Dr. Scott Vrzal is giving listeners $50 off his Functional Muscle Testing online courses! Use coupon code LTH here: sownutritionalsystems.com/functional-muscle-testing
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https://learntruehealth.com/understanding-the-7-types-of-headaches
Unlock powerful healing tools with Functional Muscle Testing—get $50 off with code LTH at sownutritionalsystems.com/functional-muscle-testing.
In this enlightening episode, Ashley James welcomes back Dr. Scott Vrzal to discuss his newly released book “The Headache Advantage,” which identifies seven distinct headache patterns that signal specific underlying health issues. Dr. Vrzal explains how headaches serve as the body's communication system, revealing connections between neurotransmitters, organ function, and nutrition while sharing practical approaches to address root causes rather than symptoms. The interview covers surprising nutritional insights, functional muscle testing techniques for “listening” to the body, and natural immune support strategies, empowering listeners to decode their body's signals and take control of their health naturally.
Highlights:
Intro:
Hello True Health Seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. I am so excited to have back on the show Dr. Scott Vrzal, who is here to teach us so many things today. You're going to be blown away by today's interview. Now, he and I sat down before his book came out. So when you hear us talking about a few things, we say the beginning of flu season, and you're like, hey, that was a few months ago. You're right, that was a few months ago. I'm publishing this now because his book is out and I want to let you guys know his book's pretty awesome.
He had reached out to me after this interview that you're about to listen to and said, hey, would you like to write a review for my book? If I gave you the PDF of my book before I publish it? And I said, yes, heck, yes, I will. Getting the backstage pass to your book before you publish it. That's going to be awesome. So I wrote him a review. That was, I guess I won the award for the best review. I'm not even a doctor, but all the cool doctors he reached out to, all the cool health people, health experts he reached out to, and I kind of won because he turned around with tears in his eyes and tears in my eyes, and he goes, “You just wrote the forward to my book.” And I'm like, “He goes, you just wrote the forward to my book.” And I'm like, “Yes, life goal achieved.” I mean it. Come on, how many books have I read? I've always been , oh, I want to be the cool person that an author asks to be the person to write the forward to their book. And here I am, Ashley James. I wrote a forward to someone's book, not only someone, someone who wrote a really awesome book, The Headache Advantage.
I bet everyone knows someone who suffers from migraines, who suffers from headaches, and they can be chronic, they can be once in a while. But even if you have a migraine twice a year, that's still a major disruption in your life. For some people, migraines last a week or longer, or even just recovering from them. It takes over a week. So no one, no one wants that. Who wants that? But the whole thing that we unpack today, which is really exciting, is this concept that the body is speaking to us, that every symptom of the body is the language of the body, and he teaches you today how to listen. Now, he teaches online. This is a newer development, so exciting. He teaches online the techniques that he uses as a chiropractor.
And my chiropractor, who is a saint, I'm going to submit to the Vatican that my chiropractor be registered as a saint when she passes away, because she has been a miracle worker for me. She's an amazing chiropractor. So if you're in and around the Seattle area, Dr. Claire Russell, Blue Heron Chiropractic, I am doing a little shout-out. She has put me back together. She's just the most amazing chiropractor.
If you don't have an amazing chiropractor, if you don't believe your chiropractor is worth their weight in gold-pressed latinum, then you need to go find another chiropractor and hunt around, because I've been to over 13, 14 chiropractors in my life. I've been seeing chiropractors since I was three, and there's a bunch of chiropractors out there that are okay, that are good. They're good, they do no harm, they help a little, they're good, amazing.
Then once in a while, maybe 10%, let's say, are outstanding, just blow-your-mind amazing. You know, those chiropractors aren't there yet. They're still figuring their way out in the world. You know, it takes a few years to get to amazing status, and some are born that way, some have to work on it and work hard to get there. But you don't want to give up on chiropractic. You want to hunt around and find the chiropractor for you that knocks your socks off, that makes you feel three inches taller when you walk out of there, that makes you feel like, oh wow, I didn't realize I could feel that good again, or even that good for the first time.
That's the kind of chiropractor you want to see, and every chiropractor that's been blows me away amazing has used functional muscle testing, has used specific kinesiology techniques to talk to my body, to see what it needs to be corrected, be corrected, and this is like understanding the layers of the nervous system on a whole new level, that our body actually is constantly talking to us, but we didn’t. We didn’t know how to listen.
Kind of like how cats and dogs can literally string together words that make dramatically correct sentences. If you haven’t seen this on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, or wherever you watch videos—not your TV, if you still have cable, maybe there, I don’t know if you have a smart TV—but go type in “talking dog buttons” or “talking cat buttons” and you’re going to watch 500 hours of dogs interacting in a real way, and cats too.
It’s amazing that these animals, this whole time we’ve had pets, hundreds of years we’ve had pets, and we didn’t realize that they were that smart. We knew they were kind of smart. Like, oh, I told him to go bring in my slippers and he actually brought me my slippers, I thought that was the height of the intelligence of dogs, because I had a friend once who she would say go get the mail or go get the newspaper. I mean this is back in the nineties, and we lived out in the middle of nowhere. So you had to go, half a mile down the road to the mailbox and this dog, you just say go get the mail and he would run, he’d go out the dog door, down the stairs, down the long road, all the way to the mailbox and he’d come back with it and drop it right by your feet, and I thought that was the height of their intelligence. But the whole time, they’ve actually understood us, and when we give them an outlet like the buttons to press, they have humor too. They’re hilarious. There’s this one dog that will hit the button that goes “bruh” to his owner and it is. The timing is perfect. It’s really hilarious.
So, my point being, our body has actually been communicating with us this entire time and we didn’t know the language of the body. So we’re just kind of like, stupid body, let’s just go take an Advil. We just weren’t listening, and now we can listen. Now it’s all of a sudden we have those buttons, the dog finally has the buttons. Now you’re going to actually, by learning from Dr. Scott, you will have the ability to communicate with your body in a way that you’re able to decipher the language the body’s speaking and then you can help it to get better, and that’s what amazing chiropractors do.
But Dr. Scott, first of all, this whole interview is great, but what he does is he teaches. He has this course that you can sign up for. Super affordable in terms of what you’re getting for it. Very affordable. He’s giving us $50 off. The course is just under $300. So it comes to just under $250 after the discount, which is really gracious of him to give a $50 discount.
He has an introduction to functional medicine, functional muscle testing. Introduction to functional muscle testing. That's kinesiology learning about how to do applied kinesiology techniques. So if you’re completely new to applied kinesiology, you want to take that course. If you’re like me and you have done applied kinesiology, maybe on yourself and family members, or you’ve done it with some clients, or you’ve done a little bit, but you want to take it to the next level and you’re intermediate, he has an intermediate hybridized kinesiology techniques that he has mastered and created through years of working with so many clients. So really exciting to share this.
When I first started talking to him about it, he’s like, “Wow, I really only gear this towards, maybe only doctors.” I’m like, “Okay, so can anyone learn it and do it?” He goes, “Yes.” “So wouldn’t this really be for anyone?” He’s like, “Yes, you’re right. I guess we could say that it could be for anyone, because I mean, if anyone’s interested in listening to their body.” I’m like, “Yes, my listeners are interested in listening to their body, but since so many of my listeners are in the health space, I think this is great to add to your repertoire, to your tool belt, and at such an affordable price.” Then you just have this amazing tool, again, giving the dogs and the cats the buttons to talk. Love it.
If you haven’t seen those videos, you have to go check them out. They’re hilarious. So use the coupon code LTH, as in Learn True Health. Use the coupon code LTH. Anytime I recommend something, just try the coupon code LTH, because I always try to get you guys a discount. So coupon code LTH, as in Learn True Health.
The website is S-O-W, as in Society of Wellness, S-O-W. nutritionalsystems.com/functional-muscle-testing. I’m sorry that’s very long. I promise it’s going to be right there at the top in the links to the show notes of today’s podcast at LearnTrueHealth.com and wherever you’re listening—Spotify, iTunes, wherever, Podbean, wherever you’re listening from. The links are going to be there in the description of the show note area. If you ever can’t find a link, just email me at support@learntruehealth.com. Feel free to email me, be , “Hey, hey, that episode with muscle testing,” and I will send you the link.
You can also come join us in the Facebook group if you’re into that, if you’re into Facebook and if you’re into connecting with the community and asking questions and learning from each other. I love what we learn together as a community in the Learn True Health Facebook group. Come join us. You can go to learntruehealth.com/group. We’d love to see you there.
If you would love to connect with me because you’ve heard my story, maybe I’ve reversed several major issues and I did a 180 with my career after healing myself and said I have to help others. I’ve been doing that for now 13 years, probably going on 14 since 2011. So that’s a whole lifetime. It feels like. What were you doing in 2011? I was changing careers and beginning to help people heal themselves.
Before that, I specialized in anxiety cessation. I’ve been doing that since 2005, so that is two lifetimes ago. I’ve been helping people to end anxiety. So if you have a family member, a friend, yourself, or a teenager who suffers with anxiety, I have amazing techniques that teach you how to turn off anxiety in the body and how to rewire your brain. That’s something I’m really excited to help people with because I can get people in 90 seconds to completely turn off anxiety and they finally have relief. Sometimes we cry just tears of relief and joy to finally be out of that state of anxiety. So I love teaching that.
So I’ve been working with people for a very long time in terms of emotional, mental, and physical health, and if you'd like to talk to me, if you want resources, please feel free to reach out to me. It’s free to have a 15, 20, or 30-minute phone call with me. Go to learntruehealth.com and in the menu, select “Work with Ashley James” and you’ll find two options there. One’s blood sugar and the other one’s phototherapy. Just check which one makes more sense to you. But you fill out a little form that tells me a bit about you and what your goals are and what you’re interested in learning about, and we just have a great conversation. I can point you in the direction of some great resources, especially the phototherapy, which I am thoroughly impressed with. I’ve been using it for over two years with my clients, over 200 clients having really great success, and I’d love to share that with you as well. I have nutritional protocols and so many resources for healing.
Thank you so much for being a listener and thank you so much for sharing this episode with those you care about. If you like or love my podcast, if it makes a difference for you, please, please, leave a five-star rating and written review, or just a five-star. That really helps. It helps promote the podcast to other people. So if you want this information to get out there, please do that. I really appreciate it.
Please copy and paste the link to this and send it to a friend, especially the friends that have headaches or migraines. You will be forever in their life if what you share with them ends their headaches for good. It will solidify you as someone they will always want to, bring a coffee or tea to, or invite out for dinner or something. Can you imagine suffering for so many years and then a friend says, “Hey, check this out”? That is the thing that they’ve been praying for. That’s how God works. God answers prayers through us. If you get an urge to share this episode, do it. You might be answering a prayer you just never know. Awesome, enjoy today’s interview. I know you will.
Welcome to the Learn True Health Podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 538.
Ashley James (0:14:00.624)
I'm so excited for today's guest. We have back on the show with us, Dr. Scott Vrzal. You were here in episode 523, and I love that you figured out how to decode headaches and migraines and get to the root cause, understanding the root cause and helping people to heal.
Headaches and migraines, they're often treated like they're the root cause, they're the problem, and they're the symptom of the problem. There's so many different root cause problems and you've decoded it. It's amazing. Now you have this book. It's an amazing book. Just launched, super excited for my listeners to get it for those who have headaches or migraines.
I also think it's really interesting just to learn this because you might not have headaches now, but maybe one day you will. Because this is one of the ways the body speaks to us. The body speaks in symptoms. We really need to listen and listen so that we can help our body come back into balance because the body is always working at healing itself. It's always being torn down and it's always building itself back up.
When we have illness, that's when we're tearing down more than we're building back up, just to simplify it. So our job is to get out of our own way. We got to really learn what is it that we're doing or not doing that the body really needs.
So you've simplified something that's so complex and it has really strained so many people for years to try to figure out the mechanism of action and what's going on with their migraines or their chronic headaches. So I'm really excited for the listeners to have access to this.
So we're going to dive deeper too. Episode 523 was a great place for us to start. We had a wonderful introduction to what you teach. Today we're going to really dive deep into this topic.
So excited to have you back on the show. Welcome.
Dr. Scott Vrzal (0:15:49.912)
Thank you very much. I'm so looking forward to sharing more and yes, diving into tying some brain chemistry into physical function and what we can do about it to really be our best. Some fun subjects for today.
Ashley James (0:16:04.588)
Love it. I know that we're going to get into so many different varieties of headaches. That's what I'm excited about because all the way from headaches, from restlessness and anxiety to headaches, from PMS to high blood pressure headaches and low blood pressure. It's just all the different things we're going to be talking about. Dopamine, serotonin, all those wonderful neurotransmitters.
Before we get into that though, I know you have this new, is it new? It's new to me, this new course where you're teaching practitioners and people who, you could be massage therapist, acupuncturist, anyone along that practitioner space, health coaches, teaching them in an easy to learn video series on functional muscle testing. I want to learn a bit more about that.
I also think that super health nuts who are really into learning how to listen to their body would also be interested in looking into it just to understand more about how we can listen to the body. So tell us a bit about this. Of course, the link is going to be in the show notes of today's podcast at LearnTrueHealth.com and wherever you're listening from in the show notes, the link will be there.
You informed me this morning that you're giving my listeners a discount. Thank you so much. You're taking $50 off. I think it's really generous. It's not that expensive to learn what you're sharing. It's pretty remarkable because I know a doctor local to here that charges thousands and thousands of dollars to teach kinesiology and muscle testing and you're doing it for a very, very affordable price.
So thank you for making it accessible to everyone. I think all practitioners should have this in their tool belt as some way of continuing to help their clients and patients to listen to the body. Tell us a bit about this for those who don't even know what functional muscle testing is.
Dr. Scott Vrzal (0:18:00.034)
So the functional muscle testing videos came about as I was running around the country years ago, teaching doctors on how to deal with autoimmune conditions and thyroid and high tech things like that. They needed a resource that they could go back to and workshop and practice with their colleagues. So we created these videos that basically walk a person or practitioner from this is what a muscle test looks like. This is how we would prioritize and determine what the weakest link is for the body, whether that's a thyroid or a stomach problem or brain issue.
Then, once we identify the priority, then we would look at clinical corrections, meaning whether they need a structural change, a nutritional change. Meaning diet or supplemental or acupuncture which kind of leads to some of the stuff we're going to talk about today with neurotransmitters. Sounds kind of high-tech, but this kind of brings it to a usable level. Then it also gets in especially in the second round of videos gets into how to determine what might be the best supplement and others if there's three stomach acid supplements that are good for a person which one is going to be the very best so that we can get to the most simplified approach and the least amount of change for a person to get the biggest bang for their buck, if you will.
Then there's ways of treating what we talked about in episode 523 with some of the emotional corrections and so on as well are shine the light on through those. So that's what the videos are about. They're great if you have a workmate that you want to practice with and you can get together and do a 30 minute video together and kind of refine your skills.
Ashley James (0:19:50.916)
I'm definitely doing it with my husband. I want to learn it. I've been using muscle testing for years, especially as you had mentioned, if you have, for example, you have three different supplement bottles that are very similar. I typically do it at the supplement store. There are a few health food stores around here and I trust the quality or I know the brands and they're used to it. They're used to people doing that.
But I'll do either the sway test or I'll do a muscle test on myself. I find it easier for someone though. The sway test for me is, you sway forward when it's something your body wants and you sway back when it's something your body doesn't want. Like putting my arm up and having my husband just push on my arm the same, it's not precise. It's just that he's trying to push the same amount without him seeing what I'm holding, so there's no unconscious bias.
