Endocrinology (Part 1): Parkinson's

00:00 Well, there we go, from the Middle East to Ireland, it’s this evening’s Ask Europe Doctor. My name’s Andrew Murray. My name’s Sarah Johanneson Murray. For those of you who perhaps have never listened to the shows, they run every Friday, every third Friday, sorry, from 7.30 to 8.00 p.m. we have callers, but they run from 7.00 to 8.00 p.m. on the third Friday of every month. We’ve been for a long time now, being very pleased to have Dr. Raymond Pete joining us with various different topics. This month will be no exception. I wanted to try and do some kind of a introduction or some kind of an outline, a basis, something in which I know that people listening to these podcasts, who I get emails from regularly all over the world, not just the states who’ve been listening to them, who’ve found them interesting and informative and it’s led them to read research from people that Dr. Pete’s mentioned on the show, or they’ve had conditions and illnesses and they’ve recovered 01:04 listening to Dr. Pete’s advice, et cetera, et cetera. So I’m very much aware that this is a real resource with which people are being reached and there will always be those people who are looking for something different, something alternative, as well as those people who are not looking and they won’t listen and they’ve already got their paths set out, but there’s plenty of people who are looking for alternatives and so that’s what the thrust of this show has been for the last 12 years, probably. So as I said, we’re very pleased to have Dr. Raymond Pete to join us and I wanted to do an outline starting this month with endocrinology as the subject and I wanted just to outline the nervous system as a whole and then we’re going to get into Parkinson’s disease and Parkinsonism and a few of the other little subsets that are similar as an introduction to the endocrine system and then maybe next month we’ll get into the pituitary, you know, 02:05 we’ve mentioned a lot about thyroid hormones and Dr. Pete’s, his main speciality is hormone, hormone physiology, so and then the thymus, the adrenals, pancreas, ovaries and testes, these are the sources of hormones and how they affect health and how everything that we do can consciously interact for good or bad with our health. We’re not at the mercy of anything in particular, we make choices and so each one of us, just by hearing and listening and then going ahead and reading and seeing the facts and the science, people can find further information to support everything Dr. Pete’s been shouting from the rooftops for the last 30, 40 years. So are you there Dr. Pete? Yes. Well thanks so much for joining us. So I wanted to try to explore the endocrine system in a large topic I know but one I feel will be a useful exercise in understanding physiology from your perspective Dr. Pete and you make a regular mention of pioneering scientists 03:07 whose works give a better appreciation of the physiological processes occurring in the body and often provide a new direction away from the hijacked modern scientific theories we’re cultured to accept, a lot of which are a pandora’s box of ever increasing drug dependencies and conspiracies abound along with that train of thought. Given we are truly complex organisms with a network of communication systems and feedback either positive or negative to that input, the pathways through which these signals travel as well as the structures which respond to the signals and the signals which ultimately affect another system all need to be cohesively organized. So any deficit however small can have far reaching and dramatic consequences and it is true that the organism will do everything possible to correct or mitigate disease before failing sometimes resulting in disease processes that take decades to end in death and so communication systems and appropriate responses are key to good health and functioning and this is the role of the endocrine system I want to explore with Dr. Pete. The earliest records 04:11 of recognizing the role and maybe earlier than this but the earliest records that I found during my last two days or so getting material together for the show was the Chinese pulling out isolated sex and paternity hormones from human urine in 200 BC for crying out loud. So that’s certainly food for thought when we think we know everything that we know now with ICP, MS and other mass spectrometry being the kind of leading investigative machinery. So and then obviously the ancient Greeks and Romans from Aristotle, Hippocrates and Galen and where we get our herbal medicine background from. Until the emergence of the germ theory and I know you mentioned this a lot in the 19th century then and this is I think is perhaps where it just veered off of normality and common sense and it’s a real true scientific endeavor that’s where it kind of just veered off the rails and I think we’ve carried on in that vein ever since and I know that your whole philosophy has been about challenging 05:17 mainstream science for science’s sake because it’s not very scientific and I think in that regard Dr. Pete would you mind giving an overview of the basis of understanding disease past to present and how this has formed our