Heart, Brain, Cancer, and Hormones

00:00 Welcome to your own health and fitness. I’m health integrationist Lena Berman with Jeff Hossett PhD. We come to you weekly with a critical independent voice on the politics and practice of health. If you are a woman or man benefiting from the use of bioidentical progesterone you have today’s guest to thank. I’m grateful to him for starting me on my path after hearing him lecture at UCSF about early animal research on helplessness. That’s when I understood the importance of learning enough to be at the center of my own health care and not at the mercy of a long-term treatment plan. That was about 30 years ago and it’s formed my work this many years later. This radio program is designed to introduce you 01:01 to critical thinking about science and what promotes the capacity to live fully embracing a complexity of ideas that will challenge the current ecclesiastic convention in health care. Challenging ideas is what you’ll hear in this next hour with Dr. Raymond Pete. Stay tuned as we discuss heart, brain, cancer and hormones. First a commentary about this week’s health news by Dr. Jeffrey Fossett. Thank you Lena. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy has created something called the Social and Behavioral Science Team. The team is intended to draw upon these fields in order to make government policies more effective and efficient. The approach is discussed in a New York Times article by a professor at the University of Chicago who has advised the Obama administration and who also advised the villainous David Cameron administration in Great Britain. Fox and other right-wing media were sent into a fit with fears of Obama brainwashing. It’s nothing of the kind 02:04 which doesn’t mean that the team’s work is benign. I’ll tell you why. The Times article mentions three issues that are receiving the team’s attention. At three years of age poor children have a significantly smaller vocabulary than well-off children. Much of this is attributed to how caregivers and parents speak to and read to their children. Coaching and new technologies are cited that could improve the performance of parents and caregivers. A second category concerns domestic violence and the effectiveness of domestic violence hotlines. Women who call are too often left on hold. The call is dropped and help is not received. Improved call handling methods and technologies are cited, for example, communicating wait times so that callers are kept on the line until they can get the help they need. The final category concerns the failure of patients to follow a course of treatment such as taking medications at the prescribed times during the day or getting to appointments, changing 03:06 medication design, for example, from three times daily to two to once, and information technologies for mental crutches are cited as ways to make compliance easier. Although only the last is called a health issue, I believe that all three are health issues and serious ones. It’s disappointing that the solutions offered ignore the obvious political economy of each of these problems. Yes, enabling parents to improve children’s language skills is desirable, but that’s not the problem. The problem is they’re poor. Providing those families with economic security will do far more than coaching parents to read to their children. Yes, having better communication techniques for victims of domestic violence is a good thing, but eliminating the economic insecurity that is the soup from which domestic violence bubbles up is going to be far more effective than telling callers how long a caller, how long she has to wait before she can talk to someone. And for that matter, why not 04:10 spend money making sure that no one ever needs to be put on hold? Yes, some people have trouble following a doctor’s orders. How often is the problem not three pills versus one, but choosing between the pill and the meal with which you’re supposed to take it? Oddly, the article opens this section by citing a study that showed better compliance when the copayment for a treatment was eliminated. After concluding, quote, for some highly effective treatments, there should be no copayment at all, end quote. The article pats the idea on the head and moves on to redesigning pills. Why not eliminate all copayments altogether? Characteristic of the Obama administration’s disappointing performance in general, the work of the social and behavioral science team will nibble at the edges of serious problems. The ideas are not necessarily bad ones for what they are. They come from an academic literature on what’s called nudging, which means making small environmental changes that 05:13 have a significant effect on our health and well-being. An example that sticks in my head concerns organ donorship. Both the US and France manage organ donation through their driver’s license system. Your driver’s license designates you as a donor or not. You choose when you get your license and can have it changed at any time. But there’s a big difference between the US and France. The percent of people who are donors in the US is very low, while in France it’s very high. The difference has nothing to do with altruism, but with how the question is asked. In the US you are asked to opt in, that is, you have to check the box to be a donor. In France you are asked to opt out, that is, you’re a donor