Welcome And Medical Disclaimer

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Hormone Heroes, where I share testimonials from real people who have experienced bio-identical hormone therapy. Men and women share the symptoms they have experienced and the difference proper hormone replacement has made. I'm your host, Dr. Kelly Hopkins, and I have been in the functional medicine space for over 30 years, with a focus on hormones for 20 years. Please keep in mind this podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Please consult with your physician or practitioner for medical advice. Let's get started with today's guest. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm very excited. I have Dr. Jess Armine with me. He is a functional medicine practitioner for about five decades. Congratulations. I bet you've seen it all, Dr. Jess.

SPEAKER_03 0:51

Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 0:54

And you are currently located in Philadelphia. And you grew up in Brooklyn, New York. And just tell us a little bit about your history. Sure.

A Father’s Fight For His Son

SPEAKER_02 1:05

Well, I began my journey in healthcare in 1975. I was in EMT in New York City. And uh, as you might imagine, that's a very active place to be working on an ambulance. Wow. I took the very first paramedic course in New York City. This is when the older people among us will remember the TV program Emergency, where then everybody in the whole nation was screaming, why don't we have paramedics? Why don't we have paramedics? I'm like, okay. Of course, New York City's answer to that was listen, you're five minutes from a hospital. Not if you're in a four four-floor walk-up during writing code, or you're in traffic. That five minutes turns into 45 real fast. So eventually they got that together. And most places in the uh country have paramedics, which just improves pre-hospital emergency care to a higher level, and people have better survivability. At the time, um I come from a poor Italian family. And I, of course, I didn't think I could be a doctor, so I actually went to nursing school. I graduated with a uh Bachelor of Science in Nursing in 1978. I was also an ROTC, so I had my got my military commission and went into the Army as an army nurse for um four years and did mostly emergency department, and uh I ended up being the head nurse of a carinary intensive care unit. But about four days into it, I decided I wanted to be a doctor. Exactly. I I met a lot of doctors. So it took me a few years to get through the uh get through the um prerequisites, and I was applying to medical schools, but I had gone to a lot of conferences and I met a lot of medical doctors, and almost ubiquitously, they detested what they did. They were burnt out, they had difficulties, they were not happy. I met a lot of chiropractors at the same conferences. They seemed to be very happy. Mind you, I was very naive at the time, so I decided to go to chiropractic school and graduated there in 1978, and I started practicing standards of chiropractic, you know, manipulation, so you know, so forth and so on. You know, I learned applied kinesiology, I learned a lot of semi-esoteric stuff, but I was not, if you will, satisfying. To me, chiropractic, the diagnosis process was rather simple because it's a, you know, even though some practitioners catastrophize it or or magnify it to something that it's not, you know, I was taking care of people. I love taking care of people, I always have. But I started getting a better, more interest in the broader concepts of alternative medicine to include the more esoteric but the more biochemical side and so forth. And that was like an inkling and started, but then one of my children developed schizophrenia. And this young man who at 10 years of age could read, did read Dante's Inferno and explained it to me. He read it for fun. Uh you know, and I looked at him and like I did not read it for fun. I did not read it for fun either. Nor did I understand it. You know, it's like he explains it to me, and I'm like, for real? Really? For real? You know? And I'm sitting here going, is this guy from this earth? I mean, he always told me he was from a different planet. Well, I was beginning to believe him. I was like, Right. Um, but this very clib, he was a um just you know, he still is a wonderful guy. Uh became a non-entity with all the medications. Now, mind you, I'm gonna say this up front. I am not anti-medicine.

SPEAKER_04 4:24

Right.

SPEAKER_02 4:25

I'm not anti-anything. I'm anti-the injudicious use of medications. I am anti-the injudicious use of supplements, herbs, or anything else. I'm anti-this little focus that I have everything. What all you have to do is follow me and everything will be well. No. Okay, that's that has always bothered me because it's not true. Yeah, right. Anybody who says they have the magic bullet is lying. Okay, or trying to sell something that they think is a magic bullet, and as soon as they make enough money, you won't see them anymore. Uh I'm this this is the nice thing about having been in this in this profession for five decades. I've seen it all come down the pike. 100%. Yeah, okay, right. I'll wait six months, eight months, they're gone. I know. You know, like they were selling you cranberry juice. All that stuff they said was in this is in cranberry juice.

SPEAKER_03 5:12

Right, yeah. No less. And lying the cheap. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:20

So um So interested in uh just dealing with your son and medications and things is what kind of led you down this path.

SPEAKER_02 5:30

Yeah, the re the reason is that he became a non-entity. He would sit on the couch doing this. This is an extremely cooperative and intelligent man. I was like, this can't be. I'm a religious person, so I've been praying and you know, and I got so angry, and I looked up at the power in the sky and said, This disease is messing with the wrong daddy. And very clearly I say I heard I heard them say, okay. So what happened was I what was thrown in front of me was all these opportunities to learn and learn and learn. And I learned to make it very, very quick. I was at the very forefront of the genetic craze now. So I'm a genetic expert. I wrote some of the programs that evaluate your genetics that you get in like Dr. Ben Lynch's um strategy. And I I I wrote the original one and gave it to him because he had money I didn't to develop it. I learned uh I worked with the Neuroscience Corporation that taught me to balance neurotransmitters over time. And they had a they had a certification in uh neuroendoimmunology, which is the nervous system, the hormone system, and the immune system, and how they interact with one another consistently to create homeostasis. Uh I've been in the forefront of the mitochondrial craze. I call it a craze, but all the research is being done. So over time I've learned an awful lot of stuff. I applied it with my son. He's now a graphic artist, and he is a um he's a full-time uh employee at a at a uh major uh printing firm that he does the digit digitizing for embroidery and stuff. Of course, he was working with me. We also worked with an integrative psychiatrist who's one of the most brilliant women on the planet. I'm dead. I'm not I'm not the doctor, I'm deaf. So he listens to me and sometimes does and sometimes doesn't.

