Misconceptions Relating to Serotonin and Melatonin

00:00 This free program is paid for by the listeners of Redwood Community Radio. If you’re not already a member, please think of joining us. Thank you. Our top bacterial antioxidant medicine made from, sorry, made without heat or ice. Golden Dragon medicinal syrup is organic, edible, topical, cosmetic, and water soluble. Information is available at Golden Dragon medicinal syrup at gmail.com and by phone at 707-223-1569. We are KMUD, Redwood Community Radio, Garberville 91.1 FM, KMUE, Eureka Arcada 88.3 FM, 01:11 KLAI Laytonville 90.3 FM, and FM translator K258BQ Shelter Cove 99.5 on the web at kmod.org. And coming right up, we have Ask Your Herb Doctor, although their nice CD is not working. It’s funny because it doesn’t work in my computer and now it does not work in the most reliable of our lovely KMUD CD players. And I will try on the unreliable KMUD CD player. And if not, actually I have a lovely song and we’re gonna have a new theme song for right this second. Here we go. 02:20 Music Well, welcome to this month’s Ask Your Herb Doctor. My name’s Andrew Murray. My name’s Sarah Johanneson Murray. For those of you who perhaps have never listened to our shows which run every third Friday of the month from 7 to 8pm, we’re both licensed medical herbalists who trained in England and graduated there with a degree in herbal medicine. We run a clinic in Garberville where we consult with clients about a wide range of conditions and recommend herbal medicine and dietary advice. As I mentioned a few months ago, it’s become increasingly obvious over the last few years that if you really want to get a point across, you cannot just mention it once or twice, but that varied topics encompassing a similar root subject will allow the emergence of a coherent view of the matter in question. 03:22 Association is after all an excellent tool for improving the memory. We get such a lot of positive feedback concerning Dr Ray Pete on our shows. He’s joining us again tonight and we want to explore misconceptions in medicine and marketing related to serotonin and melatonin, but with wider implications for medical drugs in general as well as carrying on last month’s topic on the Fukushima incident which is still ongoing unfortunately. Thank you once again for joining us Dr Pete. Hello? Okay, maybe he’s not with us just yet. Well, until he comes on, you’re listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor KMUD Garberville 91.1 FM and from 7.30 until the end of the show at 8 o’clock, you’re invited to call in with any questions either related or unrelated to this month’s topic of the continuing Fukushima incident and the misconception in medicine surrounding serotonin and melatonin with wider implications for medical drugs in general. 04:30 Okay, so I think we’ve got Dr Pete on the line, so thank you once again for joining us Dr Pete. Hello. Okay, thank you. I think probably we should start with finishing off last month’s topic on… Well, first I’d like you to introduce Dr Pete to our listeners. Sorry. Okay, well done. You’ve introduced us and my name’s Sarah. This is Andrew. Hey, we always do this. I’m so sorry. I got thrown a little bit there when he wasn’t joining us. I kind of skipped the intro Dr Pete, so if you would please just describe your academic professional background for those who perhaps have never listened to you. Okay, after I had studied and taught literature and linguistics, I decided to understand consciousness and language. I should study the brain, but when I started graduate school as specializing in nerve biology, 05:31 I discovered that the brain scientists were just as dogmatic as the linguistic theorists, so I went into general physiology, specializing in reproductive endocrinology. And that was one aspect of that got me interested in the biological effects of radiation, although I had been interested in the fallout from the nuclear tests for many years as a big problem. So when I saw that the biology of estrogen was very similar to the biology of radiation damage, I tried to understand just what was going on in a cell that caused identical biochemical events to occur either from a dose of x-rays or a dose of estrogen. 06:36 Alright, well to continue on and wrap up last week, last month’s presentation on the Fukushima dilemma of what was happening there, unfortunately the power plant is still smoldering and it doesn’t look like there’s going to be any real hope of having it calm down sufficiently at least until September. I heard as a realistic date the cores themselves are not either approachable or too hot to deal with at this point in time and it looks like they’re going to continue smoking away. And in the initial stages of the development of this catastrophe, several websites were revealing information. I think one of the first ones we came across was an Austrian website and it was ZAMG.AU, I think it was .AU something. I can give that address a little bit later on. And there’s also a website RadNet which is the EPA RadNet air concentration measurement data. 07:44 They were giving out measurements right in the early days and we