid precursor availability being only one job on a very long list! And if this was in a patient who is regularly smoking cannabis, due to upregulation of the tyrosine hydroxylase enzyme – there is likely to be more of the supplement headed for even more dopamine production and very little or none reaching in fact your intended target.  And don’t get me (re)started on Glutamine – supplements of which in an anxious and glutamate dominated patient will make…G.L.U.T.A.M.A.T.E…right…not GABA! 🙁

Sorry, I know, it hurts right? But these are essential teachings, that tend to have been over-looked or under-played I find, in nutrition education, regardless of training: nutritionists, naturopaths, IM doctors, dual qualification practitioners remedial therapists.  Nutritional medicine is a wonderful and potent modality when it’s done well…but we need to revisit some core truths and principles that many of us have missed out on, to ensure we’re not writing letters to Santa.

Want to revisit your core nutritional knowledge which will cover this and much much more? 

Let’s start with Micronutrients. Let’s talk make sense of the over-arching nutrition principles, that will profoundly change your understanding and application of this modality  Truly understanding the ‘big’ concepts, so often overlooked, or incorrectly taught, ensures you get the critical ‘small’ detail in your nutritional prescriptions right. In this 4 hour recording, together with key clinical tools, we talk about the tough stuff: dose-response curves, active versus passive stores and excretory pathways and ooh lah lah…the myth of taking ‘activated vitamins’.  Even those who felt well trained – will find a lot in this critical review that is new, insightful and truly practise-changing!

A Package Packed With Iron, Iron & Even More Help With Iron

 

 

We’re not deaf…we heard that stampede of Iron-Inundated Practitioners!

Our recordings and clinical resources for improving your skill-set in all things iron including, your accuracy of diagnosing deficiencies, pseudo-deficiencies & excesses, plus radically rethinking the best treatment approaches for each scenario…have been some of our most popular. Because nailing iron (pardon the pun) is harder than we were all lead to believe and at least 1 ‘iron maiden’ or ‘iron man’ walks into our practice every day, right? So we’ve brought together 5 extremely popular UU30’s on Iron into one bundle for the price of 4! So if you’re more than ready to graduate from ‘iron school’, now’s your best chance!

1. So You Think You Know How to Read Iron Studies? (≤30 min audio + Cheat Sheet)

Overt Iron Deficiency Anaemia or Haemochromatosis aside…do you understand the critical insights markers like transferrin and its saturation reveal about your patients iron status?  Most practitioners don’t and as a result give iron when they shouldn’t and fail to sometimes when they should.  This audio complete with an amazing cheat sheet for interpreting your patients Iron Study results will sharpen your skills around iron assessment, enabling you to recognise the real story of your patients’ relationship with iron.

2. Pseudo Iron Deficiency (≤30 minute audio)

The most common mistake made in the interpretation of Iron Studies is this one: confusing inflammation driven iron ‘hiding’ with a genuine iron deficiency.  Worse still, following through and giving such a patient oral iron – when in fact it is at its most ‘toxic’ to them.
This audio together with some key patient pathology examples will prevent you ever falling for this one! Learn how to recognise a ‘Pseudo Iron Deficiency’ in a heartbeat!

3. Iron Overload… But not as you know it (≤30 minute audio)

We’re increasingly seeing high ferritin levels in our patients and getting more comfortable referring those patients for gene testing of the haemochromatosis mutations; but, do you know how to distinguish between high ferritin levels that are likely to be genetic and those that are not?  This can save you and your patient time and money and there are some strong road signs you need to know.  In addition to this, what could cause ferritin results in the hundreds if it’s not genetic nor inflammation?  This Update in Under 30 summary will help you streamline your investigations and add a whole new dimension to understanding iron overload…but not as you know it!

