How to Reduce Chronic Inflammation
Dr. Murray is a highly accomplished physician who has been certified in four different medical specialties including internal medicine, osteopathic manipulative medicine, energy medicine and functional medicine. 
From her clinical work, she has learned how much pain and suffering is caused by chronic inflammation, and how reducing this inflammation helps people reduce pain and live happier lives.
-Eat the rainbow. Vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients. There are over 25,000 phytonutrients.
-Stretch. your body has 3 holistic systems in it, Nervous system, vascular system, and connective tissue.
-Eliminate gluten! If you give up gluten for the next 21 days, that could be the most important thing I tell you today.
Root Cause Medicine.
Functional medicine is about root cause medicine. Ideally, you’re only in the doctor’s office in extreme situations. So if you learn the tools, you can be empowered to do guided self doctoring and you don’t need to be in the doctor’s office as much.
I want people to be empowered because too much of us are running around thinking that someone else needs to care for us or someone else needs to do things for us. 
But the bottom line is if you’re educated to some basic concepts about how to take care of yourself and be in right relationship with your body, your mind, your spirit and your relationships, then you are not going to need to be in the doctor’s office all the time, or dependent on prescription medications.
10 Ways in 10 Days to Stop Your Suffering and Live a Pain Free Life.
https://www.discoverhealthfmc.com
It’s about Inflammation and Toxicity.
Statens essentially do not stop that. You’ve got to go to the root cause, which is the fact that the majority us are inflamed and toxic from our environment and our diet and the chemicals we’re exposed to. And you’ve got to go back to, you’ve got to go upstream and correct those problems and people can be trained and educated and given the tools to be able to reverse their underlying inflammation and immune dysfunction and never need a staten.
Make sure and check out Dr. Murray’s book Make A DENT in Chronic Disease: Your Guide to Living Pain Free Through Functional Medicine.
https://www.amazon.com/Make-N-T-TM-Chronic-Disease-Functional-ebook/dp/B07L45ZVWC
Immune dysfunction, inflammation, autoimmunity.
The immune system and inflammation is what’s causing most of the chronic disease in our world today. And your immune system is your military. I have a book out now, just came out about two weeks ago that I’m over the top excited about and it’s called Make a Dent in Chronic Disease. Right in chapter one I explain the immune system and how it works, but obviously not in high level science terminology, more in analogies and everyday explanations like I’m about to explain your immune system is your army, your navy, air force, and marines.
If foreign invaders get in, such as a bacteria or a virus or a mold or chemicals or a food sensitivity, some food that your immune system is sensitive to or allergic to, then your defense system’s going to go into effect and try and protect you. And the whole point of the your immune system is there are steps that it takes in order to fight against these foreign invaders. And that’s what inflammation is.
About those foreign invaders… Does time restricted eating help? (Intermittent Fasting)
Absolutely true. Intermittent fasting is something you want to do daily, preferably. There’s many ways to do intermittent fasting, but one of the most typical ways to do it is each day try and put between 12 and 15 hours of a time when you are not ingesting food that has any new information to your body, such as sugars or carbohydrates or fats or proteins or chemicals or things like that.
Any time we eat, even when we eat a clean diet, we are putting glucose sugar into our body. We’re putting proteins in our body and our body is going to have its information and our body has to respond to it. And sometimes we put allergens in our body.
With big allergies, you’re going to have a rash and then maybe even shortness of breath and God forbid, a full blown reaction. I’m not really talking about allergens. Most people know if they’re allergic to something.
So I’m talking about food sensitivities to gluten or dairy or soy for example. So that’s one piece. But the other thing is even when we are not eating a food sensitivity, our body needs to respond to whatever we are eating, including unhealthy elements in the food.
You can’t avoid all of them. Your immune system sits right behind that gut wall and is going to respond. So you’re military needs to rest in the same way that, if you think about it, a soldier does. If they have to work all the time and never gets to sleep, then they’re going to make mistakes.
And there’s going to be, as we all know, that term friendly fire. So the point is those 12 to 15 hours allows your immune system to take care of the last meal and then allows your immune system to rest. But also some of the soldiers that are on duty can be finding some of the pathogens that might be hiding in your tissues or in things called biofilms. For example, like plaque on your teeth. The plaque on your teeth is actually bacteria that are living in little communities that spew out a gel like substance or the plaque itself that protects them and hide them from your immune system and your soldiers that are looking for them to try and get rid of them.
So the intermittent fasting allows your immune system for rest, but also the troops that are still on duty while the others a resting can be looking for pathogens that may be hiding, whether that be bacteria or mold or chemicals and so forth.
Some important definitions: Acute inflammation versus chronic inflammation.
