Female Hormones & Progesterone

00:00 Well, welcome to this month’s Ask Your Doctor. My name is Andrew Murray. For those of you who perhaps have never listened to the show, they run from 7 to 8 p.m. every third Friday of the month, and from 7.30 typically until 8 o’clock. We invite callers to a call-in with questions related to the month’s subject. The toll-free number is 1-800-568-3723. That’s 1-800-KMUD-RAD. And if you’re in the 707 area code, the number is 707-923-3911. Well, I think I should probably start off. It’s January 2018. Happy New Year. Nice and cold outside. Certainly not very environmentally enriching, but I’m sure there’s plenty of things that can be done, and I know we’re probably going to get into some of the things as a recap on environmental enrichment. But this month’s subject is going to be, 01:04 I won’t say specifically for the ladies out there, but a lot of what we’re going to talk to Dr. Pete tonight about is related to female hormones. And whilst progesterone is not typically female, it is produced by males, progesterone is a topic of discussion for us tonight. Tonight we’ll run through many of the disorders that we’re going to cover. And some in particular I wanted just to highlight again the difficulty. If you are looking online for information, I mean the internet is an excellent source, but it’s also a good source of disinformation. So you have to be really careful where you pick your narrative. Typically clinical journals and clinical trial published information is also skewed. You can’t always take it on face value that that result is actually what happened. 02:05 So we’re going to get into a couple of instances where some very prominent peer-reviewed trials with thousands of people, I mean huge cohorts of people that were involved in these trials to try and demonstrate an effect. And particularly with regard to progesterone, the effects of progesterone on traumatic brain injury are one of those things we’re going to look at. And then we’re going to look at things like the effect on cognitive impairment. We’re going to look at the effects on Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative disorders. And then postpartum depression and epilepsy, menstrual related epilepsy, catamennial epilepsy, and then sleep apnea. So I’m sure from a perspective of postpartum and progesterone for the women who have had maybe PMS symptoms or estrogen excess symptoms which are going to be very much tied to tonight’s discussion who suffer with polycystic ovaries, you know what they call breast mice. 03:11 So cysts, cystic formations, obviously endometriosis and then difficulty conceiving. So if those females are listening, if it’s picture or interest, there’s a lot that can be done about this. I graduated 20 years ago now with an honours degree in herbal medicine and I’ve worked with Dr. Peter here for the last 9 to 10 years and a lot of what we’ve found out from Dr. Pete has been pretty revelational because when I was studying herbal medicine in England, even the medical literature and we were trained by doctors and endocrinologists and pathologists and all the otherologists, but they all came out of a medical background. We weren’t really taught by holistic practitioners apart from maybe the material medical side of the education. So we were taught by doctors and we had gynecologists and physiologists and pathologists. But they have the same kind of medical background and a lot of the things we learned, 04:12 I’ve later found out from Dr. Pete and from doing research online looking to see deeper, there actually is quite a lot of untruth in what we were told as was good for you. So hopefully these shows are all online. Our website which is www.westonbotanicalmedicine.com, there’s a resource tab and every one of the shows that we’ve recorded with Dr. Pete here since 2008 are there. I think they’re maybe the last one or two months that’s yet to be put up, but essentially it’s a great resource and it’s free so people should definitely go there and look at that. And then obviously Dr. Pete’s website and he’s very much somebody I want to support fully. His website is referenced with lots of articles, all of these articles I should say are fully referenced. So his specialty, I’ll just introduce him here in a second and he can just give you his bio, but I know people that are listening who probably tuned in just for the show know him, 05:15 but there’s always people that I come across who have not heard him before and so obviously he’s a great resource to further learn and relearn some untruths that we’ve been brainwashed with. So I don’t see the engineers talking to somebody, I don’t know if he’s talking to Dr. Pete or not. Let me just see if he’s there. Hi Dr. Pete, well thanks so much for joining us again. As always, I know some people have mentioned on the forums that your bio, they’ve heard it all before, but you know what, there’s people that haven’t heard you, so I’m just going to carry on as usual and please ask you to give a background, your academic background and your research since then. My PhD study was at the University of Oregon in 1968 to 72. My dissertation was on reproductive aging. And my intention when I went back to graduate school in biology was to study the brain, 06:17 but I found that the brain research was the most doctrinaire next to genetics and so I looked around and found that the reproductive physiology was actually oriented towards science and my background before that had been studying literature, linguistics and painting. It’s probably the background in literature that made me think in an adversarial manner in evaluating science rather than in a authoritarian, except because the professor said it’s true. I think the legal attitude of looking for truth by an adversarial approach should apply to medicine and science in general. 