Ageless: The Naked Truth About Bioidentical Hormones (42 page)

SS:
Explain chelation.

MG:
Chelation refers to the binding of a toxin, usually to a heavy metal. Mercury binds with sulfur; lead binds with EDTA. So in mercury chelation, we use sulfur compounds that bind to mercury. Chelation draws heavy metals out of the body and cleans out the system. We then do a urine test to look at how much mercury came out. Routinely, we find uranium and arsenic in the urine. Both are part of the contamination of the water supply. If a person has cancer and mercury toxicity, I wouldn’t try to get the mercury fillings out. Instead, I would try to neutralize mercury within the body using selenium supplementation, 200 to 400 mcg a day.

SS:
I have been putting that amount in my morning smoothie for years. Should people take selenium every day? I’ve read that selenium has anticancer and antiviral effects.

MG:
Supplementation with selenium is a very good idea, as long as you don’t go too high. Taking 200 mcg once a day is good.

SS:
It’s my understanding that when taking a bath with bath salts and oils and whatever, we take in 80 percent of that water transdermally. But what are we supposed to do, bathe in Evian?

MG:
Of course, it is not realistic to bathe in bottled water. What you can do is put EDTA into the bath to pull lead out of the body. So you can actually do chelation therapy while taking a bath.

SS:
What is EDTA, and where do you get it?

MG:
EDTA is sold only to doctors. EDTA is ethylene diamine tetra-acetic acid. Technically, it is used as a food preservative to keep packaged food on the shelves longer. EDTA is a synthetic, or man-made, amino acid that was initially developed for intravenous use. First used in the 1940s for the treatment of heavy metals poisoning, EDTA chelation removes heavy metals and minerals from the body such as lead, iron, copper, and calcium and is approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for use in treating lead poisoning and toxicity from other heavy metals. Other ways of taking EDTA include EDTA chewing gum, swallowing it as a capsule or powder, or inserting it rectally as a suppository. Any way that we can draw these heavy metals out of the system is a major plus. You can do infrared saunas, which seem to help pull toxins out of the body, or colon hydrotherapy to help the colon detoxify. There are herbs and homeopathic remedies that neutralize pesticides and the chemicals in the body.

SS:
So when a person comes to you who is healthy and proactive about their health, what do you do for them?

MG:
We run a battery of various assessments, all very comprehensive. We measure body fat and body water, for example. There is a one-minute test using electrodes on the wrist and feet that measures body fat. We also want to know their basic metabolic rate and the number of calories they need to eat in order to lose weight. We want to know if there is water inside their cells; healthy people have 60 percent of their water inside their cells and 40 percent outside their cells. This helps us determine the health of their cell membranes. With this information, I can determine the level of their vitality and their ability to regenerate and create these cells.

Next, we conduct a heart rate variability test and look at the nervous system. We monitor their heart rate and stand them up for seven minutes. This gives me an idea about how strong their adrenals are.

After that, we run a test called blood/urine/saliva, or BTA (biological terrain assessment). The BTA has to do with where the patient lives and is based upon a test that originated in France in the 1950s. Back then, the French government studied clusters of cancer in various geographic regions. One area had a lot of cancer, and another
area had very little, so they hired this hydrologist, Louis-Claude Vincent, to look into the differences. He concluded that where the soil and water were the healthiest, there was no cancer; where the soil and water were unhealthy, there were large levels of cancer.

The saliva test tells us what is in the lymph and digestive system. Blood tells us what is coming out of the cells. And urine tells us how well the patient excretes toxins.

From running these tests, we find that people often have too many acids in their bodies and that their blood pH is too high. What this means is that the liver, whose job is to detoxify the blood, is not filtering well. A healthy liver, on the other hand, is able to filter and clean the blood. With a healthy liver, people are able to sleep through the night. By contrast, people who have a malfunctioning liver frequently wake up about 1:00, 2:00, or 3:00 in the morning.