approach to its management and how your rationale differs? I see it as a deviation from the Chinese and the Greeks who had a pretty unified picture of what an organism is. Aristotle actually was pretty much an organist in his understanding of the organism and it was really around the time of Descartes middle of the early part of the 17th century when the things really got formalized on the wrong track. Descartes 06:27 described the organism as a machine completely separate from consciousness. This was guiding the machine possibly from some contact point in the brain but under the ground mostly of people who were persecuted by the monarchies and such they continued to think along the organic unified understanding of what an animal or a person is but following Descartes the organism was seen as made up of parts just like a steam engine or a clock each part could be defined understood and mechanically interlocked with the other parts and the consciousness or the soul 07:34 was seen as something completely separate from this machine and could somehow sometimes interfere with its operation but mostly it was out of our control simply running according to causal determinism and when the idea of infection had something from the environment causing a disease in it happened that the use of the microscope had developed to the point that people had seen the compartments in plants and they called the compartments cells when the plant dried up left the cellulose framework empty little chambers which they called cells well a more 08:37 underground approach looked at particles like red blood cells and called the units corpuscles little bodies and empty compartments and the this idea of breaking the organism down into cells and seeing those as parts of a machine made up of material without consciousness or spirit this became the background for seeing a disease as a particular mechanical interference with the operation of the machine and this is where the term reductionism came from right or reductionist medicine yeah and the disease what one line of thinking was that it was a particular little 09:42 particle of evil material a germ cell analogous to the cells that make up the machine so it was a material particle interfering with our material particles that became identified as a disease very concrete specific interference with the machine and as people looked more closely at tumors they saw really it was a matter of organization rather than some particular concrete change or substance but this idea of organization took about 150 years to finally catch on right up until the beginning of this century people were still stuck on Descartes picture of 10:46 a mechanical organism being interrupted by something right down on the cellular level or even smaller the molecular level so that cancer was defined as an evil cell a mutant cell containing bad genetic material defective DNA and so all you had to do in the case of a germ caused disease all you had to do was kill the germ and you were cured in the case of the cancer interpreted as a mutant cell all you had to do was eliminate every single individual mutant cell and the disease would be cured I mean that’s still how they treat cancer now isn’t it I mean to some degree almost everyone is still stuck in this 17th century idea of what 11:48 an organism is and what a disease is and Parkinson’s disease even though in the 19th century people recognized that all the symptoms of the disease stiffness generally the older person is the more Parkinson’s traits they have stiffness wobbly tremor and a slowness of movement and all of the extreme old age symptoms are simply coming on stronger and earlier when they call it Parkinson’s disease but in by the latter part of the 19th century people had noticed that people suffering from this so-called disease if they took a long train ride to get to the doctor 12:51 their symptoms might disappear or if they came on a carriage or rode a horse their symptoms were greatly alleviated by just moving around through space and so some people proposed a vibration therapy about 40 years ago someone noticed that swimming alleviated the symptoms so simply a different kind of stimulation could reverse the the symptoms and it turns out that in the animals that you can create the disease by poisoning them and by giving them an enriched environment you can reverse the actual anatomical chemical changes of their nervous system so in the poisoned animals if you place them in an enriched environment you’re saying they no longer display the yeah similar to what they noticed in people who took a long train ride all right you’re 13:57 listening to ask your ab doctor k midi garbable 91.1 FM at 7 15 now so from 7 30 till the end of the show at 8 o’clock you’re invited to call in with questions either related hopefully related to the question subject matter of the endocrine system and Parkinson’s if you have any other endocrine based questions that would be fine too if you’re in the area seems like there’s still a temporary calling number which is 707 383 9007 so 383 9007 the toll free numbers should still be the same here 1 800 KMUD rad that’s 800 568 3723 and the engineer i think you’re going to read some things out yeah thanks andrew