Teresa Gryder's Naturopathic Notes: How to get healthy and stay that way without taking handfulls of meds for the rest of your days.

SEVEN ALLERGY SEASON TIPS

5/25/2018

The long version on this topic went out in a newsletter, but for those of you who are not subscribed, here’s a quick checklist of ways that you can reduce your dependence on drugstore remedies during allergy season. Now that we know benadryl can contribute to dementia, the last thing we want to do is take that every day.

1. Tolerate some symptoms. A runny nose is rinsing allergens out of your head, and that is good. If you want to help your runny nose do its job instead of taking some drug that dries you up and makes the allergens stay in there, try using a neti pot.

2. Exercise daily. Cardio immediately changes the balance of your immune system and makes you better able to fight infections and less prone to hayfever.

3. Eat a clean diet rich in fruit, veggies and fresh fish, and limited in meat and cheese. Mangos, blueberries, cherries, raspberries, ginger and hot peppers have been shown to reduce allergies. Fast food, leftover fish, and aged meat and cheese definitely increase allergies. Kids who eat fast food have a much higher risk of developing allergic asthma.

4. Limit allergic exposures. This includes changing your sheets and dusting your house, cutting back on foods you are sensitive to, not using soaps that you sometimes react to, wiping down your pets, and generally trying to live in a minimal-allergen environment.

5. Increase Omega 3 fatty acids—You can take fish oil or you can change your diet to consume more fresh fish and certain nuts and seeds, specifically walnuts, chia, flax and hemp. Eggs are allowed because there are omega 3’s in the yolk.

6. Be nice to your intestines because leaky gut is another allergy trigger. Avoid stress, eat fermented foods, avoid NSAIDS, and keep going back to that clean diet with lots of veggies. Make sure you are eliminating every day. A happy intestine reduces your risk of allergies and autoimmune disease.

7. If you drink alcohol, go easy on beer and wine and try mixing drinks with clear liquors instead. Wine contains sulfites which worsen allergies. Gin contains juniper berries which are a fairly strong anti-allergy medicine. And there’s something about gin and tonics that’s perfect when the weather turns warm.

My Office Burned Down Last Night

1/29/2018

Fire destroyed the building. Such a transformative force. Time to move along.

My new practice address will be my home until further notice.

All visits for the months of January and February will need to be rescheduled; please call my cell number (patients will have it already) because the office phone is obviously out of commission.
--

Pesticides in your Food

11/9/2017

Most of us don't eat enough fruit and veggies. It's so easy to eat processed stuff and meat and cheese instead. It takes effort to eat a healthy diet. I happen to agree with Michael Pollan who wrote "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." But how can we safely eat mostly plant matter when it has toxic chemicals sprayed on it?

There are several tricks to getting or making clean food. The first and most obvious is to grow it yourself. Unfortunately gardening is time-consuming, and you can't get tomatoes in winter. Some folks can't or won't grow food. Grow what you can when you can, and forgive yourself when you can't. Home-grown tomatoes are one of the great pleasures in life.

If you're not going to grow it yourself, perhaps you have a job that will allow you to buy clean organic produce. There's more of it available all the time. If you have a local source of produce that isn't organic certified but is still cleaner than grocery store produce, use that. Farmer's markets are nice because you can talk to the farmer about what they use to manage pests and weeds.

The plant foods that you should try to buy clean are listed by the environmental working group every year as the "dirty dozen". The 2017 list (below) includes many of our favorite fruits and veggies.

The EPA sets limits for pesticides, herbicides, fungicides and other chemicals on food, and those limits are not zero. There's no way you can avoid every toxin in or on commercial food, but it's worth some effort to minimize your exposures. Young people and children have the most to gain in terms of healthy life years.

Some contaminants are easier to remove than others. Strawberries are covered in little pores and it is impossible to get the pesticides off (out) of them, so it is important to buy those organic or choose another fruit. Apples are also hard to clean because they can have a coat of parrafin (to make them shiny) that seals in the pesticides. Potatoes may be less important to buy organic if you peel off a good layer and boil them too. Boiling has been shown to remove or destroy some of the contaminants.