SS:
You give me liver drops to detoxify; is there another way?

MG:
Yes. Take a lemon and squeeze the juice out of both halves in eight ounces of water every morning. Other natural ways to detoxify the liver include consuming carrots, beets, zucchini, squash, watercress, and artichokes.

SS:
I believe very strongly in a good diet for antiaging. From your point of view, how important is eating right?

MG:
Think of your body like a Ferrari. You’ve got to use high-octane fuel in your Ferrari. Likewise, your physical body requires superb fuel. Balanced eating that includes real food, such as fruits and vegetables, is critical. Organic is best; this includes meat, free-range chicken, and fish—proteins raised without antibiotics and hormones.

SS:
What else is important?

MG:
The biggest obstacle in people’s health is stress. It seems to me that every patient I see tells me about how stressed they are. Learning to destress is a challenge. Everybody has taken on more than they can handle, and consequently, they are driven by what they have taken on. Sure, you can detoxify, eat right, and exercise, but getting your emotional and mental state under control is the most important measure you can take.

Focus on what makes you feel good. Then use that feel-good energy to solve your problems. Express love to people or someone or
something. Love your wife, your kids, your dog, your patients. Love the Lakers. If you ever need a refresher course, listen to the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love.” Then do what kids do all the time … imagine. Imagine being absolutely healthy, every day of your life. Imagine living to a hundred with energy. See yourself as ambassador of longevity to the world.

Have fun in your life, whatever it is you are doing, your work, your family, your friends. Do what kids do … have fun. Some people say there is no fun in their lives because there’s no one to have fun with. I advise them to make a list of all the fun things they can do on their own.

Be grateful for your life and for your family. Concentrate on the energy of the universe moving through you. If you can do these things in life, then you can get your head and your emotions together. Longevity will have a way of following.

SS:
If someone has run themselves into the ground, eaten badly, smoked, consumed a lot of alcohol, stayed up late, overworked all their lives, and then they come to you, are you able to reverse the health of that person if they’re willing to make changes?

MG:
Definitely. There is never a lost cause. I believe everybody out there can get better. A lot of people ask, “What is more important, the patient’s belief in the doctor or the doctor’s belief in the patient?” I think it’s the doctor’s belief in the patient. That’s because when the doctor believes in the patient, the patient gets it immediately. Once the patient gets it, all things are possible.

The art in this form of medicine is to meet patients at their level and move them up slowly, or sometimes quickly, depending upon where they are. With some of my patients, I have to get very basic with them. If they are addicted to junk food, for example, I show them how the Highway Patrol uses cola to remove bloodstains from the highway.

Everybody progresses at his or her own pace. I go over a plan for them. I tell them that I don’t expect them to stop the colas and junk food tomorrow. It’s a gradual process in which they start doing little things and then find themselves feeling better. Later, if they revert to their old ways and realize how bad they feel, they get back on the right path.

It is also important to recognize that different people age differently. One person who is eighty years old may have ninety-year-old bones but a fifty-year-old mind. Katharine Graham, the late owner of
The Washington Post
, comes to mind, sharp as a tack upstairs. But she was injured in a fall and died a few weeks later. After a fall, many elderly people just don’t make it. They get immobilized, and their minds can’t handle the immobilization. They get pneumonia from the immobilization; once that happens on top of the fracture, survival is difficult.

But the real key is that different organs age differently. My job is to find out which of your organs are aging the quickest. So something that improves protein regeneration, like growth hormone, will find its way to that organ.

SS:
By the time a patient comes to you, they’ve all been around the block with traditional medicine. Aren’t they desperate for help?

MG:
Yes, and they are open to new things. The majority of my patients are women because of your book
The Sexy Years
. However, when I first started, I treated more men, especially men with prostate issues. I can do a lot to help men get their vitality back. Women are desperate to find a solution to their hormone issues. And we both know bioidentical hormone replacement is the only way, and it works.