But it's pretty crazy that your arm will become so much weaker when you're holding something you shouldn't have. I actually remembered learning this many years ago. I feel it was something 30 years ago on a PBS special. It was just a famous healer author who has passed away now, but he was teaching. I was too young to go like, wow, they're really doing something kind of far out. They were teaching, hold your arm up and think of love. He'd push on the arm and no matter what, couldn't get the arm to go down. He said now think of hate. The person could not keep their arm up no matter what. She's like, wow, I feel so much weaker. It's just interesting how the body responds just to even a suggestion of an emotion and a vibration.
Everything is energy, everything is vibration. So if you're trying to figure out, well, is this protein powder good for me? Or there's a bunch of different protein powders, which one am I going to take? Or there's a bunch of different vitamin C's, which one is the one I want to take? Then you can do a muscle test. If you're buying one anyway and you kind of have decision paralysis, you don't know which one's best, why not muscle test? It goes so much deeper than that, that we can actually use muscle testing to ask the body what it's missing or ask the body where we're out of alignment, ask the body. It's a way of communicating with each other. I imagine Helen Keller. We try to figure out how do we communicate with her. She can't hear, she can't see, how do we communicate? They figured out how to communicate with her. That's sort of the same thing, figuring out how to listen to the body. The body is not stupid, it's super intelligent, but we just don't speak its language. So we have to listen and learn how to speak its language.
Dr. Scott Vrzal (0:22:51.552)
Just a pearl to even help you get started in the supplement store, for example, in general, energy goes in the right and exits the left. If we're holding a product in the right hand and it's detrimental for us, the whole nervous system will shut down, kind of like you alluded to. Whereas if we need that product, physically need that product and we would benefit from it, we hold it in the left hand, we're actually going to get weak because that's taking it away from us.
That gives us a whole boom, a mind blow of opportunities and options. For example, most people have stress and need an adrenal supplement. So if they're in an adrenal fatigue state and we put, say, ashwagandha in their right hand, they're going to get weak. Areas of stress-related weakness are going to get more tender in the right hand, whereas if we put a supplement, a glandular, or a B5 or a L-utero that's going to help for more of a low adrenal fatigue scenario, they're going to get strong and those areas are going to get less tender.
It creates this whole tool to really, one, demonstrate to the patient, the person, how the supplement is going to benefit them. Two, helps us identify if there's potentially side effects. I took a supplement for a year to help me not bring everybody's baggage home. It turned out it was overdriving my immune system and I had a shoulder weakness for a year. I wasn't able to throw people out. I was playing softball at the time. Wasn't able to throw them out at first base until I finally realized that the supplement was creating a weakness in my shoulder because of its adverse effect on my thymus in this case.
Ashley James (0:24:32.834)
Wow. Does that still apply for people who are left-handed or have left-handed, right-handed? Does that matter?
Dr. Scott Vrzal (0:24:41.040)
It does not matter. It's the energy. It's a kind of acupuncture energy, a basic principle where it goes in the right and exits the left. So another application of that is an Apple watch or if people are wearing electronics that sense pulse and that sort of stuff on the right hand, wearing that on the right hand, it's going to adversely affect and manipulate energy going into the body. It's more detrimental.
Whereas it's much better tolerated if it's on the left hand where that's energy on its way out of the body.
Ashley James (0:25:11.046)
What? That's crazy. But we can't see it. So a lot of people don't really acknowledge that we have an energy field. But they can test it. You can test it. There are certain machines that can test it, that can see it. We have a torus. They call it a torus that is this magnetic energy field that comes up and around us and back in.
It's amazing how polarity, for example, when your polarity is off, just like the earth has poles, everything has, everything alive has a positive and negative pole, a battery or a magnet. But when your polarity is off, you will feel off. I have a client who corrected her polarity. I have a technique. It's acupressure combined with phototherapy and we do this technique and it only takes a day and the next day your polarity is now correct. It's in the correct spot. She got rid of a hundred percent of her symptoms that she'd had for six years. It was weird. She was feeling totally out of it and weak and nauseous and almost dizzy and anxious and insomnia and, she felt so off and she'd been to practitioner after practitioner. What it was was her polarity was off. So your energetic field can be disrupted, and can be affected by these things. That's what I love about muscle testing is we can listen to the body and learn very quickly what it needs.
Dr. Scott Vrzal (0:26:48.058)
100%. Then we throw in things like toxic metals that are going to make us more polar or adverse to electromagnetic challenges, whereas good minerals will be less sensitive to the electromagnetic. I'm a chiropractor. I studied neurology and so on in school, but I actually find that acupuncture meridians give me a more profound benefit. I mean, a great example of this is sciatica. So many people are plagued with pain down the back of the leg.
But it turns out that the kidney meridian goes down the back of the leg and parallels the sciatic nerve, and treating kidney issues or serotonin, which is the brain's control of that kidney. Treating those is where we get literally immediate relief of, say, that sciatic pain. Whereas in the outside world, they're going to be talking surgery to manipulate the way the spine works, or cutting pieces out of the spine to try to correct that pain when functionally we could correct the way the kidney functions, change their mineral balance, or take care of their fear or paralyzing emotions that are compromising the kidney, and that pain will go away virtually immediately.
Ashley James (0:28:05.464)
I love it. I love it. So the link to your functional muscle testing course is going to be in the show notes and wherever you listen from, whether it's Spotify, iTunes, wherever you listen from, the link is going to be there. The coupon code LTH, as in Learn True Health. LTH gives you $50 off. I'm going to take the course. I'm excited. I want to take it. I want to learn. I want to.
I know it's really, when you filmed it, I know you told me you geared it towards practitioners, but I still think there's going to be some people out there like me that are total health nuts. Well, I'm a practitioner. I was a massage therapist many, many years ago in Canada, and it's a bit different. In Canada, it's a three-year program versus a 500-hour program down in the States, depending on what state you're in.
Now I've been a health coach for many years, but I think I'd love to do it just to be able to muscle test myself and my husband and my son. I just know that there's probably some moms out there that would be, or some dads that'd be, super interested just to be able to muscle test their spouse and their kids and get a little bit of an idea as to, okay, you're out. Hey, let's go to the chiropractor. Your body's saying we should probably go to the naturopath and get some more of those herbs or something. Just to help you navigate your own health issues.
I'm just passionate about helping everyone to listen to their body more and to be proactive instead of waiting to be hit by the cosmic two-by-four. Listen to the whispers of the body. The body will whisper. The body will give you a little warning sign, like, headaches. We're going to get into that topic.
We often, unfortunately, in this day and age, we often wait until it's so big and so painful, then we'll take action. But if we can listen to the whispers, we can prevent the big things most of the time. I'd rather train us to listen to the body when the body is telling us, hey, something's a little off. My mom, who died of cancer, had warning signs for months, but she just chalked it up. She just kind of ignored it. She's like, we moved and I was busy and I was stressed out, and her digestion was off. She was kind of achy. She was kind of tired. She was having just these little things starting to tell her something was wrong. But by the time she got scans, it was too late. It's not to create hypochondriacs out of all of us, but if we listen to the body when it's the whispers, we can catch something and help correct it before it becomes something very painful like chronic migraines and headaches. Let's get into it. You wanted to talk about neurotransmitters and I'm super excited to learn because I know several people who suffer from headaches of unknown origin.
Dr. Scott Vrzal (0:31:03.139)
I mean, just to piggyback on your last statement about your mom and that sort of scenario. I tell people, listen, every meal your body's going to tell you, give you hints of what's going on and how it worked for you. I love the way you stated it—learn to listen to the whisper instead of waiting for the two-by-four, the yell, the shout, because often it's a whole lot more to overcome by that point.
Maybe I'm just fanatical, but at 14, I realized how lousy I felt when I ate things like sugar, for example. So I quit because I didn't like feeling that way. So, I mean, every meal, if we eat something that doesn't work for us—whether it's something that might work great for you, may not work for me—for example, tomatoes. O blood types will do fine on them. I'd fall asleep and have memory issues if I ate too much tomato.
I mean, all those little nuances tell a story and help us learn the early warnings before it's a catastrophic issue.
Ashley James (0:32:09.215)
Exactly. So, yes, you were saying to me that you wanted to get into the neurotransmitters and teach us more about that from the standpoint of what's going on with these headaches.
Dr. Scott Vrzal (0:32:23.151)
Dopamine would be the neurotransmitter, but the symptoms, the question for the consumer, for the health pursuer, is do you have vivid dreams, resting tremors, concerned about hormone-related cancers, monthly headaches, drown or those age spots, or lack of inspiration? Those are bi-temporal headaches. A headache that comes on every month, typically that physical manifestation of that headache is going to be in both temples. On the cover of my book, there's a diagram, does a pink headache, because it's often related to estrogen and dopamine is the brain's control of estrogen. It's kind of the precursor to estrogen.
So if estrogen is low, dopamine will be low and that would be the apathetic person that is estrogen deficient, if you will. They're going to have low dopamine symptoms, which ultimately could lead to resting tremors or Parkinsonian type concerns and trouble learning because dopamine is also the neurotransmitter of storing memories. So those are all signs that as we go further down the road of problems, the symptoms get more and more profound trying to call our attention to make a change.
So those are low dopamine symptoms of lower estrogen, whereas the high dopamine is going to be the vivid dreams. There's cheese, orange cheese is a great example. It's a monoamine oxidase, an MAO inhibitor, and many drugs. That would set up vivid dreams for people if they're sensitive in this regard, because that orange cheese could cause these nightmares. It causes these high dopamine symptoms that ultimately end up schizophrenia is a pathologic example of chronically high dopamine that at its heart is an estrogen metabolism concern. So when we learn these early whispers, then we can say, hey, this isn't working for me and figure out, every time a person eats sugar, they have these symptoms or, cheddar cheese, they have these symptoms.
Then we want to make changes in those and learn to listen to what our body's saying. Maybe you need to do a journal and create some kind of journal to know what food or what you're doing, that every time you eat cheese or so on, you end up with a headache at ovulation or at menstruation. So we can make these simple changes and correct it before it is a clinical emergency.
Ashley James (0:35:06.005)
So I want to stop there and unpack that because we have two things. You just talked about too little estrogen and too little dopamine and too much dopamine. Do you always see that there's also too little estrogen? Is that for both men and women? Is that also for women postmenopausal?
Dr. Scott Vrzal (0:35:30.025)
Yes, low dopamine is synonymous with low estrogen and high dopamine is synonymous with high estrogen. So, the female, you're probably well more versed in that. You can lay out the symptoms of low estrogen, but yes, that's menopause, perimenopausal scenario. Go ahead.
Ashley James (0:35:54.502)
I was just thinking, for me, low estrogen, usually women feel their testosterone more because that estrogen, when it's backed off, now we feel invincible, we can throw a man that pisses us off. That testosterone comes up, we feel it. But we hear the classic heart palpitations, sweating in the night, sudden hot flashes, weepy, weak, irritable. Does that do a good job?
Dr. Scott Vrzal (0:36:38.114)
So yes, yes. So for me, if they have high test low estrogen symptoms and high testosterone, typically insulin is the hormone that's going to cause a female to convert estrogen to testosterone. So that's going to create the testosterone kind of symptoms. At its heart there, we'd want to correct blood sugar concerns. Maybe it's a nerve. Gymnema is really good in that situation. That'll help with uterine fibroids or ovarian cysts. By stabilizing blood sugar, potentially reduce hot flashes. So that's a great way to go when that is the trigger.
If it's purely a hormone deficiency, we need to look upstream at cholesterol. How's a person's cholesterol? One of the very common causes of high cholesterol is hormone deficiency, because the body, the liver, is trying to kick out and produce cholesterol to have the building blocks because it's sensing that those hormones are low.
So that's a very common way I find to reduce and correct high cholesterol is to correct hormone function in the body, whether that means nutritionally feeding the ovaries or the testes or making these dietary changes to help the body have the building blocks, have the omega-3s and so on to produce the hormones as a whole.
Ashley James (0:37:58.402)
So just to emphasize, cholesterol is a necessary nutrient. The body makes every cell where the nucleus makes cholesterol, not just the liver like we once thought, but that it's the raw building blocks for making hormones, sex hormones, and stress hormones. You're saying that when cholesterol is high and hormones are low, the body is trying to make the raw building blocks to make the hormones. Where's the break? Where did it break? Where did it break down? Because for me, I imagine a factory where we have something coming along the assembly line. Here's the cholesterol, the DHEA. Here's the cholesterol for the widgets to make all the different sex hormones. Then you look on the other side of the machine, it's, well, we're not getting enough hormones. So what happened? Where did it break down?
Dr. Scott Vrzal (0:38:54.550)
So one aspect is, the person deficient in the omega-3 is the building blocks. So again, the body's trying to compensate for that. In the hormone example that we're using, is there a compromise in the female case? Obviously the ovaries, food corn can cause damage to the ovaries, it causes ovarian cysts. If that's damaged and it does under functions, and that can ultimately set up the high cholesterol scenario.
There's other potential triggers of low thyroid. Hypothyroid is massively common. Thyroid medications are the highest, most best selling medication, even over and above statins and cholesterol medications. So hypothyroidism—love this I in there—hypothyroidism is a very common cause of high cholesterol, which then starts that whole ball rolling of 12 medications by the time they hit 60.
Ashley James (0:39:49.632)
This is so annoying. I am so annoyed. Just hold on. Let me get on my soapbox. I promise I'll get off it quickly. We've been lied to for the last 40 years. I've had numerous cardiologists come on the show that say that cholesterol is not the cause of heart disease. We've been all lied to and that it's not even a good marker of heart disease. What we really should be looking at is blood sugar, triglycerides, blood pressure, inflammatory markers.
That's what we should be looking at. Forty-some years ago, the pharmaceutical industry decided they wanted to literally get everyone on this cholesterol medication. They wanted to do this mass experiment. So they said they made up an arbitrary number and there are doctors and scientists involved in this. I've seen them in the interviews. They said we had to come up with an arbitrary number. We did not have any scientific proof that lowering cholesterol in the population would prevent heart disease, but we wanted to do an experiment and see if it worked and the pharmaceutical industry obviously was behind it.
So they said, okay, total cholesterol 200. Then they get everyone on these meds. Majority of people on these meds. If you hit 55, you're being pushed pretty heavily. I've seen it in my own family members to be on these meds. What it does is the meds, I mean, you can speak up, but the meds damage the liver so much the liver ceases to produce it.
But every other cell in the body that has a nucleus is still producing it. Yet they don't say anything about lowering the exogenous cholesterol you're eating in your diet, which is really funny. But it didn't lower heart disease in the last 40 years. Then they lowered the number more. They said, okay, now we want a total cholesterol of 150. So we can get even more population on this drug. You qualify for this drug.
The drug was so damaging to the liver that up until 2012, remember this started in the 90s, I think. So it's been a while and up until 2012, if you were on cholesterol meds, I think it was every three months. This is, this is, this wasn't Wikipedia. I mean, I read it, the history of cholesterol meds. I don't know if Wikipedia still kept it up there, but every three months you had to go back and get liver enzyme panel testing to make sure that the medication wasn't damaging your liver too much because you could have liver failure. But yes, the last 40 years we have not reduced heart disease. It still is on the rise. Now we have this whole host of other things. So it's that whack-a-mole, it's going to pop up another page because cholesterol was not the problem. This was what you're saying. This is what I'm really excited about.
If you see high cholesterol, that's the body trying to heal itself. That's the body saying something is out of balance. Please help me. So now you're, okay, let's look at the hormones. Now let's look at the thyroid. Now let's look at the sex hormones now. So you're going down the list. Let's look at the nervous system. Let's look at the omegas. Let's, and you're going to list. You're going, why isn't the body using this properly? Why is it pumping out more? Because there's a signal. The body's intelligent, but in MD drug-based medicine, the body's stupid and we have to drug it into submission.
