Beating Fatigue

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You get your nine hours of beauty sleep regularly every night. So why do you feel so tired? You eat all the right foods or so you think. You regularly exercise thirty minutes a day. However you just can’t seem to get up and go. Even sex seem to be a chore. If so read on…

If you are fatigued and have trouble falling asleep, or sleeping restfully, suspect that caffeine may be the cause when: You drink any caffeinated beverage within three hours of bedtime You drink the equivalent of five or more cups of coffee per day You become aware that small caffeine increase makes you restless, excited, super-alert or nervous. You may suspect that your fatigue may be caused by caffeine overstimulation, if you drink the equivalent of five or more cups of coffee per day and if you suffer symptoms of physical hyperstimulation or a sense of depletion. If cutting down on your coffee makes you feel better, you have discovered the source of your problem.

Do you remember the times you used to feel depressed and out of sorts? Do you remember what you craved to eat at that point in time? Was it fruits and nuts? Was it salad and fruit juice? Most of you at such times would have gone for sweet things like chocolate, cookies and candies or ice-creams

The initial rush of energy or lift that you get occurs because these food products are quickly metabolised to produce blood sugar.This is precisely what happens when you crave your mid-morning cup of coffee with sugar. Initially you will get a temporary energy lift since it raises your blood sugar level. This is followed soon by a downward plunge of energy leaving you feeling worse than before, calling for a repetition of more coffee and sweets or alcohol.

When we have a simpler way of life we would strike at our enemy or run away for an emergency. The event would end and the body would return to a more normal relaxed state. In everyday situations however we are confronted with a series of stresses that arouse our bodies in the same fashion as a fight/flight emergency.. No wonder you are tired. However many individuals don’t feel their emotions of anger, impatience, frustration or depression and despair. They may be so accustomed to being worried or hostile that they think the condition is normal. Meanwhile their bodies are falling apart as they tax it to the limit. Fatigue is the inevitable outcome.

If you want to have a constant supply of energy, forget the “three square meals ad day” rule. Most meal aren’t square anyway but are likely to be unbalanced or inadequate anyway. Eat like a rabbit or squirrel. Nibble your way through healthy snacks. No, I am not suggesting that you snack on ice-cream, chocolates and sweets or pastries.

Eat health foods that build up your energy level consistently. Substitute protein for sweets and carbohydrates at your many meals. Snack on slices of fruits, nuts, a piece of raw fruit, a celery or a carrot stick.

Make a protein powder drink with your fruit juice for breakfast or lunch and you will have the juice of life to burn for hours. If you plan to attend an important meeting after lunch and you need to be mentally alert than skip the carbohydrates during lunch. Have a salad with some fish or chicken.

You could even try a protein drink with fruit juice. Sometimes though, you happen to be a really nervy type. You want to deliberately calm down and slow down at the meeting. That is when you would want to snack on rice and vegetables.

Skip the protein foods for they will make you overly alert. Another quick energy boosting routine is to eat a little fat. That’s right fat. I can imagine some of you shaking your head and thinking “Now I have really heard it all”.

Researchers have learnt that a little fat is necessary to make your gall bladder work. I have heard of horror stories of people who have had their gall bladder shut down on them because went they went on a diet and did not take any fat at all. They needed surgery after that.

Taking a little fat staves of hunger as well as fatigue for hours, Either add a bit ofcold-pressed vegetable oil to your protein drink before you blend it (you will never notice it there) or add more oil to your salad at mealtimes and drink only the remains from the bowl.

After almost 19 years of seeing clients with a range of fatigue conditions, we have come to the following factors that could underlie as serious case of fatigue. These factors are

Allergies
Chemical Poisons
Heavy Metal Toxicity
Candida
Parasites
Dental issues
Nutritional Deficiencies
Hypoglycemia
Hypothyroid
Structural Issues
Emotional Issues
Estrogen Dominance – Progesterone Deficiency

Be well

Dr Sundardas

Is Natural Medicine safe?

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For many years, Natural Medicine has always been touted as being the safer of the two medical systems. After all herbs and vitamins rarely if ever give you side-effects. They are also often non-toxic and rarely habit forming.

However this view is often rebutted by critics on the pro Western Medicine side who will talk about the incidences of herbal products being toxic or dangerous. One of the most recent incidents being skullcap (about 3 4 years ago). The difference is that when herbal products are considered unsafe, very often the person has been using a product for months if not years. Very often you have liver enzyme inflammation or a side effect like that. In contrast when Western Medicine drugs are considered to be unsafe, the death count would have often reached thousands and than someone blows the whistle and its yanked of the market or it comes back on the market with new disclaimers.

Doctors in the UK have linked 103 deaths to patients taking the drug Vioxx, which was mainly used to treat the pain associated with arthritis.

Dr David Graham said he had felt pressured to water down findings from a study linking the drug to greater chances of heart attacks. An FDA scientist told a Senate inquiry in November that the regulator had been guilty of a “profound regulatory failure”. According to Dr Graham’s calculations, Vioxx may be linked to as many as to 56,000 American deaths.