First of all acute inflammation is, again, your Army, your Navy, your police force going out and attacking any immediate invasion or injury. So if you stub your toe or you step off a curb and sprained your ankle, or you cut your finger, they come to clean up that wound.
And so certain types of cells come in and start laying down tissue to create the scab and then over time, other layers happen that start healing that wound. So we’ve all seen that and experienced that and acute inflammatory response. This is normal. It’s a normal healing response by your body.
The difference is that if we are constantly exposed to chemicals, toxins, stress, chronic bacterial, or let’s say Lyme as a bacterial infection or Epstein Barr like mono from a viral infection, or if someone lives in a moldy, wet, moist environment, then the acute inflammation never stops.
The inflammatory response is going on 24 seven and the person develops this iceberg of underlying inflammation that they’re not even aware of going on in their body, which can be the chronic reason and the root cause of many disease processes in our body.
How do you find out if you’ve got too much chronic inflammation?
Well, first of all, if someone is exhausted most of the time, if someone has chronic pain such as joint pain or abdominal pain, if someone has irritable bowel syndrome such as they never leave the bathroom feeling satisfied of emptying their bowels or anytime they eat anything they are running immediately right afterwards to the toilet and having diarrhea.
If someone has migraine headaches and so forth, these are all signs that you are chronically inflamed. So it’s not like you have to have a big lab tests to tell you what the symptoms are.
But also there are of course lab tests that are commonly done through any primary care doctor’s office that can test your level of inflammation.
When you talk about being hypersensitive to our environment, what does that mean?
The environment is everything that we interact with in our day. For example, the most typical one for people is food. So we eat at least three times a day, typically more. And Food is information. It can be either good holistic, healthy inflammation or it can be negative inflammation looked at as foreign invaders, or food sensitivity information. So that’s one piece of anyone’s environment.
In the science perspective, we talk about a term called Epigenetics, meaning the environment can affect your genes and either keep good genes turned on or it can cause negative genetics to be turned on and signaled to come to effect. So when referring to the environment, I’m referring to the food we eat, plus we are all exposed to air pollution, noise pollution, and chemical toxins.
They did a study on the umbilical of pregnant women and it showed upwards of 250 cancer causing toxins in that blood. So you can’t avoid toxins. We all are exposed to them in our environment.
We’re all exposed to stress in our modern world, the cell phone, it’s going off all the time. We never get a quiet moment and that affects our immune system. I’m also referring to infections. Again, as I alluded to before, someone may have had infections and even the down to the plaque on your teeth is a chronic bacterial infection of your guns. So the environment is everything.
What about cleaning chemicals and things like Lysol, Draino and other household chemicals?
Absolutely. Thank you for bringing that up because I should have listed that. If you haven’t heard of the environmental working group, ewg.org then I strongly suggest that you go there.
Most of us are slathering lotions on ourselves with parabens and phthalates in them, which disrupt your immune system and disrupt your hormone balance. And we don’t know it. And this is what I’m talking about, the tools for self doctoring and to keep you out of the doctor’s office and to keep you away from chronic diseases is that there are the chemicals in the cosmetics, the soaps, the shampoos, and then of course your whole household cleaners.
And if you go to the environmental working group.org it’s a wonderful nonprofit organization. I’ve been standing in a pharmacy and looking at the shelves at let’s say shampoos and I put in a brand on the ewg.org website and I find that exact product and they will rank it or rate it green. Go ahead and buy it. If it’s not green, don’t buy it.
Before buying anything, check with https://www.ewg.org
You claim chronic immune dysfunction is the root cause of most chronic diseases. That’s a powerful statement. Talk about that.
Well, again, your immune system is your military and as I said earlier, if your immune system cannot rest, if it is constantly working, then you’re going to end up having friendly fire, which leads down the path for many people to one of the most common conditions in our industrial world which are auto immune diseases, auto is self and immune is your immune system attacking self. So for example, one of the most common chronic auto immune diseases in our in women, predominantly women doesn’t mean men are a excused from it, but Hashimoto’s thyroiditis or Hypo-Thyroidism most commonly that is caused by chronic immune dysfunction. That’s caused by the fact that your immune system is constantly fighting and therefore it can’t even differentiate anymore between the enemy and you. And so your different organ systems in your body get attacked. Now some auto immune diseases are purely inflammatory related such as asthma.
Asthma is an allergic reaction if you will, and it’s a hypersensitivity inflammatory response. Your lungs are getting irritated and red. And like we talked about with the finger wound thyroiditis is a little bit of a different pathway through the immune system.