A review of the literature reveals that washing your veggies in tap water for 30 seconds actually removes most of the pesticides and fungicides. Unfortunately there are some that water does not remove, including chlorpyrifos (a nerve-gas pesticide) and vinclozolin (a fungicide). Thankfully these are removed by soaking in an acid solution, acetic acid being the most effective. Acetic acid is vinegar. The longer you soak your veggies the more of the chlorpyrifos is removed. My rule is to soak my cherries in a 5% vinegar solution for at least an hour.

Why do we care about chlorpyrifos? You may have heard about it in the news. It was originally developed as a nerve gas by the Nazis. Now it is used as a pesticide because it paralyzes insects. No surprise that it also wreaks havoc on the human nervous system. It was slated to be banned until Trump got elected. It's already banned for indoor use. Dow chemical (the maker of chlorpyrifos) donated a million bucks to Trump's inauguration fund to make sure that their profitable poison would remain legal. The EPA reversed course and this toxin will be sprayed on veggies and golf courses, in spite of the fact that it shrinks and deforms children's brains, lowers their IQs, and is linked to lung cancer and Parkinsons. Chlorpyrifos sticks to fruit even when it's rinsed in tap water.

For the foreseeable future we will need to work to avoid this toxin as best we can. This means seeking clean sources for our produce (gardens, farmer's markets, buying organic), washing it, peeling and boiling what can be peeled and boiled, and soaking plants that we eat with the skin on in a vinegar solution for at least an hour.

If you need a little good news to help wash off the sad feeling about all this poison, below are the kinds of food least likely to be contaminated. =-] Eat more of them.

Naturopaths Know about Aristolochic Acid Toxicity

11/8/2017

The photograph above is a wild ginger plant in the genus Asarum. I photographed it last week in the woods near my father's house. Don't eat it. We know this. Some plants are poison. Naturopaths know about aristolochic acid because it is part of our training in botanical medicine.

Medicine in the US today is as polarized as our politics, and just as full of talking points and bald faced lies. I find it infuriating and frustrating. Today I read a hit piece attacking naturopathic doctors. It claimed that we push herbs that contain aristolochic acid (AA). AA is a known carcinogen in the bladder and kidneys, and a new study suggests that it's causing a lot of liver cancer too. It really ticks me off when headlines say we push people to take poison. Not so. We are here to guard against such mistakes.

Chinese herbal products have often been found to contain toxins, and to be mis-labeled or not labeled at all. Herbs containing AA can be found in Chinese weight loss formulas, among other places Here in the good old US we may complain about the shady politics in the FDA, but at some level they really are trying to protect us. They're doing better than the Chinese authorities, far as I can tell.

There's been an incredible increase in the wealth of the Chinese middle class in the last 25 years. Suddenly people have jobs, cars, and disposable income. They are eating more sugar than they ever have before, and they are getting fat, even getting diabetes. The Chinese are looking more and more like US.

Combine their new obesity, disposable income, and good supply of poorly regulated herbal products, and you can understand why the Chinese are getting cancer from AA. Lots of other people in Asia, like the Taiwanese, are having the same problem.

We've known about AA for a long time. The FDA issued a warning about it in 2001 which is when it came onto a lot of people's radar.

If you would like to know if an herbal formula or a supplement is safe to take, there is no one better to consult than a naturopath. We study on which herbs are useful and which are dangerous.

It is true that the vast majority of herbal products are not very well tested. You have to do the research to find out which ones are good, or ask a naturopath. Some companies have excellent quality assurance standards, and some do not. If you are going to take a product, you want to know if it contains what it says on the label. You also want to know that it does not contain anything toxic. Third party testing of products is expensive and most companies don't do it. If you buy the cheapest herbs you can get, you are probably choosing the ones that haven't been checked. Just so you know.

The people who are dedicated to the project of smearing alternative medicine don't know much about it, but that doesn't slow them down. It has become disgustingly normal, especially online, to just say whatever you want as if it were true, and keep saying it until the dimwitted come to believe you.

Don't let them brainwash you. Keep your wits sharp. Gather information and challenge your own assumptions. There is disinformation on all sides, and medicine is as rich a medium for BS as politics.

Just because something is natural does not make it safe. Just because something is herbal does not make it dangerous. If you're going to experiment with herbs, do your research--or get some help from someone who has. And don't buy imported herbs online. Please.