07:18 Okay, well good. So as I was preparing material for this evening’s show, I was looking at initially, I wanted to ask you kind of go through a list of disorders that I have that will all be found to be linked, but didn’t necessarily want to bounce around all of them in describing one at a time. And I started off with looking at the evidence, again wanting to be just like you very scientifically oriented here and looking for truth in science and wanting and expecting good science to reveal the truth, which it will do impartially and it’s a reproducible event which is a defining marker of good science. About traumatic brain injury, now I never actually realized that the numbers were so huge, the amount of people actually suffering with traumatic brain injury, whether these are people that play in professional soccer or boxing or people that get in auto wrecks 08:20 or people that fall off of buildings and ladders and the numbers are pretty staggering and actually it’s been one of the most difficult to treat conditions. I never really thought about it really too much until I started plunging into the papers around the subject, but traumatic brain injury is not very well treated and whilst there have been some very good phase one and two trials using progesterone which is going to be the topic of tonight woven in many different diseases or pathologies that although the trial one and two trial results were very promising and they spurred the phase three trials which had huge numbers, cohort numbers of 10,000 in one of them and 1,000 or 1,500 in the other, both of these studies and we’ll go on to describe them so people can take a look at it themselves, both of these studies seemingly found no benefit. 09:22 Now I know you’ve described at length the anti-inflammatory and anti-edema to mention just a couple of the effects of progesterone but the swelling that occurs in traumatic brain injury is one of the main contributors of all the damage along with of course with all the leakage and the inflammatory cytokines that are released as a process of cell breakdown and rupture. So given that the phase one and two trials were so promising and spurred the call for a phase three trial, I read both of the most recent ones, the protect three and the synapse trial on progesterone for severe traumatic brain injury saying that there was no beneficial effect and we’ll bring this out in a little bit after you’ve described perhaps your understanding of progesterone and how you definitely would advocate progesterone for swelling and then we’ll go bounce around the production, 10:25 the endogenous production of progesterone because it’s very different to estrogen for example being produced in the CNS and the brain cell astrocytes and oligodendrocytes as well as gonads etc. So the main study here showed no benefit and it’s almost just yet another closed door if you like. I find more and more as I talk to you and as I look at papers myself that there really, you know the word conspiracy is thrown around so much I know, but there does seem to be a real work to undo progesterone’s good because in the study given the 120 hour study for this particular application of progesterone they said there was no benefit in reducing swelling or outcome but a later piece of work that was done when both of these phase 3 trials didn’t seem to show any benefit was refuted by a professor of Neurosway, actually he’s a working for the Emory University 11:33 he’s basically just been studying brain trauma for the last 20-30 years so it’s his specialty. He’s actually revealed some of the faults of the study that are definitely noteworthy. So I was going to start the questioning here to you in terms of progesterone and its beneficial effects how do you interpret this negative effect that was shown in the trials in comparison to truly what progesterone is capable of doing? There have been, I think it was about 15 big studies on brain injury and interestingly after overwhelmingly promising results from for example using intravenous magnesium to reduce swelling and restore metabolism 12:34 all of these by the time they reached the phase 3 level suddenly the results were the opposite and nothing turned out to be beneficial for treating human brain trauma even though the previous smaller studies and many many animal studies were showing overwhelming good increased survival, increased full recovery and so on and the fact that something happens at the phase 3 level I think is very suspicious when the government and big corporations get involved I suspect that they really are protecting drugs that are not generic the way progesterone is Urea I don’t think there’s ever been a major study of treating brain trauma with simply intravenous urea but it has had just amazingly good results 13:39 and I think probably a serious study could be done using all of the known beneficial things urea, magnesium, progesterone, hypertonic