unless you check the box. You might think it’s too bad that the US has such a bad system, one that prevents a noble life-saving act. However, the organ donation system is less than a noble undertaking and there is some evidence 06:17 that many donations are made before the donor has joined the choir invisible, both from the haste of the extraction team and the questionable parameters used to decide when someone is dead. What I’m saying is that making a policy work better using nudges is a smart thing, but we should make sure we’re signed up for the policy and understand the de facto effect of the policy. It seems to be a de facto policy that children should live in poverty. It seems to be a de facto policy that women should live in fear of domestic violence. It seems to be a de facto policy that medical care should require financial sacrifice. It’s those de facto policies that the social and behavioral science team is nibbling at in the name of efficiency, producing band-aids at best. The transcript with this comment is available at yourownhealthandfitness.org. I’m Jeffrey Fawcett. Take care of yourself. Jeff Fawcett is a political economist, writer, 07:18 health educator who produces the show with me and is the primary author of our book, Together, Too Much Medicine, Not Enough Health. Now to our topic which is heart, brain, cancer, and hormones, although I’m sure we’ll move into all sorts of other places as well, time permitting. Our guest, I’m very pleased to introduce you to Dr. Raymond Peete, P-E-A-T. He has a PhD in biology from the University of Oregon with a specialization in philosophy. He has taught at the University of Oregon, Urbana College, Montana State University, National College of Naturopathic Medicine, Universidad Veracruzana, the Universidad Autonoma del Estado de Mexico, and Blake College. He also conducts private nutritional counseling. Dr. Peete first started his work with progesterone and related hormones in 1968, in papers in physiology, physiological, sorry, 08:21 chemistry, and physics, 1971 and 1972. In his dissertation at the University of Oregon in 1972, he outlined his ideas regarding progesterone and the hormones closely related to it as protection of the body’s structure and energy against the harmful effects of estrogen, yes I said estrogen, radiation, stress, and lack of oxygen. The key idea that underlies Dr. Peete’s work is that energy and structure are independent and interdependent, I’m sorry, interdependent, not independent at every level. I made a hash of that. Welcome to you, Raymond. Hello. His commentary got me thinking about how I happen to gravitate in the direction of those hormones. I was in the 50s, you know, the political situation was totally desperate, but the beginning of democratic movements around 1960 coincided with changes in science, 09:30 and I hadn’t considered going into science during the 50s, because science was so politicized and basically oriented towards militarism and the psychiatrists were working on things such as lobotomies and electroshock and torturing animals to see what happened. In 1960, the opposite interest developed in which rats were put into an enriched environment. They discovered that they became more intelligent, and their brains even enlarged, and that enlargement was passed on to the next generations, growing with each generation, and that got me interested in science, and I thought science had some real possibilities 10:30 if it could be integrated with social stimulation, nutrition, and so on. So I went to university thinking to study brain biology, but I found that the brain biologists were totally doctrinaire looking to the government grants for their approval, basically, of whether they should go in a certain direction, a mechanical kind of thinking. So I went over to the other end, reproduction, and saw that stress and aging and radiation injury, which had been an interest of mine in the 1950s because of the bomb tests. I saw that all of these kinds of stress and injury created the same situation, which essentially was a brain shrinking process. The follow-up of the 1960s 11:35 studies at Berkeley in which freedom and enrichment enlarged the brain, they tested different hormones during pregnancy, and found that stress shrank the brain, and that overlapped with some of the torture experiments that had begun in the 1950s, but by the 1970s, when I had finished my dissertation and research on the aging effects of progesterone and estrogen, the culture had shifted away from that, and basically medicine and biology couldn’t see the connection between enriched growth of the brain and suffering, causing shrinkage of the brain and inability to help oneself. Learned helplessness goes with shrinking of the brain. Can I say something? I was going to lead you into helplessness because you sent me 12:41 those three abstracts last night, which bring up some interesting questions about serotonin and things like that, but to backtrack a little, The New York Times just published an article about a new study about urban animals, rats, mice, bats, who are, their brains are growing, they’re getting smarter because they’re living in urban environments. The explanation is, their conclusion is that it’s because they’re being forced to think harder about where to find food and all the stuff, and that can’t quite be right because in fact- It’s more like being