could see looking at the model of the plume fallout from Fukushima that it was spreading across the Pacific and was eventually going to touch land on the west coast and or affect northern and southern latitudes. Sarah, do we want to cover some of what’s gone on with those results to date and just cover some more of that? Well, I’ve only found one PDF file on the EPA’s website that lists reported uranium in Anaheim, uranium 234 in Anaheim, Riverside on March 15th and then also in Seattle and San Francisco on March 18th. And I haven’t seen an updated file of recent records of uranium on that same PDF. It did list plutonium, it had a column for plutonium, but it didn’t list that it had detected any. 08:47 Right, the sims have shut down the… Well, I’m not sure if that’s just because they haven’t detected any or they haven’t reported what they have detected. It seems that there’s iodine being detected in the rain, water and the air all over the country and I don’t know if that’s… We can presume that’s from Japan or whether that was being detected there before the accident and we only see after the accident. Dr. P, I wonder, I had a look on… There’s an interesting website which is called the Modern Survival Blog which covers many different topics relating to preparedness, etc. And when this incident happened, the person who runs Modern Survival Blog got straight on it and was posting a day by day scenario of what was happening. There was a retired nuclear scientist, I think that was his title, a nuclear scientist called Arnie Gunderson, who I think he’s been on several radio and television interviews with various people detailing what’s happening. 09:55 And from the very outset of the incident he was saying that rather than being a level 5 accident it was already a 7 about a month ago and in fact they raised it from a 5 to a 7 now. So in terms of what’s potentially happening here, what do you think is some of the best advice people could take? I think the basic thing is to eat old food, canned or dried food and avoid fresh vegetables as far as you can do that. And to, for example, cheese, aged cheese is going to be completely safe for a long time. And avoiding the iodine damage to the thyroid gland, you can pretty well protect yourself by saturating yourself with iodine from kelp and eating canned oysters and other hell fish and maybe even taking, if you paint tincture of iodine on your skin you absorb quite a bit of it. 11:06 So you can saturate yourself with iodine to protect the thyroid gland during the time that iodine is still active which it stays harmful for roughly 6 weeks after its creation. So if they’re still making new radioactive iodine and emitting it, there’s no telling how long that might continue to be a problem. What’s your impression of potassium iodide as a supplement? Well, it has its own long-range, potentially harmful effects. Even one milligram a day in a chronic diet is known to be associated with thyroiditis, hypothyroidism, and probably increased rate of thyroid cancer. So you don’t want to take any thyroid supplement beyond a normal dietary sufficiency except in the presence of serious radioactive iodine exposure. 12:21 But considering the risk from the radioactive iodine, I think a few milligrams of potassium iodide per day is a reasonable balance. I think in a lot of ways with most things you would rather see these things come from nutrition. Yeah, it’s a safer balanced amount. Even iodized salt is now seen to correlate with increased thyroiditis. So just what they’re putting, they’re putting iodine in our salt to try to protect us from thyroid problems and in fact it’s now been associated with causing thyroid problems. So half a teaspoon of kelp powder, a couple times a week, or a couple milligrams of potassium iodide if you’re in an area that has iodine coming, or even if you’re not in an area with radioactive iodine, the fact that that low dose shouldn’t be too harmful for several weeks. 13:32 For most people not. A few people have some strange hypersensitivity to iodine, so you want to test the first dose at a very small amount because some people get an asthma attack or other very violent symptoms from even a small dose of iodine. And then the other site I wanted to mention was the beta count on the RadNet data, the EPA’s website. It’s showing that there’s been up to 50 counts per minute. 50 per second is where I would be seriously concerned, but 50 per minute wouldn’t be bad. So and that was showing like in Eureka, California, they have a beta count monitor and it’s showing it was up to 50 counts per minute before the Japanese catastrophe and it continues sometimes reaching up to that level. 14:35 So locally, if this information is correct, which there’s another website that’s called Radiation Network, and it’s a private or it’s not private, it’s a bunch of individuals with their Geiger counters and they’ve hooked up to a database that’s on real time. So every minute this website updates with the counts, the beta counts per minute. And so that’s another place people might want to go if they’re interested to look at real time around the country and it’s called radiationnetwork.com. The government website is theepa.gov and you click on Japanese nuclear emergency. Okay, and then lastly the other one I mentioned at the beginning was modernsurvivalblog.com and the nuclear scientific engineer, Arne Gunderson, he’s got a couple of posts on the site and is basically giving a day by day breakdown of what’s been happening. 