So, okay, I'm getting off my soapbox. I just think it's really important to understand that we've been lied to. I'm super excited about what you're saying. So for so many people who have these hormone issues and then they see they have high cholesterol, well, I eat really healthy and exercise and why do I have this high cholesterol? But they have really poor hormone output. The body is trying to patch it up, but it's missing certain key nutrients in order to patch it up. You said, good omegas. Corn damages ovaries. I’m kind of in shock. That’s the organic non-GMO corn, just all corn in general.
Dr. Scott Vrzal (0:43:44.856)
Especially GMO corn is pretty much all corn in America. But yes, unfortunately it seems to have a cortisol response as well as some adverse effect on the ovaries, especially for the O blood type. A little bit less so on the A blood type, but all of them have seen uterine fibroids. Well, ovarian cysts for sure. I mean, Tiffany was a gal that I'd been working with for years. It was very clean, had a very clean diet. After three days of eating rice chips, she had an ovarian cyst grow and burst and corn was the third ingredient on those chips. So that's a kind of a good example of how profound that can be.
Back to the soapbox thing. The tide is changing. The tide is changing. I have a brain trust buddy that has been at a couple of pharmaceutical meetings where they're starting to say, well, we're realizing that cholesterol isn't the whole thing, but there's two or three medications in the pipeline to lower lipoprotein little a. Lipoprotein A is an inflammatory marker, which is going a little better direction if there was a good direction in the pharmaceutical world. But watch for the narrative to start shifting where we realize cholesterol wasn't making enough change. Now everybody's going to need this lipoprotein A and their narrative is, if your lipoprotein A is up, you're born with it and you need this drug forever. Kind of like they were originally saying with cholesterol medications and no lifestyle manipulation will change it. But there's a study that shows that niacin, of all things, actually lowers it, but they kind of poopoo that and say you need the drug. So just a heads up of yes.
Ashley James (0:45:26.567)
Of course. A harmless B vitamin or a toxic petroleum-based patented drug. You choose. My goodness. Okay, so I have to ask though. You kind of freaked me out with corn. In a good way.
I don't watch South Park often, but it's really funny. I've been gluten free for 13 years. If you're not easily offended, go watch the South Park episode on being gluten free. It's this one scene. I cried laughing. It's where they first discovered gluten is bad for them and the parents run around the house, run around the kitchen, kind of like, gluten is a ticking time bomb that's about to explode. That's how intensely they get rid of all the gluten in their house.
I just remember that because I'm going to run downstairs and take all the corn in my freezer and just go, throw it out, throw it out. What other foods must we know about that are absolutely 100% off? They should be out of our kitchen, out of our lives. If corn does that, I want to know about some others that we got to know about.
Dr. Scott Vrzal (0:46:45.909)
Well, where do we start? I mean, for me, it's condition specific. I really try to work from a perspective of telling me where it hurts and I'll help you identify what the primary food trigger would be. For example, left upper trap tension tends to be a blood sugar concern. So, I mean, obviously sugar is going to mess with the pancreas and create that.
Unfortunately, just to open up, get on another soapbox, COVID, the retrovirus that the COVID virus is, causes damage to whatever the weak link was. So if a person was eating a lot of sugar and had a struggling pancreas and then got exposed to COVID, then that could exaggerate and accelerate damage to the pancreas. They're going to end up with left upper trap tension, yeast problems because of the blood sugar yo-yos that would cause neck tension, especially on one side of the neck. Left side is very common for that. Sugar, that's the low hanging fruit that hopefully everybody realizes is a poison ultimately and nutrient void.
Ashley James (0:47:57.424)
I'm planning on doing a little special right before Halloween about sugar because they call it flu season, and I want to say, listen, the term flu season was made up by the pharmaceutical industry to sell more flu shots. You can get the flu any time of year. You could be sick any time of year. The thing with flu season is it's actually sugar season because it starts at Halloween, Halloween, Christmas nears, Thanksgiving, and these holidays, plus then we have Valentine's Day, but all the cookies and all the overindulgence and the stress and the sugar and the alcohol. We just kind of pig out from the end of October to halfway through February. We wonder why we get sick, and sugar, it taxes the immune system and really it shuts down. There's one white blood cell that just goes to sleep in the presence of processed sugar. We wonder why we get sick.
But if you avoid processed food and processed sugar, you will be quite amazed, quite amazed at how your immune system holds up. That's my soapbox when it comes to sugar. Do you have any other corn damages overage? Do you have any other like, you didn't know that peas destroy eyes or something? Do you have any other bombs to drop? Because I always thought corn, if it was organic, was healthy.
Dr. Scott Vrzal (0:49:26.113)
Especially from a vegan sort of perspective, you said gluten-free corn is a non-gluten grain. A lot of, on the plant-based diet, people are using corn to try to get that complete protein, mixing it with rice and so on. So we have to find other ways around it. Another truth bomb kind of food is tomatoes. Believe it or not, tomatoes will cause insulin dumping, especially for B blood types and A blood type people. It stresses the gallbladder.
When the gallbladder is challenged and we have acetylcholine deficiency, which acetylcholine is a precursor to nitric oxide. So that's going to set up high blood pressure, or in a catastrophic state, constriction of the arteries. That's not good news. But then memory recall issues because acetylcholine is the brain chemical of recall. So when acetylcholine is low, that's when we're having trouble coming up with the names or test anxiety kind of thing, or information we know is in there, but we just can't quite pull it up. That's a low acetylcholine problem. Unfortunately, tomatoes, because of the stress they put on the gallbladder and the pancreas, cause that low acetylcholine, which is going to manifest as those symptoms of recall issues and higher blood pressure, potentially higher cholesterol, because it's stress in the liver and the gallbladder.
Ashley James (0:50:45.389)
What raises acetylcholine?
Dr. Scott Vrzal (0:50:49.125)
Toxins so the brain's control of the liver.
Ashley James (0:50:54.261)
Sorry. Okay. So too much acetylcholine causes recall issues.
Dr. Scott Vrzal (0:50:58.025)
Too little acetylcholine causes. Acetylcholine is the brain chemical of recall. So when it's low, we are missing the faculties of recall, if you will.
Ashley James (0:51:07.964)
So, but how do we get it up? How do we make it healthy? What do we do to get it to healthy levels?
Dr. Scott Vrzal (0:51:15.900)
Choline is the precursor, the building block. Riboflavin helps us make it as well. So in active form, B2 technically is, riboflavin helps the gallbladder function better, eating our good fats so that that gallbladder is contracting when we eat those omega-3s. That keeps the bile being produced. If a person had already lost their gallbladder, sacrificed their gallbladder, we want to replace bile on a regular basis with a supplement of some sort. Pantothenic acid, B5, is another one that helps with bile production. So we look at those nutrients to bring it up. Beets, beet leaf juice especially, thins bile and will help with the acetylcholine production, the betaine that's also in beets helps the methylation pathway and sorry throwing a bunch of big terms out but, it facilitates that methylation pathway which is one of the main liver pathways to formulator to make bile.
So all that will help us make the bile which then we digest our fats better, better elimination because if the gallbladder is congested, if we're deficient in the acetylcholine, we don't digest fats and it's called the ilio break where the valves in the intestine the ileocecal valve and the valve of Houston, these valves kind of stay closed or slam closed, you will, causing constipation because it's trying to give the body, the colon more time to assimilate and digest those fats that it so desperately needs to make cholesterol to help keep the immune system functioning properly and so on.
Ashley James (0:53:02.146)
What are your favorite sources of those healthy fats? What are some to avoid?
Dr. Scott Vrzal (0:53:11.022)
Avoid trans fats, that's fried foods, the package, the sad standard American diet foods. Avocado is a great one for A blood types and O non-secretors. Keep telling the blood type thing out, but I mean, it does make a difference. I'm a B blood type and avocado will crash my immune system. My throat will actually close. If I eat sushi or something with avocado or guacamole, my throat will literally close up and I have to excuse myself.
So, avocado is a good plant source of omega 3s. Yes, otherwise it's fish or fish oils or flax oil or chia seed would be the plant sources. So yes, we need to pursue that though, especially if a lot of your people are plant based. So it takes an active pursuit to get the flax oil, ground flax oil. You want to grind it fresh ideally, so it doesn't go rancid or capsules, that kind of thing.
Ashley James (0:54:10.558)
Yes, I love chia. I'm allergic to flax, which really sucks, because flax is so good for you. Every few years I keep trying flax, maybe I'm over it now. Nope.
Dr. Scott Vrzal (0:54:23.876)
Wow, have you tried it ground? Does that make a difference?
Ashley James (0:54:27.012)
No, It can be trace amounts. But nope, unfortunately I can't. But chia is wonderful. I love making chia pudding.
I think avocados came from heaven. That was the manna in the Bible. That was the manna that fell every day from the sky was avocados. So we're pretty good there. Obviously fried food, oil, trans fat, anything that comes in a container, some kind of weird margarine. Those are horrible, toxic things we should stay away from.
I love it. You've given us such gold. I just want to pump your brain. It's so exciting. So we've talked about low dopamine and these are things that can cause headaches. You said the low dopamine can cause monthly headaches and is hormone related because there's low estrogen. Then you said that there's high dopamine, high estrogen, so like an estrogen dominant person?
Dr. Scott Vrzal (0:55:29.530)
Right, which typically means the liver is not breaking the estrogen down properly. There's at least four key pathways in the liver that need to break the estrogen down. So that's the clinical fun, it’s figuring out which of those is awry. When we identify which pathway is off, then that also gives us insight. Throughout the age spots, the brown age spots are said in the literature to be a poor estrogen metabolism.
That typically means methylation is under-functioning. That's a massive week-long seminar subject. But methylation is so huge, it's very B12 dependent. I think we talked about last time that the lactobacillus enzyme organisms in the gut make B12 for us. So that's kind of God's wisdom in the body.
Helping facilitate methylation and so on. So if that's under-functioning and otherwise we're B12 deficient, or the gut biome is out of whack so that they're not making the B12 to drive methylation, then a person can end up with these estrogen dominance symptoms. Brown spots are a cosmetic concern. But certainly if that was to progress over time, then that estrogen, methylated estrogen, is floating around and becomes very carcinogenic. That's where we end up with bigger problems down the road.
If it's a pathway called P450, cytochrome P450 is the first phase of liver detoxification, when that one's under-functioning, which is dependent on antioxidants, so there's all your green leafy vegetables and lovely fruits and vegetables that are so high in antioxidants, your avocados, then that helps that pathway work fine and break that down. But if estrogen is not breaking down properly in P450, that's going to set the stage again for high estrogen symptoms. But down the road, that's the more malignant type of cancer where cells all over the place are mutating and going bananas. So those are definitely some pathways that we want to make sure they're functioning right. Comes down to eating our plants, eating our green leafies for the folic acid and feeding to make the B12 and the B6 that drives those path—the methylation especially—and antioxidants for P450. We keep those functioning and that's how we stay out of the oncology ward.
Ashley James (0:57:51.802)
I love it. It sounds like you do some genetic testing with your clients.
Dr. Scott Vrzal (0:57:58.538)
I can actually do it through muscle testing. Yes.
Ashley James (0:58:02.874)
Shut up. Okay, that's coming back to that really cool course that my listeners get $50 off that they can go check out. That is super interesting. Have you ever just for fun done the muscle testing and then done the genetic testing to confer or just go, hey, yes, wow, I was pretty on track with that.
Dr. Scott Vrzal (0:58:26.750)
Great question. In my earlier days, as I was working out what's now called the Verso technique, I did a lot more lab testing, but I got to a point where I actually felt out of integrity almost by charging or running labs that just proved me right, as it were.
Ashley James (0:58:46.790)
But you did prove yourself right enough times that you felt confident with the muscle testing technique.
Dr. Scott Vrzal (0:58:54.266)
Totally. It takes them three weeks to get the results back. By that point, the condition was typically fixed, but it just said, yes, this is what we saw.
On the genetic front, I am kind of digging into that a little deeper currently. Epigenetics is helping our good genes function or helping suppress our bad genes. I think there's a massive world that's about to be discovered there.
I alluded to the retrovirus, and COVID is one of them. It tends to compromise methylation, and so that suppresses it. I suspect where we're going to end up is recognizing that viruses compromise, and flu-type viruses will ramp up the P450—the first-phase detoxification. So there are these triggers that can actually manipulate genes.
I can't find anything in the literature that substantiates that, but we know that retroviruses suppress methylation. So that's going to be that MTHFR gene. If we correct that function, that facilitates the immune system—which reminds me, we need to go back to that on the immune and how to treat viruses and so on, or help the body treat viruses. Let's go back there.
Facilitating those pathways suppresses them. I haven't seen anything to confirm that they will be a hundred percent reverse or correct. But I think it's—I mean, God of infinite possibility.
Ashley James (1:00:27.402)
Absolutely. Yes, let's talk about the immune system. But in the back of my mind as you're talking, I'm just thinking about all the people that were vaccine injured the last four years. Can't even call it a vaccine. It was a medical experiment.
It's so horrific. I know so many people who died, died suddenly. I lost a best friend. I've seen so many children where parents just thought they were doing the best they could and with all the information they had at the time, were permanently damaged. I mean, God willing, they're not permanently damaged, but they're significantly damaged at this point.
I've just seen so much of it in my own personal circle of people, although a large group of people that I surround myself with are people who don't jab with anything. But then, with all the different communities I'm involved in, I've seen so many people damaged.
Then of course, on a professional level, on a weekly basis, people reach out to me and ask, I got injured by the COVID vaccine. What do I do? Or can you point me in the right direction?
I've seen some things really work, but I don't know because it messed with your RNA synthesis. So I just don't, I don't know. I just really don't.
Do you have any thoughts on that?
Dr. Scott Vrzal (1:01:51.775)
There's hope. Yes, they're massive subjects, and thank you for being willing to bring it up. My favorite resource on that is Standard Processes, a primary company that I lecture for. They have a line called the PMG—stands for protomorphogens. So for me, ultimately it's through the muscle testing, the Versatile Technique, identify what organ is most compromised or was most challenged from that so-called Vax and then give the PMG product for whatever that is.
So if it was a heart that was damaged, for example, there's a product called Cardiotrophin PMG. So we give that product and take three twice a day, fairly common thing initially for a couple of weeks or a month. That kind of rebuilds the heart and tells the immune system it's okay. It stops attacking the heart, for example, or the thyroid or the pancreas or the liver that has been damaged.
Again, that kind of goes back to there was probably a weak link when they received the shot, and then it just exaggerated that. So then we rebuild that gland or organ, and that seems to be taking care of most of those side effects.
We do have the adjuvants that were new too—the graphene oxide that was new for the COVID Vax. That's a whole nother animal, and that is often what's placking up the arteries and causing that.
There's a whole documentary on that, Died Suddenly, that shows people and has video of how they all turn, look to the left, and think it looks like they're looking for an alien, and they're done. That's that graphene oxide.
Ashley James (1:03:38.751)
Yep. My friend's daughter actually survived, and she has video of her doing that where her arm spasms out. She's doing the Nazi salute, I didn't know how to say that in a better way, but her arm goes straight out, and then her head kind of shifts over, and she can't help herself. It was in, but it's not Iike a normal seizure.
I saw so many clips of people having this specific seizure after, shortly after getting the poison injected into them. It's on Rumble. People can find that. Go to Rumble. Rumble is the uncensored YouTube. You can find that documentary. Really worth watching just to educate yourself on this whole world that the mainstream will not let you know about whatsoever.