SPEAKER_04 7:16

Right, right.

SPEAKER_02 7:17

He still has some issues, but he is my hero. Oh my god. He's my hero in a lot of senses. Uh you know, I intuitively, and I hope this doesn't get too esoteric. I have this innate feeling that maybe he was my father in a different life. You know?

SPEAKER_00 7:29

Wow. Wow.

SPEAKER_02 7:31

In my in when I've had any issue issues or difficulties, if we chatted, he went into that dad mode. I'm like, I'm your dad. He's like, now you're not. I'm like, okay, let's not argue. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 7:44

Right, right. Wow.

SPEAKER_02 7:46

So the the accumulation of all the certifications that I have and all the the uh the various types of knowledge came together, and I started looking at, I started attracting people with a lot of chronic illnesses that weren't getting better elsewhere. And I noticed over time that there was one very common glitch, and it was that, and this is traditional and alternative medicine, people were treating the symptoms, they were treating the downstream effects with the thought that if I take care of this, the body will take care of itself. If I eradicate the Lyme disease, then the body will take care of itself. And I found that not to be true. And I looked at the cells and I said to myself, I created this thing called foundational treatment, which you may see in the literature now as terrain treatment or bioterrain treatment.

SPEAKER_00 8:38

Say what you what what did you name it first?

Cell Danger Response And Long COVID

SPEAKER_02 8:41

I called it foundational or fundamental treatment. Okay. Treating the cell or treating the body at the cellular level in order to give it back its ability to work. A good if for a good, for instance, in the hormone concept, if you had a total hysterectomy, okay, and you're taking HRT, one of the reasons it may not work as well as it should is because your cells themselves aren't working very well. So it kind of doesn't matter how much you're supporting it, you have that basic cellular function, the biochemist biochemistry, the especially the mitochondria to create energy are not working up to par. So even if you're supporting something or supporting the end result, like with uh SSRI, you're what you're doing is saying, okay, this is the end result. Or they give somebody um something that's the end of a uh end of a biochemical pathway, like uh five methylfolate, okay? Uh-huh. They're not fixing the pathway. They're giving the result that doesn't seem to be there without consideration of why it's not working. Okay, so I started that. That was kind of ubiquitous depending on the scenario, but it all came down to the same thing. Okay, the cells aren't working. Uh-huh. And this is where I started concentrating. I started concentrating on giving the body back its ability to heal. On the heels of that, Dr. Robert Navio, who's an MD PhD in 2013, wrote a paper on the cell danger response, which is what cells do when they're attacked. And he quantified all the things that could injure a cell. And they were toxins. Makes sense, right? Well, there are different toxins out there, the plastics, the, you know, as you know, estrogens and yada yada microbes like viruses, parasites, yeast, and the like. But he also quantified that all the emotional, psychological, and spiritual traumas that we face will injure a cell in equal measure as toxins and microbes. And in this time frame, since the pandemic, we now have the effect of COVID, which is the spike protein. That's what the that's what injures the body in COVID and it actually occupies these two receptors. And guys, people, uh, don't be impressed that I can pronounce polysyllabic terms, really. Let's let's understand the concept. If somebody gets really ostreparous and they want to get really deep, I can I can pronounce words that are 17 syllables long. Big deal. Okay. Right. If you understand it, if you understand what's going on, you can intervene. But this particular problem, which they're now they're now calling along COVID, which has contribution to everything. And why does it have a contribution to everything? Because it interferes with the mitochondrial function. Mitochondria are your energy-producing things in your cells. And you all remember from high school or wherever, they drew a cell on the on the board, and it teaches you bit of a little circle, that's the nucleus, that's the brain of the cell, and then a little dots, and that's the cytoplasm. And gets all the garbage and dumps it out. And then they drew this little racetracking thing. I said, Yeah. That's the mitochondria, that's the powerhouse of the cell. And they they and they left, you know, because I don't know how it works. I don't want to know how it works. But the fact is that um, and I've I've been very deep into this and and uh I lecture on it throughout the world, that if your mitochondria aren't working, and mind you, it's not an on-off thing, it's a it's a um it's a percentage, if you will. Okay, if they're not working, you're not producing the amount of energy, which is called ATP, again, don't worry about it, the amount of energy that you cannot heal, right can be sitting up looking at us and talking to us and still be very sick. It's a amount, it's a percentage. So if normal, if you will, output is 95%, let's say, and I've got these are not these are not studies. I'm just doing this for example, you know, for for examples, and you get an acute illness, uh get strep throat, or you get a virus, that mitochondrial function may temporarily drop to 85 or 80 percent, and you'll be fatigued, deal like this. And then as the cell danger response re uh resolves itself, it'll go back up to 95%. When you have multiple inputs, multiple traumas of you know, toxins or or uh xenoestrogens that you're eating in the breathing stuff in the atmosphere, and you have another, you have more uh infections, and maybe you have some psychological trauma or emotion trauma, it adds up. You know, the the body keeps the score, if you've read that book. Right. Where where it interacts is at the mitochondria. So your basic function may be around 75-80%, which is enough to force yourself to get through the through a day, you know, work your way through the fatigue, over caffeinate so you can so you can function, and realizing that, of course, you know, i if if you're a mom, you know, you're the hub of the family. You know, the the phrase, if mom's not happy, nobody's happy, is quite true, okay, because mom is the hub. Mom is how the family runs. Right. And you want to, and you're being pushed actually by society, but in your heart, you want to be the best mom of the world. You want to be a good partner, you want to be a good woman, you want to feel good about yourself and have your own interests and have the energy to do them and just be the person you want to be. And this is what prevents you.