15:36 Okay, I think as time goes on these things will become more apparent, but unfortunately I think what Arne Gunderson was bringing out was the striking similarities in the cover up of information between Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and this incident and that it’s unfortunate but the pathways of which the information comes is restricted in many ways at many times. The same thing holds true and that’ll be the focus of the rest of the show, but a lot of pharmaceutical drugs, unfortunately pharmaceutical drugs and drugs in general are manufactured for profit with supposed pathologies to treat and not always does the truth emerge until much later perhaps when they’re withdrawn. Unfortunately the motive behind their production is not always too white. So I just wanted to let people know that you’re listening to ask your doctor on KND Galville 91.1 FM and from now really until the end of the show at 8 o’clock you’re invited to call in with any questions either related to the nuclear incident and what can be done. 16:53 Or surrounding the rest of this topic of this month’s show which is going to be serotonin, serotonin uptake inhibitors and melatonin. Both of these are I think widely known by people where people have heard of the SSRIs and they’ve heard of some of the controversies surrounding them. But it seems that people generally believe that serotonin is a good happy drug. If you look for it or you search for it on the web, everyone talking about it says it’s a feel good, feel good hormone. Doctor Pete, what do you have to say about serotonin in terms of your knowledge and information on it? The body has many responses to injury and serotonin and estrogen are two of the most basic primitive responses to any kind of generalized injury. For example, if you get sunburned in the next few hours you can measure a large amount of serotonin in the urine and that same thing happens for any kind of injury including ionizing radiation. 18:09 Dental x-rays are enough to activate the production of serotonin and it’s one of the basic defense mechanisms. What it does is activate simple things like shifting away from oxidative metabolism to glycolytic or even a kind of hibernating shutdown of systems. At an extreme overproduction of serotonin you tend to go into a hibernating state. Animals, according to the diet and weather stress and so on, before they go into hibernation for the winter will be producing more and more serotonin. That’s its basic purpose is to keep the machinery running while shutting down the expensive biological processes. 19:22 Actually Doctor Pete, could I ask you to hold that thought for a second? Okay. There is actually a caller on the line so I just wanted to make sure the person gets on. You’re on the end? Hi. Hi. Yeah, I had a couple of questions. One, does anybody know how long it takes for the ocean currents from Japan to come over to the west coast? I was looking at an old atlas and the current goes north up Japan and south down the west coast and one of my fisherman friends says that it’s actually seasonal. It does that in the summertime and it’s something different in the winter or something. And the other question I had is, is anybody monitoring the ocean contamination from the plan? And of course everything that’s not coming over to us is ending up, most of it’s probably going into the ocean. And I just wanted to know maybe some callers would know on that. 20:25 Okay, thank you very much. Okay, yeah, I’ll leave that open to other callers as I don’t have that information in front of me and it would only be a rough guess. I think some of the, so something like 80 to 100 miles a day maybe. Right. Okay, there you go. And it’s 4,000 miles is it? Okay, all right. I think more than that, I think it’s 6,000 isn’t it? Somewhere around there. Okay, maybe even 8, takes 12 hours flying or 11. All right, so that’s… Okay, well let’s carry on. I’ll leave that thought open then for any other callers perhaps who’ve got that specific information to hand. And then Dr. P, if you’d carry on, you were talking about hibernation and protective mechanism for expensive cellular machinery. Yeah, in the 1950s and 60s when the Soviets were worried about getting hydrogen bombed, 21:29 they were doing a lot of research on ways to defend against very intense radiation doses. And serotonin was one of the things that they were studying and looking for safe analogues to use defensively because a big dose of radiation puts the organism in a state where it can tolerate with maybe reducing mortality for a given dose by maybe 50%!i(MISSING)n some cases for a dose of maybe 1,000 rads. And unfortunately for the kind of dose that we’re more likely to be exposed to, serotonin is really what’s causing the bulk of the damage. 