So you said PMG— is it M as in Mary?
Dr. Scott Vrzal (1:04:37.785)
Yes, protomorphogen, so P-M-G. Then my favorite when graphene oxide from the Vax is compromising in that very unique kind of almost seizure-stroke-looking pattern that you described, is iron supplements with vitamin C. Vitamin C certainly helps absorb the iron and offset the graphene oxide.
But vitamin C is also a very great detoxer, it helps drive that P450 phase one detoxification pathway. Iron products with vitamin C tend to work really well for that.
Ashley James (1:05:13.321)
I've also heard boron—taking one to two milligrams of boron a day—is also part of that. There's a woman I've had on the show five times, you may have heard of it, it's called the Platinum Energy System. It's an ionic foot bath that removes heavy metals from the body and it does a few other things. It's a frequency specific microcurrent. It's a rife machine. It's really cool.
I've had her on the show several times. It's Kellyann Andrews, and the website's platinumenergysystems.ca to their system or systems. It's just off the top of my head. Wonderful woman. She'll spend so much time on the phone with you. She's a nurse, been doing this for years. I witnessed with my own eyes someone with severe vaccine injury recover using it daily. Getting results recovering. We also have other practitioners who are anecdotally saying, yes, we're getting really good results because it's supporting the body's ability to heal itself by drawing out heavy metals. It does a few other things, but that's just what I know. So just sharing my knowledge. Yes, we got it.
We got it all kind of pulled together and share what we see works because the mainstream is not going to acknowledge this. Heard one of my friend's daughters was in a children's hospital for a whole month with horrific, horrific life-threatening consequences after getting the vaccine and they would not acknowledge that it was vaccine-related. Wouldn't even acknowledge it. That's just really sad that they're not even willing to go down that road. That's because they get funded by big pharma. So what do you want? We have to question everything. Okay, so let's dive into the immune system.
Yes, super excited. Now this is for people who have headaches or just generally?
Dr. Scott Vrzal (1:07:10.549)
In life, as you mentioned, we're going into cold and flu season. My line is cold and flu season starts when Halloween candy hits the shelves. As you alluded to, suppresses the immune system and basically causes white blood cells to go dormant for four hours. Most of the time people are eating sugar before that four hours is up again. That leaves the body vulnerable.
Parasites are another one that polarize the immune system to be more susceptible to viruses. So if a person has a chronic parasite, then that's going to leave them more virally vulnerable. But ultimately, all bugs are opportunists. So when I shifted my paradigm to call it more the terrain sort of perspective, looking at where the weakness is, my results just went through the roof and started chasing around trying to kill viruses per se or kill bacteria most other practitioners are going to do. I look at where the weakness is that allows that parasite, virus, or bacteria to flourish.
So if there was a weak lung, then somebody sneezes on them, they end up with a virus in the lung, for example. So we would look at what it would take to strengthen the lung and then the body has the reserves, has the mojo to kill that bug as it should, as it was originally designed. Typically, it's things we're doing.
Dairy is a biggie to suppress the immune system, processed dairy for sure. I mentioned avocados for you. Avocados are godsend. So it depends. It's somewhat different for each. Identifying what is suppressing the immune system that allows the bug to flourish, but then ultimately is it a weakness in the intestine? At least half the immune system, if not more nowadays, is from what's going on in the gut and the gut biome. Then we've got lung concerns or spleen weakness or massive thymus gets suppressed from the aluminum in vaccines and the pre-COVID vaccines, all your flu and all the HEP and vaccines that most people are forced to take to get through school and so on. Those are loaded with aluminum and mercury and that aluminum suppresses the thymus, which is the tagging mechanism for the immune system. So then the immune system, and that's part of what allows them to then have that virus start the antibodies and do what they're trying to do with the vaccine. But ultimately it suppresses the thymus and then we lose a tagging mechanism to say, hey, this is a toxic metal or this is a virus, go to work immune system, get it out of here.
So we want that to function optimally. Aluminum in deodorants is another potential source there. That's more prone to affect the lymphatic system, but from VAX's is a biggie to inhibit that thymus. That was kind of where I was talking about where I had trouble throwing because one of the rotator cuff muscles called the infraspinatus is a very prolific muscle in the rotator cuff that gets weak and compromised.
Throat injury where it feels like they can't throw or hurts to put the arm up over the head. That's a sign that that muscle associated with the thymus gland or the immune system is not functioning properly. So that's a sign that you want to get aluminum out of your world. Get some good minerals going on to offset that, or take a supplement like thymus PMG is a very common one to tag up. Now that's a lot of what I use if a kid has to get immunizations or so. I'm loading them up with that Thymus PMG for damage control to try to mitigate damage that way.
Ashley James (1:11:09.998)
I love it. I was going to ask what we should do for the thymus gland, but you answered that for me. I’ve standard process. That's all. I have a very small list of companies I trust and Standard Process is one of them. So that's cool. So yes. So, so PMG, is that something you could just take all throughout?
Candy season, all throughout flu season. If someone's, listen, I'm not going to avoid sugar 100%. I'll do my best. I'm still going to eat a few. I'm still going to have some pie on Thanksgiving. I'm still going to have a little bit. I'll cut back a bunch. I won't overdo it. But what can I do? Because most people, most people are not you and me who are, we're not going to eat any sugar at all. I make my own pumpkin pie with no sugar. I use a little bit of date syrup or a little bit of maple syrup, not much. Lay on the spices super thick because I like a spicy pie and also they're so good for you. I just think that the flavor of the pumpkin really shines anyway. I just find that regular pumpkin pies are just so sickly sweet you can't even taste the pumpkin. So I like to find ways of making alternatives that are naturally low in sugar, but also like eating an apple. People go, carbs are bad. It's like, what? Fruit, vegetables, these things are carbs, they're super healthy for you. It's not the same thing as doing teaspoons or tablespoons of processed sugar. It's just not the same thing at all.
So for those who eat some sugar but promise to cut back significantly, what can they do during the flu season to just, again, I say flu season, but in parentheses, it's sugar season. What can we do during the winter months?
To really just bolster the immune system and just, everyone else in the office or at school is sniffling and coughing. We're just breezing through.
Dr. Scott Vrzal (1:13:21.560)
Learn to listen to your body. Stress cortisol suppresses that thymus gland that we were just talking about. So that's part of why the thymus is much more prolific pre-immunization, much more prolific in children into the teens. Whereas they used to say when I was in school, they said it shriveled up as we became an adult, but it still has function. So listen to your body.
Like I said, if I eat avocado, my immune system will crash. Whereas I can get away with that potentially when life is chill or things are good. But I'm certainly not going to push it when I'm in a high-stress season. So, first up again, my platform everywhere is, listen to your body. But then vitamins A and C are huge, your antioxidants. There's lots of good products that are loaded with that to help the immune system function.
Echinacea is great for the immune system. If you get a good one, there's alkylamides that you want, that's the immune-building part that's going to taste pretty crazy if you taste it. If you help, if you got a good echinacea. Again, A and C and echinacea really are the starting point.
Then there's some of the new mushroom products. Standard Process makes an EpiImmune product that works really well to generally bolster the immune system. They have Congaplex, that's for congestion, Congaplex . That's for more antibacterial, immune building. Then they have Emuplex that's more kind of tilted towards an antiviral cascade. That has some of the spleen and vitamins A and C in it.
So there's a lot of great options. Ultimately it's to figure out what works best for you. Colloidal silver is another kind of unique one. If there's a sore throat or localized infections in the eye or the sinuses, the colloidal silver works well. That's pretty readily available. So ultimately figure out what has worked for you in the past and keep it going during the season.
Ashley James (1:15:35.324)
I have a whole interview with Dr. Keith. My gosh. I was able to recall his name yesterday. I'll get it. It's in my brain. I have a whole interview with Dr. Keith on Nano Silver. Nano Silver is different from Colloidal Silver. Colloidal Silver is Nano Silver's dumb cousin. Nano Silver is amazing. There's over 400 studies published about it.
Dr. Keith was involved in that. So I recommend going to my website, just type in LearnTrueHealth.com, type in Nano Silver to listen to that one, because it's pretty wild that it is even better. Colloidal Silver, and I grew up loving Colloidal Silver, but if you use colloidal silver, you're going to be blown away by Nano Silver. I also do ozone. I have an ozone machine. I make my own ozone water. So if we ever kind of start getting a little bit of sore throat, all of us are gargling our ozone water as well. Just anything you can do to catch it. I love that you said, listen to your body, because anything you could do to catch it right at the beginning, then you're good, you're good. You can blow it out before it really takes hold.
Dr. Scott Vrzal (1:16:49.666)
For sure. The silver facilitates that P450 pathway we were talking about, which ramps up the liver. Believe it or not, everything's the liver as detoxification, but it has a couple key pathways in there for viruses and bugs. That P450 pathway is great against the cold flu virus. That's where kind of the mechanism of action for the silver, great product. Yes, the Nano Silver is a great way to go.
Ashley James (1:17:16.218)
Wow. So cool. We have a few more minutes before we have to wrap up because I know you got to go. But I want to just make sure that we're covering everything you wanted to make sure you covered today. Your book coming out. I know my jaw's been on the floor several times today. I know my listeners as well. Your book covers so, so much. We're going to learn things like this in your book.
So we should get your book. Tell us about your book that's coming out. Actually, I'm going to publish this right as your book comes out so they can run straight to Amazon and grab it. Tell us about your book, the name, and everything we need to know.
Dr. Scott Vrzal (1:17:56.776)
Thank you. Wonderful. Yes. I got into, as we talked about on episode 523, I got into healthcare because of the headaches I was having. I was told that I might have an aneurysm, don't work out and you're going to die kind of thing. Then he said, well, you don't have an aneurysm, go see a psychiatrist. So I kind of made it my mission to figure out and using these applied kinesiology tools or the understanding of acupuncture meridians and so on. I made it my mission to figure out the patterns of headaches and what the location meant.
Ultimately it whittled down to seven different patterns. So every headache, and a person may have one or two or three of the patterns, but every headache whittles down to one of these seven locations, whether it's a right-sided problem, a left-sided problem, a frontal, what I call third eye is another one. The whole head is a headband or the suboccipital tension type of a headache.
Each of those has a different trigger, whether it's a gallbladder, stomach, pituitary, poor stress management, poor stress tolerance as the frontal headache. So the book goes into each of those patterns and then talks about the typical triggers or emotional triggers, things that the DIY stuff, things that people can do themselves to get rid of the cause of those headaches and stop sounding the alarm that they might have a stroke or a cardiovascular problem.
Empower people to make good choices and learn from what their body's trying to tell them. That's why it's called The Headache Advantage. Because I do find clinically that the location of the head pain really ultimately is the priority. They may have symptoms associated with the stomach and hormones and a lot of other things, but the location of the headache is going to be the priority. Typically, if we fix whatever the cause of, say, the left side of headache is, that will take care of the lion's share of the rest of their symptoms. It's a very nice tool that way.
Ashley James (1:19:54.458)
So cool. I think the last thing I wasn't sure we fully covered was people have anxiety and restless sleep between 1 and 3 a.m. Did we get to cover that one?
Dr. Scott Vrzal (1:20:13.648)
I’m presumptuous. I'm trying to get myself invited back.
Ashley James (1:20:17.054)
Yes. Come back. Come back. I like it. Well, man, you leave me wanting to go down these rabbit holes and learn more and more. I think I love that. I very seldom do I get a guest that gets me so excited about health, gets me so excited about learning about how food, and how herbs, how life's simple lifestyle changes, how it has the mechanism of action. This affects your phase one of liver detox. I'm like, cool. Tell me more.
I can't believe you just took corn away from me. I'm going to run downstairs and frantically throw out all the corn. Not that I have a ton of it, but I have some. I have some frozen corn in the organic frozen corn in the freezer. I think I'll just use it as an ice pack or something, but no more, no more corn for me.
That's fine. Honestly, I'm at the stage in my life where I don't want to be ignorant. I want to know what hurts me and what helps me. That wasn't always the case. I think a lot of people want to walk around and just have that freedom, which I miss sometimes, the freedom to just eat anything. I'm like, yes, but most food is junk.
That's what we don't understand is that we can't walk around and just eat anything. This is what I say often on the show. Look around you. If you want to be a statistic, one in three people have diabetes, pre-diabetes, have obesity, and multiple health issues. Seventy percent of Americans are on at least one prescription medication—mental health, emotional health, physical health. It's all deteriorating. Look at the numbers. Look at the statistics. One in three people will have a cancer diagnosis.
We are a sick nation and obviously you're listening to a health podcast. You're clued in, not one of the people that is burying their head in the sand. But if you want to be a statistic, then do what everyone else is doing. Just go with the flow. Eat whatever. Just eat the way everyone else is eating. Drink alcohol the way everyone else is drinking. Stay up late. Don't exercise. Don't move your body. Just do what everyone else is doing. You too could win the prize of—pick your prize, pick your disease that you want to give yourself. But I gave myself disease, and I was able to reverse it. You can turn disease on and off in the body based on your diet.
I had the wonderful experience of recreating disease in me based on my choices and went, I didn't learn my lesson the first time. I'm going to come back for the second time and learn.
You empower us. Thank you—to make better choices. Yes. You empower us to make better choices because you're putting the power back in our hands going, no, listen, you don't need to wait to get sick and go see a doctor and get a drug. You can heal yourself. But it's so confusing and there's so much dogma around diet and around nutrition.
So to come in and have someone go, let's decode your headaches, let's decode your symptoms and listen to the body and help give the body what it needs. That's really exciting.
My listeners are everywhere. So can people work with you online or do they have to come see you in person? How does that work?
Dr. Scott Vrzal (1:23:58.946)
Yes, actually, thank you. I saw somebody from one of your shows remotely a couple of weeks ago. Yes, so we do do remote visits and I have three other doctors in the office as well. My schedule is congested, thankfully, I guess. But yes, we have three other doctors that do the same thing as well. So yes, we can do remote visits and figure this stuff out for you that way.
Ashley James (1:24:24.622)
Awesome, and what website is best for them to go to?
Dr. Scott Vrzal (1:24:28.981)
For the clinic, it is drvrzal.com. The book is headacheadvantage.com. That also has some links for potential supplement and food choices based on the location of headaches.
Ashley James (1:24:48.917)
Cool. Then the muscle testing, which of course I'm going to have all these links in the show notes. No matter where you listen to, you'll find them in the details, but your functional muscle testing course, which I'm really excited about, the website is at sownutritionalsystems.com/functional-muscle-testing. So I just wanted to say it. Just in case you have a hard time finding it. Then the coupon code is LTH for $50 off. Thank you so much.
Dr. Scott Vrzal (1:25:22.123)
Absolutely. Yes, maybe an easier way to get to those videos is Vrzal Technique. We'll take you to that same site.
Ashley James (1:25:28.154)
Wonderful. So vrzaltechnique.com and then LTH coupon code. Hey, come back to the show. Keep teaching us. We want to hear more. I'm speaking for everyone. We're like, don't take away our favorite foods. But at the same time, we really need to know. We need to know. I'm excited for you to come back and continue teaching about understanding our pain and understanding our bodies and listening to the whispers of our body and what nutrition we can give us so that we can live in optimal health. It was wonderful having you on the show. I can't wait to have you back.
Dr. Scott Vrzal (1:26:04.572)
Thank you so much. It was a true pleasure and sorry to make it such a Hallmark movie with no cord. I can feel great. I'm empowered. That was fun.