saline solution and so on I think if you do everything that’s known to be beneficial to the brain you would get even better results than with a single drug like treatment the worst thing about this big protect study I think was that they not only didn’t give a big enough dose but they gave it emulsified with I think was an intralipid soybean oil and the amount of soybean emulsion that they were giving intravenously in animal studies 14:46 in itself is harmful 6%!s(MISSING)olution I think was about 1970 someone injected an emulsified soybean oil into rats and showed that on the first pass through the brain 17%!o(MISSING)f the oil was taken up into the brain there’s no blood brain barrier that functions against oil and then they dissected the brain and showed that one dose of oil was enough to alter the morphology of brain cells so intravenous treatment with something supposedly beneficial with a known toxin of the brain with a long history of evidence it’s hard to imagine how corporate and government interest putting millions of dollars into the project could have been that thing 15:53 you mentioned the 6%!s(MISSING)oybean oil that they used they were only using 2mg of progesterone per milliliter for the active treatment and then the drug infusion was started intravenously with a loading dose of 0.71mg per kilo body weight per hour for 1 hour followed by 0.5mg per kilo per hour for the rest of the 119 hours I’d like you to put this in perspective for people that are listening because maybe people don’t quite understand the normal values that females are exposed to during the menstrual cycle and or pregnancy so 2mg of progesterone per milliliter so basically 0.5mg per kilo per hour for 120 hours so would you put either 0.5mg or 2mg in perspective of the progesterone exposure that most females enjoy? some people have reported that in the last week or two of a healthy pregnancy 16:58 a woman’s placenta is producing 8 or 900mg of progesterone per day and that doesn’t do anything potentially harmful it’s very protective women generally feel great the last two or three weeks when their progesterone is at a maximum so they could easily have given 2,000mg of progesterone per day instead of a few hundred milligrams this was 2mg per hour ok crazy so that brings me on to the next thing and it took a long time to find this because there’s a lot of information, re-repeated information information that people are quoting from this same study to say that progesterone is not effective for traumatic brain injury hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and very little actual pro supportive evidence for progesterone’s anti-inflammatory effect 18:00 and brain edema, decreasing effect but one person in particular, this particular doctor who was studying this at Emory University and his name is Donald Stein he published a couple of articles back in 2013 when he was very hopeful that this phase 3 trial was going to show very positive results for progesterone and I think it took maybe 18 months or two years afterwards for him to publish this latest paper in the Journal of Neurotrauma dated June 1st 2017 and it’s titled suboptimal dosing parameters as possible factors in a negative phase 3 clinical trials of progesterone for traumatic brain injury and it’s about a four page article basically refuting the dose that was given and as you mentioned the emulsifying agent, the polyunsaturated fat that was used, the soybean oil that was used as part of the carrier 19:02 certainly bringing its own negative inflammatory effects and you’ve always talked about poofers as being pro estrogenic progesterone obviously is a known water logger both of neurons and cells and so all of this is working against any tiny dose of progesterone that was part of the trial so just again for people that are listening it’s very difficult sometimes to wade through all this material and find the facts because a lot of it is being promoted by pretty vested interests that are plugged into many different levels of academia doing follow up research to get their PhDs etc and we all know from what you’ve mentioned and from personal experience for people that have been in academia that there is this real ego centric mentality running through the departments and obviously funding that runs through those same mentalities that people don’t want to give up and so it’s very difficult sometimes to find objective truth but it is out there and so that’s what this show has been around for a long time 20:03 so have you on the show and get you to refute what have been believed innocently I think for the longest time because we’ve been taught it and we think these people are telling the truth but your research shows otherwise You mentioned the estrogenic effect of the polyunsaturated fats when there’s a trauma the toxicity of the polyunsaturated fats is tremendously amplified by their conversion to the pro-inflammatory prostaglandins and in any trauma not just trauma but any harmful experience of an organism estrogen is produced in the injured tissue and in the whole organism there can be sunburn or parasites in the intestine or broken bone x-ray treatment any harm you can think of due to the organism is going to increase the estrogen production and the conversion of polyunsaturated fats 21:09 to the pro-inflammatory mediators This is what you would term or literature would term