4. So You Think You Know How To Treat Iron Deficiency? (≤30 min audio)

And then you don’t.  The reality is we all struggle at times with correcting low ferritin or iron deficiency anaemia  – so what have we got wrong?  In spite of being the most common nutritional deficiency worldwide, the traditional treatment approaches to supplementation have been rudimentary, falling under the hit hard and heavy model e.g. 70mg TIDS, and are relatively unconvincing in terms of success. New research into iron homeostasis  has revealed why these prescriptions are all wrong and what even us low-dosers need to do to get it more right, more often!

5. So You Think You Know the Best Iron Supplement, Right?!  (≤30 min audio + Iron Supplement Guide)

Iron supplementation, regardless of brand, presents us with some major challenges: low efficacy, poor tolerability & high toxicity – in terms of oxidative stress, inflammation (local and systemic) and detrimental effects on patients’ microbiome.  What should we look for to minimise these issues & enhance our patients’ chance of success.  Which nutritional adjuvants are likely to turn a non-responder into a success story and how do we tailor the approach for each patient? It’s not what you’ve been taught nor is it what you think! This comes with a bonus clinical tool, a fabulous easy reference guide – to help you individualise your approach to iron deficiency and increase your likelihood of success.

You’ll never look at iron studies or your iron-challenged patients the same way.

Listen to these audios straight away in your online account.

Are You a Quercetin Queen (or King)?

Did you and all your patients survive Spring?  Have you had a chance to restock the shelves with all the big-gun-Quercetin-products for the next allergy onslaught…or maybe for patients presenting with other conditions that respond well to this, like leaky gut, asthma, MCAS, Grave’s disease?  Either way…can I ask you a Quiet Quercetin Question…how high do you go? 

I ask this because I know myself to be pretty heavy-handed at times, especially in those severely affected by traditional allergies..and the results are so impressive for patients and practitioners alike, it’s easy to perhaps get very enthusiastic with this approach, with doses sneaking higher and higher… if a little is so good then a lot must be great!

“Severe eczema and allergic asthma – [Insert preferred big-gun-Quercetin-product] 2 three times a day – STAT!”

And we use it across all patients, right?  I love it in kids, teens and adults, men and women.  So I kind of stopped dead in my tracks when a colleague recently said…”I do the same…buckets of Quercetin especially over hayfever season but Rach, what about it’s phyto-oestrogenic effects? Should we be worried?” Ah…yup…that’s right…being a flavanoid…it has them. Now let’s be clear about one thing, unlike  some practitioners I am NOT, I repeat, NOT against phytoestrogens nor even (ahem) soy 😉 but the question was great because it got me thinking…at high-end supplement doses we are producing levels in the body 100s if not 1000s of times higher than a fruit and vegetable rich diet ever can….is it time we knew a little bit more about what Quercetin does at this level, or is suspected of doing and not just the benefits. Therefore we can be more informed about who we should not be so generous or so long-term with our big Quercetin prescriptions?

So I started busying myself in the literature and it turns out THERE IS A LOT OF LITERATURE!

[Note to said colleague who asked me question, you owe me some sleep] But at least I got an answer! 

If you want a bit of DIY drilling then this Andes et al paper is an excellent overview of quercetin supplementation safety concerns…but it doesn’t cover everything.  We need to talk.  We need to talk about that dang estrogen aspect but it’s bigger than that – you see Quercetin doesn’t just engage with oestrogen receptors like a ‘normal’ phytoestrogen…it messes with levels of this hormone via several other paths…and where does that lead us…?  Listen in to the latest UU30 Querctin – Are We Pushing the Limits? and you’ll know exactly our destination. This is important for the Quercetin Queens (both male and female) among us…and that’s like…everyone…right? 🙂

Quercetin has become an absolute go-to treatment for many practitioners faced with patients affected with allergies and high histamine.  It is in this context, that often we find ourselves using large amounts over long periods. Supplemental quercetin exhibits a 5-20 fold higher bioavailability than its dietary counterpart, therefore increasing body levels beyond what a diet could ever achieve. This introduces more potent novel actions: anti-thyroid, pro-oestrogenic, detoxification disrupting…are we pushing the limits of desirable effects and introducing some undesirable ones and who should we be most conservative in?