i actually should have done this at the top of the hour we would not have this show without the support of Chautauqua natural foods in garbable locally owned for 34 years they specialize in local and organic produce natural groceries nutritional supplements and body care products now announcing every day is senior day Chautauqua natural foods open monday through 15:02 saturday nine till seven sunday’s 10 till five just off the town square more information online at facebook.com slash Chautauqua naturals support for our community radio station is coming as well from emerald kingdom greenhouse.com they’ve got information and products for all aspects of greenhouse growing specializing in timer run auto blackout light depot greenhouses emerald kingdom greenhouse also carries light depth for existing structure modification kits and good old-fashioned greenhouses accessories include plastic coverings light traps cooling pads exhaust and ventilation systems emerald kingdom grow your future the views and opinions expressed throughout the broadcast day are those of the speakers and not necessarily those of this station its staff or its underwriters time will be made available for other viewpoints thank you so much for joining us okay so to continue dr. p i wanted to explore parkinson’s disease and parkinsonism 16:04 as there’s several different similar related type situations that may not necessarily be parkinson’s per se but it does actually seem to be a fairly woolly kind of construct in terms of the multitude of various symptoms that can be expressed some of which may start early some of which may just be late onset but basically they go over the mechanism that’s discussed today about the disease and its treatment and highlight your approach to this condition later on to understand it the way you do so the terms used to describe long term degenerative disorder of the central nervous system affecting mainly the motor system but which can involve the sensory system with cognitive and sleep and mood disturbances also noted as part of the picture there’s a compound here and i know we talked about this the other day alpha synnuclein a compound present in these so called louis bodies that are present under microscopic examination found within the 17:05 substantial nigra in the brain yeah as well as several other brain regions and they are diagnostic for parkinson’s disease okay so several parkinson’s genes are involved and they’ve been high been highlighted here i’d like to pick your brains about some of those as we go on through this but so far as the functioning of waste product digesting lysosomes that may be linked to the inability to break down alpha synuclein there’s a protein also called dardarin now the primary symptoms of parkinson’s result from the loss of dopamine secreting cells within the substantial nigra and there are five major pathways in the brain that we know now there may be more but there were five when i was studying connecting other brain areas with the basal ganglia these are the motor so this is a movement oculomotor where the eyes will track the hands or the eyes the eye movement will track the movement externally the associative the limbic and the orbital frontal 18:09 circuits now all of them are disrupted essentially and this disruption explains the many varied presentations of the disease so in terms of how you understand the nervous system and physiology just to start with the motor circuit and how higher brainstem functions interact through nerves to elicit muscular contraction for example because we will talk about the tremor of parkinson’s disease and we’ll get on later to describe some of the drugs and treatments that can be used but they are also responsible chronically for the same symptoms such that it’s almost the worst outcome than the initial outcome so it’s not a particularly successful treatment but in terms of the motor system of the nervous system and the various drug second messengers etc that exert those controls how do how do you see this motor circuit working in the body and how would you perhaps 19:15 be able to rationalize an alternative approach to the treatment of parkinson’s disease given how you know um my orientation is very similar to pavlov’s who saw the motor system as subordinate to the sentry system he saw the cortex of the brain as primarily an extension of the sense organs and that this formed the environment for the motor reflexes and the idea of a reflex is another thing that originated with Descartes and the simply wrong that the cells aren’t mechanically connected in in reflex patterns uh one of the um first people in the west to analyze this carefully was um the french existentialist so-called philosopher uh merleau plenty morris merleau 20:20 plenty who analyzed the meaning of reflexes and he clearly shows that there are no reflexes in the cartesian sense and if you if you attend a neurology course you’ll probably find people still arguing that there are simple innate mechanical reflexes in in the Descartes sense and um for example the linguistics system of noam chomsky is based entirely on this primitive false idea of the brain function based on mechanical reflexes and it simply doesn’t work merleau plenty is