the excitotoxic situation That’s part of it, that’s an even more specific part that happens under the influence of estrogen and polyunsaturated fats They activate the glutamatergic transmitters in the brain these literally excitatory signals to the point that they become toxic and progesterone opposes all of these not just the direct anti-estrogen effect but it blocks the formation of prostaglandins blocks the release of the stored polyunsaturated fats blocks the formation of other inflammatory mediators and antagonizes the glutamatergic excitotoxins 22:21 Every function of the organism you can think of that’s harmed by trauma is intensified by estrogen and polyunsaturated fats and those are blocked by progesterone Okay, alright, so you’re listening to ask your doctor K. M. U. D. Galbavel, 91.1 FM From 7.30 until the end of the show at 8 o’clock people were invited to call in with questions either related or unrelated to this month’s subject of progesterone and its treatment for traumatic brain injury We’re going to look at cognitive impairment Alzheimer’s is going to touch on that a little postpartum depression is quite interesting from a female perspective postpartum catamennial epilepsy which is a menstrual cycle related to epilepsy and sleep apnea and how progesterone and CO2 have interrelated effects So the number if you’re in the area is 923-3911 or if you’re in the outside area or indeed out of the states which has happened many times there’s an 800 number, 1-800-568-3723 23:26 So we will take your calls from 7.30 on, I saw the light flashing here just a bit ago I don’t know if you’ve got anybody on at this point, maybe not, maybe taking questions Okay, we can always go back to him if he’s there Okay, he’s there. Let’s take this first caller Caller, you’re on the air, where are you from? What’s your question? My name is Jeff from New York, I was listening to the comment about progesterone and progesterone is I guess the miracle product but does it only apply to women? Because I think you’ve mentioned in the past that progesterone is sort of universal but progesterone men have to be careful about and I’m not talking about like a 25 year old, I’m talking about like a 55 to 70 year old where the risk of endotoxins is increasing just with basic age So that’s one question that I had, the other one is with regard to salt and insomnia I was actually using sea salt and I switched over having read your forum 24:29 to canning salt, they’re actually kosher salt which is pure salt doesn’t have any other minerals in it and I actually think it really helped, I’m just wondering if you would agree with that and sort of why, because I don’t seem to be waking up at 3 o’clock in the morning anymore I seem to be able to sleep through the night, so it might not be the only item but anyway, that was the second question, thank you I’ll let Dr. P ask the progesterone, answer the progesterone question with men and progesterone but I will quickly just say the whole thing about salt and natural salt and Himalayan salts and deep earth crystal salts the fact is they do contain a lot of other trace elements and other negative material and I think that could be in part why there may be disruptions going on a hormonal level in a type of endocrine fashion with very small picogram concentrations of very questionable heavy metals and other products that can be present in the salt so all of those coloured salts and Himalayan salts etc 25:32 typically have other particles within them that are not beneficial and so I think just like Dr. P is talking about white sugar being good it’s not opposed to white sugar at all and I think you find the caramelization product of any organic or brown sugars maybe more detrimental than just straight white sugar for its own sake so you use kosher salt, do you agree that kosher salt and canning salts are the same and that’s the product that would be most efficacious for this type of program? yeah, I would say that it’s a straight forward white sea salt again, after I guess I have a question on that because sea salt has its own elements within it that we know are not particularly good for you a white sea salt is particularly what we use what do you think about iodine? not a good product to supplement with obviously in terms of any Fukushima fallout or that kind of thing and obviously there’s a rationale for it for getting it taken up into the thyroid gland 26:36 so that the radioactive material doesn’t collect there Dr. P, what do you think about progesterone and men? well, first I’d like to comment that my interest in salt supplementation was related to the estrogen because I saw premenstrual women restricting their salt and making their symptoms worse and I suggested to a friend that she salt her food to taste and suddenly she didn’t retain water salt was acting as a diuretic and years later I knew old people who were restricting salt and developing serious insomnia and not improving their blood pressure so I suggested the same thing to them and again they went to sleep, got good sleep suddenly and their blood pressure actually came down and then I realized that Tom Brewer with his diet for pregnant women in the 1950s and 60s 27:44 had seen the same thing that some people he collaborated with supplemented pregnant women with toxemia symptoms with huge amounts of salt daily and their toxemia essentially was cured by