Outro:
Wasn't that an amazing interview with Dr. Scott? Can't you just wait to have him back on the show? We're definitely going to have him back because he's such a wealth of knowledge and, oh my goodness, he had my jaw on the floor a few times. Didn't he have to draw your jaw on the floor a few times? I want to remind you to check out his functional muscle testing introduction and intermediate classes online. The link to that again is https://sownutritionalsystems.com/functional-muscle-testing/ and, of course, the link, the very long link, is going to be in the show notes of today's podcast at learntruehealth.com or wherever you're listening from. Just click on the notes or the details and it'll pop up right there. Remember to use and always use coupon code LTH if you take the course. Let me know what you think.
I'm really excited to take the course. It's on my list of courses to take. I actually like taking four courses right now online and it is. It's right there in my folder in Firefox waiting to jump in and complete it and then play with it. So when I do, I'm going to be sharing in the Learn True Health Facebook group my experience, and I'd love to hear your experience as well. So, when you do the course, come on in the water's nice and warm, come jump on in to the Learn True Health Facebook group and let us know what you thought and what you learned. Let us know what your body said when you started, when you started talking to your body and started talking back. Let us know.
I'm curious. I'm curious to hear how it helps you, how it impacts you, and thank you for sharing this episode with those who care about them. I'm really excited to hear how many people we can help end their chronic headaches and migraines. So, please, please, if this episode helps you, I want to hear about it. Can you please, either just private message me, email me or publicly, you can just blast the horn on social media, and tag me at Learn True Health or in the Facebook group. I just really want to hear. I want to count how many people we help to permanently end those nasty chronic migraines and headaches because that's why I do this—knowing that we're ending the needless suffering of millions. So let's do that and please share so we can do that. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being an amazing listener and have yourself a fantastic rest of your day.
The Headache Advantage: 7 Pain Patterns as Tools for Total Body
Get my ebook and audiobook here: https://learntruehealth.com/op/addicted-to-wellness-ebook.
Get my course, The 7 Foundations of Health, here:
https://learntruehealth.com/sp/7-foundations-of-optimal-health
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Dr. Ellen Kamhi's website: http://www.naturalnurse.com
https://learntruehealth.com/your-natural-medicine-chest-hpa-axis-balance/
In today’s episode of the Learn True Health Podcast, Dr. Ellen Kamhi returns for part two of our powerful conversation on natural healing. We dive deep into understanding the HPA axis—how your hypothalamus, pituitary, and adrenal glands work together to regulate stress, energy, sleep, weight, digestion, and so much more.
You'll learn how chronic stress throws the entire body out of balance—and how simple, natural tools like herbal medicine, better sleep habits, and plant-based remedies can help restore true health. Dr. Kamhi shares practical, time-tested solutions you can start using right away to support your body's innate ability to heal itself.
If you’ve ever struggled with fatigue, brain fog, thyroid issues, gut problems, or low immunity, this is a must-listen episode!
Highlights:
Intro:
Hello True Health Seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health Podcast. We have an amazing episode for you today, with Dr. Ellen Kamhi coming back on the show. She was with us in last episode 536, part one, where we discussed using herbal medicine to support our immune health and to eliminate or control pain, and also support the body's ability to heal itself while we're going through injury or illness. Today, we're diving into understanding the HPA axis—the hypothalamic, pituitary, adrenal axis—and how that plays a major role in everything from migraines, obesity, digestion, back pain, insomnia, energy—the list goes on and on. A lot of times when we go to a doctor with symptoms, the doctor starts treating the symptoms instead of going upstream to the root cause of the problem. There are hundreds of problems that are all caused by a dysregulated HPA axis, so today you're going to learn about how to support your HPA axis and how to support your body's ability to come back into balance and your body's ability to heal itself.
Here at Learn True Health, we believe in the body's innate and God-given ability to heal itself. We grew ourselves from a single cell into over 32.7 trillion cells that are a symphony within a symphony. In fact, a biologist once said that the single human cell is more complex. There's more things going on in one human cell than all of Manhattan. If you can imagine how busy it is in New York City, let alone Manhattan, you think about Manhattan, you think about just everything that's happening, imagine one human cell is more busy than that. It's more busy than all of New York. There's more things going on, and we're just scratching the surface. Every day we're just learning more and more and more.
Yet there's this ancient medicine, long before pharmaceutical, drug-based, chemically patented pharmaceutical interventions. I'm not saying we should ignore those. I'm saying we should look at the whole picture. If you needed an entire toolbox to fix a car but I only let you have access to one of the shelves of that toolbox, how effective would you be at repairing that car? Maybe you could change a tire, but you couldn't change the oil. I don't know. Point being, if we want to take care of ourselves, we really should have access to and an understanding of the full plethora of what is available for us.
Holistic, plant-based medicine—so herbal medicine, for example—was used even by medical doctors up until about the 1950s when, because of the way their education was manipulated by the pharmaceutical industries, those practices fell by the wayside. Yet we have effective, easy-to-use herbal remedies to support the body's ability to heal itself. We have access to so much now. Because you're listening to this, because we have the internet, we can start exploring. We can start finding practitioners. Doesn't have to be even in our town or our city. They don't even have to be in our state or our country. We can connect with people worldwide and learn how to support a body's ability to heal itself.
I highly recommend checking out our previous episode 536, where we began this talk with Dr. Kamhi. You can listen to it out of order. You can continue listening to this, then go back to the last episode if you haven't already, because it's a wonderful journey to learn from her. I also encourage you to go to my website.
My name's Ashley James. If you are new to this podcast, welcome. I've been doing this podcast now coming up on 10 years. It's amazing, I can't believe it. Together we are learning how to heal our bodies and learning how to create true health, which is a balance of emotional, mental, spiritual, and physical health. You can go to LearnTrueHealth.com and use the search function to find dozens of episodes on topics that you're interested in. You can also schedule a free phone call with me. I'd love to help you.
I've been a holistic, integrative health coach for many years. I am now a proud author. I published a book last year called Addicted to Wellness. You can check it out by going to LearnTrueHealth.com/addictedtowellness. I'm also an anxiety cessation expert. That's something that I do talk about, but not as often. I think I should talk about it more, because so many people suffer with anxiety, and I've been teaching people since 2005 how to eliminate anxiety. Can you believe it's been 20 years? What? That's crazy. I have been helping people for two decades to completely eliminate anxiety from their life, and I have these amazingly powerful tools that I can teach you.
If you want to work one-on-one with me, I'd love for you to hire me as your health coach. You can also sign up for a free consultation if you'd like to have a chat with me. I love talking to you guys. I love, love, love connecting with you. I have so many resources. If you're sick of suffering from physical ailments or if you just really want to have that peace of mind and you've been struggling with anxiety or insomnia or depression, or struggling with food and not knowing how to eat healthy or get on the right track to getting your energy back—just any of these things—please book a free consultation with me. I'd love to help you. I have some amazing resources that I can send your way, one of them being the phototherapy patches, which have been so life-changing. I've got some amazing tools that I could point you in the right direction. If you want to hire me, you are absolutely welcome to. If you want someone to hold your hand and guide you through, I'd love to be there for you as well.
I also really recommend checking out TakeYourSupplements.com. It's a fantastic resource if you're ready to take your health back and take your life back. The supplements there, the protocols that they have, saved my life coming up on 13, 14 years ago. It was right around 2011. That's when I got on their protocols, and they helped me to reverse what I was told was irreversible PCOS and infertility. I have an amazing son to prove it, that we conceived naturally after getting on these supplements. They helped me to reverse my type 2 diabetes and my chronic adrenal fatigue, which was amazing to have vanished as a result of nutrition, natural supplements, and diet changes.
What I'm saying is that there's so much suffering going on out there, and I was in it. I suffered for years while being cared for by MDs, by medical doctors, and they really didn't have any answers for me. Now I believe that drugs and the medical system—the hospitals and those clinics—are good tools. When we break our arm or when we get into an accident, we want to have them at our disposal. They really fail us when it comes to supporting our body's ability to heal itself. They just don't have those tools.
So this episode, this entire podcast, my over 500 and now 37 episodes, are dedicated to showing you that there's a world out there that isn't in the mainstream media. That's a whole other topic as to why, but it's here for you, and it's been around for a long time, and it's proven itself. It's proven itself effective, and it's also gentle, and it is something that it's about coming back to ourselves and nourishing ourselves and supporting what our body actually needs to heal itself.
So dive down this rabbit hole with me. Enjoy the ride. It's a lot of fun. If you're new, welcome. If you've been a health nut for a while, I know I'm preaching to the choir. Please share this episode with those you care about. We are going to help end the suffering of millions of people through helping them learn true health.
Enjoy today's episode.
Welcome to the Learn True Health Podcast. I'm your host, Ashley James. This is episode 537.
Ashley James (0:09:06.042)
I am so excited for today's guests and to have back on the show Dr. Ellen Kamhi. Your website is naturalnurse.com. We had Dr. Ellen back in episode 536. That was part one. I feel we're just going to jump right into part two. We talked about some amazing things about herbal medicine.
You should be a national treasure. There should be a Secret Service guarding you. The amount of information you have, it's life-changing. I'm so happy that we have you here today because you are going to change lives today with the information you're sharing. We're going to dive into understanding how we can get out of that stress response to then help the body go into that healing mode through balancing the HPA, the hypothalamus-adrenal-pituitary access.
That's so cool. But first, I really want to talk about the fact that you have very affordable online courses. One coming up in March. I'm so excited. I'm joining it. I'm going to be one of your students. I'm inviting my listeners to come join. It's such life-changing information. So affordable, so accessible. Tell us a little bit about your course that's coming up in March. Naturalnurse.com
Dr. Ellen Kamhi (0:10:29.173)
Well, thank you so much for the opportunity. I've been doing herbal medicine since 1964. What has been so exciting about that is seeing people really get well. They seem when they're just put on pharmaceuticals during a two-minute visit or eight minutes if they get a whole long time with their doctor, all that happens is they're given a prescription drug, which sometimes can be useful.
But does not usually heal the situation. In fact, I would say it almost never does. That's unfortunate because people then get on a roundabout. Well, when we use a natural intervention such as herbal medicine, now herbal medicine, of course, was always used even by physicians until very, very recently. So even in the 1950s in the United States, and all other countries. Herbal medicine was what anything that might be called a pharmaceutical and was found in a pharmacy. Those were all herbal medicines.
Only after a big political agenda, and I write all about that in my book, The Natural Medicine Chest, The history of Natural Medicine, there was something called the Flexner Report that was actually commissioned by the Rockefellers and was part of a discussion of the AMA, the American Medical Association, as it came into being. That is when purposefully and politically there was a move to restrict both access and information about herbal medicine and other natural healing modalities such as homeopathy and other things that can be very useful that we use in integrative and functional medicine.
There was a movement to actually stop the teaching of any of those things. It was called Irregular Medicine. To actually stop the teaching of that to physicians in medical schools. To restrict the teachings to physicians to only one source of information that had to do with only two modalities. One is pharmaceuticals and one is surgery.
So when people say, how come my doctor did not tell me about this? It worked so great and it was so inexpensive and it had no adverse effects. Why didn't my doctor tell me about this particular natural healing modality, such as herbs, which we'll be talking about now? The answer is unfortunate because it's actually politically maneuvered. That's a topic for another whole show.
But as I came into my understanding of natural medicine, which actually happened for the first time when I fell off a horse and had a very severe back injury, which doesn't heal on its own, and I was told I needed surgery, which would be appropriate in most cases, but I sort of had a little bird talk to me, I would say a spiritual revelation.
So look into that because the doctor had told me I would never walk again without surgery, but I did not believe it. So I went to the local library and looked through the card catalog. For those of you old enough to remember those things, they're little drawers that you pull out. Remember, there was no internet. There were no credit cards. This is a long time ago. But I looked through the card catalog about natural therapeutics for a hurt back, which I had. I found so much information and I actually got in touch with all those places I read about such as Dr. Bernard Jensen was one. All of his writings are still worth diving into by any of our listeners today, as well as I myself wrote 18 books. They're all listed on my website at naturalnurse.com books.
So Dr. Bernard Jensen and many other people that I studied with all talked about using herbs for healing. So that is really where I got my start. One thing that I have noticed over many years, because I'm very involved with the American Herbalist Guild. The American Herbalist Guild is an excellent place to get information about herbal medicine, but I do notice that many of the in-depth training that are offered to the public are very, very, very expensive.
So therefore, it's going to be limited only to those people of high means to be able to take some of those courses. So I specifically decided to give back to society to have a basic class in herbal medicine so people can do any one of the above.
They could either be able to intelligently decide what herb or group of herbs, an herbal protocol, would be the right thing for them and their family, just locally for themselves, their family. Then also, the course incorporates for health care professionals who are already doing something that is now being called integrative or functional medicine, which means natural health suggestions for their clients, how a professional also could intelligently and correctly put together herbal protocols. So that's why I started this class. I think it's been going on for about 15 years. So it's new next to some of the things I've been doing for 57 years or more since 1964 in terms of herbal medicine.
So this class I think is wonderful and I love to share it with people. It's given through the Florida School of Holistic Living, which is a wonderful organization in Florida that does both online training as well as in-person training. I do a lot of in-person as well where we go out in the field and identify plants and actually make them into medicine. That's part of herbal medicine. So in this class, the Natural Nurse Basics of Herbal Medicine actually also offers 18 CEUs for anyone who does have a license. So that might be a nurse or a massage therapist or a holistic practitioner of some kind who is also a licensed health professional. So that's why we put this class together, to be useful for anybody who really wants to study herbal medicine.
It's broken into four classes. We have one class a month. The first one is called the Basics of Herbal Medicine. Here we learn the fundamentals and essential terminology that is relevant to herbalism. Just like nurses, which I'm also a nurse, I'm a PhD RN, nurses have a, I say, a cliquish language. Everyone does. Hairdressers do. Everybody has their own little cliquish language.
In the first class, we have assignments. So we meet for an hour and a half. It's usually on a Sunday for an hour and a half in the morning. You're also given tons and tons of handouts that you're given to actually download and keep forever in your computer. They're given as PDFs. That would be both what I use to lecture from and discuss from, as well as many other handouts about that topic. There is quite a bit of homework. Now, if you want to just listen in and not do the homework, that's fine. But if you want a beautiful certificate given by the Florida School of Holistic Medicine and also the CE units, those are only necessary for someone who already has a license. If you want to get those, then you have to do the homework.
The homeworks are very in-depth because the homeworks are where you learn. So you would look up all these special words for herbal medicine so you could talk to another herbalist. What is a cologog? Do you know? If you do, you're probably pretty well versed in herbal medicine. What is a mucilaginous agent? When would you use that? So that's the kind of thing that we learn in the Natural Nurse class.
So if anybody wants to take it, you can just go online to naturalnurse.com, Classes and Events. The second class is Botany and Botanical Nomenclature. Because if you want to talk about herbs, then you really should understand a little bit about the actual plants that you're talking about. So the botany class covers the importance of Latin names when communicating with other herbalists.
Something very special called the Doctrine of Signatures. The Doctrine of Signatures is a very special thing that has to do with the fact that a plant, when you actually look at the plant, can tell you because of its shape and its size and its function and its color, it can actually tell you what it is used for in the body.
So that's a fantastic aspect of the Doctrine of Signatures. We go deeply into that spiritual signature that a plant has. Also identifying plant families and how we decide if a plant is edible, medicinal, or a very important topic is plants that are poisonous. It's a real good thing to study before you go out and gather plants for food and medicine.
So if you do not come on board with the class when we have it at that time, you can always get it on the archive. Once you sign up for the class, you will get a link to come to the live sessions and you will get all the handouts for you to download. Then you also get an archive link so you can join us anytime. If you don't come in when we're doing it live, you can come in basically anytime at your convenience to finish the course.