22:30 For example, if you give cells in a culture dish the amount of X-ray exposure that you get with a set of dental X-rays, these cells will, if you put them in a photon detector, they’ll be emitting photons light produced by the cellular damage and excitation for over an hour after the exposure. And if you put unexposed cells in the water that those cells are in, even without being exposed to radiation just to the emissions such as serotonin into the water, the second batch of cells will begin mutating hours later and people have cultured these unexposed cells, 23:37 exposed only to the chemical products produced by the inferred cells. And for 30 generation mutations keep occurring and to form a human being, you only need about 30 multiplications of the original fertilized ovum. So that one small exposure has tremendous repercussions. And for example, a man with an X-ray treatment to a brain tumor, for example, is much more likely to have children with major malformations. The injury is circulated through the body even affecting the health of the sperms and probably animal studies suggest that these genetic instabilities can go on for many generations 24:47 of whole cycling organisms passing on their unstable genes. So do you think the amount of radiation we might be exposed to, however small it might be, right in this area in Humboldt County or even up to Oregon or along the West Coast, you’re saying that’s not a lot of radiation but it could be causing our cells to express more serotonin and be exposed to more serotonin that then could have long-term negative effects? Yeah, probably one single atom fissioning in your body. It will cause that cell or a few cells to produce those toxic communicating substances. And the rest of the body, if the person is healthy, the rest of the body will shut down those excited signals. 25:51 So it’s a matter of balancing the vitality of the whole organism against the number of these injured cells. Okay, good. Well, we’re going to talk about how we can balance that serotonin, but we do have a couple of callers on the line. Actually, first a caller just wanted to interject that they had heard that it’s going to take three years for the parts of houses that were washed out from the tsunami to start washing upon our beaches here. Three years? Three years, according to one source. And we have another caller coming right on now. You’re on the air. Oh, sorry. That was me. I did say that. It was on the BBC. Thanks a million to the program. It’s terrifyingly wonderful. Thanks. What was the name of that program? I didn’t quite hear that. Was that the name terrifyingly wonderful? I’m not sure. It was on the BBC, whatever it was. I didn’t hear the name of the program. 26:52 Okay, so that was the caller who said it would take three, if she heard on the BBC, it would take three years. No, that was a separate caller. Okay, well, let’s get back to what we were doing here a minute ago. Okay, so if our cells are being exposed to a minute amount of radiation or more, if they’re not telling us the whole picture, the whole story, then our cells are starting to express more serotonin and the vitality of our organism is trying to quell that cascade of inflammation. What can we do to keep our cells in a vital state? If you think of the old studies of the radiation-causing DNA breaks, they found about 40 years ago that high thyroid function and the magnesium taken up into the cells under the influence of thyroid 27:53 was the best way to accelerate the repair process so that you didn’t have the lingering mutations from breaking the chromosomes and the DNA. But that was the repair activation for fairly high doses. But there are processes that apply to even the lowest exposure. For example, a study in Seattle two or three years ago found that a full set of dental x-rays to a woman who was pregnant but wearing lead apron and so on, the exposure to her face would cause systemic influences that would cause the babies to be underweight and underdeveloped. Just as if she had taken an estrogenic substance that was stressing the system. 29:00 Animal studies found that those estrogenic effects coming from the exposure of any part of the body to ionizing radiation could be antagonized just like normal estrogen is by a good dose of progesterone or even testosterone and the usual nutritional things that help the body constantly control the estrogen that it’s being exposed to. So just average everyday stress has a great overlap with radiation injury and estrogen and serotonin happen to be the things that we have the best handle on for protecting ourselves from the long range effects. 