Franklin and Hodin’s book anyway, the progesterone I used it myself after I had worked with it in aging animals I tried it on my own migraines and twice having a very intense migraine a complete reversal of the symptoms from one to two minutes from a total migraine to total wellness after ingesting about 100 milligrams I guess it was and that was what really got me interested in describing it to other people 28:49 and when I took too much for too long I noticed that it had the effect of a cold shower for a day or two an anti-testosterone effect but that passes quickly when you stop taking it and I’ve found as I got older that I could tolerate 5 milligrams or 10 milligrams a day without that anti-testosterone effect several people have told me that it actually seems to reinforce their testosterone and I think that works because testosterone when you’re under stress is being converted to estrogen and if you stop that conversion with progesterone progesterone like aspirin inhibits the conversion of testosterone to estrogen you can actually raise your testosterone by blocking that conversion of stress that’s very interesting 29:50 the question on iodine a moment ago I know you’ve mentioned that taking a very small amount or even a seemingly small amount could be toxic but that was in an experiment so as you probably have written incredibly articulately and I don’t want to make it a political comment but clearly the fluoridation of the water is something that Americans just literally can’t escape so I’m just wondering outside the laboratory does more iodine make sense in the context of an environment where you’re so exposed to fluoridated water that you can’t really escape it is it counteracted and maybe would suggest more than a small dose to offset the fluoride that you’re probably consuming without your knowledge? I’ve never seen a test of that idea I think it should be tested and when I spent some time in San Francisco without thinking about the fluoridation of water there 30:52 I was using a daily supplement of T3 cytomyl and within a few days I developed a migraine which made me assume it was a sudden crash of my thyroid function and so I looked up the interaction if you take T3 with fluoridated water if it’s in your stomach at the same time the amount of fluoride in the water will totally knock out the dose you’re taking but I think there is some effect once it gets in your body as long as it’s circulating as ionic fluoride I think it will knock out any T3 that it runs into that’s great. I have just one last question if I may on amino acids you say like gelatin, you better off taking gelatin because that’s how you get your proline and your glycine it’s more biovailable and cleaner without any additives 31:53 but there are some isolated amino acids like taurine which I think in and of itself may be extremely therapeutic and perhaps reduce the stress and the other one that I was interested is carnosine not carnitine which you’ve written well on carnosine seems to be a long list of benefits do the possible risks of additives are they essentially offset by the fact that those two particular amino acids have a laundry list of benefits? Yeah, I don’t discourage people from taking those if they want to try them but I don’t use them myself Okay, well yeah, okay Okay, so one last question I am holding my breath for two minutes at the best with my take a breath and you let all the air out and you hold it for a minute and a half my maximum is two minutes and then you take one breath in and you hold it for a minute, two minutes and a half 32:54 when I do that and sometimes I can do it better than others it seems that that might be a good proxy for bag breathing or swimming or whatever to increase your CO2 and is that something that if you practice it over a period of time as an older person you can reduce the systemic stress to your body as opposed to putting your whole body in a bag of CO2 gas? Holding your breath does have its value but the amount of time you hold it depends on your metabolic rate if you have a high thyroid function you might be unconscious after a minute of breath holding If you have a high metabolic rate or low? If you have a high metabolic rate and are producing CO2 and consuming oxygen very fast the fall off of oxygen supplied to your brain 33:56 is going to be twice as fast as the average person four times as fast as the hypothyroid person so if you have a high metabolic rate you don’t want to force yourself to go two minutes Is there a good average for someone who is like modestly hypothyroid? I mean as you get older everyone becomes hypothyroid right? to some extent so I mean not to pin you down but doing it a minute a day Is that a good target? Like 30-60 seconds? It’s not hard, it’s not easy, it’s just something you can do and seems to certainly feel relaxed afterwards I mean you feel like your blood vessels literally are relaxed it’s very odd feeling A very high proportion of the population is breathing too fast hyperventilating so it’s beneficial for most people to hold their breath slower to some extent 34:57 but there’s no way without doing an oxygen consumption test that you can tell exactly how many seconds you should hold it Gotcha, gotcha, I gotcha but I think that’s a good point, if you’re doing it and you reduce the number of breaths you take during a normal minute without thinking about it then