Hear all about it by listening by my latest Update in Under 30: Quercetin – Are We Pushing the Limits?
For all Update in Under 30 Subscribers, it’s now available in your online account and if you are not a subscriber you can purchase this individually here.

Ready, Aim…Don’t Fire!

Oral sex. There I said it.  Last month when I talked about Helicobacter pylori and where people might ‘catch’ this – if they didn’t inherit the little critter from their mum or family as an infant – we thankfully were able to rule out kissing as a source of transmission between couples P.H.E.W…but I sort of got shy (Who, you, Rachel?!!) and danced a little bit around the question of whether other forms of sexual contact represent a possible route of exposure (pardon the pun).  Until a lovely colleague after listening to Blowing the lid on H.pylori-who gets it & why – said, ‘Now seriously Rach, are you trying to say, oral sex may be an issue?’ Well…ahem…maybe.  You see, remember what I said about candida being a vector for H.pylori and therefore H.pylori being present in the vaginas of women who have this bacteria residing in their stomachs. Ok…enough of that now I am blushing..but if you want to read more on this grab this article in BMJ from 2000 by Eslick who discusses (and seems a little too interested in, can I just say), the risks of H.pylori transmission via a myriad of sexual activities.

A month has passed since that last UU30 edition and it’s time for another instalment. This month, I’ve taken the giant leap forward many of you requested, into the fascinating realm of how best to manage H.pylori positive patients, in whom this bacteria really does constitute a pathogen.

Do we just try with multiple relentless antimicrobials to blast holes in this critter, a lot like the conventional approach…which, thanks to its significant capacity for developing resistance, is like aiming at a constantly moving target,…or…?

I’ve got a very different suggestion and approach.   Increasingly we realise that the GIT microbiome is a vulnerable & dynamic balancing act and as a result, when treating patients with confirmed parasites, or worms or potentially (but not always) pathogenic bacteria such as H.pylori, most of us are doing much less ‘weeding’, less ‘eradicating’ and definitely less ‘shooting at things only to hit others’, these days.  Instead we think about how we can best change the environment.  So, what is it about someone’s stomach that opens the door to H. pylori and lets it in, and then perpetually ‘feeds’ it to ensure it stays longer and wreaks some real havoc, we identify & treat what about this over-friendly stomach is amenable to rehabilitation? As it turns out…that’s a lot.

And surely if add to our antimicrobials a larger focus on rejuvenating the gastric environment of H.pylori patients, to control the growth and activity of this bacteria, and in some cases even kick it out of the big brother house altogether…the chances of relapse and reinfection (a big one in this condition) will be dramatically less..not to mention the broader benefits on the greater GIT function, now the stomach has been remediated.

Or you could just keep trying to hit the moving bulls-eye?

For a bacteria identified just a few decades ago as being a cause of chronic gastritis, atrophic gastritis and gastric carcinoma, the escalation of number of antibiotics used to eradicate it (4 at last count + PPI) has been nothing short of breathtaking.  A management approach more consistent with both integrative medicine and with an improved understanding of the delicate microbiome includes a bigger focus on changing the gastric environment to ‘remove the welcome mat’. What do we know about how to do this successfully? It turns out…quite a lot.

 

Hear all about it by listening by my latest Update in Under 30: H.pylori – Eradicate or Rehabilitate?
For all Update in Under 30 Subscribers, it’s now available in your online account and if you are not a subscriber you can purchase this individually here.

Special offer for RAN subscribers…

Not long ago, Kathryn Simpson and I were sharing a hotel room on yet another work trip to somewhere. The lights were out, it was way past our bedtime and we were just gasbagging incessantly like a couple of teens, when a thought pops into my head:

“Hey Kathryn, back when you were my student, did you ever imagine this scenario in the future – you know us being colleagues and friends and having slumber parties full of laughing?”, she replied, “Well no, but you know what I REALLY never could have imagined in my wildest dreams…the Australian Naturopathic Summit and you inviting me to be a co-founder of something that’s had such a big impact! That one I just didn’t see coming!”