You have about a year to hand in all the assignments. The third class is very specific. It's called Using Herbs for Yourself and Your Family. Now, any of these classes, by the way, you can take just that one class rather than the full series. You can always take just one class. Each class gives three CE units for professionals. Well, if you take the whole class, the whole course and do all the homework, then you get 18 CEUs. But the third class is using herbs for yourself and your family. This covers common herbal first aid that people might use for colds and flus and ear infections, upset stomach, skin rashes, and other mild daily health issues that can be handled at home.
Actually, herbs are much better than let's say the over-the-counter pharmaceuticals, where if you read some of them, they still have a long list of possible adverse effects, as well as dyes and coloring agents and all kinds of things like that. So even if you just want to know how to use herbs for yourself and your family and put together your own protocol and have me review it and go, that's pretty good, or not, and why not, and where you could look for better information. So that's class three, which is Using Herbs for Yourself and Your Family.
Then we wrap it up with the fourth class. The fourth class is actually about our very deep spiritual connection to plants. This is called actually feeling the consciousness of plants. Because since ancient times, people have experienced plant communication. Almost anybody can walk outside their door and there's a tree that lives there and the tree might be living there a lot longer than you're living there. It will validate the reality of that feeling that you have. Most people have that feeling. What's so interesting is that scientific investigation now completely supports the fact that plants do communicate.
In fact, there are cellular structures on every single cell in our body. There are specific structures for what's called interdimensional communication and intra and even among species. There are specific cellular parts of each and every cell that are for communicating with your own species.
So with humans, that would be called intraspecies communication if we're speaking to another human. But let's say your dog comes over and he or she can tell you that they want to go for a walk. That is intraspecies communication. We're communicating with a different species. Guess what? We have those same receptors for the messages that plants put out and now they're actually being measured.
The actual ancient shamans as always were able to tune into that. So can we, if you learn those techniques, as well as learning dowsing. That's another great technique to communicate. Besides that, getting back to more scientific-based stuff, you definitely want to know exactly how to do herb-drug communication in terms of herb-drug interactions. Before you take any herbs, or suggest any herbs for any particular person or even a pet, you really need to know what possible herb-drug interaction would happen. So in terms of plant dowsing, there are definitely techniques to use, and then when we're talking about herb-drug interactions, it's very important to know which are the best websites to use, and before you're going to start bringing a lot of herbs into your routine or suggest that someone else does, you really have to take a list of their drugs and then look up herb-drug interactions, because sometimes that can actually be dangerous. I'll give you one example here. Let's say you're working with an elderly person, and unfortunately, unlike myself, let's say my mom, my mom's 96 and she's on exactly zero pharmaceuticals, but that's very unusual. In fact, when I do take her for a checkup or something, the doctor will send in four people because the first person he came in, there was nothing on the list of her pharmaceuticals. So they send someone else and say, my dear, I guess you don't understand this question. Let's look at your list of drugs. Oh, you don't have it? Okay, let's ask your daughter. Maybe she knows them. I'll back her up and say zero is the answer. She is not on any pharmaceuticals. It's a shocking thing when I think it should be really the normal thing.
However, when you have slight imbalances of one kind or another, an herb usually can help bring it back. It should be the remedy of first choice. Later, if or else fails, you need to look at things like exercise, stress reduction therapeutics, all kinds of natural remedies, and then you might want to consider a pharmaceutical. But really, most people should get through their entire life with not one single pharmaceutical. That's actually my belief. As a PhD RN, I think that even more so because we understand the science. So those are what those four classes are.
Again, if you are an acupuncturist, a massage therapist, an RD, a midwife or nurse, or anyone who has a license, then you can get the 18 CE units that are through the Florida Department of Education. Other people in other states take it and also have submitted it to their licensing bureaus, and it is accepted. But if you don't have a license, then you just take the class for your own edification and you also still get a certificate saying that you completed the course. It's nice for people who are herbalists, such as an RH. An RH is a registered herbalist. If anyone's interesting in becoming an RH, I am a mentor who bring people through that whole process, which this class, the Natural Nurse Herbal Certification course, can be used towards your RH. The RH is more comprehensive than just this class and involves quite a bit of study. It's really in the United States one of the only recognized certifications so that it's standardized, meaning anyone who's an RH, which is a registered herbalist through the American Herbalist Guild, they all have to complete the same kind of educational processes. So anyone within RH is definitely a knowledgeable herbalist. So that's the class called the Natural Nurse Herbal Certification Course. You can find it at naturalnurse.com and then go to classes and events because we have lots of other things going on, sort of everyday lectures, et cetera.
Ashley James (0:29:25.632)
I love it. If someone wanted to hire a registered herbalist to work with them, what's the best way to find one, either local or online? Are you available to work with people or do you have a website you can refer people to, a directory?
Dr. Ellen Kamhi (0:29:42.368)
I do. So I personally did one-on-one, where we made and we set up an herbal protocol for an individual. I did that for 57 years, but no more because I am way too busy. I am really way too busy. So my focus now is if an individual wants to walk the path of becoming an herbalist, I do a lot of one-on-one education. Walking them through the process that I do. But not, you have a cold or flu, take these herbs. That I did.
Now, I did write 18 books. So we have all kinds of books with very specific protocols in them, as well as lectures, individual lectures, what you do for colds and flus. You can take that from my on-demand site. That's Natural Nurse Academy. Those are only $35.
So we're talking about really low-cost information. But to become an RH, you can work with a mentor. I do that one-on-one. That is through a specific organization, which is called the American Herbalist Guild. The American Herbalist Guild is who grants the RH, which is a registered herbalist. That's my favorite, let's say, certification for people to get who would like to call themselves an herbalist because there are many, many programs around who grant something called master herbalist.
When you look into the different programs who teach it and then it goes to master herbalist when you're done with their program, there's no coherence necessarily. Some of them are excellent and in-depth. Some of them are, a three-hour class and all of a sudden you're a master herbalist. Kind of like other things, a holistic health counselor. There are some that are excellent, a health coach. Someone who has a certification as a nurse health coach is deeply qualified. Other people who call themselves a health coach because they took an online course for a week and never even took anatomy and physiology are not well trained. So that's the difference. An RH is a very well trained, knowledgeable herbalist who has gone through all the requirements of the American Herbalist Guild.
Ashley James (24:22.37)
So the American Herbalist Guild, if we were to look that up, do they have a directory so anyone who's listening could find someone who is certified by them and local to them, for example.
Dr. Ellen Kamhi (0:32:23.662)
That's an excellently stated question to make it clear. So people can just go to the American Herbalist Guild, type that into your browser, American Herbalist Guild, and once you get to their site, they do have a directory of registered herbalists. Then I do think it's set up maybe by state, so you could find someone local if you want to work locally.
Of course, nowadays, one of the positive things that I think happens because of that whole COVID incident was it really opened up people being able to work with people at a distance. A lot of people are much more comfortable with that now. So you might find an herbalist right down the street, or you may find one anywhere in the world that you vibe with, that you would like to work with. So that is a good place to find an herbalist. If someone is an RH, I can't promise you that you will love that person or work well with them, just like any doctor that you work with. But I can guarantee that they are well-trained, knowledgeable herbalists, because to become an RH, they have to go through quite a bit of training.
Ashley James (0:33:34.798)
Wonderful, and I'm very excited to take your classes. So I'm going to be going to naturalnurse.com and I'm going to be signing up it starts in March so I'm going to make sure I sign up before March and of course, this is evergreen, people can be listening to this years from now go to naturalnurse.com and sign up for for whenever the next class is. Just to check it out. Just to continue our own education and of course all your books and let's go back and listen to episode 536 if you haven't already. We learned so much and I'm so excited to dive in. Before we do, I want to let what you shared with us about the immune stuff helped so much. My whole family, going through the holidays, we were around people who had the crud, and several times I woke up in the middle of the night throughout the last few months—just a few times where I woke up and was like, okay, I feel maybe there's something in my throat or a sore throat's coming on.
I immediately took that homeopathic you recommended, put it under my tongue, went back to bed, woke up fine, no problem. It was just the first sign of any kind of symptom. I was actively around people who were coughing, and my friends had fevers, and I was running over to their house to deliver goodies to them, natural stuff to help them, including that homeopathic. When my son got sick, I gave him all the remedies that you suggested and he just blew it out of his system. We saw it made such a difference. So episode 536 is worth its weight in gold because it is so great.
Dr. Ellen Kamhi (0:35:19.350)
Thank you. That's why I called one of my books The Natural Medicine Chest, because everyone should set that up in their house ahead of time, especially for anything that people get—sore throats and little colds and things like that, upset stomach. You should have that all there ahead of time, both herbal and homeopathic. So when someone in the family needs it, it's right there.
To stock the whole entire chest with high-quality remedies is not terribly expensive. Also, a good herbal extract never goes bad. So if you buy it now and you need it four years from now, it doesn't go bad. So you can use it then. The same with homeopathics.
Ashley James (0:36:04.271)
Same with homeopathy. Exactly. Yes. So after literally moments after we hung up from our last interview, I went and I purchased everything you recommended and I had it ready. No one was sick then, but I was like, I am going to be prepared. We were prepared and we used them throughout the crud, the crud season. It was great.
Of course, all of us, we talked about how a lot of people get sick because they actually eat way too much sugar, they overindulge in alcohol and sugar, staying up late, the stress, and just everything that we do between Thanksgiving and New Year's lowers the immune system. Then we kind of blame the pharmaceutical industry created the PR campaign of its flu season, get your flu shot. We're really not taking as great care of ourselves during that time.
So my focus for my family was to make sure that we take care of ourselves. If we do get exposed to some germs that our body starts to respond to, we can dive into those natural remedies quickly at the first sign of symptom to help our bodies overcome very quickly. And it worked. It was wonderful. So I thank you for that guidance. I bet you've helped so many of my listeners with that. So I'm just equally as excited to dive in today to learn more about what herbs we can do for the HPA axis. Of course, maybe we start by talking about what is this HPA axis and why is it so important that we have some herbal remedies for it?
Dr. Ellen Kamhi (0:37:45.943)
Yes, we will do that. But I just want to say, just now, since you did bring up everything about dealing with these various seasonal challenges, the FDA just today decided that the new vaccines have to have stronger warnings because a lot of them cause a beret syndrome, which is a neurological problem, and that has to do with what we're talking about today. So this is very much being watched.
So the more you're prepared naturally, the less you come in contact with some of those very harmful kinds of therapeutics. So that's a great idea to talk about stress, like you said, and support for the HPA axis, and we'll talk about what that is. I will say I have an article that I wrote, which is in several major journals, and it's called Herbal Support for the HPA Axis. So if anybody wants a copy of that full article, I can actually email it to them if they request it, and it'll have a lot of what we're talking about today. It was published in the Journal of Integrative Medicine way back in fact in December of 2016, but everything in it is still physiologically correct.
So we talk about things like yeast and microorganisms and all the things that can cause stress in your body. Then looking at how the HPA axis, which really has to do with your endocrine organs. So some of the organs that are involved in this axis are the pituitary gland, the pineal, the hypothalamus—that's the H—also the pancreas, the gonads, the adrenals, the adrenals, we're going to talk about the thyroid gland, and also the parathyroid gland.
So all of these glands in our system work together in an energy connection that is like a dance. When one pushes, the other one pulls. They are found all throughout our body. So some of these things are in our brain—the hypothalamus and the pituitary. Those are in the brain. The thyroid gland, anyone can look these up now. It's so easy to find. You don't have to go to medical school to take a look at it. It looks just like a bow tie, which is really interesting in a spiritual aspect when you think about someone wearing a bow tie. Where did that shape come from and exactly where it's placed. Did you ever look at that?
The thyroid gland is right where a bow tie would be if a gentleman uses it on his collar, and it's that exact shape. So all these representations for me always have a spiritual significance. When we see how they play together, a symphony and the different hormones that are involved with each.
For instance, in the hypothalamus, there's a lot of different hormones—dopamine and growth hormone and gonadotropin, which has to do with sexual action, oxytocin, all kinds of hormones—and they play in an intimate dance with the pineal gland, the thyroid, the pituitary, but each one has kind of a special focus.
If we look at the HPA and we look at the hypothalamus for the H, it controls things like body temperature, hunger and thirst, and also, interestingly, parenting and attachment behaviors. When you feel like you're in love with someone, it's really monitored by hypothalamus activities, as well as fatigue, sleep, and circadian rhythms, which are the rhythms that go on on a daily basis in our body.
So it's really interesting to see how they interact. The pituitary gland, which is just a little protrusion under the hypothalamus, has to do with growth and blood pressure, which we'll discuss another time, sexual function, how your thyroid works, as well as aspects of pregnancy, childbirth, and nursing.
It's not like you can actually divide these things up into one or another. The adrenal gland is very interesting because one thing is the adrenal gland has an outer covering. The outer covering of the adrenal gland is called the adrenal cortex. That releases certain hormones, which we're going to be talking about—cortisol, because cortisol is also known as the stress hormone, and also DHEA. Those both come from the cortex, which is the outer covering on the adrenal gland.
Then there's the inside of the adrenal gland, which is called the adrenal medulla, and that releases epinephrine and norepinephrine, which maybe some people have heard of. For instance, they actually use that at the dentist in an injection when you're going to get your teeth worked on in terms of the epinephrine.
It works, it's helpful for pain reduction, but it also causes some people to get heart palpitations, so everything has two sides. So where are the adrenal glands? Everybody can actually massage their adrenal glands because if you know where your kidneys are, which are in the small of your back, if you just round your back and put your two fists back there, and you will feel what's called the small of your back—right in there is your adrenal glands. They are sitting right on top of your kidneys.
Many people, if they reach back there and massage that area, they'll find that there's a soreness there. So it's really a good thing to pay attention to because the adrenal cortex releases cortisol and cortisone. This has to do with stress, physical activity, low blood glucose levels, and also there's a difference with short-term cortisol release and long-term cortisol release. People could probably even sort of know when that's going on.
For instance, short-term cortisol release is when, let's say, you step off a curb and a car is coming fast and it doesn't hit you but it almost does, you jump back from it, you will feel that cortisol. Anybody has felt this at some time. Something happens that's worrisome, but it puts you into what's called that fight or flight response.
When you're in that flight or fight response, you get that rush. It's called, sometimes they call it an adrenaline rush, but it's actually linked to that cortisol release. Different things happen, it narrows the arteries while then the epinephrine, which is also released, causes the heart to beat faster and you'll feel that heart palpitation when you're in a stressful situation. But then very often the stressful situation is resolved. You jump back out of the traffic, you go, he wasn't going to hit me anyway, it's okay. My child is okay. Take a few deep breaths and before you know it, you kind of back to normal. That's different than long-term cortisol release. Many disease processes are linked more to that long-term cortisol release that doesn't shut off appropriately. It sort of stays on, lower dose release of cortisol, but it doesn't go off. That's when you're experiencing things like insomnia, migraine headaches, even obesity and GI complaints. Usually have a long-term cortisol release part of it. It weakens the immune system and you have imbalanced emotions, low resistance where you kind of catch everything that goes around. So stress in the adrenal glands are very, very intimate in terms of how well we feel. The pancreas is involved, the thyroid is involved, all of them are sort of turned on and off by this cortisol and also DHEA.
Ashley James (0:46:48.783)
You talked about how the thyroid is involved. It's so fascinating. Is someone with long-term stress, that long-term cortisol release where it's kind of can't shut off, do they tend to become more hypothyroid or hyper? Does that come together? Do you see thyroid function being impacted directly from long-term cortisol being kept on?