you’ve improved, there’s some benefit because you’re taking fewer breaths per minute Okay, thanks for your call We do have another caller on the line waiting to get on in so let’s make sure they get the opportunity You’re on the air, where you’re from, what’s your question? Yes, hi, this is, I’m calling from Finland and I’m always very grateful for your show and just learning so much My question is unrelated to this week’s topic it’s basically prompted by a recent book in French by a doctor who founded the oxidative stress college and so I’d like to know if this whole white fat, brown fat thing 36:05 is good science what I found in the book, which just came out recently this is why I dare to mention it is basically the assumption from this doctor that you cannot get rid of or it’s almost impossible to get rid of white fat you just accumulate it and the only one thing that they mention would be to use cold but I know that in past shows it has been told that the stress created by applying cold makes it almost worse than not applying it so this would be one of the questions and my other question is I’ve seen a study basically it’s on mice so I don’t know if it’s applicable if it’s good science either for men but that also goes as far as to say that 37:07 starvation or fasting, actually not starvation fasting would actually reverse the thing so basically turn good brown fat into bad white fat so any opinions on this would be appreciated thank you again so Dr. P, what do you have to say about brown vs white fat? there is a lot of good interesting research on that and my orientation to it is that the activation of T3 the active thyroid hormone is the crucial thing and that stress will prolong fasting is going to have a lot of harmful counterproductive effects and one of those is that it knocks out the T3 and the various tissues even though the T3 that circulates in the bloodstream is two-thirds of it roughly is produced in the liver 38:08 and about a third in the thyroid gland but the various tissues of the body muscle, skin, kidneys, brain all of the tissues that have been studied are able to produce T3 from T4 locally to supplement whatever can get in from the bloodstream so that even if your circulation isn’t delivering enough T3 your tissue is able to produce it itself and the crucial factor for producing it locally in the tissue it’s partly glucose but fructose seems to have a special ability to activate that tissue local production of T3 and so I would say that eating enough sugar having your orange juice and other fruit regularly throughout the day is much better than either chilling yourself or starving yourself 39:12 Okay May I just ask one more thing just very quickly if you were to choose a place to live just based on trying to get your metabolism high would it be safe to say that you would choose a high altitude warm the warmest place at high altitude or am I getting this one right? Somewhere in Peru on a maybe 12 to 14,000 foot elevator near the equator How about Mono Loa, Doctor Pete? I don’t know how high it is I think it’s about 8 or 9,000 Yeah, I like Toluca, Mexico a little chilly but I really feel exhilarated at that altitude and I think it’s better to be a little higher 12,000 or so Probably less chance of getting bombed by the Koreans too Anyway, thanks for your call, Colla 40:13 Thanks very much for taking my call Okay, so for people who’d like to call in the 800 number is 1-800-568-3723 Doctor Raymond Pete sharing his wisdom with us going through the motions of how progesterone is demonized time and time again by posture and by corporate scientific interests So Doctor Pete, I wanted to talk about the GABA receptor excuse me, the GABA A receptor in particular I know that this is the receptor which progesterone and its metabolite allopregnanolone which apparently is one of the more active metabolites but that may just be hearsay too I don’t know what you have to say about allopregnanolone These bind to the same GABA receptor producing that anxiolytic, that kind of calm peaceful type nervous response because they block the excitatory stimulation and that valeriana aficionade is common valerian 41:14 does just that and I remember very clearly some of our first material Medicare that was talked to us about valerian and GABA receptors and chloride channels et cetera and how the whole exotation is calm down So in terms of the GABA channel GABA receptor and progesterone or allopregnanolone’s activity do you think the metabolite is more active than progesterone per se or do you think progesterone itself is still a good anxiolytic and calming agent we talked about anti-inflammatory, anti-edema since progesterone the precursor for progesterone itself is pro GABA I suspect the progesterone in itself is but it is converted, reduced chemically to form allopregnanolone 42:15 and that seems to be the most powerful activator of the GABA system in the brain but I think all of them are acting in the same direction and besides acting to reduce stress and excitation by activating GABA progesterone also inhibits several of the excitatory processes including the glutamatergic and NMDA receptor systems OK, we do have another call let me hold your train of thought there before I question you some more Caller, you’re on the airway where are you from and what’s your question? Buffalo, John Buffalo, New York? Two callers from