a wild animal. Wild animals have bigger brains than- Well, what I was going to say is that they’re reporting that these urban animals are suddenly becoming smarter because they have to work so hard to get food, and I’m thinking, in the 1700s in London, they had to get food too, and they don’t mention the fact that urban environments will also give them shorter lives. So it was a very selective piece of reporting 13:44 that seemed to indicate that they believe that just putting people in urban environments, which is the trend these days- Well, I imagine the rats in New York are eating better than they had other times when- Could be. Living was harder. Yeah, could be. Anyway, let me just say again, because we’re going to get into a break thing here, that this is your own health and fitness, and I’m on the phone today with Ray Pete, P-E-A-T-P-H-D, and you will find as you listen to the show that he is a very provocative and very interesting biology professor and researcher. So, you know, conventional medicine, as you just said, is only interested in prevention as early intervention and doing invasive things of various sorts to prevent people from dying of heart disease and cancer, but the rates of these diseases, as you point out in your papers and your newsletters, are climbing, and they tend to be somewhat lower in people in the third world who are not 14:47 getting treated as much, which is ironic. You have a different way of thinking about what makes people vulnerable, and the helplessness stuff, which really caught my attention, really got my attention and got me thinking 30-something years ago when I heard you speak, you just sent some abstracts about helplessness. It’s very interesting. Everybody’s heard me talk about the research, which is that they threw rats into vats of water to see whether they would keep swimming if they were held long enough for them to give up. If they were held for a while and put back in, they’d swim to save their lives for any length of time. If they were held beyond that point, they would give up. Yeah, the naive rats typically would swim for three or four days before giving up, but if they had been held in someone’s fist until they gave up or were shocked and couldn’t get away from the shock, they would usually drown after six or seven minutes. More animal cruelty. 15:47 And several of the experimenters observed that when they died, their hearts were in a relaxed state. They were actively turned off, and that’s where this relates very directly to what was seen in the very first 1960s experiments with enriched rats. The insight that increased along with intelligence was cholinesterase, which destroys acetylcholine, which is thought of as the agent of the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the relaxed and sleep regeneration associated nerves where the adrenaline side is associated with fight or flight. And so the acetylcholine along with the parasympathetic nervous system are given this ideology sort of like serotonin. 16:52 It’s all sweet and positive, but the stress can go in either direction of excess. Too much adrenaline and cortisol, which tend to break down your tissues, or too much of the turning off mobilization, too much acetylcholine, and that turns on all kinds of inflammatory cancerous degenerative processes. So that’s a shock response? That’s the one. Is it sort of a shock response? Yeah, when you give up, going into shock and giving up is biologically involves things such as too much nitric oxide, too much serotonin, and too much acetylcholine, so it’s too much of the relax and be serene. It goes over the edge into quick death. 17:59 Let me just stop you there because that’s really interesting. That’s what I thought I read here, so that the way that too much serotonin works is it literally kind of puts you out in a certain way. Because I thought acetylcholine was excitatory. Yeah, it’s excitatory to muscles, and it has some inhibiting functions, but it is one of the three basic excitatory toxins that is known to kill brain cells. Cysteine, the amino acid, works with glutamic acid and aspartic acid that got famous with MSG. Well, and aspartame? Yeah, and acetylcholine has just been given the assumption that it’s all pleasant and relaxing, but in fact it’s one of the excitotoxins. It excites nerves, and if they don’t have enough 19:03 sugar basically and oxygen to support that excitation, or if they have too much cortisol interfering with their ability to use both glucose and oxygen, then the acetylcholine stimulation kills them just as much as the glutamic acid would. This has really interesting implications for not only long-term treatment in general, which increases helplessness, and that’s what you were talking about at UCSF, and that was really interesting because I was in treatment for chemical sensitivity. I was being treated for what was called back then environmental allergies and stuff. If people are given serotonin reuptake medications and their serotonin gets too high, they become manic and they feel like they’re on speed, so not only are we treating, not us personally, not only is the institution, the 20:04 medical institution treating people by overdosing them with serotonin when they’re depressed, but you’re, you know, so in every way this is dangerous is what I’m trying to say. Yeah, and because of this ignoring the dark side of stress, the cholinergic