30:01 How about the serotonin reuptake inhibitors that have come out some of which have been discontinued, some of which have been modified. What’s your opinion on this class of drugs in terms of their negative effects knowing what they do energetically within the body? Well, to the extent that they really are acting largely on serotonin I think it’s good to look for alternatives. But much of that is just advertising invented things for going with the TV commercials. The idea that they’re a happy pill for raising your happy hormone and that sort of thing but actually they’re acting on many different processes 31:07 increasing adrenaline and dopamine and activating enzymes and inactivating other enzymes all through the body so no one really knows the full extent of what they’re doing and some of what they’re doing is beneficial, some of it isn’t. So it goes pill by pill. There are a few very effective antidepressants that are the opposite. They’re the serotonin uptake promoters, just exactly the opposite but they even work better in those cases. So which ones are, what are the drug names for those serotonin re-uptake promoters? The best studied is TNeptine. The brand name is Stablum and some people get it over the internet but it isn’t legal in the U.S. But it’s basically, it promotes, you’re saying it… 32:09 It promotes the uptake of serotonin so it’s less active and it turns out to have lots of beneficial effects on bodily health for arthritis and diabetes and lots of inflammatory things that relate to overexposure to serotonin. So with people that have diabetes and arthritis maybe for them to take something that would block their serotonin like you’re a Stablum as I use it, then that would help their symptoms and arthritis and… Yeah, I’ve talked to quite a few people who were taking it as an antidepressant who had very dramatic physical improvements at the same time. And the physical conditions are all things that are known to be associated with high serotonin and there’s a whole class of anti-serotonin drugs 33:16 that are becoming popular for more uses. For example, some of their uses are to prevent nausea or diarrhea from radiation exposure. What they’re doing is protecting you from the serotonin which is a byproduct of the radiation exposure. And you can even prevent sunburn with an anti-serotonin drug. So I wonder if the Japanese medical system is giving the people that have been exposed to high levels of radiation. I wonder if they’re giving them these anti-serotonin drugs. I suspect that they’re just as hypnotized by the pharmaceutical industry as Americans are. So what are some of the names of these anti-serotonin drugs that are used for nausea and diarrhea and radiation exposure? Antencitrine is the most popular anti-nausea anti-serotonin drug, but I think one of the best is called Lysuride, L-I-S-U-R-I-D-E. 34:23 And all of these are based on the same indole molecular structure that serotonin is, but they are tuned in a different way by additives, for example, adding bromine. Bromocryptine is one that’s used to treat pituitary tumors because prolactin is promoted by stress or by serotonin or by radiation. And by modifying the indole molecule from the ergot fungus is that’s the basic molecule that is used for these anti-serotonin drugs by modifying it slightly. It blocks the effect of serotonin and brings the pituitary tumor 35:25 by preventing the stimulating effects of the serotonin. Okay, you’re listening to ask your own doctor on KND Galbovo 91.1 FAM and from 7.30, that’s gone, it’s 7.35, until the end of the show here at 8 o’clock. You’re invited to call in any questions either related or unrelated to this month’s topic of serotonin, melatonin and misconceptions in medical drugs. And we have with a special guest speaker, Dr. Raymond Peake, who’s able to answer any questions that you may have about that subject and or the ongoing Fukushima accident and what can be done safely to help yourself avoid any unnecessary harm. Okay, so serotonin, it’s so strange, it’s come full circle that serotonin is supposed to be the happy pill, and yet slowly but surely through one mistake or another, they’re now bringing around anti-serotonin drugs. Well, our tax dollars are paying for research in medical universities 36:27 while I think it, I don’t know exactly if it’s tax dollars or not, but all these professors and our people doing their PhDs are doing this research on these things, and yet the general public, when they go to see their doctor and they ask for this drug or that drug, well, that’s not what they get prescribed. It doesn’t matter what the research shows. It has to go through how many, oh, it’s just very frustrating. Well, how about melatonin, Dr. Peake? Oh, well, the body has enzymes that are activated by stress. The pineal gland adrenaline is the signal. Adrenaline rises in the darkness because ordinary light is preventing some of the free radical activity that rises in the darkness. That activates adrenaline, and the adrenaline is the immediate activator of the enzyme 37:28 that converts serotonin into melatonin. But this same enzyme system can be found in an inflamed breast or a rheumatic knee joint, for example, and in these situations of inflammation, melatonin is, some people have believed that melatonin was at fault for causing rheumatoid arthritis, but actually it seems to be performing the same function that it does in the brain, a way of eliminating serotonin, which is the actual pro-inflammatory substance. And since serotonin stimulates cell division and inflammation, the presence of this enzyme in the breast is being considered one of the approaches for preventing or treating breast cancer 38:30 to