SPEAKER_04 14:08

Right.

SPEAKER_02 14:08

Bring it bringing long COVID, which is just chronic spike protein involvement. Okay, you have that 80, 85% going down to 55 or 60 percent on a permanent, or I'm sorry, I'll say chronic. Chronic is not permanent. You say you say, it can't be reversed. I say chronic because it can't be reverse. Sorry, okay. It can be reversed, no question. Okay. So then it stays down there. This is why in the post-pandemic area, if you read some of the literature out there or some of the claims, that with since that time, people are having more uh lung problems, more heart problems, more problems in a lot of different systems. Okay, even um hormonally, you know, absolutely, infertility, worsening of pre-existing conditions, initiation of conditions that shouldn't happen at somebody who's 30 or 35 years of age, increased amounts of autoimmune diseases. Uh, and it all comes down to the mitochondrial function and how that expresses. Real simply, when you have a cell danger response, what happens downstream of that, okay, if it if it remains chronic, is that it the cells themselves can't get rid of heavy metals, they can't utilize their vitamins, uh, their methylation pathways aren't working very well. And what ends up happening is damage that creates inflammation or oxidative stress. Okay, same words. That inflammation creates those other conditions. And depending on your genetic predispositions, it'll express in certain ways. That's why you're seeing pulmonary, that's why you're seeing cardiac, that's why you're seeing different things in every because there aren't a particular root cause for that. The root cause is in the cell. And in this time frame, the major issue is that spike protein with um you that's occupying the uh the receptors and interfering with mitochondrial function and interfering with your ability to create energy. And the energy, just not to be, you know, not to keep repeating myself, is how you feel, how you repair, okay, not only how you go through life. Yes, chronic fatigue is is a horrible thing. There's nothing worse than having to live like you're trying to start a car, just pushing through it. Okay, and you know you're not functioning the way you want to because you feel horrible. Okay. And you can take a lot of the stuff that they they give out to compensate. Some people will take Adderall, some people will take uh things like nuvigil, some people will uh could be taking thyroid medicine or hormone. You gotta think you gotta realize that when you're under stress, have a lot of oxidative stress, you're gonna have a lot of cortisol release, and that's gonna suppress the sex hormones. Even if you're doing HRT, this is a factor aside from the cellular function that's going to dysregulate the hormones. Inflammation alters not only hormonal function, but thyroid function. You don't get enough of the circulating thyroxine, the active thyroid. And when you have mitochondrial inefficiency or dysfunction, the signaling, the way that your body signals with the hormones, okay, because hormones are things that create signals that create the body to do other stuff. But nevertheless, the efficiency, if you will, of the hormones, even if you have them, even if they're even even if you're taking HRT, and appropriately so because you don't have it there, because you don't have the uh the organs to produce it. Guess what? Right. You know, is it's not going to work very well. Okay. And your adrenal function, which is being trashed by this long-term stress, oxidative stress, and all the inflammation, is how a postmenopausal woman creates her sex hormones. Adrenals release DHEA, dehydroxy epiendosterone, big word for a male hormone that gets converted to testosterone, and then the testosterone gets converted to estradiol. So that's the major pathway. You're not producing as much progesterone, hence you don't have your period. Okay, but you are producing estradiol. And you should. You should have relative, you should have normal function. It should not be a post-menopausal, oh well, my life is over. That's where does it all happen? Down at the mitochondria. The reason I'm saying this is because it really explains all the varied expressions that you get from chronic inflammation from a stuck cell danger response. Why has this been allowed to happen? Well, I'll tell you that in in traditional medicine, the they have an acute care model concept, which means if I take care of the root cause, the body will take care of itself. Again, Dr. Nabio wrote another paper in 2018 in his introduction. And I didn't believe that an MD would actually write this because I have that other mindset. Mind you, I'm not anti-MD. I'm not anti-anything, I'm just pointing out a truth. I do this when I'm I'm teaching MDs also, you know, because they're a little harder to get through because not because they're precious, because they have a certain mindset. You know, and I have to like add to that mindset, and you know, you can see that they can stop and go, oh, okay, that makes sense. But he said in that introduction that the treatment of acute care is very, very necessary. And, you know, looking for the root causes and so forth and so on. But when you apply the concepts of acute care medicine to chronic conditions, you're often hurting the patient. Now, he goes through that in very scientific language, and usually, you know, usually they give me the paper and say, make it understandable. I'm like, okay. Because I tend to think in cartoons myself. You know, I look at that like, okay, okay. But that's how I simplify things. Not because I'm really intelligent, which I like to think I am to a certain degree, but it's because I try and simplify it so I can understand it. Okay. Sure, sure. So what happens is whatever root causes are causing the cell danger response, in the longer term, it starts exhausting certain systems. It starts, I'll say damage, but I don't when I say damage, I don't mean permanent. It damages certain areas in in um neurotransmitters. It may overuse your neurotransmitters, but not supply the production, because production takes a lot longer than using it. Or the so the things that the vesicles that hold on to, the warehouses for the neurotransmitters, get emptied. And I'm just saying that one thing, but it applies to everything else in your body. So if you just take care of the causative agent, Lyme disease, EPV, whatever it happens to be, you just do that in a chronic condition and don't take care of the downstream effects, then nothing's going to work. Even though you take care of the root causes. The common wisdom for Lyme disease is that it cannot be cured. Well, the reason for that, or the appearance of that, which is more accurate, is because when you have Lyme disease, you start developing a certain pathway of symptoms. Think of it as a rut. Okay. It's called a facilitated neurological pathway for those people who insist on the scientific evidence. Okay? Okay. But think of it as a rut. So you're building a house, you have a wheelbarrow, you've gone back and forth, and you develop this rut. And it's always easier to put the wheelbarrow through the rut. Okay. And so think of that as a rut, and it's nice, it's ingrained. So when you get rid of the Lyme disease, any stimulation from whatever source will tend to want to go down that rut because it's the path of least resistance. So then you get lots of symptoms of Lyme disease when you don't have Lyme disease. And even though they've gone through rotating antibiotics, I mean there's there's no evidence that the Lyme disease is there of whatever ilk, Lyme coinfections, and so forth, that rut remains. And it has to be, and the way you get rid of that rut in this concept is to fix or fill or give the body back its ability to heal, meaning you give it back what it needs to heal. And then the body will not utilize that rut because it has what it normally needs at whatever whatever particular site. That sounds really trite, but it hangs together. Right. Like a webby thing. It hangs together. And I started practicing like that. I started looking at things like that. And I did things that most of my medical colleagues are not able to do. I'll spend an hour and a half doing it into it. And I don't miss anything. I remembered my old GP from way back when. And for those in my particular age group, I was 69 years old. I had, you know, during the 1960s, we had Marcus Welby MD and his associate Dr. Kyle, who was the uh apprentice. That generalist knew you from when you were a baby. Okay, they knew your family, they knew everything around you. So they knew all about you. So when you had to go to a specialist, they would send you to a specialist. That specialist would barely talk to you, say, I'll call your doctor. Call your doctor, your doctor will listen, discuss whatever needed to be discussed. Then they would call you and say, This is what the specialist said, this is what I think we should do. And you did what he said or she said you should do because you trusted him. Well, we don't have that kind of doctor anymore. Okay? And in order to get anywhere near that, you have to take an extensive history. You have to take the time to take an extensive history. Because that's that's as if I knew the person from birth. Right. So I can see where the timelines were, I can see where the deviations were. Not nearly as good as my old GP, but pretty close.