side of stress, or the giving up side, the medical business has used it the same way they’ve used the serotonin drugs, building on a myth to sell drugs that in fact are doing exactly what they should be undoing. Progesterone happens to activate the cholinesterase enzyme the same way that enriched environment activates it, so it protects the brain against this excited toxic, so the brain can become excited and active without killing itself, but if you’re deficient in 21:07 progesterone, you run the risk of overexciting the brain and any injury and it doesn’t, doesn’t have to be a behavioral stress, but just a physical knock on the head excites the nerves and if you get enough progesterone soon enough, the brain recovers with great ability. Just being low in progesterone, any little stress becomes a dangerous injury, and the Steins group in the last 10 years has made great progress in treating traffic accident victims of a concussion and brain injury with progesterone, but it’s stuff that was already being demonstrated in the 1960s with the brain expanding effects. Marion Diamond, for example, wrote a book showing that stress changes the shape of the face and 22:14 thins the cortex, making rats look mean and stupid and actually being stupid, prenatal stress, but giving them extra sugar and progesterone to nourish the brain prenatally gave them a sort of baby face look like a puppy with a big head and a good disposition and higher intelligence. John Lee is now long dead, Dr. John Lee. For people who’ve been listening to my show for the length of time it’s been on, which is getting close to 20 years, they will have heard many shows with John Lee when he was alive and John Lee learned about progesterone from you, and I knew about progesterone from you because I started using it after hearing you speak and getting to know you, so I started using progesterone in my 30s and it was very helpful to me. John Lee, 23:14 who was a physician in Mill Valley for 30 years, used it in his practice and never had any case of breast cancer or any kind of cancer in his practice, and he also was able to cure infertility problems in women by giving them progesterone. And you know, I, in my own practice, have made those suggestions to people and have also observed that as women move into metapause their progesterone drops off precipitously and the estrogen is still present, but they can’t use the estrogen because there’s no progesterone, plus estrogen being excitatory, they’re basically jumping out of their skin during that period, so the progesterone is remarkable, but progesterone is also remarkable in very, very small doses for men, right? Right, it works for arthritis and epilepsy in men, just as well as in women, and it hasn’t been used as much for treating cancer. 24:18 The Alexander Lipschutes in the 1940s showed that progesterone would stop the cancerization of basically every tissue starting with the uterus, breast, then lungs, kidney, and prostate. Yeah, but that was picked up by a few medical doctors to treat uterine cancer, breast cancer, and kidney cancer, but all of his implications weren’t followed up, and it was just dropped out of consciousness about 1955 when more chemicals were coming on the market for treating cancer. Yeah, which makes more money. You can’t patent a natural substance, so then we obviously provera, which is synthetic progesterone, which really causes cancer fast and doesn’t do anything protective. The one thing to be mindful of with progesterone in my own experience, 25:21 in my experience with at least my clients, and in men, is that hormones like to be in a milieu that’s balanced, and the balance should always favor progesterone, but an overdose of progesterone, it’s sedative, so it’ll basically put you out, it’ll make you sleepy, and you’ll feel kind of loggy and blue. So one problem, I think, is that sometimes people, women, hear that it’s good, and they slather this stuff on, and then they feel awful. So it’s good to remember that, well, what do you think a good replacement dose of progesterone is in the two genders? Oh, for my own experience, I’ve taken as much as 1,000 milligrams of progesterone. And stayed awake? No, I couldn’t tell where my hands and feet were for it. You and Oliver Sacks like to do stuff like that, yeah. Taking about 10 milligrams 26:23 of progesterone had a very soothing effect, but if I kept it up for about a week, it was like I was constantly getting out of a cold shower, had a definite antagonistic effect to testosterone. Yes, it reduces your contests. I think a good dose for men is 5 to 8 milligrams, which is a really small dose. And in women, what do you like to see? It’s going to vary, obviously. It’s variable. Some women can take 400 milligrams, I know, of women who couldn’t feel it at all because their estrogen was so high. It has to reach a ratio of five or 10 times at least higher than estrogen. And if your bloodstream is full of estrogen, you just can’t get there. So you’ve got to get the estrogen under control then 30 to 100 milligrams. I rarely see women who can tolerate 100, but I have had clients who are quite obese and can’t use a transdermal method 27:31 because progesterone likes to soak into the fat cells and hang out slowly releasing itself. So with those cases, I gave it to them under the tongue, which is still transdermal, but absorbs faster. Yeah, you can just add it to food and swallow it. It absorbs all the way down. Yeah, so I would probably depend on the method through this. I like to put it on my skin. Several men have used it transdermally, but putting some olive oil on their skin first and then rubbing in hundreds of milligrams. A friend of mine, for example, had a rheumatic arthritic knee that looked like a football, and it had been going on for many weeks. One application that way, 500 milligrams, but oiling from his thigh to his ankle. It cleared up in about two hours. That’s remarkable. 