Something's Fishy

8/22/2017

Or maybe I'm just paranoid. Any time there's a change in laws governing medicare, medicaid, or health insurance, I get suspicious. Who is benefitting here? The patients? Maybe a little. The doctors? Only the ones who really milk the system for all it is worth. The insurance companies? Certainly, until and unless we finally send them packing and opt for single payer. I've been heartened to hear Trump celebrating the single payer systems that exist in other nations. Yes, it is cheaper than the shitshow we have going.

Einstein's Definition of Insanity

8/11/2017

Skeptics Attack Naturopathic Medicine in Oregon

6/18/2017

I find it disheartening that so many people who consider themselves skeptical are really not open-minded critical thinkers, they are kneejerk naysayers. In their view anything that doesn't already fit into their particular understanding of reality is obviously nonsense. In other words, they are unwilling or unable to learn. And when these skeptical individuals band together under the banner of reason or science, without having an ounce of either to back themselves up, the result is saddening and maddening.

Discourse with all concerned parties will result in the best outcome. When the subject is medicine, we are all concerned. It matters.

I understand thinking that all ND's must be homeopaths or whatever, but it isn't true. There are rational and intelligent people practicing under this umbrella, and there are crystal-believing mumbo-jumbo talking MD's out there too. I know. I know these nonsense-accepting MD's exist because they talk to me. They assume that because I'm a naturopath I will agree.

My point is that the letters after the name give no assurance that you will be treated rationally. The amount of pill-shoving that goes on within conventional practice will be proven murderous someday. Chemotherapy will be thought barbaric.

More on this later. If you are already interested in expressing your support for wholistic and preventative medicine under the naturopathic umbrella, you can do so here:

http://www.naturopathic.org/lac#/57.

THE CFI LETTER (CORRECTED AFTER ACCIDENTALLY ADDRESSING IT TO GOVERNOR SMITH):
Tell Governor Brown:
Don’t Endanger Oregon’s Health – VETO SB 856The Oregon Legislature has just made the terrible mistake of granting naturopathssweeping new powers to make life and death decisions for Oregonians. Unless vetoed by Gov. Kate Brown, Senate Bill 856 will give naturopaths the same authority as medical doctors (MDs) and osteopathic doctors (DOs) to make important medical and legal judgments for people’s lives, despite lacking the basic qualifications to do so.
Naturopathic “medical schools” are not part of the mainstream health care education system and students are taught pseudoscience like homeopathy and “detoxification.” Unlike MDs and DOs, naturopaths do not do residencies upon graduation, but go straight into practice. Most naturopathic grads have never practiced in a hospital or specialty clinic.
Yet SB 856 would give NDs the authority to make critical decisions on serious health matters, such as the authority to:

Decide if seriously ill patients are eligible for hospice care, or make end-of-life decisions for terminally ill patients who are not competent to consent to treatment;
Weigh in on whether mentally ill persons should be involuntarily committed and decide what treatment they should receive;
Decide whether a child receives special education services or a veteran is disabled;
Make the call as to whether a food worker is putting the public at risk for contagious diseases;
Be employed by the state to provide medical care to vulnerable populations, like prisoners, juvenile detainees and addicts;
Order physical or chemical restraint, or psychotropic medication, for elderly and disabled persons.

Naturopathic doctors (NDs) do not practice evidence-based medicine and offer the public a plethora of dubious diagnoses to be treated with a cornucopia of pseudoscientific remedies, including homeopathy, herbs and colonics. Studies show they do not even support vaccinations.
Oregon already gives NDs the most liberal scope of practice among the few states that license NDs. It allows them to practice as primary care physicians, even though their education and training is inferior to an MD and DO. It would be a mistake to put the public at further risk by giving NDs authority to make medical judgments they are not properly educated and trained to make.
With SB 856, the state would be effectively forcing substandard care upon vulnerable populations who don’t have the capacity to refuse. This bill must not be signed into law.
Tell Gov. Kate Brown to veto Senate Bill 856.

On Spiritual Practice and Loving Life

3/26/2017

What do you practice in your life? I believe it was the Mahatma Gandhi who said that bit about how your thoughts become your actions and on down the line…. It was about how you create yourself by what you choose to think and believe. A practice is anything that you do regularly, even ritually. A morning cup of coffee is a common practice.

If it is true that what you do becomes who you are, it is worth putting some thought and intention into your own personal practice.