SPEAKER_00 23:44

Yeah. You know the right questions to ask.

SPEAKER_02 23:47

Yeah, and you listen to what they're saying, and you know what if they say, hey, I lost my taste for meat and I had a tick bite, you kind of know what you're dealing with. Right, because certain types of Lyme disease will create a syndrome that does that. But in standard medical practice now, since it's been corporatized in the late 70s and 80s, they want productivity. Everybody complains the doctor only spends 10 minutes with me. The doctor's being forced to do that. They're being forced under the threat of you're not going to have a job. Or worse, we're going to kick you out of our network. And if we kick you out of our network, you'll also get kicked out of Medicaid and Medicare, and you've essentially lost your ability to feed your family. Okay. They're under enormous pressure. Enormous. And they don't have the time to do this. So you fill out forms, or a PA comes in, or a assistant comes in and takes your history. But that's not like the physician doing it, because you know, those 12 years or 21 years of knowledge or whatever, you know, kind of goes into when you take a history, you know, you know, and not disparaging anyone, it's a reality. So if you know somebody's history, you know where to go, what to do, what everything leads. Okay, and then you can intervene where it's appropriate.

SPEAKER_00 25:04

So, Dr. Armine, what would that look like? You've taken, let's say, you know, someone goes to your website and wants your expertise, which I totally recommend anyone doing, even if it's a second opinion or a third opinion. What what after the so you offer a uh a consultation, is that correct?

SPEAKER_02 25:27

I offer I offer a um a free 30-minute um what I call it a discovery call. Okay. And the reason for that is uh in that 30 minutes I can I can gather enough information to at least honestly look at you and say, yes, I I think this is a case I can help. And also you like to know if you're gonna get along with somebody. Right. And and no, I'm serious, relationship is important. Okay. Because when I take on a case and I don't take, I only work with complex multifactorial illnesses that haven't gotten success elsewhere. Because that's my that's my wheelhouse. That's where I'm the most successful. Yes. And I can tell within that, and sometimes I get people who say, well, but I'm like, you know, have you done this, this, this? No. Okay. Go do that first. Because you know, maybe they haven't had the proper medical work out, which means that all the bad things haven't been checked. But they can go, I mean, I'll send you all my links, but they can go to my website and you know, there's a button there that you can schedule that on your own. If you happen to, I have a worldwide practice. If you happen to be outside these time zones, just email me at uh this email. If you go to my YouTube channel, which is at Dr. Jess Murmelite, I have tons of videos that I've done over the years that you know you can access and learn stuff from if you like and see the way that I work.

SPEAKER_00 26:43

You're you're a wealth of information. I'm just amazed. So just kind of what could someone expect after you have your discovery call? What if if you decide that you're going to work together, what would that look like?

SPEAKER_02 26:55

Aaron Powell Well, simply they uh they'll schedule an initial intake, which will be about at least 90 minutes, if not two hours, and then we go on from there. Okay. I don't have what what are some people calling onboarding testing. In other words, I'm not going to ask you to take spend a few thousand dollars on tests before I see you. And I will tell you that that is a red flag if you're going to see a functional medicine doctor, because that's a practice management technique. If you don't know somebody, how do you know what test order? I will go through all their old tests. I will go through their history and review all of the tests in that in you know, in con when I'm putting everybody together, you know, uh I put it in context. Okay, but and then if any other tests are necessary, we talk about it and decide together. Okay. My treatment, the only thing I ask of my patients when we decide to go into treatment together is that to stick with me for at least three months. No one gets any treatment plan correct at first. There's no such thing. You have to work with somebody, and we usually meet every couple of weeks to make mid-course corrections, to see what you're reacting to, where the improvements are, what can be made better, and so forth, which is why, again, I'm so successful at reversing these things. Just understand that if you were ill before COVID and you became more ill, if you will, and never got back to your baseline, the spike protein from COVID is the main reason for it. If you were not ill and you became ill and you never got back to yourself, that's the spike protein. I just published a uh research paper uh treating long COVID, and it is totally and completely reversible. There's no question. I don't know why it's being withheld in the literature, otherwise people are not engaging it. I have my theories, but you don't need to suffer from that. You don't need to suffer from chronic illness.