30 years later, he hadn’t had the 28:32 recurrence after that one application. And that’s an extreme case, but several others have done the same thing. Well, I remember that, well, again, we’re talking about a single application, because keep in mind that a very, very large dose of progesterone in either gender has the potential to knock you out, literally, to put you out, to put you to sleep, because it is very sedative. And if you prolonged the application of lots of it, you will feel logy and some people feel depressed as a result. So you have to monitor, you know, also another thing that can happen in women, I discovered this the hard way, literally, is that if you use too much progesterone, your breasts will think that you’re lactating. So you’ll end up with these very attractive, very large, buoyant breasts that no one can touch, because they’re so painful. And that’s one way to tell that you’ve overdone it. He said, your breasts are really, but it’s not dangerous. Again, the patented altered, molecularly altered versions of this are very, very toxic, 29:36 birth control pills and provera and things like that. But the natural forms are extremely benign. And like I said, the worst thing that will happen is you’ll feel blue or tired, or you’ll go to sleep. I need to take a very brief musical break. When we come back, we’ll continue this discussion about hormones and progesterone and hopefully talk about heart and brain and cancer. Raymond Pete is my guest today. Hang in and come back for more. You’re going to really enjoy this interview. So stay tuned. I’ll be right back. 31:27 Welcome back. This is your own health and fitness. I’m Lena Berman. Visit our website, YourOwnedHealthandFitness.org, all spelled out, for access to over 500, it’s actually more like 600 now, archive shows with our library card feature. Find out about our practice or free stream of this week’s show, our book, Too Much Medicine, Not Enough Health, and lots more at YourOwnedHealthandFitness.org. You can email us if you’d like to reach us. It’s admin, admin, at YourOwnedHealthandFitness.org. Ray, you have a website with articles and all sorts of stuff. Yes, repeat.com. Yeah, oddly enough. The music choice today was because both Dr. Pete and I have a fondness for Dvorak’s pieces that he did that were folkloric. So did I 32:35 get it right? I don’t know. You do? Was it folkloric enough for you? It was fine, yeah. All right. Now, since we’re talking about progesterone, it really does beg to go ahead and talk about both heart disease and cancer because in both cases there’s been press about how there are studies that show estrogen to be heart protective. So estrogen is mostly excitatory if there’s an imbalance in the body, which most women have and men too because men pick up estrogen as they age, particularly if they get heavy. It’s going to contest and lower testosterone in both genders, which is heart protective and cancer protective, I think. So I’m going to just let you kind of go. Albert St. Georgie was who got me interested in 33:38 the effect of estrogen and progesterone on the heart. And he showed in rabbit hearts that progesterone basically strengthens the heartbeat as the heart has more demand put on it. Progesterone lets it respond to the demand where too much estrogen keeps it in the basically small stroke, but having to speed up faster and faster because it can’t make a bigger stroke. And in some ways that’s analogous to what happens in other tissues. Progesterone facilitates the ability to gather resources by relaxing. Its basic effect is to prevent excess stimulation and response until it has the resources to respond fully and correctly. 34:40 So in the heart it riots the heart while increasing the amount of blood it can pump in each stroke. And in the brain it does the same thing where too much stimulation fatigues cells and can kill them. Progesterone activates a whole system that will tend to come the brain. The uterus is another dimension like the heart. It has to function according to whether it can relax or contract. To give birth it has to contract strongly, but during pregnancy it definitely doesn’t want to contract. So progesterone has to be dominant all through right up until the time of birth. And one of the ways that progesterone is doing that is to the same way it 35:42 does in the brain to keep the brain able to be stimulated but grow. It allows the uterus to destroy acetylcholine even when it’s receiving irritation and stimulation. It activates enzymes that prevent inappropriate stimulation. So it lets the uterus keep growing and resisting that unnecessary stimulation. And in an overdose in the brain that’s what you see as the sedation and basically anesthesia. You can create a complete anesthesia with an adequate progesterone. But with the injected kind, for example, the type that