New York at my night I had a question about the spine 43:17 so if someone has a disc herniation so it either dries up or the gel breaks through is it practically possible to regenerate that particular gel? because I know you’ve mentioned I think it’s some studies that have been done where people have seen regeneration of different parts of the body although it sounds crazy but it seems like you said it’s been done so is it possible for the space between the disc vertebrae to regenerate? Dr. P, what do you think about that with that nucleus pulposis? Do you think that’s possible to regenerate that? I’m sure you do Yeah, I know people get well from it but I’ve never seen X-ray evidence they actually spaced out the distance between the vertebrae I don’t know if the bones themselves can adjust 44:19 so I think it would be possible for the disc to rebuild itself and for the bones to conform themselves to the regenerating cartilage disc I’m sure you’d probably advocate the use of progesterone in and of itself I’ve heard and seen knee joints and shoulder joints that were making noise and causing relative immobility to the person to heal themselves from an hour to overnight overnight a completely functionalist knee recuperated to the point that the guy had to come to the house just to run up and down my stairs to show what had happened to his knee Well, this is sort of a testimony I’ve had six knee operations and three herniated discs 45:24 and I’m over 60 and by being on your diet and mitigating poofa primarily and trying to do the other stuff that you talk about I almost have no pain I must say though, the red light is my go-to thing things go bad the red light kind of just eliminates pain almost immediately I can’t say that for the other products you speak about but I believe the progesterone I just don’t know much about it Have you ever tried applying a progesterone-based oil to that area on your spine where you say you have a herniated disc? Have you tried that? I don’t know if you’re using aspirin as anti-inflammatory as an anti-inflammatory compound to reduce swelling obviously that’s primary importance during that type of repair It’s funny you mentioned that because I did run today and I literally put a paper towel in that aspirin solution 46:28 that Dr. P had previously suggested so I do do that I do believe it doesn’t just help locally but I think based on what I’ve read in his aspirin articles it actually helps systemically in a body temperature metabolism which is like aspirin is kind of an unappreciated product as you’ve well documented but no, I’ve never tried progesterone on the spine but I remember in one of your programs I believe or another one that Dr. P said you can put progesterone on like a mole or maybe you were talking about that or DHA and you put it near a mole and it moved around and eventually it got better, is that also possible? Putting it next to the mole the pigment cells are extremely mobile if your skin is warm like in summer they can travel through your skin close to an inch per day and if you know what they’re looking for 47:32 depending on whether it’s on your forehead or your wrist or your chest if you put it in the right place they will apparently satisfy their need for the progesterone or DHA and leave, go back to where they should be to keep your hair pigmented for example So the mole just kind of breaks up because the pigment sort of doesn’t clump together? It congregates because they’re deprived of something where they came from and for example on my temple I applied I forget which was DHA or progesterone on the front side and the next day there was a ring of pigment cells nearly an inch to the back side and the mole itself had shrunk the second day I applied another dab in front of it 48:35 and the following day there was like a bullseye two brown rings spaced out in a curved line behind it and the mole itself was again smaller and I kept doing that and within a few days a red, shiny blood vessel adherence constricted the base it had been as big as a dime and it constricted down to about the diameter of a matchstick and then right up and fell off and didn’t leave a scar Wow Well thank you Andrew had mentioned about GABA and so that just sparked a question based on his comment is GABA something you can take as a supplement or does that mess up the rest of your neurotransmitters because I know people say it also does a supplement it gets your dopamine up but doesn’t that mess up the balance how do you deal with that? 49:36 In animal studies when they gave it to a healthy animal none of it seemed to get into the brain but if the animal had been sleep deprived so its brain really needed GABA it was in an excited state then GABA was able to get into the brain and relax it Okay we do have another caller so let’s make sure we get this thanks for your caller call I don’t mean to catch you off the quick but we do have another one and where are you from and what’s your question? Dr. P, hello my name’s Chris I’m calling from Garberville, California in Southern Humboldt County I’ve tried something called monk fruit sugar which maybe you’ll be familiar with Nope, I haven’t heard of it Okay monk fruit sugar is a melon and it comes from Southern China I recently found out about it and about three months ago I purchased two pounds of it and I stopped eating table sugar entirely granulated white table