probably the person who most clearly explains the problems with it but in the pamphlet in picture as especially developed through the 1950s and 60s by his student 21:30 pk anokun the the sentry system is fluid and continuously being revised as the organism explores its environment and so the sense of exploring and being stimulated by newness idea of traveling through time and space is in charge over overriding defects in the motor system interesting is this at the relevant picture i think of first seeing disease especially parkinson’s disease in a non-mechanical way the protein you mentioned dargeron yeah the interesting thing about it is that it shows up as a defect in crone’s disease 22:31 in the intestine as well as in parkinson’s disease and parkinson’s typically starts with constipation and in 19th century medicine people remembered the intestine as well as the brain in treating disease it was very common to diagnose death as a result of inflammation of the bowel which pathologists typically overlook as just a side issue but the intestine was recognized as very important and the brain as the other end of the organism that sort of the two dimensions and now doctors are taught that if you have a bowel movement three times a day or once every three days it’s all normal yeah and when you trace out the the chemical links between what’s going wrong in the intestine and in the the rest of the motor system the behavioral system 23:38 and so on you can see links but they’re they’re always contextually working there’s no simple pathogenic chemical in the intestine but the the bacterial living in the intestine the food you eat and the way your intestine responds to it and the stress you’re exposed to yeah these act in in the the activating part of the brain around 1950 a part of the brain called the reticular activating system was identified and this includes the region where the substantia nigra and the basal ganglia are and this is where sensory input is dished out to activate 24:39 the upper parts of the brain and when that’s happening it tends to go with an inhibitory effect on the body so the stronger your mentality is dreaming for example the more relaxed your body tends to be and in Parkinson’s the the system it really tends to be over activated unable to relax properly and so a characteristic thing is that during sleep and dreams the person who is developing Parkinson’s disease doesn’t relax properly the body if they have a dream they might scream and and thrash around and hit people so there is a failure of consciousness to override and relax the body can i take you back to what you said a moment ago about 25:44 reminds me of inescapable stress on the rat experiments and that being countered by the environmental enrichment that you said could totally restore a Parkinson’s created or induced effect in the mouse that was put into a environmental enrichment situation naturally lost the symptoms you i know that one does not directly causatively cure the other but you were saying here that there’s a link between environmental enrichment and the progressive replacement of gosh what can we call it something substantially good that offsets the negative effects of the inflammation the degradation the slowing of the bowel endotoxin release etc etc reabsorption and and that this is this is a definite key feature if you think that you think it could be definitely as part of a holistic program for sure i can understand that would be 26:48 very plausible to to suggest something like that but is that where you were going to yeah that the pk anokin and all of the people in the pavlovian tradition see a global uh uh event or process in the brain that they called the acceptor of action it’s our intention and expectation in the world and this is um what is uh integrating not only the the motor system and and dominating the so-called reflexes but as this process which is it’s like a model of everything we know and intend to do in the world this is um supported in in the organism not just in the brain but it’s a process 27:52 involving sensory nerves from the whole body and this process in the brain uh it’s sort of uh during during daytime at least it’s um uh based on our inner ear balance system the vestibular system and uh this uh it’s a unified picture of the world and the organism and this process itself of being conscious is uh involved in the activation of not only the endocrine endocrine glands throughout the body but in the nerves themselves as they are supporting uh this model of the world or acceptor of action in the process 28:52 of metabolizing to be conscious they are making changes internally that involves for example synthesizing turning of energy substances sugar for example into cholesterol and turning cholesterol into pregnant alone right in the nerves for example of the substantia nigra this process is going on energy sugar cholesterol pregnant alone progesterone and the the endocrine process which is then stabilizing the structure and the consciousness so that the flavor of your consciousness when it’s successful is modified by the the balance you have between your progesterone the ATA and other steroids 29:55 and the energy processes so can you try to explain like the