Catharina Dalton had such great results with all through the 40s and 50s, she was using an oil 36:45 alcohol injectable form in which the alcohol counteracted the effects of progesterone to a great extent but still she was getting terrific results. But when that form has been injected, for example, for treating uterine cancer, they could inject around a thousand milligrams into a person and they weren’t sedated at all showing that the infected form was very poorly assimilated into the whole body. So the body has to deliver progesterone in the appropriate way to keep things relaxed. So in terms of what sorts of mechanisms are occurring when cells lose individuation and start to be recruited as cancer cells, how does progesterone help? Well, 37:47 I think all hormones to some extent protect the cells from losing. In other words, if you look at a cancer cell from the breast that you can’t tell where it came from, it’s just a cancer cell. It doesn’t look like a breast cell anymore. You know, cells react to stress either by growing too fast or by dying the same way as the whole organism either goes into a fight or flight state or gives up. And the cancer is basically the fight or flight state that cells try to get out of the bad situation, multiplying faster and moving, getting away from whatever is causing the stress. And progesterone keeps cells from experiencing that kind of stress in the first place. But it’s one of the factors that can, if a cell has started down a stem cell pathway, 38:53 basically progesterone helps to guide it in the right direction. The one pathway that when a stem cell invades the heart, for example, if it finds a slightly injured heart, it can mature into a functioning muscle cell. But once the heart is under great stress, not enough progesterone to keep it quiet periodically, the stem cells moving into the heart are either killed or, in the case of the heart, they become a fiber-producing cell, produce collagen and make the heart progressively harder. And that’s one of the things that happens in just about every cancer. The cells which don’t die, a few of them become multiplying cancer cells. 39:58 Others become fiber-producing cells in an attempt to wall off whatever the irritant is. For example, the polycyclic hydrocarbons that run the famous carcinogens from smoke, when these are painted on an animal’s skin, it usually produces cancer. But in the process, if the animal is able to resist the cancerization, it will produce a walled-off, collagenous lump that protects the cells and the animal by closing in the irritant. So the defensive process of hardening heart or a thickening, stiffening tumor, it’s the same defense reaction just in a different context. 41:00 Let me try saying that in another way to tell me if I’m saying it right, just to sort of unpack it for listeners. I think what you’re saying is that when the heart, either from stress or from the stress of something in the environment, because radiation of all forms, including microwave wireless radiation, which is non-ionizing, ionizing radiation, pollution, toxins, all of this is stress in really horrible food and toxins that are ingested and your social psychological state. It’s all environmental. So environmental irritants can cause the body to encapsulate damaged tissue, to go to an area of inflammation, of chronic inflammation, and encapsulate it, and that’s a tumor. And this can happen, this fibrolytic action can happen both in terms of just tissues in the body trying to encapsulate an irritant and forming a cancer, 42:03 or in the heart as it becomes more fibrolytic and more stiff and almost scarred from a number of other kinds of assaults. Yeah, and every stress or irritated tissue is constantly open to receiving cells coming in from the bone marrow or nearby tissues. These fairly undifferentiated stem-like cells are constantly available. Anytime a tissue needs help, these cells tend to come in and fill in whatever is needed. But as a person, usually it starts over the age of 50 as the whole system starts getting congested with all kinds of stresses and poisons and failure to eliminate toxins, many of these areas accumulate half walled off, 43:07 half controlled. And a person who has had cancer removed, for example, there have been studies following up on populations of these people who had no signs of cancer, but a large proportion of them had constantly circulating cells identifiable as cancer cells going around in their blood, but not causing any harm because their body was just able to use them as repair cells, maybe, or just close them up in a little collagen package and forget about them. Now, the next part of this, which is very important, is that I’ve always felt that if possible, you don’t have surgery with a cancer if you can avoid it. Unless it’s really interfering, it’s certainly better not to do things like the stereostatic needle, 44:12 so-called needle biopsies. This is really a gun with a thing that they shoot into. That these disturb the cells, and I’ve never understood what the mechanism was, and I read it in your newsletter. Why is it bad to cut into cancers? It’s just one more stress. It calls on the body to mobilize the healing process, and if the body has a lot of it, if it’s young and healthy, it can stand being cut up and recover perfectly, but the sicker the individual is, the more likely the stress is to