SPEAKER_00 28:41

And uh will you make that available to our listeners? Your paper?

SPEAKER_04 28:47

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 28:48

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 28:48

Absolutely.

A Practical Long COVID Starter Plan

SPEAKER_00 28:49

That will be in the show notes. So could you give us some tidbits on how you would combat long COVID? Sure.

SPEAKER_02 28:58

Well, I'm gonna tell you by the way, um, I'd say it's a secret, but um, I tell everybody. Okay. This is gonna sound very basic and very simple, and people are gonna say, well, what's the big deal? But people aren't doing it, nor nor are professionals. Okay. In the concept of you now have to get your cells working again, what do they need? Right. They need vitamins and minerals because those are the cofactors for the enzymes to work. Okay, your genes create enzymes. The biggest problem has been absorption. It's not just, oh, I take a multivitamin, it's what vitamin are you taking, does it get absorbed? And think about it, when you take something, it's got to break down in the stomach, get absorbed, go through the liver, sometimes a couple of times, get released in circulation, good, and then get into the cells. That's quite a journey. And if the form of the vitamins does not lend itself to good absorption, then you're getting very little. The trick is, and everybody listen, is to take liposomal vitamins, L-I-P-O-S-O-M-A-L. They used to be quite expensive, but since many people are creating them now, the price has gone down. Also, there is a process that was created by the uh people at Victoria Nutrition International to create a dry liposome. So now instead of having to buy this liquid from companies and it was all kinds of expense, and you had to keep it in the refrigerator, you can buy the capsules of them. And I can guarantee you they work because I I tested this with uh live blood cell analysis, like I did the other, the liquid stuff, and I'm getting the same results. So you do that, and if you've been ill, maybe take the bottled dose twice a day, that kind of that area. You're gonna be supplying your body what it needs in the way of vitamins and minerals. Now, other side of the coin, you got a lot of inflammation. Almost everybody does. So you can take anti-inflammatory stuff, but you're still not getting at the cause of it. Generally speaking, for most people who are chronic and have, and by definition have chronic inflammation, they have leaky gut syndrome. This is where incomplete breakdown of proteins or whatever start getting through the bit through the barriers into the basement membrane where the immune system is in, they're reacting to it. And you're getting a lot of antigens in and they're creating a lot of antibodies, that's inflammation.

SPEAKER_00 31:25

And what causes that usually?

SPEAKER_02 31:27

Food sensitivities or yeah, what happens is everything that causes a cell danger response is how that gets injured. Toxins, microbial illnesses, use of antibiotics, all these different things in combination over the years. Okay. Stress, anybody would say that stress causes you know damage. It does, there's no question. Now you know how by looking at the cell danger response. Nobody can just say it's just in your head. Right. I lectured in um in Ireland this past September on the cut brain axis and its relationship to neurodiversity. But the bottom line of that is you know, leaky gut syndrome and balancing the microbiome. Uh so anyway, the easiest way of going about this, and this is what you can do, even if somebody says you don't have leaky gut syndrome, because what I'm about to tell you is not going to hurt you anyway. Okay? So you need to break down your food spell. You need to break down your food spell. So for most people, then the necessity there is digestive enzymes. And what you should look for is a kind of a multiple digestive enzyme. Look for things like lipases and proteases and amylases. And there are some products that have, you know, uh beta hydrochloride and peptiotamine oxbile and a bevy of vegetable enzymes in there. Okay. And you want to take capsule of that with each meal. Never use tablets. The breakdown is very, very, and this way you're digesting your foods better. Instead of creating antigens, like if you have a big protein, which is a bunch of amino acids, if you don't break it down to the individual amino acids, there's two things that happen. Okay, you're robbing your body of the basic building blocks of your proteins that you know, they take that and they reform it. And you're creating these little short-chain proteins, which are antigens. Okay, and your body's responding to that.

SPEAKER_00 33:13

Do you like to add sorry? Go ahead. Go ahead. Do you like to add hydrochloric acid to that usually?

SPEAKER_02 33:20

Well, I like to use a combined digestive enzyme that has hydrochloric acid in it. Okay. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 33:25

Which is what our stomach makes.

SPEAKER_02 33:27

Exactly. And the reason that I don't automatically add hydrochloric acid to because it's difficult to titrate it, and sometimes it causes more of a stomach problem. But if you have a combined, it's a good starting point. These are all starting points. Okay. And for a leaky gut, the first thing you want to recreate is the mucus layer. That's your first layer of defense. And that's done with what's commonly known as prebiotics. Okay, juice Lamort chokes, slippery elm, inulin, okay, the FOSs, GOSs, and XOSs. Okay, they all create a mucus layer, which is where your microbiome live and where they do their work. So the first layer of defense is where the antigens get stuck in there. And then something called secretory IgA, immunoglobulin, goes in and ties it up, like hum tying it. It actually looks like that, okay? So that it stops, it stops the antigen from getting in. And the holes, if you will, the damage that's created in the gut, you want to kind of reverse that. You want to give the body what it needs to heal. And those are things like butyrate. Um, and there are tributerine complexes, which are short-chatty acids. Um, that's commonly used. Uh, glutamine is very commonly used at about the five gram level. Here's the caveat about glutamine. A lot of people with anxiety or excitation problems, if they use glutamine and they get worse, what that means is that glutamine, which produces glutamate, which is a very excitatory neurotransmitter, and it's not converting to GABA, which is what you use to calm down. There's a particular enzyme that does that, it's called GAD or glutamate to gromboxylase. But if that's what's happening, you'll get you'll get you won't like the feeling you have when you use glutamine. If that happens, just stop. Use the just use the butyrate.