accelerate the removal of serotonin. And into the breakdown of serotonin into melatonin. Yeah. We have a caller on the line. Hey, Cooley, you’re on there? Hi, yeah. A couple of questions, and you’ve gotten actually to where my question was going to go, how serotonin relates to melatonin. I’m understanding that serotonin is converted by adrenaline into melatonin, and is that part of, as a body, has maybe done a lot of work that sort of downshift them into a sleep mode, because I understand it’s available as a supplement melatonin is, to help people relax and get to a sleep state sooner. Yeah, probably melatonin has a fairly direct anti-serotonin effect. It hasn’t been studied very much, but besides eliminating the serotonin by combining it chemically, 39:33 turning it into melatonin, I suspect that the melatonin is actually a defense as an antagonist, to some extent, against the serotonin. And when you say antagonist, I want to make sure I understand the term. It means basically that it counters or converts whatever that material that it’s an antagonist to into something else, or neutralizes its effect? Neutralizes the effect, I think. The presence of the enzyme that changes serotonin to melatonin, it’s present in inflamed situations. That’s a way of getting down the level of serotonin, but I think the presence of melatonin itself blocks some of the effects that this free radical production activated by serotonin. 40:34 So melatonin of itself would be an anti-serotonin effect, I would understand. Yeah, I don’t know how great that effect is, but I think there’s evidence that it has some of that effect. You mentioned something a little bit ago at Peek My Curiosity. We’ve got this huge problem with diabetes, and I think that a lot of it is related to high fructose corn syrup, if I can say that, obscenity on the air. And the other thing, since you brought this up, I’m curious as to whether the huge influx of SSRIs such as Prozac, etc., may also have contributed to the rise in diabetes and obesity amongst very young kids that seem to be the lab rats for the pharmaceutical industry when it comes to giving them these new, allegedly wonderful anti-depressants. A study at UCLA that came out last summer analyzed the corn syrup sweetener that’s used in soft grains, 41:41 and they chemically tested it and found that it contained just the amount of fructose and glucose that it was claimed to have, but then they hydrolyzed it and found that it contained polysaccharide, starch-like material containing four to five times the amount of calories that the original sugar had. So it’s basically a syrup or a starch-like material with four or five times as many calories as you think you’re getting from the sugars. And then if somebody were taking a lot of those types of foods and were given an anti-depressant that was serotonin reuptake inhibitor, that might even further compound the problem. These polysaccharides that aren’t easily digested by our human enzymes 42:47 are likely to feed bacteria lower in the intestine that produce fermentation products including lactic acid, which are responsible for causing the intestine to increase its already great production of serotonin and to cause it to be absorbed into the circulation in quantities enough to affect behavior. Anxiety, for example, is increased in animals in proportion to the fermentation of these starch-like molecules. So I suspect that the starching materials in the corn sweetener are pretty directly increasing exposure to serotonin. Well, I wonder if anyone has done a study on someone taking Prozac or a related SSRI who’s also obese would expose the real cause of this whole thing spinning out of control 43:48 and causing all this obesity. It’s really an interesting point that you brought up and it made me think along those lines. And before I go, I did want to mention to previous collars there are some websites that should have the information as to how long those radionuclides and weather in general come across the Pacific from Japan and the whole Asian continent over here to the Pacific coast. And that would be the NOAA website, the USGS website, Helen Caldecott and Physicians for Social Responsibility will have all kinds of information on radiation and radionuclides after effects and probably will have some links to other websites that might have good information on that. And there should be a UC Berkeley site that has specific transmission across the Pacific. I saw on a newscast specifically what that caller was asking about and it was just a few days because of the jet stream. So if it gets up into the jet stream, that’s why we here in the Cape Mendocino area, 44:52 both in Humboldt and Mendocino County, we were the first landfall that detected radionuclides a few days after that occurred. Thank you very much for the program and I’ve always enjoyed listening to the information that you bring to the air. Thank you for your call. Thank you for calling. We do have one or two more questions on the line, so let’s take the next caller. Actually, your engineer has a question about inflammation. I keep honey bees and get stung a lot and I’ve heard it’s good to stop inflammation yet I get inflamed when I get stung. So what’s going on? Probably developing some kind of hypersensitivity to it. Did you get the same inflammation? Oh, no, no, I mean at the site of the sting it’s inflamed, but I hear it’s good for you in anti-inflammatory in the long run, so I was wondering if you knew anything about that. And it seems to be good. Okay, yeah. I heard a little bit about the treatment of arthritis with bee stings. I know that I’ve heard about the nettles thrashing, the Romans thrashing themselves with nettles to relieve joint pains and that seems a little bit, I don’t know, in terms of the histamine. 