personality that you’re saying in people that develop Parkinson’s they’re not getting they’re experiencing learned helplessness I think the way they live they have incorporated duties obligations and and such that they they can manage very well but they aren’t overcoming the stress adequately because they’re not exploring new things or they’re not they don’t have new input to their brain it’s just the same oh like treadmill they’re on or yeah they’re stuck in a way so that they aren’t getting enough sensory input emulation to um that’s so that’s so interesting because uh I think when you read the the regular texts medical texts about Parkinson’s and they go through the plethora of symptoms um one of them um was a symptom most characteristic I think um is fairly 31:01 emotionless expressions are on the patients with Parkinson’s um not enthused difficult to engage don’t don’t have any kind of um uh what can I say any any kind of just wider viva you know I don’t know how else to say it apart from the french way you know kind of joy of life but that that’s very much part of a learned helplessness type construct that would cause an organism then to just see things just within the boundaries of what they have and there not be anything new and stimulating them and that stimulation you’re saying is very much part of switching on what is a totally holistic approach to Parkinson’s outside of the mechanistic view that the regular science has and we’ll go through the drugs because the drugs are really not effective at all and they work very mechanistically and they actually cause typically more problems than they’re seeking to address so are you saying new sensory output will for example I mean sorry 32:03 new sensory input will for example increase the dopamine output from the substantia nigra in the brain or the protective progesterone and pregnelem or the the hormones that protect against those cells degrading not producing dopamine yeah the dopamine theory it’s really part you have to look at it in in the history of at the beginning of the 20th century with the mechanistic view they were uh seeing the brain as a mechanical thing which uh was having defects causing the tremor and they actually started cutting out parts of the brain to remove the tremor oh yeah sounds like a good idea doesn’t it the the man who invented the word cybernetics norbert wiener uh-huh yeah he proposed the best surgery up to that time instead of cutting out 33:06 parts of the cortex which they had been doing in the 1930s they were focusing on the brain stem and he designed the the radar searching self-control systems that would focus on an airplane and aim a gun this feedback system he saw the brain having tremors his his uh radar gun aiming system if it was poorly aligned would have a tremor of a searching movement back and forth so he saw the tremor as a feedback uh searching process and so he suggested what you would do to his radar apparatus was to uh knock out part of the sensitivity so he suggested the surgery to cut 34:11 out as part of the uh searching feedback apparatus and it actually worked better than the grosser surgeries and that it’s been done right down to the 70s and 80s they were still simply ablating or destroying part of the brain and then they got a little more refined and started uh stimulating it but sometimes that didn’t work like uh michael fox yeah but he wasn’t going to have any more surgical treatments because instead of stopping the tremor of his left side it started the tremor in the right side yeah well that’s that’s the issue isn’t it well i guess we’ll get into some of the medications now just to bring them out and to explain the mechanistic view that was constructed to 35:12 support the use of these drugs but um okay so the substantia nigra uh is part of the brain here that we’re focusing on in parkinsons that um is the site of dopamine production now dopamine excuse me dopamine is um i think i understand this right but i i think the nervous system is pretty much wanting to be firing fairly constantly and dopamine actually controls that from happening ad hoc so that you don’t get these sudden jerks etc and that dopamine allows through this inhibition the ordered uh movement of muscles in coordinated patterns it’s not a stimulant per se and that it’s it’s integrated with the inhibiting uh systems so it’s much more relaxed in yeah in itself it is an activator but it runs into uh nerves that uh feedback with an inhibition right 36:16 so when when somebody for example i think el dopa is supposedly the gold standard for one of a better word uh of treatment and that within five years most patients using el dopa as the replacement for dopamine because el dopa dopamine doesn’t cross the blood brain barrier as far as i know but el dopa does and within the brain el dopa’s converted into dopamine and then has uh an action directly but the long-term effects of el dopa are a condition called bradykinesia where there’s involuntary movements like there is in a fine tremor a resting tremor because again there’s a differentiation i guess without getting too medical there’s a difference between intention tremors and resting tremors um so resting tremors are typically something you can see