SPEAKER_00 35:14

Okay, so glutamine is not across the board for everyone. No, not a great tip.

SPEAKER_02 35:20

In my patients, I almost never use glutamine because with their complex conditions, they usually have excitation which can come out as anxiety or just feeling uncomfortable. And of course, they take a long history, and I ask them, okay. Everybody wants to use probiotics, and that's not a bad deal. Okay, understand that the probiotic craze, they've gone through the psychobiotics and everything else. People don't know which probiotics to pick out. But here's let's this is what you look for. Look for a combination of lactic bacillusis or spacilli, and bifidobacteria. That's your basic microbiome. You can't go wrong with that. Some of the spore biotics are root a bit better. Okay. And if you find a combination, you don't have to go to the most expensive one. More expensive, more expensive does not mean better. Okay. Good tip. So here's the thing. Now, let's say you suspect you have long COVID. Honestly, there's only one product on the market that will pull it off the receptors and break it apart, and that's called augmented NAC, which is N acetylcysteine. The research done in that, that um on that particular product took the standard NAC and they augmented it by improving the bioenergetic coherence, which when I first heard about quantum coherence, I said, yeah, right, until I dove into it like you wouldn't believe. And I realized they have a process that actually does that. And they did in vitro studies on tissue that had COVID in it, and the standard NAC broke it apart by 18% in 24 hours, where the augmented broke it apart by 99%. So it's it's worth doing. Now, why is this a major benefit? Well, NAC produces glutathione. It takes your glutamine and it produces glutathione, which is your master antioxidant. That's what your body uses to fioxidated stress. And it's better to use it that way than giving yourself glutathione because there's in the bottom part of that pathway, there's a feedback loop, which means you give it what it needs to work, and the body will regulate the glutathione that it needs. And by the way, we have a recycling mechanism that takes the used up glutathione and brings it back to the active. But you have to produce it first. And the end acetylcysteine is giving you the cysteine. And since the old mental NDC does that better, you're getting more. It will regulate glutamate if you're having any kind of excitation, so that glutamate's almost always a feature, and it uses glutamate so it's regulating that. It improves your detoxification pathways and again brings down inflammation. I recently had an MS patient in Canada, and she started a little particular problem, a little more extensive than this. And the first two weeks, and this is unusual, the first two weeks, her numbness started going away. She had better balance. Was that reversing the MS? Not yet. What it was doing is it was sparfing up the inflammation that showed that a lot of her symptoms were inflammatory related. So if you put those things together, the good absorbable multivitamins, uh, a simple program for leaky gut, you might want to add like sunflower lecetin, okay, which is really easy to use the power, you put it on your cereal. And you also have egg lecetin if you're not um allergic. Why? Because the lecetins give you the phospholipids that are used to recreate your cell membranes.

SPEAKER_00 38:48

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 38:49

See if you're if you're on a low-fat diet, well, we're not going to get into that one. If you're on a low-fat diet and you have trouble absorbing your lipids, your fats, you're not going to produce the phospholipids that you need to repair your cells. So you kind of need to give it to somebody, at least in the beginning. Okay. While you're improving their digestion. So that's a simple little program, and you should give it a few weeks to work. When I say work, it's you're not going to resolve it. You just should start feeling a little bit better, like within the first month or so. And again, if this is not improving your condition, if you know you have more complex things going on, that's when you have to seek professional help. A good functional medicine practitioner should be able to reason out and work out what is wrong with you, what else needs to be done. But that's a good beginning program. And doesn't it sound really simple? Doesn't it sound like, and you know why? My my colleagues were like, Jess, that's too simple. I said, But are you doing it? Yeah. Yeah, well, I treat leaky gut. What are you doing? I give them probiotics. And then I meet then I meet them in a dark alley with two of my friends that have no necks. You know, because I'm Sicilian from Brooklyn. I'm like, you for now, but you want them out. You know, come on, man. I see a lot of people I wrote a book on leaky cuts called leaky gut to leaky cells, leaky brain. It's on Amazon, where I explain leaky gut and how to treat it and so on. But guys, the parameters are there. Mucus layer, you know, cellular layer.

SPEAKER_04 40:14

Right, right, yeah.

Genes Methylation And Real Testing

SPEAKER_02 40:16

Diet's not gonna change. Diet will not change it. Diet will improve something. But you've got food allergies and you do something else. I've noticed people with food allergies, they do a food allergy test, they stop what they're allergic to, they're eating something else. Six months later, they take another test, they're allergic to the stuff that they started taking. Right, right. And the reason is is leaky gut. If you treat that, and of course, if you have a food allergy test, you should kind of shy away from the things you're very allergic to until you fix your gut. And people say, well, if you have celiac, can you ever eat gluten again? Well, if you actually have celiac, I wouldn't. But if you have gluten intolerance, you should be able to eat some gluten once every few days without paying for it, or eat gluten by mistake and not spend three days in bed. So fixing your gut is the way you go about that. Okay. Uh same thing with casein, same thing with a lot of food, things that we have as food allergens. By the way, once you start getting into that, you start creating inflammation, that's where the that's where the hormonal dysregulation, the firework dysregulation, the uh adrenal dysregulation happens. And those systems are all talkable to one another. Right. If you attack one, then attack on one is an attack on all, especially as time goes on.