sugar thank goodness, and brown table sugar went to this organic product tried it ate like a pound and a half of it over a month 50:38 just you know putting it on cereal and etc and all the pain in my body I think from the sugar inflammation absolutely disappeared including like the toes and extremities, I’m 63 years old I’m a big guy but I’m in the process of losing considerable amount of weight and what I’m telling you about monk fruit sugar is I seem to be progressively losing weight I’m interested in knowing about the anti-inflammatories I also have been promoting stevia sugar on another radio station in San Francisco called KGO about 15 years ago and it’s kind of taken over in America because of its anti-inflammatory low glycemic index actually zero glycemic monk fruit sugar if you go online and look at it, zero glycemic it’s almost exactly like white table sugar tastes the same but it’s zero glycemic so any diabetics out there might want to try monk fruit sugar which you can buy at local health food store 51:41 it’s more expensive but boy it’s about prevention and a pound of cure and all that what do you think of this? have you have you heard of this product Dr.P? the effect that I was describing of ordinary sucrose for example in orange juice is able to stimulate weight loss by activating the T3 in your fat cells so glucose is available at health food stores in the pure form if a person is diabetic that doesn’t increase the blood glucose the way are you still with me? yep why I’m telling you about this monk fruit sugar M-O-N-K fruit sugar is that it’s zero glycemic it seems to go in everybody in America everybody in the world has eaten table sugar over a lifetime but what does it contain? 52:42 I don’t know it’s a melon but I don’t know what the constituencies of it is I think it’s mixed with erythritrol which is the stevia product but the monk fruit when I purchased it and ate it and it’s been about two months now I have absolutely no problems with inflammation it seems to have neutralized the inflammation I have after that two months were over I started eating white table sugar again organic brown sugar and it absolutely has negated the effect all the inflammatory effects of that white sugar as I’ve been eating it I was doing my own experimental study so I’ve been telling everybody about it that’s overweight that they should go from eating granulated cane sugar table sugar to this monk fruit sugar that’s in melon form and zero glycemic well I’d be interested to know what what constituents it has as far as stevia is concerned 53:43 I think it’s a pretty toxic product and like xylitol and all the other sugar substitutes I do believe that there’s a lot more negative effects to them than any positive effects from any lower calories or insulin sensitivity type reactions from their non-sugar sugar but I’ve never, yeah I know there’s lots of information out there that will say that sugar is toxic or it’s pure white and deadly etc and we’ve totally visited it and I don’t think there’s any mileage in it not too sure why it is that you would have had your information clear up but it’s good that you did who knows what else is going on with you with your thyroid etc you said you were pretty large I don’t know if you have any metabolic issues maybe have some low thyroid situation happening with you but typically those situations do predispose to toxin build up and that obviously has its effects as does weight on the joints so I think all of those things 54:45 kind of work against you but yeah happy that you got a reduction in your inflammation but anyway Dr. Pete thank you very much for joining the show again I appreciate your time so much and we didn’t get through much this evening but I appreciate the call as I called perhaps we’ll carry on next month and then go on to another topic from there okay very good thanks for your time okay so people that have tuned in to this evening show for you place calls thanks for your calls and input for people that want to find out more about Dr. Pete www.raypeat.com fully referenced scientific articles that have been produced and plenty of information and references to back up what he’s saying again for those people who have listened to the show this evening the first part I was mentioning about the use of progesterone in traumatic brain injury do take a look at those two studies one excuse me was the synapse study and the other one was the protect 3 55:47 breed them I mean they seem to show that there is no benefit and yet Dr. Donald Stein is produced a paper here in 2017 in the Journal of Neurotrauma he’s been a brain specialist for 30 years that’s all he’s done and his paper here I think outlines quite clearly the shortfalls of the study and that actually progesterone is a very good model for treating this kind of disorder so there’s certainly hope there and progesterone’s got a lot of other benefits that we didn’t get into I know we’ve mentioned it on other shows but certainly not the product that the industry would like to tell you it is because it’s actually estrogen so again things back to front well thanks for joining us and till 7 o’clock next Thursday third Friday of the month from 7 to 8 p.m. my name is Andrew Murray if anybody wants to reach us we have an 800 or 1-888 number 1-888-WBM-URB or through our website 56:48 which is westernbotanicalmedicine.com so see you next month