either reactivate the cancer in the same place or activate a completely new cancer somewhere else. It doesn’t have to be just surgery, but chemical poisoning and radiation all activate the carcinogenic process 45:15 either in the place that’s being treated or elsewhere, so it’s just a matter of the total stress and the body’s ability to respond to it. What you say in your newsletter is it is now clear that normal cells are attracted to in a radiated area, and you’re quoting Klopp at all in 2007, and Kitt at all in 2009, that the recognition of a quote bystander effect, close quoted, in which radiation for other… Anyway, the point is that it causes injury, and the cell injuries cause nearby cells with signals to go to the… Just what you said. My mouth kind of hung open when I read this, because it seemed so obvious to me, and yet you said it very succinctly, so… Yeah, the people like… I think her name is Carmen Mothersill. Yeah, you do quote her here, yeah. They’ve demonstrated that cells send out SOS signals, including serotonin, 46:18 and to recruit their neighbors to come and help repair the damage. And at a certain point, instead of repairing the damage, the local situation is so bad that they prefer the recruits and let them cause more damage. Well, you know, the… Oh, again, I should mention this is your own health and fitness. I’m Elena Berman on the phone with Dr. Ray or Raymond Pete, P-E-A-T. He’s a biologist. He’s a researcher. He has been a professor for many years. He has a newsletter and articles that you… Well, the newsletter is a prescription, I think. A subscription. Should be a prescription. Subscription. Is that through your website? It’s raypeat.net.com. It is dot com, raypeat.com. That’s too easy. Raypeat.com, but articles are there and whatnot. And those are, I believe, paintings that you 47:18 did? Yeah. Remarkable, really. Lovely. I was going to be a painter until I thought I saw a possibility to work in biology. Yeah, kind of me too, although I haven’t painted in years. So, people are terrified of cancer and heart disease. Terrified. And when they have… They find something or there’s a diagnosis, there’s this train that starts coming at them. And it’s very hard for people to resist. I have had some very interesting clients who did resist. I had a woman come to see me who had a remarkably large breast tumor that she was just living with and doing all these alternative things with. And it was just there. And she’s still around. So, you know, I don’t want to advocate on the air that people should not treat things, because I would get sued for doing that. So, I’m not saying that. I’m just saying that people should be very considerate about when they go and get screened for things, because if they find 48:22 even something tiny that your body might mop up on its own, the doctors are going to push you toward having surgery, which may make the situation worse, or they may give you radiation, which they’re still doing, which definitely causes more cancer. John Goff’s five-year research that shows all medical interventions with radiation cause other cancers over time, especially if you’re young. Anyway, go ahead. About 40 years ago, three different doctors diagnosed told me that I should have a biopsy on three different things. And since I had already been studying what doctors do and know about cancer, I ignored them and increased my thyroid and used a little nutritional addition, like extra vitamin A and folic acid and methylation. I put some progesterone and DHEA on the area. Vitamin D. And so far, that’s 40 years ago, and none of them 49:27 have persisted. Okay, but I have known very smart people who did all kinds of really good things and help things off, and then things metastasized and weird stuff happened, which might come under the category of you’ve got to dive something. But we also do know about things like young people getting a melanoma and ignoring it, letting it go, and then it metastasizes. You should ignore things. Try to figure out what signals are occurring in your body. The things that produce learned helplessness, I think, are sometimes after a certain age, at least, there are signals from inside the body telling your nervous system to do something. And if your resources don’t tell you what to do, then you can get pushed by symptoms into a more helpless state 50:31 in which the medical signals to control you and make you more helpless, they just add to the internal stresses. So it’s important to try to do something, but to figure out what the best thing to do is. I would be remiss if I didn’t get you to talk a little bit. You’ve talked a lot in all of your literature about radiation, and I think when we talked, you confessed to also being very concerned about the proliferation of microwave wireless radiation everywhere. I have interviewed lots of people all over the globe about this stuff and read a lot of research, and part of the mechanisms here is that it causes, as you have always been concerned about, a shock and stress reaction in the body. It causes heat shock proteins to go up. It causes granulation in the mast cells. This is Oli Johansson in Sweden. So people get eczema, they get skin cancers in places where the sun doesn’t shine, and people are getting a lot of heart symptoms, 51:37 lots and lots of heart symptoms because of the hyperarousal this causes. So if you can spend a little