SPEAKER_00 41:26

Let's touch on the genetic testing and the methylation breaks and things like that, and how that plays a part when you're taking your vitamins.

SPEAKER_02 41:36

Okay. Well, let me tell you about genes. And and anybody who's super interested in this should listen really carefully. The genetic studies that have come out, the genetic things that, you know, we're not talking about the serious stuff, we're talking about the common things that were succeeding, um you can get tested and they give you these big long reports that are difficult to read and tell you what to do, to be perfectly honest, are nonsense. Okay, and I'm gonna tell you why. Okay. You're born you're born with your genes. So how come you weren't sick when you were a baby? How come you get ill later on in life? How come you get uh autoimmune diseases later if it's genetic? How come an autistic autistic kids, our our genome hasn't changed very much, okay? We're a BC body in AD time. How come in 1970 the incidence of autism was one in 10,000 births and now it's one in 34? Better diagnosis doesn't tell you that. Let me tell you why. Genes create enzymes. And genes, we're all talking about SNPs, single nucleophile polymorphisms or polymorphisms, which basically say that the gene, the enzyme that create is created doesn't work as well as if it didn't have a polymorphism. Mind you, if you talk about the dreaded MTHFR, okay, that everybody concentrates on methylene tetra tetrahydropolic reductase, there's 50 variants, 50, 5, 0, and they test two. There are some studies that I see 15, so I can do it in a, okay, now I know if I should pay attention to that. And it's just one thing, it's not a deity, it's not a devil. It takes the end of the folate pathway, which is a big word, five ten methyl tetra, folate. When I say something fast, ignore it. It reduces it into five-methyl folate, which is what you use as a folate in your body. And it's one third of the methylation pathway. Then you have copalaman, you have methion and yada yada yada. Okay. Now, why so the genes give rise to enzymes. Now, if there's no problem with the gene, think of it as a hundred percent or an eight lane highway. Okay. If it's got something called heterozygous, which it only has one glitch, if you will, it works at about sixty percent or a four lane highway. If it's homozygous, which is two glitches, it works at about twenty percent efficiency, which is a two lane highway. I submit to you that if there is no traffic, what is the problem? Is it going to interfere with what the enzymes do? Remember, enzymes turn one thing into another, into another, into another, until you get to the point where your body can use it or it's created. That's what it's there for. That's what they're there for. They're in these long, you know, complex uh, you know, highways that they're doing, you know, and you sit there and you look at the pathways and you're like, oh my God, you know, and I can show you the pathways, and that's how I lost all the hair, okay? I had to go, you know, I had to do like for years before I was like, oh, is that what you're talking about? And they're like, all right. Uh-huh. So it's the traffic that's the issue. So if you have traffic going in, obviously the two-lane highway is going to get blocked up faster than the four-lane highway. And the four-lane highway can get blocked up, but can you have an eight-lane, something that's good? An eight-lane highway that has enough traffic to block it out. Just look at LA during rush hour, or if you're in New York. If you're in New York, the Long Island Expressway, okay, during rush hour, which is called the world's long parking lot. What's the traffic? Allergens, toxins, uh, microbes. In other words, oxidative stress is the traffic. So if you want your and now, okay, so let me go into methylation real quick, as a is a term that's bandied about a lot. So let me tell you exactly what it is and why it's important. Our genome is like the hard wiring of our computer, and it's very well protected. Okay. Our epigenome, which is methylation, glucuronidation, transfilferation, all these pathways, are the pathways that produce what we need to work, but they interact with our environment. So what you eat, how you eat, how we utilize it, that's the interaction. The interaction between the environment and the genome is through methylation. What does methylation do? All those things, the MTH and FAR, creating methylcobalamin, all looking to create SAM, SAM, acidosyl methionin. That is our body's major methyl donor. What does that have to do with anything? Well, what methylation does is your body takes those methyl donors, goes into your genome, puts them in different places, and turns on and turns off different particular pathways to create homeostasis. You don't have to worry about it because your body does it very well by itself. People, if you have methylation issues, it may interfere with your bodily functions to a certain degree. Okay, how do you get that? Well, the other pathways aren't working that well or they're not contributing. Because, you know, we can talk about the individual pathways, but what you don't see in most of these tests is how they all interact. Okay, because you know you'd have to look at the Roche biochemical pathways, which will actually, you know, make you faint because they're so big and interactive. But just understand that your body is like a big web and it interacts with each other and it does very well. You know, it's been doing that since been human. So it's not something to be concerned about. You have methylation practitioners out there, which is nothing more you know, which is worse because it's the concentrating on one, and their whole elementarium is methylcobalin, methyl B12, methylfolate, and Sam. You know, guess what? Just because you have those SNPs in the pathways does not mean that you couldn't express that way. So one of the a phrase that I I put together and I always tell us that the presence of a polymorphism does not mean you're ill. The absence of a polymorphism does not mean you're well. Okay? I often get people call call me up and say, I have compound heterozygous MTHFR. But but but but I said, Were you sick yesterday? No. Are you sick today? No. Then you're not sick. Thing is, it's the traffic. Okay. What goes into the traffic? How do you how do you fix that? Just what I told you, right? We need vitamins and minerals because those are the cofactors that get the enzymes to work.

unknown 48:03

Right.