in the park ensign’s patients uh with either the leg uh tremoring or the hand tremoring in a pill rolling fashion i always remember this from studying but they they talk about pill rolling tremor as one of the hallmark signs of classical park ensign’s so supplying somebody with el dopa to treat that 37:22 tremor does in initially have a positive beneficial effect but how is it i wonder that the administration of dopamine over a chronic period of three four five years actually causes worse symptoms than the tremor for which it was prescribed and most patients that um use el dopa are in worse shape five years down the road than they are if they weren’t treated i think the problem is that the whole theory of what el dopa and dopamine are doing is mechanistic and mistaken it’s so they’re just patching they’re just putting a little band-aid on it they’re not treating the the sensory input deficiency another drug that is approved for use in park ensign’s is amandadine or mantine more recently and in the 19th century they were already using belladonna and hyociamine and i call energics to treat the tremors and they were pretty effective 38:27 and didn’t have the bad side effects of increasing rigidity and so on that el dopa does uh and the um it turns out that these amandadine and me mantine have the anti-colonergic uh anti-excitatory effects but they are also anti-excitatory in the glutamate urgic uh system right um the um glutamate and colonergic systems are both very powerful excitatory and um the glutamate system ends up producing nitric oxide okay and uh the amandadine and um anti-colonergics and amandine are not only stopping the the excitation that is part of the 39:33 tremor but they end up lowering the exposure to nitric oxide and nitric oxide is a chronic stress induced factor in suppressing mitochondrial respiration and energy production and accelerating aging of the brain so using using these approved drugs is um it actually is giving insight into what’s going on to a much more global uh organismic process rather than just restoring the lost so-called dopamine uh regulatory system it’s restoring energy processes reducing the effects of that stress in a systematic way okay you’re listening to 40:34 ask your Dr. K. Meadigal of all 91.1 FM uh from now until the end of the show you’re invited to call in with any questions about this subject of endocrinology and Parkinson’s disease if you live in the area the temporary number for the 707 region is 383, 9007 and the 800 number is 800 5683723 so I see the lights flashing here so let’s let’s take the first call and see where we’re going call her you’re on the air and watch the question hi I’m from the San Francisco Bay area hi and I was wondering are there simple things that someone can do like a stepping stone to get out of learned helplessness for you know for people that are overcoming hypothyroidism and still find it overwhelming to do big tasks or big things what was the very first thing you said a stepping stone to stepping stone to get out of the learned helplessness dogs pee do you think there is a progressive course that can be followed to get out of what do you what do you suggest to 41:37 increase sensory input to the brain oh and and to help get out of the learned helplessness painting behavioral things like going new places meeting new people doing very different things that you’ve never done before but thought you might enjoy doing at the same time as you try to correct your your energy processes that are suppressed having more enjoyable more varied meals for example and making sure that your thyroid function is good I know you told me when I asked you what was it one of the best things I could teach our daughter or what’s a good education for our daughter and you said introduce her to new people and she loves to meet new people and she gets so fired up okay so dogs pee I think just on the 42:40 on the basis of that last call in terms of gosh new things I mean I think everybody I think arguably everybody would most people let’s not say everybody that’s too all-inclusive you know people I think have a bucket list of 20 things I’d like to do you know whether it’s jumping out of an aircraft and you know with a parachute and I know just just fast things or exciting things or going to new places I think outside of the scope of that because most people probably think they can’t afford it or they don’t have the time for it how do you think about creative creative outlets like painting and or constructing poetry or as long as that’s not something you do every day anyway I’m just thinking of it as a construct that would be maybe more more easily attained rather than Dr. Pete doesn’t want to give a prescription here I can tell that I’m doing something unexpected 43:43 out of the routine and some people actually quit their job and learn a new profession or new trade okay let’s get into some of the some of the things that I’ve spoken with you about earlier that were things that are in keeping with the whole anti-inflammatory process that you’re saying is is all part and parcel of this breakdown so I guess mitochondrial function I’m getting pretty interested about the whole approach to supporting mitochondria and whether