Research published by The Lancet medical journal, also in November, highlighted a study by the University of Berne in Switzerland which found serious question marks over the safety of the drug dating back to 2000. The Lancet concluded that the drug should have been taken off the market years before it was finally withdrawn. Editor Dr Richard Horton said: “The licensing of Vioxx and its continued use in the face of unambiguous evidence of harm have been public health catastrophes.”

So at this point we can say Natural Medicine is safer. However let me offer you a third scenario. If Western Medicine is guilty of sins of commission, Natural Medicine is guilty of sins of omission. Western drugs can kill. A Natural Medicine practitioner or therapist can by holding out false hope mislead a patient into foregoing the appropriate treatment.

A case in point. I saw this young lady who said she had a lump in her breast. She refused to have it X-rayed or scanned. I felt that I could not responsibly treat someone without appropriate testing. She opted to work with someone else who promised that her condition would clear up. This someone kept selling her health products for two years giving her the impression that her cancer would improve.

Two years later, she came back to see me. She was still alive. However her breast was ulcerated. She had been using hydrogen peroxide on an open wound because she has heard or read somewhere that this was a good way to clean it up. Eventually I persuaded her to work with a medical doctor as well.

Eventually she had the ulcerated (cancerous complication) breast removed. Eventually the tumours spread and she had to do chemotherapy. What should have been an open and shut case has become a precarious one. If she had done the X-rays and the scan, done surgery to reduce the tumour burden than gone on to do nutrition and diet, the whole situation would have been very different. Simply because someone with the best of intentions and the poorest of knowledge, information and training had held out to the cancer patient that these Natural Methods and products would cure her cancer.

In my opinion this is really sad. Of course the practitioner would maintain, “I was only giving her advice. She had made the choice.” The issue is more like, was there a gross misrepresentation? So what would you my dear reader do? Be safe when you work with Natural Medicine. Ask for training, expertise and life experience in your wellness practitioner.

Be well

Dr Sundardas

Male and Female differences to wellness.

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Over the last 19 years that I have been in practice, I have noticed that I have consistently seem more men rather than women. I used to wonder about it. I used to believe that this was because women were more in touch with their emotions and so they knew far earlier that something was not right.

There is this quite common misperception that women often imagine their pain and  it is often part of an attention seeking mechanism. In my experience I have yet to meet a female hypochondriac even after more than 10, 000 clients. When a woman says she feels something is not quite right, there often is. The only hypochondriac that I ever met was a male. He kept asking me to check him for cancer because his sister had had cancer. Eventually I told him to go and do medical scans to convince him that he had no cancer because all my testing did not show up any early warning cancer markers.

Until fairly recently it was controversial to suggest that there were any differences between males and females in the perception and experience of pain, but that is no longer the case,” said Dr Ed Keogh a psychologist from the Pain Management Unit at the University of Bath.

Male female differences in pain perception

“Our research has shown that whilst the sensory-focused strategies used by men helped increase their pain threshold and tolerance of pain, it was unlikely to have any benefit for women,” said Dr Keogh.

Other research by the Pain Management Unit has looked at the relationship between gender differences in anxiety sensitivity and pain. Anxiety sensitivity is the tendency to be fearful of anxiety-related sensations (e.g., rapidly beating heat), and seems to be important in the experience of pain sensations. In a study of 150 patients referred to a hospital clinic with chest pain, researchers discovered that the factors that predicted pain in men and women were different.

Researchers believe that it is the fear of anxiety-related sensations and an increased tendency to negatively interpret such sensations, both of which are more predominant in women than men that influences women’s experiences of pain.

When do men and women seek help?

Prompted by one’s cognitive appraisal of a stressor like pain, individuals respond using various coping mechanisms. Researchers have found that men and women differ in their mechanisms of coping with stress — particularly, coping with pain.

Unruh, citing other studies, reported that women more frequently use coping strategies that include “active behavioral and cognitive coping, avoidance, emotion-focused coping,
seeking social support, relaxation, and distraction.

Men rely on direct action, problem-focused coping, talking problems down, denial, looking at the bright side of life and tension-reducing activities such as alcohol consumption, smoking and drug abuse.

Researchers found that women’s ways of coping involved more expression of feelings and seeking social support, whereas men’s ways of coping “were more rational and stoic (e.g., accepting the situation, engaging in exercise).”

Other researchers found that in response to pain, women reported significantly more problem-solving, social support, positive self-statements, and palliative behaviors than men. Jensen and colleagues found that among individuals with long-term intractable pain in the neck, shoulder, or back, women increased their behavioral activity (e.g., household chores and social activities) as a coping strategy more often than men. Other studies suggest that coping strategies are influenced more by the type and duration of pain than by whether the person is a man or a woman.

Research has also shown that women, as compared to men, respond more aggressively to pain through health-related activities (e.g., taking medications or consulting a healthcare provider). This is consistent with studies that have shown that women tend to report more health-care utilization for treatment of pain than do men.

I once saw this lady who was worried about the heath of her children. Their hair mineral reports suggested significant metal toxicities and they were doing poorly healthwise. I also suggested that she check herself out. Eventually she came in with her husband and I suggested what tests they should do. They had to leave on a holiday.