There are a lot of yoga practitioners out there. I count myself as one. I practice at least a little yoga every day. For me it is the avenue by which I came to recognize and respect my own body, which was necessary before I could begin to care for it. I was in denial of my body for many years. In my 20’s, though I looked fit, I could not touch my toes without bending my legs. One cannot gain flexibility without a regular practice, because it is a gradual process. And one cannot be truly strong without flexibility; if you can’t use the full range of your body’s movements, your strength is hobbled. I believe this applies to flexibility of the mind, too. If once lacks mental flexibility, one cannot learn.

Many say we should all develop a spiritual practice. This is about choosing at least some thoughts and actions that are oriented toward our highest values and goals. A cup of coffee might not satisfy this. Having some small fraction of each day that is dedicated to the big picture, to the people and things that we most love, is a simple way to remind us that we are part of that Wholeness that is the World. Regardless of your belief system—and even if you are firmly atheist or mildly agnostic—you will benefit from such a practice. The research tells us that you will live longer, be less depressed, and be more likely to request life-extending medicine when your time is short. You will love life more.

I personally have been mulling on these ideas of a practice because I now have a medical practice as well. What is the core of my practice? It is evolving. Perhaps the most important thing I can do for my patients is to help them to notice the great blessings that abound as long as we live. The irritants of daily life are passing things, often irrelevant in the longterm. I practice meditation, gratitude, kindness, the four agreements, and also being in nature. My church the is river, sky, mountain, snows of winter and buds of spring. Science shows that being in natural environments lowers blood pressure and stress hormones, but I believe it does more than that.

I also practice Feng Shui. Not in any traditional way, but in the deeper concept. Feng Shui taught me that the physical things that surround me either facilitate or impede my practice. I strive to make every item in my space a reminder of all I have to be grateful of, and what I am striving for. If physical things get in my way, I move them. If they are not moveable, I move other things to improve the flow.

So now you know my practice. What is yours? I look forward to hearing about it.

Ten Tips for Drinkers (You Know Who You Are)

2/2/2017

Never mix alcohol and tylenol. Tylenol’s other names are acetaminophen and paracetamol. It’s a common ingredient in over-the-counter cold medications (Nyquil), allergy meds, and RX pain meds like Vicodin and Percocet. People can accidentally take too much because it’s in so many different products. Tylenol is the world’s leading cause of fulminant liver failure, meaning severe, acute, and potentially fatal liver failure. Mixing alcohol with tylenol is the kiss of an ugly death. When you have a hangover and are searching the cabinet for something to treat your headache, use aspirin or ibuprofen or naproxen. They're not quite so dangerous.
Hydrate. Most hangover symptoms are caused by dehydration. Alcohol is a potent diuretic. You might know this from the way that one beer makes you pee like you drank two. Instead of taking pills for a hangover, guzzle water. And if you know you’re going to imbibe, drink water before you even start.
Take lots of vitamin C. Especially after a binge, vitamin C helps neutralize the toxic breakdown products of alcohol metabolism, and it helps reverse fatty liver disease. How much is lots? Four to twelve grams a day, split up into lots of doses. At the high end of this dose range it will cause diarrhea, but if you really binged, you will already have diarrhea.
Be nice to your Gut. Drinking alcohol causes Leaky Gut. This is when food particles leak through your gut lining instead of getting processed through the cells like they should. Leaky gut compromises your immune system and is a common factor in autoimmune diseases. So eat a healthy diet with fruit and vegetables, and eat fermented foods like live yogurt, kefir, kraut or kimchi. And get help if your gut isn’t working right.
Know when to call 911. If a heavy drinker suddenly spits up blood, it’s time to call. Alcoholics can die when blood vessels in their esophagus burst, but they can live to see another day if you call early enough. If the kids have had red bull drinks (alcohol and caffeine together) and start acting delirious, it’s time to call. Caffeine prevents people from passing out so they’re more likely to reach a blood alcohol level that is really poisonous. Oh yeah, and definitely get help if someone turns yellow. Their eyes turn first.
Eat FISH. It’s good for your brain. Heavy alcohol consumption can cause dementia, and consuming lots of good omega 3 fats helps prevent the brain from degenerating. So learn to love those fatty fishes—or start taking fish oil.
Drink coffee. You think I’m joking. Coffee helps reduce liver damage caused by alcohol and by hepatitis. It’s a powerful effect. Coffee also helps prevent dementia for other reasons. So enjoy your cuppa joe! It will help you sustain your Great Satan lifestyle longer.
Sunbathe. Large expanses of skin in bright sunshine makes hundreds of thousands of IU’s of vitamin D in just 15 minutes, so get a natural dose any time you can. If you can never expose your white expanses, or if you live where the sun don’t shine, take a vitamin D supplement. It helps prevent cirrhosis.
Take a B Complex. Thiamine is vitamin B-1, and a deficiency of this vitamin causes the severe memory loss that affects alcoholics. You need all the other B’s too, so don’t take just one kind of B. Take a quality B-complex in doses as big and regular as your drinking, and you’ve headed off this deficiency at the pass.
Don’t be stupid. I know it’s hard not to be stupid when you’re drunk but plan ahead when you’re not drunk so that you have a ride, a coat, and a place to crash. Your body wastes heat after heavy drinking, so you can feel warm while you are descending into hypothermia. Take a little extra care if you’re feeling reckless or have a tendency to behave impulsively. Get help if you’re really headed down the drain: we need you.