time talking about, because I would like to hear you talk a little more about the heart, and heart symptoms and stomach gastrointestinal symptoms are big. The intestine really is where people should be paying more attention because any kind of stress or shock reduces circulation to your intestine, and that makes it more permeable or leaky. And aspirin, incidentally, is now being studied as possibly the best defense against a leaky intestine, even though there’s a tremendous amount of Tylenol type propaganda saying, don’t use aspirin, it makes your intestine leak. But in fact, it prevents endotoxin and bacterial movement from your intestine into your bloodstream. But you, I’m sorry to interrupt you, it’s just that you must be saying that if people use aspirin to use real honesty God, 52:41 just aspirin, and to take it with food, you have to dissolve it preferably in water and take it with a good amount of food. So there doesn’t form a pocket of concentrated acid. Right, exactly. Yeah, it’s a cool bitter, basically. Yeah, and what happens in following up the initial phase of shock, where you have released too much histamine, acetylcholine, and serotonin, are the main chemical factors. But the leaky intestine allows endotoxin from the bacteria to be absorbed systemically. And that activates things like nitric oxide. Yes. And do you know about Marty Paul’s work? He wrote a book called The No Oh No Cycle? Oh, no. Yeah, we should get him to send you a copy. Anyway, what he’s saying is that the cycle gets, 53:44 it just goes crazy and it starts overproducing. Yeah, the nitric oxide in some organs like the brain makes iron more toxic. The endotoxin makes you absorb too much iron if it’s present in your food. And the series endotoxin iron nitric oxide has one further step. Nitric oxide activates hemoxygenase, which produces carbon monoxide and releases free iron from the heme complex, which is kept as under control. So iron participates once it gets loose, participates in a series of activation that increases the local production of free iron. And that has been traced to dementia, Parkinson’s disease, heart disease, 54:46 diabetes, organ failure of a great variety. And, for example, just studying the stressed brain, the traumatized brain, for example, blocking nitric oxide synthase can have tremendously protective effects. Yes, and we neglected, but you did mention it, that one of the things on the list here was to talk about iron and its toxic effects in the brain and its contribution to Alzheimer’s. The ratio of copper to iron is one of the characteristics. It decreases in relation to the iron content of the brain in Alzheimer’s. And copper is used in the superoxide dismutase that is an antioxidant and in the respiratory enzyme that produces the energy which is lacking in all of the stress conditions. And one of the important issues here is that I learned long ago 55:48 that when women were really high or men in estrogen, estradiol, they tended to biocumulate copper and be low in zinc. So I found myself suggesting people avoid copper. Now I understand that most people are bioaccumulating iron as well because of the diets unless they’re strict vegetarians. In a comparison of female animals to male animals, especially the pregnant female, nine times as much iron from a given dose was absorbed by the female under the influence of high estrogen. That’s right. And even though it increases your seruola protein, seruola, anyway. But the point is that iron status is very important. It’s something that should be checked. And it’s very important to take copper because of its relationship to iron. And if your iron is high, there are lots of tricks. We actually did a show on iron overload with Richard Cunnion in its entire library. But we’re running down on time. It’s clear that we’re going to have to have you on 56:51 again and again and again. So if people want to read your articles, if they want to subscribe to your newsletter, they can go to repeat.com. And do you want to say any last thing about wireless? Well, one of my recent newsletters mentioned that working at a sewing machine in the factory for years had enough electromagnetic field just from the sewing machine order to increase the risk of dementia. So just imagine if you’re using a wireless router in your house in a cell phone and all the rest of it. That’s radio frequency versus, but they’re all part of the spectrum. Okay. What can I tell you? You’re a wonderful interview, Raymond. I really 57:53 appreciate you taking the time to go over this stuff with us. I hope that if people have questions, they will go to your website, repeat.com, and read some of your articles. And we will plan on having you back soon. Okay. Anytime. Thank you so much. Raymond, repeat. Thank you again. Okay. Bye. I want to thank you all for listening. I’m Laina Berman. Visit our website, yourownhealthandfitness.org for access to our over 600 archive shows with our library card feature. Find out about our practice, a free stream of this week’s show if you want to go back and listen. Our book and lots more at yourownhealthandfitness.org. If you’d like to reach us, please do email us. The email address for us is admin, at yourownhealthandfitness.org. Your own health and fitness is produced by Laina Berman and Dr. Jeffrey Fawcett. Remember being informed not only protects your health, it protects your freedom.