Dr. Ellen Kamhi (0:47:18.674)
Absolutely, I'll talk about that in terms of T3 and T4. But first, I just want to bring in where we had mentioned about the parenting aspect with cortisol, because it's so interesting that specific studies have been done showing maternal stress and elevated cortisol during the child's infancy relates to anxiety and depression, particularly in teenage girls. So that is really, really interesting that because of the mother's stress, even after the child is born, we find a higher level of anxiety and depression in teenage girls. Studies are so interesting when they find things that we know anyway.
So yes, let's talk about the thyroid gland. That's another whole gland. I said, it's shaped like a bow tie. There's two biologically active thyroid hormones. One is called T4. It's also often called thyroxine. It's another name for it. Then there's T3. There's more, but the two important ones that are often measured are T3 and T4.
They're both derived from an amino acid called tyrosine. So if you don't get enough tyrosine, you often will have thyroid problems. So the tyrosine is converted in the body into T4 and T3. Those are the main thyroid hormones. Here's the difference between them. During a normal day, your thyroid will secrete about 80 micrograms of T4 and only five micrograms of T3. So you see there's much, much more T4 that your body generates. It generates just a little bit of T3.
However, T3 is much more important in terms of biological activity. So it's interesting because the body will then convert some of that T4, which it has lots of, into T3. It will do that if it has all the nutritional support needed and all the enzymes that might be needed to do that to keep the thyroid functioning better. So there is a whole lot of conversion of T4 to T3 that takes place in the liver and the kidneys.
Then the T3 is released into the bloodstream and floats around and does its actions. But if any of those things are interfered with, such as liver toxicity or kidney toxicity, then there's not going to be enough conversion, which means you won't have enough of that really active T3. So the body is just incredibly complex and beautiful.
This is where a lot of people hear that they may be deficient in iodine. This is where that comes in because iodine is important in the thyroid gland and also in the uptake in the energy cycle. How do we make energy in our body? Some people may have heard of this. It's called ATP, adenosine triphosphate and ADP, adenosine diphosphate. This is where the thyroid gland has a lot to do with how much energy you have. How good does that transfer happen? But this is interesting. Adenosine tri. What does the word tri mean? Adenosine di. What does the word di mean? You can guess. So it goes to three phosphate molecules, that's adenosine triphosphate. It releases a phosphate molecule and becomes adenosine diphosphate, which has two phosphate molecules.
But let's think about what phosphate is. Phosphate, if you think about a match, if you strike a match, what you see there on that flame is linked to phosphate because phosphate is something that gives off light. So to me, that's really amazing because this entire HPC access that we're talking about and HPA axis with the adrenal glands has to do with how well our intracellular light-releasing mechanisms are. So we look at that both from a physical aspect of the phosphorylation action, which has to do with the release of a phosphate molecule from ATP to ADP, releasing energy.
That's how we walk around. That's how we think. That's how we do everything. So we are actually light energy beings. So when people say, that's just kind of a new age, floppy concept of some sort, it really isn't. It is actually how we work. We work energetically on light. That's not just a philosophical, new agey kind of statement. That's an actual statement.
In terms of how our body releases energy in this HPA axis. So these hypothalamus and the anterior pituitary, the thyroid, they all work together. Then, what do they do then? In the cardiovascular system, it increases heart rate and how well you have vasodilation, which is your veins and arteries as they open and close, how they affect blood flow. In your central nervous system,
If somebody feels all kinds of mentally sluggish and anxious, well, that has to do with this thyroid hormone not working well. It's kind of all across the body where we can feel these things. So then another gland I'd love to go into here is the pineal, because the pineal then moves into a very, very interesting thing because it works by light.
The pineal gland in humans depends on the light-dark cycle. Right now, in our modern culture, we are way over-inundated with light. When you're inundated with too much light, the pineal gland can no longer produce melatonin. That's why many people have sleeping difficulties, because of the melatonin interference.
So, it all fits together in terms of how well we feel, how much energy we have. That HPA axis is incredibly important. We could talk about some herbs that can be useful to help balance it.
Ashley James (0:54:35.321)
I'd absolutely love that. Just really curious about how many people are walking around with a diagnosis of one or another, that it actually all comes back to, I don't know how to put it in the correct way, but an unhealthy or an imbalanced HPA axis.
People are walking around being put on all kinds of drugs from blood pressure to weight loss to blood sugar to thyroid to adrenal. So many different issues in the body. This is my frustration, I'm sure yours as well, that so many MDs and because of their training, they're not taught to go upstream and support the body's ability to heal itself.
That's what we really need. Need to stop looking at drugs as the answer and look inward at the body is the answer. The body wants to heal itself. We got to give it what it needs and get it of its own way. Could you name a few illnesses that people suffer, common ones that people suffer from, that when they balance their HPA? Of course, obviously make sure they're doing all the appropriate lifestyle, lifestyle medicine things as well. But when they balance the HPA with herbal medicine, those issues resolve. What are the more common issues that we would be able to see resolve by helping the body heal its HPA axis?
Dr. Ellen Kamhi (0:56:18.475)
Definitely, I'll just name a few. Insomnia is very big. Migraine headaches. Obesity in general, having too much weight that you can't get rid of. Any kind of GI complaint, ongoing things that are called Crohn's or this, that, or the other name that they give them.
Would you believe when you go to a gastrointestinal doctor, they do not do a food diary? That is criminal because lining your gastrointestinal tract is actually the biggest part of your immune system. It's called IgG. There's different parts of our immune system, which would be a topic for another day. But IgG is the part of the immune system that completely lines the whole entire gastrointestinal tract.
So if you want to do a test for food allergies, a good test would be an IgG food allergy panel. So you can see when that food hits your gut, how it reacts. Now that's linked into the cortisol, because when too much cortisol is there, then the IgG cannot function correctly. It gets turned off. It gets turned off because your body is put into a fight or flight mode, even though it's a slower long-term one.
So then your body decides, well, it's not so important to digest properly because I might have to run at any minute, so let's keep it so that my muscles can run. So all of that is true. All of those things are linked to this specific axis of hormones dancing together.
Also, a weak immune system, which of course leads to every illness. Just on a daily level, having low energy, imbalanced emotions, low resistance, and just a general low level of well-being are all linked into this particular group of hormones, which when they work well together are in constant communication and they kind of talk to each other, they turn each other on or they turn each other off.
Even things like having a very strict vegan diet can definitely interfere with the amount of tyrosine that you have. If your tyrosine is too low, then you're going to have trouble keeping up with the T4, T3. So we talked about T4, T3, that is your thyroid hormone. So all of them are in balance, you're feeling better than when they're out of balance.
Taking one pharmaceutical or other is probably not, like you said, going to back and balance all of those things. Neither is just taking any herb, either. I just like herbal interventions because they will often deal with what's going wrong. They're like food. They have different nutrients in them that can address various parts that you might be missing.
Then there are specific diseases that happen. Graves' disease. That's a condition caused by excessive production of thyroid hormone. That's where you see an enlarged thyroid gland. People actually get a lump in their neck or protrusion sometimes of eyeballs that kind of stick out a little bit as well as a rapid heartbeat and being very excitable in terms of nervousness.
So those are things that can be really recognized even by a doctor. Then, of course, with the thyroid, there's hypothyroidism, which has to do with not having enough, or hyperthyroidism, where you're having too much of those thyroid hormones. But there are many herbal remedies that can help address this.
Ashley James (1:00:26.875)
Well, I know so many people just generally complain about wanting better sleep, more mental clarity, and more energy. Those are major, major issues. If you can resolve, if you can give everyone better sleep, better mental clarity, better energy, you're sold. Everyone's going to take my money, just tell me what to do.
Dr. Ellen Kamhi (1:00:51.411)
Well, but I don't find that they actually will often do it because one of the first things you have to do is get more dark in your life because light is one of the main things that throws the HPA axis off because it's actually scheduled to have a lot of dark. I mean real dark. I don't mean looking at your phone dark. I don't mean having the TV and lights on in the room, or the little lights that are even on the clock, or the little light on the modem, all of that interrupts the production of melatonin, which has everything to do with sleep. Just popping some extra melatonin is definitely not a good idea either, because melatonin itself can be toxic when it's in an unnatural, irregular form.
Ashley James (1:01:45.823)
So the solution is lights out, put a mask, eye mask over your eyes?
Dr. Ellen Kamhi (1:01:53.629)
That is a good idea. Meditate. Meditation actually naturally increases melatonin. Deep meditation, it could be just prayer. Doesn't have to be meditation with one guru or another or saying some mantra. It can just be deep prayer. In other words, getting into that deep state of quiet mind, and there's some very good studies on that as well, that can help your body produce more melatonin.
So there are natural things you can do. First, recognizing that it's a problem. Then there is self-awareness that's so important, but also the ability to change habits. It sounds easy. Oh, eat healthy. But how do we do that? Get more rest. Well, how do we do that? If you're raising three kids and everybody's got to get to school and you're having a full-time job, it's not necessarily so easy.
Ashley James (1:02:51.035)
Going to sleep when you put your kids to sleep. I know it sounds crazy because so many moms but that's my me time. If you go to bed when your kids go to bed, you will have your me time in the morning before the kids wake up. I had an amazing morning before my son woke up this morning. My whole personality has always been a night night person. I had to train myself. I had to basically protect my sleep, get very protective, a pit bull, get very protective of my sleep.
Do that little switch in your head that goes, my health is more important than scrolling through whatever social media or whatever I was going to do on a screen at 10 at night and protect your sleep. I do notice deeper sleep, better sleep when I wear an eye mask, even just because you want to block out even the tiny little light that might be coming in through the street lamp, just tiny little light block, totally block it out.
I get much deeper sleep and I feel so much better in the morning when I protect my sleep and keep the light out. They said get darker, the moment you said that I thought, are we going to talk about dark, leafy green vegetables?
Dr. Ellen Kamhi (1:04:07.911)
That's part of it. But definitely that eye mask is great and there are different ones. The one I always recommend is, you put it over your eyes but it's not flat on your eyes. It's almost cups. But then it goes around and it has a specific brand and a specific name but there's several of them. The reason is because then when you go into different sleep stages, REM sleep and the various sleep stages, which is another whole discussion in and of itself. When you have the ones that press right on your eye, it stops your eyes from fluttering because it squishes in your eyelashes. So they don't have their natural movement because your eyes actually do flutter when you're in that deep, deep sleep. But if you have the right kind of mask, it doesn't interfere with it, but it completely blocks the light.
Ashley James (1:04:57.847)
That's such a good point to make. Because so many people just have those eye masks that do touch the eyes. I have long eyelashes, and I don't want anything. I couldn't stand the feeling of something pushing up against them. But you're right. You've got to get the ones that are cupped. I can't believe that it blocks the deeper sleep. That's amazing if you don't have the cupped kind.
So, we have a good understanding of the different issues. I've actually been diving into studying the hypothalamus when it comes to metabolism, which is really interesting, how it regulates hunger, how it regulates that whole obesity thing and how it plays a really big role in that.
Our diet, for example, saturated fat crosses the blood-brain barrier and impacts the hypothalamus and causes inflammation and it impacts our desire to eat more and gain more weight. Whereas eating a cleaner, healthier diet and there's certain lifestyle things we can do actually impact metabolism. But from that standpoint, if we are balancing the whole system, it's exciting to know that if someone's suffering from one or more of those things you mentioned, that they'll have some really good results to look forward to.
Dr. Ellen Kamhi (1:06:30.183)
They do. That's right, Ashley. It has to do with a commitment to oneself and really reversing that concept that, if I just go to this doctor or that doctor, then it will be taken care of. But, with the big movement towards those GLP-1 drugs, the weight loss drugs that are becoming so popular, they definitely do help people lose weight.
They do address some of these issues, but they do it in a way that has quite a bit of negative impact and side effects. What they actually do is make people have less of an appetite so they eat less. But there's lots of natural ways to do that. When you exercise more, you have a lower appetite, for example.
Ashley James (1:07:17.319)
Is it black cumin? Is something that lowers appetite?
Dr. Ellen Kamhi (1:07:24.595)
Yes, in fact, black cumin, which is an oil, that's one thing that I really love. There's a combination of omega-3 fatty acids along with black seed oil. Black seed oil is black cumin oil. Black seed is another name. It's for the seed of the cumin. Now, it's really amazing because it's also highly antimicrobial. That is a really good thing to add into your diet, black seed oil.
Ashley James (1:07:53.201)
Interesting. I actually just bought the actual seeds because I was going to grind it up myself and add it to my food. So, I'm going to play around with it. It is not wild that something we can take so naturally can have it in our own kitchen and can make such a positive difference. I feel very sorry for the people who are those doctors who are getting them on the GLP drugs because studies are showing that people not only lose some fat, but they lose muscle mass. We're seeing they actually lose heart muscle. That is, you want to protect your heart, your skeletal muscle, and your skeleton at all costs. This is your longevity. This is your health in the second half of your life. If you are wasting that for 20, 30 pounds of fat loss, you're robbing Peter to pay Paul and you're actually going to end up coming up short basically by robbing yourself of the parts of your body that are going to take you healthfully into the rest of your life. It’s very scary, and you never get on a drug that's new. You just don't. Don't be a guinea pig. It's so sad.
Dr. Ellen Kamhi (1:09:18.413)
You're right. It's hardly tested. So we'll see what happens with that one in 20 years. But there certainly are a lot of herbs that have been used for thousands of years. One that I love to share about is mimosa. If anyone has ever seen a mimosa tree, in the spring it gets these feathery, beautiful pink flowers. The name of the plant is albizia, the mimosa tree. It's called the tree of happiness because it calms the spirit and relieves constrained emotions.
So when we go deeper into how does this work, we know that it's very high in specific active medicinal constituents called subponins, such as triterpenes and flavosubponins. They're also very high in quercetin. Quercetin is definitely a known nutrient that helps with staying calm. Helps the adrenals and helps the heart. So all of these are found in the mimosa tree, in particular the flowers. So of course you can only get it when the flowers are out, but you can purchase a product that might be made with it. It's a nervine, which means it calms our nervous system with both immune regulating and cancer inhibiting effects. We even know how it works. By binding to the 5-HTP receptor, and that influences depression, anxiety, and irritability. So how great is that? Because it has an effect on GABA, dopamine, and serotonin. GABA, dopamine, and serotonin are those chemicals actually in our system that have to do with staying calm or feeling really stressed out with being able to sleep well or not, with feeling you're in a good mood or not. People with low blood pressure, low mood, low thyroid, or anxiety and poor energy are very much helped by mimosa.
It also has no known adverse effects. So it's an absolutely wonderful link to the whole endocrine system that we've been talking about. It works via the pituitary gland. So mimosa is one that is a really good adjunct to staying healthy. You don't need a lot. If you get a liquid mimosa extract, you can use a few dropperfuls a day. They have it in capsules. There's actually no reports of adverse effects or interactions. So mimosa is a really good one to look into.
But of course, if you start any herb for the first time, you want to check your reaction. Don't take 15 new herbs all at once. Take one, take it for a week or two, go, it feels a little good. Then you might want to add in another one. For our discussion today with the HPA axis, another really great one to add in is magnolia, which is another gorgeous flower.
It's interesting how much flowers actually are linked to human mood, anxiety, and happiness. But magnolia actually binds to a lot of important targets that are mood regulating, such as serotonin. That's one that it binds to. It has to do with cortisol, which we've been talking about. That whole stress hormone cortisol, magnolia lowers it. It also suppresses NF-kappa B. NF-kappa B is one of the things that makes us have inflammation. So very, very good herb to add to your herbal thing. Then, castor oil pack, which is another whole discussion that we could go into at another time. But putting the castor oil pack on your adrenal glands and on your thyroid gland, switching it off one day on one, one day on another, maybe twice a week, can really make your body make its own stress-supportive hormones. So that's another great thing to do.