Well to be honest, neither did I but sometimes I just have an idea that won’t leave me alone and is too important and too promising to ignore. Three years ago when I shared one of these, the vision of a national naturopathic conference by naturopaths for naturopaths, that would lift us all professionally, offer collaboration over competition and provide us the highest level of non-biased education, with Nirala Jacobi, turned out she’d been visited by the same thought bubble.  Then I approached Kathryn, who was working for me at the time and pretty fresh out of uni but full of passion and drive about building a better ‘new’ naturopathic career path, one that supported rather than splintered those emerging out of great courses into a harsh, challenging professional space.

Time-travel forward to now, we are just 10 weeks(ish) out from erecting the chai tent, marquees and lanterns, for the second inception of this extraordinary thing called the Australian Naturopathic Summit 24-26th August at Lennox Head.

This is the culmination of 3 years of work from us, one paid project manager and the exceptional generosity of over 25 of our naturopathic idols, thought leaders and torch bearers who are donating their time to present plenaries, workshops, case studies, panel discussions… because they believe so strongly in the cause and the need for such an event. 

If you think I am running out of breath between all these words..I am. This thing…has taken on a shape and life much greater than even we had envisioned.

If you follow the work I do – you’ll know that I am passionate about collaboration over competition.  I could never have come to this place in my career without the input of many (some who remain on speed dial even now!) and through my mentoring programs, the infamous RAN internship and hopefully times we’ve come across each other…I’ve encouraged you to do the same and by doing so, grow bigger together.  So just imagine the value of collaborating face-to-face…over 3 days…at a festival in Lennox Heads… ? And not just for 1 hour, but for 3 full days with 100’s of other practitioners from all areas, specialities and locations. Oh and if you’re thinking you’ll just have to wait ’til the next one’…SPOILER…there is no guarantee of a next one! Being a passion project that we 3 donate our time to, for you, it requires your support to keep it going.

So with saying all that…..(cajon roll…that’s a drum for you non-hippies)….It is with great excitement and enthusiasm that today I can announce a special deal for RAN subscribers. Yes….that’s you! Just like myself you all see a need to grow and build skills, knowledge, competence and confidence in the practice of naturopathic medicine. Come join the very best of your profession and take up this special offer to attend the second independent Australian Naturopathic Summit held in Lennox Head on 24-26 August.

To get 15% off a full 3 day pass enter Festival at the checkout

Book your tickets before they run out at  www.australiannaturopathicsummit.com.au.
For information or questions about this special email [email protected].

This summit is unprecedented in Australia for the following reasons:

  • It is free from commercial bias
  • It is about professional development, improving our practices and career paths, not products
  • The primary objective is to support the Australian Naturopathic community, celebrating our diversity and creating a platform for our own Naturopathic torch-bearers in various areas (Practice, Research, Herbal Manufacture, Corporate Health, Entrepreneurship etc.) to help light the way for the broader professional community

This year our theme for ANS 2018 is ‘Coming Together On Common Ground’
Naturopathy has many different practices and paths,
but we all work for the same purpose, guided by the same principles.

The ANS 2018 program has three distinct themes across the 3 days…

  • Friday 24 August: Custodians of the Vital Force
  • Saturday 25 August: Upskilling Your Clinical Practice
  • Sunday 26 August: The Business of Business Development

The morning of each day consists of plenary sessions followed by a lengthy lunch break that allows for networking, beach walking, guided outdoor meditation, perusing the vendor village, or simply enjoying the festival atmosphere in the beautiful outdoor location that our summit is surrounded by OR for those die-hards some amazing case studies presented by the likes of Jason Hawrelak, Dawn Whitten and Sandra Villella.  Afternoon sessions are workshop-style, designed to be more interactive. There are plenty of workshops to choose from to keep you riveted and inspired.