It’s not going through the army or the marines, it’s going through the navy and it’s just a different path of a complex system, but there’s still the same thing remains in that your immune system is dysfunctional and the immune system is not being able to differentiate between self and non-self and and it attacks and so this immune dysfunction, autoimmune disease and inflammation are so many times in our world as much as 60-75% of the time, the root cause of most chronic diseases, and if people can reverse it, then they will reverse the disease process or the disease process will never start to unfold and the bad genetics will be kept quiet and completely of course avoid or prevent going down a path of autoimmune disease or heart disease or migraine headaches or any of these things.
I have patients every single day that reverse their chronic conditions as a result of quieting their inflammation.
So what do we do? Give us some solutions.
Absolutely. I’ll give three primary solutions. And then if you’re interested, I’ll give a bonus. But number one, number one, and the most important again, is we put food in our mouth three, four, five times a day.
You want to eat the rainbow. And it’s the color red, yellow, orange, blue, green, and purple. I do not mean skittles.
I think real food, fruits and vegetables of all colors of the rainbow.
Why? It’s because every, you know, whoever put us here, whether you come from a place of saying God or the universe or whatever, your religion doesn’t matter. But the point is whoever developed us and created this wonderful creation we’re in, put different vitamins, different minerals and something called phyto nutrients. The prefix stands for plant and there are over 25,000 different phyto nutrients in plants, fruits and vegetables, and phyto nutrients protect the plants from their environment. So you notice we need to eat every color of the rainbow to maintain our health. So every day eat at least one serving of every color of the rainbow.
And it’s in chapter two of my book, make a dent in chronic disease.
Number two solution for today’s talk would be to stretch.
If you took all of your muscles, your ligaments, and your Fascia, which is the name for a type of connective tissue, it’s like Saran wrap, it surrounds everything in your body. If you took that all out and you made it three dimensional, it would look exactly like you.
And if it has restrictions in it, it will cause blocks in blood flow. You will get blockage of the ability of waste products to be drained out of your tissues.
So if you stretch with really, really basic stretches like I have on my website, you go to the health library and you drop down to exercise videos, I have a basic, less than 10 minutes of very gentle stretches. And if you were to do that, it will decrease inflammation and quiet pain.
One of my primary specialties is pain. I will say to a patient, over the next month, I want you to just stretch everything day and that’s all I want you to do. These basic basic stretches. And 99.9% of the time they come back to me if they’d done it every day and they say that is the best thing I’ve ever been taught and my pain is reduced by 85% at least.
You must be a fan of yoga.
Absolute fan of Yoga. But many people don’t have a 90 minute interval to go to every day. Many of my patients say, well, I go to a yoga class. I ask how often, and they say once a week. Okay, that’s great. I’ll also say that the patients that I teach these stretches to, that come back to me and say I do it two or three times a week… it’s not helping that much.
Versus the other example I gave in case study is that the patients that say they come in and they stretched every day come in and say, oh my goodness doc, that’s the best thing I’ve ever been taught. Why didn’t anybody ever teach me this before? My pain is 35-90% gone.
The third solution for reducing chronic inflammation…
So the third solution is to eliminate gluten. Especially with thyroid issues, but many other autoimmune conditions. If you give up gluten for the next month, or at least 21 days and see how you feel, that will be the number one in today’s discussion. I would say with the caveat that a person could do a comprehensive elimination diet and that’s more advanced. And of course I do cover that in my book, but today I’m trying to keep it simple. And for the majority of people I would say eat the rainbow and stretch everyday, gentle basic stretches and eliminate gluten for the next three to four weeks and see how you feel at the end of that month.
Well if you think about it, gluten sounds like glue and it is, it’s a protein that causes a glue like substance in your digestive tract that doesn’t process well. So that’s a problem.
Then there’s Celiac disease of course, which is a horrible disease. It’s an autoimmune disease but that’s only 3% or less of the population. Non Celiac Gluten sensitivity is at least 20% or probably more of the population and particularly in people with autoimmune or other inflammatory conditions.
Okay, how about the bonus solution?
The bonus solution is that every morning before you get out of bed, I want you to list at least one thing that you are grateful for in your life.
We’ve got to shift ourselves and our perception of our environment from things that are the stressors like fear, anger, frustration. These emotions are inflammation producers. So you want to start every day of your life from the place of the positive emotions that are healing and anti-inflammatory, gratefulness, compassion, joy. So just wake up each day and think of one thing or one to three things that you are grateful for in your life.
Learn more about Dr. Murray’s work here:
- Facebook Group link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1641843829256865
- Now on Amazon: http://a.co/d/6bacgtB
- Podbean: https://trishmurray.podbean.com
- Itunes/Podcast: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/dr-trish-murray-functional-medicine/id1283622648?mt=2
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