it’s coenzyme Q10 or other kind of new atropics and things like that I know you’re not particularly keen on new atropics and drugs that supposedly enhance mental perfunction and or mitochondrial function because you you don’t you don’t really put a lot of value to it but in terms of mitochondria 44:48 and and their obvious role in energy production and how energy in the body is at the root of paying for all the transactions how do you feel about mitochondrial support in the in the approach to a Parkinson’s patient um getting getting good rest is part of of the support stopping unnecessary excitatory stimulation good stimulation should be fun rather than stressful and so not jumping out of an aircraft unless you find that fun stressful probably the riding a roller coaster I mean that might be a little bit stressful it’s fun right yeah everything that is anti-inflammatory can be relaxing as well as stimulating caffeine is extremely protective against all of the defects in Parkinson’s disease and it activates while protecting 45:55 the mitochondria gamma hydroxybutyrate which is in some plants like the passion flower yeah the tropical fruit what’s it called uh what you’re not he was thinking you meant GABA oh well it’s it’s um an activator gamma hydroxy deuterate okay well the passion fruit or the lilicoy or what else you call passion fruit yeah um the other name is where I was looking for yeah I thought it might be but I didn’t want to jump in grenadilla I think it’s another name for it um yeah it’s something we make along with GABA which which helps to um eliminate stressful overexcitation uh the the synnuclein which is one of the things 46:57 that goes wrong and is damaged in Parkinson’s disease it happens to have the same effect as wrote known wow this toxic thing that has been seen to cause uh something exactly like Parkinson’s disease by blocking uh the complex one of the mitochondrion so then all of the herbs that act on the GABA um would be useful what you’re saying yeah yeah and um even cannabis has been uh because of its uh sedative effect it can be protective uh against the the toxic types of overstimulation and what about alcohol um yeah I think it’s um antioxidant can be anti-inflammatory and can be in the right circumstance it can be anti-inflamm anti-parkinson’s now how about this a nicotine as I’ve seen a fair amount of research showing that nicotine is 47:59 actually protective significantly protective against Parkinson’s in a in a big study that’s been done um yeah I think the population effect where they see that smokers have somewhat protection against Parkinson’s I think part of that effect is that it uh relieves constipation it activates the intestine and that in the cell has an anti-inflammatory anti-toxic effect interesting okay so what do you think is the best method for delivery of nicotine like making a a tea out I mean it’s not I I think either um absorbing it through the skin as in the form of an ointment or ingesting very small amounts of of the leaf that’s a leaf very very quickly I think while we’re while we’re talking about um tobacco I read an article today that’s now saying that the vaping craze that’s really starting to take off and reintroduce smoking 49:01 to a younger generation is actually showing up with some fairly disturbing health effects it’s kind of early days yet for the research to come through but they’re actually saying that even it could be even some even worse side effects to vaping than there would have been to smoking obtaining nicotine that way so nicotine in its own right is not uh well I mean it’s a neurotoxin for sure but it’s not a good molecule but it’s not the poisonous component in tobacco smoke it’s mainly the carcinogens correct and the tar but um but nicotine can have some therapeutic effects I’m yeah and and keeping the intestine healthy because of the um when endotoxin in itself reaches the nervous system it locally as well as uh systemically activates processes that uh lead to the uh the same blockage of mitochondrial respiration that 50:04 wrote known does or that um ionizing radiation does uh in a chronic sense uh having uh uh CAT scans of the head I think is probably part of the the reason that um Parkinson’s prevalence has increased so greatly right over the last 20 or 30 years because I’m pretty keen to give you CAT scans for anything oh well it’s a shame but I um I’m hopeful I’m hopeful that uh in time things far less damaging will become more commonplace a little bit like the switching attitudes towards saturated fats from the uh long protected uh polyunsaturated certain changes to do so much damage now how about um aspirin is another mentioning of the polyunsaturated fats um one of the uh prostaglandins produced in substantia nigra 51:04 it is very toxic to the brain and simply having a regular use of aspirin will protect against that prostaglandin made from the polyunsaturated fats okay and the breakdown of the polyunsaturated fats acrolean it is a very toxic material uh that we produce internally from the polyunsaturates and that uh is one of the things that turns synnuclein into a toxic fibrous material for like the prions in mad cow disease interesting because now what do you think about this this