We have created a jam-packed program to do just that.
Download your copy of the full program here!

ANS 2018 – come join the very best of your profession.

Book your tickets before they run out at  www.australiannaturopathicsummit.com.au.
To get 15% off a full 3 day pass enter Festival at the checkout.
For information or questions about this special email [email protected]


Enough said.

Have I Got Your Attention Now?

You know I’m not one to raise my voice and make scene.

Ok, I always raise my voice and make a scene, but only when I think something really warrants our attention and the issue of under-recognised, under-estimated and mismanaged chronic worms, demands our attention.  I’ve been talking about this ever since the first patient stepped into my clinic, a young girl with severe mood issues who just happened to also have treatment-resistant chronic threadworm, and since then, as the volume of patients I see affected by this has grown, so too has the volume of my message. And there’s actually so much to say.

Chronic worm problems don’t always come with an itchy bottom calling card. In fact, many individuals don’t have any of the telltale signs you might be used to screening for.  Recent research suggests adult men, in particular, are commonly asymptomatic when infected with them (Boga et al 2016)

So what alerts us as practitioners to the possibility of chronic worms – so many things…but here’s just some thought bubbles to get you started.

Are you treating patients with recurrent or treatment-resistant Dientamoeba fragilis?

Are you seeing women who have thrush-like symptoms, in spite of negative swabs and no benefit from antifungals?

Are you faced with families coming undone because of one child’s behaviour whether that’s aggression, defiance, emotional lability or just serious sleep problems? (more…)

I’ve Had a Gut Full of Glutamine!

“I always give some Glutamine to heal their leaky gut”

Cue pained expression on my face.  No, I’m not a fan.  I take that back, I have no problem with the amino acid itself and I’m still in awe of its incredible multifaceted role in the gut.  What I do have a giant issue with is the mismatch between everything we are being told Glutamine is going to help our patients with, and the dosages that apparently will do that, and the reality.   I know, I’m attacking the Holy Grail of Gut Health 101….right? But it’s time to set the record straight. Firstly, where’s the evidence at in terms of Glutamine interventions in GIT pathology, particularly in relation to reducing excessive intestinal permeability and improving lining integrity  Well if you’re a rat – Good news!  Rats’ GITs have a greater dependence on Glutamine than ours, a deficiency of this amino produces clear reproducible negative effects and supplementation fixes these brilliantly!

But if you’re treating humans not rats – well – the evidence & the case for Glutamine for the Gut is not so straight forward or impressive. (more…)

GORD, It’s Hard to Sleep In Pregnancy!

Just finished talking with the fearless fertility naturopathic specialist, Rhiannon Hardingham, who wanted to let me know that after listening to my Update in Under 30: Silent Reflux she’s had a lot of success treating both GORD and insomnia in her pregnant patients. That calls for double the celebration …YAY! YAY! 

‘What’s the magic answer?’, I hear you ask… (more…)

Iodine – Questions & Confusion Need Clearing Up!

That’s me…always questioning the ‘status quo’ and Iodine is  the perfect example!  The interview I did on this important subject with Andrew Whitfield-Cook from FxMedicine, covers a lot of key areas of confusion & underscores why it’s so critical all health practitioners get clarity on this topic. ‘It’s just a matter of geography’.

You know, I say to people, we can make vitamins ourselves, we can get all sorts of  other organisms including animals, bacteria and plants to make vitamins for us, and then eat those…but minerals…our source of minerals…well it all comes down to the rocks and the soil our food itself is grown or fed on.  And iodine is profoundly influenced by these factors. (more…)

So You Think You Know How to Treat Iron Deficiency?