When they came back, the lady sent me a email asking me about what testing she should do. I gave a a more elaborate list. Than she asked me about her husband. I gave him a simpler list of tests. She later queried me about the difference.

I replied that generally men unless they cannot work, are disabled by pain and cannot move or they are so sick and have a nervous breakdown, they maintain this veneer of stolidity and the attitude that says “I am fine”. I was being merely respectful of this. Whereas women prefer to be proactive and prefer to preempt trouble generally. She was very amused by my response.

My personal opinion is that women are more proactive, more sensitive to pain and seek earlier intervention. They are more interested in intervention before the quality of life is compromised. So serious issues are discovered earlier. Men wait until what happens to them creates an impasses in their ability to work or be effective. This may be one factor that accounts for increased life span.

Be well,

Dr Sundardas

Why Wellness is the way to go.

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We all know our health is influenced by what we eat, drink and other well-known lifestyle choices that we make. The latest scientific research now shows that for each of us these choices can have greatly differing effects on our health.

Small differences in your genes can influence how well your body metabolizes foods, utilizes nutrients and excretes damaging toxins, all of which can affect your general state of health. By finding out if you have any of these small variations, you can modify your diet and lifestyle choices to achieve optimum nutrition and health.

After 40 years of the American Medical Association saying that three square meals a day could feed your nutritional needs, the statement below totally repudiates that stand. The AMA has been forced to revise its stand in view of the new evidence. They say it takes 25 years before a new idea takes hold in medicine. In 25 years every medical doctor will be studying nutrition thoroughly. Currently average medical education spends 7 to 12 hours out of a 7 year education on food, vitamins, minerals and health.

Vitamin deficiency syndromes such as scurvy and beriberi are uncommon in modern (Western) societies. However, suboptimal intake of some vitamins, above levels causing classic vitamin deficiency, is a risk factor for chronic diseases and common in the general population, especially the elderly. Suboptimal folic acid levels, along with suboptimal levels of vitamins B6 and B12, are a risk factor for cardiovascular disease, neural tube defects, and colon and breast cancer; low levels of vitamin D contribute to osteopenia and fractures; and low levels of the antioxidant vitamins (vitamins A, E, and C) may increase risk for several chronic diseases……….
( JAMA. 2002;287:3127-3129)

The average naturopath spends 1.5 to 2 years of a four years diploma/degree program on herbs, vitamins, minerals, amino acids and nutrition and food. This is why naturopaths and natural health care providers excel at prevention and medical practitioners at pathology.

By the time you have a heart attack or a gastric ulcer or a lump in the breast, you may need medical intervention, drugs or surgery. These conditions do not happen overnight. They take anything from 5 to 15 years to develop. Meantime subtle changes occur. In fact people become so used to these changes, that they put it down to ageing. Once you put it down to ageing then you of course can’t do anything about it.

What will early interventions do for you? It will ensure that you will be healthy and well enough to make your next million or more between 45 to 65. For others it will mean that they can be healthy enough to run and play with their grandchildren instead of waving at them feebly from the bed of a hospital or nursing home.

While doing a health checkup is a good practice, conventional medical testing does not provide a full picture. Functional medicine testing will often identify hidden health conditions long before they show up on conventional medical tests.

Most medical doctors will look at the standard tests and be satisfied with its results most times, possibly dismissing nagging pains or discomfort that a patient has experienced over long periods of times. Only a small percentage of medical doctors will look at functional testing to get a truer picture of health. They will also check with the quality of life the patient has.

I was once talking about early Wellness Screening to one of my ex-wife’s very good friend. She heard me politely and said with a shudder, “I’d rather not know”. About a year later, she discovered a lump in her breast and had to see a surgeon to remove it and biopsy it. Fortunately for her, it was benign. It could easily have been otherwise.

If you think that a healthy lifestyle and eating fresh organic food protects you, think again. There are more than 100, 000 chemicals in the environment that our grandparents did not get exposed to. There was this sweet radio personality who used to interview me on radio some years ago. She was famous for her healthy and organic food lifestyle. She was diagnosed early this year with cancer. She came to see me for a visit. A few months later, there was a report about her death.

While I can’t say that I have prevented people from developing cancer, (because if the early method of detection that I use in my practice work so well, they will never develop cancer), I can say that I have found individuals who have come in with cancer markers. Those who clean up their lifestyle and diet do not develop cancer. Those who find out but did not make the necessary changes often do go on to develop cancer. These are general tendencies from a sample population of 10, 000.

I will round up with a positive case history. This lady flew in from Bangkok. She was incidentally an “A” blood type. She had a great diet, exercised reasonably well and was a little stressed. She had recently discovered that she had a breast lump. She had it excised.Biopsy revealed that it was malignant. When we examined her and tested her, we found that a mercury filling in one of her teeth was leaking. It also happened to be in the tooth on the left side that was involved with the stomach meridian. The left stomach meridian by the way also influences the left breast. Mystery solved. If she had come in earlier, she could have even bypassed the cancer. One month later, she came in for a second visit feeling wonderful.

So which would you rather choose? To say, “I’d rather not know” or “Lets nip it in the bud.”

Be well

Dr Sundardas