7 MYTHS about Poison Ivy and Oak

11/7/2016

YOU MAY THINK YOU KNOW ALL ABOUT IT. People who grow up around poisonous plants learn the hard way, like I did. I spent my childhood covered in itchy rashes, and with great fluid filled blisters between my fingers and toes. Soap was anathema to me; I was a wild child. Because of this early education I know what poison ivy looks like, even when it’s called poison oak, even when the leaves are off in winter. It’s the same stuff.

This article is for those of you who’ve never had it, or had it once or twice, and for the people who ended up at the doctor’s office because of it. I want to motivate you to learn to recognize the plant, because the best treatment for its nasty rash is PREVENTION. Avoid contact with the plant, and avoid contact with things that have touched the plant, and you limit your risk. Nobody wants the rash. Itching is at least as maddening as pain.

If you are not quite sure what it looks like, you won’t learn it from pictures or articles. You have to learn it in the field. Ask about it when you’re out in the wilds with people who know the plant. We can point it out to you in all its forms.

You can limit exposure by wearing clothing that covers your skin. And you can coat your skin with tecnu or bentoquatam to prevent the urushiol from sticking to you. Tecnu is a product that solvates the oil but it contains propylene glycol (radiator coolant) which I’d rather not introduce to the environment. Bentoquatam is a product made from bentonite clay that forms a coat on your skin to block the oil from getting on you. It is probably more environmentally friendly.

The leaves of both poison oak and ivy are shiny when they are new and become duller over time. Both have “leaves of three”, meaning there are three leaflets on each stem that together comprise the leaf. Both have some variability in the leaf shape, with edges that range from toothed to smooth to almost lobed, but the “leaves of three” always fit together in a similar way. The leaves of both turn red in the fall and both can have white fruit that remains on the plant after the leaves have fallen. Both like to grow along rivers and streams and forested trails, in exactly the terrain frequented by boaters. The saying “leaves of three, let it be; berries white, take flight” applies to both.

There’s a debate about which plant is more contagious or causes a more severe rash. I have found nothing to shed scientific light on this question, though most people online say oak is worse. They seem equivalent in potency to me personally, and are both to be avoided.

The toxin in both poison oak and ivy is a sticky oil called urushiol. It causes a type of contact dermatitis that an immunologist would call a type 4 delayed hypersensitivity reaction. The rash appears 1-3 days after exposure to the urushiol. The first symptom is an itch, then red bumps form which later become amber fluid-filled pustules. If you scratch open the pustules then you have open wounds which can get infected, complicating the problem. The final stage is the healing of the pustules and wounds, which can take a week or more.

There are a lot of myths about poison ivy/oak, and I’ve listed my top seven here.

Myth 1: The fluid inside the pustules is contagious. This is FALSE. What is contagious is the sticky urushiol oil. The fluid from the pustules is just serous fluid from your body and it is harmless. The oil, on the other hand, can stick to your skin, your dog, your walking stick or your shoes. It “sticks around” until it is washed off with lots of soap. If it is on your skin in one place and you scratch there, then touch somewhere else, you have just introduced the toxin to a new location and unless you wash it off you can look forward to a nice itch starting in about a day.