And then you don’t, right? Because if my experience is anything to go by, there are some patients that just don’t respond to the usual iron repletion strategies. Depending on how low their ferritin is, this can then precipitate ‘practitioner panic’ (we’ve all had it right?!) where we’re inclined to go higher & higher with the dose and number of doses per day. Typically, this also fails. I hear about this from other practitioners all the time and I see the ‘normal’ doses of iron sneaking up and up.  Remember the days when we couldn’t get a non-pharmacy supplement with over 5mg elemental iron in it and now we have > 20mg?  But still, I hear you say, this fades into insignificance when you think about the standard medical model for iron correction which provides 100-200mg/day and you’re right. 

Gee… after hundreds of years of knowing about this deficiency and being the most common deficiency word-wide, you’d think we had our supplemental regime nailed.  

But that’s where you’d be wrong. (more…)

Sunshine Doesn’t Come In A Capsule..Last Time I Checked

Have you been a bit vitamin D trigger happy?  Does a patient’s low blood 25(OH)D test result have you reaching for a vitamin D supplement like the rest of us?  Yes…you might need to listen up then. Sunshine doesn’t come in a bottle.  That’s right, if your patient’s problem stems from inadequate sun exposure, have a guess what the best remedy is.  I’m not meaning to sound flippant but I think in all my ‘complex highbrow nutritional understanding’, occasionally (ahem), I have lost sight of the simple truths. (more…)

This is the Threadworm Answer You’ve Been Asking About..I repeat

I had the privilege of presenting at the Integria GIT Symposium last weekend.  For those of you who attended, you’ve gone back to your clinic with a bunch of new ideas and inspiration I hope…oh and a new respect, terror and watchfulness for threadworm thanks to me!  In my presentation I outlined the many presentations of this infestation, what to watch for and the risk of chronic recurrence due,in particular, to a reduced ability for some individuals to produce chondroitin sulfate which renders the GIT environment hostile to worms. 

Chronic threadworm is a huge & grossly under-recognised issue in paediatrics, often presenting as behavioural & cognitive disorders (and these can be severe), bruxism, enuresis etc. of course, but another presentation typically missed is vulvovaginitis, vulval pain or UTI like sx in young girls. (more…)

No Patch on Iodine Testing

 

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  Whenever I talk to practitioners about thyroid health, like I recently did at MINDD, I can guarantee I’m going to get 2 questions:

  1. Shouldn’t we aim for the high iodine intake of Japanese?
  2. Can we use the patch test for testing iodine levels in our patients?

I am so glad you asked.  The answers are no and no.

I am a nutter for minerals and iodine just won’t go away right now.  Too little = a problem, too much = often the same problems. To boot we are faced with radically contrasting views on assessment and dosage and just about everything iodine related. It’s not you – it’s iodine.  Trust me it’s a complex little mineral that requires some extra thought and caution.  If you imagine the Japanese have no thyroid problems – correct that big myth right now by reading this scientific paper that refers to health problems that result from too much dietary iodine.  It also explains that the typical first step in treating hypothyroidism in Japan is to reduce their iodine intake! (more…)

Pig Thyroid For Who?

pigGot any patients on Natural Thyroid Extracts (NTE)?  Me too…and I am finding it’s on the increase.  What’s the deal?  What do we need to understand about this form of thyroid replacement therapy to best monitor and manage those patients already on it or contemplating taking it? Does it really offer advantages to all hypothyroid patients or just to a subset of those and how would we recognise these people who might benefit the most?

NTE are marketed as being superior to synthetic thyroxine primarily based on the fact that they provide the patient with some T3 as well as T4 and in addition to that, being extracts of pig thyroid glands, there are other thyroid and iodine based actives e.g. mono and diiodotyrosine, present in the extracts.  So in essence this is giving us more iodine and more of the other ingredients we need to make our own thyroid hormones.  Based on this, many proponents of NTE say this is a major advantage over synthetic thyroxine replacement because it is more ‘holistic’ and it supports the patient’s gland in its own hormonogenesis.   (more…)