45:56 Dr. P, what would you think about the histamine reaction from that? I’ve heard that it’s the high cortisol production from the pain as well as the histamine and serotonin from the venom itself. Serotonin has some very direct actions on the cortisol producing system and I think it’s maybe analogous to the way surgery can cure things. In animal research they have to do a control false surgery on one group of animals because it’s so common for the trauma of just being cut to cure whatever it was that they were thinking that a surgery was curing and a very painful bee sting 47:01 will activate your adrenals to the point that it can relieve a swollen knee, for example. Right, from the cortisol. Counter irritation that doctors used to practice. Okay, we do actually have two more callers on the line so let’s take the next caller. Hello. The pharmaceutical industry makes a claim that these SSRIs increase the receptors for serotonin accounting for long-term effects even after the drugs are stopped. I wonder if you could comment about that. If you block a transmitter, the body adaptively increases the so-called receptors. So increasing the exposure to something usually decreases the receptors for that substance 48:07 in an adaptive process so everything ends up more or less the way it started. And the whole idea of receptor I think is just another ploy of the industry to make things simple for television advertising and for medical school. When you look carefully at the long-range arguments behind the whole receptor idea, people for 60 years or more have been pointing out that the state of the organism and of the cell absolutely determines how a given substance is going to affect the cell. Exciting it or inhibiting it, for example. And it isn’t necessarily that you make more of the so-called receptor protein 49:11 that the whole state of the cell, the energy charge, for example, of the cell, governs what activation of that receptor protein is going to do to the whole cell. So I think the only way to think of a receptor is that the organism is the receptor or the cell is the receptor because the state of the brain affects the way the gonad or the adrenal, for example, is going to respond to a given chemical because everything is constantly being subjected to nervous chemical and energy inputs. A caller is your phone on? Oh, sorry about that. Yeah, sorry. I’m having a really hard time here. Callers always turn your phone off, please. 50:12 Okay, next question. No, I didn’t mean you to hang up. Okay, well, we do have another caller. Yeah, let’s take the next caller. Callers always turn their radios off before you talk on the phone, right? I said phone, huh? Whoops. That’s okay. I think the next caller should be there. Are you there, caller? Yeah, I’m here. I can’t hear you too well, but let me get my question out. This show is just fascinating, I must say, and the expertise is well appreciated that you’re sharing it with us on there. I want to find out, because I’m currently taking Lexapro, and also sometimes I get migraines, and I take Amitrex, and I know that Amitrex sure works well on those migraines, and I’ve got a thyroid condition, so my hypothyroid is a centroid, 51:18 and I’m just kind of wondering if the serotonin uptake inhibitors are any kind of a problem for the thyroid situation. Yeah, they’re very closely connected. For a long time, it’s been clear that hypothyroid people often have extremely high serotonin levels, and so the active part of the thyroid hormone T3, centroid is just T4, which requires the liver to activate it. The active thyroid hormone increasing will decrease the production and retention of serotonin, and serotonin being inflammation-promoting and affecting constriction and leakiness of blood vessels 52:22 is a major factor in migraines, which are mostly associated with hypothyroidism. Well, you know, I also take cytomel. Yeah, cytomel is a good anti-serotonin thing with the right amount of it. It’s pretty effective against migraines. That was one of my first interests in endocrinology, was my own migraines. I found that it was largely an interaction between intestinal inflammation, which 95%!o(MISSING)f our serotonin is made in the intestine, and any kind of irritation in the intestine increases our exposure to serotonin, but especially if your thyroid function is low, causing inefficient sugar metabolism, 53:25 hypothyroidism plus a sensitive intestine will cause periodic flooding of the system with serotonin, which can be measured in migraine attacks during an attack, or just before an attack, the serotonin rises tremendously. So, I can’t hear everything you’re saying, but the upshot is, is there a problem to combine, you know, the Lexapro and the Imatrex and the centroid and the cytomel and all that crap that got me on? There is a blood test for serotonin that I think more people should be checking on. It’s much more meaningful than the urine tests and so on. And the long-range effects of excess serotonin exposure are very similar to the long-range effects of chronic radiation or chronic estrogen exposure. 