concept that the um I think I think I was reading that they haven’t actually proved beyond a doubt that these louis bodies which do show up in a substanti on on uh micro uh you know microscopic or evaluation they may be or they may have a protective role I mean I think they’ve made them pathognomic and kind of diagnostic uh for the confirming Parkinson’s but they they actually 52:09 have a kind of a protective role and I think the body might be parking to get out of the way some of these synuclein fibrils and packing them up in in little compartments that are relatively safe but some of the the toxic uh fibrils of synuclein are known to be uh passed from one cell to another causing uh a damage to the cell that receives it well I wanted to ask you Dr. P when you were talking about this rapid movement in dream state you know for people who are developing Parkinson’s or what about people who’ve had that for years and years and years is that not also a symptom of low thyroid because their their muscles just can’t relax or is it the brain that can’t relax so I’m trying to understand that a little bit better um it’s the same thing that nothing in the body can relax fully when your uh thyroid function is low uh that’s one of the funny things 53:15 that came out of the uh idea of the the cell as an a compartment enclosed in a membrane that uh the if you think of it as a corpuscle that has to be in a state ready to work when it’s rested the state where it’s ready to perform its job is a high energy state and that’s the well rested state full of energy ready to go if you don’t have enough of the thyroid and glucose and oxygen whatever to produce the energy you stay in a semi-contracted excited state so what happens in Parkinson’s is this reaches a chronically deadly cell killing condition in chronic hypothyroidism it’s it’s simply a nuisance that your sleep isn’t as restful as it 54:23 should be you can’t get into the deep relaxing restorative sleep because you don’t have enough energy so the cells are not ready to work they haven’t accumulated the energy and structure needed to do a proper job and so they keep turning through the energy producing process without relaxing and storing up the energy as as glycogen ATP creatin phosphate and so on okay well i know there was more questions surrounding things like the monoamine oxidase inhibitors the the a and b inhibitors and how they have been used with varying degrees but ultimately this condition doesn’t have any real course of action for it other than trying to offset the symptoms as long as possible followed by palliative care um 55:24 i would very much like to carry on this subject next month just to break down some of the things that are definitely shown like lack of testosterone is definitely shown and ameliorates makes better the symptoms of Parkinson’s um reducing estrogen because estrogen is a kind of very inflammatory and kind of anti anti restful type um organism molecule i know there were plenty of other things and as usual i’m sorry we only got one call i didn’t really plug too much for people to come on the air but i kind of been a bit a little bit selfish this month um maybe next month if you’re able would you be willing to carry on with this oh yeah great i’ll really appreciate that well for those people who’ve listened to the show thanks so much for your time docks people okay thank you for those people who’ve listened to the show thanks so much for either calling in like you have and or listening we know that i get such a lot of feedback from people i get it every week from people they just write me and they come from all over not just a guy from Norway or you know yeah Finland Finland 56:31 yeah they come from all over so i get emails from people from the uk i get them from south america i get them from from asia even you know so they listen all over the world and i think it’s very important that um it’s a resource that we freely make available kmud makes it available for you to download this podcast uh after that show ours on the audio archive and on our website i’m compiling what’s turning out to be a pretty big compendium of dr pete shows so until the third friday of next month now we’ll carry on with endocrinology as a bigger section anyway going over all the rest of it in the months to come but we’ll try and wrap up the parkinson’s uh debate next month and then dr pete has other suggestions that we didn’t even get into um my name’s andrew mary my name’s sarah johannis and mary and do you want to give out contact details yeah sure um well we can be reached monday through friday nine to five i have a toll free number would you like to know i wanted to give out dr pete’s oh yeah of course website you forgot to do that i didn’t know i don’t have my crib in front of me my my uh crib sheet anyway so dr pete is obviously he’s reachable www.reypete.com 57:38 he’s got plenty of articles they’re fully referenced he’s written several books to he’s not selling anything he’s just giving you information folks so take him up on it while he’s while he’s still around he’s still willing to do this and our phone number is 888 WBM herb for western botanical medicine herb okay thanks for joining us thanks for listening good night