SPEAKER_02 48:04

Okay to work at speed. We need to create energy. We have to make sure our mitochondria is working because a lot of those pathways require ATP, which is the energy for the mitochondria. Three, we need substrate in any chemical reaction. You have enzymes doing stuff, but it has to do stuff on whatever's whatever's there. Okay. And if you can't digest your foods and absorb them, you don't have substrate for those reactions. So you can have the best vitamin and mineral content in your blood as you as you want. But if they don't have the stuff, the building blocks that they need to render to give the body what it needs to reform or repair or heal, it's not going to work. So that's where I came up with liposomal vitamins, multivitamins, multimeterals, digestive enzymes, and fixing a leaky gut, because now I'm giving the body what it needs, its enzymatic reactions to work. And if I'm using logment NEC, I'm improving the oxidative stress picture from both ends, from producing glutathione by improving detoxification, and of course pulling apart the spike protein if necessary. Okay, even if it's not there, this is this is good stuff. And the most common reason for continuing and burgeoning inflammation is leaky gut. Remember, again, I'm going to repeat this again. If you treat leaky gut and it's not there, are you hurting someone? Vitamins, digestive enzymes, all that stuff. Yeah. You're not hurting them. Right. If you don't treat leaky gut and it's there because you did a zonnulin test or somebody said you don't have it, okay? And it's not, and it is there, but you don't treat it, are you hurting somebody? Absolutely. Because that can be the reason that the inflammation continues. Think of it as a forest fire. Once that inflammation gets going, you don't have to feed it. It'll feed on itself.

SPEAKER_04 49:50

Right.

SPEAKER_02 49:51

That's what happens with inflammation. And then you're using all your body's energies and stuff. One of the base reasons for cancer is oxidative stress because it takes your immune system and robs it of the ability of recognizing non-self. Doesn't recognize the mutation of those cells before they start taking root and replicating and so forth. A normally functioning immune system should be able to recognize the mutation, cancer cell mutation, and kill it before it becomes an issue. I don't recognize you, you don't belong here. Boom. Uh huh. Okay. I won't do my my imitation of the Mr. T cell and how he works.

SPEAKER_00 50:30

We'll save that for another another.

SPEAKER_02 50:32

I used to do that with second graders. They loved it. They would like to go home and say, you get a cold, my mama, don't worry about Mr. T going to take care of me. Who's Mr. T? He's in my blood. They're not worried about it. You know, they worry about it. That's of course another big thing. If you understand that your chronic illness of whatever ill is not permanent, regardless of what anybody else told you, you take away, and you sit there and you go, you know, Ken, and then you talk to somebody or you you consult with somebody, you realize that this is a reversible thing. What does that take away? Fear. And it gives people hope.

SPEAKER_00 51:07

Yeah. Exactly. The message of that.

SPEAKER_02 51:10

If you don't if you have if you're fearful, if you're nervous, if you're having to live this life, you're trying that by itself interferes with your immune function. And that's been shown since Hanselia in 1936. Okay. So and no one argues with that. You started, you know, there's been studies where somebody had a chronic illness and they watched three studios movies. Okay. Okay. And they laughed themselves into health. Right. Yes, that works. It does to a certain degree, but it's got to be a combined effort, you know.

SPEAKER_04 51:40

Right. Right.

Hopeful Wrap And Ways To Connect

SPEAKER_02 51:40

It's all logical. It's not this is not, you know, a rocket science, so to speak. It's putting the it's putting the science that we have already together and looking at the scientific evidence, look looking at the clinical picture, and using our intuitive sense to a certain degree to put it together. And just giving the body and getting out of its way once you start getting it what it needs.

SPEAKER_00 52:01

And uh, Dr. Armine, we could talk for eight more hours, and I would love to have you come back and we could dive deeper into COVID. I've been known.

SPEAKER_02 52:11

Known to chat chatter for a long time.

SPEAKER_00 52:14

That's what makes you a great teacher. And um you uh you're doing a lecture at a hormone conference in June, is that correct?

SPEAKER_02 52:24

No, I did a look I did a lecture in core for my last June. I did uh I did a lecture on the at the Ultimate Hormone Conference, which was a which was a um a virtual conference, and my subject was where do you look when you're doing everything right for the person still not getting better?

SPEAKER_04 52:38

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_02 52:39

Okay. Where what areas should you consider when you've done everything absolutely right, but they're not getting better? You've done everything you're supposed to do and they're not getting better. That was an election where to look.

SPEAKER_00 52:53

We should have you back and we should talk specifically about that. I know it has a yeah. So for our listeners, you can find Dr. Jess Armine at dr drj-e-s-s ar-m-in-e dot com. That's his website. That's where you can uh contact him and have a have a 30-minute um what'd you call it?

SPEAKER_01 53:21

Uh Discovery Call. Discovery call in your life.

SPEAKER_00 53:25

Yeah. Yeah. But I think Dr. Jess definitely offers a a message of hope and maybe a simplicity to what you may be going through. And if you've had uh a diagnosis that seems very detrimental, I think a call with Dr. Jess would be very beneficial, to say the very least. And uh I won't take up any more of your time today, Dr. Amin, but I would love to have you back.

SPEAKER_01 53:53

Thank you. I would like that.

SPEAKER_00 53:54

Thank you for your time.

SPEAKER_01 53:56

Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_00 53:57

Thanks for listening to Hormone Heroes. Take a moment to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts so you don't miss the next episode. While you are there, help us spread the word by leaving a rating and a review. If you would like to share your bioidentical hormone story or need help finding a physician in your area, please email us at drkelly at hormoneheroes.org. That's D-R-K-E-L-L-I at H-O-R-M-O-N-E. H-E-R-O-E-S.org. We want you to be a hormone hero.