SS:
Yes, but I don’t believe that people truly realize the major impact of blowing out their major hormones. I’m talking about the adrenals, cortisol, insulin, and thyroid. Women know about the minor hormones—estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, DHEA, and others. It seems to me that in antiaging medicine, you deal with the major hormones first.

MG:
It’s like a basketball game. Six of the players are women coming to see me; the other six are testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, insulin, thyroid, and cortisol. My job is getting these players to play well together.

One of the ways I do that is through “metabolic typing,” a measurement of the body’s response to sugar. Your metabolic type describes your hormonal area of weakness—the area you most need to build up. Fifty percent of my patients, for example, are “adrenal types”;
15 percent are “pancreas types”; another 5 percent might be “growth hormone types.” By identifying the area of hormonal weakness, I home in on what hormones need to be elevated and strengthened.

SS:
Antiaging medicine is preventive in its nature. The patient is part of the process by becoming aware of his or her symptoms, much as women need to do regarding their hormone imbalances.

So if a patient who was a “thyroid type” called you and complained of constipation and/or had cold hands and feet, you would see that as a symptom that his or her thyroid was low and needed building up, right?

MG:
Yes. A patient must keep me informed about even the smallest symptoms. Symptoms are your body talking. I am not able to “hear” unless the patient keeps me filled in. When we work together like this, I am able to make them feel well quickly, and it is very exciting.

SS:
So antiaging medicine is an art form because there are no rules. It’s the intuitiveness of the doctor, who, in turn, must be able to identify the different metabolic types.

MG:
That is where I have taken it. Everyone looks at it differently. Many doctors want to use blood tests, look at the hormones, and figure out which is low and high and make corrections.

But I feel that you also must figure out where the star player is. Half the time it’s the adrenals that are burned out from everyone’s stressful lifestyle. Once I strengthen the adrenals, balancing someone’s hormones becomes much easier. Adrenals are the orchestra leader. When they are off, the whole body is out of tune. The adrenals are the body’s response to stress, affecting the sex hormones (estrogen, testosterone, progesterone, DHEA, pregnenolone, and so forth). So when the body is under stress and the adrenals are tired, the body will convert estrogen to DHEA, testosterone to DHEA, and progesterone to cortisol.

SS:
To survive?

MG:
To survive at any cost, while the sex hormones go down to maintain the survival.

SS:
Because now—when the body is stressed—is not the time to make a baby.

MG:
Absolutely. Once we’ve identified the star player and strengthened it, we have one last component, and that’s the coach. The coach is the leader. He’s got to make the players play well together. In most cases, the coach is the liver. When the “team” is in a successful place and you keep the “coach” happy, that’s when people show great results.

SS:
So when a woman comes in and she’s all out of whack because her minor hormones are gone, you first deal with the major hormones. That makes sense because I know from my own research that if one hormone is off, the entire hormonal system is off. If the adrenals are the orchestra leader, trying to balance the sex hormones of estrogen and progesterone would be futile until you get the adrenals straightened out.

MG:
Yes, or any of the other major hormones.

SS:
What I am starting to see is that these different metabolic types seem to dictate our reactions to how you are going to give progesterone or estrogen. What form of transport do you prefer, creams, drops, or capsules?

MG:
As a rule, I prefer to use the cream, because with every pulse of the blood, it moves through the fat base. Most of us have such toxic livers that by the time a capsule moves through all the toxic sludge in the liver, it loses a lot of its effect.

SS:
Do you feel that men need testosterone replacement as they age?

MG:
I believe they do. When I measure men’s testosterone levels, there is a huge range, anywhere from 200 to 900. But when I measure free testosterone, I almost always find it low. I also find it important to treat the prostate at the same time. I give them herbs, including saw palmetto and the extract of giant redwoods. Redwood trees live forever, and redwood extract seems to be a male tonic that helps the prostate. I also recommend other nutrients for the prostate, including vitamin E, selenium, fish oils, and zinc.