Myth 2: You have to go get steroids to treat poison ivy. Not so, in fact corticosteroid drugs like prednisone have some nasty side effects and should only be used under doctor’s orders. Most of the time the rash is not so severe and will go away on its own given removal of the toxin and time. After you wash off the urushiol you just need to keep your sanity while the rash runs its itchy course, which takes about a week. You can reduce the immune response that causes the dermatitis by taking lots of vitamin C. If the itch keeps you from sleeping you can take an anti-histamine, but don’t take these every night longterm because they also contribute to dementia.

If it makes you feel any better, you can temporarily kill the itch with cold water. After you’ve scrubbed it with hot soapy water, chill the rash with the coldest water you can get from the tap. After you cool the affected skin, don’t touch it, and it won’t itch for a while.

Myth 3: You can wash the urushiol off with river water. This is debatable because there does seem to be some reduction in future symptoms from vigorous washing in river water after an exposure. Still from what we know about the chemistry of urushiol (a very long and sticky oil molecule), it can stick on the skin until you attack it with either a detergent or a solvent. Fancy soap with moisturizers is less effective for removing the oil than just plain soapy soap. Rubbing alcohol can work for removing the oil but it stings like the devil if you’ve scratched yourself too hard, and you might not want to bathe in it. Brief soaping up like we normally do will not get urushiol off. You have to really scrub it. Use a lot of soap and a wash rag, and scrub every surface especially in nooks like between your fingers. Wash well within 24 hours of an exposure, and follow that up with repeated soapy bathing any time you feel an itch. Wash your clothes and shoes in hot soapy water too. If you get all the urushiol off, you will at least avoid starting new patches.

Myth 4: You can’t get poison ivy/oak in the winter time. Unfortunately, false. You can get it any time of year. Sure, the sappier the plant is, the more urushiol it will deliver on contact. Late winter and early spring buds are particularly dangerous because they are bursting with sap and don’t have leaves yet. After the leaves have fallen in the autumn it can definitely still cause the rash. We recently confirmed this when at least two of us got the rash after returning home from an October Rogue trip. Even in the wintertime it’s best to give the plant a wide berth, because what looks like a dry twig could cause days of misery if it were to happen to get in your pants. Twigs of poison ivy have been seen sticking up out of the snow on backcountry ski trips.

Myth 5: Scratching does no harm. Actually, the bad news is that scratching makes it worse. First of all, you can spread the toxic oil around your body by scratching. Second, scratching makes it itch more, because it releases more histamine. Third, scratching will open pustules and cause wounds which can get infected with bacteria. It’s best to leave the pustules alone as long as you can, draining them with a pin if they get in the way. Cover them with a bandage to keep the thin skin from coming off until the wound has started healing from underneath. If you’d rather put calamine on it that doesn’t hurt, and it does mark the area not to scratch.

Myth 6: You can get immune to it. Actually it works the opposite way. The more you are exposed to the toxin, the more sensitive you get. You will get the rash faster if you’ve had it before. There are those who say if you eat the first bud of new poison ivy leaf that you see in the spring, that you will be immune. I doubt it, but people say it. As far as I know the only way to remain insensitive to the toxin is to avoid contact with it.

Myth 7: Jewel weed will treat your poison ivy rash. This is definitely false. Someone actually did a study on this. Jewel weed is a pretty orange-flowering plant that grows near water where you also will probably find poison ivy/oak, but it makes no difference in the course of the dermatitis caused by urushiol. We love our folk remedies but this one is unfortunately just a nice story.

This may not seem like an urgent concern, but you don’t have to look far to read stories of people who’ve gotten the poison rash on their face or genitals, which could obviously be very bad. There are also stories of people getting it in their lungs from breathing smoke from fires where it is burning. Severe exposures or reactions do need medical attention. Proper dosing and tapering is essential to manage the negative effects of corticosteroids, so please do not take them at home without seeking a doctor’s opinion. Definitely tell the doctor if you’ve been out in the woods when you get a rash. I have seen three cases so far of city doctors misdiagnosing a poison oak rash as shingles. They are not the same, and you can help the doc get the treatment right by giving them a full and proper history of your rash.

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