54:42 They acutely can produce inflammation, but if you keep up the exposure in the long run, you increase your tendency to have fibrosis of various tissues. Okay, one last question for the host there. You guys are the ones that own the Western Botanical Medicine Company? Yeah. Well, I’ve tried it and I initially had real good luck with your headache relief medicine or whatever you call it, the tincture. But I bought it again recently and I hadn’t bought it for a while, but did you change the dosage amount for migraine? Because I thought I used to use more of it for migraine and it seems now like the migraine and the other kind of headaches have the same kind of dosage. Was there some change? Yes, there was a label change. Okay, but and it was also a dosage recommendation change on that. 55:44 Right. What I just recommended the same type of dose whether you were, you can still take up to the 20 milliliters per day, but I changed the dosage because if you were having a stress or tension headache, I’m not allowed to put that on the label and I can’t put migraine on the label either. So I have to just put for occasional headaches. I see. Okay, yeah, because that helps explain it because when I took the lower dosage that you talk about now, it didn’t seem to have the same effect as the dose that I had previously been recommended to. So I guess I’ll just try to go back to that. Okay. I think that’s a good product. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you for your call. Bye-bye. Well, there’s one more call online. You better not take it because… Because I still have to give some recommendations for nutritional advice before we get off the air tonight. We’re going to have three and a half minutes. Hello. You’re on the air. No, we’re not. Are you all taking me? Okay. Yeah. 56:45 Hello. Yes. My name is Louise and I live on Syrox Mountain and I have a thyroid condition. And I take level throxin prescribed by my doctor every month. But I also… I’m 60 years old and I also take a tyrannol for high blood pressure. And I’ve recently been having some migraine headaches again and I was wondering, does my thyroid have something to do with that? Well, there’s lots of different things that could cause migraine headaches, but it would be good if you came for a consultation and we could look at your nutritional status. That’s always a good place to start. And if you… Okay. Are you going to be in kind of X-ray blood in midway or…? Well, I’ll give you my number at the end of the show. If you’ll just listen in a couple more minutes. I’m going to give our phone number and Dr. Pete’s website and you can contact him and you can also contact us. And we’d be more than happy to discuss nutritional advice with you. Okay. Because I am overweight and I’m very, very saddened and concerned about this. 57:46 I’ve never been overweight before in my whole life. And I’ve never…in my thyroid condition, I have ribad migraines also. I mean, I’m…the couple is the couple way both of those things. Well, we’d be happy to talk with you and we’ll give you that information in a little bit. I’m sorry, we have to end the callers and I wanted to briefly mention before the end of the show that Dr. Pete talked about starches as in the form of the corn syrup irritating the intestine and increasing serotonin. So one way we can protect ourselves from this radiation and the increased serotonin effects of inflammation is to replace our starches, which are grains and beans and starchy vegetables like cooked potatoes and carrots and beets. Replace those with soft, ripe, juicy fruits. And also by keeping our thyroid function high with lots of coconut oil, up to three tablespoons a day, plenty of foods with calcium, local dairy, if it’s still okay around here. 58:50 It seems to be that Eureka’s level hasn’t changed and also plenty of good fruit sugars. And Dr. Pete, did you have any final comments? No, I think that covers it. Okay, well for those of you listening, Dr. Raymond Pete, endocrinologist and research biochemist, his website is www.raypeatrypeat.com. And my name’s Andrew. My name’s Sarah and our phone number is 888-926-4372, which is WBM for Western Botanical Medicine, Herb, H-E-R-B. Thank you to all of you who listen regularly and those who tuned in this evening. To those who have ears, let them hear. Good. 59:59 Please remember that this program is supported by the listener members of Redwood Community Radio. If you like what you hear, please consider becoming a member of KMUD or renewing if you’ve already joined. 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