Ashley James (1:13:30.118)
So that would be a castor oil pack on the lumbar spine while you're sleeping?
Dr. Ellen Kamhi (1:13:35.054)
Yes, you can put it there or could put it on your thyroid gland, which is remember that bow tie right on your neck.
Ashley James (1:13:41.990)
For the magnolia, what's the good dosage to start with?
Dr. Ellen Kamhi (1:13:47.266)
Well, I can give it to you, but I always say you have to, if you're purchasing a product, read the label because it depends. Is it standardized? Is it a capsule? Is it a liquid? But the amount that is usually recommended is 160 to 500 milligrams depending on the weight and condition of the person using it. Also, if it is standardized to one of the active constituents that are known, such as Magnylalol, or Hanakyal, then it's usually about 1 to 10 percent of the basic bark extract. So I would just always say when you're going to get an herbal product, read the label. Of course, if you gather your own and make your own, then you're not going to know the exact milligram amount, and that's okay.
Ashley James (1:14:36.542)
Would someone make a tea out of magnolia flowers?
Dr. Ellen Kamhi (1:14:41.218)
You could. You can make tea out of it. It was named originally by a person who first named it. His name is Pierre Magnol. So he was a French botanist, which is often the case. There's some really great studies. If any of our listeners go to PubMed, P-U-B-M-E-D, PubMed, you can just plug in to PubMed anything you want to know about any herb. If you want to know about magnolia, just plug it in there and you'll get tons of studies. There's one called Magnolia and Mood. There's all these studies about every single plant, every single one, anything you want to know. You can look it up and find out for yourself. Print it out, bring it to your doctor, see what he says. They'll usually go, no, I don't know. If your doctor says, I don't know about natural remedies, then I like that because they don't know because remember we talked right at the beginning about the interruption of medical education because of the Flexner Report with them specifically taking out any knowledge about natural medicine. That's honorable. If your doctor says, I don't know because I didn't study it, but I will work with you, you can take it, just report back to me. Do you feel calmer? I'll do some blood work to make sure everything's okay. I'll listen to your heart to make sure it didn't make your heart, that kind of thing. They can be supportive with what they do best while you're working on a natural protocol.
Ashley James (1:16:16.533)
It's okay to fire a doctor if your doctor isn't supporting you and find a doctor who studies holistic medicine, a naturopath, an osteopath, even a functional medicine doctor or a doctor who just woke up and realized that there's more to medicine than drugs. So many of these MDs come on the show and they all have that revelation. They realize that their profession really is limited in supporting people's ability to heal themselves and they want to dive deeper. You deserve to have a team of practitioners that want to support you in getting as healthy as you can be. There are doctors out there who limit their patients with their own belief system.
So don't let a doctor think just if a doctor says, well, you have to be on this drug for the rest of your life because you're a or, you no, you can't heal your Type 2 diabetes. If they say these ridiculous things, or when you have arthritis, you'll always have arthritis. These are just ridiculous limitations. They're limiting you. You got to find a doctor who believes in your body's ability to heal itself and wants to support you. Now you got to do the work, but you got to find doctors who want to support you and also have the experience to back them.
I love that you said, print out the PubMed studies, show them to your doctors, and then gauge your doctor's response. Because we want to surround ourselves with practitioners who are there to support our healing journey. That's really exciting. Is Mimosa the same as Mimosa Puruka?
Dr. Ellen Kamhi (1:17:52.545)
Yes. It's a tree with beautiful pink fluffy flowers. I always think it looks, since you have kids, maybe you look at Dr. Seuss. Dr. Seuss has a trifle tree as one of its characters that always looks to me like it. But the genus and species is albesia, albesia julebricen.
So that what you're talking about might be just the common name of a mimosa tree. It's got beautiful leaves and it gets these gorgeous pink parachute-flowers only in the spring. So if you're going to use the flowers, you have to think about gathering them while they're there. Also the bark. The bark is used as well.
Ashley James (1:18:37.330)
I actually know a mimosa tree in my area. So I'm excited this spring to go look at its flowers and maybe I can get my really tall husband to help me harvest some. He's really tall. The mimosa pudica seeds are used in, I believe, Ayurvedic medicine as one of the anti-parasitic. They have anti-parasitic properties. That's how I know it from.
But it's really cool how you take a plant, like a tree, and the bark does one thing, the leaves do another, the roots do another thing, the flowers do another thing. I love that part of herbal medicine, that it's so beautiful in that way.
So we have three things to start with, the mimosa, the magnolia, and the castor oils. Is anything else that would be really good to know to bring the HPA axis into balance?
Dr. Ellen Kamhi (1:19:38.336)
Well, we did talk about other things, like getting enough darkness. That is so important. in our common life right now, it's actually difficult. You have to make a specific effort, because just going to bed and kind of shutting the light off, like you said, does not do it. So I would say that's a good place to start.
People do use melatonin as a supplement. For some people, that's really helpful. But I don't particularly like the use of melatonin as a supplement because unlike an herb, melatonin is a specific hormone and it's produced as a chemical when you take it. So I'm not a big fan of actually taking it unless you get it measured and your doctor can measure your melatonin level and if it's actually low, then it might be worthwhile to take it. But it's being overused even in the natural products industry. In almost every natural herbal combination for rest, they'll throw in some melatonin, and I'm not a fan of that.
There's a lot of other herbs that can be useful, Valerian, passionflower, really great passionflower, by the way, although it does create rest and calmness and is very supportive for the HPA axis. How it's got its name, people think it's a sexual enhancer. That's another whole show, and I did write a book on that called The Natural Guide to Great Sex. But it's actually not about passion. It was named because the Jesuit priests, when they came to the New World and saw these gorgeous passion flowers growing, thought that it was the doctrine of signatures, another thing we mentioned earlier, of the passion of Christ. Because the petals inside and the little stigmas are in the shape of five nails. So that's how Passion Flower got its name. Not having anything to do with love and lust passion, but actually having to do with the Passion of Christ. Most people don't know that. Passion Flower is a really excellent carminative, calming the system, but without making you sleepy.
So if you're someone who just needs a little bit more stability and calmness because of the HPA dysregulation or for any other reason, during the day while you are going about your daily chores, passion flower is a very good one to use.
Ashley James (1:22:11.614)
Cool. I was going to ask about when the best timing would be. Valerian is maybe better in the afternoon or evening.
Dr. Ellen Kamhi (1:22:20.890)
That will knock you out. No. Valerian, you want to take, maybe an hour before you really want to go to sleep. Another thing you can use it for is if you wake up in the middle of the night and can't get back to sleep, Valerian can be useful. But the first time you take Valerian, you have to gauge your personal reaction because while it does act to calm many people and even act as a sedative and help them sleep, some people, it has the opposite reaction, to where it actually is agitating and makes them not sleep. That does happen at times, depending on a person's wiring. So it's a good thing to try it by itself once and see how it does for you. I have it by my bedside. I don't take it every single day. But if it's one of those days there's a lot on my mind and I'm having some trouble falling asleep, I will take it. It definitely helps. But I'll combine it with a homeopathic also that's helpful for sleep. I always combine homeopathics and herbs.
Ashley James (1:23:25.610)
Do you have a specific homeopathic for sleep you'd recommend or is it more individual?
Dr. Ellen Kamhi (1:23:31.822)
I have one. No, I have one that's a branded product, but I'll tell you the name of it. It's called Combs Forte, the word comb with an s, Combs Forte. It is very mild and gentle. I've used it on my kids when they were little. It's really, really helpful without any kind of side effect.
Ashley James (1:23:52.536)
I love it. How much Valerian is a good place to start for people?
Dr. Ellen Kamhi (1:24:00.412)
So it depends again on what kind of extract you are going to use. Is it going to be standardized to where how much active you're going to get, or is it going to be, let's say, a Nature's Answer alcohol-free full plant, in which case you want to take about 1,000 milligrams, which would be one dropper full. So what you want to do is actually read the bottle if you're not growing your own. Just follow the recommendations there. Sometimes it's about 450 milligrams. That's something that you'll often see.
Ashley James (1:24:36.418)
Got it. Passionflower, same question. Do we just follow the bottle or is there a range of milligrams we'd like to try?
Dr. Ellen Kamhi (1:24:48.754)
Again, that is because is it one that's going to be standardized to an active constituent or is it going to be a full plant? It's usually between 500 and 1,000 depending on the one that you get. It will say on the bottle. If it's a capsule, it'll tell you the milligram amount or if it's a liquid, it depends on if it's an extract or a tincture because extracts are much more highly concentrated than tincture.
Ashley James (1:25:16.036)
Now, in our previous episode, you had mentioned you don't publicly pick sides when it comes to brands. I totally respect that. But we want to make sure, what are the things to look for in the label to make sure that it is a high quality, good brand? Is it organic, wild crafted? You said, standardized. What are the words that we should see on the label to know that this is probably a good brand to try?
Dr. Ellen Kamhi (1:25:46.772)
Right. Well, what I would say is definitely read the label and see how many, let's say, registrations that company has, because the herbal industry in particular is definitely a wild west and a lot of people are in the business when they don't have the right kind of facility. So what you want to know is that they are what's called a GMP registered facility. That means they're doing testing in terms of what's going in. What kind of raw ingredients are they using? What's coming out? Then also, what kind of adulteration is there? Are there microorganisms when they're done? Are you sure there's not? So those are some of the things I would test for. Also, how long has the company been in business? Because some herb companies have been around for over 50 years. That's going to be one that has been able to stand the test of time. So that's a good indicator as well. Also, if you're Jewish, do they have kosher products? If you're a Muslim, is it halal? That might be important to some people as well.
Ashley James (1:26:58.778)
God and vegan, most, most herbs are vegan.
Dr. Ellen Kamhi (1:27:05.660)
Well, I think all herbs are vegan. I never met an herb that's an animal. I mean, yes and no, when you go in, the capsule itself, that's right. The capsule itself, if you're using capsules, might be a bovine or a porcine, which is from PIC. That's absolutely true. Or it might be a vegan capsule. So if that's important to you, that's another thing to consider. I just want to take back that, because when we delve into Chinese medicine, they do use animals and plant parts as part of the medicinal components. So sometimes they do, you're right.
Ashley James (1:27:41.866)
Right. We talked about that in our last interview, a really interesting muscle that actually decreases pain. I was just floored. Thought it was cool, just an interesting thing. Listeners, if you haven't gone back, check out 536, episode 536 for that information. I love what you've laid out for us. We've got the going to sleep with an eye mask on, and do some deep prayer meditation. Do some deep breathing. It's okay to go to bed early and then you have a beautiful day. Wake up with the sunrise and you'll be full of energy. The thing is you actually feel better in the morning and you have more energy and then you're more productive and everything feels better when you get that deep sleep and that deep sleep does require us to have a little bit of self-discipline later in the evening to keep things you said dark and we've got the mimosa and the magnolia.
All of these things are going to be in the show notes of today's podcast at LearnTrueHealth.com. All these notes, I'll make sure are there. Of course, we transcribe all episodes at LearnTrueHealth.com. I'm really excited to try some of these with my son who's 10. Is there any counter indications for children? Obviously smaller doses, but Valerian tea, one of those night time teas with Valerian, is that safe for children?
Dr. Ellen Kamhi (1:29:10.414)
If it's a tea, I would say yes. How old is your child?
Ashley James (1:29:12.690)
He's almost 10.
Dr. Ellen Kamhi (1:29:14.166)
So how much does he weigh? That's what we really go more on. He might be over 100.
Ashley James (1:29:19.747)
Oh, probably not. No, he's 85, 90 pounds.
Dr. Ellen Kamhi (1:29:23.823)
Right, so he's getting close to 100. So at that point, it's not the same as a five-year-old, who weighs 40 pounds or a three, so with that kind of weight, there's very little herb that you need to be worried about, especially if you're talking about buying just tea and making tea. That would not be a high concentration, so it's not a problem. You could try it.
Ashley James (1:29:47.299)
For people who have, let's say, five-year-olds who are really hyperactive and that it's hard to get them to go to sleep at night, would making a small amount of Valerian tea be safe?
Dr. Ellen Kamhi (1:29:56.635)
I know when we're getting down in the four- and five-year-olds, I would go more with a combination of very relaxing herbs: chamomile, hops, those would be good ones for younger children. Chamomile, hops, and peppermint, that might be a nice combination. There's something called Sleepy Thyme Tea, which is specifically for children, that would be a nice combination to use.
Ashley James (1:30:20.041)
Got it. they could also try the combs forte homeopathic blend that you had mentioned.
Dr. Ellen Kamhi (1:30:28.393)
Yes. That is. That you can use also for children.
Ashley James (1:30:31.390)
Awesome. It has been, again, amazing to have you on the show. I really want to have you back so many times because it is just beautiful learning from you. I can't wait to jump into naturalnurse.com, your website, and sign up for your upcoming courses starting in March. But of course, no matter when you're listening, go to naturalnurse.com and check out the courses.
We also talked about in the last episode that you do eco tours where people can actually plan their next vacation with you and they get to go and have this beautiful vacation where they're learning the indigenous herbal remedies and making them and harvesting them and just having such an adventure. So don't go to Disney. Don't go to Fort Lauderdale or something. Don't go to some beach. Go on an eco tour with Dr. Ellen Kamhi. It would be amazing. That's on my bucket list.
Thank you so much for coming on the show. Can't wait to have you back. This has been wonderful. You've already given us so much homework, is there anything you want to say to wrap up today's interview?
Dr. Ellen Kamhi (1:31:42.018)
Thank you so much, Ashley. It was a pleasure.
I just want to thank everyone for joining us. Be self-critical a little bit. Look at your life and see if you can make changes, not when I have enough money to go to a holistic doctor. Don't wait for that. Basically, what can you do? Can you eat a little healthier? Can you cut out wheat from your diet as a first step? That's a really good first step.
We talked about coddling yourself to sleep with these really natural things. So that's a good place to start, I would say, with self-care, but also with self-responsibility.
Ashley James (1:32:17.170)
I love it. Thank you so much. Again, naturalnurse.com. I'm excited to join you in March for your classes and I hope to see everyone there.
Dr. Ellen Kamhi (1:32:28.046)
Very good. Be well.
Outro:
I hope you enjoyed today's interview. It was just so mind blowing. I absolutely love Dr. Kamhi. I want to let you know that if you haven't already made an appointment, it's a free consultation with Jennifer Saltzman. Go to TakeYourSupplements.com. Jennifer Saltzman is absolutely phenomenal and the supplements that she works with are the same ones that helped me get my health back 13 years ago, coming on 14 years. They're the reason why I was able to conceive. I was told I'd never be able to have kids. They're the reason why I don't have type two diabetes, chronic adrenal fatigue, why I don't have infertility, why I don't have PCOS, and just got my life back.
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I know if you thought that this episode was interesting, you would think talking to Jennifer Saltzman would be very interesting. It's wild that she gives a free session and it doesn't cost any more to buy the supplements than if you bought them on your own, but these aren't in the stores directly. She helps you order the right ones for you, based on your needs, based on your budget, based on your weight. It's all measured by body weight and dosed by body weight, and she gives you a wealth of resources as well. So it's a really great rabbit hole to go down. I highly recommend going to TakeYourSupplements.com and chatting with Jennifer Saltzman. She's absolutely phenomenal. Thank you so much for being a listener and thank you so much for sharing my podcast so we can end the needless suffering of millions and millions of people, and you are a part of that by sharing. Thank you.